and was surprised to find that he was no longer visible. The cave was larger than she’d realized, and its depths were in shadow, from which the red markings glittered like stars.
She turned back. Something immense and invisible rose from the water and held her in warm arms and she cried out. There was a smell of earth, blood, tears. It surrounded her, and she could see nothing. It forced its way hungrily inside, probing, reaching. It found, near the surface, a knot of humiliation over her failures with her patients D and G, and a vein of misery and loneliness and resentment of the House staff’s general coldness to her. She gasped as those things were brought into the light. It took them from her and lapped them up and she sighed with relief. Her nerve tonic, in all the years she’d been taking it, which suddenly seemed a simply absurdly long time, had never been so swift, so powerful, so determined.
It found and quickly devoured a nightmare concerning the Line’s Heavier-Than-Air Vessel and its hideous insectile gun. It remained unsatisfied. It probed deeper, looking for deeper wounds. . . .
CHAPTER 20
THE WOUND
~ 1871 ~
The front the August Hall of the Academy of Koenigswald presented to the outside world was dignified, imposing, severe—a closed face of gray stone. At its rear, its square form collapsed slowly into a chaos of arched buttresses, exposed plumbing, conservatories, shadowed verandahs and cloisters, experimental greenhouses, a surprising profusion of gargoyles, a cluster of tool sheds where pale students might at any time be found smoking—though not today—a pen for Dr. Bey’s goats, and down to gently sloping lawns.
The lawns were rolled and tended by old men in bowler hats, each of whom Liv knew by name, each of whom she greeted on her way outside with a Good morning, Mr. ———, just as she did every morning. One by one, the old men smiled and took off their caps to her.
She wore a white dress in a plain style. She had a book under her arm, as always. She had a sun hat when she came outside, but she left it perched on a hedge; she liked the summer sun on her skin.
Sunlight is essential for a growing child, her mother always said. Healthy body, healthy mind. (Only she said that in a strange old dead language, which Liv had not yet begun to learn.) She therefore made sure that Liv’s tutors sent her out into the grounds for at least two hours each day, though Liv’s inclinations were bookish.
Her mother was the Emeritus Professor of Psychological Science. Liv had a great many tutors, because the students were always eager to curry favor with her mother, and her mother was always busy, and her father was No Longer With Us—an ill-defined state he had inhabited for as long as Liv could remember.
Liv passed the croquet lawn, where the hoops were rusted and spiderwebbed and the balls grown tuberously over with dirt and grass. She walked around the edge of the pond—saying good morning to Dr. Zumwald, the ichthyologist, who leaned over the water, taking notes, conducting observations. The fish were exotics, bright blue: they flickered in the weeds like hot young stars. She crossed the rose garden, where Mrs. Dr. Bauer was cutting samples.
There was a famous oak at the end of the lawns, in the gnarled wood of which a less sophisticated child might have seen faces. Past the oak, the grass ran wild and unweeded as the garden sloped down to the river. Liv broke into a run, panting as she jumped the oak’s twisted roots and vanished into the violet of the wild jacaranda. She always started running at the oak. The old men watched her go.
Liv always started running at the oak; but that day she had particular reason to do so, because the book under her arm was stolen, and she’d imagined, as she passed under the oak’s vast shadow, that she’d heard her mother’s voice calling angrily after her. (It was, in fact, only two students from the Faculty of Metaphysics debating the Logical Necessity of Other Earths in raised voices.)
Her mother’s rules were very clear. The books on the north edge of her mother’s library: Liv was Too Young for those books. Criminal and Deviant Psychology—her mother’s area of principal concern—was not a healthy interest for a child.
The stolen book in question was Gross’s Criminal Psychology, third edition. Liv sat on her favorite log down by