The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  The second guard turned the key and opened the door for the third. He entered, gun drawn, three sets of leather strapping cuffs in his other hand.

  “Deacon Fredericks was right,” the guard with the straps announced. The other men entered. He passed each a pair of cuffs, the barrel of his gun tracking between Chalmers and Anselm.

  Chalmers scurried behind Anselm. He shot the doctor a dark look and earned a shrug in response. “I’m a pacifist, really.”

  Anselm looked back at the advancing guards, working the odds. One drew close enough to reach for his wrists.

  He had nearly decided in what body part he was willing to take a bullet graze, had figured how to turn the guard with the cuffs into a human shield, and was adjusting his weight to put the process in motion when a thought—not his own—came sharply to mind.

  Smoking the room in three. Get low.

  And he smiled.

  The guard had just taken Anselm’s hands and slipped a cuff around one wrist when everyone heard something roll under the grating.

  It was ticking.

  The key-crank grenade was a sphere as large as a fist. It wobbled to a stop right between the feet of the guard holding the gun.

  He looked down.

  The crank work’s capped ends blasted off, spinning it round as it hurled up a cloud of smoke.

  Anselm threw an elbow into the cuff man’s temple, dropped to a knee, and hauled Chalmers down by his waistcoat. Through the gathering smoke, he could see Rowena crumpled against the wall, her wrists strapped tight.

  The Alchemist kicked open the door. It swung hard left, clipping the guard beside Rowena on the back of the head, stunning him. The guard with the gun whirled, eyes streaming. He aimed his pistol in time to take his dazed partner’s bulk hurled across his chest, sending both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. The gun clattered free.

  Anselm swept the weapon up and shoved it against the nose of the man who had moments before been its owner.

  The Alchemist stood over the three reeling guards with a heavy pistol lifted from one of their compatriots. He levered back the hammer. Chalmers’s coughing fit broke long enough for him to quail in alarm.

  The Alchemist was a big man, gifted with a stare that could curdle milk. In that respect, the goggles were a mercy, though their bright golden lenses looked alien above the double-valve filter mask. It covered his nose and mouth in a fearsome triangle of metal and tubes like the flaring muzzle of a wild beast.

  The crank work’s spin slowed to a wobble. Its smoke grew thin and watery. Then, finally, the gases cleared.

  “You,” Anselm observed, “look like shit, Bear.” He stood, offering his leather-looped wrist to Chalmers. The doctor frowned at it before realizing the implicit request.

  Chalmers fumbled with the strap. “This is your partner?”

  The Alchemist lifted his goggles and pulled down his mask. Under the gear and his dark complexion, his face was ashen. The ragged, bloody mess of his shirt suggested something more like an evisceration than a bullet wound. He could have passed for dead again had he just lain down and closed his eyes.

  “‘Give Leyah my love’?” he growled. The Alchemist stowed the mask. He fished for something in his endless pockets. “That was going a bit far.”

  Anselm smiled. “It made for excellent theater.”

  The Alchemist eyed the man standing between them. “Doctor Chalmers?”

  “Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers, at your serv—”

  He tossed the doctor what appeared to be a tin of dentifrice. “Put this on their hands, then place them over their mouths. Keep it off of your own, whatever you do. Use the cuffs on their ankles.”

  Chalmers glanced at Anselm, frowning. “And, um, what will Master Meteron be doing while I’m about that?”

  “Making sure they don’t try to kill you.” Anselm weighed the gun in his hand suggestively.

  “Ah. Very good.”

  The doctor set about his business, muttering apologies as he glued the guards’ hands to their faces.

  The Alchemist knelt beside Rowena. One of the joints in the iron grating had split the skin above her left eyebrow. The eye would swell shut soon, if the red scoring of lattice around the orbital bone was any indication. He found a styptic in his breast pocket and a square of clean gauze. Rowena moaned. She winced at his touch, jerking away. Her eyes fluttered, then shot open, wild with panic.

  And then, she truly saw him.

  “Bear?”

  Something about her using that name—that small piece of personal property—shook him. The Alchemist worked at Rowena’s cuffs. If he held her eyes a moment longer, something would happen, and the fear of what it might be made his heart hurt.

  It’s only the bruise from the bullet, you old fool.

  He released the pinch latch on the cuffs, put the gauze in Rowena’s hand, and guided her to press it against the wound. “Keep still. I need to—”

  Rowena flung her arms around the Alchemist’s neck, burying her face in his collar. Something between laughter and sobs heaved up from her shoulders. Slowly, he put an arm around her.

  From the corner of an eye, he saw Chalmers hesitate while cinching one of the straps around the second guard’s ankles. The reverend watched the crying girl hang from the old man’s neck. His brow furrowed. Anselm prodded him back to work with a boot.

  Rowena shoved the Alchemist back on his heels.

  “I can’t believe you let me think you were dead, you rotten bastard!” The indignant flare in her eyes changed to worry. “You look awful. Doc said coming back wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t think you’d look so—”

  “First rule, girl: no chatter. Now tilt your head back. We won’t get far with you bleeding down into your eye.”

  Rowena obeyed. The Alchemist cleaned the wound, staunched it with a line of styptic, and began to seal it with a milder form of the adhesive presently silencing and immobilizing the guards.

  “Why is it,” Rowena mused up at the ceiling, “big, nasty brutes always want to hit me in the face?”

  Anselm chuckled.

  The Alchemist sighed. “I’ve missed something, or you’ve both lost your minds.”

  “A little of both,” Anselm answered. “What’s the path out, Bear?”

  The Alchemist stood and offered Rowena a hand. The girl fairly bounded to her feet, a puppy spoiling for a fray with mastiffs.

  “Same as always. Up.”

  Anselm smirked. He offered the gun to the Alchemist. “Good. I love up.”

  “That makes one of us. Are you ready, Doctor?”

  Phillip Chalmers looked at the other three—the sneering rogue and the bedraggled Alchemist and the skinny, dirty girl. His expression was well beyond skeptical.

  “When you say ‘up,’ could you, perchance, specify?”

  “The fastest way out to the roof is from the clerestory level,” the Alchemist said. He spotted his weaponette on the dissection table and strapped it back in place. “There are two belfry towers there. We’re taking the higher of them up and out.”

  “Climbing?” Doctor Chalmers chirruped. “I, ah . . . Climbing really isn’t my forte, you see.”

  Rowena peered down the hall, jockeyed to go. She started across the threshold. Anselm snatched her shoulder, trotting her backward.

  “Rule two, cricket.”

  “Why the higher tower?” she asked the Alchemist. She brushed off Anselm’s hand with a scowl.

  “Because the aigamuxa are living in the lower one.”

  Chalmers had been about to walk out. He stopped. “Living there?”

  “Come along, Doctor.” Anselm swatted the younger man’s back. “Stay close. The girl will teach you the rules.”

  Anselm peeled out of the room, facing right, his gun raised. The Alchemist moved left, mirroring him. A moment later, he beckoned for the others.

  Rowena tugged Chalmers’s hand, smiling. “Don’t worry, Doc. They en’t much to remember—just three rules.”

  He
nodded numbly. Once in the hall, she let go of his hand and followed after the others, running to keep up.

  From somewhere far behind the Alchemist came Phillip Chalmers’s curse. Running, he supposed, was not the doctor’s forte, either.

  34.

  Haadiyaa Gammon stepped out of the secretariat coach at the foot of the hill rising up to the Old Cathedral. She paid the driver, donned her officer’s tricorn, and walked up the hedgerow-lined path, hands in her pockets against the night chill, hiding from the burdens she was bound to carry. Tomorrow would be Sabberday; Jane’s spark still rested in her inner breast pocket, unanswered. Her shoulders ached as they always did when she wore her constabulary-issued pistol. She had no plan of using it tonight, but then a lot of things had gone astray where plans and working with Abraham Regenzi had been concerned.

  Gammon had avoided the constabulary offices all that day, accounting for her absence by the manufacture of a nasty head cold. A more accurate accounting of what ailed her would have been much too difficult to capture in a hastily crafted spark. The ledger started with mortgaging her position’s integrity and carried on through a record of profits and losses ranging from the ineffable to the decidedly bloody. The last entry had no precise figure: it was the half ruin of Rare Juells’s face, her father standing glass-eyed over her slab, the gratuity Anselm Meteron had hurled atop of her corpse. She supposed by now it really did line some morgue technician’s pockets.

  And the girl, Gammon thought bitterly. Beatrice Earnshaw’s case had passed quickly through the Court and Bar, sailing on the authority of a few official seals and affidavits. She’d be sitting on a prison skiff bound for one of the hulks by now, reeling at how swift the hand of justice could strike, given the proper scapegoat. Gammon had a plan, and a few favors, set aside to help the girl, now that she had made up her mind of what must be done. Still, it would have been better had Haadiyaa Gammon never made choices that required so much undoing.

  With neither a head cold nor her integrity, Gammon walked the paths that fanned out toward the many laboratories, auditoriums, and libraries of the EC’s Cathedral campus. It was past the supper hour. The buildings were dark except for the odd lighted window—a reverend doctor tidying up a lab or readying one for the conference’s final morning. Only a group of lanyani treelings scavenged the grounds, searching for odds and ends worth pawning out of the rubbish bins. They froze, peering with their white, inscrutable eyes as Gammon passed. Behind her, she heard whispers moving among their branches, whether words or wind, she couldn’t say.

  Gammon squinted up at the Cathedral, half-expecting to see the shadows of aigamuxa moving between its buttresses and crenellations. She’d marked it a week before and had words with Regenzi about the creatures’ keeping. There were places the aigamuxa were expected—their skyline shanty kingdoms strung up between the alleys of the south docks, or the markets, sometimes, standing strong-arm outside a merchant’s stall. Folk had learned to tolerate the aiga moving about Amidon without a master’s guidance. Seeing them crawl over the surface of a treasured landmark was quite another matter—one likely to draw unwanted attention.

  Tonight, she spied through the glaze of moonlight two forms, then three, then four moving down the side of the high belfry tower. Their movements looked too right, and that rightness was as alarming as the aigamuxa’s crooked swinging forms had ever been.

  Humans.

  “Damn it all,” Gammon murmured. She checked her weapon in its holster and put a hand to her hat, running up the path and through the Old Cathedral’s peaked Gothic doors.

  One custom of the Old Religion, at least, had endured through the Unity. A church’s doors were never locked—though, times being what they were, they were often under guard.

  The Cathedral vestibule held six guards in black-and-gold EC livery, milling about with the uncertain dignity of men with orders they didn’t understand. One whirled, pistol raised, as Gammon entered. He froze when he recognized her, not quite lowering his gun.

  “What’s going on?” Gammon demanded.

  “Some coves come for the reverend doc,” a man with a poorly trimmed beard answered. He nodded toward the nervous one with the gun. “Sturges says Deacon Fredericks wants the ground floor secured—”

  “And the lower floors, and the triforium, and the whole rutting grounds,” the one called Sturges snapped. “There’s twenty of us—least there should be. Only twelve came ’round to report, and there en’t much sign where the rest gone. En’t seen Fredericks or the other collars, neither.”

  Gammon stepped past the man, scowling. The gun was still in Sturges’s hands, muzzle pointing to the ground. He watched her cross the vestibule into the cavernous Cathedral. Inside, Gammon heard the distant sounds of aigamuxa bellowing, grunts and howls raining down on the Cathedral floor. Alchemical globes, their gases nearly spent, wavered beside the niches where the preserved bones of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon mingled with golden imprints of the Logarithmic Equation and the Fourier Transformation, taking the place of the Stations.

  The stairs up to the clerestory level, Gammon saw, were littered with bodies. More guards.

  “I’ve found some of your twenty,” she called.

  Sturges came up and looked over her shoulder. “We know about those, ma’am.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “The aigamuxa’ve gone wild,” the bearded guard answered, shifting about on his flat feet. “Leastways that’s what folk are saying.”

  Sturges nodded. “Fredericks wants Chalmers back so we can move him somewhere else, start over. The ones who came for him broke in from below, and that’s been sealed off. We en’t heard a peep from the men keeping the levels between the cellar and ground. We figured the invaders would run clear out the front, then. And now Mathers just spotted ’em up on the roof.”

  “Half of Coventry Passage will spot them on the damned roof,” Gammon snapped. She reached into a little case fastened at her hip and drew out a silk chute, a gas tube, and an alchemical bulb. She assembled the three pieces into a tiny signal balloon and passed it in a bundle to Sturges. “Find the clearest patch of land you can, shake the bulb, and toss the rig up over your head. The gas tube will lift the chute up where the constabulary’s spotters can see the signal bulb—my signal, a call for all available units.” She scanned the other men’s nervous faces. “The rest of you, go home.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Go home. You don’t want to be here when the gendarmes show up expecting answers about who you’re trying to guard against or why, do you?”

  Gammon had thought many times that Fredericks’s choice to increase security using his own Ecclesiastical escort was unwise. True, most of Fredericks’s immediate circle was part of the scheme, but that didn’t make the EC regulars any more qualified. If you wanted trouble, you joined the constabulary or the army; if you wanted a uniform and a lot of talk, you joined EC security.

  This sort of talk, the guards were happy to hear. They left the vestibule in a rush. Sturges even dropped his gun.

  Gammon drew her weapon and started up the stairs, passing the fallen men with their broken necks and blank eyes. There were two hatches to the belfries, each fitted with a folding ladder, the first leading to the high tower. It was the second that drew Gammon’s notice. She stepped beneath the opening and its unfolded stairs. Silhouetted by the moonlight, something hung there, limp and dripping.

  Haadiyaa Gammon had seen many corpses, but most still resembled men. The arm that hung down from the belfry hatch was not attached to the body lying nearby, but it was still in its sleeve. Gammon recognized the jewel-toned brocade and silver buttons.

  It was easier to resign a position when one’s employer had already resigned his life, she supposed. She turned her back on Lord Regenzi’s remains. Her shoes struck something hard and heavy at her feet. It spun away, falling between two shafts of moonlight slicing the clerestory colonnade.

  Gammon crouched and examined the weapon.

  The
pistol boasted a long barrel with a crosshair mounted toward the grip end, its under barrel fitted with a blunt magazine. It was damnably heavy. There was a slide catch on the left side of the barrel. Gammon worked it with a curt snap, and its magazine dropped free. She fitted it back into place and pushed the slide. Something inside the gun’s body shifted ominously, accepting the rounds.

  This, she thought, is going to see some use.

  In three minutes, the central offices would signal the units stationed around the Cathedral district and Coventry Passage. They would arrive perhaps five minutes later. With a little luck, another complement would come up from central inside of ten.

  Haadiyaa Gammon didn’t believe in luck. She believed she had a good sense of who had come after Chalmers, though. That suspicion pushed her up the lower belfry ladder, the heavy gun shaped like a cannon tucked into her harness’s strap.

  35.

  From the pitched copper roof of the Old Cathedral, Corma resembled a distant galaxy of stars the color of umber, glowing under a blanket of cold, yellow night fog. Rowena stared down between two blocky gaps in the raised roof’s edge, the panorama marred by the sharp, luminous towers of Regency Square and the wilted rooftop garden of the Court and Bar. A gust of wind filled her coat like a sail. She staggered, hugging her arms against its hems, struggling to keep her feet. The wind had pushed her farther from the edge, but just the same, her heels had left the hammered metal roof for an instant. Reluctantly, her stomach slithered back down her throat.

  Far below, the hedgerows of Coventry Passage sketched a maze, junctures of walkways and parkland framing the seminary and university like tiny monuments in a museum diorama. Rowena’s head reeled at the distance and how quickly it would fly past if the wind bucked her from the roof.

  A big hand closed on her shoulder. She looked up at the Alchemist. “En’t ever been up so high before.”

  “Nor again,” he said. The moonlight flared against the roof’s green patina, casting an eerie glow. “The doctor’s made it down. We need to cross to the lower roof. Take my hand.”