New Blood (35 page)

“Thank you.” Jax nodded at the two men, dignified despite the woman muttering spells at his naked back. Amanusa let Jax's thanks stand for them both.

After another moment, Elinor finished with Jax's back. She stood and lifted his injured arm to inspect it. “Nice clean slice. No need for stitching here.” She probed it lightly. “Already healing, like your back, thanks to Amanusa's sorcery. We'll just numb it, clean it, and dress it.”

Amanusa's heart felt full. These people owed them nothing, yet they'd helped when she and Jax needed them. They did want something from her—but it was no more than she expected from herself. She wanted to help with the deadly magic-free zones.

Jax shrugged back into his ruined frock coat. “My sorceress is beyond exhausted. I am taking her back to her room and sending her to bed.”

“Don't forget,” Harry said. “Nine o'clock sharp at the St. Michel registry building.”

“Will you come?” Amanusa gave in to sudden impulse. “You and Elinor. As witnesses.”

Elinor scrambled up from her chair to hug Amanusa. “Of course we'll be there. We wouldn't miss it for anything.”

“Should I be feeling unwanted?” Grey put in.

“You
are
unwanted,” Harry retorted. “It's 'cause you're useless.”

“I am useful for a great many things.” Grey paused, as if considering. “Of course, a great majority of those things are useless . . .”

Amanusa couldn't help laughing. “Come, if you like. If you're awake at that hour.”

Grey struggled to escape the pillows and the fluffy featherbed, making a show of it, extending her laughter. Once on his feet, he bowed. “Gentle lady, for you, I will force myself.”

“Good evening, then.” Jax bowed, and steered Amanusa out of the room.

There was something she'd wanted to ask him when they were alone, and now that they were, she couldn't remember what it was. She scoured her mind from one end to the other, turning out all the corners—if minds had ends. Or corners. They had trails and paths, she was certain, for her thoughts often raced along them like frightened rabbits. And she'd gone wandering down one of them now. She was too tired to remember, and her arm hurt. She was just barely aware of Jax tucking her into bed.

 

T
HE MORNING OF
her wedding day—a day she never thought she would see—Amanusa dressed in
another of the white dresses Jax had insisted on. After last night, she understood clearly why a sorceress wore white. The dark blue of last night's dress hid the blood, made it that much harder to retrieve it and its magic. The magic released by the burning was much less than magic collected by recovering the blood. She would be wearing more white in the future, even if it did make her look pale.

This dress had frills, but not so many she looked silly in it. Made of thin muslin, it was cool in Paris's late August heat. In the usual way, she had no right to wear white to a wedding. But as a sorceress—she had every right.

Jax wore white too, a white linen summer coat that made him look very man-of-the-world. After three hundred–plus years of living in the world, she supposed he was. He'd risen early, dressed quickly in the suite's dressing room, and vanished.

Elinor walked down to their suite on the floor below hers, looking fresh and lovely in a bell-skirted dress of pale green muslin. Together they descended to the lobby where Jax waited with a bouquet of roses that took Amanusa's breath away. White, with every petal edged in crimson, they were sorcerer's roses. They still had their thorns.

He had a little posy of pinks in the same colors for Elinor, who was touched by the gesture. Harry, waiting with Jax, looked both bewildered by Elinor's reaction, and as if he wished he'd thought of the posy himself. They were on their way out when Grey clattered down the stairs, skidded across the lobby's polished marble floor, and pulled up with quickly assumed dignity at the back of their party.

A
T THE REGISTRY
building, the paperwork was assembled and waiting for them, including a paper from the English embassy that had to be signed and sealed by the local magistrate. Once everything was filled out in multiple copies, and signed in a dozen places, and stamped and sealed by three or four officials—or so it seemed—the wedding itself was anticlimactic.

The magistrate spoke a few simple lines, got the agreement of John Christian Alvanleigh Greyson to marry Amanusa Maria Whitcomb, and her consent to marry him. Then he said a few more official-sounding sentences. Everyone—Harry, Elinor, and Grey included—had to sign yet another document, and it was done. Amanusa was Mrs. John Greyson.

They all went together to an elegant restaurant to celebrate at their wedding breakfast with
coquilles
and
omelettes
and
éclairs
and
framboises
and a great deal of champagne. Amanusa laughed until tears ran down her face, though when Jax asked, she couldn't tell him what amused her so.

“It's only a bit after noon,” Harry said, leaning back in his chair, an arm draped over the back of Jax's chair beside him. “Conclave meeting's not until five, when some of the conjury spirits start waking up.”

“Mine don't.” Grey yawned. “Mine are proper slugs. Refuse to wake 'til the moon's risen. Or midnight, depending.”

“Moonrise today is at four-seventeen.”

Grey paid Harry's announcement no attention, other than raising a single eyebrow.

“I know a conclave meeting ain't—isn't exactly anybody's idea of wedding day fun,” Harry said. “But I think you ought to go, after last night's adventure. I think we ought to make sure the governors know what happened, an' I think we ought to make it as public as we can. The more as knows what's goin' on, the 'arder it will be for 'em to do it again.”

“Reluctant as I am to be separated from my new bride for any length of time,” Jax said with a gallant little bow toward Amanusa, “I believe you're right. I think Amanusa should go to the afternoon's meeting. I'll keep Elinor company in the lobby.”

“So then.” Harry sat up straight and slapped his hands on his knees. “Since there's hours to fill between now an' time for the meeting to start, I think we should all go see what the lads 'ave learned about the machines after workin' all night—'cause you know they did—an' what the new Mrs. Greyson's magic thinks about it.”

When they arrived at the conclave's laboratory, proof of the all-night labors showed in the unshaven faces, disheveled clothing, and abandoned coffee cups scattered about the room. The machine lay cracked in two, its intestines rusting green and orange and black in the daylight glaring down from the skylights overhead. Other bits of the machine lay on nearby tables. Amanusa couldn't tell whether the separate pieces had been broken off, or had simply fallen off in the process of opening the thing up.

“Matteo Alvaro.” A lanky black-haired man with a beaky nose and pale skin under dark-bristled cheeks
shook Amanusa's hand. “Alchemist. Portugal. Met yesterday, but I'm sure you don't remember.”

He didn't give her time to respond before he turned away to drag her closer to the table with the machine. “What do you see?”

Amanusa blinked. “A machine. Broken open. Rust and corrosion and copper patina.” She copied his abrupt speech pattern without intending to.

“Yes, yes, but what else? Look with your magic.”

How?
She looked a question at Jax, who shrugged, seeming as bewildered as she. “I am a sorcerer,” she said. “My magic doesn't work very well with things that don't bleed. What do you see?”

“But machines do bleed.” That came from one of the very young men, an apprentice. “The machines that we make do. They bleed oil.”

“Oil is alchemy.” Alvaro poked at the machine's insides with a metal rod, frowning. “I will tell you what I do not see. I do not see any nuts or bolts or screws. Not performing their usual tasks, that is.”

“Then, what's holding it together?” Amanusa leaned over the table and peered into the machine's depths.

A jumble of metal bits and pieces formed a busy-looking tangle. She had no idea what purpose they might serve, but she had no doubt they worked toward a purpose of some sort. It
looked
like they did. She recognized small tools—pliers and hammerheads and half a scissor—turned from their original purpose and stuck together by some glue, some force she didn't know. A long bolt seemed to serve as a support, but it wasn't threaded through or screwed down to anything. Just stuck on.

“Is that a stone?” She scraped away a flake of rust
to expose a gray rock with shiny bits. Why would anyone put a rock in a machine?

“Quartz crystals,” Alvaro said. “Rather large ones, if you'll look on that side of it.” He pointed with his metal stick at a number of square clear crystals protruding into a nest of coppery-green wire.

“What does it all mean?” She looked up at him, bewildered. “How are all of those things stuck together? How do they work? What do they do?”

“We do not know how they work or what their purpose is.” Alvaro tapped his pointer in the open palm of his other hand. “We have only guesses. Theories. These will, however, give us a place to begin in sorting out what it all means. We surmise—”

“Not all of us,” someone called from the back of the room. “Some of us think you're cracked in the head.”

“Be quiet, Hansen. We're tired of you.” Someone else Amanusa couldn't see.

“The machine was not built by human hands,” Alvaro said in a rush, as if to get it out before any more interruptions.

That didn't make sense. Amanusa frowned, looking from the machine to the alchemist and back again. “Who else could have?”

“The machine itself, perhaps.” Alvaro tugged her toward the other half of the machine. “Look there. A tiny bit of a thing. A few wires and a nail, a wheel from a child's toy. I think that is the beginning, and these other pieces were added on as it grew.”

“Added on how? Why do you think someone didn't make it?” The idea seemed extremely farfetched to Amanusa.

“Don't you see?” Pyotr Strelitsky, seeming mostly
recovered from yesterday's trauma, chimed in. “It is precisely because we cannot define, describe, or duplicate the process that makes it unlikely to be human built. We do not have the ability to fasten things so securely together. Not like this.”

“Welding.” Hansen, the debater, was a stocky wizard with a thick shock of wheat-colored hair.

“Welds don't hold like this,” Alvaro retorted. “It's stronger than welds.”

“Besides, we cannot tell what this machine's purpose is.” Strelitsky had a long ivory letter opener to poke at the jumbled insides. “Humans construct machines to
do
something, for a specific purpose. The machines have an efficiency about them, an order. They are not so higgledy-piggledy inside. Things are used for their proper purposes, not stuck on any old way. Our machines are bolted together, because it's easier. More efficient.”

“But—” Hansen began.

Alvaro overrode him. “How could a man build it? The machines cannot live outside the dead zones, and men cannot live inside them.”

“We don't know that for certain, and men can survive for a time in the zones.”

“It is easily tested and proved, and it is reasonable to assume, given their behavior as we have observed them, and the condition of this specimen,” Alvaro said. “Magic damages them. And there is a limit to the amount of time even a head-blind man can spend in the dead zones. No one could remain long enough to build something so sophisticated as this.”

“He could go in and out. He wouldn't have to remain in the dead zone from beginning to end of the
construction.” Hansen glowered just as fiercely at Alvaro as Alvaro glared back at him. “And as for
why
—a man could use these machines to do things for him in the dead zones. Loot the buildings of abandoned valuables.”

“Apart from the fact that this machine has no discernable purpose, no human-built machine will work without the operator controlling it,” Alvaro retorted, then waved his hands to forestall the other man. “We have been arguing these same theories all night. You bring nothing new to the table.”

“I simply wish to ensure that our sorceress—” Hansen tipped his head in a weary bow “—is fully aware of all possibilities and not simply given the opinion of the majority.”

“Is it the majority opinion?” Amanusa asked. “That the machines . . . built themselves?”

“By a very small majority.” Alvaro shrugged. “We were hoping that sorcery would be able to tip our information one way or the other.”

“What does your magic show?”

“Conjury detects no human aura,” one of the conjurers said.

“Hasn't been touched by humans since this lady put it in her box,” Strelitsky added. “Alchemy can read the materials that were used in its construction, but the deterioration has made most other information impossible to read.”

“What about wizardry?” Amanusa looked to the wizard Hansen.

He shrugged. “Wizardry does not work very well on nonliving things.”

“Are you sure there is no sorcery you can perform
to determine whether this machine was built or, or birthed?” Alvaro asked. “Whether human hands constructed it, or it constructed itself?”

“There might be something in the spellbooks in Yvaine's tower.” She wanted to help. She just didn't know how. “But I would think this machine is too damaged for me to learn anything now.”

“We could get another one.” Harry spoke for the first time since they arrived. “You'll need to run more tests anyway. A fresh machine'll give fresh information.”

No one spoke when he paused, so he went on. “Besides, I've been wanting to see what Mrs. Greyson's magic can do with the dead zones. Her first working of major sorcery knocked the borders back across most of Europe. Maybe she can do more.”