Transmuted

by Karina Cooper

  “Medicines?” Ashmore said, and I glanced up with the wood between my fingers to raise my eyebrows at him. “Uriah says this was a known apothecary.”

  “Just an apothecary?” I asked.

  “And sundry,” Ashmore repeated when Uriah’s voice failed to reach me. I lifted the wood to eye-level. Yellow granules, not quite a powder, but fine enough to puff like one. I bent my nose to it, inhaled gingerly.

  The faintest of impressions confirmed my suspicion. “Sulfur,” I called. Leaving Zhànzhàn to her own devices, I retraced my steps to show Ashmore the powder. “Uriah, did this place sell mercury?”

  The man ducked to peer into the portico, such as it was. “Not often.”

  “What else was sold here?”

  This earned a narrowed glance—I might have thought it humor but for the sheer inappropriateness of that emotion given the carnage I stood in. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said,” I snapped. “What other services were provided here?”

  Uriah hemmed and hawed for a moment’s breath, then sighed deeply and said, “Fencing ken.”

  Ashmore was not as keen on the vulgar tongue of the streets as I. His puzzlement was clear enough that I translated the notion for him without asking. “A place where stolen goods are stored.”

  Though I might prefer the concept of coincidence to one of fate, magic, or other such sundry, I was not so blind to the idea that I would ignore a clue when it appeared. Letting Ashmore retain the stick with its sulfur grains upon it, I fished the notice from my pocket and handed it to Uriah. “Is this the place a stolen diamond is bound to be stored?”

  He did not take the notice, but glanced at it. That he was literate added to his mystique. “Likely,” Uriah said. “But this kind of coin don’t come easy. Not even to me.” Which meant someone with greater sources of wealth and a line into the Underground. That closed up suspects across the board.

  Through his knowledge garnered from Menagerie dealings, perhaps Hawke would know of— Oh.

  Hawke.

  Grasping the creaking planks for balance, I leaned outside the door and surveyed the exterior. Shadows loomed at the farthest expanses, hovered like physical entities wherever nooks and crannies allowed.

  The people held back, the curious and the horrified, and talked among themselves. Some flung jeers at Uriah’s guard, and otherwise behaved as onlookers always did.

  But it was not them I searched for.

  “Ashmore,” I said, brow furrowing deeply.

  “Yes?”

  I looked back over my shoulder to find him carefully carving a bit of the sulfur-laden splinters from the wood. Where the knife had come from briefly bothered me, for mine had not been returned.

  “Where,” I asked, “is Hawke?”

  My tutor looked up from his careful task. “What?” Then, with more intensity and much less helpfully, “Where?”

  Uriah stepped from his post outside the door and scanned the lane. “He was just here.” And now he was not.

  I rubbed at my forehead. It did nothing to lift the pressure I struggled to focus through. Bloody bells and the Devil’s own, I would leash that tiger if it was the last thing I did.

  Just see if I didn’t.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That I convinced Ashmore to let me search the immediate area for Hawke was a matter of simple logic. Somebody had to remain behind to watch our unwitting Chinese companion. Were she to misbehave, I trusted Ashmore to run her down a sight quicker than Uriah or I.

  The former would not, by sheer fact that Zhànzhàn was no longer his concern. I would have taken great pleasure in reining the Chinese girl in, however I was not so arrogant that I thought it to be an easy matter.

  Ashmore, on the other hand, seemed a better candidate for her obeisance and general safety.

  Of course, I didn’t give my tutor much opportunity to argue.

  He was still trying as I darted out into the narrow lanes.

  I turned away from the crowds, slipping down a cramped alley that served as a thoroughfare despite its size. Signs of hard use remained everywhere—refuse and discarded items clustered under pools of light. Cloth hung from support beams nailed into place with no eye for aesthetic rhyme nor reason.

  Shadows clung everywhere they could find purchase. Unlike the streets below the drift, there was no sense of movement here. Only the stillness, unique to the Underground, that came with no breeze, no sky.

  No daylight.

  It was as much luck as an eye for likely passages that crossed my path with Hawke’s. I found him crouching at a crossroad formed by uneven planks, one hand braced upon the ground, and his face tilted to the air.

  His shoulders had eased, but it would be a fool who mistook the display as letting down his guard. He could launch into motion from such a position in less time than it took to scream.

  Thoughts of slipping up behind him were quickly dispelled when his head turned just so, favoring me with the angle of his jaw and a twist of bared teeth. It was as much a personal warning to me as it was general notice of something amiss.

  “There’s something here,” he said by way of greeting.

  I never expected an apology from Hawke. Not even should he worry his companions.

  Hawke was Hawke. Intelligent beings let him well enough alone.

  I did not feel all that intelligent.

  I approached on nominally soundless feet. Were it any man but him, I doubt I would have been heard at all. “You wandered off.”

  He graced me with no answer.

  I bit back a tart word and asked, “Is it a thing you smell?”

  “Smell,” he repeated grimly, “sense. Something of the sort.”

  I halted behind him, close enough that I could stroke a hand down the thick plait of his hair, if I so chose. That my fingers twitched to do just that earned them a burying in my pockets. “Can you place it?”

  “No.” A breath, and then with less certainty, “Not entirely. Something about it seems familiar.”

  “Well, well,” I said before I could stop myself. “So even Micajah Hawke has moments of doubt.”

  He rose so swiftly—a breathtaking release of agile strength—that I took a step back before I could refrain. The look he favored me upon turning, arrogant beyond measure, said he expected no less.

  Because I was, in the end, myself, I regained that step. Took another closer, as though to dare that conceit.

  How much did it say of my desires that even smeared with the ambient coal and grime of fog and sundry, I still found his attraction to be near insurmountable?

  Too much, I’d wager.

  Deliberately, I turned half from him to survey the shadows beyond us. “Can you trace it?”

  “No.” He lifted a hand to his face, cupping his mouth and nose. Frustration twisted his features. “There is too much in the way.”

  I expected as much. “Then let us return,” I suggested. “We can do little enough out here alone.”

  Prophecy had never been my gift. If anything, a skilled fortune teller might do well listening to my words and predicting the very opposite.

  As it turned out, we could do a great deal out alone. Primarily if that function included the role of bait.

  I had no more taken a step back the way I’d come than every instinct I’d ever cultivated—the fog sense that them what lived in the drift all their lives tended to obey— screamed a warning.

  At the same time, Hawke’s head lifted, a predator scenting something far more dangerous than the docile fragrance of prey. He moved as I did, and it was too late.

  What Hawke presumed the intent of our assailant was, in fact, incorrect.

  He leapt for me, to cover me with his body or push me from the path of whatever launched from the shadows, but it was not me the thing wanted.

  The man-shaped thing collided with Hawke. His body folded upon impact, and the two rolled and tumbled, snarls and grunts and the wet sound of flesh torn peppering the fray.

&
nbsp; I hit the ground, jarred from teeth to toes, and grabbed for the knives I’d forgotten hadn’t been returned.

  I sprang to my feet empty-handed, though prepared to launch whatever assault I could.

  Intention failed at onset of realization.

  There are such things as defy reality; creatures, circumstances, truths that fly in the face of this world as explained by scientific certainty. Though I had seen with my own eyes the horrors wrought by the Veil’s twisted beastmen, though I was familiar with the precepts of alchemy that might fundamentally alter the course of nature as science knew it, I still laid eyes upon things in this world and flailed for description and logic.

  Hawke might be likened a beast, in hunger and function, but never in form.

  That what tore at his body now, long of limb and made of a tensile fury, was every aspect a beast. Yet it was not the black fur sprouted across lean shoulders, nor the claws gleaming with the fresh blood of the ringmaster that earned my most horrified of responses.

  As Hawke crossed his forearms in defense, blocking the worst of the creature’s assault from his throat, the thing sat up, back arched in an arc, and splayed arms wide. He, for it was most certainly thus, roared bloody challenge to the market.

  It echoed, but more than thunderous, it pealed—throbbed with something beyond human. Inhuman. None who heard this sound would mistake it for a simple animal.

  Long black hair waved and bounced along the furred back. It had been plaited into a multitude of very tiny braids, each bound with a wooden bead. Skin as black as pitch had turned matte, like the soft under padding of a cat’s paws, and the white teeth bared in otherworldly fury were long as a canine’s.

  Or, as was rather more likely, a lion’s.

  Ikenna Osoba had not, as I’d assumed, perished in the fire I’d unwittingly caused. He had not fled to die, a shapeless mass of char and agony.

  He had survived. Altered. Like the Ferrymen before him, he had become something beastly in every sense of the word. From features twisted by flesh seared to a scarred mass to the obviousness of his overly stretched carriage, there was little enough human left in him but that he operated on two legs rather than four—and this only an obvious matter of demand.

  If I were to call upon Eon, a Trump still beyond my safe control, I knew that I would see within him a core of brilliant azure.

  The same color that was Hawke’s own spirit, that legacy that gifted him with such power—and such a curse. The same foundation that the Veil had used to force such horror upon the Ferrymen.

  I had forced this one. I had created my own beastman.

  I and the Trump I should not have known.

  Nausea, ragged furrows of it, welled up within me.

  The night had become one surprise after another, revelation after revelation. The trek to the Underground, the cosh that left my head and face bruised and bleeding, the contest of strength and agility against Zhànzhàn, all of it had become one long strain.

  Punctuated by the thunderous report of a long-gun fired over my head.

  The lithe, alien form of the thing Osoba had become bowed, as though slapped back. His shriek scored inhuman claws through the lane as he rolled in bloodied tooth and claw, flung wide by bullet and Hawke’s own strength.

  I turned my head, and it seemed as though I moved thick and slow as treacle. As though I were in a dream—those moments of bliss where all seemed brighter than it should and music underscored every flicker of an eyelash.

  Yet there was no music. Only the howl of a creature driven to madness, like fingernails drawn over pocked iron, countered by the rolling avalanche of a voice pitched to carry—dark and deep, and booming.

  The man who flanked me reloaded the Springfield he carried with a deftness that seemed out of place in his enormous hands. Ishmael Communion ordered the four Brick Street Bakers flanking him to give chase, sparing me a hard look from eyes black in color and tinged with yellow at the whites. “You fit, girl?”

  Whatever had kept me standing failed me then.

  I could never be proud of it. I certainly couldn’t say for certain what it was that drove me to crouch upon the street, every visceral instinct stretched to the breaking point, fold my arms over my head, and scream insensibly.

  Or perhaps I could put name to it. Perhaps it was my sense of responsibility that I could not shake, the voice of my conscience that whispered Osoba’s presence—his form and ferocity— that was my doing.

  Magnitudo, I’d called when he’d near enough killed me in the Menagerie. The twelfth Trump, the symbol of strength and power. I had not thought so much as reacted, and calling upon a Trump to bolster my flagging strength had seemed appropriate.

  While the oldest of texts suggested the Trump was symbolized by trees, the slaying of a lion—the gathering of its skin, and thus its power—personified the legend that fueled it. Slaying the lion, besting the lion prince; it was all metaphorically apt.

  If there was no god of alchemical science, then there would be no god to laugh at the irony of it all.

  The raw force I’d called forth during that skirmish had saved me. In so doing, it flung the whip Osoba had been into crates of abandoned serum—the same stuff that had twisted the Ferrymen.

  I was not proud of it, but I hadleft him to burn. At the very least, I’d done nothing to help.

  What fates had combined the aether of that serum with the twisted caricature Osoba had become were cruel indeed. Neither man nor wholly beast, his eyes sheened with a madness that stemmed from agony, from slavering fury.

  And I was the weak-willed creature who folded at the sight.

  My only conceit for the whole of this moment was that my weakness saved Hawke’s life—or at least the bloodied remains of his hide. Perhaps it was the sheer horror of my screams, so ragged they were as twisted blades shoved down my throat, that kept him from obeying whatever predatory instincts demanded he challenge the beast Osoba had become.

  Perhaps it was Ishmael—blessed friend that he was; a London low gang leader who minced no words and toed no lines. He did not spare a hand for me, but stood over my insensible, huddled figure and thundered, “Cage!”

  It was as near an order I’d ever heard him deliver to the once ringmaster the Bakers avoided out of respect.

  Whatever it was they did around me, all I knew was that I could not protect myself. That I had no sense for it as I screamed and screamed, broken beneath the final straw that was my own responsibility.

  That Ishmael did not lay a hand upon me was as much a matter of guarding our backs as it was ensuring Hawke’s ire did not rise.

  Somehow, I knew it was Hawke who knelt before me. Hard, unforgiving hands gripped my shoulders, shook hard enough to rattle my teeth. Though I managed to seal them against another scream, I could not draw a breath.

  “Cherry!” A harsh demand.

  I had no breath to return a reply. No thought to form into words.

  I must have cried. Where else would the wetness upon my face come from?

  As I clutched at him, as the metallic tang of fresh blood filled my nose, he tore my grasp from his clothing, threw me over his shoulder.

  The world tipped. The close confines of the lane went sideways.

  “Hunting?” he asked, a curt demand.

  “Aye,” Ishmael’s deep voice returned. “Two down. One left. Get her safe.”

  “Careful. Osoba will not go easy.” With no other words spared between them, Hawke ran.

  The last I recognized of my friend, he forged down the lane his Bakers had gone, tracking the murderous creature by whatever uncanny sense the men had learned in long years in the fog.

  As a howl went up behind us, senseless and haunting, every bit as inhuman as it was terrifyingly close, my overwrought senses finally took leave.

  I was no wilting miss to faint at the first sign of danger. It offended me on every level that my consciousness fled while Hawke played hero to the damsel I had become.

  Chapter Fourteen

/>   There were scenes that played out around me. At the end of it all, I couldn’t be certain what had been dreamed and what was true. There were images carved into my mind, fantastical things of twisted creatures swarming Ashmore and turned to so much ash and bone.

  I heard a steady beat, strong and overly loud, masking the horrifying wail of things aflame.

  And Hawke’s voice. Strained. Taut. A rasp on the verge of utter defeat—but what defeat, I could not ascertain.

  There had been yelling. Anger.

  Ashmore and Hawke.

  And gentler refrains.

  Maddie Ruth.

  Surely I dreamt that, as well.

  All of it came with the overwhelming impression of vivid color and a cacophony of sound; I hadn’t dreamed like this since the night terrors that stemmed from an overabundance of laudanum.

  As I woke, the whole of my body twitching as though I would save myself a tumble, I was aware of two very clear matters.

  The first was that I was in my own bed.

  The second, comprised of several occurrences, was that my head ached fiercely, my nightdress was soaked through with sweat, and my mouth was as dry as dust.

  A third circumstance made itself known with placement of a cool cloth upon my brow. “They say idiots don’t get fevers,” Maddie Ruth said, her round face and concerned brown eyes filling my vision beneath the edge of the cloth.

  Her freckles, usually a source of entertainment when they winked in tandem with her smiles, now seemed as serious as the frown she levied upon me.

  I reached up to pat at the cold cloth upon my brow. “What is this?”

  “You’re an idiot,” she replied, firm enough for all it lacked in sting. “And you came down with a fever. Didn’t you feel it?”

  In hindsight? Perhaps.

  I closed my weary eyes. Among the various legacies my near lifelong obsession with opium had left me, a weaker constitution was one. I had never been prone to agues or fevers, not that weren’t caused by the opium itself.

  I couldn’t say for certain what it felt like.

  Was this the heaviness of my head?