The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  “Does it do this a lot?”

  Chalmers dropped the sheets and scrambled over. He knelt beside the machine, turning its dials haphazardly, trying to calm its protests. How the deuce was it even active? Chalmers had left the display itself off. He was quite certain of that. It was one thing to keep the crank battery connected to the apparatus charged, but he worried constantly of damaging its lenses, perhaps burning the phosphor screen. He’d let the detector run overlong the night before, and after that carelessness, he was certain he’d turned the display off.

  “Blast it! It’s overheating. I had a notion of asking to take it up to the bell tower with a telescope, so I could compare the diagrammatic path of—” When Chalmers looked up, he found himself and the girl on opposite sides of the glass.

  Now the screen was afire with motes of light. They poured in all around Rowena Downshire. He could see her face clearly, a topography of pointillism, its finest movements perfectly animated. Heat poured off the display glass, the air around it trembling.

  Phillip Chalmers opened his mouth. No sound came.

  On the other side of the screen, two golden eyebrows lifted.

  “Is it a short or something? I’ve heard electric stuff gets those—shorts. Whatever they are. Did you find one?”

  Chalmers stared. When he found his voice, it cracked. “Found . . . something.”

  Anselm Meteron and Abraham Regenzi stood in the open doorway of the sacramental locker, the room dark and still except for a shallow, ragged breathing deep within. They had been standing there a long while—long enough for Regenzi to tell Meteron most of his justifications, refined to a near-theatrical performance.

  Anselm could tell it frustrated Regenzi to find his new ally so hard to impress, and that made the worst part of him very happy indeed. The young lord had sense enough to pretend indifference to Meteron’s calm. Anselm supposed he might have been a good cardplayer, especially with that hard, knowing smile.

  “So, to sum up—” Anselm let himself sound as bored as he felt, “—you’re working for agents who are afraid God will give up on the world if these test subjects don’t perform as He intends, and for lack of clear information as to what desirable performance looks like, you’re hoping imprisonment and total social control will prevent a fatal misstep.”

  Regenzi offered him that cardplayer’s smile. “To sum up, I’m saving the world.”

  “At most, you’re saving your own arse. It’s only a happy coincidence that it occupies this world.”

  “You don’t believe my motives are at all altruistic?”

  “Call it what you like, but you’re no more an altruist than I.”

  Regenzi raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps so. You’re also not the first Meteron with whom I’ve discussed this matter.”

  Anselm felt the young lord’s eyes picking him over, hunting for a reaction. “I’ve heard.” He gave Regenzi a pointed look. “I’m sure your exploits will make a lingering impression on His Grace.”

  Regenzi bristled. “I was more hoping for a profitable one.” He nodded into the dark. “Now, aren’t you curious why we’ve come here?”

  “Not particularly. You’re clearly not keeping the doctor in this room, and so it’s of little interest to me.”

  “What leads you to that conclusion?”

  “You need Chalmers to track, record, and translate data. Not my field of expertise, but I’ll wager it requires basic illumination and space enough to turn about once or twice.”

  “You know your way around rather dark trades, Master Meteron. I’d always thought you were a businessman.”

  “My present business is wicked enough I had to pass a few other careers in my youth to train up.”

  Regenzi chuckled. “I could have used you around from the beginning.”

  The smallduke retrieved the Alchemist’s telescoping saber and a leather roll almost the length of his forearm from the inner pocket of his coat. He handed them to Anselm.

  “There is a chance,” Regenzi allowed, “that you could win your little honor duel against Nasrahiel. If that’s the case, I’ll need a new right-hand agent. Someone who can do very uncomfortable things without hesitation.”

  “Technically, I’m retired.”

  The smallduke shrugged. “It’s a notion I’d like you to consider for the future—assuming, of course, that you have one. Now there’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”

  They stepped into the darkness. Regenzi lit a hurricane lamp waiting by the door with a lucifer from his cigarette case. The room filled with a light the color of sepia and shadows like faded ink.

  The figure lying in chains stirred. He tugged at his bindings with a hand muffled in soiled gray wrappings.

  “Nasrahiel’s people have extracted everything they know how to,” Regenzi explained as he paced the room’s perimeter, well outside the chained man’s reach. “The aigamuxa have moved on to keeping him as . . . well, a plaything, I suppose. They’re like sporting hounds that way. If they don’t have something to chase or harry, they get willful. Still, there’s real work I need done with him and they’ve exhausted their creativity.” He stopped. “I have to be sure he knows nothing more.”

  “So kill him,” Anselm said. “Then it won’t matter what he knows.”

  “If he told anyone else, though, before we came for him . . .”

  Anselm nodded. “Of course.” He removed his gloves and flexed his fingers, waiting for the phantom pop in his missing finger. “I could use the practice before I move on to the girl.” And then he looked the younger man up and down. “Stay awhile, my lord. You might learn something.”

  Regenzi’s face wrinkled. He adjusted the cuffs of his jacket with a fabricated nonchalance. “If it’s all the same to you, I need to speak with my confederates. I imagine they’re concerned about recent developments. They will want assurances.”

  “Go forth with a glib tongue, then.”

  Regenzi was walking out the door as Anselm called to him.

  “I’ll need time with this one. Say two hours.”

  “That’s . . . quite a long time.”

  “I’m much more creative than an aigamuxa.”

  The door closed, leaving Anselm and Ivor Ruenichnov alone. Anselm regarded the sunken heap of a man with wonder and pity. He searched his memory, dusting off his Vraskan. Speaking to Ivor in his native tongue seemed a worthy courtesy, under the circumstances.

  “God’s balls.” Anselm chuckled. He knelt by the Alchemist’s surgeon’s kit, unfolding it slowly. “I’d heard you were having trouble keeping birds to fly your routes. I didn’t know it was because you were eating them. You look like a trussed sow.”

  Ivor’s face was a fungus of bruises. He flashed his old companion a snarl with teeth like bloodied tombstones, slurring an idiom Anselm recalled having something to do with birth mothers and the mating habits of livestock. What remained of Ivor’s tunic clung to the blood crusting his chest and belly. On the third try, he managed something more conversational. His body rolled feebly, revealing his brass hand twisted into a useless fist of scrap.

  “Too much a . . . coward . . . to come alone. Where is the Bear?”

  Anselm studied the sparkling tip of a scalpel, turning it in his maimed hand.

  “Dead,” he said at last. “I killed him.”

  “Snake.”

  Anselm snorted. “You never pretended to like him.”

  “Hypocrite—and a witch. Brave, though . . . Smart. Loyal.” Ivor ground the last word in his teeth, powdering it.

  “Do you recall Trimeeni back in fifty-six?”

  Anselm could see Ivor sifting pain in search of the memory. Finally, the Vraskan scoffed, shaking his head. “That was Iberon. You were always such fools. The Bear should never . . . never have trusted you to—” His face purpled under the strain of words. Ivor gagged, hawking a gobbet on the stones.

  Anselm frowned. “Ivor—”

  He stared back through an eye not yet swollen shut. Its pupil flared with pain
and fury. God, he was pathetic—would have been even if he hadn’t been broken. Gouty and gray and gone to waste, a wreckage of the beast he had been, the shadow his shadow might once have cast. Anselm heard a clatter in the old man’s throat and saw his chest jump with a wet cough, throwing a jagged landscape of shattered ribs into relief.

  Anselm moved closer. Regenzi had had nothing to fear from Ivor. It was amazing, really, that the man was alive at all. Perhaps something of the beast he’d been was in him, still, too stupid and stubborn to die.

  Anselm pressed the edge of a scabrous belly wound. Something yellow seeped from its cracks. There was a sweet smell. Foul.

  “Ivor,” he asked quietly, “did you tell anyone about the book, or Chalmers, or Pierce?”

  “Just you,” Ivor sneered through bloody teeth. “But you won’t believe me. . . . Too . . . smart . . . to believe me.”

  “No, old friend. I do believe you.”

  Ivor spat, then groaned. He closed his good eye. “You left me with that damned book. . . . You are no friend.”

  “On the contrary.” Anselm returned the scalpel to its sleeve and took the hypodermic injector instead, loaded with the only ampule it had ever carried—the one the Alchemist had scarcely ever used. “I think I am the truest friend you ever had.”

  Anselm Meteron was no medic, but he knew where to find a man’s jugular. There in the half dark, he pressed the needle into Ivor’s flesh. Before the pinprick of pain parted his old partner’s lips, Anselm pushed down the plunger, and the bodkin mingled with the Vraskan’s blood. Ivor sagged, one shoulder twitching spasmodically, a foot kicking. And then he was still. Moments later, there was a damp, earthy smell—the undignified end.

  Anselm rocked back on his heels, staring at Ivor’s corpse. His right hand ached. He saw he’d been running circles over the stump of his finger with his thumb again, rubbing both raw. He massaged the tightness out of his wrist and hand, shook them, hard, and felt the turn from pain to pins and needles that would eventually fade altogether. It hadn’t always taken so long.

  Sullen, Anselm seriously considered the possibility that he was too old for this sort of thing. His shoulders still ached from that business with the ladder in the tunnels. He had barely moved fast enough to kick out the young guard’s knee and get his knife into the Bear before the rest of the room could act. The odds were against something like that working again. That boded ill for his dance with Nasrahiel. And the more he talked to Regenzi, the less he liked the thought of partnering with him—and not just because he knew better than to tangle himself up with the bishop’s business.

  Worse and worse, all the time.

  Anselm folded the surgeon’s kit, noting it had contained only one ampule of bodkin. The Old Bear was more of an optimist than he had thought. There was always a chance someone else would need that mercy—or want it—soon.

  He had a few ideas of whom and slipped from the room and its sweet smell of corruption in search of them.

  30.

  For more than an hour, the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers sat huddled in the farthest possible corner from Rowena Downshire, staring at her like a rabbit cornered by a dog. Something about the big glass screen and the rattletrap machine connected to it seemed to have done in his wits. Perhaps he was sore about its breaking. Moments after he started tending it, there came a sound like the ice on the river giving way, and the glass splintered into a dark spiderweb.

  Then Chalmers threw himself back on his rumpled cot, all but crawling the wall to get as far from Rowena as the cell would allow.

  Rowena had tried to console him, then, though for what, she couldn’t say. She offered him back his handkerchief, and he whispered that she should keep it, please, God, just keep it. She asked after his health, asked if she’d done something to break the machine, asked if she could get him anything, even stupidly asked after his opinion of the weather—anything to stop his shaking.

  Finally, Rowena gave up. She slumped with her back to the grated door, hugged her knees, and wondered what she could do. How to get out. If there was a way out. How to pull the doctor back together again, to make him useful somehow. When she’d come to the Cathedral, there’d been three of them and a plan, and now she was . . . She considered Chalmers with mounting dread. Now she really was alone. She took a composing breath.

  It was the breath that undid her.

  Rowena lacked the strength to weep loudly anymore, but it sounded very loud over the faint hum of gadgets littering the room.

  You’re an eejit, Rowena Downshire. A stupid, moon-born fool.

  The sight of the Alchemist lying in a pool of blood had driven Rowena’s last bout of tears. This one was more rage than misery. It was all so obvious now. The memory of her joy at being told she should come along, and of setting out from Regency Square with eager pride just hours before, mortified her. Of course Master Meteron wanted her to come along, once he saw she could be used for leverage. If he could get his revenge for Rare’s death without fighting all Regenzi’s lackeys, why wouldn’t he? If there was a way of bargaining an end to the bloody business—well, wasn’t that the nature of his business? Bets and bargaining and goods and services?

  The more Rowena dwelled on it, the more she knew his friendship with the Alchemist was just a bit of scrapbook. Nostalgic. It was a bond between two men who didn’t exist anymore, men who had known each other before she was born. Perhaps they’d been more like each other, once, the partnership one of kindred souls. She couldn’t imagine any kinship in it now. The Old Bear was—had been—a stern, steady, solemn sort of man, hardly the kind to keep company with someone as rakish and elegant as Anselm Meteron. And there were the stories about Meteron, too. If vengeance were better served by a treacherous path, there was no question he’d take it. The Alchemist and Rowena had been perfect assets—trusting, motivated, determined.

  Disposable.

  Rowena remembered the Alchemist’s smile, almost a secret; the touch of his hand on her bruised cheek, and the near magic of his healing; his sharp, fatherly looks over the rims of his spectacles. The books and maps of the Stone Scales. The strength in his arms as he tucked her in bed. Even Rabbit’s thundering tail. She wished the smell of marjoram and fennel was still in her hair.

  She hadn’t even known his name. She wondered if anyone had.

  There was no use crying any longer. All of that was done and gone. The doctor was useless. If they were going to get anywhere now, she’d have to be the one to make it so.

  Rowena Downshire scrubbed her face on her sleeve and turned to the locked door. She rattled bars, climbed tall, teetering stools, and tried to shimmy past a gap in the grating near the rough-cut ceiling. She snatched some pithing wires from a dissection tray, reached a spindly arm through the lattice, and started jimmying at the lock.

  All the while, Chalmers watched. At some point, he worked up the will to creep by the long trestle table and snatch up a notebook and charcoal. He glanced between her and the page, writing fast, feverish notes. Rowena stopped to glower at him as she bent a wire into the lock’s tangled guts.

  “You could help, y’know.”

  “I . . . I think I’ll stay here, thank you.” His gaze darted toward the trestle table again. Rowena saw he was looking at a thick book—one she remembered disappearing days before under a flurry of brown wrapping and twine.

  “Here.” Rowena rolled her eyes, stomped over to the worktable, and lobbed the book at the reverend doctor. “Take the stupid thing. I en’t gonna bite if you move around.”

  Chalmers threw himself on the book and scuttled back to his corner.

  “Silly twat,” Rowena muttered.

  An hour later, she was on her belly under a rack of shelves, trying to find some crack in the floor, some chink she could pry open and wriggle her way through. At the sound of a key touching the heavy lock, she scrambled back to her feet, almost banging her head on a rack of balances.

  Beside the door, an aigamuxa loomed over Anselm Meteron, its eyel
ess face seeming to watch him work the key. The creatures all looked mostly the same to Rowena, but this one had mottled black markings in places on its flesh, and its trousers looked new and clean compared to Nasrahiel’s. The Alchemist’s bag hung from Anselm’s shoulder, the flap turned back to reveal the hilted weaponette and the surgeon’s kit. There was blood staining the kit leather—dry now, more brown than red.

  Rowena stared at him, anger boiling in her belly.

  The aigamuxa padded into the cell on Meteron’s heels. It paused by the edge of the dissecting table to lift a foot and turn its ankle, like a marble rolling in the palm of a hand, loose and smooth and sick-looking. Meteron still wore his chest holster and the carbine broken down in its slots. He still had both pistols and his knife.

  Regenzi must trust him to let him keep all that truck.

  Rowena hoped the smallduke got what he deserved for trusting a snake. She hoped Meteron turned on him, bit him and broke him, and that Nasrahiel made good on the Alchemist’s prediction, too. She studied the aigamuxa and had no trouble imagining it could tear a man’s arms off. And it was a runt compared to its chieftain.

  Meteron dropped the bag onto the table. He began unrolling the surgeon’s kit with ominous deliberation.

  “I’ll keep the keys for now.”

  The aigamuxa tilted its head. “That does not seem wise.”

  “Fine,” Meteron snapped. He wrapped the kit up again. “I understand. We’ll find Nasrahiel and Regenzi and tell them I can’t begin because the plan doesn’t suit you. We can wait. Would tomorrow be better? Will you be in a mood to follow your commanders’ orders then?”

  “I did not hear of such an order.”

  “How thoughtless of them not to tell you. I’m sure it’s their usual habit to consult you in all things.”

  The aigamuxa’s lip rippled. Meteron glared up at the creature. Even hunchbacked, it was two feet taller than him. He gave it his sharpest, flintiest stare.