Shadow of the War Machine (The Secret Order)

by Kristin Bailey

  I scanned the wall, but there wasn’t a single round thing in it. The surface almost looked like a woven basket. This was quite a puzzle.

  The answer came to me slowly even as my eyes settled on one thin sliver of molding missing from the edge of a panel low on the wall and to the right.

  “It’s a puzzle.” I stepped toward that small missing sliver. If I hadn’t been staring so intently, I never would have noticed the slight hitch in the pattern. I ran my fingers over it, inspecting the square panel. Acting on a hunch, I placed my fingers on the edge of the part of the molding that was like all the rest and pulled it toward the nearly imperceptible gap.

  It slid and clicked into place, revealing a new gap in the panel with a groove carved into the wood.

  “Look here! It’s like one of those Russian puzzle boxes.” I looked up at Peter, who crouched down next to me and began to feel the wall. “If we find the right method of sliding the panels, it should unlock.”

  “Now, that is brilliant.” Peter slid a piece of the molding from the square above down into the new gap.

  This was it. Whatever Rathford was hiding, we would find it here.

  Together we worked, testing each piece of wood, finding the places with give and trying new combinations as larger and larger gaps opened up. On three different occasions Will saved us from folly by noticing the pattern of grooves and stopping us from moving a piece of molding or a panel too far, which would have prevented us from moving the next piece.

  It was a pattern of careful mind traps. Our movements became a dance, holding the shifting panels of the wall as we slid them around, shifting what was before us, turning something solid into something mutable. It was the sort of task that lit a fire in my mind, a challenge of wit. With patience and observation we defeated every trap, and the puzzle unfolded in our hands.

  Dear God, I loved being an Amusementist.

  Finally we slid a flat square of a panel over to reveal a hidden latch.

  Peter opened the latch, and together we pushed the entire wall of panels to the left.

  Will lifted one of the lamps and carried it through the narrow opening.

  I followed him into a third room, expecting a cluttered study with mountains of papers lying around, but the room was stark and nearly empty. A single machine took up the majority of the center of the room. A large cut crystal had been set within a framework of smaller crystals and gears. It reminded me of the center framework of Rathford’s infamous time machine.

  Around the walls, nothing. No bookshelves, no desks with letters, no indication of any correspondence of any kind that would lead us in the right direction. The only furniture at all was a small table in the corner with a rack filled with dozens of crystal tubes.

  “This is useless,” I muttered, prepared to go back to the main room of the workshop. I’d turn everything in it over until I found what I was looking for. “Come on. Let’s search the other room.”

  “Are you daft? Look at this thing!” Peter exclaimed, standing in front of the massive structure. “It’s glorious. I wonder what it does.” He held his arms out, then leaned over, closely scrutinizing the various lenses in the framework.

  “Who cares what it does? It isn’t what we’re looking for, and our time is limited.” I couldn’t hide my exasperation, but Peter ignored it completely. “Will? Are you coming with me?” I asked, but even as I said it, I turned to see him twisting his back and neck for a better view of the innards of the machine.

  “What was that?” he said, but didn’t bother to extract himself from his contorted position. “Fascinating. There’s a very powerful lantern at the heart of this. I wonder how the light from it would project through these lenses.”

  “Let’s light it and find out,” Peter proclaimed, grabbing the candle. “Is there oil?”

  “Will you two stop this at once?” I shouted. “We don’t have time to tinker with this nonsense. We have to find a letter. You can play with this contraption to your heart’s content tomorrow.”

  Will grasped a lever. “This is the winding mechanism here. I don’t see a lock.” He pumped the lever several times. Then Peter reached up and touched a flame to the core of the machine.

  It began to hum and whirr. A large gear at the base spun as a wispy smoke emerged, filling the room with a sweet-smelling white mist.

  “What did you two do?” We were going to burn down the entire carriage house, with us in it.

  The flame at the center of the machine grew hot, then turned to bright white light as it flared through the various lenses in a web of bright beams.

  I gasped in awe and horror as the ghostly image of Rathford appeared fully formed in front of the machine. He looked so young and haunting as he turned directly to me and smiled. He reached out. Then a voice came from the machine, distant and tinny but distinctly his own and matching the movement of his translucent lips.

  “My dear, it’s so wonderful to see you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A SEARING LIGHT BLINDED ME for a moment. I could feel the heat of it on my face, and I instinctively ducked and turned my back to the machine. Rubbing my eyes, I blinked through the flashes of color floating through my vision. As my sight returned, I nearly screamed in my shock and horror as I watched a very real ghost walk toward me.

  She was the perfect likeness of the portrait that hung in Rathford’s study. Beautiful and delicate with dark eyes and hair, the deceased baroness floated through the fog. Her translucent hands caressed her swollen belly. She must have been only days from delivering her child.

  I watched her, mute and transfixed, as she continued toward me with a soft and welcoming smile on her full lips. Except for the lack of color in her face, she seemed so real, I expected her to step around me as a normal person would. Instead Rathford’s wife continued forward. I took a step back and gasped as the woman made of nothing but smoke and light walked right through me.

  I bent over, holding my arms over my middle just to feel I was real. Then I spun quickly, not wanting to miss a single moment of what transpired.

  “If I didn’t come down here, I would never see you at all,” she said. Like Rathford, her voice sounded distant, as if she were speaking from within a glass bottle. “Do you finally have it working?” She kissed Rathford’s cheek. He stood and embraced her for a long time.

  “This is so strange,” Peter commented, stepping closer to the couple as the machine behind us shifted the lenses and made a whirring noise. He waved his hand in front of Rathford’s face. The smoke curled in the breeze, making the image waver like a reflection in a pond. “It’s as if they are alive, but not.”

  “I’ve seen some of the old plans for moving-picture machines, but this is beyond words,” Will said even as my eyes began to water. The smoke stung them, or perhaps it was the lingering effects of the bright light.

  Rathford leaned back, his gaze taking in his wife’s translucent face. The wisps of smoke curled away from her, and her body faded for a moment. The lights flickered, and yet Rathford noticed none of it. “My love, you shouldn’t have come down those stairs at all. Are you still feeling faint?” Rathford laid a reverent hand against his wife’s belly.

  “I’m fine. Whatever came over me passed yesterday. Does your invention function as you had hoped?” She turned and looked up at the machine. “Can it really capture a moment in time?”

  “We shall see. I’m testing it now.” Rathford placed his hands on his wife’s delicate shoulders and gazed up at his creation. I knew the look I saw in his eyes. I knew the hope and the feeling of fullness in his heart that I could so plainly see on his face. It was part of the power of invention, the intoxicating allure of creation. Rathford had been a brilliant man, but the dark temptation of that talent had corrupted him.

  “I cannot wait to see what you have done.” She turned to face him. “I am so proud of you.”

  He kissed her hand. “Go upstairs and have your tea. Promise me if you feel weak or faint at all, you will go straight to
bed.”

  “Straight to bed, I promise.”

  The lights flickered and died, and the ghosts faded into the curling smoke. I felt a heaviness deep in my chest. Rathford had been obsessed with the moment of his wife’s death. She had fallen down the stairs after she had spilled her tea in the sitting room. Dear Lord, we had just witnessed their final moment together.

  “Well,” Peter interjected with an overly cheery voice. “That wasn’t disturbing at all, what?”

  Will shuddered next to me even as I tried to shake off my lingering horror. That was when it dawned on me. “The other crystal tubes over there on the table, they must be for the machine.” Will and Peter met me at the table. We inspected each of the large murky crystals. They were shaped a bit like hexagonal prisms. I held one up to the light shining through the crack in the panel door. Within the crystal were thousands of tiny images, miniature shadows trapped in the glass.

  For the life of me, I could not figure how Rathford had printed them within the clear confines of the prism. As I turned the crystal between my fingers, the tiny images shifted like the falling pieces within a kaleidoscope. I turned the prism in the light, and my fingertip brushed against a roughened etching on the flat end of one side. I peered at it more closely. It was a set of faint initials scratched into the surface.

  After placing the crystal carefully on the table, I inspected the others. Peter and Will were still marveling at the ones they had chosen, holding them to the light. While they peered into their prizes like fortune-tellers with oddly shaped crystal balls, I felt the ends for etchings. Finally I found one marked with my grandfather’s initials. “It’s this one.”

  It took a moment, but Peter discovered the small chamber in the machine meant to hold each crystal in place. It was difficult to work the crystal through the various brass arms. Perhaps there was a section we could open, but we hadn’t figured out the mechanism to release it. With the dexterity that had always served him well at the Academy, Peter removed the crystal that showed Rathford and his wife, and replaced it with the one I had selected. Will pulled the lever to wind the machine again.

  Fog spilled out from the base of the machine. First it curled over the floor the way mists do in a deadly bog. Then it reached higher, seeking to drown us.

  The light flared.

  The apparition of Rathford appeared once more, this time bent over the collection of crystals at the table. Peter, Will, and I backed toward the wall to stay out of the way of the haunting projection. Rathford looked much older than he had in the first turn of the machine, his face creased with a heavy sadness that settled in his drooping eyes. He caressed a crystal lovingly and waited, glancing at the sliding door every couple of seconds. He was expecting someone.

  A second apparition appeared. My breath left me and refused to return. Like the captain of a valiant sea vessel, my grandfather marched into the room with his head held high and an austere air of command. His chiseled features and smooth bald head gave the impression of a great bird of prey. His winged eyebrows and the piercing intelligence in his silver-gray eyes only added to the effect. He wore charisma like a mantle upon his shoulders. He wasn’t the sweet and loving Papa I knew. This was another man entirely.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” Rathford spat the words. His hunched manner reminded me of a growling dog with his hackles raised. “I’ll find the pieces of the plate lock. You can’t keep me from what is mine.”

  “Ulysses. It’s over,” my grandfather said. I felt a tingling deep in my body at the sound of his resonant voice. Rathford must have made improvements on the crystals, because the voices didn’t sound as hollow. “We are not the enemy,” my grandfather continued. “We are trying to help you see reason.”

  “I can have her back.” Rathford stood, clenching the crystal in his hand. “I can reach her. I know I can. If I had only been there to lead her up the stair to the bedroom.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “She will never be gone so long as I live.”

  “I know how you must feel.” Grandfather attempted to place a hand on Rathford’s shoulder, but he shrugged away from the touch.

  Rathford let out a derisive snort. “Do you? Tell me how you would feel if you were responsible for the deaths of everyone you loved. George. Elsa. What of your precious granddaughter?”

  Grandfather grabbed the ghostly Rathford by the throat, and I leapt back, slamming myself against the wall. Will took my hand and squeezed it. This wasn’t real. It wasn’t happening in the moment. It was all smoke and mirrors. I had to remember that.

  My grandfather’s gaze turned icy. “Charles told me how you tried to bribe him to return the plates we stole from your lock. Now he is dead. Edgar is as well.”

  Edgar and Charles had been Amusementists and had helped my grandfather in his endeavors. Their murders almost tore the Order apart.

  “I didn’t kill them. I swear it,” Rathford choked out.

  Grandfather released him with a hard shake. For a moment the memory of the way the man in the mask had grabbed the captain on the Méduse came to the fore of my mind. “If you ever threaten my family again, the Black Mark would be a blessing,” Papa said.

  Rathford rubbed his neck. “It wasn’t a threat. You claim to have come to help me see reason. Consider it my attempt to enlighten you. I told you before. I don’t know who killed either Charles or Edgar. For all I know, it could have been you. You cannot deny that the political winds within the Order are shifting as a result of their demise.”

  Whatever Rathford was attempting to do, it didn’t rattle my grandfather’s steely composure. “Murder for the sake of ambition is unthinkable. It goes against everything the Order stands for, and the benefactor’s motives would be too transparent. Such a man would be discovered.”

  “Would he?” Rathford cocked his head. “Or would he need a convenient scapegoat?”

  With that, the first flicker of doubt crossed my grandfather’s face. “Know this. If an attempt is made on my life, I will disappear and I will do everything within my power to stop this madness.”

  “You think Pensée will hide you?”

  Papa seemed startled at Rathford’s observation. I came away from the wall. Pensée. It was the clue I was looking for. French. A flower. A pansy.

  My papa cleared his throat. “Please, Ulysses. Your obsession will consume you until the day it takes your life.”

  “So be it,” Rathford proclaimed.

  Papa’s striking silver eyes narrowed as they swept up and down the ruined shell of the other man in the room. “I refuse to believe it is too late for you.” Without saying another word, Papa walked back out through the door, and the apparitions faded away.

  I continued to watch the smoky room, waiting for the men to reappear and tell me more. Secretly I wished for another glimpse of my grandfather, but the light within the machine died as the cogs and wheels wound to a stop.

  “That was certainly more dramatic than a letter,” Peter said as he covered a cough.

  “This is no time to jest,” I scolded. “Pensée. Do you know what he was referring to?”

  “Haven’t the slightest.” Peter waved his hand in front of his face, then slid the door open wider and motioned us to go through. We closed the door to smother the last of the smoke, and I found myself staring with new and tragic understanding at the bassinet tucked against the arm of Rathford’s old chair. I had to let it go. I only hoped that Rathford had finally found peace and a way back to the love he had lost.

  “We need to find the first letter, the one that Rathford left out for me,” I said. I had to be sure. It had been a long time since I’d read it.

  “Is this the one?” Peter said, pulling a letter from the pile of papers he had been searching before we’d discovered the secret room.

  I skimmed over the words again and again, to be certain I hadn’t missed anything. It was horrifyingly vague. The only bit that pertained to my grandfather’s disappearance said very little at all. I read it aloud
for the sake of the others.

  “It says here, ‘I shall disappear in earnest. I find being dead has certain uses. As you are the only one who knows I am indeed alive, if anyone searches for me, I shall know you are the one who betrayed us. The matter of the traitor will be settled.’ ”

  “That gives us very little to go on,” Will said. “Your grandfather didn’t confirm that he was indeed going to this Pensée.”

  “Yes, but ‘pensée’ is French,” I said. “If my grandfather did travel to France, he may have met with an old enemy while he was there.” When the man in the clockwork mask had captured me, there’d been no mistaking the hatred burning in his one human eye. Whatever grudge he held against my family, it was deeply personal.

  “The man in the clockwork mask has been traveling to and from France. It is enough of a connection to make it worth investigating.” I took another glance at the letter, as if something invisible might appear between the neatly written lines to show me the right path. “I can search through the historical records in my workshop easily enough and see if I can discover what this Pensée is.”

  I glanced at Will, and he took my hand. “It’s near dawn. We must be going,” he said.

  I nodded. This place held too many ghosts.

  “One thing, Meg,” Will added.

  “What is it?”

  Will’s brow knit into a starkly serious expression. “Should we find your grandfather, remind me to never make him cross.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WILL AND I NEEDED TO hurry. It was dangerously near morning, and Mrs. Pratt was known to be an early riser. Her constant scrutiny had been difficult enough when I had worked as a housemaid. I didn’t wish to face her wrath now, or worse, her disappointment in my moral character. The last thing we needed was for her to raise some sort of alarm with Peter’s parents. Then Oliver would have to step in to save my reputation, but by that point it would be well past repair.

  Peter braved the cold in his dressing gown. “Take care, both of you. Let me know what you discover.” He opened the gate even as he looked back over his shoulder toward the house.