42.

17^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE GRAND LIBRARY, KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

Anselm Meteron saw the Old Bear’s shadow pass the sliding door of his room, limping toward his own chamber further down the hall. It was all the invitation he needed to dispense with manners.

He had closed his chamber door by the time Anselm reached him, carrying two tiny, glazed clay cups stacked in one hand and a sake bottle in the other. He tapped the bottle against the door frame and nudged the panel open with his heel.

“You look in need of a dastardly drink,” Anselm announced.

The Old Bear sat on his tatami, boots removed, the leg of his trousers bunched over his knee. A medic’s roll lay open beside him. He met Anselm’s gaze, a capped syringe gritted between his teeth.

“You might’ve waited for an answer,” he growled around it.

“And I’d have had a time of it, trying to make you out with that thing in your mouth. God’s balls, Bear.” Anselm crouched beside the bedroll, balanced on the balls of his feet. “What the hell are you doing to yourself now?”

“Cortisone.” The Old Bear uncapped the needle.

Anselm studied his old friend’s leg with a revolted concern he didn’t bother to police. Erasmus’s knee was badly swollen, the dark flesh shiny and tight around its web of scars like the veins of shattered glass. Mercifully, he had been unconscious when the physick Anselm hired to assist Reverend Doctor Chalmers opened his shattered leg and tried to make sense of the wreckage. Bone fragments grinding into cartilage, tendons wrenched from muscles and bones, the whole structure orbited well off its proper course from hip to ankle. Hours after spent under a layer of ether and morphine. God only knew how many pins and bolts held him together now.

And for what? In the day since the Old Bear brought Rowena back from the Anchor Authority, the girl hadn’t stopped chirruping over her missing mother, and the Alchemist had barely stopped moving. Only a vow that they’d leave for Vraska to find the woman kept Rowena from packing up a satchel, stealing a purse, and running for the nearest air galleon that would take her on for scullery work. Even that hadn’t been enough to keep her from begging Umiko to send some pointless message back to the Mercy Commission Home, and nearly being killed by a lanyani monster doing it. Anselm had wanted to finish the sea-tree’s work when he learned of the incident, and to throttle the Old Bear for good measure. Using his powers to block Umiko’s memory of the incident might have been the fastest solution, but if it didn’t work, the consquences would be far, far worse for all of them.

In his agitation, Chalmers had all but suggested that they should tie the cricket up and put her in a trunk until their departure. Anselm would sooner have trussed up the Doctor, whose urgent trips forth and back from the Amanuensis library had become all the more frenzied and suspicious, driven by their vanishing timetable. Meantime, chasing after Chalmers and Rowena and working double-time on their leads into Allister Meteron’s network of supporters had taken a toll on Erasmus. And that was before they had reason to worry about a lanyani attack. Their final day in Kyo-Tokai could not come fast enough to spell the Old Bear.

He pushed the needle into the heart of his damaged knee, as if probing the rottenest part of a long-turned fruit. The plunger sank down. The Old Bear’s face hardened, jaw tight, and then it was done.

He set the syringe aside and took the gauze and lister Anselm had silently prepared.

“That help?” Anselm asked.

“For a few days.”

“And how long until it doesn’t anymore?”

The Old Bear’s eyes glinted in the crawling light of the room’s bioluminescent ivy. “Ann.”

“Come off it, Bear. I’ve had too close a relationship with too many substances over too long a time. I know how it goes.”

Erasmus’s expression was unreadable. “A few months more. Until the spring, if I go easy on myself.”

“You’ve already hit your limit. I can see it all over you.”

“Ann,” Erasmus sighed, letting the trouser leg fall back into place, and then himself, groaning as he lay flat on the tatami. “We’ve work to do, now more than ever. It’s in the nature of the job.”

“The job was to help Chalmers follow his leads on the book and the Bishop. Not this nonsense of going to Vraska.” Anselm snatched his sake rather too roughly, splashing some on his hand.

A long pause. Erasmus studied him silently, and though his expression didn’t change, Anselm knew he had just put the pieces together. God’s balls. No amount of hunching his back and snarling had ever put the Old Bear off his scent, the bastard. He lingered over pouring himself another cup, hoping to buck him and knowing it wouldn’t work.

Erasmus spoke with the patience of a surgeon. “The last time we had a conversation like this, you were looking for someone to kill for the sake of someone you couldn’t save. This is different.”

He was right, damn him. Fucking obnoxious habit, and rude, too. Anselm had spent his entire life being comfortable in knowing he was always right—right up until he met Erasmus Pardon.

“It should be,” Ann agreed. He finished his sake, shivered against it, and filled the cup again. “It is.”

“How long have you and Mrs. Downshire been lovers?”

Anselm shrugged, one-shouldered. “Not the term I’d use. We’ve never exactly made love, mostly for lack of opportunity—”

“Ann.”

“Since a few weeks after Clara came to the Mercy Commission Home. Months now. Cricket has no idea.”

A humorless sound Anselm only half-recognized as a laugh escaped the Old Bear. “Of course she doesn’t. She’d have killed you twice now, if she had.” He grimaced and tried to bend his knee. It moved with an audible grinding. Anselm winced, watching his friend’s color drain at the pain.

“You gather that trivia picking around my head?”

“It was all over your face when Rowena told you Mrs. Downshire had been taken.”

Anselm raised an eyebrow. “Really?” He passed a cup of sake to Erasmus. He set it beside his pillow, untouched. “I thought I had a very good bluffing face.”

“You’ve never played cards against me, Ann. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“I care about Clara,” Anselm admitted. “But there’s every likelihood His Grace took her to draw us off some other scent.”

The Old Bear shook his head. “This Reverend Doctor Tegura had been receiving information from Doctor Wyndham about Mrs. Down-shire’s anomalous perceptions. However much taking her is a distraction, it may also be of material benefit to your father’s plan. Another means of finding the Nine, with the current book missing. That makes her disappearance part of the job.”

“Which means shutting up operations here and dashing off to Vraska, right into the lion’s den. His patrons keep him in Vladivostoy. He’ll be there waiting. Expecting us.”

Erasmus sat up awkwardly, balanced on one elbow. “Are you afraid of confronting His Grace?”

“He can wander off a cliff’s edge for all I care.”

“Not what I asked.”

“That stuff you shot in your leg very fussy about what else goes into you?”

“Not at all. It’s localized.”

“Good.” Anselm nudged Erasmus’s neglected cup. “Help me finish this off, or I’ll be useless in the morning.”

Erasmus took the drink and finished it in two draws. He didn’t pursue his question. He didn’t need to. They both knew Anselm’s answer.

“Look, Bear,” he said, after fetching Erasmus’s pipe following a wordless gesture of request. “I can’t sit by and watch you ruin yourself jumping at shadows. We’re lucky Rowena’s snooping led her to the wrong conclusion about Clara. We can go with the lie and carry on the job. But it’s thinking we could just do the job the way we used to that made me get you in this mess.”

Erasmus scowled. “Made you get me into what?”

“The Cathedral. That idiocy with the curare. All of it.”

“I didn’t have to agree to it.”

“I didn’t listen to your alternatives.”

“That’s as may be. You also didn’t make me climb up after Nasrahiel. And you didn’t make me jump.”

Anselm had put his cup to his lips, but the gesture stalled there, the sake’s sharp, acid smell making his eyes water. Slowly, his hand fell— slowly enough to keep the drink from spilling this time.

With a grunt, Erasmus pushed to a seated pose and began tamping his pipe.

Anselm said nothing, the clockworks of his mind winding back the better part of a year, past the bruises of battle and the stabbing pain of a dislocated shoulder, reaching for Erasmus’s words that night. He’d asked Anselm to arrange the shot, told him just where Gammon’s sharpshooter should fire. He’d been ready to take his own shot, for insurance—to pin the creature down and finish it off, if needs be.

Or that was what he’d wanted Anselm to think.

“You grandstanding, suicidal bastard,” he whispered. “You meant to jump. You meant to take the creature out yourself the whole. Fucking. Time.”

Erasmus’s hands stilled for a moment over his pipe. He resumed, touching a struck lucifer to its bowl and drawing slowly on it, a cloud of marjoram and fennel rising around him. At last, he answered.

“The sharpshooter’s best angle still wasn’t a killing shot, even after I lured Nasrahiel into the clear. I only had one bullet. And all that movement, in high wind . . .” He trailed off. “The shooter couldn’t have taken another clear shot before the aiga attacked me, or killed Chalmers, or both. It would have turned into a tangled mess without a target. But if I took the aiga over the edge with me, well.” Erasmus’s raptor eyes found Anselm’s. “It was my job. My job. I had to be sure.”

Anselm regarded his empty cup. “She was your job, you mean.”

“Still is.”

The Old Bear edged backward, bracing his back against the wall. His pipe clenched in his teeth, he busied himself again with his wounded leg, gentling it into a ninety-degree bend, then flexing, his hands searching the joint with clinical care, as if the limb belonged to someone else.

“So this is what you’ve decided,” Anselm said. “To run yourself ragged chasing leads from the Aggregator and the Library’s notes and the customs reports. Find every angle my father’s using to catch cricket and all the rest. Pack all of it up and run to find her mother. And then what?” Silence. Anselm’s right hand screamed in phantom pain. He closed his fist, capped the stump of his index finger with his thumb and pressed as hard as he could bear. “Say you think of a way to get Clara free without His Grace getting ahold of you. Say you find some pattern to his search, and a way to stay just ahead of it, running with the girl from place to place. Because that’s what’s going to happen. There’s nothing to go back to in Corma. When was the last time we had a report from Gammon? For all we know, she and Jane and all the rest are dead, filled up with that fucking murderous fungus. How long can you live with Rowena on the run before you’re well and truly worn out? Before the lanyani find her again, or the aigamuxa? You’re rattling yourself to pieces.”

“What would you have me do?”

“I seem to remember buying you a God-fucking-damned island not so long ago.”

“We’ve talked about this already.”

“I don’t think you getting sentimental about gardening and keeping up a steady visiting schedule to Mama at the asylum counts as a conversation,” Anselm spat.

Erasmus’s gaze shifted like the counterweights on a scale, squaring over Anselm. “And what would you do?”

Anselm opened his mouth, a breath away from saying, I would run to that island with you. And yet, he knew that gaze— felt it reading what must surely be written in every line of his face.

“God’s balls,” he growled, raking his hands through his hair. “For the record, it’s both a pain in my arse and an injustice that you can lie to me and I can’t lie to you.”

“I believe you’ve mentioned that a few times, in recent decades.” Eras-mus’s baritone was so gentle, it raised a lump in Anselm’s throat. Anselm looked away. “You didn’t answer me.”

“I’d use what we’ve learned to go after my father.”

“Then you know why I can’t go to your island. This is my job. Her. And you. Leyah would never forgive me—”

“Shut your fucking mouth.” The lump in Anselm’s throat fairly choked him. He drowned it with a swig straight from the sake bottle. “You don’t get to play that card. Not with me.”

Silence. The ghost of a smile haunted the Old Bear’s mouth. “That was always what worried Leyah about you. Playing cards. You’ve always acted as though life is a game and people the stakes thrown in. You’ll gamble with anything, even yourself.”

“Pot calling the kettle black, that.”

“I’m the only thing I’ve ever gambled with.” A pause. The smile had left Erasmus’s voice. “The only thing I ever intended to gamble,” he corrected.

He didn’t need to explain. They both knew too well. Rare. “This is my job, Ann. My last. If I work it very hard and turn out very lucky, it will come out right.” The Old Bear watched Anselm put the bottle to his lips again. “Not that I will be able to count on you for much. You’re on your way to being useless tomorrow.”

“So drink more of your share.”

Erasmus’s brow furrowed. “Better to have us both half useless?”

“There’s always Chalmers to make up the difference.”

A pause. “Half the bottle between us, and no more,” Erasmus said gravely. “Right. Good point.”

They were nearly at the end of their appointed shares of sake, discussing the Rolands’ response (nonplussed) to their communique about an early departure and the arrangements made for flying out the following afternoon (haphazard, and overcharged in the extreme) when Anselm spied from beneath a comfortably alcoholic haze a small figure climbing onto Erasmus’s window sill.

Anselm rose, only a little unsteadily, to meet the Fabricated monkey Umiko had helped Rowena prepare. It lifted its tail—mended with a band of tin, he noticed; the girl had managed the repairs, after all. The tail snickked open halfway down its length, revealing a chamber filled with a rolled note.

Anselm pulled out the Fabricated messenger’s pearl card, turned it around to reverse the program, and inserted it again. It bounded away, to a location set for standby long before that evening.

Anselm waved the scrolled note rudely close to Erasmus’s nose, to be buffeted away by a hot pipe.

“You read it, Bear,” he yawned. “I’m too drunk to manage the cipher now.”

The Old Bear rumbled assent, fetching his spectacles from the physick’s roll at his bedside. He peered at the message, his drink-smoothed face passing through several weeks of stone cold sobriety in the space of two minutes’ reading.

Anselm frowned. “What’ve we got?”

“Cyd has made a breakthrough translating the sections Chalmers sent along. They’ve identified another of the Nine, one of the humans.”

The warmth of sake left, turning Anselm’s stomach sour. “Not Rowena?”

“Subject One, and where to find her.”

Erasmus passed Anselm the note, grave as a tombstone. He tapped the relevant passage with a tobacco-stained forefinger.

It had been nearly a year since Anselm had felt the galvanizing shock of standing too close to the ligtning strike of truth. Half a world away in a dank cellar with a mad scholar and a scrawny girl and a book plotting the path to the heart of the world open before him, the knowledge had seared itself into his bones. That feeling returned, throbbing in his missing finger.

“God’s balls,” he murmured. “We’ve been played, Bear.”

“Wake the Doctor, Ann. I’ll see to rousing Rowena.”