Mainspring (45 page)

Authors: Jay Lake

BOOK: Mainspring

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It was simple foolishness to think she'd find someone, anyone, on the Long Wharf. There were hundreds of longshoremen out there even now in the decline of the workday, along with their carts and hand trucks, horses, dogs, sailors both merchant and Naval, errand boys, pickle sellers, women of questionable virtue, customs officers, deputy port-masters and the miscellanea that any great port drew into itself. Childress had known this all along.

She would not find anyone, but they would find her. It was a reasonable presumption that the white birds had a ship tied up among the several dozen vessels moored to the Long Wharf. There they would conduct the business of the secret empire of knowledge.

The
avebianco
all held a common goalâquiet advancement of the Spiritualist cause. The movement went by different names in different places, even within the British Empire, but the purpose was always the same: acknowledge and preserve God's work in the world, while advancing the labors of Man. The Rationalists dismiss that viewpoint as secular spiritualism, while the orthodox laughed them away as feeble in both faith and mind.

It was of no matter to the white birds and their allies. Only a fool could look at the brasswork in the sky and deny God's handiwork. Only an idiot could look at the brasswork in the sky and declare God immaterial. Childress and her sliver of the quiet wisdom of librarians had been content to nudge where nudging was called for, teach where teaching would be heard, and report that which was noteworthy.

This business came back to Hethor and his feather, she knew. That had been a time when the world shook, great waves striking coasts all over Northern Earth. That New England had been spared was nothing short of a miracle, but English and Colonial lives had been lost aplenty elsewhere. The boy had gone seeking William of Ghent and passed out of her view. She'd heard sufficient echo of his later effort to know he'd achieved something.

Success, evidently, as the world seemed to be yet turning, and the horomancers had settled down once more to casting lots and predicting the fevers of children. William of Ghent had left Boston on a mysterious errand, not yet returned to the courts of Empire even now.

She tried not to wonder if her own note to the man in Boston who ran his specials had made things worse for poor Hethor. Phelps was part of the
avebianco,
too, in his way.

As she reflected, her boots echoed down the wooden planks, past bales of cargo netting, cotton and canvas, as well as larger, bulkier containersâhogsheads and tuns and barrels. There was a profusion of practice around her that signaled a vocabulary of action and word. Every craft carried its own cant, librarians and libertines alike.

Men looked at her, too. Wondering. Childress knew that nothing of her appearance telegraphed any sense of belonging here. She was far too old to be a dockside hussy, or even a madam. Her attire, high-necked black in close semblance of widow's weeds for all she'd never married, was far too plain to be a captain's wife or widow-owner. In the rising dark of the evening, the torchlight
and great storm lanterns would deepen the lines on her face to those of a children's witch.

It was no surprise at all when the
avebianco
found her. The woman who'd visited her at the library looked out from under a sailor's flat hat, just as Master Boyett of the University of Connecticut libraries stepped around a stack of wide, shallow chests.

“Good evening, Librarian Childress,” Boyett said quietly.

She was aware that at least four of the sailors nearby were not moving about at their tasks, but rather focused on her.

Childress let her voice go frosty. Boyett had always been a bit of a sucking grind. “Something of a walk from Storrs, isn't it, Brian? Out for your evening constitutional?”

Boyett moved his hands slightly, the
v
-and-
x
signal of the white birds. “I'm here as witness â¦ .”

She took satisfaction that he couldn't quite bring himself to call her by her Christian name. She still had the advantage of him. Her only advantage now, and not one she could see a way to playing. “Witness what? I have been called, I come. Most of us spend our lives watching and waiting without ever serving at all.”

The sailor-woman's hand closed on her arm. “Time to go, Librarian.” Had Childress not seen this woman in a dress some hours earlier, she would not have questioned that a man stood beside her now.

“Nonsense,” Childress answered. “The tide's running for several hours yet. Your sense of the dramatic is overtaking your judgment.”

The grip grew tighter. “You will not be baffling me as you have him.”

“Then I go. I came, did I not?”

Boyett shuddered. “I'm sorry.”

“For what?” she asked, but he did not answer.

Then the woman led her up a gangplank of a fast packet named
Mute Swan
, which shuddered as its engines
chuffed somewhere deep within the metal hull. Childress looked back when she reached the top. Boyett stared up after her.

“What did you tell him?” she asked her captor.

“The truth,” the woman said. “As for you, you go below now.”

Childress looked up at the brass curving in the evening sky, wondering if that poor, lost Hethor had found any reward to go with his success.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

MAINSPRING

Edited by Beth Meacham

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
^Â®is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

eISBN 9781429933728

First eBook Edition : March 2011

First Edition: June 2007
First Mass Market Edition: May 2008