18.

4^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE SKIES ABOVE LEMARCKE

The final day of Rowena’s journey passed peaceably. Clear skies. Good air current. No strange attacks from the remaining crew. No forbid-dances or cautions from Master Meteron or the Old Bear beyond what she had grown accustomed to—minding the rails or keeping to center ship when the winds plowed high, the cautions all shared in sidelong comments, awkward and muted.

It was utterly unbearable.

Rowena had done all she could to keep from talking to either of her companions after the lanyani’s horrible death. The timing of it had been too precise, too clearly tied to what it had been about to say. It galled her to wonder what that meant—what they were trying so hard to keep from her.

How would I prove Dor’s point? It was exactly the kind of question she’d like to have sorted out in company, running her guesses and fears over the sanding stone of someone else’s wits. The Old Bear was good for that, more a listener than a talker. And Master Meteron loved torturing truth from speculation, like a cat making a toy of its mice. But Rowena had sworn not to make them her confidantes, partly out of petulance, but also practicality. They were clearly keeping things from her. She stood to gain a good deal more playing the game back at them. At least, that’s what she told herself, when passing them by with her chin raised and eyes averted changed from feeling righteous to being lonely. How could she be just yards from them and miss them so terribly?

Stupid eejit. You got yourself tamed.

Rowena couldn’t reconcile her anger and suspicion with the ache that passed through her when she saw the Old Bear and Meteron nearby and tried to spurn them, just to teach them a lesson. It was teaching someone something, all right. It just wasn’t them.

When Lemarcke’s anchor yards appeared under the Lady Lucinda’s shadow, Rowena’s resolve to punish her companions broke like so much driftwood.

“What . . . what are they?” Rowena gasped, staring over the starboard rail at the creatures massing around the anchor pad.

Anselm glanced up from rolling a cigarette. He’d parked himself at the rail an hour before, just beyond her arm’s reach, wordlessly smoking and squinting at the horizon as the port drew ever nearer.

He sniffed, acting as if there was nothing remarkable in her breaking a full day’s stubborn silence. “They call them the Fabricated.”

It was an apt name. The mooring area surrounding the Lady Lucinda swarmed with stevedores and longshoremen hefting cargo from the ship’s unloading chute. Rowena had seen such activity before around Corma’s Rotten Row, the work mainly done by groups of aigamuxa and the occassional human overseer or clerk.

These laborers were clockworks. Animals. A veritable zoo of high-gloss brass and ticking flywheels. Gorillas, oxen, dray horses, and bears with human-seeming hands hefted and hauled, without a foreman or gang boss in sight. A few slender young women, all wrapped in what looked to Rowena like dressing gowns bound with sashes stood by, tapping notes into keyed machines slung from harnesses about their necks. Secretaries of some kind? Engineers? Once, a smallish clockwork creature fell still in the midst of scaling a stack of crates the gorillas had made. One of the women plucked the creature up, cracking open a panel under its belly. A few adjustments, and the creature— some kind of tamarin, Rowena thought—was back on the tower of crates, marking them with a grease pencil in clear, tidy print. A rope ladder tumbled from the Lady Lucinda into the midst of the Fabricated crews, and one of the women mounted it, heading up to meet with Captain Qaar.

“The Fabricated,” Rowena repeated. “Holy handcarts, why go to the trouble? I mean, there’s enough aiga to man every port in every city and then some. They work cheap enough.”

Sometime in the midst of her staring, the Old Bear had arrived at the rail. She smelled the sweet marjoram and fennel of his pipe before she heard him. She tried to keep her back turned, but it was too hard. She missed looking into his eyes.

Stupid girl. Rowena looked his way, silently swearing that she would, at minimum, not smile.

“It’s more complicated than supply and demand,” he said. “It’s more a matter of—” Meteron began. “Exercising the blessings of Reason to secure ourselves against the threat imposed by lesser species,” cut in a new voice.

It was one of the women from the anchor yard, the one climbing the ladder a moment before. She adjusted her odd mechanical device—a box of keys with letters and symbols, all of them unrecognizable—on her hip. Rowena had thought her bright red sash covered in embroidery and floral designs. Seen up close, she saw it was laced with small, gold-threaded pockets and slits through which the glittering heads of tiny watchmaker’s tools peeked. She bowed, full from the waist.

“Exercising what?” Rowena blurted. “You’re our employer’s representative?” the Old Bear said, smothering Rowena’s outburst. She scowled at him, not liking how easily he took to riding over her.

“I am Miyako Kurowa, and I have the honor to be the Logician First Rank assigned to your needs while you make your rendezvous with Reverend Doctor Chalmers. I am also scheduled to accompany you on your journey to Nippon.”

Nippon. Rowena studied the woman’s face. Her features reminded her of Lady Simone Roland, though this woman’s face was carved and angular where the Greatduchess’s had been broad and welcoming.

“We are honored by your assistance, Madame,” the Old Bear said. Madame Kurowa bowed again, this time more curtly.

The Alchemist made introductions. Rowena suppressed the urge to put out her hand for a shake or bob a curtsy when she saw how Master Meteron and the Old Bear returned the Logician’s bow, albeit less deeply. Madame Kurowa’s eyes burrowed into Rowena, studying her awkward, stiff-backed imitation of their courtesy.

“Rowena Downshire,” Kurowa repeated, upon learning her name. Rowena straightened and tried to muster up something approximating adult dignity. It lasted until a sudden gust threatened to toss her petticoats into view. She bent to stuff her skirts back down, feeling her already-forced smile turn into a grimace.

“Um, h’lo.”

“You have arrived forty-nine minutes ahead of schedule, and thus only a portion of the Fabricated we assigned to your debarkation are available. Nevertheless, we should be able to maintain your itinerary.”

“Thank you, Madame,” the Old Bear said.

Rowena only realized she was gaping when she felt Meteron’s elbow jog her arm. Her mouth closed with an audible snap. Madame raised her sculpted brows a perfect millimeter in something that, on a face less rigid, would have scarcely suggested an expression at all. On hers, the look was practically a monologue.

“You seem puzzled, Miss Downshire. It is sacred to my duties as an Emissary of the Logical Righteous to bring an end to the pain of confusion and ignorance. I am ready for your query.”

“It’s just, you—” Rowena fumbled. “People say things run like clockwork in Lemarcke. I hadn’t realized they meant literally.”

Madame Kurowa’s face yielded to an indulgent smile. Something about it made Rowena wish she’d go back to looking like a shopfront automaton.

“You have heard the metaphor of God being a clockmaker?”

“And a researcher and an engineer and a scholar and a half a hundred things, sure.”

“If the lord over all Creation and its Grand Experiment is a clock-maker, we owe it to Him as worthy creations to work with clear intent. We are the beings of greatest knowledge and aptitude ever set upon the earth. We show our gratitude for these gifts by using the tool of the mind to shape as He does.” And with this, she gestured toward the anchor yard. The movement took in the dozens of Fabricated lurching and climbing and carrying, ticking like a whole music shop of metronomes clicking in round.

With that, Madame Kurowa bowed to them, left a card with the address of the rooming house awaiting them once the ship was unloaded, and excused herself to her duties.

The Old Bear grunted and leaned against the starboard rail. Rowena wedged herself between him and Master Meteron, watching them roll and stuff their respective vices. A flash of orange fire from the tip of a lucifer, and the air swelled with the smell of the Alchemist’s pipe.

“What she doesn’t mention,” the old man murmured, sidelong, “is the Logicians would rather make their laborers than hire them, because they despise the working man nearly as much as they despise the aigamuxa.”

“I was wondering if it was something like that,” Rowena admitted. “I en’t ever seen a place with so much to haul and hang and no aiga to do a lick of it.”

“Inferior species,” Meteron noted.

Rowena looked at him. “According to Logician doctrine,” he clarified.

Rowena doubted Meteron had much of an opinion about common workers, but she was quite sure of what he thought of the aigamuxa. Most humans found the eye-heeled ogres unsettling at best. Meteron— and the Old Bear, for that matter—had reason to hate them outright.

Rare. Rowena hadn’t gotten a clear look at her battered body down in the Constabulary’s basement morgue. Truthfully, she hadn’t tried. She’d seen more than enough of it in the collapsing corridors of the Old Bear’s mind, not long after.

“Is it,” Rowena began. “Um. Is it usual for your employer to have a representative waiting for you, wherever you’re bound?”

“In some cases,” the Old Bear answered around his pipe stem. “Typically, they’re named in the contract.”

Rowena frowned. “Bear, I don’t read as well as I’d like, but I don’t remember seeing her name anywhere in the papers.”

“Because you didn’t,” Meteron agreed.

She straightened in her slouch and peered down into the yard. Madame Kurowa had returned to the Fabricated, using the typing box slung against her hip, one hand flying across its keys as she watched a bear-creature wander past, a crate balanced on its back. Rowena’s frown deepened.

“That’s why you said ‘our employer’s representative’ instead of naming the Rolands.”

The Old Bear grunted affirmation. “I suspect she knows Doctor Chalmers, or knows of him enough that her appearance wouldn’t alarm him. But she’s still come from another group and for her own purposes.”

“The Grand Library, or I’ll eat my purse,” Meteron said. “So we don’t trust her.”

“As a rule, cricket, we don’t trust anyone but each other.”

Easier said than done, apparently. “So what happens now we’re here?”

“Now,” the Old Bear answered, teeth clenching the stem of his pipe, “we keep our suspicions quiet. We settle ourselves in our lodgings and go to the Maiden’s Honor to rendezvous with the Doctor. After that, we get registered.”

“What’re we registering for?”

“Campaigning permits and our charter,” Meteron said.

Rowena pulled a face. “I thought the whole idea of the work you folk do, these contracts, is that it’s not permitted?”

“Yes and no,” he answered. “A contract binds us to the Rolands’ mission. A professional charter and permit make us, in a broad sense, legal. If you have all three, you have the closest thing to a legitimate business operation any campaigner’s likely to achieve.”

Rowena considered this. “So the charter states who’s in the group, stuff like that?”

“Mostly. We have one on record from the old days, but it requires a little—” Meteron shrugged. “Updating.”

“It is safer to have you on the charter than off it,” the Old Bear said. “It protects you from the worst legal entanglements we might face.” He tapped the contents of his pipe over the side. A wind caught the smolder and whisked it away in a cloud of gray flakes. “We’ll put Chalmers on, too.”

“Chalmers?” The thought of the feckless Reverend Doctor winning a place on the same campaign company roster as Rowena squashed flat her sense of accomplishment. “He’s no bleeding campaigner!”

Meteron snorted. “You aren’t, either.”

“But I’ve learned so much! You’ve taught me to handle a blade and climb without a kit and load a gun and . . . and even read. What’s he done? He got kidnapped, gibbered like a spooked monkey-rat, put you both back together with strapping tape and best wishes, and then disappeared to teach weights and measures at some finishing school for dimwitted barristers’ daughters!”

“He understands more about this book and where it came from than we do,” the Old Bear answered. “And he’s demanded this contract between the Rolands and ourselves, which means he feels he’s onto something worth being frightened about.”

“Like a nit in his knickers?”

Master Meteron smirked. The Alchemist did not. “Regenzi knew a lot about the book, too,” Rowena muttered. “Don’t see you offering him a berth.”

“Because he’s a pile of rotting meat now, and even when he wasn’t, he was a puppet,” Meteron answered, all the humor draining from him. “Look, cricket. Chalmers is a pint short of passable on his best day, but he’s an asset we need to protect. So he gets a promotion, same as you.”

For a fleeting moment, Rowena could swear she saw a glance, brief and cutting, pass from the Alchemist to his old partner. She studied them sullenly. They’d known each other longer than she’d been alive. Half the things they said to each other were said without words—and the other half, said without even expressions or gestures. Something like that explained what had happened with the lanyani. Rowena wondered—

She reached out, past the frame of her own mind, feeling for the edges of Meteron’s, hoping he was just distracted enough by Captain Qaar coming by to ask about unloading the baggage that maybe, possibly—

Don’t, Leyah cautioned.

Not you, too.

He’s felt that kind of contact before. You’re not going to take him by surprise.

Oh, I’ll bet he’ d be surprised.

Rowena. Leyah drew out the final syllable of her name, wagging it like a verbal finger. Pouting, Rowena relented. But she did decide to keep an eye out for Master Meteron using his ether. That might just lower his guard enough for her to slip by.

Don’t try those tricks here, Leyah begged her. Not in Lemarcke. They have ways of finding answers for things that don’t bend to Reason.

Reluctantly, Rowena put her plot away.

Slowly, the ship vented its gas. The Fabricated manning the mooring cranks below wound the Lady Lucinda ever closer to its docking cradle. Once it had settled, they pushed a rolling staircase up to its gangplank. Beyond the anchor yard’s fences, Rowena spied a clockwork carriage.

“That’s for us,” Meteron announced. He gave the Alchemist a genial swat on the shoulder and strode toward the gangplank. “Mind your leg on the way down, Bear.”