The White City (25 page)

He took Ray by the wrists firmly, pulling him closer. “Promise me, Ray. You will say nothing to Jolie or any other … at least not until I am gone.”

“But why, Buck?”

“Promise me!”

Ray closed his eyes, struggling with what to say to convince Buck otherwise.

“Ray, you are dear to me. And I know you do not agree or understand, but if you hold any affection for me … swear that you will say nothing of what I told you.”

“I promise,” Ray said softly.

Buck’s fingers relaxed. “Thank you. I won’t allow her to sacrifice herself to save me. There is another way I might be healed.”

“What?”

Buck was silent a moment, wheezing through gritted teeth. “The Hall of Progress,” he murmured. “I feel it beckoning to me. My body longs for the Darkness. It draws me back.”

“You can’t—”

“Go,” Buck said with a wave of his hand. “I can’t even go up on deck in my state. Let an old man find some measure of peace, if only in sleep.”

Ray watched Buck a moment longer and walked out into the bright sunlight of the deck. Gulls laughed from the air above the lake. A dark line of clouds was rising in the west. Ray looked out at the choppy waters, drawn to little peaks of foam by the rising wind.

By nightfall, there would be a storm.

“I can probably get into the Hall of Progress unnoticed,” Ray said. The galley’s table was covered with Mister Lamprey’s map and scattered half-finished plates of fruit and cheese.

“As a crow?” Conker asked.

“I wouldn’t need to cross,” Ray said. “Crossing drains my strength. But just taking crow form, I could fly in an open door at night. It weakens me, but not as much as crossing.”

“Even so, you could search the Gog’s hall for weeks and never find the Nine Pound Hammer,” the Pirate Queen said, running a finger along the edge of her wineglass. “What we need to look into is—”

The door to the galley swung open. Old Joshua stepped in, his sunken mouth writhing wordlessly.

“What is it?” Mister Lamprey asked.

Jolie came around the old pirate, dripping puddles on the floor.

“Where have you been?” Ray asked, standing.

“Meu sirmoeurs!”
Jolie’s eyes flashed. “My sisters, Ray! I found two of my sisters. But first, my lady, I think you should come out onto the deck. There are strange boats about.”

The Pirate Queen followed Jolie and Old Joshua into the darkening air. Ray smelled the tang of the storm looming over the lake. No rain had fallen, but the wind was heavy with moisture. Lightning crackled over the land beyond. The Pirate Queen surveyed the lake. “The rest of you stay below. We don’t want to arouse suspicion.”

Ray held back with Jolie in the gangway’s door. He watched as the Pirate Queen met Piglet on the stern. They spoke in low, urgent voices, and Ray saw the Pirate Queen tilt her head as she looked around surreptitiously.

“My sisters and I noticed the boats following the
Snapdragon,
” Jolie said. “See, there and on the other side.”

Ray looked from starboard to port. They were paddle wheelers, four of them, not unlike the
Snapdragon
but painted gray, and with their paddles mounted at the front like most of the pleasure cruisers. Ray would not have thought them to be
any different than the myriad other boats going up and down the shore, except that these boats were only a hundred or so yards behind and traveling in a line toward them.

The Pirate Queen headed up the stairs to the pilothouse. Ray and Jolie backed from the doorway as Piglet approached. “Belowdecks!” she ordered, and the crowd clustering in the gangway scattered. Piglet grabbed Malley by the collar as he passed by her. “Ready the cannons. We might see some action tonight. I’m sending the lubbers with you so we can have fighting hands on deck.”

“Aye!” he grunted, and before Ray could wonder who the “lubbers” were, Malley pointed at him. “Come on, you bunch! I’ll show you how to load the smashers.”

Ray looked around at the others, but Conker and Si were already charging past him. Redfeather shrugged. “After you,” he said to Marisol.

“I don’t think Javidos is going to like this,” she said, guiding the copperhead up her sleeve to hide.

Pirates raced around the lower decks, loading rifles and donning blades and holsters. Grim glee crackled on every pirate’s face except Old Joshua’s. He sank into a chair in the galley and began gumming the cheese left on the plates like it might be his last meal. Big Jimmie came past, carrying Buck to the Pirate Queen’s chambers.

Ray grabbed Jolie’s hand. “Come on.” They headed into the crew’s quarters, where pirates had already pushed aside the bunks to clear room around the cannons. The smashers were short-barreled, squat guns mounted on sliding carriages on either side of the room. The gun ports were half latched to keep the cannons hidden.

“Gather up,” Malley said as he slapped a hand to the pommel of a cannon. “Technically speaking, these smashers are carronades. No good at shooting long-range, but great at tearing things up in closer quarters. Start rolling shot over here,” he said to Ray, Conker, and Redfeather. “Si, get those rammers down from the walls. Marisol and Jolie, see those trunks. They’ve got gunpowder cartridges. Start stacking them by the cannons.”

As everyone set to work, a voice cried out thinly from above, carried by the wind, “Hail! Prepare to be boarded.”

Rolling a cannonball across the floor, Ray caught a peek out the gunport to see a man standing on the bow of the nearest steamer. He held a megaphone and wore no hat, as the whipping wind would surely have carried it away. But he was dressed in a black plain-cut suit.

The Pirate Queen’s voice carried without such a device. “Under whose jurisdiction?”

The man raised the megaphone again to his mouth. “The Pinkerton Detective Agency, under the ordinances of the state of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago.”

“We’re not on land, Pinkerton!” the Pirate Queen roared. “You’ve no authority out here.”

“You’re suspected of harboring criminals,” the man continued. “Prepare to be boarded.”

“Harboring criminals,” said one of the pirates adjusting the turnscrew on the back of a smasher. “Ha! We’ve got nothing but criminals on board.”

But Ray didn’t laugh. These were not ordinary Pinkertons. These were agents of the Gog.

Malley and the other pirates loaded the cannons, showing
the lubbers how to ram home the shot with rope-padded rammers.

As Ray handed Malley a parchment cartridge, he looked out the port. Two of the steamers were veering together to cut off the Pirate Queen’s escape. A third remained at a distance. The last, the one with the agent who had hailed them on its bow, moved closer to the
Snapdragon
’s starboard side. Men with rifles began to line up against their railing.

“Full steam!” the Pirate Queen bellowed.

The
Snapdragon
lurched, accelerating through the choppy waves toward the merging steamers. Gunfire opened from the agents, pinging off the metal plates of the hull. Pirates whooped and screeched from the other rooms as they rushed up on deck to return fire.

A squeal of twisting metal sounded. Ray and the others held on to the cannons to keep from getting thrown. The
Snapdragon
trembled as it broke its way through the steamers.

“Open the hatches!” Malley called. As Ray dropped the latch on the nearest gun-port hatch, he saw the vessels pushed aside, their paddle wheels mangled by the reinforced bow of the
Snapdragon
.

“Run out!” Malley shouted.

Ray wasn’t sure what he meant, but as the pirates gathered around the cannons, grabbing onto the rope tackles attached on their sides, he and the others caught on that they were pushing the heavy cannons out through the ports.

Gunfire from the agents began to pepper the gun ports.

“You lubbers take cover,” Malley ordered.

“Javidos is really going to hate this,” Marisol said, as she
got behind an overturned bed and nestled the snake against her stomach.

Jolie grabbed Ray’s hand and pulled him to the safety of the floor. “I need to tell you something.”

“Now’s not the best—” Ray began.

But Jolie had already continued, “My sisters are held captive by the Gog.”

“Ready, boys!” Mally shouted.

With all the gunfire and chaos ensuing, Ray struggled to train his attention on what she was saying. “What … how do you know?”

“Two of my sisters found me in the lake,” Jolie said. “They said Cleoma never made it to the Terrebonne. She never brought the healing waters.”

“Fire!” Malley shouted. The cannons blasted, filling the room with deafening noise and the smell of burnt gunpowder.

As the smoke cleared, Malley peered out a hatch. “What!” he growled. “The smashers ain’t smashed nothing on them boats.”

“Some sort of heavy reinforcement,” another pirate said.

Malley scowled. “Reload. This time with canister shot.”

As Ray helped pull the cannon back from the gun port, he called across the barrel to Jolie. “Do your sisters know what happened to Cleoma?” he asked.

“No,” she said as Malley reloaded the cannon. “The others grew sick, all the ones who had ventured into the Darkness. They have been drawn up the Mississippi, up here to Chicago. The two who found me—Ediet and Yvonnie—they were not
sick. They followed the sisters to where they disappeared in the Gog’s hall. But Ediet and Yvonnie could not stop them, and they were afraid to enter—”

The
Snapdragon
’s hull resounded with a boom, and Ray fell backward into Redfeather. Piglet screamed down the gangway, “What just hit us?”

“Wasn’t it a cannon?” Malley called.

The door to the engine room below opened, and a pirate stuck his head out. “Something’s on the hull.”

“On?”
Malley said quizzically.

Conker was the first to his feet, racing through the door and down the stairs to the noisy engine room below. As Ray came down behind Redfeather, he saw a group of pirates—the four firemen and the lone engineer who operated the
Snapdragon
’s steam engine—staring at one of the sloped walls.

“What is it?” Conker asked.

“Shh,” a coal-blackened pirate said. “Listen.”

Small clanks and scraping sounded through the wall.

“That’s below the waterline, isn’t it?” Ray asked, trying to understand what was scratching at the side of the steamer.

“Aye,” the engineer said. “Iron reinforcement over a wooden hull. Good for protecting against hundred-ten pounders, but whatever that is ain’t from a gun.”

“Can’t be a person neither,” another pirate said. “Hit the ship too hard—”

A shrill grinding noise began. Ray covered his ears and backed away a step along with Redfeather.

“Something’s drilling through!” Conker shouted, looking around at the pirates. “Have you got weapons?”

The pirates gathered their wits and drew revolvers and cudgels
from their belts. The whining got higher and higher in pitch.

“It’s coming!” someone shouted just as a section of the hull, a circle of metal-plated wood, shot across the room, clanging against the engine and nearly hitting several of the pirates.

Water gushed in. It struck their legs, and had the engineer not grabbed Ray by the arm, he would have fallen. Steam hissed as the water hit the blazing firebox. The room was rapidly filling up with lake water.

Conker had ahold of Redfeather, tugging him up from the gush of water. “Get up above!” he shouted.

“What’s that?” a pirate squeaked.

In the water blasting through the hole, a circle of spinning saw blades emerged. But then the saw was drawn back as a hinged case covered the blades. In its place, nearly as big as the hole, was now a metal face made of brass, which looked to Ray like some catfish or grotesque bottom-dwelling amphibian. A series of metal whiskers sprang from its face, catching on the floor and engine and flexing to propel the clockwork beast forward into the center of the deck. It thrashed with a long tapered tail, smashing a pair of the pirates up against the ceiling. They fell into the water and disappeared.

The remaining trio of pirates opened fire with their pistols. Bullets scattered and sparked off the brass scales, and had the others not taken cover, someone might have been shot. Realizing their mistake, the pirates changed course, throwing aside their pistols and attacking with cudgels. Conker grabbed the coal shovel and swung it sideways like an ax, chopping through the tentacle-like whiskers that were pulling the creature closer and closer to the far wall.

“It’s going to drill through the other side!” Si shouted.

With half its whiskers gone, the creature thrashed, trying to hit Conker and the pirates with the crescent fins on its tail. Conker caught the tail, encircling his arms around it to stop it from swinging. With a grunt, he slipped the tip through the opening and pushed. Ray sloshed through the water to join Redfeather and the pirates as they helped. The clockwork beast fought but could not keep Conker and the others from forcing it into the hole, stifling the spray of water gushing in.

“You’ve got it!” Redfeather cried. “Keep pushing.”

As Conker leaned his weight into the creature’s face, a clanking of hinges sounded. The mouth began to open. Conker fought to keep ahold of the monster while shifting his hands away from the rapidly widening mouth.

As the hinges parted wider, a circular set of jagged teeth extended. Once fully exposed, they were as wide across as the fish’s body.

“Conker—!” Ray began to warn.

But Conker was already jumping aside, grabbing as many of the others as he could to pull them away. Ray leaped just as the circular teeth started spinning.

Released from their hold, the Gog’s clockwork fish shot across the deck, propelled by the water pressure behind it. It hit the far wall, and the drilling teeth began immediately grinding their way through the hull. Water once more poured into the engine room.

“It’s too late!” the engineer shouted from the stairs. “There’s no stopping it. The ship’s already sinking.”

As Ray swam with the others toward the stairs and made his way up to the gangway, he could feel the
Snapdragon
already
tipping to one side. Piglet was coming down from the upper deck. “What hit us?”