Whitechapel Gods (35 page)

Had they searched him? Had they taken it away?

Oliver stalled: “I don’t work for her.”

The baron stood straight again.

“You clean the crocodile’s teeth, and the beast does not eat you. It is simple.” He glanced upwards. “Day passes the world to night’s gentle hands, night returns it to day. Thus there is time and turning.”

Night and day? He and I?

Oliver said nothing, feeling the situation out. Baron Hume folded his hands together in front of him. “You are knives shredding the pages of a troubled mind. You are the death of the words written by a shaking hand and a dying soul.”

Oliver blurted it out: “Your prophecies?”

The baron nodded. Oliver gasped as his memory hit him over the head with the obvious. This was the same man who had written the verses of the
Summa Machina
who had cried and railed against his own weakness even as the Lord and Lady consumed him.

He’s not an enemy,
Oliver thought.
He’s just another of their victims.

His mind started churning.

“What are you asking?” Oliver said. “Do you want the same as we do?”

“A hare shivering in his hole also profits from the ceasing of the thunderstorm.”

Instantly, all of his fatigue was forgotten. Oliver tried to stand and remembered that his leg would not work.

“I need to get to the Chimney,” he said. He at last patted his pocket and found a comforting lump within. “It’s the only place it will work. Can you help me get past the cloaks and the Boiler Men?”

The baron’s gaze drifted slowly to the pocket where Scared’s device lay hidden. Oliver’s heart jumped into his throat, as he realised he might have just betrayed himself.

Hume only looked aside a moment, as if considering, then spoke. “Raindrops will wash away once loosed from the cloud. The ticking little scrubs and the burning ones are so many ashes, and the wind will carry them over the hills.” He looked back. “But the lost souls listen only to the whispers in their own darkness.”

Oliver tumbled that in his mind a few minutes. “
Your
darkness?”

The baron nodded. “What use has a gardener of a hole that cannot be filled? Only the echoes call it home.”

Hume turned once again to face the altar, and walked in measured strides to just below the quartz clock, then halted, lowered his head, and stilled.

Oliver settled back and wondered how far Providence would string him along before crushing him down.

Beside him, Hews stirred and burbled some words past the blood on his lips. Oliver leaned towards him, tried to reach out with his broken arm and found he couldn’t.

“Hewey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, lad,” he grumbled. His eyes fluttered open, revealing themselves to be bloodshot and watery. “I didn’t quite catch the end of it. What did he say?”

“He…well, I
think
he promised that he would help us to the Chimney,” Oliver said carefully.

“He always was difficult to understand. I assume he hasn’t gotten any clearer.” Hews made no effort to rise. “Where is he now?”

Oliver glanced at the mechanical man. He stood in the same pose, still and unreacting. “He’s just over at the altar. I think he’s communing with his gods, or perhaps with the Boiler Men.”

“Do you trust him, lad?”

Oliver watched that still form and reread the passages of the
Summa Machina
in his mind. “Yes. I do.”

“Good enough for me.” Hews reached into his pocket. “I appear to have lost my gun. Shame on me.”

“You can have my knife.”

Hews chuckled. “I wouldn’t be caught dead with just a knife, lad. I hesitate to ask…”

Oliver shook his head.

“Ah. He was a good lad. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.” Hews found Oliver’s eyes. “Don’t regret, my boy. We all came into this with our eyes open and we’ll leave it with our consciences clear.”

Oliver nodded.

“Consciences
clear,
right? And don’t mourn me.”

Oliver felt a new knot twisting his innards. “How bad is it, Hewey?”

“I can’t feel my legs,” Hews said. “Nor my right arm. I don’t think I’ll be moving again.”

“Christ, Hewey…”

“Don’t mourn, lad,” Hews said. “Barbara’s waiting for me. I’ll be in good hands.” He took a long, calm breath. “You’ve never asked about your mother, lad.”

The knot grew tighter. “I never wanted to know.”

“Well, I’ve been waiting twenty-odd years for you to ask me, lad.”

“I still don’t want to know.”

“Well, since I’m the one who’s dying
I
will set the topic of conversation.” Hews took another slow breath. “Do you remember her?”

Oliver sighed. “A little. I remember I used to go out looking for her.”

“We couldn’t keep you in the house, lad. Even at that age you would disappear for a few nights and then we’d find you sleeping on the factory floor.” Hews chuckled and his eyes glazed over with remembrance. After a few sharp coughs, he went on. “I woke up one night because I heard someone breaking a window into the factory. Barbara shoved me out there with a lantern and my pistol wearing nothing but a dressing gown.”

Oliver didn’t need to hear this. Maybe Hews needed to tell it, and he was right: of the two of them, he was closer to dying.
Damn you and your courtesies, old man.

“Shadwell was crawling with ruffians in those days, just after the wall went up. I came in all fire and brimstone and to my surprise, the intruder was a woman. She saw me and bolted, jumped right through a back window and left you behind.”

Hews grew serious a moment. “Her eyes glowed, lad.”

Oliver sunk into his shoulders. “She was a crow.”

“Aye. I thought you should know.”

Oliver considered the implications, rejected them. “Thanks, Hewey.”

Baron Hume stirred. With a scraping noise much like a yawn he lifted his head, then turned and approached.

“Herbert Francis Lewis,” he said.

Hews tried feebly to tip the crushed hat still sticking to his head. “Mr. Hume.”

The baron looked at both of them, and at neither. “A Roman road is clear and leads to the palaces of gold and marble.”

“Thank you kindly,” said Hews. “One of your men will need to escort young Oliver there. I’m afraid I’m not fit to move.”

“Wait,” said Oliver. “What about the Underbelly? Would you please withdraw the Boiler Men from attacking the Shadwell Underbelly?”

The baron’s head tilted in his thoughtful pose. “A sparrow chirps for its flock, but a rooster crows to herald his own magnificence.”

Oliver glanced at Hews. “What did that mean?”

“He’s asking you why you’re making the request.”

“Ah.” Oliver turned back to Hume. “They’re no threat to you or to the Boiler Men. They’re simply trying to survive.”

The baron nodded. “The sun setting…”

An explosion. Copper gears and springs sprayed out to clatter on the marble floors. Steam rushed into the room. All three turned to see that one of the two copper doors to the chapel had been bent inward, and sported a monstrous hole in the centre.

A second explosion broke through the other door, bending it from its outer edge and knocking its delicate mechanisms loose. Steam rushed in through the hole, followed by white electric arcs.

It could only be one weapon.

“Get back,” Oliver said, searching for and finding the tiny derringer in his pocket. He fumbled some bullets out with his crippled arm and tried to load.

A string of masculine grunts sounded in the hall, then the damaged doors caved under the weight of a steel battering ram.

“Who is it?” Hews asked.

Oliver slipped the second bullet in and clicked his weapon shut. “Scared.”

The doors burst at the second hit and eight men stormed in, clad in workers’ soot-laden clothing. They dropped the ram and began winding flashers that hung on their belts.

Hume turned to face them. Oliver watched in horror as all eight men suddenly clutched at their eyes, toppled on their faces, and slid to a stop on the marble floor. There had been no impact, no arcs of fire or projectiles leaping from the baron to these men, and yet pools of blood had already begun to seep out from under their bodies.

Then a third shot, and Baron Hume’s head parted into ribbons of iron. Steam rushed along the path of the bullet, carrying deadly lightning that lanced into the baron’s chest, scorching the white shirt and tailcoat. The empty husk fell to the ground with a clang.

Oliver leveled his gun at the door and stayed silent.

A man strode through, barrel-chested and built like an ox, with a broom moustache of brown wires that nearly covered his face. On his shoulder rode the brass-hued weapon Oliver had last seen in von Herder’s workshop.

“That’s far enough, thank you,” Oliver called.

Faster than lightning, the man drew his army revolver and shot Oliver twice in the chest. Oliver found the impacts no more jarring than swift jabs with a broom handle. He returned fire.

The steam rifle fell to the floor and cracked the marble. The man faded to his knees, eyes wide with surprise, then keeled forward and ceased to breathe.

The derringer fell between Oliver’s feet. He coughed and choked, as sharp convulsions distorted his chest and fluid rushed into the two bullet holes. Oliver gasped as the bullets spat out onto the floor, splatters of white paste following.

“We’re alive,” he said, to Hews or to himself or to the dead people littering the room. “Isn’t that just a lark?”

The space swallowed his words. Not even breath disturbed the settling air, aside from his own.

Hews had expired sometime during the fight.

“Did I ever thank you, Hewey?” Oliver asked. “If I didn’t, I meant to. I’m a proud bugger, but I guess you knew that.”

He wished his new vision would allow him to see Hews one last time before he went off to heaven.

It isn’t right, you dying like this after all you’ve done for me and for your homeland.

He wiped tears from his eyes. The pus and grime transferred from his hands simply made them water more. “I hope to see you at the Gates, Hewey.”

And it isn’t right, me still being alive.

Nothing could be right in Whitechapel until the day was done.

With agonising slowness of the joints, Oliver tipped forward until he landed on his belly, then crawled. It took him perhaps ten minutes to drag himself to the altar. There, he stood, using the marble block for support, and grasped the baron’s cane.

It was mahogany wood, polished darkly and oiled. The handle and foot were sheathed in silver, both completely without style or scrollwork. Oliver examined Hume’s top hat a moment, then set it back down.

A good hat for a good man, right, Hewey?

He tested the cane, finding he had to hunch like an old man to make use of it, but it let him hobble. The white fluid that ran now like blood in his body had already begun healing his bones and straightening his muscles.

He started walking, past Hume’s inert body, past the remains of assailants and friends. He hobbled out into the Long Hall, and there, stopped to look from the windows.

He did not know which tower he saw far away to his right, but it was in flames. He saw the antlike shadows of people running, and the occasional flash of gunfire. No doubt the cloaks had gone mad all over the city, and perhaps the Boiler Men as well, deprived of their director. Without the constant light of the Stack illuminating the underside of the clouds, nothing more of Whitechapel could be seen. He watched a burning tenement break from its supports and plunge into the downstreets.

At the other end of the hallway, he found another set of broken doors, these ones not shattered but scored by flasher hits—a crude but fast way to open certain types of locks. Beyond, a lift shaft plunged far down into the heart of the Stack. Oliver stared down it and saw the lift itself clacking its way up out of the dark. It reached the level and halted, spitting steam from mechanisms beneath it.

Metal fingers an inch and a half in diameter hauled the gate aside. Two Boiler Men waited for him to board. Oliver stepped between them and turned to face the door.

He looked out one of the hall’s windows until one of the Boiler Men shut the gate, knowing he might never see Whitechapel again.

The mechanisms beneath the lift churned, and his descent began.

The echoes of gunfire faded from the vast space between the Underbelly and the Shadwell Concourse. Bergen waited, Gasser in hand, steam rifle close by. It had been the fire of Atlas rifles—unmistakable.

He turned to the sailor.

Phineas’s eyes gleamed glassy and bloodshot from the small gap between his collar and hat brim. “I can’t hear the cloaks anymore,” he said. The sailor’s trembling flapped the folds of his ulster coat.

“It is quiet,” Bergen said. Even the ordinary bustle of the Concourse, usually all too audible from beneath, had softened to an ambient hum. “What do you hear in the Underbelly, Macrae?”

The old man withdrew further. “Women talking. Babies crying. All your men fiddling with their guns.”

Bergen held still a moment, listening for that subtle absence of sound—like the stilling of birds and insects and leaves—that signaled the presence of a predator.

“Where is Heckler?” Bergen asked.

Phineas answered without hesitation. “Moving up the Parade with two men.”

Bergen nodded. “There is someone else afoot in the city, sailor. He is a young man who walks without sound, but he would be badly wounded, perhaps breathing heavily, and he will be carrying a knife.”

Bergen surveyed the street. Bergen and Phineas sat in the shadow of the last wagon, now pulled from the centre of the Parade and lodged against the wall of one of the two buildings closest to the lift. From that point, Bergen commanded a good view of the Parade, except where it dipped beneath itself and wound around the thick beams that cut the Underbelly to hold up Shadwell Tower. Nothing moved.

“Find me this man.”

They sat in silence a few minutes.

“I can’t hear shit,” said Phineas.