John nodded. There was a certain mania about him—that, Patrick was familiar with. The cusp of plans about to unfurl. “He assures me it’s all well in hand.”
Patrick pulled in a breath that lanced his throat. He felt every particle of his body shout a reproof, but ignored it. “Tell Lord Shop I’ll speak to him.”
John squeezed the flesh on Patrick’s shoulder, and it sent spikes of pain into his chest. “We’ll get back on our feet, Patty. One way or another. We’ve just gotta be patient.”
Patrick lay back on the tiles, stomach rolling, thinking that if nothing else, at least his father was here. And hadn’t that been what he’d wanted? To hand back the reins?
Instead, he found his fists clenching.
He wasn’t alone. Surely there was something to that.
CHAPTER SIXLORD TANNER
Beyond the clock tower, on the bridge between silk tailors and the dispensary, Geoffry Tanner had once asked a woman to marry him.
She’d been lovely, quite a bit older than him, and a Craftswoman.
The restaurant she’d worked in, plucking chickens and scrubbing pans, had just hours before sacked her. She met him on the bridge with raw eyes, her apron still fastened. Seeing her like that had made him want to cry.
Instead, he had proposed. He had promised her a safe life, in a town house somewhere just outside the city, where a marriage between Artisan and Crafter was sneered at far less. He’d been just a lad, only twenty or so. She had been fair-skinned, dark-haired, beautiful, her cheeks perpetually scorched by kitchen steam. This is all he remembered of her.
The engagement did not last, of course. Geoffry’s father was a Lord of the House, and a lord’s son did not marry just anyone. Certainly not a dish maid he’d lost his virginity to beside a chicken coop.
The dish maid was now dead. He heard she’d been involved in a factory accident just south of the city, not months after he’d rescinded his offer of marriage. By then, he’d married a Masonry woman instead—Olivette.
Unfortunately, Olivette took much longer to die.
Geoffry Tanner had loved his wife in the perfunctory ways of men at the peak of society. He helped her out of carriages, kissed her cold fingers, offered a laugh when she tried out a joke. He fucked her with lessening enthusiasm as they aged.
Thankfully, while a Lord’s son did notmarryCraftswomen, bedding them was no matter so long as one was discreet. The House’s servants were normally quite willing. It rarely took much persuasion—a promise of bluff, a little spare coin. “Perhaps,” he would tell them. “I can put in a good word with the board of enrollments for the Artisan school?” In this way, he endured a dull but respectful marriage. Until, that is, his wife became wise to it and threatened the shameful prospect of divorce. Such a scandal would have crippled his ambitions.
Olivette seemed to abhor him after that. Even his ascension in the House of Lords could not impress her. She complained incessantly about the long hours he worked, the company of the other lords. The continent’s idium quotas shortened and shortened, and even this crisis did not free him of her carping. She called him obsessive and single-minded. She did not understand that the entire legacy of Artisans rested on his shoulders alone. He grew to resent her, to pray for her early demise. She bore him no children, and so her death, when it finally came, had been as plain as their marriage, with only him to mourn her.
Olivette had never quite compared to that Crafter girl on the bridge, despite her impressive Artisanal feats. The thought continued to anger him, even years after both women lay rotting in separate cemeteries.
Women, he’d learned, were the single-minded ones, incapable of grasping what he himself had long ago grasped. Idium was everything. Without it, people were nothing but animals scrambling up the rungs of a food chain.
“I seem to remember your son and the earth Charmer being quite taken with one another,” Tanner said to the glass panes of a window. It offered a view of the clock tower. He could imagine the bridge below it. “Young lovers, perhaps. Am I wrong?”
Behind him, Tanner heard shoes whisper over the floor, a music box played a soft opera to an audience of two. Lord Terrence Shop sipped his tea. “They were indeed.”
“So then, have the boy fuck her back to sense. It shouldn’t be so difficult.”
“You want me to prostitute my son?” Shop said on a laugh. “Come now, Geoffry.”
“Then what do you propose?” Tanner said, turning on his heel so abruptly it squeaked. His nostrils flared. For weeks, months, he had slowly morphed from man to bull. Now he rampaged, directionless.
Lord Shop replaced his teacup on his saucer and stood. His full height was quite astonishing, his chin among the rafters. Though his limbs seemed reedy, he held them in a way that implied strength. He was bespectacled in round gold-framed glasses, and his hair was a mix of black and silver. Terrence Shop was a man so angular it was unsettling. Everywhere he went, he brought with him an emerald-capped cane, though his gait did not show a need for it. Tanner assumed it was a flaunt of some kind—a Cutter turned ordained lord, despite the odds.
“Nina Clarke won’t be persuaded,” Shop began, in a voice calmer than Tanner’s. “Not with gentler measures.”
Tanner paced to the ancient, unimpressive book that lay on the desk, its binding barely tethered, the cover badly preserved. It had been written, Tanner believed, in a time before Artisans, when men here were hardly more than those in far-off continents. It was titled retrospectively, as though someone thought, hundreds of years after it were made, that it ought to have a title. Embossed on the cover were the wordsThe Stewards’ Testament.
Tanner remembered the first time he’d seen it on his desk. He’d thought it irrelevant, at first. A strange relic. Those tales of the Stewards—witnesses of Idia’s time on Earth—were a Crafter’s myth. The Book of Belavere mentioned no such people. The true disciples were those who had followed Idia into war and watched her sacrifices firsthand.
The Stewards were the ramblings of heretics. Accounts of them had dwindled in history. There were nearly no believers now, yet here was this book.
Frustratingly, it was written in a language no one could read.Verian Script, he was told. An infantile Crafter code supposedly used by the Stewards, but more likely used in wartime to communicate on the battlefield. Some impressions of Verian Script had been found and studied in Belavere’s great history, but there had been little reason to pay attention to theseso-called Stewards until now. Inked into the margins of the first page with an unsteady hand was a faded annotation:
