Clockwork Tangerine (2 page)

“You’re a doctor?”

“No, I teach fisticuffs. I can do the basics, and I know when a man’s been knocked senseless.” He stared at the man’s pupils, not liking the disproportionate reaction of his irises. Marcus put the lantern down and held up two fingers. “How many do you see?”

“Of you or your hand? Because I see two of each.” The silver flash of his eyes was gone under the flutter of the man’s long lashes. “And I feel… sick.”

“You definitely are concussed.” Marcus patted at his coat, checking the tea package. “Do you live far from here?”

“Not far, but you don’t have to bother. I can….” The flutter returned. Then his eyes drooped, an uneven shuttering, before they stilled. The man went pale, something Marcus hadn’t thought possible considering he was already nearly bone white, but a creeping gray flush spread over his cheeks, and his breathing hitched, growing erratic.

“
Shit
.” It was a coarse word, one learned from the stable master when he’d been twelve, but it was fitting at this point in his life.

Dropping his head to the man’s chest, Marcus was encouraged by the steady beat of his heart beneath his bloodstained linen shirt. Sliding a hand up the man’s belly, he tried to concentrate less on the firm muscles under his fingers and more on the warmth of the man’s skin. He was growing cold, the chilled ground leeching away the heat of his body. Marcus would have to move him quickly, but it would have to be somewhere close. With his pate rattled, the long trek up to Great Richmond would do more harm than good, and Marcus still didn’t know if any of the man’s limbs were broken.

“Damn it, I need you to wake up, old man. I need to know where you live.” Marcus folded the man’s greatcoat around his shivering torso and pulled in his arms, telling himself not to look at the injured man’s long, delicate fingers and dream of them ghosting over his own chest. His cock certainly wasn’t listening to him. It was alert and sniffing like a dog with a bitch in the wind, and every twitch of his roiling balls was a reminder he was a sick man, perverted not just for his love of men but for raking up a desire when the man in question was clearly broken.

The lights of a low-flying zeppelin dappled the sky above him, the fog swirling about the enormous balloon’s cab as its rotary blades swished through the damp air. It was enough of a wind to blow a gust of cold down on them, and Marcus leaned forward, hoping to shield the unconscious man from the bluster. It passed quickly, driven to do better things than hover over the area on a dank night, and Marcus sighed with relief as it moved on.

His arms were certainly strong enough to carry the man, but he was loath to leave behind his walking stick. He grabbed the sword cane from where he’d let it fall earlier, tucked it into the man’s coat, and secured it beneath a row of buttons to hold the damp wool folds together.

The lanterns would have to stay, he decided. There was no way he could manage the man and a lantern both.

When he slid his arms beneath the man’s legs, he met resistance, and his fingers tangled through what felt like girders. Curious, he moved the man aside, careful not to jostle him too much, and stared in sheer amazement at what he found hidden beneath the thick woolen fabric of the man’s coat.

If anything, the contraption was small, barely two feet in length or height if Marcus parsed its construction properly. Resembling a pair of struts for a folding bridge, the device looked as if it could be secured around someone’s legs by the leather straps dangling along its lengths and the couplings attaching it to a thick cloth waistband.

“What in the name of the Nine Hells?” Marcus murmured in shock when the device slowly churned at a bend when he touched it at a jointure.

It folded up into a
V
, then stopped, moving only an inch before locking into place. From what he could see, it had no engine, not steam or gas, and the movement definitely had been powered by… something. A soft glow beneath the cloth was enough of a clue. The mechanism was powered by arcane, a clear violation of the factions’ philosophy against mingling science and magicks.

“Oh, my little crow, what the hell are you up to?” Marcus glanced at the passed out man. “Are you insane? They’ll throw you in New Bedlam for this.”

The shrill pipe of a bobby whistle broke Marcus from his thoughts, and he moved quickly, shrugging off his own overcoat to hide the mechanism beneath its heavy fabric. A red-faced man wearing the Queen’s Blues rushed into the yard, his blackjack at the ready to bash in any attacker he might see, but he pedaled to a halt at the sight of Marcus leaning over his rescued victim.

“Ah, just what I need. Help.” Marcus slid his arms under the man’s legs and back, then nodded over to the bobby. “This man was set on by ruffians. I need to get him to a healer. Is there someone in the area you know and trust?”

The bobby ducked his head, nearly solicitous in his bearing toward Marcus, but his face hardened when he took a good look at the man in Marcus’s arms. “Begging yer pardon, sir, but fuck ’im. ’E can rot there for all I care.”

“What do you say?” Marcus pulled himself up, hefting the man’s slender body into the cradle of his arms with ease. “He’s injured. And an innocent Englishman attacked by his own. He needs assistance.”

“Ye wouldn’t say that if ye’d recognized ’im, guv,” the bobby said, spitting on the ground as if to wash himself of a foul taste in his mouth. “That’s the bloody fucking Toymaker.”

T
HE
T
OYMAKER
.

Those two words became a silent dirge Marcus marched to as he carried the man to the bobby’s direction. He couldn’t convince the man to accompany him, and it was all he
could
do to get the bobby to lay the cloak-covered device on his burden’s chest so it could be transported back as well.

The man. He was no longer
the man
, but rather a nightmare made of bone and flesh.

He didn’t look old enough to be a nightmare. Despite the streak in his hair, the man… no… Robin Harris… couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. Far too young to be the Society’s Mad Terror… its Toymaker… the architect of its mechanical killing machines.

The man who thought up the skitter that killed his father.

No, Marcus decided as he looked down at the man’s face. They were of the same age. The Society had fallen almost twenty years ago, torn apart by the Queen’s armies and its supporters scattered to the winds. The man he held was too young. He would have been in his early teens during the turmoil brought on by the Society’s Golems and mechanical monsters.

He could
not
be holding Robin Harris in his arms. He could
not
have saved the man who’d brought the Empire to the brink of falling.

Any doubts Marcus had about the man he’d rescued were answered once he reached the three-story brownstone on the edge of the pier. A light burned in a front bay window, heralding its owner home, and a small, discreet rap of his boot against the wood brought a sleepy-eyed old woman to the door.

Well, at least one eye was sleepy. The other was a clicking tangle of glass and an aperture that rapidly moved about in her socket as it opened and closed to focus on Marcus’s movements.

Only one man he knew of could be skilled enough to replace someone’s sight with a mechanical gewgaw. The man he was holding
had
to be Robin Harris, the Society’s Toymaker.

If the woman wasn’t enough proof, the front room was evidence still.

What should have been a parlor seemed to have been turned into a workroom of sorts. Long tables lined one wall, and every flat surface appeared to be covered with things Marcus couldn’t begin to understand without some instruction. Tiny blips of light flashed on and off from embedded divots along slender girders and gears, evidence of arcane amid the mechanical wonders. Most of the things piled up along the workbenches and tables appeared to be nearly human in shape, as if they were bones of a man left bare to the eye.

The far wall sported shelves, but they were nearly buried beneath a weight of books and papers. Here and there, tiny remnants of the outside world made it indoors: a long white feather poking out of a thick tome, a mesh bag of marbles, and even what looked like a canine skull… if a dog had ear ridges sprouting out of the side of its head.

“This way.” The woman’s voice was as mechanical as her eye, and she walked with her left shoulder down, her long, thick graying braid swaying down her back as she struggled to mount the stairs.

“You don’t have to go up with me, Mistress.” Marcus hefted Harris to a more comfortable position in his arms. “Just tell me where to take him.”

“He’ll need healing.” She sounded resigned, and when she turned, the light caught on the slick web of scars marring most of her face. “He always does. He needs a nurse, not a housekeeper.”

Despite his insistence she remain downstairs, the woman followed him up, opening a door off the second floor landing. Excusing herself, the woman plodded away, heading back into the depths of the brownstone to hunt up medical supplies and leaving Marcus behind with her employer.

Thankfully for Marcus’s nerves, the sleeping chamber was just that, a bedroom. No long-legged maybe-monsters peered out at him from hidden places or tiny lights moving about to follow his progress across the floor. Instead, the room boasted an enormous four-poster bed, a couple of worn wing chairs obviously chosen more for comfort than style, and a few overburdened bookshelves. A large round table sat near the wide windows, its surface covered with notebooks and drawings, but the room’s filmy curtains were pulled back, showing off a spectacular view of the bay.

If the bay weren’t covered in fog, Marcus’s breath would have been taken away. He was sure of it.

Instead, he carefully laid the man he now knew was Robin Harris on the thick duvet and nearly jumped out of his skin when a pillow stretched out and yawned at him.

The cat was… odd. Long and lean, more whippet than feline and hairless to the eye, at least until Marcus looked closer and saw a thick pale down covering her slender body. Her tail curled up around her back and she crouched, spreading her front paws out in an obviously delicious display of muscular relaxation.

Her back legs were a different story.

They appeared to end in stumps where the cat’s knees might have been, but a fine spiderweb latticework fit up around the feline’s truncated limbs. The devices were attached to what appeared to be cat’s legs, if God had made them of metal and wood instead of flesh. Whatever they were constructed of, they worked, because the feline stretched them out behind her, first one and then the other, before sniffing at Harris’s bruised face. Losing interest quickly—either deciding the man wasn’t dead enough to be food or the smell of blood turned her off—she jumped from the bed, her legs singing a metal-on-metal tune, and was out the door before Marcus could blink.

Now the devices Harris’d been carrying made sense. The elongated structures were legs as well, long, and probably made for a human if Marcus remembered their shape right. Their length didn’t make much sense until he realized the mechanisms were nearly in perfect proportion for a very short person or perhaps even a child, and suddenly he was glad he’d bribed a rubbish picker to help carry them to Harris’s home.

“You live in a curious world, little crow,” Marcus mused. “Although should I dare to call you Robin?”

All he got in response was a slight moan, and Marcus frowned, trying to reconcile himself with the idea of the injured man he desired and the monster created by the Society’s ambitions.

Robin Harris looked… well, beaten. Not just his body but his very spirit. Even unconscious, the man held himself tenderly, as if breathing were painful. Although, Marcus figured, at this point, it probably was.

“Well, if you’re going to be here, you might as well be of some use. Get him undressed. I’ll see if the doctor will come see him.” The old woman’s voice startled Marcus from his thoughts, and he started, nearly falling onto the bed. Catching himself, Marcus hemmed and hawed, stumbling over his words as the woman’s nictitating mechanical eye followed him about the room. Her other eye was inert, fixing on a point floating someplace in front of her face. “Stay and help or get out. Either way, I don’t care. I’m not being paid enough to stitch him together. I’m giving my notice. Tell him when he wakes up, or he’ll figure it out eventually. Bad enough I’m working for a sodomite. I’ll not work for one that has a death wish.”

She was gone, much like the cat. Ungrateful and sour, the old woman left behind a box of medical supplies and a tainted air about the room. She’d obviously benefited from Harris’s mechanisms, but gratitude apparently only went so far. Marcus heard the stump of her legs hitting the stairs, and then the house was quiet, either empty of her presence or the housekeeper was stealthily gathering up the silver before fleeing the premises.

“Well then,” Marcus murmured to the unconscious man laid out before him. “You’re becoming more and more trouble.”

He was torn, if torn was even a strong enough word for the conflicting emotions coursing through Marcus’s thoughts. He couldn’t turn away from the man he’d rescued. Not even after everything he’d learned… everything he
knew
about what the man had done.

Thousands had suffered at the hands of the Society. They’d brought about the rise of the Golems, creatures—humans according to the courts—created in workshops and grown to adolescence in bowls of plasma and blood, only to be used as shock troops and assassins for the Society’s cause. They’d been terrorists of the basest form, attacking the very foundation of the British Empire, but Marcus had a difficult time reconciling the idea of the man laid out before him had anything to do with their destructive agenda.

Especially since it appeared the man devoted his entire life to fixing lost causes.

Because if anyone was a lost cause, it was the sour-faced housekeeper who’d just given her notice over her employer’s unconscious body.