The Nine

by Tracy Townsend

  Reluctantly, the city inspector turned to the marksman. “Can you set it up?”

  “I can’t spot that angle from here, ma’am.”

  “Then get as close as you can,” Anselm said. He stared up at the three forms nearly eclipsed by the glare of moonlight. “He can deal with close.”

  The Alchemist crouched at the buttress’s edge, unseen by the aigamuxa and man only yards away. The wind scattered their words, but he could read the situation clear enough. At best, he had ten seconds. Experience told him things were unlikely to be at their best.

  Chalmers stood nearer and to the right, about four o’ the clock. Nasrahiel was at the one. The Alchemist hoped Anselm had accurately read the image of the scene he’d sent. He hoped, too, that his partner hadn’t sensed he’d been lying about having three rounds left.

  One. The Alchemist had one, and he knew exactly how to make the most of it—a plan much surer than his marksmanship had ever been.

  He shifted his weight, keeping his knees bent and shoulders low. He was a big man, solid and perhaps even a little stronger than he looked. It had been years since his body had known so much use, yet it seemed to have remembered all the steps so far. It might have one last dance in it.

  The aigamuxa lurched forward, moving toward the young reverend. Chalmers’s hesitant foot passed the roof’s edge.

  The Alchemist raised his pistol and shot wide of Nasrahiel, letting the bullet sing off into the dark. He had never been even close to Anselm’s equal with a gun. Fortunately, his plan didn’t require accuracy.

  It only required his enemy’s attention.

  The aigamuxa spun, aiming himself at the Alchemist. Snarling, Nasrahiel surged forward, ready to devour the bait.

  The distraction had moved him ten degrees off his previous position, three paces forward.

  The Alchemist heard the shot an eyeblink after it took Nasrahiel in the chest, just below the right shoulder. The aigamuxa howled and staggered back.

  That was the moment’s delay he’d needed.

  As Nasrahiel whirled, reaching blindly for the reverend doctor at the edge of the roof, the Alchemist barreled into his back. He wrapped up the beast’s bloodied flanks, pinning his arms.

  At first, he felt only the whuff of the air rushing from his lungs as their bodies collided. Then came his sides and back smashing against the roof as they tumbled together, a tangle of mass and acceleration—

  And then there was nothing—open air, the clutch of gravity, a whirling of shadow and stone, moonlight and limbs.

  A sharp, cracking pain turned the world white.

  Phillip Chalmers watched man and aigamuxa sail off the roof, forgetting how close he was to a similar end. Then he saw the satchel with the book and notes racing down the roof’s planed edge, and he, too, leaped.

  He landed on his belly with a whanging sound, his teeth snapping shut. The bag itself was just beyond reach. He snared the strap as it slid past his fingers. The sudden, braking inertia slingshot the satchel around in a graceful arc.

  For a moment, Chalmers’s heart danced at the sight of the Vautnek text and his notes spinning back toward him—but the book’s mass carried it away, caroming after the falling figures. It disappeared into the dark, cover flapping like a wounded bird before pitching toward the ground. Momentum and the night wind played havoc with Chalmers’s papers. He gaped as their remnants fell around him, mere snowflakes from the avalanche of evidence he’d compiled.

  Below, he heard a leaden thud. There was a girl’s scream, a woman shouting orders, then men’s voices clamoring over one another. Suddenly, Chalmers remembered what had just happened.

  He swept the last of his notes up, gathering them in a ragged bundle. Then he slid to the roof’s edge and peered down.

  Some eighty feet below, the Alchemist’s body was the eye in a storm of movement.

  38.

  The fall from the upper towers began with man and aigamuxa locked in a grapple. And then they clipped the Cathedral’s ornamented flanks, chests and shoulders and the back of the Alchemist’s head dashing against downspouts and gargoyles and crenellation. He went limp. The bodies separated, his barreling down to the clerestory roof. The aigamuxa deflected against a rampart, its spidery form curling and flailing, plummeting past the sheer edge of the Old Cathedral’s eastern wall into the hedgerows far below.

  When the Alchemist met the clerestory roof, there was a boom like thunder, and a snap Anselm felt in his phantom finger. He grabbed his screaming left shoulder and ran, dropping to his knees and skidding the last few feet to the Alchemist’s side.

  A pool of blood spread at the nape of the Alchemist’s neck, and his right leg bent at a sick angle below the knee. His chest rose and fell, the movement shallow. Anselm opened his mouth to shout for a physick, but a cloud of noisome vapors choked him back onto his heels. Dizzied by pain and rising panic, for a moment he couldn’t think where it came from—

  The coat.

  Anselm reached for his knife, only to find a small hand snatching it from him. He knuckled his vision clear.

  Rowena slit the buttons from the Alchemist’s coat and threw it open. She tugged at its sleeves, trying to pull the stew of glass and chemicals away until a shrill cry froze her.

  “Don’t move him!”

  Phillip Chalmers slid from the lower belfry tower’s roof, skidding down its buttress arm. He landed in a heap and was running almost before he had his feet again. His coat bulged with half a stationer’s shop of bedraggled notepaper.

  “Don’t move him,” he panted, kneeling between Anselm and Rowena. “His neck could be broken, or his back . . . Might have a punctured lung . . . Where’s that surgeon’s kit?”

  The reverend doctor froze, looking at Anselm in despair. Anselm shook his head.

  “Get the girl away,” Chalmers said. “There’s no sense in her watching him d—” He stopped short. “I say, what on earth is wrong with her?”

  The knife had fallen from Rowena’s fingers. She knelt beside the Alchemist, a hand on his breastbone. Her eyes were lost in the space before her, as if studying a landscape unseen.

  Chalmers grasped her shoulder, shook hard. The girl swayed.

  Anselm had seen that look before. He doubted she knew they were there at all.

  The library glows with wildfire, the air itself burning. All around, Rowena sees checkered tiles rise from the floor, drifting into an open sky far above. One by one, they disintegrate, and the air is choked with their ashes. Books fly off the long rows of shelves, the covers black, flapping wings, the spines splitting as they sail into the impossible distance, growing ever smaller.

  Rowena spins round, staring. At the center of the library, the ground is a whirlpool, shelves swirling as if pulled down a drain.

  There is a long staircase rising toward a gallery above, its halls lined with doors. She hears them slamming, hears panes of glass shattering.

  “Minds are abstract things, girl,” the Alchemist had said. “You can’t walk into an abstraction, and so you enter the metaphor of it.”

  Rowena runs to the staircase, hurtles up its steps. For a moment, there is only her running and the sound of exploding glass. Then the whole structure ripples. She digs her heels in and sprints for the summit. The steps crumble under her feet. Rowena stumbles, snatches the balustrade, and leaps past the final gap, whole flights of the staircase plummeting into the yawning blackness below.

  This, she realizes, must be what it was like going into Rare’s mind. Everything falling apart, the mainspring unwinding.

  Except the Alchemist en’t dead yet. There’s something left to save.

  Rowena casts the doubt nipping at that thought into the darkness with the rest of the debris. Her whole life has been a foxhunt for uncatchable things—being free of the hawthorn, free of the debt, free with her mother, free to be unafraid. Life carved hope away, whittled her down, and no one noticed or cared or tried to change even the smallest thing.

  But he had noticed her.
He had cared, though it would have been easier not to. He had done small things and impossible things, too—reached into minds and found the truth and spoken with the dead and acted with courage and risen from the dead and saved the girl another man had simply crawled past. It was all impossible. And yet it had happened, because he had willed it so.

  It was a lack of will that made things impossible.

  Rowena Downshire has nothing but will.

  The gallery is a maze of passages and doors. The knobs burn white-hot, running like wax, sealing the ways in.

  She races down the corridors. Every passing moment, she knows less of where she is going or where she has been. The corridors curve and double back—rise into the air, or plunge like warehouse chutes, throwing her down in a heap. Every time, she leaps up and runs again, searching for the Alchemist.

  One by one, the rooms seal themselves off, disintegrating. Burning. Some are fading away, turning into vague sketches, colorless and incomplete, then unwinding into threads of charcoal and ink, joining the gathering smog.

  Rowena finds a cellar door, metal banded and unlatched. She avoids its white-hot ring and kicks at it, splintering the wood down the center. Inside, puddles of melted flesh and charring bone slide into one another like oil flowing in a skillet. Half a hand reaches from some ruined memory. A floating eyeball blinks within the crawling soup.

  The girl staggers down the passage, gagging. She passes a door split open, growing vines and sprouting green shoots. It rends away its carpentry, the nails screaming free in iron curls.

  The hallway turns a sharp right. It ends three paces later.

  Rowena fights for breath, shoulders heaving. When she lifts her head for a gulp of air, she sees a woman at the dead end. She wears trousers patched with heavy pockets. Her tunic sleeves are pinned up with little leather garters, sets of hex wrenches tinkling from their buckles. A pair of welding goggles rings her neck, as lovely against her freckled collarbone as any jewelry. Her copper hair is cropped boyishly short, her keen gray eyes familiar.

  Rowena stares at her. The moment seems to stretch on as she places the face and recognizes the eyes, the tapering chin, the crooked turn of her mouth.

  There are things that make sense now, questions she didn’t know to ask suddenly answered.

  “I know why you’re here,” the woman says.

  Her voice is sympathetic. It is not hopeful.

  “So help me get him back,” Rowena answers.

  Leyah shakes her head. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Then show me where to find him and I’ll do it myself.”

  Leyah considers the girl. Her eyes are like scales taking Rowena’s measure, but she seems to put her thumb on the balances before making her choice.

  “Follow me.”

  The alchemical lamps leak gases that mingle and spark like aurorae in the air as they hurry past, turning back up the corridor and around a bend that was not there before, cutting deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the Alchemist’s mind. The passages coil tighter, all roads dwindling down into a horizon of sepia and tearing wind.

  “If she finds us, you have to leave,” Leyah shouts over the gale.

  “If who finds us?”

  The passage ends at a rough, clapboard door. Leyah paws around, as if searching for some hidden catch. “No,” she cries, “this isn’t supposed to be here! She changed the path, somehow.”

  “Who?”

  The wind has shifted. It’s heavy now, carrying the animal stench of butchering and some kind of woody perfume.

  “I, of course.”

  Rowena freezes. She turns and faces Rare.

  The white sheet from the morgue winds about her like a robe on a marble statue. The ragged wounds in her side wink through its cloth. One side of her face is still a ruin of bone and blood, and yet somehow, she’s beautiful, the bow of her lips drawing a deadly smile.

  Rare raises a hand, and the door at Rowena’s back blasts open. She looks behind her. There is a green field, and a tree, and two figures on the hill beneath it, tangled up with one another.

  And then, Rowena knows she has been here before.

  “We have to find him, Rare,” Leyah insists. If she is afraid of her daughter’s revenant, she’s wise enough not to let it show.

  Rare’s broken face twists in anguish. “You can’t go back there. I won’t let you.”

  “Darling, please—”

  Somehow, the space all around them has bled into the grassy plain—or the hill has flowed down into the corridor. Rowena sees a pale, yellow light all around, feels the sun bloom against her skin.

  “Stay here, Mother,” Rare says. Her voice is honey, but under its sweetness, there is something else. A glittering edge. A wild, desperate fear. “This is a good place. You can’t go back there again.”

  Rowena wonders where “there” is, but now it hardly matters. Only time matters. Time the Alchemist doesn’t have.

  “She has to go with me,” Rowena snaps. “I need her to find him!”

  And then, Rare turns. The pit of her ruined eye burns through the girl. “This is all your fault.”

  Fear turns Rowena’s legs into stone. She tries to bend them, to move them, but can only stare into Rare’s broken face.

  “All I did was carry your letter,” she whispers.

  Rowena’s feet come loose all at once, and she staggers back, looking wildly around the pale green valley. The ground has softened, turning into mire and moor. It sucks at her boots, pulls at her ankles, reaches for her knees—

  Rare turns back to Leyah, as if Rowena has already been swallowed by the muck.

  “Stay with me,” she says, smiling. “With him. Here. We can fix it now. We’ll have all the time in the world to make things right again.”

  Leyah ignores her daughter, scanning the horizons, looking for some way out. Rowena follows her gaze up the hill. The forms tangled there—two lovers, uncoiling from an embrace—are changing, the smaller twisting and shrinking, crawling atop its partner with long, dark claws raised.

  Rowena looks back at Rare. Her pale skin shimmers in the air, steaming like a heat mirage. Her fingernails grow into shears, skimming against each other as she clenches her fists.

  “I can keep you here. If I must.”

  Rowena reaches for her boots, starts tugging at her feet, trying to dislodge herself. The mire shudders her down further, brimming over her leather cuffs. Panic rings in her ears. She claws and tugs—digs against the slick mud.

  Her fingers scrape the hilt of her boot knife. She looks up at the dark hill and its wild, rending creature. If she can make Rare let her go, make her come close enough—

  “It won’t work if I’m here,” Rowena shouts.

  Rare’s eyes snap round, stinging like a lash.

  “If you’re all dead and together that’s just jake. But then I’ll be dead here, too.” Rowena hauls against her boots again. The mud covers her fingers and the blade. Rare doesn’t see her draw it free, buried in a muddy fist. “Anybody can see I’m his favorite.” Rowena smirks. “That’ll be a piss in your tea, eh? So much for the family reunion.”

  Rare stalks toward Rowena, claws scissoring. “Then get out.”

  “I would,” Rowena says, “except you’ve got me in a real jam here.”

  The wind cuts across the plain again, spraying mud in Rowena’s eyes . . . and then her feet are on hard ground. The mud is gone, even from her boots—and from her hands. The knife’s edge glints in the sunlight.

  Rare looms over her. She sees the blade. “Well. You’re a clever little bird, aren’t you?”

  “Shit,” Rowena whispers.

  The claws swoop down, and she scrambles back, tripping on her own feet. Rare pounces. Rowena swipes with her blade, scraping clear the space between them. She stumbles, and the claws rake her, shoulder to hip.

  This is a dream, Rowena tells herself, scooting on her haunches. Her blouse falls in ribbons all around her. This is a dream.

  It still h
urts.

  Rowena searches for a place to run.

  The tree on the hill is still there, the small, feral creature feasting from a ragged hole in the man’s chest. The wind blows its hair like a golden banner.

  You’re a damned eejit, Rowena Downshire, she thinks.

  She runs for the hill, anyway. If the child-thing is Rare, too, she knows it will still be hungry. It will always be hungry.

  The revenant of Rare plunges after Rowena, claws scrabbling into the hillside.

  At the crest of the hill, Rowena stops, skidding in the grass. The dead man’s rib cage is a jagged nest of bone and guts. It must have been the Alchemist—but beneath that ruin, it might have been anybody. The child-Rare squats over her kill, her bare, flat chest smeared with blood.

  The monster turns toward Rowena. Its eyes burn with hunger, and it lunges.

  Rowena ducks, dropping to her knees with her hands over her head.

  Rare’s revenant reaches the crest in time to take the child-Rare’s pounce full in the face.

  The monstrous shades of the woman roll downhill, two broken pieces of what she’d been spraying blood and bone in their wake. The skies roll thunder. The lightning shivers with their screams.

  Leyah waves wildly from the foot of the hill. Rowena stands to join her, but the ground rolls like seawater, pouring her down.

  Somewhere amid her tumble down the hill, the plunging earth becomes steel, and the grass sloughs away. Rowena slams into something flat and tall and hard. She staggers to her feet and feels Leyah’s hands steadying her.

  The grassy plains are gone. They stand in another hallway, its lines charcoal dusted, faint, a badly rubbed image. Rowena stares at what stopped her fall: a bulkhead door with a great wheel at its center. Wordless, the women spin it open. A sucking sound crowds Rowena’s ears.

  The room is dim. It smells of blood and cinders and glycerin. All around the cargo hold, boxes and valises, ship’s chests and satchels, are thrown aside or torn asunder. Bits of cloth and paper drift through the air.