by Kin S. Law
“But where’s the money in it?” Howard said. He took another sip, before shrugging. “Somebody has to make a profit. And Appleby wouldn’t take the work. He used to be a millionaire.”
Hargreaves shook her head, speechless. It seemed beneath the fizzing red glitz of this nation, something was subtly rotting away. But she was one to talk—her own government was contemplating using disease as a weapon.
After the inexcusable dinner, Howard was the perfect gentleman, taking the time to lead her to a respectable boarding house in the center of the town. The signboard outside showed a merry sort of worm coming out of an apple and the words “Early Bird Bed and Breakfast” woodworked in cheerful copperplate. The worm was on a cam and a spring, so it poked its head out at certain intervals. The sign was nearly invisible in the dim light of a gas streetlamp, the only one on the street.
Howard insisted on helping Hargreaves check in with the elderly owners, who greeted Howard on sight. They looked identical, gray-haired and pearly, like a pair of matching porcelain dolls.
“Room 2D,” said the elderly woman, the front desk half of the pair. Howard took the key and passed it to Hargreaves. “And the husband can take care of your luggage.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly,” said Hargreaves. The elderly man looked hale enough, but Hargreaves had a deceptively heavy assortment of small arms and incendiaries in her carpetbag. The sparker alone would have caused a significant uproar. She struggled for a white lie.
“There are some delicate samples I can entrust to no other. In fact, once I purchase some coal for my engine tomorrow, I must get going.”
“Didn’t you come in on the bus?” Howard remarked.
“Yes. The driver found me waylaid on the side of the road, and was kind enough to offer me a ride,” she lied. Howard nodded.
“A shame. Howard talks to so few women, let alone a nice young lady. All the nice ladies are gone,” the elderly woman said, writing in the hotel’s thick, mostly blank registry.
“Gone?”
“To the city, I imagine. Here one day, and not the next.”
“And which city is that?” said Hargreaves, both flushed and endeared to the lady’s remark.
“Why, New York City, of course. No other.”
“Esther, Miss Hargreaves, I believe I will bid you a good night,” said Howard. He tipped his hat as he went.
“See? A right gentleman. Although one does wonder what he gets up to, with no wife in the house,” said Esther. Hargreaves blushed, as Esther looked at her pointedly. But eventually Hargreaves secured the room key and climbed the stairs to a small room, one of four on that floor. Curiously, the hall kept going for another few meters, and Hargreaves thought perhaps the other rooms had quite luxurious floorplans.
As soon as Hargreaves found her room, she quietly closed the door and fussed about, picking her heavy bag up and putting it down in different places. When she was sure Howard had gone, she went downstairs again and approached the front desk.
“Why, the room is delightful, just delightful, but I’m driving several hours in the morning, and I’d sooner not look on the road while I’m resting,” Hargreaves explained as the innkeeper nodded empathically.
“Those dreadful engines! With their racket and soot. I understand, dearie. Here you go.” Esther smiled as she handed Hargreaves another key. It opened room 2B, directly opposite her current room.
Hargreaves regarded such practices as second nature. Though idyllic Appleton had its charms, she had not forgotten she was being pursued. So she braced the door with the vanity chair, and confirmed she could climb out of the window if necessary.
Then she sighed, loosed her golden tresses, and settled into the quilted comforter with a depressed sort of poof. She wondered when she had even begun to have these habits. Was it when she became an agent of the Queen? When the pips had landed on her shoulder, making her a plainclothes inspector? Hargreaves suspected it was even further back than that, but before she could go there her mind drew a veil of sleep over the waking world.
Half an hour later, she was suddenly awakened by the sound of a floorboard creaking. Through the fog of sleep, she slowly worked out the sound was coming from the hallway just outside her door.
“Likely the innkeep’s,” Hargreaves thought. “Or a resident out to the loo.” Nevertheless, she got out of bed, still fully dressed, and extracted her 9mm Browning from the carpetbag. She tucked the Browning into the band of her skirt and drew the Bowie knife. Then she looked through her peephole. The moon in the hall window was bright enough, and she didn’t bother with the room’s gas lamp.
Howard? thought Hargreaves. Kneeling at the keyhole of 2D, her savior was stealthily but vigorously picking the lock. She wouldn’t have thought the pleasant man such a deviant, but there he was, kneeling in his well-starched trousers, intent on assaulting her in her boudoir. Hargreaves huffed. She might have stayed in the room if she’d known there would be an opportunity to thoroughly thrash a sexual predator.
The door to 2D swung open, and she saw the shadow of Howard go into the room. Her view was blocked by the edge of the peephole, but she heard the footsteps. With the full intention of confronting the dastard, she slipped open the door to 2B.
The blow was stealth itself, but the hard object across her temples hurt no less than if she had seen it coming. Her knife fell quietly to the rug in the hall. It would have been melodrama to faint straight away, but Hargreaves was no fragile blossom. She whirled round, her head stinging abominably, to see the vicious Howard somehow wedged into a blind spot behind a delightful bureau. His eyes were wide, the skin flush and wet, the lips open to reveal perfectly white, straight teeth. He had a knife, too, a long, thin switch that sprang cheerfully into the moonlight.
Hargreaves waited for Howard to lunge, before stepping aside and putting her knee into his abdomen. The knife snickered back across in a vicious slash, and the inspector’s training took over. She grabbed the knife hand in a Roman handshake along the wrist, and struck at the heel, bending the arc into Howard’s chest.
“Gahh…” said Howard, wheezing through a new and unnatural aperture.
Hargreaves took a step back, expecting blood, only to bite her lip as the head came up and clobbered her clean under the jaw. Her last sight was of the ceiling, and the empty hallway behind her, before her crown came down on something hard.
When the stars had faded from her eyes, she saw Howard stumble down the hall. When she followed, she found a dead end—and a secret door that had not been properly shut, leaving a hair’s breadth of opening and a bit of a draft.
Wondrous. Hargreaves sighed. She had been in Appleton a day, and already the ghosts of this small town west of all she knew were swirling around her ankles, begging to be exorcised. She drew her Browning.
Time to get to work, Inspector.
Station 2
In Maman’s Footsteps
Cezette Louissaint expected Maman to be difficult to find. After all, Vanessa Hargreaves was a trained inspector of Scotland Yard, with all the familiarity with stealth, steamcrafts, and hand-to-hand combat essential to evading capture. And she would need all her skills now. Who had led Cezette and Hargreaves’ friends this far? Who had summoned those ghastly metal spiders that so ravaged New York in Hargreaves’ pursuit? And what was the spectral train that had pulled out of the station when Cezette saw her maman escape those spiders?
It was the airship pirates again who had saved Maman, of that Cezette was sure. But what had happened after? Not even Arturo C. Adler could tell. So here they were, driving by induction alone to find her.
Cezette perched her slim shoulders on the seat back and arranged her clockworked legs a little more comfortably, so she could look out the window. The roads in America were longer and straighter than Parisian alleys, and wider than God. Flat gravel rivers of tar turned to rounded paving in the towns. Untamed foliage threatened to undo civilization from the banks of the road. There could be a dozen whirring, clacking monsters in the greenery, and t
hey would never know. That was how thick and wild this country could be.
Cezette took comfort in her maman’s resume. Hargreaves had been made an agent of the English Queen herself, survived and befriended an air pirate crew, and had the help of an iron giant built by the best craftsmen in Her Majesty’s service. If anybody could get away with the Cook box, her maman could. But Cezette didn’t have much hope of catching up to her in their stolen New York taxi leaking steam from a dozen cracks, bullet holes and seams. And though MAD—Hargreaves’ hand-picked unit—had become like family to her, Cezette wasn’t particularly fond of sharing a steaming sedan cabin with four older men.
Wait.
What was that?!
Merde!
Suddenly her maman’s trail proved all too easy to follow, or so Cezette hoped. For a moment she thought the blisters of police lights were the ones from her past, when Mordemere had laid waste to her beloved Paris. But though they resolved into American patrols, there were too many of them, and their markings reflected several different authorities. Jean Hallow, her tutor dozing in the back seat, had taught her to tell the difference. But even had she not known, and even with the dense coverage, it was difficult to miss the flocks of screaming, steaming police lorries tearing down the road, leaving rooster tails of gravel and panic.
“Alors! Look, look!” said Cezette, rousing the napping pile in the back seat. Uncle Cid, who was driving through what seemed an impenetrable gray beard, nodded that he had seen as well.
“Deuced loud, those American rozzers,” Arturo grumbled sleepily from the backseat. “What’re they on about?” The detective who had insisted on MAD following Vanessa Hargreaves to America had seemed less keen on the idea when he discovered the sheer distances the country was full of.
“Those patrol chasseurs, they are all headed to the same place. Do you think another of the spider contraptions is loose?” said Cezette. Her voice drew huge, bleary looks, but there was recognition in Arturo’s face, at the least. The toff had lost some of his glitz on the trip, but preserved a remarkable amount of lace. Jean Hallow, on the other hand, emerged from his torpor as he always did: like the undead. Hargreaves had selected him for his skill, not for his charm at society soirees.
“And what if Hargreaves has already gone on ahead?” grumbled Arturo.
“I think we all need a respite from this dreadful cab,” said Hallow.
“Consider it done,” said Cid in his usual basso profundo. “None too soon. My nethers feel like they’ve been clamped in a torque vice.”
“Cid!” said Arturo. “There is a lady present!”
“I also feel as if I’m carrying a bébé in my petticoats,” said Cezette, to the detective’s mortification. Cid exchanged a conspiratorial wink.
“I could also use the facilities,” agreed Hallow. Arturo huffed.
“Well, carry on then!”
Despite the levity, there was a sort of grim note to their exchange. None of them could forget the destruction the metal spiders, some as big as houses, had wrought. And where chaos was, Hargreaves and her metal guardian would be. After all, MAD had followed her by trailing the casual destruction left by her dastardly pursuers. Ominous and nebulous, their enemies had caused several pitfalls to appear in downtown Manhattan, and also flattened a small town.
The group took the closest turnabout and followed the sound of yowling cats to an exit, where the road deteriorated into a two-lane country track and thence into a five-street small town. MAD found the wailing sirens of the constables crawling all over a small shop. It was flanked on every side by fire engines and steaming-hot police vehicles.
And as Cid pulled around the spot to look for a place to stop, Cezette corrected herself; those were police officers, and the shop was a general store. Jean Hallow had been coaching her on proper nomenclature, and the effect it had on “the common people.” Linguistics and psychology were subjects the archivist seemed strangely keen on. He had stressed the importance of using them, particularly around figures of authority in foreign places.
Cezette applied her learning as soon as they had relieved themselves at a nearby eatery. She walked down the road, up to one of the stern, uniformed men and tried being as direct as she imagined Americans would be.
“Mon dieu! Officer, what happened here?”
The straitlaced uniform looked to her, then up past her as if he had never seen such a strange assembly of characters. She followed his gaze, to find Arturo a ways back along the road, intent on staring at everything dramatically, his spiky platinum hair quivering as he did. Merde! Cezette had hoped her modest clothes would make a good impression. She had made sure not to show any of the machinery of her legs, which were not flesh and bone but lacquer and mixed metals.
“Run along. A crime scene is no place for tourists,” the uniform began, but when he saw Cezette more curious than pale, he relented. Perhaps he figured it was safer she go away, morbid interest satiated. “There’s a lot of blood in the hallway of the inn. We’re trying to find the body now.”
“The body. You are sure they died?” Cezette inquired. Then the implication took her― what if it was her maman? A surge of Arturo’s detecting lessons pumped into her head. “Was there gold hair? The time frame? Is the blood dry? Les preuves, monsieur!”
“The what? You got some wild ideas in your head. Did you see it in a picture? Crazed directors these days, making all kinds of oddness. I blame those plains-crawler dirigibles. Traveling always gives folks strange ideas.” At this point, the officer found he was talking to himself.
Cezette had already turned away from him, intent on the rest of the scene. The others had also moved on, Cid drifting toward a nearby cafe for his morning cuppa, Jean loitering by the police vehicles. Arturo was casually conversing with the lead officer on the scene, but he soon stopped. His face announced it was a cut-and-dried case, or in Arturo’s vernacular, boring. He seemed distracted, or nervous, glancing at the police vehicles as well. It seemed she had a little time to poke about, as it were.
Cezette felt quite odd. Something about this little town smelled of Maman. The place was certainly in range of Alphonse’s loping limbs, if a bit toward the west. His pistons were not so different from those below her thighs. For a moment, Cezette thought back to when Maman pulled her from a clockwork horror, only to find she had emerged without her legs. Uncle Cid had given her new ones, with the stipulation she learn to maintain them herself. Cezette didn’t need to be told twice. She loved her regained freedom. It was a gift that meant a lot to a girl who used to be trapped all her days; so she used them now, stepping lightly onto the crime scene, being careful to leave no trace. Her heels tended to press harder than any young woman’s ought to.
When all four police officers had their heads turned, Cezette pirouetted on smoothly oiled knees and slipped into the inn, barely ruffling the cordon of thin crime ribbon. Inside, sunbeams lanced through dust motes, peacefully lighting up an abandoned front desk. Cezette instinctively took the stairs, remembering her maman’s teachings about high ground. When she got there, it didn’t take any detective training to see the ugly splotch of red, darkening to a mauve brown at the edges. It was dramatic, still wet at the center, but not nearly enough to kill. Cezette knew that much. The stain dripped away across the carpet, and around a corner.
Arturo had been teaching her the craft of detection in spare moments on the airship across the Atlantic. She looked around, trying to get the feel of the place. There were drops scattered some distance apart—two people? Scuffed rugs. An unlocked door, and a recently picked one, that was clear from the scratches. But the rooms themselves were empty, without a single sock even in the wardrobes.
There was also a lock of blonde hair caught on a door hinge. Cezette smelled it carefully: airships’ aeon steam, and the faint perfume of lilac, some days old. Even though she hadn’t mastered the art of detecting completely, she knew one thing immediately: Maman had been here! But where had she gone?
“If there’s bee
n a theft, follow the money. If there’s a body, follow the blood.” Arturo’s maxim. She followed the blood, leading her around the corner and smack dab into a dead end. The hallway terminated at a little nook, with a decorative table set against a blank wall.
“Sacre bleu!” Cezette cried, but softly. She rubbed her knee where it had banged it, though it didn’t hurt. She was simply rather protective of Cid’s gifts. But as she looked down, she observed the droplets of blood go right up to the wall. Tellingly, one of the tiny, perfect circles was cut in half by the edge of the wainscoting.
Cezette felt around. Under the lacy edge of the table’s doily, she discovered a tiny toggle switch made of brass. When she tripped it, there was no visible change or sound, but the wall felt just a little bit looser, as if no longer part of the inn’s firmament. Cezette pushed. The section of wall fell back, taking the table with it to reveal a secret passageway.
“Alors,” murmured Cezette. “Won’t Arturo be jealous?”
She slipped inside, her lithe body finding the crawlspace quite spacious. A man would have trouble with the low ceilings, she surmised. Once between the bare slats, she found there were cunning slits in the walls to let in the light. At the moment, they were showing scuffs, drag marks, old tears in the wadding of the wall. Cezette gasped, but she kept her head, looking for the fresher blood. And it was there, now outlined in a footprint. No, two. There was the trace of a large shoe. Heavy tread—a large man? Or someone struggling…
Cezette followed the crawlspace well past the physical limits of the inn. At this point, she must be in the adjacent building, which was, as she recalled, a mixed-use residence with a general store on the first floor. What she would call une epicerie. She was about to feel for a door seam or catch when suddenly the space opened up into a room about the size of a large closet. The wall simply ended, slats sticking out of the plaster like ribs. She was looking at a room with white walls and a single object in it.