The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man (38 page)

She turned until she was facing the Rake sitting on Burton’s left. Her eyes were jet black, glinting in the smoke like gemstones.

Lady Mabella. The murderer of Sir Alfred Tichborne.

“Travel through the astral plane, my child, and—”

She paused.

Her eyes swivelled to Burton and fixed upon him.

“You!”

He jerked back in his chair and gasped, tried to stand but couldn’t. Pain gripped the back of his head as if a cold hand had clamped down on his brain.

“Intruder! Spy!”

She had not spoken aloud. Her voice was now inside his skull.

The host twitched and choked as the ectoplasm continued to flow from his mouth. The two men whose astral bodies had departed sat blank-eyed and motionless. The three other men turned their heads and regarded Burton. One of them said something but no sound emerged. There was no sound in the room at all; a profound, unnatural silence had fallen.

Everything slowed and became motionless. Only the ghostly woman moved.

Something wormed its way into Burton’s mind.

“Who are you?”
she hissed.

He flinched and fought against her intrusive probing.
Get out of my head!

“My! How resistant! I am impressed! You have willpower! No matter, your defences are nothing to me. Your name is Richard Burton. Ah. I see you have a reputation. A scholar, an explorer, and—an irritant!”

Withdrawing into himself, the king’s agent visualised the mental chambers and structures he’d established through self-mesmerism. His knowledge of Edward Oxford—and of a future that had been destined but which was now cut loose and replaced—he set aside. He devalued all the routes to it and made them seem so entirely insignificant that they would, he hoped, be overlooked. At the same time, he strengthened the mental walls surrounding his more personal and sensitive memories and tried to make them impenetrable.

He was using his own insecurities to entice her away from the information he needed to protect.

It worked.

“No, no
, malchik moi!
There is no hiding!”

The words were like a blade, running him through.

Who the hell are you? Don’t try to fool me with that Lady Mabella nonsense!

A cruel chuckle echoed in his skull.

“Ah yes, the unfortunate Tichborne clan and their silly curse! How convenient that was!”

His walls were breached.

Stop!

“My, a complicated little thing, aren’t you? What is this? You are in the employ of the king himself! So I was right! You
are
a spy!”

The beady black eyes bored into his. He struggled and failed to look away.

He tried to distract her:
For all your hokum, you’re nothing but a murderer and thief. You killed Jean Pelletier, didn’t you?

“
Pah! I simply appeared before him and he dropped dead from fright, the weak fool.
”

You took his diamonds. And then the François Garnier Choir Stones.

“
Yes, yes. I lifted them through the solid metal of a safe just as I could pull your brain from your skull without breaking the skin of your scalp.
”

And replaced them with onyx crystals. Why? Did you think to delay investigations into the matter?

“Yes. I see that it didn’t work. How did you discover my little deception? Let us find out.”

He felt her burrowing deeper and deeper, and he allowed the intrusion, for as she penetrated his mind, he found that he was able to stealthily enter hers.

“Bozhe moi!
Brunel and Babbage! So, the detestable Technologists have an interest in the diamonds, too!”

Babbage had plans for the stones. Your intentions, though, seem rather more nefarious, and to achieve those ends, you’ve made unwitting pawns of the Rakes, have you not?

“Unwitting? More like witless. The vacant-headed fools! Becoming the leader of their pathetic clique was child’s play to one such as I.”

The woman’s weakness was obvious: she possessed overweening vanity. She was supremely confident in her abilities and, having no knowledge of his Sufi training, vastly underestimated him. However, in order to inveigle information from her, he had to keep her occupied, and the only way to do that was to sacrifice the deeper reaches of his own mind—to give her access to his insecurities, sorrows, and regrets.

It was agony.

Burton felt his heart tighten as she infiltrated the grief he associated with the Berbera expedition—but he pushed through the pain and surprised her with a question:
Who is Arthur Orton?

His unexpected probe was so forceful that the answer flared in her mind before she could stop it. Burton saw confirmation that the Tichborne creature and Orton the butcher were one and the same. The man had been chosen for her scheme because he possessed a peculiarly well-developed ability to project coercive mental energy, though he was oblivious to this talent. He’d been using it unknowingly in Wagga Wagga to attract customers to his shop, and they had come, despite fearing and loathing him due to his disgusting appetite for raw meat. Implanting the Choir Stones beneath his scalp had greatly enhanced the ability.

The woman’s invasive presence assaulted Burton with greater intensity.

“Very clever, Gaspadin Burton! But I shall get far more from you than you can get from me! Already I am deep inside your memories. I see poor Lieutenant Stroyan there. You killed him. How careless of you!”

Still she misjudged him, and while she dug her claws into his painful memories, she also exposed much more of herself than she realised. He felt a sense of triumph blazing through the woman. She gloried in the fact that Britain’s labourers were falling under the spell of her great deception, eagerly swallowing the story of a lost aristocrat who’d returned home to find himself snubbed by the society that produced him simply because he’d worked as a commoner. It was the perfect means to rouse their sleeping passions.

How valuable the Tichbornes had been! Her faux prodigal not only gave her the means to disseminate her evil influence among the working classes, but had also secured for her the South American diamond.

Burton, gathering information, struggled to resist her taunts. He remembered his friend’s courage, and told her:
Stroyan died as he would have wished—a brave man performing his duty.

“Nonsense! You killed him! The guilt eats away at you!”

Again, he tried to surprise her into revealing more:
Tell me, madam, where did you find out about the Eyes of Nāga?

He felt her reel at the question.

“Dorogoi!” she exclaimed.
“You know too much!”

This time, however, an answer did not inadvertently enter her thoughts. Instead, Burton detected the presence of an impassable barrier, as if part of the woman was—was—

He couldn’t define what he sensed.

“How I learned of the Eyes is of no consequence. All that matters is that I employ them to open the minds of the poor and the downtrodden. You see how I clear the blinkers from their eyes?
”

You speak as if you are performing some manner of social service, but that is not your intention, is it? Tell me the truth. What do you hope to achieve?

“Revolution.”

You want to overthrow the British Empire?

“I want to demolish it.”

Why?

“Because I am a seer
, malchik moi.
I have cast my mind into the future and I know the destiny of my beloved country. I have watched Mother Russia brought to her knees. I have watched her wither and die!
”

What the hell has this to do with Britain?

“Everything! See what I have seen!”

White-hot pain seared into Burton’s head. He screamed his anguish as the woman’s clairvoyant vision flooded into his brain—too much information, too fast, blasting down the channel that joined their minds, overwhelming his senses, telling him far more even than she’d intended, and driving him into a near stupor.

Paralysed in thought as well as body, he watched helplessly as her prophecy slowly unfolded in his mind’s eye.

Blood.

Light.

A first taste of air.

A child is born in Russia, the son of peasants.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.

He is blessed—or perhaps cursed—with clairvoyant powers.

His childhood is unhappy. Everyone knows there is something different—strange—about him. He is shunned. Only his siblings give him the attention he craves. He adores them. Then his sister drowns in a river, and his brother, saved from the same fate, is taken by pneumonia.

Rasputin knows that one day he will also die in water. The knowledge terrifies him—unhinges him. He becomes erratic and violent. His parents banish him to a monastery deep in the Ural Mountains, unaware that the establishment has been overrun by the banned Khlysty sect; flagellants, whose orgiastic rituals end in physical exhaustion, and, for Rasputin, in ecstatic mediumistic hallucinations.

Two years later, now a lanky, straggle-haired youth, he emerges from the mountains, intoxicated with a sense of his own importance and in no doubt that he will gain control of his country and make of it a great power. He has seen it. It has been prophesied. It is the future.

Before his twentieth birthday, he marries and comes to hate his wife, has children and is repelled by them, and indulges in affairs—many affairs—before walking out of his home, never to return. He travels back and forth across Russia, and, after three years, makes his way to Saint Petersburg.

Soon the whole city knows him. They call him the “Mad Monk.” He is the holy man who heals the sick, who sees the future, and who gets drunk and seduces married women and their daughters.

The tsaritsa comes to him, drawn by his reputation as a miracle worker. Her son is dying. Rasputin eases the boy’s suffering. He gains the royal family’s trust. By now he is an alcoholic and a sexual deviant, but he has the tsar’s ear.

A new century dawns.

For years, Britain and Prussia—now United Germany—have been engaging in skirmishes in Central Africa. The tensions deepen, and Britain’s Technologists begin an arms race with Germany’s Eugenicists. The British government is nervous. It has come to regard eugenics as an insidious evil, a menace to civilisation, an antithesis to freedom and the rights of man.

The prime minister seeks to publicly downplay the growing threat from the foreign power. After all, the British Empire is massive. It counts North America, India, the Caribbean, Australia, and huge chunks of Africa among its many territories. What can a comparatively small nation like Germany do against such a global power?

Then Britain’s reclusive monarch, King Albert, dies, aged ninety. Lord Palmerston’s masterful manipulation of the constitution had given Albert the throne after the assassination of Queen Victoria, but has now left it with no obvious successor.

The republican movement gains popular support. The country is thrown into crisis. The government is distracted.

Germany invades France.

Germany invades Belgium.

Germany invades Denmark.

Germany invades Austria—Hungary.

Germany invades Serbia.

They all fall.

The Greater German Empire is born.

Britain declares war.

Emperor Herbert von Bismarck sends his chancellor, Friedrich Nietzsche, to Russia to win the backing of the tsar.

Secretly, Nietzsche also meets with Grigori Rasputin. It’s the first time they’ve encountered each other in the flesh, but for many months they’ve been in mediumistic contact, for Nietzsche, like Rasputin, is profoundly clairvoyant. He is also a profligate, drug-addict, and sadomasochist.

They have a plan.

Rasputin will manipulate the tsar into allying Russia with Germany. When the British are defeated and their Empire is carved up, assassinations will be arranged. The Bismarck and Romanov dynasties will be destroyed. Together, Nietzsche and Rasputin will become the supreme rulers of the entire Western world. They convince themselves that they will be strict but benign.

It begins.

Tsar Nicholas has no resistance to Rasputin’s mesmeric influence. Russia declares war against Britain.

For three appalling years, the conflict rages, spreading across the whole world, with the British Technologists’ steam machines on one side and the German Eugenicists’ adapted flora and fauna on the other.

An entire generation of men is slaughtered.

Europe is battered until it is little more than one gigantic, muddy, blood-soaked field.

Britain falters, but fights on, and when the British American States join the conflict, Germany is bruised and, for the first time, retreats.

Russian troops arrive in the nick of time. There is another great push forward. For two more years, the battles seethe back and forth over Europe’s devastated territories, until finally, the biggest empire the world has ever seen topples and falls.

The war ends. The spoils are divided. The treachery follows.

Tsar Nicholas and his entire family are rounded up and shot in the head. Bismarck is garrotted. His family and supporters are executed.

Friedrich Nietzsche rises to power, receives life-prolongation treatments, and begins a near-century-long reign of terror that will earn him the sobriquet
The Devil’s Dictator.

Britain, from its deathbed, makes one final gesture of defiance. Two days before Rasputin is to be named president of Russia, three members of the palace staff surround him. They are British spies. They produce pistols and, at point-blank range, pull the triggers. All three guns jam. Rasputin has long feared assassination, and projects around himself a permanent mediumistic energy field that alters the structure of springs, robbing them of their power. No trigger mechanism will function anywhere near him.

He laughs in the faces of the would-be killers, and, with a careless gesture, causes their brains to boil in their skulls.

The following day, he is poisoned with cyanide. Realising that he’s the subject of a second assassination attempt, he slows down his metabolism and begins to consciously secrete the poison out through his pores. Four men corner him and hack at him with an axe. They bludgeon him into submission, bind him hand and foot, and wrap him in a carpet. Rasputin is carried to the ice-bound Neva River and thrown in.