24.

Never one to complain overmuch, Erasmus Pardon found he had an ever-growing list of objections to his first day in the Grand Library of Nippon, and nowhere to apply his concerns. Nowhere except his subconscious, which had never been as quiet as other men’s. Of late, it had proven particularly restless. And rude.

You don’t remember it at all, do you? Rare challenged as he limped down the marble staircase leading to the Grand Library’s main floor.

He missed Leyah. She had been an echo, a vague haunting, a feeling of love and regret knotted together. She was a hurt too tender to be touched. But the pain of her reminded him his heart had once had a purpose. He had held the memory of her more than she had held the reality of him. When at last he let her go, something altogether different slipped into the space left behind.

Rare was a wound tearing itself open, one stitch at a time. She strode alongside him, often before him, peeling away his attention in layers. She perched in the background of conversations with a Cheshire smile. Some days were worse than others. Days like today verged on intolerable.

Don’t remember what? he thought back to Rare, scanning the long spokes of library shelves for a dark-haired girl in jodhpurs and walking boots. Chalmers hadn’t wanted to leave the apartment suite once they’d escaped Madames Curator and Kurowa. Nervous and disconsolate about the interview, he’d thrown himself into rearranging all Rowena’s unpacking, making little visible improvement in the order of his temporary study, but succeeding handsomely at redistributing the packing shavings otherwise confined to the crates. Erasmus hadn’t liked the look of the broken Fabricated lying stories below the sitting room window in a puddle of moonlight. Two other, larger Fabricated whirred and clacked around it, sweeping up its ruins with funereal solemnity. Rowena was nowhere to be found. A supper trolley waited in the hall, attended by a mute, glass-eyed Fabricated fashioned to resemble a young woman, its features improbably lush and curves anatomically dubious. The untouched food troubled Erasmus far more than the eerie servant. He didn’t think Rowena would enjoy Nipponese cuisine, being unused to its elaborate preparations, sharp tastes, and unexpected textures—but it was still food, and the girl had a ferocious appetite.

He’d left the Reverend Doctor behind, trusting the unpacking to keep him out of trouble. Anselm would return soon enough. Rowena, on the other hand—

This place is exactly like your mind, Rare insisted, her exasperated impertinence clutching at Erasmus’s divided attention. Surely you can see that.

He responded with the mental equivalent of a grunt. Libraries are a highly generic landscape.

He spied a girl rounding a shelf halfway across the reference floor, then noticed her kimono and slippered feet and muttered a curse.

Rare’s revenant crouched before him, knocking soundless knuckles against the checkered floor. The tile beneath her was the first in a ring of embossed stone forming an ellipse up and down the wheel-hub floor. Even upside down, he recognized its mark, distinct from the others in the arcs to either side.

Highly generic? Rare’s brilliant blue eyes flicked toward Erasmus’s right sleeve, half rolled, the deep, black lines of a tattoo matching the mark on the floor nearly lost against his dark skin. Tell me another one, Father. She stood, watching him pass her by, cane punctuating his steps. For all intents and purposes, I live here, you know.

He knew all too well.

There’s no reason not to explain yourself to me, Rare shouted, rising to follow him. Her voice held no echo in the Library’s vast space, for it was all contained in his mind. On campaign, he’d mastered the awkward trick of parallel processing snatches of conversations in his mind and his awareness of the outside world, but Rare’s presence—even when she chose to conceal it—was as distracting as a dull roar in his ears. Perhaps he would adapt to it, in time. But she seemed uninterested in making that adjustment any easier or more likely.

What is there to explain? he thought back. Two clerks pushed carts of books awaiting reshelving past him, moving down the spokes of shelving with a precision eerily like the library’s automatons.

Rare cut in front of him, her timing fortunate. It would have looked to an outsider as if he had stopped to avoid a clash with one of the passing clerks. He knew it was possible to step through her entirely—or for her to pass through him—but it was too much a reminder of the absence at the core of her presence. He scowled at her, hoping it would appear to be at his own cantankerous musings.

You could explain the mark on your arm, Rare demanded . The similarity between this Library and the innermost landscape of your bloody mind, perhaps? And while we’re at it, a host of other things you’ve never spoken of. What you did before campaigning with mother, or even with Ivor. How you do the things you do. Where you came from. Any of it.

His daughter’s face had begun as a storm cloud. Now it was something else, electric with tension and about to break.

You never let me in, she seethed. And then, with a bitter bark, she looked all around. And now, even on the inside, I can’t find my way through to you.

Her gaze fell on something, then, and she snorted disgust. And I suppose I’ll have to keep waiting.

Erasmus saw Rowena jogging down another spoke of shelving, turning her shoulders aside to trot narrowly past a clerk carrying an armload of books.

“Bear! Do you recognize it? Isn’t it amazing?” she cried, a few decibels louder than any sensible library patron ought to have done.

Rare raised an eyebrow. Not so dim after all, is she?

Quiet.

Erasmus stayed the girl with a hand on her shoulder, drawing her up short of some delighted gesture.

“A secretary,” he chided, “knows better than to run and shout in a library.”

Rowena rolled her eyes, but didn’t protest. “But d’you recognize it?”

“Most of what occurred after my fall from the Cathedral is lost to me,” he murmured. It was, at least, partly true.

“Talking to the Grand Somebodyorother go well?”

“It went long; whether well remains to be seen.”

“But we’ve got access to the old volumes? The what-do-they-call-thems?”

“The Amanuensis library. And no.”

Rowena leaned close, barely suppressing a wicked smile. “When’s that sort of thing stopped us before, eh?”

“Come along, girl. There’s supper to be had and planning to be done. And Anselm will have something new to share with us, I suspect.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s still meeting with Madame Curator. He wouldn’t have lingered this long without very good reason.”

“Everything,” the Reverend Doctor Chalmers despaired, “is a catastrophe, Miss Downshire. How am I supposed to find anything in this mess?”

He stood at the center of the room he’d chosen with considerable deliberation and a triumphant collapse of baggage hours before. The various bioluminescent plants—drapey ivies bred by the Logicians for their heatless, flameless illumination, well suited to buildings full of paper and bamboo—glowed from their sisal-woven cradles, lending the chamber a warm, ruddy glow. Rowena glowered at him with a gravity well beyond what her small body should have been able to generate. The Alchemist stood behind her. Chalmers couldn’t help but suspect the pipe in his teeth masked a subtle amusement.

“Well, maybe,” the girl countered, “you could have started with unpacking your own stupid things and you wouldn’t have this problem.”

Chalmers had intended his response to sound offended. It did, insofar as any half-coherent splutter might. “You are my secretary !”

“Exactly!” Rowena ticked her response off, finger by finger. “Which means I en’t your maid, your seamstress, your laundress, your stevedore, your footman, or your mother. ’Sides, things are organized.”

“Organized! How?”

“Alphabetically.”

“Alphabetically,” Chalmers echoed flatly.

“Alphabetically-ish.”

Chalmers snatched two books set on a shelf near a sidetable. “The Z’s are before the A’s on this shelf! What kind of alphabetizing is that?”

Rowena’s mouth set in a hard line. “It’s not by author. It’s by topic.”

“You don’t know what these books are about!”

“But I could read most of the titles!”

Chalmers rounded on the old man, who by that moment was indeed sporting an ill-concealed smile. “Alphabetical by topic. Honestly, who does that?”

“I do that,” Rowena snapped. “Now the supper trays have been sent up, and I’m starving, even if it all smells like pickled dress stockings.”

Chalmers did his best not to revisit the topic of his portable study unboxed into chaos. (It would appear Rowena had alphabetized his possessions down to his suit jackets, her only defense being a certain fondness for the alphabet, now that she was learning to read properly.) He ate with chopsticks and thin rice pancakes as his tools, gathering up shreds of pickled cabbage and rolls of dense, raw fish and spicy condiments wrapped in dried seaweed. The native cuisine of Koryu, the mainland arm of the Lemarckian Protectorate, where Chalmers first learned the coordination required to eat in such a manner, bore many similarities to that of Nippon. He even quite liked their various dishes of whipped egg in hot rice porridge. Rowena Downshire seemed markedly less at ease with the food, more poking at it than eating it, despite her bold declarations.

Chalmers served up his view of the meeting with the Grand Librarian and digested Rowena’s suspicions of the Fabricated tamarin in return. Her account gave him pause, even though he had anticipated their presence in Nippon would occasion some scrutiny. The hours-long entry interview would have confirmed that by itself, even without his campaigner companions’ infectious paranoia creeping past his immunities. Chalmers’s concern (one the Alchemist shared, if his more-than-typically-taut silence were any clue) was that the tamarin’s destruction would only redouble efforts to spy on them more subtly.

Anselm Meteron did not appear until the supper tray was quite eaten through, the apartments transformed by the deployment of tatami mats, cushions, and a game table over which Rowena and the Alchemist moved tiny, porcelain chits down a system of lines and interstices Chalmers found altogether inscrutable. He looked up at Meteron’s arrival from a sheaf of notes he’d been reorganizing, marveling at Rowena’s ability to lay waste to an entire logical system.

Chalmers’s mother had always liked cats, despite her husband and sons’ rampant allergies. The young Reverend saw in Meteron’s satisfied grin a look that would have fitted quite nicely between their impertinent whiskers.

“You’ve missed supper, I’m afraid,” said Chalmers.

“I assure you, Doctor, I haven’t. Glad to see no one was worried,” Meteron replied, shutting the sliding paper screen to the anteroom behind him. The thief arranged himself on an ersatz settee of cushions, just in arm’s reach of the game board. He waved a four-and-a-half-fingered hand toward one of its corners. “He’s going to have you on your knees with a basic joseki in four turns, cricket.”

Rowena pulled a sour face. “I’m doing fine. I’ve already got a bunch of his pieces.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What kept you?” the Alchemist murmured. He lifted a black piece and passed it down the line, pinning down another of the girl’s chits. She flinched in surprise.

“Dinner. Plotting. Scheming. My irresistible charm.”

Chalmers’s ears pricked at that. “You’ve talked her into letting us access the Amanuensis library?”

Before Meteron could answer, the Alchemist tapped a finger by his ear and cast his gaze around the room generally. Mind your tongues, the look said. Meteron nodded.

“There’s a little errand she’d like me to run before that decision is made.”

Chalmers frowned. “What am I to do in the meantime?”

“There are those names of His Grace’s likely supporters you could check against the Library’s visitor logs. Cross-check their recent research interests. I very much doubt they’ve sat idle all this time. Some may have been nosing into matters of interest to us.”

“En’t we going to just, you know?” Rowena gestured in a manner that suggested maneuvering a lockpick.

Meteron sighed. “That, sadly, looks a good deal more impractical than we had hoped. I wouldn’t hazard it.”

Rowena opened her mouth to ask a question and stopped short, seeing two more of her pieces disappear in the cramped corner she’d found herself herded into. The Alchemist sat back on his cushion, looking satisfied.

“I’ll be damned,” she muttered at the board. “Well, if Doc can keep busy with all that, good for him. But what about Bear an’ me?”

What about, the Alchemist countered mentally, the security surrounding the Amanuensis library? Describe it.

Chalmers’s nerves had found nothing very soothing in Anselm’s report up to that point. Being suddenly looped into a four-way congress of minds, where communication was equal parts words and the kinotrope slides of remembered images and sensations and impressions, did even less to comfort him, even if it guarded against unwanted ears. Meteron’s careful enumeration of the hazards, human and otherwise, set between them and the cache of Vautnek texts turned his stomach in knots.

The Alchemist’s usual scowl resumed its place. It seems unlikely the books have always been guarded so well. Ignorance alone would have kept them secure.

Anselm nodded. The grease inside the lock still smelled fresh. I’ d guess it’s been on less than a month.

So the Library knew we were coming, Chalmers said.

We knew that as soon as Madame Kurowa showed her face in Lemarcke. The Rolands never hired her as a liaison. They wouldn’t have done it without our leave.

Chalmers shivered off the uncanny connection and returned to speaking aloud. “And this, um. This errand you’ve been asked to do, to earn us entry?”

“You let that be my concern. I have a few ideas of how to be about it.”

“But what will Bear and I do, if we can’t get into the Aman-u-whatever library now?” Rowena pressed.

“The Old Bear will be free to work as he sees fit. There are several directions I would advise that to go, pending Doctor Chalmers’s findings,” Anselm replied. “As for you, cricket, Madame Kurowa wants your help.”

“For what?” the Alchemist and the girl spoke in near-unison.

Meteron smiled. “Apparently, there’s a project afoot which requires very small hands. I think it will prove quite worth our while for you to carry it out.”