The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  And then Chalmers saw Nasrahiel’s shadow swinging up the buttresses to the upper belfry tower. A moment later, the aigamuxa was running across the spine of the pitched roof and toward the inner buttresses and the square Gothic tower perched above the Cathedral’s chancel. The girl’s form was clamped tight to his and so was something else—something smaller, something bundled and square.

  For the first time in his life, Phillip Chalmers set off at a run toward something decidedly unhealthy.

  Haadiyaa Gammon raised the blunderbuss at the charging aigamuxa and pulled its trigger.

  There was only a click.

  “Damn it!”

  Whatever the weapon was, she hadn’t found extra munitions with it. She threw it aside, dropping to the roof, stabbing a hand into her coat for her constabulary issue.

  “Anselm, get down.”

  Gammon’s crouch saved her from the aigamuxa’s leap. It also cleared the path for it to barrel into Anselm, flattening him against the copper roof. The rogue’s left shoulder struck the tiles with a sickening crunch.

  Anselm dropped his empty right-hand pistol and heard the left-hand clatter from his nerveless fingers. His knife sheath was pinned, his left side afire with pain, the creature’s weight bearing down. The aigamuxa reared up to deal a hammer blow with its knotted fists.

  Three shots, spaced by the clicks of a caplock hammer, shook the creature from behind. The last exited the aiga’s mouth, raining blood and bone fragments as it toppled over Anselm. Groaning, he put his right hand to the roof and pushed. Then Gammon put a shoulder into the corpse and rolled its dead weight away.

  She reached an arm around Anselm’s back to lever him up. When Gammon touched the wounded shoulder, Anselm shoved her off with a curse, eyes watering.

  “Dislocated,” he gasped. “I think I’m done shooting for the night.”

  Gammon pulled him up by the right arm instead. “Just as well. It looks like the rest have gone.”

  Anselm looked for the Alchemist, blinking his vision clear. “Bear! Where the hell is Chalmers?”

  The Alchemist pried his sword free of the last aigamuxa to have met it. He looked around.

  And then, all three looked up.

  Nasrahiel moved like a shadow across the moonlit roof between the chancel towers, grasping a kicking and clawing form. Picking a slow, slippery path up the gutter works of the upper belfry tower, the Reverend Phillip Chalmers followed after. He paused, kicking off his slick-soled dress shoes, and carried on in stocking feet, alternating between teetering in the skirling wind and clinging like an insect to the Cathedral’s upper reaches.

  The Alchemist flicked his wrist. The sword collapsed to its holster length.

  “Can you catch up to them?” he called. And then he saw how Anselm leaned against Gammon, marked the droop in his shoulder. “Damn it all,” he spat.

  Gammon pointed to the south. “Look.”

  The hedgerows and larches of the Cathedral Commons were hazy shapes in the yellow fog far below, but all three could see a dozen or more constables and gendarmes spreading out to cover the grounds. One man carried a long, narrow case. He and two others disappeared into the Cathedral’s front porch.

  “They’ve sent a marksman,” Gammon said. “He can take a shot at Nasrahiel from this level.”

  “Not while he has Rowena,” the Alchemist barked.

  “We might still get a clean shot. He’s likely to—” The inspector stopped. She had been about to say “drop her.”

  Anselm shook his head. “It’s a bad angle. The wind will take the shot off course. Bear, do you think—”

  He turned, but the Alchemist was already gone.

  Gammon frowned. “Where the hell is he?”

  Anselm glared up at the gutter works leading to the upper belfry tower. “No,” he whispered, then shouted, “You idiot bastard, get down from there!”

  There was no telling if the Alchemist could hear his shouts, but Anselm knew he would have ignored them in any case. Bears were impossibly stubborn beasts, and they could climb—

  The real ones, anyway.

  Anselm watched the Alchemist’s silhouette move across the gabled belfry roof, watched it pause and make a short leap to grasp the shoulders of a gargoyle leaning over the chancel roof. He had one of the rappelling rigs wrapped across his chest, flecks of mortar falling from the pin just torn from its moorings.

  Gammon glanced between the Alchemist and Anselm. “Is he familiar with free climbing?”

  “Familiar,” Anselm said distantly, “is a relative concept. Get your marksman up here, Haadi. I’ll get him into position.”

  37.

  Reverend Chalmers wasn’t one for high places—or low places, or risks, or pain, or anything that left him feeling cold and afraid. Yet somehow he’d ended up in the middle of all these things as he climbed his white-knuckled way after the aigamuxa chieftain.

  Chalmers reached the last span of buttress connecting the upper reaches to the tower roof and there sank onto his belly, hugging the yard’s width of stone with all his trembling strength. The wind was a deafening keen, running the staff between the tooth-grinding register that set dogs singing and the low, throbbing drones of a bagpipe.

  Nasrahiel had started the climb well ahead of him, but Chalmers had had no captive, no satchel with notes and book to weigh him down, and the benefit of his eyes straight before him. The distance between them could be measured in yards now. The aigamuxa chieftain stood at the far end of the buttress, panting. Blood from the wound in his shoulder stained his side. He seemed at last to resent the weight he had carried all this while.

  Nasrahiel clawed at Rowena’s flailing form. Snarling, he peeled her off like a tick, then hurled her away.

  Rowena struck the roof, rolled, and shot off its edge, her body skimming the buttress’s face.

  Chalmers opened his mouth to scream—

  And Rowena’s hands closed on a gargoyle’s beak. She hooked an elbow around its stony head and struggled to get her feet up where they could dig for purchase.

  Almost before he knew what his body was doing, Phillip Chalmers crawled toward her, worming across the buttress’s span. The wind cut. Chalmers’s hands ached. His eyes watered, tears frosting his lashes. He stopped to scrub the rime away and pulled himself along again.

  And then she was there, just to his left, still holding on with one arm and one hand, her scabby fingers slick with sweat and dark with dried blood. Rowena saw him. Her eyes went wide.

  “Can you reach my hand?” she shouted.

  Phillip Chalmers stared at her. He had understood the words, but his eyes looked past her, down into the steep bluffs of ironwork and stone relief breaking the space between the buttress and the ground.

  And then, he inched past her, eyes on Nasrahiel and the book. Chalmers gritted his teeth against the girl’s shrill screams.

  He was a scientist. There was an experiment underway. Experiments always had test subjects, control subjects, parameters, requirements. Often, the parameters were not gentle. That was why every good experiment had more than one subject at its center.

  Chalmers believed in good experiments. He knew when to resign himself to their costs.

  When his fingers touched the Cathedral’s highest roof, he stood up, hugging his wind-whipped coat.

  Ten steps away, Nasrahiel waited. His eyes flared triumphantly from their perches on his shoulders.

  “I see I could have spared myself bringing two types of bait. I did not know I already had the kind you prefer.”

  At Chalmers’s back, there was a strangled scream and a scrabbling sound. He winced but did not turn.

  “The book is useless to you without an interpreter,” he shouted.

  “And you have been good enough to put one in my reach.”

  Chalmers’s legs had been weak when he took to the roof. He nearly lost them at those words.

  Phillip, you idiot. You’ve given yourself to him.

  The wind staggered Chalmers. He thre
w out an arm to get his balance, then sank to a knee.

  Unless, he considered grimly, there are other options. . . .

  The tower roof was eighty or more feet above the clerestory level. To the right and left, very little of that lower level was visible over the eaves and overhangs. It wouldn’t take much for a falling body to miss the clerestory altogether—to find its way to the cobblestones below.

  The bones in Rowena Downshire’s left hand were frozen, her fingers nerveless. They lost their grip of the ornament’s beak for the second time. When she tightened her right biceps around its head, trying to swing the left arm back up and hug herself to safety, her shoulder jerked weakly in response. The stone bit into her arm. The pins and needles running through it promised it would give way soon.

  The reverend’s voice echoed nearby, tangled up with Nasrahiel’s slithery rasp. All Rowena could see was the lip of the buttress sagging farther away as the strength drained from her fingers. She looked up, hoping to move her grip a little, and her arm slipped. Rowena yelped, dug her hands in, and kicked until her boots pressed the underside of the buttress.

  You are going to die.

  The thought came to her in a calm and practical voice, the sort of voice that would make a list of the day’s chores. The washing needs doing, and someone has to stop by the greengrocer’s, and you are going to die, and things like this happen every day.

  Except they didn’t. Three days ago, Rowena Downshire would not have been surprised to learn she’d die run over by a careless hackney driver, or falling on the charged rail of the lightning lines, or getting stuck up for her coin purse, or nicking a delivery surcharge and taking Ivor’s hawthorn until he made a soup of her brains. Things like that happened every day. People did not fall from the tallest monument in Corma every day. Reason knew she didn’t. Not after being duped and kidnapped and imprisoned and shot at and chased. Not after having her whole world turned arse over teakettle. Not after years of filth and flight and hunger and harassment, without even a bed for her mother that wasn’t a holiday home for rats to show for it.

  It was a bloody awful way to die. It had been a bloody awful way to live.

  Knowing that only made her want to drive her thumb in fate’s eye harder. She looked up again, reached with her half-numb arm. Her fingers were so close to a stone rose. They brushed the petals, but that was all. Rowena wanted to scream in frustration, but that might jostle her somehow, and it was such a long way down.

  She stretched for the rose again. Something shadowed the face of the moon.

  Hands. Arms. The Alchemist hooked her under the shoulders, hauling her up.

  Rowena felt herself dragged to the far end of the buttress, away from the aigamuxa and the reverend and all their bookish troubles. She lay panting, staring up at the bright, full moon. The Alchemist was panting, too, but he perched on his heels, untying the rappelling rig wrapped over his chest. Dimly, Rowena saw the blood dried against his graying temple and the gashes torn in his sleeves where the aigas’ claws had raked him. His shirt was starched bright red. Rowena was too exhausted to sit up. It dawned on her how tired the Alchemist must have been.

  Rowena put a hand on his leg. He looked down at her hand, then her face, and smiled.

  “You’re all right, girl?”

  “I think so.”

  He pulled her into a sitting position, working the harness over her head, fastening it under her shoulders, strapping it across her chest.

  Rowena stared at his hands as they worked, brisk and automatic. It occurred to her this was not the way he had hooked the rig before. Not the way you fastened in a passenger.

  She blinked. “You’re coming, en’t you?”

  “Not yet,” the Alchemist answered, frowning over a buckle. “Time for rule three. Stay with Ann. Do as he says.” He cinched another strap.

  The harness across Rowena’s chest must have been too tight. Her breath wouldn’t come.

  “I en’t leaving you.”

  The Alchemist’s hands paused over the last buckle. He ran his fingers down the strap, shaking his head. “Rowena—”

  “No. I won’t.”

  The Alchemist took her head in his hands. His dark raptor eyes were close by, closer than they’d ever been. They were telling her something she didn’t want to know.

  He kissed her forehead gently. “I’ll catch up.”

  And then he pushed her, and the rest was down, down, down, Rowena looking up as the Alchemist turned back toward the buttress and began crossing.

  He’d set the braking wheel almost perfectly, her heels jouncing lightly against the clerestory roof. She bent her knees on reflex and sank onto her rear. There were hands grabbing the straps, pulling them loose. Rowena looked dully at two strange men stooping over her, each in constabulary blues. Behind them, Inspector Gammon pointed to different areas of the uppermost roof. Anselm flung curses at her. A young marksman stood by the argument with his rifle and bracing fork, waiting.

  Rowena looked back up. She felt much colder than she had only a moment before, clinging to stone in the winter wind.

  Chalmers considered the vertiginous fall, its path broken by the Cathedral’s ancient ornaments.

  Nasrahiel uncoiled himself, giving Chalmers a moment’s advantage. The creature was effectively blind, and though he could still smell and hear his human quarry, Chalmers doubted he had a way of sensing what he intended to do.

  He shuffled closer to the edge.

  The wind banked off the tower. Chalmers’s coat bloomed like a parachute, pulling him back. He staggered before wrestling himself free of its flailing hems.

  As the coat whipped away, Chalmers saw his right foot was only a half step from the roof’s edge.

  He swallowed a bitter knot.

  “You need the book and an interpreter,” he shouted. “You’re farther from having both than you know.”

  The aigamuxa tilted its head. Its clawed hands clamped the straining hems of the Alchemist’s bag.

  “This is a very inopportune time for you to develop principles, Doctor,” Nasrahiel growled.

  Chalmers laughed. He could almost see himself pitching over hysteria’s edge. Then he felt a stockinged heel brush the roof’s lip and froze. “I’ve always been a slow learner. I thrive on example. I’m surprised it took me this long to think of Nora again.”

  Nasrahiel edged closer, grasping.

  “You wanted me to think you killed her. To keep me cowed,” Chalmers continued. “But you wouldn’t have risked losing her. She killed herself, didn’t she?”

  “You are making a terrible mistake, Doctor.”

  “I think,” Chalmers shouted, “I am finally doing the correct thing.”

  And he lifted his foot.

  “I’m going back up there,” Rowena snapped. She broke free of Anselm’s maimed hand with a twist. The left arm stayed tucked against his chest, limp. Useless.

  “There’s nothing you can do to help,” he insisted. There was an edge of something in his voice—pleading? He’s not the kind who pleads with anybody.

  Rowena looked frantically around. Gammon’s constables had taken their positions, sighting with monoculars and shouting things back to the city inspector. The marksman had bunkered in for his shot, Gammon hovering close. They wouldn’t even see to stop Rowena if she made a break for the belfry again, and there was no way Anselm could make the climb up after her.

  But she couldn’t afford to go unprepared.

  Rowena darted for one of Anselm’s holsters, hoping to snatch a pistol and make a run for it. He saw it coming in time to swat her hand away and hook her legs from under her with a swipe of his heel.

  The roof’s copper ridges bit into Rowena’s back. Her eyes welled with tears. She scrambled back to her knees, ready to pelt Anselm with curses—but he wasn’t glaring at her anymore.

  He squinted against the moonlight, eyeing the shadows moving on the high tower.

  “Ahead of the target? Why?” he murmured.

  Rowena
stared at him. “Who are you talking—”

  Anselm waved at her, shushing. His lip twisted. “I don’t like it—and you may not have time. How many rounds do you have left?”

  Rowena followed Anselm’s gaze, and all at once, she understood.

  Whatever answer the Alchemist sent, it earned a curse in response. Anselm turned on his heel, cradling his arm, and jogged back toward Gammon. Rowena looked back and forth, torn between the belfry tower and Anselm. She spied a third form crouched high above at the buttress’s edge, hidden from the two on the roof.

  “Stay with Ann,” he’d said. “Do as he says.”

  “You’d better know what you’re about, Old Bear,” she murmured and ran after Anselm.

  Gammon peered through her monocular, studying the scene above. “Five degrees left,” she called.

  The marksman shifted his rifle and sighted through its crosshairs. He curled a finger around the trigger, then uncurled.

  “The EC collar’s in the way.”

  “Scope it out a moment. Steady on.”

  Rowena arrived four strides behind Anselm, just in time to hear him bark, “No!”

  He stopped close enough to Gammon the city inspector edged away, peeling like paint from his heat.

  “Even if Chalmers moves,” Anselm insisted, “the wind will take that shot clear past the target. The aiga will move forward. Shoot ahead of its position. Cut the angle to the right.”

  The marksman blinked at Gammon. “Ma’am, who is this bastard?”

  “Anselm,” Gammon said, reaching to turn his shoulder. “I think we have this.”

  “If you touch me with that hand, I’ll break it,” Meteron snapped. “Tell your man to take the shot my way, or it’s wasted.”

  Gammon hesitated.

  “There’s a reason we learned enough to get here in the first place, Haadi. Trust me. Cut about ten degrees right, ahead of the target.”