Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [218]
Chibbins was immediately at my chair, making easy work of the knots and straps that bound me. “Come quickly,” he said. “It took me forever to find you in the maze of secret passageways.” The catacombs beneath the house were impossibly complex, but Chibbins led the way with confidence and eventually brought us up, through a hidden stairway, back into the piano room. I will admit here, for no one else to see, that I’d still be there, beneath the Summer Palace, if it weren’t for my partner. We found Ludiya, on the couch, sleeping.
“Did you have your way with her?” I asked Chibbins.
“Heavens no,” he said, “to have done so would have been monstrous. I was administering artificial resuscitation. She passed out and I caught her.” He gave a smile, and I wasn’t sure if Chibbins was actually trafficking in irony or genuinely pleased with the aid he’d given. As it was, it didn’t matter. By morning, once the Beauty had worn off, blithering and buffooning without mercy or mustache, he was as inane as he’d been before its odd sea change.
Now that we had eradicated the threat to the Summer Palace by killing the ghost of the Sanctity of Grace, Ludiya pretended to want nothing to do with me. I tried to comfort her some more in the fashion I had the previous day, and she shrugged off my grasp and told me I’d outstayed my welcome. A woman of such a tender age, she did not have the vocabulary to express her affection for me, and so her words became twisted, expressing the opposite of her desires. I could tell. I pressed my lips against hers and forced my tongue into her mouth. She bit it. True love is a sharp pain, I tell you.
WITH THE TASTE of blood still on my lips, Chibbins and I rode back in our carriage to the Well-Built City. We had brought with us Rothac’s notes, and the cauldron of the remaining Sheer Beauty sat on the seat next to my partner. Every now and then, he’d stick his pinky into the cold mixture and bring it to his mouth, and for a few seconds he’d go from gibbering fool to sophisticated conversationalist, calling me, “Cley, old boy.” All together, this amazingly erratic performance irritated me more than usual. Amid the kaleidoscope of Chibbinses, I wondered what our time in the Willow Forest added up to. It didn’t seem to make any sense at all.
Physiognomist Scheffler had me report to the Master himself about the case. I was sent to his tower office at the center of the city. I’d met Drachton Below before. One night he’d mysteriously come to my rooms when I was a student in the Ministry and took me to see a young woman he’d transformed into an automaton. I’d not yet had to face him in a professional setting and was worried that he’d have little patience with the story I had to tell about his summer retreat.
His office was circular, with windows all around, a 360-degree view. I entered a room below its floor and then climbed a stair that left me in the middle of its circle. Below stood at the window, looking down.
“Physiognomist Cley reporting, Master.”
He turned, cocked his head back and raised one eyebrow. “Cley, you’ve been to the Summer Palace?”
“Physiognomist Chibbins and I.”
“Yes, well, the Chibbins boy is a subtraction of zero from itself,” he said. “I’m sure it was a pleasure working with him.”
“A delight,” I said.
“His father will be pleased to hear it. Now sit down and tell me of this ghost Scheffler said you’d encountered.”
I launched into my absurd story, mentioning Ludiya, Mrs. Barlow, Rothac, and the Sanctity of Grace. When I got to the part where the old woman’s head was pierced by an icicle, he said, “Thank goodness for small favors.” He referred to Rothac as “a curious and dirty little satyr,” and at the mention of Ludiya, he smiled sardonically. He only really became interested when I began to describe the Sheer Beauty and its effects. The rest of the story disappeared for him, and he wanted to know every little detail of the violet brew. When I told him I’d brought Rothac