Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “I fear we have stepped into a trap, boys,” the peer said. “The past has risen up against us.”

  “Poetic,” Balfour said. It was not meant as a compliment.

  “Eight decades ago, more or less, Napoleon laid siege to the empire,” Lord Carmichael went on. “You recall your history lessons, I presume.”

  “You mean his Egyptian campaign,” Meriwether said. “The attempt to interfere with the British trade routes that began with Lord Nelson cutting his supply lines at Aboukir Bay and ended, as I recall, with Little Boney sneaking away in the dead of night and leaving his men to the questionable mercies of the Mamelukes?”

  The driver gave a loud shout, and the carriage lurched. Outraged voices rose briefly above the clatter of hooves and wheels.

  “Bonaparte’s forces were the first to plumb the depths of the ruins of Egypt,” Lord Carmichael said. “And when the time came that the French had to put themselves upon our good graces, we were able to acquire a great wealth of these artifacts for the British Museum. It has been the labor of decades to catalog and assess them. Academic careers have gone from nurse’s teat to graveyard dust without ever walking out of the collection. For the most part, the information gleaned from the pieces was dry as the dusts of Egypt. But there were... oddities.”

  “Meaning?” Balfour grunted.

  “Pieces that merited special study. Works that failed to fit into place gracefully among their fellows,” Lord Carmichael said.

  “Fakes,” Meriwether said, “placed among the true artifacts by Napoleon’s minions out of spite. I’ve read Lord Smithton’s papers on the subject. As I understand, some of them rather amateur attempts.”

  “Why?” Balfour asked.

  “To confuse and embarrass British efforts to make sense of the fallen civilizations of Egypt,” Meriwether said. “Only the French would know which artifacts were genuine and which false, and for generations any theory or proposal with the temerity to include a British name could be discredited by the mere suggestion that someone on the continent might know better.”

  “It sounds petty, I know,” Lord Carmichael said, “but these are the French we’re speaking of.”

  Balfour coughed eloquently.

  “It appears that Boney may have had something more direct in mind,” Lord Carmichael said. “The most impressive of the oddities is a sealed sarcophagus. Clearly, it is not of the lineage of the other works. The markings upon it are different, the materials used to fashion it, obviously modern. And thus, while it was ignored by the more traditional academics, it was the holy grail of the cranks and dabblers.”

  “Was?” Balfour said.

  “Permission was given to break the seal and open the thing,” Lord Carmichael said. “Her Majesty signed the order herself.”

  “As a favor, I presume,” Meriwether said. “A favorite cousin, perhaps, has thrown in his lot with the dabblers and cranks?”

  “Lord Abington,” Lord Carmichael said.

  “The anti-Semite?” Balfour asked.

  “The very one,” Lord Carmichael said. “Apparently in his scattershot inquiries into the alleged dark conspiracies of the Jewish race, he found reference to something which he conflated with Napoleon’s imitation sarcophagus. He put upon his wife to intercede with Her Majesty, and was thus to supervise the experiment an hour ago.”

  “All has not gone well, I take it,” Meriwether said.

  “We can’t say,” Lord Carmichael said. “Abington closed the workrooms and locked the doors from within. There were sounds apparently. Something that might have been a shriek, and then the lights went out. No one’s been able to raise him since.”

  “And you would like us to make our way into the place and discover what sort of Greek the Emperor left within his Trojan horse,” Meriwether said.

  “Just so,” Lord Carmichael said.

  Balfour leaned forward, the action of the carriage barely sufficient to shift his solid weight. His dark eyes looked to Meriwether’s pale ones.

  “Plague?” Balfour said.

  “Perhaps,” Meriwether said. “There are several diseases endemic to the Nile valley which might have survived the decades. Two of them might have overcome a man before he could call for help. Abington may have done us all a great favor when he barred those doors. At worst, we may have to raze the museum.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Lord Carmichael gasped.

  “My dear man,” Meriwether said, “I am often glib, but I am always serious.”

  The carriage skidded to a halt at the steps of the British Museum. In the paired darkness of night and fog, the great columns rose up like the Nephilim of Genesis: giants of a forgotten era. Balfour and Meriwether took the wide marble steps two at a time, Lord Carmichael following as best he could. A young man waited at the top of the stair, anxiety twisting his face into a comic parody of grief.

  “You are?” Balfour asked.

  “Assistant Curator Olds,” the man said. “I was working with Lord Abington on behalf of the museum. I was supposed to have been present at the unsealing, but Lord Abington ordered me out at the last moment.”

  “Lead on, young Mr. Olds,” Meriwether said. “There may not be a moment to lose.”

  The halls of the museum rose above the men in a gloom darker than the autumn sky. The scent of dust and still air gave the great triumph of English culture the unfortunate aspect of a necropolis. Their footsteps echoed against the marble and stone, dampening even Meriwether’s gay affect. Mr. Olds led them down a long corridor, up one long flight of stairs, and then another to a hall designed around a pair of great oaken doors. Two other men, clearly minor functionaries of the establishment, huddled in the harsh light of a gas sconce. The hissing of the flame was the only sound. Balfour stepped immediately to the closed doors, scrutinizing them with an expression so fierce as to forbid speech. Meriwether paced back and forth some length down the hall, his pale eyes moving restlessly across every detail, his footsteps silent as a cat’s.

  “Something’s happened,” Balfour said, stepping back from the doors with a nod. Meriwether strode to Balfour’s side, licked his fingertips, and held them before the doorway.

  “Yes, I see,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Lord Carmichael asked. “What do you mean something’s happened?”

  “The room within is not sealed,” Meriwether said, his voice unnaturally calm. “All through the museum, the air has been still as the grave, but here there’s the faintest of breezes. What other access ways are there to this workroom?”

  “None, sir,” one of the functionaries said. “There was a back way, but it was bricked up years ago to make more storage room for the collection.”

  “Light?” Balfour asked.

  “Gas lamps, sir,” the functionary said. “Same as the rest.”

  “And during the day?” Balfour said. “Are there windows?”

  “Well, yes, sir. But they’re set at the rooftop. The workrooms are high as a cathedral, some of them, sir.”

  “We’ll want rope,” Meriwether said. “And ladders that will reach the roof. There’s little time.”

  “What do you suspect?” Lord Carmichael asked as the functionaries scattered to Meriwether’s command.

  Meriwether shook his head silently and gave no other reply. A few minutes’ work brought the discovery that the window high above the workroom had indeed been breached, and less than a half hour more allowed the pair of special agents to be lowered into the stygian darkness within. Meriwether and Balfour descended slowly, the rough rope harnesses around them shifting as the functionaries strained against their weight. Meriwether had both revolvers drawn, and Balfour gripped his sharpest knife in his right hand. In the large man’s left, a lantern glowed, slowly revealing the disarray beneath them.

  Napoleon’s sarcophagus stood at the center of the room, easily half again as long as a sleeping man. The ornate bronzework of its spilled lid seemed to glow in the dim light. The long wooden workbench at the object
’s side lay overturned, papers and dust-grayed hand tools strewn about it. A strange scent like an overheated skillet filled the air. With a gesture, Balfour indicated a dark, rounded shape in a shadowed corner. Meriwether trained one of his pistols upon it, the other still at the ready should some as yet unrecognized threat appear.

  The pair reached the stone floor with near simultaneity. Shrugging off his rope harness, Balfour went immediately to the slumped figure in the corner while Meriwether examined the unsealed sarcophagus. Balfour needed little time to determine that Lord Abington was stone dead, the thick bruises around the man’s neck telling of strangulation by an assailant of tremendous strength. The only odd feature was the small red pinch marks that punctuated the bruises, as if the killer had pressed a length of barbed wire into the dying man’s flesh.

  The sarcophagus was beautiful and unnerving. It appeared to be of cast metal, but while the outer layer was clearly bronze, the careful inlaying defied Meriwether’s experienced eye. Perhaps silver, perhaps steel. The symbols that traced their way along the object’s exterior began with a simple divided circle that became more and more baroque and complex with every iteration. Meriwether holstered one of his pistols, freeing him to run fingertips across the cool, slightly raised design. It reminded him of nothing so much as the schematic for a particularly powerful mainspring. The two men glanced at one another for a moment. Balfour nodded to the far wall, where a dusting of marble and stone littered the floor. In the dim illumination of the lantern, the handholds in the great workroom’s wall stood out as deep shadows against the gray. Something had gouged the stone as easily as a man might press strong fingers into clay.

  “Not plague,” Balfour said.

  “No, old friend. Before this is finished we may wish it had been.”

  Quickly, they unbarred the doors and stepped out to the hall where the assistant curator and Lord Carmichael awaited them. Meriwether summarized their findings—indeed something had been alive and waiting in the sarcophagus; it had slaughtered its liberator and climbed to the high window to make its escape. Whatever the beast was, it roamed free upon the streets of the city, and there was no time to waste. Assistant Curator Olds rushed into the workroom, stifling a shriek at the sight of Lord Abington’s corpse. Lord Carmichael matched the long strides of Balfour and Meriwether as they made their way out to the street.

  The fog had thickened, softening what light it did not swallow. The damp pressed at the men’s faces and clothes, soaking their coats as if they stood in a light rain. It was some minutes before Balfour coughed out in triumph, calling Meriwether and Lord Carmichael to his side. Meriwether knelt, oblivious of the alleyway’s stench of filth and grime. The pale gaze shifted over the nearly obscured ground, picking out signs and markers almost too subtle for mortal eyes.

  “Someone was waiting here,” Meriwether said. “The wide tracks are, I think, from the beast. But here and here, smaller feet. They spoke to one another, I think. And then...”

  Meriwether went silent, moving down the alleyway, bent almost double. Balfour, at his side, held the lantern before them, dew forming on his wide moustache. Meriwether’s hand darted out like a striking cobra, and he lifted a shard of glass toward the lantern. It had clearly fallen from the shattered window far above. A bright red smear of blood marked it.

  “The beast?” Balfour asked, skeptically.

  “Perhaps,” Meriwether said, “but more likely this new person of the smaller shoes. I suspect there is another hunter already on the trail of our prey.”

  “I shall alert Scotland Yard,” Lord Carmichael said. “We’ll need manpower to hunt it down. Come with me, the both of you. You can tell them what to look for and lead the pack.”

  “I’m afraid not, My Lord,” Meriwether said, his eyes fixed upon the darkness. “There is little time now, and if we are to have any hope of stopping this, Balfour and I must hunt this dark hour alone.”

  Balfour nodded gravely and snuffed out the lantern. In the sudden gloom, Lord Carmichael heard the quiet sound of blades being drawn. The click of Meriwether’s revolvers answered as if the two men spoke to one another through their weaponry.

  “Don’t be daft,” Lord Carmichael said to the darkness about him. “Wait an hour, and I’ll have you a small army at your back. As it stands, even if you find the thing, it’s as likely to kill you as you it.”

  “It’s a risk,” Balfour growled, and an instant later Lord Carmichael found himself alone.

  CHAPTER TWO: A CONSPIRACY OF JEWS

  The trail they followed was faint. Strange scratches on the cobbled streets, smears of blood that appeared with increasing frequency, and the uncanny scent of heat and dust that had haunted the workroom. Balfour and Meriwether made their way through the darkened streets, communicating with the slightest of sounds, the occasional light touch, and where the fog-shrouded street lights permitted, gestures. Years of training and shared experience gave them an instinctive telepathy that might have appeared unnatural had there been mortal eyes to follow them.

  The thing from the sarcophagus moved quickly. Its stride was wide enough that, were it the shape of a man, it would stand easily seven feet high. In some places, the thing’s passing had scraped the tops of the cobblestones white. The other tracks—smaller shoes with leather soles and blood—were made by someone moving more slowly. At a shrouded intersection, Balfour leaned close to the ground; his eyes were little more than glimmers in the fog. He made an unsatisfied grunt.

  “Yes,” Meriwether said. “I see it too. The beast knows it is being tracked. It’s letting this poor man follow it, leaving marks to guide him on.”

  “Why?”

  “I cannot say, but I suspect it knows its pursuer. Perhaps it is hoping to tire our fellow hunter before turning upon him, in which case, God help the man.”

  Balfour grunted his agreement, and the pursuit began afresh. It was only minutes later that Meriwether lifted his head, fists tightening upon his revolvers. The barest sound reached through the blanketing fog—metal against metal like a swordfight or a machinist’s press. Balfour paused a moment, then heard it as well.

  “The quay by the river,” Meriwether breathed, and the pair was off, speeding through the darkness, heedless of the risk to themselves.

  The scene that greeted them was the tissue of nightmare. A human figure in a long damp-slicked overcoat stood near the edge of the flowing Thames, silhouetted by the great metal torch held before it. And in the glow of the fire, trapped between water and flame, the beast itself stood, a living statue.

  The gears and clockwork of its arms and chest lay exposed, the constant interior movement lending it the aspect of a thing made of a thousand minute, blind, idiot processes. Its face, framed by the silver and gold headdress common to the enigmatic images of Egypt, was inhuman, metallic, and twisted into an expression of rage and hatred and, oddly, sorrow. Articulated fingers glimmered like claws, and Balfour recalled viscerally the red pinch marks on Lord Abington’s flesh where the dead man’s skin had been caught in those hinges.

  With a cry of despair, the hunter swung his torch as if trying to drive the thing of metal back into the water. The beast was too fast, its arms thrusting forward more quickly than the eye could follow.

  Even as Meriwether let out a howl, the mysterious hunter fell to his knees, the great torch dropping to the ground at his side. The beast looked up, something like eyes, but not, taking in the appearance of these new attackers. A knife hissed through the thick air, striking the thing’s face with a sound of breaking crystal. The automaton’s bestial mouth gaped open, and an inhuman cry of rage drowned out the reports of Meriwether’s pistols.

  Sparks flew from the thing where the bullets struck home. The wide metal legs bent, and the clockwork beast launched itself into the darkness just as the pair arrived at the quay. The hunter lay in a spreading pool of blood, torch guttering on the stone.

  “After it,” Balfour said.

  “Wait!” Meriwether called, kneeling to the
fallen figure. He turned the wounded hunter. A wide fan of dark hair surrounded the unconscious face of a woman of olive complexion and striking beauty. Balfour looked from the injured woman to the darkness and back, a hunting dog torn between its fallen companion and the chase, then sighed and spat into the Thames before coming to Meriwether’s side to aid in binding her wounds.

  Back at the apartments on King Street, the mysterious woman lay on the divan. Mrs. Long brought thick wool blankets kept for just such occasions, the stains of previous visitors’ blood hardly visible thanks to her careful laundering. The smell of strong tea competed with the sharp scent of Doctor Lister’s new “anti-septic” fluid. With as much regard to propriety as possible, Meriwether and Balfour had cut away the woman’s garments in order to treat her wounds. The chore had been more arduous than they had expected; heavy leather and steel links armored the woman’s body. And yet the blows the great clockwork had delivered against her had done terrible damage.