8 #2
“Is this luminium?” he asked, trying not to choke.
“Mmm,” said the girl, leading the way to the watchhouse.
“What’s that?” asked Miss Rosara.
“Heard of incandaeum?”
“No.”
“It’s a stimulant they give the flash arcani,” the girl said, dropping her crates at the watchhouse door. “Luminium’s the poor cousin.”
“For the guards?” asked Felix, laying down his load as Miss Rosara did likewise.
“Nah.” The girl glanced about, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Thems in the eternity cells. Y’know. Wire ’em in and harvest ’em to death. This stuff”—she patted a crate—“keeps ’em churning out arcana.”
“I say,” Miss Rosara murmured, eyes wide with guilty intrigue. “Have you ever . . .” She trailed off and mouthed the last few words—been in there?
“Nah,” the girl chuckled. “The guards let me have a peek once, though. Saw it through the periscopes in the watchhouse. Hundreds of ’em in there, like corpses in cold storage.
Glass tubes coming out of ’em, full of arcana, pumping it into the tanks.
No lights on, but that magic . . . bright as anything I’ve ever seen, and every color in the world. ”
“Good gracious,” said Miss Rosara, following her back to the cart. “Still . . . I suppose they must have done awful things, to be locked away in there.”
“Perhaps.” The girl shrugged, then patted the back of the wagon. “Need a lift? I’m back off to the factory. Veneum Lane.”
“Oh, that would be marvelous!” Miss Rosara said, before Felix had the chance to point out that Veneum Lane was farther from the Althion than Haideum Castle was. The girl clambered into the driver’s seat, and Miss Rosara climbed up beside her. Impatience strumming faster, Felix followed on foot.
The streets turned shabbier by swift degrees.
Veneum Lane was in the industrial district, where the air grew thick with soot and steam.
Ash mingled with alchemical runoff in the gutters, forming a blackish soup that singed the falling leaves.
Old papers scuttled down the streets like vermin.
A muggy wind whipped at his coat, carrying the scents of foulness in all its grand variety.
Felix trod warily as they went deeper. That place wasn’t short of crime—thefts, mostly, and affrays between the foreign enclaves.
Worse still, the heavy therical manufacture played merry hell with the arcanic fabric.
Streets led back to their own beginnings, ascending staircases finished lower than they started, and alleys abruptly halved in breadth when the arcana mills kicked up.
He found himself moving like a wolf ready to show its teeth to anyone who came too close, hands hovering near his weapons.
“Do you find yourself at Haideum often?” Miss Rosara asked the girl, raising her voice against the din of industry.
“Every three days,” she shouted back. “They need the luminium fresh. We mostly supply the milking sheds, though.”
Felix was too slow in disguising his distaste at the name, and the girl didn’t miss it.
“Beggin’ your pardon. The arcana factories,” she said with a smirk. “Some don’t like it, but they’re a damn sight better than the bloodshops. Not that that stops Haideum buying from them.”
He pinned his composure back into place, vexed at himself.
It’d done nothing for the dignity of the fifth science when they’d begun packing arcani into factories and harvesting their power for the grid.
Even so, the bloodshops were beyond the pale.
They simply drained their workers’ blood and sieved the raw arcana straight from the pool.
Their pale and staggering castoffs were a common sight about those streets.
Another half mile saw them to the factory.
It smelled like Carintheum Harbor at low tide—salt, muck, and whoever’d been decomposing in there for the last six months.
The floor was dotted with vats of brown liquid, bubbling sluggishly, left open to the elements.
He winced at the sight. An unscrupulous person could slip anything in there.
“Well, what a very productive day!” Miss Rosara declared once they’d unloaded the last box, dusting off her hands.
Unhinged, he decided. Poor thing.
Amadis Lane was glimmering beneath the stars when he arrived. Amber-golden windows lined the streets, ablaze with treasures fit to make the last imperatrix crawl from her grave. Diamonds large as eggs winked from the displays, and opals glittered green and red against dark velvet.
Number thirty-one was something of a rock among the jewels. Aurium Gemwork was embossed in tarnished bronze letters on the window. The curse across the glass was barely strong enough to lift the fibers on his coat. The lights were low, and an elderly man was packing up the displays for the night.
Doubt arrested Felix as he reached the door. He’d been fixed on getting there, with little thought of what he’d do when he arrived. In truth, he didn’t even know what he was looking for. Nonetheless, his arcana set spurs to sides and drove him forward.
Just dive headlong in, he thought. Always worked before.
He marched inside, plunging into mahogany darkness. The proprietor flinched upright, his gauntleted hands rising in alarm. Then, spying Felix’s uniform, he backed down with a huff of air.
“Pardon me. You entered quite . . . ahem. I’m shutting up the shop. You’d best come back tomorrow.”
“I fear it can’t be delayed,” said Felix, flicking down the mask of office: calm, conciliatory, but never apologetic. “I’m here on prefecture business. This emporium was robbed three years ago.”
He knew the look of prey scenting a predator—the tensing, the sudden stillness, senses straining to perceive the danger. It was the look of the man before him.
Something’s amiss.
“It was, sir,” the proprietor said, setting a ruby necklace in its case with calm deliberation.
“Tell me what happened.”
Seeing as he hadn’t the first idea what was going on, he made no attempt to explain why he was asking. The man gave him a quizzical look. For the first time, though, Felix felt a spark of fondness for the uniform. Prefects didn’t need to explain.
“If you’re from the prefecture, then surely . . .”
“You are the owner of this emporium?” Felix asked impassively. Impassivity was a mirror in which a man could see whatever he chose, and whatever this man saw, it unsettled him. He gave his optics a quick polish, then carried on clearing the displays.
“Yes, sir. Of course, I . . .” He trailed off and cleared his throat.
“It was a little less than three years ago. I was abroad at the time. They broke in through the back window. The patrium curses had near as dried up, so they smashed the glass, but they didn’t notice the alarms. The prefecture arrived before the desperate creatures made off with anything. ”
Felix hid a frown. Something in the fellow’s manner rang false. If anything, it seemed oddly . . .
Rehearsed.
He looked around the shop. It was lesser than its fellows, but still crammed with jewels. No merchant worth his salt would let his patrium curses expire.
“I see. Do you know who the perpetrators were? How many?”
“Four, I believe,” the man said stiffly. “I’m afraid the prefects told me very little.”
“You made good the loss on insurance, I trust. Which firm?”
“I . . . Rivium’s,” the man replied, looking more perplexed by the minute. “Forgive me, Prefect, I don’t understand—”
“That window there, was it?” Felix went on, striding past him to the wide stretch of glass at the back.
“Ah . . . yes?”
“I see. Thank you.”
A minute later, Felix was standing in the lane that ran behind the shop, examining the glass.
With his arcanic senses sunk and scuppered, it was difficult to reckon the age of the curses protecting the window.
He still had eyes, though, and the brass lettering on that glass was just as tarnished as the script at the front.
Curious indeed, he thought. It was a strange thing to lie about, but that brass was ten years old if it was a day. Then there was the owner himself. He’d spoken like a bad actor reading straight from the script.
He was lying.
Like any decent insurance firm, Rivium & Sons was still open and refusing claims at the chime of eight. Felix swept past the doorman and straight to the public desk.
Half an hour and several confused clerks later, he was out again, bewilderment ringing in his mind. He’d induced the insurers to show him the jeweler’s file, and it was plain as day. Aurium Gemwork had made no claims in seven years.
Felix’s mind whirred as he set out into the city. Sealed records, no trace, and a crime that had never been? And that strange woman, with her past locked up tight and her memory gone . . . It didn’t make sense.
Still, he knew one thing for certain. It was time he kept a closer eye on Miss Rosara.