Whitechapel Gods (6 page)

Bailey and Hews shared a silent look. Oliver scrambled to right the derringer and fit his long fingers around the handle. Muttered curses accompanied sounds of movement over the crates.

Bailey counted down on his fingers. Oliver turned himself over into a squat and got ready. Three. Two. One.

They all leapt up at once, and the room filled with light and noise. Oliver’s first shot went into the ceiling. Then he took aim on the gold cloak who’d shot at him and let fly with the second. The cloak went down, tumbling backwards. The chief cloak, his fine coat a mess of blood, brown grease, and black oil, staggered to the door despite the bullets slamming home in his broad back. The cloak on the left spun and fell, his rifle tumbling from his hands.

Suddenly all firing ceased. Oliver brandished his empty derringer as fiercely as the others now held aim on their last quarry.

“Buggers, all of you,” the man said. He grasped the door frame to stay upright, and shot a snarl over his shoulder at them. Streams of oil streaked his face. “The noble Grandfather will bring me back, and I’ll execute you all.”

The two cloaks from outside appeared in the doorway, eyes wide in alarm. Bailey and Hews, who, Oliver realised, had been saving their last rounds, shot the two men through their foreheads.

“You don’t even die like a man,” Bailey scoffed, lowering his now-empty weapon.

The gold cloak’s sneer dissolved into a slack, vacant expression, and he slumped to the floor with a sloshing sound that chilled Oliver’s bones.

Hews relaxed his arms. “Perhaps he does.”

Bailey turned to Kerry’s sprawled body. Only a small black-rimmed hole marred Kerry’s chest, but beneath him lay a slowly spreading pool of blood.

Not a bad way for it to end,
Oliver thought.
Better than the Chimney or the steam guns or any of the other horrors of this city.

The other three faced their fallen comrade and bowed their heads. Hews removed his hat.

“A great honour to die in the service of queen and country,” Bailey said, voice hard. “We salute this man who gave his life for the cause.”

“Flights of angels,” Hews muttered. “We shall see you at the gates, my friend.”

Bailey turned to face the rest of them, dismissing Kerry’s body like so much scenery. He gestured towards the cabinet.

“Everyone down.”

One by one they fled through the trapdoor. Hews came last, sealing it behind and fastening the unseen catch. They knelt and huddled close against the stinking, grime-heavy wind that greeted them below. Everyone took a moment to hide their weapons away and draw handkerchiefs to cover their mouths against the sickening air.

“How did they find you?” Hews asked, pressing his hat down to keep it from flying off.

Oliver almost reeled back at the anger that flashed in Bailey’s eyes. Bailey made a fist with his free hand. “Aaron has been captured.”

Oliver knew the name, having heard it passed in casual conversation between other revolutionaries. As usual, they hadn’t trusted him with the details of Aaron’s role. Oliver had assumed he was another agent like himself, but Hews’ startled gasp indicated otherwise.

“Lord in heaven,” Hews muttered.

“Contact your people and order them into hiding,” Bailey ordered. “Reconvene at the den in Dunbridge Tower.” He and Sims backed up, dropped off the edge of the beam, and disappeared.

Oliver turned to Hews. “Hiding? What did he mean?”

Hews ground his teeth, staring inwardly. “If Aaron gave up this hide, he’ll give up the rest of them, lad. Not a one of us is safe now.”

Oliver’s heart leapt back to a racehorse pace. “This man didn’t know my crew, Hews.”

“We can’t take any chances. Let’s get up and find a telegraph.”

Hews touched Oliver on the shoulder and pointed back the way they’d come.

“How’re we to get all the way to Dunbridge?” Oliver asked. “They’re certain to be watching the cars.”

Hews broke out of an internal reverie. “They didn’t seem to know
our
faces. It’s Bailey and Sims who have to be careful.”

They crawled in silence for a moment, walking on three limbs to counter the wind. Oliver glanced over several times at Hews, whose brow grew more and more wrinkled, and his manner drew more withdrawn.

“Hewey, who was this Aaron?”

Hews loosed a long, frustrated sigh.

“Our hope, lad. Our best bloody hope.”

The first principle of the machine is Purpose. The machine designs itself to this chosen end, aligning all functionality to a single outcome. The machine, by its nature, cannot fathom or choose its purpose. It must be handed down, as revelation or as doctrine, from a being of higher stature. In this way could it be considered divine.

—IV. ii

Ticking: a thousand clocks echoing into endless dark, the motion of a million gears grinding and churning, a morass of straining forces clashing against shaped metal, a finely tuned symphony of coordinated motion, culminating in a single tick—repetitive, deafening, implacable.

The mind of Grandfather Clock.

Aaron had imagined himself shrieking and writhing, struggling against the bonds that held him. He imagined a line of Boiler Men at the entrance to his prison, standing ready with rifles, rods, and steam guns to block his eventual escape. He’d imagined a door locked with steam-powered bolts, to seal in this man who was such a danger.

It wasn’t so. He hung now in a chair, arms and legs supported by thin scraps of brass, six copper tines penetrating his neck. He spasmed randomly. He drooled. He bled dark oil from his eyes and ears. To his left and right, above and below, thousands more trapped souls shuffled mindlessly, their bodies jerking in the indecipherable rhythm of the Great Machine.

He’d fought when they dragged him here, to the Chimney. He’d despaired to see the endless column of quivering humanity vanishing upwards into the core of the Stack, and to know the fate of those there interred. He’d soiled himself from terror, and begged for death instead.

But the baron, in his passionless monotone, had directed the Boiler Men to string him up and keep him conscious while the tines did their work. The baron had stood and watched with immobile copper eyes as the encroaching cacophony of Grandfather Clock’s thoughts had hammered their way into Aaron’s mind. Aaron’s last visual memory was of that man’s featureless face: not even a smile of triumph, nor a vicious grin to condemn Aaron as a man. Aaron was a mere faulty part in the Great Work, now tempered and put to better use.

Aaron threw imaginary arms over an imaginary head. He ran on imaginary legs, desperately searching for a spot to hide, but in the Chimney all was Grandfather Clock. Every turn took him between grinding gears or into the path of uncoiling springs.

He ran this way for ages, in an agony beyond measure, swallowed, like all the others, worn down until he was but a dead man who hadn’t properly died. The tines tore into his neck as the gears and the noise tore into his mind, and he gave up every secret he had ever held. He gave up his friends, his plans, his secret hideaways, his many paltry indiscretions against propriety and against God—anything to make the pain stop. But Grandfather Clock cared nothing for pain, as long as the gears turned.

After countless long hours, something changed. The million ticks did not come together in one. For a single instant, they cascaded like a short but powerful wave as Grandfather Clock hesitated.

Aaron came alive again. He stole the smallest and quietest of breaths, and as he did so he felt his body do the same. What was it he felt drawing the attention of the vast being all around him?

He reached out, felt the gears and springs around him clacking in their altered pattern. The rhythm came to him, clearer now that it was not so loud. His subconscious did its work, and impressions formed in his imagination: thickened, greyed images of Grandfather Clock’s purposes and directives. Huge, unfathomable, yet with character, with flavour.

Apprehension: that the Great Work may not be finished.

And then a command: to seek, to capture, to preserve.

Joseph,
Aaron realised.
Joseph escaped.

He laughed.

And suddenly the ticks came together again. A crashing slap of sound battered him. A hundred thousand bells exploded into chaotic song—church bells and electric buzzers, alarm clocks and hammers striking anvils.

Grandfather Clock had seen and heard Aaron’s thought. All the sharply ordered energies of the machine tumbled onto Aaron’s head. He felt bones breaking in his real body.

Stop laughing!
was the command.

So Aaron laughed more, even as he screamed.

Grandfather Clock crunched him down like a mechanic scraping rust off a stubborn bolt. Aaron flaked apart and drifted away. What remained tightened securely, then began to spin at its designated frequency. It became part of a work greater than itself, part of an infallible string of physical logic inside the perfect machine.

It was the chin, Missy decided. The broad chest, the muscled arms, the swept-back short blond hair were certainly no drawback, but it was the square, almost Roman chin that really caught her attention.

The man had taken position on the edge of the road, head down, back to the closest wall. He and Missy and all the other grubbers of the Shadwell Underbelly stood squashed to the edges of the street as the Boiler Men passed through. The cloaks, one could have fun with: a shoe in the wrong place when passing was always good, seeing as they were too proud to sully their dignity with childish finger pointing; a little flash of ankle at the right moment was amusing as well, for the canaries at least—eyes like hawks, them, but feet like an elephant on a frozen lake when their blood rose up. With Boiler Men, one just kind of got out of their way.

If she was like most people, Missy would have dropped her eyes and tipped her ash hat down and tried to have no more presence than a pig in a butcher’s shop. She would have held her curiosity down with fear and shuddered in her shoes until the Ironboys passed, then gone on about her business as if all was fine and the sun was due to come out any minute. But Missy was not like most people, and neither was the man with the chin.

He watched the Boiler Men with narrowed eyes. Missy noticed his hand had twitched towards the large leather-wrapped object he carried on his back the instant the Ironboys had appeared. He’d restrained himself, evidently, and had retreated to the steps of a storefront flanked by his two companions, a brown-clad ogre and a slim urchin boy. The vantage allowed him an unobstructed view of the grim procession, and Missy an unobstructed view of him.

Now what
is
this lovely specimen up to?
she mused. He was far too fixated on the Boiler Men to notice her, and so she was free to study him at leisure. He stood with muscles taught, legs comfortably wide as if he expected to dodge aside at any moment. His thick moustache and mop of hair seemed to bristle like tiger’s fur. He stood alert, tense, exuding an aura of control.

You must not judge a client by his looks, nor his manner. To you, all men are Adonis and Casanova.

Missy frowned at the thought, and wondered if it was wrong to wish that they had all been like this one.

Even though you flee me, the lusts are still on you. You were born to this work, child.

The Boiler Men moved off, though their heavy, synchronised footsteps would echo in the Underbelly for some time yet. The crowd began to swell out into the street again, silent at first, gradually building to hushed conversation.

The object of Missy’s observation conferred with the ogre at his side a moment, then gestured with his head for the lad to follow. He shot a glance sideways, directly into Missy’s eyes. Her heart jumped at first; then her face flushed with sudden anger.
He was playing me!
She responded automatically with a coquettish smile and a wave.

The man quickly looked away and down, shifting his focus to the street ahead and the crowds swarming about.

Ready for anything but the tempting touch of womanhood,
Missy realised.
Refreshing, after a fashion.

The three hurried ahead at a good clip, purposeful and terribly out of place in the Underbelly. Missy walked more naturally, mimicking the shifting wanderings of the tower’s occupants. Though her quarries moved faster, their directness clashed with the aimless dance of the crowd, and Missy kept pace without difficulty.

The floor of the Underbelly was like a giant bowl of concrete, warped and misshapen to conform to the vagaries of the tower’s steel supports. She tracked the three strangers between two-and three-storey tenements, inexpertly constructed of whatever spare wood and plaster could be scrounged from the city above. The place had a ruined graveyard quality about it, enhanced by the few ghostly street lanterns that Missy had always detested. When this silliness with the queen’s agents had run its course, Missy intended to make Oliver buy her an apartment in Aldgate.
Oh, why compromise on fantasy?…in Cathedral Tower!

She trailed her foxes into a nest of rum dives and two-step alleys called, for reasons unknown, the “Blink.”
They must know the area,
she decided,
to stride so confidently into that labyrinth.
Why, then, had she not seen them before? The other two, though odd in stance and motion, would pass for locals with a little effort. The man with the chiseled chin, however, she would surely have remembered him. She slipped into the alley some minutes after them, to ensure they’d passed the first of the alley’s many pointless corners. The hem of her skirt brushed the narrow walls, and she gathered it together in front of her to keep it from staining on the piss and puke all over. Why was it the drunks never managed to quite make it to the street?

She stopped at the first corner. Cursing sounded from ahead, echoing off the stained walls above: possibly the ogre having trouble manoeuvring through, and the chin man’s backpack as well. She peeked around the edge and saw, just as she thought, the ogre’s wide shoulders stuck between loose window trim and a pipe. The chin man must have been in the lead, for she saw only the teenaged lad. He cocked his head, and began to turn.

She darted back into cover with a stifled yelp. Something in the lad’s posture, head lowered between raised shoulder blades, suggested a cat about to pounce, or a dog about to growl and charge.

A sudden fear blinked in her mind like an electrical spark: why was she following these men?

Because Oliver will ask you what they were up to, and if you don’t have an answer he is sure to chastise you like a little girl and sulk the rest of the evening.
There. It was on his head now.

It is preposterous to maintain belief in the innocence of your motives, child. You sully the very idea of goodness in people by your association.

Heedless of the noise, Missy slapped herself hard on her cheek.

I’m done with you, old woman. Leave me be!

Gradually the cursing ahead subsided, and after a few minutes in silence, Missy plucked up her courage and followed.

After a few more turns, she emerged into one of the little plazas that were referred to by a term she wouldn’t repeat, even to herself. Lit by a single oil lantern hanging off a second-storey windowsill, the plaza gleamed with moisture and stank of filth of every kind. A descending stair on the left led to a rum house entrance, a boarded door on the right to a condemned shop with broken windows.

Three more alleys led off. All three took their first turns too early to see very far along, and the only sound audible, despite the constant muted thrum of the factories from above, was some murmuring and a badly played tin whistle from the rum house. She could find no trace of her little foxes.

Well, that’s that. Perfectly acceptable, me losing them in here. And Oliver can’t rightly argue with me not wanting to take my lone, feminine self into a grog house, can he?
She dusted her hands together in symbolic dismissal of the whole affair and turned to leave.

A man stepped from the dark of the rightmost alley. Missy’s hand flew to her chest as her heart began to thunder. Words came automatically to her, rehearsed and practiced so many times before: “Goodness, you do give a lady a fright, sir.”

The man with the exquisite chin gestured for her to step towards him, and backed into the alley.

“If you would, miss,” he said. His voice was rich with a husky Germanic accent, though it was also scratchy, as if he had spent a lot of time yelling.

Missy fixed him with her most disarming flutter of the eyelashes. “Now that would hardly be proper, would it? Me following a strange man into a dark place.”

“You have been following this strange man for some time, miss.”

The bastard prick knew.
She smiled shyly. “Sharp eyes on you, I see.”

He made no response to that, though his eyes flicked for an instant a little lower than her face. Revulsion surged in her gut for an instant.

Remember that your client has come to you to be toyed with. It is his wish to be led by your wiles and have that responsibility lifted from him for a time.

Something useful from you for once, old bat.

As an experiment, Missy took one direct and intentional step inside the range of his arms. He responded by backing away, wary, hands by his sides but open and turned out slightly to be ready to reach up at any moment. She fancied she saw his skin pale and chuckled inwardly. Why was it the big strapping ones were always the easiest to unman?

“Now, what’s a fellow handsome as yourself doing in the Underbelly, I wonder.” She gauged his pained squint to mean she could safely proceed further. “Nothing that can’t wait, if the company’s right, I hope.”

His neck flushed red. Missy folded her hands sweet-as-you-please in front of her, the back one slipping her switchblade partly out of her sleeve. Befuddled though he was, the man carried a sidearm just out of sight in the shadow of his right hip, and she wondered if the slight lump beneath his shirt just above the waistband might be a belt of ammunition, like Heckler carried. The man’s right hand held steady just above the sidearm’s grip.

“I am not interested, miss,” he said.

Her fingers wrapped around the knife’s grip.
Oh, but you must be, for I’m ready for you.

“Well, not yet, love. But the day is young, and you’ll find I know a mite of pleasurable conversation, among other things, if you’d give a doe a chance.”

The flush and jitteriness vanished, to be replaced with a cold, discerning stare. The man’s entire posture grew fierce, and Missy suddenly realised just how large he actually was.

Stupid. Too forward. Now he’s…