29.

9^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

Anselm consulted his chronometer. He had timed his arrival almost perfectly, down to hiring a riverboat whose lanyani pilot—a drooping, tentacular creature—was just laden enough with other finely bedecked passengers to ensure a leisurely voyage. His refusal of the ritual robes and sashes Madame Kurowa had suggested for the excursion had been utterly tactical. People loved a bit of the exotic sliding sideways into the everyday. All that changed, really, was how the exotic was defined: whose gaze offered judgment and applied standards. Anselm’s jacquard vest and tail-coat would have been de rigeur for an evening soiree in Corma, but in Nippon, they were strange and usefully disarming. Drawing attention to oneself on the job had its risks, but attempting to adopt local dress and doing it poorly hazarded far more.

“Let the leopard wear its spots, Madame,” he had told Kurowa. “It’s more natural than putting him in bearskin.”

He mounted a staircase leading up from the boardwalk, shrugging past other pedestrians too well-mannered to let their gazes linger on him overlong. The street toward which he bore translated, more or less, to “Ring of Fishes,” a kind of roundabout for clockwork carriages and Fabricated-drawn sedan chairs, with people in fine, summer-weight silks slipping along the lanes like fish down a river’s tributaries. At the center of the Ring of Fishes lay the Tower of Water. The sight of it stopped Anselm at the final stair’s edge. Someone behind him muttered an urgent, perhaps not altogether polite comment in Nipponese. He murmured an apology and sidled out of the main path, pausing beside a flower stall being boarded up for the night by a distractingly curvaceous girl.

Anselm had heard of the Tower of Water even before practical need set him to a careful study of its design. He’d been told to expect it would be magnificent—one of Nippon’s first and oldest architectural innovations, the centerpiece of the city’s elaborate design. He had not been prepared to be so entirely underwhelmed.

The wheel-like outer rim of the River of Fishes offered paths down toward a sunken-looking building. The pavement around it showed gaps where the walls seemed to have dropped down into a sheer sinkhole and then a few spare yards—three stories, no more—reached up from that crevasse to a pinnacle that looked better suited to the crown of a spire than a vaguely ovoid structure collapsed into the heart of Kyo-Tokai.

Anselm puzzled over it. He wondered if the mechanism still worked as the diagrams had described. Nippon fell victim to earthquakes and tsunamis in various seasons. Over the years, they had proven brutal enough to scour the sprawling nation-city off the coasts, scraping it back until mighty bulwarks had been built off its most vulnerable tracts of shoreline. Very little of Kyo-Tokai touched the open ocean anymore. The Logicians specialized in astronomy and meteorology, engineering and mathematics, more out of necessity than natural love, and this had led to dozens of meters and graphs and other devices meant to detect natural disturbances and build substructures of support against them. It was why so little of the city was even slightly elevated, instead sprawling like a rhizomatic plant to cover the ground and root into it for safety.

The Tower of Water looked like nothing more than a collapsed relic. Surely, its peculiar design would have made it vulnerable to such a calamity? How could the catastrophe have escaped news, and how could it not have changed the purported venue of the event the Grand Librarian had asked him to infiltrate, with one deadly objective in mind?

Slowly, as if raised by a magnet’s field, the hairs of Anselm’s neck rose. Behind him, the flower stall girl continued her packing, unperturbed. The ground began to shake. Slow, at first, then insistent rumbling, with a doggedness that made his instincts crack like a whip.

The flower girl smiled and nodded toward the fallen Tower. “Every day. It’s okay,” she said, in uncertain Amidonian. “You’ll see.”

And Anselm did see. The schematics had seemed impossible—but they had not lied.

Somewhere far underground, a mechanism rumbled, and out of the groove and the darkness into which the tower seemed to have tumbled, it rose, level by level, turning like a screw, sections sliding apart like the bands of the Old Bear’s telescoping blade. The upper three levels of the Tower of Water were, indeed, its only true habitable area, but not because the rest had fallen in some disaster.

The rest was a machine. A piece of art. Anselm did not realize he was staring until he felt his chin pulled upward, tied on a marionette string, his gaze tracking the long pipes and runnels, the curves of gleaming metal and planes of sparkling glass turning upward in the moonlight. It took fully ten minutes for the Tower of Water to rise up to its proper height, all the architecture of its long lifts and staircases revealed like pearly bones. And then, the tower made good on its name.

High above—twenty stories, Anselm’s burglaring eyes counted—the metal spouts shimmered, suggesting some unseen movement, and then a mist began to fall. The Tower of Water’s sluices opened, the pneumatic press used to deploy the structure pumping down its great confection of pipework a trio of waterfalls, spiraling around its outer edges and gathering like a moat over the crevice in the plaza below.

“God’s balls,” Anselm murmured.

The water channeled back to its natural runnels just around the tower’s base. Other people—elaborately silked and brushed, pinned and adorned, no doubt bound for this soiree, too—gathered around the River of Fishes. Women stepped down from sedans borne by Fabricated chairmen. Men handed one another down from rolling steam ricks and clockwork crank-carts, removing driving gloves and goggles and testing that the pins that set their hair in the traditional arrangements were right. The shining silver doors at the Tower’s base, crafted to resemble carp caught in mid-leap, parted, and a footman within bowed to the assembled.

Anselm eyed the proper place to slide into the crowd and studied those around him, sizing up the money and titles both implied and overt in their dress. The misty air left women’s pale, painted faces sparkling, though it did their silks no favors. He felt the dagger in his left sleeve and the pistol tucked under his right arm, both well out of sight with his jacket properly buttoned.

He passed his invitation to the waiting servant, who studied its cuneiform and the nine-fingered man who had offered it with unconcealed skepticism.

“Our families are old friends,” Anselm said, smiling. It was not even a lie—or not entirely one.

With a curt nod, the servant passed him up the line. For quite the first time since arriving at the Rolands’ ball, Anselm Meteron felt utterly at his ease.

Cyddra disliked many things. It was what made them difficult company. Their friends were forever worrying over offending their temperament. It wasn’t that these friends put much concern into Cyd’s well-being or happiness. Cyd’s money made keeping them contented a matter of crude, practical survival for those naturally ambitious sycophants, and everyone knew it, few more than Cyd themself. On the occasion of a substantial parcel of grants being awarded in the Tsuneteva family’s name and celebrated in Kyo-Tokai’s celebrated Tower of Water, Cyddra felt more scrutinized and catered to than ever.

It was awful.

And so, they stood on the balcony that wound round the ellipse crowning the Tower of Water, sullen and bored and thoroughly resenting their guests, their duties to their mother’s fortune, and most of all, their chaperone. They had stepped out into the open after the build-ing’s ascent was complete, though that hesitation had only come at their chaperone’s insistence. Mother dictated they were to have a chaperone until they were properly married, or until they took ordination with the Ecclesiastical Commission, whichever came sooner. Neither event struck Cyddra as particularly likely. Still, they supposed it wasn’t an entirely unwise imposition after the debacle they had made in lower Vraska the year before. “Swanning about,” Mother had called it. She’d had no problem with Cyd’s going when the ostensible purpose had been to court a match. Sadly, though Cyd had mastered the fine art of dissembling to their mother, their friends did not share the same talents, and all too quickly revealed what Cyd had actually been doing in the courts and libraries of Old Mongolia. It was around that time that these these same friends discovered that among the many things Cyd disliked, they disliked meddling most of all.

No wonder the friends Cyddra still had in Nippon had taken one look at the young scholar’s sour, imperious face spurning their escort’s guidance and steered well away from a scene that was only minutes from dissolving into a proper row. Madame Tsuneteva’s choice of a chaperone for her only child, a spinster aunt with the instincts of a goshawk, was sure to provide some entertainment for the party—but only if one observed it from a safe distance.

The fact that Cyd had delayed stepping out onto the balcony so long—had missed the entire glorious cascade’s beginning—was, in their mind, a most generous concession to their mother’s intentions.

It was also absolutely the last concession Cyd meant to afford anyone that night.

“Tell me,” Cyd said, stifling a yawn with their woodcut fan, “who I am looking at.”

Auntie Suki peered down at the line of people, barely more than beetles without her opera spectacles. “Hard to say.”

Cyd plucked the spectacles from the bangle at the old woman’s wrist. Two quick flicks and the lenses were at Cyd’s eyes.

“Madame Gorsky. Master Hanzo. At least three of the Ong-ba clan, though I can never tell them apart.” Cyd sighed, lowering the glasses. “Nobody.”

“There are nearly two hundred guests,” Suki protested. “All the finest—”

She had been about to say dignitaries, or scholars of the city, perhaps. Cyd rode over her, seething. “The finest xenophobic, close-minded, doctrinaire idiots Kyo-Tokai has to offer. I told Mother I would have been further along hosting a gathering in Hwarang, but she never listens. In Hwarang, at least, there are actual trees in places.”

“We have Fog Island,” Auntie Suki said.

Cyd scowled. The tone Suki had used—as if mentioning that place would score some positive mark in the conversation—rankled them.

“Don’t,” they answered.

Suki wasn’t cowed. Very little cowed her, an absolute necessity with Cyd as her charge for the night. But she did have the decency to look a little subdued.

The old woman glanced back at the lines of guests entering, the golden lift carriages spinning them upward. “Foreigners aplenty,” she observed. “I think I have spotted four already. Suits and cravats and other things.”

“And a taffeta gown, too,” Cyd agreed. “Stupidly hot, those. I tried a few back in Rimmerston, but the look never became me.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t.”

Cyd chose to ignore that. They were surprised how easy ignoring Suki proved to be. Hopefully, for the old woman’s sake, she would not be paid for her services based on her effectiveness. Everyone had to eat, and Cyd did not resent their auntie enough to be spiteful. Or at least, they didn’t resent her that deeply yet.

Something occurred to them.

“Four foreigners, you said?”

“Yes, four for certain.”

“I invited three.”

“Someone local must have passed their invitation on.”

“Possible. Well.” Cyd deposited the fan and spectacles behind the broad sash of their kimono. “I think it’s time to meet the guests and mingle. The sooner I know who isn’t expected, the sooner I will know whether to be pleased by the surprise.”

Anselm had perfected the art of appearing to mingle with a crowd while dwelling largely at its periphery during his boyhood’s Sabberday lessons. It had been an exceedingly useful way of abandoning tours of historical sites, with lectures given by docents and deacons, and returning at odd moments without the least notice of his comings and goings. The key was to make just enough conversation in passing with congenial-seeming people, and to find opportune moments to disengage from them and travel the floor to some other innocuous-seeming location, that everyone would remember having seen him somewhere, at some point. That impression of ubiquity led to an easy assumption of actual presence. If he spread his movements about properly, he could disappear for ten minutes for every one he spent in clear view.

At the present moment, he was exercising the liberties of a five-minute disappearance, assessing the tiered cocktail hall that comprised the Tower of Water’s usable space. For a building created by Logician technology, it was a beautiful, majestic, appalling monument to inefficiency. The hall could hold only a little better than two hundred guests comfortably, by Anselm’s estimates, and all for want of more actual floors beneath it. Whatever bulwarks had been built in the substructures of the city to protect the tower when it was not deployed were deep, complex—and capable of hiding many more things. If Anselm could be done with his task involving the ingénue the Grand Librarian so resented in good time, he had a mind to investigate what else lay below the Kyo-Tokai the people around him took for granted.

The benefit of a vast structure with a very small practical gathering space, though, was that keeping an eye on his target’s comings and goings became very easy.

Chalmers had been more than a little squeamish about Anselm’s plans when the thief pumped the Reverend Doctor for information about his former friend. Then again, Chalmers was capable of seeming squeamish about everything from breakfast menus to library catalogs. Now that Anselm had a look at the tall, rangy youth who was to meet with certain dire plans, he could understand Chalmers’s concerns.

“Cyddra isn’t what I would call your type of person,” he had warned. “You might find them difficult to charm.”

And Anselm had snorted, checking the edge of his knife against his thumbnail. “I think you underestimate me.”

The Reverend Doctor Chalmers, as it turned out, had not underestimated Anselm Meteron. Anselm Meteron had altogether misjudged his target.

A man of about Anselm’s age—an Amidonian, by the look of his coat and spats—indicated the host scholar with a tip of his champagne flute. He must have noticed Anselm watching Cyddra Tsuneteva’s descent of the spiral stair from the Tower’s outer rail, their kimono lifted slightly to prevent a most unfortunate tumble.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” the man said. Anselm pretended not to notice his solicitous smirk. “A friend of mine and I have a pool going about them. About what’s under those skirts, I mean. Ante’s a hundred marks, if you’re keen.”

Anselm studied the man, taking careful inventory of his ill-fitting waistcoat and overbrushed side-whiskers. The eastern Amidonian drawl was all affectation, far too little north coaster and too much southern bay to pass as authentic. A midlander, hoping to come off as old money.

Anselm eyed him grimly. “It’s not a skirt, you nit.”

Anselm followed Cyddra’s passage down the stairs, tracking which guests came forward to greet them at its foot and which hung back, murmuring like pigeons among themselves. A henpecked-looking older woman trailed after Scholar Cyddra, taking offered tokens cast in metal and carefully enameled with icons and inscriptions. The Nipponese equivalent of calling cards, to be displayed in a place of honor in the Tsuneteva household. Anselm had no such token. Certainly Madame Kurowa, bearing the Curator’s instructions, would not have wished him to carry something so material and traceable.

It was a shame their plans and his converged only so far. Differences of opinion about a job’s outcome tended to resolve badly. Then again, sometimes, it was just such matters of nuance that made a job really worth one’s while.

He moved around the room, quiet and conspicuous, and kept track of who spoke to the scholar and what tokens they passed. He waited for signs of the host making their escape.