She felt a stack of bills tucked within.
“The bishop sends us both his regards,” Regenzi explained.
Gammon put the envelope aside, though not without wondering just how much it might contain. She chased the thought away with a shake of her head. “But if this Vautnek text is what Chalmers and Pierce claim, it’s already happening. God’s already collecting the data and making His judgments.”
“That’s why we’ve got to find the Nine. Gather them in. Keep them from making some damn fool mistakes that will make the lot of us look even worse than we truly are. Why should the rest of us lose what we have, our whole lives and fortunes and legacies, because some idiot we’ve never met makes a poor showing, and then God decides to snuff the whole species and start from scratch?”
“We don’t even know what behaviors God’s looking for.”
“The Old Religion had some ideas.”
Gammon raised an eyebrow. “A social doctrine held together by dogma and superstition. Tablets of stone from a mountaintop. Mythology. That’s the best you and your bishop have to go on?”
Regenzi spread his hands. “After the Unity, the Ecclesiastical Commission threw away the social conscience of religion and turned it into the worship of Rational design. We don’t say little prayers for moral guidance or beg for absolution because the sin of ignorance is all that matters. Go to a Sabberday lecture, then, and be freed. We took down the blocks and unified the mental resources of the best human minds. Now we’ve got Savery motors and algebraic engines and particle physics. They’re even starting to use petrolatum to make something for building that won’t rust or chip. I heard about that from a guest at the ball. Plastics, I think he called it. Bloody awful stuff. I’ll take brass, polished or patinaed. But isn’t that the problem? We don’t have the plastics yet, but it’s where we’re going.” Regenzi tapped his breastbone meaningfully. “It’s where we already are. If we were honest with ourselves, looked at our little inner cranks and cogs, we might finally clean house and straighten up a bit. But we won’t. We’d rather be Rational. If the problem of the soul is that it corrodes, we’d rather build it all over again out of something durable and new than remember the art of tending it.”
Gammon stared at the smallduke. “Tidily done. Did you have to practice that lecture long to get it down?”
Regenzi shifted uncomfortably, his brass a little tarnished. “It’s an . . . approximation of an anti-Rationalist argument I saw in a tract once. But does it matter if it’s not really in my heart? If we’re wrong, and the book is a hoax, and the bishop and all his collared cronies mad as hatters, then there’s no God and nothing to punish us for what we’ve done. But there will still be men in high places willing to pay out rewards. And if we’re right?” He shook his head. “It’s not impossible. Listen, Haadi. Deciding a little moral stricture was inefficient and subjective doesn’t prove it was actually the wrong practice. And just because we stopped demonstrating a behavior doesn’t mean God ever stopped looking for it. I’m certainly not convinced that when the bishop of Rimmerston promises me a seat in the governor’s cabinet that he’d do it on the strength of a fairy story alone.”
Haadiyaa Gammon looked down at her desk, its surface awash with a week of case files. She was desperately behind. Her lieutenants and sergeants had begun orbiting her office days before, wanting clearance to close this murder, to pick up that warrant, to transfer that prisoner. On the chalkboard of active cases, there were six reports of larceny, two rapes, a murder, eight assaults, two missing persons—
And that was only the last five days. She would most assuredly not find her way to Jane’s luncheon, or her arms, with the board in such repair.
Regenzi was right about one thing, at least. The EC had brought an end to religion’s stymie on science, had made science adopt religion as a valid narrative—and had, in its description of a dispassionate and watchful God, replaced a being of divine guidance and judgment with a figure not unlike itself. Who knew what such a Creator wished to see from its labors? They had only assured the world that it had been looking.
If Pierce and Chalmers were right, that gaze was far more considered than Gammon had ever suspected.
Abraham Regenzi leaned forward, smiling consolingly. “I know you don’t like me, Haadi. But I also know you’ve dealt with men you don’t like before, when it makes the right things happen.”
Gammon knuckled her eyes. It was past the dinner hour—early afternoon. She had not slept since . . . she couldn’t remember. She had no appetite yet, but her last meal was far off, too, sometime long before she’d stood in the gallery of the Regenzi manor over a bug-eyed, buckled woman in a black reverend’s dress. Regenzi was making sense—maybe more sense than he deserved credit for, but enough that Gammon couldn’t find a way to buck his argument. It was true, at least in its constituent parts. She had done ugly things to become the constabulary’s chief officer because she believed she was, at bottom, a better and truer soul than the other likely candidates. In the end, she would do whatever was necessary to make her city safer.
“I’m going to issue a warrant for the Alchemist,” Gammon said. “We’ll take him in for questioning. I can offer him a deal, some kind of immunity. The kind of man who sells poisons will sell anything.”
Regenzi nodded and blew air—he looked relieved. “Good. Fine. There was another matter, though.”
“Go on.”
“When Nasrahiel’s aigamuxa got the Vautnek text, there was something else in the bag—a letter to Ivor Ruenichnov. Seemed some kind of blackmail or extortion about the book. I’ve never heard of the woman it came from. The name sounded like an alias. ‘Rare Juells’?”
Gammon cursed and knuckled her eyes again. “She works the underside. Cat burglar. Spy. Seductress. We haven’t been able to pin much on her definitively. She’s Anselm Meteron’s lover.”
That name, of course, could not be lost on a man of Regenzi’s means. People of his station wallowed in Meteron’s empire—his casino, his hotels, his cathouses and burlesques. And his present business, Gammon supposed, had acquainted him with the surname for entirely different reasons.
“We don’t know how much she knows,” Regenzi said.
“You could say the same about the courier girl. Or the Alchemist.”
Regenzi nodded thoughtfully. “We’ve been trying to clean up as we go. We’ve only just gotten Chalmers in hand and tidied up the question of Pierce’s fate. We can’t afford another mess.” He strolled back to the bar and set his emptied glass down. “Am I free to go?”
“You were never charged with anything.”
“Good. Chalmers should be settled nicely with Nasrahiel by now. I really should pay him a visit.” The smallduke wrestled into his overcoat. “I’m going to send him to you later tonight. Nasrahiel, I mean.”
Gammon had been about to usher his lordship out the door. Instead, she frowned and held her place. “Why?”
“It seems there are a lot of people who might know a lot of things. The Alchemist, the courier girl, this cat burglaress, Meteron.” Regenzi dusted off the shoulders of his coat and perused himself in the little mirror hanging on the back of the door, approving the state of his moustache. “Perhaps you’ll need a little help.”
“I can manage well enough.”
Regenzi arched an eyebrow. “Is that pique I’m detecting, Inspector?”
“I will make arrests with constables, if that seems prudent. That’s all. I don’t need aigamuxa thugs.”
“Perhaps. Still, they’re quite useful. Absolutely devoted to the cause.”
They were. That bothered Gammon. The fact that it seemed only an unexpected boon to Smallduke Regenzi did little to put her mind at ease.
As Regenzi reached for the doorknob, a page boy stuck his head in the room. Seeing the smallduke, he flushed and looked at Gammon.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, I can—”
“He was just leaving, Matthew. Message?”
“Sergeant Ren says the la
ndlady from the Coventry Passage rectory is getting mighty sore, sir. She’s talking about wanting a barrister.”
Gammon glanced at Regenzi. To keep Chalmers’s kidnapping quiet, there had of course been the landlady to consider. She could only keep her so long on the excuse of needing a statement about her honorable tenant’s disappearance.
Cleaning up messes, indeed.
“You seem to have your hands full, Inspector,” Regenzi said with a half bow. “I’ll see myself out.”
“Of course.” Gammon turned to Matthew. “I’ll see Ren in a few minutes. Stay here. I’ve a warrant request you can run to the Bar for me.”
16.
It was past the dinner hour, and the Alchemist was restless. Rowena watched him peer out the arched windows of the café, squinting through a cloud of pipe smoke. Rowena didn’t mind waiting. She was on her second plate of roasted chicken and potatoes and had nearly finished a pint of weak ale. Between this, a full night’s sleep in a real bed, and the new jacket she was sporting, Rowena Downshire felt her fortunes running jake. She’d almost put from her mind their row in the kitchen hours before.
They’d departed the Stone Scales after breakfast, silence like a curtain between them. A young man coming up the highstreet to call on the shop had stopped, watching the Alchemist turn the shingle to the “Out of Doors—Call Again” side. He stared at them as if he was not sure what was queerer—the proprietor’s departure at the dawn of the business day or the scrap of a girl following in his shadow.
The Alchemist was in the habit of using his legs rather than the rails. That suited Rowena fine. The free air and wary distance the locals afforded gave her a chance to order her thoughts over the long walk to the Hangman’s Market. Now that they were settled in the Last Drop, she was ready to try them out on her companion.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
The Alchemist blinked, looking almost as if he had forgotten her. “If you like,” he said.
“Why are people so afraid of you?”
“Are they?”
Rowena suppressed an incredulous snort. “You must have noticed.”
“I suppose.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t it?” He weighed his pipe in his hands.
“Well, no,” the girl insisted. “You’re just a . . . I don’t know . . . a scientist, basically. Right? That’s what a good alchemist is. His craft’s all Rational stuff.”
“It should be.”
“So, people should know better than thinking you’re some kind of silly magician.” Rowena watched the old man’s face change very slightly, a smile playing at the edges of his features.
“And I suppose you have never been prey to such superstitions,” he said.
Rowena opened her mouth, then let it snap shut. “Well, I know better now. You en’t so bad.”
“Why, thank you.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. So you’re a little, I dunno, stern. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“For one thing, I’m not a reverend doctor.”
Rowena shrugged dismissively.
The old man tapped the table with a finger, as if pinning down an axiom. “Any fraternity that seems to have a grasp of knowledge others lack will inevitably appear powerful. Any outsider to that fraternity with similar knowledge will inevitably appear to be a heretic.”
“So why didn’t you just join the EC, go to seminary? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about people getting queer ideas about you.”
“Fraternity of that kind isn’t exactly in my nature.”
“Maybe you just need a little practice,” Rowena said. She tried to fox him with a smile, testing if his morning’s temper had run its course.
Perhaps it had. He made no reply. The Alchemist was back Somewhere Else, that place high above ground, his raptor eyes trained out the window once more, studying the middle distance.
Rowena watched him, an inspection to which he seemed utterly indifferent. He looked . . . not angry. Not like he had before, when he asked about Rare. There was a Something Else in this look, too, but a different Something Else altogether, something new.
“You’re nervous,” she said.
The old man glanced at her. With exaggerated care, he tapped his pipe out into the ashtray. “I suppose I am.”
“Because these people are late?”
“What do you think?” There was no drip of sarcasm in his voice. “You seem to like puzzling things out,” he clarified. “Try this.”
“These people we’re meeting, Anselm Meteron and Rare,” Rowena began, “they’re sort of . . . crooked folk, right?”
“You could say that.”
Rowena warmed to the task. “I know plenty like that. Sometimes, they’re late just to push you around, show you who’s boss. Or sometimes it’s because they’re hanging back, being careful. They know you, but not me, and so maybe they’re trying to get a read of what I’m doing here. If they don’t like what they see, maybe they’ll never show at all.”
“God’s balls, Bear. It seems the urchin does have a brain rattling about up there.”
Rowena turned and saw a man standing behind her, arms crossed. He wore a black vest and leather trousers as tight and tailored as his smile. His hair was a pale blond tipped with white, his chin sharp and imperious. She’d never met him before—had never even seen the kind of money it took to meet him—but he had the look she’d expected. He had to be Anselm Meteron.
“Bear?” Rowena asked.
She recognized the woman standing beside him with four cups of mulled wine on a tray. Rare was a different creature by daylight. The leathers and belts had disappeared in favor of a lavender day dress pinned into a high bustle about her hips, gathered to show her tall, heeled boots and a few inches of crocheted stockings. She set the tray down between the Alchemist and Rowena, winking conspiratorially.
“Men have their pet names for each other,” Rare purred. “They’re like schoolgirls, all pigtail pulling. Before he turned into a fossil selling antiques and hokum potions, ‘the Alchemist’ was a rather formidable sellsword. Men like that always earn names in the trade.”
Rare took her place on the old man’s side of the booth and pecked him on his bearded cheek with perfect chastity. “Hello, Father,” she said, in the same tone she might have said, “Sod off, bastard.”
“Hello, Rare.”
Father? Rowena searched back and forth between them. She found nothing but her puzzled face reflected in the Alchemist’s eyes. Looking for a resemblance between Rare’s golden mane and blue eyes and his ebonwood features was more than hopeless. It was absurd.
“On the matter of your theory, Rowena,” he said, “I had begun to regret bringing you here and exposing you to their general depravity.”
“Very noble of you to think so much of a jaded young courier’s innocence,” Meteron answered dryly. He smiled an apology at Rowena. “We called him Bear for his manners, among other things. Now, will you introduce us properly, or am I simply to talk around your young companion all afternoon?”
The Alchemist was stuffing his pipe again. He nodded toward each in turn, without raising his eyes. “Rowena Downshire, I give you Anselm Meteron and Rare Juells, for what they may be worth.”
“Master Meteron.” Rowena shook his hand. Something about his grip felt strange; when they released, she glanced down to see why, but his hands were beneath the table as he slid in beside her. “I’ve met Rare before, but I didn’t know your family name.” Rowena stared at her. “Jewels?”
“Spelled a little differently than you’d think.”
“But still.”
“My mother had an insipid sense of humor. Now—” Rare spread a napkin on her lap and rested her hand on the Alchemist’s, “—we’ve already had our dinner, but I could do for something sweet. You’re buying, Father.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
She nodded toward Anselm. “You know he never would. And I’v
e heard a rumor that you’re lately quite a gentleman to women in need.”
With something between a sigh and a growl, the Alchemist hailed a passing waiter and put in another order for the table.
What unfolded afterward seemed to Rowena like watching auctioneers running the quayside blocks. Rowena was certain she knew all the words her companions used, and yet the talk moved so fast, and was strung so oddly together, that whatever the rules of this cant might have been flew by her completely. They seemed to be confirming whereabouts, comparing pieces of insight, going through a list of possibilities and striking them off. Over a plate of cheese and grapes that arrived before Rare’s sweets, they came to the package, and that turned their eyes and questions onto Rowena. She explained the delivery to Chalmers, his panic, and the book he’d been so eager to lose.
Master Meteron looked up from rolling a cigarette. “Do you know why he had to be rid of it?”
Rowena frowned. “He seemed to think he was in danger. He’s a twitchy cove. Didn’t seem like it would take much to set him off. But when Ivor went dead white looking at the book in his own turn, I knew there was something to it.”
“He sent me a spark about the book, hoping to find someone to pass it on to,” Meteron said.
“Before he sent me out, Ivor was in his office looking through the book. He got panicky after. That was when he sent me to the Alchemist with the package, and I met you on the under-irons.” Rowena looked to Rare. “An aiga jumped me for the bag later. The book’s gone. So’s your note—but it really en’t my fault. I had planned on the lowstreets, like you said, and then it started after me—”
Rare’s only answer was a sharp, silencing look. The waiter had returned. There was a general shuffling of crockery to make space for an architecture of pastry. Rowena was too full to even look at it overlong. Apparently the Alchemist had been too absorbed in getting the meeting going to count her out of the order. No one paid the food much mind.
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