Caspar Goldstein will be killed at midnight on the 13th of Mai unless 2 gallons of pure and unadulterated black mercury are first secured and delivered to us.
If the police are involved, he will be killed immediately.
Await further instructions.
“Where did this come from?” Clara called.
Hildy put the carriage in motion again and cranked up the speed. “Was sent to Max about an hour ago.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to Max.”
“What—why? Don’t you have enough mercury at the manufactory?”
“I’ve just checked. I don’t have enough of the pure stuff—we’ll need Max for that. He can talk the necessary people into supplying some more.”
“But will he?”
“He will,” Hildy growled.
There was a suppressed violence to Hildy’s tone that warned Clara to let the topic drop. She sat back and prayed as Hildy roared through the dark city, narrowly missing several horse-drawn carriages and sending pedestrians scuttling away from the road. Shutting her eyes, she tried to suppress the image of Cas carried off somewhere into the depths of the dark city, furious and helpless and possibly hurt. Did Faulkner and Matilda Bernat have anything to do with this? What of the mysterious Shadow? And how would they track any of them down? She didn’t trust to the idea that Cas would be released without harm, even if Max could come up with the black mercury.
“Right,” said Hildy as she drew the carriage to a juddering halt. “Follow at leisure.” She launched herself out into the street and ran at the front door of Max’s house, pounding violently on it. It soon opened and Hildy disappeared inside.
Clara took a little longer as she helped Lukas out of the back seat and restored his crutches to him.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and almost threw himself to the pavement in his hurry to catch up with Hildy.
“Steady,” she said. “Those few seconds aren’t going to hurt.”
By the time they reached the house, the front hall had emptied of people. Listening, Clara vaguely heard voices coming from somewhere near the back of the house. Following the sounds, she found Hildy in Max’s home office, standing over her thunderous-looking brother and waving the abduction note in his face.
“This is your son!” she was saying. She didn’t shout—Hildy never shouted—but her tone was low and forceful and shook with fury. “What do you mean, ‘no?’”
“I mean no!” Max said in a similar tone. “I will not go rushing about the city at the behest of a group of thugs. If people weren’t so easily pushed around by these schemes, it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s while to kidnap in the first place. We’ll get the police in, they will find him, and it will be dealt with.”
“And if they kill him?”
“Why? Because I called the police? That is an empty threat. What use is it to kill the only leverage they’ve got?”
“They could kill him, then kidnap someone else. Clara maybe, or me.”
Max snorted. “Then we’ll get extra security in for anyone else who might be considered a target. Those are exactly the kind of paranoid fears that create vulnerability.” He pressed a button on his desk and a bell sounded somewhere in the distance. A liveried servant appeared at the far door and bowed to Max.
“Get the police here,” Max snapped. “Tell them we have an incident.”
“Damn you!” Hildy raged. “Forget it—I’ll fix it.” She stuffed the note into her pocket and marched towards the door where Clara and Lukas stood in silence. Clara hastily stood aside to let her pass.
“What’s the plan?” she said softly, hurrying to keep up with Hildy.
“We find the stuff that Cas has got hidden,” Hildy said darkly.
“What if it isn’t enough?”
“We’ll worry about that if it happens. How long is Til in the hospital?”
“They’re keeping him overnight, but they think he’ll be all right to be released in the morning.”
Hildy nodded. “Min’s with him?”
“Should be.”
“Right. Let’s pick her up. We’re going to need help.”
***
Cas woke up to a blinding headache centred around a knot of acute pain at the back of his head. Bruises and abrasions throbbed and stung elsewhere on his body, mementoes of his earlier encounter with the Shadow, and for a moment he simply lay still and wished vaguely for death.
When he finally opened his eyes it was to a deep, inky darkness, uninterrupted by so much as the faintest hint of light no matter how hard he stared. Could that be right, he wondered, or had something happened to his eyes? For a long moment he lay frozen in panic, blinking his eyes frantically as if that would somehow resolve the problem, a feeling of cold terror growing in his gut.
Then his mind registered the odd feeling of constriction around his face and neck and, putting the two circumstances together, came up with the conclusion that one of his captors had put a bag over his head. He reached up to rip it off, but his arms wouldn’t move—they were tied behind his back.
“Bastards,” he muttered, fighting down the flutter of panic that washed through him. Kidnapped! Him! What would they do with him? Would they use him to hurt his friends?
He twisted his hands, trying to loosen the bindings, but then the ground he was lying on lurched and began to move, and the motion tipped him onto his face. He wrenched himself back onto his side, only to be pitched forward again with the next juddering motion.
He was in a vehicle of some kind, he concluded, forcing his panicking mind back to some degree of rationality. He needed to figure out what the circumstances were; then maybe he could find a way to escape—or to turn the situation to his benefit. He snorted at himself for that thought: how could he, Cas Goldstein, expect to be clever or wily enough to outwit kidnappers? Including a Shadow! Clara would laugh herself senseless.
Shut up, he told himself sternly. Think. He was obviously in some kind of vehicle, on his way to… somewhere. A bit of constructive thrashing around revealed a degree of open space around him that was inconsistent with the rear seats of an autocarriage. He judged that he was in the back of a farm truck, the sort that hauled crops from Eisenstadt’s surrounding farms into the city for sale or trade, and hauled seed and other supplies back again.
That was a clever choice, for such vehicles could be freely hired and they attracted little attention. Nor was it unheard of for them to travel late in the day, when the roads were clear of other vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians. But did that mean he was being taken out of the city?
The vehicle’s motion smoothed out and settled into a steady pace, and Cas was spared any more humiliating tumbles onto his nose. Over the creaking of the machinery and the hiss of the steam he heard a faint murmur that sounded like voices. The drivers? He rolled in the direction he thought the sounds were coming from but they grew fainter, so he rolled back. A few more experimental turns finally fetched him up against the wall of the truck nearest the driver’s compartment and the mutterings grew more or less loud enough to decipher. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his head, he lay still and listened.
“It is hardly appropriate to lay all the blame on me,” said a female voice. “My proposal was sound, and he was ready to fall for it. If his friends hadn’t intervened, we would have the stuff by now and be on our way.”
A male voice answered her in a stream of nonsense. That was certainly Wrede Faulkner, the second voice; not a doubt of it. But the woman? It sounded like Matilda Bernat—she could clearly understand what Faulkner said, which offered more support for that idea—but in that case how did she fit into this scheme? And where was the Shadow?
“Oh, I see,” answered the woman in tones of pure scorn. “You’ve forgotten your promise to take me back to Inselmond with you. How convenient.”
Cas was so struck by this revelation that he forgot to listen further, and a short exchange escaped his notice. Faulkner was from Inselmond? The Drifting Isle? He�
��d never heard of anyone coming down from there before. But then, he’d never heard of anyone going up until recently, either. And it certainly explained Faulkner’s trouble with the local language.
But it did pose a new question: what did the folk of Inselmond want with the black mercury? What could be up there on the Isle that would benefit from it? Faulkner was going to extreme lengths for a mere fuel, no matter how powerful it was.
Faulkner was saying something else.
“My methods differ from yours, that’s all,” said Matilda stiffly. “It is monstrously unfair to call me a liability. How far would you have got without me, I’d like to know?”
Faulkner’s next response was prefaced with an arrogant snort.
“Me!” gasped Matilda. “I brought Caspar’s friends down on us! I have taken the utmost care in—”
Faulkner cut her off with something else.
“The beating served its purpose,” she said stiffly. “Spooked him; made him anxious to deal, to get the stuff off his hands. It also kept him away from his friends, as it was supposed to! How could I have predicted that they’d go in search of him—or that they’d find him in this mess of a city?”
Faulkner said something in an acid tone, and even Cas could guess the gist of his reflections on Matilda’s personal life. A moment’s silence followed, which Cas spent in puzzled thought. So Matilda had hired the Shadow? How had she done that? They were supposed to be extremely expensive. But she’d offered him a lot of money too; perhaps she was rich, university lecturer or no. Or perhaps she had rich accomplices. Was Faulkner wealthy?
“You approved of the plan before,” Matilda was saying coldly. “You assisted with it! The search at his house, the attack on that other driver—”
Faulkner interrupted with an obvious negative.
“What?” said Matilda.“Then who—”
Faulkner offered something in a wry tone and began to laugh, a chortling that set Cas bristling with fury. Was Faulkner laughing? At whom? It had better not be at Cas himself! It wasn’t enough that they’d had him followed and beaten, that they’d manipulated and tried to steal from him—they had to ridicule him too! That was a step too far. He lay seething, too angry to listen any more.
It was only some half an hour later, or possibly less, that he calmed enough to give further consideration to what he’d heard. If it hadn’t been Matilda Bernat or Wrede Faulkner who’d searched his house and Lukas’s and knocked Luk out, who had done it? Perhaps their pet Shadow wasn’t as tame as Matilda thought. But why would a Shadow do something they hadn’t been paid to do, that their employers hadn’t ordered? It didn’t make sense.
If Clara was here she’d be able to figure it out. He sighed and went back to work on the bindings that confined his hands and feet. He didn’t really expect to get loose when a Shadow had been involved in his abduction, and his fears proved justified, for he only exhausted himself with writhing about. The knowledge that he was stuck, irrevocably so, and on his way to who-knew-where in the company of weird Wrede Faulkner, predatory Matilda Bernat, and probably a sinister Shadow brought the panic back and he was thrashing about like a wild animal when the clanking sound of the rear doors opening arrested his attention and he realised that the truck had stopped.
Faulkner uttered a harsh syllable, obviously an order. Cas only thrashed harder, until a foot connected sharply with his ribs—a foot whose toes were encased in steel, by the feel of it—and he subsided with a yelp. He had hopes that they might take off the hood and at least he could see something again, but they didn’t. Hands grabbed his shoulders and feet and hauled him out of the truck.
The night air felt cold on his heated skin, colder than it had before, and his twitching nostrils discerned scents like… grass. Soil and green things. He didn’t know what most of the scents were—maybe flowers of some kind, who really cared anyway—but it was enough to inform him that he had indeed been taken beyond the borders of Eisenstadt. Possibly they were in a farmyard, given the method of transportation, and he was about to be stashed in some disused old farm building where no one would ever find him.
He drew a breath to start shouting, but this effort was anticipated, and a sharp slap across the face knocked the breath out of him again.
Cas muttered something under his breath. This, predictably, was greeted with another slap and he shut up. He considered another attempt at escape, before they had him locked away and the matter became harder still. But two things occurred to him. One, the fate of his earlier attempt before he’d been removed from Hildy’s house; he didn’t wish for another shot with the coilgun. And two, he’d already established that his hands and feet were bound beyond his power to undo them, and he had a bag over his head. If he managed to wrench himself from the grip of his captors, what would he do next? Flop about on the ground like a beached fish, that’s what. That would be constructive.
Dejection washed over him, squashing his feeble hopes. He’d been right before: he hadn’t the mental equipment to work his way out of this one.
Pretend you’re Clara, he tried. What would she do?
She’d probably have some useful implement on her that she could use to cut the bindings, that’s what. But his pockets were empty. He wasn’t in the habit of carrying useful things around with him, because he didn’t do much of anything useful in his day-to-day existence. That was a depressing thought. He’d have to think of something else; some other, clever thing Clara would do if she didn’t happen to have a knife or a pair of scissors on her.
He waited, but his brain furnished him with nothing at all by way of reply. His dejection deepened, even as the night breeze and scent of grass disappeared as he was carried inside some building and dropped unceremoniously on the floor.
Faulkner’s soft voice spoke from somewhere disconcertingly near Cas’s ear. Cas tried to scuttle away but came up short against the legs of someone standing behind him, who kindly awarded him a swift kick for his error. Matilda’s voice followed: was she the one who’d kicked him? “You have two options,” she said. “You can wait for your friends to come up with the black mercury, or you can tell us what you’ve done with your own supply and perhaps we’ll release you sooner.”
Cas’s brain whirled. He could secure his freedom immediately, just by telling them all the hiding places he’d found for his black mercury? The notion was tempting; so much so that he opened his mouth to make an instant reply in the favourable.
But he shut it again. At last—and somewhat to his dismay—came the twinges of suspicion that he’d never been burdened with before. If they really meant to release him so easily, why bring him all the way out here? They could’ve asked him these questions in Eisenstadt. And two: what was all the hurry for the black mercury anyway? Nobody would go to such ridiculous lengths to secure the small quantity of the fuel that he’d taken for himself. Not if it was wanted as a fuel. He’d only taken enough to operate his own autocarriage for a race or two. He couldn’t begin to guess what Faulkner might be planning to do with it, but he had the nagging feeling that it wouldn’t be good.
If he, Caspar Goldstein, just handed over his black mercury supplies to this conscienceless beast of a human being, what might it mean for the Drifting Isle? Obviously there were people up there—Faulkner was one of them. Cas didn’t get the impression that Faulkner’s intentions would mean sunlight and rainbows for the rest of the citizenry of Inselmond. A person like him could only be up to No Good At All.
So. Was he, Caspar Goldstein, capable of better? Could he resist whatever persuasions they might employ—and this thought made him pause for a long, quivering moment as his imagination agreeably provided plenty of options—to do the decent thing and try to keep the mercury out of their hands?
His stomach clenched at the idea and his spirit quailed, but then he thought of Clara. What would she do?
Well, she was Clara. Of course she’d be perfect and brave and tough and Do The Right Thing.
Cas had to do it too.
; But what about Clara and Lukas, Hildy and Til? Faulkner’s words implied that they’d received demands. They’d probably follow them. They’d do it with the best intentions, but if they simply handed over buckets of black mercury to Faulkner in exchange for Cas’s release, that would render all his courage useless.
He’d have to get out, then, before they had chance to follow through on Faulkner’s requirements. And in the meantime, he’d have to toughen up and resist the part of his mind that merely wanted freedom at any price.
He took a deep breath.
“I’ve nothing to tell you,” he said resolutely.
“Are you sure?” Matilda said.
‘Perfectly,” said Cas, experiencing a buzz of shock at his own audacity.
“You might want to change your mind,” said Matilda conversationally. “There’s a Shadow standing right behind you, and she is a little bit irate with you.”
She? Cas thought distractedly. For some reason he hadn’t thought that the Shadow could be a female. Maybe it was the way he—no, she— had beaten the crap out of him without an instant’s difficulty.
How embarrassing.
“Then I hope she’ll enjoy herself,” Cas said stoutly. “It’ll be a waste of time.”
Cas heard Faulkner’s heavy footsteps moving away, and then a door shut behind him.
“I’m more than a little irate, come to think of it,” came Matilda’s voice again, and then she kicked him.
This was only the first of her kind attentions, and as Cas curled into a ball, trying in vain to protect his head and face from the onslaught of her hands and feet, his mind could only shriek, Matilda is the Shadow?!
Chapter Fifteen
Crowding herself, Hildy, Lukas, Min, Top and Bunce in at Til’s bedside wasn’t easy, but Clara knew they needed a consultation right away, regardless of the circumstances. Finding Cas’s secret stash of black mercury wouldn’t be easy, and they had a mere two days in which to accomplish it.
Or to change Max’s mind and enlist his help in raiding the government’s firmly locked-down storage unit, which seemed even more unlikely.
Black Mercury (The Drifting Isle Chronicles) Page 18