The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  When the waiter had bowed his way off again, the Alchemist spoke: “What was your letter about?”

  Rare seemed about to lash him with a bitter comment, but Meteron’s eyes narrowed. She stared back with her lips tight. Rowena bounced a look between the three, utterly perplexed. She might as well have been watching hurlers at play.

  At last, Rare shrugged. “It said that I had some knowledge of what Ivor was trying to be rid of, and I knew others who would want to know about his involvement with Pierce and Chalmers—City Inspector Gammon, for one. I didn’t know Rowena was delivering the book at that moment, or I would have put the matter differently. Still, with what I knew, and what I pretended to know, I could have had him for quite a sum.”

  The Alchemist’s face was a portrait of disgust.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Rare sighed, favoring him with a long-suffering smile. “You’re probably prepared to moralize at me awhile, Father. I wouldn’t deny you your little pleasures. Go ahead.”

  “Ivor was a criminal, but he was my friend once. He was your mother’s friend, too.” His tone was flat, edgeless. It bludgeoned where another man might have cut.

  Meteron spread his hands. “I told you, kitten: principles.”

  “They’re an ironic affectation for a man who sells as much out of the back of his shop as the front,” she snapped.

  The Alchemist’s voice turned cold. “Affectations are so fashionable in this company. I hate to be left out.”

  Meteron cleared his throat. “What happened after the robbery, Miss Downshire?”

  “I wasn’t sure what to do. I en’t been robbed by an aiga before, and I’d always been told . . . you know . . . things about the Alchemist. Stuff about him being powerful and whatnot.” Rowena felt the old man’s gaze purpling her ears. “Anyway, I thought if I told him what had happened, he might talk Ivor out of whipping me, or firing me, or whatever else. I think we’ve all got the rest from there.”

  And then, thinking of that rumor of power—any one of the dozens that were supposed to make her fear the man who had given her a bed and a meal and a clean set of clothes—Rowena felt a question pluck her sleeve. It took a moment for her to construct it. But as the others watched, she could see in their eyes it had been written on her face.

  “What I don’t understand, though,” Rowena wondered, “is how you knew I’d talked to Rare at all. I didn’t tell you. I never told you. It’s like—” and she laughed at herself, a dismissive little hiccup, “—I dunno, you read my mind or something.”

  Rare’s ice-blue eyes flashed victoriously. “‘Principles,’ indeed.”

  The Alchemist watched Rowena over steepled fingers, his mouth hard and drawn. She stared at him. The raptor eyes weren’t looking down from their impossible distance. They were almost begging her to keep her peace. All the fables about the Alchemist she used to believe gathered around him, rising from the dust of memory as if they’d never been discarded.

  Suddenly, they became very real.

  It couldn’t have been possible. And yet the candle had been burned, and the chair had been moved, and someone must have sat there, looming close in the night.

  “You— You did go into my mind,” Rowena murmured.

  It wasn’t a question. The Alchemist sat back and closed his eyes. Rowena’s stomach knotted.

  “You bastard. How did you—? No. You know, I don’t care.”

  All at once, Rowena realized she was caged in, surrounded by strangers, staring at a man who somehow heard inside her things she’d never said. The thought of what else he might know, and how, pulled on her oldest instincts.

  Run.

  Rowena scrambled in her seat, butting against Master Meteron. She dropped under the table and darted between its posts and his shins. She clambered from under the booth, banging her shoulder on the table, upsetting the dishes. Meteron recoiled in time to miss catching his wine in his lap.

  Rowena saw the Alchemist on his feet, reaching for her. She bolted for the street, Meteron’s string of curses unspooling behind her.

  17.

  After a third set of calipers died a groaning, twisted death in the padlock’s tumblers, the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers began at last to consider the possibility that he was well and truly buggered.

  The holding cell clearly wasn’t meant to serve as such. At first, that had given him some hope of jiggering his way out. It mattered very little that he’d only seen a few kinotrope shows of dashing actors picking their way free of unlikely prisons. He was, after all, a scientist, and acquiring knowledge through systematic observation was his stock and trade, and therefore—

  Therefore, it seemed things should have been going a bloody lot better than they had been.

  Throwing the ruined instrument down with a curse more befitting his father’s trade in costermongery than his rank in the commission, Chalmers returned to the practice that had occupied most of his confinement—a vocation in which he seemed more naturally gifted.

  He paced the room, gnawing his cuticles, and took stock. His inventory of the situation had become quite thorough.

  First, there was the room itself, clearly an old wine cellar, and—judging by the pearly condensate on the mortared walls—far below both ground level and the frost line of whatever building it occupied, perhaps some manor on the outskirts of Corma. That last idea was an impression gathered over the long, circuitous route Nasrahiel had traced, Chalmers thrown over his shoulder with a sack on his head.

  The room boasted a wide, grated door with a heavy padlock. Empty wine casks held long boards up to make trestle tables and improvised walls of shelving. These bore an impressive and largely irrelevant array of scientific equipment, a shrine to his captors’ ignorance. Every time Chalmers completed a circuit of the room, he spotted something new among the treadle-powered centrifuges, distillation kits, aiga bar-cranked dynatron coils, microscopes, and miniaturized sum boxes imported straight from Nippon, every bead and lever and counterweight within their open bodies stamped with the Lemarckian protectorate’s seal.

  And there was the Vautnek text itself, resting in the midst of an almost quaint improvised desk, flanked by pen and ink, blotter and notepad.

  Chalmers wasn’t certain if he found the reckless array of supplies amusingly eclectic or quietly terrifying.

  A low, snarling sound prickled the hair of Chalmers’s neck. He whirled. An aigamuxa padded by, stopping to lift a foot and thrust its heel eye against the grating.

  A few blinks later, it carried on into the dimness beyond the cellar.

  Terrifying, Phillip Chalmers decided. Most definitely terrifying.

  At the washstand beside his blanket and cot, Chalmers took off his soiled shirt and began washing up, splashing water through his hair and working out the worst of the sick still crusted in it. The face staring back in the glass was a pale, wild-eyed phantom of the one he knew. On the streets of Corma, he would have passed such a man by, thinking him a lunatic—but only after crossing to the other side of the street.

  Chalmers frowned at that face. He practiced a few expressions that were meant to convince him of its strength, its resilience.

  None of them proved credible.

  He turned his back to the washstand, approached the Vautnek text, and stood over it, one hand hovering above its cover. He wondered just what had become of the courier girl he’d given it to yesterday. The dull aches and pains of his body suggested her fate. He wasn’t a strong man. Certainly not a courageous one. How much battering could such a slip of a girl take before an aigamuxa caved in her skull?

  Chalmers leafed pages, scanning, looking for signs of change since he’d last reviewed the book’s contents.

  His breath caught somewhere about the last third of the pages.

  “Well,” Chalmers said to the open air, “you’ve been busy, haven’t you?”

  In a moment, he had the desk shrouded with leaves of paper. Nine pages. Soon, nine piles of pages. He labeled the top of each sheet and returned to the V
autnek text, thumbing forth and back. The top of each page in his notation piles was labeled in the blocky, half-completed geometric shapes of the old script, a language he’d learned very quickly when his and Nora’s theory suddenly fell into place. Necessity was a wonderful teacher, and Phillip Chalmers was her most eager, if not always her most gifted, pupil.

  He sequenced his recordings as he’d always done, beginning with the subject whose location was closest to his own—Six—and working to those progressively more distant. Subject Six, Subject Three, Subject One, Subject Seven . . . The remaining five were ordered thus simply because he liked the euphony of the numerical sequence he’d assigned to them—Nine, Four, Five, Eight, Two. He hadn’t the faintest idea of their actual locations relative to Corma because he hadn’t gotten that far. The assigned subject numbers corresponded to the amount of data the text had accumulated in the section of the book apparently set aside for them. The earliest subject numbers—One, Two, Three—had long, rich histories but comparatively little new activity. The later numbers, presumably more recent additions to the experimental population, had much slimmer records and seemed to be accumulating data with a speed relative to their ranking. Very orderly.

  But not today.

  Today, Subject Six—the subject that had been in Corma as long as Phillip Chalmers had worked with Nora Pierce—was running away with the show.

  Soon, Chalmers gave up trying to make separate file copies of the other eight subjects and focused on transcribing only Subject Six.

  There were coordinates, equations, data points . . . Chalmers all but flew across the cramped room, weaving between a lamp-film reader and a silver specimen table, to tear into the shelving. He had been supplied a whole rack of atlases, unbound and threaded on long bamboo staves as in a library. The aigamuxa knew very little of what equipment might actually be needed to cipher the book’s notations, but they had been practical to that extent, at least.

  By the time the aigamuxa guard came loping along again, Chalmers was absorbed in applying the fast-changing sets of coordinates to various atlases of Corma and its surrounding areas, narrowing down, drilling deeper. Now that he’d started into it—found his rhythm and found in Subject Six a blur of activity he might spend a week tracking backward to make full sense of—he had to keep narrowing his gaze, lest he lose all sense of the narrative the data strained to tell.

  And finally, there it was.

  He crossed a straight edge and a drawing triangle over a map detailing the public square once used for hangings, and could see from the steady changes of the last three coordinates that the figure was moving hurriedly to the southwest, one tiny point pushing toward the sea.

  Subject Six.

  For an absurd moment, Chalmers wanted to say hello. I see you. I know we’ve never met, but really, in a sense, I know you. You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve been having.

  In the corner of his eye, he could see new numbers taking shape, and he moved his improvised crosshairs accordingly. To cover that ground so quickly, Six would have to be running—running hard.

  It was impossible, looking down through the glow of low-hanging lamps, to judge if he was running toward something or away from it.

  Chalmers did the only thing he could do.

  He kept taking notes. And, very quietly, he said an old and thoroughly irrational prayer. He could not have said with certainty if it was for himself or for Six, wherever he was going.

  18.

  The Alchemist had been chasing her. Of that, Rowena was certain. She’d had a good head start, though, and knew from her footraces with constables that she could make a fair distance on jangled nerves alone. She’d ducked under the traces of parked hackney carriages and side-shouldered through clusters of pedestrians. Somewhere along the way she’d lost him, and herself, in the long avenues of Midtown. From there, it had been back to the alleys between hostels and tenements, threading her way to Blackbottom End.

  The sun hung low over the horizon, haloing the spires of church laboratories and the blocky faces of tenement towers. The buildings of Blackbottom End cast grim shadows, the phosphorescent street lamps winking on, one after another.

  Three quick turns, then down a narrow alley.

  Rowena stood, her breath steaming, and gazed at the hollow of New Vraska Imports. A murky gas lamp showed a door swinging on a bent hinge. She glanced up and down the street, then scurried through the splintered entrance.

  The main floor was completely turned over. Broken crates, scattered cargo, and banker’s boxes of paperwork were strewn around as if a hurricane had cut a path through the building. Rowena picked her way through the rubble, reaching out in the darkness, hands scraping over brambles of broken furniture and crates. Her boots crunched glass. She winced at the sound, afraid someone would hear.

  The last rays of daylight seeped down from the courier loft’s high windows. Rowena peered around, her eyes adjusting to the darkness.

  No one would hear her. Not anymore.

  She spotted the ladder to the loft perched in its usual place, as if nothing were amiss.

  Rowena’s eyes stung. When she realized she was crying—crying in relief that her ladder was still there, that she might climb back up to her little straw pallet and pretend all was well—when she realized how much she wanted to, and how safe it would make her feel, she hated herself.

  Stupid girl. You weren’t ever safe here. This en’t your home.

  She was still thinking that, even as she scaled the ladder. She chided herself for being a soft-bellied fool, wishy-eyed and sentimental, as she stepped onto the loft floor. Then she hooked her arms under the ladder’s rungs, hauling for all she was worth.

  The ladder was all wood, and nearly twenty feet tall, but Rowena had only to think of the Alchemist putting his fingers—or whatever he used—in her head, fishing around, and she found the strength to wrestle it up. She angled it back, and back, fighting for balance. Finally, Rowena dropped it across Mick’s dusty mattress by the coal stove. She fell on the boards beside it, gasping.

  Why did I trust him?

  Rowena stared up at the soot-blackened rafters, their edges silvered in the fading light. She had trusted him. That was the strangest part. She knew better than to trust anybody. Even Bess had skimmed off Rowena’s deliveries when she was first learning the trade, claiming it was “guild practice.” It had been a fortnight before she’d learned there was no guild and that “practice” among courier birds only meant the “thing we’re doing this week to get by.” She had trusted the Alchemist because he offered her a bowl of something hot and a place by the fire for a night.

  That’s how you tame an animal, Rowena thought. You’re as easy a mark as a terrier. He looked at you like a cold piece of meat, and he wouldn’t tell you his name, and still, you trusted him.

  Worse, she had found herself liking the Alchemist. Under all that silence and brooding, there seemed to be more than a bag of myths and witchy tales. She thought she’d caught a glimpse of a real person. But she’d been wrong—and being wrong, in her world, wasn’t far from ending up dead.

  Well, whatever the Alchemist was, Rowena wanted nothing more to do with him. She found that in her distraction, she’d begun searching the loft’s flotsam and jetsam for something, picking about the chaos. A light, she realized. She needed a candle or a lamp.

  She found a cracked hurricane glass with a taper still in it, long enough she could reach its wick with even a broken stub of a lucifer. Pawing about the wreckage, she found one, and soon had it glowing well enough to see properly.

  Rowena surveyed the loft. Hay mattresses torn open. Coal bin overturned. The lid of Bess’s trunk had been smashed, a fistful of clothes pulled up through its shattered ribs. The hatch to Ivor’s private storage room, built into a copse of the rafters above, swung from one hinge, leaning drunk against the ladder falling from its mouth. Elevenmonth wind whistled through the warehouse walls, wafting a sharp, coppery smell down from Ivor’s room. Rowena turned away, stomac
h churning. She didn’t wonder anymore what had become of him.

  Rowena set the lamp on a window ledge. The street was empty. Quiet. Strangely quiet—but then, any cove could see something dark had gone down in Blackbottom End. The usual lot would keep their distance awhile longer, she supposed. Maybe long enough for her to pick over the wreckage and pawn a few unbroken things against the Oldtemple ledger. She might save a bit of clink to line her pockets—to keep her while she looked for a new situation.

  She might.

  Or the pickers might be here by morning, and then she’d be scrapping just to keep the new coat on her back.

  Remembering the coat, Rowena remembered the Alchemist. She felt the garment’s charity burning her, mocking her. She wrestled free of it, spitting curses, and tossed it into the rag pile beside the coal bin. She hugged her knees, certain her anger would keep her warmer than any woolen hand-me-down. Even if she was wrong in that, she was sure of one thing.

  If the Alchemist knows what’s good for him, he’ll leave me be.

  The sound of crunching glass made Rowena start. The crick in her neck told her she’d fallen asleep against the railing, and the candle’s guttering nub showed the hours that had passed. A haze of sooty moonlight filtered through the window.

  Rowena’s ears pricked at the shuffle of feet below. Pickers? She reached for her boot knife, trying to scoot silently into shadows.

  Her heel nudged something. She winced at the scraping sound it made.

  “Rowena?”

  Rowena plunged a hand back into her boot, fumbling for the knife, then stopped. The ladder lay beside her, out of his reach.

  Don’t be stupid. He can’t get you up here.

  She shuffled to the loft’s railing, peering down. The Alchemist was a shadow moving amid tumbled crates and twisted shelving.

  “Go. Away,” Rowena called.

  He squinted up against the glare of moonlight. “Are you all right?”

  “You were right ’bout one thing.” Rowena put her candle beside the railing. “I think Ivor must be dead.”