by S. M. Peters
“He will build Scared’s invention,” the German said. “In three hours we will be returning to his workshop to retrieve it.”
Oliver nodded. He concentrated on breathing for a few seconds, since it was becoming more difficult. The gods still fought and shrieked in his mind’s ear, and the den shook with blows only he could feel.
He noticed a slip of yellow cloth in Hews’ hand. Hews saw him looking and held it up for him to see. It was a long strip with Chinese characters written along its length.
“Mrs. Flower,” Hews said, with some discomfort, “gave me this. It’s a ritual of some kind. A spell, to send you back to the afterlife.”
Oliver couldn’t help but laugh. “If only it were that simple.” He laughed more, until it became a screeching, grating sound, emanating from vibrations deep in his chest. He choked and stopped.
“Sorry.”
“I’m certain both of us have heard worse,” said Bergen.
Oliver looked him over. He was the same steel-eyed, tight-jawed soldier he’d always been, and yet something had changed. Something had softened, so that Oliver no longer felt that irrational anger the man had inspired. And was that concern in his expression?
“So have I,” Oliver said.
Hews looked grim. “Who did this to you, lad?”
Oliver could not keep the tears from his eyes. He looked away. “I didn’t see.”
Hews moved his lips for a moment, gloom written on his face. “In any case, the question now becomes—Do we proceed or do we hole up here until you’ve recovered?”
Oliver looked down at his hands. The burned one had swollen, unraveling the bandages. There’s no recovery from this. “Where’s Tommy?”
Both men shifted uncomfortably. Hews cleared his throat. “He’s outside. He isn’t handling all this well.”
Bergen scowled. “He’s handling it like a child of five, but that he has no skirts to cling to.”
Oliver struggled again to rise. “I’ll see him.”
Hews and Bergen helped him onto numb legs.
Bergen seemed about to say something. Hews quieted him with a subtle shake of his head. Oliver opened the door and, gripping the doorjamb for support, hobbled out.
The Stack burst and sputtered at its peak like a volcano, lighting the whole of Dunbridge in the colour of fire. A chill wind raced through the streets, carrying with it the scent of rot and decay. He was not surprised when the acrid air passed through his throat without so much as a tickle.
No one was about. A lone, apelike hump crouched on a step leading down from the platform’s far edge.
Oliver struggled over and seated himself on the stair next to his friend.
Tommy’s shoulders hunched farther down. He gazed without focus down the stairs to where they vanished between two walls of plaster.
“I’m sorry I shot you,” said Oliver.
No reply. Only his breathing indicated that Tom wasn’t a statue.
They sat in silence for some minutes. In intermittent mental flashes, Oliver saw the tower of arms and the sea of illness jockeying in the sky. He shut his eyes against it, but that only made it more clear.
Tommy swallowed hard. “Was it Missy?”
Oliver choked on the answer.
The big man wiped his bad eye with the back of his hand.
“I don’t understand it, Ollie. Why did she do it? I mean, I thought she was one of us, right? She played poker with us, Ollie. She sat down and drank and played cards and did she have one hell of a poker face—” He cut himself off.
“I know, Tom.”
“Did she play us, Ollie? We’re not all fools like that, are we?”
Oliver gripped his knees to keep them from shaking. He had no answer.
Tom sniffled. “I liked her. She seemed a good soul.”
“We all liked her.”
“I was awake when she ran out,” Tom said. “I heard it happen. And I crawled over and there you were. I messed up, Ollie. There I was lying on some comfortable mat with you getting murdered in the corner.”
“They’re not that comfortable.”
“And then,” Tommy continued. “Then you weren’t dead and that was so much worse.”
“It isn’t your fault, chum,” Oliver said, hoping some of his sincerity came through his tortured voice.
“But I was there, Chief.”
“So was I. Don’t take this all on yourself. We were hoodwinked.” Oliver clasped him on the shoulder. “But we’re alive to tell the tale.”
“Are we?” Tom sighed, still not looking over. “I died when I was sixteen, Ollie. Someone didn’t tie a knot right and I had a crate of shingles fall on me. So I don’t care if you shoot me and I don’t care what the cloaks or the clacks do to me. But I didn’t want this to happen to anyone else. I saw enough working the docks, those poor coves with gears growing out of their chests. They should’ve died—some of them even asked for it.”
Oliver remembered a time after the Uprising, when he’d gone into a steam-blasted house to look for survivors. He’d found only one young woman, skin boiled off, flesh poached, who sat and twitched and mouthed words he could not understand. The gears in her heart and brain churned away endlessly, holding her in this world.
“I could never blame them for that.”
“It’s a funny state,” Tom said. “Men fighting for the privilege of dying. Who’d’ve thought it?”
“We’re fighting for dignity, so we can be human beings again.”
Tom chuckled.
“What?”
“You sound like Hewey. All ‘dignity’ and ‘civility’ and ‘neighbourliness.’”
“Go jump in a hole.”
“That sounded like a roar,” Tom said. “Is the lion back?”
“Is the ape?”
They chuckled once or twice. Then the mirth drained away into the night and melancholy settled in again. Oliver felt the churning and vibrating in his gullet, and the motion of some viscous fluid inside the injured neck. His heart sank, but he spoke anyway, because something had to be said.
“We’re neither of us dead, Tommy.”
The words vanished into the smoke. Tom looked at his big hands and said nothing.
“But we have to consider that once they’re not around anymore to keep us going, we might just up and die,” said Oliver. “So might every other cove who’s got a pump for a heart or wire for a spine.”
Tom twiddled his thumbs. “Some wouldn’t mind, really.”
“Would you?”
Tom looked at him for the first time in their conversation. It was a long, troubled look, like he’d never considered the question. Eventually he shrugged, and stared forward again. “ ’S bigger than me, Chief.”
So it’s the Uprising coming ’round again—coves who thought their lives didn’t matter when compared to the cause. Oliver buried his face in his hands. It had cost hundreds of good, innocent lives the last time he’d tried to rebel. Would it cost thousands this time?
I’m a walking, talking dead man. Should I really be worrying about my conscience?
Good one, chap. Reason your guilt away.
Quiet as a mouse, Tom started to weep.
Oliver reached out and clasped him on the near shoulder.
“When I saw you, Ollie,” Tom began. “When I saw you lying, I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t right, it happening to you. That’s what I’m there for—to get hurt—because what does it matter that it’s me?” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “I thought for certain you would make it out to see Chelsea and meet the queen and all that other stuff.”
“We’ll see it together, Tom.”
“Codswallop. I’ve got two holes in me and I can feel that thing growing in my guts again. My life was over at sixteen, but I thought I could take that same blow for you, and maybe your life wouldn’t be cut so short. And then, there I am lying on the floor while you’re being cut a second smile.”
He hammered the stair with his metal hand. It cracked and splin
ters flew up. “I thought if you made it, maybe my death wouldn’t be so damned worthless.”
Oliver inhaled through his teeth. Tom sat very still, breathing hard.
“You’re not dead,” Oliver said. “Neither am I. We’ve had our lumps, we’ve got our diseases, but we’re still walking and talking, and if a crate fell on you and you’re still around that’s a damned good thing.”
Tom’s face scrunched up in a pained expression.
Oliver shook him. “If you just sit here and wallow, your death will be meaningless, when it comes. We still have cloaks to pound. We still have gods to bring low. Do you think I hauled your sorry, heavy person all the way up here to have you quit?”
Tom’s bleary eyes fell. Oliver stopped himself.
“Tom,” he began again, voice calmer. “You once told me you would be with me to the bitter end.”
“Of course, Chief,”
“Well, this isn’t it. That was a blow—that was a bad blow—but that was all. We’ve taken knocks before, and this is the same.”
“If you say so, Chief.”
“I do say so.”
Tommy grumbled some assent.
Oliver finally allowed himself a smile. “Then on your feet. We can’t leave Keuper thinking he has the run of the place.”
Tom rose reluctantly, and Oliver led him back to Mrs. Flower’s.
Hews and Bergen greeted them as they stepped inside.
“Have you decided?” Hews asked.
“We’re going ahead as soon as we have Scared’s device,” Oliver said.
“It will not be ready for some hours,” Bergen said.
“Well, then,” Oliver began. “On the advice of a good friend, I have decided on our next course of action.”
They waited to hear it.
Oliver lay back down on the blankets and closed his eyes. He heard chuckles from Hews and Thomas, and then the rest settled onto mats of their own.
Oliver tossed and turned at sounds and memories and wondered if he would ever sleep again.
John Scared rocketed into the red sky as the Whitechapel of dream stretched beneath him. The mei kuan rushed through him, rolling his consciousness out to far horizons and inflating him to cosmic size with the pressure of its vapours. From every point, he watched himself looking back, felt himself channel a universal rhythm, felt his thoughts flit through the very atoms of reality.
Now I am ready, my love. Yield to me.
He reached out an infinite array of hands that clasped, one by one, on to her own. He felt her struggle, felt the cries inside her mind, felt the ripeness of her furnace-womb. His fingers crawled through her veins, scuttling forward like spiders, deep inside her. There, they turned valves and bent pipes and redirected her fires, bending the engine to a different function.
She cursed at him in her tongue-without-language. At the same time she shivered secretly with pleasure.
A man to love, a man to hate. A man to use you, my love. You have never found one such as I, in all your long days.
He twisted and she cried out.
You will beg for me, my love, until the end of time.
She melted, blazed, writhed at his urging. Whitechapel shook from its roots. Scared watched the towers crack and tilt. Some came apart. The vapourous ghosts of humanity tumbled and fell.
Something rushed up to catch them.
What is this, my love? Who has been hiding in your skirts?
The putrid sea was on him before he could react. It burnt and corroded his fingers. A wash of violent, diseased energy rushed through him, and far away, his body gasped.
He pulled his fingers from Mama Engine and retreated back against the red dome of the city sky. This new entity of disease lashed at him once more, then fell upon the Mother with equal ferocity.
You are that broken castoff from Grandfather Clock’s impure seed. Poor, downtrodden boy. I would have taken you in, if only you had spoken to me nicely.
Alas.
He reached out once more, and made the child scream.
Aaron fell to the ground as the dream of Whitechapel jolted and came apart. For one terrifying instant, he was everywhere and nowhere, lost beyond the red sky and beyond the stable dreams of men and women, caught in a nightmare realm of horrors his mind could not fathom. Then the phantom city cracked across its length like a pane of glass shot through, with the coming of the new arrival.
Aaron dug his nails into the brass grate of the walkway. He craned his neck to see, through his thrumming vision, what had just manifested.
He beheld a towering skeleton form, a chain of a thousand skulls larger than steam ships, which faded in and out of view as if passing through fog. From the base of that shifting pile grew bony fingers as tall as the towers themselves. Some had flesh and nails still on them; others were but wisps of smoke.
Aaron saw through it to the laughing man at its core. John Scared.
The diseased child’s pus-body shuddered as those long skeleton fingers penetrated it. Aaron felt the tremors of that contact ripple through whatever connection he still shared with the creature. The giant fingers tore long gashes through the surface of the putrid sea. Ribbons of pus flew into the air and evaporated, and the child struggled away.
Aaron rose and moved, stepping with a few paces through a hundred corridors, up a dozen lifts and out onto the roof of Cathedral Tower. The structure shone like sunlit platinum, unsullied by oil, by fire or chains.
He took advantage of the rhythmic tolling of the Great Machine, which echoed from the building up through his feet, using it to steady himself. Looming a hundred storeys above him, Scared’s snake of skulls tore its fingers into Mama Engine and her child, prying them apart. Both gods struggled and fought to no avail.
Aaron looked into Scared and let his perceptions carry him deeper and deeper through levels of demeanour and desire. He dove through memories of the rolling mountains of the Far East, back through acts of violence and depravity that would chill the blood of any hardened criminal, past a dozen changes of name and identity, past dull days of medical school, ungrateful patients, and uppity colleagues. Finally, as had been his gift since the day of his birth, he saw into the essence of the man.
He found two souls: the one, respectable and timid, a tangle of worries and insecurities hiding from the world inside a thin veil of education and status; the other, a monster of suppressed desires given life and form, a deviant creature who drew sustenance from subjugation, and who, when first loosed, had dominated and imprisoned the good man who’d spawned him.
Now I know who you are. And I know what you’re trying to do.
Now there were four gods, and one of them was a flesh-and-blood man. The poison would not work on him, just as it would not work on any living man or woman. Aaron had worked that much out himself, when he’d been after the same weapon in a different lifetime.
And he had no way to warn Oliver.
Chapter 19
The third principle of the machine is Function. Each component is given a task that does not vary. Diversity or commonality is the prerogative of the machine itself, and who are mortal men to argue when their destiny is regulated upon them?
Then who am I to protest such a thing?
IV. iv
“That’s all?”
Oliver gaped at the little bauble the mechanic held out to him.
The old man wrinkled his nose. “What did you expect, exactly?”
No bigger than a pocket watch, the device was a little oval of gold with curved copper wires sticking out of the rim, five or six ounces in weight.
“Not this.”
The German mechanic harrumphed. “It is the mechanism inside that is important. If you desire, I can build it to be as ungainly as you like.”
Hews lifted the device reverently from Oliver’s open palm.
“Of course, we’re grateful to you, sir,” he said. “The lad’s having a bit of trouble believing it will work, I think—a condition I must admit that I share.”
&nb
sp; Von Herder hobbled to one of the large cabinets on the wall. “Grandfather Clock has as many bodies as there are gears in all the clocks in Whitechapel. It is as if he has no body at all. What instrument would you make to destroy such a creature?”
Hews rubbed his cheeks. Oliver stole the device back and turned it over and over.
Von Herder removed a faded, moth-bitten frock, about forty years out of style, from the cabinet and shrugged into it. “I have had long debates with Herr Scared over the nature of these beasts. It is always a satisfying way to spend an evening. His hypothesis is that the creatures consist of some manifestation of thought. As to whether the medium involved is energy or matter, or whether just patterns in the aether, both he and I are undecided.”
He reached up and pulled a cord. The lightbulb in the rear half of the workshop died, leaving only the glimmer of lingering furnace coals.
“Herr Scared seemed to think that no transmission of thought could ever affect the gods. He instead proposed an electrical method. The problem with that was that the gods were not electrical.”
“Grandfather Clock is,” said Bergen, from his post at the base of the staircase with both steam rifles and a bag of ammunition at his feet.
Von Herder shook his head. “Not as such, but there is an exchange of an electrical nature between himself and those attached to the Chimney. Those people are used as part of the Grandfather’s mind, and so present a direct route for the energies of that device.”
Oliver ran the fingers of his good hand over it, finding it cold. It resembled a large insect, tipped onto its back.
“Aaron described it as poison.”
“Accurate enough.”
It seemed good practice to ask what that poison did to its “direct route,” but if what Aaron had said was true, that wouldn’t much matter.
Hews was not through asking questions. “We’ll be using one of those poor buggers on the Chimney as our target, then.”
Von Herder answered in the affirmative. Oliver did not contradict him.
You’re the key, Oliver, Aaron had said. You alone out of all these souls have a connection to both the child and the mother. There’s only one more, and he’s only too willing to have you connected if you irk him. There we have three minds in one body.