Heirs of the Old World

The fog did not smell of water. It tasted of copper, and under the copper something sharper that turned the back of the throat numb, so that by the end of his own street Vadim had stopped being able to taste the cold at all. It came on the bad nights, when the charge stood high in the air before the dark had properly come down, and it meant the walk to the Palace would not be an easy one.

Beside him Clara had dropped back half a pace. She walked as every woman in the city did, the cage of steel under her skirts riding with each step like the hull of a small boat, a weight she had carried so long she no longer braced against it. Tonight she moved slowly and carefully, her umbrella held close over her head, though nothing came out of the sky but fog.

"Early," she said.

Vadim worked his jaw. The numbness was in his back teeth. "Keep to the middle of the road."

She was already moving toward it. The avenue ran between walls too tall and too thick for the houses they fronted, with age-blackened iron brackets projecting over the pavements. On a night like this he kept clear of exposed ironwork overhead. The middle of the road was churned to brown slush beneath a thin frozen crust. His boots broke through it, and cold water seeped in to soak his socks, but the distance from the buildings was worth wet feet. He kept the iron tip of his cane trailing along the ground, letting the charge drain through it before it could gather in his body.

He had known the rules of bad weather long before he began drawing lines beneath the city. The trade had taught him something different. Pumps, heating apparatus, valves, runs of pipe disappearing into old walls: he had learned to notice where newer construction met older work, where metal continued after the plans said it should stop, where a solid wall answered hollow under the knuckles.

Four years ago, during an ordinary repair, he had opened a wall and found a length of old copper that belonged to nothing he had been sent to mend. It entered the masonry and kept going. After that he began noticing the same sort of thing elsewhere. Not the same pipe, not even always the same material, but the same refusal to end where the building said it should. That was when he started keeping a record.

The notebook lived in a concealed pocket sewn into the lining of his coat, over the ribs. He had followed the eastern circuit through a whole season of repairs that were not his to make. He had chased the northern feed two months back, during a thaw, on his knees in a flooded service trench off the Moika. Both of them bent toward the Palace.

Tonight he meant to find where they met. There had to be one. A junction. Some single switch the buried web answered to. Once he had that, he thought, the rest might finally begin to make sense. He hoped the lines would be easier to trace while the ballroom was in use.

A spark cracked off a lamppost ahead and leapt sideways to the ribs of Clara's skirt, blue-white. She did not flinch. The charge crawled along the curved steel in a brief bright web and died there, and the silk held, and nothing reached her. She had not looked down. She kept the same rolling walk the frame asked of her, and Vadim watched the place where the spark had been and thought, not for the first time, that she was better at reading nights like this than he was, though she would never say so. A second crack came from a bracket somewhere behind them, louder and flatter, like a dropped plank, and they both moved further into the open without a word about it. The fog thinned as the avenue widened toward the square, and the charge eased as it always seemed to do near the Palace.

Then the Palace stood in front of them, filling the end of the street. Not the way a building fills a street. The way a headland closes off the mouth of a bay.

The stair up to the doors was the worst of the walk. Each step was a little too high and a little too deep, the proportions only slightly wrong, but climbing the whole flight burned in the thighs and punished anyone who tried to hurry. Clara climbed the steps facing forward. He went up sideways with one hand on the balustrade, and under his palm the stone held a low patient tremor.

At the top the brass handles were set a little higher than usual. He rested the cane against the wall, got both roughened hands around the cold metal, and hauled. The door came open on hinges that fought him most of the way and then gave all at once, and the heat behind it hit them in the face. He took up the cane again.

Inside was warm and dry and loud with people who plainly wished themselves at home. A line had formed at a long table under the lamps, and behind it two clerks checked names against a register with the patience of men who had done this a thousand nights and would do it a thousand more. Servants moved down the queue taking wet overcoats and hats and hanging them on racks where the clothes steamed. Near the front a stout man was complaining to no one in particular about the hour. Two women had stopped to right their frames, one crouched over a bent hoop, working it straight with both thumbs.

Vadim gave his name. The clerk found it, or found a name near enough to it, and made a mark. The papers folded inside his frock coat would have passed muster with the tired man in front of him and would not have survived a careful reading. Clara gave her own name. The clerk marked it without lifting his eyes. They surrendered their wet outer coats and hats. Clara checked the pins in her chestnut hair before her umbrella went onto the rack with them. Vadim kept the frock coat on; the notebook stayed against his ribs.

They passed through into the ballroom.