Whitechapel Gods (19 page)

“Ollie? Ollie! Jesus, I can’t see.”

“You’re breathing. That’s a start.”

“They got me! They got me with their damnable flashers and…Lord Almighty, it was like being burned alive and…They’re guarding the stair, Ollie—the Boiler Men! They were waiting and we…”

“Calm down, man.”

“Bailey’s dead, Ollie. I saw it happen. And Phin’s gone, and the other chaps, too. They’re guarding the stair. We won’t make it back to…”

“Don’t worry about the Boiler Men, Tommy. Jeremy’s new friends can handle them.”

“Jeremy?”

“We ran into each other.”

“I’m glad. But…Ollie, I can’t see. I can’t feel anything. I…I’m frightened.”

“You’ll be all right. Let’s see if you can’t walk and we’ll get you back to Sherwood.”

“Thanks, Ollie. Knew I could count on you. Always looking out for us, you are.”

“Always.”

Oliver had never seen a dead Boiler Man before.

This one lay sprawled across a decayed mound that might once have been a wooden cart. In his hands, he still clutched a spear-length, copper-tipped flasher hooked to a machine on his back by a length of rubber hose. His eyes had cracked, and his black armour was marred by deep, gleaming slashes and dents. His chest plate splayed out in ribbons where Bergen’s rifle had cracked him like a walnut. Oliver leaned over the hole. The scent of dry dust and spent gunpowder crinkled his nose.

Ten feet onward, the road dissolved into a jumble of bricks mired in mud, afterward stretching into an uneven field of forgotten trinkets and stinking human refuse. There was some light here, shed by seepage through the domino hole above. It illuminated a thousand half-buried items cast off from the city above: pots, hats, empty matchboxes, bags and boxes of all description, wagons—whole or in pieces—and the occasional corpse. What a strange disconnection of the mind it was to think that the things one tossed from the towers were instantly gone forever.

Across that small plain, the soldiers of Jeremy’s army wandered, stepping over the broken bodies of both their comrades and their enemies without so much as a glance. Oliver could hardly believe that twenty minutes ago these horrid gargoyles had been swarming the Boiler Men like a legion of hellish rats. The first wave had been shattered by the Ironboys’ Atlas rifles. The second as well. But there were more, so many more, that the rifles simply ran dry of ammunition. And as they fell silent, the horde of screeching, buzzing, clawing, biting inhuman doom poured over hastily constructed defences and bore the baron’s soldiers to the ground.

Even then it hadn’t been over. Possessed of an unnatural strength, the Boiler Men had, one by one, tossed off their harassers and regained their footing. And then Bergen had blown them to pieces with his shoulder cannon.

Oliver shuddered to recall the look on the man’s face: like a statue, eyes colder than those of the half-human wretches the downstreets had claimed.

He navigated between the remains of six or seven hounds, a good dozen of the Frankensteins, and two more Ironboys, eventually finding a clear path, and worked his way back to Tom. The big man sat leaning back against the oxidised remains of a copper boiler, arms piled in his lap, head lolling to the side.

The light danced over Tommy’s features and Oliver felt his heart clench up. Tom’s clothes had been burned through by flasher strikes to his belly and shoulders. Wormlike scorch marks had been seared into his one real hand and the skin on his neck and face; some had cracked and were leaking runny brown grease.

Oliver had seen Tom injured before, had seen him with wounds much graver than these. It was Tom’s posture that alarmed him: he sat with hunched shoulders and raised knees, shaking like a beaten child. To see this happy soul so lost and afraid brought tears to Oliver’s eyes. He blinked them back, swallowed hard against the quivering in his gut, and knelt by Tom’s side.

The big man started. His eyes flew open, panicked. “Ollie?”

Oliver laid a heavy hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Easy, chum. It’s me.”

Tom shakily exhaled. He reached up and clasped Oliver forearm with his real hand. “Jesus. Gave me a start, there. It was so quiet, I’d wondered…”

As Oliver looked on Tommy’s face he felt the tears welling again. Tom’s entire left eye had been burned away from the inside, leaving only an oozing scab over most of that side of his face. The right eye moved around with random jerks, squirting oil with each movement.

Oliver gave the shoulder a squeeze.

“The battle’s won, Tommy. You should see it—Ironboys rusting in the mud. It’s positively the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in years.”

Tom’s face fell. “I’d rather have fought.”

“Buck up, man,” Oliver said. The encouraging tone came automatically, quite in spite of any rational evaluation of Tom’s condition. “Hews knows a doctor. I’ll post him a telegram when we get back to Sherwood and we’ll have you fixed up in less time than it takes to down a pint.”

It was a weak lie weakly presented, but it seemed enough for Tom, who managed a smile.

“If you say it, Chief, then I’m game.”

“There’s my lad,” Oliver said. He clapped Tommy on the back. “Now, let’s get you on your feet. You still owe me that round.”

Tommy’s face crumpled in concentration. “How do you figure that?”

“I beat you to the ground, Tommy. And a gentleman like yourself’ll surely keep to our bargain, eh?”

“Codswallop. You probably tiptoed like a ballerina down the whole route. There is no earthly way you could have beat me to the ground.”

“Perhaps. But seeing as there is no apparent way for us to compare our arrival times, the round still goes to me.”

Tommy frowned, adjusted his hat. “Again: how do you bloody figure that?”

“Simple: I now have to haul your not-inconsiderable bulk up that whole blasted stairway.”

Tommy cracked a smile at that. He threw off Oliver’s hand and lifted himself up to perch on unstable knees.

“A round says you’ll have to do nothing of the kind.”

“Double or nothing, then?”

“A deal, Chief.”

Oliver held his hands ready to provide additional stability to his friend as Tom tested the motion of his legs. His joints shrieked terribly.

Tom chuckled. “Like a banshee. Hee, hee.”

Oliver looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps.

“Twelve of them dead,” Bergen said, in the manner of a soldier giving a report. “That is their full number. A lucky thing, since I am nearly out of ammunition.”

Bergen’s eyes had not changed. They were stone, lifeless, emotionless. The rest of his body kept perfectly still like a compressed spring, as if the man was still expecting battle.

The man was a killer; that was the long and short of it. There could be no guarantee of controlling him, no matter with whom he claimed to lay his allegiances. And if Bailey really had met his end, Oliver might not be able to pawn the fellow off on another crew.
No good will come of this partnership, and that’s the truth.

But that was something to leave to Providence and a later day.

Bergen tilted his head. “We should return to the city.”

“Let’s get ourselves to the base of the stair,” Oliver said. “We’ll wait there.”

“Why would we wait?”

“So that Phineas Macrae can find us. Let’s get on.”

He urged Tommy into a slow shuffle by gentle pressure on his back. Bergen scowled, but fell into step.

“Do you truly still hold out hope that any of your party survived?” the German asked. “If the Boiler Men did not kill all of them, surely your rat’s army finished the work.”

Tommy swallowed hard before adding his comment. The pain of the admission contorted his face: “I hate to say it, Ollie, but…I haven’t seen him. He’d have found me, I think, if he was still…”

Tommy choked off the last few words, and Oliver gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.

“He isn’t dead, Tommy. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if he was already waiting for us at the stair.”

The German grunted—a half laugh. “If he’s truly so resourceful as to have escaped his fate, he would be quite capable of rescuing himself without our aid.”

The mockery in that tone raised Oliver’s hackles. He ground his teeth a moment before making a reply. “You’re quite correct, Mr. Keuper. He does not need our help. But getting Thomas all the way back to the Underbelly in his present condition is going to require more than one man.”

“We have more than one man.”

“Keuper, ever since you first laid eyes on my friend’s state, you’ve been thinking that he is an unnecessary burden. You’ve been scheming ways to rid our expedition of him so that we can make better time.”

Tommy gasped, looking towards Oliver for confirmation.

Oliver’s eyes tracked the rolling mud battleground ahead. He did not look at either of them. “And so I have decided not to trust you with my friend’s safety.”

His mood improved slightly as Bergen fell into a sullen silence.

“Fair?”

Oliver took the further silence as affirmation.

They found Phineas at the base of the stair, perched on the edge of an overturned rail car, one so out of style it might have predated the baron’s takeover of Whitechapel. He stubbed his cigar out in the mud and left it there as they approached.

Oliver resisted the urge to rub his satisfaction in Bergen’s face.

Phin greeted them with a tip of his impacted hat.

“If you blokes walked any slower I’d rent a cab for you. Hellfire, I’d
build
a cab for you and rope a couple of those dogs to pull it. And what in God’s name is wrong with Thomas?”

Tom smiled through his grimace. “War wounds, you piss-yellow dodger. I assume you’ve none of your own.”

“He took a few prods from those flashers of theirs,” Oliver explained.

Phineas scowled. “I know that. I was
there,
or hasn’t gear-guts told you? I mean that bloody noise.”

Oliver helped Tommy to seat himself on a bent train wheel. The big man groaned with the effort. Oliver handed him a canteen—the last remnants of his water supply. “What noise, Phin?”

Phineas gestured at Tommy with a vague sense of disgust. “The…the
noise,
man. He’s always been a damned factory all to himself but…Oy, bolt-britches, you hear that grinding?”

“I can’t hear hardly any, you…you…” He sighed. “They burned me something terrible. Yeah, I can hear it.”

Phin shared a look with Oliver, which even through Phineas’ perpetual squint Oliver knew as a warning.

And now Mr. Keuper is thinking that Tommy is a danger, as well as a hindrance.

Bergen remained stony silent, bending a little now under the weight of his enormous weapon and several hours’ long hike. He kept Phineas under a watchful eye.
Doesn’t trust any of us. Perhaps Missy can crack him.
Missy would dive right into the man the instant she saw him: smile at him, charm him, melt him, rub him down under her heel.

Phineas was giving Tommy a pat on the shoulder and muttering some encouraging, if vulgar, words. Oliver motioned him over. For Bergen’s benefit, he announced ten minutes’ rest.

The German nodded.

Oliver drew Phineas aside, to the edge of the rail car.

“What’s this grinding, Phineas?”

“Something in his belly, I’m thinkin’,” Phin whispered. “Wasn’t there last I saw him. Like a clickrat crawlin’ in mud.”

“Any ideas on its identity?”

“Not a one, Cap’n. Ne’er heard it comin’ from inside a man before.”

Oliver sighed and glanced back at Tom, who had fallen into still, regular breathing. Bergen was unabashedly observing their conversation, though he was probably too far off to eavesdrop. Oliver turned back to Phineas.

“How did this happen, Phin? Didn’t you warn them?”

“Wasn’t any warning to give, Cap’n. Not firstly, anyways. The Ironboys, they don’t make any noise.”

“Codswallop. They shake the bloody ground.”

“When they’s movin’, sure, but when they’s still, they’s silent as the bloody grave. No breathin’, no gears grindin’ or heart pumpin’. We didn’t even know they were there until we’s thirty feet away.”

“But the dogs, man.”

Phin crushed his hat farther down his head, until the dropping brim almost hid his eyes.

“I heard the damnable mutts ages before we got to ’em. Mr. Knight ordered us ahead anyway.”

Oliver nodded.
Can’t say I blame him. Hounds or Boiler Men? I’d have chosen the same.
“And the fight?”

Phineas spat into the mud. “What’s I supposed to do against the Tin Soldiers, Ollie? I lit out. Not my fault that copper-balls goes berserk. He didn’t even use his rifle, for Christ’s sake.”

Phineas ground his teeth

“I hid in the dirt, Ollie,” Phin said through gnashing teeth. “ ’S what they all should’ve done. Blasted stupid, just like the Uprising.”

“You gave them your warning, man. Everything else is on Bailey’s head.”

Phin smoothed out his impossibly wrinkled coat. “Bailey’s dead, Ollie. He took two or three shots. I heard him crying those eloquent curses of his. The Ironboys, they charged him and stomped him down.”

Oliver nodded. It was what Bailey had wanted—to die in service of his beloved queen. Oliver felt a curious hole in his stomach, like a coal burning there.
It’s what I wanted, too: to be free of that man. To be free of his rules and his damn distrust—
Oliver felt guilty just thinking it—
and now I am.

So, what now? With what the cloaks knew, would Joyce still be alive, to build this weapon on Scared’s tape? Would any of Bailey’s other nameless compatriots still be alive? Would…Hews?

“What do you think, Ollie? We’s a bit buggered, eh?”

Oliver looked up. Phin stood expectantly, fiddling with his pockets.

“Let’s get climbing.”

They turned and walked back to the base of the stair. Jeremy Longshore had returned, and sat looking contented with his head poking out of Tommy’s pocket. Tommy stroked the silver ridges of the thing’s back, murmuring silent nothings to it. Bergen crouched like an ape, watching wordlessly.

“Stalwart like an ox, Chief,” Tommy announced, proudly hoisting Jeremy into the air. “What did I tell you?”