Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

  Marta ignored the words, only taking a quick glance over her shoulder as she shoved through the chaos, adding a punch or kick when necessary as she worked her way toward the back. She caught sight of the captain craning his neck, of him recognizing the scarlet coat perhaps. He pointed right at her. “You! Stop!” He drew his pistol. “Halt now or I will shoot.”

  If he shot, he was an idiot, she thought grimly, dropping under another table. There were too many unrelated bodies in unpredictable trajectories, which had rather been the point.

  Three things happened in quick succession. Marta rose up from the other side, and one of the saloon patrons actually lunged for her, arms wide as if to take her into a bear hug. From the corner of her eye, she saw a bulky man, his face streaked with old burns and distorted with rage, fling his own glass forward, toward the guard captain. A split second later, she heard it shatter, followed an instant later by the crack of a gunshot.

  The man lunging for her went down, blood spraying from his shoulder.

  The fight Marta had started with her chair was nothing compared to the chaos that erupted now. She dropped down again as more gunshots sounded.

  This she had not intended, nor planned for. Annoying, how often stupidity reared its ugly head and made things infinitely worse. And hell, they’d probably give that captain a medal for bravery in the face of a slavering horde of drunks.

  Someone stepped on her hand, another kicked her in the side and she rolled with it, fighting to regain her breath. They weren’t after her, any more; it had gone to a place without reason. She scrambled to her feet and got shoved back toward the wall for her trouble. That she was more than willing to comply with, catching herself up on the rough boards with a slap of her hands. Marta squeezed along the wall, glancing back and forth in the hopes of catching sight of any of her crew in the melee.

  Her hands found the door that led back into the brewery. Locked, of course. She yanked her picks from her pocket as a heavy hand fell on her shoulder—only recognition of a rather particular burn scar on one of the fingers kept her from jamming the pick into the nearby flesh. Amelia. “Captain! Elijah!”

  “Not now, Mister Cavendesh,” she shouted to be heard over the din. “Get them both here, I’ll have the door open if you stop distracting me!”

  The hand—and Amelia—were gone an instant later and Marta concentrated on the door, the process complicated as people insisted on being shoved into her. Teeth clenched, she elbowed someone who smelled strongly of garlic back and gave the lock’s mechanism one last desperate rake and twist, and felt it give way. She clawed the door open as more gunshots sounded. A moment later, Amelia squeezed through the doorway, and then Lucius barreled in, dragging Elijah with him.

  Marta let the door slam shut and re-engaged the lock. The din of the fight retreated to a muffled roar, which revealed a far more unpleasant sound—panting, burbling breaths coming from Elijah.

  “Captain, Captain, it’s Elijah—”

  “I know,” she said curtly. “Mister Lamburt, get him laid down. Mister Cavendesh, go peep out into the back alley. If there’s not a clear way through, bar the door and find something heavy to barricade it with.”

  “But Captain—”

  “Do it!” she snapped. While Lucius dragged the unfortunate Elijah a bit deeper into the brewery, Marta located the bar for the door and slid that home. A nice workbench joined it as an impromptu barricade. Satisfied that would hold while the guard subdued the riot outside, she hurried to Lucius’s side.

  Things did not look good at all. Elijah was awake still, dark eyes rolling frantically. He weakly clutched a bloody rag against his chest. More scarlet dotted his lips, a long string trailing down from the corner of his mouth. Lucius cursed a streak so blue it was nearly visible to the naked eye. He tore his jacket off and folded it into a pillow that he could shove under Elijah’s head.

  Marta dropped to her knees on the dark wood floor, pulling her leather gloves from her pocket and yanked them on. “Let me see that, Mr. Masterson, there’s a good fellow…” She pulled his hand away from the rag for a moment, yanking open his shirt to expose the wound better. Buttons sprayed onto the floor. There was a red wet hole in his chest, air burbling unhappily from it every time Elijah tried to draw breath. She pressed the rag firmly down again, ignoring his strangled sound of pain, and dragged his hand back over it. “Did it go through, Mister Lamburt?”

  Lucius shook his head. “Bullet’s still rattling around in there.”

  She looked down at the pale-faced man, throat working as he breathed raggedly. “All right. I’ll stay here with him. You and Mister Cavendesh will go.”

  “Go where?” Amelia demanded with a tight voice. “I just barricaded the back door. They’ll be knocking it in at any moment. I barely got the bar down before they reached it; workers ran out that way, I guess.”

  “Even so, can’t say I like the idea of you stayin’ neither, Captain,” Lucius said, beetle brows drawn together.

  “The Duke went to a lot of trouble to look for us specifically, and with an overwhelming force. I mean to know why.” Marta’s tone had gone dangerously quiet. And she knew that it had to be the Grand Duke himself behind this move and not just his Chief of Security, who was her normal opponent. As Chief of Security, Colonel Douglas was in charge of the police and special security forces, but normally had no power to dictate the movements of the uniformed soldiers. She would have been more inclined to flee and tweak the Grand Duke’s tail had Elijah’s blood not been slicking down the fingers of her gloves at this moment.

  “And Elijah—” Amelia began.

  “Mister Masterson will not make it even as far as the train.” Marta began divesting herself of her weapons, sword and pistols and knives, followed by a few of her more eclectic and specialized belongings—the collapsible spy-glass, most of her lockpicks, everything else but the twists of string in her pockets. “Immediate medical attention is his only hope.” She feared none would prove immediate enough, though she did not voice it. “I will not have him left alone now.” She closed her hand over the hilt of her machete, an automatic gesture as if she thought to hand that, too, over to Lucius.

  No. She let it go.

  “And where will we go, Captain?” Amelia asked again, caught somewhere between defeated and defiant.

  As if in answer, a well-hidden trapdoor popped open in the floor with a hollow boom. A moment later, the grinning face of Simms came into view. “Heard you were in a spot of bother, Captain—” His eyes widened. “Oh, hell.”

  “Smuggler’s tunnels,” Marta said. Sometimes she forgot that the others hadn’t bothered to get to know the town as well as she and Simms. She also found it quite annoying that they would need to be told to make such explorations. “Go!”

  A hollow boom sounded from the door at the front, followed by another from the back, as if to add emphasis to her command.

  “Sir?” Simms asked as the other two headed toward him, protests cut off by that sound.

  Marta glanced over her shoulder, lips curling in a smile despite the situation. “I’ll be wanting a visit from my maiden aunt in prison, Simms.”

  He was still cursing as he retreated from view, Amelia and Lucius following him. The sound was only cut off by the trapdoor returning to its original place with a final thump.

  With them safely gone, she turned her attention back to Elijah. He stared at her with wide, burning eyes. “Steady as you go, Mister Masterson. You should not have to wait long.”

  Perhaps too long. Logic dictated giving the others a head start by keeping the bulk of the force outside distracted by its efforts to get in. They had a better chance than poor Elijah anyway. Marta remained kneeling, silent and grim as the booming from both doors did not quite manage to mask the sound of increasingly labored breath. Elijah frantically clawed for her hand, and she let him, holding on tightly until his fingers went limp.

  He stopped breathing.

  She set his hand carefully down on the floor and co
unted the seconds roughly by the assault on the doors, having sent her pocket watch with Lucius. Two minutes later or close to it, Elijah’s fingers began to twitch.

  “I am sorry it had to come to this, Mister Masterson,” Marta said. She drew her machete and rose to her feet.

  The back door splintered. A resounding crack sounded from the front.

  Marta raised the machete and brought it down unerringly on what had once been Elijah Masterson’s neck. It sheered through flesh and sunk into his spine with a meaty thunk. A second precise blow as the workbench in front of the door fell over with a loud crash, and the machete went cleanly through, biting deeply into the wooden floor behind. Elijah’s head rolled away from his body; his fingers twitched once more, spasmodically, and then went mercifully still.

  “You! Hands up!”

  Marta stopped trying to pry the machete from the floor and straightened, hands coming up. The idiotic captain who had turned the riot into a shooting fight strode into the room. “Marta Ramos, sometimes called Captain, you will stand for arrest.”

  “You certainly took your time,” she said poisonously. On closer inspection, the man looked freshly promoted and far too young. The lines of his uniform were sharp enough to cut cheese, buttons bright even in the dim brewery, and his beard and mustache, while neat, still seemed to be coming in. Either troops had been sent in on special notice to come look for her—quite a long way for a potentially fruitless search—or the nearest garrison had changed commanders very recently.

  His eyes widened at the sight of the headless corpse next to her. He did not, however, need to ask what happened. “And what of your other compatriots?” he demanded.

  “Transformed into birds and flew away. I think all the pounding startled them.” Marta smiled with sweet insolence. “Add sorcery to my list of charges.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed, and he gestured two of his soldiers forward to drag her arms down and secure her at the wrists, rather more roughly than necessary. One of them, she noted with nasty pleasure, had a bloody nose. “The Grand Duke wants a personal word with you.”

  “Funny, that. I rather wanted to speak with him myself.”

  It was with no small amount of trepidation that Simms approached the ornate little row house, a gingerbread fantasy done in green and brown. He resisted the urge all the while to claw at his overly starched collar. He hated playing the role of the gentleman caller on a normal day, and hated it even more now, knowing the sort of viper’s den into which he was about to walk. But the Captain had been very specific in her own way, and Simms also had to admit that he was in well over his head at this point. He’d never had a head for prison breaks; those were always the Captain’s department.

  An impeccable butler answered the door. While he followed social form politely enough, the way he eyed Simms indicated clearly that he thought the man had come to the entirely wrong entrance of the house. “Yes, sir?”

  “I’d like to speak with the lady of the house,” Simms said, taking his hat into his hands. “News about her jewelry.”

  The man’s eyebrows moved almost imperceptibly. “Ah. Please, come in.” He escorted Simms to a sitting room that had once been familiar, only now lacy doilies and intricate bits of statuary and enameled objets d’art cluttered every spare surface. Simms found he disliked it even more than when last he’d been in here, with a body putrefying majestically on the floor. He felt afraid to touch anything, let alone sit, as if a simple action might start a chain of chaos that would end with everything in the room broken and him in the middle of it like a guilty dog.

  The butler opened the door a moment later for a woman dressed head to toe in black, her face obscured by lace veil. The fine line of her chin was still visible, the secretive curve of her lips. Deliah Nimowitz, unlike the room, hadn’t changed in the slightest. In her arms was a tiny fuzzy white dog. At the sight of Simms, it began to squirm excitedly and yip until Deliah put him down. The dog scurried over to him and began sniffing at his shoes and pants cuffs with avid excitement.

  The butler, very pointedly, shut the door behind her and left the two of them quite unacceptably alone.

  “Mr. Simms, what a pleasure it is to see you again. Chippy is very excited too, as you can see.”

  “Miss Nimowitz.” His mouth had gone very dry. For all the pleasant grace in her voice, the soft glitter of her tawny eyes from under that veil put him in mind of a lion watching an antelope from a thicket.

  “I know this can’t possibly be a social call, since you seem to have left your most delightfully social half elsewhere, unattended.”

  Simms swallowed hard and did his best to ignore that ridiculous jab. “I’m sorry to say that Captain Ramos has been arrested by the Grand Duke’s men. Very trying, of course. She’d probably enjoy a visitor, if you have the time.”

  “How sloppy of her.”

  “It was a sloppy situation.”

  Deliah laughed softly, the lace in front of her mouth stirring with her breath. “I might, at that. Oh, and what of my jewelry? Any luck…finding it? I know you’ve been looking ever so hard.”

  Jewelry that had been stolen fair and square by Captain Ramos, and only belonged to Deliah thanks to the death of her wealthy Grandaunt Clementine. For all that Captain Ramos seemed to think it a lark, Simms still felt distinctly uncomfortable about the circumstances of the old lady’s demise. It was one more reason to not trust Deliah in the slightest. He inspected his blunt fingernails carefully. “We may have turned up a piece or two. The Captain would know…perhaps you ought to ask her yourself.” All of this lying—and Simms lied, Deliah lied, and they both damn well knew they were doing just that—made his skin crawl.

  That just seemed to amuse Deliah all the more. “I suppose a favor calls for a favor.” She offered him her hand.

  Not liking this one bit, Simms took her lace-covered fingers and shook.

  The Grand Duchy’s central gaol was like an old familiar friend to Marta, one she’d spent many a quiet stretch in while she waited for some bit of planning to fall into place. The predecessor of Colonel Douglas had, for some reason, always put her in the women’s wing, where security was far more lax and the adventure of escape therefore proportionally less interesting.

  Colonel Douglas apparently wanted to take no chances this time. She was escorted through the men’s wing of the gaol, accompanied by a good deal of confused hooting since the inmates seemed divided over if she was man or woman. The gaolers tucked her into a cell meant for solitary confinement, its single high window far too small to make escape more than an insane fantasy.

  This was fine with Marta; she had no intention of going anywhere until she’d had a word with Colonel Douglas if not his master, the Grand Duke of Denver. She lay down on the pallet in the corner that functioned as the cell’s bed and composed her thoughts, charting potential courses and rolling the question over in her mind as to why the army had been sent looking for them, not just Colonel Douglas’s security forces. Why the army was composed of green recruits. Why Silverthorn’s furnaces roared into the night, smelting steel.

  She did her best not to think of Elijah’s fingers starting up their tell-tale post-death twitching.

  The Colonel didn’t keep her waiting long. That, she’d expected, since he’d always been a punctual man in their other encounters. No, what made the meeting surprising was that he did not come to her, to taunt her through the door of the gaol cell; rather, she was taken from her cell, put in shackles, and escorted into the courtyard where a wagon with thick bars and thicker walls waited, the guards showing the sort of wary caution normally reserved for mass murderers and the dangerously insane.

  The guards stuffed her into their Black Maria, two of them sitting in the back with her, rifles at the ready, and they took a jolting ride through the more narrow winding streets of Denver. Her eyebrows jumped slightly as she recognized the heavy chocolate scent of a confectioner, the particular accents of the children shrieking and playing outside as they passed.
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  A few minutes later they paused to go through the gates of the Grand Duke’s Palace. The Maria rattled around to the back to the shabbiest of the wings, and the guards hauled her out and marched her in through one of the side doors. Rather than upstairs to the office she’d been familiar with from many an information gathering trip, they took her along the ground floor to what had once been a briefing room and was now, it seemed, Colonel Douglas’s office.

  Or was, she had a feeling, only temporarily so. If she’d already made him this paranoid, she’d wager he wouldn’t keep it in the same place once she’d escaped his clutches yet again.

  The office was almost suffocatingly, overbearingly masculine, all dark woods and sternly patterned wallpaper, pictures of hunt scenes and generals on horses. It affirmed her assessment of the colonel as someone deeply invested in the social order—nothing new there. Far more interesting were the items artfully arranged around his desk blotter—pens and papers as usual, a cigar box and snifter, a desk lamp, and most interesting, a cheap little tin orrery, a halo of off-white dust surrounding it.

  Marta took that all in with a quick glance, as well as the fact that every scrap of string and twist of metal that had been in her pockets was now laid out neatly on his blotter. She let no curiosity betray itself on her face, just smiled slyly at the man behind the desk and held up her hands to display the manacles. “Are these really necessary, Colonel Douglas?”

  “Jewelry becomes a lady,” he said dryly. “You do know why you’re here. It’s a long list and I’d rather not waste my breath.”

  “Acts of piracy and the like, I’m sure. Though that isn’t the true reason you’ve gone to all this trouble, is it?”

  He raised an eyebrow, gesturing for her to go on.

  Marta tilted her head toward the corner of his desk that contained the orrery. “Lost a souvenir, and hoping some kind soul picked it up?”