by S. M. Peters
“I think she will be disappointed,” said Oliver. “She and her kind aren’t welcome here.”
Fickin perked up. The fire danced in his eyes, casting its glow over the rows of spines lined on the shelves.
“So you know about the child, then?” he said.
Oliver nodded.
“Mother Engine always wanted children of her own,” Fickin said. The heat of his body touched Oliver’s face. The air began to grow smokier. Illumination from no discernable source spread into the room. “She once tried, long ago, to conceive from the Lord’s seed. What was born was an abomination to both of them, a creature of disharmony and decay. It has dogged at their heels from world to world, unable to be rid of them just as they are unable to be rid of it. But what else could come from a union of such hatred on the one hand and indifference on the other?”
Fickin became distracted with the passions washing over him. Oliver took the opportunity to scan the room and take in the changing light, the sudden smokiness of the air. Right now, in the back of the store, those four furnaces were flaring higher as a fanfare for the goddess’ arrival.
It was time to leave. Oliver took one quiet step back towards the door.
“She likes you, Mr. Bull,” Fickin said. “You have qualities she fancies.”
Another step back. Jeremy poked his head fully out of the pocket.
“Qualities.”
“I don’t presume to understand her,” Fickin said. He floated closer as Oliver retreated, stretching out his hands in a kind of pleading gesture. “She has needs and desires far outside the boundaries of human experience, and she engages in many kinds of unions.”
There’s a vile image. Oliver snapped the Summa Machina closed and slipped it back into his pocket. “She knows my opinion of her, Fickin. I’ll be going now.”
Fickin snatched Oliver’s sleeve. The voice that spoke next was no ancient bookkeeper’s, but a rattling gasp like the last breath of a dying man. “She needs you. She cannot suffer this again. She must have a husband who will love her.”
The lamp overhead exploded, raining sparks onto the shelves. Strips of Fickin’s skin peeled off steel bones when Oliver tore his sleeve loose, and Oliver bolted for the door. Jeremy burst from his jacket in a flurry of ticks and buzzes as the shop exploded into orange light.
Oliver did not see what Aaron Bolden did next. For an instant time suspended, sound deepened, and space expanded past comprehension. The cracks and fissures in the walls began leaking yellow pus. A sickly green light flared up outside the windows.
Fickin’s cry for deliverance gurgled away.
The pus fell to the floor, where it picked up a sudden speed and rushed past Oliver’s feet. An instant later a blast of heat struck him from behind, followed by a wall of hissing steam, and a shriek of pain went up like the beams of a tower ripping itself apart.
This time without hesitation, Oliver tore the door open and plunged into the street.
The crack of the sidewalk against his cheek brought him back to clear reality.
Bergen made no move to help him up. The German drew his revolver and trained it on the bookshop.
Oliver lifted himself off the street, straightened collar and cuffs.
“Light it now, Phineas,” he whispered, knowing the sailor would hear him.
The derringer leapt into Oliver’s hand.
The bookstore stood dull and darkened. The door creaked shut. They waited.
Phineas appeared by Oliver’s side.
“Got the block evacuated, sir,” he said.
Oliver nodded, keeping his eyes trained on the door.
“Better cover your ears,” Bergen grumbled, leaving his own unprotected. Phineas ran off, already bunching his collar around his head to dull his hearing.
Oliver’s heart stung for him. I’m sorry to have to do this to you, Phin.
Steel fingers slick with blood moved the shop door aside. One spindly appendage, bending evenly at a hundred different joints and arching like a spider’s leg, reached beyond the doorjamb. Oliver heard Fickin’s voice from inside.
“Why do you do these things?” the bookseller rasped, his face a hint of teeth and bloodied scalp. “Why do you hate her so? All she wants is your love.”
The voice held all the sadness and hurt of the unjustly wronged.
The German loosed a shot that took Fickin in the face and drove him back. An instant later the building exploded and they all crashed to the ground.
The concussion broke windows halfway down the street. A gout of fire threw the back of the shop’s roof and its supports into the air and lit the Underbelly with more light than it had seen in twenty years.
The roof of the bookshop rained down in fragments for blocks around. Some of it had probably struck the underside of the upper Concourse. Bits of plaster and twisted steel clattered on the street around him as Oliver lay curled on the ground.
“Gott in Himmel,” Bergen cursed beside him. “How much did you use?”
The last pieces of the bookshop crashed to the street all around, and Oliver slowly uncurled.
“Twenty-seven,” he said. “A full third of Heckler’s supply.”
“Why so much?” the German asked.
They both got to their feet. Oliver removed his hat and shook it off, then ran a hand through greasy, knotted hair. “I had to be sure that abomination of his never gets loose in the Underbelly.”
“I wouldn’t lay odds on it now, English,” Bergen said.
“I won’t be satisfied until I see it in pieces, Keuper,” Oliver shot back. “Now keep me covered.”
Obediently, the German raised his pistol and aimed it into the ruin of the shop. Oliver caught the rare flicker of an actual expression on his face—amusement? Bugger him.
Amazingly, the door and much of the building’s façade had stayed intact. Dying fire flickered through the shattered windows. Greater fires than these had already claimed the atmosphere of Whitechapel.
The door cracked off its hinges as Oliver swung it open. The bookshelves had toppled forward like dominoes, spilling their wares all about the floor. Some were burning; most were simply blasted into pieces and lay snapped and mangled in piles against the remaining walls.
Beneath one shelf lay a twisted heap of iron and steel. It twitched ceaselessly, respiring puffs of dry, dusty smoke. It had too many arms, too many legs, and not nearly enough skin left on it, but it lived.
One of the old man’s arms grasped feebly at Oliver’s shoe.
“I’ll tell you why I hate her, Crow,” Oliver said. “I hate her because all the women and children that slave in her factories or twitch and rot on her husband’s Chimney aren’t alive enough to hate her. I hate her for the air, and the dark, and for the disease that’s eating my friend alive from the inside.”
The shape screeched like a heavy door on unoiled hinges.
Oliver watched Fickin trying to crawl and had to blink back tears. “I hate her because she doesn’t let her people die.”
He raised his eyes and stared into the empty space were Mama Engine had once come for him.
“Please,” he asked, “let this one go.”
The twisted shape continued to squeal, continued to grasp at unseen things with steel fingers.
Oliver sighed, and stepped over the body. He walked over the downed shelves to the back of the shop. The dynamite had broken a hole clean through the Underbelly. No sign remained of Fickin’s monster or the four furnaces used to craft it.
Bergen, from behind: “Are we finished here?”
“Yes, Keuper, we’re finished,” Oliver said. “Get Tom ready to be moved. We’ll be going shortly.”
The German retreated.
Oliver stood amongst the ruins of the shop and let his sadness have expression. After the Uprising, with the Underbelly burning, he’d sworn it in a silent pact with God: no more children shot in the streets for getting in someone’s way, no more families broiled alive by steam guns for hiding in their cellars, no more ho
mes or lives burned and torn down.
And here I am, destroyer of my own city.
But this was the hideout of an enemy. This was the stronghold of an invader who would have brought only more misery. That made a difference, didn’t it?
And what of those who might have been hit by stray debris? What of those who will suffer at the hands of the cloaks when they come down on you for this?
Strange. That had sounded like the German.
The echo of Bergen’s momentary smile flashed in his mind. The German had never laughed; Oliver imagined him laughing over this.
He dug the crushed body of Jeremy Longshore out of the rubble before departing.
Chapter 15
I have not asked Them whether I am fated to die when Their work is done. I am too frightened that They may answer me.
—II. xxix
Windows shattered and cables broke in the world of dreams.
Ten thousand arms grasped at yellow-brown ichor. Towers swayed; brass and copper and glass puddled in the air before raining into the rising sea of bile. The searing heat of the fire and the sticky cool of the swamp clashed and annihilated each other. Steam burst upwards and tore the red sky, opening rents into horrid other spaces, which screamed above the incessant booming of the clock.
Aaron fled for his life.
The diseased child-god had used him. Whatever the Lord and Lady had done to keep their malformed spawn from invading the city, Aaron had undone.
At first he had seen her clearly, as Mama Engine emerged into man’s realm at the beckoning of her priest. The layers of her essence unfolded in sequence, revealing progressively deeper levels of her mind, from the simplest surface thoughts, to capricious desires and whims, to deep convictions of love and pain, to an exacting point of fire, hungry to consume and smelt and mould.
At one instant he had been safe, buoyed inside his silver body and anchored firmly on Adam’s earth. The next, he felt a tug at his mind, then dull claws slashed into it and a howl of pain ripped through him. In that instant he became a thousand individuals writhing in pain on a thousand beds, cots, and street corners, every sliver of his body ground apart from within by teeth and gears, black oil spilling from every orifice. He’d looked up and seen the faces of friends and family, tormentors and cloaks, sometimes no face at all.
The diseased child-god burst from Aaron’s soul like water through a breached dike. In moments, the thing’s pus-body had attached itself to the towers and walkways of the dream world, and then began to oxidise them.
As the tower of hands bent and closed in, Aaron had torn himself free. Something of him was left behind, to singe and curl and turn to ash.
The void. Where is the void? He ran through the copper-plated streets, through glass arches and across chain bridges. Every turn brought him to a new corridor, identical to the last, or to a new chain bridge over choppy, black seas.
It must be somewhere. He reached into it to get me, so there must be an entrance.
He reached a ledge and halted. From there, he scanned the sky ahead. A chain ran from the ledge some two hundred yards to the prismatic saw creation that stood in for the Docks Tower. Beyond, black skies and London’s army of ghosts waited and watched.
Words came to him from that echo of his mind that knew the unknowable: They guard the ancient dreams of London from all invaders, even yourself.
He spun and looked back. Cracks spiderwebbed across the sky. Long trails of smoke flew in all directions as the tower of arms lurched and bent and smashed against its foe. The air filled with the wailing of souls on both sides as the gods threw those captured wretches into the fray.
Grandfather Clock ticked in steady rhythm, and did nothing to help or hinder.
He’d run as far as he could. The tower and the chains shook, and he wondered what good any amount of distance would do him.
There is always a way out.
He closed his eyes and reached up with his mind. The rock-and-dirt world shunned him as he touched it. A brief impression of pressure, damage, and deformity flashed over him: his second body had been lost, and with it, his link to the city above.
The heat and the noise swelled. Aaron began to hear the screams of men and women echo in from the real world, and longed for the peace of the void, which hid from his reach.
There really was no way out.
Was he to be a mute witness to this, then? Was he to sit and watch and do nothing?
What else could he hope for? His body was gone, and escape into the void unlikely. He dared not place himself between the two entities clashing before him.
So there was no other course. Seeing was what he had always been best at: seeing, thinking, planning, advising, but never acting. He had acted once, and he had been killed.
So he seated himself upon the hot air, and watched.
On a crowded cable car, halfway between Cambridge-Heath and Dunbridge, Thomas started screaming.
The cries flew out into the vast spaces around, vanishing without echo. White eyes in black faces turned. Oliver’s company froze as one for an instant, uncertain. The stunned silence dragged on, each passenger waiting to see if the sound was repeated.
“Ah, bugger the dog! Jesus!”
Oliver leapt up into the wagon and tore the concealing burlap blanket from Tom’s face. A visage of agony greeted him. Oil and pus squirted from Tom’s burned eye.
“Sorry, Ollie,” Tom managed.
Oliver knocked him on the head. “You should be. I’ve told you a thousand and one times you make too much noise, chum.”
Tom chuckled through his grimace. “Like a banshee. Awooooo.” The mirth dissolved into a fit of horrid coughing that produced brown bile.
Oliver skipped his gaze over his crew. Bergen was already reaching for his pistol with his left hand. Hews was likewise reaching for his. Oliver shook his head at them and they stayed their hands.
“I’m terribly sorry.” It was Missy’s voice. “Our friend is very sick with the clacks. We didn’t mean to be a bother. We’re taking him to see a doctor.”
Half the crowd nodded and turned away. Conversations began all about the car, passing quickly from mouth to mouth; everyone knew someone with the clacks, and everyone had a story to tell. The men of Oliver’s troupe communally exhaled a held breath. Missy slid smoothly into conversation with a woman close by. Thomas coughed and spat up, but by then the crowd’s attention had been redirected.
“Got a good tongue,” Hews said, from his position at the right front handle of the wagon. “I couldn’t have made that half as convincing.”
“It’s why I hired her,” Oliver said. He pulled a rag out of his pocket and started blotting the fluids spilling out of his friend.
Tom chuckled. “Certain there weren’t other factors, eh, Chief?”
“You’re supposed to be sick.”
“Wouldn’t you know it,” Tom said. “A dozen knives to the heart and two shots to the belly and it’s a bloody fist in my gut that gets me.”
Oliver jostled his shoulder. “You’re going out pounding cloaks, remember?”
Tommy coughed again. “Ah. Right-oh. Where would I be without you, Chief?”
Packing coal in Aldgate, healthy and in one piece, that’s where. “I’m sure you’d be neck-deep in trouble by now even without my help.”
“Ah! Stung! God’s own truth, if I ever heard it. Where is the king?”
Oliver started. “Jeremy?”
“Yeah. The little bugger didn’t run off on me, did he?”
“I…er…sent him on a mission.”
Tom’s one remaining eyebrow perked up. “Truly?”
Oliver tried very hard for a casual shrug. “I said I’d make him a member of the crew, right? Little guy has to pull his weight. Besides, he’s shown he’s capable.”
Tom squinted through his good eye. After a moment, his expression changed and his face fell.
“Knew he was a good pick,” he mumbled.
Oliver gestured to Hews. “Take o
ver, would you?”
The older man ended his conversation with a fellow passenger and obediently mounted the wagon as Oliver climbed out. The wagon was of native Whitechapel variety, made of iron rods, tin, and aluminium. They’d loaded it with a pack of supplies, Bergen’s steam rifle, Lawrence’s manual, and the translation of Scared’s tape—and then Tom’s body, for when he’d come to, he’d been unable to walk and was far too heavy to carry.
Oliver walked round into Hews’ place at the right handle and faced Bergen, who stood at the left. Phineas, Heckler, and the doctor, they’d left in the Underbelly: Oliver expected a strike on Shadwell to come within the hour. Phineas could give fair warning and had been through the last Uprising; Heckler was a capable lad, and a prodigy shooter; and Chestle…well, he’d be needed soon enough.
It would have been nice to leave Bergen and his cannon there as well, but…
“Where is this mechanic of yours?” Oliver asked.
Bergen regarded him coolly, as if evaluating whether he was trustworthy enough for such information. “John Scared has a hide at the top levels of the Dunbridge slope, and the mechanic keeps his workshop in it.”
Oliver crossed his arms and leaned on the wagon. “So you’ll be leading us right into Scared’s headquarters.”
The German glowered. “I dislike your tone, English. Had I wished your death, I could have effected it any number of times.”
That much was true. The man had certainly made an effort, and yet something about him tickled at Oliver’s attention and set his mind to doubting every time the two ended up in the same room: Why would Bailey, with his God-save-the-queen bravado, go out and hire a German? Why not a fellow Briton, born and bred?
“Will Scared be there?”
Bergen snorted. “Doubtful. He’s likely evacuated to a different hide, as I know the site intimately. He has another in Aldgate, and he has told me there are several more. I suspect one in Shoreditch, though I could not say where.”
Oliver noticed Missy glance their way. After a second she turned back to her conversations with the other passengers.
“Why would he evacuate, I wonder?”