The next morning was a holy day. Now that I was excommunicate, I couldn’t attend services, so I rebuilt the fire and then huddled under the covers reading several more chapters of Flowers Over the Dark Water until the fire heated the two rooms. It felt … comfortable, which was a peculiar sensation. Then I spent the rest of the morning rearranging my possessions to my satisfaction, hiding the forbidden books behind the bookcase and listing the items I was going to have to buy now that I was respectable, such as drinking glasses. It was the most pleasant and relaxing morning I’d spent in over a decade.
I assumed the knock on my door would be Droit, but it turned out to be the landlady, holding a grimy-looking piece of paper.
“A man delivered this. He said it was important,” she said, with a sour look. “He was very dirty, Doctor Axton.”
“I’m sorry.” I took it. Could it have been Arlin? He didn’t usually entrust information to paper. The landlady was still standing in the doorway, clearly awaiting an explanation, so I unfolded the paper and skimmed the note.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, looking up. “This is related to an ongoing Watch investigation. I’ll try to ensure that this kind of business doesn’t disturb you in the future.”
“I would appreciate that, Doctor. The messenger looked like a ruffian.”
“I expect he was,” I agreed. I waited until she turned and started back down the stairs again before closing the door and limping back to sit at my new table.
I opened the note again and re-read it, recognizing my former landlord Mirk’s handwriting: Tomcat at Barkers. Black Tate watching.
It didn’t need to say anything else. I knew where Barker’s was, on the border between Southgate and Dockside. I took a second to gather my thoughts.
The last time I’d gone after Tommy Malkin, I’d ended up with a knife in my leg. I needed backup this time. Droit? Nobilis Aronson? Both lived all the way across town in Parkside, and I was no sentinel capable of racing across Cislunar on a balesteed. Captain Lorencz and Sergeant Connas lived closer, in Dockside, but it would still take me valuable time to reach them.
Once more I felt the existential frustration of having been born mundane. Even after all these years, I still tried making calls sometimes, hoping that maybe, just maybe, if I concentrated hard enough I’d be able to glimpse the Line. Summoning Far was as close as I’d ever come, and we already knew he didn’t care whether his summoners were adjurically adept or not.
I thought about Droit, building up his image in my mind’s eye until it was clear, and concentrated on drawing him to me — but the old, familiar headache immediately started to pound, the headache that would turn into a splitting migraine if I didn’t stop. I opened my eyes, disappointed afresh.
I knew better, of course. If I hadn’t Manifested in the emotional and psychological crucible of Hellsgate, I never would.
I took another look at Mirk’s note. Ten years in Hellsgate might not have sparked any latent magical powers, but it had taught me how the world works. I tucked the letter and all of the money I could find into my pocket and reached for my crutches.
“I don’t know nothing about it,” Malkin repeated, sullenly. Black Tate, who’d proven quite willing to do more than watch the young thug for enough chink, twisted his arm up a little higher behind his back.
“You can talk to me or talk to General Droit,” I warned.
“You’re going to sell me out to the Dog anyway,” he spat.
“Yes, but I’ll give you a head start on your escape if you talk to me now.” I shifted my crutches. “It’s going to take me a while to get to the general. You’d probably have at least an hour to get out of town. He wants to arrest you, but he’s also disinclined to leave city limits; his amnesty agreement is void outside Cislunar’s legal boundaries.”
Malkin swore and Tate gave me an inquisitive look, waiting for instructions. I slid my gaze away, pondering my next approach. We were standing in the snow-filled, stinking alley between Barker’s and the next building. I’d talked to Tate first, who’d told me Malkin was in the common room, brooding over a late breakfast of beer and bread. After a quick negotiation, Tate had force-marched my quarry outside into the alley, where we stood now, shivering in the cold winter wind.
“You were bragging in Lud’s about selling children, and I can link you to a kiddie stew down on Experience Street,” I said, trying to channel Captain Lorencz’s aggression. Malkin sneered at me, but Tate’s grip tightened on his collar. Black Tate was an upright, reverent kneebreaker, and I doubted he had any sympathy for childnappers and pedophiles. “I want to hear about the kids you nicked a few months ago. Who bought them?”
Malkin hawked and spat. Tate slammed him against the brick wall even as the sticky globule landed on my coat. I ignored it, watching as Tate buried his fingers in Malkin’s hair and pulled his head back. Blood streaked the kidnapper’s face.
“Don’t knock him unconscious,” I instructed. “I need him to talk.”
“He’s young. He can take it.” Tate swung Malkin back around to face me. The bully looked dazed and, finally, frightened. I’d always thought I’d relish seeing my enemies cowering before me, but all I felt now was impatient. Tate gave the kidnapper another shake.
“Tell Ratsie what you know, slimebag, or I’ll rip off your balls.”
“Malkin,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “did you ever work with Wry Dick and Jack Rake? Did you take a commission to kidnap and nix children who were Manifesting?”
Malkin was silent. Tate’s fingers tightened in his hair and gave his head a warning yank.
“They wore masks,” Malkin muttered at last.
My heart beat faster.
“They?”
“There was two, three of ‘em, sometimes. They wore masks and robes, so it was hard to tell anything about them.”
“What kind of masks?”
“Just … blank ones. Not even a mouth.”
“Their voices. Male or female?”
He shook his head. Tate’s fingers tightened in his hair and he winced.
“The boss was a jill. At least, I think she was the boss. She did most of the talking.”
“Are you sure it was a woman?”
“I know a woman, even under a mask and robes.” He looked up at me, blood trickling from his lips, and I saw a flicker of uncertainty pass over his face.
“Are you sure?” I pressed again.
“She was a woman,” he said swiftly. “Small, like you, but a jill for sure. I could tell from her neck and the size of her hands. The way she talked. You know what I mean. She’s the one told us what to look for and where to take the baby becks. Gave us a drug that made them stupid.”
I jammed my hands in my pockets. The obvious suspect was Sentinel Carignan Carel. Would she have been foolhardy enough to hire kidnappers on her own? Possibly. It would have meant taking a risk, but it would have been just as risky to trust the job to a subordinate. And the arch-sentinel was a precise, exacting woman. But this wasn’t proof.
“What color were the woman’s eyes?”
“I don’t know.” He grunted as Tate twisted a little harder. “The eye slits ] were too small! I wasn’t looking!”
“Did you smell anything? Perfume, cologne, smoke, anything?”
“No.”
“Did she talk a lot, or did she cut straight to the point?”
“She talked business. No babble.”
“Then —“ Suddenly a piercing pain shot through my head and yanked my brain like a barbed hook. My sight blurred and I doubled over, dropping my crutches and vomiting.
“Fuck!” Tate stared at me from over Malkin’s shoulder. “What’s going on, Ratsie?”
Nausea swept over me in a wave, accompanied with an irresistible urge to turn around and find Magister Carel. I gagged and fumbled for my crutches, grabbing them. A call. It had to be a call. I’d never been called before. Sentinels said it felt like a headache — this felt much worse than a headache.
“I have to go,” I gasped, already turning. Was she deliberately making it hurt this bad? Did she know what I’d just discovered?
“Wait, Ratsie! What do I do with this guy?”
“It’s a call.” My vision blurred. “Let him go. Go — tell Lorencz — to go to the Vigilance.”
“Sorry, Ratsie … I ain’t talking to the Firebitch, and I sure ain’t getting mixed up in any damn beck business.” Tate released Malkin, who gave me a confused look and then took off running.
Bile rose in my throat and I dropped the crutches again and leaned over, retching and coughing. I grabbed a handful of filthy snow and rubbed it into my face, trying to clear my head, but the pain was a sharp, steady pull. The only thing that relieved it was traveling toward its source. I left Tate and my crutches behind, unable to spare a thought for either of them. It was all I could do to stay focused on the street through the recurring waves of dizziness and nausea. Tate didn’t follow. We’d met in Hellsgate Prison, but that didn’t mean we were friends.
I flagged a carriage, managed to croak out “The Vigilance,” and staggered inside before nearly passing out on the seat. The pain was excruciating, and I think I was delirious. I remember the driver hauling me out. I dropped his fare in the snow because my hands were shaking so much, hoping I was paying enough, and then limping up the Vigilance’s walk, gagging. Tears of pain ran down my face as I pounded with bare fists on the closed front door.
It opened. The Vigilance’s secretary, Mazarin Saint-Cloud, stepped aside as I collapsed to the floor on my hands and knees.
“Allow me.” The Vigilance’s secretary slid an arm around me and half-carried me the rest of the way into the lobby.
“Magister,” Saint-Cloud called, voice carrying through the huge entry hall. “Mister Axton is here but indisposed.”
I shuddered, dry-heaving. Across the room, a door opened and Carel walked out. As soon as her eyes fell on me, the sharp, tugging pain in my head stopped. The dizziness and nausea didn’t. I clung to Saint-Cloud’s arm, unable to stand on my own. My wounded leg was hurting all over again.
“That’s interesting.” Carel strode across the room and rested a cold hand against my brow. I swallowed hard and tried to focus on her. Was she going to kill me now? “Have you ever been called before, Mister Axton?”
“No,” I gasped.
“I see. I’ll take him from here, Mazarin, thank you.” Carel slid a wiry arm around my shoulders and propelled me forward into a large conference room.
“Shall I call a physician?” Saint-Cloud asked.
“No; it should pass.” Carel closed the conference room and pushed me into a chair. I risked one quick look around as I sat.
Eight masked faces turned to regard me, and five familiar, unmasked faces. I’d seen similar masks once before, when Droit and I had rescued Captain Lorencz. The Banishat.
That was all the visual information I could stand, and all the visual information I needed. I folded my arms on the table and rested my head against them, keeping my eyes closed. The world tilted, making me sick. I didn’t want to die with my eyes shut, but I was afraid that if I opened them and saw the world spinning, I’d vomit again, and that would be an even worse way to die.
“This is Mister Axton, the city’s coroner and a special consultant to the Vigilance,” Carel said, her voice businesslike. “He asked to be included in these meetings, and I agreed. Axton has published a number of studies of famous criminals, including Cislunar’s own General Tegeus Droit, and several notable papers on treating madness.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Holly demanded, sounding worried. A few of the other children chimed in with their concerns.
“He’ll feel better in a few minutes, Miss Francis.” The arch-sentinel sounded reproving. Then she took up her introduction again. “Mister Axton’s most important work, however, never saw print. I own the only surviving copy of the study that sent him Hellsgate Prison.”
My stomach was slowly settling, but I had no desire to look up and experience another wave of vertigo.
“His unfinished thesis was titled ‘An Inquiry into the Physical and Mental Nature of Transients.’ Axton studied and vivisected the transients that his research partner, a sentinel named Jonathan Ivory, called across the Line for the purpose.”
I heard murmurs of interest. I took a deep breath. I was going to need to look up soon. I braced myself for the moment.
“Needless to say, Axton and Ivory’s methodologies were unique, their work groundbreaking, their conclusions shocking, and their entire study unconditionally illegal. Unfortunately, rumors of their experiments spread before they were prepared to present their work, and their rooms were raided by a cooperative group of agents from the Reverence, the Vigilance, and the government.”
More murmurs, this time of outrage. The Banishat were sympathetic. And they only knew part of the story.
So, perhaps Carel hadn’t brought me here to kill me, after all. Perhaps she hadn’t known what I’d been doing right before she’d called. I pulled my hands up and rubbed my face, trying to massage the headache away.
“The representatives who evaluated their case were split into two factions; one led by the Reverence, which wanted to make public examples of the two researchers, and one led by the Vigilance, which preferred to cover up the experiment in order to prevent others from replicating it. When Jonathan Ivory hanged himself in his cell shortly after his arrest, the latter prevailed. Mister Axton had engaged in several other projects of dubious legality, and those were used cited as the reasons for his excommunication and imprisonment. All drafts of his thesis were destroyed except mine.”
“What conclusions did they reach, that were so dangerous?” asked one of the strangers, speaking in a thick Geronfran accent.
I carefully lifted my head. The dizziness was going away, but listening to Carel’s neat summary of my past had done nothing to alleviate my nausea. My stomach ached from dry-heaving, and my pants and sleeves were damp from falling in the snow. The wound in my leg was agony. Dr. Hawkins wasn’t going to be happy with me.
“Their results may surprise you less today than they would have a year ago. Axton and Ivory discovered that transients are, internally, almost identical to humans.”
More murmurs, longer this time. I dragged my eyes up, as slowly as possible, looking for the children. They looked mystified but unharmed. Around them, the masked adults leaned close together as they discussed the implications.
I slipped my hand into my coat pocket and found the bottle of laudanum. I pulled it out, uncapped it, and took a cautious sip, wondering if it would stay down. As I lowered it, I saw Carel looking at me. Her gaze held mild curiosity but no outright rancor.
“Feeling better?”
“A little,” I croaked, recorking the bottle. I slipped it back into my pocket and slowly looked down to the manuscript on the table in front of her. “Jon — that was Jon’s?”
“Yes. I was on the team that searched his rooms.”
I pulled my gaze up, swallowing. It wasn’t too bad, as long as I didn’t make any sudden moves.
“You didn’t … give me a mask.”
“No.” She smiled coolly. “I thought it would be safer this way.”
The group was quieting down, looking at us. She turned to address it.
“Mister Axton suffered an unusually violent physical reaction to being called. Diagnosis?”
“Brain damage,” one of the masked Banishat said promptly — a woman. I tried to discern her eye color. Malkin hadn’t been lying. It was nearly impossible.
“Yes, very likely.” Carel looked at me with dispassionate interest. “Madmen and simpletons suffer unusually adverse reactions to a call. So do people who’ve suffered extreme head trauma. Are you insane, simple, or scarred, Axton?”
I looked away.
“He’s not crazy,” Jack protested. “He works in an asylum!”
“Maybe the madness is catching,” suggested the Geronfran with a rough laugh. Others joined in, but none of the children, and not me.
I knew I wasn’t simple, which left either brain damage or insanity. I reached up to touch my temples again. Brain damage wasn’t out of the question. Fleeting memories of being battered against the prison floor pushed against my mental defenses and I cringed, forcing them back.
Insanity wasn’t impossible, either. I had only the dimmest memories of those first few months in jail — biting and scratching, screaming and ranting, covering myself with feces and urine until the long-timers labeled me with the half-derogatory, half-admiring verdict, ‘crazy as a shithouse rat.’
As an alienist, I had a good idea why I couldn’t remember my first months in Hellsgate. And when Far had taken us across the Line, I’d seen with my own eyes some of the events my mind refused to recall. But my madness in Hellsgate had only been temporary. I’d recovered. I thought I had, anyway.
My mouth was dry, and my heart was beating so hard my shirt trembled.
“Whatever the cause, it’s an interesting example of a relatively unusual phenomenon,” Carel said briskly. “But not why we’re here.” She turned to the children. “If you’re ready?”
“Not yet, Magister.” Caro frowned, looking back and forth between us. “Why is Doctor Axton here? I thought this was secret.”
“I … asked if I could be here,” I said with some effort. My voice shook, and I hoped she wouldn’t pick up on it. “I’m representing … Nobilis Aronson. It’s all right. You don’t … don’t need to worry about me.”
Caro gave me a long look, then glanced at the other four children. I relaxed just a little. If Carel did decide to kill me, she’d have to do it very carefully or she’d alienate her star pupils. The realization made me feel a little safer. I pushed myself upright, pain dulling as the laudanum took effect.
I’d already seen much of what the children were demonstrating for the assembled sentinels, at least to the extent a mundane could see it. The Banishat would be discerning their manipulations on a completely different level, of course. I’d discussed it often enough with Jon to have some idea of why they were so interested.
Bale is an alien material, instrinsically disturbing to human senses. To create structures as complicated as the armor the children so easily wrapped around themselves should be next to impossible. To actually transform one’s body with bale — if that was what in fact they were doing — was the stuff of legend. Most sentinels who tried it lost control and died, which is what I assumed the Banishat sentinel in the warehouse had done. The few who survived did so only briefly, during which time they suffered excruciating agony. Not surprisingly, the Vigilance had forbidden such dangerous experiments and banned the books that described such attempts.
One of the demonstrations the children gave surprised me, however. Holly walked out of the room, only to return across the Line several minutes later. On the surface, that didn’t seem so amazing, but I understood enough about Line theory to be impressed. There was no one-to-one correspondence between the seething chaos of hell and the world around us, so Holly was finding her way back through unusual means. I had a tentative theory about that, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to share with the Banishat.
The demonstration and discussion lasted an hour, and then the children were dismissed, presumably returning to their rooms in the Vigilance dormitory. After a few final words, Carel send the masked sentinels away, as well. They left one-by-one at ten-minute intervals through a back door.
I remained seated while the room slowly emptied, pulling Jon’s copy of our work to me and slowly paging through it. It was like reading the work of a stranger. I touched one of his scrawled notes. The cheap ink we’d used as students had faded to brown.
“Well, Axton,” Carel said, when we were finally alone. “Are you satisfied that I’m not endangering Aronson’s wards?”
“You aren’t intentionally putting them into any direct danger.” I agreed, looking up. “But there’s still danger. First, you’re implicating them in an illegal cabal. The sentinels are taking a calculated risk by being here, but the children don’t understand the implications of these meetings. Second, you’re pushing them to attempt increasingly difficult maneuvers across the Line. Eventually they’ll overreach themselves, and someone is likely to be hurt.” I tapped the manuscript. “You’ve read our thesis. What if one of the children gets trapped again?”
“Those five are safer than anyone else in the world.”
“Have you made them aware of the risks, though?”
“They’re getting the same training as any other young sentinel. That includes a list of dangerous and forbidden acts.”
“Crossing the Line is dangerous and forbidden, and yet you’re encouraging them to do it, anyway. They need a thorough briefing on all the risks, including the ones the Vigilance doesn’t like to discuss.”
“You have a suggestion?”
“Stop the experiments until they’ve gained more self-discipline. I’ll instruct them in human anatomy, so they’ll have a solid base of knowledge to supplement their natural instinct.”
“Do you really think they’ll stop experimenting on their own?”
“They won’t if you keep trotting them out to the Banishat like some sort of circus act.”
Carel smiled thinly.
“That sounds like something Aronson would say.”
“I’m representing his interests.”
“But are you representing theirs?” She cocked her head. “Ten years ago, did you let a question of legality stop you from pursuing knowledge?”
“No.” I looked down at the manuscript. “And I paid a steep price for my actions. So did Jonathan. I don’t want those children ending up in Hellsgate or the end of a rope.”
“You and Ivory made one important mistake: You didn’t secure a powerful patron before you broke the law. Those five children are protected by Aronson, Droit, Jaspin, and me. If they’re caught, they have enough influential friends to ensure they get nothing more than a reprimand.”
I wearily rubbed my eyes. Maybe she was right. They were certainly safer with Carel now than they had been when she’d first had them kidnapped and nixed. Her experiment had paid off, and now she wanted to study the results. And I wasn’t entirely innocent when it came to encouraging them to take risks, either.
“Do you need me for anything else?” I asked. I needed time to think, and I needed Dr. Hawkins to tell me how badly I’d re-injured my leg.
“No.” She paused. “How shall I notify you of our next meeting? I presume you don’t want to be called again.”
“A mundane message in the care of Blackstone Hospital would be sufficient. Give me a day’s notice, if you can.” I stood, favoring my wounded leg. “Good evening, Magister.”
“Good evening, Axton.” She nodded, and I limped away. Saint-Cloud was gone, so I let myself out.