The Unnaturalists (36 page)

Syrus followed him.

Bayne tore the Guard’s pike from the wall with a grunt. He kicked the useless sword blade aside. “That was my favorite sword, too,” he muttered.

“Why didn’t you make a sword of magic like you did at Rackham’s?” Syrus asked.

“I’m trying to save as much magic as I can until we reach the main chamber,” Bayne said. “Pity that we no longer have the element of surprise as our ally. Come on.”

They raced down the tunnel, trying to get out of it before more Guards came. All they could do now was move forward.

Bayne reached out to stop Syrus before they ran out into empty space. They were on a narrow landing. A metal catwalk to the left went down toward the Refinery floor. Syrus looked out over the cages and swallowed. To see so many Elementals held captive, to imagine so many spaces in the world devoid of life because of their absence—it was almost too much to contemplate.

Beyond the cages sat a strange throne on a raised dais, but there was no sign of the Empress or any other human. Where was Vespa? Syrus wondered. Only one way to find out.

The sound of feet coming up the metal stairs severed his thoughts. Syrus drew out his pipe.

The first few guards—regular humans, rather than Raven Guards—fell to his fairy darts.

Bayne looked back at him. “Why didn’t you just do that in the tunnel?” he asked.

Syrus shrugged. “You told me to stay back!”

Bayne glared at him. “If you have that much skill with a weapon like that, don’t listen!”

Syrus blushed.

Bayne turned to the next wave of guards and pushed them down the stairs with his pike. Fortunately, none of these had guns, nor much skill at fighting, either, when it came to all that. Syrus supposed that the place was so charged with magic that a gun might not even fire properly in here. He just hoped Bayne’s wouldn’t suddenly go off and take off a foot or bit of his leg.

Syrus leaped into the fray with his dagger, trying not to remember his cousin Raine taken down by his own hand. Piskel also bit and confounded and rained curses down on the guards.

When at last they made the ground floor, the Elementals in the cages were going wild. Singing, screaming, hooting, chanting—all begging for one thing in a myriad of voices . . .
Free us . . . Free us!

Bayne looked around wildly as a lull came in the fight. He had a gash on his forehead where a thrown dagger had nicked him. Hordes of wraiths and guards—human and Raven—poured down the stairs after them.

Syrus hardened his heart against the wraiths. They might have once been his people, but the most important thing now was to find Vespa.

“Piskel, where’s Vespa?” Syrus yelled.

He and Bayne raced down the aisles of cages and things reached through the bars, crying out in pain. In the great, cloudy aquaria, water Elementals beat the glass with suckered arms and brilliantly scaled tails.

Piskel fluttered and floated, trying to get answers from his brethren above the din. At last, he came back shaking his head.

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Bayne asked. “What have they done with her?”

A nearby dryad clutched at Syrus with twiggy fingers. “Do you seek the witch?” she asked. Her voice was the murmur of dry leaves. “They’ve already taken her down to the Museum for the Grand Experiment. That’s why there are so few guards. The Empress has gone down with them for the viewing.”

“So few?” Syrus laughed hollowly.

The dryad’s green eyes pierced Syrus as perfectly as one of his fairy poison darts. “Let us out and we will help you free her. The control panels are over there by the throne. Just take all the fields down. Hurry!”

Syrus and Bayne nodded. So much magic in one place made Syrus’s skin curdle. He was afraid at any moment he might find himself changing and be unable to stop. He gritted his teeth and raced across the floor toward the strange throne.

A Guard led wraiths to meet them. “Go!” Bayne yelled, lifting the heavy pike. Syrus pushed himself past them, diving for the control panel beneath the Raven Guard’s swinging ax. He had one last dart left. He’d try to hold off using it as long as he could.

He stood in front of the control panel, as the Guard loomed behind him. He tried pulling levers and turning dials, but beyond some hissing sighs in the tangle of hoses above him, he heard nothing.

Except for the swinging hiss of the ax.

He dodged just in time, and it came crashing down on the control panel right where he’d stood.

Then he heard the flicker and murmur, the stuttering sound of paralytic fields dissipating. The nevered cages sparked and steamed, and then the bars dissolved entirely.

A Thunderbird rose toward the dark ceiling and when it shook its wings, lightning flashed and echoed around the entire chamber. A Giant uncurled from his cramped confinement and stretched high above; his shadow drowning everything in the flashes of lightning.

Syrus yelled triumphantly. But there was still the Guard to deal with. He brought his ax up again and swung. Syrus just barely jumped high enough to miss being severed in two. Piskel fluttered around the Guard’s eyes, trying desperately to distract him.

And then the Giant lifted his foot. There was a gust of wind, and the Guard disappeared in a puddle of metal and feathers under huge, cracked toenails.

Syrus fell back, sure the Giant would crush him, too, but the Giant seemed as uninterested in him as he would have been in a mayfly. With a great roar, he smashed both fists down on the throne, sending sparks and smoke flying. The concussion knocked Syrus head-over-teakettle toward the cages, from which Elementals of every kind and description were pouring in a golden tide across the shaking stones.

“Syrus! Syrus!” Bayne called to him through the smoke.

Bayne lifted him from the floor. “Come on, let’s help them get out.”

“But . . . my people . . . they’re trapped somewhere in here too. We must help them!”

Pain convulsed Bayne’s face. “I know they are, Syrus, but look there—” He pointed up the stairs. Refiners, wraiths, and more Guards were pouring in, some of them toting thunderbusses whose humming charge carried under the sounds of the melee. “If we go that way, deeper into the Refinery, we and all the Elementals are doomed.”

“But . . .” Syrus reached toward the Guard-infested tunnel. He pushed away from Bayne, tottering toward the wave of onrushing guards.

“Syrus!” Bayne yelled. Before the boy knew what was happening, he was upside down over the Architect’s shoulder. Bayne raised a hand and sent a current of magic behind them, creating a great, glowing wall that nearly blinded Syrus with its light.

Then he saw a low, roofed tunnel and the Giant, stooping so he was almost crawling as he led them through it.

Bayne carried Syrus down the tunnel in a flood of Unicorns and Amphiteres, bugbears and dryads. A Kraken thundered by them at
one point, desperate to get to the River. The Giant punched a hole into the living rock. The roof shuddered overhead as if in pain.

Soon enough, the winter sun shone on Syrus’s face, but all he could do was reach back toward the dark tunnel, reaching for the people he knew were still imprisoned there, even as the Elementals rejoiced in their freedom all around him.

C
HAPTER
27

W
hen I wake up, I ache all over as if my bones have been broken and hastily reassembled. Something is breathing under me. At first, I think I’m lying on a great, billowing bed. Something takes slow, steady breaths, breaths that inhale the world and let it back out again. The Beast in the Well sleeps deep beneath me. For a moment, I think I might have reached my destination after all, that everything is safe, that victory is assured.

Then, I smell something familiar—the must of old books, dust, forgotten displays. My eyes don’t want to open, but I sense the light going by in a circuit. I manage to peel my eyes open. I’m in the storage basement in the Museum, that room where Bayne and I first kissed. I’m lying on a pallet and an old blanket from Father’s office.

The illusion of breathing remains just for a moment. Even the walls stretch and snore. Then the light passes the door and a paralytic field glimmers, the wards snug inside the door frame. Everything returns to normal. Except nothing is normal anymore.

A tall shadow passes, so familiar the cry is out of my throat before I can hold it back. “Father!”

He looks in at me through the shimmering field. His eyes are sad, so sad.

“Father, let me out!”

He shakes his head. “Charles told me you would try to use your witchery against me in any way you could. I can hardly believe it of you, my little girl.”

There’s so much sadness in his voice that I get to my feet and go to the door. I walk as if I’ve never used my feet before. I look down. I’m still in my torn stockings. My gown is tattered and streaked with dirt and blood. And I remember. I remember the Manticore’s death, changing into the Phoenix with the Heart safely in my own chest, the Guard coming after me in a twisted cloud.

The field is so strong that it snaps and hisses at me the closer I come. There’s definitely no way I’d be able to trip this field as I inadvertently did with the Sphinx’s field. This one is a hundred times stronger. I stumble back, but I put out my hand toward Father.

“Father.” I swallow the sharpness that rises in my throat. I won’t apologize, nor will I beg. Charles—or rather, the Grue inside him—has been the puppet master all along. The puppet, even if he is my father, won’t suddenly grow a will of his own. But I try to appeal to the inner recesses of his heart. “Father, I may be a witch, but I am still your daughter. I’m still your Vee.”

He puts his hand up—the mirror image of mine, only larger, more gnarled. For a moment, for a single breath, I think he might free me. But instead he shakes his head. “Minta warned me you would turn out just like your mother. I tried to dampen your abilities, tried to shelter you from them while giving you at least some rein to enjoy what you loved. But Minta warned me. And I wouldn’t listen.”

“What does that mean?” I ask. “Father? What do you mean?”

He comes back to look at me through the glowing field. “Your
mother was a Tinker witch, an opera singer who managed to hide her true origins behind the beauty of her voice. I didn’t realize until I was so deep in her enchantment that I couldn’t find my way out. I thought I could make you different with her gone. I thought if I just brought you up Logically, you would never stray. You were my Great Experiment, my attempt to prove, if to no one else but myself, that Tinkers could be normalized into Society. And I’ve failed. I’ve failed utterly.”

I can’t think of any Doctrine of Logic that could save me. Not that I believe in it anymore, anyway. It’s not that the news is so very shocking—why else would they hide everything about my mother but the one thing that took away her power?—but the perspective is so very skewed. There is no language to express the wrongness of it. I don’t even want to think about what must have happened to my mother, trapped as I am in a society that feared and reviled her gifts.

There is nothing more to say.

Father slouches off down the corridor, back toward the main stair.

I pace until my feet remind me that they’re incapable of such abuse. I return to my pallet, thirst turning my throat and mouth to nettles. They haven’t left any water or food for me. This is not a good sign.

I think about what he said about my mother, how Aunt Minta never wanted to discuss her. I was told she died in childbirth, something which is still all too common. Aunt Minta had moved in to help care for me and Father had never remarried, his heart too broken. But now I’m sure there’s more than I will ever know.

I press my hand against my chest. The Heart ticks under a thin
layer of skin. When I touch it, the skin dissolves and the Heart rests in my palm, singing out its ancient song. I look at it, trying to understand who made it, where it came from, how it came to be. There are characters I can’t read incised into its metal chambers. All I know is that it, like me, yearns to be in the place it most belongs.

Ironic that I thought the Museum was where I belonged and now I’m imprisoned here. I frown, remembering how I soared toward New London, as I looked down and saw my purpose laid out so clearly before me. And now I know I’m only a few feet from the goal. A powerful field and a rusting iron gate are all that separate me from it, but they’re enough to allow Charles to win and everyone else—the people of New London, the Elementals, the Tinkers—all to lose.