The Gilded Scarab (40 page)

“We might as well blow trumpets to warn ’em we’re on our way,” I said. “There’s no way we won’t be seen by half the population of Londinium. We need a power blackout.”

The silence that followed only lasted a fraction of a moment, but it was definitely one of those dramatic cut-with-the-proverbial-knife jobs. On the Marconi, the Gallowglass choked and muttered. Beside me Sam Hawkins chuckled, and his big hand landed on my shoulder. He squeezed hard and, when I glanced at him, for the very first time there was approbation on his face.

He nodded. “Yes, we do. Helps us get into the museum too. And puts them at a disadvantage in there.”

The Gallowglass’s muttering had been to someone in the autocar with him. “We’ll drop off Matthews and a couple of men to take out the aethernet power relay station on the corner of Queen Square. That should do it. Three minutes.” The Gallowglass sounded grudgingly approving. “Good idea, Lancaster.”

We kept going. It was somewhere between one and two hours after midnight. There was little light in the streets, and we saw and heard no one on Duke Street. But Hart Street is a major thoroughfare, better lit and more populated—doxies and their clients, men walking home late from work, night soil men busy installing a new sewer line… the streets were not as crowded as during the day, but there were enough people for our presence to be noted.

We slowed to a fast walk, dodging the passersby and trying not to look conspicuous. Behind me I heard Alan gasp out something that might have been thankfulness for the respite. When I glanced back, he was hobbling between Will and Hugh, his face set and determined.

We were almost at Bloomsbury Square when the lights went out. And I mean every light went out. Building lights, street lights… everything. The whole of central Londinium plunged headlong into a darkness so profound it was primeval, more menacing than a mere absence of light. The Gallowglass’s men had found the relay station, obviously. Around us came faint shrieks and curses. An autobus passed us and lit the scene for an instant before disappearing again. The darkness in its wake seemed blacker and heavier.

It was a relief to turn left into Bloomsbury Square and head north. Now we could run again, where there was little traffic and no one about other than us. We were shadows moving within shadows. The only glow came from the aether tubes powering our weapons. That seemed fitting.

Hawkins led the way when we got to Montague Street. The side gate to the museum was a hundred yards up from the junction with Great Russell Street, set back behind a high spiked railing, an empty sentry box beside it. The museum was in darkness, a hulking, formless black shape against a sky almost as dark. Two autocars waited for us.

And eight men.

“Sam?” The tall man in the center of the group took a step forward. The Gallowglass. I couldn’t make much out through the night goggles, but he was as tall as his son. Broader.

“Sir,” said Hawkins, miserably.

The big guard beside the Gallowglass shuffled his feet to shift his weight, and his hand dropped to rest on the butt of his pistol. Like the Gallowglass, he didn’t take his eyes off me. He stood with the Gallowglass, I suspected, in the same relation as Hawkins did to Ned.

“This is Captain Lancaster, Mr. Brennan,” Hawkins said. “He’s clear.”

The guard stared at me for an instant before relaxing. “You’re all armed?”

“Yes. They got Rosens and Abrams, and the weapons cache in the coffeehouse, but they didn’t know about the stuff we had parked with Somers. He’s here too.” Hawkins gestured to us. “Mrs. Somers is watching the front of the museum for us. I don’t have blasting powder, though.”

“I do.” Brennan nodded toward the autocars. “Enough to start a small war.”

“Move the cars out of sight,” the Gallowglass said. “Take them into Russell Square out of the way.”

“Let’s get in there,” Brennan ordered. “Over the fence. I don’t want to blow the gate and risk anyone running to see what the noise is. Quick now!”

The autocars moved north and turned right into the Square, while we went over the gate piers, eight feet high, but the cast iron, molded with fancy wreaths and decorative flambeaux, gave just enough purchase. Alan was manhandled up by two Gallowglass men, and bore it patiently. There was no sign of a security guard or of Daniel’s helpers.

We ignored the wide goods doors and turned north to the public entrance. High, heavy doors, to be sure, but not nearly so massively solid as the goods entrance. We gathered in the shadow beside the set of shallow steps leading up to the door.

Brennan nodded to one of the men. “Minimum charge, Frank. Just enough to blow the lock.”

The man nodded and darted up the steps.

“Frank’s the best we have at using Nobel’s blasting powder,” Hawkins said in my ear. “He could blow up a hen’s egg without lifting her off the nest.”

As an aeronaut, I’d never seen much of this kind of action. I’d never used Nobel’s myself. I was more a drop-a-phlogiston-bomb-from-a-great-height type. Following Hawkins’s instructions I turned my back to the door, ducked my head, and let my night goggles hang by their strap, to preserve what night sight I had against the expected flash. “Are you all right?” I asked him.

I could just about see his head nod. “Yes.”

I found I was better at reading Sam Hawkins when I couldn’t see him very clearly. Hawkins had been looking after Ned for more than twenty years. The depth of misery in that quiet
yes
, the apprehension and fear, spoke of a love for Ned that probably rivaled that of the Gallowglass. I put my hand on his arm and he let me. For a moment or two we stood together, united for the first time.

The Nobel’s charge going off sounded like a firecracker above our heads, a sharp, flat crack. Forewarned, we all had our eyes closed, and the flash barely registered.

“We’re in,” said Frank.

Chapter 26

H
AWKINS
DARTED
to the door and pushed it open, leaping through to get to the alarm controls on the other side. Less than a minute later, we all stood inside the museum. One of the guards closed the door and wedged it shut.

“The alarms were off,” Hawkins said. “No power.” He switched off the small brimstone he’d had trained on the alarm control panel and engulfed us all in shadow.

The darkness was absolute. Nothing relieved the gloom. It pressed up against my eyes and shrank down to coat me like a second skin, absorbing what little light there was until everything was swallowed up into it. I was crushed under it, sank into it, wondered if I still had eyes to see. It hurt to breathe.

God, the dark was cold. So cold. It leached out all light and warmth and life.

My hand shook. It took two tries to grasp the night goggles hanging on their strap around my neck and fit them over my spectacles.

Thank God for them. The darkness sprang away, shaken off, and became a world of shades of gray. There was differentiation again. I was separate from it. The pressure eased off my chest, and I drew a deeper breath, and this time when I looked around, I could see the shapes of desks and chairs, a pair of sofas against the wall.

Hawkins’s voice pushed against the shadows, sounding muted and thick. “I’ve got the storeroom seeded with a kinetoscope camera and our own security transmitters, of course”—and why did that leave me completely unsurprised?—“but we’ll need to be at the other end of the museum to get in range and check they’re there with Ned. We’re in the Newspaper Reading Room—in the south-east corner, diagonally opposite where we need to be. We have a choice. Straight north and down the northeast staircase, and work our way at basement level to the storeroom. Or go west now through the entrance lobby, to the other side of the museum, and then straight to the northwest stairs.”

The storeroom was three floors down, in the northwest corner, under the Aegyptian rooms. We couldn’t get straight there—the Reading Room got in the way. We’d have to go round, dammit. More damn delay!

“Assessment?” asked the Gallowglass.

I cut in before anyone could speak. “There’s a clear line of sight down the whole length of the galleries on the other side. If Daniel has men sitting over the northwest stairs and guarding that corner, they’ll spot us moving before we can see them. Too risky for Ned. Sam’s first option makes most sense. Stay on this side of the building and stay out of sight for as long as possible.”

Another one of those silences that felt solid, as oppressive as the darkness of a moment before. The Gallowglass faced me, his head tilted to one side, his face obscured by the large-lensed goggles. In the gray semidarkness, they gave him the look of an ant, or some other insect, tilting its head to focus huge eyes on its target. Not a scarab. I would never look kindly on a scarab again.

“We must not underestimate your military training, Captain.” His tone was neutral. “Joe?”

That must be Brennan, because the big guard shrugged. “Agreed. No matter what, we’ll come on them when we get to the storeroom. The least warning we can give them, the better.”

The Gallowglass nodded. “Then lead the way, Sam. You know the museum better than any of us.”

I stuck close to Hawkins, Will on one side of me and Hugh behind with Alan. Through to the Newspaper Room and the Manuscript Saloon, and a right turn into the empty, echoing vastness of the King’s Library. It stretched up one entire side of the museum, two stories high. When I was a schoolboy, I’d always thought there were too many books, and most of them dry as dust. Now that I had to traverse the length of the library, navigating through reading desks and display cases full of parchments and old Latin tomes, I was convinced of it.

“Walk quiet,” Joe Brennan said. “Everything will echo in here.”

We threaded our way north, passing through a collection of statues on plinths. The King’s Library ended at a wide door through to the northeast staircase. Grand as anything I’d seen in Stravaigor House or Ned’s home, the broad marble treads led up into a faint grayish light above, and down into gloom.

“Close enough now.” Hawkins had picked up a handheld datascope from the autocar. He fired it up. It didn’t have a huge screen, and the Gallowglass and I pressed up close to see it. Hawkins worked the controls with deft fingers. “I should be able to tap into the microphones. I don’t reckon the kinetoscope’ll be a lot of use with no light. Let’s see if I can get it going….” A pause while Hawkins tapped commands into the little brass typewriting board.

The screen stayed black. There was no way to tell if it was lack of light or if the kinetoscope wasn’t working. There was something hopeless about staring at a dark screen hoping for—wait! A flash of something, not quite bright enough to be described as light. A sense of movement, a vague man-shaped shade slightly blacker than the darkness around it. It moved again. Definitely someone in there.

“It appears you were correct, Lancaster, and it’s the artifacts they’re after.” The Gallowglass leaned in closer. “But can we be sure Ned is there?”

“If I can pick up the phonic signal….” Hawkins unwound a wire from the back of the datascope and attached it to his earpiece. He turned one of the knobs, his hands surprisingly delicate and deft, despite their size. He frowned, listening. And even in the gray world of the night goggles, the sudden relief on his face, the relaxation of tense muscles, was obvious. “They’re here. I caught Ned’s voice. He’s alive.”

I missed the next minute or two. I half heard the Gallowglass’s fervent “Thank God!” and could see the lightening of Hawkins’s somber expression, but none of that really mattered.

Ned was alive. He was alive.

My knees gave way. I sat down plump on the stairs and put my face in my hands. I am not a praying man, but I prayed then. Not for long and not with any expectation that God would listen to a sodomite and a sinner, and not with words beyond a broken
Oh thank God, thank God
repeating inside my head like a phonograph disk caught under the needle. But I was blind and deaf to anything else for a small space of time while I realized precisely what Ned had come to mean to me.

Well, I suppose if a man has to fall in love for the first time, a dark stairwell in a deserted museum seems as good a place as any to do it.

“Here.” Hawkins was beside me, the datascope in his hand. “Listen.”

I glanced up. The Gallowglass stood to one side, his head down, while Joe Brennan stood at his shoulder, talking quickly and very quietly. “Shouldn’t he—”

“He’s heard. Here.” Hawkins plugged the wire into my earpiece.

“… too long.”
Daniel. Tetchy, and with a sharp edge betraying his tension and anger.

“You shouldn’t have had them put the lights out.”
Ned’s voice, as edgy as Daniel’s. I last heard that tone when he was demanding to know where Mr. Pearse was.

Ned was alive. He was alive and bad-tempered. My eyes stung. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

“I don’t know what you mean.”
Daniel was fretful.

“Get your friend to help.”
Ned again.

“Certainly not! He has hands like an Irish navvy, and this stuff’s too deli—”