The Iron Wyrm Affair

conspiracy – for all I know, he may have killed Throckmorton himself. And yet several things do not make sense. The work was theoretical; a logic engine is valuable, yes, but all signs point towards the conspirators having some defined use for it already.”

“… It does. They do, rather.” He was, he thought, beginning to recover from the shock somewhat.

“I suspect a military application.” Patiently, as if she expected some further reaction from him.

Clare blinked. “I should think so.”

“The question becomes, then, which military. You see the difficulty.” Her hands still worked at each other, at odds with her calm, logical tone. The fire opals in her rings glowed dully, foxfire gleams.

“Britannia has many enemies. Any one of whom would not hesitate to use such an engine …” But for what precisely? “Even if there is not a military application yet, the consequences in manufacturing alone could be tremendous. And even in Alteration.” His dinner, had any of it been left, might have tried for an escape at the last thought. “The unregistered mentaths. Their bodies were somehow savaged?”

“Certain pieces were missing, Alteration is not out of the question. I do not know enough yet.” Emma Bannon’s dark eyes glittered. “But now, Mr Clare, it is war. I will brook no treachery or threat to Britannia’s vessel.”

“Admirable of you,” Clare muttered. “No wonder you locked me up in your house.” Keeping me safe, certainly. And any mentath is suspect. There is precious little I would not do to lay my hands on such an engine. The research possibilities … simply staggering.

But it would not do to voice that particular thought.

“You may become extraordinarily necessary, Mr Clare.” She finally stopped twisting at the ragged remains of her gloves. “If not, you are at the least useful. But in any event, you must be protected.”

“I cannot quibble with that sentiment.”

“Consequently, we are about to pay a visit.” She dropped her hands, but her gaze was still level and quite disconcerting. It took Clare a few moments to discover why, exactly, he perceived such discomfort.

A woman should not look so … determined. “To gain some further variety of protection for my tender person?” He was only halfway flippant. Still, it gave him a chance to gather himself. The irrational feelings were highly uncomfortable, and he longed for some quiet to restore his nerves.

“Precisely. While we walk, occupy those admirable faculties of yours with the question of how you will uncover the whereabouts of a core and a transmitting logic engine. My methods have produced little of value at great cost, and I am needed to solve another riddle.”

He found he could walk again. The Park was deadly still, but Londinium growled in the distance like a wild beast, and the Palace was a faint smear of indistinct light behind the boiling-thick fog. If Miss Bannon took another four steps, she might well be lost to his sight entirely, so he hurried after her, his torn jacket flapping. “And what riddle would that be, Miss Bannon?”

“The riddle of a dragon, sir. Come along.”

Arrowing north and west from St Giles, Totthame lay under a dense blanket of boiling yellow. The shops were closed tight against the choking fog – except for some of the brokers, low-glowing brass-caged witchballs barely visible above their doors and a flashboy or two often lounging on the step to keep the metal from disappearing. Side doors leading to individual closets for the gentler sellers to haggle privately were closed and bolted at this hour, but furtive movements could be seen in the shadows about them.

The swaybacked, dull-flanked clockhorse didn’t even swish its ragged tail as they disembarked. The cab driver, swathed to his nose in oddments, was no trouble either, hiding Alterations from his misspent youth as a flashboy. Clare decided him as a Sussex youngblood come to Londinium to make good and only now as a man wishing he’d stayed where he was born. So much was obvious from the style of his dress and the broad accent in which he grunted the bare minimum necessary to secure their custom and give his price. Mikal appeared out of nowhere again and paid the man before they were allowed to alight, and Miss Bannon, still sunk in the profound silence she had spent the entire ride in, set off for the far side of Totthame with a quick light stride.

Mikal, silent as well, followed in her wake, glancing back at Clare as he hurried to keep up. The fog cringed away from her, curling in beseeching fingers. She was making directly for a broker’s door, and the flashboys lounging there – one slim dark youth with half his face covered in a sheath of shining metal, the other just as dark but stocky, with gleaming tentacles where his left hand should be – elbowed each other. The thin one sniggered, and opened his mouth to address her.

Mikal’s stride lengthened, but whatever the flashboys saw on Miss Bannon’s face cut their ribaldry short. They hopped aside, the stocky one awkwardly, and the sorceress sailed past them, a slender yacht passing between battleships.

“Wise of you,” Clare mumbled, and hopped up the biscuit-coloured stone step. The tentacle Alterations rasped drily against each other, scaled metal letting fall a single venomous-golden drop of oil, splattering on blue breeches. The stocky flashboy breathed a curse.

Inside, an exhaled fug of sweet tabac smoke, dust, paper, and the breath of mouldering merchandise piled in mountains enclosed them. Carpenter’s tools beached themselves against the front of the shop; a pile of larger leather tack sat mouldering under hanging bridles and hacks. A cloud of handkerchiefs foamed over a long counter in front of the side door that would lead to the closets where the shy would seek to trade their wares.

Miss Bannon turned in a complete circle, her hands become fists and the sapphires dangling from her ears flaming.

“Twistneedle!” she called, and a mound of cloth moved near the back of the narrow shop. The shelves groaned with odds and ends – china, metal, clothing, a pair of duelling pistols in a long, dusty glass cabinet, a tangle of cheap paste jewellery and slightly less cheap snuffboxes threatening to swallow the gleaming barrels. Patterns formed with lightning speed, Clare’s brain seizing on the sudden sensory overload and categorising, deducing, sorting puzzle pieces with incredible rapidity.

For the first time that long night, he was comforted.

“Don’t shout, woman.” A thready, reedy, irritable voice. More puffs of tabac smoke rose from the rear of the store. “I’m an old man. I needs my rest.”

“Do not anger me, then. Ludovico. I want him.”

“Oh, so many do. So many do.” A wide, froggish face over a striped muffler rose peevishly from what Clare had taken to be a soulless mound of piled clothing in bundles; a polished brass earring gleamed. The round little man pushed aside a froth of calico petticoats and grinned widely, showing rotten stump-teeth. The pipe in his soft, round brown hand fumed extravagantly, while rings gleamed on the thick fingers. One was even a real diamond, Clare noted. “What will you give, miss? I don’t hand out nothing for free, not even to those I fancy.”

“Mikal.” Deadly quiet.

The Shield glided forward, and the frog-man cowered, raising both plump hands. “None o’ that! He’s upstairs. Sleepin’, most like.”

Clare placed the accent – this man had probably never ventured more than a half-mile from Totthame in his life. Deduction ticked along under the surface of every item piled inside the narrow cavern. He wondered why he had never visited a pawnbroker’s before – a single shop could keep him occupied for weeks. And with every deduction, Southwark retreated, more distant and dreamlike.

A movement behind a clutch of hanging frock coats in different colours, a slight twitching. There’s a door behind there, Clare realised in a flash, but it was Mikal who moved, slapping aside the flung knife, its blade a blur in the smoke, burying itself in a pile of waistcoats tumbling off three narrow wooden shelves.

Some of the waistcoats still had traces of blood marring the fabric. Not just a pawner’s, then. Clare’s skin chilled.

A corpsepicker’s shop.

“Ah.” Miss Bannon sounded amused. “There you are.”

“Call off your snake-charmer, signora.” The frock coats twitched again. “I have the more knives, I use them, eh?”

Naples, Clare thought. No more than twenty-six. And more afraid of the Shield than the sorceress.