Whitechapel Gods (36 page)

Bergen had made certain the street was empty. The men had been crowded into the single building to the lift’s left, along with the wounded and that fussy but capable doctor that Oliver had fished up. A concentrated resistance would deter the prudent predator, but one man, alone and without support, was an inviting target.

So where are you, boy?

Phineas’ presence was an unfortunate necessity. Bergen told himself he had no intention of protecting the old man if Penny showed.

“The Ironboys are moving,” Phineas said. “They’re gathering somewhere near the old square.”

“Where is that?” Bergen asked.

“About above the Parade three or four streets up from Coll’s,” said the sailor.

“What are they doing?”

Phineas snorted. “Damned if I know, Kraut. It’s not like they bloody talk to each other, is it?”

Bergen stilled the impulse to chastise the man for his tone. He knew too well that bluster was a coward’s only courage.

Heckler and his two escorts appeared from an alley mouth three streets down. An easy shot from this range, if Penny followed them. But no, he would never be so careless.

Heckler approached, white-faced and drawn. His moustache had thinned pitifully as sweat stuck the hairs together. He and the two men with him stank of fear.

Bergen kept his eyes roving: alleys, rooftops, lift, bends of the Parade.

“What have you found?” he asked.

Heckler squatted behind the wagon and swallowed before speaking.

“It’s the Wordsworths, suh. The mister’s got his throat cut and the missus’s been stabbed.”

“He is trying to draw me away.” Bergen looked at the young man with narrowed eyes. “Have the tunnels been breached?”

“No, suh,” Heckler said. “The Bemets hid in their cellar. Someone broke off the lock and kicked through the trapdoor.”

“Why were they not in the tunnels?”

Heckler shrugged, looked away. “Some folk wouldn’t go, didn’t want to leave their homes. It ain’t like we can force ’em to.”

“You can. You should have. This is not a time to have the city spotted with stray civilians. Why didn’t you tell me about this attack, Macrae?”

“Because I didn’t bloody hear it, Kraut. The noise from those God-cursed guns almost broke my skull.”

Bergen grunted in response, and let his eyes wander again, let his instincts guide them, point to point, shadow to shadow.

After a few minutes of silence, with Heckler and his men shifting like admonished schoolboys, the American spoke. “Suh, should we be here? What Ah mean is, shouldn’t we be guarding the tunnel doors?”

Bergen tolerated the question. “If we gather there, the attack will come there. We gather here because this location is of no value to us, and will yield no power to our enemies should they take it.”

“But with that killer out in the streets…”

“He has not the strength to break the tunnel doors, nor the voice to convince the women to open them. And in any case, they are not his quarry.”

Without warning, Phineas jumped in place and slammed his palms over his ears.

Bergen shot to his feet, followed instants later by Heckler, already shouldering his Winchester. The two nameless militiamen struggled to their feet with more trepidation than haste.

Thunder broke out in the vast space.

Bergen localised the sound, pinpointing it to the upper Concourse, a spot some six blocks away. As he watched, bits of concrete from the roads above chipped off and fell. Larger pieces followed them, crashing onto the tenements below, and then an entire segment some twenty feet across tore away, braces and supports and all, and crushed the building beneath it.

“Gather the men,” Bergen ordered, not turning away to see who obeyed.

Soft gaslight shone through the hole in the upper concourse onto the rising cloud of dust. Then the light grew dark, and exactly two dozen shapes dropped through the hole in perfect unison, shapes too tall and round to be men. Bergen watched them smash through the roof of their landing spot, and watched the whole building come down in a splash of debris.

They would have to extricate themselves. Perhaps two or three minutes.

He turned to his army, his ragtag group of labourers, bakers, wheel menders, and plebeians—old, feeble, bowed with years of work or with rickets.

“Do as I say and you may live,” Bergen said. “Run from them. Shoot them from windows and dark alleys. Lead them astray from the tunnels. If you are swift they will not catch you. Any man who stands his ground deserves his death.”

He holstered his pistol, reached down, and hauled the steam rifle onto his shoulder.

“I will do the hunting.”

He rapidly divided them into teams. Some he assigned to run, others to shoot from rooftops and windows and keep out of sight as much as possible.

“Do not stay in one location,” Bergen said. “Spread them out as much as you can and if caught in a motion, always retreat. If you get a shot from safety, aim for their weapons and their mechanisms.” He pointed to three teams and told them to run past the bystreet and closer to the Blink. He ordered three more to run into the tenements on the east side, where the streets curved and connected without any order. The rest dispersed as they saw fit, with one team remaining to guard the wounded.

“Heckler, you are with me.”

The American nodded and stepped up. Bergen was not surprised to find that Phineas had vanished.

As the men ran off down the Parade, Bergen looked Heckler over. The lad stood ready and expectant, capable and confident. He was how Ellingsly should have been.

“Your task is to cover me, boy,” Bergen said. “With this weapon I am not mobile, and you may need to draw fire away from me.”

Heckler nodded without hesitation. “Yes, suh.”

“Good.”

The rumble of Atlas rifles drew their attention. Bergen simultaneously felt fear building in his gut and a smile growing on his face.

“This time Bergen Keuper will
win
the day,” he said aloud.

They began the hunt.

Scared’s mind manifested as a field of ice, bordered on each horizon with savage, unscalable crags, and torn across by a savage wind. The sky was dark and without stars, though strings of sparkling fluid crisscrossed it. Aaron struggled for each step, casting about with his unique vision for Scared’s trapped other self.

Beneath his feet lay images frozen in the ice. These were the memories and nightmares of the creature that called itself Scared, locked away where they could not hamper him. Aaron glanced at them only a moment, for he found he couldn’t stand to watch the atrocities that played themselves out over and over under the surface: things done to women, to children, done with chemicals and knives and bare hands. They were monstrous. Still, Aaron could not help but marvel at the mental discipline required to erect such a place, and at the strength of the personality that had done so.

The images told him a story, a story of a once-good man, corrupted by sinful thoughts, by guilt and shame and lusts he could not control. The man had done terrible things. Though he longed to be caught and imprisoned, the police did not connect him to any of his crimes; he was a respectable man, beyond suspicion. Finally, unable to bear the weight of his shame, he had withdrawn deep within, and abandoned his life to the monster that called itself John Scared.

“You are not him.”

Aaron looked down to find himself walking across a face that looked much like Scared’s own might have, in days of youth and health.

“No, I’m not.”

“You are not a nightmare,” said the man, whose lips stayed still and frozen, and whose voice came on the wind. “You are a living man.”

Aaron nodded gently. “Yes.”

“I do not understand.”

Aaron knelt above the man. “I am here to free you.”

“I do not understand.”

“It’s all right.” Aaron stroked the ice above the man’s face. “You’re the man he was, before his twisted passions took him. You’re the part of him that doubted and was ashamed.”

“I had terrible thoughts,” said the man. “Thoughts I could not live with. They tortured me every night and every waking hour, until I gave them away to him. I don’t want them back.”

Aaron nodded. “I know,” he said. “It will be hard, but there will be peace afterwards. I promise.”

He reached into his pockets, and withdrew the tools he needed. In this dream realm, anything he wished met his hand within the fabric. He tried a saw, an electric arcing device, a quantity of pitch and fire, and finally a hammer and chisel. The ice would not yield.

Aaron let his mind think on it.

“How did he do this?” he asked the face. “How did he build this prison?”

“Do you see the river?” said the face. “The heavenly river.”

Aaron glanced at the streams of fluid above. “This liquid?” He reached up and touched some. Its white glow lingered on his fingers and skin.

“It is divinity in a bottle,” said the face. “That is what he said. It is heaven or hell as he pleases. And hell pleases him. How it pleases him.”

Aaron looked into the glimmering fluid with his vision, seeing the yellow flower that grew in the deepest South Asian jungles, seeing the decrepit, starved monks who would rather smell it than eat or sleep, seeing the tendrils of its scent spin in the human body and mind, until both burned up with wonder. It was the infinite power of a mind unfettered.

He breathed it in, letting it flow about his astral form until he glowed as bright as a night star.

I need be a watcher no longer,
he thought.

The ice began to melt around him, and the nightmares growled as they emerged.

The brass wheel had been jammed open, its metal twisted and locked together by impacts. Oliver stumbled over the threshold and into the temple.

The Stack was a war zone. Mad crows and machines danced and cackled and cannibalised one another while canaries ran about trying to restore order through reasoning, commanding, destroying. And the Boiler Men marched through the halls, murdering everything that moved.

Oliver felt it as much as he heard it. Mama Engine’s perpetual fire in his mind had gone cold, as had the sickening pulse in his stomach and bowels that belonged to her diseased child. The open spaces and grand halls had fallen victim to a chill wind. The machines built into the walls stuttered and stalled, pressurised steam leaked from conduits, and the copper wiring strung against the ceiling sparked erratically.

The black cloaks that he and his guard passed had died in terror, their last expressions frozen on their faces.

Only twice did they meet resistance. On the first occasion, a pack of gold cloaks blocked their path as their leader demanded that the baron put a stop to the disorder. The Boiler Men had taken two steps in front of Oliver and gunned the cloaks down with cold efficiency.

The second encounter had been with a crow gnawing a steam pipe, oblivious to the heat scorching the skin from her face. The Boiler Men had dispatched her with the same precision.

The Boiler Men had obviously been into the temple already. The hundred cloaks that had brought down Tommy lay about the mirrored floor literally blown to pieces. Not a single one moved.

Oliver’s bodyguards led him across the floor to the edge of the Chimney. The promised lift waited there, a plate of gold and steel mounted on tracks. This vantage brought him close enough to see the individual people in Grandfather Clock’s thrall. The lift started up with a hum and a crackle of electricity, and began to roll sideways down a descending track that spiralled the outside of the chamber, always facing the Chimney.

The sound of hidden machines was deafening, the stench of ozone overpowering. Oliver forced himself to watch the endless rotating gallery of faces, wondering how many he had known, how many no one had known. So many of them were the child victims of the Chimney gangs, and some had been here long enough that their bodies had rotted away, leaving dry, cracked organs and nerves clinging to bone—yet still they were unable to die.

You will rest tonight,
he told them.

Electricity arced between the Chimney and the copper threads extending out to the far walls. The lift circled the chamber over and over, descending two or three storeys with each loop. As they approached the bottom, Oliver estimated that they must be a quarter mile underground.

The lift reached its destination, locking into place with powerful magnets. The Boiler Men escorted him along a walkway that extended out into the room to a ring at the base of the Chimney. At the edge of that ring, they found a creature built of bent strips of brass and copper wiring. Oliver looked into its porcelain eyes as it assessed him and realised this was the one that had brought Tommy down.

It looked inquisitively at the Boiler Men, who did not speak or react, then reached out to a bundle of copper wires wound about a railing. Arcs leapt from its fingers and ran along the wires, jumping between different coils until they vanished into the Chimney. The Chimney reacted with an electric hum and the lowest two rows began to turn. The chairs carrying the Machine’s victims shifted, some sliding up, others down, bringing an empty spot onto the bottom row, then rotating it towards them. In the gaps revealed during these movements, Oliver caught a glimpse of the Chimney’s interior: a spider’s web of interlaced copper balls and wires, alive with wiggling electric worms.

The bottom row slid to a halt. The creature pointed a single wire finger at the tarnished chair settling in front of them.

Oliver reached into his pocket and palmed the golden device. The Boiler Men closed ranks behind him, blocking any route of escape. Oliver allowed himself one deep breath, then hung the baron’s cane over the railing and climbed awkwardly into the chair.

The Boiler Men remained where they stood, blocking Oliver from the other creature’s line of sight. Oliver drew Scared’s device up to his chest, tines pointed inward. He gazed into the eyes of the Boiler Men, looking for answers to the questions he should have asked hours earlier: when was he supposed to activate it? How deep did the tines have to sink? The Boiler Men gave no answer, not in voice or gesture.