Rowena said nothing. She glared in his face and crossed her arms.
Meteron shook his head, disgusted. “No wonder the Old Bear likes you. You’re cut from the same stubborn cloth.” He pushed one of the gilded doors open, raised an eyebrow at Rowena, and waited.
“It’s a long walk to Oldtemple,” Rowena said. “And it’s cold.”
They’d been walking ten minutes already. If the cold bothered Meteron, he was of no mind to let it show. He kept his hands in his trouser pockets and stalked beside Rowena as they wended their way out of the Upper Districts to the rough-cobbled streets of Old Town.
There was a feeling to his tension like the air just before a thunderstorm. It gathered around him and drove him forward, like the crackling power suffusing the lightning rail. She kept his pace and kept her peace. It seemed about all she could do.
“It’s twelve blocks from Uptown,” Meteron said after a time. “We’re practically there already. Shouldn’t you be making a stop at some pawn-monger’s shop to hawk that ivory and silver?”
“I put it all back. I’ve got some money—what Rare paid me, for carrying the letter she meant for Ivor. Thirty sovereigns.”
“She paid you well.”
His voice was toneless. Rowena felt she should say something more, but it seemed foolish. She tried another topic.
“Where’s the Alchemist gone?” She didn’t bother asking why he was allowed out alone in spite of the aigamuxa searching for loose lips to seal. She remembered the telescoping saber, the packets of things drawn from his coat. He’d probably been pursued many times before, and probably had more things to protect himself literally up his sleeve than Rowena could even imagine.
“City records,” Meteron answered. “If there have been any major renovations or repairs to the Old Cathedral, there would have to be formal surveys and permits on file.”
“Why does that matter?”
“They would have dimensions and schematics of the interior. There were a few things we needed from the Scales, too—that key in the rafters, for one. And I suppose he needed to cave awhile.”
Rowena frowned. “Cave?”
“One of the reasons we called him Bear,” he explained, “was that after a long stretch of using his mind tricks, it gets to be too much for him. He has to hole himself up awhile, keep his distance from people. It’s a little like . . .” He puzzled over the middle distance for a moment, then asked, “Have you ever seen an ambrotype being exposed?”
“Those are the pictures they use for kinotropy, right?”
“And some police records.”
She shook her head.
“The longer you expose the image, the clearer it becomes. But only up to a point. If you overexpose, then the image loses clarity. Sometimes the outline warps, or everything gets washed out. You end up seeing something that is, and isn’t, what was actually there.” Meteron shrugged. “It’s like that, the more he uses the power, except he sees overexposures of minds. That’s how Leyah used to explain it. Eventually, he starts picking up thoughts and feelings he isn’t trying to find. When that happens, he stays away from people until the worst of it passes.”
“Caving,” Rowena murmured. “Poor Bear.”
Meteron laughed. “Time was, we were the finest campaigning group you could hope to contract, and Bear was our best secret. Of course, we all played our parts—Leyah was a brilliant machinist and a crack shot with a rifle. Ivor was ferocious, true idiot-fearless. There was no better second-story man in the business than me, and I might have been a better marksman than Leyah, come down to a firefight. But those mind tricks of the Bear’s?” Anselm shook his head admiringly. “You’d be amazed what he could do—the information he could find out, the communications he could relay, the complexities he could coordinate. You’d face the wrath of the Creator if you tried to get the drop on us. There are people in this world who would literally kill to do what he can.” He fixed Rowena with a warning look. “Save your pity in case any of them should ever find out about him.”
“You seem to have a lot of those sort in your life. Folks who’d kill to have this thing or that.” Rowena looked at Meteron pointedly, hustling to match his strides.
“We’ve lived eventfully.”
“What about your da—”
“His Grace,” Meteron interrupted coldly, “is rarely so heavy-handed. There’s something else in play. Something bigger than we know.” Rowena could see from the line between Meteron’s brows how it dug at him, the uncertainty a burr rubbing him raw. “It’s the book they have, and Chalmers—and it’s whatever’s in that box in Lemarcke, as well.”
“I never really imagined that EC types could be dangerous.”
“You’d do well to exercise your faculties more often, cricket.”
She glared at him. “It’s not like I’m stupid, y’know.”
“Stupid, no. Naïve, clearly.”
Rowena bristled. She didn’t have an impressive host of words at her disposal, but she knew that one. “How do you mean?”
Anselm Meteron stopped walking. He stared down at Rowena, his gray eyes sharp as a knife’s edge. “You believe it all, don’t you? The idea of the Grand Unity, the gathering together of science and religion. All the peoples of the earth Rational and objective and wise.” He shook his head, looking up and down the street. “You can’t take a world with half a hundred faiths and convince them all that whatever they think they believe it’s really just science. Not by pinning a treatise to a church door. Not by calling symposium, or giving lectures, or sending emissaries. Not by trade or marriage or open war. We’ve done all that for nigh on three hundred years, and there are still people in the world waiting for the Unity to collapse.”
“Kneelers,” Rowena said.
Meteron snorted. “Call them that. Call them Hindoos and Ishmaelites, Gautamans and Protestants. Call them what you will. There are more of us than them, now, and they waltz in time with the reverend doctors because the commission is too vast and powerful to be ignored. But don’t think for a moment that they believe. I would ask my father what his father had in mind when he shaved his forelocks and gave up his shawl, but I suspect His Grace would take that amiss. He likes to imagine the Meterons have always been scions of the Unity. Never mind that any deacon with a little Hebrew under his hat can tell the name for what it is.”
Rowena blinked. “Your family are converts?”
“Go back far enough and everyone’s was. Mine . . . came round a little later than His Grace would like to admit.”
“And the Unity is actually divided.”
“In scores of unequal pieces. Factions within factions, each with a different notion of how to bring the rest of creation to heel, and none of them able to prove what course is objectively superior for the Grand Experiment. Now, imagine you got wind of a book that shows you exactly what God is seeing, right now—all His little notes and marginalia. Mightn’t that motivate some unprecedented fervor?”
Rowena gazed down the street, past the ever-shabbier storefronts and slack-faced tenements. She scanned the open jaws of alleys. Her mouth had gone dry.
“We’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
“Yes, cricket. Yes, we are.”
They began their walk again, silence hanging heavy between them. A huge square yawned at the foot of the steep street, opening around a building shaped precisely like a giant red brick and decorated with equal imagination. The name “Oldtemple” was a relic of the city’s earliest days, when this had been a comfortable, middle-class neighborhood popular among the Ishmaelite tribes of Hasids and Tzadikim, whose mythologies were the Old Religion’s cornerstone.
Oldtemple had been gradually worn down by disregard and desertion until most of its properties were bought up by the governor and his peerage as a haven for the city’s lower classes. Inexpensive housing, ready access to the rails, free Ecclesiastical schools and seminars for those who could demonstrate sufficient penury. Oldtemple became Oldtemple Down, and finally i
ts namesake house of worship was demolished to provide the foundation of the debtors’ prison and its adjacent alms house.
Anselm and Rowena walked into the heart of Oldtemple Down. At the bottom of the street, the detritus of the neighborhood gathered like a gutter head around the prison walls, smelling of ash hoppers and fish bones and sour wine.
Rowena stood before the prison’s slab doors, feeling her shoulders stiffen with a familiar, focused hatred. She’d spent the first six years of her life in that tomb, choking on its airlessness. She’d bloodied her fingers picking oakum for Corma’s naval fleet and merchant air galleons. Her first year sleeping in the louse-infested hay of the courier loft had seemed luxurious by comparison.
Rowena realized her companion was watching her, his breath steaming. She felt herself being moved about on the balances of his mind. It made her squirm to wonder what measure she made.
“There’s a waiting room,” she volunteered, “before you get to the accountant’s desk. You’ll probably like it better there.”
Meteron shook his head. “I didn’t leave my home without a coat or hat to let you out of my sight now, least of all here.”
Rowena grabbed the rusted iron handle, pulling hard. It was a beastly heavy door—as much to keep folk out as keep them in. She struggled against it, her heels digging into the cobblestones, and still hadn’t split the door’s seam.
Suddenly, it moved all at once, and Rowena staggered back. Meteron’s four and a half fingers held the handle above her hand, tilting the balance and seeing them through.
26.
Anselm Meteron stood outside Clara Downshire’s cell, painfully aware of the woman’s eyes searching him. Rowena argued at the accountant-turnkey’s desk some yards off. She was a foot shorter than him and not half his weight, but she snapped like a rabid terrier, hands punctuating her protests.
Anselm regarded his shoes with a practiced, fictitious interest. He pretended to ignore the ragged woman and her little hellspawn and pretended he wasn’t a good enough lip-reader to have made out the crux of the argument—bedsores and mildewed food and an uptick in the keeping fees since Rowena’s last visit, just three days prior.
Anselm cracked his knuckles. He rolled his shoulders. He took an impatient mental inventory of his body and felt alert. Strong. Ready. All of this nonsense was preamble, something to pass the time while the Old Bear readied his part of the affair. Anselm had learned patience through a long effort of will. The hours before a job tested it intolerably.
“I hadn’t expected you’d still be here.”
The voice made him flinch from the lattice at his back.
Clara Downshire was taller than Anselm would have expected, given Rowena’s size. She stood with her face uncomfortably near the grating. It irked Anselm to see she had him by a half hand, and barefoot, too. He was not a tall man, nor particularly large, though he had a compact, tenacious strength only a shade less than the barrel-bodied sorts he’d often met on campaign. Experience had taught him he was a match for most of those inelegant hulks. And besides, a tight, unassuming build was an asset to his particular trade.
But it was still galling to look up into the eyes of creatures he saw as little more than bedfellows.
If Clara Downshire had been a month nearer her last bath and better fed, she might have met Anselm’s standards for a night of company. She had fine, high cheekbones and a full, expressive mouth. But her long, black hair was a dusty nest of snarls, the dress covering her pale, bony body the murky brown gray of the common washtub. She smelled of sweat and her last month’s blood.
And she had a beautiful, terrible smile.
It was the angelic expression of a person with no notion what was going on around them, who suffered the world with infinite, eerie patience.
“I beg your pardon?” Anselm asked. She’d said something to draw his attention, only a moment before.
“Said I thought you’d be gone by now,” Mrs. Downshire repeated. Again, she smiled. This time, her teeth showed. They needed very badly to be cleaned—or pulled. Likely both.
Anselm wasn’t certain he wanted a clarification. He was even less certain what she offered qualified as one.
“It’s good you en’t. She needs you here awhile, before she needs you there.”
Suddenly, Clara Downshire stretched her arms through the lattice, but Anselm was just beyond reach. She pulled back reluctantly.
“That was forward of me. Begging your pardon, sir. I wanted to say thank you, is all.”
Anselm stared at the woman, searching her face. It took a will not to turn away from so much deluded sincerity.
“Have we met before?”
“No, sir. But we will. Can’t be helped.” And then she laughed, the sound discomfitingly childlike. A hand flew up to her mouth. “Or I suppose we just have, and there it is, en’t it? Anyway—I’m glad you’re still here. Means it’s not as late as I thought, and that’s a comfort. I get turned around. Time gets bad down in dark places. I’m sure you can imagine.”
I am sure I have no god-fucking-damned notion what you mean.
“Of course,” Anselm said. He offered a thin, charitable smile.
Rowena stalked up to the cell. “Idiot scribbler bastard. Does he really think—” she rounded on Anselm, as if he were in a position to verify the accountant’s frame of mind, “—that raising the keeping fees ten per quarter is going to go over easy? People in the upper floors will riot.”
Rowena stopped cold, noticing Anselm’s proximity to her mother. “Oh, God.” She bit her lip and looked green. “She’s been bothering you. I’m sorry—she just . . . She gets these ideas, and . . . Look, Mama, I’m coming in awhile, see? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Clara Downshire smiled indulgently and stepped away from the cell door. There was no lock on it. Anselm doubted very much the woman had ever tried to roam. If she had, he supposed the worst danger she posed was filling some other man’s ear with nonsense.
The two women retreated to the bench in the corner by Mrs. Downshire’s pallet, well away from the privy bucket. Rowena took her mother’s hands, speaking with quiet urgency.
Anselm watched for a moment, though he had no need. He’d determined what fool idea had set Rowena out the door of his suite when he spied her in the mirror below the postboxes. They had the whole walk back to Uptown for him to dissuade her of it.
He went to the trestle table where the accountant clerk scratched out his sullen duties. The man didn’t look up as Anselm’s shadow fell over the ledger.
“Gave you an earful, did she?”
The man grunted. He was fish belly pale, as bad as Mrs. Downshire, but jowly and soft, the way men who spend their lives hunched over figures seemed inevitably to go.
“Little bitch, that one. Didn’t used to give lip, but you send them off to pay the red down and all of a sudden, they’re popping off.”
Anselm glanced back toward the Downshire women. “They were in together, before the Vraskan bought the girl up?”
“The whole lot of ’em—father and mother and three kids, that one smallest. Father was a carter with some bad loans. The wife, she tried to run the business awhile with what he’d left behind. Got kicked by a horse some ’prentice was trying to shoe.” The clerk tapped his temple meaningfully. “Lost her wits after that. The Court and Bar put ’em all in here to keep the kids from turning vagrant.”
“What happened to the others?”
“Father died of the bloody flux. Older sister, she was let out to start earning. Went whoring but came down with a belly right fast and died by a stillborn. Middle child was a boy. He and that little shit went away with the Vraskan. En’t seen him in a deal of years. Suppose he up and died, too.”
Anselm looked at the ledger spread before the clerk. “The girl seems to think she can have the debt settled in four or five years.”
The accountant snorted.
“If she’s got hold of a money-press, maybe. There’s five hundre
d and a fourth bit left on the account.” He tapped the page with judicial firmness. “Then there’s three sovereigns a month in keeping, and two in taxes. She puts down about twenty a year, usually, after the taxes and keeping. I give her long odds on making black in fifteen years. ’Course, by then the ague or consumption will probably have the old lady, so it’ll be a wash.”
Anselm said nothing. He was not surprised by the enormity of Rowena’s overestimation. He knew more than most men about Oldtemple. Anselm had lent a great deal of money at interest over the years, and on a few occasions, his debtors had had the bad luck or bad sense to fall short on the note. He had deferred his right to prosecute such cases because of the stunning waste it would represent. A little dumb show of clemency—the promise of something other than Oldtemple’s darkness and disease—would turn a man’s debt of sovereigns into a debt of service, and that was as hard to pay off as the prison’s red ledger. But far more useful to the creditor.
Anselm Meteron had no illusions that the system of Oldtemple was fair or even logical. He had no illusions, either, about why it existed.
It was because of men like him.
Rowena got up on tiptoe to kiss her mother’s filthy cheek, said something in her ear, and left the cell, letting the grate fall shut behind her. The alchemical lamps cast her wiry shadow far down the corridor as she walked toward Anselm, fists jammed deep in her pockets.
Anselm gave the clerk his little shadow of a bow. It drew a poisonous glance from Rowena, but she stuffed the look away quickly. They stamped down the corridors and past the close, animal smells, through the heavy front doors, and up the hill toward Uptown.
It was a long time before Rowena spoke. She began as Anselm knew she would.
“I said good-bye to Mama, in case things don’t go well. So I’m ready for the plan.”
“Whatever plan you’re imagining we have doesn’t involve you.”
“The hell it doesn’t.” Rowena held her chin high. “I en’t just going to stay back with your ham-headed guards and let you two get yourselves killed, you know.”
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