She jumped off the piano bench and looked around the room, scanning its shelves of books and maps and lamp-film cases. “You know, it’s funny. I’m not all that different from the aigamuxa. The book about them you read to me—it said they don’t care much for human languages and science, right?”
“Not generally,” the Alchemist agreed.
“Well, I en’t sure what half this stuff is here, Master Meteron,” Rowena announced. She felt oddly proud to make some use of her ignorance. “Most of the stuff back at the Scales is way past me, too. I couldn’t name more of it than I could count on my fingers.”
“Your point?” Meteron sighed.
“If Regenzi’s got a bunch of aigamuxa doing for him, they probably were told to kidnap Chalmers and set up a shop for him, but they wouldn’t know what to get. They’d do what I’d do—grab a little of everything and hope it would suit.”
Meteron nodded. “But they’d need to get it all from somewhere.”
“They’d steal it.” Rowena shrugged. “I would, if I needed it right away. Costs a bloody mint to get all that technical stuff, I bet, and there’d be receipts and deliveries and all sorts of things you could trace.”
The Alchemist looked up from the map again, as if something had just jolted into place in front of him. “When I was waiting for my appointment with the Council Bishopric, there was a reverend doctor giving a page hell over equipment gone missing from her demonstration lab. She wanted the gendarmes who were taking me for questioning to record her complaint.”
Rowena crossed her arms and grinned in triumph. “Best place to steal science stuff in all Corma’s got to be the EC’s Cathedral campus, especially with the conference in town. And if I was stealing that much stuff, I wouldn’t take it far and risk getting caught or busting things. I’d hole up close to where I could get more if I needed it.”
“So close by, in fact,” Master Meteron murmured, pushing the lightning rail map aside to expose the outline of the Cathedral campus, “that it would be mad to keep him there. Mad enough nobody would think to look there.” He tapped the sketch of the Old Cathedral itself. “The foundations could go a hundred feet deep. Who knows how much of that space is stuffed full of old reliquaries and sacramentals the EC has no use for anymore? The old girl’s bloomers are practically apocryphal.”
“So they kidnap the keynote speaker, and they hide him in the very Cathedral where he’s scheduled to speak,” the Alchemist said. “It is mad.”
“And brilliant,” Meteron concluded. “Ballsy. Hell, Bear, we might have done the same in their position.” He shook his head at Rowena. “You are a passing clever cricket, I’ll give you that.”
A little part of Rowena glowed at the compliment. She returned to the piano bench. “Doesn’t count for much if we can’t get in.”
The Alchemist’s expression darkened. He snapped off his spectacles. “We?”
“What do you expect me to do? Sit around here and hope it all goes okay when I could be helping?”
“Point of fact, yes.”
Rowena opened her mouth to snap back but stopped short. Meteron was peeling the onionskin backing away from the lightning rail schematic, separating its two pieces—the mounting paper and the overlay, a hazy film with the network of rails threading its surface like lines of frost.
He laid the schematic film over the city map, squared the corners, and there it was.
The foundations of the Old Cathedral were skirted on all sides by the single and double lines of passing rail tunnels. One of the double-lined routes boasted a little purple X drawn just below the bones of the Cathedral’s eastern transept.
“Maintenance tunnel entrance,” said Meteron. “There’s one every half mile.”
The Alchemist donned his spectacles again. “I’ll be damned. . . . Based on that position, it would almost have to intersect with the Cathedral’s drainage system.”
Rowena smiled. “Now that’s jake.” She looked between the two men eagerly. “So—what’s next?”
Master Meteron and the Alchemist exchanged a glance.
“We’ve a little more research to do before we could move on this,” the old man said. “The kind that takes a trip out in daylight.”
“So,” Rowena pressed, “what can I do?”
“You can go to sleep, Miss Downshire,” Anselm Meteron answered, his voice flat and cold. “It’s past your bedtime.”
INTERMEZZO
In my mind, I’ve written all this down. I held a quill in my hand, and I made it look easy, guiding that scratching thing all up and down the page. Maybe that’s foolish. There must be half a hundred things folks would sooner write about. But I can’t help thinking they must choose all the wrong things. Little moments will tell you everything, sometimes. So I’ve written it all down—in my head, at least. I have a feeling I won’t want to forget.
That night, I was passing tired, curled up under one of Master Meteron’s housecoats, but I watched everything from under my eyelashes. The sound of the gun parts clacking startled me properly awake, my head still tucked under the coat as I shammed sleep. It was strange, listening to them talk between themselves. You can tell a lot by how they say things—and by what they en’t saying, too. I don’t know if there’s a way to write down what people don’t say, but I’m trying, here in my mind. I’m trying to get it all right.
There was a mess all about the solar—long guns and short guns and spring guns and other gizmos, too. Bags of equipment and things that must have come from the room hidden behind the china hutch.
“Don’t bother with the carbine.”
(That was the Alchemist. I’ve seen carbines before—gendarmes carry them around Blackbottom End. Meteron had one across his knees, a gun about as long as my arm. Like a rifle but shorter and nasty.)
Meteron showed him something like a pepper box, stacked full of studded rings. “It takes the same caliber as the caplock pistols. I’d rather carry one kind of ammunition.”
“If that’s a thirty-eight, you’ll wish you had more stopping power.”
“That’s what this is for.”
And Meteron showed him something else. Bear glanced up from checking a revolver’s cylinder and looked about poleaxed by the pistol in Master Meteron’s hand. He took it, weighed it, one hand at a time, real careful. The gun looked like a cannon and a pistol got mixed up together in some armorer’s shop. A long, narrow nose, with a flaring trumpet at the end. Shiny. Blunt. Brutal.
“What the devil is this?”
“Enthusiasts are calling them ‘semi-automatic grenadiers.’ New thing I bought from a dealer in Vraska a year ago. They’re common enough there, but the Vraskans won’t export them or sell the design, so you don’t see them beyond their borders. It’ll shoot three times faster than anything else we could carry at five times the power.”
“Weighs a bloody ton. You’ll never hold it steady long enough to pull a decent shot.”
“I don’t have to.” Master Meteron winked. “It’s for you.”
Bear tried to pass the blunderbuss thing back, but Meteron wouldn’t take it.
“Humility isn’t my forte, Bear, but you are stronger than I am, senescence notwithstanding.”
“Go to hell, Ann.”
“You first.”
Bear sighed and set the weapon aside. “Given the circumstances, I might oblige you.”
“Tsk. It’s not like you to have cold feet.”
“Cold feet, hell. Cold facts. I’m seven and fifty.”
Meteron snorted and did something with his hands that hinged open the stock of some kind of arquebus. He squinted down its barrels. “You’re an alchemist,” he said at last. “Everything you’re good for is age irrelevant. It’s all brains—” he tapped his temple, looking serious, “—and this business. You seem to have kept those faculties in working order.”
“And what about you?”
Meteron didn’t say anything. He looked angry again—angry like he had in the hours before the Old Bear finally c
ame to, the stewing anger that made it hard to be near him.
“After thirty, second-story men age in dog years,” Bear pressed. “That makes you around ninety-eight, assuming one only counts the dog years.”
“Our assets are different than they were, but we still have them. And I still have a rapacious interest in living out my threescore and ten.”
The Old Bear grunted.
“You don’t believe me.”
“Of course I don’t. You’ve caught the bishop’s scent on this business. The chance to foul up whatever game he’s playing is enough to send you to the Cathedral on principle. Never mind that you’re also furious and vindictive and starving for someone to kill. If you caught Rare being this reckless, you’d have taken her to the woodshed twice over.”
Then nobody said anything. The guns clicked as Meteron snapped things into place. Bear kept himself busy with a notebook, making a list—or pretending to. It didn’t look like he’d written anything new in a while.
“That was coarse of me,” he said quietly.
Meteron snorted. “You might be right. So, are we in the woodshed now? Is that what this conversation is?”
“I’m coming with you, remember?”
“To keep me from getting myself killed.”
“Partly that. Partly for Rare. She was my daughter, in spite of everything. She died finding that letter and the key. I saw in her mind where she hid it. Pierce arranged that only Chalmers can use it. We need him, if their deaths are to come to anything. If we’re going to get our lives back.”
“You don’t have a life, Bear.”
It was a dirty shot, but the Old Bear let it go. He seemed to know what Meteron meant—even nodded a little. When he looked up, he studied his friend’s face.
“When was the last time you slept?”
“Last night.”
“And?”
“It was fine.”
“How long?”
“Maybe four hours. I don’t keep track.”
Bear frowned at his chronometer. “It’s nearly three. If you expect to have those assets you’re so sure of come daylight, you should turn in now.”
I couldn’t really see Meteron’s face clearly. He stood up and started rearranging things on the edge of the writing desk—boxes of cartridges and bullets and firing caps. The Old Bear was talking again. The words were tough, but his voice was gentle.
“You’re still addicted to the ether?”
“Naturally.”
“I can help you use it.”
Meteron barked a bitter laugh. “I’d have predicted a temperance lecture from you. Enablement is rather novel.”
“Another time. You need the rest. I know how to dose you.”
“I’ve managed well enough myself.”
“Fall asleep with the gauze still in place and you won’t wake up. Now, are you going to yield to my professional wisdom or shall I threaten you with this new present?”
“You make a compelling argument.” Meteron stretched out on the settee and waved back across the room. “Right-hand desk drawer.”
“You don’t want your own bed?”
“I want to sleep by myself. Not with ghosts.”
“There are two other rooms.”
“Here, Bear. Just here.”
I heard some rummaging around in the drawer, the sound of glass being handled. “What dilution have you been taking?”
“Dilution?”
“For God’s sake, Anselm—”
He had rolled so his back was to me, no chance of seeing my eyes half-peering from under the coat. “Scold me later, Mother Bear,” Meteron sighed. “Just put baby to bed.”
I heard more sounds—the Old Bear working with the bottle. The air was full of his tobacco, all marjoram and fennel and damp autumn leaves, but the ether had another smell. Sweet, almost sickly. It tickled my nose, then stung so hard it was all I could do not to scrub at my face.
Meteron talked in a faraway voice—the one people use when they don’t mind if what’s inside their heads wanders to the outside.
“I think I loved her. Did I ever tell you I asked her to marry me?”
The sounds stopped. “You’re joking.”
“Six years ago. I was drunk at the time. But I meant it. She said no, of course.”
“Usually that ends things between people.”
“Usually. But she had good reasons,” Meteron conceded. “I could hardly blame her. If I had asked her when I was sober, she said she might have considered it. It was the other thing she said that kept me from asking again.”
Bear came and sat on the arm of the settee, his body shadowing Master Meteron’s. I couldn’t see anything of him but his legs.
“She said it was all in our heads, anyway,” he continued. “We could call it anything we wanted. It would be the same.”
“I’m sorry, Ann. Truly.”
“Do me a favor, Bear. It’s very bright and busy up here tonight.” I had a feeling Meteron was pointing at something, and I had a fair notion of what it must be. “Make it dark for me. . . . There are dreams I’d rather not have.”
“Eventually, you’re going to have to face whatever’s waiting for you up there,” Bear said. His voice had that weary patience people use when they talk to children. I expected Meteron to snap at that, but he didn’t. He took it straight—sounded, for a moment, very small.
“I know. Not tonight.”
There was something in the Old Bear’s right hand, a little wire thing shaped like half of a shell or a sliced egg, a piece of linen lining it. It was sized to cover a man’s nose and mouth.
“Not tonight,” he agreed and reached out with the mask.
At first, I saw Meteron’s legs move, one knee bending up. Even after the dilution, the smell was all honey and acid, strong enough to make my eyes sting. Then I saw his legs relax, his body falling still.
The Old Bear knelt down and put his fingers on his friend’s neck, like he was feeling for the life beat. He stayed there a long time. I watched him. The corners of his eyes creased. He studied the air in front of him, or the space inside of Anselm Meteron, or I don’t know what, and after a long, slow while, he slipped his hand away and seemed satisfied. He went back to the desk to put away the ether mask.
I squeezed my eyes shut and felt tears leak through my lashes. It’s the ether smell, I told myself, but it was a lie. There was a hot coal burning right in my throat. I was angry at myself for ever hating the Alchemist. For threatening him. For being afraid. It seemed a cheap thing to do—an easy, cowardly way to make things simple.
Nothing was simple. Not now. Maybe not ever.
A moment later, I felt him gather me up in his arms like I weighed nothing at all.
I don’t know why I pretended to be asleep. He must have known I was shamming and just let me have my way. I think— Really, I just wanted him to hold me awhile and take care of me, too. He’s good at that, taking care of people. Better than he knows.
Bear carried me to the bed I’d slept in the night before. He left my clothes alone, except for my shoes. He set them by the radiator, then came back to tuck me in. By then I was finally really tired, sinking down into sleep.
Things were pretty dark in there for me, too, that night. A good dark. I don’t know if it was all my own doing or if he worked a little something to rest me.
I didn’t mind, either way. The pillow smelled of chamomile and rosewater. I could smell the Old Bear’s pipe smoke, too, where my hair had rubbed his shoulder. I could write about that scent pressing into my cheek a thousand times over and still not find the words to say how much it mattered.
DAY FOUR
4TH ELEVENMONTH
25.
Rowena Downshire lingered just outside Regency Square’s mahogany and granite vestibule. She was back in the trousers and coat borrowed from Rare’s trunk at the Scales, happy to have shed layers of skirts and ruffled tunics. She felt fast and ready. For the first time in days, she was completely herself, and that m
ade it easy to watch Anselm Meteron’s back with an intensity usually reserved for unwary carters and greengrocers.
Meteron scratched out a message on the concierge’s galvano-graph pad. His maimed hand gripped the pen awkwardly between middle finger, ring, and thumb. If his penmanship was as bad as that grip, it was a wonder he didn’t just keep Miss Ennis on a lead.
Satisfied that she was in the clear, Rowena walked briskly through the lobby. She did her best to look purposeful, as if she absolutely belonged there and was just on her way out, thank you kindly. She had one hand on the front doors’ brass bar when she heard Meteron call her name.
Rowena froze, cursed, and looked back over her shoulder.
He hadn’t lifted his eyes from the paper. “Have an appointment somewhere, cricket?”
Rowena let her hand fall from the bar. Several reasonable-sounding responses occurred to her; she chopped each down, wondering how he’d even spotted her. Then she noticed the mirror running halfway up the wall of postboxes behind the front desk. Inwardly, she groaned, realizing how easy it had been.
Meteron handed the pad back to the concierge and joined her at the doors.
“Well,” he said, “let’s be off.”
Rowena blinked. “You don’t have your hat. Or your greatcoat.” “I wasn’t expecting to leave when I came down. Plans change.”
“I . . . sort of hoped to go alone,” Rowena admitted.
“Hence the sneaking off. I’d gathered as much.”
“I’d rather be alo—”
“Do you really think,” he said, eyes narrowed, “that my father’s people will call a moratorium on the hunt so you can run a private errand?” He nodded toward a broad-shouldered man with a folded gazette and a cigarillo standing under the Regency’s awning. “Do you think that once you leave this place where I can put a man on every floor and another on the roof you’ll be perfectly safe? I could have every potted tree in this vestibule replaced with a lanyani bowman and it still wouldn’t help you out there.”
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