He was ignored. “Mr. Blyth. You’re in Mr. Gatling’s shoes now. You’re in Mr. Gatling’s office.”
“And Mr. Gatling is very displeased?” Robin demanded. “Is that it? He can damn well come back, then. His typist’s upset.” That was an exaggeration. Courcey had seemed upset. Miss Morrissey had seemed . . . miffed.
“Mr. Gatling hid something in his office that’s very important, didn’t he? But it’s proving tough to locate. You’re going to help us.”
Robin found the words Like hell I am in his mouth and tasted them longingly. But he was wary now. These men had tailed him from the office, and then from his club. They knew his name. They weren’t going to be put off easily.
“What is it? What did he hide? And how do you know it’s there? If it’s that important, he’s probably taken it with him, wherever he’s buggered off to.”
The fog swirled a little. A chill chased across Robin’s neck.
“No, the contract’s there,” the man said. “Had that from his own lips, and he weren’t lying.”
“There’s a lot of paperwork in that office” was all Robin could think of to say.
An impatient sound. “Don’t play foolish, Blyth. Gatling must’ve had someone muffle it for him. It doesn’t have the feel of power to it anymore. But it’ll be there.”
“What?”
A pause. “He didn’t tell you any more specifics than he told us, ey? Secret-binds’ll do that. Something hidden, we reckon. Something that doesn’t belong.”
This was turning into one of those dreams where you turned over the Latin paper to find that it had been replaced with Ancient Egyptian instead.
“Not one word of this is making a single bloody ounce of sense,” said Robin. “And—” He managed to bite that back too. Instinct told him that admitting he’d had his first glimpse of magic that very day was more likely to hurt him than help him at that precise moment.
When Robin didn’t continue, his speaking captor gestured to one of the loomers, who knelt down and took hold of Robin’s right arm at the wrist and just above the elbow. The fear flared urgently, but Robin recognised superior strength when he felt it. Trying to pull away would just wrench his shoulder for nothing. His fingers curled into a tight enough fist that he could feel the blunt edges of his fingernails.
It took Robin a second to recognise what the speaking man was doing as cradling: the same thing that Courcey had done, except that Courcey had used string, and had been much slower than this. Robin stared, because for a moment it seemed that there was string there, the same glowing yarn that had noosed him. But there wasn’t. The glow clung only to the man’s fingertips, then gathered in his palm as he upended his hand onto Robin’s forearm and moved it as though smearing paint.
In the wake of the man’s hand a pattern laid itself over Robin’s sleeve. Something like geometry, or a foreign alphabet. Robin barely had time to notice its details before it seeped into the fabric, fading slowly. Gone.
Robin’s arm was released. He cradled it to his chest, but there didn’t seem anything wrong with it. Bones intact. Muscles working fine.
He said, “Whatever you—”
Sudden, excruciating pain captured his forearm as though a cage of red-hot wires had been clasped around it. The pain startled a frantically guttural sound from between his teeth. He’d broken bones in his time, as a boy and an adult. None of them had felt anything like this.
He couldn’t have said how long it lasted. The wires tightened, and then they were gone, and Robin’s throat felt like he’d been yelling for the Light Blues on three consecutive race days.
“There,” said the man. “That’ll give you something to mull over while you’re shuffling all that paperwork in your new office. Keep those eyes peeled. Find the last contract. I wager you’ll be a lot more happy to help the next time we come calling.”
Robin emitted the wheezy opinion that every single one of their mothers had conceived them in congress with pox-ridden barnyard beasts. The knowledge that his parents would have been horrified if they’d heard their model firstborn spitting out words he might have licked up from the gutter slightly made up for the parting kick that was delivered to his stomach as the men walked out of the alley.
After a long count of ten, Robin held his ribs and struggled to his feet.
On Robin’s arm, the strange symbols no longer glowed. Instead they were as black as any tattoo. Blacker, in fact, and crisper, than those examples of body art that Robin had seen—mostly on sailors in the street but once, memorably, on a fellow scholar who’d found someone prepared to ink a few lines of Horace into the delectable dip of his lower back.