Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl (41 page)

“Bent is down, hit by a rock,” called Stoker. “Elizabeth is most weak. Trigger . . .”

Gideon knew. Trigger was a husk, as though Reed had sucked the life out of him. “The whole place is about to come down,” said Gideon. “We need to get out of here.”

“I concur,” shouted Stoker across the rapidly dividing room. “What’s your plan, Gideon?”

Plan? Gideon peered through the sand and dust. He couldn’t even see the others. They expected him to have a plan? A chunk of falling masonry narrowly missed him and he pressed against a column, which shook alarmingly. He looked up. A grotesque, froglike face leered down at him. No, not a column. A statue. Heqet, evidently. He coughed and spat a glob of dusty spit on to the stone floor. A statue.

“Trigger! Captain Trigger!” he called. “Stoker, can he speak?”

He heard Stoker shouting sharply, then a weak voice: “Mr. Smith?”

“Captain Trigger!” called Gideon. More stone was falling; the sky kept tantalizingly appearing far above then disappearing again, as though the sands were the tides of the sea. “Do you remember
The Temple of Death
?”

“The Temple of . . . Death, did you say?”

“Yes!” shouted Gideon. “
The Temple of Death,
from the . . . the March issue two years ago, or the April one. . . .”

“I think so,” said Trigger, distant and uncertain.

“The Thuggee temple in India!” said Gideon. “It collapsed, remember? Dr. Reed pushed over a statue of Kali and it stopped the roof from coming in. Do you think that would work with these statues of Heqet?”

There was silence. “Captain Trigger?”

“Yes,” said Trigger doubtfully. “I remember that episode.”

“
Would it work?
” shouted Gideon. “Should I push the statue over? Or will that make it worse?”

“That episode . . . ,” called Trigger.

“Yes?”

“That episode . . . I’m afraid I rather embellished John’s notes, Mr. Smith.”

“Embellished?”

“I made it up, Mr. Smith. I’m very sorry. I’m afraid I made quite a lot of it up. The derring-do and suchlike.”

Gideon snarled and punched the statue. He heard Stoker’s voice: “Gideon, we’re trapped here. If you have any kind of plan . . .”

He made it up
. Despite the mounting evidence, Gideon had still held firm in his belief in Captain Lucian Trigger. From Sandsend to London, from London to Egypt, one constant had remained absolute:
This adventure, as always, is utterly true, and faithfully retold by my good friend, Doctor John Reed.
He had lived his life by that, by what he’d read in the pages of
World Marvels & Wonders
. And now . . .
Trigger had fucking made it up
.

There was a fearsome crack from above, and stone and sand began to rain down on Gideon. He heard Stoker yell something formless and terrified. Gideon took a deep breath, got behind the statue of Heqet, and began to push with all his might.

Gideon clambered up the statue, which had fallen diagonally across the chamber, its head poking through to the sundrenched desert, precariously holding the collapsing pyramid together. Gideon scrambled along its length. It would not hold for long. He breached the surface, and he took a welcome lungful of burning air before turning to help Bent up through the gap, his arm twisted horribly, his head bleeding, but alive and staggering. Ashen-faced Trigger came next, and Gideon peered down for Stoker and Bathory.

“Mr. Stoker?” he called. “Countess?”

“We are here,” called Stoker, though Gideon couldn’t see him. “Elizabeth is losing consciousness. Mr. Smith, do you think you might lend a—”

Gideon leaped backward as the sand suddenly shifted beneath him like water, and there was a thunderous crack as the shattered wall of the pyramid toppled inward, sending an avalanche of stone blocks down below.

“Stoker!” called Gideon. “Stoker! Can you hear me?”

There was no answer, but Gideon became aware of someone tugging on his shirt. It was Bent.

“Erm, Gideon,” he said slowly. “I really think you need to see this. . . .”

30
A Dragon to Eat the Sun

“Now that is somewhat astonishing,” said Okoth. Fanshawe and Cockayne were sitting on the grass in the shadow of the
Yellow Rose,
enjoying the breeze drifting off the Nile. As she turned to follow Okoth’s outstretched finger and saw the column of dust rising from far out into the desert, she began to get a bad feeling in her gut that told her she should perhaps have kept her wishes to herself.

“Roundabout where that pyramid is, ain’t it?” said Cockayne. He checked his pockets and withdrew a collapsible telescope. He watched for a moment, then took it away from his eye, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he saw.

“What’s that?” asked Fanshawe. “Something coming out of the ground?” Cockayne handed her the telescope.

Something bright and shining in the sunlight, like a tall mirrored column, had pushed up through the broken granite stones. She frowned and adjusted the focus. It looked for all the world like the head of a crocodile with glinting glass eyes. She swore softly as the rest of it emerged, a fat, sleek body made of overlapping scales forged and hammered from what appeared to be brass, two powerful hind legs with glinting clawed feet, and a pair of smaller forearms. Then it unfurled a pair of vast leathery bat wings and rose into the air, its hinged tail swinging beneath it.

“It’s a dragon,” she said wonderingly. “A brass dragon.”

“I think we’d better get over there,” said Cockayne.

For once, she agreed with him.

Stoker coughed as a cloud of dust billowed up and began to slowly settle. The rocks had fallen and taken him and Bathory with them, sliding back down to the sepulcher below. He could still see the bright sunlight lancing through the dust, though it was terribly distant, and bordered by a shuddering blackness. He could not, however, feel his legs. It was only when he put his hands down to his waist and brought them back slick with his own blood that he realized his lower half was crushed under a huge stone slab.

“Elizabeth?” he coughed. “Elizabeth? Are you alive?”

As the dust settled he saw her, lying in a pool of sunlight shining through the wreckage of the pyramid above them.

“Elizabeth,” he said weakly. “You must rise. Get to the surface. Get help.”

“I . . . cannot . . . Bram,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “The battle with the Children of Heqet . . . I was already weak . . . the harsh Egyptian sun drains me. . . .”

“What are they doing up there?” moaned Stoker. “Why aren’t they coming to help?”

“Perhaps . . . battle is joined . . . ,” she said. “Feel so very tired, Bram . . . must sleep. . . .”

“No!” he said sharply. “Elizabeth, no! You must save yourself, . . . Oh!”

He felt his legs, then, felt the pain of his crushed nerve endings sending sluggish telegrams of emergency to his brain. He coughed into his sleeve, and it was wet with blood as well as spit when he took his arm away.

“I have been such a fool,” he whispered. “Elizabeth . . .”

“Hush,” said Bathory. “You need not say anything.”

He tried to turn his head to look at her, but the blackness that edged his vision was spreading. She said, “What would you do, Bram, if you were not here? What would be your wish?”

“I would so like to walk the corridors of Trinity College in Dublin again,” he said hoarsely. “Gaze upon the Book of Kells once more. But before that . . . Hyde Park, on a warm day . . . I would be hand in hand with Florence, and Noel would be running ahead, spinning a top. And I would tell her . . . tell her I was sorry for everything, and I wished I had been a better husband, and a better father. . . .”

He slipped into a reverie, and when he came to, sharply, he did not know if he had in fact slept. He whispered, “Elizabeth?”

There was no answer. “Elizabeth?”

She made a small sound, almost an agreeable one, as though she merely dozed. He put out a hand to her and felt her bare arm. She was cold.

“Thank you . . . ,” she said. “For all that blood you drew for me . . .”

He blinked. “Of course,” he said softly. “Elizabeth, listen to me. There is no need for both of us to die. I cannot recover. But take my blood. . . .”

“I . . . cannot . . . ,” she said, almost dreamily. “It would kill you, Bram.”

“I am dead anyway. Take it.” He thrust his arm toward her. “Take it from my wrist. Drain me. It shall be easier for me, that way. I am in such pain. . . .”

For a moment she did nothing, then he felt her cool lips upon the inside of his forearm. A kiss, and nothing more.

“Take it!” he urged. “Help them stop Reed. Florence and Noel are in London. . . .”

He felt twin pinpricks on his wrist, and he was glad he could not see Elizabeth in her vampire state. He pictured her, beautiful and serene, in his head, as she drained his blood and he slowly slipped into the darkness for the final time.

Apep was above them, framed against the blue sky, the sun bouncing off every brass scale on its magnificent body. It hung in the sky, the huge metal wings flapping down and up, down and up, and seemed to regard them with its baleful porthole eyes.

“What the eff’s keeping it up in the sky?” asked Bent wonderingly. “Helium, do you think, like a dirigible?”

“Science,” said Gideon. “Witchcraft. I don’t know. Look at the thing. It defies all rational explanation.”

One of the eyes glinted in the sun, and Gideon saw it was opening. Reed’s head emerged. He roared at them from the dragon, “They always say the sun will never set on Britannia. Apep is the sun-eater, and he shall rain fiery death upon that foul and debased place. It is good you live, because when I am done those who are left will need to know who did this. One final story for you to pen, Lucian.”

And then, Gideon remembered his dream of so long ago. The night it all started. The day that was the last of the life he once knew.

He had dreamed a dragon ate the sun.

“No!” he shouted. “You will not do this, John Reed! You will not!”

Reed laughed from his perch atop the brass dragon. “And who are you to tell me, the Hero of the Empire, what I will and will not do?”

“I am Gideon Smith!” he cried. “And I will stop you, John Reed, if it takes my final breath.”

Reed closed the porthole, and the dragon executed a tight turn in the sky and began to fly north. Gideon watched it go, powered by arcane means, piloted by the enslaved Maria. The rescue mission had now turned into something far more urgent. “We need to get to London,” he said. “To warn them.”

There was a scrabbling behind them, and Gideon turned to see Bathory climbing through the fissure in the rock- strewn sand. Bent said, “Stoker?” and she looked away, giving the smallest shake of her head.

“We should get his body out,” said Bent. “Christ, my arm. My effing head.”

“We’ll send someone later,” said Gideon. “We must go now, or there will be many more corpses to disinter from what is left of London.”

“But how?” asked Trigger hollowly.

A shadow fell across them, the vast balloon of the
Yellow Rose,
banking and descending so the observation platform turned to them. Fanshawe stood there, leaning on the rails.

“What the hell was that?” she called. “We saw it from the river and reckoned you might need our help.”

Gideon looked at Apep, now a dot in the clear sky. “That was death, Rowena. And it is bound for London. We must follow it.”

She unfurled a rope ladder as Cockayne, on the bridge, brought the
Yellow Rose
down as low as he could. Gideon said, “Let’s get moving. I’d hate John Reed to think I wasn’t a man of my word.”

“You know, I’m not being what you might call unpatriotic or nothing,” said Bent, wincing as Fanshawe strapped a splint to his broken arm, “but some might say Reed’s got something of a point.”

Gideon stared at him. “You are joking, of course?”

“I don’t agree with his methods or anything, all this raining death on London with a brass dragon and all, but . . . well. Let’s just say the British Government doesn’t always act with the most honorable intentions, shall we?

“Take your Maria, for example, and that brain. All Annie Crook did was fall in love with a geezer who just happened to be a member of the royal family. And what does the Crown do? Whisks him away and kills the Crook girl. All because it wouldn’t look good, and it might give the great unwashed ideas above their station. Is that any way to behave? And Reed himself . . . he goes to all that trouble to find these lost treasures scattered about the world, just to have scoundrels like Walsingham come and pick and choose what he wants.”