The Hangman's Revolution

by Eoin Colfer

  The old maxim that every action has a reaction is true, but when you start messing with time travel, that reaction could take place in a whole different universe.

  —Professor Charles Smart

  GROSVENOR SQUARE, MAYFAIR, LONDON, 1899

  Woodrow Rosenbaum was the youngest soldier in Colonel Box’s original unit that had time-jumped back from twentieth-century London. At the time, Rosenbaum had been pretty anxious to get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, because he had been way down the debt hole with a couple of London shylocks, with no reasonable hope of climbing out, short of robbing a bank. And now he was in deep again with Victorian bookmakers, specifically the Ram king, Otto Malarkey. So this assignment suited him very well indeed. Two birds with one stone, as it were. He was carrying out his orders and wiping clean his debt. Not that it mattered in the long term, because Malarkey had lost his crown; but Rosenbaum did not want the details of his gambling problem getting back to the colonel, who considered gambling a horribly inefficient use of currency.

  Rosenbaum was the colonel’s go-to guy when it came to up-close assassinations. Box still liked to take the long shots himself and then send a cleaner in to dig out the slugs, but for knife work there was no one better than Woodrow Rosenbaum. And knife work did not require a cleanup team, as there were no tell-tale future slugs left in the body; so the corpses could be left where they fell if necessary, though the colonel usually preferred them to be rolled into the river, just in case a zealous inspector traced them back to the catacombs. In this case, it didn’t really matter, as there would be plenty of bodies popping up all over London, and one more would not make much difference.

  Emergence Day, that’s what those two Thundercats called it. Today is Emergence Day.

  Providing Farley managed to recruit the Rams. If not, they might not be emerging from the catacombs for a while yet.

  Grosvenor Square was a picture this time of morning, with the sun in a clear sky shining down on its clean cobbles and tended park. Rosenbaum ran his fingers over the twin knife hilts in his belt and thought: I don’t care what the begrudgers say, a sunny day puts everyone in a better mood.

  “Fine morning, is it not?” he said to a pretty flower girl.

  “A good day for it,” he said to a bobby, who saluted him with a wave of his club.

  The bobby did not suspect him of nefarious intention, and why would he? Rosenbaum was dressed up like a common worker, and there were plenty of those swarming over the scaffold that was clamped to Malarkey’s secret digs.

  Secret, that is, unless an electronic bug has been planted in the precious boots that once belonged to your mentor.

  Rosenbaum chuckled. You will never know how we found you, Otto. You will never even have time to wonder.

  There was a pile of builder’s equipment and wares by the front steps. Ducking behind it and then under a drop cloth, Rosenbaum was lost from view in less than a second. In twenty more seconds, he had drawn a flat blade and was working on the latch of an upstairs window. In five more, he was inside Malarkey’s house.

  He padded across the thick rugs, thinking, Knock, knock, Commodore. I’ve come to cancel my debt.

  Riley had fallen asleep on the rug in front of the drawing-room fire, wrapped in his weighted magician’s cloak. In fairness to the lad, he was a mere fourteen-year-old boy, and one that had seen more than his fair share of trauma over the past day, and so his body was certainly owed a spot of recuperation. But in the negative column, it had to be said that he had volunteered to stand watch while Malarkey slept, etherized through the worst of the lacerations from his wounds, as Chevie kept watch over Michael Figary. Were Riley an army conscript, this nap would have seen his back against the pocked firing-squad wall. He had not intended to fall asleep, but the warmth of the fire and the sun through the window had proved too much for his weary eyes, so he had shut them for a moment and rolled from his lookout spot on the windowsill onto the soft, deep rug.

  Riley smiled in his sleep as the Irish butler entered his dream and muttered the words, “So I am.” But then Figary’s small frame stretched like pulled taffy and changed into someone else entirely. Someone Riley knew too well, as he dreamed of him most nights.

  Riley my boy, said Albert Garrick. You let me down, son. You betrayed your master. And I will have my revenge.

  And Albert Garrick had loomed over him, raising the very blade he had used to murder Jack the Ripper himself and said, Slowly I will do it, lad. Slowly, so you feel every stroke.

  Riley bolted awake, shooting up as though electrified, and was amazed to find a man with a knife looming over him.

  “G—Garrick?” he stammered. “You ain’t real. You ain’t here.”

  It was this surprised awakening that saved his life. Rosenbaum had been poised above him, blade raised for murder, when the boy shot up and startled him back a step or two.

  No problem, thought Rosenbaum. A second’s delay, is all.

  A second was all Riley needed to come fully awake, as he was accustomed to getting his bearings lightning fast. He had never known when Garrick would need him or when he would commence to beating him for no apparent reason. And Riley had often fantasized about the occasion when he would be driven over the edge and finally decide to fight back. He’d planned for this moment so many times that he had choreographed his assault, and it was this strategy, or kata, that he unleashed now on Rosenbaum.

  Step one was to twirl in his magician’s cloak so that it fanned out to form a black saucer and conceal his exact position. When his attacker lunged, Riley dropped to the ground, leaving Rosenbaum with an armful of cloak, and giving Riley the chance to roll across the room into a patch of breathing space.

  In the penny dreadfuls and adventure novels that Riley loved to read, there came a point in every story where the hero would face off against a cold-blooded murderer. They would trade barbs as they fought, and often the battle of wits seemed more important than the clash of steel. But this wasn’t the way in real combat. Professionals did not talk when there was killing to be done. They went about their business.

  And such was the way of this fight. Rosenbaum was not one of your flamboyant Jack-the-Ripper types; he was a knife fighter who had been told whom to stick his knife into.

  Rosenbaum tossed the cape aside and pulled the second knife from his belt, spreading his arms wide to cover both exits to the room. Of course, Riley could choose a window; but they were twelve feet tall and would take time to open, and time was something this boy didn’t have. It was important for Rosenbaum to stick him quick, so he couldn’t alert Malarkey.

  Rosenbaum’s mistake was the assumption that the boy would attempt to flee. Then again, how could he have known that Riley had been trained in more martial arts than Rosenbaum had ever heard of?

  Riley faked left, and Rosenbaum threw knife number one. It did not spin like a circus thrower’s; it flew like a silver streak toward its target, which was not where it was supposed to be, so the knife buried itself in a portrait of Otto—a copy of Martorell’s Saint George Killing the Dragon, in which Malarkey’s own head and nimbus of silky hair replaced Saint George’s face and helmet.

  Rosenbaum put the dodge down to fluke. After all, what boy could move that quickly, unless by accident? At any rate, he had another knife. Plenty for the job.

  Riley’s dodge was no fluke; it was step two in his kata when fighting a knife thrower: put some momentum behind a feint, then yank the body backward as if a string controlled it.

  Step three was attack, and in this, placement of the feet was the most important element. There were several improvisations that could be made depending on the exact opponent, as long as the feet were in the correct position and the balance was right. Riley took two quick steps forward, leading with his left, bent low, then grabbed the meat of Rosenbaum’s inner thigh and squeezed as hard as he could, causing the soldier to put all his energy into hold
ing in a shrill scream. Rosenbaum was not entirely successful in this, and a keening squeal leaked out; for, after all, the inner thigh is a favorite pain center of many attacking disciplines. Rosenbaum drove his second blade straight down to where Riley’s head should be, but of course Riley had stepped back, and the soldier’s momentum drove the knife tip through the rug and into the floorboards below.

  My head is awfully exposed here, thought Rosenbaum, and he was right about that; and the fact that he was fighting a boy meant his head was at the perfect height for Riley to drive his knee upward and catch Rosenbaum under the chin, which he did with all the force he could muster—and after years of imagining just this situation, that was quite an amount of force.

  Unfortunately for Rosenbaum, his tongue had been lolling out slightly as he bent over, and when his teeth clacked together, he bit off a good chunk of meat before reeling backward toward the doorway he had come in.

  The odds in this particular fight were evening now, as Riley plucked Rosenbaum’s second knife from the floor and, judging by how he palmed it between hands, Rosenbaum reckoned the blasted boy knew how to handle a blade. Rosenbaum realized that if he were to bet on this fight, as he had on so many, his cash would be on the boy to win.

  But I know something he doesn’t, thought Rosenbaum.

  And this something was that Rosenbaum always brought a gun on a job. It was against orders, and he’d never had to use it, but Rosenbaum had always reckoned that if it came to it, he could dig the slug out himself and burn the body.

  I will burn this whole blasted house down, he thought, and he reached to the small holster at the back of his belt. The holster was there, and the extra magazine, but no gun.

  No gun. Had he dropped it?

  Rosenbaum spun around to find a small man standing in the doorway, holding the pistol between thumb and forefinger.

  “You, my dear intruder fellow,” said the little man in a singsong lilt, “have been dipped by the best pickpocket who ever lifted a wallet. You should be honored, so you should.”

  “What?” shouted Rosenbaum, utterly confused now. This job, which had seemed so simple, had somehow become a twisting nightmare. “What?”

  Rosenbaum probably would have shouted What? at least one more time, so utterly turned about was he, but Riley picked up one of the iron firedogs from beside the hearth and clocked him hard just behind the right ear. And so the soldier reeled to the window through which he had entered and fell straight out.

  “Nicely done, that, boy,” said Figary. “Some tea now, I think.”

  Riley rushed to the window just in time to see Rosenbaum crawl from a pile of planking and take himself shakily off.

  “You should forbear from speechifying during a crisis,” Riley said to Figary. “What was all that guff about pickpockets and intruder fellows?”

  “That was what we call blather,” said Figary. “Very useful for distracting a body so that someone else can brain him.”

  “Why could you not simply shoot the cove?” said Riley.

  Figary passed over the gun. “Shoot him? Oh no. Missus Figary’s boy abhors committing violent acts.”

  “But you are not averse to watching them?” Riley pointed out.

  “Indeed not. In this particular case, the advantages are twofold. Firstly, my own life is saved, and thank you very much, sir. And secondly, the sin is not on my conscience, so it isn’t.”

  Riley thought he should change the subject of discussion before Figary disappeared down a theological rabbit hole.

  “What news of the Rams?” he asked. “Did you see your guardian angel?”

  Figary’s face fell as he thought on the girl he had abandoned to her fate.

  “We should wake the commodore,” he said.

  I often think I should just abandon the whole thing. I really do. Time travel could be a gift to humanity. Whoever controls it could do some real good for mankind. But you have to ask yourself, with humanity’s track record, is that likely?

  —Professor Charles Smart

  It is a universally accepted maxim that making water in the area where a person drinks water is generally a bad idea, as the waters get muddled, and that person could end up drinking the water he prepared earlier, which is never good for the health. Just ask the tens of thousands of Londoners wiped out by cholera.

  Until the late 1860s, London sewers fed directly into the Thames, which also provided the city’s clouded drinking water, a fact that accounted for more fatalities over the years than war or fire. But there were worse things than being dead, as the rhyme went:

  I took a stroll through London town

  The smell it near to knocked me down

  There ain’t no pill nor tot to drink

  Can help escape the world’s great stink

  The Great Stink was how the entire world referred to the London stench that floated up from the sewers and hung in a cloud over the city.

  Eventually Queen Vic cried foul and commanded her engineers to fix the blooming stinkpipes, or words to that effect, and so three hundred million bricks were baked to build over eighty miles of tunnels to intercept the effluvium rushing into the Thames.

  LONDON SEWERS, 1899

  “Efficient sewers was good for the population in general, my little Ramlet,” said Otto Malarkey to Riley. “But it was bad news for those of us on the toshing budge.”

  Riley was impressed by his regent. “You was a tosher, King Otto?”

  “Indeed I was, my boy,” said Malarkey. “Times were hard in the Malarkey family, so my brothers and I put together a three-man team and down we went into the great underworld. Time was, a man could walk into the tunnels from the Thames’s bank, but with the new sewers came new securities, huge gates over the tunnel mouths. If a man was caught in a flush without a handy manhole, he would be flattened like a Shrove Tuesday pancake up against those gates.”

  They were skirting Regent’s Park toward a particular manhole through which Malarkey was certain the colonel’s own hidey-hole could be accessed.

  “There’s money in manure,” said Malarkey, quoting the tosher’s maxim. “Folks throw away the queerest things, or lose ’em. Either way, they ends up buried in filth, waiting for some tosher to wash ’em off. My brothers and I ran a nice little business, carved out a network for ourselves in central London, where the fattest pickings lie. I found a silver candelabrum once, and I have often wondered how that fit down a flush toilet. Perhaps it was a murder weapon, eh?”

  Riley forced himself to listen to Malarkey’s tale as an effort to distract his mind from Chevie’s predicament. His dear mate was in the clutches of this Colonel Box cove who was in lavender in the sepulchral catacombs below Camden, like some class of subterranean Professor Moriarty. Figary had filled them in on Farley’s speech to the Rams, so they knew how time sensitive their mission was. Box had to be stopped today, and Chevie rescued, if she was still…

  No. I will not even think it.

  It was a stroke of amazing fortune that Otto had worked the Camden sewers years previously as a tosher, also known as a stinkpipe magpie. Malarkey knew only too well how those particular sewers flooded regularly and had always overflowed into the railway catacombs until an American colonel had bought them outright and built a waterproof wall that could withstand the regular floodings and the massive flushes.

  And if a cove could demolish that wall at the exact time a flush is due, Malarkey had told Riley and Figary, then Colonel Box and his fine soldiers would find themselves chest-high in floaters and rats.

  It was a loose plan at best, with a million what-ifs floating around it, but it meant that Chevie could possibly be rescued in the chaos, and for that reason alone, Riley’s heart and soul were behind it.

  What about me? Figary had asked. I too wish to serve, so I do.

  Stay here, Malarkey told him. When the deed is done, I will send for
you. You are my eyes in London town, Michael. And I will need to know how our sabotage has been received by the Rams.

  They found their manhole and lingered in the environs all innocent and such until the path was clear of all those taking their daily constitutional. Malarkey pulled a strange tool from his satchel that put Riley in mind of a metal animal claw.

  “One time in the Bailey, the justice says, he says that my brother was soft in the noggin,” said Malarkey, inserting the tool’s prongs in corresponding holes in the manhole. “And yet he made up this manhole jemmy from a few old cutoffs. I’ve never seen the better of it for popping biscuits.”

  Malarkey put his weight on the handle, and up swung the manhole like a clamshell.

  “Down you go, lad,” said Malarkey.

  Riley had endured many trials and survived many tribulations, and yet he felt a crippling fear now at the thought of descending into the Stygian darkness, into the embrace of damp and reeking fingers. The terror sat like a deadweight on his shoulders. A chain-mail cloak of fear.

  “Me? I should go first?”

  Malarkey spoke through gritted teeth. “Look sharp, lad. This biscuit ain’t holding itself open.”

  I should be off with myself. What care I for kings and kingdoms? thought Riley, and he was ashamed of his own survival instincts. Chevie needs me to squirrel down this hole. If I don’t, then the whole entire plan is doomed.

  Riley gathered his courage and swung his legs into the manhole. His toes found a slick rung and wiggled full onto it.

  “Cripes alive, kiddo,” said Malarkey, his voice shaking slightly with strain. “Shift yerself. There ain’t nothing to fear in darkness.”

  This, Riley knew, was patently untrue. Albert Garrick waited for him inside the folds of a shadow, and someday Riley would voluntarily wander into the wrong one. It was simply a matter of when.

  Not today. Please not today.

  Down he climbed, inch by inch, clanking as he went, fingers wrapped in death grips on the sweating, bubbled metal rungs, shoulders scraping the brickwork.