Whitechapel Gods (31 page)

Tom’s bleary eyes fell. Oliver stopped himself.

“Tom,” he began again, voice calmer. “You once told me you would be with me to the bitter end.”

“Of course, Chief,”

“Well, this isn’t it. That was a blow—that was a bad blow—but that was all. We’ve taken knocks before, and this is the same.”

“If you say so, Chief.”

“I do say so.”

Tommy grumbled some assent.

Oliver finally allowed himself a smile. “Then on your feet. We can’t leave Keuper thinking he has the run of the place.”

Tom rose reluctantly, and Oliver led him back to Mrs. Flower’s.

Hews and Bergen greeted them as they stepped inside.

“Have you decided?” Hews asked.

“We’re going ahead as soon as we have Scared’s device,” Oliver said.

“It will not be ready for some hours,” Bergen said.

“Well, then,” Oliver began. “On the advice of a good friend, I have decided on our next course of action.”

They waited to hear it.

Oliver lay back down on the blankets and closed his eyes. He heard chuckles from Hews and Thomas, and then the rest settled onto mats of their own.

Oliver tossed and turned at sounds and memories and wondered if he would ever sleep again.

John Scared rocketed into the red sky as the Whitechapel of dream stretched beneath him. The
mei kuan
rushed through him, rolling his consciousness out to far horizons and inflating him to cosmic size with the pressure of its vapours. From every point, he watched himself looking back, felt himself channel a universal rhythm, felt his thoughts flit through the very atoms of reality.

Now I am ready, my love. Yield to me.

He reached out an infinite array of hands that clasped, one by one, on to her own. He felt her struggle, felt the cries inside her mind, felt the ripeness of her furnace-womb. His fingers crawled through her veins, scuttling forward like spiders, deep inside her. There, they turned valves and bent pipes and redirected her fires, bending the engine to a different function.

She cursed at him in her tongue-without-language. At the same time she shivered secretly with pleasure.

A man to love, a man to hate. A man to use you, my love. You have never found one such as I, in all your long days.

He twisted and she cried out.

You will beg for me, my love, until the end of time.

She melted, blazed, writhed at his urging. Whitechapel shook from its roots. Scared watched the towers crack and tilt. Some came apart. The vapourous ghosts of humanity tumbled and fell.

Something rushed up to catch them.

What is this, my love? Who has been hiding in your skirts?

The putrid sea was on him before he could react. It burnt and corroded his fingers. A wash of violent, diseased energy rushed through him, and far away, his body gasped.

He pulled his fingers from Mama Engine and retreated back against the red dome of the city sky. This new entity of disease lashed at him once more, then fell upon the Mother with equal ferocity.

You are that broken castoff from Grandfather Clock’s impure seed. Poor, downtrodden boy. I would have taken you in, if only you had spoken to me nicely.

Alas.

He reached out once more, and made the child scream.

Aaron fell to the ground as the dream of Whitechapel jolted and came apart. For one terrifying instant, he was everywhere and nowhere, lost beyond the red sky and beyond the stable dreams of men and women, caught in a nightmare realm of horrors his mind could not fathom. Then the phantom city cracked across its length like a pane of glass shot through, with the coming of the new arrival.

Aaron dug his nails into the brass grate of the walkway. He craned his neck to see, through his thrumming vision, what had just manifested.

He beheld a towering skeleton form, a chain of a thousand skulls larger than steam ships, which faded in and out of view as if passing through fog. From the base of that shifting pile grew bony fingers as tall as the towers themselves. Some had flesh and nails still on them; others were but wisps of smoke.

Aaron saw through it to the laughing man at its core.
John Scared.

The diseased child’s pus-body shuddered as those long skeleton fingers penetrated it. Aaron felt the tremors of that contact ripple through whatever connection he still shared with the creature. The giant fingers tore long gashes through the surface of the putrid sea. Ribbons of pus flew into the air and evaporated, and the child struggled away.

Aaron rose and moved, stepping with a few paces through a hundred corridors, up a dozen lifts and out onto the roof of Cathedral Tower. The structure shone like sunlit platinum, unsullied by oil, by fire or chains.

He took advantage of the rhythmic tolling of the Great Machine, which echoed from the building up through his feet, using it to steady himself. Looming a hundred storeys above him, Scared’s snake of skulls tore its fingers into Mama Engine and her child, prying them apart. Both gods struggled and fought to no avail.

Aaron looked into Scared and let his perceptions carry him deeper and deeper through levels of demeanour and desire. He dove through memories of the rolling mountains of the Far East, back through acts of violence and depravity that would chill the blood of any hardened criminal, past a dozen changes of name and identity, past dull days of medical school, ungrateful patients, and uppity colleagues. Finally, as had been his gift since the day of his birth, he saw into the essence of the man.

He found two souls: the one, respectable and timid, a tangle of worries and insecurities hiding from the world inside a thin veil of education and status; the other, a monster of suppressed desires given life and form, a deviant creature who drew sustenance from subjugation, and who, when first loosed, had dominated and imprisoned the good man who’d spawned him.

Now I know who you are. And I know what you’re trying to do.

Now there were four gods, and one of them was a flesh-and-blood man. The poison would not work on him, just as it would not work on any living man or woman. Aaron had worked that much out himself, when he’d been after the same weapon in a different lifetime.

And he had no way to warn Oliver.

The third principle of the machine is Function. Each component is given a task that does not vary. Diversity or commonality is the prerogative of the machine itself, and who are mortal men to argue when their destiny is regulated upon them?

Then who am I to protest such a thing?

IV. iv

“That’s all?”

Oliver gaped at the little bauble the mechanic held out to him.

The old man wrinkled his nose. “What did you expect, exactly?”

No bigger than a pocket watch, the device was a little oval of gold with curved copper wires sticking out of the rim, five or six ounces in weight.

“Not this.”

The German mechanic harrumphed. “It is the mechanism inside that is important. If you desire, I can build it to be as ungainly as you like.”

Hews lifted the device reverently from Oliver’s open palm.

“Of course, we’re grateful to you, sir,” he said. “The lad’s having a bit of trouble believing it will work, I think—a condition I must admit that I share.”

Von Herder hobbled to one of the large cabinets on the wall. “Grandfather Clock has as many bodies as there are gears in all the clocks in Whitechapel. It is as if he has no body at all. What instrument would
you
make to destroy such a creature?”

Hews rubbed his cheeks. Oliver stole the device back and turned it over and over.

Von Herder removed a faded, moth-bitten frock, about forty years out of style, from the cabinet and shrugged into it. “I have had long debates with Herr Scared over the nature of these beasts. It is always a satisfying way to spend an evening. His hypothesis is that the creatures consist of some manifestation of thought. As to whether the medium involved is energy or matter, or whether just patterns in the aether, both he and I are undecided.”

He reached up and pulled a cord. The lightbulb in the rear half of the workshop died, leaving only the glimmer of lingering furnace coals.

“Herr Scared seemed to think that no transmission of thought could ever affect the gods. He instead proposed an electrical method. The problem with that was that the gods were not electrical.”

“Grandfather Clock is,” said Bergen, from his post at the base of the staircase with both steam rifles and a bag of ammunition at his feet.

Von Herder shook his head. “Not as such, but there is an exchange of an electrical nature between himself and those attached to the Chimney. Those people are used as part of the Grandfather’s mind, and so present a direct route for the energies of that device.”

Oliver ran the fingers of his good hand over it, finding it cold. It resembled a large insect, tipped onto its back.

“Aaron described it as poison.”

“Accurate enough.”

It seemed good practice to ask what that poison did to its “direct route,” but if what Aaron had said was true, that wouldn’t much matter.

Hews was not through asking questions. “We’ll be using one of those poor buggers on the Chimney as our target, then.”

Von Herder answered in the affirmative. Oliver did not contradict him.

You’re the key, Oliver,
Aaron had said.
You alone out of all these souls have a connection to both the child and the mother. There’s only one more, and he’s only too willing to have you connected if you irk him. There we have three minds in one body.

If the poison got into his body, it would leech into those three minds. What did it matter what became of his own?

He nodded as if listening. Let Hews think what he would, and let Thomas, who was waiting for them on the street above, do the same. Hews might still go ahead if he knew the outcome, but he’d lose Tom.

“The tines must puncture the skin,” Von Herder was saying. “Once a circuit is made, the device will activate automatically.”

Oliver slipped the device into a pocket, tines pointing outward.

“We’re in your debt, sir,” Oliver said, trying to sound confident and grateful.

The old mechanic smiled. “Considerably.” He reached to a second cord and pulled it. The bulb in the front half of the workshop died as well, leaving them all in pitch darkness.

Bergen grumbled from the stair: “I suppose you find that terribly funny, Herr von Herder.”

“Terribly, Herr Keuper. I’ll see myself out. The hour is late and I’ve a want to soothe my throat with your grotesque English brew.”

Somewhere off to his left, Hews stiffly thanked the man. Oliver pictured him bowing and tipping his hat.

Slow steps, then a sliver of amber light as the door at the stair’s top opened, spilling over Bergen’s tight jaw.

“I hope you two have a plan for accessing the Chimney,” Bergen said. “It is not a place most men return from.”

“You’ve been to a few such places, if your tales have been any indication,” Hews said.

“And in any case, you’re not coming with us,” said Oliver.

The German’s glare was that of a statue in some ancient, vine-tangled ruin.

“I do not think I heard you properly, Sumner.”

“Don’t fight me on this one, Bergen,” Oliver said. “What use is that cannon of yours when one shot will bring the entire Stack down on our heads?”

“There are many noises in the Stack to cover such things.”

“I need you in Shadwell.”

There in the bottom levels of the hide, the noises of the city seemed distant, as did the safety they provided.

“You are trying to rid yourself of me again, Sumner. Why, after all I’ve done for you, do you still expect treachery from me?”

“Why do you expect me to expect it? Shadwell won’t hold out, even with the lift gone. The crows may build another lift. The golds may just climb down. Heckler’s a good lad, and Hanley as well, and all of them, but they aren’t soldiers.”

The expression on the German’s face was clear: he was deciding whether Oliver’s leadership was worth the trouble.

“Bergen, there are hundreds of people in the Underbelly. The canaries have just been waiting for an excuse to revenge the Uprising, and they won’t spare a quarter. I need your gun there, Bergen. I need you to lead them.”

Some distant vibration hummed the air in the long silence before Bergen spoke. “You care for these people.”

“Yes, I do. And I trust you to honour that.”

Bergen’s words became very quiet then, whispered without a hint of an accent. “Maybe he was wrong.” The German turned and silently ascended. His shadow fell across the stairs and then they were in light again.

The room felt suddenly empty, as with the release of some pressure.

Hews’ hand fell on Oliver’s shoulder, gave a squeeze, and then he, too, mounted the stairs.

Oliver stood alone in the dark a moment, then followed.

Half an hour later they walked into the most dangerous place on Earth.

Oliver’s first step onto the platform at the Stack’s station sent shudders through his bones. The metal vibrated with a subsonic tone, feeling slippery and loose, as if it moved beneath the feet. The beams of soot-coated iron rose up in their thousands and bent inward towards their Lady. Steam shot into the skies like escaping dragons, and on the higher slopes where no human being could go, gears the size of cities churned relentlessly. Oliver could not help but despair at the inhuman mass of the structure. It was one thing to witness it from afar; quite another to have it surrounding him, touching him at every point like a thousand-fingered claw twitching slowly closed.

The Stack had grown up like the towers, irregardless of tiny human concerns. In places, the walkways had to skirt monstrous boilers and furnaces, sometimes vast stretches of slope where mechanical arms bent and shaped metals to their Mother’s purposes. It was a living expression of the iron goddess, surging mindlessly into the sky, and crushing those weak creatures fool enough to interfere.

The fire blazed in the back of Oliver’s mind, hotter than lightning, and his eyes burned like magnesium. He wore his hat low over his face. He’d wrapped a veil of cloth around his eyes to dull the light, but it was thin enough that he could still see.

Hews went first, as he knew the Stack and had been there many times.

“Like stepping from church directly onto the lake of fire,” he’d said of it. Hews wore a thick, wet handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose against the air. Oliver had found that, like Tom, his lungs were not bothered by it.

Gold cloaks watched them dismount with the rest of the small crowd. Their eyes tracked in jumps, in perfect rhythm with the station’s giant clock. These ones showed clearer signs of Grandfather Clock’s influence: their bone structure was more rounded, their faces more angular, with stretches and sometimes splits in their skin to accommodate growths beneath. The platform emptied into a thin corridor between shapeless steel monoliths where Boiler Men stood like statues, row on row, guns to their shoulders, glass eyes staring into some unseen void. Oliver felt a chill as he passed in front of each, a hint of some emptiness that seeped into his mind from their gazes.

Two more cloaks scrutinised them with luminescent electric eyes as they reached the grand arch that exited the station. They betrayed no hint of recognition.

You don’t even recognise yourself, chum.

They cringed and drew back as the light of Oliver’s eyes fell on them.

The arch emerged onto one of a hundred concourses that ringed the Stack at different altitudes. Sparks lanced along naked copper wires hung between the beams above. Heat pummelled them from all quarters, carried through the building’s supports, walls, and floors. The sounds of the machines were like the cries of giants locked beneath the Earth.

They walked the empty streets in silence, not daring to think, and frightened sometimes to breathe. Those men they did pass, labourers kept at the machines long hours, moved like hollow ghosts, only the red light of the Stack’s angry fire to define them.

The rumble of the titans’ struggles beat on Oliver’s inner ears, and their blows shook his knees. Oliver found himself leaning on Tom more and more for support as they worked their way in. He did not miss the glances Tom and Hews exchanged.

They walked one of the many broad avenues that connected the rings with the Stack’s central tower. On either side, endless rows of closed doors led to the factories. Now and all night, those unfortunates confined within would run the machines to Mama Engine’s unknowable purpose, under the direction of their semihuman masters.

From the avenue, Hews led them along catwalks toward the Stack’s inner walls, over huge smelting pits and lonely arenas populated with twitching mechanical creatures. They passed lightless wells hundreds of feet deep, cranes and engines and monstrous glass spheres with dark fire burning deep inside. There was not a single clock to be seen, and their march became timeless, eternal.

Oliver felt nausea welling up, and shut his eyes awhile as he walked. The gods savaged each other somewhere above. Grandfather Clock’s tick was omnipresent. And there—something else. Laughter?

“This is the place,” Hews said. The words stilled the atmosphere like curses spoken in church. “It has a steam lock, and my contact was unable to obtain a key.”

Oliver stepped forward. The door was pitted like pig iron, and sealed across by four bolts. The lock was a small hole in the casing, no wider than two fingers.

Oliver knelt before it and produced from his pocket a copper tube that split into six pipes at the far end, each pipe capped with a rubber cup. Oliver felt around the inside of the lock, noting the shape of the interior. He bent the six pipes to match.

In a moment he rose and gestured to Tommy. The big man knelt down, drew in an enormous lungful of air, and blew into the pipe with all his strength. Some colour came back into his cheeks and a click sounded. There followed the hiss of escaping steam and the bolts withdrew. Tom drew the heavy door back to reveal an abyss on the other side.

“You’re certain your chap wouldn’t lead us wrong?” he asked.

Hews stepped past and into the door. “They’re all like this.” The darkness swallowed him whole.

Tom shifted uncomfortably behind.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here?” he said. His chuckle died in infancy and he cleared his throat. “After you, Chief.”

Oliver stepped through. The light of the street vanished and new light replaced it. Oliver walked on a net of woven chains above a bed of white coals. Glass creatures of indefinite form wriggled between the links.

“What can you see, Hews?” Oliver asked.

“As much as a bat in the daylight.”

“I thought as much.”

Heat withered him, blasting up from below, pressing in from the sides. He focused on his shoes, fearing to look up and have the vision of Mama Engine’s true self drive him mad.

He heard Hews fumbling with an electric torch. With a hiss, it brought light into the hall—beautiful, mundane light. The vision faded into a barely illuminated pipe hallway, ending in a malformed ladder leading down.

Tom stepped in and closed the door. “Cloaks outside,” he said. “A pack of golds, and they might have seen me.”

“The baron knows we’re coming,” Oliver said. He had no torch, electrics being difficult to find in Whitechapel, but the radiance of his eyes seemed to work just as well.

“Lad, when were you going to tell us that?”

Oliver looked over at Hews. The older man’s face was cut with two sets of shadows.

“Truth be told, I wasn’t, but this is all pressing my mind and I let it slip.”

“You weren’t going to tell us at all?”

“It didn’t seem relevant,” Oliver said with a shrug.

“Not relevant?” Hews said. “We’ll be caught for certain, lad. He’ll have guards at every entrance.”

“We will walk in a straight path all the way into the Chimney,” Oliver said. “The baron won’t stop us. The crows won’t stop us. All we need to worry about are the canaries.”

Creases formed around Hews’ eyes. “Explain yourself, lad.”

“We have divine favour on our side, Hewey.”

“Tell me you did not deal with these creatures.”

“Perhaps I did. Or perhaps this is all just fortunate happenstance. If you’re looking for an explanation, I will have to disappoint you.”

Oliver grimaced as a wave of nausea hit him. He must have swayed, for an instant later Tom’s big hands were on his shoulders, steadying him.

“We trust you, Chief,” he said. “Always have, always will.”

He must have been sharing a look with Hews, for the older man ground his jaw a moment, then turned away.