Whitechapel Gods (14 page)

Well, she couldn’t very well dispose of it
here,
and quite besides: it might be needed in the crooks and corners of the Blink. One never knew, in such a place.

She loitered out front of an apartment building—as if waiting impatiently for someone to meet her there—until the cloaks had slipped out of sight into one of the Blink’s alleys. She counted ten heartbeats, then stole in after them.

She dogged them through the Blink’s random turns, following with ease the tick-tock regularity of their footfalls. After a dozen twists, they stopped, and Missy crept to the next corner to listen.

“Where are we, you dullards?” one of them boomed.

“Dunno,” said another.

“What?”

“Er…dunno, sir?”

“Harmony is built upon obedience, whatever-your-name-is. The spring turns the gear, and the more the gear protests, the less the efficiency of the whole.” Missy heard something that could only have been a sharp blow. “So
be respectful
!”

“Er…yessir.”

Their footsteps began again, and retreated off. Missy stepped around the corner and pursued them into a section of alley particularly twisted and misshapen.

A hand darted from a close nook and clasped onto her shoulder.

“That’s right! Come on!” she screamed, whirling with one rapid step and plunging her hand into her bag. Heat and rage flared up in her so rapidly that she did not recognise the wide eyes until her fingers were at the trigger with her arm tensed to draw.

Two long-fingered hands waved surrender. “My fault. I ought to have learned from the last time I snuck up on you.”

Missy gasped. “Oliver? You ass! Have you any idea what you almost made me do?”

Oliver grabbed her wrist and pulled her down a side alley. “Oh, I can imagine it.”

She flushed. “I don’t think you can. What are you doing here? What is all that?” She gestured to the pack Oliver wore, and the long rifle strapped to its side.

Oliver ground his teeth a moment before replying. “Bailey’s called us in. We’re going down, Michelle.”

“Down?”

“Into the downstreets.”

Missy stood stunned a moment, as the statement sank in.

I told you it would not last, bird, this fantasy of yours.

She crossed her arms to keep them from shaking. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re coming back?”

Oliver’s smile looked forced. “That’s my plan, even if Bailey doesn’t share it.”

“You are a poor liar, Mr. Sumner.”

Oliver adjusted his pack’s straps and regarded her with a furrowed brow.

“I should catch up. I stayed behind only to ensure they didn’t follow us.”

“I suppose you should,” said Missy hotly. “Duty to England and all that rubbish.”

“Michelle…”

“I don’t want to hear it, Oliver.”
I don’t want to hear you tell me you are not going to die, that I’m not going to have to go back to…to…
“If you must follow that madman to an early grave, who am I to get in your way?”

“I’ll be back inside a day,” he protested.

“I
don’t
want to hear it! Your fool’s crusade is your own.”

“My fool’s crusade is—”

“You won’t come back. You know it; it’s written all over your face.”

“Oh, for the love of Pete—here.”

He jammed a hand at her, holding a leather-bound book. Missy looked from his eyes to the golden letters on the cover and back.

“What kind of absurd gesture is this?” she said.

“I’m leaving this with you,” he said. “I intend to read it when I get back. I’m told”—his face relaxed a bit—“that it’s a ripping good read.”

“Oh, now
there’s
a reason for returning,” she replied, snatching the book.

Missy knew he was staring at her, but did not raise her eyes from the golden script. As the silence dragged, she felt an unwelcome heat creeping up her neck.

“Try not to give up on me,” he said at last. “If all goes well, we’ll be eating gruel in Sherwood by morning.”

Missy jammed the book in her handbag.

“Hadn’t you better be off?” she said.

Oliver swallowed hard before replying. “I suppose I should.”

They shared a long look, filled with unspoken words.

Oliver turned and vanished into the alleys. Missy stood alone for a while.

Shall you make your way back to me now, little one, or will you await the news?

Be quiet.

He
would have had faith in
her,
and so she would wait until morning.

An hour ago I severed my left hand with a hatchet. A new one has grown in its place. I now have fingers of brass and iron, fingers strong enough to accomplish my next task, which is the removal of my eyes.

II. vi

Oliver was afraid of heights.

“I’m not bloody afraid of heights.”

Tommy snorted politely. “Come now, Ollie. You’re white as a ghost.”

“You clam up, Tom, or so help me I’ll be riding you down like a sled,” Oliver snapped.

Defiant pride managed to rise up and choke his fear for a few seconds. Oliver stepped up to the rim of the tiny ledge and raised his lantern high. The light, focused by a curved mirror of polished silver behind the flame, shot out into the dark, returning visions of smoke and the occasional gleam, indicating the presence of a sapling steel beam. Already the glass goggles Bailey had given him had begun to blur from greasy deposits that seemed carried on the very air.

He glanced downwards as long as he dared, charting the treacherous hand-over-foot route down into Old Whitechapel. The “rusted stair” was a path over, under, and along the maze of beams that held up the Shadwell Underbelly and went on to support the Concourse above. The path, such as it was, had been marked by smears of yellow paint, the legacy of some long-forgotten explorer with more gumption than sense.

People in this city have a strange definition of the word “stair.”

Bailey had led his team down first.

“How long, Phin?”

Phineas, reclining against the ladder leading to the public house above, had Tommy’s captured clickrat, now eerily still, out in his palm. After a few seconds, he mumbled, “Eight minutes,” and returned to his examination.

“Let’s prepare, then,” Oliver ordered. Bailey had directed them to wait ten minutes, and then start their descent.

Oliver adjusted the bandages on his right hand and the kerchief over his mouth, then buckled the clumsy express rifle over his shoulders, tightening the dual straps to keep it from swinging too much. He also wore a belt of ammunition about his waist, a two-quart canteen of water at his hip, and a pack on his shoulder into which had been stuffed dried jerky, kerosene, an extra face mask, a compass, a few more bandages, a matchbox, and one stick of dynamite.

“Why the dynamite, sir?” Oliver had asked.

“All men in my company carry a single stick of dynamite” was Bailey’s answer.

His load secured, Oliver slipped one foot cautiously over the edge. “I feel like a packhorse.”

“And look like a Swiss mountain hermit,” Tommy contributed.

“More an Edinburgh vagrant,” Phineas said, passing the rat back to Tom. “They can’t climb either.”

Oliver found purchase on the first dull smudge of paint, set his weight on it, and slowly lowered himself from the sane, flat, sturdy ledge into total structural madness. A gust of wind shoved him sideways like a soft but insistent pillow and he had to scramble for some minutes to find spaces for his other foot and his two hands.

“Bugger you both,” Oliver spat through clenched teeth, that being the most scathing comment that visited him. He craned his neck around, spotted the next yellow marker, and began shuffling his way along the beam, thankful for once for the constant grit and ash that gave his fingers and soles purchase. Four agonising eternities later, he discovered two beams running parallel and almost level. Tommy trotted up behind him an instant later.

“Not so bad a climb, really,” Tommy said, grinning.

“I always knew you were an ape, Tom.”

“Apes walk on the ground, Ollie.
Monkeys
swing in the trees.”

“
Lions
injure things when they are pestered.”

Tommy guffawed merrily, having no apparent need for mask or goggles. “Our regular John Bull fancies himself a lion, then. Knighthood in the future, I’ll wager.”

“If it turns one into an arrogant sot like Sir Bailey, Her Majesty can keep it.” Oliver fished a foot down for a suitable beam. The next marker lay some twenty feet below. Three steps later, with his nose pressed almost flat against an upshooting beam, Oliver beheld a clickrat skitter down and stop right before his face.

It’s going to bite me,
he realised. Slowly, he peeled his left hand from its roost, leaving his injured one bearing most of the weight, and reached for his derringer, then reconsidered and reached for the water canteen instead. One quick swat would do the job.

“Jeremy Longshore the Third hereby names you as his first knight. Arise, Sir Lion-upon-the-Cliffs.”

The clickrat swivelled and scuttled up the beam, leaping to Tom’s arm when it got close enough, then clambering down his jacket into his pocket. Oliver shook his head and clamped his hand back onto the beam.

“Good God, Tom, have you
tamed
that thing?”

“Jeremy Longshore cannot be tamed,” Tommy pronounced. “That is the essence of him: solid will and indomitable spirit. He is the very symbol of perseverance.”

Phin appeared behind him, panting. “Bugger that, bolts-for-brains. He don’t have muscles to ache or bones to pop about. Jesus, but I’m old.”

“And cantankerous as well,” said Tom. “Curmudgeonly, even. Perhaps churlish, if you prefer.”

“Right, laugh. Enjoy that young body while you can. The clacks is like to eat you up by your thirty-fifth year.”

Oliver gaped. “Phineas!”

Phineas frowned down at him. “Oh, don’t be such a woman. I expect to wake up dead every morning with my nerves given out. Can’t be easy on them, all this seein’ and hearin’ I do.”

“But how could you say…”

Tom waved him silent. “It’s all right, Ollie. That kind of talk doesn’t bother me.”

“You know what bothers
me,
” Phin said. “Your new toy, there, is what. It isn’t really a clickrat.”

“Quite right,” Tom said, warming back to his new acquisition. “He is such a picture of majesty as no clickrat could equal.”

“I mean it in earnest, tin-teeth. It has a different seeming to it. Something different inside.”

Oliver interrupted: “May we get moving? I would not lay odds on Bailey waiting for us.”

He calculated the contortions necessary for the next step, and stretched out for it.

“In a sour mood, is our chief,” Tommy said. His voice grew faint with distance and the intervening thickness of the air. “He needs the company of a certain good woman.”

Nothing more was heard, not that Oliver would have spared the attention to listen to it.

Four marks and a thousand drops of sweat later, the faded light of the Underbelly above had vanished, and Oliver could not see the next mark. He unhooked the lamp from his belt and swung it in all directions, finding nothing but serpents of dust and ash coiling and uncoiling at random. The air moved, rolling past him like a great ocean wave. A rumbling sound passed with it, shaking the beams, like the breath of the Mother herself.

He leapt recklessly to his next perch, skidding a bit as he landed on a moist stretch of steel. Oliver scrambled to fight the platform’s extreme slope, his hands flying out in all directions. His nails found rivets in the platform and dug under them. Pain pricked up his fingers; annoying, but better than the alternative. His injured hand skittered uselessly across the surface, unable to grip to anything.

I’m ill suited to this,
Oliver concluded. He slid one foot carefully towards the more level beams running up the right side of the platform. Before him, the platform’s slope ended in grey nothingness. Some of the toxic air slipped around his mask and down his windpipe. He coughed it out, violently, shaking as his chest caved inward. A burning sensation flared at the back of his skull.

The smoke turned and looked at him. Or maybe it was something within the smoke. Something, in any case, with eyes and a face resembling human. It blinked and was gone.

Oliver froze and tried not to breathe.

Memories of Mama Engine flickered across his mind and vision, playing on the currents of ash. Had that been something real, or the product of a violated imagination?

Oliver felt unmistakably like he was not alone. Quiet, indecipherable whispers reached out to him from a burgeoning fire at the back of his head. Eyes searching the smoke, he reached for his derringer.

When it appeared again, he swung at it—
through
it—as if it had never been there. The sudden movement twisted his left hand. Two nails tore out of place and gravity claimed him.

The face watched him slip into the dark.

Scared awoke to find the heavy curtains around his bed frayed and singed.

He sat up, wiping the drool from his chin onto his nightshirt.

You were angry tonight, my sweet. You were aggressive, savage. Quite out of character for you.

Mama Engine was not in the habit of keeping secrets from their embrace, and Scared found it irksome. Details and schematics had always been withheld—Scared cared little for those—but not her emotions, not her urges. Those things that were
her
were his to peruse, his to catch and hold, and then release at his fancy.

Playing a game, my love? I am very good at games.

He roused himself and shoved aside the curtains. The room was cool and dark, the fireplace empty, the night table vacant. He dragged a knobby finger through the charcoal dust there and lamented the need to order servants to keep out of his room, lest his lover annihilate them: the wood paneling had been cracked and curled by heat, the floors stained with ash. The wan light of faraway electrics filtered into the room through its single, frosted pane.

He hobbled to a low-backed plush chair in the corner and dragged the leather cover from it. Beneath this, the fine velvet upholstery lay undamaged by heat, with a small bottle of yellowish liquid nestled against the left arm. Scared lowered himself into the chair’s welcoming grip.

A strange night it had been. Towards the end, the nightmares had begun to creep in from the edges. They had come through the singed curtains; he was sure of it. The burns inflicted on those curtains by the night’s lovemaking had weakened them somehow, and they had begun to admit all those outcast thoughts Scared had long ago banished to the far reaches of his mind.

He banished them now, clearing his head for the relentless chill of calculation. He retrieved and uncorked the small bottle, allowing the faintest scent of the liquid within to twist into his nostrils. Scared replaced the cork and settled back to let it do its work.

It is the chief folly of modern mathematics to confine calculation to the written page,
Scared said to himself, almost as a mantra in the fashion of the Indians ascetics.
The scope of logical reasoning is too vast to be expressed in human symbolism. All objects in the universe are data, all forces equations. All events are the result of fast and fixed processes, algebraically perfect.

His nose began tingling, followed by the rest of his body. His hands began to shake, but he paid that no mind now. The drug filtered into his mind, pushing the paltry needs of flesh aside, thumbing down the trappings of morality and emotion until only the endless order of everything remained. He breathed deeply, and dropped away from that chill, hidden room, into the spaces between molecules.

And now, my sweet, we will see what you have been up to.

He mentally pulled together the memories of her quivering essence as she had shuddered in his grasp. These he crystallised until every detail stood out like a diamond among stones, and then delivered them to the universe’s equations.

He held his thoughts back and let the calculations run themselves. The touch of man could only sully such perfection.

Some long minutes he stayed in such a state. There was utter timelessness here, though mere seconds, perhaps, passed in the vulgar world.

The calculations delivered their answer. Mysteries became knowledge, variables became constants.

Scared leapt upwards and arrived slouched in his chair, the bottle of precious fluid rolling to a stop three yards distant—recorked, thank the Lord. He pressed his hands hard onto his thighs to keep them from shaking. Mama Engine had indeed been hiding a secret from him.

You filthy harlot,
he thought.
You’ve found another.

Her eye was on another man. A sudden, unbecoming tickle of jealousy nagged him. More calculation would be required to discover this rival’s identity, but that would have to wait. Time and hot tea were required now to banish the remnants of the drug from his blood. He had taken too much this morning, enough to impair the flexing of fingers and bending of knees.

He reached out to the wall and pulled on the hanging cord. A wall panel, mounted on ceramic tracks and wooden wheels, slid aside to reveal a rack of bottles and tubes. At the base of the shelves sat a panoply of scientific equipment and a full washbasin. Still too tired to rise, Scared slumped back in the chair and took deep breaths to steady his heart.

The question now was what to do about his lover’s new fancy. Death would be easiest, though the fickle Lady might take that harshly. For the meantime, information would need to be gathered, control exerted. He might have delegated it to one of his boys, but—if she
was
courting another lover, if she
was
intending to betray him, the matter was Scared’s alone to confront.

He let his body recover over the next few minutes, allowing automatic mental processes to wheel in the background of his consciousness. He had trained his mind so well over the long years that deduction no longer required any conscious effort. As soon as it was able, his mind would deliver to him the answers he sought. The potion was rarely needed.

Except when the deduction concerned Mama Engine—not her plans or her children; no, those were plain to the ordinary, mortal eye. It was the Lady herself that required the superhuman mental space brought on by the potion, which the Chinese called
mei kuan
. To fathom her, in her entirety, to know all the nuances of her psyche better even than he knew his own…that was a feat extraordinary in any set of lovers.

How many have you had, my sweet? How many have you burned to dust because they could not understand you?

He forced himself up, fighting the shuddering aftereffects of the potion, and waddled to the washbasin. He splashed the warm water across his face, letting it chase away the sweat and ashes. A yellow-skinned
ghast
of the worst children’s tales scrutinised him from the mirror.