Андреа Хёст - The Pyramids of London

“Someone else had too!” Griff put in. “Searched. They’d been in our rooms.”

The vampire didn’t even blink. “The world-shaking discovery of a method of creating artificial fulgite is announced on an almost weekly basis. Unless some hoodwinked investors tracked your parents down, it’s as likely a motive for murder as a bottle of Dama Wilder’s Patented Cure-All.”

Eluned stood up. “Our parents weren’t cheats,” she said. Vampire or not, he had no right to suggest anything of the sort.

“He knows that, Eluned.” Aunt Arianne pushed her plate away. “There’s a wide difference between finding a way to unlock stored power, and creating an appearance of stored power. I didn’t know the exact nature of the commission Eiliff and Aedric had been working on—the children only told me that an automaton was missing. But when I prepared an accounting of the business, there were two large cash deposits that suggested someone had provided funding they didn’t want traced. I could find no documentation whatsoever. Aedric had recorded only the fact of the deposits, against the name ‘F Project’, but there was no contract, no schemata, no correspondence. Every clue to identity was missing.”

“When they were first commissioned, Mother and Father were pleased because the payment was good,” Eluned said. “They didn’t tell us anything until the mid-term break, but I remember the day they came back from the first meeting, and put all this money in the cash box to be banked. That was before we left for the beginning of spring term. When she put the money away, mother said that it would be an interesting challenge, and she’d have to ‘thank Lyndsey’. Then there’s this.”

Pressing two sections of her right arm exposed a storage slot—for Eluned always liked to have a secret space in her arms—and she drew out paper, curled into a tube. The vampire accepted it with lifted eyebrows, and unrolled three sheets: a sketch of the missing automaton as they’d last seen it, and two envelopes that had been flattened out, then decorated on both sides with minutely detailed sketches of rooftops, all chimneys and gabling.

“Mother always gave envelopes to Griff,” Eluned said. “Because he uses up so much paper.”

“Date on the first sketch is the day they went to that meeting,” Eleri added. “Second is the mid-term break. Hold them up to the light.”

The vampire silently obeyed, and even sitting a seat down from him Eluned could clearly see the translucent shape of a tower with outstretched wings.

“Took us a while to track down who that belonged to,” Eleri said, with the satisfaction of the one who had been successful.

Dem Makepeace lowered the envelopes, looking down the length of the table at Aunt Arianne.

“You sold yourself to Msrah on the strength of a watermark?”

“It was the best lead.”

“A watermark.” The vampire looked like he was trying—not very hard—to stop himself from laughing. “You realise that whoever commissioned your automaton would have no reason to steal it? That there may be a second party involved?”

“That’s a strong possibility. But knowing more about the first could lead us to rivals, saboteurs, or at least reasons. Besides, the desire for secrecy suggests a strong motive to tidy up loose ends, and it’s very odd that whoever it is hasn’t inquired after Eiliff’s progress. Griff is quite certain about when he was given the first envelope, and the second clearly arrived while the children were away at school, during the period a second cash deposit was made. Other than a passing reference to someone called Lyndsey, the only information we have about Them—about whoever commissioned this—is the fact that their payments came in envelopes marked with the crest of Sheerside House.”

Dem Makepeace muttered something under his breath, then said: “Where is the second automaton?”

Aunt Arianne left to fetch it, and the vampire propped his head back on his fist, idly turning over Griff’s pictures.

“You could ask Willa questions and know whether she was lying,” Griff said, getting up to search the covered dishes for sweets. It was typical of Griff that he would chat to the vampire like he was simply an interesting neighbourhood boy. He might back away from a bird, but even what had happened to Aunt Arianne wouldn’t faze Griff when it came to a person, unless that person was behaving in a way that made Griff uncomfortable.

Dem Makepeace at least seemed fairly tolerant—or not hungry at the moment. “That’s the assistant? Do you think she’s lying about something?”

“She was lying about who finished the last of the treacle tart. And she’s lying about something that happened after the funeral.” Griff triumphantly lifted a wedge of nut-studded cake, and turned to enjoy their expressions.

“What?” Eluned exchanged a glance with Eleri, who clearly shared her surprise. “What do you mean?”

“When we went back at the end of spring term, and Aunt had us pack up the bits she was letting us keep, Willa came around. She wanted to know what Aunt was going to do with all of Mother and Father’s things. Said she wanted to buy pieces to add to her tool set.”

“More likely wanted schematics,” Eleri said. “Not creative.”

“Whatever she wanted, what was she going to pay for it with? Willa never had any money, and she got taken on by Theyan’s Workshop. They’re room and board only for the first year. She said that herself when father took her on.”

Griff’s prodigious memory could be more than useful, though he also tended to remember tiny grudges, like who had the last slice of a treacle tart made for the New Year’s Feasting. And he’d obviously hugged this fragment of news to his chest all through the first half of summer term, waiting for the right moment.

“Tools are a good investment,” Eleri said, unimpressed. “Probably borrowed money for them.” Eleri certainly would have if she’d been able, and had yet to forgive Aunt Arianne for not keeping their parents’ workshop intact.

“She was asking for someone else,” Griff said, with complete confidence. “Even I could tell that.”

The vampire said: “Tell me more about how these automata were to be constructed.”

Eleri did that, producing a flood of technical detail on how their parents had been trying to create an arm for Eluned that was as fully responsive as a normal arm.

“I can currently trigger a few set movements,” Eluned added, her glass shield steady. “Position one, position two, hand grip. Nowhere near precise control. Our Thoth-den had told Mother and Father that my upper arm still contained all the…the body’s telegraph wires that carried messages to the missing part of my arm. If they could find some way of reading the signal, they could give me greater control.”

“Did they succeed?”

“Not yet,” Eleri said, as Aunt Arianne returned, carrying a long box with a square tin sitting on top. “Not reading the commands of the body. More progress on the other half of the problem: an array of movements triggered by a flow of fulquus. Used that.”

“So the commission, substantively, was for an automaton that treats fulgite as a mind capable of issuing commands?” Dem Makepeace had lost the lazy note to his voice.

Aunt Arianne, lifting the mannequin from its box, said: “Eleri passed this to me when I visited on my way to Sheerside. I didn’t open it until my first night there, when I heard it trying to get out.”

The mannequin, familiar for the many weeks Eleri had worked on it, stayed upright when Aunt Arianne propped it in a sitting position against the box, the small head with its painted monocle and moustache tilted quizzically to one side.

Explaining how she’d seen it move, and removed the fulgite, Aunt Arianne opened the tin and fished inside, lifting out a purple sphere. She looked down at it, brows rising, then crossed to Dem Makepeace and held it out to him.