I do my best to turn slowly and keep my expression icy-calm.
“Don’t you have better things to do than sneaking up on people?” I retort.
“Vespa, if you have any sense at all, which I begin to doubt, you will come with me now before we are discovered and all my work is in vain.”
He’s so close to me now that I can smell him—crushed roses, ink, a whiff of jam cake. Piskel looks up at me from his pocket, nodding fiercely.
I turn and walk out of the observatory and down the corridor back toward the Main Hall. Reaction makes my knees hot and wobbly. If the Sphinx leaped at me from some corner right now, I don’t think I could run fast enough to get away from her. Hal catches up to me in silence.
“What do you want, Pedant?” I say, finally.
He slides a cream-colored, neversealed envelope into view. “This was delivered to your Father’s office. The clerk asked me to give it to you when he passed me a bit ago; he couldn’t find you,” he says.
The invitation from Lucy Virulen. It’s sealed with a tiny Manticore.
“Just in time, it appears,” he says, looking back toward the corridor where he found me.
My hands shake. I touch the seal and it dissolves. The letter unfolds like a living creature and rests lightly in my palm.
“Yes,” I say. Words with all their arabesques and illuminations swim before my eyes.
“What were you doing back there?” he asks. His voice is stiff.
“Why are you angry? Because I was about to discover information you haven’t dared to find out for yourself?”
Hal looks around at the flood of Pedants and Scholars moving through the Main Hall on their way to morning lecture or laboratories. A search party is still wandering through the halls, but I’m guessing they’ll call in the Raven Guard when they get desperate enough. Or else just forget about it and hope nothing untoward happens, as they did with the Grue.
“Not here,” he says. He takes my elbow. A little shock zips past my sleeve and beneath my skin. Before I can protest, we’re on the stairs toward the storage basement.
I clutch the letter like a limp bird in my hand as we descend. Fear slips through me—why should I trust Hal? He is an Architect and a heretic. He’s had every chance to use my own powers (about which I know nothing) against me. And yet he has risked his life for me more than once. He has kept my secret. Whatever else there may or may not be between us, he’s the only person in the world who could possibly understand me, perhaps even help me. Why, then, is he so angry with me now?
We go to a storage room beyond the iron gate. I peer down the narrow stair as we pass. That elusive breathing haunts me with thoughts of the lost Unnaturals.
A single everlight wanders an endless circuit around the room Hal chooses. Skeletons, collection boxes, and specimen jars cast strange shadows, but the musty smell of ancient things is infinitely comforting. I would like to hide here for quite a long while.
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
“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?”
