10.

29^TH SEVENMONTH, 277 A.U.

BRIAR HILL CEMETERY, CORMA

It was dusk and still murderously hot when Anselm Meteron pulled on the last of the black, tarry cigarillos he’d purchased abroad, hoping something evil in his lungs would steady the blood in his veins. Thus far, it seemed determined not to.

Perhaps, he considered, planting his arse on a tomb slab for the last quarter-hour had been none too good a plan, either, where tending a black mood was concerned.

“Fucking woman,” he sighed through a cloud of smoke, grinding the cigarillo butt into Briar Hill Cemetery’s gravelly earth. Its monuments were only a few decades in service, with barely any moss or rust stains to give them the character he’d come to expect of cemeteries during his childhood in Rimmerston. But Rimmerston was an older town than Corma, part of the first, abortive wave of Amidonian settlement that stalled for two generations when pre-Unity medicine struggled to treat the maladies of the southeast’s swampy climate. The EC had eventually returned to Rimmerston, dignifying it as they’d done the west once they’d conquered the continent’s western shores. Still, that plantation town had its roots sunk past the foundations of the Unity. Some of its monuments still boasted angels, though properly contrite families had slipped sets of balances or calipers or astrolabes into the figures’ delicate hands, hoping to discourage public murmurs of a Kneeler past. Anselm found most cemeteries rather scenic, even the ones with doctored histories. But Corma’s Briar Hill was little more than a seismic upheaval of granite and iron.

More than cemeteries, Anselm loved theatrics—provided, of course, they were his own. A meeting at sundown in Corma’s oldest bone-yard appealed to a certain morbid, dramatic instinct lodged between the thorns of his innermost self, but waiting there because it had been Haadiyaa Gammon’s plan was an offense to his considerable dignity. Impractical, foolish, and clichéd. Even as he critiqued her idea, he stifled a jealous pang that, really, he should have thought of it first.

“You were hoping to outdo me,” the former City Inspector’s voice called out, as if privy to his thoughts.

Anselm turned a razored look over his shoulder, watching Gammon’s approach. The almost-evaporated spice of the Indines rested on her polyglot tongue, some residue of whichever parent had come to Amidon and mingled with the Unity. She stood on a rise a few yards off, a bundle tucked against her hip, summer storm clouds gathering over the iron arch marking the cemetery grounds behind her.

Anselm snorted. “Since when did you develop a penchant for melodrama?”

“Conspiracy, perjury, betrayal, disappearance.” Gammon closed the distance down the hill in a few long strides. “They occasion some aesthetic adjustments. I’ve been studying up.”

Anselm considered Gammon’s bundle. Something bulky in a canvas shoulder bag. It looked about the right size. The lingering heat in his blood iced over. He stared at his feet, wishing he hadn’t run through his cigarillos.

“I meant to bring her to you sooner. Things have gotten out of hand.”

Gammon placed the bag on the insteps of his shoes. God’s balls. It weighed far, far too little.

“I used a private facility instead of the Constabulary’s crematory. It seemed more appropriate.”

The sack’s drawstring opening had fallen slack, revealing a wooden box corner. Knotty pine. A dovetail joint. She always fancied quality goods, Anselm thought bitterly.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Pity’s sake, Anselm—”

“I pay my debts, Haadi,” he snapped.

The look Gammon wore under her tricorn’s brim was as well sanded as Rare’s urn. “This time, she paid for you.”

She didn’t mean the crematory fees, of course. Naming everything Rare had paid for—Anselm’s arrogance, his presumption, his expectation of control—would take all night, and most of the day after. It was a red ledger stretching back thirteen years, settled with claws and fists.

Gammon sat beside him, slumping on the tomb lid as if she’d dropped a heavy load. Anselm slid left, giving her space enough to put her elbows on her knees and rub at her temples.

“You’re not dealing with the pain in your usual way,” she announced. “Which means you aren’t dealing at all. Which means Bess’s message about your wanting a meeting is actually you wanting closure. You think I can give it. So.” She looked at him, her mouth a hard line. “What do you want to know?”

Anselm frowned.

“How do you know I’m not dealing in the usual way?”

“Surely you know I had a tail on you between our meetings, as often as I could spare a man.”

Anselm ticked them off on his right hand, skipping the stump of his index finger. “The Indine boy, probably a mail page in the Constabulary offices. You’d usually set him out bussing tables in restaurants and cafes. The fat secretary, who you liked to use in market spaces. Some indifferent-looking, brick-faced lout on the street, selling smokes or posing drunk.”

“And Giezelle.”

Anselm arched an eyebrow.

Gammon shook her head. “If you didn’t notice her, I won’t ruin her cover. She’s still with the Constabulary and will take a sideline from me, if the money’s right.”

“I’ll be damned. She’s good.”

“The very best.”

“And, to return to the subject, how do you know I’m not dealing with my pain?”

Gammon searched the slow-gathering clouds. “I always knew when you and Rare were in a row because you’d go on a spree with some other girls, trying them on for size. Taller than you, usually blonde. Younger, by varying degrees.”

Shame had burned out of Anselm Meteron long ago. It lingered in him more as a memory, an essentially theoretical conceit. If Gammon meant to color his cheeks like some silly schoolgirl, she’d chosen the wrong tack.

“You haven’t been doing that lately,” Gammon finished.

There was no buxom almost-Rare taunting him now, true. But still. He pictured long, black hair, haunted eyes, a body hardened by hunger. I’ll see you next Sabberday, he’d said. But he hadn’t. And she’d known it would be that way.

“Not really,” Anselm sniffed. “Haven’t had the time.”

“You’re the one who wanted to meet. If this isn’t about closure, then what?”

“I can get closure in my own way,” he said, the word itself suddenly grating. Fucking women. He had taken Gammon for something less predictable, but there she was, talking like some half-clink romance reader. “I want to know what you know about His Grace’s involvement in the events of last fall.”

Gammon took her time composing what next to say. Then she shook her head.

“Almost nothing. Bishop Meteron was Regenzi’s spur and financier. I’m aware of his research denouncing the Vautnek theory back in the ’30s and ’40s, and read some of it, though I’ll confess most of the mathematics he uses to substantiate his arguments are over my head.”

“Topological reasoning applied to socioeconomic and organizational theory,” Anselm murmured. His mind drifted back to uncountable boyhood hours in his father’s study. The tutoring, recitations, examinations. God’s balls, he wanted a smoke. Gammon eyed him with the scrutiny of a copper sizing up a lead.

“I don’t follow much of it, either,” he lied.

She let that go.

“The book is still lost,” Gammon continued, fanning herself with her hat. “Though I’m working on some leads salvaged out of Chalmers’s notes. You’re about to travel abroad, so I’m assuming you have something brewing, too.”

“Unless whatever tail you’ve put on me doubles as a precognitive, I don’t see how you think you could know that. Call up Miss Ennis. All my appointments in Corma are intact through the end of the year.”

Gammon shook her head. “First, you and I both know I’m not calling anyone on the voxes or sending a spark under my own name. As far as the Constabulary, the Court and Bar, the Governor’s offices, and the Ecclesiastical Commission know, I’ve disappeared off the face of Amidon. Second, if you think I could deal with you all these years and not figure out that you keep four separate calendars, only two of which contain anything remotely like your actual schedule of activities, you haven’t thought enough about how I earned my job.”

Anselm raised an eyebrow. “Haadi. You’re positively galvanizing when you’ve spent the final shit you had to give. If you keep this up, you’ll inspire me to soothe my grief with you.”

“You’d lose another finger trying.”

“I’ve risked far more for much less. The grass is dry and we’re both passably young.”

“Not on your life.”

“Pity.” He sighed. “But your insistence on being provocative dodges the question of why you’re so sure I’m about to leave the city.”

“Because the Alchemist called on the Dolly Molls for a shop-sitter ready for a rough neighborhood, and he’d only do that if he were leaving. Putting aside your message coming back to me through Bess Earnshaw herself, I saw the look on your face when the Alchemist was dying on the Cathedral roof. You’ll never let him go anywhere without you now.”

Anselm studied her face—sharp-nosed, thin-lipped, her hair too blunt to soften her features the way they deserved. He’d put too much stock in such details, once. He should have noticed how clever the woman was—should have seen her as more than a means to his ends.

“You were magnificent at your job, Haadiyaa.”

“It was a magnificent deal for you,” she answered, in clipped, bitter tones. “I should have—” For a moment, the hammered-copper steadiness of her features bent. She wrung the rim of her hat, scowling. “I would do things differently, if I could go back.”

And that opened the door. He saw Nasrahiel, and Rare’s ravaged body, the wind whipping across the Cathedral’s clerestory roof. The tide of anger rose inside Anselm again, slow enough he could build up a levee against it, try to force it below a glacial calm.

“What do Chalmers’s notes have to do with rebuilding an aigamuxa?”

“Bloody Proof. Bess talks too much.”

“I ask,” Anselm continued, his words blurring hot around their edges, “because there’s a certain aigamuxa I can think of in particular need of rebuilding. He owes me a chance to take him apart, hinge by hinge.”

“I think you’d better take your little trip and let me see to Nasrahiel.”

“I was promised a chance to make him pay.”

Gammon waved her hat at the bag lying at Anselm’s feet. “And I can promise where you’ll end up, if you try.”

“If you think I don’t know my way around a fight well enough to put a dent in him—”

“You’ll end up dead because I’ll put a bullet in you now.”

Anselm glared at her.

“If I have to,” Gammon added, her voice quiet and fierce. “I need him. He wasn’t the only aigamuxa willing to hurt a lot of people for his cause. He can find out what they’ll do next, and if they’ll listen to him, we can stop the avalanche before it starts.”

“And if it’s already started?”

Gammon smiled, the expression utterly without humor. “Be happy you’ll be out of town awhile.”

Anselm’s hands ached. He looked down and found them clenched into fists. One by one, he worked at the joints, pausing to gentle the stump of his missing finger, feeling for the root of its phantom pain. “What makes you so sure he won’t twist your head off the first chance he gets?”

“Nothing. But I have to try. I helped make this problem. Maybe I deserve to lose my head fixing it.”

“You’re a damned fine lawman but an apocalyptically stupid campaigner, Haadi. No job is ever worth your life.”

“I stopped getting paid for this a long time ago.”

“That’s not what makes it a job.”

Gammon made a small, knowing sound and looked at Anselm side-long. “I suppose you’d understand something about that, wouldn’t you? You and the Alchemist are taking the girl?”

Anselm recalled his argument with Erasmus in the Rolands’ parlor, not even a week past.

She’s safer with us than anywhere else, the Old Bear had insisted.

He wasn’t wrong. But Anselm remembered the same argument coming from Leyah when Rare joined the family. The road that followed inevitably after stretched out so clearly before them, he couldn’t fathom Erasmus’s willful blindness.

“You’ll excuse me if I decline to specify where,” he replied, at last.

“I have a few educated guesses. Do me a favor, while you’re turning over rocks the other side of the Western Sea. See if you can find a scholar with a background in lanyani culture.”

Anselm Meteron didn’t flummox easily, and he would have resented the label for this reaction, though he knew it to be accurate. He stared at Gammon, making no effort to hide his confusion. “The EC doesn’t endorse any program of study for xenoculture. There’s a small subset of anatomists who use the other sentients to inform human biological studies, but no one who expects to earn their collar and signet would try to connect sociology to xenospecies. The very idea is incoherent.”

“It’s not incoherent. It’s perfectly reasonable, but EC doctrine assumes the other sentients are servitor species without the native resources to organize structures analogous to ours. But perhaps they’re meant for something completely different than humanity—not just ecologically, but more than that. They might see the book as a means of reaching that destiny.”

“They. Both the Trees and the apes.”

“I’m following some leads connecting the two, and they’re troubling.”

Anselm pinched the bridge of his nose. “If I find such a scholar, they’re almost certainly going to be a Kneeler.”

“That makes no difference to me.”

“I can send a name and credentials on through the Dolly Molls’ usual channels, if anything turns up. There’s a set of codes we’ve used in the past. If the message comes through while someone other than Jane’s on duty, it’ll be recorded without raising suspicion.”

“Perfect.” Gammon rose, dusting at her trousers with her hat and donning it just as the sky began to rumble in earnest. Tombstone shadows pooled on the gravelly paths, purple in the coal dust twilight. “If things go poorly here, you may have your shot at Nasrahiel after all.”

Anselm’s smile turned vulpine. “I feel a little torn about what to hope for.”

“Don’t be,” Gammon answered. “Keep the girl close, and keep an eye out for the Trees. We don’t know half as much as we should about how they communicate. But they already know too much, and it’s spreading.”

Anselm stood, too, putting the sack with the wooden urn on the tomb lid that had been his bench. His hand ached worse than before. He caught himself running his stump finger raw under his thumb. The scales of his mind shifted, trying to level the weight of mistrust and urgency, taring and clearing and tilting, the seesaw action stubbornly out of kilter. He wanted to put a finger around a trigger. Put a knife in his hand, and then through a mouth of saw-bladed shark-teeth. Take hold of the urn and its chalky ashes and bury himself with it. Find his father, and finally say what he’d meant to, twenty-five years before.

He wanted to take Rowena and the Old Bear and run.

“If you need to reach me while I’m abroad, there’s a public house in Lemarcke called the Maiden’s Honor,” Anselm said. “We made it a business office, of a sort, back when we were for hire. They’ll take my messages and pass them along, wherever we end up.”

“You pay them well enough to keep quiet?”

“I own a controlling interest in the property. A nostalgia purchase on my last business trip. What can I say?” He shrugged, but it wasn’t enough to slough the bitterness out of his voice, or take his eyes from Rare’s urn. “I’m a sentimental old fool.”

The promised rain finally started. Melodrama, Anselm thought, and almost laughed. Gammon was already making her way back up the hillside, her shoulders curved in against the storm.