Though the Alchemist had opened the door of the Stone Scales and given Rare money enough to see her way through most anything—though he’d said there was nothing left for her in the place she’d called home, that she might be happier putting him behind her—it was Rare who crossed the threshold. Some nights, she imagined that if she’d only planted her feet, he might have relented. He might have forgiven her anger after Mother’s death, her outbursts and tantrums, and she might have forgiven him for giving up so easily. He might have held her in his arms and allowed himself, at last, to cry.
But she hadn’t. And he hadn’t. And so Rare was put out, or put herself out, and turned to Anselm, with his new fortune and his stunned silence, too raw and wounded to turn her away.
That was thirteen years before. Things had been that way ever since.
Rare found the tight leather roll of the surgeon’s field kit, earned at the end of an apprenticeship almost forty years gone. She unfolded it, examining its gleaming residents, fingering each in turn. There’d be a half dozen others like it in the shop’s stock, but this was the one she wanted, because it was his.
Rare would leave Corma at dawn carrying a bag stuffed with everything that meant anything to her father. She would pith him, scrape out what remained of his core, and carry it off with her, proving beyond question that however much his abandonment had hurt her, she could do him far worse. Taking the surgeon’s kit first seemed poetically right.
Now, she could cut deep.
In ten minutes, she found a chronometer inscribed with unfamiliar initials, its yellowed faceplate frozen on a date passed weeks before. She found the Alchemist’s wedding band, a wide, plain ring of silver large enough to sit loosely at the base of her thumb. In a trunk at the foot of the bed, there was a little wooden box with her mother’s matching ring, a necklace and two pendants, and an iron skeleton key.
At the bottom of the keepsake box was a stack of notes, folded neatly and tied off with twine. Rare slipped the string away and opened one. Letters from Mother, written in her familiar, left-leaning hand. Rare pondered them a long time. Not love letters. Not all of them, anyway. Notes. Little arguments and harangues. Lists. Reminders. And some tendernesses, too. The creased edges were well-worn hinges now, yawning apart and quartering the pages.
Rare wrapped them up and reached to stuff them in her bag, only to find she lacked the space.
The letters from the warehouse.
She might have told Anselm that she’d done more on her trip to New Vraska Imports that morning than confirm Ivor’s death through blood and bedlam. She might have told him about the packet of correspondence from the office she’d lifted before leaving for the Hangman’s Market. But it had seemed wise to give herself the chance to review that little haul first. Now that she knew she’d be leaving Corma on the next lightning rail bell, it was time to toss the excess, find what could be sold to the lanyani quickly. A little spending money for a little effort. It was worth the time.
Rare sauntered to her old bedroom, riffling papers with a thumb. Rabbit lay on the foot of the bed now. She flopped onto her belly beside him, ruffled his ears, and rolled onto her back.
The packet was all letters and little parcels in overstuffed envelopes, the stamps showing they’d arrived in Corma as mail freight from a galleon out of Lemarcke. Some might have been from clients of Ivor’s, but many, she supposed, had simply been lifted wholesale from the anchor yards of Quayside Down during unloading. Ivor would have sent that fink of a boy, Mick, to pose as a porter and sift the best of the baggage. The boy had probably snagged the correspondence on a guess: a galleon full of EC squints, all penning letters to pass the time, would have to turn up some missives worth the effort of a bit of blackmail. The date of entry into Corma flashed by again and again—26th Tenmonth, 26th Tenmonth, 26th . . .
Rare’s fingers brushed away an envelope, reached for another, and froze over its delivery address.
Phillip Chalmers, PhD, ThD, 16 Lamplighter Circle, Coventry Passage
The envelope was tiny, like the ones a lady might use for a courting note, but the writing was meticulous and unromantic. A professional hand. A reverend doctor’s hand.
Rare tore open the flap. Inside was a piece of galleon stationary hardly larger than her hand, its center watermarked with the seal of the good ship Hipparchus. At the bottom, below Nora Pierce’s hasty signature, lay a blob of postal wax—just enough to bind a tiny key to the paper.
She read, and on the third sentence, her breath caught. Rare pulled her hand from Rabbit’s shaggy head. She sat up, scanning the letter, then started over again. It couldn’t have said— Rare’s eyes burned into the page.
And yet, it did.
“Bloody Reason,” she breathed.
Rabbit lifted his head and stood on the wobbling mattress. Then the air split with his barking, huge belting yelps that nearly covered the sound of the front door being hammered by something very large. Not a fist but a shoulder. A whole body. The dog charged downstairs, baying alarum.
Rare was on her feet before the sound of shattering glass ended the thunder below. She stuffed the package of the Alchemist’s things in her satchel, cramming Pierce’s letter in among them. Then she stepped up on the nightstand beside the bed and jumped for the exposed rafters. She swung her legs up over a beam and lay with her belly hugging its cobwebs, staring at the darkened room below. She dialed down her magnesium torch, let it cool a moment, and thrust it into her bag.
Voices. Three. All male, one with that particular grating quality, that sound of sandpaper over skin.
Rare mouthed her curses. The aigamuxa would smell her all over the upper floor, and soon.
The stairs groaned. She counted their protests, could tell the intruders had ten steps to go before they came to the landing outside this room. Rabbit’s barking ended with a heavy, thudding noise, a sharp yelp, and the sound of the dog scrabbling through the back door’s hatch.
Rare fished Nora Pierce’s letter out of her bag. She snapped the seal over the key and pressed that tiny thumbnail of brass into a crack in the rafter beneath her. The oval of the key handle showed a stamp and a number: 49. It would serve her well as a hiding place—but only if she got away.
Reaching forward with her arms and pulling, hugging with her knees and releasing, Rare inched along the beam toward the dormer and nudged open one of its panels. She kept her breath steady. “Almost everything a good thief does starts with the breath,” Anselm had said a thousand times over. “Lose that, and you lose control. Lose control, and you’re done for.”
Slowly, her fingers plied the window catch. She pulled herself out into the night, belly pressed to the gabled roof, peering past the casement edge, reversing the upside-down room in her mind’s eye.
“Hullo! This is the gendarme! We saw your torch. We know you’re up here somewhere.”
Rare closed her eyes and sighed. It would just be her luck that some bloody gendarmes of the constabulary made their patrol as she was sweeping the place. At this hour, a light moving furtively around the upper stories of the Scales would draw attention—might compel them to knock after the welfare of the proprietor and justify forcing the door.
But it didn’t explain the hunchbacked shadow looming in the bedroom now, casting its crookedness along the moonlit floor. One of the two junior constables had already bypassed the old attic room. A beam from his magnesium light grazed the walls and floors and moved on. The aigamuxa was one step into the room, one foot raised, ankle pivoting, pink eye blinking and peering.
The aiga’s flat face twitched, snf, snf, snf. Rare’s pulse bucked. She fought to keep her breath.
The creature set down its foot.
“Nobody here,” the gendarme called back. “Not even the Alchemist.”
Slowly, the creature nodded its blind head. “He will keep. The girl was here.” And it pointed toward the bed.
The gendarme was a young man, younger than Rare, and he looked green as grass, trying to avoid looking
at the aigamuxa’s face.
“Then we can leave. Inspector Gammon said to get the Alchemist to open up the records and come down to the station if he was here, and he en’t. She didn’t say boo about any girl.”
“A courier girl. She is becoming important.”
The gendarme shook his head. “What’s important is what I got told. Nothing about a girl.”
The other voice called, from the storeroom below: “Nothing here, Mills!”
The first one, Mills, nodded and hung his torch on his belt. “That scratches it. We’re done.”
“No.” The aigamuxa prowled forward, paused, lifted his other foot. His back was a quilt of bright, white scars. “There is the other one. The woman. The letter-scent is everywhere. New.”
Rare’s haunches tightened. She looked for the downspout, shimmying close enough to curl down onto it and start her descent to the moonlit yard below.
If they’re looking for the Bear, and for Rowena, and if the aigamuxa knows my scent—
She didn’t quite know how to finish that thought. But it coalesced into a very firm conviction of Things Being Wrong and cleaved to the vision of the officer and the aigamuxa speaking in confidence. To Bishop Meteron’s name in Nora Pierce’s letter. If the aigamuxa who took the book and the constabulary itself were searching for people connected to that botched delivery—if Bishop Allister Meteron were part of that—Anselm would need to know. She could tell him, and leave after, go farther than she’d first intended, and never return. Regency Square was a long way off, but she knew Westgate Bridge well and could cut a path through it like a hot knife, make it to Uptown within the hour, even taking the time to be careful.
Rare’s feet touched the cobblestone yard. Something about that solid ground cleared her mind and pricked her ears.
From the shadows around the stoop came a piteous whine.
Rabbit cowered, the hairs of his spine a rusty set of quills. His eyes fixed on the old machine shed behind Rare.
There was a sound like a pot at the edge of the boil.
A second aigamuxa waxed into view from the shadows of the alley, his arms reaching for the ground, ready to launch toward her. Rare knew it could clear the space. Aigamuxa were hideous leapers, muscle springs always tight and twitching.
Rare sprang up, snaring the downspout again. Her feet dug against the building’s backside. Behind, she heard the aiga’s bellow and pounding, bounding stride, and the sudden silence that was its eye heels leaving the earth to wheel in the air, a shadow growing over the frame wall before her, faster and wider and closer and suddenly upon her.
INTERMEZZO
The diary of the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers
Second-day Elevenmonth, year 276:
They’ve left me alone long enough I suspect they’ve done with me for the night—or, perhaps, the morning. There is no telling time down in this beastly hold. All the instrumentation I could dream of, and no clocks. I shall have to ask for one, of all simple, stupid things. I could laugh, but . . . no. I don’t have the will for irony now. Not after our meeting.
I have decided to start a diary. It once seemed to me a rather womanish habit, something too indulgent to suit the character of a reverend doctor. I own hundreds of old lab books filled with scrawls, and drafts and galleys of papers I’ve published. But no diaries. Thinking on that, it seems I’ve had no life to speak of—no personal thoughts and reflections. Just a lot of papers.
I’ve seen four different human guards, all of them uncharitable in their long stares. There are at least six aigamuxa. I am learning a few tricks for telling them apart, mostly by their scars and limps and such. Certainly there is no mistaking Nasrahiel for any of the others.
He came an hour ago, with the other half of “we.”
Some EC are devoted to knowing the peerage of their district. I left that business to Nora, so much better at small talk and digging gently in pockets for pious donations. If I’d followed her example, I should have known Smallduke Regenzi without the introduction. Were I not presently sleeping on a cot and making my water in a bucket, I might have called him a gracious host.
He came in as I was calibrating the phosphor display, Nasrahiel loping behind him. The aigamuxa’s sacking trousers had blood on them, a handprint on the outside of the thigh, long trails marking where fingers lost their hold and fell away.
Regenzi gave me his name—his card, even.
“Fascinating little array you’ve put together here. Could you show me, perhaps . . . ?” And he let the question trail, gesturing coaxingly.
I eyed Nasrahiel. Regenzi tsked. “I am sorry for that roughness back at the rectory. Nasrahiel is an enthusiast for our cause. That has its detriments, I’m afraid.”
“The display is rather technical,” I said, at last. “I’ll try to keep things simple.”
And I began adjusting the apertures. I had done it so often before I had the display ready in moments.
“And what is your ‘cause,’ exactly, my lord?” I wondered aloud, wheeling the particulate scanner around on its dolly cart to face a little band of blank space between my captors.
The smallduke shrugged. “More easily explained, perhaps, once you’ve shown us the tricks of your trade.”
I checked the connections, then waved to the aigamuxa, pointing and signing at the creature to ensure its comprehension. “This is, ah, a generator. A treadle-powered dy-na-mo. It collects, um, demons of energy that are enslaved by these conduits to provide—”
Nasrahiel’s shark teeth bared. He slammed his foot down on the treadle board, hard enough to send the flywheel spinning in a mad, clattersome rush. The screen sparked in response.
“I . . . see you already know how it works,” I said sheepishly.
He folded himself into his customary crouch, pink eyes glaring from his heels.
Regenzi laughed. “The aigamuxa don’t practice science, Doctor, but they are really quite a bit more clever than we’ve given them credit for. Did you know they also believe in God? Granted, there are some philosophical differences separating us, but that was also true of human societies three hundred years ago. We’ve enjoyed quite a profitable partnership: I’m looking for scientists who can tell me how to find the Vautneks. Nasrahiel believes God has asked him to do the same. Perhaps we’re both right.”
I was about to ask what either of them could want the Vautneks for, but Regenzi looked suddenly quite eager, and so I took my place at the treadle board and began pulsing it along, bringing the phosphor array up to a warm, steady glow.
“Turn down the lamps, please,” I said.
The screen was thick glass, its color dilute amber. It lent that sepia tone to everything seen through its face, the movements of particles and waves curling and sparkling. The particles pulled right and left, trying to gather around the reflections of man and aigamuxa in turn, and then, as if losing interest, drifted back to the middle. Nasrahiel reached a leg out and held it at the height of my head, ankle turned toward the screen, the pose an impossibility of anatomical angles.
My stomach knotted, threatening rebellion. I held it in place. I am getting rather too experienced in that business, I think.
I gestured to the drifting matter. Regenzi leaned close. A particle, tiny as a needle prick, dashed off screen in an arc, following his movement.
The smallduke gave a low whistle. “So these are they. The god particles.”
I nodded.
“We called them god particles because they exhibit patterns one might call behavior. That’s unusual because they lack any kind of charge—a sort of neutron waste, the particle physicists used to think. They should experience neither attraction to, nor repulsion from, any other kind of matter. They should behave more or less like dust. When I was studying volatile weather patterns, I had a theory of the particles being connected to pressure systems, perhaps as a form of atmospheric fallout. Instead, once I compiled the data from the various arrays, I found different patterns entirely. There were nine zones of con
centration, and they were mobile.”
“The particles follow the Nine,” Nasrahiel said with certainty.
It was a strange thing, having part of what might qualify as his face hovering by my left shoulder, and the voice of the creature itself in front of me.
“That’s . . . what we ended up theorizing, when Nora’s Vautnek text and my readings showed the same coordinates. The movement in particle fields corresponds quite precisely to the changes in the book’s data set.”
Regenzi leaned back and stroked his side whiskers. “But how do you know that?” he wondered aloud.
I nodded toward the nine piles of papers stacked up on my ersatz drawing table. “My own notes. Some algorithms. About a year ago, I used a coordinate set from the text to identify a survey area. Here. In Corma.”
“And?”
“Subject Six,” I said. “I set up a little station for myself in the Cathedral belfry, connected the array to a telescope, and was able to follow a path Six had moved through a few hours before, according to the textual record. The particles linger for quite a long time in the wake of the Nine, you know. Hours, at minimum. Perhaps days.”
Nasrahiel swung back up to his feet. “You could hunt by such a trail.”
I should have said nothing. I should have tried to turn the idea aside, but something about talking the work over made me feel safe again. I felt cradled in the presence of knowledge and reason, in a world that knew my purpose.
I forgot I was looking at a monster.
“It would be cumbersome, but once you narrowed the plat of survey with a little mathematical modeling, it could be done very . . .”
Regenzi looked at Nasrahiel, and though the creature’s eyes were planted on the floor, I think he was looking back at the smallduke, as well.
I considered the aigamuxa uncertainly. “Nasrahiel . . . why are you called by God to find the Nine?”
“I called him to serve me,” Regenzi snapped. And he smiled reasonably. “For all practical purposes, that’s what it comes down to. Doctor Chalmers, may I ask you a question?”
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