Read Chapter 16: The Spider's Parlor

The rain had not stopped since morning. It fell in greasy sheets over Mayfair, washing soot from the chimneys into the gutters where it ran like black ink. Elias stood across from Ashworth's mansion - a wedding cake of Portland stone and wrought iron - and checked the derringer in his coat pocket for the seventh time. One shot. That was all the weapon held, and the odds of it mattering here were slim.

Four men guarded the gate. He counted two more on the roof. At the front door, a butler with a face like a mourner's took his coat and found the derringer without comment. The man held it up between thumb and forefinger, as if handling a dead rat.

"You may collect this on your way out, Mr. Thorne. If you come out."

The foyer ran two storeys high. A chandelier of gas flames and crystal threw fractured light across marble floors and a staircase wide enough to drive a carriage up. Oil paintings watched Elias pass - ancestors with Ashworth's sharp jaw and colder eyes. The butler led him to a study at the end of a long corridor lined with display cases. Mechanical birds. Clockwork hearts. Instruments of every kind, each mounted like museum specimens.

Ashworth stood at a window overlooking the garden, a glass of amber liquor in hand. He did not turn when Elias entered.

"Punctual," Ashworth said. "I do admire punctuality in the lower orders. It suggests they understand their position but harbour ambitions above it. Ambitious men are easier to predict."

"I came for information, not conversation."

Ashworth turned. His suit was charcoal, his cravat silver, and his smile revealed nothing. "And I offered exactly that. Lila's whereabouts. The name of the man who burned your workshop. All in exchange for the prototype and your mother's journals. Fair terms, I thought."

"Fair for you."

"Fair for us both. You lose nothing you can use, and you gain answers you cannot obtain anywhere else. Sinjin would sell you the same information at twice the price and half the truth." Ashworth gestured to a leather chair facing his desk. "Sit. I'll not bite unless you give me reason."

Elias remained standing. "Tell me about Aldous."

The smile flickered. "The good Brother serves the Crown, as I said. What you do with that knowledge is your concern."

"He was at the Foundling Quarter fire. Did the Crown order that?"

Ashworth's expression closed like a door. "That fire was not Crown business. My sources tell me Aldous was there for his own reasons, and the office is not pleased with his extracurricular activities. A priest who weeps over burning children - even one with a scar across his face - gathers attention. Attention is expensive." He set his glass down with a click. "You've had your question answered. Now let's discuss my terms."

"The prototype is dismantled. I can rebuild it in three days."

"Tomorrow. You have the journals."

Elias reached into his coat and produced the bundled oilcloth that contained his mother's notebooks. Ashworth's gaze fixed on them the way a hawk watches a rabbit. The decoy panel sat in a separate pouch against Elias's ribs - heavy, warm, waiting for the moment it might be needed. He laid the journals on the desk but kept his hand on them.

"The prototype comes when my sister is safe and I know who burned my workshop. Those are the terms. The journals are a show of faith."

Ashworth raised an eyebrow. "Faith. How quaint." He stepped forward, and for a moment his hand hovered over the journals. Then he nodded once. "Very well. The information first, as you ask it. Your sister was not in the Foundling Quarter. She was moved two days before the fire to a private residence used by the Church's charitable arm."

Elias's heart seized. "Where?"

"Sutton House, outside Chelsea. Ran by a woman called Mother Jocelyn. You'll find it on the river road." Ashworth's voice was smooth as poured cream. "As for your workshop - the arsonist. You will not find his name in any register. He calls himself the Curator."

"I've never heard of him."

"No. He prefers it that way. He collects secrets the way other men collect art, and he does not care who owns them first. He knew of your work before either Sinjin or I did. He arranged the fire to destroy your records and the extraction device — to keep it out of the market until he could control it."

Elias watched Ashworth carefully. The man's eyes were flat, too practiced to reveal a lie. But truth could hide in plain sight just as easily.

"Why did he want it?"

"He wants everything. Power, memory, the machinery of the mind itself." Ashworth glanced at the journals. "Your mother knew that well enough. She helped him once. Before she disappeared."

The words struck like a physical blow. Elias's hand tightened on the oilcloth. "You're lying."

"I am the worst kind of liar, Mr. Thorne - one who tells the truth too late to matter. Your mother corresponded with the Curator for years. I have proof of that, as well." Ashworth moved to a wall safe behind his desk and worked the dial. The door swung open on felt-lined compartments, each holding delicate mechanical pieces. He withdrew a small brass plate, not much larger than a pocket watch face, and placed it on the desk.

Elias's breath stopped.

The plate was engraved with concentric circles around a central eye - the same pattern that decorated the interior of his mother's locket, the one he had worn since her disappearance. The pattern he had thought unique to her. To his family.

"Where did you get that?"

"From the Curator's collection. I paid a great deal for it." Ashworth turned the plate over. On the reverse, tiny copper traces ran in spirals that Elias recognized from his own experiments - memory latticework, the foundation of the extraction device. "Your family was involved in this work long before you. Your mother didn't stumble into this field. She helped create it."

Elias stared at the plate. His mother's hands had touched this. Hers had drawn these lines. He could see her leaning over a workbench in their old flat, hair escaping its pins, muttering to herself as she filed a copper surface. He had been eight years old and had not understood what she built. She said it was make-work. A hobby.

She had lied.

"I need the locket," Ashworth said. "The plate is one half of an original memory key. The lock requires its sister piece."

Elias's hand moved to his breast pocket, where the locket rested against his heart. He had never shown it to anyone. He had never spoken of it. And yet Ashworth knew.

"You've been watching me longer than I thought."

"Longer than you can imagine. Your mother came to me with a proposal fourteen years ago. I declined. I have regretted it ever since." Ashworth held up the plate. "This is my second chance. The journals and the prototype are the price of your history, Thorne. The locket is the price of your future. Your sister lives, but she remains in a Church house that answers to Aldous. Time is not your ally."

Elias looked at the engraving again. The eye. The circles. His mother's signature, hidden in every piece she made. He had memorized her handwriting, her soldering habits, the tiny flourish she gave her seams. The plate was hers beyond doubt.

"I'll bring the locket," he said. "When my sister is here and the Curator is dead."

Ashworth smiled - a thin, understanding approximation of warmth. "I expected nothing less from an optimist. Go to Sutton House. Bring her home. And when you return, we will talk about your inheritance."

Elias scooped up the journals and left the plate where it lay. The butler returned his derringer at the door without expression, and the rain met him again on the street - colder now, or heavier, or both. He walked two blocks before his hands stopped shaking.

His mother had helped create the very thing that had ruined his life. And the locket she had left him, the only object he had kept from her death, was the key to it all.

Ahead through the rain, a figure in a dark coat turned and vanished into a side street. Elias caught only a glimpse - but the man's face had been marked by the pale line of a scar across his cheek, shaped like a cross.

Brother Aldous. Or the Curator. Or both.

The locket grew heavy against Elias's chest as he walked on into the darkness.