The Unnaturalists (16 page)

Hal releases me. “Do you have any idea what’s at stake here? Do you have any idea how much you risk if we are exposed?” His anger flashes cerulean in the gloom.

I raise my chin and arch my brow in the way the Instructor of Refinement once taught us at Seminary. “We?”

“Yes, damn it,” he says. “You are part of this now, whether you like it or not.”

“Why? And I don’t particularly appreciate your cursing at me, Pedant Lumin.” I would almost swear the boggle fetus in its jar trembles at the frost in my words.

Hal closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose with a long sigh of frustration. Piskel peeks out of Hal’s waistcoat pocket. He glares at me and shakes his fist, as if reminding me that he’ll bite me again if I don’t cooperate, even though I’m not exactly sure what I’m to cooperate with. He slips out of Hal’s pocket and floats over to examine the specimens on the shelves.

“Well?” I ask.

“I am trying with all my might, little as it is, to shield you and keep you safe. And yet you are continually putting yourself in harm’s way.”

“It seems I’m putting myself in harm’s way no matter what I do. But I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Are you just jealous because I’m on the verge of discovering things you aren’t? Is that it?”

“Vespa, don’t you see? You’re at the center of a vast web of
darkness that is about to close in on you. The Empress sits at the center like a spider, waiting for one such as you to be delivered into her clutches. And your father is just the one to do it.”

The everlight slowly travels the perimeter of the storage room. Things leap from the shadows—goblin spines, kelpie eggs preserved in spirits. Piskel floats between them, humming sadly.

I hear the Tinker thief’s words in my head again. “That’s what the Tinker thief said, that he meant to use me as bait. . . .” I choke on the words, unable to finish them aloud.

“The Tinker thief? What?”

I tell him of the boy Syrus breaking into my room, the things he said that I don’t want to believe.

He closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, he says, “It is worse, so much worse than we thought.”

“I don’t understand.” My voice squeaks inelegantly on the last syllable.

“First, did you tell your father what Rackham said to you that day?”

I shake my head.

His shoulders relax somewhat under his Pedant robes. “Good. Then perhaps he is not yet fully cognizant of your role.”

“Of what?”

“Do you know of the Heart of All Matter?”

It’s a non sequitur, meaning “a thing that doesn’t quite follow” in the Old Scientific language, but it’s firmer ground than the present subject matter. I swallow the scratchiness in my throat. “It’s said that the Manticore bewitched Athena into giving the Heart to her. That Athena ran off with the Manticore and the guard who seduced her to live in the Forest until her father, the Emperor, rescued her.
And that Athena would not bend to her father’s insistence that she restore the Heart to him. He could not protect her any longer from her own witchery, and thus she was sent to die on the black sands.” I can still hear the rector telling the tale to us every Chastening Day, his eyes agleam with the zeal of Logic and Reason.

“That is a falsehood,” Hal says, a dangerous edge to his voice.

“How? The Church teaches—”

He retorts, “Everything it teaches is meant to ensure our compliance with Imperial mandate. The Empress needs us to believe in her religion. Otherwise, like Athena, we might discover the truth.”

Now
I
am angry. How dare he? I almost expect Saint Darwin to send his apes to carry this heretic away to the Infinitesimal Void right now! “And just what is that truth, if you are so sure you know it?”

“This world is alive, Vespa. And it is founded on magic.” He paces away from me, gesturing at the racks. “All these beings you see here—they are part of a great Circle of Being. They are sentient nations unto themselves, just as we are. But unlike us, this world needs them to survive. The more Elementals there are, the more this world thrives. When they are destroyed or taken from their native places, those places become a desert of null energy, what we call the Creeping Waste. Elementals continue to disappear and the Waste keeps growing. Our very lives may depend on the existence of things we are so thoughtlessly destroying. That is the true science.”

Piskel floats toward us, nodding and making chirruping noises of agreement.

“But if that’s true . . .” I fall silent, looking between Piskel and the jars of preserved things. I’ve always secretly thought there was
more to the Unnaturals than meets the eye, but that they are intelligent beings, that our lives depend on them, that we are willfully destroying them for no reason—it goes against everything I’ve ever been taught.

“The problem is we can’t figure out what’s happening to them,” Hal continues. “That’s part of why I was sent here, to discover what the Refineries do with them after their capture. We think we know, but it’s all still conjecture at this point.”

“Part of why you were sent?”

A strange expression crosses Hal’s face. “I was also sent to investigate . . .” He pauses and shakes his head. “It’s delicate. All I will say is that I suspect your father’s assistant may be other than he seems. Have a care around him.”

I nod. I’ve always been careful of The Wad. I don’t really see how I could do more.

“What I didn’t expect to find is that your father is also involved in some kind of dangerous experiment, something involving the Waste. I never expected to find that he is trying to procure the Heart of All Matter from the Manticore as part of his experiment. Why would he need something so powerful? Surely, the Waste will overwhelm the City, if he attempts to use it as our theories suggest. I didn’t expect to find Nyx’s daughter a witch into the bargain, a witch it appears he will try to use for his own ends.”

“But it can’t be true, can it? My own
father
. . .”

Memory threatens to crush me utterly. All our tea times in his office, long walks by Chimera Park, Father’s approving smile whenever I showed him a particularly good sketch or mount, that day long ago when the sylphids crowded around me and he had them destroyed . . . I stare down at my shoelaces, noting absently that
one is untied again before everything dissolves in runnels of silver and darkness.

“Vespa,” Hal says in that same low tone he used to keep me from looking at the Sphinx. I look into his eyes. His sad smile nearly takes my breath.

“I will teach you all I can. You will learn to protect yourself with your magic. No one will harm you.”

I can’t say anything. I find myself absorbed in the curve of Hal’s mouth, the edge of his cheek, the blue ocean of his eyes so very close to me. I don’t think about it. I lean forward and kiss him, just like we used to do in Seminary when we practiced on the backs of our own hands.

But this is so different from kissing one’s own hand.

For a moment, his lips yield to mine. The magic between us—for that’s what it must be—stings with gentle heat. Our thoughts merge, like that day in the laboratory, only more softly. We are together in a golden field with the sun pouring down all around us. I have never been so warm, so awash in light. Sylphids dance through the air in a sparkling cloud around us, playing in our hair, whispering their sibilant love charms. Other Elementals come to the edge of the light; I see their shapes before I’m entirely blinded. I sigh his name against his lips in wonder.

He breaks the kiss almost roughly, standing back and adjusting his robes with trembling hands. The darkness of the moldy storage room eats holes through the golden world until it’s gone. Piskel drifts near, shaking a finger at us. Then he sees what’s between us, and his little face darkens in confusion.

“Hal?”

Hal shakes his head, almost like a dog coming out from under a
waterfall. “We mustn’t. I mustn’t. I don’t want—” He stops.

“What?” I feel cold outside his embrace, though my lips still burn with his kiss. I cross my arms over my chest. “You don’t want what? To dally with a witch?”

He glowers. “It’s not that. You know it’s not. It’s just . . . It’s not safe. . . .”

We hear the footsteps simultaneously. Piskel dives between jars, dousing his light under a werehound skull.

I am not sure what to do. In perhaps the most useless gesture of all time, I gather some dusty charts into my arms, trying to pretend that I’m fetching them as the Pedant’s assistant.

Two black-coated gentlemen enter. They are very well-dressed. Both of them wear a Wyvern brooch pinned on their cravats. They certainly carry themselves as if they hail from Uptown. They dip their heads and sweep their tricorns from their white wigs almost in unison.

“If you will come with us, sir,” one of them says.

Hal’s gaze moves from me to the two gentlemen as if he’s contemplating some insane magical feat.

Then his shoulders slump. He walks toward the gentlemen like a condemned man, letting them take his arms.

“Hal?” I whisper. “What—”

They usher him past me with sidelong glances of scorn. Hal looks back at me over his shoulder. “Be safe. Be wise. Be vigilant.”

And in my mind, I hear a whisper,
I will come to you when I can
.

He turns and allows them to escort him from the door without another glance. I hear their feet on the steps as the charts slide from my arms onto the floor.

C
HAPTER
14

S
yrus hadn’t bothered looking up at the ghastly, shrieking things tethered to the roofs. He put his hands over his ears and ran as fast as he could, their cries following his progress until they died away at the gates of Midtown. A regiment of sentry wights tried to seal off the Midtown gate and called mechanically after him as he ducked through them. One persistent wight chased him all the way across the Night Emporium Bridge and almost to the Dials before it was reined in by its own warding field and returned to its proper post. Human sentries picked up where they left off, chasing him through Lowtown.

In the end, Syrus lost them only by cutting through the maze of alleys that led to the Lowtown Refinery. Just before dawn, he found himself alone, staring up at the glowing smokestacks, the scent of burned bone filling his aching lungs.

Stupid witch,
he thought, gulping at the foul air. Why couldn’t she see reason? He’d never get into Midtown again after that episode. And how was he to get her to understand if he couldn’t speak to her again? What did the Manticore need her for, anyway? He realized that he didn’t even know. He was just acting on orders, unsure of whether anything he hoped would come to pass as a result.

He clutched at the iron-spiked fence to hold himself up. The nevered bars stung and he pulled away. Somehow, when he did so, the bar slid off its base, leaving a gap in the fence wide enough for him to slip through. He stared. Someone had obviously been filing away at the fence in secret, trying to escape. The gap was wide enough that he might be able to slip his family through it if he could just get them out. But was the fence armed with banshee alarms like the houses in Midtown?

He looked around. No one was about. He slid his hand through the gap in the bars. No werehounds came, no alarms sounded. All he heard was the steady chugging of machinery deep within the Refinery.

He was through the fence almost before he’d decided what to do. The nevered bars stung his skin until he stood completely within the fence’s perimeter. If the witch wouldn’t help and if the Manticore couldn’t help without her, then maybe it was time to help himself.

He had heard horrendous things about the Refineries and how the Refiners kept their secrets to themselves. Werehound guards were one thing, but the illusion mines were another. It was said that if you stepped on one, a beautiful illusion sprang up all around you that held you in thrall until guards came or the mine itself blew. And in the green-glowing darkness, one edge of tile could just as well be a trip plate as another. He’d had three cousins who’d tried to break into this Refinery on a lark once. (No one ever tried to break into the Imperial Refinery near the Tower. That would have been suicide). Only one of them had come back to tell the tale, and he hadn’t made it inside before the werehounds chased him off. He was the only reason Syrus knew about the mines, but also
the reason why no one had tried breaking into this Refinery again.