Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) (26 page)

“
Oi, fella, what are you doing this far in?”
Oh, God.
She shrugged without meaning to. The hoarse male voice sounded as though it belonged at a derby race, vocal chords worn to gravel by incessant yelling. “Won’t turn around, eh? You’re either lost or you’re about to be...from this earth. Who are the devil are you?”

Meredith shut her eyes, mashed her lips together. He would be upon her any moment, and she would never see daylight again
. See Sonja again. The echoing
click-click
of his heels on the concrete belonged to a giant, Atlas himself, rearing up behind her. Size was all that mattered, and she had none.

Size?

Her right foot pressed onto the side of her left Wellington before her brain had fully comprehended. The boots were far too big for her, easy to step out of. The left peeled off with a single tug.

“
Oi, what are you up to? Stop that.”

Not likely. She kicked
the right boot off and, without even turning to see his face, bolted for the steel gate. The
click-click
was right behind, growing quicker and closer. He could reach out and snag her. But he didn’t. He couldn’t? Meredith dodged through the open gate and tore up the winding steps behind it, watching the ground and only the ground, its slippery, depressed-by-wear stone increments leading her...where exactly? Hot on her heels, demonic clicks. Above, demonic laughter. She either had a quick way out at the top of these stairs or she had to make up a story, a plausible story, for the
real
eight of the Eighth.

She clatt
ered into upside-down wooden chairs stacked on a circular wooden table before she realised the staircase had ended. A soft carpet broke her fall. She rolled aside, hid her face with the flat cap so the people sitting on barstools couldn’t identify her. Gasping, she snatched up a chair and hurled it with all her might through the nearest stained-glass window. It smashed. A strong gust threw biting smithereens at her, so she shielded her face with the baggy sleeves of her overall.

“
Quick, someone grab her!”

Her,
yes. Without the flat cap she was a woman again. The smoky taste of night air beckoned. Meredith was in mid-vault over the jagged shards when strong arms lashed around her midriff and yanked her back inside.

“
Get off, bastard. Let go, you son of a—”

A slap to her face s
tung like crazy, smarted as the group manhandled her across the lounge.

Anxious voices overlapped:
“Who is she?—Let me see!—How on earth did a little girl?—Girl my foot, she’s a Coalition minx, come to bury us—That right, Minx? You aim to do away with the Eighth, do you? Well, you’re ours now, and you’ve no more hours left. Ha! Ha! Hours—do you smoke it?”

“
If you morons plot as badly as you pun, the rest of the world has nothing to worry about.” She spat. Another stinging slap made her cry out, and she had to blink twice as hard and twice as fast to demist her vision.

“
As chairman, it’s your decision, Denton. How do we do away with—”

Meredith
head-butted behind her, caught her captor square on the chin. He yelled and let go. She fled for the open window, this time managing the leap outside, where she instantly collapsed under the gouging pain of her soles being cut to ribbons on shattered glass. She crawled on her knees and sleeve-covered hands—the turn-ups had unravelled to full length—out into a cloistered courtyard on a blustery night. A measure of how far she’d travelled since the cemetery, where it had been misty and still.

Rough hands picked her up again. This time she trembled, balled her
feet to lighten the agony—it only compounded the multiple wounds, as many of the shards were still embedded. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. Everything she was and had ever been did not permit it, not tonight, not in the face of bullies.

“
Slit her throat and have done with it,” said Denton, a slight, very short man well past retirement age, whose Slavic face was framed by enormous mutton chops. “I don’t have the stomach to torture any more young girls. They can endure the devil’s own punishment, and you get nothing from them.”

“
Let me try, then,” replied a hawkish-looking woman of about forty-five. Her smooth husky skin and lifeless dark eyes belonged at the prow of a barge on the River Styx. “Maybe you’ve been missing a woman’s touch.”

“
Come now, Cybil, that isn’t your game,” said Denton.

“
No, but I have a feeling this one knows more than we suppose. What say we take her to one of the new labs, see if we can’t get her to...open up a little. Cathy, Lily, it’s time you got your hands dirty as well. There are dark times ahead, and wars are not won by parlour games.”

Cathy? Lily?

“I’ve seen her before. I believe I know her,” said the taller of the two.

Meredith
blinked twice. Bitterly. Twice more. She backtracked in her mind, trying to remember where she was—not at home in Southsea, nor in her house near Vincey Park in London. But—but Lady Catarina and Aunt Lily were here in the flesh, not ten feet away, gazing at her with such disdain, such contemptible contempt, she might as well be nothing more than an insolent tweenie maid from their long-forgotten past.

T
his had to be a bad dream. Cathy and Aunt Lily...Atlas members? Sonja would laugh herself silly...or spontaneously combust in horror.

“
No, I must have been mistaken,” Aunt Lily corrected herself. “The girl has gumption, though, twenty-four carats of the stuff, whoever she is.”

“
Gumption or not, we should find out what she knows,” Cathy replied.

“
Cathy? Aunt Lily?” Even speaking their names out loud could not pierce the unreality of them being here.

“
She
does
seem to know you.” Denton pinched Meredith’s cheeks together, shook her head until her teeth rattled. “You mean to say you’re this woman’s niece?”

“
No!” Meredith replied instinctively.

“
So why the ‘aunt’?” demanded Cybil.

“
Why the ugly face?”

“
You’ll answer me, or by God you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

“
How many guesses do I have?”

Cybil dropped her shawl from her shoulders.
“Smythe, hand me one of your pistols.”

“
With pleasure.”

“
You’re not interrogating her after all?” The Right Honourable Denton sounded a little put-out.

Cybil leaned forward, pistol in hand, and gave a hateful
ugh
noise, as though the very thought of Meredith being alive any longer in her presence made her retch. She leaned closer, her French perfume invading Meredith’s nostrils. Her bosom swelled in the centre, between her breasts. The fabric of her dress continued to bulge, to tent outward, almost as if...

The blade tore through her dress
from behind at the same moment blood ran from the corner of her mouth. The same
ugh
noise sank deep, more prolonged, a heavenward scream trapped in a bileful bubble on its way to hell.

“
Traitors!” Denton yelled, and his throat opened wide, gushed crimson at the slash of a blade. Blood slapped the floor before he did.

A flurry of deadly action erup
ted around Meredith. Cathy wielded the blade—unsheathed from her parasol—like a vengeful Valkyrie, felling Smythe before turning to spar with a large man who swung a barstool at her. It was an uneven fight, as Cathy’s agility and footwork had him swinging at air.

Meanwhile, Aunt Lily hitched her skirt and petticoats up and pulled a derringer from her garter b
elt. One shot, right through his forehead, freed the desperate hold of Meredith’s captor. He flopped onto the shards of broken glass at her feet.

The m
an swinging the barstool got lucky, clipped the hilt of Cathy’s blade, knocking it from her hand. In ducking his next swipe, she tripped backward over the fallen bodies of Cybil and Denton, and lay spreadeagled on the ground, at his mercy.

Furious, Meredit
h snatched up the pistol Smythe had given Cybil and shot Barstool Man through the chest. Twice. Three times. Four. She wouldn’t give up the gun to Aunt Lily, not even when blood blossomed as a dark rose on the ground around him. Aunt Lily had to prise it free.

Unfortunately, one of the group had escaped. He
’d been injured during the fight but now limped away across the courtyard, screaming for help. Meredith had no idea whereabouts in London they were, but any assistance he managed to procure here, in this vicinity, would not be to their benefit.

“
Finish him,” Aunt Lily said to Cathy—one tigress to another.

My
Aunt Lily?
My
Cathy?

The only thing Meredith knew for certain was that she
’d brought this on herself. Curiosity hadn’t killed the cat tonight, but it had certainly skinned it, left it doubting even its closest kin. Aunt Lily draped Cybil’s shawl over Meredith, held her tight, not saying a word.

Under a gibbous moon, on the far edge of the gothic quadrangle, Lady Catarina
ran down the last member of the eighth sect. There was a glimmer of steel above her head. The man screamed and wailed and screamed.

Then he didn
’t.

Chapter Thirteen

Hits and Misses

“
You had to do it, didn’t you? Couldn’t leave it alone like you were told.” After a brief scan of the corpses both in and out of the bar room, Aunt Lily slapped Meredith’s cheek with extreme viciousness. It didn’t just sting, it throbbed against the bone. “You always were a wilful child, but
this—
words can’t even begin to...” She held a trembling forefinger and thumb to her brow. “You may have killed us all. And for what? So you could play at Wilkie Collins, solve a piece of a puzzle you had absolutely no hope of getting to the bottom of. You selfish little bitch!” Another fully swung slap, this time spilling stars from Meredith’s left temple, knocked her sideways into a table.

Hot tears welled in Meredith
’s eyes. Her only resistance to convulsive sobs was the sobering thought of where they were, the impossible and immediate bind she’d put Aunt Lily and Cathy in, which they now had to somehow escape from—and quickly. For this was a place deep in enemy territory, behind multiple locked gates, girdled by the secret underground roots of London. “Is there another way out?”

“
You came in via the cemetery, I take it?” Cathy didn’t stop rifling through the corpses’ clothes as she spoke. “Impressive, Meredith. When you appeared just now, I assumed you’d followed me directly from the party. But seeing how you’re dressed, you had to have found your own way in from the opposite end.”

“
Is your exit nearer?”

“
Yes, but it’s out of the question. You can’t see it from where we’re stood, but behind the cloistered building to your right is the Leviacrum tower itself.”

“
Impossible. That was at least a mile across the river.” Meredith considered the geography, the journey she’d taken. “You mean the tunnel goes under the Thames?”

“
More than one of them. There are eight tunnels in all, each leading to the tower. So in effect they all have two ways in and out—but only the senior members are granted access to and from the tower. Certainly not filthy girls in overalls.”

Aunt Lily
plucked as many glass shards as she could out of Meredith’s soles, with little remorse. The excruciating pain would haunt her forever, if she even survived the night. After bandaging her feet with strips cut from a bar towel, Aunt Lily then rummaged through the pockets of Denton and Cybil, tossed their wallet and purse onto a table. “Gather all their valuables,” she said to Cathy. “It will add fuel to our story.”

“
Good. I may have found something here.” Cathy collected the wallets and keys and pocket watches, then handed Meredith a small, riveted brass object shaped like a fat cigar. Several tiny wheels protruded at one end. After seeing Meredith’s frown, she took it back, held one end of it up to her eye, pointed the other end at a wall lamp and fiddled with the wheels, demonstrating its use. “It’s a sort of microscope, for reading miniaturised plans and diagrams. Guard it closely. We may have something there.” And to Aunt Lily, “Who wants to go first?”

“
I will. There’s no time to draw straws.”

For some reason, scissors
-paper-stone flashed through Meredith’s mind. She kept it to herself.

“
Blade or bullet?” Cathy asked.

“
Oh, blade. Please God, don’t put a bullet in me.”

“
Wimp.”

“
Tramp.”

“
I should shoot you for making sure
I
get the bullet,” Cathy said. “Now, you want it in the arm or the side?”