The Unnaturalists (29 page)

When the door closes behind him, I lean against the wall, limp.

One of the maids grins at me. She’s missing some of her teeth. “Handsome thing, ain’t he?” she lisps.

I don’t answer her.

C
HAPTER
22

I
t had been a bit of a trick avoiding being swept up with the other boys and locked into the gallery for lights out. But Syrus had managed, hiding behind the enormous pie safe. He had learned his lesson hiding in the water closet; never again! The manor didn’t have regular security wights like other houses he’d heard of, so it was relatively easy to slip down the corridors and out into the garden once everyone was asleep. It was so cold that Syrus longed for his Tinker dart pipe and knife, but there hadn’t been time to retrieve them from their hiding place outside of the estate. If Vespa would just hurry, they could make it before they were discovered.

He felt that itch again, that craving. The moon was rising and soon the Forest would be flooded with silver and shadows. He rubbed his hands along his arms, trying to warm himself. If she would just hurry . . .

Then he saw something creeping low and hesitant along the hedgerow. He moved toward it, hoping it was Vespa. He smelled her before he could quite make out her face—the sharp sweetness of lavender and lemon soap.

“Syrus?” she whispered.

“Here,” he said, leaving his hiding place.

She sighed in relief. She wore men’s trousers and a too-big old greatcoat, and her hair was stuffed into a bowler. A long knitted scarf was wrapped several times around her neck.

He snickered. “Where’d you find that getup?”

“In the trunk in my room,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what the proper attire was for meeting a Manticore, but I figured trousers were best in case we need to leg it.”

“True.” He was glad she couldn’t see his face. She’d probably slap him.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He was relieved that they were finally on their way.

A strange scratching sound made him turn.

Vespa’s hand was in her pocket. She lifted her hand and showed him the toad and a pebble, which she’d been rubbing together in her nervousness.

“You really must get rid of that thing,” Syrus said.

She glared at him in the moonlight, looking more like a Tinker girl than she ever had. If she’d had darker hair and the checkered headband . . . He betted there was something about her family history she either wasn’t telling or didn’t know.

They started along a side path that Syrus knew would lead them out of the garden and into the surrounding pastures that bordered the Forest.

Light flared. Syrus stopped and turned and Vespa tripped on his feet. They caught each other from falling.

“Well, well, what have we here?” Charles Waddingly said. “The darling witch and her accomplice. Off for a moonlit stroll, are you?”

Syrus glared at the rogue warlock.

Charles was surrounded by men carrying everlight lanterns. A
few of them carried heavy silver chains. Syrus’s teeth chattered, and not just because of the cold.

“Charles—” Vespa began.

“No,” Charles said. “I have no time to bandy words with you. I know what you’re on about. You’re going to the Manticore.”

Syrus and Vespa were silent.

“You will lead us there. We will capture the Manticore and bring her back as a wedding gift to Mistress Virulen and Master Grimgorn. And you will give the Heart of All Matter to me.”

“We will never do that!” Vespa said.

Syrus looked around. While they’d been talking, more men had filed silently down through the hedges. All of the escape routes were cut off. He could probably slip through a guard’s grasp—it was what Tinker pickpockets were good at, after all—but he was quite sure Vespa couldn’t. And she was what the Manticore needed.

Charles came down the steps. He stood inches from Vespa. Most of his face was in shadow, but Syrus could just make out his sneer as he said, “You will do everything I say to the letter. To the letter! Do you understand?”

“Or?” she said, raising her chin.

Syrus wanted to hide, remembering the last time he’d dealt with Charles in the Archives. Her impudence would likely get them both killed. He stepped a little away from her, hoping to get enough leverage to bolt, but Charles’s hand shot out and held him in a grip of stinging iron.

“Where do you think you’re going, Tinker imp? Your latest stunt in the caves hasn’t been forgotten. There is much I owe you for, it seems.”

Syrus’s brain was ablaze with anger. He growled.

“Do you remember this?” Charles said. He patted the jar another man held for him.

No one said anything. He gestured for one of the men to come closer. He was a Tinker, someone who had left his clan to work for the Virulens a year or so ago. He refused to look Syrus in the eyes.

Charles flipped open the jar, and Syrus would have sworn the jar groaned like a starving animal.

Charles lifted his free hand and
tugged
. A white mist rose from the man’s head, streaming from him to the jar with barely a sound. Syrus watched his eyes go white and his shoulders slump, just like the dead Architects around the table.

He took his soul.
A creeping horror shivered along Syrus’s limbs. And an anger so great that for a moment he was blind. Then, he felt it. The change rippling along his arms and back.

Charles shifted his grip to seize Syrus by the throat.

“Charles!” Vespa’s cry was strangled.

“Ah . . . how amusing! So the werehounds did get a taste of you. I had wondered the last time we met. How rich! Almost better than what I’d planned.”

He pulled Syrus to him. Syrus closed his eyes, clenching his teeth against the change. Charles’s breath was so foul he thought he might faint. Whispering moans from all the souls trapped in the jar made Syrus want to cry. How many of those were people he’d once known trapped within?

“No, no. I’ll not take you just yet. And you’ll not change now, do you understand?” A slow, deadening energy numbed Syrus’s senses, smothered his anger to a bare spark. “I have work for you to do that requires more consciousness than a wraith’s.”

He released Syrus, pushing him toward Vespa. She put her hands
on his shoulders protectively. He wanted to sink back against her, as if she were one of his long-lost aunts, but he didn’t. “You will lead us to the Manticore now,” Charles continued. “And you, witch, will lure her to me. Or into the jar both your souls go.” He patted it before capping it.

Vespa stared at him. “You took that from Rackham, didn’t you?”

Charles’s grin looked ghastly in the half-lit shadows. “I can’t see how it matters, but yes.”

“Why, Charles? Why are you doing all this?” Vespa said. “My father has always been good to you. In time, he would have—”

The boy’s face hardened. “You will not interrogate me, witch. I will reveal my business all in good time. Enough talking. Move. And if you try to lead us into difficulty, Tinker boy, think again.”

He pushed them forward. The wraith who had once been a man shuffled along with the rest, as mindless and in thrall as the Tinkers at the Refineries.

C
HAPTER
23

S
yrus leads us out of the garden, across an old pasture, and into the eaves of the Forest. He hesitates a moment before choosing a path. The moon weaves odd shadows through the naked branches. There is much creaking and scraping, and far off, a lonely howl that sets Syrus shaking.

Charles is an ever-present menace behind us with his cursed soul jar. I’m reeling with what’s come to pass, even as I’m angry at myself for not being more careful. We should have waited longer or I should have tried to go alone. But since Charles infiltrated the Architects and has known everything all along, perhaps it never would have mattered. He has us all at his mercy.

I rub the toad and pebble together in my pocket. They make a sound like a cricket singing. I’ve been trying since the moment the Wad revealed himself to summon up energy of the sort Bayne used to rescue me from the Imperial Refinery, wondering if I could transport Syrus in the same way.

But there’s nothing inside me. I don’t know how to make the magic work. I am so angry and frustrated I could scream.

I don’t know exactly what Charles means about the werehound bite, but after a while, Syrus is limping.

“What happened?” I whisper.

“I broke into the Lowtown Refinery. A werehound bit me.” There’s pain in his tone deeper than just the fact of the wound.

“Why did you go and do a foolish thing like that?”

He looks aside at me. “Because you wouldn’t help me. I had to try to get my family out somehow.”

I blanch, glad for the cover of darkness. I pull the old scarf closer about me. “Your family is locked in the Refinery?”

“Yes. With a bunch of other Tinkers. They turned my people into werehounds, too.”

His words clip off like there’s more that he just can’t bear to say. It strikes me how vulnerable he is. I can’t bear to tell him what I saw in the Imperial Refinery—the Tinkers being shoved into the boiler and made into wights. What if those people were his family?

“You’re very brave,” I say, “to have gone in after them like that.”

“Thanks.” He wipes his nose. I see the glimmer of snot or tears.

What he says next stabs me to the heart. “If you have so much power, why don’t you use it now to get us out of this?”

I realize he is just questioning the truth as he sees it, just as I did with Bayne many a time. I swallow an angry retort. “I’m trying. It’s just . . . I really don’t know how.”

Syrus snorts. “Figures.”

“Quiet!” Charles says behind us. “I have ways of stitching your mouths shut, you know.”

I very nearly turn and run back to punch him in the face, but I don’t. Yet it’s as if he hears my thoughts for, suddenly, Charles yanks me backward and closes his fist around mine.

“Enough of that,” he hisses.

I pull my hand from his grip.

“Be assured I can turn you to dust if I choose,” he says in my ear.

“Well, why don’t you?” I say. My destiny seems to be dust, no matter what I do. The stench of his breath makes me want to gag. “Why all the games? Just do it and have done!”

He releases my hand and steps back, far enough out of reach that I can’t punch him as I’d like.

“Whether I like it or not, I need you. But only for a little while longer. After that, you’re of no further use to me. Now move along.”

I turn and continue behind Syrus. We’re on a narrow part of the trail, so I get as close behind him as I can without stepping on his heels. “When the time comes,” I whisper to the back of his head, “you run like mad and get Bayne.”

He nods slightly, enough to show me he’s heard.

The rest of the walk is a grim march through moonlight. The wraith stumbles over roots and breaks limbs, his breath as heavy and ungainly as his shambling, and it makes me sick to the core. Though I joked that Charles was capable of much evil, I never guessed that he would be far more powerful or dastardly than anything my vivid imagination could conceive. He was always a nuisance, a thief of my father’s attention and time, but the sheer malevolence of his designs astonishes me. And what is the ultimate goal? To build some Engine that will take him back to Old London? Whatever for?