Heart's Blood(32)

Grey had first seen the machines in Paris, during the international Conclave of All Magic this past summer. There, the dead zone had encompassed a middle-class neighborhood, and the machines had been bright and shiny, made of silver-plate tea trays and polished brass fireplace fenders.

This dead zone had originally included one of the worst slums in London, as well as a massive refuse pit where an army of workers had picked through the city's discards for rags to be converted to paper, bones for blacking and glue, and even dog manure for the leather tanners across the river. The machines here were as dark and ugly as their discarded parts.                       
       
           



       

The overcast sky, promising a miserable, cold rain sometime in the day, had Grey peering into the gloom. "I can't see anything," he grumbled.

"What is that?" Pearl pointed. "See? Next to that brick wall that hasn't quite fallen over? The rusty-orange bit. Is that a machine?"

"Is it?" Grey squinted, trying to bring it into focus. Could he be needing spectacles? Never say so.

Pearl gathered up her skirts and strode into the zone before anyone could stop her.

Grey started after her, but Harry caught his arm in a tight grip. "She's a sorceress," Harry said. "You're not. You'll be 'arder to drag out o' there."

Grey waited, but not well. He fidgeted, rose upon his toes, leaned forward against Harry's hold, tapped his fingers on his thighs, furiously impatient, though Pearl only walked the few yards forward, bent and retrieved the object she'd spotted, and returned. She did stop twice on her way back to pick up something else, but she wasn't in the zone above a minute.

Grey fell upon her when she returned. "Do not ever behave so recklessly again," he gritted through clenched teeth, seizing her arm too tightly. "Ever. This place is called a dead zone for a reason. It can kill you."

Pearl blinked up at him in apparent surprise. "But it didn't. I'm perfectly fine. And look, I got-"

"It could have," Grey interrupted her, the strength of his rage shocking him. Where had it come from? He was too angry to truly wonder. "You had no business traipsing off without, at the very least, discussing it with me, with other magicians more experienced than yourself, before doing something so rash.

"You cannot simply begin throwing magic around, or walking into areas where magic is affected, without knowing what will result. Or at minimum, having a fair idea of what might occur. Did you even think what might have happened?"

"Of course I did. There's folks that come in here every day. As long as they don't stay too long, they're fine. Jemmy Watt, he stays in half the day all the time."

Grey brought his face close to Pearl's, unable to shake his fury, wanting to shake sense into her. "And is Jemmy Watt a magician? Can he see the crimson tides of blood magic rolling through the streets?"

"No." Pearl's voice was a tiny squeak of its former self.

"Did you know that an alchemist can take only a few steps into a dead zone before collapsing and having to be carried out? Conjurers won't get much farther. Did you know that?"

"No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. I didn't think. I-" She cleared her throat, blinking rapidly. "I'm so sorry."

Damn it, he hadn't meant to make her cry. Grey cleared his throat, his rage subsiding. His scold wasn't done, however. "No, you did not think. I hope that this will serve as an inducement to remind you to do so in the future, though I have my doubts."

He cleared his throat again. "As it happens, sorcerers are the best equipped of all magicians to enter the dead zones, since you essentially carry your magic with you. In your own blood and bones and such. Which is why no harm was done. But you didn't know that, did you?"

"No, sir." She clutched the machinery to her, smearing rust on the pale gray of her dress.

"Next time, wait. Ask. Give us time to discuss what to do." Grey took a deep breath and let go the rest of the emotion gripping him. Emotion he did not want to name. "So, what is it you've brought us?"

"Look." She held out double handfuls of . . . junk.

Grey poked it with a finger. It had that same nasty, gut-clenching, head-pounding feel as the machine he'd touched in Paris, back in the summer. But it didn't look like anything but assorted junk, and he said so.

"But look." Pearl crouched down right there in the filthy street, pushing her skirts behind her, and laid her bits of rust out on the stones. "It's not just separate nails and wires and such. They're stuck together."

She looked at her hands, streaked with mud and rust, then looked about as if hunting something to wipe them on. Her pale dress was already smudged, but Grey didn't blame her for not wanting to make it worse. He offered his handkerchief.

"My hands feel dirtier than they look." She grimaced as she scrubbed them clean. "It feels nasty. Disgusting."

"Lack of magic." Harry poked the largest bit with a metal rod he'd pulled from his pocket, his alchemist's wand. This one appeared to be made of silver, but might as easily be nickel or zinc or tin, or even steel. Grey didn't really care.

"Look here," Harry went on. "This bit looks like an articulated arm, with a cog down on this end to allow for turning in all directions."

"This, too," Pearl said, using the handkerchief to pick up a slightly smaller piece in order to peer at it more closely. "It's missing the cog, though."

"So the machines are falling apart. Is that it?" Grey didn't want to get any closer to the things, but if Harry could, he could. He was a conjurer, after all, and less susceptible than the alchemist.

"They didn't fall apart." Harry stood and scowled into the dead zone, hands propped on his hips with the silver-colored wand pointing behind him.

Grey moved to one side so the wand didn't point at him. One never knew what a magical item might do next.

"There were more of them yesterday," Elinor said. "Dozens. Maybe scores. Pieces of machines scattered everywhere. Piled up against the walls."

"Guess the other machines scavenged parts," Harry said.

"Or maybe they retrieved the bodies for burial," Elinor countered.

"They're machines," Grey interjected. "Not human beings. Not even animals, which-remember-are known to eat their young."

"They were torn apart," Pearl said from where she still crouched, investigating her finds.

Grey bent to see what she had discovered.

"Look here." She turned the "arm" in her hand to expose its broken end, and the joint fell limply to one side, for all the world like a skeletal limb from an anatomist's laboratory. The metal had been stretched, distorted, bent. Torn. Quickly and abruptly, it appeared to Grey, though he was no metallurgist.

"It was easier to see it yesterday," Harry said. "The chunks o' torn-apart machines were bigger, and there were more of 'em. Some of the machines 'ad to 'ave been near big as ponies." He stared into the barren desolation of the dead zone.

Grey's frown deepened. "I don't like this. Not at all. When did you discover the broken machines?"

"Not broken, torn apart," Harry corrected. "Yesterday. Elinor an' me come out to take a look, as usual."

Grey knew Harry visited the dead zone every few days to check on its growth and behavior. Now that Elinor had apprenticed to him, she came, too.

"What time was that?" Grey asked.

"After lunch. Early afternoon."

"And when had you come before then?"

"Yesterday was Tuesday," Harry began calculating. "We spent all o' Monday getting you out o' the 'ammer, and the day before Monday was Sunday an' we didn't go then, so Saturday. The last day we came 'ere was Saturday."                       
       
           



       

"Four days previous."

"And there weren't any torn-apart machines then."

"But there's no way of knowing when exactly the machines were dismembered," Grey argued. "They could have had a war all day Sunday and no one would be the wiser."

"Jemmy Watt would," Pearl put in. "He'd know, and his sort. The scavengers."

"Might be important to know," Harry said.

"Given the piles of machines we saw here yesterday," Elinor said, "and the much smaller numbers today, it had to have been recent. If they could be cleared away so quickly, then either it happened no earlier than Monday, or so many machines fought in your war that their broken remains would have stacked up higher than the buildings still standing in the living sector here. I am frightened to think there are so many machines."

Now that Grey knew what to look for, he could see the pieces of broken machine still lying in the gloom of the dead zone. The machines disturbed him, unnatural things that they were. Their broken remains disturbed him more, for he didn't know what might have caused it. Suspicions roiled in the depths of his mind, troubling the surface, but he refused to give them voice. He sighed.