37.

16^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

“You seem out of sorts.”

Rowena flinched at the sound of the Old Bear’s voice. She realized she’d stopped walking dead in the middle of the canal barge’s boarding platform. Muttering apologies in her best Nipponese, she let the other passengers shoulder past, taking their seats under the painted canopy. The old man’s raptor eyes studied her until her cheeks flushed.

“S’fine,” she answered, “I just didn’t sleep well last night.” Or the night before, or the night before that. “Thanks for taking me out of the Library today. I needed to get some air.”

Rowena stepped into the boat first and put a hand back to help the Old Bear keep steady as the craft keeled under them. He nodded his thanks, unhooking his cane from his arm. They claimed an empty bench at the back. Rowena surveyed the distance between them and the other passengers—shoppers and social callers and servants sent across the vast, state-sized city on some errand or other. They were near enough the rest not to seem suspicious and far enough away to converse privately. At the front of the boat, the drooping, tentacular lanyani that manned the craft lurched forward, stretching down into the waters. The barge drifted from the quay, the locks holding it in place falling away, triggered by some unseen mechanical cue.

“We’ve more than enough information from the Aggregator to parse through. I am glad to have your help,” the Old Bear said. He stretched out his bad leg as far as the seating permitted. “Now what’s troubling you?”

Rowena hesitated. He could just reach into her mind and poke around for the answer. But he wouldn’t. He’d done it once when she was a stranger and a liar. She was still a liar, but one he had decided to trust. She was sure of that. Her certainty of his faith hurt, when she thought of the second book she was not meant to have, secreted in her steamer trunk under a panel she’d made herself before they’d left Corma. Still full of secrets, after all this time.

The Alchemist would let her keep her own counsel. But she didn’t want to. She didn’t know how to explain the shuddering panic the stolen text had sent through her, or how deeply it still gripped her.

She tried, all the same. “You ever seen something for even just a second that made you feel . . . really small and sort of big, all at once? Like the whole world isn’t sized the right way, and you’re in some kind of dollhouse where if you turn too fast, you’ll knock everything down?”

The old man frowned. “I can’t explain it right,” Rowena continued. “But it’s kind of like that. I thought, maybe just going out with you—looking for answers to questions that are simpler, like ‘where was so-and-so going?’ or ‘what data did they ask for?’ . . . maybe that would make the feeling go away.”

And she had wanted to be with him. Their tasks—hers, earning Umiko’s confidence and using her tools to investigate the Bishop’s next moves, and his, taking her findings and probing the weary minds of disaffected functionaries for answers—had kept them on separate schedules, working separate places, for days on end. She had missed him. Rowena was not accustomed to missing people. She’d been a whole unto herself ever since her brother, Jorrie, died. Missing him had hurt so badly, she’d turned that part of herself off, burying it under her quest to pay down Mama’s debt. She’d thought she didn’t need people. But she needed the Old Bear. Not having him by her side ached in ways she couldn’t explain. He’d tamed her. Or she had tamed him. Maybe both. Even without trying, she felt his relief rising off him, a cool breeze amid the city’s swelter.

He’d missed her, too. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Who are we looking into today?”

“I visited the offices of the Nipponese Anchor Authority and pulled the travel records of the Reverend Doctor Deliverance Tegura, who came to the Grand Library several months ago to retrieve a parcel of data printed by the Aggregator. They are under the impression I’m an inspector representing the grant commission which has been funding Doctor Tegura’s work for the last several years.”

Rowena frowned. “Why’s that a useful cover?”

“Grant inspectors check into the progress of scholars awarded their institution’s monies. The Logicians would not dare dispute their authority.”

“That’s jake. And so you don’t have to worry about not being EC or being a foreigner, then.”

“Just so.”

“So, how much of them being under this impression is campaign craft, and how much is . . . other stuff?”

The Old Bear eyed her disapprovingly. “An admixture we’d be better served not to discuss openly.”

Their barge had paused at another quay head, letting off passengers who paused to drop their coins in the machine tiller set beside the sloe-eyed lanyani. Rowena studied the scene in puzzlement. “Is everybody dropping a different kind of coin?”

The Old Bear looked up from lighting his pipe, squinted, and nodded, shaking a scorched lucifer into the canal. “Nippon, Lemarcke, and the other countries in the Protectorate use a currency called ‘marks.’ It’s a system where certain shapes of coin and their images are tied to certain economic castes, and in some cases, to specific families and businesses. Each mark coin represents a small percentage of income from the owner of its design, and so a single mark to transport a passenger through the canals might represent a very small expenditure for a lower-class household, and a considerably greater one for the wealthy. It’s a frightfully complicated accounting process to redeem the actual value of a transaction, but the Logicians swear by it.”

Rowena considered. She was no wizard at maths, but one piece of that plan made sense to her. “So, everybody pays the same part of their value for a thing, but people who can afford a lot pay more for it? Reason’s Rood, that is a mess. But I guess it makes sure rich folks pay for keeping up streets and shops and such, doesn’t it?”

“It certainly does. Now hush awhile.”

Rowena saw why straight away. A group of soldiers was taking the place of the disembarking passengers, boarding two by two, six of them total. They wore banded mail shirts, glossy as enameled tea sets. Rowena was a little too used to Corma’s plump coppers, easily winded. The sight of proper security—military, really—chilled her. The Logicians who ruled Nippon liked nothing done in half-measures. She resisted the urge to rub her feet and ankles together. “Cricket,” Anselm called her. At least the nickname had made her aware of the nervous habit. Rowena gauged the soldiers warily, studying the long, single-edged blades stowed at the backs of their belts and the arquebuses that reminded her a little too much of the gun the Old Bear had never had the chance to shoot last fall.

“What’re they doing here?” Rowena whispered. “What’s their thing?”

“Their thing,” the Old Bear answered, in a voice that lingered around the second word as if prodding it with a scalpel, “is protecting order and Reason. An Argument is always six soldiers strong, and they cover the prefectures of Kyo-Tokai in shifts. These are probably coming on duty now.”

“And what happens if you’re caught disturbing peace and order and Reason and whatnot?”

“Fog Island happens.”

Rowena sewed her lips tight as a deaconess’s drawers, at that. She didn’t know what Fog Island was, precisely, but the name reminded her of the prison hulks on Misery Bay.

Rowena scanned the river banks, taking in a clearer, more complete vision of Kyo-Tokai than she had been able to previously, despite gazing out the high windows of the Grand Library compound every night. The sprawling city of two-tiered buildings, bowed roofs, tiled porticos, and everblooming cherry trees was little more than a busy blur from that vantage point. Here, she could truly see things.

The barge sailed downriver, angling toward an elaborate loch system. Rowena’s boat sat in a kind of purgatory between one space and another, waiting for the reservoirs from the pumping station to finish leveling off before the barrier itself finally opened, letting them pass through.

Rowena and the Alchemist dropped two marks into the till beside the lanyani boatman as they disembarked. Each of the coins bore a symbol Rowena didn’t recognize.

“Those didn’t come from the Rolands, did they?” she asked as the barge slipped away, taking the staring, stoic Argument along with it.

“I traded a little of the credit they put away for us in Lemarcke for some marks Keeper had put aside at the Maiden’s Honor. He sells off false marks stamped for various corporations and interests. What the Logician economic system gains in social equity it loses badly in graft.”

“I s’pose it’d take ages to track all the marks from a day of business back to their owners and pass on the charges. By the time anybody figured out they were phony, you’d be gone. I kind of like this system.”

“Don’t get light-fingered,” the old man cautioned. They walked a cherry tree-shadowed lane rising toward a gate and a vast, open yard beyond, air galleons anchored above. “The easiest way to end up in trouble here is to be caught using a mark you’ve no right to carry. Most of the people on Fog Island go there for just such petty theft.”

“So it is a prison.”

“In a manner of speaking. The Logicians don’t believe in wasting resources running a prison, in the usual sense.”

“How’s it un usual?”

“It’s an island far from the mainland, a rocky place with bad weather on the land and worse things lurking in its waters. They take the prisoners there by steamship and leave them.”

Rowena froze, her sandals rooted to the spot. “What d’you mean, leave them?” Slowly, the answer dawned on her. “They don’t waste resources,” she repeated, “because there en’t shelters or meals or guards or anything. They just leave folk there to die.”

“Or to live, however they can,” the Old Bear confirmed.

Rowena shook herself at the horror of it, then trotted a few steps ahead of him, trying to put the thought of Fog Island from her mind.

“Remember,” he cautioned, “you are my secretary, so you ought to take notes during our visit to the Anchor Authority.”

“Right. But en’t you going to be talking in Nipponese?”

“Your notes can be nonsense. Shorthand looks different in every language, and people tend to see what they think they should. All you need is cover.” He smiled at her, so brief Rowena wondered if she’d imagined it. “You’ll actually be checking their galvano-graph transmission record, to see who has been relaying messages to Doctor Tegura since her departure, and what about.”

Rowena pulled a face. “I can’t just sneak off in the middle of your talking without somebody noticing.”

“Oh, but they will notice you,” he said. “They have to.”

Rowena was so accustomed to thinking of Master Meteron as the deceiver of their company, it was easy to forget how comfortably the Alchemist could slip into an adequately tailored lie. The Nipponese Anchor Authority offices were staffed by a combination of Fabricated automata, feeding pearl cards one after another into an Engine that looked like a much-simplified version of the Aggregator. These were in turn managed by businesslike young women who resembled younger, more harried versions of Madame Kurowa. The Alchemist’s lie fit their expectations perfectly: an older gentleman, Army retired and likely wounded in action, judging from his cane, carrying out his duty to proper research and enlightenment by protecting the investment of his employers against scholars inclined to sloth, or fraud, or both. The Alchemist cut a figure their training taught them to respect, and so if his secretary were a little young and perhaps a little slapdash in her note-taking, it was an oddity they were prepared to forgive. They had been apprentices once, too. Thus, while the Old Bear ran through what the rhythms of language suggested was a rote list of questions, Rowena waited for the right moment to disappear into her real work.

She didn’t have to wait long. After a few minutes of conversation, the Old Bear produced a blank sheet of paper from an inner pocket of his frock coat. Rowena watched, dumbfounded, as he spread it on the counter between himself and the station manager, pointing to it with mute confidence.

“Osu,” the woman replied. She turned to Rowena and spoke slowly, her Amidonian meticulous. “Your warrant is in good order. Please be careful of the machines.”

Rowena looked to the Old Bear, hoping to convey her bafflement beneath a smile.

“Off you go.” He nodded toward the galvano-graph station outside the main office.

“Of course,” she said.

What, Rowena asked Leyah as she went, was that about?

An old trick. Sometimes, he can make people see things that aren’t there—especially things they expect to see.

A warrant, Rowena mused. Sneaky Old Bear.

Most of Rowena’s trickiest drops for Ivor Ruenichnov had involved acting like she belonged in a place that was actually none of her business. The galvano-graph station was no exception. Though the Old Bear’s mind trick had given her leave to run off, she decided to treat it like a job from the old days. You could get away with delivering a parcel, and say, and nicking an extra something along the way, provided you acted natural. Then nobody would look twice. Various mechanics, stewards, and secretaries walked past her. She arrived at the signal station with her head high, returning their courteous nods.

The galvano-graph station’s door was a split affair that could open at top, leaving the bottom behind as a sort of counter. She opened the lower half and edged past the lemur-shaped Fabricated perched atop the transmission box. Inside, shelves and drawers and sticking-pins bursting with messages pending or sent studded the walls. Rowena checked one of the very few real dates in her notebook—from the start of Eight-month, when Deliverance Tegura was to have arrived in Corma. She started fishing through the catalogs by recipient, happy Amidonian was the standard language of galvano-graph transmissions. Then she narrowed her search by dates.

There were indeed messages sent to Tegura, each coded from Vladivostoy. Rowena frowned, trying to call a map of the Lemarckian Protectorate to mind. Vladivostoy was at the outmost eastern edge of Vraska, hundreds of miles to the north. Some of the messages were received in Corma, and responded to. All spoke of a package— package will be needed within the month; package departing with me by steamer, expect delays; and so on. The signatories varied—L. Fredericks outbound, or sometimes A. Cortes, and D. Tegura inbound. Fredericks was a name she knew already, as close to a confirmation of the orders coming from Bishop Meteron as she was likely to see in print.

It was the messages sent from Corma to Tegura some days later that gave Rowena pause. Each was marked “to be held at waystation.”

5^th Eightmonth

0800

To: Anchor Authority Station 1, Nippon, Attn: Rev. Dr. D. Tegura

From: Mercy Commission Home, Southeby, Amidon

Returned from holiday to find my assistant relinquished Mrs. Downshire to your care pursuant to a request from His Grace. No medications accepted for the journey; no notice from Mrs. D’s benefactor. Please confirm your receipt of this message and Mrs. D’s well-being.

I eagerly await your prompt response.

Rev. Dr. M. Wyndham,

Lead Physician

Mrs. D. Rowena scattered the messages around her, scavenging for the requested response. Wyndham’s spark had arrived eleven days earlier. Eleven days! She found nothing in response—only a tiny paper slip indicating the system had pinged to confirm the message’s arrival. Other messages from Wyndham—each a little more urgent and clipped than the last—confirmed he had never received Tegura’s response. Nothing in the little galvano-graph office suggested there had ever been one. Rowe-na’s eyes stung with hot, furious tears.

Why had she ever left Corma? Why had she believed she needed to go? To save the world on an adventure? Adventure had found her, after all. It had found her mother. But why would the Bishop want her? What could she possibly have to offer him?

And then, like an avalanche of snow and twice as cold, the memory of the book and its charts and its all-too-clear markings of Mama’s cell reared up in Rowena’s mind.

“Rowena?”

She whirled around, still clutching the message from Dr. Wyndham. The Old Bear stood under the galvano-graph station’s awning, mopping his brow in the heat.

“They’ve taken her,” she blurted. “By steamship, ages ago. To Vraska, I think. He’s figured it out, Bear. I read it all wrong, but he didn’t. He knows she’s one of them.”

The Old Bear stepped through the half-door, a thunderous scowl rumbling in his voice. “What do you mean?”

“My mother. I saw it in one of the books, Bear, and it’s true. It’s got to be. And now he’s got her, and—”

The Alchemist dropped his stick and bent to look her in the eyes, holding her shaking shoulders. “Slowly. You’re not making sense.”

Rowena shoved a fistful of printed sparks against his chest. “ It’s all here. Just look at it. Why else would he take her?”

The old man gathered up the papers spilling off his waistcoat, donned his spectacles, and scanned the crumpled messages. Rowena backed away, feeling for a stool. She found the wall instead and slid down it, breathing hard between sobs that only now registered in her ears.

The Alchemist folded the sparks with three fast, brutal strokes and tucked them inside his coat. “Come along, girl. We have to leave.”

“For the Library?”

“For Vraska.”