Андреа Хёст - The Pyramids of London

“That sounds very…”

“Incestuous? Or—that’s not the word for it, but let’s say the idea gave me pause. If you’ll take my advice, fill your time: whether it’s a side position with Lord Msrah’s administration or writing books or proving some extreme scholarly point, or competitive gardening. Something that can take you out of the role of Bound. Being paid well to present your wrist once a week throws all sorts of perspectives out of balance. Especially when those couple of minutes with the Lord are so impossibly intense.”

“There wasn’t any difficulty about leaving?”

“No. Don’t fret about that. After the initial ten years, you can give notice at any time.”

“Is turnover high?”

“Not really. People seem to fall into two groups—those who serve ten years and then leave, and those who stay for decades, until they grow restless. I don’t know of anyone who has broken contract with Lord Msrah, though of course it happens elsewhere. I’m second oldest of the Lord’s current Bound, and Evie is the youngest, having served two years. We do make a nodding acknowledgement to seniority, though those of us who work with the Lord’s administration complicate any attempt to keep a real hierarchy. Oh, good, they’ve brought up your trunk.”

And unpacked it, which was an aspect of a large household that Rian would need to keep in mind. There was nothing written down, but she could risk no hint of her true purpose. Could her target be among the servants? A place this large would have dozens.

“The house was partially wired last year, which is a luxury I most definitely will miss. I’ll leave you to dress for dinner. The Lord doesn’t always expect us to dine with State guests, but we do make useful table fillers—”

Sccrrrttt. Trrckttt.

Delia Hackett’s warm smile dropped away, and she backed toward the door, staring at a large box sitting on the dressing table. “What—?”

The thin, secretive sound came again, and Rian stared blankly at the box, square-tied with coarse twine. But then she remembered a sleek blond head, eyes determinedly lowered, and a box thrust at her during the last moments of the previous day’s school visit.

“It’s a gift from Eleri, one of my nieces. She’s following her parents’ profession.” Rian unpicked the knot, and lifted the box lid to reveal a layer of tissue paper shifting fitfully.

A wooden arm rose, dragging down the concealing paper, and Rian caught her breath—not so much at the sight of an automaton, but the particular form it took. There was even the faintest scent of turpentine, to conjure memories of sunny afternoons in the studio. Old paint had been refreshed, and posable wooden joints replaced by delicately-worked bronze-gold metal, but this was definitely a former friend, not seen for years.

“My father’s mannequin. He brought it back from Lutèce when I was ten,” Rian said, pulling away the last of the tissue. “I called him Monsieur Doré, and painted the monocle and moustache on him. I thought he’d been lost years ago. So Aedric had him.”

She hesitated, then lifted the now-still automaton out of the box and sat him on the dressing table. Over two feet tall, the mannequin was even heavier than she remembered, but the joints repositioned smoothly and silently, and the wood and metal figure could be sat upright without sliding.

“But it was trying to get out?” Dama Hackett took a step closer.

“Eleri probably added a movement,” Rian said. “I suppose it was meant to be a gift for my brother’s birthday, and the charge has run down.”

“And now I feel a fool,” Dama Hackett said. “And have opened wounds. I’m so sorry, child.”

With a charmingly inconsequential grace the woman brushed over awkwardness and moved on to instructions on how to reach the dining hall, before leaving Rian to freshen and dress for dinner. Rian closed the door firmly, then looked back at the dressing table.

The automaton now sat leaning forward, the head turned toward the door. The face was merely flat planes marked by the curling moustache and the thin gold circle of the monocle, lacking any eyes at all. Yet Rian felt quite certain it was looking at her.

“Well, Monsieur Doré,” she said. “You are a most unexpected development.”

The automaton shifted, attempting to stand, but then slumped, tilted, and remained unmoving as Rian returned to the dressing table.

Gingerly, she cleared the box away and then touched a wooden arm, not quite certain whether she should be afraid. There had been stories all through spring and summer of automatons spontaneously activating, running wild. But then, there’d been such stories since the first automatons.

When her cautious prodding produced no response, Rian laid the mannequin face down, and puzzled out a way to unfasten the back. The mechanism she exposed, intricate and cramped, centred around a globe of faded purple crystal.

Her eyebrows rose. “Now this is beyond excessive.”

Lifting the globe out of its casing, she held it toward the window. Fulgite had transformed Rome’s lightning into a workable force they called fulquus—the lightning horse—capable of hauling the world into a new age of machines powered by crystals. Which it had then promptly stranded, as supplies of fulgite ran painfully short.

An automaton the size of Monsieur Doré could be comfortably powered for weeks with a crystal a quarter the size of Rian’s smallest fingernail. This globe, as large as a pigeon’s egg, was tantamount to pulling a wheelbarrow with an Iron Dragon’s steam-forced engines. It represented a considerable amount of money, especially since the theft of Prytennia’s last fulgite shipment had led to a tripling of already intolerable prices. The shape was unusual: smooth and rounded instead of faceted, and it offered a puzzle, and a new layer of complexity to her investigation.

“You might have mentioned this, Eleri,” Rian murmured, and suspected her greatest challenge was not murderers or vampires, but three children who considered her a stranger and an interference. Perfectly true, of course, but they at least shared the same goal. Now did the gift represent a last-minute decision to trust—or a challenge?

“First step, a portable dynamo,” Rian said, since she could hardly send such an unusual piece to be charged with the rest of the household crystal. But a dynamo should be a simple enough request in an establishment the size of Sheerside House.

That decided, Rian fastened Monsieur Doré’s back, buried the fulgite in her tin of bath salts, and turned her thoughts to suitable dress for a dinner with the First Minister.

With over thirty people at table there was little chance to get to know the rest of Lord Msrah’s Bound during dinner, but Rian found nothing to object to in her position between Evelyn Carstairs and an Alban man with cut-glass cheekbones that Evelyn introduced as Lyle Blair, an attaché to Alba’s Lord Protector, Prince Gustav. Prince Gustav provided a looming presence at the far end of the table, sitting to the left of the Queen’s sister, Princess Leodhild herself. First Minister Aquila was a muted presence beside two such vivid personalities, and Lord Msrah absent altogether.

“I knew Sheerside House’s reputation,” Rian said, “but this is exceeding my expectations by an order of magnitude. I didn’t realise one of the Suleviae was here.”

Her tone was light, but ghosts from Rian’s childhood stirred, conjuring the shadow of seemingly-insurmountable walls, that sense of standing at the bottom of a well, ankles sunk into mud. Here she was at the same table as royalty, including one of the three living avatars of the goddess Sulis, and no-one considered her out of place. So why could she not keep herself from remembering an impossibly embarrassing conversation? Why did her mind dredge up that terrible realisation of inadequacy?