The Timeseer's Gambit (The Faraday Files Book 2) (15 page)

he door to Olivia Faraday’s office flew open, and the woman herself bustled in. The sunlight hit Chris in the face like a stack of knives, and he winced, raising his hand against the light. “Gods, Olivia!” he groaned.

She paused in the midst of fanning herself against the oppressive heat. She peered closely at him. Her head tilted to one side. She was dressed in workaday clothes, a high-belted skirt with button-up blouse. Of course, hers had the recently fashionable leg-of-lamb sleeves, and the wrists and collar were trimmed with bright red ribbons and rosettes that matched the red feathered hat she wore.

She looked remarkably like Agnes Cartwright had last night. At least, Chris
thought
so. The fact was, he remembered it all through a foggy, confusing haze, when he remembered it at all, and the sunlight was going to kill him.

“Are you sick?” Olivia asked.

Chris nodded helplessly. He made a visor with his hand and stared back down at Olivia’s damn receipts. Only a few pages left, and he’d finally be done. If he thought it had given him a headache last night…

“With what, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. He knew exactly what he was sick with. His morning had been even more of a blur than last night, hopping around William’s flat with one boot on, looking for the other, while Agnes Cartwright bawled in the kitchen for what seemed like no reason and William ran out the door wearing his smart police uniform, looking
maddeningly
fine. The taxi ride to the Buckley manor had cost twice as much as it should have, because he had lost his on-the-go breakfast of toast and bangers and had to pay a fine for it, and then he’d needed to get Olivia’s papers, put on fresh clothes, vomit discreetly before he found another taxi…

Olivia slammed the front door and Chris threw his hands up, crying out in pain as one final knife cleaved his skull in twain. “Gods!” he exclaimed again, and Olivia laughed delightedly.

“I see,” she sang. “You’ve come down with the brown bottle flu, then.”

Chris turned a page. Two left, and he’d be done and she couldn’t yell at him. For once, her savage tongue seemed considerably less threatening than the accompanying volume. “I never drink,” he said morosely. “Never.”

“Special occasion, then?” Olivia chuckled. The temperature immediately began to cool again with the front door shut, the fiaran’s magic having no exits to escape out into the day. “I’m not forgetting your birthday, am I?”

“It just seemed like a swell idea at the time,” Chris muttered. None of the names on the page matched any he’d weaved. One left.

“And it certainly doesn’t anymore! Well. I suppose I should be pleased that you’re on time at all.” Luckily, Olivia was in a fine mood this morning. “You had better have finished my work, though,” she said, warningly, swishing her way over to the mirror.

Chris tried to focus his eyes on the weaving as Olivia tapped out a familiar frequency. No repeats that he could see…

“Faraday?” he heard Maris’s voice through the mirror. Despite his curiosity, he stayed focused on his work. Woe betide him if he didn’t have this done when Olivia turned her attention on him.

“Maris!” Olivia chirped. “Good morning! You look―um, alive. Barely. Goodness!”

Maris sighed. “Get to the point, please. Assuming there is one. I have a to-do list as long as your arm.”

“Right! Well. How about you leave off whatever you’re doing that has you looking like you crawled out of an open grave and come bully people with me! I expect I’m going to need your spine-chilling presence to get some of these tossers on my list to spill, and―”

Maris barked out a laugh. “You
must
be joking.”

“Never!” Olivia said. Chris couldn’t help sneak a glance. His employer had put on her very best wounded expression, and Maris’s face in the mirror was dark with disapproval.

“Do you have
any idea,
” the officer asked, “just how
mad
the entire world has gone? There are four riots happening right at this very moment.
Four
. And probably eight more brewing. Who do you think is dealing with those?”

“Surely not investigative supervisors!” Olivia protested.

“
Everyone
.” Maris reached up to press a hand against her temple. She
did
look terrible. She hadn’t seemed quite so drained yesterday. “We’ve even got
William
out on the beat today.” She shook her head and lowered her hand. “Handle this on your own, Olivia,” she said. “If you want my help or my input, get me your paperwork. I can at least read that while driving to the next disaster.” And even as they spoke, she stood up and grabbed her overcoat from the back of her chair. “I’m off. Best of luck.”

She didn’t even bother to disconnect the mirror, just hurried out of range.

“Well,” Olivia said sourly. “Today just got more complicated. Ah, well. Maybe we’ll get lucky!” She rang the chimes, sending the mirror back to smoke, and twirled on her heel to face him. “Finished?” she asked pointedly.

Chris folded the final page over. “Finished,” he agreed. He sat back and sighed with relief. And then, remembering the results of his search, winced. “That said,” he murmured. “I didn’t find much of anything at all.”

Olivia’s skirts swirled as she walked over to his desk. He glanced over her, impressed at how… ordinary she looked, ribbons and rosettes notwithstanding. She even had a little cameo at the throat of her high-collared blouse, the very picture of a respectable working class lady. She reached out, and then paused with her hand just over his page of weaved names. “Is this your work?” she asked.

Chris nodded, and Olivia picked up the page. Her eyes scanned it. A little line appeared between her eyebrows and her expression grew more discouraged as she looked.

“Names that appeared more than once, I―” Chris began, but she held up her free hand to shush him.

“I follow your method, Christopher, thank you,” she rebuked. Mild as it was, he felt his colour rise. He wondered if her criticism would ever stop stinging.

Olivia’s eyebrows drew fully together and she sighed, dropping his notes back onto the desk. “You know,” she said, rolling her eyes, “that would actually have been considerably
less
infuriating if there hadn’t been so many cases where a ‘binder had visited more than one of the churches, and
not
all four.” She ran lace gloved fingers over the edge of his desk, raising it to look for… dust? Olivia never cared about the cleanliness of her office. In fact, she frequently teased him about how clean he kept his corner of it. “My,” she said, her voice warm. And fake. “Christopher. How
do
you keep your desk so clean?”

He looked up at her. She was almost on eye level with him sitting, tiny as she was. “What is it, now?” he asked. His voice came out very pathetic. He really did not want to play Olivia Faraday games this morning.

She grinned. One canine tooth gleamed. He was still learning not to find that unsettling. “Do they work together often?” she asked.

He blinked. “Who?”

She sighed. “Spiritbinders. You know.” She made a vague gesture with her hand, long fingers wiggling. “
The community
. Do they collaborate? How closely do they work together?”

“Olivia…”

“I know, I know. It’s been six years since you had anything to do with that world, I
know
, but do you have any idea how insular those people are? I spent all night trying to get an in and my
goodness
, they’re so closed off you’d think they were protecting the very beating heart of Tarlish society.”

Chris couldn’t help but smile crookedly at the wording. “Well,” he said. “The fact is, they think they
are
.”

“Ugh.” Olivia rolled her eyes. “Pretentious, self-important tossers. Do you know who is protecting the very beating heart of Tarlish society? Me. Christopher, please, I really need some sort of in, here!”

Christopher let his mind flow back. He
hadn’t
been a part of that world since he was a boy, but back then, it had been his daily life. He remembered being reminded to stay quiet, to practice his piano in his bedroom and not in the parlour, and to behave himself in the presence of company. Almost every day, someone from Lowry was taking tea with his father while his mother waited in attendance, always the dutiful wife. Meetings like those that had put him in close proximity with Georgie Edison had been constant, and Chris slowly nodded. “We―” He stopped himself. Most certainly not “we”― “They do. Quite a bit, at least in the day. My father was always sharing his ideas with colleagues. They’d sit about and bandy ideas back and forth, trying to think of methods to make them work.”

“Was this at Lowry? Or, you know…” She wiggled her fingers again. “
Privately,
” The way she stressed the word made it clear what she meant.
Off the books
.

“Certainly, many of the meetings took place outside of Lowry Academy itself,” Chris mused. “In smoking rooms, parlours, dining rooms, ‘binders clubs…”

Olivia scanned the page of names he’d weaved again. “What about the ones who’d be doing common work like this?” she asked. “Binding household elementals for priests?”

Chris flushed a bit as he admitted, “My father
was
one of those ‘binders. He pretended otherwise and was welcome in higher circles because of his name, but there were plenty of others just like him in those days. I suspect it’s only gotten worse. All the strongest ‘binders were at the Castle, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the ones who were left tried to echo the society that had come before them.”

Olivia produced a fountain pen seemingly from nowhere and made some marks on his weaved notes. She handed the papers back to him. Eleanor Wardingham, Hugh Edwards, Rupert Scrivener, and Bryonie Pye were all circled. Chris recognized Miss Wardingham. She’d done firebinding in three of the four churches. The other names all had stars beside them, too, showing that they’d appeared in at least two of the churches, initials indicating which churches and for what sort of binding, and relevant dates. He furrowed his brow. He tried to follow Olivia’s logic, but his head pounded and he had a very difficult time drawing easy conclusions.

He sighed, reaching up to massage his temple. “What am I looking at?”

Olivia laughed and swirled away from him. “Oh, you are so lucky that I find your baffled self adorable, or I would be very irritated that you’re here without your full deck of cards.” She picked up the mallet in front of the magic mirror and struck the lowest note on the chimes repeatedly, and Chris’s skull reverberated with the tone. “At least one of those names was at each church within a week before each murder.”

Chris looked at the names again. His eyebrows raised. She was completely right.

“
And,”
Olivia added, still beating on the chime, “all
four
visited Georgiana Edison’s church within the past four months, most multiple times. Isn’t
that
interesting?”

Chris supposed that it was.

“Good morning. This is the Darrington City operator, how can I assist you?” The voice of the operator was thin and reedy through the mirror.

Olivia was on her best behaviour. There was a smile in her voice and she radiated warmth as she asked, “Good morning! I need the mirror frequencies for Eleanor Wardingham, Hugh Edwards, Rupert Scrivener, and Bryonie Pye, all spiritbinder categorization! I don’t need to be patched through. Just the frequencies, please!”

“Just a moment, miss,” the operator replied, and the mirror faded into cloudy mist.

Olivia turned back to him. “I’m not actually going to mirror them.” She winked, leaving the misty mirror to bustle over to the overstuffed bookshelf. She ran her long fingers over the spines of the books. “I’m going to use a frequency map to try and learn where they all live.”

“Olivia!” Chris rebuked, then winced at his own volume. “That’s so… prying. Can’t you go through the official channels to question them? You know Maris will find you their addresses quickly enough.”

Olivia pulled out a book. There was a folded paper inside it, and she pulled it out, unfolding it to its full length. She studied it, and then nodded to herself, letting it flutter to the ground as she swirled back over to the mirror. “I’m not going to question them,” she said airily. “I just want to know where they live.”

“Why do―” Chris began, but the operator reappeared and, all courtesy, recited the frequencies of the four spiritbinders. Olivia thanked him effusively and Chris shook his head as the call was terminated. Olivia immediately moved to the discarded map, picked it up, and began to study it.

Trying to ascertain someone’s address by their frequency was more than rude. Nevertheless, they
were
tied to location, and with a guide and patience, someone uninterested in respecting privacy could manage. Chris supposed, watching Olivia quickly mark off spots on the map, that being a truthsniffer would certainly cut down on the time needed.

Olivia paused, stepped back, and turned to him with a grin. She held up the map. Her fountain pen had seen new use, and there were four dark black Xs inked onto the map of Darrington City. They were all four in the Lowry District and clustered closely together. And that was… interesting. Spiritbinders were certainly all privileged, but it was a special
kind
of privilege, living in the Lowry District. Only the old families lived there, but, more importantly, only the old families that had been without great means at the time. The Buckley estate had once been in the countryside, before generations of growth had put it in the middle of the city, a fine estate for a respected man. But Richard Lowry’s other assistants and colleagues had mostly been poor university students. Their community had grown up in the Old City, near the university that they’d been attending and had made them what they were.