Whitechapel Gods (30 page)

John Scared was in such a good mood that he poured himself some wine.

It was a fine rice wine of the Orient, flavoured with peach and aged several decades, though the Siamese who’d sold it to him had been unable to give an exact date. Scared had never intended to drink it, but had brought it back in case it might be useful in wooing an informant. Men of power, after all, appreciated fine things. He’d won Moran over with a bottle of Scottish brandy from ’54.

Well, perhaps it had been the six thousand pounds, but the brandy had oiled the wheels, certainly.

He poured the wine into a shimmering crystal goblet of French design and settled into his chair. The familiar curves and upholstery nestled against him. He looked once around his bedroom, bidding adieu to the sanctum that had served him so many years. The traps at the door had been set. If anyone ventured down to find his body, they and any with them would suffer a dozen painful deaths.

He let the bouquet tickle his nose.

You’ll never know the pleasure of earthly senses, my dear. A terrible pity.

Scared had always placed little value in ritual. The repetition of things not only made one vulnerable to prediction, but also dulled the mind into ignoring recurrences in the environment.

Nothing repeats endlessly, my love. You expect your new husband to be the same as the last. Oh my dearest, I pity you your ignorance.

But he could not help feeling that
some
observance was in order. The ending of things needed to be acknowledged, and the beginnings of other things celebrated.

He sipped the wine, letting the delicate flavour swirl like vapour atop his tongue before opening his throat and letting gravity draw the liquid down.
Heavenly. Would that it could be the last thing I taste.

Of course, the last would be the
mei kuan
. He eyed the clear bottle where it sat exposed on his closet shelf. Four drops of it, and no more, to swell his consciousness larger than the forces he faced, without killing him outright. He’d calculated it all precisely while in trance that morning.

The fire in the back of his mind flared and whirled, stinging his old thoughts with its agitation.

Patience, my love.
All was ready: Gisella’s little girl would rid him of his rival; Moran would rid him of the city’s master; his German would release his bride from her vows, and then Penny would do his duty. With a palpable regret, he set the wine aside and took up the liquid gates of heaven.

Scared uncorked the bottle. Keeping it far from his nose, he dipped an eyedropper inside and filled it to the black mark he had made earlier. Mama Engine’s fire skipped and jolted.

Ah, the city will shake and crumble to our nuptials, my darling.

He opened his mouth and squeezed the dropper. Clear liquid splashed over his tongue as the vapours shot into his nose. The world dissolved into a string of equations and fled to the four winds.

Scared’s body slumped in his chair, and did not breathe.

Now, it seems to me that while I made you into a whore…

Missy looked down at the gun hanging limp in her fingers: shining, dull, beautiful, terrifying, ugly.

…you became a murderess all on your own.

“It was the hobgoblin man,” she whispered. The words vanished into the smoke around her. The wind blew down from the Stack, stinging her eyes and burning her lungs and she could not care. She had run for hours, blindly, through the Dunbridge maze, to arrive here, at the edge of the tower, with the abyss beneath her and the twinkling lights of Shoreditch taunting her from afar.

Oh? Then I suppose you went after that handsome German fellow at his beck as well? And what about that perfectly respectable accountant?

Gisella’s stern face in the haze: her sharp nose and bladed cheeks shimmers of bone white in the shifting ashfall.

Do you remember how you would wish a man dead when you led him through the bedroom door? Do you remember that silent prayer to God to strike him down?

Missy looked off the edge of Dunbridge at the factories on the slopes of the Stack. Lights winked out, one by one, at the approach of night.

Do you remember when you wondered how it would feel to commit the deed yourself?

Oliver’s face in the mirror: eyes wide, hands grasping, before his spraying blood obscured it all.

How did it feel, dirty little dog?

“It was the hobgoblin man,” she said again.

Was it any hand but yours upon the blade, my child?

She couldn’t feel this. Couldn’t feel…

She heard a clattering, and looked down to see her hands shaking, to see the gun bouncing back and forth in her grip. The threat of pure realisation pressed against the cushioning wall of shock. In an instant she would feel it all, and it would destroy her.

The gun stopped shaking, and rose. Gisella gasped and fixed her with a reproachful scowl.

What impropriety. Wipe the thought from your mind, child. I’ll have no lady of mine contemplating such nonsense.

“But…I can put it to an end.”

You are an arrogant and presumptuous child, to think such a thing.

The gun retreated and hung loose from her fingers.

Did running away help, child? Did defying my lessons? Did wishing men dead?

She could run to the end of the Earth and Gisella’s voice would always be with her. That, and the memory of whom she’d just killed.

This was your fault
she raged,
always talking to me inside my head. You drove me to all of this by never giving me a moment’s peace.

Preposterous. There is only one person in your head, my dear.

Silence, and Gisella’s face was just a pattern in the ash.

The memory pressed in, the vast, crushing horror of what she had done. It loomed like a phantasm in the smog, whispering to her.

She lifted the gun again and drew strength from the steel, until she was hard, cold, unfeeling.

A dog, then a whore, then a villain.

Fine.

Yes, she’d murdered Oliver. She’d cut his throat open like a pig on Sunday. And she’d murdered that other man, stuck him through the chest like a slab of beef. She
was
a killer. The proof was drying under her fingernails at that moment.

Then I’ll do as killers do,
she thought.

Because there was someone who needed to be killed.

And after her, someone else.

“He will not let you go.”

It’s my time.

“They’ve robbed us of that time, Oliver. The child-god keeps your body for you. He’s not done with either of us.”

I’m done.

“You’ve nowhere to go, Oliver. Like me, they deny you your rest.”

It’s too late.

“You came to me once, when I thought it was too late. When I was lost, and didn’t know what to do…Do you remember the oath we both took?”

“Until me meet at St. Peter’s gates, or we drive them from the face of God’s green Earth.” Bailey’s melodramatic drivel. I never really believed in Bailey or this British Empire of his.

“But you still took the oath.”

I took the oath so I could join Bailey’s crew, to get access to his funding and resources. I don’t care for England. I don’t care for her queen.

“You didn’t take the oath for England, Oliver, but you took it with sincerity. I can see that love and loyalty whenever I look at you. Why did you take it?”

…I took it for Whitechapel.

“And we’re not at St. Peter’s gates yet, are we?”

Why are you doing this to me, Aaron? Let me rest.

“Because I’ve found a way, Oliver. All three of them in one stroke.”

I don’t believe you.

“It is you, Oliver. You and only you can bring them low. They’ve each of them sunk their hooks into you and tried to claim you for their own. They’re in
you
, now. They’re
vulnerable
.”

…Are you trying to cheer me up?

“Am I succeeding?”

Bastard.

The instant the door swung open, Bergen’s jungle senses flared and the Gasser leapt into his hands.

“What is it?” Hews asked from behind.

Bergen motioned him silent and slunk into the opium den. The first sign that something was wrong was that the den was empty. Every last opium sot had vanished, leaving behind stained blankets, coats, hats, and the foul reek of their presence.

The second sign was Moore. He sat slumped against the wall, a dark, shivering lump. The Chinese woman stood beside him, arms crossed, ringed fingers flexing. She turned her slanted eyes on Hews as he blundered through the door.

“My lady,” Hews began in his most congenial tone. The words shrivelled up in the palpable fear of the room. The Chinese woman snapped a few syllables at him in her native tongue.

Bergen crept up to Thomas. The big man had his knees drawn up to his chest and his face buried in them.

“What did she say, English?”

“She’s upset at us.”

“That much is beyond debate.”

The Chinese woman yammered some more. Bergen knelt in front of Thomas Moore, pistol ready.

“She says…” Hews said, the struggle to understand rattling his voice, “that we’ve brought a
jiangshi
into her house.”

“What does that mean, Lewis?”

Bergen tapped Thomas lightly on the shoulder. The man’s block head lifted just enough for him to stare at Bergen with the torn eye, white, drooling fluids.

“It shouldn’t have been him,” he said.

One of the partitioned areas at the back of the room moved. Bergen’s eyes snapped up.

Hews called again over the assault of that woman’s words: “I’m afraid I can’t make out everything she’s…”

Bergen blocked him out and crept up to the partitioned area. Clear sounds of life slipped past the hanging blanket: a gurgling and wheezing, as of someone drowning in pneumonia. As he pressed up close, the rank stench of vomit struck him.

Bergen grasped the blanket and flung it aside, jabbing the pistol into the space. A sudden wave of heat forced him back.

What turned from the mirror to regard him was barely human. Its skin was putrid yellow with green blotches. Its right hand hung pulsing and swollen and leaking pus. A bubbling, crusted wound bisected the neck side to side. The watery red glow of its eyes regarded him.

The voice had the frailty of a dying man’s and all the ferocity of a demon’s: “About bloody time you got back. We have work to do.”

My people will call me a great man, will call me a High Priest and revere me above all others. They will not call me coward. They will not call me failure. They will not even whisper against me in secret. To them, I will always be First Among the Chosen.

I. xvii

The clocks had ticked for ages beyond counting. They had ticked in the aether between worlds. They had ticked in the minds of the dull and pedant creatures of the primeval swamps. They had ticked in the tortured brain of a young architect, crippled by drink and shame and guilt. And finally he had built them of wood and metal and they ticked for the hearing of all men.

Atlas Hume stood in the Church of Measured Time and listened to the last hours of Grandfather Clock’s life.

The rhythm had already begun to break. Five of a thousand coordinated sounds had fallen a fraction of a second behind. Pendulums swung out of phase, their arcs getting farther and farther apart. It was harmony seeping away from the Great Machine, as it turned its attention to the assault of its accursed child.

He spoke, to the clocks or to his lost soul: “The wind blows on the flowers at their edges, and they bow to its beck and smile no more at the sun.”

Perhaps he should have been afraid, but like those souls he’d condemned to the empty iron suits of the Boiler Men, he had been carved hollow. He, like those others, was denied the serenity of eternal repose, and likewise the restless clamouring of the unruly ghost. There was nothing in him—not heat or cold, not silence or noise, not motion or stillness. He was a great void infinite in measure and bounded only by the iron strips of his own skull.

Yet in that void, tears fell.

The British were coming. Beyond the walls, the English army loaded their guns, having seen the trembling sky above Whitechapel, and felt the change in the wind. And inside the walls, the servants of the crown approached, bearing death for the immortal.

The tears were for Grandfather Clock. The tears were for himself.

“God creates only the day, and the grasses wither in the heat, and the beasts never know rest. God creates only the night, and the grasses never grow, and the beasts stumble about in blindness.”

He’d known it would be his decision, when he had agreed to take them into his mind. It was his price for the gift of void they had given him. They had carved his pain and sorrows away and left nothing behind. And now no true man remained to choose between life and death.

Yet a decision must be made.

Scared had spoken the only truth he could now believe:
it was all madness.

With measured movements, he opened a leather folder that lay on the featureless marble altar. He ran his white gloves over well-used loose sheets, with strange symbols scrawled in a messy and desperate hand. These were his words, a record of the nightmare visions suffered by a lone man sixty-six years ago.

It was a man he had once been, but had chosen not to be.

Since that day he had been a vessel for forces beyond his ken, acting as an extension of two conflicting wills. He had been a tool since that long-ago day, and had never had to choose.

He chose now.

The call went out through the void. His soundless thoughts traveled to all those other empty spaces that touched his own emptiness, stirring them to life. Metal feet thundered as they stepped down from their pedestals, row upon endless row. Iron fingers grasped rifles, flashers, and steam guns, readying and loading in perfect unison. Those thousands of feet began to march—left, right, left, right—up secret stairs no human eye had ever seen, rising from where the supports of the Stack ground into foundations of the Earth.

His
soldiers, giving their allegiance to the only creature emptier than themselves.

Atlas Hume closed the folder. He decided he must be a man again.

Oliver’s body didn’t hurt anymore; the pair of gods that inhabited him had made certain of that. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t in pain.

He played that last vision over and over, scrutinizing Missy’s expression. The memory was frantic, and difficult to look at, but he recalled her terror as strongly as his own. Was it hope distorting truth? Did he remember it that way because he couldn’t bear to think she could actually…

“Sumner. Stay with us.”

The German.

“I’m fine,” Oliver said. His throat stretched as he pushed air through it. Moments after the cut, white ichor had rushed into the wound from some unknown part of his body. It had saved his life, but had congealed in thick welts that restricted his throat and windpipe. His voice echoed in his own ears as if off metal plates.

“We’re returning with you to Shadwell. Chestle will treat you.”

Oliver shook his head.

Hews, standing over the German’s shoulder: “None of that, lad. You need attention.”

“We can’t go back,” Oliver said. “Heckler destroyed the lift.”

Bergen and Hews both gaped.

“It was my order; to slow the Boiler Men down.”

Hews rubbed his muttonchops. “You weren’t planning on going back, then?”

“I reasoned,” Oliver said, “that either we would finish what we came to do and could take our time returning, or we wouldn’t return.”

Hews nodded sagely. So did Bergen.

Really, I thought we might all die.

The memory of a stinging line crossing his throat burned into him, blotting out his senses.

Maybe one of us did.

Missy smiling, Missy chewing, the razor, the shave. He’d been a fool. He’d felt it coming, and he hadn’t trusted himself to act on that feeling. He’d known Missy wasn’t
right
at that moment. Maybe it wasn’t her doing.

Or maybe she played me just as well as she played everyone else.

“Sumner!”

Oliver snapped back—the den, the crew, the mission.

“Sorry,” he said. He tried to rise from the bed of blankets, but strength had left him. “What about your mechanic?”

“He will build Scared’s invention,” the German said. “In three hours we will be returning to his workshop to retrieve it.”

Oliver nodded. He concentrated on breathing for a few seconds, since it was becoming more difficult. The gods still fought and shrieked in his mind’s ear, and the den shook with blows only he could feel.

He noticed a slip of yellow cloth in Hews’ hand. Hews saw him looking and held it up for him to see. It was a long strip with Chinese characters written along its length.

“Mrs. Flower,” Hews said, with some discomfort, “gave me this. It’s a ritual of some kind. A spell, to send you back to the afterlife.”

Oliver couldn’t help but laugh. “If only it were that simple.” He laughed more, until it became a screeching, grating sound, emanating from vibrations deep in his chest. He choked and stopped.

“Sorry.”

“I’m certain both of us have heard worse,” said Bergen.

Oliver looked him over. He was the same steel-eyed, tight-jawed soldier he’d always been, and yet something had changed. Something had softened, so that Oliver no longer felt that irrational anger the man had inspired. And was that
concern
in his expression?

“So have I,” Oliver said.

Hews looked grim. “Who did this to you, lad?”

Oliver could not keep the tears from his eyes. He looked away. “I didn’t see.”

Hews moved his lips for a moment, gloom written on his face. “In any case, the question now becomes—Do we proceed or do we hole up here until you’ve recovered?”

Oliver looked down at his hands. The burned one had swollen, unraveling the bandages.
There’s no recovery from this.
“Where’s Tommy?”

Both men shifted uncomfortably. Hews cleared his throat. “He’s outside. He isn’t handling all this well.”

Bergen scowled. “He’s handling it like a child of five, but that he has no skirts to cling to.”

Oliver struggled again to rise. “I’ll see him.”

Hews and Bergen helped him onto numb legs.

Bergen seemed about to say something. Hews quieted him with a subtle shake of his head. Oliver opened the door and, gripping the doorjamb for support, hobbled out.

The Stack burst and sputtered at its peak like a volcano, lighting the whole of Dunbridge in the colour of fire. A chill wind raced through the streets, carrying with it the scent of rot and decay. He was not surprised when the acrid air passed through his throat without so much as a tickle.

No one was about. A lone, apelike hump crouched on a step leading down from the platform’s far edge.

Oliver struggled over and seated himself on the stair next to his friend.

Tommy’s shoulders hunched farther down. He gazed without focus down the stairs to where they vanished between two walls of plaster.

“I’m sorry I shot you,” said Oliver.

No reply. Only his breathing indicated that Tom wasn’t a statue.

They sat in silence for some minutes. In intermittent mental flashes, Oliver saw the tower of arms and the sea of illness jockeying in the sky. He shut his eyes against it, but that only made it more clear.

Tommy swallowed hard. “Was it Missy?”

Oliver choked on the answer.

The big man wiped his bad eye with the back of his hand.

“I don’t understand it, Ollie. Why did she do it? I mean, I thought she was one of us, right? She played poker with us, Ollie. She sat down and drank and played cards and did she have one hell of a poker face—” He cut himself off.

“I know, Tom.”

“Did she play us, Ollie? We’re not all fools like that, are we?”

Oliver gripped his knees to keep them from shaking. He had no answer.

Tom sniffled. “I liked her. She seemed a good soul.”

“We all liked her.”

“I was awake when she ran out,” Tom said. “I heard it happen. And I crawled over and there you were. I messed up, Ollie. There I was lying on some comfortable mat with you getting murdered in the corner.”

“They’re not that comfortable.”

“And
then,
” Tommy continued. “Then you
weren’t
dead and that was so much worse.”

“It isn’t your fault, chum,” Oliver said, hoping some of his sincerity came through his tortured voice.

“But I was
there,
Chief.”

“So was I. Don’t take this all on yourself. We were hoodwinked.” Oliver clasped him on the shoulder. “But we’re alive to tell the tale.”

“Are we?” Tom sighed, still not looking over. “I died when I was sixteen, Ollie. Someone didn’t tie a knot right and I had a crate of shingles fall on me. So I don’t care if you shoot me and I don’t care what the cloaks or the clacks do to me. But I didn’t want this to happen to anyone else. I saw enough working the docks, those poor coves with gears growing out of their chests. They should’ve died—some of them even asked for it.”

Oliver remembered a time after the Uprising, when he’d gone into a steam-blasted house to look for survivors. He’d found only one young woman, skin boiled off, flesh poached, who sat and twitched and mouthed words he could not understand. The gears in her heart and brain churned away endlessly, holding her in this world.

“I could never blame them for that.”

“It’s a funny state,” Tom said. “Men fighting for the privilege of dying. Who’d’ve thought it?”

“We’re fighting for dignity, so we can be human beings again.”

Tom chuckled.

“What?”

“You sound like Hewey. All ‘dignity’ and ‘civility’ and ‘neighbourliness.’”

“Go jump in a hole.”

“That sounded like a roar,” Tom said. “Is the lion back?”

“Is the ape?”

They chuckled once or twice. Then the mirth drained away into the night and melancholy settled in again. Oliver felt the churning and vibrating in his gullet, and the motion of some viscous fluid inside the injured neck. His heart sank, but he spoke anyway, because something had to be said.

“We’re neither of us dead, Tommy.”

The words vanished into the smoke. Tom looked at his big hands and said nothing.

“But we have to consider that once they’re not around anymore to keep us going, we might just up and die,” said Oliver. “So might every other cove who’s got a pump for a heart or wire for a spine.”

Tom twiddled his thumbs. “Some wouldn’t mind, really.”

“Would you?”

Tom looked at him for the first time in their conversation. It was a long, troubled look, like he’d never considered the question. Eventually he shrugged, and stared forward again. “ ’S bigger than me, Chief.”

So it’s the Uprising coming ’round again—coves who thought their lives didn’t matter when compared to the cause.
Oliver buried his face in his hands. It had cost hundreds of good, innocent lives the last time he’d tried to rebel. Would it cost thousands this time?

I’m a walking, talking dead man. Should I really be worrying about my conscience?

Good one, chap.
Reason
your guilt away.

Quiet as a mouse, Tom started to weep.

Oliver reached out and clasped him on the near shoulder.

“When I saw you, Ollie,” Tom began. “When I saw you lying, I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t right, it happening to you. That’s what
I’m
there for—to get hurt—because what does it matter that it’s me?” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “I thought for certain
you
would make it out to see Chelsea and meet the queen and all that other stuff.”

“We’ll see it together, Tom.”

“Codswallop. I’ve got two holes in me and I can feel that thing growing in my guts again. My life was over at sixteen, but I thought I could take that same blow for you, and maybe your life wouldn’t be cut so short. And then, there I am lying on the floor while you’re being cut a second smile.”

He hammered the stair with his metal hand. It cracked and splinters flew up. “I thought if you made it, maybe my death wouldn’t be so damned worthless.”

Oliver inhaled through his teeth. Tom sat very still, breathing hard.

“You’re not dead,” Oliver said. “Neither am I. We’ve had our lumps, we’ve got our diseases, but we’re still walking and talking, and if a crate fell on you and you’re still around that’s a damned
good
thing.”

Tom’s face scrunched up in a pained expression.

Oliver shook him. “If you just sit here and wallow, your death
will
be meaningless,
when
it comes. We still have cloaks to pound. We still have gods to bring low. Do you think I hauled your sorry,
heavy
person all the way up here to have you quit?”