Thames Fog

London came to her first as a smell.

Ixara stood at the rail of the Sable Albatross in the cold gray hour before dawn, in a borrowed coat that hung to her knees, and watched the river open out of the sea like a wound. Behind the ship the Channel had been wide and clean, with a bitter, honest salt in the wind. Here the air changed. It thickened. It took on a taste: coal and tar, tallow and rot, a sweetish, greasy undertone she could only identify, after a long moment, as the breath of ten thousand fires burning ten thousand kinds of waste.

The fog lay on the water in sheets. Through it, as the ship crept upriver on a falling tide, shapes began to resolve: a forest of masts, bare and black, hundreds of them, packed so tightly that they looked like a drowned wood. Warehouses crouched on the banks, their windows glowing a dull yellow. Chimneys rose out of the murk, one beyond another, and from every one of them poured a column of smoke, and the smoke was not purple, or sweet, or alive.

It was black.

It crawled across the sky and settled on the roofs and on the water and on the decks and sails, until everything wore a faint film of soot. It settled on her own face and hands. She rubbed her fingers together and they came away gray.

Smoke, she thought. All this smoke. And not one voice in it.

On Corvane, smoke was a door. Here it was a lid.

"You are staring," said Garrick.

He had come up behind her so quietly that she had not heard him. He stood a pace away, a tall straight shape in a dark greatcoat with the collar turned up, and his breath made small white clouds in the cold. In the weeks since the storm she had learned his silences. This one was careful.

"I have never seen so many people," Ixara said. "I can feel them. All of them. Like the hum in the roots of a forest, only..." She hesitated. "Wrong."

"Wrong?"

"Like a forest where everyone is shouting, and no one is listening." She turned to look at him. "It makes my head ache."

"You will grow used to it." He said it flatly, as one speaks of a climate. "Everyone does."

"Did you?"

He didn't answer.

…

They had agreed on the terms the night before, in the stateroom, with the ship riding at anchor in the Hope and the lights of Gravesend a smudge on the black.

It had taken three hours. He had sat behind his desk with his hands folded and his face as expressionless as a clock, and she had sat across from him with her chin up, and between them lay a sheet of foolscap on which he had written, in his small neat hand, five numbered clauses.

One. Miss Ixara will accompany the Viscount to his London residence, in the character of a ward.

Two. She will answer to the name Miss Calla Merrow, an orphan of an English father and a Portuguese mother, lately arrived from Lisbon.

Three. She will speak as little as possible in company, and never of smoke, visions, or the Aurelith.

Four. She will submit to such examinations as the Viscount deems necessary.

Five. She will not attempt to leave the house without his knowledge.

"It is a cage," Ixara had said.

"It is a measure of protection."

"From whom?"

"From the world." For an instant his mask slipped, and a muscle moved in his jaw. "You know nothing of London, madam. A dark-skinned woman with no papers and no patron is, in the eyes of the law, property. If you were found wandering the streets of Wapping, you would be sold within the week. If you were found in possession of the gifts you claim, you would be tried for witchcraft. There are men in this city who would pay for you. There are other men who would burn you."

"And you?"

"I would like very much," said Garrick, "for you to remain alive until I understand what you are."

She had read the other thing beneath the words, the thing he'd have given his left hand not to say. She had read it in the way his eyes slid from hers and back, and in the tight line of his hand on the table, and in the faint hot flush that had come up under the pale skin of his throat.

He is afraid for me, she had thought, with a kind of horror. This man, who stole the Heart of my people. He is afraid for me.

It should have made her hate him less. Instead, she hated it with all her heart: the small, treacherous warmth, the softening in her chest. It was a weakness. It was a door.

The smoke showed me a man who would do anything to keep his sister breathing. I did not ask to understand him.

"I will accept," she had said at last, "on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you tell me why. The real reason." She had looked him in the eye. "Why you are keeping me. And do not say science."

He had been silent a long time.

"Because," he had said at last, very low, "you are the first thing in twelve years that I could not explain."

It was not the real reason. She knew that, too. She had heard the second voice beneath it, the one that was telling her, in a language older than words: and because of Odette. Because you could see her. Because you might help her. Because you are the only door I have left.

But she had let him have the lie. She had signed the paper with the quill he held out, in a clumsy, laborious hand: Calla Merrow. The name sat on the page like a stranger's face.

Calla, she had thought. A white flower. Pale and pure. It is a joke, I think, and I am the only one who knows.

…

By seven the fog had thinned enough to show the shore.

The ship made fast at a private wharf in a dingy, bustling stretch of the river that the sailors called the Pool. Cranes creaked. Longshoremen roared. Barges slid by, loaded to the gunwales with coal, and children in rags ran along the quay shouting and holding up fish. Ixara watched it all with her fingers tight on the rail, trying to hold on to the shape of things, the colors, the sheer unbearable noise.

Jory appeared at her side, scrubbed and shining, with his best jacket buttoned wrong.

"Miss Ixara," he whispered. "Miss Calla. I mean. Are you scared?"

"A little."

"I was, my first time. It's loud. But there's mutton pies on the corner of Fenchurch, and the best penny gingerbread, and if you ever want to see the river from the top of the Monument..." He ran out of breath, red to the ears. "I'll show you. If you like. If the Captain says."

She smiled. It was the first real smile she had given anyone in weeks.

"I would like that very much, Jory."

"And—" He looked quickly round, then dropped his voice, with the delicious conspiratorial gravity of fourteen. "Miss. About my mum. What you said. I never told anyone. Not even the Captain. But I thought you should know. I think she'd like you."

Ixara put her hand against his cheek.

"She does," she said. "She is very proud of you."

His eyes shone. He ducked his head and bolted.

…

The Wynmore carriage was black and lacquered, with the crest in silver on the door, and it smelled of leather and violets and cold. Ixara sat on the very edge of the seat, because the cushions swallowed her, with her hands clasped in her lap and her whole spine rigid.

They had dressed her in the early light, in a gown of gray wool Pike had begged from a chandler's wife, with a plain linen cap and a woolen shawl pulled up over the braids. It scratched. The stays, loosely laced, pressed on her ribs like a hand. She felt like a bird in a box.

Garrick sat across from her. He had changed, too. In the weeks of the voyage she had grown used to him in shirtsleeves and an old blue coat, with his hair carelessly tied. Now he was the Viscount: black velvet, a silk waistcoat, an immaculate stock, a powdered wig that made his face look severe and unfamiliar. He sat with his gloved hands upon his knees and gazed straight ahead, and he did not look at her at all.

That, she thought, was the surest sign of how he felt.

The carriage lurched forward. London unrolled outside the window.

It was like being swallowed by a vast machine. The streets were narrow and slick and crowded, loud with iron wheels and shouting, lined with houses that leaned over the road like drunks. She saw a man selling hot eels from a tray. A woman with a basket of oranges. A boy carrying a dead dog. A line of chained men being marched to a prison, with a bailiff walking beside them, lazy and bored. A gentleman in a sedan chair, who looked directly at her through the window with his eyes half-closed, and then looked away.

Everywhere there was smoke. Everywhere there were eyes.

She pressed her hand to her chest. Under her bodice, against her breastbone, the Aurelith's pulse had followed her from the ship, faint now, a distant drum, but steady. He had left the lead box in the care of Brandt, to be delivered by his own hand to the Duke's agents at the Society's hall. She could feel it traveling along some other road, farther and farther from her.

Do not go, she thought at it, helplessly. Wait. Wait for me.

"You are pale," said Garrick.

It was the first thing he had said since the wharf. He was looking at her now, with a small furrow between his brows.

"It is the stone," she said. "It is going away."

His face did not change. But she saw his hand move on his knee, the fingers tightening, as if he wished to reach for something.

"It will be returned to you," he said. "Once I have established—"

"Do not say what you cannot promise."

He stopped.

"I have read your face in the dark of a ship for two months," Ixara said quietly. "You are not a liar. But you are a man who tells himself things. It is not the same."

For a long moment, only the rattle of the wheels filled the carriage.

"I find," said Garrick, with great care, "that you are the most disconcerting woman I have ever met."

"Good."

"It was not a compliment."

"I know," said Ixara, and for the first time since the Straits, he laughed.

It was brief, and rough, and startled out of him, as though a hinge had given way. His whole face changed. For an instant the lines went out of it, and he looked ten years younger, and she saw in him a boy who had once ridden a gray pony called Biscuit through a field in the sun.

Then it was gone. He turned his head to the window. But the color in his throat had risen.

Be careful, said the cold small voice at the back of her mind. Be so very careful.

…

When she looked again, the fog was lifting.

It happened all at once, as the carriage turned from a narrow lane onto a broad avenue, a rush of pale light and sudden space. The houses grew taller and whiter. Trees appeared, heavy and dusty-green. The air smelled, not of sweetness exactly, but of money: coal burned clean, horses groomed to a shine, soap and starch and flowers.

And, ahead, rising out of the thin silver mist, she saw a building.

It was not large, as buildings went in this city. It stood at the end of a quiet square, set back behind iron railings: a tall, pale, classical house with a portico and a pediment, and a great arched window above the door, glinting with panes of colored glass. A brass plate gleamed beside the steps. It bore an emblem she could not read from the carriage, a circle, and within the circle a spiral, and within the spiral a star.

Her pulse stumbled.

She knew that window.

She had seen it, three times in the smoke. A great pane of pale colored glass, and behind it a long room, cold, with a floor of black and white marble. And in the center of the room, upon a plinth, beneath a glass dome, a stone the color of the deepest sea.

A stone that beat.

Meridian, she thought, and the word came down on her like a bell. The Hall of the Meridian Society.

"Captain." She heard her own voice, flat and strange. "Where are we going?"

"To Hartwell Square," said Garrick, not turning. "My house. We are passing the Hall on the way."

"It is there."

He was silent.

"I can feel it. It is there, in that building. In a room with a door of glass." She put a hand on the carriage window. Her fingers left a print of heat on the pane. "It is calling."

"Ixara."

"It is calling to me, Garrick."

He did not look at her. He looked at the building as it slid by the window, pale and elegant and impassive, a place where men of learning gathered to lock up the secrets of the world. A shadow crossed his face, the shadow of a man who did not entirely like the thing he had done.

"I know," he said softly. "I know it is."

The carriage rolled on.

She sat motionless, with her fingers still pressed to the glass, and watched the house of glass and stone shrink behind them in the mist. Beneath her palm, the faint, faraway thudding of the Heart kept time with her own.

A year, she told it. Nine moons are left. I am coming for you.

I will come with your child in my arms, and I will not leave without you.

And from the fog behind her, in the glittering window of the Meridian Hall, a pale face watched the carriage go, and smiled.