do?’ Quirke opened the drawer and placed the artefact back inside the felt-lined case. ‘I shall keep it as a reminder that there are things in this world older than I am. You’ll see no papers from me speculating on the origins of the coin. I’ll leave it to you in my will – you can have it along with my office, when the High Table have forgotten your name and your impudence towards them.’
‘I shall never be the sort of person they believe fit to sit in here,’ said Amelia.
‘You’ll see,’ said the academic. ‘In time, you’ll see.’
‘Fools, they’re blind, bloody fools.’
‘Some advice, Amelia,’ said Quirke, passing a cup of cafeel over to the professor. ‘As one of your father’s oldest friends. Don’t publish any more papers about the city; keep your head down and let the procession of nature take its course. The membership of the High Table will change, and in time fresh faces will arrive who have never heard of you. There is a dig along the foothills of Mechancia, some Chimecan-age ruins overrun by glaciers during the coldtime. I can get you on the expedition – you’ll just be another anonymous face helping out, a few years beyond the reach of the official journals and your enemies.’
‘Academic exile.’ Amelia set aside her cup without drinking from it.
‘I taught you better than that, my dear. A tactical withdrawal. Entropy can be an astonishingly powerful ally in these sleepy halls of ours. The long game, my dear, the long game.’
Amelia stood up. They both knew she was not going to follow his advice, and the old man had damaged his own prospects enough already by making Saint Vines her last bolt-hole within the eight universities.
‘You stood by my father after he lost everything,’ said Amelia, ‘and you have done the same for me. You are a rare old bird, Sherlock Quirke.’
He shrugged. It had never even occurred to the old academic that there was an alternative way of doing things. He was a singular touch of humanity among all the bones and dust of forgotten things.
She made to open the door and leave.
‘Amelia, did it ever occur to you that some things that are lost are meant to be that way for a reason?’
Now that was a queer thing to say. Was that the master of archaeology, or her dead father’s friend talking?
Amelia shut the door on Quirke and her old life.
Amelia could see there was something wrong with the woman in the quad the moment she left the college building – something out of place. She was the right age to be a student but her poise was wrong; like a panther waiting patiently on the lawn, carefully watching the bustle of the undergraduates. Could she be a topper sent after her by the caliph? The Circle knows, there was always a surfeit of professional assassins in Middlesteel, ready to do the capital city’s dirty work when enough coins were spilled over the bench tops of the more disreputable drinking houses.
She noticed Amelia and started to walk towards the professor, the shadows falling behind her. The visitor was approaching with the sun in her eyes. Amelia relaxed. The woman was not planning to try to sink a blade between her ribs after all.
‘Damson Harsh?’ enquired the young lady with a slight accent. Where was that accent from? It had been softened by years in Jackals.
‘Professor Harsh,’ said Amelia.
The woman pulled a folded sheet of notepaper from her jacket. ‘You are, I believe, currently in need of employment. I represent an individual who may be interested in offering you a suitable position.’
Amelia arched an eyebrow. ‘You are suspiciously well informed, damson.’
The visitor handed Amelia the piece of paper. ‘The offer is contingent on you being able to translate the text you see here.’
Amelia unfolded the sheet. It was not possible! The script on the paper was nothing this young woman should have in her possession.
‘Is this a joke?’
‘I can assure you that the offer is quite genuine, professor.’
‘Kid, where did you get this from?’
‘The translation, if you would be so kind.’
‘The last – book – of – Pairdan. Reader-Administrator of … Camlantis.’ Amelia haltingly traced her finger across the ancient script. She had nearly died in the desert wastes of the caliph to get her hands on such a treasure, yet this young pup had breezed onto the college grounds blithely oblivious to the fact that she held in her possession the title inscription of a crystal-book that had been lost to humanity some six and a half thousand years ago.
‘The crystal-book that this was taken from, does it have information blight?’
‘Turn the paper over, professor.’
Amelia looked at the other side of the sheet. An address: Snowgrave Avenue – the richest district of Sun Gate, the beating heart of commerce that kept the currents of continental trade circulating for Jackals.
‘Go there now, professor. You may see for yourself if the book is functioning or not.’
It was all Amelia could do to stop herself running.
Snowgrave Avenue lay five minutes’ walk away from Guardian Wren station on the atmospheric, the underground transportation system that served the capital and was now spilling workers out onto the avenue’s wide boulevards. This season, it seemed that the women had taken to wearing the severe uniform of the clerks – dark suits cut long to cover their dresses, and stovepipe hats. Last season it had been bonnets bearing the badges of the parliamentary parties sewn in lace. Amelia still kept an idle eye on the milliners’ window displays in Middlesteel, even if she usually set aside her attentions and the increasingly slim pickings of her salary for following her vocation. Along the avenue, the richer denizens of the counting houses and commercial concerns were stepping out of hansom cabs clattering over Snowgrave’s cobbles, while the truly wealthy – the capital’s finest quality – brushed down their waistcoats and checked their gold pocket watches from the snug comfort of private coaches. To be poor of course, meant coming in by foot, trudging from the rookeries in the shadow of the vast new pneumatic towers, water-reinforced rubber gurgling over the vendors’ cries of eels and fresh milk for sale.
Amelia gazed up at the tower that matched the address on her sheet. Seventy storeys high, but unlike its neighbours, the pneumatic building had no granite plinth outside, no brass plate announcing the names of the concerns inside. Perhaps they had yet to get around to erecting one? A lot of new towers had gone up after Quatérshift’s invasion of Jackals a few years back; half the city had been left burning after Jackals’ aerial navy had been turned against her own capital in an unspeakable act of treachery.
Inside, the atrium was polished marble, tall men in ornate frock coats waiting as if they were the sentries outside parliament. Each doorman held a bulldog on a leash, the creatures’ black noses swollen to the size of a tomato. The canines had been twisted – either by worldsinger sorcery or by the even more disrerutable hands of womb mages.
‘Damson Harsh,’ said one of the doormen. ‘Please do come in. We have been expecting you.’
Amelia looked down at the bulldog sniffing suspiciously
