"So was I," Pearl said. "Exhausted. That's why I fell asleep. I truly did just fall asleep. And Grey was too tired to drag me home."
She took her life in her hands by daring to approach and lay a hand on Elinor's arm. "Don't you think you're blowing this a little out of proportion, Elinor, dear?"
"No." The other woman shook her head grimly. "I am not. The Cranshaws and Simmonses of this world are waiting to pounce upon the least little indiscretion, and no matter what did or did not happen, this is not little. It is huge.
"The magister of the conjurer's guild took his female apprentice into his workroom late at night, locked the door, with just the two of them inside, and did not emerge until morning. They can do anything with that information. Portray Grey as a lascivious monster using magic to work his wiles on the innocent. Smear Pearl as a wicked seductress luring Grey into her clutches. Or blacken the both of you and your magic as altogether evil."
"So, what do we do about it?" Grey asked. "It's terrible, dreadful, awful. And horrible. What do we do?"
Elinor threw up her hands. "I don't know. That's how awful it is."
"Didn't happen," Harry said.
"It didn't?" Grey was confused. He often was, early in the morning.
"It did," Harry said, "but it didn't. You an' Miss Pearl came 'ome. But you weren't alone. We-me 'n' Elinor-were 'ere, too. We came in later, after your servants had gone to bed, to discuss what you found. And wot we found, which is truly why we came. It's early enough we can say we came earlier than we did. Who's goin' to say we didn't? I never knew a magician's servants to gossip when th' master-the magister-didn't want 'em to."
Grey squinted at the gloom outside. "How early is it?"
"Probably risin' toward six by now."
Grey groaned. No wonder yawns kept climbing up from his chest. "I'm a conjurer. My best work is done in the wee hours. Why would anyone think it acceptable to invade my house hold at such an hour?"
"Elinor insisted." Harry looked at her. So did everyone else.
"I did eventually accept the need to act," she defended herself. "Especially since Pearl did not come home at all last night, nor did she send word. I was worried."
"And she was some anxious to talk to you about what we found at th' Bethnal Green dead zone," Harry added. "As was I, so we toddled on over."
Grey's stomach took that moment to inform him, in a large, loud grumble, that it had not been fed since before midnight. "Let us finish this discussion over breakfast. My apprentice and I worked a great deal of magic yesterday, and we have not yet refilled that well."
"She's an apprentice." Harry frowned. "Wot sort o' magic did you work?"
Grey led the way out of the workroom, shutting the door firmly behind everyone. He wondered if the additional living presences would leave behind auras that might prevent some of his more skittish spirits from attending him.
Once everyone had gathered in the breakfast room, Grey filled the others in on yesterday's discovery, that sorcery and conjury working together could lay ghosts. Everyone exclaimed over the news, then they discussed the developments in the murder investigation.
"I am almost certain," Grey said, as they sat back to finish a last cup of tea, "that the murder was done in an attempt to call a demon. But to what purpose? Even the most foolish, magic-blind ordinary recognizes what a dangerous proposition that is." The answer to that question had him turning in mental circles.
"Could be anything." Harry shrugged. "Revenge comes to the top o' my list. Revenge for some great injustice."
"Greed," Pearl suggested.
"Ambition. Power." Elinor poured the last of the tea in the pot into her cup and added sugar. "I could read the leaves."
Tea leaves were a wizard's augury. Alchemists read the future with crystals of varying shapes, or sometimes bowls of calm water. Conjurers didn't have a method of seeing the future, unless a spirit deigned to pass on a message-which they sometimes did. Grey wondered if sorcery had its own method. Tossing knucklebones, perhaps?
"Later." Harry leaned forward, elbows on the table, and curved his thick hands around the delicate china of the teacup. "I 'eld off talkin' about what we came 'ere about, because I decided it would be better to show you than tell you. An' because we had other things to talk over."
"I am assuming it has to do with the dead zone in Bethnal Green." Grey had little patience with Harry's mysteriousness. "What is it you found?"
Harry wiped his mouth and tossed the napkin on the table as he stood. "Better you see it and decide what you think without me tellin' you wot to think."
Grey did not commit actual physical assault on the alchemist's person. But he wanted to. The information was further delayed by Pearl's need to slip back to her flat and change clothes, refresh her toilette, and do whatever else females needed to do of a morning. It gave him a chance to wash and shave and change his linen. His new frock coat was still conjurer's black, but his valet allowed him pale gray trousers.
Harry maintained his own carriage and horses. Grey could afford to, but found it a bother. Easier to use Harry's. He walked down and across the street to Harry's house to meet the others.
Pearl's appearance left him speechless. Nearly breathless. The dress was a plain one, in a pale silvery gray somewhat lighter than his trousers, without excessive trim or frills. But it was a woman's dress, not a child's, and it fit her. Lovingly followed every curve. She bowled him over with her beauty.
She noticed him staring and blushed. He could see it in the tips of her ears, as yet uncovered by her bonnet.
"Pale colors are so impractical," she said, smoothing her hands over her new skirt. In pleasure, Grey thought, satisfied that she liked it.
"Sorcerers wear white," Elinor said, "so the blood isn't missed if any goes astray. Amanusa said she thought pale colors would do fine for students."
Grey hadn't been thinking of that when they were shopping, but the shop clerks had insisted that pastels were de rigueur for young ladies. The carriage pulled up outside and the bonnets were tied on. Grey would miss seeing Pearl's blush.
The early start to the day put their excursion in the thick of the clerks' daily rush to their jobs in the City and elsewhere around London's commercial centers. Omnibuses were everywhere, as were the carts and wagons of the working classes who'd been on the job an hour or two already. Harry's carriage threaded its way through the fading traffic until, as they neared the dead zone, the streets cleared to echoing vacancy.
The carriage pulled to a halt a few blocks away from the edge of the zone where it stretched north and somewhat east of the burned-out sector near the docks. The horses wouldn't go closer. The gentlemen helped the ladies to the cobbles and escorted them down the narrow, silent alleyways. Grey wondered whether the rest of London might be so excessively crowded because this dead zone had pushed the residents out into the few hovels left.
"What happened to the magic?" Pearl asked. "Where did it go? Why did it die?"
"That's what I'd like to know," Harry growled.
"I think it got used up," Elinor said. "And there wasn't any to replenish it."
Pearl frowned. "I should think there would be, given how very much there is splashing about."
"Hadn't considered that before." Grey did now, voicing his thoughts as they came to him. "Perhaps it's not the right kind of magic. The magic of innocent blood is very powerful, but it's single-minded. And it's created by death-"
"Not all of it. Actual death isn't necessary," Pearl interrupted.
"But much of it, perhaps most. And perhaps it's simply not strong enough, for what the earth needs to replenish."
"Or perhaps it has to be used," Elinor said. "It's not the raw magic itself we've been missing over the past few centuries, but the sorcerers."
"Never mind that," Harry said. "Look."
The alley didn't come to an end so much as disintegrate. The rickety ancient buildings to either side of what had been the alley were slumped in on themselves, creating piles of wreckage where things could hide. Grey wondered what Harry had brought them to see. He didn't want to have to cross the boundary. Bad things happened inside the dead zones.
"Them 'ouses is 'eld together as much by alchemy as by nails," Harry said. The environment seemed to have an effect on his speech, obliterating most of its refinements. Grey had noticed the phenomenon before.
"What are we supposed to be looking at?" Grey inquired. He still had a murder to investigate.
"The machines."
The strange, self-animated machine creatures had begun to appear only in the last few months. Cobbled together mostly from bits of refined metal, the creatures skittered about the dead zones on their own unknowable purposes, often seeming to defend their territory against incursion. Magic seemed to have as inimical an effect on the machines as lack of magic did on organic beings.
That, in conjunction with the machines' higgledy-piggledy construction, led to the conclusion that the machines had not been built by any human facility, but rather had built themselves. No one yet knew the how or why of that, and Grey suspected no one ever would. It didn't actually matter. What did matter was dealing with the dead zones the creatures inhabited.