41.

17^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

VLADIVOSTOY, VRASKA

The room was dark, but Clara Downshire had expected that. The Reverend Doctor Deliverance Tegura had been quite clear on that point. Too serious by half, that woman, but then again, what did Clara know of the pressures of working for the EC, let alone for someone so important as the Bishop Professor Meteron?

She found a chair, half-visible in the light stretching from the open door. The room gave her no sense of the Bishop being nearby. No surprise there. For days, she’d been accepting his apologies for the delayed introduction, every one of them noting the pressures of current research dividing his time. Clara wasn’t offended. Doctor Tegura and her new assistant, Ana Cortes, had occupied her time in the most curious ways, with little card games and drawing challenges. They were supposed to prove something about her—or test it. It was all the same to her.

And so, Clara sat, smoothed her skirts, and didn’t fuss over whether what little she knew of the Bishop Professor really mattered, or was even really true. She was used to knowing things when she needed to. It might be a jumble most of the time, but when it truly mattered, her mind never led her astray.

Her husband, Jerrol, rest his soul, always said she had a good head on her shoulders. The fact of her having a head at all after their dray horse bucked her square in her skull was a matter worth a little vanity.

Eyes finally adjusted, Clara considered the broad room full of the vague outlines of furnishings. She hummed. The nurses at the home had given her a reticule of little lady-things, full of pins and needles and darning thread. She passed the time threading pins through her apron, in-out-up-down, and finally through.

“I suppose,” she called, “you might well be in here already, Your Grace, and me none the wiser. That would be a fine trick.”

No answer. The vagueness that crept over Clara parted for half a moment. In the clear eye of its passing, she remembered the wrist chronometer Master Meteron—the other Master Meteron—had given her that spring and wondered if she had come at the wrong time. Livvy Tegura had said ten of nine . . . Or had it been nine of ten?

She examined her wrist, but found the room too dark, and suddenly, a crashing certainty fell over her. She must be late. She had at last been called to receive the Bishop, and had missed him. Clara choked back a sob and staggered up from the chair, hunting for something that could shed light around her, tell her the time, tell her if she was wrong again, again—why was she always wrong, so wrong. The warm fog of confidence that surrounded her a few moments before was long gone, like steam pouring off a pump engine.

You thought you knew because you always know but you’re always wrong. You shouldn’t have come here, stupid Clara. Stupid Clara with a hoof in your head.

What had Tegura promised? That coming here, halfway across the world to Vladivostoy, would be good for Rowena, somehow? Why had she believed it? Where was her darling, dirty girl?

Clara blundered into a sideboard and felt the tall, fluted neck of a lamp. She fumbled about it, searching for a wick dial, or a chamber switch, or—

There.

Her hand closed on the slider that separated the lamp’s alchemical vats, mingling them so they burned in a single pillar of light.

Clara looked to her timepiece. Its delicate hands flickered. Quarter to nine. She was not late.

On the other side of the room, near a bay of windows shrouded by long, heavy curtains, a door opened. Bishop Meteron entered, his arm tucked carefully in a portly, red-faced man’s grasp. The man guiding him wore the marks of a deacon on his banded collar. The Bishop wore a dressing gown over something plainer, an ordinary set of nightclothes.

Clara almost knocked the lamp to the floor, so great was her haste to curtsy.

The Deacon froze, looking like a horse on the verge of a balk. His widening eyes brought back a memory that made her rear up in turn.

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I was told to be here—I came early. I thought— I thought—”

“Mrs. Downshire, please.”

The rest of her words sat in her mouth, heavy as stones. God almighty, they have the same voice.

Age had roughened the edges of the Bishop Professor’s tenor as much as smoke and poor decisions had his son’s. It was a voice she had felt brush against her ear, a voice that pulled her close and murmured into her hair—a voice all ashes and the grave, because the horse’s hoof had kicked open every door in Clara’s mind, and she knew everything, knew all of it, knew the things no one wanted to know or hear or see.

She must have started crying, for the Deacon was beside her, gathering her up from the floor, ushering her back to her chair. The old Meteron—not her Meteron—had taken a seat on a divan across from Clara’s chair. The Deacon placed a folded handkerchief in her hands. Clara mopped at her face, muttering things that were meant to be thanks, but came out jumbled.

Stupid Clara. Stupid, stupid.

“The fault is mine,” the old man said, in a voice so perfectly even, so light in its touch, it soothed her even through her sobs. “I should have had the room better prepared for you. It is my habit to do most of my business in the dark.” He smiled, the expression as lopsided as the one she already knew, but its knife-edge was sheathed. “I prefer not to waste resources.”

Clara blinked the last of her tears away. The old man’s pale eyes had fixed just past her, somewhere above her shoulder and several degrees to the right. The eyes glinted in the lamp light, turning back the illumination like flashes of quicksilver.

Cataracts. He was blind, or very near to it.

“S’no matter,” Clara said. “I’m a big girl, Your Gracefulness.”

The old man clucked his tongue, a chiding sound—and one, based on his rueful headshake, directed entirely at himself. “I have been so long at my studies, I am practically a brute. Please, forgive me.” He offered his hand, more in the general direction of Clara’s body than at an angle quite suited to her taking it. She reached out, crossing her body to take his cool, paper-skinned hand in hers and guide it back toward the mid-line.

He smiled, nodding his thanks. The gesture stung her with its familiarity. Was she looking at the ghost of who Anselm Meteron might have become, had his life not carried him toward back rooms and back deals and blades driven into the backs that occupied them? Bishop Meteron’s hair was sparse, his face unbearded and deeply lined, casting all his years in sharp relief.

“I am Allister Meteron,” he said, releasing her hand.

“Bishop Professor Meteron,” Clara corrected. She had been a dithering idiot when he came in a few moments ago, but she would prove now she wasn’t the fool she must seem. She knew things. She was useful.

“The title is a formality,” the old man sighed. “I am all but retired from the Commission.”

“Miss Livvy—Doctor Tegura, I mean—she says you’re doing a project. That your work called for me and she had to see if I was suited to it.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, it does. A vanity project, some have called it. You know the term?”

Clara’s nose wrinkled. “Sounds beneath you, Your Grace. Somethin’ for pride.”

“Pride goeth before a fall.”

Clara had a prickling notion he was quoting something. She had never been much of a reader.

“It’s no matter,” he continued. “But this project requires so much more than one man’s vanity.”

Clara blinked. “Like what, Your Gracefulness?”

“Wisdom. Patience. Forbearance. Courage.” He paused, clouded eyes settling almost upon her. “It takes your cooperation and the love of a mother for her child.”

Clara had borne many pains in her life. Filth and darkness. Freezing cold and stifling heat. Illness, thirst, and hunger. She could count Oldtemple’s little deaths and endless taxes off on fingers and toes and still needed another set of hands to tally what it had taken from her. But first in every accounting came Maggie, and Jorrie, and Proof help her, little Rowie, too. Still with her, that child, but somehow always gone. Clara felt her turn to water, running through her fingers every time they embraced.

“It is gauche of me to call upon that bond when we are still strangers,” the Bishop allowed in his measured voice. “But I know something of being a father to lost children.”

His words turned a key in Clara’s mind. Her eyes went blurry. It started at the center of her vision, the way it always did, pieces of the world slipping out of joint, the kinotrope slides shuffling out of order. Light poured through. She blinked into its glare, her cheeks wet from tears shed to save her sight from the press of all time in a single moment. Allister Meteron—still milky-eyed and blind, but a thousand years younger. A little girl with hair like polished copper, a squalling infant in her arms, crawls awkwardly into his embrace. Then the children are grown. There are trees climbed, pianofortes practiced, playrooms full of tools and gears—all the glittering clockworks that formed a history.

All those visions, yet never the mother. Whatever had become of her? Just a blackened space where she once had fit, like a bit of film burned through.

Clara blinked and shook herself back to the present, where she saw Bishop Professor Meteron and a piece of something that might have been his son sitting unquiet on the divan before her. It lurked, as shadowy as the burned-away mother.

“Are you well, Madame?”

Clara raised her chin, defying her brain, defying time, daring it all to have a go at her again. “So you want me to do some job for you?”

“You have, in a sense, already been doing an important job for me.”

“All those tests and such.”

“I hope you can forgive my curiosity, but Doctor Wyndham’s reports . . .” He trailed off, his rutted brow furrowing all the deeper. “They were most peculiar. I had to be certain of what he’d claimed about you. Reverend Tegura tells me you were able to make some very interesting predictions, based on limited evidence.”

Clara sighed. Oh. That.

“Begging your pardon, Your Gracefulness, but it en’t predictions.” He raised an eyebrow. The expression lanced through her. She had seen it before on a different face, the one that kept creeping around the corners of her mind. Yet the sick, sweet smell of death and lilies rose from them both.

“Predictions,” she whispered, “are things that en’t happened yet. This has all happened. Just nobody’s seen the details right.”

A pause. Clara dangled from it. She stared at her slippers, knowing they, at least, weren’t likely to turn into ghosts or start talking back to her.

The old Meteron’s voice cut the silent thread holding her. “Might you provide me an example?”

“The librarian has your letter and all she needs from it. She’s well pleased with the deal you’ve struck. It doesn’t go all to plan, of course, but nothing ever does.” Clara held the rest for a time. The words tasted sour and oily, like milk that had taken a turn. “Really,” she blurted, stabbing the pin back through her apron again, “you’ve been expecting things to go this way a long, long time. He’s all but dead to you, anyway.”

She looked up from her apron and found Bishop Meteron’s face sorting curiosity and puzzlement.

“I haven’t written a librarian a letter,” he said, at last. “That’s as may be. You say you need my help? And that my help will see to Rowie’s needs?”

“After a fashion.”

“Then tell me what you need me to do.”

He pointed to the sideboard. Clara went to it and brought the map waiting there back.

“I’m jake for reading maps,” she boasted. “I helped Mr. Downshire, rest his soul, when we ran the carting business. Nearly ten years. If I couldn’t read maps to help him make routes, I wouldn’t have been much good to him.”

“You’ll find this map is quite special.”

It was, clearly. Apart from the little bumps and shapes punched almost-but-not-quite through the paper’s edges, like pockmarks running up and down the margins, it was also hand-drawn. Someone who knew their craft had been at it with a square and protractor and stylus. She’d marked streets in her husband’s map that way, once upon a time. This map was of land spaces—big ones. The scale was only fine enough to dot cities and thread rivers, but it was a map all the same, and she had always liked them. Clara squinted over the print, trying out words, turning them on her tongue.

“Nippon . . . What’s there?”

“Secrets.”

Clara’s vision blurred again. She let go of the map, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes until everything was sunbursts and stars and stars and stars.

A tap at the study door. Clara looked up, seeing Meteron’s abstracted gaze turned in its direction. “Come,” he called.

Deliverance Tegura entered. “Your Grace, there’s been a spark. More of a letter, given its length.”

“Has there,” he murmured. No questioning note curled that last word.

“I’ve had Leopold punch a copy out for you.” She carried a tablet with a sheet of paper clipped to its surface. It looked blank until Clara’s squint picked out an array of nubs raised along its surface.

“You are both so good to me,” Meteron said. He seemed to mean it. Tegura stepped to him, placing the tablet in his outstretched hand, then retreated to await his reading. The old man set the tablet in his lap, the fingers of his left hand running over the bumps and nubs, angling up and down, pausing before leaping onward. His face passed through a succession of unguarded expressions—flickers of eyebrows, tightenings of his lips, a brief smile of satisfaction. Clara couldn’t fathom how he read whatever his copy of the letter said, but it was plainly of great interest.

Finally, he straightened in his chair, hands steepled. “Shall I take down a response for you, Your Grace?” Tegura asked. “Tell Madame Kurowa . . .” He paused. Clara felt his attention drift in her direction, inexact in its landing. “Tell her I would be pleased to give her the support she requires, provided my conditions are met.”

That answer tightened Tegura like a noose. “The same conditions as before?”

“I require her to honor my agreement with the Curator. And to surrender her visitors.”

“How many of them?”

“All.”

Tegura nodded crisply. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Clara watched the woman go. Her own fingers tingled, as if they’d been the ones running over the strange, bumpy script the Bishop had deciphered. All the guests. Clara looked at the map spread before her. She knew enough about Nippon to know it had a library, and that it was a monstrous big one. And that it was a long way off. Her Rowie and Anselm had been bound somewhere to do research . . .

Well then.

Clara traced the borders of Kyo-Tokai, a city that swelled over most of the long chain of Nipponese islands. Its inky shape blurred and twisted in her vision, fraying into line drawings little better than stick figures, moving herky-jerky in the space between the present moment and a memory. Something happening. Happened already. Time settled in her like a stone, its weight drawing her down into her chair.

“You remember what I said about your letter to the librarian,” she murmured.

“I do, Mrs. Downshire.”

“You say you want all of this Madame’s visitors. Well. You should know you en’t getting ’em. They’ll only scare up two.”

“Which?”

“Depends what you want most.”

Bishop Meteron smiled bitterly. “You might be surprised how accomplished I am at getting all I need from only half of what I wanted.”

Clara nodded. “As you say.” The stick figures crawling on the map blinked in and out of her vision. She wiped away a tear, hoping it might smear them away, too. Still, they chased on, or were chased. There was a room, and a glass roof, and something tiny and tick-tockily moving, no bigger than a monkey. “Just . . . mind you be gentle with him,” she added. “The Alchemist. He’s always been good to my Rowie. A positive angel.”

“Your angel is better described as a monster. But he is a monster we will need—here, where we can use him.”

“For what?”

“To find those like Rowena. And to do that, I will need your help as much as his. You’re a good mother and a decent woman. You have the sense to give your help freely. He, though . . . He will require some persuasion.”

That seemed wrong. Backwards. “He’s always helped my Rowie. If you just asked him, he would help you, too, for her sake. A monster wouldn’t do that.”

“A monster will do a great many things, where its own needs are concerned.” Allister Meteron’s mouth flattened into a pale, merciless line. “First among them is to keep from being caught out as what they are. It’s finally too late for that.”