16.

3^RD EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U. —DAWN

SOMEWHERE OVER THE WESTERN SEA

Captain Qaar loomed over Anselm Meteron, his knotted face a closed door. The set of the thief’s jaw warned Erasmus how close his partner was to kicking that door in.

“I’ve considered your proposal, Master Meteron,” said Qaar.

“And?”

“No.”

The Alchemist was half-sure he’d cracked a tooth keeping his own temper down as the Tree captain stonewalled them, but that didn’t excuse him from at least attempting to pose as the voice of reason. Not now or anytime in the last thirty years, he thought.

“Before anyone says something they are bound to regret,” he began, speaking around the stem of his pipe, “we might consider the circumstances that brought us to this moment. Your crew. An ambush.”

The Captain’s lamp-like eyes trained on Erasmus.

“A certain vigorous application of a spark to one of said crew,” he countered. “The scorching of my portside deck and the demolition of its rail.” Qaar’s voice burned as his crewman had—at least until Erasmus had wrapped his frock coat around his arm to shield it and shoved the flaming creature over the side into the dark waters thousands of feet below.

Anselm raised an accusing finger. The other hand he kept to his side, a little out of view. Qaar was already none too pleased about the stake he held in it and the ampule of picloram installed in its blood-groove.

“And that,” Anselm noted, “might just have something to do with our being attacked.”

“You have no right to keep my crewfolk hostage,” Qaar snapped. “Release it.”

The Alchemist stood, obliging the Tree captain to edge backward. He put a hand on the table where his field kit lay open, both to keep it from shifting as the ship keeled windward and to keep his own feet steady. The burned lanyani had been Rowena’s handiwork, but spilling the creature over the side and hauling Rowena back up using the coiled hemp lines she’d been lucky enough to trip through—that had left him rattled. His temper buzzed like a beehive, all but audible in the closed space of their cabin.

“Your men tried to kill us. I woke with a thorn at my throat in that bed,” Erasmus growled, indicating the bunk behind Qaar. “Rowena went over the side. Anselm—”

“I’m fine,” he lied.

Usually Erasmus had to touch someone to sense how deep their pain went, but he’d known Anselm too long not to sense the outline of his presence anytime they were in the same room. His side still ached where one of the lanyani’s spiked club-limbs had connected. Not hard enough to crack ribs, Erasmus had concluded, but anyone could see his seeping bandage through the linen of his shirt.

“We need an explanation for the attack,” Anselm finished, trading overt irritation for icy calm, like a street performer palming a sovereign. “The surviving attacker is the only being likely to have one.”

“Unless you’re hiding something, Captain?”

Qaar’s white stare flicked over to Erasmus, seethingly silent. “I hired them out of one of the hothouses in Corma,” he admitted. “Crystal Hill. My crew from Anchor Pass was deep in wilt and needed time ashore.”

“How many of ‘em came from Crystal Hill?”

All three turned toward Rowena. The girl had said very little since waking up in the cabin a half-hour before. There’d been more than enough to listen to, certainly. The hiss and rattle of the remaining crew in the gangway outside the cabin. Qaar’s efforts to quell them. Erasmus and Anselm’s muffled argument, huddled over the field kit, passing glances toward the last of the attacking lanyani: a ponderous piece of lumber with arms like oak trunks, now pinned to the cabin wall by stakes in its shoulders, wrists, ankles, knees—clever contraptions left over from Leyah’s machine-working. Each stake had a trigger which opened the tip into a fierce, flat cross of iron, mounting the creature more brutally than a Kneeler crucifixion.

If the theory that the lanyani had no pain receptors was true, it was an excellent work-around. Erasmus had never believed that claim. Pain was an evolutionary benefit—how a being’s body signaled distress to itself, discouraging further damage. Still, he preferred the practical limits of force and physics: even if the lanyani captive could endure the pain of tearing itself into kindling to escape, it lacked the leverage to do it. And it was deeply concerned by the poisoned spike Anselm carried.

So was Captain Qaar. Hence the stalemate.

“Five came from the hothouse on the Hill,” the captain answered, after a long, uncomfortable hesitation.

Five attackers. One sent to do in Erasmus as he slept—a plan badly fouled when it found him a habitually light sleeper; one set upon Rowena; three gone after Anselm.

“If you took on five and the same five were the ones that jumped us, then your usual crew’s probably innocent,” Rowena concluded.

“If you mean to keep this news from the Rolands,” Anselm said, leaning into the Greatduke’s family name with nothing like nonchalance, “you’d better let us have a conversation with the Tree that will clear your good name.”

Qaar studied his pinioned cousin, inscrutable and silent. Then he nodded. “Do what you must. When you are done, give it to me. We have ways of disposing of . . . rubbish. And see to it that,” he nodded toward the poison spike Anselm carried, “does not leave your baggage again before we reach Lemarcke.”

Erasmus grimaced. “One day’s journey left. Our problems will be much greater than your displeasure if we cannot make it that long without needing it again.”

Visibly reluctant, Qaar slipped out of the cabin, letting the door fall shut behind him.

Anselm’s eyes flicked over to Rowena, too fast for her to notice as she focused on the tar-paper muzzled lanyani. The Alchemist caught his eye and nodded.

“You should go, girl,” he said in his gentlest voice.

From the look she gave in response, he might as well have told her to jump off the stern.

“No.”

“There’s a chance it could break loose. I won’t have you nearly murdered twice in a day.”

“But that’s just it. They weren’t trying to murder me. The one I used the sword’s shock-end on tried to tie me up. It had that pointy, stabby arm and could’ve done me in with it any time. But it was binding me, instead. I mean, why bother? I’m smaller’n either of you and I wasn’t armed. I’d have been easy to kill, like swatting a fly.”

Anselm raised an eyebrow. “Give yourself a little credit, cricket.”

“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t flatter me just to pretend I’m not on to something. I know I am. After I broke free, it tried to knock me out. I don’t think it wanted to kill me, but they sure had all their thorns and stickers out for you two.”

“Going over the port rail hardly qualifies as not trying to kill you,” Erasmus countered.

“I jumped back from the fire and tripped. I’m just lucky I dragged my foot through the ropes doing it.”

God save us, she was. The memory of her spilling out into the dark seized Erasmus’s heart all over again, closing it in a fist. He had rebuilt his world around her only to see it nearly dashed to pieces by happen-stance. The others, he realized, were staring at him. He leaned into the table a little harder than he had a moment before. The ship must have shifted course, the cabin heaving in a way only he had noticed, or—

The fist thrust behind his breastbone bore down again.

He sank down to the bunk and put up a hand to stay Rowena as she swept over to check on him.

“I’m fine,” he muttered.

The almost-voice of Anselm’s thoughts needled privately. Your turn to lie, Bear? Erasmus put his head in his hands, breathing slowly. “I’m fine,” he repeated. The fist in his chest was hardly a stranger to him. The curare he’d taken to perpetrate their hoax with Regenzi had made sure of that. It had been the frequency of its visitation more than its existence he’d hoped to keep from his companions. Rowena had seen him in a spell just once that spring, and her wild, pained look had convinced him to keep his troubles to himself.

“Stay if you must,” Erasmus said, fixing Rowena with a hard look. She’d crouched in front of him, eyes wide and searching. He hoped his face looked less drawn than hers. “But if it does anything to threaten you—”

“I’ll keep my distance,” she vowed.

Erasmus grimaced. Mind the trigger, Ann, he thought.

His partner sent a signal back—a wordless pulse of affirmation. Then he drove the stake into the center of the crucified lanyani’s chest, precisely where a breastbone would be, if it had one.

The Alchemist had been expecting the blow, but it still rang like a gunshot in the enclosed space, loud enough to make him flinch. Rowena jolted to her feet, staring at the jagged crack where Anselm had smashed the iron wedge through a seam in the lanyani’s body. The fissure wept beads of golden sap.

“Thank you,” Erasmus murmured. He picked up his pipe, checked its bowl, and struck a lucifer for it.

Rowena scowled. “After that shake-up, I don’t think you ought to be doing that.”

“I am not,” he answered, drawing on the stem twice to encourage the flame. The tobacco plumed dense, gray smoke. He passed the pipe to her. “Set this below its feet, near the wall.”

Rowena coughed. “Right. And then I’m to break a porthole or something so the rest of us don’t stifle?”

“We need the smoke.” The Alchemist levered himself to standing, pausing a moment to assess how much of the sick spin he felt was the ship and how much his unsteady heart. The inventory came back decidedly in arrears. It would have to do.

“Why smoke?”

“They use pollen clouds to communicate with each other from a distance. The particulate matter of the smoke will combine with the pollen, confusing any messages it tries to send through the cracks in the door.”

Anselm offered his one-shouldered shrug. “It would be impolite for it to invite anyone else into our private conversation.” He donned a pair of leather gauntlets tailored for his missing finger and tore the tar-paper binding from the slash of the lanyani’s mouth. With a few, irritable flicks of his hand, he managed to free the paper from the leather, picking at its tarry surface fussily.

“Well, friend,” Anselm began. “Seems you’ve made quite a debacle of this pleasure cruise. Care to explain yourself?”

The lanyani did its best to burn them all under the white heat of its eyes.

The Alchemist examined the contents of his field kit. Having chosen the wrong ampule twice, he sighed and plucked his spectacles from his shirt collar. “Time was,” he said, not a little ruefully, “I could conduct a proper interrogation without reading glasses.”

“Weakness of the flesh,” the creature hissed.

Erasmus saw Rowena shift uncomfortably at the creature’s rasping voice.

You wanted this, he thought to her.

I know. I’m fine.

And that makes liars of all of us, he thought, though only to himself. We might at least have thought of something original.

“I suppose you’re right,” Erasmus continued, addressing his captive. “But lanyani fiber isn’t entirely impervious, either.”

Anselm snapped his fingers, feigning an epiphany. “What’s the stuff you’ve put into this thing, Bear?”

“Picloram.”

“Right. How does it work again?”

The lanyani’s eyes rounded into moons. “You would not.”

“Captain Qaar has some misgivings about us using it,” Anselm allowed. “And you’d think we’d want to stay on his good side. But honestly, we’re two deeply pissed off human savages. Who knows what we’re capable of? So in the interests of full disclosure, I will keep this hand here, on this stake and its trigger, and you had best keep your mind on the topic at hand.”

Erasmus grunted absent affirmation, having found two more phials of picloram. He was glad Anselm had passed his news from Haadiyaa Gammon along in time for it to influence his packing. He loaded another ampule into a second spike. It wouldn’t take more than one dose of the herbicide to kill the lanyani, but two would make it go much, much faster. If the quantity housed in the spike currently seated deep in the Tree’s vascular core were released, it would be only moments before the lanyani’s hyperactive osmosis passed the toxin along, breaking down its cell membranes, destroying the creature from pith to periderm.

“What do you want to know?” the lanyani asked, its voice piping minor-key from its fissured chest.

The Alchemist could not muster a twin to Anselm’s smug smile. He rested against the table instead, turning the spike in his hands. “Why did you try to kill us?”

“You are my people’s enemies. You are trying to protect the ones we must undo.”

Anselm lifted an eyebrow. “Last I was aware, we had done a magnificent job making enemies of the aigamuxa. I don’t recall wronging any lanyani.”

“There might be hope for your people, if you showed any sign of understanding what you have done to our world.”

Rowena frowned. “Filled it up with cities and railways and factories and such?”

The creature’s blank, blocky face tilted. Its eerie voice hummed with pleasure. “It is a shame you are marked, little one. You are not so foolish as your fathers.”

The girl opened her mouth to reply. Erasmus rode over the words she had not yet spoken.

“Who sent you?”

The creature’s attention snapped his way. “My clan on the Crystal Hill, of course. We learned of your plans to travel from the servers in the Greatduke’s house. And we know who you are. Dor knew.”

“Dor?” Anselm looked to Rowena. “Is that one of the lanyani fences Ivor bought for?”

“No, he worked with Sticks and Sugar Maple and—” She rounded, shaking her head as if to throw off an irrelevancy. “Look, what do you mean I’m marked?”

“My people have allies,” the Tree hissed. “We will find the ones your precious book names, and we will see to it the Experiment ends. We can return the world to what it was, wipe you from its face—”

Ann, Erasmus thought urgently.

Let him go on. We need to know more. “Why were you trying to capture me?” Rowena demanded.

Ann, please— Erasmus took a step forward, turning his spike into a stabbing grip. If he had to, he could lunge for the Tree and silence it before it spoke the whole truth with Rowena standing right there to hear it. But he could very well move too slowly, and Anselm was already there, his hand on the poisoned spike, holding the lanyani hostage.

“You’ve gotten in the way,” it growled. “You might have been left alone for a time, like all the rest, but you are too deep in the truth and we must make an example of you.” The lanyani’s craggy face split with a cruel, chipped-bark sneer. “Your fathers were expendable but Dor needed you in Corma to prove her point.”

And all at once, the creature seized up, its pinioned body shaking. Long, spidering cracks opened up around the stakes driving it in place, its limbs crumbling into jagged spears.

Watching Anselm’s cold, focused face transform into a mask of shock reminded the Alchemist how lucky he was to have a very fine actor for a partner. “Oh, fucksake, Bear, my hand must’ve slipped—”

Rowena rushed up, heedless of the lanyani’s convulsions, and slapped Anselm’s hand away from the poisoned spike. Its thin blood-groove, once capped with black, inky poison, stared back at her, empty.

“You stupid toff! He was about to tell me something!” she cried.

And that’s why he had to die. They could have gotten so much more from the Tree, if she hadn’t insisted on staying. But some things were worth the world to keep from Rowena Downshire.

The creature was still trying to make some last pronouncement. Half-words juddered forth from the rotting splits in its chest, too close to intelligible to be risked. Too much like agony to be borne.

“Here,” Erasmus called, tossing Anselm the second spike. “End it quickly.”

He plunged the second stake inches from the first, and a moment after, the room fell silent, apart from the muted crackle of the smoldering pipe.

Rowena stared at the rotten wreck of limbs and fibers hanging from the cabin wall. A piece of the lanyani’s ruined head fell away and rolled toward her feet, seesawing in place before settling with the hideous half-moon of an ocular cavity staring up at her. Rowena’s eyes flashed with unshed tears, her gaze darting back and forth between Anselm and Erasmus.

“I have to—I—”

Erasmus put out a hand. “Rowena. I did not want you to see—”

“I’m going up for some air,” she sobbed, scrubbing at her face as she stormed toward the door. “Stupid smoke is bothering my eyes.”

Her shoulder clipped Anselm’s as she passed. There had been more than enough room to make it to the gangway without staggering him. But it was the point she had to make.

The cabin door slammed shut. In the darkness beyond, Rowena’s bare feet scrambled up the companionway.

“I shouldn’t have pushed it that close.”

Anselm stood at Erasmus’s side. His false shock had fallen away, replaced with something etched between his brows, furrowing the corners of his eyes.

“She shouldn’t be alone up there,” he added. “And she won’t thank me to check on her now.”

“I’ll go after her,” Erasmus murmured. “You did your best. She didn’t make it easy.”

“When does she ever?” Anselm peeled his gloves off and flung them to the deck, his mouth a hard line. “She’s going to figure it out, before long.”

“More than likely.”

“What then?”

Erasmus closed his eyes. The pain in his chest had subsided, at least for the moment—polite enough to make room for new arrivals, perhaps. He tried to formulate an answer, but it eluded him amid a tumult of variables, too much to weigh and consider at a drop.

For forty years, he had cured, murdered, conspired, freed, tortured, kidnapped, protected, stolen, retrieved, and escaped. He strove to be a good man as often as circumstance allowed, and had been a bad one more than he cared to consider. He had plotted campaigns that were still legends in his field, and achieved a notoriety so great, it had swallowed up his given name and spat him back, stripped of everything but his profession. And yet he had no idea what to do about this single, solitary girl.

No. Not truly solitary. The sixth of nine. A fraction of our future. “The lanyani was right,” he said, at last. “If this Dor has the book, then they’ll be able to find Rowena anywhere she goes—track her with a living map. If Gammon is right, too, and the aigamuxa are still in pursuit, it’s that much worse. We will keep her from them until we can’t anymore, and train her to take care of herself as best we can, in the meantime.”

“Not what I meant, Bear.”

“I know.” The cane in the corner would no longer be ignored. Erasmus limped toward it and hooked it on his arm for the climb up the companionway—to fresh air, and the spreading dawn, and the girl who held a knife turning like a mainspring in his heart. “Let me know when you have a better answer.”