The Master of Heathcrest Hall (43 page)

But of course he wasn’t. He was still at Madstone’s. Nor had he spoken to her like that since she was twelve years old, before he lost his mind while binding the protections around the Eye of Ran-Yahgren. She had simply recalled the sound of his voice, and the things he used to say while she was solving a puzzle, that was all.

Except it hadn’t seemed like her father’s voice had been a memory in her mind. It was as if she had really heard his voice, here in the room, just like the chiming of the clock.

No, that was impossible. Just as it was impossible the clock had chimed. It was not the top of the hour, and it was past the start of the third farthing of the day. All the same, Ivy went to the fireplace, looking at the old clock on the mantel. She could hear the soft whir of its inner workings, and a steady ticktock as it kept time.

Carefully, Ivy turned the clock around, then she opened the door in the back. There was a small brass plaque on the inside of the door, but it was too tarnished to read what was etched upon it. She breathed on the plaque, and polished it with the edge of her sleeve. Then she turned the clock so that the brass plate caught the light coming through the window.

D. F. Larken, Clockmaker
, read the fine words engraved on the plaque.
No. 18 Coronet St., Invarel
.

Ivy stared, dumbfounded. Now that she understood the riddle, it was obvious. She had indeed found Larken in good time—inside the beautiful old clock. And the references to the crown, and the number of scoldings he had given, were obvious as well. A coronet was a type of crown, and a dozen and a half was the same number as eighteen.

A shroud of riddle obscured by magick and shut in a locked Wyrdwood box—why had her father gone to such lengths to conceal the knowledge in the journal? What was this keystone?

She didn’t know, but she was going to find out.

Carefully, Ivy shut the door on the back of the clock. There was at least one thing she understood now, and that was how the rosewood clock was able to keep time even when the almanacs no longer could. After all, the mechanics of Mr. Lockwell’s celestial sphere had been able to accommodate the addition of the twelfth planet. Why shouldn’t a clock made by Mr. Larken be able to do the same?

A thrill came over Ivy. Perhaps she would go see not only Mr. Fintaur that afternoon, but Mr. Larken as well. After all, she knew where he was. She had been to No. 18 Coronet Street once before, when she brought in the old rosewood clock, thinking it broken. Only this time, she would not settle for speaking with an apprentice. She would speak to the master clockmaker himself.

An excitement rose within Ivy at the idea of speaking with her father’s old compatriots. They would know why the keystone was important; they would understand what it was her father wanted them to do. And with her duty in the matter discharged, she could have no reservations about leaving the city. Her heart quickening, Ivy turned from the fireplace.

And halted.

The tall silhouette of a man stood outside one of the library windows. Despite the warmth of the day, he was dressed as always in heavy, frilled garb of black.

It is too late
, he said, and this time the words indeed sounded in Ivy’s mind.
You have delayed too long. He has returned
.

She could not move, could not breathe.

“What do you mean?” she said, or at least, she tried to. “Who has returned?”

Look
.

As if compelled by a will not her own, her head bent and her gaze went to the low table by the sofa. Despite the fact that she had banished them from the house—and the fact that she was certain there had not been one there a short while ago—a broadsheet lay open on the table. Like a puppet, impelled to movement by another’s thoughts and actions, she moved toward the table, then looked downward.

B
OOKSHOP
P
ROPRIETOR
F
OUND
M
URDERED
, read the headline on the open page.
Perpetrator Unknown in Violent Slaying Near Greenly Circle
.

A coldness came over Ivy, and at last she was able to make a sound: a low moan. Suddenly freed of the force that bound her, she took a lurching step forward, nearly falling onto the table before catching herself. She drew in a shuddering breath, then looked up.

There was nothing outside the window save the little chestnut and hawthorn trees in the garden.

A
QUARTER HOUR LATER, Ivy sat inside a hack cab as it jostled through the streets of the Old City. She had not asked Mrs. Seenly to have Lawden ready the cabriolet; there had been no time. Instead she had dashed through the front gate onto Durrow Street, and had waved down the first available carriage for hire.

It was only as the hack cab started into motion that she realized she had rushed out of the house without telling anyone what had happened or where she was going. Not her sisters or Mrs. Seenly. Not even Mr. Quent, who had still been shut in his study. After seeing the man in the black mask, her mind had been consumed
by a singular thought: she must warn Mr. Larken that he was in dire peril.

That was, if he had not already met the same fate as Mr. Fintaur.

For a moment she considered returning to the house to tell Mr. Quent what had happened. But by then the hack cab was already proceeding down the street at a full clip. Ivy had waited too long to return to Mr. Fintaur’s shop, and now she would never have an opportunity to talk to him. She could not risk the same occurring with Mr. Larken.

As the carriage continued along, Ivy looked down at the broadsheet on her lap, for she had brought it with her. According to the story, the incident at the bookshop off Greenly Circle had occurred the prior lumenal, and several gruesome details were given.

Ivy folded up the broadsheet, unable to read anymore.

“Poor Mr. Fintaur,” she whispered, and her eyes stung with tears. How she would have liked to talk to him, to come to know him, and to ask him about his memories of her father. Now she never would. Someone had made certain of that. But who had done this thing?

Except she already knew the answer to that.

He has returned
, the man in black had said. But the magician Mr. Gambrel had been locked beyond the door Tyberion, forever trapped inside the way station on a moon circling the planet Dalatair. There was only one other man Ivy knew of who would resort to such awful means to gain Mr. Fintaur’s fragment of the keystone.

And Torland was not nearly so far away as Dalatair’s moons.

The hack cab came to a sudden halt with a clatter of hooves. A moment later the driver was at the door.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s some commotion blocking the street. Would you like me to go around by another way?”

A fear gripped Ivy. She fumbled with the door, thrusting it open, and was out and down to the street before the driver could so much as move to help her.

“Are you well, ma’am?”

With numb fingers, she found a few coins in the pocket of her gown and pushed them into the man’s hand. Then, without waiting for a reply, she hurried past him down Coronet Street. The driver was right; there was indeed some sort of disturbance. Carriages and wagons were all at a standstill, and people were pressing forward between them, as if trying to get a view of something.

Ivy wormed her way among the people, relying on her diminutive size when her strength was not enough to force her way through a gap. Abruptly she burst through the front edge of the crowd—and she could not clamp a hand to her mouth quickly enough to stifle a choking cry.

Three soldiers in blue coats stood in front of the open door of a shop. With their stern looks, as well as the rifles fitted with bayonets which they gripped, the redcrests had managed to keep a large half circle before the shop free of onlookers. Behind them, dozens of clocks kept time in the shop’s window, pendulums swinging and hands turning. The number
18
was chiseled into the stone above the door.

The soldiers made an effort to stand close to one another, blocking the crowd’s view of the doorway. But they could not conceal the stream of crimson that had flooded over the threshold to cascade down the front steps. Then another soldier emerged from the shop, his face gray. As the other men parted to let him pass, Ivy caught a fleeting glimpse through the doorway. A form lay upon the floor, limbs splayed out at unnatural angles like the legs of an insect pinned inside a naturalist’s shadow box.

“Good God!” someone shouted. “They opened him up and gutted him like a pig!”

Gasps and cries rose from the crowd. The soldiers returned to their positions, closing off the view through the doorway. It didn’t matter; Ivy had seen more than enough.

A sickness rose up in her, and a dizziness swam inside her head. People were continuing to push their way forward to gain a look at the scene, and she ceased resisting their pressure. Ivy fell back, and in moments found herself on the ragged edge of the throng. She turned around, wondering if the driver of the hack cab had waited for her. As she did, a man in a dark coat caught her eye.

It was not the driver.

He was walking down Coronet Street, away from the clockmaker’s shop: a tall, gaunt man dressed in a charcoal-colored suit, a broad-brimmed hat on his head. As he walked, he cast a furtive glance over his shoulder, back in the direction of the shop, and suddenly Ivy felt as if it were her own blood draining into the street. For in that moment she saw the man’s face beneath the brim of the hat. It was long and sallow, with narrow eyes set deep above a sharp blade of a nose. Then he turned and hastened away down the street, passing around a corner.

With that, Mr. Bennick was lost from view.

For a moment, Ivy was gripped by a paralysis. She felt she should run after him in pursuit, or shout out for the soldiers. Only it was no use; he was gone. Nor could it have done any good. It was not as if Mr. Bennick would have kept a bloodied knife about him or any such obvious evidence of his crime. He was far too clever for that. Calling for the redcrests was more likely to hinder her than it was
him
.

Besides, she was too late; he had gotten what he had come for, and now he was gone.

Only he had not gotten everything he wanted yet, had he? There were two more fragments of the keystone in the city—presuming Mr. Mundy had not already met a similar fate as Mr.
Fintaur and Mr. Larken. The man in the mask had been right; she had indeed delayed too long. Only she had never imagined Mr. Bennick would dare to show himself again, not after the way he had been defeated in his attempt to gain the Eye of Ran-Yahgren.

But she should have known the temptation of power would be too great, that it would eventually induce him to return. Mr. Bennick had been deprived of his magick. How this had been done, she did not know. She had thought it was his own order of magicians that had taken his power from him, though Mr. Gambrel had claimed that was not the case.

Well, no matter how it had happened, Ivy had no doubt that he sought a way to gain his power back. Could this keystone be part of that plan? Whatever the keystone was, it was clear he wanted all the pieces for himself.

Ivy turned around, searching, but there was no sign of another hack cab for hire. Yet perhaps a carriage was not the quickest way to where she needed to go next. Across the street, between two buildings, was the start of a stairway. If she recalled correctly, that was Market Stair, which led down from Coronet Street to Greenly Circle.

Without stopping to consider the wisdom of trying to beat a murderer to what might be his next destination, Ivy crossed the street and started down the stone steps. The narrow stair twisted back and forth as it descended among buildings that leaned back into the steep incline. More than once, in her haste, she nearly lost her footing on the steps, which were worn smooth from centuries of passing feet.

At last the stair let out into a dim lane. To the left, the lane opened up into a large space filled with horses, people, and market stalls. But it was not to Greenly Circle that she needed to go. Instead, she turned to the right, moving farther down the grimy lane.

Ivy was not certain she knew how to find it coming from this direction. A fear of more mundane origin began to rise in her—that even by daylight it was not prudent for a woman to be wandering along these dim, labyrinthine streets alone. Then, just
when she was thinking she should go back toward the bustle of Greenly Circle, she saw a sign hanging above a door a short way ahead. The silver eye painted on the sign seemed to shimmer in the gloom, almost as if it were winking at her.

Quickly, she closed the last distance to Mr. Mundy’s shop. Like the prior time she was here, the door was shut and the windows to either side were so hazed with dust that she could not see through them. Nor did any light shine from within. Perhaps Mr. Mundy had feared Mr. Bennick was going to return, and so had fled. Perhaps he was long gone from the city.

Or perhaps the shop was dark because Mr. Bennick had already been here.

Ivy realized she was trembling. She took a breath to steady herself, bracing for what she might see. Gripping the cold handle of the door, she pushed—

—and the door swung inward, moving so rapidly that the handle was violently ripped out of her grasp.

“Oh!” she cried out, recoiling back a step.

“Ah!” exclaimed the small, toadish man on the other side of the threshold as he did the same.

It took both of them a moment to recover from their shock, but Ivy was a bit swifter.

“Mr. Mundy!” she gasped. “I’ve come to warn you. I believe you are in grave danger.”

Even as she said this, she cast a furtive glance over her shoulder, fearing the sight of a tall, gaunt figure striding toward them down the lane.