by S. M. Peters
Oliver regained his footing as the burns dulled into a mute throb.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“Boy, you are going to tell me what is going on right this minute,” Hews thundered.
Oliver stared down at the short, fat man. “No, Hewey, I’m not. I haven’t the strength or the time for it.” He started down the next corridor at a pitiful hobble. “Are you coming?”
It was four lengths of tunnel and several turns before Oliver was certain they were following. The electric light cast a shadow ahead of him that vanished as they reached the exit.
Oliver drew in breath at the sight of the next chamber. A thousand glass eyes, smoldering red in furnace light from below. Hanging from chains, dozens of malformed iron monsters, in the same pattern as the one Fickin had built, stared blankly ahead. Their tentacles and arms twitched and flicked. Amongst and upon them black cloaks lay in crumpled heaps, twitching and moaning with sounds both human and machine.
Oliver waited for Hews to come forward with the light, then started onto the long catwalk that led across the chamber, one of many crisscrossing it without geometric logic.
“Ollie,” Tom whispered. “What are they?”
They’re the end of the world. They’re the death of every man, woman, and child on Earth.
“Shit trouble.”
Laughter echoed down from the arches above. Oliver ignored it, and focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
“What the hell was that?” Hews said. He flashed his torch about the room.
“What?”
The laughter sounded again. Different this time, omnipresent, multitoned.
“Can you hear that, Hewey?”
Oliver jumped his eyes over the unconscious cloaks. They shuddered, their mouths opened. The next bout of laughter exploded from all those throats, in perfect unison, ringing from the walls and ceiling until it became a battery of noise. The metal creatures bounced in their restraints to that rhythm.
A tentacle moved. A cloak’s eyes opened. The whole room came alive.
Chapter 20
Oh, how I wish I were mad and this were all some phantom of my mind. But I look around my quarters and see my pipe cool and cleaned, see the bottle of brandy stoppered and full, and know that I am no longer dreaming.
I. xviii
The wind tried to pull Bergen to his death with arctic fingers.
The chain ladder had been where Hews had said it was. Bergen had discovered it in the back closet of Hews’ wire factory, having to navigate through a mob of workers waiting for the plant to be opened, then through the factory to Hews’ personal office. A trapdoor beneath the desk opened a hole right through the foundation of the building, through which the chain could be lowered.
Bergen was no stranger to climbing. Not that any amount of experience would have made the task easier: with one heavy weapon hanging from his shoulder, an arm still bruised from the previous night’s fighting, and a stomach wound that the sway of his body constantly reopened, it was a wonder he hadn’t fallen already. Nicholas Ellingsly certainly would have.
And in addition, he was being followed.
He’d first become aware of it on the cable car ride from Dunbridge to Cambridge-Heath. He’d inspected each of the passengers as best he could without being too conspicuous, and had found nothing. It was no ordinary cloak or turncoat tracking him, then, but a predator. He could have deduced that from his senses alone.
He stopped to rest a moment, pulling his body upright and close to the rope to lessen the pull of the rifle. He kept his muscles taut, knowing that to relax them was to invite the fatigue so anxiously waiting to enter.
Another ten minutes of climbing brought him to the street, where he immediately dumped the rifle and the ammunition and squatted, panting and rubbing his palms.
He had come down into a circle of men with guns, whom he ignored until he had recovered his breath.
“I come at the request of Oliver Sumner,” Bergen said, not getting up. “I bear weaponry. I need to see the American.”
“Oi,” said one of the men. “That’s the cove what blew up them cloaks at Sherwood.”
“Heckler’s up by the lift, mate,” said another. “I’ll take you.”
“Good.” Bergen rose, finally, willing his legs and arms not to feel their overuse. He turned to two of the men, middle-aged labourers who nonetheless looked confident holding their weapons.
“Shortly, a man will come down this rope after me,” Bergen said. “He must be killed.”
The men nodded.
“He is not to set foot in the Underbelly. Do you understand?”
“Relax, Gov, we got it.”
“Good. Lead me to the American.”
Heckler had indeed destroyed the lift. The Beggar’s Parade ended in torn beams and swaying cables. A boarding platform of wide, textured steel led to a hole where the lift itself had once rested. Of the machinery that had powered the lift, only fragments remained, the rest having fallen into the downstreets. The braces and the frame of the chute up which the lift traveled still stood, being far too thick to yield to any mere explosive. Fastened firmly to this by chains and bolts, high above the street, the monstrous clock ticked away, immune to the angry glares from below.
Bergen took stock of the defences as his guide led him to Heckler’s post. The lift chute stood at the very end of the Beggar’s Parade, with no buildings or other streets on any side of it. A succession of two-storey buildings began some fifty yards away from it along the Parade, the two closest bearing the unmistakable wounds of gunfire. Heckler and his men had set up a crude barricade of tin wagons, crossing the street between these two buildings, having tipped them on their sides and layered them to provide cover without blocking access to the street beyond. Several dozen motley defenders crouched behind them, swapping port and cigarettes and fidgeting with their weapons.
That street and the boarding platform were littered with gold-clad corpses.
Sumner should have given them more credit.
As he approached, someone called from the left building: “Got one movin’.”
A shot rang out.
The old sailor, Phineas, poked his head from the shadow of a wagon.
“Stow that fucking iron, you rat-faced caw. I’m trying to listen.”
“ ’e was moving, ’e was,” the shooter came back.
Bergen and his guide reached the barricade. Bergen kept low, accounting for the steep angle at which the cloaks could fire on them from the clock above. Half of these men were totally exposed and didn’t even realise it.
What else can one expect from bakers and stiffs?
Bergen stepped over and around the crouched men. They muttered as they saw him, and something of a spark came back into their bearing. They, like their comrades, recognised him and his weapon.
These men were happy to see him. It was an unfamiliar experience and the German—the Englishman?—found he didn’t much care for it.
Bergen crept up to the huge iron four-wheeler that served as Heckler’s command post and heard what no soldier ever wants to hear his first five minutes on the battlefield.
“We canna hold here, Yankee. We canna even lift our heads to shoot at ’em next time—no’ with them bastards up there.”
“We ain’t got the men to hold a wider line. We fall back and they get into the buildings and into the streets we’ll never beat ’em back.”
Bergen crouched behind the American as another of the four men with him spat his dissatisfaction. This one was obviously a baker, owing to the flour still caught in his cuticles.
“Heckler, boy, we can’t stay. We haven’t the ammunition for it, nor the will. I mean, look at us!”
Bergen watched quietly as Heckler’s resolve weakened. The lad’s finger picked at his mustache, his hair, his ears. “What can we do, then? We can’t retreat. For God’s own sake, these are your families.”
Sumner was right. The boy is not fit to lead, and these four are swelled-headed fop
s who will do something rash if left unchecked.
His guide deposited the steam rifle at Heckler’s side. He fixed all five men with a withering scowl and spoke. “Discipline problems, Yankee?”
“Bergen?” the lad’s eyes spread wide in reverence. “Is Oliver with you?”
“Sumner sent me to take over,” Bergen said. “The men are low on ammunition?”
Heckler nodded. “We’ve got maybe a dozen shots apiece. And we keep wasting ’em because them ones we already killed won’t stay dead.”
The other four men opened their mouths at once to add their voices. Bergen silenced them all with a gesture.
“We will hold at all costs,” he said to these men. “There can be no retreat or they will indeed get into the city, and after that the defence will be too messy for us to maintain it.” He unbuckled the harness on his steam rifle.
“But we’ve no bullets!” said one of them.
“Then we will get more.”
Bergen pulled the weapon out and watched the mens’ eyes widen as they beheld their new ally.
Five minutes later Bergen gave the signal, and a dozen men began raining fire on the clock. Bergen lifted the steam rifle, backed six paces from the barricade, and shot three rounds through the face of the clock while all the other men ran onto the killing fields. Four cloaks fell dead and sparking from behind their shelter. Bergen let loose three more shots, sending two more cloaks into a long fall. Bergen retreated back to the barricade as the men returned with rifles, pistols, and pockets full of extra bullets.
Bergen reloaded his rifle, then checked the boiler—three-quarters full—and the battery connections—still hot.
Heckler’s smile as he showed Bergen handfuls of shells warmed him within in a way he did not find uncomfortable.
“Ammunition,” Bergen said.
“You son of a whore!” It was the sailor, grimacing from the third wagon down, hands pressed hard over his ears. “You’ve bloody deafened me!”
“It had to be done, Macrae,” Bergen said.
“I heard footsteps, Kraut,” the sailor snapped. “Bloody hundreds of them. And now I can’t track them until my ears level out.”
“Hundreds?” said Heckler.
Phineas nodded.
They both looked to Bergen, who only smiled.
“We will greet them with open arms. Do you have any explosives left, young man?”
They were running the instant the first crow gained its feet.
Oliver shouted some orders, which even he could not make out over the sudden din of crashing metal, and the three lone human beings broke for the opposite end of the rail.
Hews ran in front, Tommy behind. Oliver pulled his derringer.
Why do I even bother carrying this thing?
Cloaks rose up on the other walkways, howling and cackling. They leapt inhuman lengths and grappled onto the room’s chains like monkeys or spiders. Their black eyes glittered like far-off stars and their tattered garments trailed after them as they moved.
A multilimbed cloak dropped into their path. Hews shot it down and seconds later Oliver found himself leaping over it even as its arms twittered back to life. Thomas stomped it an instant later.
The laughter degenerated into cries of pain and desire. A cloak clambered up the railing beside Oliver and he discharged one of his shots into its face.
Hews drew up short and Oliver bumped into him from behind, cursing. An instant later a cloak crashed with enormous force against the walkway’s edge. The impact bent cloak and railing into accordion folds. Oliver looked up sideways and saw one of Mama Engine’s monsters mounting its own chains, swatting the crows that clawed and chewed at it.
“They’ve all gone mad,” Hews breathed.
The monster fixed one of its limbs onto a cloak’s head and twisted it clean off.
“Go, Hewey!” Oliver ordered, and shoved him.
“Blast!” Hews dove against the railing and clung to it. Something struck the walkway from below, bending it up into a low ramp and shaking Oliver off his feet. He slid back into Tommy’s boots.
“Got you, Chief,” Tommy shouted. Oliver looked up and watched the big man reel back his fist and hammer a cloak leaping for the rail.
The walkway shook again and split at the point of impact, about twenty feet past their position. Shapeless limbs reached from below and began slicing the metal like soft cheese.
Oliver pointed towards another walkway, ten feet below and fifteen away. “There?”
Tom looked. “I can make it.”
Oliver leapt back to his feet and grabbed Hewey by the shoulder to haul him back. Hews fired his last three shots at the monster breaking through the walkway.
Tommy wrapped huge, sweaty arms around both of them. Oliver gagged as the force expelled the air from his lungs. Black spots danced in his vision, and his mind, deprived of vital oxygen, shrunk back and rang with the roar of fires and the tang of alien laughter.
Thomas crouched, shuffled, launched.
The room shifted and fell back, spreading in Oliver’s perspective until the full battle presented itself: cloaks tearing one another apart, beasts scraping at the walls and the chains. Some dropped into the red furnace fires with the vacant stare of the suicide.
Tommy’s feet bent the steel as they landed. His friend released him and acrid air rushed into his chest.
“There!” Oliver said, and ran for the tunnel at the walkway’s far end, an arch rimmed in brass, with a many-limbed abomination crawling down the wall to block it.
“Are you mad?” he heard Hews shout, but did not slow.
That’s the way we must go, Oliver thought. He leveled his weapon at the monstrosity above.
Move aside. He reached into the flickering fire in his mind, and through it, to the creature. The visions of Mama Engine’s dream self surged into the periphery of his sight. The Mother wants you to stand aside.
A ram of emotion toppled him: fear and anger, confusion. It was wrong, so utterly wrong, that a clear purpose could be so subverted. The creature unloaded all its anguish into him, and Oliver’s body convulsed. His gun went off.
Strong fingers snatched up his collar on the first bounce, and Tommy dragged him bodily towards escape. The monster Oliver had connected with slowed and eventually fell, careering off the edge of the walkway and bending the last ten feet into a dangerous slope. Tom slid to a stop and almost fell. Oliver found his feet and watched the creature fall, feeling a deep, deep sadness through the fire in his mind.
Hews emptied his revolver and began thumbing new shells into place. Oliver did the same.
“Holy yellow dog piss, Ollie,” Tommy said. “What kind of shells are you plugging in there?”
“Lucky ones.” Oliver clicked the derringer closed.
Across the room, two of the monsters, upper limbs tangled in the architecture above, grappled with each other in as fierce and as noisy a conflict as the gods above. Then a new sound undercut the cacophony: a low, vibrating growl. Oliver knew it at once; they all did.
An Atlas rifle. The Boiler Men were coming.
Hews’ prayers faded into choking, then coughs. Oliver slapped him hard on the back and let him finish.
“I shouldn’t have come, lad,” Hews muttered. “I’m bloody old.”
“You’ve still got your hat on,” Oliver said. “Get at the railing.”
One by one they crossed the slanted section by sidestepping across its highest point, white-knuckled grips on the rail, then fled into the dark beyond, with only Oliver’s eyes to light their way.
They ran through Gothic halls, past steam-seeping constructions that might have been statues and might have been machines. The empty spaces echoed with shrill laughter and the repeating rhythm of iron-clad boots. Oliver guided them at each turn by Mama Engine’s silent direction.
They met black cloaks at every bend and archway, more than Oliver had ever thought existed. The cloaks yowled in their madness, running amok and clawing at walls and floor and one a
nother, oblivious to intruders. Every once in a while, the deep rumbling of Atlas rifles smothered all sound.
As they descended, the architecture became cleaner, straighter, composed more of brass and copper and shining metals. The ambient light faded from red to white, the halls ceased their twisting, and the beating of footsteps dimmed.
Oliver signalled them to a halt before a brass wheel two storeys in height, rotating slowly through the actions of a hundred chattering gears.
Oliver placed his hand on the wheel. “This is a canary chapel. There’s a lift inside that leads down to the Chimney. They won’t have weapons while they’re in prayer, but we can still expect a fight.”
Tom pounded his fist into an open palm. “Right and ready, Chief.”
“Hewey?”
The old man let off a sigh that rattled with all of his fifty-seven years. “There won’t be another time to say this, Oliver.”
Oliver had the impulse to stop him, to tell him there would be plenty of time, though he knew there wouldn’t. His guts felt sick for reasons unrelated to infection.
Hews breathed once and removed his bowler. “You were always bigger than me, lad.”
“Hewey, don’t…”
Hews pressed on. “I couldn’t supply you a life that you would accept. I used to lay awake and wonder what I was doing wrong that forced you back out the door every few weeks.”
Oliver squeezed the man’s shoulder. This was too much. “Hewey, you don’t need to—”
“I do, lad!” Hews snapped. “You would have been a dullard backer if you’d listened to me! Oliver, I never meant to—”
“Stop it.” Oliver stared Hews straight in the eyes, heedless of the stinging light that caused Hews to wince back. “Whatever happened, it doesn’t matter. All right? It doesn’t matter.”
“But—”
“No,” Oliver said. “I won’t have it. Anything you think you’ve done, anything I’ve said you’ve done, it’s all passed now. I need you here. I need you with me. Now.”
Hews sniffed back something, swallowed whatever he was going to say.
“Right,” he said.
“Right,” said Oliver.