44.

18^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.—DAWN

THE AGGREGATOR ROOM, GRAND LIBRARY, KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

Rowena bounced on her heels, restless as a puppy, watching Umiko leaf through the Amanuensis lifted from the Indexer box. The other girl’s mouth was screwed up in a scowl.

“I put a few leaves of my own notes in,” Rowena explained, hoping her chatter would distract her friend from her funk. “Her name and where she was born and all that. Subject Six. It’s my mother, Umiko, I just know it, and we’re going to Vraska to get her back.”

The Third Literate was seated at one of the smaller desks near the Aggregator’s card punching station. “You’ve said that. Probably a hundred times.”

“Today,” Rowena confirmed, not really listening. She gestured at her clothes—her usual Cormarran dress, riding skirt and shirtwaist buttoned for easy movement, with a little panel of ruching one pull of a ribbon away from revealing the weaponette in easy reach on her thigh. She’d kept the weapon oiled and ready; the attack on the roof the night before last only confirmed the wisdom of that decision. It felt good to be in her own clothes again, the Grand Library’s kimonos and sandals shed like ill-fitting skins.

Something twitched in Umiko’s face, too fast for Rowena to read it properly.

“Today,” Umiko echoed. “And you want me to use the Aggregator with this to do what?”

Rowena frowned. Her friend was only an arm’s length away, but she might as well have been on the other side of the earth, for all the distance Rowena felt between them.

“To find out what else the Aggregator knows about her, I guess?” Rowena suggested, embarrassed at the uncertainty in her own voice. “I know the report would take a bit, so I can make arrangements with Master Meteron to have your data sent along somehow. He’s good at that sort of thing. I’m sure there’s a way.”

Umiko shook her head. “You don’t understand the first thing about this machine.”

“Come again?”

Umiko spoke in a rush, the threads of her voice unraveling. “The Aggregator doesn’t know anything. It can’t just access any kind of datum about anything you can think of. It only pulls data that’s being gathered for a purpose, transmitted into its logs through programming. Important things.” Umiko sighed. “You asked me to meet you here at the break of dawn for nothing, Rowena. It’ll have nothing on your mother, because she’s just a single, tiny data point, not a person. Not as far as the Aggregator is concerned.”

A fist closed in Rowena’s belly. She forced it open, peeling at its fingers. “You don’t know that for sure. She’s one of the Nine, and the books about her have been here forever. Surely that means something about her is in data the Aggregator pulls up. Surely there’s something that would help us figure exactly where they’ve taken her?” She swallowed. “Vraska’s a big place. Even just Vladivostoy. It’s my mother, Umiko. I need to do something.”

“Or you could stay here.”

All at once, Umiko Haroda was on her feet, the book tumbling from her lap. She clutched her friend’s hands so hard, Rowena yelped in surprise. “Stay. I’ll talk to Madame Kurowa. I’m sure she’ll let you. None of this is your fault, anyway.”

Rowena blinked. “What are you talking about?”

Umiko’s hands lowered, Rowena’s still tangled between them. She looked away, scanning the cabinets of the silent Aggregator, her eyes wandering, as if in search of the switch or dial that would churn out an answer. “It’s not your fault,” she murmured, more to herself than Rowena. “Surely Madame knows it. She’ll understand.”

Slowly, Rowena unknotted their hands. “Umiko. What are you talking about?”

The girl’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I told her.”

Rowena wasn’t aware of having stepped back. The distance between her friend and herself had simply . . . grown. “You told Kurowa what?”

Umiko blinked. Tears trailed down her round cheeks.

“Holy fucking Proof,” Rowena whispered. “What did you tell her?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“About the reports on the Bishop’s studies, and the stolen Amanuenses, and the translator, and the lanyani attacking you, and what Master Pardon did in my . . .” Umiko shook her head, sobbing. “They’re coming today. They might even be here now, gathering them up.”

“Everything,” Rowena repeated. She felt herself breathing, sawing air in and out, painful and strange. “Everything.”

Umiko nodded. “The book, and the Cathedral, and Master Pardon’s evil magic—”

Rowena leaped back, stung. “That was just part of the story! It wasn’t any of your business, and it doesn’t matter for us being here, I just needed you to understand who they are. What they’re really here to do. ”

“I did understand!” Umiko shouted. “I thought you were making that story about him and his magic up. But after the lanyani attacked, he went inside my head and told me to go to bed and just forget. That’s when I knew I had to tell her.”

“But you programmed the Fabricated we used to send the messages! You helped us!”

“I needed to see how far you’d go,” she protested. “If you were really after what you claimed to be. It might have all been a silly little girl’s story, some mad fancy, but then you kept telling me things, and I just couldn’t . . . I couldn’t allow it. And I couldn’t allow Master Pardon’s wrongness here any longer.”

Rowena covered her mouth with her hands. A heave in her stomach nearly doubled her over. She remembered a cold, wrecked loft in the dark of night and the Old Bear calling to her from the ruined warehouse floor below. She had threatened him—promised to find a Logician and serve him up to their experiments. And here they were now, in the heart of the Logicians’ territory, and she had tried to win herself an ally by telling the truth. Telling the whole truth. His truth.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Rowena spat. She straightened like a viper, hissing rage. It took all her will to keep from drawing the weaponette. “Nothing.”

“I don’t think Madame Curator agrees, or the Argument that’s been sent to take them in.”

Oh, God, Rowena. The voice that wasn’t quite Leyah’s beat inside her like hands on an iron-shod door. Get out of here. Warn them. Find them.

She had already been running, by then. Umiko’s cries chased after her, and the girl with them, but they stood no chance of heading her off.

If there was anything Rowena Downshire did well, it was run.

Rowena tore across the surface of the Grand Library’s seal, its half-familiar sigils taunting her with questions she’d never properly answered. The staircase came next, and she plowed up it, shoving through clerks and Literates trying to make their way down with armloads of books and scrolls. Each fell in an explosion of paper, tripping out of her way. Rowena ducked through the chaos, spun and scrambled and gained the landing, then the skyway, then the corridors to the residences, their windows trading the glow of lamp-plants for the rising dawn.

The door to her company’s apartment was open. A crowd of people swelled out from it. She heard voices, shouts, Nipponese and Amidonian clashing like cymbals.

Rowena ducked her head and crashed into the knot of soldiers—a whole Argument’s worth—shoving her way through.

“Leave them alone!” she shrilled. “Get out of here!”

Hands jerked Rowena from her feet, then shoved her past the threshold, where a second Argument stood in positions around the apart-ment’s common room, covering each door with a flintlock rifle, their bayonetted ends glinting. Rowena staggered into Chalmers. He caught her shoulders and tried to set her right. She sprang away from him and took in the scene.

Most of the luggage—meager for Master Meteron and Rowena, more ample for the Old Bear and his supplies, and embarrassingly voluminous for Chalmers—sat at the center of the room. Chalmers was dressed, though his waistcoat was only half-buttoned and his hair embarrassingly untidy. He seemed content to be held at bay by the angry stares of the Argument. Meteron had clearly been caught at the end of his shaving, barefoot with a towel thrown over his shoulder and a little foam still at his jawline. One of the soldiers of the Argument kept him in place with the edge of his bayonet, ready to take a vicious bite from his spine.

The Old Bear had been fully dressed—at least before it had been undone.

He was held on his knees by two young men only half his size, their grip of his arms behind his back making up the difference. His face was a knot of pain. Something in Rowena that was half herself and half Leyah quailed as the soldiers leaned forward, lifting his arms and ducking his head, grinding the Alchemist’s wounded knee into the floor. His shirt lay in tatters beside him, cut away and discarded.

The guard holding the Old Bear’s right arm turned it to reveal the faded tattoo barely visible against his dark skin.

Madame Kurowa glided forward, hands in her sleeves, and leaned close, peering at the markings. She clucked her tongue. “Master Pardon, you have not been entirely forthcoming with us.”

Chalmers bristled. “We don’t know what you’re—” A nearby guard hissed and made a jabbing motion with his bayonet. Chalmers’s mouth snapped shut.

“It is no matter now,” Kurowa continued. She looked up at Rowena, as if only just noticing the girl. “Fortunately, someone in your party has been most thoroughly helpful.”

The weight of a dozen stares piled on Rowena. The Old Bear couldn’t lift his head to look at her, thank the Proof. But Master Meteron’s eyes carved to the bone. She looked to him, grasping for the words to make him sheathe the daggers in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I thought the more Umiko knew, the better she’d understand. The more likely she’d be to help.”

Meteron’s mouth curled in a sneer. “You thought.” The words came out slowly, tortured on a rack. Then he looked toward the apartment door.

Rowena followed his gaze.

Umiko pushed the Grand Librarian’s wheelchair through a widening gap in the Argument’s blockade. They bowed, and she nodded in turn, her white head dipping and rising like some ancient bird. Umiko stared at the chair’s handlebars as if she never wanted to meet a human eye again.

“Is this how you treat all your guests, Madame Curator?” Meteron called. “A ritual for our departure, perhaps?”

“Sadly,” she answered, “no. Though I do wish I had been apprised of your intention to leave.”

Chalmers cleared his throat. “An oversight on my part, Madame. You have my sincerest apologies.”

Perhaps the old woman lacked the strength for a cackle. She gave series of creaks, instead, grinding as hinges of bone. “Apology accepted, Doctor. You are in no personal danger, I assure you.”

“Funny . . . It, ah. It doesn’t seem that way from this end of a pointed thing.”

“You are, in fact, most fortunate,” the Curator continued. “Bishop Professor Meteron extends an invitation to you and to your secretary, Miss Downshire. He would very much like you to join him in Vraska. There is excellent work to be had on his staff.” Her fathomless eyes turned upon Rowena. “Even for one as young as yourself, I am told.”

Rowena shook her head. “Sorry, I had other plans.”

“If you mean plans with Masters Meteron and Pardon,” Madame Kurowa interjected, “consider your calendar cleared.”

Rowena looked in panic from Meteron to the Old Bear, then back to Kurowa. “What does that mean? What are you on about?”

Kurowa smiled. “Perhaps you should explain, Umiko.”

The girl stood silent as a stone, her hands turning knots in the hems of her sleeves.

“Umiko,” Kurowa pressed. Her voice crackled with a galvanizing charge.

Umiko flinched. It was as if she were herself an Algebraic Engine, fed a card and spouting back data. “To serve Reason properly, we must live in an orderly world. Logic gives us a system for speaking rationally. Laws give us a system for living rationally. As Logicians, we know that Reason is our path to wisdom, and that it requires an end to all disorder. We take the beings that unsettle the natural order and put them in a place to be of use to Reason, or to be ended.”

It was like watching a demagnetized compass needle wander, twitching and spinning, only to find true north at last. All at once, Rowena understood Nippon and the Logicians as she had never done before. No aigamuxa. Creatures of brawn with will of their own were a liability to their order, and so they made the Fabricated to take their place. No lanyani, apart from the stupid, senseless creatures they had bred into boatmen or light fixtures—or the wild horrors risen up from who-knew-where, the ones that had evaded the Logicians’ efforts at control. Truly wild things had no home in a city whose very rivers had been turned to streets—a city that teemed over the mass of a whole nation. In such a place, creatures Reason could not explain would be snuffed out. That included creatures like Erasmus Pardon.

Creatures like Rowena herself, if she’d taken her honesty with Umiko even one sentence further. How close had she been to confessing she carried the ghost of a dead woman in her mind, or that she longed to reach out and touch the Old Bear’s thoughts, to sit within them again? What would have happened to her, if she dared speak that truth?

“His Grace,” the Curator croaked, “has asked our help in acquiring Master Pardon. It seems his most unusual faculties are of some value to his present research.”

“My father overestimates him,” Meteron cut in sharply. “Parlor tricks. Inferences and innuendoes. His mind games are useful only for amusing the foolish and superstitious. I will be more than happy to explain as much to His Grace when we meet.”

The Curator sighed. “That, I am afraid, will not happen.”

“Continue, Umiko,” Madame Kurowa purred.

Umiko’s shoulders sagged. “When disorder comes in the form of lawlessness, we must take other measures. Fog Island is our solution for such disorder.”

Kurowa seemed to enjoy the almost measurable drop in the room’s temperature. She stood before Meteron, paused, and took the towel off his shoulder to wipe the shaving foam away. “It seems,” she mused, “you kidnapped a scholar familiar with the Amanuensis library, secreted them away, and extorted them for aid in your partners’ research. For all we know, you’ve actually killed them by now, to clean up after yourself before leaving the city. A very nasty business. You could hardly expect your father to ignore it.”

Meteron’s eyes had remained on the Curator during Kurowa’s speech. “I don’t suppose His Grace has been told how Scholar Tsuneteva’s connection with me began.”

“I doubt it very much,” Kurowa said, smiling.

The Old Bear growled through his teeth. “I would wager he already knows a great deal about you, Madame Curator.”

The old woman’s birdlike head perked toward him, genuine interest in her eyes. “Would you?”

“There’s the fact of your being Subject One,” Meteron said. “Ah. Yes. There is that.” She nodded wearily. “We have an arrangement in regards to that, and to his studies. I have promised him something. Soon, he will have the tools he needs to make use of it.”

Rowena caught a look, tense and momentary, between Madame Kurowa and the Curator.

“In the meantime, we had best gather you up for your voyage,” the Curator said. “It is convenient that you have packed so well, though I am afraid only half the baggage is likely to be relevant.”

Kurowa turned to a member of the Argument blocking the door to the hall. “Call up Fabricated to see after the baggage. Leave the trunks belonging to Masters Pardon and Meteron. Everything else goes on the air galleon.”

“And what of the prisoners?” One woman—perhaps some kind of captain, by her larger insignia—nodded toward the disheveled remains of the Corma Company.

“The same cart can take them all. We’ll separate them at the quays before we reach the anchor yard.” Kurowa looked Rowena up and down, her face curiously sympathetic. “You might as well use the ride to say your good-byes. You won’t need your hands free to do it, though.”

Rowena opened her mouth to shout the foulest words of Nipponese Umiko had taught her, but one of the Argument put an arm over her throat, cinching it tight, as another cuffed her hands at her back.

Phillip Chalmers kept a sort of timeline of his life’s calamities, punctuated with various incidents great and small. A broken ankle playing tag with his brothers. His cousin Marjory’s sudden death from a vicious cancer, and his mother’s declaration that, as a newly minted student seminarian, he should give the eulogy. His first failed examination. His father’s passing a year before completing his thesis. And then, meeting Nora Pierce, and everything after.

His journey in a prison cart through Kyo-Tokai earned an entry all its own in that vast space of “after.”

The clockwork cart rattled furiously, obliged by the canals to take a long and uncomfortably circuitous route through the city, pausing at lever-bridges to permit various barges’ passage. At these intersections, the winding men would leap up from their seats and crank madly with their huge keys, the iron-bound cart needing constant minding to manage a load of four passengers.

Chalmers’s wrists screamed in pain, trapped behind his back and banging between spine and steel wall with every jounce. Meteron sat with his head against the wall, a thoughtful squint writing lines at the corners of his eyes. Rowena huddled as near to the Alchemist as their bonds allowed, murmuring apologies in an endless, breathless stream. The old man’s usually grave face looked positively sepulchral, though from time to time he answered the girl’s urgent voice with a hush or hum Chalmers couldn’t make out. He had not been restored the dignity of his shirt, though the Argument’s officer had been good enough to throw his frock coat over his shoulders, obscuring his bare skin and its shocking map of scars.

The captain had also been sensible enough to see the coat stripped bare, all its pockets turned out, emptied of hope.

“Three times,” Meteron announced.

Chalmers rattled back into the present as best he could. “Beg pardon?”

“We’ve been carted off to be hanged together three times,” Meteron explained, though he was clearly speaking to the Alchemist.

“Four,” he answered automatically.

Meteron frowned. “If you’re thinking of Rimmerston, you were the only one standing at the gallows.”

“Malay.”

A look Chalmers thought more fitting to a child opening a holiday present than a man bound for an island of abandoned criminals dawned on Meteron’s face. “I’ll be damned. I forgot that one.”

“Never made it as far as the gallows cart.”

“Psh. Doesn’t count, then.”

Chalmers gaped at them. “Perhaps we would be better served by considering the unique features of our present predicament?”

“Technically, your only predicament will be remembering which fork you’re to eat your salad with when you take supper with His Grace,” Meteron answered. “You’ve nothing to worry over.”

“Except, perhaps, a madman’s plot that could lead to the dissolution of life on earth, your imminent banishment to a place of certain death, and Master Pardon’s probable dissection as a curiosity of modern—” Chalmers flinched away from Rowena’s thrashing foot, narrowly missing a solid kneecapping. “I say, what are you on about?”

The girl had slid off the bench beside the Alchemist and begun writhing on the cart’s dusty floor, thrusting her legs in a most unseemly manner. Chalmers spied more than a little of her underslip and looked away, flushing.

“And now Miss Downshire’s having some kind of fit,” he cried miserably.

“Miss Downshire,” the Alchemist said, “is seeing to your freedom.”

Chalmers was about to suggest that perhaps attending the young lady’s welfare would be a more appropriate response than rash optimism when Rowena gasped in triumph, managing to hook her feet through a hoop made of her bound hands stretched out as far behind her back as they could go. Red-faced and panting, she closed up in a ball, easing her arms up and around her legs, past her knees, and, at last, had her hands in front of her.

Meteron grinned. “There may be hope for you yet, cricket.”

“Maybe,” she murmured sullenly, then started pulling pins from her hair. “Give anything for a proper set of picks now.”

“Two hairpins wound together and hooked at the end are a close match for a size one,” Meteron suggested. “Most handcuffs take ones or fives.”

Rowena raised the cuffs to her eyes, squinting through each keyhole in turn. She even, to Chalmers’s horror, prodded at them with her tongue. “Nhhhh. Feels like a five. Can’t see anything for sure without a torch.” Muttering curses, she began twisting two pins together. “It’s a one or nothing, then.”

In the kinotrope films Chalmers had seen, picking locks was a matter of a screwed-up-tight expression, a well-applied tie pin, and a bit of flourish. In reality, it was a boring agony of curses and bent pins and near misses, ending long, long minutes later with Rowena Downshire’s freed hands, her wrists ringed with red bracelets of torn skin. She lunged for Meteron’s hands next, despite a shake of manacles from Chalmers and what he had hoped was a most encouraging smile and waggle of eyebrows.

It turned out to have been the right choice. Once free and given a moment to rub at the shoulder he had dislocated the previous fall, Meteron moved quickly to the Alchemist and Chalmers in succession, finishing the jailbreak with the last brutalized pins.

Chalmers winced over his chafed wrists, though he began amending his record of calamities to account for this positive turn.

“So now what? We open the back of the cart, overpower the guards?” he suggested.

“Cart’s locked,” Rowena answered. “We’re still stuck.”

Meteron and the Alchemist shared a look, long and unfathomable.

“When they open the cart at the quay head,” the Alchemist said, “all of you need to run. I’ll cover for you.”

Rowena blinked. “How?”

To his credit, Chalmers managed to keep from flinching. The plan they had silently formed unfolded in pictures, faster than thought, more complete than words. Chalmers readied himself for Rowena’s screech of objection, but none came. He saw in her agonizingly young face not the least understanding of what he’d just been shown. Apparently she’d been left out of the mental discourse. It wasn’t hard to understand why.

The Alchemist fixed him with a sober stare.

“It’s . . .” Chalmers hesitated, his voice gone brittle. “It’s a very good plan, I think.”