“I will need time to convince the good doctor how important his cooperation will be to this girl. I need to be able to leave and let them dwell on what I’ve done. I will need to share details with Regenzi as I make progress. I need the freedom to come and go without your falling all over me, ape. I am keeping the keys. Unless you’re of a mind to take them back.”
His left hand drifted over the grip of his pistol.
The aiga’s flat nose flared, bull angry. It turned, slouching out the door and slamming it shut. Its steady footfalls grew distant as its shadow stretched out of sight.
Rowena bent her knees.
Meteron turned toward her just in time to take her full weight straight to the chest. She flew at him, shrieking and slapping and clawing. For a moment, he was staggered—but that was all.
He tore Rowena’s hands from his face with a snarl. And then the whole room moved around her as he spun and hurled her down. The floor surged into her back, driving the breath from her body like a bellows. He straddled her and pushed a forearm up under Rowena’s neck. Stars exploded at the edges of her vision.
“Listen carefully, cricket—”
Rowena bucked her hips, hard. That moved him enough for her to turn a hip and drive a knee between his legs. She heard a grunt, then a gasp. Meteron rolled away, reflex jerking his arm from her throat. Rowena scuttled back, rattling into a shelf of glassware.
She reached behind herself, felt her hand close around a long, slender neck—
A chemical flask.
She smashed it on the ground and sprang at Meteron just as he curled up from a wounded crouch. Her weight drove them back together, clipping the dissection table’s legs. A rain of sponges and steel and trepans pounded them.
Rowena pressed the jagged glass under his chin.
They stared at each other, breathing hard. Faintly, Rowena heard Chalmers scratching away at his notebook.
Meteron smiled. “Gently now, cricket.”
Gentleness was the last thing on her mind.
“You killed him. He wasn’t so bad,” she shouted. The words surprised her, but she knew they were true, and they dragged all the other truths along after. “He listened to me, and he cared about me, and you ruined it, you bastard.” Rowena wept, her voice so thick she could barely make out her own words. “I’m going to kill you. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve killed people before—big people. Bigger than you.”
“And I’ve raised the dead before.”
Rowena’s hand trembled. She felt a trickle of blood between her fingers. “We’re not playing your game now, you sonovabitch.”
“You were lying. I wasn’t. I imagine the Old Bear will be sore if you should kill me before he returns.”
Rowena moved the glass a hair’s breadth from Anselm’s throat. “He’s dead. You only want to catch me off so you can get clear of me. It en’t going to work.”
“Rowena.” Meteron’s voice was perfectly level. “Think. Do you really believe I’m enough of a monster to kill the only man who will suffer being my friend?”
She didn’t want to think that. She didn’t know what to think.
Rowena squeezed the shattered flask harder. There was a thin, cracking sound. Her palm throbbed as a splinter of glass burrowed into its flesh.
Slowly, Meteron reached up. He closed four and a half fingers around her wrist and pulled gently. Her arm trembled on the descent.
“He’s alive?”
“He’s alive.”
“How?”
He touched his neck, saw the blood lacing his fingers, and sighed. “Why is it young women have such a passion for cutting into my face?”
“How?”
“Curare. It’s a paralytic. Bear always kept a little in reserve when we were on a job, in case he needed something silent and sure. We were lucky he’d brought some with him when the idea came to me.”
Rowena sat back on her haunches, blinking numbly. “What idea?”
“To get caught so we could get out.”
He rose and reached a hand down to her. Rowena considered it with weary eyes, unmoving. Meteron took her by the elbows and hauled her to her feet.
“How does getting caught help us?”
He looked back toward the hall, scanning its shadows. “The only thing we could be sure of was that we knew little enough of the environs capture was almost a certainty. So we used our last asset.”
Rowena scowled. “Me.”
“Hardly. You are a liability, cricket. Our last asset—” he smiled, “—is the fact that experience and treachery trump youth and enthusiasm every time. Regenzi has distinguished himself by his willingness to take lives, but a more experienced enemy would have a plan that didn’t require so much mopping up. We gambled on him making amateur errors.”
“Like what?”
“It takes a very particular kind of arrogance to drag your enemy before you when they still have most of their teeth. He should have disarmed, separated, and interrogated us. There’s not much angle in it for me to turn on you, but he wanted to believe it. The scene fed his fantasy of being a ruthless, charismatic leader, the sort who can make an ally of a man like me.”
Rowena shook her head. “You really figured him out.”
“Credit the figuring to our Alchemist. He saw enough of him in his shop a few days ago to make some valuable inferences about Regenzi’s character.”
“But Regenzi took his pulse. He can’t be such an eejit he didn’t notice the Alchemist was still alive.”
“I doubt most physicks would have had a better chance of recognizing our trick.” Meteron perched a hip on the trestle table. “The knife was tipped with the curare. Used the usual way, it causes total muscular and respiratory paralysis. It’s a quiet death, but horrible. You suffocate and know it’s happening the whole time—no struggles or crying out. On the other hand, if you know your way around human anatomy and prepare the poison to a precise body weight and concentration, well—” he shrugged, “—then you can stretch the onset, reduce the mortality risk. The pulse and respiration drop to just a few beats and breaths a minute. It looks damned convincing. And, if you’ve got a strong heart and a good constitution, there’s even a chance you’ll wake up none the worse for wear.”
Rowena felt herself go cold. “But the Alchemist is . . . he’s . . . Well—”
“Not a very young bear? I suppose. He managed it once before, about twenty years back. His odds weren’t as good this time, but there wasn’t a better candidate.”
“What about you?”
“Come along, cricket. If I’m to be the corpse, the Bear has to play the traitor. Could you have believed that of him for even a moment?”
Rowena bit her lip. No. Send the bastard to do a bastard’s job.
And then, she understood. “You needed me to believe it was real, too.”
“Lead plate over the target zone, a few packets of drawn blood.” Meteron nodded. “We had the props down, but there’s nothing that seals a performance quite like a shrieking extra.” A passing sobriety took the edge off his features. “We couldn’t be sure if you were a good enough actress to pull your part off. And I knew already you’re a terrible liar.”
“I am?”
“You blink twice every time. Don’t take up cards.”
Rowena looked down at her feet, arms crossed. “It scared me to pieces.”
“We told you to close your eyes,” he answered quietly. It was as near as he’d come to an apology, Rowena supposed.
She scrubbed her nose to chase off the teary feeling that was coming on again. “How does the Alchemist being ‘dead’ help us get out of here with the doc and the book, anyway?”
Meteron smiled deviously. “No one keeps very close watch on a corpse. My job while the curare ran its course was to learn as much about Regenzi’s operation as possible. He’s been quite generous in showing me the way around, which let me take stock of the occupied rooms and a rough head count of his men. Meanwhile, wherever Bear was dumped, he’ll be abl
e to move about freely, start dispatching guards, and clearing the way for our exit. Between what I’ve learned and what he’ll have determined, we’ll have as close to complete intelligence as we could have hoped from a week’s stakeout.”
Rowena shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe it. He’s alive.”
There was a voice from the corner of the room—hesitant, corrective: “Medically speaking, suppressed vitals carry significant risks of long-term consequences.”
The Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers watched Anselm and Rowena from his cot, his dishwater eyes darting between them. He flashed a weak smile.
“Arrhythmia. Memory loss. Nerve damage. It’s, ah . . . it’s really quite dodgy.”
“I think,” Rowena said coldly, “he’s going to be fine.”
Meteron made a cautionary sound. She turned.
“Isn’t he?”
“The good doctor has a point,” he allowed. “But I’m more concerned about the Bear’s disposal than his recovery. If the aigamuxa dumped him into an incinerator, or hauled him down to the river, that might put a kink into his resurrection.”
Rowena and Chalmers cried out in dismay, nearly on-key.
“Still, we’re far enough north of the river an aiga would have to be passing industrious to haul him to the nearest quay. If there’s an incinerator on the Cathedral campus, it would be in one of the laboratory buildings where the conference has been meeting, and it probably wouldn’t burn hot enough to cremate a whole body. And the industrial quarter’s too far east to make the journey worth it.”
“So . . .” Chalmers began—and stopped when Rowena’s gaze fell on him. He looked down at his notes, shuffling papers into superfluous piles. “So, ah, where is he?”
“Right now?” Master Meteron considered a water clock on a nearby shelf. “No idea. But he’s running late.”
31.
Each large building in Corma boasts a refuse catch, a pit dug into the lowest levels of the foundations and fed by drop chutes. The chutes resemble dumbwaiters, with gear-locked doors opening to a compartment about three feet square into which refuse can be loaded. Once the doors close, the user can reverse the crank, releasing the compartment’s suspension chain and sending the stinking flotilla hurtling down to the chute’s bottom, where it drops its contents on the refuse catch’s ever-growing heap. The pits have access bays to the sewers through which the laborers city folk call “mole men” enter to dig the lot out onto skiffs, following a schedule kept as tidy as their smocks are befouled.
Moling is profitable work, if you can stand its stink. There are always things being discarded that have no business going down the drops.
The aigamuxa who loaded the Alchemist into the refuse chute was not overly careful. But then, care hadn’t been its first concern. Had it been, it might have considered the regularity with which the refuse catches were emptied, the correspondingly inevitable discovery of a body, and the displeasure of Lord Regenzi at a reeking corpse turning his conspiracy’s hiding place into a public travesty. No. The aiga’s first concern was that the old human cut a very heavy corpse and that the letter of Regenzi’s wishes only required its disposal.
A three-foot square compartment is a tight fit for a man a hand over six feet and a shade over sixteen stone. Stuffing said man into said compartment when one’s eyes are obliged to stay planted on the ground meant the aiga’s most inventive inflictions of contortionism were met several times with a shoulder blocking the doors’ closing, or a foot and ankle wedged between them. Finally, on the brink of a resolution to simply break the corpse’s back and stuff it in, the aiga folded it into the happy accident of the fetal position.
And so the doors were closed, the crank engaged, and the platform and its cargo dropped down into the dark on a route that terminated quickly. The aigamuxa had used the drop just two levels above the refuse catch itself.
Under any other circumstances, finding oneself in an overfull refuse heap would be simply and utterly vile. In the Alchemist’s case, it was still vile: vile but merciful, its high, damp hillocks breaking a fall that marked the day’s second opportunity of breaking his back.
He lay there a long time, adrift in the fog of half death, before a sudden, sharp pain in his wrist woke him. Though the rest of his body lagged far behind, his arm knew what to do.
It jerked back against his chest. The rat that had sunk its teeth near the vein scurried away, bounding over drifts of gazette paper and food scrap and the reeking mountains from the Cathedral’s ancient earth closets.
Piece by piece, the world came back to the Alchemist, and he signed off on each of its deliveries with reluctance. All around was darkness. A miasma of rot and its steaming warmth crawled over the waste heaps. The air above that swamp was coffin cold. His right side flared in pain from shoulders to toes. It took on a throbbing enthusiasm as his pulse quickened.
A body sustained at the threshold of life, with only a marginal pulse and the slowest, most shallow breathing, returns to normalcy with a feeling more like dying than lying at death’s door itself had been. Sixty beats a minute feels like running a footrace. The lungs’ steady bellows scream with the effort of full motion. The blood surges, and the body warms, and with that flush of heat comes a wave of nausea and dizziness.
When the Alchemist sat up, it was only to keep from vomiting on his bloodied clothes.
Once he had nothing left to add to the refuse pile, he was past the smell of the place, past the bruises of his fall. It was the pain in his chest that worried him, until he remembered the shot.
The Alchemist fished under his shirt for the lead plate guarding his heart and withdrew it gingerly. He explored the plate with his fingers, finding it caved in nearly half the depth of his thumb, pinching the bullet tight. He felt a greedy, bone-deep contusion sinking deep into his chest. The bite wound had begun to seep, too, as had the damp line on his throat where Anselm’s knife had done its work.
The Alchemist kept a working voice in his head—a version of his own sharper than even his most irascible bark. It ordered him about with callous efficiency.
Take stock.
He started with the coat and found his supplies—secreted in a double-quilted lining—had survived the fall. His bag was gone and with it the torches, some munitions, the grappling fork, the rappelling rigs, and sink pins. The scabbard on his thigh felt light and loose. He vaguely remembered the hand blunderbuss being taken before the shot. The Alchemist reached up to his throat, felt the goggles hanging there, and sighed relief.
Now get moving.
Leyah had been a brilliant engineer, capable of crafting or adapting virtually any device. Good campaigning groups needed such skills, and she’d been a savant. Given a week of preparations and the proper funds, she could construct things her husband had never seen before, things that proved to him that calling God an engineer was higher praise than calling Him an experimenter.
The goggles were one of Leyah’s little gifts. The Alchemist donned them and clicked through several lenses, at last finding the glazed optics.
The refuse catch offered dim light from the drop chutes’ apertures. The sewer access door was framed in a murky halo by the alchemical globe positioned just outside. The parabolic lenses and their refractive coating amplified that light, letting the Alchemist perceive the outlines of the refuse heap’s contents, the mouths of the chutes above. The one directly overhead beckoned, its open hatch revealing the platform from which he’d fallen and the chain suspending it.
Out you go, old man.
Telling his pains he would give them their due sometime further on, the Alchemist gathered the sturdier pieces of the refuse—crates and broken furniture and scrap. He built a platform just tall and steady enough to put the hatch in reach. He snatched its edge, hauling up until he could place a hip on the platform. Resting there, he gave the chains a hard tug, testing their load.
The Alchemist climbed back up the way he’d come down, resting twice with feet and back pressed to ei
ther side of the chute. It would have been slow work even if he hadn’t felt half dead. The chain was strong, but his hands ached, callused fingers slick with sweat. Finally, he reached the first dumbwaiter doors. Light leaked through their center seam. The Alchemist braced himself again, legs quaking with the effort, and drew a flat iron tool from the sleeve of his coat, tapered to a bit driver tip on one end, flared into an adjustable spanner on the other. He drove the bit driver tip between the doors and levered them open.
For an instant, the hall’s globe light blinded him. He pulled down the goggles and made his cramped way out.
The corridor was rough stone and slate, identical to those he had traveled with Rowena and Anselm. And that was the trouble. He had no notion where he was.
Fortunately, he had ways of remedying that.
The Alchemist kept close to the wall, following the lamps to a stairway. He lingered there, back to the corner where the corridor narrowed at the foot of the stairs. He reached into his coat, working with one hand, watching the stairwell. The Alchemist knew the feel of the chemical parcel he sought, its familiar heft, and the stinging smell that already seeped through its heavy linen. He waited. It did not take long for a shadow to stretch down the steps.
The Alchemist squeezed the packet in his right hand. Its crystallized contents ground together, leaving his palm wet. The guard came down the stairs at the Alchemist’s right side. With his left hand, cross-body, he snared the man’s shoulder and spun into the wall, stepping behind him as he did it. He hugged the guard’s back to his chest, stuffing the chloroform packet over mouth and nose.
The guard bucked and thrashed. That only made him breathe harder. When he slackened, the Alchemist let his body slide to the floor.
After tossing the chloroform aside, the Alchemist wiped his hand on the man’s uniform and checked his neck for a pulse. Steady and strong. He would live, though he’d have a screaming headache, and not all for the chloroform’s sake.
The Alchemist left his hand on the man’s neck and closed his eyes. He didn’t have to go slowly or pick carefully. He knew what he sought. He shouldered his way through the walls of unconsciousness, tossing the rooms that lay beyond.
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