Clockwork Chaos (9 page)

“It won’t play that way, especially after word gets out of what happened in the city.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The major blinked. “Don’t you know? You were there. Don’t you know what we found?”

“No,” I said.

“They’re dead. All of them. The whore ordered them to drink poison, and they did. Every last one. Can you believe that? It’s a city of ghosts.”

Surprised, I looked back across the bay at New Athina, feeling a deep hurt in my chest.

I wasn’t sure of my decision, until I met you
, the queen had said. In my good hand, the satchel containing the two books was heavier than it should be.

Standing nearby was Zelena, who stood just outside my tent, her leg still chained to the ground, her stomach visibly swollen. I walked up to her, and she threw her arms around my shoulders. She clutched onto me for a long time, and I held onto her the best I could. I held on until finally her heart rate slowed.

I handed her the bag containing the two books.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s everything that’s left,” I said.

B
ernie Mojzes

––––––––

D
awn brings yet more bad news.

“Sail ho!” shouted from the crow’s nest, echoed in a parade of voices the length of the
Light Brigade
.

Mr. Gibson curses. “Where ahead?”

“Dead ahead, sir! And all across the bow from one point starboard to two points port!”

A dozen feet slapping the deck, even before Gibson starts to crank the siren, more below deck and hitting the stair. Captain Carrigan still tugging one-handed at his belt buckle as he bursts from his quarters, looking-glass and coat collar clutched in the other.

“Bring her ’round hard to starboard!” he yells, scrambling to the foredeck with the ease of a much younger man. The coat flaps like a matador’s cape in the wind as he shrugs himself into it.

The deck pitches sharply, tossing some of the less experienced boys against the rail. Mary’s feet come out from under her as she emerges from the captain’s cabin, and she slides across the deck until a burly hand grasps her by the ankle.

“God bless, Yaqub.” She sits up, straightens her bodice, struggles to her feet. “What’s happening? I thought we’d a good lead?”

The big moor shrugs and wags a thumb at his captain. “Don’t know yet. Ask your man, or wait with the rest of us.” He hefts the box of ammunition he’d set down to save her and hurries on his way.

Mary reaches up and tugs the hem of Carrigan’s coat. “Tom? What’s wrong?”

“Below decks, woman.” Carrigan scans the mass of ships that block their escape. Some of the ships start to raise the Union Jack, others raise the flags of France and the Golden Horde, depending on which of the pursuing armadas they see first. Their confusion is short-lived, but enough. Two fleets chase this lone clipper across the waves, and it’s too late to hope to trick either into lowering their guard. They raise their true colors.

“Fucking East India Company,” Carrigan mutters.

And they’d almost escaped, riding the wind before the fleets of two empires. With a decent tail wind, a fast clipper could still outrun any ironclad. Especially the
Light Brigade
. Better to be a gazelle on the high seas than an armadillo.

Unless there is nowhere to run.

Carrigan speaks into Gibson’s ear, waits for his first mate’s acknowledging nod. Gibson scowls, concedes, then takes the stairs three at a time, swinging ‘round the banister to catch Mary around the waist.

“You’re coming with me, lass.”

She struggles in his grip as he drags her below.

Behind her, the captain bellows. “All hands on deck! Raise the white flag! And prepare to engage!”

Mary stumbles on the stair, but Gibson’s rope-muscled arm holds her up. He doesn’t slow, and it isn’t until they’re half down the hall that she gets her feet back under her. He stops at a closet, shoves her in among the mops and buckets, the filthy rags that stink of brine and puke.

“Keep your trap shut ‘til we come for you,” he says, ugly, pocked face half in shadow, demonic, scared-angry lips tight and work-hardened fingers gripping her face hard enough to bruise like it’s Whitechapel again with a gent too good to hit his own wife but not
that
good. She reaches for her knife. Instinct, though she knows there’s no need. His fist doesn’t rise. Instead, the hand drops to her shoulder, a half-comforting pat, just before he swings the door shut. “Try not to break anything this time, aye? And maybe we’ll all get out of this alive.”

In the dark, she hears the bolt slide into place, hears his footsteps, running now. And then there’s just the creak of the wood, the calls of the men as sails are raised, and the endless slapping of the sea.

Not that she’s scared of the dark. She’s a creature of the dark, and she knows its ways, the ins and outs of the soot-stained alleys and shit-smeared cobblestones, the taverns and brothels and opium dens. She knows the robbers and cutthroats, the soiled women and men who trade in stolen gold and flesh. The dark is the realm of the lost and desperate, and while it’s brutal and dangerous, she knows how to survive, when to spread her legs and when to run, and when to strike back.

The Devil is not one of their company, even should he deign to walk among them.

The Devil wears a silk top hat and velvet gloves and an overcoat of the finest wool. He watches the girls from within his carriage as his driver goads the horses through the cold mist. And when he spots the one he wants, he is ever so polite and charming.

“Ah, Miss Kelly,” he’d said, leaning from his carriage to extend his hand, and Mary didn’t ask how he knew her name, her real name, and not one of the names she wore to work as the one garment that never came off. She had no recollection of him, and yet he seemed familiar, and she knew at once that she would go with him, even before he adds, “You will be so good to grace us with your presence this evening.” Even now she has no idea how many times she went with him, or where they went, or what she did there. Those memories are lost, as good as dead, and there’s no point dwelling on it. There’s no man she’d trust enough to bring them back, and only one woman, and that woman lies rotting in St Patrick’s under a gravestone marked with Mary’s name.

All she knows is that there were lost days, lost nights, and if there was a bit more coin in her purse the following morning, she’d been sore enough to have earned it. She’d chalked it up to the gin.

The Devil even smells good, of soap and roses. Mary felt filthy sitting next to him on his velvet-cushioned bench, his gloved hand idly stroking her thigh under her dress as they rolled through the Whitechapel streets. The velvet was nice though.

After a time, two other girls had been brought into the fold. Familiar, both of them, though she’d be hard pressed to say why, and she never could remember their names, no matter how many times the Devil addressed them.

The carriage took them far from her familiar haunts, far from the safety of dark alleys to a place of wide, gas-lit streets and gated mansions. A guard held the gate for them and locked it behind them, and the doorman brought them inside.

Others were waiting, two other men in similar finery. Mary curtsied. It seemed only proper.

One of the men laughed.

The other rose to his feet. “Shall we get started?”

The Devil led them through a maze of corridors, left, left, right, and left, Mary memorized.
Always know your way out.
She wonders how many times she memorized these same passages, this same door, and the rooms beyond. The two men led the two girls through the door into a darkened room.

“You will be so kind as to wait here, Miss Kelly,” the Devil said, stopping her in the corridor. “We will call for you when we are ready.”

Mary waited patiently for half an hour, then less patiently, pacing the length of the hallway and wishing for a chair to rest her feet. She sat against the wall, and after a time, began to doze.

She woke, her head in a muddle, to a voice at the door.

“Excellent! The experiment is a profound success. Just one more test.” The door opened, and the Devil peered out at her. “Come, come, Miss Kelly, we’re not paying you to sleep.”

He brought her into a dimly lit room. At the far end was a thick, metal door, and next to that, a tube that led from the wall to a chair, where a man might sit comfortably while looking through the eye-piece into the next room. He led her by the elbow to the metal door, opened it onto a blindingly bright room and pushed her through, then pulled the door shut behind her.

What did she see first? The machine? The donkey? The naked girls? Or the blood?

Mary stared at the scene in front of her, trying to comprehend. One of the men sat within the machine, strapped in with leather cords. Copper prongs extended from two metal-lined tubes to either side of his head. The machine buzzed lightly, and thin arcs of light crackled between the prongs and the copper-mesh crown on his head. The machine itself was a thing of wood and metal, two disks rising vertically like a pleasure wheel at the fair. Another man stood at the crank. He wore a strange helmet of rubber and lead that extended all the way to his shoulders. He’d clearly already been pleasured, as had the donkey, who now pressed himself against the wall as far from the dead girl as he could manage. One girl stood above the body of the other, wearing almost as much blood as the girl on the floor, and almost as blank and motionless. A knife hung loose in her hand.

Mary stared, mouth open. She’d been seriously underpaid.

The Devil’s muffled voice came through a grate in the wall, next to a thick block of curved glass. “Has Miss Kelly begun to emote?”

“She’s just standing there like a cow.”

“We need to see if the Influence Machine can establish control over a distance
while
they’re agitated. Do something to agitate her.”

“Very well.” The man in the machine focused his gaze on the living girl, and sparks arced across his head.

The girl dropped the knife and crouched by the dead girl, gripped her hair to lift her head off the floor, and kissed the dead mouth with passion. The man in the machine smiled and bit on his lower lip; in response, the girl clamped her teeth on the dead girl’s lip and tore. Mary screamed.

She scrabbled at the doorknob. The door rattled against the lock. “Let me out. Oh God, let me out!”

God may not have heard, but the Devil did. “Splendid. You may begin.”

The man with the helmet turned the crank. The disks spun, each in an opposite direction. Electricity crackled and arced brighter over the other man’s head, glowed around freestanding copper balls. The room smelled like a lightning strike.

A disturbingly familiar pressure began to build at the base of Mary’s skull, buzzed at her temples.

“No, no,
no!
” Mary drew her own knife, a bone-handled thing she’d had from her father before he died, and had carried tucked in her boot from Cardiff to London, and from Caernarfon to Cardiff before that. Could she reach the man in the machine before she was reduced to a mindless automaton? Before they made her do things like
that
?
Again
? No, the closer she was to the machine, the stronger the effects; a single step confirmed that. Instead, she pressed the blade against her own chest.

A sound came through the grate. A popping sound, muffled like the Devil’s voice had been. Mary took a step back, away from the machine, behind the door. It swung open and a man stepped in. He fired two shots at the man in the machine, striking him in the chest both times. The girl clutched her head and screamed. The assassin fired another two shots into the man beside the crank, who fell back against the wall and slid to the ground, his head trailing blood. The gunman reloaded, and executed the screaming girl with a single shot to the head.

The donkey’s panicked wheezing broke the sudden silence.

Mary cowered behind the door while the assassin examined the machine. He stepped out for a few moments—Mary could hear him rustling around in the other room—and returned with two trunks and a notebook, and a bag of tools. Consulting the notebook, he extracted the dead man from the machine, and then disassembled it, packing the parts into the trunks. He struggled getting the trunks strapped onto the donkey’s back, and he cursed in a tongue Mary could not understand.

This was it. When he turned to lead the donkey out, he would see her. She had no choice.

Mary threw herself across the room, burying the knife in his back. He howled and staggered forward into the donkey. She pulled the blade free and drew it across his throat as he turned. The blade sliced easily through flesh and arteries, caught and ground sickeningly in cartilage. He fell to his knees and clutched at her dress, gurgling through pink bubbles, then sagged to the floor.

Mongol. Pale makeup might be adequate disguise passing in the night, but up close in this brilliant light, there was no doubt. Madmen and Mongols, and a room full of corpses.

She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to get away, as far away as she could, but she seemed frozen, staring into a dead man’s eyes. She’d cut a man before, in self defense, but this—to the best of her unreliable memory—was the first person who had died at her hands.

The Mongol lay at her feet, her knife protruding from his throat. She could hear her father’s voice now, grim words from that grim night on the Caernarfon docks.
No Mong fwkar touches my girl.
She grasped the bone handle and yanked the blade free. Air burbled and sighed through the hole.

Mary fled.

In the other room, the Devil slumped in his chair, motionless.

Right, then left where the doorman lay in a heap. Another Mongol lay dead just around the corner. More corpses just down the hall—another Mongol, right again, and the driver lay tangled with the body of yet another assassin, the body of a maid laid out just beyond.

The doors Mary had entered through were still closed and locked. The assassins had come in through the servants’ entrance.