21.

5^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

SAKHIDA ISLAND, LEMARCKE

The Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, feeling too little the seasoned scholar and too much the restless schoolboy under the notary’s disapproving glare. The Alchemist studied the document before them with furrowed brows, his raptor eyes swooping up over the rims of his spectacles as he paused in his reading, punctuating the silence with questions about changes in the law, riders and clauses, and other minutiae that put Chalmers in mind of his first year Apocrypha lectures.

Rowena all but danced in place as she waited. Chalmers steadied himself on the soles of his shoes, hoping that if he did not cut a very convincing pattern for a campaigner, he might at least avoiding looking half so puppyish as she. For his part, Master Meteron looked little more than bored.

“Eight pages now?” he’d complained when the Lemarckian notary passed them the charter update. “God’s balls, do they expect a cheek scraping and our marks from Sabberday exams, as well?”

“Don’t tempt,” the Alchemist murmured over the papers.

“Hmph. Well, best do them the usual way, then.”

“What’s that?” Rowena asked.

The rogue winked. “Pepper boring honesty with audacious fiction until all the blanks are filled.”

That had been nearly a half-hour before. Now, they were down to the signatories’ page.

“You’ll need the final page notarized, of course. Mind the change to the Ecclesiastical Commission representative line, as well,” the hatchet-

nosed woman behind the grille cautioned as Meteron produced a cartridge pen.

“What change?” Chalmers asked. He crowded between the Alchemist’s tall shoulder and Meteron’s much shorter one, jabbing his face as near to the page as he could manage.

“A properly filed charter used to require the signature of a single EC representative to render it valid. Our offices now require two. Far too much graft in the past, Doctor. I’m sure you understand.”

Chalmers cast the Alchemist a worried glance. “Two. I—I’ve met a few deacons and such since I arrived in the spring. Perhaps one of them could—”

From Chalmers’s left, a hand with four and a half fingers pressed a ring to the paper in one of the three places where it been chemically conditioned to take on the impression of a seal.

Chalmers bird-necked around to gawk at Anselm Meteron. Meter-on’s hand disappeared into the inner pocket of his jacket, like a conjuror vanishing a false card.

Chalmers dropped his voice to a theatrical whisper. “Did you steal that from someone in the queue?”

Meteron sighed. “Bloody Reason, Reverend. You can’t honestly believe I was born to Allister Meteron and not put through the seminary paces.”

Chalmers blinked. “You’re a Reverend Doctor?”

“Deacon. Never sat my final examination. Other interests to pursue.”

“Err—yes. Of course.”

Chalmers affixed his signature and his seal to the page beside Meter-on’s and passed the document along.

Rowena scratched out her signature in a wobbly, wide-spaced print that more closely resembled the hand of a kinder-student than a girl better than half-grown. Chalmers wondered how often she’d practiced those letters and how many margins of how many account ledgers in the Stone Scales now bore her infant scrawl.

She reached the final letter nearly a minute after beginning and looked up at the Alchemist, beaming.

Phillip Chalmers had grown up the lackluster middle son of a costermonger, too weak to take up his father’s barrow and not brilliant enough to demand an immediate elevation out of the free schools. He’d had to work twice as hard as others to achieve even modest success, but he had done it, all the same. His father and mother’s pride had been his chief motivator. Only later had his own pride entered into it.

He imagined he must have looked at his family as Rowena looked at the Alchemist, earnest and hungry for praise. His parents had looked back with pure, uncomplicated admiration. But there was nothing uncomplicated in the look the Alchemist gave his ward.

They returned to the Maiden’s Honor that morning, which appeared to have opened for the sole purpose of providing them (now properly the Corma Company and again a member of its preferred patronage) a place to conference over the contents of Nora’s safety deposit box. Chalmers unpacked the papers and the now-silent notebook bearing the Grand Library’s crest, passing them around to his companions. They read, Rowena sometimes leaning over to point at things in Nora’s letters, murmuring questions to the Alchemist. Chalmers translated Pierce’s hen-scratch dutifully. Anselm leaned his chair at a perilous angle, perched against the wall, its two front legs insolently airborne. He flipped pages in Nora’s lab book and ground at the stump of his missing finger with a restless thumb.

Chalmers paced. It was a habit to which he had always been prone. A crook-backed old woman made her rounds of the bar floor, shouldering a wash-bin of half-drunk ales. She was probably still working from the night before. Madame Kurowa had departed the rooming house the Rolands had rented them almost an hour earlier, armed with Engine-printed copies of their traveling papers with which to secure their final passage to Nippon. She had not had a copy of their campaign charter.

That was, at least in past, what they had come here to discuss.

The sound of a throat clearing brought Chalmers into proper focus.

Meteron tossed the notebook on the table. It would have skidded off its edge, if not for Rowena’s hand swatting it back. The girl scowled at him as he stretched, yawned, and laced his hands behind his head.

“So, summing up,” Meteron began, “you think there are things in the Grand Library that will help us find the Nine and keep them out of harm’s way.”

“Nora thought that,” Chalmers corrected.

Meteron raised an eyebrow. “We’ve a difficulty to navigate, then, seeing as your partner stole from the Library and meant to give a presentation to the whole of the Ecclesiastical Commission on the very thing they’ve been keeping secret for generations. I very much doubt they failed to notice.”

“But I have a plan, you see—”

“He’s right, Doc.” Rowena alternated between peeking at the letters the Alchemist surveyed and digging a deeper trench with her knife through the butter crock. She gnawed an overtoasted heel of bread, wrestling out words between bites. “I wouldn’t let you near any of my stuff if you did me a turn like that. Can’t see why the Library would be forgiving.”

“They might be, if the trip were intended to make amends,” the Alchemist said through a cloud of pipe smoke.

Chalmers pointed to him victoriously. “Yes, thank you! Just—look, I understand Nora’s work with Bishop Meteron puts me in a very precarious position as a researcher seeking access to their archives, but if I’ve come with the intention of returning the old book, the one she took, and apologizing for my role in a theft I did not even know had taken place, that seems a reasonable plan. It’s not having the current text to return which poses a problem.”

Rowena pulled a face. “Does it? I mean, you were beat up, kidnapped, and had your apartments all busted up. Your stuff got stolen, and once you came here and found this dead book and how it connected to the other one, it was too late to find it again. There’s a Constabulary report about your being held captive and everything.”

“Even so, what we have to determine is why I need you with me,” said Chalmers.

“The public reasons,” said the Alchemist.

“And the private ones,” finished Meteron.

“Security,” Chalmers suggested, pacing again. “That will do for both, though it does very little to explain Rowena’s presence.”

He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice. He’d been proud of his scheme for begging admittance to the Library and relieved to learn through his research that there was some precedent for reverend doctors and bishop professors traveling under guard. But typically, the Ecclesiastical Commission provided its own staff for the purpose.

“Your hiring private security makes sense,” Meteron answered, sounding bored with the preliminaries. “You were held by EC security, though that’s been explained away as Regenzi using his wealth to corrupt otherwise reliable servants of the Commission. Now that you’re free, they all seem a bit suspicious to you. You were in Corma, so you looked up an out-of-date charter, hunting for some old hands on the cheap. The Rolands took care of the rest.”

Rowena snorted. “Why would anybody believe you went back on campaign, let alone on the cheap?”

“Anyone who knows me well knows I do rather foolish things when I’m bored. As for explaining your presence, cricket . . .” Meteron shrugged, one-shouldered. “You’re Chalmers’s secretary.”

The girl all but fell out of her chair. Chalmers might have, too, had he been sitting.

“But she’s barely literate!”

“I en’t a secretary !”

“Enough,” the Alchemist barked. Chalmers winced. The Alchemist folded his spectacles, hanging them from his shirtfront, and straightened Nora’s papers. “It’s a passable story. Gammon’s report on the events at the Cathedral left our names out, so our prior connections are largely unknown. Now what, Doctor, do you need us actually looking for?”

“The Bishop’s allies. Whoever has been helping him research the Grand Experiment. Anything connected to the Nine. A way into wherever the librarians keep the completed copies of the book, if I’m forbidden legal access. I must find a pattern in the older texts, something that might allow us to predict how soon the text will choose new subjects, or if there’s a distribution pattern to them I’ve missed.”

“That could take years of work,” Meteron said.

“If needs must, Master Meteron.”

Rowena’s eyes had gone wide. “But my mum! She’s back in Amidon. I never said I wanted to stay here forever.”

“I understand your goals, Doctor, but they’re impractical,” the Alche-mist said. “Our first priority is to find the people working for, or with, the Bishop and what they’re after.”

Chalmers blinked. “Isn’t it obvious? They want the names. Of the Nine. The Vautneks.”

“But why?” Anselm Meteron’s smile could have cut glass.

“I . . . because . . . Regenzi wanted to find them and keep them all?” Chalmers stammered. “In a sort of moral quarantine.”

“Lab rats,” Rowena muttered. “He didn’t mean for those Vautneks to sit pretty like in a zoo. They’re lab rats—kept because they’re useful.”

Chalmers grimaced. “I know what experimental creatures are for. I also know what Regenzi told me.”

“And what did my father tell you?”

Meteron’s face was a frozen lake. There was no telling how deep the ice went, or what pressure would break through.

“We never met,” Chalmers admitted.

“Then it’s possible Regenzi went a little off-script.” Meteron slid from his seat and stretched. He winced at a pop in his right shoulder and looked to his hands, working their knuckles, spending more time on his missing forefinger than anything invisible warranted. “His Grace isn’t gathering a petting zoo of the divine will as an exercise in conservancy. He has an agenda—something he wants them to do for him. If we can learn who his people are and what they’ve been researching, we can potentially gum up his agenda without ever finding the Vautneks.”

Rowena perked up. “But we’re still going to try, aren’t we? Since the lanyani are after ‘em now, too?”

Chalmers watched Meteron and the Alchemist share a look, indecipherably brief. He looked away, not trusting his own treacherous face.

“We’ll try,” the Alchemist said.

“To that end, Doctor, I could use your help with something,” Meteron said.

“Anything—I mean, well.” Chalmers spread his hands. “I’ll try.”

“Are there any scholars of lanyani culture at the Grand Library?”

Chalmers wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “Lanyani culture?”

Meteron rolled his eyes. “That thing sentient beings do when they all get together and live in places and partner up, yes. Culture. Surely someone’s bothered studying it?”

“Um.” Chalmers was sickly certain the others could see the color rising on his face. He set about pouring tea, and forgot until he’d nearly turned over every notebook and carbon paper on the table in search of the milk that Lemarckian tea service did without it. He shoveled a desultory spoonful of strawberry jam into the smoky brew, instead. “Well, I know one. We shared a flat back in Rimmerston while I was looking for a post as a lecturer. It was after my doctoral thesis was accepted. They were just doing a few courses at seminary on a lark. They were from some wealthy Vraskan family—coal barons or some such, I think. Last I knew, they were in Nippon, gadding about, making donations to the Library in their family’s name to pay for their access.”

“They.” Meteron paused in rolling a cigarette. “You said you know one scholar.”

“They’re a more complicated person than you’re accustomed to, Master Meteron. I’m not entirely convinced you would . . . um . . . work well with them.”

The thief looked as though he were prepared to interpret that as a personal challenge. The Alchemist cleared his throat.

“We’ll settle the matter of personality differences another time. Let Anselm find your lanyani scholar while I look into Bishop Meteron’s contacts.”

Rowena looked up from her breakfast quizzically. “But if Master Meteron’s got the background in the EC, en’t it a waste not to give him that job? I mean, you probably know something about your da’s affairs, right?”

Meteron lit his cigarette with a flick of a lucifer against his thumbnail. “And his people know something about me. It’s too obvious. Better to keep me further from those circles. His Grace always kept our family’s connection to the Old Bear as quiet as possible.”

Chalmers did not have to wonder why. For all its claims of having made men equal in the world through education and science, there were those in the EC who saw in science an excuse to substantiate old biases. So many studies claimed to link the slope of a Leonine native’s brow to their native intelligence or celebrated the pedigrees of decorated scholars as a thin gloss on inherited traits. And then there were the whispered alehouse theories linking various women’s career growth with certain physical charms. Amidon was a better country than most at putting such petty conjectures aside. But there were other differences Amidonians liked to enlarge upon, whenever possible. Certainly a scientist of trade marrying the daughter of a prominent theosophist was one.

“All right,” Rowena said, a little too brightly. “That leaves me in charge of getting into the room with the old books, if nobody will give us a free pass in.”

Chalmers dropped his next spoonful of jam into his lap, rather than his cup. “I’m not certain that’s a good idea.”

“It is if I go with her,” Meteron said. He smiled. “Unless you’d like the man with the cane in charge of breaking and entering.”

The Alchemist gave his partner a look that could have gutted a fish. “If I did not know better, I’d think you enjoy my being lamed.”

“I am always starved for novel entertainments.”

“After nearly thirty years, needling me should have gone stale.”

Meteron shrugged. “And yet, here we are.”

Chalmers leaned toward Rowena, speaking sotto voce. “Are they always like this?”

“Pretty much. Pass the jam, would you? This porridge is awful.”

He nudged the pot her way, not entirely sure he had found her answer comforting.

“Oh, and . . .” She leaned close, too, a mischievous smile playing on her face. “Tell me about this ‘they’ of yours, doc.”