The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Gammon stopped. “Something wrong, sir?”

  She waited in the morgue’s threshold, its door propped against her polished heels. The Alchemist looked up at her.

  “You said there was a body.”

  “This way, sir.”

  The constabulary morgue was a vast room, lined with thick vault doors and half-frosted tiles. The cold dampened the sweet smell of the dead, pushing it down to hug the ground with lingering, malevolent vapor.

  Gammon stopped at the medical examiner’s table, painting camphor under her nose. She offered the pot to the Alchemist. The old man waved it off.

  He was already looking at one particular vault, weeping water where its ice bevels met the tiled wall. Its surface beaded with perspiration. The other doors were dry.

  Number eleven. That was where the body would be.

  Gammon cracked the vault’s lever and pulled the slate tray out.

  Even in death, Rare Juells had a kind of pale splendor. It was a stark and distant beauty, a cool radiance faintly blue beneath the curve of her cheek and the bow of her lips. That, more than the ruin of the rest, forced Gammon’s eyes away. She did her best to cover it by studying the Alchemist’s face for some reaction, some sign of recognition. Of surprise. Distaste.

  The old man’s blank face was almost as terrible as Rare’s bloodied body.

  A gash ran just under her armpit, showing winks of bone and rags of muscle. Her blood filled the slate table’s long grooves. The left side of her face was a shattered mirror of the still-lovely right. The orbital bone was caved in, piercing her eye with shards of skull, the nasal cavity left gaping. Through the mats of blood and bone in her hair, Gammon could see the pulp of gray matter.

  She cleared her throat.

  “The evidence suggests that after she robbed the Scales, she was murdered by an accomplice. The goods we found on her were of negligible value, and likely that started a row. Perhaps the accomplice wanted to go back in for more. The neighbors awoke to the sounds of a fray. One of them came round the backyard and found her there. No weapon, but I imagine the devil ran off with his cudgel. Happens all the time.”

  The Alchemist nodded distantly. Gammon felt a lurch in her stomach—bile at the lie she had told, or unease at that blank, stony face beside her. Both, perhaps. She frowned.

  “Do you know her, sir?”

  “I do.”

  “Take your time.”

  The old man surveyed the woman’s face. He seemed to be searching for something, a line etched deep between his brows. He spoke more to himself than Gammon.

  “If you check the family records division of the Court and Bar, you’ll find papers on the adoption of Rare Juells. Her adoptive mother’s name was Leyah.” He paused, seeing Gammon remove a notebook from her jacket, and repeated the names, spelling each in turn. “You’ll find my name in that record, as well.”

  Gammon’s pencil stopped scratching. She stared at her hand, then cleared her throat.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Do you mean to say she’s your daughter?”

  “It’s all in the records, Inspector.” The Alchemist drew in a slow breath. “Would you mind, perhaps, giving me a few minutes?”

  Mechanically, Gammon reached into a drawer beside Rare’s vault and produced a white sheet, drawing it up over her nakedness.

  “I’ll send someone down later to take your deposition.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And, sir?”

  The Alchemist’s gaze locked on Haadiyaa Gammon. For a moment, Gammon said nothing, chewing her words, trying to work them into something whose taste she could stomach. I could have prevented this, she almost said. Instead, as if it belonged to someone else, Gammon watched her hand drift up to touch the Alchemist’s sleeve.

  “I am sorry.”

  That, at least, was the truth.

  There was another truth in the Alchemist’s hard, dark look. He turned his gaze back on his daughter’s corpse, the line between his brows deepening again. As Gammon left the morgue, she could not shake the feeling that there was something the old man was looking for in her shattered face—and that he was close to finding it.

  22.

  “There’s nowhere to park,” Anselm’s driver grumbled.

  The streets of the Upper Districts were a snarl of clockwork buses, hackney cabs, costermonger carts, and darting pedestrians. The line of iron posts for hitching drive teams that ran half a block outside the constabulary’s central offices had been cordoned off, probably to keep a path clear for the officers’ own coaches and carts. Anselm’s driver had boxed in another secretariat coach in the scrap to get as close as possible to that broad building, toothy with windows and colonnades.

  Anselm donned his grandee hat. “Drive around the block awhile, then. We should only be a few minutes.” He stepped off the platform beneath the coach door and reached a hand up to Rowena.

  The girl looked something between charmed and frightened under the ruff of Rare’s old overcoat. He supposed she’d never ridden in a coach before. The thought of her finding anything novel in something so mundane amused him. Then again, a good deal about the girl and her provincial penury amused him.

  “My lady?” he said, smiling at the flare in her cheeks. It was wonderfully satisfying to see her disarmed. He considered it compensation for his temporary services as governess. Still, those services seemed in danger of becoming less temporary with every passing hour.

  Certainly the Old Bear’s message gave the impression that this might be a concern, if a congenial party able to offer alibi or bail failed to make a timely appearance at the constabulary offices.

  They started up the long stairs, Anselm in a fine gray doublet with a long, woolen coat buttoned halfway to his ruffled cravat. It took only a moment for Rowena to forget herself entirely and bound three steps ahead. He plucked her sleeve, holding her back until they were side by side again.

  “On my arm.” He threaded her right through his left. “We’ll be in and out a good deal faster if you look a lady.”

  Rowena’s mouth twisted. “Instead of a what?”

  Anselm started up the stairs again. She was obliged to keep his pace.

  “Instead of a street urchin in borrowed clothes. This is the wrong place to raise suspicions. The people here are paid to have suspicions.”

  The sergeant at the front desk had the good sense, at least, to pretend that he didn’t know Anselm Meteron on sight. Anselm and the girl had discussed this moment in the coach. Rowena noticed his hand squeezing her forearm and reached into her clutch for his card.

  Anselm let the other man review the token. “I’m here to see Inspector Gammon on the matter of the Alchemist. There is no appointment.”

  The clerk began jotting down a note, then paused. “Master Anselm Meteron and . . . who else, may I ask, is calling?”

  “This is my daughter.”

  When the clerk returned to the appointment diary, Rowena cast Anselm an exasperated look. He smiled, winked, and enjoyed himself thoroughly.

  “I’ll ring down to her office, sir. You can take a seat down the hall.”

  Anselm took Rowena with him, still steering her by the arm. Her eyes darted as they moved through the central waiting area, crowded with benches of sour-smelling ruffians and half-fed whores with gendarmes looming over them, working out papers on their writing slates for this crime or that. A pair of rough-looking lanyani sat strapped in separate metal chairs on a concrete dais—far enough from each other and high enough off the scuffed wooden floor to keep them from easily rooting into the boards or vining together before the officers could see to them.

  Anselm opened the door to a private waiting room and held it for the girl. Then he threw his hat on the seat of an easy chair. Rowena rounded on him.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  Anselm quirked an eyebrow. “I could have said you were my courtesan, but you’re a bit young, even for me. Besides, Miss Downshire, I have a certain aesthetic standard to consider
, in which regard you are rather wanting.”

  She swatted his hat off the chair it had claimed and flounced down in its place, her arms crossed over the less than ample bosom of her dress.

  “A lady,” Anselm suggested as he bent to recover the upended grandee, “takes her coat off before she takes her seat.”

  “Stuff it.”

  “You’re in a mood, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t like this place.”

  “Been here before?”

  “Is that some way of asking if I’ve been arrested?” Rowena shook her head. “Well, I en’t. Known lots of coves who have, though.”

  “You’re on the right side of the law this time,” Anselm said, draping his coat over his arm. “At least insofar as anyone here is aware. Relax.”

  “I’ll relax when we’re well and gone, thanks. Do you really think you can just walk off with the Old Bear?”

  There was a note of actual distress in the girl’s voice, quite a different quaver than her little rage moments before. “What would it matter to you? I thought you were furious with him for the liberties he took. Frightened of his unnaturalness.”

  Rowena lifted her chin stubbornly. “He saved my hide, so I suppose I owe him a lookout.”

  “Ah. Now, I thought you were the one who ‘did for’ the aigamuxa last night.” Rowena gave Anselm a searing look. “Where would I have gotten such a notion, I wonder?”

  “Can you get him out of this hole or not?”

  “As there hasn’t yet been a formal arrest, absolutely. The inspector and I have an understanding.”

  There was a rap on the doorframe. Anselm winked at Rowena. I’ll do the talking. She wriggled free of her coat, folding it demurely over her clasped hands just as the door opened.

  Sometimes, they can be taught.

  Inspector Gammon always had a pinched, stiff cast to her hawkish features. Anselm expected that sail-in-a-gale tightness, the propriety the inspector couldn’t, for all her pragmatism, shed. Now, though, there was something else at play.

  “I left him in the morgue,” she said from the doorway, without preamble. “Perhaps—” Gammon looked tentatively at Rowena. “Perhaps the young lady should wait for us here.”

  Anselm frowned at the girl. She’d gone stock-still at the word “morgue.”

  “No,” he replied. “Let’s all go.”

  Gammon fastened the latches on the lift’s scrolling doors and cranked the lever. Anselm looked up at the ceiling as the carriage jerked downward.

  “Where did you find his body? The warehouse?”

  The inspector regarded him uncertainly. “The Alchemist isn’t—”

  “I know he isn’t dead,” Anselm snapped. “You do have him down there identifying a body, yes? Ivor Ruenichnov?”

  Anselm returned Gammon’s gaze, saw its passing blankness, and felt his own prickle of misgiving. Rowena fidgeted, her petticoats whispering. Gammon shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, Anselm.”

  The lift felt oddly cold, the walls closer than they’d been. Anselm’s hackles rose.

  “Haadi,” he said, drawing out the name, dismembering it with lingering care. “What precisely is going on?”

  The lift stopped. Gammon attended to the doors. Anselm swept past her as soon as they released, his hat and coat under one arm. He clipped Rowena’s shoulder, stalking through the morgue doors.

  Rare lay on the slate table. The Alchemist slumped on the floor beside it.

  Neither of them moved.

  Rowena bolted in, her skirts whipping her ankles, and rushed for the Alchemist. The old man’s back rested on the body-vault wall. His legs spread out before him as if they’d given way, his whole frame sinking to starboard. The girl pushed and tugged at him, trying to shift him upright.

  “I’ll call down a physick,” the inspector said, turning to the bellpull and tube beside the doors.

  Anselm grabbed her shoulder. “No. He’ll be fine.”

  “He’s in catalepsy or had a palpitation. God only knows what.”

  “He’ll be fine, Haadi. Stay here.”

  They locked eyes. Gammon nodded, stepping aside.

  Anselm walked to the slate table and instantly wished he hadn’t. From across the room, he couldn’t see what had become of Rare’s face. He had seen worse deaths before. Sometimes, he had even been their cause. But to see Rare wearing its grisly colors silenced him. He was aware of that sudden stillness—the echoing halls of his whole system, so full of clamor and incidence, ground to a sudden halt. Usually, that peace was a good thing, the most longed for of all uncommon things.

  Peace, Anselm thought distantly, was Rare.

  He focused on the right side of her face, the angle of her cheek, the blueness of death bleeding through like ink. Rare had been chaos itself. He would pet, and she would purr, or scratch, one nearly as often as the other. He loved that willfulness, though the part of him that was something other than a lover watched her exploits with a fist of anxiety tightening in his belly. Some nights, it took all Anselm’s energy to match her impulses, her wits, her audacity. Rare exhausted him. He needed that. No other woman was brazen enough to insult him, sink in her claws, and then sink into his bed a moment later. She had been utterly, unchangeably herself, the whole of his joy and his grief.

  There was a voice nearby, insistent and shrill. Anselm turned. A wide-eyed girl crouched beside him, flailing in a dress cut for a woman’s curves. She seemed familiar. The clockworks slipped back into motion, anger turning the winding spring. At last, he could put a name to her face.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Rowena cried.

  Anselm stooped and felt for the Alchemist’s pulse. It was there—dogged and strong, perhaps even too fast. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied Gammon lingering by the doors, arms folded, bottom lip white between her teeth.

  “You should have known better, you old fool,” Anselm murmured. He looked at Rowena. “He must have been looking for answers. He’s been . . .” He tapped a finger to his temple meaningfully. “Traveling abroad.”

  Slowly, the girl seemed to understand. “He went . . .” She stared at Rare’s body. “He went in there?”

  In there. To a place. A thing. Anselm’s stomach turned.

  “Will he be all right?”

  “Damned if I know, but he can’t stay here. Gammon!”

  The city inspector looked up.

  Anselm stood, reaching into his folded coat. He drew out a gold clip of sovereign notes and tossed it on the sheet covering Rare. It thumped into the valley between her breasts. For an instant, he watched her, waiting for her to start up at the indignity, hoping a hand would swat the bundle away.

  Nothing.

  “We’re leaving,” Anselm announced. “We’re taking this man with us. Send anything of his you have in holding to my apartments. I’ll expect the delivery within the hour.”

  Gammon looked at the bundle of bills—thousands of sovereigns discarded. Her face twisted. “I can’t take your money, Anselm.”

  “The hell you can’t,” Anselm spat. And then his lip curled. He shrugged. “Leave it here, if that pleases you. Let some lucky ghoul in your staff turn up rich and quit his post on the morrow. It would be a laugh. The Trimeeni bury the dead with all their riches, you know. We should be so generous with our own.”

  Anselm knelt beside the Alchemist and slapped him once, hard. The older man groaned, stirring. Anselm began packing up the little altar of items arranged by Rare’s corpse, stuffing them unceremoniously into the canvas envelope lying at her feet. Chronometer, wedding rings, surgeon’s kit . . .

  “Help the man get his feet, Haadi, if you’re so determined to be a gentlewoman.”

  Haadiyaa Gammon said nothing. If she had, Anselm knew he’d have done something unwise, something his right hand and its missing finger ached to do to someone. Instead, Gammon strode over, slipping an arm around the Alchemist, and levered him to his feet. Rowena kept prodding and chirruping until, dazed, the old man accepted
the help silently, making a slow, uncertain path to the door.

  Gammon was holding the door open for them when Anselm called.

  “Haadi?”

  Gammon looked over her shoulder. “Yes?”

  Anselm stared down at Rare. Get up, kitten. He stared at the right side of her face, willing warmth into the flesh, willing open eyes and smiling lips. Get up. You never sleep this late.

  “Anselm?”

  Anselm flinched. For an instant, his gaze strayed to the other side of Rare’s face. Its bare meat and bone flashed bright as lightning before his eyes. He winced, shutting them. “She’s been through quite enough,” he said. “No inquest.”

  “Given the circumstances, it would be difficult to justify denying one.”

  “Ask me if I care.”

  “There’s the possibility you might never know what happened without it.”

  “I have a rather good idea of what’s happened.” Anselm looked at the Alchemist darkly. “We can determine the finer details on our own.”

  Gammon sighed. “I’ll have the chief medical examiner transfer her to the mortuary of your choice. You can leave their information with our courier when you receive the Alchemist’s effects.”

  “Just burn her.” Anselm shook his head. “There’s no decent place to bury the dead in this city.”

  Wordless, Gammon guided the Alchemist and Rowena away. The door shut.

  Anselm lingered, studying the right side of Rare’s face. It was almost as he’d always known it, cool and dark in the night, waiting to turn into gold and fire with the dawn. Yet there was no flush of life coloring her throat, no steady rise and fall of breath. It was too still. The stillness stretched over Rare’s restless loveliness like a winding-sheet. Then, he considered her left side, crushed by a strength greater than any a man could bring to bear. It was bitter and brutal, as vicious as the lacerations running down her body.

  Anselm slipped on his coat. He tucked the Old Bear’s belongings under one arm. He almost donned his grandee.