At the center of a blasted circle of cargo lies a copy of the woman standing at Rowena’s side, stretched out with her head in the Alchemist’s lap.
It is worse than the ruin of a body beyond the cellar door, because this is not a metaphor.
This happened.
Leyah’s right arm is a jagged length of bone and meat ending at the elbow. Her remaining hand twists in the gash of her belly, holding in a handful of the viscera that swells out with every rattling breath. Her eyes are fixed, her face pale. The rapid gasps parting her paper-white lips are the last signs of life. The Alchemist holds her head. He stares into her eyes. Rowena can feel him reaching into her, struggling to find something he can keep alive until help arrives.
But there could never be enough help for damage such as this.
“This is the place Rare was talking about,” Rowena says.
Leyah nods. “Perhaps I could have come back from those wounds,” she says, though her voice is doubtful. “Perhaps. But I couldn’t face the pain.”
The wounded Leyah’s back arches. Her legs quake. The dying breaths come harder, deeper, rending her throat.
Rowena knows something of death. She has a dead father, and sister, and brother. She saw two of them breathe their last and thought she was done with illusions of death being pretty or easy. But she had always imagined living must be better than the alternative—that light is better than darkness.
The dying Leyah makes a heaving sound. Her body stills a moment before trembling in agony once more.
Rowena realizes the illusion she had left. Sometimes, the darkness is better. She had assumed that losing Leyah was the source of the Alchemist’s pain. The truth was he hadn’t given her up soon enough. And he knew it.
“What do I do?” Rowena asks.
The room shudders. The pressure in Rowena’s ears becomes a tearing. The cargo hold’s walls peel away, metal shrieking and curling. A howling wind sings through the gashes in the hull.
Leyah grabs a support strut. “If I knew, we wouldn’t still be here!”
Rowena sacks her memory for something useful. The human mind is supposed to be a delicate, complex thing. But if there is a gesture that suits the Alchemist’s metaphor, some key to his locks she’s supposed to have, she can’t waste time imagining it.
Rowena darts between the Alchemist and his dying wife. She shoves the woman out of his lap. When her hands come away from Leyah’s clammy flesh, her palms burn with cold fire.
“You can’t help her,” she shouts.
The Alchemist wears a younger face, beardless and livid, distorted by grief. He glares through her. Rowena grabs his shoulders to shake him. He throws up an arm, buffets the girl aside, and reaches for Leyah again.
Rowena rebounds to her knees and throws a punch—a hard left, clean across the Alchemist’s jaw. Her fist erupts with pain, an electric sting that turns instantly to pins and needles. For a moment, the Alchemist stares at the floor, hands propping himself up. Rowena pounces, shakes him and slaps him. Her heart feels full and burning, the secondhand memory too much to bear holding, too powerful to let go. She could not pry her hands from him if she wished it.
“Forget it!” Rowena cries. “It’s done, it’s over. Save yourself!”
She can’t tell if he recognizes her—can’t tell if she savages the Alchemist she knows or a ghost of his past or some knitting of the two. His dazed, dark eyes are lost in the middle distance. Over building wind and tearing metal, she barely hears his response.
“What for?”
“Because I need you now!”
The cargo hold opens like a flower, petals of scrap spinning away in the wind. The Alchemist’s eyes widen at his first true sight of Rowena, the moment of recognition.
And everything goes suddenly, fiercely white.
39.
Dawn was a pink haze when Rowena Downshire finally stirred in the tangled bedsheets. She lay still a long time, not entirely certain where she was. Her body felt strangely distant, and so she tested it, lifting a hand before her eyes and bending the fingers, stretching one leg and then another under the coverlet. There was a long, white space in her mind where she knew something else should have been. She rubbed her arms, massaging life back into them. Her hands throbbed with a half-familiar ache. A cold rush of air, blistering pain shooting up her arms, someone’s eyes . . . The scene, all scattered sensations, played in her memory. But its narrative was all gone.
When she breathed deeply and smelled chamomile and roses in the pillowcase, Rowena knew the bed, and the curtains around it, and the lace-collared nightgown she wore. She sat up, knuckling her eyes. A muzzle the color of rust and iron nuzzled her elbow.
“Hullo, Rabbit.”
The dog wormed his way under her arm, whining and thumping his tail. Rowena ruffled his ragged velvet ears. Rabbit licked her face, his sweeping tail throwing open the curtains around the bed. Rowena spied a breakfast cart where several domed plates waited. Her stomach made noises very much like the dog.
Rowena was pushing her way past Rabbit’s fervent kisses toward the edge of the bed and the promise of food when the door of Anselm Meteron’s guest room opened.
Whoever it is can wait, her stomach commanded. She wheeled the trolley closer. A little cry of joy and dismay came from behind her. She knew without looking who must be there.
The Reverend Doctor Chalmers insisted on taking Rowena’s pulse and peering into the pupils of her eyes, a ritual of medical attention that rather got in the way of tearing into two fried eggs, sausages, and a stack of griddle cakes. Rowena managed a good start in spite of him. Rabbit bounded off the bed, announcing himself loudly to anyone passing in the hall.
The young reverend sat back in the chair he’d dragged to the bedside. Slowly, he shook his head, ran his hands through his thinning hair with a look of wonder, and slipped a brass stethoscope into his ears.
“Like you’ve come up from a nap,” he murmured. “Astounding.”
Rowena let him fuss as long as he was of a mind. The food was good—not quite hot, but she didn’t care. She had appetite enough for another cartload, and she meant to satisfy it.
“You seem very well,” Chalmers pronounced at last. “Now what do you remember?”
Rowena chewed a forkful of eggs and considered. “We were on the roof of the Old Cathedral,” she decided.
“And?”
“Is Master Meteron all right?”
Phillip Chalmers blinked. He tapped the stethoscope’s end idly and flinched, reminded by the boom that it was still tucked into his ears. “Ah—ow! Well, yes. Dislocated left shoulder, some rather colorful bruises, but he’s on the whole quite well. Give him two or three weeks in a sling and he’ll be none the worse for wear. But don’t you—”
“How did you know I’d be awake in time for breakfast?”
Again, the reverend doctor’s face sorted through a look of utter perplexity, his features bending around a question of his own before finally bypassing it.
“Didn’t. You’ve been out three days. We’ve had breakfast brought up each morning, and dinner, and supper, so it would be ready when you awoke. Nothing’s gone to waste. Master Meteron’s footman seems quite happy to claim the excess.”
Rowena plowed through the last of the griddle cakes and poured as much tea as her cup would hold. Chalmers resumed his account, ticking items off on his fingers.
“God, what you’ve missed! Regenzi was found dead in the Old Cathedral. His manor has been cordoned off by the constabulary, but since City Inspector Gammon’s resigned her post and gone missing, the investigation’s in shambles. They found—the other constables found, I mean—Gammon’s badge of office on her desk and a note in which she confessed her role in Smallduke Regenzi’s conspiracy. Concealing Nora’s actual disappearance by way of the murder at the ball, my kidnapping, so on. They sent a barrister and constable down to the prison hulks after the courtesan charged with Pierce’s murder, but it seems the warden had already issued her a pardon
. Nobody could say where the order first came from, and no one’s been able to find her since. Master Meteron says that’s just as well, since the new city inspector is a pet of the bishop of Corma. He doesn’t think the EC will permit more details of Regenzi and Gammon’s alliance to see the light of day. Probably there are scribes in the Court and Bar scrubbing the records even now.” Chalmers pursed his lips, as if he might have forgotten something. “Let’s see . . . Ah. Yes, of course. The constabulary searched the whole of the Cathedral campus and never found Nasrahiel’s body. There was a nasty smashed row of hedges about where he ought to have come down and a blood trail coming off it. No sign of him or what’s left of his particular tribe. The gendarmes have feelers out for him, much good may it do.”
Chalmers began clearing Rowena’s plates with all the fussiness of a governess. “We—I, rather—lost the Vautnek text. Fell from the roof. No sign of it, now, either.” He wrinkled his nose in distaste as Rowena reached out at a departing plate, using a finger to swipe up the last of the sausage grease. “I can send for another round, if you—”
“Yes.” Rowena looked up fervently. “That’d be jake.”
The reverend found the Regency’s concierge bellpull and speaking tube stationed nearby. Rowena looked around the room and scrubbed her eyes again, taking in details carefully. Now that the piercing hunger was more of a blunt ache, she realized the room looked off, its colors alternately livid and washed out. She felt curiously raw, as if she’d just risen from a hot bath, scrubbed hard and roughed down with a towel—exhausted and aware and somehow apart from herself. The window curtains were half-drawn, diffusing morning light that seemed to be growing steadily whiter.
She blinked at Corma’s skyline.
“It’s snowed.”
Chalmers glanced at her. “Oh. Yes. It began yesterday evening—nearly five inches and still coming down. Hardly a surprise, after the dry summer and precipitous drop in autumn temperatures. Nature has a way of compensating.” He paused and looked down at his shoes with painful self-consciousness. “Miss Downshire?”
“Hm?”
“You, ah . . .” He looked up, fingering the buttons of his waistcoat. His nervous hands wandered home to their pockets. “You haven’t asked after the Alchemist.”
Rowena put down her teacup and regarded Chalmers with perfect earnestness.
“I know what happened,” she said. “He’s already told me.”
After his third attempt at the morning gazette, the Alchemist gave the early edition up for lost, spiking it into the waste bin at his bedside. The gesture earned a sharp, scolding pain from his bandaged ribs.
“It’s useless,” he said. “You’re certain you didn’t find them after the fall?”
Anselm Meteron stared icily over his wineglass’s rim. “In the desperate search for whatever resources or persons might be secured to save your irascible, ungrateful life, no. I’m afraid looking for your bloody spectacles quite escaped me.”
“You’d scarce believe the headache I get reading without them.”
“That might also be owed to the skull fracture you’re ignoring.”
The Alchemist glared. “I suppose drinking before breakfast is doctor’s orders?”
“I don’t have the benefit of a rather generous dose of morphine. So I’m making do, thank you.” Anselm shifted in his chair to prop his slung elbow against its arm and grimaced. “Although, since you insist on using only half your prescription, I’ll happily take up the excess.”
“I’ve no love of being doped into a stupor.”
“And I’ve no love of your being a cantankerous arse. Why should we both suffer?”
The Alchemist rested his head against the wedge of pillows propping him at forty-five degrees. He closed his eyes. The throbbing pain in his skull eased, making way for his ribs and leg to call in accounts. Chalmers’s skill in medicine was markedly less than his skills in the hard sciences, but he’d managed a competent splint for the leg and a solid line of bracers and bandages to keep the worst flexion from the Alchemist’s rib cage. The medical corset made taking more than a half breath devilish hard, but there was no arguing with three broken ribs.
“I know you’re worried about the leg,” Anselm said. “I still keep in touch with Jane Ardai, if you’re looking for . . . options.”
“Little Jane from McManus’s company?” The Alchemist snorted. “She’s practically a child.”
“Twenty years ago, perhaps. She does amazing work. These days, folks who get roughed up in the trade call her ‘Resurrection Jane.’”
“I think I’ll decline the assistance of anyone for whom resurrection is a requisite feature of medical practice.”
Anselm shrugged his good shoulder. “Given the prognosis, you might consider what she does in brass.”
“Let that be my affair,” the Alchemist snapped. He considered Anselm’s flat, patient look and sighed. “God, I really am a bear.”
“A little more than usual.”
“You’re certain she isn’t awake yet?”
“Chalmers would have told us.”
Anselm drained his glass, glanced back at the guest room’s nearly closed door, and dragged his chair closer to the bedside. He poured a second glass, an operation of several added steps done single-armed, and offered it to the Alchemist.
“I am an authority on wine before breakfast.” He winked. “It’s a white. That’s allowed.”
The Alchemist took the glass with a resigned smile. A moment later, Anselm refilled his glass and they clinked.
“Well, Old Bear, it seems you’re going to live to fight another day, given your pet urchin’s tender resuscitations.”
“So it does.” The Alchemist drank. The wine was still cool from the decanter, faintly sweet.
Anselm’s expression darkened. “What exactly happened up there?”
“Exactly?” The Alchemist squinted at the ceiling. There was an ache in his head quite apart from the blow it had taken, a feeling that something had left him, and something else had taken its place. “I can’t remember all. But she came for me. She held on.”
“How?”
“No idea.”
“Is it possible both of you—” Anselm paused, reaching for the right expression, “—are on the list, so to speak? Your mind tricks are the sort of extraordinary thing I would want to observe, if I were the Deity.”
“They aren’t,” Phillip Chalmers interjected.
The Alchemist and Anselm looked to the door. The young doctor entered hastily, checking the hall for eavesdroppers that weren’t there. Whining and wagging, Rabbit trotted through the closing door. He turned three circles in the space between Anselm and the Alchemist, thumping down on the rogue’s feet.
Chalmers cleared his throat.
“Rather, he—or you—as it were, aren’t ‘on the list,’” he clarified. “Nothing in the Vautnek text ever pointed to you as one of the Nine.” Chalmers glanced between the two men uncertainly. He knit his fingers behind his back like a schoolboy standing his headmasters’ inspection. “The only subject in Corma is Rowena. I’m quite clear on that point. Whatever . . . thing . . . happened between you doesn’t appear necessarily linked to her being of the Nine.”
The young doctor realized what his patients had in their hands, eyebrows climbing.
“Good Lord, are you both drinking?”
“I blame Ann,” the Alchemist said. “Bad influence.”
Anselm smiled coaxingly. “Join us, Doctor—or do you prefer a red? I have that, as well.”
“You are . . . the . . . the most . . . appalling patient I’ve ever had!”
“You’re a physicist. It’s a rather pale achievement to be both your most appalling patient and your second, all told.”
Chalmers presented the Alchemist with his best scowl—really something more like a pout—and bustled up to check the old man’s pulse. “You should know better.”
“It appears I’ve outlived knowing better, Doctor.”
Th
e younger man met the Alchemist’s eyes. He looked stricken. “It’s shameful, really. I still haven’t thanked you for—”
“Don’t.” The Alchemist passed his drink to the side table and lowered himself against his cushions with a hiss. Chalmers reached to help. He swatted the proffered hand aside. “Instead,” he gasped, “tell us what you found out from the EC.”
“In lieu of the keynote address, I’ve been asked to produce a long form of my conference paper.” Chalmers noted the pointed look the other men exchanged. “It’s not ready yet, quite. It will be something . . . expurgated.” The reverend smiled manfully. “I doubt they’ll think very much of my research again after they read it. That should help curb interest in the project.”
The Alchemist studied Chalmers’s tissue façade. He considered what to say to the scholar, but nothing properly conciliatory came to mind—nothing to suit the magnitude of his loss. In just a week, Phillip Chalmers had gone from his career’s apex to its armpit, forced by hazard and conscience to substitute the work that would have earned him a place in history for some bowdlerized sham. The scandal of the Decadal Conference’s spotlight stolen by a trumped-up piece of buggery would put an end to any meaningful appointments, projects, and funding for years to come—perhaps for the rest of his life. It was a kind of death for the young reverend, a suicide protecting what he’d put at risk. Perhaps the sacrifice was just. It would be no less painful for that.
“I told them I’ll be taking sabbatical,” Chalmers added suddenly. “Given everything that’s happened, they could hardly deny me.” The reverend searched about the room and, finding no second chair, perched himself on the window seat an awkward distance from his interlocutors. “I looked into who left Corma the night of Fourth-day, too, and early Fifth-day, as you suggested, Master Meteron. There were around six thousand members of the EC attending the Decadal. A little fewer than a hundred left during that time frame, most of them queerly early and without prior notice. Probably when Deacon Fredericks fled he spread word of trouble among his confederates and they scattered. In any event, it’s too large a group to easily gather all the names, but I was able to track about two dozen down.”
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