Eagles and Swans
Chapter 25: Open Wounds
Preface 04: The Basic Principles of Chemistry
Sharmon’s lab was not the sort of place one associated with scholarly pursuits, for it more resembled an artist’s painting room than it did a laboratory.
The bottled chemicals that sat arranged in ranks along shelves contained every hue of the rainbow, and every hue outside it too. On other shelves were bottled metals, dull, matte, lustrous.
The samples were as foreign and fascinating as tales of another land. Some fizzed when stirred together; others created pastes and sediments. It had always struck Ruthenia as strange, that metals meant to take on the most wondrous of forms should be incarcerated in glass vials to be treated with blue fires and tinted solutions.
Up on Sharmon’s wall, there was a bulbous chart of multiple merged circles: a line of cells that made a circle and wrapped around itself many times, budding suddenly in parts, sagging with the names of metals. There were words in the boxes, some familiar and others as peculiar as the colours of the bottled chemicals—“copper”, “lith”, “haf”—and Sharmon said that it was a scientist of Akido who had first thought to put them in a spiral.
The man had, like Ruthenia, been learning about science since his childhood, and while he’d always had a flair for painting, he’d also watched his parents create strange new pigments in their shed. At some point in his childhood, chemistry had swallowed him up, painter’s psyche and all.
Why did you join us? Ruthenia asked. He said, “It is the right of Astra—to know, and to rejoice in that knowing.”
Sharmon sometimes took it upon himself to educate Ruthenia in the fundamentals of chemistry. The chemicals seemed indecisive and ungoverned, even though every transformation was an immutable process. Why should they trade charges? Why should they combine the way they did?
Some of these questions, Sharmon said he could not explain in ways she would understand; others, he claimed the scientific community had as little of a clue as she.
On Friday, Ruthenia flew to the New Town to join her friends for lunch under the bridge. The river murmured below the cobblestones, and it wasn't hard to see how far the swirl of water had risen, how choppy the current had grown. She found their usual spot flooded out, her friends sitting on stones farther up the bank, munching on skewered meat and round loaves.
Each one turned to stare at her as she arrived, enraptured or worried. And with just a hint of a twinge, she saw that they already had a fifth member with them: Reida, who sat atop a suitcase on dry bank without any lunch in hand.
“Ruthenia!” Den called out over his lunch before that thought could go elsewhere. “Ruthenia, heartiest congratulations! Reida tells us you made a ruckus at some high society function over the weekend. Especially well done on soiling the Arcane King’s favourite robe.”
“Quite the story,” Reida put in with her own smile. “They're milking it for all it's worth at work. I'm still not used to hearing a friend's name in the offices.”
“Yeah yeah, Ruth's just off gallivanting with the royals while we're down here wondering where our next meal's coming from,” Tante muttered before tearing meat off a drumstick with his teeth.
Leaning over, Hyder passed Ruthenia their basket of bread and a pot of chicken, and a wooden fork. “Ruth, tell us what it was like,” he said as she began to pile chicken onto a slice of bread. “Being up there in the palace.”
“It was…excessive. There was too much of everything. Just like you’d expect, but with twice as much.”
“Must have been nice.” Hyder sighed. “Why didn’t you tell us? About the Arcane Prince, and about attending with him.”
“All I meant to do was get in and talk to Aligon about my boss!” she muttered. “I asked him if he’d help me, and he said yes.”
“And he just—let you?” Hyder burst out. “You don’t even tie your shoelaces, how did you convince him?”
Ruthenia shook her head. “We're friends. It is literally that simple.”
Tante scoffed. “Sure, just ‘make friends’ with a royal.”
“Anyway, Ruth!” Den cut in amid a crescendo of voices. “Now that you're here, I believe Reida has a thing or two to say to you. She's been looking for you since last Friday.”
“Don’t you worry, love,” the woman answered with a smile, waving Ruthenia towards herself. “I’m afraid I shall have to speak to Ruthenia in private. Excuse us, boys.”
“Ooh, I bet it's lady stuff,” Ruthenia heard Tante whisper to Gordo. Picking up her umbrella from where it lay by her feet, she followed Reida out of the alley.
Once they were at the junction under the sprawling oak where the bridge met the road, Reida turned. “So, how are you, love?” she said. “I mean, aside from getting in with the nobility and all.
“Tired,” she muttered. “Talking to the king I can take. The visibility? Not sure how much longer I'm going to last.”
Reida offer her a smile. “Fickle, isn't it? Fame, I mean. You do the right thing in the right place, and suddenly you're on everyone's front page,” she replied. “They’ll make sure it means something.”
“So I've learned,” she grumbled. “Anyway, what'd you want to talk to me about?”
“So, d’you remember the gun carriers I spoke of a couple months ago, in which you took great interest at the time?” Ruthenia nodded. “Excellent. Lately, I have taken to searching for an explanation, and my questing has yielded me a lead.”
“Really? Tell me you weren’t hunting down leads for my sake.”
“No, you silly,” she laughed, hand to her mouth. “I have business of my own, and it takes me strange places. The Swan’s Post could stand to gain from reporting on a potentially dangerous gang situation, what with all the guns about. If the boss will let me.” She paused. “But enough about the Swan’s Post. I have traced suspicious activity to the New Town East Laboratory, and intend to investigate further.”
“That’s my mother’s— It’s abandoned.” She frowned. “What did you discover?”
“I heard mechanical noises from inside the building,” Reida said. “I stayed an hour but saw no one come or go, and the front doors appear untouched.”
“What are they doing with the lab?” Ruthenia muttered, glancing at the blocks across the street. “Could we meet tomorrow about this? At, say, four o’clock?”
“Four would be perfect,” she answered with a temperate smile. “I meant to ask if you’d accompany me. Perhaps carrying a weapon of your own.”
Ruthenia grinned. “You didn’t ask any of the rest?”
“I trust you more than I do any of them. Tante gives me the shivers. And Den only knows how to use his tongue.”
“Does he?” She waggled her eyebrows. “How’s that going? Your business with Den, I mean.”
Reida laughed. “I barely know if he cares about me in any genuine way,” she replied. “I have never doubted that my standing with the bureau is a part of his motive, but I’m afraid I cannot tell just how great a part.”
Ruthenia smirked. “He’ll be disappointed to know that you’ve figured it out.”
She shook her head. “I’m sure he knows that I have. Besides, I dislike Marva almost as much as he.”
“Is he so bad?”
“Every month or so, a Royal Bird comes around, offering to pay the Swan’s Post to feed trash to the New Town. The boss is glad to follow stipulations.” Ruthenia grimaced. “Of course, that is the very reason I have worked as hard as I have. Already he is positioning me to become one of his managers.” Reida smiled, a touch slyly. “I’ll show him how to run a press.”
“Even if you end up losing funding?”
“We are in the business of telling the truth, not turning a huge profit.”
Ruthenia grinned. “You’re going to drive the company to ruin,” she said. “Should I leave you my messenger code?”
In what was the finale of three weeks’ fierce deliberation, Tanio's flying camera was found to fly on the power of Thread alone, and accepted by the government as a research instrument.
A tremor had sent a bank house crashing into the ground earlier that week. There was no doubt the mounting danger had had a hand in these concessions.
Tanio's porch was crowded with reporters the next morning. She saw many a camera flash at her shed, and one time she heard a knock on her door that she dourly answered by asking them to leave in less palatable language. She had been on the third page of the tabloids, but he was on page one, and was graced with precious radio airtime.
Listening to the interview in her boss’s little living room (he’d assembled a staticky radio from spare parts for that very purpose), Ruthenia began to wonder how she survived in the same house as this man. He could be speaking of religion and politics one morning as if discussing an exotic breakfast, and the next, making a breakfast decidedly the opposite of exotic.
*
A musicmaker awaited Ruthenia inside the door to her shed when she got home the next evening. She hefted the machine over to her workbench, and stared down at it, arms folded in thought. When she cranked it to play, it only rolled for a few seconds—a tinkling tune that made her think of the quadrille—before it wound down and slowed to a halt. But it was too late in the evening for.
That night, Ruthenia flew down to the riverside with her lantern. She draped her legs over the edge of the umbrella so it tipped slightly, dipping her feet in the frigid water. She listened closely to the murmur of the river. There were no voices tonight.
“Lilin,” Ruthenia said. “Are you going to destroy Astra? After so many centuries of truce? What’s making you angry?” She closed her eyes to the glow of the moon, and sighed in the cool wind. “I think I understand. Parents aren’t always reasonable, are they?”
The moon rippled in glittery circles about her feet. She thought she heard night sparrows flitting through the rustling crop.
“Are you angry, Lilin?” she asked again as her eyelids parted. “Are you grieving?”
As if in answer, a wave surged from the surface of the river, swirling once about her feet as if reaching to hold her, to pull her in. She held fast to her umbrella’s shaft, listening for an answer, hearing none.