The Unnaturalists Read online

  Syrus had fallen asleep waiting, but when the door clicked he was wide awake. The fire had burned into embers and the book Syrus had been idling through for days—maps of Old London—had slid to the floor.

  Bayne slipped into the room, holding a candle rather than the everlantern most Cityfolk would have used. “Come,” he whispered.

  Syrus followed past the hulking bed and a massive wardrobe that threatened to trip him in the dark.

  “They’ve nevered the door against my leaving, but not against a skilled lockpick.” Bayne’s smile was ghoulish in the flickering candlelight. He handed Syrus the tools of his trade.

  The boy rolled his eyes and bent to the task, hoping it wouldn’t be like the Harpy’s cage. His wrists still smarted just thinking of those little iron hands grasping them.

  As the tumblers turned, there was a spark and a fizz. One jolt whizzed into Syrus’s thumb. He shook his hand, cursing.

  Bayne watched him expectantly. “Once the lock is sprung, I can disable the rest.” Syrus sighed and turned back to the work.

  At last, the door opened. Bayne whispered something and Syrus saw a faint web stretched between the doorposts dissolve into glimmering nothingness.

  The house was vast and echoing; Syrus felt swallowed by it. They crept through everlit halls hung with dour portraits and mounts of things both Elemental and not. Down a curving, creaking staircase, back along another hall, through the silent kitchen with its spit-boy snoring by the hearth, and to yet another door Syrus was forced to pick open. Then along a cobbled corridor, through a garden and a courtyard to an iron side gate that sizzled with warding magic.

  “A moment,” Bayne said. He stretched his palms toward the gate. Then he paused, looking over at Syrus. “Can you run if required?” he asked, glancing down at Syrus’s foot.

  Syrus nodded, grinning.

  The next thing he knew, Bayne seized him by the sleeve and pulled him. One moment, they were on one side of the fence, the next they were on the other, running madly through the deserted Uptown street while a banshee alarm wailed behind them. The Empress’s Tower reared so very close on its hill that Syrus thought he could almost see faces looking out at him from the windows. The Imperial Refinery coughed green smoke just beyond it.

  “Couldn’t avoid that one, I’m afraid!” Bayne shouted. He grabbed the boy’s sleeve again and yanked him through space and darkness and wailing alarms to stand before the maw of a cave on the River Vaunting.

  Syrus put his hands to his head to stop everything from spinning. “Think you could warn me first?” he gasped.

  Bayne chuckled. “That was a bit rough. The danger and suddenness and all that. Didn’t have much time to prepare.”

  “Why couldn’t we have just done that from your room to here like we did the other night?” Syrus asked. His temples throbbed.

  “A little more difficult getting out than getting in. And the summoning stones . . . well . . . their magic is older and more refined than what little we’ve managed to learn in these dark days. The stone draws me to it; I can’t help but go to it. But on my own, without a witch. . . Pffffft.” He gestured lamely and half-smiled.

  “Without a witch? She makes you stronger?” Syrus asked.

  “Indeed,” Bayne said. “Which is why we’ve been hoping one would arise for so very long. Without her, we’re rather like a hive of drones without a queen bee. Everything depends on her.”

  Syrus nodded, though he wasn’t exactly sure about all this talk of drones and bees and whatnot. Sounded like something Nainai would’ve understood much better than he did.

  “But don’t tell her I said so,” Bayne added suddenly. “Wouldn’t want her to get a swelled head.”

  “I think you’re too late to prevent that,” Syrus said.

  Bayne chuckled. “She’s a saucy thing, is she not?”

  “Minxish is more what I’d say,” Syrus muttered. He glanced at the Architect. Shadows hid most of his face, but the City lights from far above tricked out a glimmer of something that chased the amusement from his expression. That hardness, whatever it was, wherever it came from, returned.

  Bayne looked up at the wavering everlights of the Night Emporium and the phantasmagoric smoke of the Refineries. “We’d best get moving,” he said. “Getting back into my family’s house won’t be easy.”

  The stench of the river mud and City offal slimed the back of Syrus’s throat. He coughed as they climbed over detritus and battered rock. He had been down on the shores of Lowtown, where the mudlarks scavenged the refuse caught in the river bend. But he’d never been this far—never had he imagined anything like this existed within the walls of New London. Crumbling columns and pediments carved with weathered faces loomed over them. Even higher, armless dancers, faceless gods, and curving tails of Elementals wormed through the cliff face.

  “What is this place?” Syrus whispered.

  “It was a city once, a temple of learning where men came in peace to treat with the Elementals. Now it’s a ruin. It’s also a convenient hiding place. No one comes here for fear of what may lurk, even though the Museum up above is built on the old city’s bones,” Bayne said.

  The Architect opened his palm and a light sprang into it, a pure, living flame, so very different than the sickly green everlanterns all the Cityfolk used. Syrus followed him under the shattered eaves and through the labyrinth of fallen ceilings and vanished doors, while the river’s muttering echoed in the cavern ceiling overhead. Things looked at him out of the shadows—little nyxes or water sprites or other things he couldn’t guess in the darkness. Syrus missed Truffler fiercely and wondered if he would ever see the hob again.

  Bayne didn’t seem to notice the Elementals, but was concentrating on a path only he could discern. At the center of a soaring cavern, a great stair spiraled down from the roof. Old rusting pipes crisscrossed here and there from other tunnels and up along the staircase. There was a sound far below—a whooshing noise that reminded Syrus of the Refinery bellows breathing in and out, fueling the furnace into which the Refiners had thrust the poor Elemental.

  “What’s down there?” he asked.

  Bayne looked back at him. “Down there? The Lowtown Refinery pipes join up with the Museum fittings in the roof. Just steam, most likely. Come on.”

  Syrus followed him around the pit; there was a landing where the sound was particularly loud. A tunnel carved roughly in the living rock plunged off to the left, gated by rusting bars that rattled with the noise.

  Syrus stopped and listened. There was a hitch and then a drawn-out snore. No myth-powered machine made a noise like that.

  “It sounds like a sleeping animal,” Syrus said.

  Bayne listened. “Maybe all those stories about the Beast in the Well are true,” he chuckled.

  “The Beast in the Well?”

  “It’s said that when Tesla’s Grand Experiment landed our ancestors here on the river bank, they encountered a temple enclosing a deep well. And that if you looked into it, it would look back at you. Some people think the Well ended up underneath the Museum, but no one really knows. I imagine everyone was surprised enough to be here, much less to have buildings showing up at random for several days afterward.”

  “I suppose,” Syrus said. He remembered Granny Reed’s story about Tianlong the night she’d died. Could that be the same thing? The Beast whose Heart had been stolen and given to the New Londoner’s Saint Tesla? He didn’t know much about how the New Londoners had gotten here. His people had already been coming here off and on for as long as their tales told. Granny Reed had said that when the Cityfolk showed up, they’d somehow shut the gate behind them so no one could enter or leave again. And that was why everything was in such a terrible mess.

  He wished there was some way to open the gate up again and shove all of New London through it.

  “Or,” Bayne said, “it could be the Grue that got loose a couple years ago. I heard no one ever found him, either.”

  Bayne half-grinned, but Syr
us blanched. A Grue loose in the Museum? He’d heard tales of them from some of his kin who used to wander in the southlands. There were legends of the Grue that were deeply unpleasant. He shivered and drew the collar of his jacket up a bit more around his neck.

  Bayne led Syrus at last to another rusting gate set into the living rock. The gate swung loosely on its hinges and its grating whine subsumed the well’s sighs. Beyond the gate, a hall tunneled back into the rock. The hairs stood up along Syrus’s arms. Everything about this corridor warned him away.

  Bayne frowned. “Something is wrong.”

  Syrus nodded. It didn’t take an Architect to figure that out.

  “Stay close,” Bayne said. Syrus patted his pockets and realized all his weapons had been removed. Bayne drew a familiar knife and handed it to him. “I would guess this is what you’re missing. Just don’t stab me in the back, eh?”

  “Not until you get me out of here, at least,” Syrus said. The Architect looked back at him with a raised brow. Then, he blew the flame from his hand. It danced off into the air, moving before them like a will-o’-the-wisp.

  They followed it down the corridor into a silence so deep Syrus’s ears buzzed with it. They came to a battered door. Bayne passed his hand over it, as if to remove an illusion, but there was no magic. The door remained as it was.

  “No,” he whispered.

  He pushed past the shattered wood, the flame bursting into a great ball of light in a cavernous room. The Architect stood there for long, silent moments. His shoulders slumped and he put his face in his hands.

  Syrus came to stand beside him, and it took every ounce of his will not to scream.

  The Architects were dead.

  They sprawled obscenely around a long, scarred table. Syrus walked toward it, but he wasn’t seeing this room. He was walking again into the train car with its empty hands and unseeing eyes.

  “They’re all dead. All of them. I’m the only one left in all the Empire,” Bayne whispered.

  Then Bayne saw the white eyes of one of the Architects. “They’re all like the man who leaped in front of the trolley.”

  “The trolley?”

  As Bayne wandered around the table, gently closing his fellow Architects’ eyes, he related the story of how the man had run out into the square and been crushed, how he and Vespa had narrowly managed to save Lucy Virulen in the process. “There is foul magic at work here,” Bayne said. “Magic such as I’ve never seen before.”

  “And just how much have you seen?” Syrus asked, trying and failing to look away from what Bayne was doing. He was still incredulous of the man’s youth. And now that he had some inkling of his high birth, he was even more so.

  “These men were my teachers. They taught me everything they could, everything we knew from these Archives. They asked me to come here to investigate one of our order who had gone renegade and was working at the Museum. I never thought it would end like this,” Bayne said, gesturing around the expansive room.

  The movement of his fingers unfettered Syrus’s gaze. The room was a shambles—broken glass and fixtures, slashed chairs, books and magical items pulled from their cases and dashed on the floor. Even books from shelves high overhead had been scattered; their pages drifted here and there like spiritless wings.

  “He must have come while they were at Council and taken them by surprise. All that knowledge, all our efforts and plans—gone,” he whispered. His voice shook so hard Syrus feared he was on the verge of tears.

  “Who did it?” Syrus asked.

  Bayne shook his head, unable to speak as he went from body to body, gently closing their eyes.

  Syrus moved away. He would cry himself if he looked at those old men a moment longer. They reminded him far too much of his poor dear Nainai.

  “Well, whoever he was, he definitely was looking for something,” Syrus said, at last, noting all the scattered books. “But how would you ever know if anything was missing?”

  Bayne finished his ministrations to the dead and began helping Syrus look around the room.

  “There’s just so much destruction, I can’t tell,” Bayne said. “It might take days to sort this out, and we don’t have that.”

  Then they saw it—a book on the table, large and flat-stitched across the spine. Its cover was slashed and pages had been torn out of it. It was filled with schematics, all written in the old language of Syrus’s people. Syrus read a few entries about immortality elixirs and opening of heavenly gates before he said, “This . . . this must be what he’s trying to do.”

  Bayne bent over his shoulder. “What? You can read that scribbling?”

  Syrus frowned at him. “It’s not scribbling. It’s the sacred language of my people. See here . . . these words mean ‘eternal life.’ And this one is about a heavenly gate. . . .”

  Bayne’s gaze followed Syrus’s fingers along the characters beside the torn schematic.

  “A machine to return to the World Before,” Bayne said softly. “Is that what Malcolm Nyx and Charles Waddingly are building?”

  “Malcolm Nyx and Charles Waddingly?” Syrus asked, frowning. He recognized the first man’s surname as belonging to the witch, but couldn’t place the other.

  “Vespa’s father and his assistant, Charles. I was shadowing Charles on the suspicion that he may have been the rogue warlock who left our order several months ago. But he was so different from what he had been and his magic so slippery that his true identity has been nearly impossible to uncover. This Machine must be part of the reason for his defection, if he is indeed the one I seek.”

  “Well, he must be very frustrated that he can’t quite understand how to make it,” Syrus said.

  Bayne said, “That must be why Nyx and Charles collected the Waste. He’s using it as a power source. But why would he want to risk destroying everything? He knows how deadly the Waste is, especially if he’s one of us!” He looked back at the schematic. “It looks like he needs a catalyst, too. Could that be why he’s seeking the Heart?”

  A hollow clapping sound echoed through the dome. Syrus and Bayne both turned as a young man stepped from a shadowed alcove. Under an old-fashioned cloak, the man wore a motley doublet and hose, like an actor just come from playing the Fool on stage, or someone preemptively dressed for Carnival.

  Syrus recognized the young man then—the bearded fellow who had been in Rackham’s hexshop the day Syrus had sold the toad for information.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve gotten it all wrong once again.”

  “Bennon,” Bayne said. “Or should I call you Charles?”

  Bennon’s visage sloughed off. A tall, thin young man with weasel-brown eyes regarded him. “Ha. A shame you never paid better attention. You always did underestimate me, Bayne.”

  “How could I underestimate what apparently wasn’t even worth my regard?” Bayne said.

  Syrus didn’t recognize him at first, but then he remembered. Charles had been the young man in the carriage with Vespa and her father, the one Syrus had darted at the outset of the clan raid. He didn’t seem quite human—something about the way he moved, the way his eyes flitted here and there. There were many Elementals who could take human shape, and Syrus had been taught the signs of such shapeshifting, but none of them were present here. Still, Syrus sensed that things were not at all right with this Waddingly fellow.

  Charles laughed.

  “Enough!” Bayne said. “What do you want? Why did you kill all our brethren?”

  Charles withdrew something from under his cloak—the ugly dark jar Syrus had seen on Rackham’s counter. “It was all merely an experiment. As everything is, really. I wanted to test whether this little soul jar worked. One always needs to test the merchandise, yes?”

  “Bayne . . .” Syrus said. He started to back away, but Bayne put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

  “Have no fear,” Bayne said.

  “Wrong again!” Charles laughed. “Do you know why?”

  “I feel sure you’ll te
ll me,” Bayne said.

  “Because,” Charles said, as he walked closer, “I’m going to take your souls now. And once the witch gets me the Heart, then I’ll have everything I need to power a second Etheric Engine to rival Tesla’s—one that will open the gates which have been closed for far too long.”

  “So, that’s it, then?” Bayne said. “You’re just doing this to take a jaunt to historic Old London? I just want to be sure I know whom to blame when this Grand Experiment fails and we all die miserably!”

  “It can’t fail!” Charles said, spitting in fury. Some of his spittle hit the table and pitted the surface. “It will open the Gate!”

  Definitely not human.

  “Bayne, I really think we should—” Syrus said again.

  But Bayne pressed onward. “You do understand that the Waste is not to be trifled with? Even the most skilled Architect, even a group of us with a full-fledged witch at our head, would never be able to handle it! We discovered that at Euclidea when we tried to build a gate back to the Old World the first time! Nyx should know better. And so should you.”

  “Such a weak-minded fool!” Charles said. “Your lack of imagination truly dazzles me. Though I must admit that your going undercover as a lowly Pedant to find me did rather surprise me. I didn’t think a lord would stoop to such a thing!”

  “I did stoop, much good has it done me. And them,” Bayne gestured toward the fallen Architects.

  Charles laughed. “Yes, well. I suppose there are those with imaginations less clever than yours. Or were, I should say. And I suppose those who lack imagination have their uses. Nyx, for example. He thinks he’s building a new Engine to power the Refineries; he has no idea what’s going on. He does as I bid. As for me, I don’t care what happens with the Waste after I’m gone. It can swallow this world whole for all I care. And good riddance!”

  “But this world is the seat of your power! How can you possibly—”

  “I’ve no time to debate Magical Philosophy!” Charles snarled. “That Well of Power theory is just that—a theory. No one knows if it’s true. Now into the jar you go! I have a witch to catch. And she is a wily one, isn’t she?” The renegade warlock smirked.