"Too many things in this venture can be described as 'interesting,'" I said. "I don't like it."
"Perhaps you should hang out with people who are interested in less morbid things," Wilson said. He produced a pair of long tweezers and used them to fish around in the servant's gaping mouth. With a tug that pulled at something deep in the servant's chest, Wilson held up the tweezers. They were grasping a twig. "You can't tell me this isn't interesting."
"I can, and I will," I said, sweating nervously. "About as interesting as getting fatally shot, at the moment."
"Mm. Yes." Wilson dropped the twig into a specimen tube and tucked it happily into his vest. "Alrighty, then. Shall we continue?"
"Cheerfully."
The rest of the main house seemed deserted. The higher we got, the more nervous I got. The stranger our surroundings got, too. The carpets were so plush under our feet they seemed rotten, like swollen sponges. Several of the household plants that the Tombs kept carefully manicured in various sidehalls had grown fetid, spilling out from their containers and crawling up the walls. One midget oak had burst its blue and white ceramic vase with an exuberance of root growth, and the branches scratched at the ceiling and walls with their dry leaves.
"It's a lively place," Wilson said.
"Clever. This isn't natural, is it?" I asked.
"Oh, definitely not natural." Wilson paused to examine the oak, brushing the enormous leaves with the back of his hand. "Perhaps Mr. Crane is some sort of nature enthusiast?"
"He didn't seem the type," I said. "And again, this isn't natural."
I pointed out a clock that hung from the wall of the hallway. The cogs had sprung free and unraveled into looping cords of ivy. As we watched, the pendulum burst like a seed pod, a thin fuzz littering the escapement as it collapsed.
"I'm getting nervous about breathing this in," I said.
"Don't be," Wilson answered cheerfully. "We've been breathing it in for most of the last half hour. If it's going to kill us, the damage is already done."
"Couldn't you lie or something? Pretend that it's perfectly safe?"
"You know better than that, Jacob. Come on."
We continued to the top floor of the main house. Since the decline of their fortune, many families had shut up unused areas of their vast manors, and Tomb was no exception. The last two levels of the house were sealed off. Stiff tarp covered the archways off the stairwell that would usually lead to those halls. I was tempted to cut them open and see what might be hidden beyond, what fecund growths had taken root among the linens and the dust. My urgency to get to Crane and end this kept my curiosity in check.
The fact that everything was closed up made finding the path to Crane's tower simple enough. His was the only hallway that was open, and his was the only door that hadn't been sealed. Odd that they would put him way up here, so far from his supposed charge. Then again, if a man like Ezekiel Crane was in my house, I would want as much distance between us as possible. Distance and padlocks.
There was no way we were going to be able to sneak up on him. The staircase was a tightly coiled stone spiral, the steps worn by years of use. One of the original structures of the manor, I suspected, from back when the estates of the Founding Families were by necessity armed fortresses, rather than luxurious manors. Our feet were loud on the steps, and there was no other sound to mask them. Wilson led the way, walking carefully, his spider talons touching the walls on either side of the passage. Our hope was that he would be able to react more quickly to an ambush or sudden encounter. We needn't have worried about it.
Crane's room was empty. The walls were lined in empty cages and bird shit. The center of the room was occupied by a narrow bed, pushed up next to a desk. Books and papers were strewn across the desk, held in place by dripping candles and empty bottles of wine. It was a familiar scene. This time I was able to get a good look at the contents of the desk. I didn't understand them, other than to be sickened.
"Anatomical drawings, diagrams. Something that looks very much like a template for cogwork of some nature," Wilson said, flipping through the papers. "A genus of flora, overlaid with the typical mortal tree. Unusual stuff. Doesn't explain the ivy clock, or his dead friends in the river."
"Is there anything we can use? Any clue as to what he might be after?"
Wilson shook his head grimly. "Hard to say. Maybe if I had a week, or a month, I might be able to glean something from all this. This is not anything I'm familiar with. Not a traditionally taught science, whatever it is that he's practicing."
"Take what you can. What you think looks promising." I glanced at the stairway we had just left. This was the only way out. "He's downstairs somewhere. I don't really care why he's doing what he's doing. I just want to stop him. Maybe if we…"
I drifted off. A very old piece of paper hung, framed, above the door. I reached up and took it down, laying it on the desk.
"Lettering's faded. This thing is old." Wilson picked it up. No dust on the frame, or on the glass. He squinted at the paper. "Like, 'historical document' old. And the language is hard to make out."
"Is it Celestean?" I asked, averting my eyes.
"No, no. Nothing that exotic. Just old. Letters change, over time. Descenders shorten, people get lazy with…"
"What does it say, Wilson?"
He spun it around to face me.
"You're an adult. You can read."
It took me a second to adjust to the lettering, like he said. It was some sort of official document. There was a crumbling seal at the bottom, and many signatures in florid hands. But I picked out the words I needed.
"It's a Right of Name. These are supposed to be engraved in stone, or steel. I've never seen one on paper."
"Perhaps the original was destroyed. And the name, Maker. I've never heard of them."
"That's not possible. Every Founder's history is preserved by the Council. This must be some kind of forgery."
"Or," Wilson said, "the original was destroyed."
Things fell into place.
"There aren't many families left from that time," Wilson said. "But two of them — "
"— are Burn and Tomb," I finished for him, then ran to the door. The Tombs weren't just left from that time. Patron Tomb was still alive back then. Back before he took on his cloak of mausoleum, before his family came to depend on him staying alive to keep their seat. He was the last living link to that time. He might know who this guy was, who the Makers were, and why they were purged.
And unless I missed my guess, the Patron was alone right now, in the care of the last remaining scion of the Maker line.
Chapter Thirteen
I had only been to the Patron's chamber once before, and that was in the middle of an emergency. I remembered a secret door, and a stone corridor that snaked between the walls, but very little about the exact route. It took a while before I realized that the dining room where all those house guard had died was the room I was looking for. It took a fair amount of banging on walls before we found the false panel, and then some violence to get it open. While we were tearing the plaster from its moorings, a distant siren started up, cutting through the quiet air that hung over the city. Wilson and I exchanged a look. He rushed to the window.
"Someone else's problem," I said, getting back to the door. "We have enough on our plate."
"There's smoke in the air. Black column rolling straight up into the sky," he said.