“You couldn’t ask?” I smiled.
“You would have answered?”
I shook my head. He was right, of course. I wouldn’t have listened, wouldn’t have trusted. Didn’t trust him now.
“So what is it, this artifact?” I asked.
“You tell me. We haven’t seen it.” He stood up and went back to the window. Angela has seen it, I thought. For that matter, Angela has held it in her hands. I put another check in the careful lies column. Or maybe the Tombs weren’t being as forthright with their allies as old Alexander thought. “But it’s something to do with the Church’s power. Something that will shake them off our backs.”
“By our backs, you mean the city? Or the Council?”
“The Families.” He put his hands in his pockets and sighed. “They have too much favor with the Young Seats. They have too much power. They’ve helped, of course. Without the Church there would be no zepliners, no cogwork. We’d still be dealing with the Artificers Guild. But they need to be put in their place. Restrained.”
“Good luck with that. Suppressing religion always goes well.” I stood up and wiped my hands on a spare napkin. “Thanks for the answers. And the breakfast.” I started to leave.
“Just like that? You’re going to walk in here, demand answers, and then walk out?”
“Looks like it,” I said.
“And give me nothing in return. You know I can’t let you do that, Jacob.”
“You know you can’t stop me, either. I don’t have the Cog with me. I’m not going to tell you where it is. You can’t call the Badge, because they’ll take it to Sloane and the Young Seats. Are you going to stop me? Is Billy?”
He folded his arms and looked at me. He was tired, I could tell. I shrugged and walked out.
No matter how I felt about my father, about his lies and his betrayals, I had the feeling he had mostly been straight with me back there. Nearly the truth was the best kind of lie. And the bit of the story that had me most interested wasn’t the stuff about Angela and the Young Seats and Sloane. That was all development, complication. What interested me was the seed of it. Someone in the Church, he had said. Someone with access to the Church of the Algorithm.
The holy men of the Church of the Algorithm, the Wrights dedicated to the machine’s maintenance and liturgy, were devoted to their clockwork deity. They didn’t break ranks, and no one left the service intact. I had seen the hobbled Wrights in the street, their peaceful faces, the smooth machine of their skull pumps. I shook my head. They went in to the service knowing that there was no out. The Algorithm was jealous of its revelation. For there to be someone inside who was willing to sell bits of that revelation to the Council; it was unthinkable. There were no former Wrights. Well. There was one, and he had gotten out in a very unconventional way. He had died, drowned, and ended up among the Fehn. I swung by the cistern first, to pick up the map. I thought it would interest him.
He drank water like I breathed. He kept a glass in his spongy hand, and every time he stopped talking he lifted it to his blistered lips and drank. His voice gurgled.
“These are unusual questions, Jacob.”
“You wouldn’t believe.” We were near the river Reine, two doors down from a publicly accessible basement pier on Water Street. One of the few contact points with the Fehn. People came here to visit lost relatives or trade with the people of the river. What they needed with money, I was never sure. Then again, they sometimes demanded more exotic pay for the treasures they dredged. “But what do you know about it?”
He gestured to the pistol I had laying on the table, the one from the Glory.
“You think it’s the real thing?”
“I think someone’s trying to scare me, or warn me. And the people who would want to do that?” I leaned back in my chair and looked the dead guy square in his milky eyes. “Those kind of people would take the time and effort to get the genuine article.”
He nodded, then picked up the pistol in both hands, touching it only with his fingertips.
“We were contracted, of course. You know that. The Council hired us to recover the wreckage, for their memorial. This would have been part of that.”
“And all that material, all the wreckage, it went to the Council.”
He nodded. “The bodies as well. We kept our percentage.”
“Some of the victims have joined the Fehn?” I asked. It would help to be able to talk to some of them. Maybe talk to Marcus. “Was there a guy named Marcus among them?”
“Marcus, Marcus. The name is familiar, but he was not among our tithe. Those we took have not hatched yet, if you mean to interrogate them.”
“Maybe. But if Marcus isn’t among them, there’s no point. So you think this pistol is the real thing, maybe taken from the wreckage for the memorial?”
“Unless someone paid one of us to steal it. Unlikely.”
“But could that happen? Enough money or shiny beads or whatever you people trade in, someone could ask for a specific thing?” I leaned forward. “Get one of you to fetch it?”
“Fetch.” He curled his lip. “Fetch. Yes, I suppose. If it were important.”
“How would I find out? If this had been… retrieved. And who paid to have it done?”
“The way you talk about these people, it seems they would pay a great deal to have it done. And a great deal more to keep that transaction from public eyes.”
I sniffed, then regretted it. He smelled like stagnant water and the sickness of swamps.
“How do I find out?”
He waved his hand, spreading the fingers like a fan. “Is that all this is about? This gun? Really, Jacob, you’re usually so much more interesting than this.”
“It’s important, Morgan. I can pay.”
“No, Jacob. You can’t. Just because we live in the river doesn’t mean we don’t hear things. And you’ve been making a lot of noise. The Council, Valentine, some of the Founding Families.” He drank a long and slow glass of water, savoring my discomfort as much as the slosh. “I was looking forward to this discussion, Jacob. I thought you might come to me for something interesting. This?” He tapped the revolver, then shook his head.
“There’s more than this involved, Wright. Your old buddies, they’re in on it, too.”
He paused, just as he was reaching for the pitcher to refill his glass. Just a second’s hesitation, then he completed the action. When he set the pitcher down, he stared at me with cold eyes.
“The concerns of the Church are much deeper than this. You can’t claim to have caught the attention of the Algorithm, Jacob. Unless there’s much more to this than I’ve heard.”
“Do the Church concerns include angels, Wright Morgan?” I picked up the pistol. “There’s something in the city. Hunting.”
“How dramatic,” he said glibly, but he had the glass halfway to his lips, and showed no sign of moving it.
“A friend of mine, an anansi familiar with the Artificer’s Guild, says it looks like a cross between the cogwork of the Church and the Artificer’s biotics. It’s killing people, and it’s looking for something. Looking for me, too.”
“Well.” He set his glass down, then rubbed the slack skin around his eyes. “Your friend is a heretic, comparing the holy pattern of the Algorithm to those Artificers and their damn beetles.” Drink. “But he has a lot correct, as well. The pattern, as manifest in the seedcoin, is the body of God. Longing for the pattern in us. Together, we are becoming something more complex. More beautiful.”
“Minus the theology.”
“Cog needs blood, and it needs our mind.” When he talked I could barely see the writhing pool of flat, black worms that replaced his organs, squirming at the back of his throat. “That is the layman’s version.”
“So this Angel?” I asked.
He crossed his arms and stared just above my shoulder. Several long drinks later, he refilled the glass from his pitcher and then steepled his fingers.
“That interests me,” he said.
He was quiet for several moments, not even drinking. When he spoke, his voice was still, like a deep pool.