The Iron Duke (47 page)

What a bloody liar
, Mina thought, and set the bottle aside. It wasn’t helping. She wasn’t Yasmeen. She didn’t want to pretend to feel something else—and she didn’t want to hold her emotions at bay anymore.

Throughout the afternoon, Yasmeen paced the decks, smoking. Night fell to eerie growls below, from zombies drawn by the lanterns. Mina refused her wine over dinner. Yasmeen seemed in good spirits, and they’d spent enough time together of late that the occasional silences were no longer awkward. After she’d finished eating, Yasmeen pulled out a tattered magazine and settled into the pillows to read.

She caught Mina’s look and said, “If he survived the damn zombies in the Egyptian tombs, he can survive Venice.”

“No doubt.” Though after observing the number of zombies below, Mina wasn’t so certain. “Have you seen the tombs?”

“Not those underground, but I’ve flown over the pyramids several times. New Worlders will pay almost anything to see them. The only route that makes more is smuggling pilgrims into Mecca.” She narrowed her eyes at Mina and let the magazine fall against her chest. “Where would you go, if it could be anywhere?”

Back to the
Terror
. But unless she stopped imagining herself with him, the pain would never fade. “The Ivory Market,” she said. “The Horde quarter. So that I could see what it’s like to walk down a street without being stared at.”

“They would anyway. So small and pretty, and yet you look like a police inspector even when you aren’t wearing your uniform.” She pursed her lips. “I don’t want to return to the Ivory Market, but I know of another city where people wouldn’t care what you are. After we’ve picked up Fox, how does a week in Port Fallow strike you?”

A week where nobody cared what she was—before she returned to London, where people cared so much that she couldn’t have what she most wanted.

“I couldn’t pay—”

Yasmeen waved that off. “Trahaearn paid enough.”

Twenty-five livre for one day, and that was only to Calais. Mina couldn’t imagine the amount Lady Corsair had made on this journey.

“How much is Fox paying you?”

“Five livre.” Her hard stare dared Mina to say anything.

Prudently, Mina didn’t.

 

 

Mina woke, staring into the ceiling of the narrow cabin. From giddiness to devastation, then muzzled by wine—but for the first time in several days, her mind was sharp.

And she was clearly an idiot.

Through the porthole, she heard the growls and hisses from below. Fox still hadn’t shown or signaled to the airship. She hauled on her overcoat, buckling it over her nightshirt as she left the cabin.

Sheffield wasn’t Black Guard. He wouldn’t have sent the order to the assassin. Burnett
couldn’t
have—he’d been on a ship near the Ivory Market. She’d missed someone.

Arriving at the captain’s cabin, she knocked softly. Yasmeen opened the door wearing a crimson silk wrapper that clung to her breasts. She’d uncovered her hair. Her ears poked through the narrow braids, revealing the black, tufted points.

The sweet, sickly smell emanating from the darkened cabin was unmistakable.

Blissed on opium, Yasmeen’s pupils were dilated as she looked Mina over. She smiled slowly, and asked with a purr, “Yes, inspector?”

“Burnett didn’t order Baxter’s assassination. We have to return to London, so that I can discover who did.”

“Yes, I suppose you should. Do you have five livre?”

Of course she didn’t. “No.”

Yasmeen shut the door in her face.

 

 

When the aviators’ shouts sounded above decks a week
later, Mina was pacing her cabin like a woman crazed, and trying to convince herself that she’d have no better luck returning home if she jumped from the airship and took her chances with the zombies all across Europe.

She climbed up into the glow of the deck lanterns. At the side of the airship, Yasmeen was ordering the rope ladder tossed over. Rifles cracked as the aviators shot into the dark at the zombies below.

Fox climbed over the gunwale, dirt encrusted over his skin, clothes hanging off his frame, his mouth hidden in a month’s growth of beard. He set down his glider—folded now into some other contraption, Mina saw—and looked up at Yasmeen. His face held none of the eagerness he’d displayed the first time he’d boarded. His features were hard, dangerous.

“Take me to the Ivory Market now,” he told her.

Mina couldn’t see the captain’s face, but the aviators around them went suddenly still.

Yasmeen’s voice was pleasant. “Our agreement was that I’d return you to Chatham, Mr. Fox.”

“I’m changing it.” Withdrawing a heavy purse from his belt, he tossed it at her feet. “The Market. Now.”

“By way of Chatham. I’ve another passenger, Mr. Fox. I cannot kidnap her.”

Jaw setting, he pulled his revolver and aimed it at the captain. Mina’s hand went to her own weapons, but she wondered if shooting him would be necessary. Beneath his determination lay obvious and severe exhaustion. He might simply drop where he stood within another moment.

Yasmeen lifted her hands out to her sides. Her voice softened to a purr. “Put that away now, Mr. Fox, and we’ll both pretend that four weeks of running from zombies has muddled your head. You’ll sleep—and wake up alive. But only if you put it away
now
.”

Without lowering the gun, he glanced at an aviator. “Set the course for—” He broke off, his gaze searching the spot where Yasmeen had been. His head turned.

She came up from behind him, as if she climbed up the outside of the ship’s hull. Her forearm snagged around his throat and yanked him back over the rail. Both disappeared.

Heart racing, Mina sprinted forward. Before she reached the side, Yasmeen flipped back up, landing in a crouch on the gunwale.

Gingerly, she hopped to the deck. “Pull that ladder up, Mr. Pegg. Ms. Khouri, fire the engines. Take us the hell out of here.”

Blue heavens.
“And Fox?”

With the toe of her boot, Yasmeen flicked his purse up to her hand, and continued on. “I threw him over. Will you arrest me, inspector?”

No.
He’d tried to take her ship at gunpoint. Even over English soil, Mina wouldn’t have arrested her. But she was still shocked by the suddenness of it—and saddened by the stupidity of it all. She hadn’t known Fox very long, but what she had known, she’d liked well enough.

She watched the captain drop through the hatch to the lower deck and moved back the rail. There was only darkness below. Only the hisses and growls of the zombies. Fox must be one of them now.

What had possessed him to do something so foolish? What possible motive could he have had for immediately heading to the Ivory Market? Not just exhaustion or insanity.

She glanced down at his glider.

 

 

Mina found Yasmeen in her cabin, downing a snifter of
green absinthe. Feathers floated in the air—she’d torn the pillows to pieces. She looked at Mina as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

“What’s that?”

Mina held up his glider. “It transforms into a reinforced carrier.”

“Oh? For what?”

Kneeling beside the low table in a pile of feathers and shredded silk, Mina opened the carrier. Yasmeen sucked in a breath.

Between carefully cushioned plates of glass lay a small sketch, the paper yellow and fragile, the ink faded to brown. A study of a wing skeleton, paired with a mechanical counterpart created of a wooden frame manipulated by pulleys and strings—a glider contraption, perhaps.

The captain stopped with her fingers hovering above the glass, as if not daring to touch even that. “Is it real?”

Mina’s gaze slipped over the neat, backward script. Though she couldn’t read it, the shape of Leonardo da Vinci’s handwriting was as familiar to Mina as her own—as it was to everyone in England and the New World. If this was genuine, it would be worth thousands of livre. Tens of thousands.

And because it might be genuine, she gently closed the contraption again.

“I’ll find his sister,” Yasmeen said.

“To give her this?”

She grinned. “No. To tell her that I killed him. If I gave her this, she’d have no reason to write.”

“She won’t have anything to write about now, anyway.”

“I suppose not. The stupid bastard. Why do they always try to control
everything
? Why can’t they just let us be?”

Men?
Mina shook her head. Her experience with them had obviously been different than Yasmeen’s. “I don’t know,” she said.

Yasmeen sighed before sliding her a wry, sideways glance. “To England, then?”

 

 

To England, and back to the gray. Clouds blanketed
London—not the yellow fog that often came at night, yet still low enough that Yasmeen could sail in during the afternoon without drawing much notice. Mina had said to drop her in Chatham, but the aviator captain had only looked at her for a long moment, and Mina had decided not to argue. As they flew closer, following the path of the Thames, she was glad for Yasmeen’s stubbornness.

London was burning in patches.

Across the river from the Isle of Dogs, the navy docks had caught fire. To avoid the thick column of smoke, Yasmeen sailed over the island—and the Iron Duke’s docks hadn’t been touched. Mina’s breath caught painfully in her throat when she recognized the
Terror
, her sails furled and decks empty. Though she’d been trying to avoid looking at it, her gaze flew to his house. Was Rhys home now? How long ago had they arrived? Had he tried to contact her—and what had he thought when he’d learned that
Lady Corsair
hadn’t returned to England yet?

But the airship sailed on, and unless she followed the rail to the stern with spyglass in hand, she had to let that small glimpse of him go. With an ache in her throat, she looked forward again. They flew past the tower and its ruined wall, and the grounds that no one had built on in nine years.

“Inspector!” Yasmeen came to the rail. “Look there. My men spotted steelcoats. Near the prison, they said.”

In the city?
Revulsion turned in her stomach. Perhaps they were necessary on navy ships, for protection on the seas and abroad, but nothing in London wanted or warranted the use of that much force. If not for the ratcatchers, the police wouldn’t even carry guns with bullets—just the opium darts.

She found the steelcoats through the spyglass, dozens upon dozens of them. In their great hulking suits, the marines formed a solid line in front of Newgate prison, apparently guarding the entrance from—

“There’s a mob!” Astonished, she strained to see. “They’re packed solid from Ludgate to the meat market!”

Great blue heavens.
What had happened? Had the police called in the navy’s steelcoats to help manage it? Mina simply couldn’t imagine Commissioner Broyles doing anything of the sort.

She glanced up the river toward headquarters and froze. Where was
that
smoke coming from? “Is Scotland Yard on fire?”

Yasmeen signaled to her men. “We’ll soon see.”

Within a few minutes, the source of the fire came into view—not headquarters, but the Admiralty building across the street. Yasmeen ordered the sails furled, and she climbed down the rope ladder with Mina. Despite the fire, the street was all but deserted. A pair of constables rushed out of headquarters as they approached the entrance, not even pausing to gawp at Yasmeen’s tall boots, shirtsleeves, or the pistols and knives studding her person.

“Constables!” They stopped at Mina’s voice. “What’s happened?”

“The Iron Duke’s been arrested, sir! He’s set to hang at sunset!”

She couldn’t comprehend it. “Arrested by whom?”

“The Lord High Admiral, sir, as
Marco’s Terror
came into dock this morning. The duke’s at Newgate now—as we’ve been ordered to be.” Without waiting for dismissal, they began to move on at a fast clip. “Your man’s upstairs with Hale, inspector. They’re coming right after us.”

Headquarters’ first level was as empty of people as the street. Mina ran up the stairs, followed by Yasmeen. She almost collided with Newberry on the stair landing.

“Sir?” He stepped back into the hallway, his eyes wide with shock and relief. “Thank God, sir! We thought you were on the ship—and in Newgate with the others now.”

“
All
of the crew was arrested?” Had everyone in London gone completely mad? “Why?”

“Because the Iron Duke destroyed the Black Guard’s weapon.” Hale joined them in the hall. Her gaze flicked to Yasmeen. “Captain Corsair. Thank you for bringing her home.”

Yasmeen smiled, showing her sharp teeth. “Is that a dismissal?”

“Not if the Iron Duke is a friend of yours.” Hale looked to Mina again. “Your report arrived.”

And had detailed Sheffield’s involvement in this. “Sir, I’m sor—”

Hale held up her hand. “Mr. Sheffield confessed all to me the day you left—including that it was the Duke of Dorchester who approached him, asking for the invitation to the auction in return for my safety.”

Smoking hells.
The same man who’d arrested Rhys. “The Lord High Admiral, sir?”

“Yes. As you can imagine, that put me in a delicate position. My involvement—my
former
involvement—with Mr. Sheffield immediately made my investigation into Dorchester’s activities . . . problematic, and anyone would have regarded Sheffield’s confession as suspect. I lacked evidence of any sort. Your Newberry provided me with the first bit.”

“That wiregram came from Dorchester’s office, sir,” Newberry said.

And they couldn’t have arrested the highest ranking member of the Royal Navy on so little evidence: Sheffield’s word, and the memory of a clerk in Chatham.