Let the Evening Begin
From the diary of Penny Holloway
I went to Lord Ashcombe’s ball because Clara was the chief guest and somebody had to stand next to Clara.
The fog cleared at nine. Everyone looked up at the stars.
I was mostly interested in the fun below.
By the time the papers wrote about that night, I already had a pet and a professor.
I did not know about the professor yet. I only knew it was, perhaps, the beginning of a long story.
The orchestra fell silent as Lord Ashcombe stepped onto the dais, and the conversations died away one by one, from the front of the room to the back. He raised his glass.
“My friends. I thank you all for joining us this evening.”
His gaze swept the ballroom. Above him, the great glass ceiling of the Grand Ashcombe Hotel stood black with fog, as it had every night of October. Then, suddenly, the grey fog thinned and parted, and the moon came through. Weather magic, and expensive. Three hundred guests looked up at once as their faces went silver.
“Now,” said Lord Ashcombe, “let the evening begin.”
He lowered his glass, and for a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the conductor lifted his baton, the strings came alive, and a waltz moved out over the floor. Couples took their places on the polished marble without anyone seeming to decide to.
At the head of the room, in the chair reserved for the chief guest, sat a girl with her hands folded in her lap and her back very straight. She smiled at the right people, but she did not look at the stars for long. The chief guest is looked at, and she knew it.
Beside her, in a chair that had been brought for the purpose, sat another girl who was not looking at the stars at all. She was eating a sugared almond while looking at the marble floor beneath the dancers, her head tilted slightly to one side. She sat very still, waiting for a shape underneath it to move again.
“You are staring at the floor,” said the chief guest, without moving her lips.
“There’s something under it.”
“There are kitchens under it.”
“Mm.” The girl took another almond.
Below the kitchens, below the cellars, below the last course of dressed stone that the hotel’s masons had signed their names to, the night had only just begun.
The Underground Works ran beneath the whole of the old city, a labyrinth of brick that carried its water, waste, gas and steam. Great iron pipes ran overhead and vanished into clouds of steam, while sewage rushed through channels below the narrow walkways. Brick arches disappeared into the dark on either side, their faces thick with glowing green moss and a century of cobwebs. The air smelled of hot iron and cold rot, and under both came, faintly, the waltz from the world above.
A group of men came out of a side tunnel with a lamp. They were dressed for the ball: black tailcoats, white waistcoats, throats bound in silk. Their boots were already smeared with the darkness of the world below.
“You are sure we were not followed?” asked the heavy man in the centre of the group without turning his head.
The one holding the lamp laughed. He was young and thin, and he walked the slick bricks without once looking at his feet.
“We were born down here, sir. If anyone could tail us in the Works, it would be one of my brothers. My brothers all made it big and went to Meridian.” He said the name softly, and his face changed when he said it.
“You know how it is there. My pa went there once. He never came back, but they say it is a city that never sleeps. You can find anything you want in Meridian.”
His voice went dreamy. “Some say it is like a great beast. Once you go into its belly, you never come out again.”
The heavy man’s guards watched the tunnels and followed the rat. They did not bury him then and there, though two of them wanted to.
Behind the heavy man walked a scholarly-looking man in wire spectacles, who carried nothing and had not spoken since they came down. He might have been taking the evening air in the central park of Meridian.
He did not look at the tunnels, nor at the pipes overhead, where a man could lie along the iron and breathe through his mouth, nor down at the black water beside the walkway, where a trained man could hold his air for a long time. He looked at nothing at all. Then he adjusted his spectacles, which needed no adjusting.
“They are here,” he said softly.
The tunnel opened into a tall vault where a dozen pipes met overhead and the steam made the October air almost warm. A wide drain ran through the middle of it, black water moving fast, and a narrow iron bridge crossed the drain without a rail.
On the far side, in the moss-light, stood the others: six men in long cloaks. Under the cloaks, when they moved, the lamp found the shine of army boots. In front of them, smiling, stood a tall man with beautiful teeth and a leather case. The two groups met in the middle of the bridge.
“Do you have it?” said the heavy man.
The tall man lifted the case and let the latches go with two small, sharp clicks. “Behold,” he said. “The Collapsing Bomb.”
Inside, held in a nest of brass fittings, sat a globe of glass the size of a melon. A disturbance moved inside it that was neither liquid nor light. Around it, in a ring of velvet sockets, sat a dozen smaller globes the size of marbles.
The scholar’s eyes flicked once behind his spectacles, not at the melon but at the corner of the case. A third object sat there that the salesman had not named, in a socket lined with lead: a creature the length of a finger, curled, grey, and asleep. The scholar looked at it for exactly as long as a man looks at what he expected to find, and then he looked away.
“How do we know it is the real article?” said the heavy man. His face had gone shiny.
“Perhaps,” said the salesman, “a demonstration is in order.”
The water beside the bridge exploded.
A figure dressed all in black oilskin came out of the drain in one movement, one hand reaching for the case. A double shield snapped into being around her as she came, honeycomb over honeycomb, cast so fast and so clean that even the men in boots stepped back. The salesman did not.
He plucked one marble from the velvet, pressed it with his thumb, and tossed it underhand without looking. The marble touched the shield.
Suddenly, the air around the running figure folded. The moss-light bent, the pipes behind her bent, and the woman herself bent, all of it pulled towards a point the size of a pinhead and held there, quivering, for the length of one heartbeat. Then the world let go and snapped straight.
The shield came apart into a thousand pieces all at once, and the woman inside it came apart the same way. She dropped into the drain, and the black water took her and moved on.
Nobody spoke, and on both sides of the bridge, hard men stood very still. Only the salesman looked pleased.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it seems we shall have to cut our meeting short. But surely that is demonstration enough of the capabilities of our latest creation.”
The heavy man’s voice came out heavier than before. “That is enough. But we have brought our own expert. He may have a few questions.”
The scholar stepped forward onto the bridge. The salesman’s smile widened by one tooth.
“As a good salesman, I always try to satisfy every doubt of my customers, however trivial.”
The scholar pushed his spectacles up his nose with one finger. “I see that you have contained a spatial disturbance by isolating it in a small pocket of low-density space,” he said, in the flat voice of a man reading from a page. “A disturbance in low-density space can be stored for a long time. That is a good way to keep it until it is used on your opponent. When it is released into our own space, which is dense, the disturbance cannot hold.”
He glanced at the drain, where the water was carrying away the demonstration. “The collapsed space heals. Almost at once. The snapping is very hard on flesh.”
“I know how a spatial collapse works, scholar.” The salesman’s smile stayed where it was.
“Good,” said the scholar. “Then you would have no trouble explaining how you keep a pocket of low-density space open, with a live disturbance inside it, anchored on…”
He tilted his head. “Let me see. A jumping amber?”
“Hmph. What do you mean, how? We are not selling the blueprints.”
“That makes sense,” said the scholar. “You cannot sell something you do not have.”
The tall man’s eye twitched. The scholar looked at him for a moment longer. Then his expression changed, very slightly, into what might have been pity.
“Ah. I see. You were not told.”
“Told what?”
“Have you heard,” said the scholar, “of the X-series anomaly? The cosmic worm?”
The salesman’s eyebrows went up. Behind him, the six men in boots did not move at all, and not one of them looked surprised. That was the answer: soldiers who already knew.
The scholar’s eyes went over them once, and over the heavy man’s shiny face, and came back to the salesman. His expression closed.
Somewhere above them, in the pipes concealed by the fog, somebody laughed. A voice drifted down.
“So. It was a trap after all.”
The men in boots moved before the voice had finished. Shapes dropped from the pipes on every side, cloaked and fast, and the vault went white with spellfire.
The moss burned. A pipe burst and threw a fan of steam across the bridge. Somebody screamed, and was abruptly cut off.
The heavy man did not run. He put up a barrier with his left hand, a plain grey wall of force that took two fire bullets and held. With his right hand, he drew a key from his waistcoat. It was a small brass key on a chain, with nothing at all remarkable about it.
He held it up into the empty air above the bridge. “You took me for a fool?” he said, to nobody, to the salesman, to the men falling out of the ceiling. “This time the cosmic worm will fall into our hands. Spatial lock!”
He turned the key. There was no keyhole, but the key turned anyway.
And the space closed.
The sound of the drain went far away. The waltz from above stopped. The spellfire went on, but it went on more slowly, thick and dragging.
The straight pipes overhead were not straight any more. They bent towards the middle of the room, all of them, gently. The room was a bowl now, and the bridge was the bottom of it.
The scholar stood on the walkway with his hands at his sides. For the first time that night, his face changed, though not much. It was the face of a man who has heard a door lock behind him and has already begun counting the windows.
Across the bridge, the salesman had understood at last. His beautiful teeth were showing, but there was no smile behind them.
“The blueprints,” he said. “It was you.”
“It was me,” said the heavy man.
A bolt from the ceiling took his barrier and burned his shoulder. He went down on one knee with the key still up in the air, still turned.
A body fell across the case. The bomb rang once, a clear, high note, and then it lit. There were perhaps three seconds left before the collapsing space snapped back.
What the scholar noticed first was the smell. It was the smell of rain on a hot road, filling the vault from nowhere, so strong it hurt. Every rat in the Works was running the same way.
Then the moss went bright, brighter than the lamp, and the light in the vault began to distort. A pressure came down on the room from that same nameless direction, patient and enormous. It was the world itself, leaning its weight on the roof of the sealed space, pressing in, trying to bury the collapse.
The seal cracked under it, and one hairline split appeared in the air above the drain, where the pressure was worst. The worm, somehow awake now from its sealed sleep, went for it. It came up out of the case in one motion, a grey blur that was there and not there. The heavy man’s key caught it in the air.
The bowl of the room drew tight around the bridge, and the worm hung over the case in the closing space, pinned and thrashing. The heavy man, on one knee with his ruined shoulder, began to laugh. The key in his fist was shaking.
The scholar was not looking at the worm. He was looking at the edges of the space around it, where the crack was.
The worm stopped thrashing. It gathered itself and pushed with all its might towards the crack, and the hairline split tore wide open.
A wound gaped in the air above the drain, taller than a man, and the worm was through it and gone.
The heavy man stared. All his efforts had been for nothing.
Along the edges of the wound, even as it opened, frost was forming. The space was healing itself, and the seam was closing. Two seconds, perhaps three, before the collapsing space snapped back.
It was the only door in the room. Every man still standing saw it and made a swift dash for it. The scholar moved in the opposite direction first.
A bolt went through the place his head had been a split second before. A cloaked man lunged towards him and missed. Around him, spells that should have found him lost their way, and the men who cast them were too busy dying to wonder why. He reached the second stanchion and took the rat by the back of the collar.
“Sir,” said the boy, “what?”
“Hold your breath.”
The scholar stepped into another crack in the space and reached the seam in an instant. It had closed to a slit the width of a hand. He put his palm flat against the frost, and the frost stopped.
The wound shuddered as the whole world’s pressure leaned on it, and it stayed open exactly the width of a man and a boy until they leaped through. Then it snapped shut behind them. The bomb on the bridge went white, and the space began to snap back.
The bowl of the room drew in on itself, all at once, every bent pipe and burning cloak and screaming man pulled towards the centre as the disturbance was erased by the space of this world.
A cold, foggy October street opened around them, and the faint waltz from the hotel still reached them. The rat retched at the mouth of a drain nearby, while the scholar took an empty envelope from his coat and dropped it through an open manhole. Then he put his spectacles back on his nose and let out a sigh.
“Getting too old for this.”
He went back to the boy. The rat was sitting with his back to the wall, his lamp somehow still in his hand, still lit. He looked up at the man in spectacles and did not know what he was looking at.
“Who…” said the boy.
“Your brothers are wrong. You can leave Meridian whenever you like. Most people just do not want to.”
He turned and walked away into the dark as the fog swallowed him.
Three floors up, the chandeliers shivered. A champagne glass on a tray touched its neighbour and sang, but the conductor did not lose the beat. The waltz went on, and the couples turned.
Somebody laughed, and somebody else said, “The trains, my dear. I hear they run them in tunnels underground now, so the poor can get to work.”
Out on the long terrace, the girl who had been staring at the floor stood at the balustrade with her gloves off. Unlike the nobles under the chandeliers, she had been down to the underground train tunnels, and the sewers, and had seen the web of steam pipes haunting them.
The worm was swimming up through the ground beneath her now. It was fast, hurt, and very frightened. She had seen the whole ordeal it had been through below.
Then she put her hand into the air beside the balustrade, into nowhere at all, and when it came back out, the escaping little creature was in it. The worm thrashed once. Then it stopped, because it had felt what was holding it.
“Oh,” she said softly. “You poor thing.”
She held it in her palm and blew on it. The air around it thickened and went still, forming a little bubble of four-dimensional space. Inside the bubble, the worm turned over once and settled.
In her other hand, a slim translucent book appeared out of nowhere: her grimoire. She opened it and put the bubble between the pages.
“You can stay here safely, little friend.”
“There you are.” The chief guest had come out onto the terrace with a shawl over her arm.
“You’ll freeze. What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing,” said the girl. “Just found a new pet.”
The chief guest looked at the book. She looked at her friend, and then she put the shawl around her shoulders. Honestly, she had stopped trying to understand her best friend a long time ago.
“Come inside,” she said with a smile. “They want to see you dance.”