19.

4^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

SAKHIDA ISLAND, LEMARCKE

Dusk came late that summer evening, bringing with it a cool, seaward breeze. That, at least, gave the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers a little comfort. He felt very much entitled to it, especially as he stood before the sign of the Maiden’s Honor, trying to determine through an indignant fog if he was the victim of some tasteless prank.

The longer he considered the evidence at hand, the more certain he became of that assessment.

First there was the seedy establishment itself, and the winking directions the rat-faced woman at the lightning rail station’s payment stile had given. “The Maiden’s Honor is on Quick Street. You’ll have to look down to find it, if you know what I mean, sir.”

And, sure enough, there was a crooked set of iron steps leading down into a grotto and a rusty sign waving from its arch fashioned like a buckle on an unfastened belt. Add to this the steady stream of clientele passing up and down those stairs to disappear through the tavern’s entrance, which was only a tattered curtain frisking in a doorframe, and there could hardly have been a doubt.

The Rolands must have been mistaken to send him here. Surely. Of all the places he should be expected to conduct business!

Phillip Chalmers sighed at his chronometer. Quarter past nine already. He would be late to this meeting, whether he was at the right establishment or not.

The grotto was a clot of comings and goings. Chalmers counted passing heads, sizing up the proper opening, and then surged forward, stumbling after a trio of opal-eyed lanyani, their sexless bodies budding with green shoots and leaves. He bumped against one of them and earned a steady, expressionless glare for his sins.

“Sorry! Terribly sorry . . . excuse me!”

He staggered down the little staircase and ducked through the drapery door into the hot, humming space beyond.

Pubs were hardly unknown to Phillip Chalmers. Indeed, there were a few he had frequented in his seminary years. One was called “The Library” by its bookish patrons, a name given so long before, no one remembered its proper name. The Library was as full of its particular patrons as the actual bibliotheques themselves, though (naturally) far less staid and silent. It was the thriving heart of Rimmerston’s scholarly youth, and like all places that had captured a particular sort of people, it had become like its people.

The Maiden’s Honor was that sort of a place, too, though for a very different class of patron.

Campaigners, Chalmers thought, looking around. All of them.

The pub was a great ellipse of activity, with a curved bar hugging its back wall, the space behind it barely broad enough for a pot-bellied, gray-faced keep to prowl up and down on bandy legs. The space this design saved did not go toward more seating for the patrons, whose tall, teetering tables with backless stools speckled the room like the edges of a scab lifting from a wound. It was given over to a pit, instead: thirty feet by fifteen, curved like the room itself, and burrowed ten feet into the floor. The pit was floored with sawdust, the better to soak up sweat and blood—and possibly worse. Presently, two men dragged a third from it. They’d hooked the battered man’s heels under their arms and hauled him toward the ladder. Given how the man’s head bumped along, Chalmers judged he was in no position to protest his treatment. The ruin of his face suggested he wouldn’t be protesting much of anything for a long time.

The crowd looming over the pit, dicing at tables or trading murmurs over pints, was as clearly composed of campaigners as Chalmers’s pub had been filled with students. He passed men whose coats lay across nearby chairs, showing off the pistols strapped to their thighs. Eyes followed him, and conversations stalled for a syllable or two. His palms had gone sweaty.

The air teemed with tobacco and stale drink, a sweltering heat rising up from the fighting pit, where a new pair—two women armed with glares that tokened some ancient quarrel—dropped from the ladders and dusted their hands, watching one another. Those who gathered around the pit called to have their markers placed on a peg board carried on the hip of a slender, smiling hostess. She gestured to a man on the other side of the crowd, who nodded at her signal and climbed up on the bar to make some obscure notation in chalk on a leaderboard.

Eyes ahead, Chalmers told himself. Just make for the bar.

Phillip Chalmers had survived the general rigors of his studies and the more recent trials of his life through main force of concentration. He was capable of focusing on a task so entirely, he could miss the moment of having completed it.

And so, glancing at the man updating the board, thinking of reaching the bar, watching the mill of the crowd so as to avoid stepping on feet or, worse, being stepped upon, he achieved his objective three strides earlier than anticipated, and applied his midsection with some force to the bar’s brass-railed edge.

“Ooof.” Chalmers doubled over, righting himself so hastily, he nearly tipped over a burly Trimeeni’s rum.

Both Trimeeni and barman eyed him with cool contempt. Chalmers took some consolation at that. Their scorn suggested he ranked somewhat beneath the effort required for a solid drubbing.

Chalmers waved apologetically to the barkeep. “Sorry . . . Um, sir, I was wondering if you could direct me, to, um . . .” He glanced about conspiratorially, then hooked a finger, beckoning the man closer.

Frowning, the barkeep limped nearer. His single bushy eyebrow climbed toward his hairline.

“I was wondering,” Chalmers continued, “if you could direct me to table forty-nine.”

He spoke the last words through gritted teeth, eyes wide and nodding significantly.

The barkeep stared at him.

“Table . . . forty . . . nine,” Chalmers repeated urgently.

“What, the Corma Company’s table?” The barkeep snorted, his voice anything but discreet. He jerked his stubbled chin to Chalmers’ left. “S’over there, where it’s always been. Tell your friends to see me before they cast off, eh? I’ve got a tab older than that girl with ‘em that needs settling. I could stock the top shelf for a year off the interest alone.”

Chalmers blinked. “The—the girl with ‘em? Er, them?”

The barkeep shrugged. “Look, mate, I don’t have time to gad about much running this place, but I know a girl when I see one. Here.” He reached into the pocket of his apron and retrieved an onionskin sheet, torn roughly from a ledger’s page. He shoved the paper into Chalmers’s hand before turning him toward the table in question and the trio awaiting him. “Tell ‘em it’s only water from the well until I see the rest of this iron go from their pockets into mine.”

Chalmers might have stared at the bill—the figure was markedly higher than the costs for his final year at seminary, including room, board, and examination fees. But given his shock at seeing Rowena Downshire waving cheerily between the Alchemist and Anselm Meteron, it scarcely fazed him.

Sakhida Island might have been the capital of the Logicians’ much-vaunted Protectorate, but places like the Maiden’s Honor better resembled Corma than the rest of Lemarcke. It was a cancerous place of a sort Chalmers had long avoided. But it was, he supposed, Meteron and the Alchemist’s sort of place. When the Rolands relayed this as their rendezvous point, Chalmers had thought the old rogues had lost their wits. Seeing the most singularly precious and dangerous person he’d ever met along for the meeting confirmed that suspicion.

He reached the table and offered one hand in greeting, the other in apology, holding the bill.

“Ivor’s doing, most like,” the Alchemist concluded after examining the barkeep’s scrawl. “All wodke and cigarillos.”

Meteron chuckled into his pint. “Well. Seems the old sot got us in the end, after all. How much?”

The Alchemist pushed the page across the table and folded his spectacles, hanging them from his shirt’s uppermost button hole.

Meteron whistled at the figure admiringly. He pulled out a cartridge pen and jotted a string of numbers below the total—an exchequer’s routing code. His cramped, curving grip left behind a long mark Chalmers would have called “chicken scratch,” had that not been a cruel insult to avian literacy. Meteron finished with a flourish that began with an A and terminated in series of waves and curls roughly approximating the syllables of his given name.

Chalmers hugged his satchel, easing onto a stool as if it might at any moment buck him off. It wobbled just enough to make the concern seem reasonable. “When the Rolands told me in their spark that you knew just the place to meet here on the island, I had, um . . . rather a different mental image prepared.”

Chalmers looked around warily and leaned close. Rowena had slipped away to stand tip-toe at the fighting pit’s edge, peering between shoulders and under elbows at the women squaring off below. Chalmers turned a chiding finger on his companions.

“Are you out of your minds bringing her here? Reason’s Rood, she’s only one of the most important people alive, and this is the . . . the . . . education you’ve offered her?”

Meteron smiled wickedly. “She seems to like the place. Said it had . . . what was it, Bear?”

“Atmosphere,” the old man answered from behind a fist. His dark gaze trained on the girl with such intensity, Chalmers imagined him counting her breaths. “She’s safe here, Doctor. We know how this place works.”

“And you assume nothing has changed in a generation?” Again, Chalmers scanned the room. The Alchemist was twice the age of his nearest equivalent among the patronage. There wasn’t another gray hair to be seen, apart from those on the barkeep’s bristling face.

Meteron shrugged. “They’ve kept our table, and our tab. God’s balls, Doctor. Settling the bill alone will ensure our professional notoriety another ten years, or I’m a Tobagan monkey-rat. Now, tell me something worth opening a new tab. How did you land Greatduke Jonathan Roland as your patron?”

Chalmers smiled nervously. “It was quite the easiest time courting a sponsor I’ve had. You might say I was all but thrown at them.”

Meteron arched an eyebrow. The Alchemist’s face gathered a new collection of shadows.

“You don’t mean to say that they kidnapped you, Doctor,” the old man murmured.

“Having had a little experience with a proper kidnapping,” Chalmers answered, “no. But there was an unexpected dinner invitation delivered by a very large man and two lanyani valets for which I was asked to drop everything. I was just concluding a lecture at the finishing school where I’d been tutoring, you see, and—”

“Wait.” Meteron lifted a four-and-a-half-fingered hand, barring further speech. “Two lanyani. They were from the Roland household as well?”

Chalmers blinked. “Well, yes. Serving staff. They drove the clock carriage back to the Rolands’ manor, and there it was—a great feast and Lady Roland quite familiar with my body of research, before and after the Decadal Conference. Their solicitude was something of a relief, given how my services had been secured before.”

“Your services.”

The Alchemist’s bone-dry growl made Chalmers shiver. “Um, yes. The Rolands asked if there were any next steps I might take to continue my research into the Vautneks. They offered to fund the work, provided I gave Lady Roland an author credit on the final papers.”

Meteron snorted. “That’s one way to make a grand re-entry into the world of theosophical scholarship. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed your tail?”

Chalmers felt suddenly overconscious of how long it was taking him to process the question. He measured it with his finest mental calipers, still uncertain of its dimensions. “My . . . tail? I’m being followed? By whom?”

In his own opinion, Chalmers was now quite a seasoned survivor of intrigues and malefactions. He would have anticipated any number of canny, judgmental looks from Anselm Meteron; a look that bordered on open pity proved far more disconcerting.

“By the Rolands’ people, you spectacular toff. If they expect you to achieve something that will springboard Lady Roland back to theosophical prominence, they won’t give you a very long lead. And there’s this Madame Kurowa, as well. What do you know of her?”

Chalmers’s eyes darted back and forth between his interlocutors. “I don’t . . . Kurowa? She’s from Nippon, I suppose?”

“She claimed to have been sent by our employers to see to our arrangements in Lemarcke,” the Alchemist answered.

“Perhaps she’s from the Grand Library. I contacted them, but I didn’t think . . . Well. As to the Rolands, surely they’re trustworthy? They sent you, just as I requested, after I investigated Nora’s deposit box. I knew when I saw what was in it that I’d need your help.”

“The Rolands have reason to be less than pleased at your choice of assistants,” said the Alchemist.

Meteron sighed. “We’ll keep our eyes open. There’s a limit on what we want filtering back to our benefactors, and when. Now, about that deposit box?”

“Here.” Chalmers wrestled with his satchel, fussing with its buckles until he unearthed the thick, red, cloth-bound volume secreted within. He laid it on the table with a proprietary air. “This is it. The start of it all.”

The Alchemist leaned forward. Chalmers spun the book round and nudged it toward him. Again, the old man unfolded his spectacles and, donning them, lifted the book’s silk-wrapped cover.

The seal of the Grand Library Special Collection stared up from the frontispiece.

Meteron raised an eyebrow. “Some other book, then?”

The Alchemist turned the pages slowly. Chalmers watched him handle them with the care of an archivist. Pages crowded with precise, geometric print filed past, studded here and there by graphs and tables, sketches like street maps or land elevations. The deeper into the book the Alchemist turned, the darker both men’s faces grew.

“Not some other book,” corrected Chalmers. “Another book. There are dates. Those are the only things uncoded. The latest of them leaves off—”

“Five years ago,” the Alchemist murmured. “When did you start working with Doctor Pierce?”

“Around then, more or less.”

“You’ve never seen this book before?”

“No. But I’ve seen one like it. One I knew very well.”

Meteron shook his head. “But this isn’t the same thing. We haven’t seen the script moving.”

“You won’t, either. It’s done. Used up.”

The Alchemist peered at Chalmers over his spectacles. “Used up?”

“Every last page,” Chalmers thumbed the pages, snapping through them like a deck of cards. “There’s no room anywhere. All the spaces for the entries. Every bit of the margins. All of it, taken up. But the language is the same, and nearly all of the subjects, too, as near as I can tell. Don’t you see?” He looked back and forth between his interlocutors, smiling so hard his cheeks ached. “They’re only books, after all. They must run out of pages someday. I used to wonder with Nora, some nights—after long hours at the ciphers, trying to break the language and translate the datum . . . Well, we’d have a drink and fall to talking, and I’d wonder aloud what would happen to the subjects when the book finally ran out of pages. I’d had a rather morbid theory that they’d simply, well, you know.” Chalmers made a slitting motion across his throat, accenting it with a protruding tongue, in case his meaning was at all ambiguous. Then he tracked the Alchemist’s gaze back toward Rowena.

“Sorry . . . I wasn’t thinking about—”

“Carry on,” Meteron said. “It was a silly notion, anyway. I’d muse all sorts of things—that perhaps the book would just wipe itself out and start over again from tabula rasa, and all that the time, Nora kept mum. I always thought it was because she was such a humorless drunk. It might still have been that, I suppose, but she also knew the answer.”

“Lovely,” Meteron drawled. “Now tell us.”

“Do you remember the old book—the book in Corma? It was nothing, an ugly thing. A common laboratory notebook. Nora must have owned half a hundred of them and kept a few blanks for her next project when she traveled. She liked to be prepared. If you look at the dates in this book, you’ll see it lines up. This was the book she found first; she must have had it on her person, and then, when the pages filled, the particles—” Chalmers laughed, spreading his hands wide and nearly knocking a passing waitress’s tray of drinks clean out of her grasp. “Well, that’s just it. The particles aren’t just attracted to the book. They author it, somehow. They’re like . . . emissaries of His consciousness. Little observers, ambient scribes. It’s brilliant, don’t you see? When the book at hand has no room for more material evidence, the particles search for the nearest similar receptacle, and they take it over.”

“You mean the book back in Corma wasn’t stolen property after all,” the Alchemist concluded.

“Ah, but it was !” Chalmers crowed. “Nora took this book from the Grand Library, just as her undelivered letters suggested, at the Bishop’s urging. But the book she stole was near the end of its lifespan, and it carried on recording by taking over one of her ordinary notebooks. Look. I have a theory,” he continued, tapping the open book, its curious writing all the more alien in its stability. “Somewhere in the Grand Library, there’s a room full of books like this, stretching back Proof even knows how far. As many as have been filled, there must be dozens more just sitting there blank, waiting to form the next volume. It’s the story of the entire Experiment, self-sustaining and inviolate.”

Anselm Meteron pinched the bridge of his nose. “‘Inviolate’ my ass.” Chalmers blinked. “I . . . I beg your pardon?”

The Alchemist shook his head. His hands, Chalmers noticed, wrung the neck of his cane.

“We don’t have the active book anymore,” Meteron said, in a tone that suggested his estimation of Chalmers—never quite so high as the doctor felt he deserved—had precipitously dropped. “Nora set it loose in the world, and when she found the data could carry on in another text, she hid the evidence and took the live document away to work with you. Now that it’s missing, it can move on to another carrier—not just another person’s hands, but into another text entirely.”

“How close to being full was that book, Doctor?” the Alchemist pressed.

“I—” Chalmers’s mouth opened, but all he managed was a squeak like a door on a bad hinge. “I . . . I can’t remember.”

“Try.”

“Parts of it were nearly done. There were dozens of pages left, though. A hundred, maybe? I don’t . . . it would last awhile longer.”

“Would it last eight months more?” the Alchemist asked. “From the time you saw it last until now, or beyond?”

Chalmers bit his lip. “Based on the previous speed at which data accumulated, yes . . . barely. Perhaps? It had awhile left. But that must be nearly gone now.”

Meteron looked to the Alchemist. “This Dor from Crystal Hill found Rowena. The lanyani on the ship said they can use the book to find the rest.”

Chalmers jumped in his seat as if a galvanic current had run up his backside. “I’m sorry, Dor from what can use which?”

“They have the book,” the Alchemist continued, quite as if the young doctor were not there at all. “But not for much longer, it seems.”

A waitress swept over, ready to refresh the table’s drinks. Chalmers watched Meteron wave the girl off, his heart pounding so fiercely his vision blurred.

“What do you mean someone found Rowena?” The solemn silence that followed made Chalmers long to call for a bottle of gin. “So someone—”

“The lanyani,” Meteron clarified. “The lanyani have the book, and they’ve figured out how to use it to track Rowena down?”

The Alchemist nodded. “And presumably the rest of the Nine.”

“We’re not just running out of time to find the Vautneks and get back the book,” Chalmers groaned. “We’re running out of time before it moves to a new receptacle entirely.”

“And we’re on the wrong side of the world to intercept it, when it does,” Meteron added.

“But it also means we’re on the wrong side of the world to stop whatever the lanyani are planning,” Chalmers cried.

The Alchemist pushed the book back to the Reverend Doctor. “See if Keeper will let you use his spark line, Ann. I need you to pass word of this to the Dolly Molls.”

Rowena watched the fighters in the sawdust pit dig into each other with elbows and knees, hurling their weight against each other hard as the surf on stones. She’d seen her share of street brawls near Rotten Row and Blackbottom End, but this was something different. Those fights were brutal and artless, and always cost a man more than he won. This, ugly as it was, looked more like some kind of a dance, with bodies closing and weaving together.

The broader of the two women hooked an arm around the other’s leg and dropped to her knees. Turning, she flung her opponent like a rag baby. Even the sawdust and the cheers weren’t enough to dull the loud report of a shoulder popping and cartilage tearing when the thrown woman struck the ground.

Rowena winced. But she kept watching. The thrown woman kicked her legs up, kipping to her feet, and paced around her opponent warily.

A hand closed on Rowena’s shoulder. She flinched, jumping back. “Our supper’s come,” the Old Bear said.

Rowena glanced back at their teetering table, its surface crowded with plates and mugs. The room wavered in the smoke and sweat and heat. Food? The thought set her stomach on edge.

“I don’t—” Rowena shrugged apologetically.

“I’m not so hungry.” The Old Bear grimaced. “We should have found some other place to meet.”

“No. No, I like it. Sort of.” Rowena let herself be guided away from the crowd, though she stopped the Old Bear at a quieter nook where the kitchens curved away from the rest of the Maiden’s rowdy floor. “This was an old haunt for you?”

“One of several. The Logicians care about it enough to see it remains open, though not to see what goes on inside. All the best campaigners base their charters here.”

Rowena scanned the room, appraising. “Yours, too?”

He grunted in the affirmative. “Ivor always favored it. When it was only the two of us, before Leyah and Anselm, we could use the pits to make coin between contracts.”

Rowena’s nose wrinkled. “Not hard to picture him knocking folks’ heads around.” She glanced at the Old Bear. The set of his jaw under his graying beard made her look again, harder.

“What?” he asked.

“Bloody Reason. Was it you down there?”

“They wouldn’t allow a man with a clockwork limb in the pit. Their only sensible rule. A hand like Ivor’s could drive clean through a man’s face.”

“Were you any good?” Rowena asked, too eagerly. The idea of the Old Bear— her Bear—circling and punching and crushing in that pit was at once revolting and fascinating.

“Good enough to keep the bills paid. Some of them, anyway. It was a long time ago.”

“Still, though—”

“Don’t get any notions of it being romantic. It’s nothing but broken noses and split lips, and that’s for the lucky ones.”

They turned back toward their table, only to bump into a man as big as one of their airship’s boilers.

The stranger smiled down at Rowena. His teeth were very white and terribly crooked, like a hand of playing cards badly fanned.

“Sorry,” Rowena said. “Didn’t see you there.”

The Old Bear took her arm, pulling her a little closer.

The boiler took note of that. He raked his smile over the Alchemist— looking up to do it. The Alchemist was a hand taller than the next largest man in the pub.

The next largest man, Rowena judged, was probably this cove.

“Heard you say you’ve done some rounds below,” he said, loud enough to draw the eyes and ears of the folks on the near end of the pit. The boiler looked the Alchemist up and down. His gaze lingered on his cane and the girl at his side. “Must’ve been a long time ago, grandpa.”

“It was. Excuse us.”

The boiler put a hand up—waiting to do it so his palm would thump against the Alchemist’s chest as he moved to pass him by.

“You any good?” the boiler demanded.

The Old Bear stared at the man’s hand, two of its fingers smeared against his folded spectacles. He looked up, his eyes gone flat and hard.

“I’ve answered that question already tonight. And we’ve yet to take our supper.”

The boiler shrugged a shoulder the size of a holiday ham. “Just making conversation. I like conversation. This yours?” He nodded toward Rowena. An angry flush burned up her neck. “I didn’t know the cat dens sold ‘em off so young.”

“I am afraid you’ve made the wrong assumption,” the Old Bear replied. “Rowena. Go join Ann and the Doctor, please. I’ll be along.”

Rowena tried to skirt around the boiler’s other side, but someone from his table had risen, covering her path like a rolling boulder. She flinched back, realizing it was a woman—broad as a brick wall and hemmed in by something between a corset and a bandolier, pockets of munitions and bladed things stashed here and there like the bows on a proper lady’s underthings.

“Oh, hell,” Rowena muttered. “We could use somebody small, you see,” the boiler was saying, edging in closer to the Alchemist, his hand still pressed to the taller man’s chest. “Got a job that needs an inside touch, and Mayeline and I just aren’t suited.”

“Name us a price on her,” the woman the boiler had called Mayeline said. She had a voice like gravel pouring down a factory chute. “We can have her back to you in one piece. Just need her for a day or two. What d’you say?”

“No.”

Mayeline sniffed. She looked honestly hurt. “We’d keep her out of harm. C’mon. We’re chartered. Legal. Anybody hereabouts would vouch for us.”

Rowena surveyed the room. The concentric circles of observers had grown. The looks Rowena spied passing between them suggested Mayeline might not have had as many backers as she imagined. One skinny man with a hooked nose spat at the floorboards, punctuating some side-long comment Rowena couldn’t hear. His comrades laughed. She had the terrible feeling, as his pinprick stare dragged across her skin, that it wasn’t Mayeline he was scoffing at.

“The girl isn’t what you suggest,” the Old Bear answered, grinding the phrase in his teeth.

The boiler snorted. “What is she, then?”

“I’m his daughter,” Rowena blurted out. “He’s my da.”

For an instant, an expression Rowena couldn’t quite read flashed across the Old Bear’s face – something warm and unguarded. Then his sober face ordered itself again, before anyone else took note of it.

Mayeline belted out a laugh. The boiler sniggered, shaking his head. “Sorry, grandpa,” he said. “Guess I didn’t see the family resemblance.”

Rowena’s hands knotted into fists. She wished she wasn’t wearing a skirt and blouse, even if it was a riding skirt and good for moving. The strangers’ greasy solicitude was bad enough. Their scorn was a bridge too far.

“Well, he is,” she snapped. “And you can piss off with your inside work or whatever it is. C’mon, Da.”

The Alchemist raised a hand to brush the boiler’s paw away. The brute’s fingers closed over his wrist, instead. He leaned close, bare inches from the Alchemist’s face.

“She en’t your daughter,” he snarled. “Any fool can see that. And if she en’t on your charter, there’s nothing to keep us from having a conversation with her about incentivized employment.”

“The hell you will!” Rowena spat.

An arm came down on her shoulder, knocking her off balance. She fell into a wall of humanity. Mayeline. Rowena tried to stomp the woman’s toes, but Mayeline’s boots might have been made of iron, for all the good it did. She snatched Rowena up in an embrace that was decidedly more bear than hug., crushing the breath out of her.

Then a lot of things happened, all at once.

There was movement off to Rowena’s left, dark and darting. Master Meteron stealing up behind Mayeline. In the same moment, the Alche-mist spun in the boiler’s grasp, breaking his hold and snatching his opponent’s wrist. He straightened the man’s arm, then reversed his grip on the cane in his right hand, palming its handle like a set of boxer’s knuckles. In one, sharp motion, the Alchemist drove its brass head into the outside of the boiler’s elbow. There was a sickening crack as the whole arm buckled. The boiler howled and sank to his knees, hugging his ruined limb.

Meteron’s hand flashed past Rowena’s face, plucking a leaf-bladed dagger from one of the pockets in Mayeline’s battle-corset. He raked it across Mayeline’s forearm as she wrangled Rowena.

Her roar came an instant later, strangely deeper than the boiler’s. Blood coursed down her arm as her hand went slack. Rowena scrambled back, bumping against Meteron, who stood near enough to admire his handiwork—and to finish it, if it came to it. The Old Bear loomed over the boiler, his jaw tight.

“Oh, stop it,” Meteron said, the screams of the wounded finally subsiding into whimpers. “You’re both right-handed. Consider yourselves lucky.” He raised an eyebrow at the Alchemist. “You could still invite that one down into the Pit, you know. He seemed interested.”

The Alchemist turned his grip on his cane and leaned into it, making his way back to table forty-nine. “I’ll pass.”

Rowena turned to follow him, then spied someone else darting from behind Meteron toward the curtained exit to the grotto and the street above.

“Hey!” she cried. Master Meteron turned. She snatched the bloodied throwing knife from his unguarded hand, hurling it hard for the running boy’s knee.

She missed by nearly a yard, the blade thunking into the wooden landing by the door. It was still enough to scare him. When he looked back, wide-eyed, she put her hand up to throw again. He didn’t linger long enough to notice it was empty. The bank wallet that had been stowed under Meteron’s jacket tumbled from his hands as he scrambled, whimpering, through the curtained door.

Master Meteron smiled at Rowena. “Nicely done. I hadn’t been thinking about scavengers.”

Rowena imitated his one-shouldered shrug. “I was one. Comes natural.”

He took his time sauntering over to fetch his wallet. No one in the pub seemed interested in contesting his ownership of it. By degrees, the Maiden’s Honor resumed its usual business. Someone—bouncers of some kind, though Rowena had to wonder where they’d been just half a minute earlier—came by to gather up the boiler and Mayeline. No one said a word about damages, or who would clean up the mess, or if there was some price to be paid for one company attacking another.

Rowena had a feeling this place had worked out its own way of managing moments such as these.