A Quantum Mythology
Read A Quantum Mythology Online
Authors: Gavin G. Smith
Title Page
A QUANTUM MYTHOLOGY
G
avin G. Smith
GOLLANCZ
LO
NDON
To Nicola and Simon Bates, and my nieces Nell & Amelie,
who can read this when they are in their thirties.
Birmingham, 1791
Sir Ronald Sharpely may well have been impatient, but the Clockworker was not to be hurried.
‘The innovation, Sir Ronald, is not in the pepperbox style of the weapon …’ With delicate tools inherited from his watchmaker father, the Clockworker continued finessing intricate adjustments to the complicated powder pan of the seven-barrelled flintlock pistol. ‘It’s not even in the rifling inside the barrel, which will make it more accurate,’ he continued. His Swiss accent was very slight. He turned to look at Sharpely, a well-built man in the prime of his life with the complexion of someone who enjoyed outdoor activities. Sharpely did not like the way the brass-and-leather lens arrangement strapped to the Clockworker’s head made one of the man’s strangely coloured, lifeless eyes look so large.
‘Damn it, man, I was told it would be ready!’ Sir Ronald snapped, looking down at the pale, emaciated figure dressed in dark clothes that made him look like one of last century’s Puritans. The Clockworker wasn’t bald so much as someone who did not quite suit hair. Sir Ronald was pleased when the Clockworker turned back to work on the pistol’s mechanism.
‘You were told it would be ready today. And it will,’ the artificer said absently as he worked with the tools he had rescued from his father’s burning workshop. A religious man, his father. Realising that all sin came from the flesh, he had attempted to replace his children’s flesh with his own devices. To the Clockworker this had been sound reasoning, inasmuch as any religious reasoning was.
‘The rifling will make it much slower to reload than a smoothbore weapon, but after seven shots, if you haven’t killed what you were aiming at—’
‘When will it—’
‘The innovation on this pistol is the mechanism for the pan. All you need to do is turn the barrels as you would normally and my mechanism will refresh the pan with powder. This will of course rapidly increase the speed of your firing.’ Sir Ronald watched impatiently as the Clockworker demonstrated the weapon. ‘Will you be staying in Bromichan tonight?’ He used the old name for the city, which was only just starting to go out of fashion.
‘No, we are staying with friends in Aston,’ Sir Ronald said in exasperation.
‘We? So your family are with you?’
Sir Ronald stopped staring at the finely wrought seven-barrelled pistol that was being constructed for him and instead looked at the Clockworker’s eyes. His face burned red with anger at being addressed so familiarly by a tradesman, even one so singularly skilled as the Clockworker. He didn’t see the Clockworker cut himself with one of his tools. He didn’t see the Clockworker smear blood on the butt of the pistol. He didn’t see the blood absorbed into the wood of the gun as if it had never existed, and he didn’t see the Clockworker’s wound heal itself of its own accord.
‘Damn your impudence! What business—?’
The Clockworker made one more tiny adjustment and there was an audible click from the clockwork pan mechanism.
‘And we’re done.’ The Clockworker held up the completed pistol. The engraved silvered barrels were longer than a normal pepperbox, for greater accuracy. It was a heavy pistol but finely balanced, with a lead weight in the rounded base of the mahogany butt.
Sir Ronald took the expertly crafted weapon from the Clockworker and stared at it with awe.
‘That, sir, is a fine piece of work,’ Sir Ronald said. The Clockworker merely nodded. ‘Excuse my rudeness. I am not a patient man.’ Sir Ronald tested the weapon’s action, pulling the hammer back and then lowering it without letting the flint fall and spark. The Clockworker grimaced as he turned the barrels by hand, forcing the ticking clockwork mechanism. ‘My wife and Elsa, the eldest, wish to frequent the various dressmakers and seamstresses the town has to offer, whereas Alexander, my youngest—’
‘Wishes to see the toy manufactories the city is so famous for?’ the Clockworker finished for him.
‘Just so,’ Sir Ronald said, transfixed by the pistol.
‘Well, I believe our business here is concluded. I make children’s toys also – in fact, I prefer to do so. I am a faint-hearted man, I’m afraid, and the thought of guns … Well, let us say I prefer to create entertainments that make children happy. I have a small workshop on Snow Hill. I would love for young Alexander to see my creations.’
‘What? Oh, yes, we will look for you. If you will excuse me, sir, I must bid you good day.’
The Clockworker watched Sir Ronald walk out of the workshop. No, he wasn’t a religious man, but he knew he had demons in his blood, demons that would do as he bid them.
Before it became a reality of soot-stained brick and stone buildings, the city was a cloud of black smoke pouring from thousands of chimneys on the horizon. Houses, forges, mills, manufactories, workshops and churches, all tightly packed together.
The canal boat he was travelling on brought the coal from the Black Country that powered the city’s industry. The Hellaquin had never been fond of cities, and already the stink of the smoke, of the people and animals all pressed together, and of the filth in the street they created was beginning to feel oppressive. Birmingham looked like a slice of hell to the Hellaquin as the narrowboat slid through the water towards the foundry wharf in the west of the city.
The boatmen secured the narrowboat and saw to the horse that pulled the craft as the foundry-men and -women came with barrows to unload the coal. The Hellaquin picked up his belongings: a wooden case just over two feet long and a waxed-leather-wrapped stave some six feet long. The boatmen tried to ignore the two short swords the man with the hulking upper body wore at his waist under his leather coat. They just returned his nod as he climbed off the narrowboat and headed east. Behind him was the orange glow of molten metal being poured from crucibles in the foundry, accompanied by a constant thunderous clanging.
On New Street he waded through mud and excrement, both human and animal. The street was packed with people. He hated the way the wood-beamed houses crowded in over his head, almost touching, blocking out the smoke-stained sky. He had been in battles where the press of people wasn’t so extreme. He was appalled to see horses, and even wagons, trying to make their way down the street. The six-foot stave he carried wasn’t making him any friends, either.
There were too many of them, and with the stench, and the smoke, he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. A fat, bald, florid man in a leather apron was screaming in his face now. It may as well have been in a foreign language. The Hellaquin felt his forehead connect with the man’s nose. His forehead came away wet and sticky. The man fell into the filth and ordure.
A horse bumped into him and he staggered back. He almost lost his
grip on the stave. He felt the panic rising in him. He was at Poitiers again. Then the panic was gone. He felt the change. The calmness he felt in battle. He had killed horses at Poitiers, when English arrows glanced off curved French plate mail.
The Hellaquin turned away and pushed through the mass towards the edge of the street. He made it to a narrow alleyway, where a crown in the hand of a hard-faced urchin secured him a loyal backstreet guide.
Where New Street had been oppressive and closed in, the Froggary may as well have been underground. It was a tangled multilevel warren of ramshackle buildings connected by narrow corridors in which people lived, and it was impossible to tell where one building ended and another began. The Hellaquin followed the urchin through rooms inhabited by entire extended families, sometimes more than one.
Other than crossing two streets, they had pretty much been moving from one building to another, occasionally looking down on crowded courtyards or walking over makeshift bridges. Then the urchin led him out onto the High Street. The Hellaquin didn’t like the press of people out here, either, but his guide forced a path for him through a mixture of pedestrian agility and aggression.
They made their way south over the refuse of the different markets that ran down from New Street towards the corn market at the Bull Ring, in the shadow of St Martin’s Church. The Hellaquin heard the barking of the dogs and the bellowing of a wounded bull long before he saw the small green outside the church.
The ‘Bull Ring’ was a heavy iron ring embedded in the ground. A badly savaged, blood-covered bull was weakly trying to fend off several dogs bred specifically for the purpose of baiting. A number of dead and dying badly gored dogs lay around the green – presumably the bull had put up quite a fight. The practice had been banned in the city some eighteen years past, but too many people insisted that the meat tasted better if the beast was baited first. Those people were prepared to pay extra for it.
The Hellaquin turned away from the death throes of the beast at the teeth of the flat-faced dogs. He could remember when this entire area had been a deer park. In fact, it hadn’t been far from here, in a root-lined earthen cavern, where he’d drunk from the Red Chalice.
Just off the green a crowd had gathered by a large clanking, hissing mechanism with two black iron arms that pumped up and down, steam rising from it constantly. The whole machine must have been
four, five yards tall, the Hellaquin estimated. He stopped and stared at it. The urchin backpedalled to stand by him.
‘What is it?’ the Hellaquin asked, his tone equal parts awe and dread.
‘It’s one of Mr Watt’s steam engines,’ his grubby guide answered. Then his tone became more guarded. ‘They say it’s going to replace people soon – working, I mean. Then everyone will be like us. The world’ll be a rookery.’
It was a machine, a device. The Hellaquin knew about those. He had been a man once, but now he was something else. He stared as long as he could manage.
The Hellaquin dismissed the boy and headed south-east into Digbeth, where three- and four-storey stone houses became two- and three-storey wood houses. With fewer crowds than the market centre, the Digbeth Road had dried to cracks and dust in the late-July sun. Horses and carts plied the route under the watchful eyes of soldiers called in to quell the recent riots. They leaned against the walls of houses, sweating in their red coats, bayonets affixed to their muskets. With his big build, his upper body so large he looked almost deformed and his thick leather coat in the hot July sun, the Hellaquin attracted their attention and they watched him go by.
It had been many years since he last felt warmth or cold like others did. So long since he last sweated.
He could remember a time when the Old Crown had been a guildhouse and a school. Now it was a hostelry and tavern. The Hellaquin was a tall man, and he had to stoop to avoid banging his head on the ceiling beams inside the wooden-framed two-storey thatched building. Nobody paid any attention to him, not even when his substantial bulk jostled them as he made his way through the press of customers towards the bar. The exception was the Knight. He noticed the Hellaquin. He was sitting at a table in the corner eating a large roast beef dinner that would have fed a family. Like the Hellaquin, he needed a lot of food to sate the devils within.
Their vocations meant they were natural enemies. Even allowing for that, the Hellaquin had never liked the Knight. He wore the clothes of a gentleman who preferred the outdoor life. The exception to his rural finery was the cavalryman’s trousers with leather inner legs. The trousers were tucked into knee-length riding boots.
He wore no wig, and his fine blond hair was tied back into a ponytail with a black ribbon. Both his hair and face had been powdered. Blue eyes glanced at the Hellaquin’s shabby clothes and shoulder-length, unkempt, dark hair with the easy disdain of the aristocrat. The Knight beckoned for the Hellaquin to join him as if he were calling a servant.
‘When it was a guildhouse, at least the wine was better,’ the Knight said by way of greeting. His French accent had become a lot less noticeable during the nearly five hundred years the Hellaquin had known the other ‘man’. ‘Get my friend whatever he wants and a lot of it,’ he said to a passing servingwoman. The Hellaquin asked for stew, bread and ale as he put his case down and slid it under the table. He leaned the stave against the wall. ‘Still carrying that thing, I see?’ said the Knight.
The Hellaquin observed a brace of pistols on the table, and a belt with scabbards for a cavalry sabre and the Knight’s strange Far-Eastern knife hanging over the chair next to him. The Knight noticed the Hellaquin glancing at the ornate, long-barrelled flintlock pistols.
‘Nock of London. Perhaps you should consider joining this new age? I looked for you in America.’
‘I was further north, Hudson Bay.’
‘And the recent unpleasantness in France?’ It was asked casually enough, but the Hellaquin knew it was a test.
‘I don’t think our masters liked my sympathies.’
The Knight stopped eating and looked up at the other man.
‘Why am I here?’ the Hellaquin asked in an attempt to forestall the inevitable argument.
The Knight put his fork and knife down and wiped his mouth on a linen napkin. ‘Very well. I fear I have lost my appetite.’ He stood and the Hellaquin followed him out of the main room of the tavern.
The Hellaquin stared at the body of the boy and tried not to shake with rage. The Knight leaned against the wall of the tavern’s back room, watching the Hellaquin’s response.
The boy couldn’t have been much older than five or six. His blood-spattered clothing was expensive, and he looked like he had been well fed and healthy when he was alive. The back of his head had been caved in, which was clearly the wound that had killed him. By far the stranger wound, however, was the ruin of his left eye, into which a tiny, ornate brass scorpion had crawled and then curled up, clamping itself to his skull and eye socket. The Hellaquin had to turn away from the body and found himself looking at an amused expression on the Knight’s face.
‘What happened?’ the Hellaquin asked.
‘The nanny found him just after he had murdered his infant brother. Then he turned on the nanny. It was his mother who beat his head in after she saw what he had done to her other child.’
