He carried on before I could have given a reply. “Are you quite comfortable with the idea of mankind’s worth being measured by the actions of just nine individuals?”
I started shuffling the papers on my drafting table, stacking and secreting them.
“I’m a reverend doctor of the Ecclesiastical Commission,” I answered. “Our first belief is that God is the creator of a Rational and organized universe, and that He uses His infinite observation and wisdom to render judgments about that universe. His nature is the model of science itself, and our pursuit of its processes a meditation on His being.”
“Lovely speech. It’s not an answer to the question, though.”
“Our second belief,” I continued tightly, “is that God must carefully observe His creation in order to judge its value—its efficacy, worthiness, substance. He does so without interference in our actions. God preserves the conditions of the Experiment.”
“Until such time as the Experiment has demonstrated conclusively its significance.” Smallduke Regenzi was still smiling.
“Yes. Exactly.”
“It hardly qualifies as a proper experiment, though. Where are the control subjects?”
“If God is truly ubiquitous and omnipotent, there is no Rational cause to doubt He created other worlds with other conditions and populations, against which we might be measured.” The smallduke stared at me. I shrugged at his bafflement, a little pleased with myself. “I wrote a paper on the Many-Worlds Hypothesis using string theory.”
He frowned. “And so you’re at peace with the idea of our being watched at all times by God.”
“Observation is the second tenet of our doctrine. A cornerstone of the scientific method itself.”
“Are you equally at peace with only nine of us being watched?”
My hands were on my transcription of Subject Six’s information. I evened the papers’ corners and set them in the stack, perpendicular to the next subject down, building my way up to Nine. He had me ready to say what I had been stewing over for years, for the first time really wanting to say it aloud.
“No, my lord. It’s a frankly atrocious sample size, even given the likelihood of many worlds. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, He shouldn’t require such a narrow view. He should be able to see everything, judge from everything, all at once.”
Regenzi nodded sympathetically. “There are others who feel quite the same way.”
Others. Of course there were more than two to this conspiracy—a hand pushing Regenzi, just like the hand of God Nasrahiel claimed pushing him. I should have pressed on that, but then he was prowling the room with curious confidence. He gestured to the phosphor screen, then laid hands on the cart and wheeled it toward the Vautnek text. The amber screen was suddenly afire. It magnified a hail of golden motes, raining and darting and swarming down into the text, seemingly absorbed by its bindings.
“There used to be a theory that eyes cast out light, wasn’t there, Doctor?” he asked.
“Emission theory. It’s been discredited. The ocular apparatus reflects light. It can’t produce it.”
Regenzi shrugged. “Perhaps that’s true of humanity. Why should the same rules apply to God?”
“I fail to see your point.”
“Perhaps I’m just a wealthy businessman,” Regenzi answered, letting go of the cart and straightening up, pausing, dusting off the banded arms of his very fine green coat. “A purchased title. But my father worked hard to become such a thing so that I might become such a thing, and he was quite a decent man—paid the workers in his mills well and kept the aigamuxa fed and unfettered. The first man of business in this city to do away with their chains—did you know that? When my benefactor shared the little apocryphal tidbits the EC had been keeping from common knowledge—these things that are, given the work you and Reverend Doctor Pierce produced, more than just apocryphal—I felt the ground shift under my feet. The thought that God might shrug His mighty shoulders and wipe the slate once He’s learned all He wishes to about mankind? Or He might clear the board if He found us displeasing, or simply got bored and wished to make the world over again? Well. That means my destiny and everything I’ve worked for belongs to someone else, doesn’t it? And for all we know, they’re sinners. Or saints. Or backward aboriginals. I don’t like that powerlessness, Doctor. And I do not accept it as the necessary condition of my world.”
I sat on the edge of the shabby little cot. “There’s something to be said for not disrupting the conditions of an Experiment we can’t fully understand.”
Regenzi snorted. “We don’t bother to make claims about what God wants of us anymore, morally or ethically. So what harm could it do to take nine souls under aegis and protect them from the depravities of the world?”
“You can’t expect people to live under quarantine, forced to live out someone’s guess of what may or may not be good for all of us.”
“We do it in laboratories with mice.”
I was about to protest that, too—claim that these men and women were not lab mice, but that was patently untrue. They were. God’s lab mice, no less.
“According to the Old Religion,” Regenzi went on, “there’s quite a storied tradition of sacrificing the one to secure the salvation of all. We’re merely expanding on tradition.”
I looked up at Nasrahiel, still standing, looming. He has no other way of being. The aigamuxa are built to loom.
“You, ah, never answered my question,” I recalled. His head tilted, as if he knew I must have been addressing him.
The teeth parted, smiling. But it was Regenzi who answered.
“I felt I owed Nasrahiel and his clan a certain employment after the labor acts were passed, something to keep his people out of the streets. When I was . . . recruited into this endeavor, I knew I would need help of his kind. Besides, his wanting to keep the world turning should hardly be a surprise.”
They left not long after, but I swear the creature’s smile is still hanging in the air, two rows of saw-teeth bared against the dark.
DAY THREE
3RD ELEVENMONTH
20.
It was morning, well past first light. Rowena Downshire had awoken in a cloud of pillows and satin sheets perfumed with chamomile and rosewater—alone.
The last she remembered, she had been with the Alchemist in Master Meteron’s apartments. There had been supper, and a bath, and a change into a nightgown laid out in a guest room. The Alchemist had called down to the concierge for a lady’s nail kit, some iodide, and a roll of gauze. He waited for Rowena to emerge from the water closet, then gestured for her to sit on the edge of the bed.
She had watched him suspiciously as he donned his spectacles and examined her red, raw palms. The bath had soaked the glass splinters to the surface of the skin, prickling them out like tiny quills. She’d had a notion what the old man meant to be about with those tweezers and tiny scissors. It made her creep backward on the coverlet.
“The quality can just call down to a desk and get what they like easy, huh?” she piped nervously.
The Alchemist had said nothing. The little silver instruments glinted, waiting.
“I think I’ll be fine,” Rowena had insisted. “I mean, it hurts some, but—”
“Sometimes you have to open a wound up for it to heal properly. Now stop squirming.”
The Alchemist dabbed something retrieved from his coat all over Rowena’s skin. It was clear and smelled of wool factories and dye shops. It tingled a moment, and then he settled into the task, working steadily, drawing forth the needles of glass in perfect silence. Somehow, it didn’t hurt, though she could still feel a dull probing and pulling. They’d said nothing more. Rowena’s head was so full she could barely think how to pry words from it, let alone what they ought to be. The silence grew strangely comfortable. Finally, the Alchemist had finished, painting her palms with the iodide, bundling her hands into two gauzy mittens.
As the old man gathered up his things, Rowena was still deciding i
f she was cross enough to withhold her thanks.
He’d gone altogether before she made up her mind.
Now, hours later—awake, alone—she climbed into the morning clothes the help had laid out: an oak-colored woolen skirt and a white tunic that tied behind her back. A breakfast trolley waited in the hall. Her stomach rumbled, but she suppressed the urge to wheel it into the room and tuck in.
The place was deadly quiet, so it seemed a good time to give it the once-over. She unwound her bandages and found her hands only a little stiff, if very orange from the iodide. Then Rowena tiptoed down the bright, broad corridors of Anselm Meteron’s penthouse.
There was a dining room, narrow and long with a table fit for twelve, all cherrywood and marble and crystal chandeliers. She considered the china cabinet, opening one of its drawers. The other guest room’s door was open, but she paused to knock anyway, expecting to find the Alchemist with his gazette and a coffee. But there was no breakfast trolley, and the bed was made, though in a loose fashion that suggested it had been occupied not long before. Rowena paused by the room’s vanity, fingering an ivory comb with a golden palm leaf handle.
Across the hall was a room that could have held all three of the others, the biggest bed she’d ever seen at its center. It was all white and fine and very neat, except for the sheets, knotted up and spilling to the floor.
Last, Rowena approached the solar, two voices echoing within. She crept to the doorframe and peered around.
Anselm Meteron paced between divan and pianoforte, his back to the door. A secretary sat at the escritoire, taking dictation:
“On the matter of Twentieth-day Fourmonth, I see no cause to delay appropriation of the assets from the Brietney sale, and give you leave to execute the remaining terms of the contract.” Meteron paused and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You can craft some kind of conclusion from there, I assume, Miss Ennis? The usual pleasantries.”
The secretary scribbled on, nodding. She wore a tiny pair of spectacles on the tip of her punctilious nose. “How far shall I go, sir?”
Master Meteron smiled. “Make it none too pleasant.”
“Of course. Will there be anything—”
And then a footman came through the front door and bumped another breakfast trolley against Rowena’s unsuspecting backside. A clatter of china and the boy’s apology turned all eyes toward her hiding place.
Rowena glared at the boy.
“No, Miss Ennis,” Master Meteron said. “I think we’re quite done for now.”
Rowena’s host had the footman, Benjy, lay both their meals out in the solar: coffee, toast, a soft-boiled egg, and a sectioned orange—even slices of black pudding, the sort Rowena had only seen in the windows of expensive butcheries. Her head was a tangle of hope and suspicion. There she was, eating like the governor’s peerage, wearing a clean set of clothes, fresh from a good bed and a sparkling washstand—
And she still wasn’t sure if it was good luck or bad that put her there.
Master Meteron poured coffee. Rowena filled her cup with as much cream and sugar as it could hold. He kept his black, though there was something already in the bottom of his cup waiting to mingle with the pour.
“Thanks,” said Rowena, blowing at her coffee. “Where’s . . . ?” She paused, searching for the name Meteron had used. “Where’s the Old Bear?”
“Visiting the Council Bishopric. Apparently he believes the EC graybeards will answer his questions about Pierce and Chalmers’s work.”
Rowena frowned. “And you don’t think they will?”
“I don’t think they have the damnedest notion of what’s really going on. And if they did, I very much doubt they’d let it out to the likes of him.”
Rowena sawed at the pudding. “Thanks for all of this. It’s really jake of you to put me up the night.”
Master Meteron hadn’t touched his plate. He sat far back in a roll-armed chair, holding his coffee, one hand lifting the cup and turning it a few degrees, setting it down in the saucer again, lifting it, turning it. Corma’s skyline, ringed with gray clouds, filled the window at his back. Rowena ate until the chinking rhythm of his game with the cup worked under her skin.
“Are you, um . . . ?” She looked at her plate of food, then at her host. “Are you just going to watch me eat, or what?”
“We talked awhile after you were abed, the Bear and I. It seems you came into some trouble last night.”
Rowena studied him, chewing slowly. The corner of his mouth had turned a little, crooked and knowing.
She lifted her chin. “We managed it all right.”
“We?”
“There were two aiga,” Rowena said briskly. “I done for one of ’em.”
“Did you.”
Meteron’s tone raked down the back of Rowena’s neck. She shifted in her seat.
“You don’t believe me?”
His head tilted, as if to take her in by another angle. “Should I?”
“I’m being straight with you. Least you could do is stop staring at me like some constable query man.”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “But you’re in my home. And I’ve been thinking. Perhaps you haven’t been as straight with us as you’ve pretended.”
Rowena sat back, arms crossed. “So ask me something instead of sitting there playing games.”
Meteron raised an eyebrow. “We can make this a game, if you like. It would even be fair.”
Something in the cold calm of Anselm Meteron’s voice told Rowena there were very few games he played that were at all fair to his opponents.
“What . . . would we be gaming for?”
“Pieces of things. Truths. There must be things you’ve been wanting to know.”
Rowena looked all around the bright, white room, taking in its gilded edges and deep cushions. It was nothing like the Scales with its aching old stairs, and even less like Ivor’s squat over the courier’s loft. Somehow, those men had something to do with each other, and that something had to do with the book, and the delivery, and her sitting there with a plate of eggs and black pudding and blacker worries pushed to the back of her mind.
“Some things,” she admitted. “I suppose. But there’s nothing left for me to tell you. You know everything about me already.”
“I doubt that very much, cricket.”
Rowena opened her mouth to snap at him, then faltered. “Cricket?”
Meteron nodded toward Rowena’s feet, tucked up and peeking out sidesaddle from her skirt. Her cheeks burned.
Rowena’s bare feet rubbed against one another, sawing together in little anxious strokes.
Meteron chuckled. “At our rendezvous yesterday, I could fairly hear the leather of your boots rubbing away. You’re a nervous thing, aren’t you, cricket?”
Rowena shifted, hiding her feet, and stared daggers. “What are your game’s stupid rules, anyway?”
“Every truth you give me, I’ll give you one back.” Meteron leaned closer, his eyes hard. “But feed me some clever street lark lie and all you’ll get is birdseed.”
“What makes you think you’ll be able to tell the difference between when I lie or tell the truth?”
“I’ve met your kind before.”
Rowena snorted. “I’ve met your kind, too.”
“Have you?” Meteron sipped his coffee. “What’s my kind?”
“You,” she said, “are a rich, pompous, lazy sonovabitch who en’t got the least idea of what it’s like to scrap every day just to get by. That’s why you don’t think a thing of making me play games like this when I en’t done you any wrong. It’s as much nothing to you as that girl writing your letters because you can’t stand getting the ink on your pretty hands.”
Rowena folded her arms tight to her chest. She hoped her eyes looked as hot as her face felt.
“Passion,” he observed mildly, “makes you strikingly eloquent.”
“Privilege makes you an arse.”
Meteron set down his cup, reaching for a cigarette a
nd a lucifer from the smoking box on the table. “You’re right on some counts. I think nothing of testing you, and that requires arrogance. But you also missed the mark. Twice. First, it requires an extraordinary amount of work to achieve and maintain the rich, pompous life I enjoy. I’m afraid you can lay all manner of veniality at my feet except sloth.”
Rowena ate with sharp stuffing motions. “And the second miss?” she asked through a mouth crammed with toast.
Meteron held up his right hand, unlit cigarette between his middle and ring fingers. Rowena stopped eating, staring in spite of herself at what she had felt the afternoon before—the oddness lurking in his grip. He wagged the stump of his index finger, its scarred tip sickly white.
“Miss Ennis takes my dictation because my penmanship is simply beastly.”
Rowena wiped her mouth to cover a grimace. Meteron lowered his hand. She was happy to have its ugliness out of sight. She felt his gaze and weighed her options. There were things she wanted to know. If this was the way to be about learning them—
“So you’ll match me?” she asked. “Truth for truth?”
“Birdseed for birdshit.”
Rowena nodded.
“But remember: you’re in my house,” Meteron added. He struck the lucifer and lit his cigarette. “So I’ll ask the first question, if you don’t mind.” He didn’t wait for her response. “Have you really told us everything you know about this delivery and the aigamuxa?”
“Yes.”
He breathed smoke through his nostrils. “Very well. Your turn.”
“Wait. That’s it? You don’t think I lied?”
“No, cricket. You’re a terribly easy read.”
“Stuff ‘cricket,’” Rowena snapped. Anselm Meteron might put a roof over her head for a while, but that word went a bridge too far and crossed it too often. She knew very well why men like him used such names. “I’m not your pet.”
“Do you have a question?” He sounded bored.
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