Whitechapel Gods (23 page)

Heh. He actually needs my help, darling. What a lark.

“What do you need me to find, sir?”

Brass eyes, tinged red by the light, studied him. The baron wore a tailcoat and impeccable slacks, a crisp and gleaming tuxedo shirt beneath. Strange how he always made a point of dressing like the man he’d been.

“The ending of order without the growth of chaos, sealed in the code of scratches upon the skin of trees. Where is that which is yours no longer?”

He knows then. As expected.
“I have yet to locate it, sir. When I do I will notify you.”

The baron’s featureless black head tilted slightly. “The enders of prophecy are men who walk upon two legs. These creatures of great words and frail bodies saw at the stem of that which must come to be. Do they hide in their own skin and resist harmony?”

“The Britons are mostly wiped out, thanks to the golds,” Scared said. “I have my boys looking after the rest. Not to worry. I have them well in hand.”

“A hand on the saw moves. Is the saw vicious when at the neck, benign when at the trunk? Who can hate that which is moved by another hand?”

Scared’s eyes narrowed. “Your point, sir?”

“You are a tool, Jonathan Augustus Scared. You are the saw that revels in the shedding of dust, thinking itself mighty.”

Is that you speaking, pet? Heh. You really know nothing about me.

“I live to serve, sir. Truly.”

“A dog who walks in front of his master still cannot swing a cane. In this one thing he can be proud, but no more.”

I already know what place you’d pigeonhole me, my love.

The baron continued. “Creation without limits is chaos. A yard without a fence is a plain. A sea without a shore is a place where men drown.”

A long pause followed, so long Scared almost turned to leave. Then Hume spoke again, in a voice softer and more human.

“Why?”

The question carried genuine pain. Was it the man speaking now, and not the double tongue of the gods?

“Can you be more specific, sir?”

Another long pause, like a machine with a stuck gear, grinding to break loose. When the words finally did come, they emerged in a clockwork rhythm with gaps and starts, like Hume was choking on them.

“Brother slays—brother a plant—despises the—sun why—does a harp fall—out of tune when—the music is—so beautiful?”

Scared actually laughed. He cackled, his voice ringing off the hard surfaces, mingling with the ticking, playing with the light.

“You don’t understand, do you, Hume?” he said. “You can’t fathom it at all. Under all those gears and pistons, you’re still that same simpleminded architect who could never get his buildings to stand.”

The baron stared with the eyes of a statue.

“She
hates
him, Hume. She hates him because she loves him and she loves him because he doesn’t care one whit about her. It’s madness, all of it. Mania and melancholy all around. Your gods are
insane,
Baron.”

The baron replaced his top hat. The white ribbon wrapped about it near the brim sparkled like sunlight on water.

Yes, I said it, my sweet. I said it directly to his face and to yours. And yet he won’t kill me for it because it is the God’s own truth.

There was something of a man in the way Hume turned away to contemplate his Church of Measured Time.

Scared took it as his cue to exit. He deliberately planted his cane out of synch with the cacophony around them.

Yes, Hume, see if you can find your answer in that ticking monstrosity.

Marvelous! The weak-willed man who’d written the
Summa Machina
was still buried in that mechanised body, and still remembered the failing days of his own sanity. Back then, the baron had realised the absurdity of the Lord and Lady: a match made in hell and consecrated with shit and shackles. Scared had simply reminded him of that.

Scared had read him. The man inside had stirred, and begun thinking and feeling again. So much the better if his doubts rendered him unable to act. That just left more of the city open to acquisition by one Jonathan Augustus Scared.

Oh, my sweet. Even your adopted son cannot save you.

The bronze doors hissed closed, and Scared practically skipped down the Long Hallway.

The second principle of the machine is Harmony. This is the core of the wisdom of the machine: that component parts cannot but work together towards the accomplishment of the machine’s noble Purpose. In that Harmony facilitates the completion of this Purpose, the machine will devote its resources to the promotion of Harmony and the excisement of those elements that would draw it into chaos.

IV. iii

Gisella had never laughed, so why did Missy hear laughter? It had been echoing in her mind all day; that, and a gravelly voice that whispered to her from every reflected surface.

“Bursting apart,” I believe it translates. In a few seconds you’ll cease even to dream, my pet. You will live only for my voice, and will do all I ask of you.

Missy still wore a smile, brushed with beet juice to redden the lips. She wore red gloves and a red scarf tucked around her neck. Had she dressed herself that morning? It was so difficult to remember.

“You are certainly invited to join us, Miss Plantaget.”

Missy started. Hews was offering to help her out of her chair.

“Oh. Of course, I should be delighted.”

She accepted the man’s outstretched hand and stood. Hews smiled at her and moved to join Phineas and Oliver in the hall. The instant he turned his back, she shot her fingers to her temples and gave them a good massage to clear the fog from her head.

She followed them down Sherwood’s staircase and then down the hall to Oliver’s room.

“Shut the door, be so kind,” Phineas said. Hews quietly closed the door once Missy had stepped through. Smells of dust and spent candles came to her, along with the faint scent of a man’s body odour, unmasked by powders or perfumes.

“Your face is distressingly grave, Phineas,” Missy said.

“Didn’t say it was easy or safe, did I?” Phin pulled his hat brim down, dragging it even farther over his nose. The single oil lamp in the corner caught only the wrinkles on his chin and neck.

Phin reached deep inside his coat and withdrew a box of pale wood, carved with Oriental symbols and painted in patterns of red, no longer than his stunted index finger.

Her attention turned to Oliver, with a vague notion that she was supposed to be watching him.

Oliver held out his hand for the box and Phineas placed it in his palm. Phineas’ hand shook as he released it, and he withdrew from it as from a coiled snake.

“What is it, Phin?” Oliver asked.

The old sailor shuddered as he inhaled to speak.

“Chinamen call it
mei kuan
. Means ‘pleasing to the eye,’ near as it was explained to me.”

They all crowded around Oliver as he undid the clasp of scarlet string that held the box closed. Missy could swear she felt a heat coming off Oliver above and beyond ordinary body heat.

Do not be frightened of your own heat when it comes on you,
said Gisella.
Encourage in your own mind the breath to quicken and the face to flush, as both will be most arousing to your client.

Oliver opened the box with a single finger. Within, nestled in a crumple of unspun cotton, lay a vial of blue glass. A glass stopper, held in place with copper braids, kept it shut. It could not have held more than a thimbleful of liquid.

Hews cleared his throat. “How is this to take us anywhere, Phineas?”

Phineas had turned away, and now faced into the darkest corner of the room. “Doesn’t take you anywhere. Frees up the spirit. Lets the breath out. You’ll be lying on the bed, no breathing, no heartbeat, even.” Phin looked back over his shoulder. The lamplight caught electric brilliance in his eye. “But the places a body can go, Cap’n! The things a body can see!”

Hews frowned then. “Hogwash. Opium addicts say the same, pitiable creatures.”

Phin eyed him over the rim of his collar.

“This ain’t opium, gentlemen,” he said. A hideous smile crept onto his gargoyle face. “This is St. Peter’s gate in a bottle. You’ll be bigger than the world, Cap’n. They say it would turn a man into a god, if only it didn’t kill him first.”

They all stared at the bottle. Eventually, Missy spoke just to break the silence.

“Well I for one am intrigued. Shall we try it?”

Hews huffed and retreated to the door. “I’ll have no part of this foolishness.”

Oliver slipped the bottle free with two careful fingers. “None of you will. Hold the fort, Hews. Find me that entrance to the Stack and keep the German under control. We’ll be done when we’re done.”

Hews set his jaw, nodded, and departed. The door snapped shut in his wake.

Oliver offered Phin the bottle. “How does it work?”

Phin jerked away from it. “Confound it! Keep it back! Don’t…don’t tempt me.”

Oliver wrapped his fingers over the bottle. Phineas visibly relaxed as it vanished from sight.

The old sailor exhaled. “Just…there are terrible things to be seen, ’s well as wondrous. I never learned properly how to protect myself. A body’s got to be so careful.” He rubbed shaking hands over a face that suddenly gleamed with sweat. “I did a favour for some Chinese—what, I won’t say—when I was over there. They let me have a sniff, just a sniff. I swear I saw…I saw…”

Missy shivered at the old sailor’s next word.

“God.” Phineas swallowed hard and audibly. “Spent twenty years just sittin’ in that room, workin’ up the nerve to drink it. I don’t take it anymore—can’t—but I could never part with it either.”

Phin choked up. He clenched his fists and jammed them into his pockets, apparently done talking.

Oliver turned the bottle over in his palm. The liquid caught the light with the rich sheen of liquor.

I’m supposed to watch Oliver,
Missy remembered.
Someone told me to. A man…

The fiendish grin and teeth flashed back into her memory.

“No. I don’t…” escaped her lips.

The man’s voice:
You will not remember any of this, little one. No, not a whit, until I command you to.

Oliver and Phineas were staring at her.

She cleared her throat and affected a broad smile. “Please forgive me. I haven’t been…Well, never mind me. Shall we?”

Oliver lay back on the bed and Missy perched beside him on a fragile wicker chair.

Phineas hovered at the exit, sunken in his crumpled clothing, with his calloused fingers twitching towards the door handle. “Miss, you take the bottle. You pop the cork and hold it under the cap’n’s nose, right? Ollie, you take a sniff. Remember, only a sniff. Like a pinch of snuff.” He shuddered. “And don’t dare drink it! Not a drop.”

“I’ll be careful, Phineas. Just get back on post,” Oliver said, passing the bottle to Missy.

“Not a bloody drop, hear?” Phin hesitated, wringing his hands. “One bloody drop—look what it’s done to me.”

Then he left, shutting the door behind him.

Oliver looked up at her with that concerned, welcoming gaze that so frustrated her. She forestalled him before he could speak: “How inappropriate, the two of us shut in a room alone.”

Oliver took her hand. Though the touch was light, yet still the warmth of it penetrated into Missy’s body. Her insides began to quiver.

Your client may wish to court you as he would a proper lady, or he may wish satisfaction immediately. He will indicate this through his gestures and expressions. In time, you will learn to read these cues as clearly as letters and will know the correct course to follow.

She could not withdraw her hand.

“If something’s amiss, Michelle, just tell me,” he said. “No one will think the less of you for it.”

“Ollie, I can’t say. I
can’t
. I’m not…Please, don’t ask me…Don’t ever…” She choked off, and painted her mask back on with a fury. “Well, enough of the failings of womanly temperament, I say. Shall we get on?” She lifted the bottle.

Oliver did not release her hand. “As much as I’m able and you’re willing, Michelle, I’ll take care of you.”

A pause. Then, “I appreciate the sentiment, I truly do, Oliver. But we’re not here to trade pleasantries, are we?”

Her hand withdrew from his. The heat of that contact receded.

He settled back on the bed, eyeing her curiously, and nodded.

She unstoppered the bottle and held it beneath his nose. He sniffed quietly, and she quickly withdrew it and closed it.

Oliver’s eyes drifted closed.

Oliver, be careful,
Missy thought.

“Oliver, be careful,” said her voice.

He nodded, then fell still.

Missy stared at him some long minutes, then slipped her fingers back around his. Nothing moved in the little room.

He slipped from waking to sleep, and then into something else.

He was eight years old. He’d run away from Hews’ factory, where he’d been sleeping under the smelting pots that kept warm long into the night. He’d stowed on the lift down into the Underbelly, and chased himself through streets and alleys. The vagrants eyed him, the vendors hoarded their goods away from him, and ordinary folk kicked him out of the way with a curse.

Behind a bakery on the Eighth Row, he made his bed. He smelled the scent of the bread and imagined he was tasting it, and lay down on the edge of the Underbelly, nothing but air and smoke beneath him. He would butter the bread, he decided, and he would have raspberry jam besides, and a glass of milk from a real cow. And it would all squish together in his mouth and get stuck in the holes where his baby teeth had fallen out, and he would worm it out with his tongue and chew it again, until it dissolved into his saliva and slipped down his throat like syrup.

He must have fallen asleep. A boot to his shoulder blade roused him, then another to his hip rolled him over. Then gravity took him.

He plunged down, leaving his body behind. The wind whistled through his hair and across his face. Ash flicked across his eyelashes and tickled his neck and toes.

Sherwood was above. Sherwood was below.

Where did he stop, when the falling became stillness and the rushing air silence?

Oliver opened his eyes.

Below, above, all around stretched an endless vista of light and dark. The roiling shapes of massive chains snaked between sparkles and flares of furnace fire. Embers swarmed in the air like fireflies, chasing shapeless creatures of molten glass. His eyes adjusted slowly, as if coming from the light into the dark, and the sky became muted fire of crimson and orange.

The landscape was not without form. Out of the web of chains and fire rose towering, geometric buildings of copper-shaded glass, edged sharp as razors. Silk-fine strands of brass and silver linked one to the other. Gears and springs turned to no apparent purpose on their outer surfaces. Oliver recognised them: Shadwell, Stepneyside, Cathedral, and others in the far reaches of perception. Where the Stack should have been stood a tower of intertwined mechanical arms pulsing with red light. Sulphurous fumes billowed out like curtains raised by the wind, and everywhere, the clacking of machines and the roaring of furnaces.

“This is how I always see it.”

Aaron sat beside him, perched on a steel beam connected to nothing. He sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, and his coat-of-many-pockets dangling down. In the manner of dreams, his features seemed to shift as if seen through water, the only constant his eyes, an unnatural blue that tracked on Oliver’s vision.

Where are we?

Aaron twiddled his fingers awhile. “There’s another side to things. This is where one finds the
idea
of a place, as well as its ghosts and its dreams. Manchester is built of wicker and wool, and cotton rains from the sky.”

Whitechapel hasn’t fared so well, I’d guess.

“All its dreams here are dead, surely as night and day were killed off by the smoke,” Aaron said. “Now there’s only the three of them, and the little parasites that live in them.” He indicated the globs of glass.

And us.

“We aren’t really here like men aught to be. We’ve no histories anymore and no idea about ourselves.”

Oliver scowled at him.
Remind me to speak to you whenever I’m lonely for gloom and pessimism.

Aaron laughed. “I am dead, after all.”

Not from where I’m sitting.

Oliver tried to settle down beside the strange dead man but found himself without limbs to move or a rear to seat himself on.

Aaron, I’m here because I need your help.

“What happened to Bailey? I heard you talking about him.”

He’s dead. Sorry to break the bad news to you.

Aaron shook his head. “He’s not dead.”

The Boiler Men shot him, Aaron.

“And when have you known that to kill anyone in Whitechapel?”

What do you mean?

“I heard the bells silence him. He cried out to God when Grandfather Clock subdued him.”

You mean he’s on the Chimney?

Aaron nodded. “I heard him. The sound carried into this place.”

Oliver felt his real heart skip a beat, perceiving it like the echo of a far-off drum. The crew wasn’t safe. Damn it all, Bailey
knew
where Sherwood was!

That limits my time here, Aaron. I’ll need to get back as soon as possible. But I need to know a few things first.

Aaron nodded for him to continue.

Scared discovered a method to kill Grandfather Clock. How do we kill Mama Engine and the other one?
He had no finger to point, but Aaron followed his gaze to the depths of the city. In the shadows of ash and smoke, glinting in the red light, a sea of pale sludge shifted restlessly.

He considered a moment. “My researches always seemed to point to the production of an event in the same medium as the gods. I was always stuck on discovering what medium they dwelt in. Certainly, they are nonphysical, but are they mental, or spectral, or aetheric? I could never tell.”

Scared must have found out.

“Mama Engine told him where to look,” Aaron said. “And Scared must have designed a delivery system to carry his poison into Grandfather Clock. If he has discovered the effect necessary, then we’d simply…But I would need to see…”

Aaron looked ashen. His face thinned visibly before Oliver’s eyes, skin paling, eyes sinking deep. For an instant it looked as if he might withdraw right into himself and crumble to dust. Then he clamped his blue eyes shut, breathed, and hugged himself. When he came back he seemed healthy again.

Aaron?

“I will need a close look at Mama Engine.”