Dead Letters
From THE DAILY CRIER, Thursday edition
SUBSIDENCE BENEATH THE GRAND ASHCOMBE. A section of the Underground Works beneath the Grand Ashcombe Hotel gave way in the early hours of Wednesday. The Municipal Engineer attributes the collapse to a failure of the gas main and wishes it known that the Works are perfectly safe. His lordship’s ball was not interrupted, and several guests have written to this paper to say that the stars were very fine. The police declined to comment, which our readers may interpret as they please.
“You mean to tell me all of this happened while our ball was still going on?”
Lord Ashcombe asked it without looking at the inspector. He was looking up, and there was a great deal to look up at.
The vault was gone. Where a dozen pipes had met over a bridge and a drain, there was now a hole in the world, round, smooth and the size of a chapel. The lanterns of the constables could not find its far side.
The brick of the Works stopped at its rim in a clean edge. Nothing had broken it; it had been cut. The great iron pipes stopped too, sheared through, and water poured out of their open ends into the dark. Two engineers stood at the edge with a measuring chain and had not yet agreed how to start explaining it. It smelled of wet brick and cold rot and, under both, faintly, of rain.
The inspector’s face was dark. “These spies are getting bolder every year, my lord.”
“Spies, you say?”
“Spies.” The inspector turned and pointed with his chin at the boy sitting on an upturned bucket with a constable’s blanket round his shoulders and a lamp, still lit, still in his hand. “From questioning that tunnel rat we have managed to piece the story together. Most of it. The rest we already had.”
Lord Ashcombe waited.
“It was the Veldran, my lord. The one our service calls the Locksmith. We knew he had got himself into the military. We did not know which department. Well. Now we do. He was after the cosmic worm, so he holed up in the Advanced Magical Research Department, and I will tell you, his plan was a brilliant one. He drew up a blueprint for a weapon that could not work without the worm. Then he arranged to discover that blueprint by accident, and he sold it to the department’s vice chancellor.”
“Dorrance?”
“Dorrance. Who is a greedy man, as your lordship may know. The two of them cooked up the collapsing bombs together, and they sold them to Mr. Crane.”
“Crane. The gangster.”
“The very same. Whom your lordship so graciously invited to the ball.”
Lord Ashcombe lifted one hand and let it fall. “Now, now, inspector. I am the local lord. I must keep working relations with everybody.”
The inspector let that pass and went on. “Then the Locksmith put on Crane’s face and came down here to buy his own bombs, and to steal the worm out from under Dorrance’s men with a little brass key of his own making. A spatial lock. He is brilliant, my lord, I will say it again. All those Veldrans are brilliant. They even have the disguise magic now. That will have to go to the Secret Service, and they will not thank me for it.”
“And yet here we are, standing in the Underground Works.”
“Here we are.” The inspector looked at the hole. “He underestimated the worm, my lord. Everybody does. It does not care to be woken from its nap, and it does not care to be caught. We never learn from history.”
“And the others?”
“The Alliance had got wind of the sale, so they sent men down the pipes to steal the bomb for themselves. Three sides on one bridge, and a thing in a case that none of them understood.” He shook his head. “None escaped. All buried. Swallowed by the collapse.”
Lord Ashcombe was quiet for a moment. “Then who was the scholar?”
“My lord?”
“The boy said Crane, or the Locksmith, or whoever he was, brought a scholar with him. An expert. In spectacles. Who walked out of here alive with the boy under his arm.”
The inspector’s mouth tightened. “We have no record of any such scholar. No department, no college, no name. He must be another spy.”
“Whose?”
“That, my lord, is the question I have been asking myself since four o’clock this morning.”
Boots came down the walkway at a run. “Inspector. Inspector!”
“What? Do not shout, man. The whole city is asleep above your head.”
The young constable pulled up, breathing hard, and held out his find on a square of cloth. “We found this in the drain below the manhole on Tanner Street, sir. An envelope, sir. Small. The size of a playing card. It is too new to have been down there long, so I thought it might belong to last night.”
The inspector took it in his white-gloved hand and turned it to the lamp. His eyebrows climbed his forehead and stayed there, while the rest of his face went very still.
“It is addressed, sir,” the constable said, “but there is no such street. Fourteen Mill Lane, Sarnholt. There is no Sarnholt. Not in Ashfox, not on any map we hold. And the stamp is blank, sir. Just a square of paper with nothing on it. Perhaps the sender never meant to post it at all. A dead letter.”
“No.”
The inspector’s voice had lost its steadiness. “No. This letter reached exactly the right person.”
“Inspector?” said Lord Ashcombe. His voice had gone grave too. “You mean to say…”
“This is above my clearance, my lord. Well above it.” The inspector did not take his eyes off the envelope. “Have you heard of the Dead Letters, Lord Ashcombe?”
“Dead Letters?”
“The most dangerous spies on the continent. Nobody knows how many there are, or who pays them, or what they want. But wherever one of these turns up, it is a matter for the Secret Service, not for a city inspector.”
“And the dead letter is their calling card?”
“Their calling card, and their signature. Every one of them uses a different stamp, and every stamp is from somewhere that no longer exists. We have recovered thirty-one different stamps over the years. Thirty-one members, so far as anybody knows.” He turned the envelope over, and the blank square caught the light. “This is the thirty-first. The newest of them. The service calls him Blank.”
The young constable swallowed. “But we know his face now, sir. We can have it sketched from the boy’s memory.”
“You are underestimating them, lad.” The inspector folded the cloth back over the envelope, gently, with both hands. “Every one of the Dead Letters is a master of disguise magic. They can become anybody, so long as it is a man for a man and a woman for a woman. That face existed for one day. It was burned this morning with the rest of him.”
On his bucket, the rat looked at his lamp, and said nothing at all.
In the railway station early in the morning, under a roof of iron and dirty glass, a man walked towards his platform with a small suitcase in one hand. He wore a cream three-piece suit, cut close and perfectly to his body, and a top hat.
He was tall, about six foot, and mildly built, a man who walked a great deal and lifted very little. His face was young, not yet thirty to look at, angular, with a sharp jaw and blond hair combed neatly to the sides. On his nose sat a pair of round wire spectacles, and behind them his eyes were a deep and unremarkable blue.
Nobody looked at him twice. That was the point of him.
“Excuse me, young man.”
An elderly newspaper seller stood by a pillar with his papers under his arm and his cap pulled low. “Today’s news has a very exciting story about yesterday’s collapsing bomb.”
The man in the cream suit stopped. Newspapers did not write about collapsing bombs; newspapers wrote about gas mains. So he looked at the old man again. He found nothing in him that a careful person would call a threat. That, more than anything, told him who he was looking at.
“Master Pigeon?” he thought.
Master Pigeon was the oldest of the Dead Letters, and the one who had made the disguise magic that every other Letter wore. He was Circle Eight, an Archmage in a world that had perhaps ten of them. It was said he had some teleportation magic of his own, and that he could appear anywhere, at any hour, wearing any face he pleased. He had given Lucian every mission he had ever received. Now here he stood on a railway platform, selling newspapers, looking exactly what he was pretending to be.
“That does sound interesting,” said Lucian, and took a paper, and paid for it with a one-mark coin.
He opened it while he walked. Some of the letters had been printed in bold, here and there, at random. A careless typesetter, anyone would have said. Lucian read the whole paper from the front page to the advertisements, and gathered the bold letters as he went, and turned them in his head through a cipher known to exactly thirty-one people. The message read:
The Royal College of Ashfox has a new headmistress. Lara Allard. Our reading puts her at the Seventh Circle. But whatever the Meridian’s elite may say, she is more dangerous than she appears. Find out what she is planning. Your public identity, Lucian Grey, is enough to enter the College as an assistant professor. This is a long-term mission.
He folded the paper and put it under his arm. “The Royal College of Ashfox,” he said, and looked along the platforms for the one he wanted. “Meridian it is, then.”
He had not gone ten steps before a boy in the blue livery of the telegraph office caught him by the sleeve, out of breath, and held up a sealed brass tube with a wax seal the size of a crown piece. “Mr. Grey, sir? Paid delivery, sir. Very urgent, they said.”
Lucian gave him a coin. The boy looked at it, then went away happy. Lucian broke the seal.
The paper inside was thick and expensive and had been enchanted to warm in the hand. He read it once. Then it browned at the edges and curled and went to ash between his fingers, which was a great deal of money to spend on a message that said this:
The Royal College of Ashfox has opened its doors to students from every nation on the continent. Join the faculty. Discover what they are planning. Long-term posting. Funds to follow.
Lucian brushed the ash from his glove. The Alliance did everything this way: loudly, and with money.
He had two masters, and he served them with the same pen. To the Alliance he was Lucian Grey, a promising young scholar they had found and trained, and who reported to them faithfully. To the Dead Letters he was Blank, and he had been theirs long before the Alliance ever heard his name.
The Letters had made the scholar. Then they had let the Alliance discover him, recruit him, build him a legend and defend it. It was the finest cover on the continent, because a real service believed in it.
“The Letters are always ahead,” he said to nobody. “They knew what the Alliance would ask before the Alliance did.”
He put the empty tube in a bin and walked on to the Meridian express.
The commoner carriage was long and open, with rows of wooden seats facing each other down its length. It smelled of coal smoke and oranges. Lucian took a seat at the far end, by the window, and set his suitcase on the rack over his head and his newspaper on his knee.
The whistle blew. The door at the near end banged open and two girls came through it at a run. They were in the uniform of the Royal College: warm grey sweaters over white shirts and ties, with pleated skirts. One of them had her hat in her hand instead of on her head.
“Penny,” said the taller one, catching her breath, “we could very well have taken the next train.”
The other girl did not answer. She had stopped dead in the aisle, one hand on a seat-back, and she was staring down the length of the carriage. Her mouth had come a little open. She had the look of a person who had walked into a room and found the sun sitting in a chair.
She was a long way off, and the carriage was full of people between them. So all Lucian saw, when he glanced up from his paper, was a schoolgirl standing in the aisle with her hat in her hand and her mind somewhere else. He went back to the paper.
The girl closed her mouth. Then she walked the whole length of the carriage without looking at anything else in it, and her friend followed her with the face of someone who had done this before. The two of them sat down in the seats directly across from him.
The train began to move. The girl folded her hands in her lap, and her friend opened a book. Lucian turned a page of his newspaper he had already read.
“Sir,” said the girl.
He looked up. She was looking straight at him, and she was smiling, a small, pleased, private smile.
“You do not have to worry,” she said. “I will not tell anyone.”