Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon

by David Barnett

  Rowena nodded. “Thank you. I—”

  The chairman held up his hand. “However … although the whole enterprise was flawed from start to finish, you agreed as a member of the Esteemed Brethren of International Airshipmen to take on a cargo with the express understanding that you did not tamper with the documentation relating to said cargo. By your own admission you opened the cargo manifest when you were strictly forbidden from doing so.”

  “But—”

  The chairman glared at her. “Miss Fanshawe. The word of the Brethren is their bond. Any lapse in honesty or integrity reflects on the whole organization. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, you gave your word and you broke it.”

  “Then I am to be punished,” said Rowena numbly.

  The chairman nodded. “It is the decision of this panel that your membership in the Brethren shall be held in abeyance for the period of one year from today’s date. During that time you may carry on your business but not under the auspices of the Brethren, and you must inform any and all clients before you take business that you are not Brethren at the present time.”

  Rowena stared at him. “This is my livelihood…”

  He smiled. “Come, Miss Fanshawe. You are the Belle of the Airways. You were given the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal by Queen Victoria herself. Surely you will find enough lucrative adventures to fill your time until your punishment is at an end.”

  The chairman and the panel nodded and rose, leaving her alone in the room. “And this is the thanks I get,” she said. Did they think adventuring actually paid? Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, indeed. She wondered, as she sighed and left the Union Hall, how much they’d give her for it at the pawnbroker.

  * * *

  Outside on Whitehall in the sunshine, Bent laughed long and hard and clapped Gideon on the shoulder. “‘You pay our wages, but you don’t own us?’ Now where have I heard that one before?”

  “Here’s another one you might know. ‘We’re going to have sleep, and lots of it, with ale and gin at regular intervals.’”

  Bent cackled as Gideon took Maria’s hand in his. She squeezed his, and he squeezed back then impulsively leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Shall we take a steam-cab back to Grosvenor Square?” asked Bent.

  “Oh, can we walk?” asked Maria, pirouetting and laughing, the wind from the river blowing her hair behind her. “It’s such a lovely day, and the weather will turn soon. I haven’t seen London look so beautiful for a long time.”

  “It’s nothing compared to you, dearest Maria,” said Gideon.

  Bent mimed a vomiting motion with his stubby fingers in his mouth. “You might steal all my best lines, Smith, but I can see I’m going to have to teach you how to speak to a lady properly. And you can learn to effing cuss right, as well. Now come on, it might be a lovely day, but there’s ale in them barrels that’s not going to drink itself. I said we’d meet Rowena in the Audley Hotel after her Brethren meeting. And it’s your round, I believe, Gideon…?”

  * * *

  From his window, Walsingham watched the three of them walk arm in arm along the bank of the Thames. They had earned their break. He looked back at the neat pile of buff folders on his desk. There was plenty of time, and enough to keep them busy. For now, at least. After that … what was it Gideon Smith had said? Ah, yes. He had many fingers, and many, many pies.

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  It was turning colder, much colder than it had ever been on the island, and she could feel herself slowing down, her blood running more sluggishly. But she was still fast enough and big enough that the black-furred beast that had bared its teeth and growled at her, standing upright on its back legs and batting its paws at her when she’d interrupted its attempt to scoop fish out of the bubbling stream, had offered little real resistance. The hunting was good in this place, and the animal would make a satisfying meal.

  The wounds on her belly from the spitting sticks of the hairless creatures had healed, leaving her yellow underside crisscrossed with scars. She had resolved to keep away from such animals in the future, and none had ventured deep into the forest of soaring trees that stretched right up the coast of this vast new land she now called home.

  Taking the beast in her mighty jaws, she began to thunder back through the forest. She shouldn’t be here, she knew, perhaps shouldn’t be anywhere in this world. But she was here, and she was alive, and she had to survive.

  She felt a pang in her chest for her mate, whom she knew she would never see again. She could not conceive of going back into the vast ocean, could not think that she would ever see her island, or her mate, again. But life would go on.

  Before she had left, he had filled her with eggs, barely a couple of months since her last clutch. She had known, as she fled into the forest of tall trees that shielded her from the hot sun, that something was happening inside her. It was only a week or two later that she had found herself clearing a space on the forest floor and lying down to ease out the eggs, seven in all.

  Just like on the island, there was nothing bigger than her here, nothing to threaten her babies. Two had not hatched, and one had not survived longer than a day. But that left her four strong babies, two like her and two like her mate. They were tiny, still, no bigger than half of one of the hairless beasts that had attacked her, but they were growing stronger by the day. They chirped and growled as she nosed into the clearing and dropped the dead animal in the middle of the nest, the four of them falling on it hungrily, nipping at each other to get around its still-warm flesh, burying their teeth into its furry hide.

  She watched, proudly, as they ate. Soon they would be big and strong, and she would teach them to hunt. Then they would leave to strike out on their own in the forest. They would pair up, if they survived, and have babies of their own, and she would be the head of a grand dynasty that would rule the forest.

  And woe betide any of the hairless beasts who ventured into her domain.

  As her babies ate, she thought, as she often did, of the egg that had been stolen from her, and she paused to wonder if by some miracle it had survived and hatched, and if it was out there somewhere, in this world that was so much bigger than she had ever imagined.

  She threw back her head and roared, and the vast trees shook, and the tiny, feathered creatures flew, squawking, from the branches, and the furred beasts of the forest quaked and hid in their burrows. The land was huge, unending. She had never felt so free in all her life.

  * * *

  Snow blew against the window, the sky beyond pitch-black save for the pale corona of the nearby gas lamp on the street outside. Perhaps it was going to be a white Christmas. Emily Dawson paused to rub a stubborn smudge from the glass and glanced out at the rapidly falling flakes. Just the main laboratory to clean, then she could be away for the weekend. She moved away from the window and stood before the tall double doors, smoothing down her apron. She always left the laboratory for last. She hated it in there, hated the way the beast regarded her with its yellow eyes. She was sure an intelligence lurked behind those eyes that seemed to be sizing her up, appraising her. She couldn’t understand why Professor Rubicon gave the thing houseroom.

  He called it his “baby,” which she thought an affront to nature and God. Still, Stanford Rubicon was a good employer, better than any she had worked for before. She had kept house—well, laboratory—for him these past three years—even while he was lost on that remote island—and he had always paid her well, on time, and never troubled her like some of the other girls said their masters did, especially in drink. She wasn’t sure that Professor Rubicon had any interest in ladies at all; his work was everything to him, and he often jovially said that if science wasn’t quite his wife, then it was certainly his mistress. She blushed whenever he spoke that way, and he always roared with laughter. Still, life with the Professor of Adventure was never boring. He always had some tale to tell of his expeditions to the far-flung corners of the world, some knickknack or trophy to show of
f. He had a home, of course, somewhere in Holborn, but he spent most of his time either at the Empirical Geographic Club on Threadneedle Street, where he was currently holding court, no doubt still regaling his companions with tales of being shipwrecked in the lost land of monsters, or his discoveries here, in his laboratory in the warren of streets just off Bishopsgate. Very often she would come in during the morning to find him snoring gently in a chair in his study, or slumped over a scattered pile of stones or ancient tiles in his laboratory, the thing in the cage mewling like a cat, waiting to be fed the chunks of raw meat she was obliged to bring in every day for its breakfast. The monster ate well, better than most within a square mile of the laboratory.

  Taking a deep breath, Emily pulled open the doors and picked up her basket of polish and dusters. The laboratory would only need a cursory wipe-down, and then she could be off, away from the beady eyes of the beast until Monday morning, the pay Professor Rubicon had left for her in the kitchen safely tucked into her apron pocket. She poked her head around the door, took one look at the laboratory, and screamed.

  * * *

  The laboratory had been wrecked, benches overturned, books and glass phials scattered across the pale carpet. The gas lamps burned dully in their sconces, illuminating a vivid burgundy stain across the floor. Emily’s first, mad thought was that someone had spilled a decanter of wine, but then she saw the door to the cage that dominated the room swinging open on its hinges.

  The cage was empty. The beast was not inside.

  Emily backed up against the door, casting fearful glances around the room. The monster—she corrected herself, as Professor Rubicon did every time she used that word—the tyrannosaur was not in the laboratory. It was as tall as a man now, and there was nowhere it could be hiding. And the doors to the laboratory had been closed. Unless the beast really was as intelligent as she had feared, and it had let itself out of the room and then closed the door … but no. One of the three windows that looked on to the dark alley running alongside the building was open, the curtains billowing inward, snow dancing through the gap. Two three-toed footprints, as big as dinner plates, led from the bloodstain toward the window.

  Someone had been in here, an intruder. They had released the beast and … what? Been killed by it? But there was no corpse, unless the thing had eaten it whole. Safe to say that the intruder was someone who had not been as badly injured as the blood suggested, then, or perhaps there had been a second intruder who had helped their stricken colleague out through the window.

  Emily ran over and peered into the alley. It was one story up, low enough for a man—and a dinosaur?—to leap down. The snow below was disturbed, as though a fight had taken place, and there was more blood. Emily paled. The tyrannosaur was loose in London.

  Emily ran to the study and began to search for a telephone directory or a notebook that might hold the number for Professor Rubicon’s club. She could find nothing. Should she alert the constabulary? She bit her lip. She should tell the professor first. It couldn’t be helped; she was going to have to walk. She took one more look out of the window before closing it. Who was to say the beast wasn’t lurking out there, nearby, waiting to bite her head off?

  But it couldn’t be helped. She had to tell Professor Rubicon that his dinosaur had escaped.

  Emily hurried through the snow, past the tavern that spilled out warmth and men on to the track churned to slush and mud by the horse carriages and steam-cabs. She pulled her shawl tight around her, to ward off the biting wind, the falling snow, and the catcalls from the drunkards.

  “Over here, love. Penny to see your titties.”

  Emily kept her face down and almost ran past, but a thick hand grabbed her shoulder, a whiskery face breathing beer and a rotten stench at her. “Two pennies for a fuck, eh, love? I’ll be quick.”

  “I’m not that sort of girl,” she muttered, shaking him off. The others laughed as the man staggered back and said, “Every woman is that sort of girl, for the right price.”

  “You should give her one anyway, Harry,” cajoled one of his friends.

  “Think I will.”

  Emily uttered a small scream and began actually to run, casting a glance over her shoulder as the man staggered after her, fumbling with his trousers. She ran blindly, turning a corner and getting a dozen yards into pitch-blackness before she realized she had fled into an alley piled high with stinking refuse that rustled with rats, or worse.

  She paused to look back. He had not followed her. But should she continue into the darkness, or retrace her steps to where he might be waiting? As she bit her lip, undecided, there came a noise beside her, something bigger than a rat. She jumped and turned to see a dark figure, something glinting in its hand. There was the faintest glow from a window high in the wall behind her, and the figure stepped into the slight pool of light. It was a man, clothed head to toe in black. He wore some kind of mask that covered the top half of his head, leaving his mouth and nose, and a neat mustache the only things visible save for eyeholes in his cowl.

  The man was weeping.

  He said something in a language she didn’t understand.

  “You’ve lost what?” she asked. “Lost yon toe? What do you—?”

  At first she imagined a snowflake had kissed her forehead below her hairline, until a curtain of blood crept down to obscure her vision, and she saw the stranger’s right hand whip to his side, the blade he held flashing in the dull light. With a sick, thudding heart, she knew.

  Jack the Ripper.

  It was the last thought she had.

  ALSO BY DAVID BARNETT

  Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Barnett is an award-winning journalist, currently multimedia content manager of the Telegraph & Argus, cultural reviewer for The Guardian and the Independent on Sunday, and he has done features for The Independent and Wired. He is the author of Angelglass (described by The Guardian as “stunning”), Hinterland, and popCULT! His website can be found at davidbarnett.wordpress.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  GIDEON SMITH AND THE BRASS DRAGON

  Copyright © 2014 by David Barnett

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Nekro

  Maps by Jennifer Hanover

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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  Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Barnett, David.

  Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon / David Barnett. — First edition.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates Book”

  ISBN 978-0-7653-3425-1 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-0909-3 (e-book)

  1. Alternative histories (Fiction) 2. Fantasy fiction. I. Title.

  PR6102.A7689G47 2014

  823'.92—dc23

  2014017604

  e-ISBN 9781466809093

  First Edition: September 2014