The Iron Wyrm Affair

disobedience. You will guard the mentath.” The threat of you strangling me as well is not enough to make me tolerate an order from a Shield. Not nearly enough at all.

The struggle went out of him. He slumped inside the cage of her will. “Yes,” he murmured.

“Yes …?”

“Yes, my Prima.”

It was a wonder he did not hate her. Of course, he very well might. But as long as he was desirous of continued survival, they were allied. Hatred mattered little in such an alliance.

Or so I tell myself. Until he finds a better treaty to sign, and then? Who knows? “Good.” She turned, skirts swishing, and set off for the door. Her will slackened, but Mikal did not move.

“Emma.” Softly, now.

She did not halt.

“Be careful.” A little more loudly than he had to, making the salle’s bright air tremble, dust swirling softly. “I would not care to lose you.”

Sudden self-loathing bit under her breastbone. It was a familiar feeling. “I have no intention of being lost, Mikal. Thank you.” I should not have done this. Forgive me. The words trembled just on the edge of her tongue, but she swallowed them, and left him behind in the sunlit salle.

Chapter Eight You Will Do, Sir

The sorceress’s house was odd indeed. It was a good address – Mayefair was a very respectable part of Londinium, and Miss Bannon was of course comfortable. Rare indeed was the sorcerer with bad business sense, though most of them affected a high disdain for such matters. To be in trade carried its own shame, sometimes worse than the stigma of sorcery.

The house seemed far larger than its exterior would have given one to surmise, and he did not like that illogical notion at all. It caused him some discomfort until he consigned it to his mental drawer of complex problems judged worthy of further investigation at some later date, if at all.

The suite he had been shown to by the cadaverous Finch – tall, thin, marks of childhood malnutrition around his jaw and evident in his bowed legs, dressed in dusty black but with his indenture collar lovingly polished – was furnished spare, dark, and heavy, but the fume of scorched dust told him hurried cleaning charms had been applied just prior to his residence. Dark wainscoting, leather and wine-red upholstery, but the bed was fresh and its linen crisp. Fire crackled merrily on the grate, and he was gratified to see that during his morning’s exercise newspapers and periodicals had been brought, stacked neatly on the huge desk. Plenty of paper had been provided as well, and a complete set of Encyclopaedie Britannicus, in fifty-eight volumes, was arranged on the bookshelf, along with two dictionaries and a chemist’s arrangement of reference works.

Miss Bannon must have given orders. It would do to keep his faculties occupied for a short while.

The servants were proud, but they spared no effort. Each one had a burnished indenture collar, and they were an odd assortment. Finch, for example, spoke with a laborious upper-crust wheeze, but Clare’s trained ear caught traces of a youth spent mouthing Whitchapel’s slur and slang. The man’s musculature was wasted, but several of his mannerisms led Clare to the conclusion that Finch was familiar with the ungraceful dance of a knife fight or two in the darkness of a forgotten alley.

Then there was the pair of chambermaids – one with long chestnut ripples pulled tightly back, all elbows and angles in her brushed black gown, the other a short, plump, fair Irish colleen – who descended on his room to put it to rights a few moments after he pulled the bell-rope upon awakening. And the housekeeper, a round merry-eyed Frenchwoman with an atrocious Picardie accent, who had fussed him into a Delft-and-cream breakfast room and tsked over him.

The chambermaids both flinched at odd moments, and the housekeeper compulsively straightened everything she could lay her hands upon, tweaking with deft fingers. Yet they did not seem precisely afraid; Clare’s sensitive nose caught no acrid note of fresh fear. The food, of course, was superlative, for all that Miss Bannon made no appearance until mid-morning in the salle.

And what an appearance that had been.

The man Mikal was still a puzzle. Clare settled in a chair next to the fire and lit his pipe, puffing thoughtfully. He was ready to turn his entire attention to the problem of the Shield, but there was a tap at the door.

A pleasure foregone was enough to irritate him at the moment. “Enter!”

The door opened and the Shield appeared, his yellow eyes flaming and his entire body stiff. “I hesitate to disturb—” he began, but Clare brightened and waved him further into the room.

“Come in, come in! You will do for a half-hour at least. Is Miss Bannon gone?”

“I saw her to the door.” The man’s jaw set, and Clare deduced he was most unhappy with this turn of events. It was, from what he could remember, not at all usual for a sorcerer, especially a powerful Prime, to set foot outside without a Shield or three, or more.

Of course, what Clare knew of sorcery was little more than the average man would. It did not do to think too much on the illogical feats such people were capable of performing. On the other hand, a surface study of such things would have armed him with enough to make workable deductions about Miss Bannon’s character.

Let us test the waters. “No doubt you can tell me her true motivation in leaving the pair of us mewed here.” He took a mouthful of smoke, tasted it speculatively, and almost smiled at the sensation. Mentaths did not feel as others did; logic was the pleasure they moved towards, and irrationality or illogic the pain they retreated from. Emotions were to be subdued, harnessed, accounted for and set on the shelf of deduction.

Privately, Clare had decided that few mentaths were completely emotionless. They simply did not account fully for Feeling, it being easier to see the occlusion in a subject’s gaze than in their own. It was simply another variable to guard against, watch for, and marvel at the infinite variety of.

“She thinks to protect you.” The Shield lowered himself into the chair across the fire, sat bolt upright, his hands resting on his knees. His long grey coat, buttoned all the way to the neck, did nothing to hide the muscle underneath. Outside the window, Londinium continued its morning roil under a blue spring sky lensed with coal- smoke fog. Shafts of smoke and steam rose; the note of copper from the Themis told Clare there would be clouds by afternoon and fog tonight. “Since the Queen, via Lord Grayson, consigned you to her care.”

“Fetching concern,” Clare murmured, puffing on his pipe, his eyes half lidding. The mournfulness of his features was accentuated by this manoeuvre. “Tell me, Mr Mikal—”

“Just Mikal.” The man’s chin lifted slightly.

Aha. Jealous of our pride, are we? “Mr Just Mikal, how many Shields does a sorcerer of Miss Bannon’s stature – that is to say, a Prime – normally employ?”

Mikal considered this. His short hair was mussed, as if he had run his hands through it. When he visibly decided the information could do no harm, he finally responded. “A half-dozen is the normal minimum, but my Prima keeps her own counsel and does as she pleases. She had four Shields some time ago, and … well. It is a dangerous occupation.”

“Four Shields. Before you?”

“Yes.” Mikal’s face visibly closed. Clare could almost hear the snap. Most interesting.

“And she has been chasing this conspiracy …”

“Three days. Sir. Since she was called to examine a mentath’s body in situ—”

“That would be Tomlinson, I take it. The first to die.”

“The first she was called to examine.” Those yellow eyes glittered. Their colour seemed much more pronounced now, as the Shield gave Clare his attention.

Very good. You are not stupid, nor do you assume much. “Your lady suspects there must be more.”

“She has not seen fit to share her thoughts with me.”

Well. This is a pleasant game. “We will get exactly nowhere should you continue being obstreperous.”