“I hadn’t realized that was the plan.”
“Maybe I can help you, huh? Ever thought of that?”
“Not even once.”
Rowena glared at the road ahead, plowing up the hill with red cheeks and damp eyes. “I’m fast, and I’m smart, and I’m actually pretty strong, too.”
“I kept thinking that as I watched you work that door back at Oldtemple. Intimidating.”
“I’m going with you.”
“There’s not much good you can do for your mother if you’re lying dead in the bowels of the Cathedral, cricket.”
“There’s not much good I can do for her now,” Rowena spat back. “Maggie’s dead, and Jorrie’s dead, and now it’s just me, and I’ve got no job and nowhere to go. So say I don’t go with you. The Old Bear ends up dead, you end up dead, and I’m back out picking pockets in the Shipman’s Bazaar. Then one of Gammon’s shields collars me. Some kind of ‘accident’ happens and I get a matching bunk alongside Rare down in her basement.”
“If seeing what happened to your mother can teach you anything about what your life’s worth—”
“The only thing I learned from what happened to my mother,” snapped Rowena, “is that there’s some people who get kicked by horses and some who don’t. That’s all. That’s what life’s worth.”
They were obliged to stop at a crossing to let a knot of aiga bar-cranked omnibuses and frilly secretariats clatter by. Anselm shivered against an icy gust that tore down the lane, marveling at how utterly unprepared he’d been for this journey.
He had needed a great deal more than a coat.
“There’s a very real possibility that in trying to help, you could put us all in more danger.”
Rowena’s face was a mask of conviction. “I’ll do whatever you say. I know I’m useful. I’ve met Chalmers. I’m the only one who actually knows who we’re looking for, and he might recognize me, too. It could help if he gets nervy.”
The idea struck Anselm as the girl stepped off the curb and looked furtively about, checking for gaps in the press of traffic. He knew suddenly how they would get inside, no matter what the blueprints the Alchemist retrieved would say.
He knew exactly what his revenge would require.
“You’re right.”
Rowena’s brow furrowed. “I’m . . . what?”
“You’re right,” repeated Anselm. “Chalmers knows you. You’re exactly what we need to get to him.”
The girl beamed. She grabbed Anselm’s hand—the right hand, not flinching from its maimed touch—and towed him toward the crossway.
“Well come on, then! The Alchemist might be back by now! What are you waiting for?”
She was too excited to linger. She let loose his hand and turned, almost running, stopping on the other side of the street to look back expectantly.
Anselm crossed, offering Rowena his arm and a smile when he reached her side again.
He offered her an apology, too, but kept it in his own mind. There were some things she was just too young to understand.
27.
The lightning rail lines beneath Corma ran between thirty and fifty feet underground, always at least two city blocks from the waters of the tidal river or the Western Sea, in case of flooding after the long spring rains. The tunnels had a bone-aching chill that crawled on the ground, a mildewed odor that worked its way into your skin. Rowena had never walked the tunnels before. The experience thus far was putting her off plans to visit again.
The journey had begun back at Regency Square. Rowena and Master Meteron returned a little before the dinner hour to find the Alchemist checking off a list in the secret office, surveying an array of equipment. His spectacles perched on the bridge of his broad nose, but there was also a pair of goggles hanging down around his neck, all brass and dark, thick lenses. A postman’s bag rested against his hip, the telescoping saber sheathed on his thigh. The beastly pistol Meteron gave him sat in a holster under his left arm.
Rowena had taken one look at him frowning down at a notebook through his spectacles and half-choked on a laugh.
The Alchemist glanced at her reprovingly. Meteron swept the old man’s coat off the back of a chair, throwing it open to reveal a lining checkered with padded pockets of every size and shape, a patchwork quilt of compartments, stocked and ready. He rifled them, then turned to his partner, a little phial tucked in the palm of his four-and-a-half-fingered hand. The old man took it, raised an eyebrow, and cast Anselm a skeptical look.
Rowena watched Meteron in baffled silence as he hummed his way through gathering up his own kit. He craned his neck to check the Alchemist’s list, then exchanged a few comments about the building plans drawn from the Ministry with the older man. He seemed . . . cheerful.
“Be a love, Miss Downshire,” he called at last. “Ring down to Benjy for something to eat.”
Rowena frowned. “Like . . . ?”
“Anything quick. We’ll need a little time after to pull some of Rare’s things out for you.”
The Alchemist looked up from a sheaf of notes. “The hell we will.”
Meteron offered Rowena an indulgent smile. “And be sure to dawdle in the solar after the call so your pet Bear and I can have a little row.”
Rowena was about to insist on making her own case when he shooed her with an insistent raise of his eyebrows.
Just go, it said. I’ll take care of it.
She could hear the range of tones in the argument, though not the words, for they closed themselves up in the office behind the china hutch. She found it hard to resist listening by the dining room door, but a sudden fear that the Alchemist might overhear her thoughts pushed her back down the hall. At the solar door, something nudged Rowena in the back of the knee.
Rabbit sat behind her, sporting a wagging tail and a lolling canine grin. He must have been asleep over by the fire, unnoticed. She lost herself in rubbing his belly, only remembering to ring for food when her own started to rumble.
The two men emerged just as the dinner cart came up. Rabbit thundered over to Meteron, throwing his paws on his host’s chest and licking his face. He shoved the dog off and scowled at the Alchemist.
The old man shrugged. “Couldn’t countenance leaving him at the Scales again after all that’s happened.”
“I hope he uses papers.”
They ate over notes the Alchemist had scrawled on lithograph duplicates of the Cathedral’s various levels, from the clerestory and lower transept down to the cellar. They learned only a little more about what to expect once they entered the drainage system tunnels, but the cellar itself was worth investigating closely.
Rowena returned to her guest room and dressed in the best-fitted combination of leather, wool, and corduroy Rare’s childhood castoffs could supply. She slipped her knife into a tall black boot and raked her hair back with two heavy combs. Studying herself in the washstand’s glass, she fancied she looked an adventuress—smart and ready and fearless.
Then she spied Master Meteron standing in the doorway behind her.
Seeing the Alchemist outfitted for action had been odd. Seeing Anselm Meteron this way was like meeting him for the first time.
He wore black gauntlets tailored for his index finger’s stump, and a charcoal shirt under a black leather waistcoat scored where a blade once sliced it. He carried two caplock pistols and a knife strapped at his thighs. A chest rig held the carbine, broken down in pieces. If Rowena had seen the Alchemist’s clothes and Meteron’s hanging side by side, she would have been hard-pressed to mark any real difference between them. Both kits were dark and durable, studded with extra pockets and compartments. Both announced a certain efficiency and precision.
But the Alchemist, Rowena realized, could not have worn clothes like Meteron’s, even if they had been tailored to his size. His dress was plain and purposeful. Meteron looked like a man who had turned evening formalwear into something deadly.
He offered his bow that was only a nod and swept his coat—cut more lik
e a dinner jacket than a long coat—over one shoulder. For a moment, he looked like a stranger. Then Rowena realized he’d shaved his moustache. Its absence left his wry mouth wickedly untamed.
The Alchemist came up behind the thief. He shifted the bag on his shoulder and shrugged into his frock coat, and without a word spoken, all three left together.
They began in the lightning rail station of Ippining, just on the border of Midtown and the north end of Oldtemple Down. After the first train passed and the platform conductors began a circuit of the station, waving off vagrants and buskers, the Alchemist slipped off the platform to the rail floor below. Meteron handed Rowena down to him, then stepped off the platform, landing in a crouch. A hundred yards farther on was a side passage that they followed to the Ravenswood line. The Ravenswood had been closed by the governor’s offices for better than three years, shuttered by a string of derailments.
Since then, they had walked so many long, winding paths lit only by the Alchemist’s magnesium torches that Rowena doubted they would ever reach the Old Cathedral. The electric charge of action that had lifted her steps before had fizzled out. There was strikingly little to do other than keep her place between her companions as they walked the disused tracks, giving the third rail a wide berth. There were a hundred questions Rowena longed to ask: Had they been in the under-irons this way before? Or the sewers? If Ivor and Leyah were here, what would they be doing right now? Had the Alchemist fired a gun that big before? Just how good a shot was Master Meteron, anyway? She wanted to fill the time with tales of glory and intrigue, but there had been rules set down over dinner. They hadn’t been complicated. She meant to show she was up to the challenges of the day by obeying them.
“First,” the Alchemist had said, pinning the rule down on the coffee table with the tip of his finger, “no chatter. We’ll be in a deal of trouble if we’re heard coming. Second, if a fight starts, stay behind me. Not Anselm.”
Rowena had frowned. “Why not him?”
“Because chances are good that if a fight starts, I’ll be the one in the middle of it,” Meteron answered. “Assuming precedent holds.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
The thief chuckled. “Then get behind me and wish you had bigger cover.”
“So no chatter. Stick with whoever’s under cover. Is that all?”
“No,” the Alchemist said. He’d been looking at the map of the clerestory level, examining a staircase curving up toward the bell tower. He removed his spectacles, as if they might put some barrier between his words and her ears, and held Rowena’s gaze a long, uncomfortable time.
“Rule three is if we tell you to run, run. No stubbornness. No looking back. Get as far off as you can, as fast as you can.”
“And then?”
He smiled. It was the weakest of lies trying to hide in the honesty of his face. “I’ll find you later.”
Rowena nodded down at her watered ale. And then her lips twisted impishly. “Do I get a gun?”
The answer had been no. In a panic, with no aim or experience, Rowena was as likely to shoot one of them as anything threatening. And so, she endured the long walk with her knife scraping inside her boot, somewhere between bored and frightened. The walk supplied no conversation and nothing more interesting than the long, rust-colored trails left in the stone by rainwater seeping down. She had seen twenty-three rats and countless miles of cobweb stitched by long-dead spiders. They passed a tilted, twisted forecarriage and spark engine that had once headed a derailed train. Most of the windows were knocked out. The beam of Rowena’s torch flashed across an interior eaten up by mildew and nesting things, some of the old wrought-iron benches pried up and carried off by some squatter king’s muddy princelings, hunting salvage.
Rowena stopped wondering how this venture could turn exciting when Meteron gestured with his torch toward a short iron ladder punched into the tunnel wall. The ladder seemed to start much higher off the ground than it should have—eight feet at least, perhaps ten. Rowena blinked at it in puzzlement before she realized he had stopped just short of a place where the tracks twisted sharply down, the rocky floor sinking into a pit of rubble and wreckage. The avalanche of debris had bent the lower ladder rungs, tearing most of them away, leaving the ones farther up the wall just beyond the Alchemist’s reach.
“Well,” Meteron said, “I think we’ve investigated the derailment.” He waved his torch back toward the wrecked car and engine some hundred feet before.
The Alchemist nodded. “Sinkhole. The train must have been going fast enough to jump tracks over the gap.” He considered the rung ladder poised five feet beyond the lip of the sinkhole. The ground that would have put it just barely in reach had long since fallen away.
Meteron dialed down his torch and handed it to the Alchemist. He walked to the sinkhole’s edge, checking the distance. “I can reach it if you give me a boost.”
“No.”
Meteron shot the Alchemist a bemused grin. “No?”
“I want to see if the assets we need are still there. Jump it.”
“You want me to clear nearly ten feet of height in a leap over a bone-breaking hazard?”
The Alchemist crossed his arms. “If clearing this gap is the worst thing you have to do tonight, you’ll be lucky.”
“Bastard,” Meteron sighed.
He fussed with his gloves. The Alchemist made an impatient noise. His partner ignored it, glancing between the rung ladder, the jagged gap below, and the space between himself and its edge. Ten feet, perhaps.
He walked it back to twenty.
The Alchemist stepped across the path that was to be Meteron’s runway. Rowena followed on his heels. They took stations along the tunnel’s opposite wall, watching.
At thirty feet back, the thief at last seemed satisfied. He considered the path, rolled his head over his shoulders, leaned forward, and tore into a full run.
He jumped about three feet before the gap, coming off his right leg toward the ladder wall, still several feet short. He pushed off the wall with his left leg for another surge of height.
The distance closed, almost sailing by. Meteron snatched the ladder’s lowest rungs, legs swinging past, then whipping back in a pendulum motion. He planted his boots into the wall, grinding to a halt.
Meteron had bounded off the wall like a cat, all power and perfect timing. Rowena clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a whoop. He winked at her. The Alchemist rolled his eyes.
“Good enough?” Meteron called.
Rowena doubted he could see the Alchemist’s smile through the glare of their torches. “The wall jump was a cheat.”
“I wanted to be sure. You first, cricket.”
“Me first, what?”
“Over by the edge. Grab the sleeve and hold tight.”
Master Meteron climbed up a few rungs. He hooked his knees in the ladder and bent back until he hung upside down, within five feet of Rowena’s hand, if she got on tiptoe and leaned out over the crumbling lip of ground as far as she dared. He slipped free of his coat, wrapping one sleeve around his hand and wrist, and swung it toward her.
Between the length of his extended arm and the span of the conscripted coat, there was plenty of sleeve left to grab. Meteron hauled her to the lowest rung. She grabbed it, let go of the coat, and edged around him, climbing the ladder to the access hatch above.
Below, Rowena heard a rustle, a grunt, a tearing sound, and two curses. She stopped short of the hatch and looked down. The Old Bear was pulling himself onto the bottom two rungs, Meteron righting himself with a slow, groaning sit-up. One of the jacket’s back seams yawned open. Meteron sighed and dropped the garment into the sinkhole with a salute.
“That was one of my better field coats,” he sulked. “You’ve put on a bit, Bear.”
“I’m carrying most of the equipment.”
“Of course. That must be the trouble.”
On the other side of the access door was a room so small even Rowena found it cramped—probabl
y a disused storage closet for rail maintenance crews. Beyond it stretched a corridor that eventually found its way into the Cathedral’s drainage system, as the Alchemist had predicted.
Rowena wasn’t sure what the difference between a drainage system and a sewer was. She had imagined it would be filth, but the smell inside suggested otherwise. The ground was submerged in two inches of black water, drifts of half-frozen mold floating in archipelagoes along its oily surface. Her breath steamed. It hurt to hold the dank room’s air in her lungs overlong. There was another iron ladder, rusty and damp. The Alchemist stayed at the rear to catch Rowena’s feet when they slipped on the frosted metal.
Finally, Meteron pushed a hatch open. He climbed through, crouched beside the hole, and pulled Rowena up after. She fished out her torch and swept the beam slowly around. Meteron drew a pistol and smirked.
“God’s rummage sale.”
There were crates stacked up along one wall, the top ones unsealed, protruding thatches of moldering straw and the glossy edges of statuary. Paintings slouched against one another, like books on a shelf missing its bookend. Mice had been at some of the canvases, but Rowena could still make out many of the images—oils of men in robes and sandals, one of them usually taller and more beautiful than the rest, his hand raised in a vague gesture over the other people. Glowing figures hovered aboveground, huge, feathery wings stretching out behind them. It took a moment for Rowena to see the wings weren’t decorations behind them but part of them.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. The Alchemist looked down at her.
“Be ready to move along.”
Meteron pushed crates and dollies draped in canvas away, revealing a door. “Time?” he called.
The Alchemist flashed his torch over his chronometer. “Three o’ the clock. Sunset is at five forty-eight today.”
“Good,” Meteron answered. “I think we’ll manage this yet.”
The Alchemist joined him in clearing the largest of the obstructions away. The door was hinged to open outward, into whatever hall lay beyond.
“We’ll avoid most of the aigamuxa if we keep ourselves under an hour,” the old man grunted to Meteron as they worked, “given their nocturnal habits. But we don’t know how many humans to expect.”
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