The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  And then he paused. Anselm laid the package and his hat atop the bundle of bills. He leaned close to Rare’s face—

  The right side.

  His nose brushed her eyelashes. There was a smell skulking in her fine, long hair like old meat and an open privy. His lips drifted over her cheek, close.

  Very close. And yet—

  “Sorry, kitten,” Anselm murmured. He straightened, taking up the parcel and his hat.

  Anselm Meteron walked to the morgue door and doused the light behind him.

  23.

  Rowena knocked once, firm and loud. For a long time she stood in the dim hallway, trying to choose the right interval to knock again. She counted slowly—one-will-you-won’t-you, two-will-you-won’t-you, three—

  She came to ten, prayed against Reason for an answer, and figured the Alchemist wouldn’t. Best just to head back to the solar and tell Meteron that he was still . . . what? Sleeping? Was that what they left him doing there in the guest bed, all those hours before?

  Master Meteron asked you to check on him and bring him to supper, so . . .

  Rowena turned the knob as she might tear off a hangnail and stepped hastily within.

  The curtains were drawn, filtering in the harrowed light of a sunset struggling through coal dust and saltpeter. The Alchemist lay tangled in the bedsheets. A bare leg, pocked with the scar of an old wound, balanced on the mattress’s edge. A bullet wound? Master Meteron’s words came back to her: “After all we’ve done together.”

  The Alchemist twitched fitfully. She could tell he’d been left to sort himself out naked under the covers. Rowena froze, fighting the urge to fetch Benjy in her place.

  She imagined herself retreating to the solar to ring down for the footman. And she imagined Master Meteron’s cold, burning stare, his quiet contempt at her for being a yellowbelly under all her streetful sneers. Her fingers tightened on the candlestick she carried.

  You en’t afraid of some old cove shut up in a room having nightmares.

  She put the candle down on the nightstand. Half the sheets had slid from the bed, lying in a satiny puddle still smelling of laundry perfume.

  It wasn’t fear of waking the Alchemist that left Rowena knotting her hands in her skirt. Whoever he was—whatever he was—she doubted he could turn her into a toad or some other silly fairy-book nonsense for interrupting a rest that was clearly not restful in the least. No. The thought assembled itself awkwardly, with all the wrong words and pieces jabbing at strange angles, but when Rowena pushed it around, setting all her worry and wonder in order, it came together clearly.

  She wasn’t afraid of the Alchemist. Not anymore. She was afraid for him—afraid of what he might need. Afraid of not knowing what to say, and what that failure would cost when he finally fumbled his way back into a world where his daughter was dead. What would she say about that? Surely the moment required something.

  Sorry your daughter’s dead, Master What’s Your Name. That’s some sore luck.

  As if he’d heard that thought, the old man writhed again. His graying beard rasped the pillowcase. Perspiration beaded his hairline. He seemed to be pushing away from something, straining for distance. And then he whimpered.

  A big, growly man folk called the Bear, and something in his head was making him whimper.

  That tore it. Rowena took the Alchemist’s bare shoulder and shook it, hard. He twisted, waving a hand to shoo her off. She tapped his chest, knocking on his breastbone at first gently, then harder and harder.

  “Hey,” Rowena called, “Alchemist . . . Bear . . . what’s your name . . .”

  Her knuckles stung as if she were laying into the door again, and then, suddenly, a door did open.

  Rowena felt herself stagger forward, a wobbly momentum pitching in her guts, though somehow she knew her feet hadn’t really moved at all. She felt a lurch, and then her eyes flooded with a sunlight that glowed through the sky and her skin and the blades of grass in the field all around. A summer wind brushed her cheek. It carried none of the city’s damp, doggish smells. The wind mounted into a gale that whipped her hair across her eyes, curtaining a vision of a distant hill—a man lying under a tree, a small, feral, naked thing digging into his chest, his back arching and scream rising—

  The Alchemist awoke with a strangled cry, the sound jerking Rowena back into herself like a hook in her spine. She found his hands closed on hers, clamped so hard her fingers had gone numb. He scrambled back from the thing he might still have been dreaming, half-throwing her onto the mattress. Then his head struck the board with a sharp crack.

  The Alchemist cringed. Blinking, he looked down at his tight-knuckled hands smothering Rowena’s, as if puzzled how they got there. He saw her sprawled before him—and finally himself, bare-chested and tangled in the sheets. Flushing so deeply Rowena could see the color despite his dark skin, he let her go and gathered the covers up around his hips.

  “How did you do that?”

  Rowena stared at him. “Do what? What happened?” She looked down at her hands and wondered if it was just the feeling coming back into her fingers that made the rumpled bedspread feel like grass, or only the blood thundering in her head that felt like wind.

  The Alchemist rubbed his face. In the dim light, Rowena could almost make out the tattoo on his forearm again. It reminded her of the insignia on constables’ coats. Some kind of rank—something military? But then it was gone, out of sight. The Alchemist’s hand drifted down to his breastbone, lingering where Rowena had been rapping. She remembered the twisted, naked thing tearing at the man under the tree.

  “You sounded . . . um. Are you all right?”

  “What day is it?” The Alchemist’s voice was dusty. He handled it cautiously, like a curio taken from a stranger’s shelf.

  “Same day. You’ve been down for hours. Master Meteron’s ordered up supper, and I was thinking you might . . . well . . .”

  Eejit. Ask him something. “Are you hungry?” “Would you like me to send down for some clean clothes?” “Your things from that parcel are in the solar.”

  Even in her head, she wasn’t doing it right. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  The Alchemist closed his eyes. “How is Anselm?”

  “He’s . . .” She thought better of it. “Maybe you should just come to supper.”

  The old man squinted about the room. His eyes followed Rowena as she stood again, leaving the candle on the nightstand where his clothes waited in a bundle.

  “I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

  Good. Done now. And yet, Rowena couldn’t make herself go. Absurdly, she looked down at her feet peeking out from the hem of her skirt. Move, damn you.

  “You can ask,” she heard the Alchemist say.

  Rowena turned. He was making a too-careful study of his shirt buttons as he worked them, as if they held some mysterious interest. You can ask. But trying to pick just one question was like fishing the bottom of the quay—the hook would always snag, and when you tried to pull it up, you’d discover the whole muck of creation dangling on the other end.

  She swallowed. “You were really in Rare’s head, weren’t you?”

  “What remained of it.”

  “What did you—”

  “Tell Ann I’ll be down in a few minutes, girl.” The old man’s gaze was too plaintive for her to hold long. “I cannot tell it more than once.”

  Rowena nodded, backing away another step.

  And then, suddenly, she felt absurd—full of small, stupid fears she had to outgrow. Her feet stopped moving, and so did her heart, wedged like a cork in her throat. She struggled to work it free.

  “I’m sorry,” Rowena said. “I don’t know what else to say, because I don’t even really know you. But I’m sorry about Rare all the same. For what it’s worth.”

  The Alchemist’s hands stilled over the buttons. He nodded. “Thank you.”

  Rowena stared at him a long time, trying to puzzle out what to say next. Then she was back at the t
hreshold, and leaving seemed the only thing that could come next. Slowly, she shut the door behind her, wondering why the carpet felt so much like grass.

  In the hours since the morgue, Rowena Downshire and Anselm Meteron had developed a system. Wordlessly, they divided the solar, occupying its opposite poles with the wary tension of enemy states. Rowena kept to the armchair beside the empty fireplace, hugging her knees to her chest and following Anselm’s movements as he unpacked papers from his escritoire in large sheaves. Rowena’s business was waiting and listening. Master Meteron’s was industry.

  He sent a spark to the Empire Club, ordering a detail of three men to stand watch over the Regency’s foyer, the penthouse roof, and the back lift to the carriage garage. He rang down for Miss Ennis and canceled all his appointments for the next day. He searched for something in the escritoire’s bowels. When he found it, he stared at its many pages, leafing through the dense, hand-printed lines with a look entirely too calm for Rowena’s comfort.

  After waking the Alchemist, Rowena returned to her post and found Master Meteron still manning his, comparing two documents spread on the blotter. She looked to the pianoforte bench, where the Alchemist’s frock coat and the canvas parcel lay in a heap, as forgotten as the supper tray on the coffee table.

  “I hope you got my pipe back,” Rowena heard from the doorway.

  The Alchemist studied his partner’s frozen face. The younger man smiled grimly, staring at the papers as his friend entered and began a search of his coat’s pockets.

  “You couldn’t pay a man to steal that damned dirty lump of beech,” Meteron snorted.

  The Alchemist retrieved the pipe and began stuffing it. Silence. Rowena stared at them, wondering if that would be all. Could they possibly act as if there was nothing more to say? Or could it be that two grown men were as afraid of what to say as she had been? The thought left Rowena’s stomach in a knot. If none of them knew what to do with the death poisoning the air around them, what would they do about the rest of it? The aigamuxa, and the constables, and the book that still felt as though it hung from a satchel around Rowena’s neck?

  “I am sorry, Ann,” the Alchemist said at last, mostly to his pipe.

  “Of course you are.” Meteron’s voice dripped acid. “Ready to do something about it?” He looked up with eyes keen as daggers.

  Rowena didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what that look meant: Tell me who to kill, Bear.

  The old man took the chair beside Rowena. He struck a lucifer from the cigarette box and touched it to his pipe. Meteron stuffed the documents before him into a barrister’s envelope.

  “What are you doing?” The Alchemist frowned.

  “Rare is the principal heir of my estate. I had a secondary version of the will drawn up a few years ago, though, after she made a rather large gamble with both our hides. After that, it seemed a little less certain she would survive me than I’d once imagined.” He threw the envelope into an “out” basket flanking the blotter. “I had hoped to be wrong about that. I’ll have it sent down to my solicitor in the morning. We can settle the finer details in a few days and refile at the Court and Bar. Too busy before then to possibly keep an appointment.”

  Rowena looked between the two men. “Busy doing what?”

  Meteron swept into the settee opposite her. He plucked a few olives from the dinner tray. “Killing people,” he said. “Lots of them.”

  “Ann.”

  He smirked innocently, but the anger still glittered in his eyes. “Sorry, Bear. Afraid I’m going to scar the little gamin again?”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “Of course. You’re right,” Meteron answered coldly. “I should wait until the first business day of the week to take action, settle up with the solicitor first. Probate is a bloody mess.”

  “Ann, you don’t even know who killed her.”

  “Then tell me!” Meteron struck the coffee table with the heel of his hand. The platters jumped and rattled. They took a long time to stop ringing.

  The Alchemist muttered a curse. He set the pipe in the ash stand, letting it smolder.

  “Light the fire,” he murmured. “Have something to eat, both of you. It will take some time to pull it all back together.”

  24.

  Rowena couldn’t muster herself even to think of food. She let the supper tray sit by, ignored, and watched the Alchemist sitting fireside with his head in his hands, staring a hole into the cherrywood floor. Perhaps Master Meteron ate. She had little sense of what went on around her as she watched the old man, the struggle to sort out Rare’s fragments written on his face. When her ankles started to burn and ache, she realized she’d been rubbing her feet together, for how long she could only guess. Meteron said nothing of it, this time.

  The solar’s long windows showed only the distant glow of alchemical lamps and the prow lights of merchant ships threading in and out of port, like constellations reflected on the murky waters. It was full dark when the Alchemist sat back in the chair, pressing his hands to his eyes. He reached for his pipe and tapped out its cold ashes.

  Questions had been eating at Rowena. They were still hungry.

  “What’s it like?” she blurted.

  The Alchemist was using the end of a burnt lucifer to scrape out his pipe bowl. He seemed to understand the question’s context.

  “Every mind is different. A platitude, perhaps, but true, despite.”

  Rowena waited. She thought she’d finally gotten a feel for the old man. He would tell her what she wanted to know, if she kept at it long enough.

  “Minds are abstract things, girl,” he continued. “A bit of memory, some personality. A trace of the organic elements of the brain itself. You can’t walk into an abstraction, and so you enter the metaphor of it.”

  Rowena pulled a face. “What’s a . . . metaphor?”

  “A description of one thing in terms of something else. The mind is full of memories, and so you might say it’s a library. Or a museum. Those are common images. Some minds are sprawling manors or rambling estates. Some places in the mind are forests, with memories hanging from trees like fruit or covering the ground like moss.”

  “And so, with Rare—you went into her metaphor?” Rowena chewed a nail, puzzling the notion out. “You can really just go into minds anytime? Even dead ones?”

  The Alchemist turned his pipe in his hands. He looked up, gazing past Rowena. She checked over her shoulder. Master Meteron stood at the foot of the pianoforte, his back to them, a whisky bottle and tumbler at his side. He looked down on the city with a back so stiff he might have been a corpse himself.

  “It’s not something I’ve done before,” the Alchemist answered. Something in his voice pricked Rowena’s ear. That’s a lie. Or near enough.

  The old man shook his head. “It’s almost impossible to guard an abstraction or build a shield around a metaphor. So, yes. I can go into minds more or less as I will. But unless the mind in question is distracted, or disabled, somehow—confused or drugged or frightened—”

  “Or sleeping?” Rowena suggested. The Alchemist’s expression showed he’d noticed the edge in her question.

  “Or sleeping. Without those distractions, it’s all too easy for a person to realize I’m there. And as a rule, I don’t want anyone to know I’m there.”

  Rowena had warmed to the topic, almost forgetting the grim business that had brought them to it. “So, what’s my metaphor, anyway?”

  “Are we ready, Bear?” Meteron called. He threw a look at Rowena that made her wilt back into her chair.

  “Ready.”

  Meteron sat down on the settee, leaving the whisky behind. Rowena glanced between the two men and realized they were preparing for something. Then it dawned on her.

  This isn’t the sort of story you can just tell.

  Rowena looked at the Alchemist, hoping she had it wrong. He sat back in his chair, nodded once, and emptied his hands. Out of the corner of her eye, s
he saw Meteron had done the same.

  In for the quarter, in for the clink.

  Rowena Downshire closed her eyes and nodded—and sat on her hands to keep them from shaking.

  It began like a lamp-film ring with the slides all unseated and sliding around pell-mell. Each moment a frozen frame, the Alchemist had lifted them up, peered at them, studied their details to put the sequence together. Now, with each section finally in order, the vision clipped along, the chop-chop-chop of passing images blurring into smooth motion, shapes and shadows and light wheeling into players on a stage.

  The story began with the letter in Rare’s hands and the sound of glass shattering.

  Dear Phillip,

  If my recent luck holds, this letter will find you after we’ve already met, and after you’ve read my other warnings; that would be best. I did not wish to risk this letter and its contents in a personal meeting. Bishop Meteron’s snares are considerable, and I might yet suffer some accident of his design and lose this message with it. He set me on this path from the first, Phillip. I’ll be damned to let him lay hands on what lies at its end. That honor falls to you.

  Please settle our account with the courier. I’ve borrowed a little money and laid it by for you in the rectory finances; it should more than cover. Use what remains to pay Gilleyen for her confidence and buy your passage.

  The bank is the First Principles Unity in Lemarcke, box 49. Ask for Miss Aneyru. She knows your name and some quite personal details by which to verify you, and will accept the key from no other hand.

  Once you’ve been to the box, you’ll know where next to meet me—or how to carry on, if I’m absent.

  Yours, etc.

  Nora

  Rare sees the beast, then starts up the side of the building, in spite of the pistol holstered on her thigh. Its safety knot is still tied, and the aiga is closing fast.

  Rare has good hands, strong arms, sure feet. She doesn’t look back, because that’s the first thing that happens before a fall—even when there isn’t a monster on your bootheels. “You never need to look down,” Anselm always said, “because everything your feet will touch, your hands touched a moment before. You already know where you’re going. Down is down—it’s gravity; it’s a broken neck. Keep your damn eyes up, kitten.”