by Lavie Tidhar
"Ma'am! Hostile fire, ma'am!"
A burst of gunfire, sudden and unexpected, was followed by the whoosh of something heavy rising in the air–
She watched the slim, deadly rocket rise, a trail of smoke behind it–
"Take them," she said.
The rocket hit the side of the airship.
For a moment nothing happened. In the distance a burst of gunfire, which was returned, as her men fired on the unknown hostiles and were fired on in turn. Then, abruptly, a bright ball of flame erupted overhead and the side of the ship blew open, pieces of wood and metal raining down onto the park. Flames caught the side of the ship and it tilted with the impact, losing altitude rapidly.
Lucy swore.
"Ma'am, they are heavily armed!"
"Kill them."
"Ma'am, second group of hostiles moving in."
"We've lost any element of concealment," Lucy said.
"Ma'am?"
"Eliminate them."
And now the park had become a cacophony of battle, gunfire and explosives going off while the airship, having come all this way across Europe and the Channel, fell down heavily, into Richmond Park.
Lucy was already running, three of her men following, running towards the ship as it hit the ground with a sickening crunch, bouncing still, once, twice, then tilting on its side. A second explosion rocked the ship and flames rose high, almost engulfing it. If anyone was still alive inside…
"Ma'am, what are you–?"
"Stay back!"
She ran towards the flaming wreckage of the ship.
"Lucy! Stay back!"
Heedless, she dived into the flames. Thick black smoke rising now, the engines on fire, there would be mere moments before the whole thing blew up. Onto the flaming deck, titled sideways–
"Hel– help! Help me!"
He was still alive. She saw the small figure, not young any more, crawling towards her, gripping on to slats on the floor. He was leaving behind him a trail of blood– at least one of his legs was broken. She slid towards him.
"Stoker?"
"Help me. Please!"
The smoke had an acid stink to it. It burned her eyes, forced its way down her throat, choking her. She picked him up, or tried to. He was heavy; he cried out in pain when she touched him.
She wouldn't fail Mycroft, not now.
She picked him up and supported his weight and slid down farther, deeper into the raging fire–
Bullets flying overhead, tracer bullets lighting up the sky–
Through the fire, it licked at her skin, it caught in her hair, his weight no longer mattered, the ground was close, they were going to make it–
She fell off the side of the burning ship, her cargo with her. She rolled on the ground, putting out flames. Hands grabbed her, beat out the fire, lifted her.
"Stoker," she said. "Get… Stoker."
"Ma'am."
A new, loud voice, cutting like a rapier's blade through the night.
"Give him to us! You are outnumbered."
An alien accent. German, she thought, wildly.
"I thought," she said, panting, "I told you to kill them."
Apologetically: "There are a lot of them, ma'am."
"Grab Stoker!"
She spared a glance for the man. He was out, breathing shallowly, with difficulty. There was something around his neck, a metal canister on a string.
"Who the hell are you?" she called out, to the opposition.
There was an answering burst of gunfire and she smiled. They loped away from the burning airship, the smell of wood burning, metal melting, gas–
The explosion hit her back, threw her forwards. She rolled, a whoosh of hot flaming gas passed over her, and then they were up and running again and under shelter of the trees where the rest of her team closed on them, covering them against attack.
She checked on Stoker. Still alive, just about…
"Let's go," she said.
They pursued them across Richmond Park in deathly silence, the Germans, if that's what they were, however much their force had been reduced, and the other force, whom she could not put a name to. In the shadow world there were no labels, nobody carried a name tag or a calling card with which to announce themselves. The attackers could have been anyone. French? She would have bet good money on that. The Quiet Council, meddling in Bureau affairs…
And Krupp's men, perhaps.
She couldn't know, and right then she didn't care. She had her prize, singed and wounded but hers to keep, and so they went deeper into the park where deer and squirrels shied away from them, a ghostly pursuit in the darkness, amongst the trees, while behind them the landing site had been compromised, the siren song of police automatons sounding in the night, and Lucy thought of Irene Adler and how she was getting no sleep that night.
They pulled back to the Isabella Plantation. There had been a folly there, a stone house amidst the ponds and flowerbeds, and there they laid down Stoker while they waited for their pursuers.
Lucy knelt beside him, checking his pulse. It was weak, irregular. And suddenly she knew he was not going to make it.
A knowledge like that had come on her before, in other battles, other days. With comrades and with enemies, and with civilians sometimes, who were not a part of the battle but had wandered into it and were singed by its fire. It was a terrible knowing, that a human's life was ending, before their time, violently, and that there was nothing she could do, that most of the time, if she was honest with herself, she had been responsible for that very thing, that terrible ending.
Yet all life comes to an end, and never are there answers as to why; Lucy had learned, the hard way, not to question, not to wonder. Death was something to be accepted; to question it was futile.
"Stoker," she said, gently. She gave him water, wetting his lips, letting it dribble into his throat. At last he opened his eyes.
"I need to know," she said. "I need to know what you've found."
"M… Mycroft…?" Stoker said.
"He sent me."
Stoker closed his eyes – in understanding or fatigue she didn't know. Lucy waited. It was quiet there, at the Isabella Plantation. The hunters would come but they were not yet there. At last Stoker opened his eyes. "I had… written down… report." His eyes moved, she followed their direction to the can hanging over his chest. "All there," he said. His mouth moved. Perhaps he tried to smile. "I had always… wanted," he said. "To… be a writer."
His eyes closed. His chest rose and fell and then did not rise again. After a moment, Lucy gently removed the can and the chain from around the dead man's neck. She opened it.
Inside was a small notebook, bound in dark vellum. It was filled with neat, tidy handwriting.
On the first page, in careful calligraphy, it said: Bram Stoker's Journal.
Sitting there, in that silence that comes before battle, Lucy read the last words of the dead man beside her.
PART VII
Bram Stoker's Journal
THIRTY-SEVEN
Bucharest–
I had finally arrived at this city, with darkness gathering, casting upon the city a most unfavourable appearance. Having checked into my hotel I drank a glass of strong Romanian wine, accompanied by bear steak, which I am told they bring from the mountains at great expense. I had not enquired as for the recipe.
I am sitting in my room, watching the dance of gaslight over the city. Tomorrow I set off for the mountains, and as I write this I am filled with trepidation. I have decided to maintain this record of my mission. In the event anything were to happen to me, this journal may yet make its way, somehow, back to London.
Let me, therefore, record how I came to be at this barbarous and remote country, and the sorry, tortuous route by which I had come to my current predicament.
My name is Abraham Stoker, called Abe by some, Bram by others. I am a theatrical manager, having worked for the great actor Henry Irving for many years as his personal assistant, and, on his behalf, as
manager of the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden.
I am not a bad man, nor am I a traitor.
Nevertheless, it was in the summer of 18— that I became an unwitting assistant to a grand conspiracy against our lizardine masters, and one which I was helpless to prevent.
It had begun as a great triumph for my theatrical career. Due to a fight between the great librettist W.S. Gilbert and his longtime manager, Richard D'Oyly Carte, over – of all things – a carpet, I had managed to lure Gilbert and his collaborator, the composer Arthur Sullivan, to my own theatre from D'Oyly Carte's Savoy. We were to stage their latest work, titled The Pirates of the Carib Sea, a rousing tale of adventure and peril. The first part, and forgive me if I digress, describes our lizardine masters' awakening on Caliban's Island, their journey with that foul explorer Amerigo Vespucci back to the British Isles, their overthrowing of our human rulers and their assumption of the throne – a historical tale set to song in the manner only G&S could possibly do it.
In the second part, we encounter the mythical pirate Wyvern, the one-eyed royal lizard who – if the stories in the London Illustrated News can be believed – had abandoned his responsibilities to his race, the royal Les Lézards, to assume the life of a blood-thirsty pirate operating in the Carib Sea, between Vespuccia and the lands of the Mexica and Aztecs, and preying on the very trade ships of his own Everlasting Empire, under her royal highness Queen Victoria, the lizard-queen.
Irving himself played – with great success, I might add! – the notorious pirate, assuming a lizard costume of some magnificence, while young Beerbohm Tree played his boatswain, Mr Spoons, the bald, scarred, enormous human who is – so they say – Wyvern's right-hand man.
It was at that time that a man came to see me in my office. He was a foreigner, and did not look wealthy or, indeed, distinguished.
"My name," he told me, "is Karl May."
"A German?" I said, and he nodded. "I represent certain… interests in Germany," he told me. "A very powerful man wishes to attend the opening night of your new show."
"Then I shall be glad to sell him a ticket," I said, regarding the man – clearly a con-man or low-life criminal of some sort – with distaste. "You may make the arrangements at the box office. Good day to you, sir."
Yet this May, if that was even his real name, did not move. Instead, leaving me speechless, he closed and then locked the door to my office, from the inside, leaving me stranded in there with him. Before I could rise the man pulled out a weapon, an ornate hand-gun of enormous size, which he proceeded to wave at me in a rather quite threatening manner.
"This man," he said, "is a very public man. Much attention is paid to his every move. Moreover, to compound our –" our, he said! "– problem, this man must meet another very public man, and the two cannot be seen to have ever met or discussed… whatever it is they need to discuss."
This talk of men meeting men in secret reminded me of my friend Oscar Wilde, whom I had known in my student days in Dublin and who had once been the suitor of my wife, Florence. "I do not see how I can help you," I said, stiffly – for it does not do to show fear before a foreigner, even one with a gun in his hand.
"Oh, but you can!" this Karl May said to me. "And moreover, you will be amply compensated for your efforts –" and with that, to my amazement, this seeming charlatan pulled out a small, yet heavy-looking bag, and threw it on my desk. I reached for it, drawing the string, and out poured a heap of gold coins, all bearing the portrait – rather than of our own dear lizard-queen – of the rather more foreboding one of the German Kaiser.
"Plenty more where that came from," said this fellow, with a smirk on his face.
I did not move to touch the money. "What would you have me do?" I said.
"The theatre," he said, "is like life. We look at the stage and are spell-bound by it, the scenery convinces us of its reality, the players move and speak their parts and, when it's done, we leave. And yet, what happens to make the stage, to move its players, is not done in the limelight. It is done behind the scenes."
"Yes?" I said, growing ever more irritated with the man's manner. "You wish to teach me my job, perhaps?"
"My dear fellow!" he said, with a laugh. "Far from it. I merely wished to illustrate a point–"
"Then get to it, for my time is short," I said, and at that his smile dropped and the gun pointed straight at my heart and he cocked it. "Your time," he said, in a soft, menacing voice, "could be made to be even shorter."
I must admit that, at that, my knees may have shaken a little. I am not a violent man, and am not used to the vile things desperate men are prepared to do. I therefore sat back down in my chair, and let him explain and, when he had finished, I must admit I felt a sigh of relief escape me, for it did not seem at all such a dreadful proposition, and they were willing to compensate me generously besides.
"You may as well know," Karl May said to me, "the name of the person I represent. It is Alfred Krupp."
"The industrialist?"
May nodded solemnly. "But what," I gasped, "could he be wanting in my theatre?"
For I have heard of Krupp, of course, the undisputed king of the armaments trade, the creator of that monstrous canon they called Krupp's Baby, which was said to be able to shoot its payload all the way beyond the atmosphere and into space… A recluse, a genius, a man with his own army, a man with no title and yet a man who, it was rumoured, was virtually the ruler of all Germany…
A man who had not been seen for many a year, in public.
"Fool," Karl May said. "My lord Krupp has no interest in your pitiful theatre, nor in the singing and dancing of effeminate Englishmen."
"I am Irish, if you don't mind," I said. "There really is no need to be so rude–" and May laughed. "Rest your mind at ease, Irishman," he said. "My master wishes only to meet certain… interested parties. Behind, as it were, the scenes."
"Which parties?" I said, "for surely I would need to know in order to prepare–"
"All in good time!" Karl May said. "All in good time."
Bu teni–
This is a small mountain village near to my destination. I had taken the train this morning with no difficulty, yet was told the track terminated before my destination, which is the city of Brasov, nestled, so I am told, in a beautiful valley within the Carpathian Mountains.
This region is called Transylvania, and a wild and remote land it is indeed. The train journey lasted some hours, in relative comfort, the train filled with dour Romanian peasants, shifty-looking gypsies, Székelys and Magyars and all other manner of the strange people of this region. Also on board the train were chickens, with their legs tied together to prevent their escaping, and sacks of potatoes and other produce, and children, and a goat. Also on board the train were army officers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of which this was but a remote and rather dismal outpost, with nary a pastry or decent cup of coffee to be seen.
I had wondered at the transportation of such military personnel, and noticed them looking rather sharply in my direction. Nevertheless I was not disturbed and was in fact regarded with respect the couple of times we had occasion to cross each other in passing.
The train's passage was impressive to me, the mountains at first looming overhead then – as the train rose up from the plains on which sat Bucharest – they rose on either side of the tracks, and it felt as though we were entering another world, of dark forests and unexplored lands, and I fancied I heard, if only in the distance, the howl of wolves, sending a delicious shiver down my spine.
But you did not ask me for a travel guide! Let me be brief. The train terminated, after some hours, at a station in the middle of a field. It was a most curious thing. I could see the tracks leading onwards – presumably to Brasov – but we could not go on. The train halted within these hastily erected buildings, lit by weak gas lamps planted in the dirt, and all – peasants and chickens and soldiers and gypsies and goat – disembarked, including this Irishman.
At this nameless station wai
ted coaches and carts – the peasants and local people to the carts, the soldiers and more well-to-do visitors to the coaches. I stood there in some bewilderment, when I was taken aside by the military officer who seemed to be in charge of that platoon. "You are going – there?" he said, and motioned with his head towards the distance, where I assumed this city of Brasov lay.
"Yes," I said.
"To visit… him?"
I nodded at that, feeling a pang of apprehension at the thought.