The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  And so she does.

  One stretch shy of the gutter framing the tiled roof, a sudden pain shrieks down her right side. The freezing air stings her torn flesh. The aigamuxa has reached up with its wicked hand and pulled down, hoping to drag her off the wall, but its reach is badly aimed. Its eyes show only the ground, not its prey. It loses hold of her leathers and slices them open, instead, claws flensing the flesh below.

  Rare screams at the pain, throws her left arm up, pushes with her right foot, feels the scrabbling grasp of the long fingers on her heel.

  And then she hauls herself up on the roof. She scrambles back and wrestles her pistol free in a two-handed grip.

  When the aiga lifts its head over the roof’s edge, it can’t see the barrel ten feet away, can’t see the muzzle flash. The smell of gunpowder and ozone splits the air, and the heavy shot drills into the center of its eyeless face. Its body plunges into the night, black limbs flailing.

  One of the gendarmes in the yard blows his whistle. Rare finds her feet and reels for a moment, the sky full of whirling stars. She puts a hand to her side. It comes away gloved in blood, slick and blue in the moonlight. Her breath saws in her throat.

  She is aware of the other aigamuxa only when she turns and its hands close around her throat. Blackness crowds her vision, but she hasn’t forgotten the gun.

  She raises it.

  The aiga has not forgotten the gun, either. It punts her, driving an eye heel into her breastbone. She tumbles end over end, and then there is the free air, her hands flailing for the gutters. The iron ducts cut into her palms as she snares them, her fall broken. She almost loses her grip. Below, the gun clatters on cobblestones.

  Above, a shadow spreads over her bloody fingers.

  The aiga prowls to the roof’s edge. It drags her into its embrace.

  A moment later, Rare lies on her back in the yard, heaving for breath. She sees a sky full of stars hovering above and the moon-white faces of the young gendarmes. The aiga’s flat, fierce face rises between them like an eclipse. Its body shifts, and then the eye heels flank its head, blinking red rage.

  “The one you killed,” the creature rasps, “was a bond brother to me, Rare Juells. It will not go well by you now.”

  “We had . . . a misunder . . . misunderstanding.”

  The shoulders shift again. She can see they are a map of scars—long, white snakes crawling on gray skin. She shuts her eyes, expecting a blow. One of the junior constables speaks.

  “Hold up. She’s collared now. Inspector Gammon will want to talk—”

  Rare opens her eyes at that name.

  The aiga’s face turns toward the green policeman, but its eyes stay fixed on Rare.

  “She is a murderer.”

  “En’t any criminal statute for a human killing an aiga,” the other gendarme snaps.

  The creature bares its ragged shark teeth, growling. The sound is something between a rattlesnake’s tail and a gorilla’s bellow. The men shrink back a step. They share a look. Then they go rigid, distant, back to being coppers.

  “What do you know about a delivery girl who came by here yesternight?”

  Rare blinks. She realizes the copper must be talking to her. She considers sitting up, but the aiga is nearly squatting over her, and the thought of moving closer to its teeth and its horrible, corded arms— No.

  Rare shakes her head. “Nothing. She’s just a delivery girl.”

  They’ve used her name already, which means they must have been the ones to get the book and the note meant for Ivor. No way to undo what they know already, but still—

  “Where is she now?” The aiga speaks this time.

  Rare smiles thinly. It is the first time she’s ever answered two questions truthfully in an interrogation. She almost laughs. Almost. The aiga is so very close. She remembers the letter in her bag, the name it contains, and that looms every bit as dangerous.

  “No idea. Might have gone back to her warehouse.”

  The constables exchange another look. The one who tried to cut off the aiga starts in again.

  “Who else knows of her and the delivery?”

  Rare is surprised by how long she hesitates. The satchel with her father’s life stuffed in it lies in a heap just a few yards off. She wanted to pith him. She could send these thugs after him, end him for good and all.

  And she can’t do it.

  “I’m not sure.”

  An aigamuxa’s bones are heavy—far heavier than their rangy movements would suggest, but they must be to hold up all that muscle and anger and hate. The fist comes down like a hammer. Rare’s face explodes in a bloom of pain. She feels her nose break, sees a spray of red in the air.

  She gags on the blood. Things are moving in her face that had no hinges before. The voices all clamor together now, half-drowned under her bubbling breaths.

  “Dammit, Nasrahiel, she can’t tell us anything if you kill her!”

  “There’s a signal station down the way—I’m going to hail the inspector.”

  “Bloody hell . . . we’re good as dead if this gets out to the rest of the force. They say Regenzi kills folk who let things slip.”

  “Let the inspector take care of the goddamned lordship.”

  “Tell her we need some kind of backup to keep this blasted monkey—”

  There is another sound, a thud like a fuller’s club pounding a hundredweight of cloth. Then the night goes quiet.

  Rare smears the blood from her eyes. The second gendarme lies in a heap, doubled over by the blow to his belly, silently heaving up his guts.

  The first gendarme has drawn his pistol, but he points it at no one as he backs away. His eyes dart all around. His partner reaches up, beckoning to him from his knees and his pool of bile.

  The other man runs.

  The aiga curls its feet back down and draws Rare’s face up to its featureless brow. Slowly, it rises to its full height. Rare’s feet dangle. For a moment she kicks, but it pumps the blood away faster; she loses the will to struggle as quickly as she found it.

  “I am expected,” the creature called Nasrahiel says, “to make a report. It should be a full one. Help make it so, and it will end quickly.”

  So Rare gambles. She learned that from Anselm.

  “You can find the girl and the Alchemist,” Rare gasps, “if you look for Anselm Meteron.”

  “All three know what the book is?”

  “It . . . writes itself?”

  The face creases in something too terrible to be a smile. “The reverends thought God writes it.” The head tilts left, right, center, considering. “Perhaps you will carry a question, on behalf of Doctor Chalmers? He has been very busy.”

  “What . . . what question?”

  “Ask God if the reverends are right.”

  The head rears back, then surges forward, heavy brow ridge bearing for her pulped face.

  After the pain, everything is stars and stars and stars and stars.

  Rowena heard a quailing sound so near it seemed right on top of her. She flinched and realized when she looked at the Alchemist and Master Meteron that the sound had come from her. She found her arms wound round her knees, hugging them close.

  Master Meteron reached for his cigarette. There was nothing left in the ash stand but curled paper and cinders. The anger was still on his face, a hard sheen of ice. The Alchemist massaged his temples.

  “Neither of you can leave here now,” Meteron said after a time. “Not with things as they are. I’ve called down three of my better security men from the club and put them about the Regency. It will do, until the conference ends.”

  The Alchemist shook his head. “This won’t end when the conference ends. Not with the bishop involved.”

  Rowena put her chin on her knees. The fire was still going, crackling as bright as if it had just been fed its logs. She stared at the water clock on the mantelpiece, wondering if its gears were somehow done in. Then the second hand flickered once, and again, and again, and she realized
the whole vision dug from Rare’s mind had passed between them in no time at all.

  The fire didn’t matter. Rowena still shivered.

  The Alchemist rose and walked unsteadily to Meteron’s escritoire, taking the lounge coat draped over its back and draping it over Rowena’s shoulders. Her hand reached for his, clutching on reflex, as if it could keep her from falling back into the black, starry end that swallowed Rare. Then Rowena remembered to whom the hand belonged and made herself stop short. She bit her lip and wrapped the garment close.

  “I don’t understand. Who’s Bishop Meteron?” Rowena looked back and forth between the men, trying to pry open their closed faces. “Family of yours?”

  “My father,” Meteron said.

  Rowena frowned. “When Rare read the name in Pierce’s letter . . . it felt like she was scared of him.”

  “He has a certain reputation for . . .” He considered the contents of the ash stand and smiled ruefully. “Implacability.”

  “But he’s your da. He wouldn’t hurt you—would he?”

  Meteron’s eyes trained on the Alchemist, hard and cold. “No. I don’t believe he would. But he’s been looking for a chance to kill the Old Bear for better than twenty years.” He seemed at last to notice Rowena’s puzzled face. “Old business between them. His Grace despises leaving an account unsettled. We have that in common. And you heard the ape, Bear. ‘Carry a question for the doctor.’ They’ve kidnapped Chalmers.”

  Rowena frowned. “But why would ‘they’ want him?”

  “Now that the conspirators have the book they wanted, they need someone to decipher it,” Meteron answered irritably. “Do you really think God writes His notebook as plain as a housemaid’s shopping list?”

  “But that assumes we believe God’s got a book or something He’s writing in for some reason or other. And that we believe these coves have got it,” Rowena protested.

  “Believe it,” the Alchemist said flatly. “If Bishop Meteron asked Nora Pierce to pursue the book and has employed agents in Corma to retrieve it, it’s very real. He is not a man who entertains simple curiosities.”

  Rowena looked to Master Meteron, scanning for his approval. The hard line of his mouth was all the confirmation she needed of the Alchemist’s claim.

  The Alchemist returned to his chair and lit his pipe. “This morning I made it as far as requesting an appointment with the Council Bishopric and sitting in waiting before the constabulary came to collect me. Bishop Meteron must be the one who tipped the constabulary after my request for an audience. I should have suspected it earlier. I saw the title of the keynote in the conference program. ‘God Is with Us.’ Chalmers and Pierce seem to think their research revealed objective proof of God as observer. Probably these aigamuxa and their allies captured Pierce some time before the conference and tried to force her to reveal her findings in greater detail. She didn’t have the book or the information they wanted. Then they killed her.”

  Meteron shook his head. “His Grace wouldn’t go to the trouble of getting her just to kill her for lack of a few resources. He’d have his men get the book, if that’s all that was needed to make her useful.”

  “How do you account for the body Rare heard about by Misery Bay?”

  “There were marks around the neck. She might have made her own way out. A suicide—a hanging.”

  The Alchemist nodded. “So they needed another scientist. They got Chalmers, but not until after he’d sent the book away. We know how they got it back.”

  “But who are ‘they’?” Rowena repeated.

  “Apart from my father? Smallduke Regenzi, apparently,” Meteron answered. “Inspector Gammon. The little mysteries make more sense now—the lack of press about Chalmers’s kidnapping, the vagueness in the gazette about the death at Regenzi’s ball. He would need someone like Gammon to have kept his mayhem quiet.”

  “Gammon told me the victim from the ball was Nora Pierce,” the Alchemist added. “But that would have been some cover agent Regenzi employed. She was killed with a compound he purchased from me two days ago. I’ve been wrapped up in this business longer than I knew.”

  His partner clucked his tongue. “Bear. You’ve been holding out details.”

  “Until recently, that detail was irrelevant. And for most of today, I’ve been less holding out than catatonic.”

  “I suppose that’s a valid distinction.” Meteron looked at Rowena. His mouth twisted into a smile devoid of humor. “Well. They got the EC docs responsible for the work they wanted. They finished the smuggler who ran their correspondence, and the thief who offered to market their research to the highest bidder. If it’s loose ends these conspirators hope to tie off, you and the Old Bear would have to be next on the list. Especially given my father’s grudges.”

  Rowena opened her mouth, then let it snap shut.

  Meteron raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

  “Rare gave up your name, too.”

  “Well,” he murmured, “we all have our bad days. As it stands, I’m more interested in my father’s head than he would be in mine.”

  And then Meteron was on his feet and across the room, opening the glass doors of a bookcase. One section was shaped like a honeycomb, its cells full of long rolls of heavy paper bound with twine. He scanned the shelf and drew two rolls out. The Alchemist lowered the pianoforte’s hood to make a flat surface. Together, they rolled out the papers, and Rowena knelt on the bench to get a better view.

  One was a map of Corma drawn in black and blue and red, detailed down to its narrow alleys and side streets. The other was a nervous system of jagged lines and cross hashes: a schematic of the under-irons, with the names of the tubes and lines coded by color and distance and the year they were opened.

  “What are you looking for?” Rowena looked between the men flanking the maps.

  “Our angle,” Meteron murmured.

  “A way out of this mess,” the Alchemist corrected.

  Rowena studied the Alchemist, watching him don his spectacles to consider the map. “You’re going to look for Chalmers,” she said. “Try to kidnap him back.”

  He grimaced. “Usually ‘kidnapping back’ is called a ‘rescue.’”

  “If he’s important enough for his work to create a heap of bodies,” Meteron added, “I’d like to meet the man—particularly since this cabal seems to think we should join that heap simply because we came into contact with his work.” He frowned. “And there’s also the small matter of his being the houseguest of some people who owe me restitution.”

  The Alchemist pointed at the constabulary’s central offices. “There are lockups in the lower levels, between the morgue and the main offices. It could be here, if Gammon’s in control.”

  “But she isn’t. She’s hushing up kidnappings and tracking down loose ends. She’s a gopher, not a principal. Pragmatic, but not ruthless. Certainly not devious, and too cautious to keep a serious liability that close at hand.” Meteron waved dismissively over the Upper Districts. “Forget Regenzi’s manor, for the same reason.”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand.” Rowena scowled at the maps over her folded arms. “Say Gammon isn’t in charge. Say she’s taking somebody’s orders. Why did she let us all go? There we were, right in the belly of the bloody constabulary. Rare had been dead for hours already. She had to have heard from her officers and maybe even that aiga that we’re all wrapped up in this thing with the book. And she lets us go? It en’t sensible.”

  “She might have been letting us out into a trap,” the Alchemist suggested. “Or hoping Rare’s death would scare us into keeping our peace.”

  Rowena pulled a face. “You couldn’t catch a pigeon in a trap that clumsy—and any trap she’d let us out of is no trap at all.” But there was something else, too. She chewed her lip. “When you were . . . you know . . . out . . . she was acting funny about things. All apologetic and concerned. That’s not a copper who’s looking to scare anybody straight.”

  The Alchemist grunted, eyes sti
ll on the map. “Perhaps, though I wouldn’t leave our fortunes after tonight to the mercy of her conscience.”

  “Count out all the markets,” Meteron decided. “Too mobile and exposed.”

  Rowena craned closer. “The shipping district? There are lots of old warehouses.”

  Meteron offered a disparaging noise. The Alchemist shook his head. “Too obvious,” the old man said. “Hard to keep secured against thieves or squatters.”

  They eliminated the Regenzi family’s textile mills on the eastern outskirts of Corma; their fulleries on the Westgate Bridge quayside; the five blocks of tenements surrounding Oldtemple Down; the debtors’ prison itself; the aeries of abandoned construction sites and rope ladders and fire escapes of Southwater, where the dispossessed aigamuxa tribes squatted; and each of the three prison hulks, ruins of slag floating derelict in Misery Bay. They ruled out locations with more than three angles of entrance. The whole of the Ecclesiastical Commission’s campus and the Decadal Conference facilities were scratched off. They were too busy now for some laboratory or even a humble storage room to remain conveniently unused.

  Rowena stared at the map, her eyes aching, the colored lines and cross-hatched districts blurring together. Something had to fit. Something close by, still in the city. Something you could guard. Something . . .

  She felt the prickle of inspiration along the nape of her neck and blinked at the map as if seeing it for the first time. Rowena realized the Alchemist was watching her. She wondered if he’d felt—if he’d heard—the thought ringing through her head.

  “What kind of stuff d’you suppose he’d need?” she asked.

  Meteron was studying the lightning rail schematic. “Who?”

  “Doc Chalmers. To use the book and tell them what they want to know from it.”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Rowena felt a smile tugging at her lips. “Well, so—they wouldn’t either. But they’d need to get him stuff to work with. All kinds of stuff.”