The creature reached out an arm towards the gray man, the limb oozing ichor and steam through the metal skin. Stanton couldn't begin to imagine what form of alchemy was keeping the man alive, but death would be a mercy.
“Good!” Eschaton shouted at him. “I need you to move beyond the pain, and concentrate!”
The figure gave an almost imperceptible nod, and the rumbling began to subside. Whatever hold the villain had over the man, it seemed to be working.
Stanton sat up and began to reel in his gun. The weapon had been thrown out of his hand when he fell, but it was still attached by the wire that secured the feed belt to his waist. He looked it over to be sure that nothing had broken, but the only way to truly test it would be to fire it.
Eschaton had walked up to the dais and pounded his hand against the shaft that held the monstrous creature in place. The metal rang out in response. “Now tell me my name!”
The Paragon twitched and jerked a few times. “Focus, damn you! You've come this far.”
The creature slumped over and let out a long wheezing sound that seemed to echo around the room.
As the rasping continued, Stanton realized that the noise wasn't coming from Hughes directly. Instead it seemed to surround them, piped out of the same hidden places that Darby's message had been generated from. After a moment, it began to form into something recognizable. “L-l-l-ord. Es…Eschaton.”
“Good God!” Stanton blurted out.
The giant turned towards the Industrialist. “Perhaps you begin to truly understand what has happened here: the Hall is mine! The Paragons are mine! And now I have moved beyond even what Darby was capable of! I've given birth to the first true child of the new humanity!”
“The bastard whelp of your insanity, more like it,” Alexander said, attempting to stand. The polished granite bit hard into his knees, and the wounds he had taken from the White Knight were complaining loudly. He could feel blood seeping into his costume. Perhaps some of the glass had managed to pierce him after all.
Eschaton smiled at him. “It's taken me years to get to this point, Stanton. I'm so glad you could join me at both the beginning and the end of my journey.”
Alexander pulled himself up into an empty chair, barely noticing that it was Nathaniel's throne of smoke that he was sitting on instead of his own shattered seat.
For a moment, he considered shooting the gray man and being done with him, but after his display in the courtyard there was no guarantee that his bullets would even pierce the skin. Besides, the villain seemed in an expansive mood, and the others would be along any minute. “The beginning? Who in the blazes are you?”
“Of course you don't remember me. Not at all…” Eschaton took a step toward him.
Stanton lifted his weapon and aimed it at him. “That's close enough.”
The gray man smiled, revealing a row of startling white teeth. “I made your first gun.”
“Darby made my gun.”
Eschaton's brow furrowed, leaving deep cracks along his face. “As always, Darby took the credit. But,” he said as he held up his arms in front of him, “it was these hands that did the work!”
Alexander narrowed his eyes. “Wait…That man whom I hired…The one from the accident…”
“Accident?” he said in a mocking tone. “You think it was a simple mistake that found me in that chamber?”
Memories began to return to him in bits and pieces. “Harris, was it?”
“Harrington,” Eschaton said, correcting him. “That's who I was once, but it's the name of a man long dead.”
Hughes sighed. “You were the Clockwork Man. We fought you, beat you, and I thought we killed you…It must be ten years ago now.”
Eschaton stepped closer. “You fought me and lost.”
“That's not how I remember it.”
“Because I realized it was better for me if you thought I was dead. And once I had vanished, I could supply your enemies with the machinery they needed to fight against you.”
Stanton and Darby had often been puzzled by how the villains had managed to keep up with them for all those years without the power of fortified steam. The Sleuth had postulated a supplier of some sort, but they'd had nothing more than the vaguest of clues to go on. It turned out that Wickham had been right again. “For all the good it did you.”
“Oh, Alexander, you defeated my customers, but at what cost? The Crucible's incineration gun—the one that took the life of your wife and orphaned the Winthorp boy? That too, my dear Industrialist, was built by these hands.”
Alexander could feel himself squeezing the trigger, but it was a distant and disconnected sensation, almost as if someone else was doing it. He hadn't even realized that his other hand had dialed up the power of his weapon to maximum until the shot rang out loudly and he felt his arm snap back.
Eschaton, Stanton, and Hughes all screamed in unison as a shower of living electricity exploded out from the gray man's body. It moved from point to point around the room, jumping across exposed metal.
Bolts touched the gun and his belt, shocking Stanton in his chair. Every muscle in his body contracted and shook.
Nearby, Hughes's amplified moans were barely audible above the sounds of shattering stone as the building began to heave again.
A shockwave ripped through the floor, leaving a crack in its wake as a metal pipe rose up from underneath the ground.
The shock passed and Stanton felt his arms return to his control. He lifted up his gun and aimed it at the shaft that attached Hughes to the dais. He pulled the trigger and the force of the blast toppled him on the floor.
“Pain!” the half-man screamed, and when Stanton pulled himself up, he saw that the Paragon had disappeared into a cloud of steam that was billowing out from the bullet hole.
The shaking increased, sending a large chunk of the ceiling crashing to the floor. The Hall had been built from pure granite, and Darby had intended it to be able to take the worst abuses, but Alexander imagined that there was no building built by human hands that could withstand these forces for long. If he couldn't stop Hughes soon, the entire structure would collapse on their heads.
“What have you done?” Eschaton shouted as he fell to his knees. It was impossible for Stanton to tell just how much damage he'd done, but at least for the moment the gray man seemed unable to act.
“Hang on,” said Stanton, his voice surprisingly steady as he rose back to his feet. “I'll deal with you next.”
Peering through the steam, he waited for a moment until he could see a recognizable shape inside the mist. His fingers rotated the dial at his belt, turning down the power to his gun by a single notch. The moment a vaguely human form appeared, he pulled the trigger.
For a moment, he wasn't even sure if he had hit his target. Then something inside the tube burst, ripping a huge hole in the side of it. No longer able to support the weight of the metal-encased man, the shaft buckled, then finally collapsed. Hughes crashed to the ground with a blissfully non-amplified scream.
The rumbling stopped, and Stanton turned toward Eschaton. “Okay, let's finish this.” The villain had begun to rise but was still on his hands and knees as the Industrialist walked forward and pointed the gun straight at his head. “Do you think you'll be able to magic this out of your brain?”
Eschaton raised his head, his disconcertingly bright smile still intact. “If you shoot me, and even if you manage to kill me, the energy I discharge will surely kill you as well.”
“It's a risk I'm willing to take.”
“For what it's worth, Stanton, I always thought of you as one of the people whom I'd like by my side when I rebuilt my new world.”
“And I'd rather be dead than live in your twisted vision.”
“I thought that as well.” Eschaton nodded, and Alexander Stanton felt something hard and cold slam into his back. For a moment, he'd thought he'd been punched, but as a feeling of numbness spread outward from the point of impact, he realized that it was something far, f
ar worse.
From behind him came a familiar voice in his ear—carried on hot breath laced with the foul smell of tobacco and liquor. “How's that for an affront to the honor of your precious Paragons, you bastard?”
Alexander tried to fire his gun, but his fingers would no longer obey his commands. Eschaton laughed and stood, taking the weapon out of his trembling hand. “Very good, Mr. Clements. Very good.”
“Why do you wear such a terrible costume?” Viola asked Sarah in a matter-of-fact tone.
She had already spent the better part of the morning trying to uncover the Italian girl's softer side, but so far it had proven to be a fruitless endeavor. It was likely, she was beginning to suspect, that there was no sugar and spice in this woman, and if you cut her open you would find snips and snails all the way down to the center of her tough little heart.
As for Viola's outside—the term scandalous didn't even begin to cover her attitude toward clothing. Her tastes were by any measure obscene, and although she had technically covered enough of herself that she could avoid being considered naked, her loose-fitting peasant garments seemed designed to constantly be exposing random bits of flesh at any given time—a peep show that seemed to positively radiate with the promise of more.
Sarah was shocked that the woman hadn't attracted the attention of the police, or at least the temperance league. She had been working up to asking Viola what she was thinking, but so far she had barely been given the opportunity to start a sentence. Any moment of silence had instantly been filled with another of Viola's loud criticisms of Sarah. So far she had commented on her manner of speech, her clothes, and the particular seats she had chosen on the ferry as they had journeyed into Manhattan.
The only thing free of critique had been Sarah's hair, and that had been for the simple reason that she had let Viola color it the night before. It had been a battle to make sure that her hair remained a tasteful reddish shade, rather than the harlot's crimson that Viola seemed to prefer.
Going into the enterprise, Sarah had hoped it would provide a way for the two of them to bond, but instead it seemed to have spurred Viola on. She had subjected Sarah to a long and detailed analysis of why being a “rich girl” made her a permanently unsuitable mate for any Italian man—especially her brother. Sarah was, she had learned, also utterly useless and flailing when it came to actually taking care of herself or anyone else in the “actual world outside of her big bedrooms with fancy curtains.”
And even if she had managed to put in a comment of her own, it seemed clear that no amount logic or explanation on Sarah's part would make the slightest dent in the Italian girl's mind once it had been made up. Sarah simply was a useless child of privilege, and nothing she would do could ever change that, not even the fact that she actually had lived on her own for the last few months.
Once they had reached the island of Manhattan, the subject had turned to the Adventuress's costume, and had remained there during their entire trip to her flat. Sarah was angry, but somehow she was unable to speak without sounding as if she was begging for approval, “I—I was in a hurry. I simply put it together from the things that I could find.”
“How can you see to fight anything through a ridiculous mask? You must be blind under there!” Her hands went flying through the air as she talked, punctuating her criticisms with gestures that only managed to make her accusations even more pointed and annoying.
“I can see quite well, really,” she replied through gritted teeth. Sarah considered mentioning the fact that the Sleuth had worn the mask for years before she had ever put it on, but any kind of reasoned response was a futile gesture. Viola was a master at verbal fencing, turning any kind of logical response into yet another line of attack, and the girl's refusal to ever respond directly to what was being said to her had begun to make Sarah feel as if she were the one struggling with English.
The current conversation, for instance, had been in response to Sarah's merest suggestion that perhaps having faced off actual villains three times might have made her just the tiniest bit qualified to comment on the actual dangers that they presented. Viola's response was to launch an extended attack on her costume choices.
“My brother knows that your gloves are too big. He told me you almost fell off on the way to the balloon!”
Sarah was, she had to admit, finding it harder and harder to keep herself from simply shrieking at the girl. Neither one of them had given up their age to the other, but it seemed to Sarah they couldn't have been more than a year or two apart. Yet somehow Viola had managed to take on the role of an angry nagging mother, acting as if the very fact that she found so much to criticize about Sarah was a terrible burden that Viola had to bear, and that she was doubly disappointed since she had nursed Sarah back to health and put color in her hair.
For a moment, Sarah considered letting her anger get the best of her, but she had already decided to rely on her manners instead; it had always worked for her mother. And if the little harlot was going to pin all the crimes of society on her, she might as well teach the girl that one skill that came with being from the upper classes of New York was very a stiff upper lip. “Perhaps you're right about the gloves, Viola. I'll need to do something about them. Maybe you can help me sew them up a bit.”
At least the journey was almost over now. This last argument had seen them to within a block or so of her apartment. Sarah hoped that she might be able to set the beastly girl loose on Mr. Grieves while she went upstairs and finished her business.
Sarah hoped that her things were still there. She had managed to put the fear of God into her lecherous landlord the last time she had been there, but she doubted that it was enough to keep him from disobeying her orders for the better part of the week, especially with Mrs. Brooks clearly breathing down his neck.
Viola's intensity was certainly a weapon of great magnitude in its own right, when it was on your side. “I tried them on. They were too big for me, and I don't have your tiny, little rich-girl hands.” Viola said it matter-of-factly, clearly challenging Sarah to tell her that she either wasn't supposed to wear them, or that her hands weren't too small—or probably both.
Instead Sarah found herself speechless—trapped by a conversation totally bereft of manners, and dangerously close to unleashing a torrent of uncivil words. She'd already been called “rich girl” one too many times today. And just at the moment she was about to open her mouth and finally give Viola what for, she heard a familiar voice speak her name, “Sarah? Is that finally you?”
When she turned around, it took a confused moment before she recognized the familiar figure of Mrs. Farrows standing beside her in a woolen winter coat.
“Jenny!” Without saying another word, Sarah threw decorum to the wind and ran to her, wrapping her arms around the woman and giving her the hardest squeeze she could.
The housemaid responded in kind, although without quite the same level of intensity. “It's good to see you…”
Giving herself a moment to enjoy the reunion, Sarah let go and looked up at her. “But however did you find me?”
“I thought I saw you at the department store a few days ago, but you vanished before I could be sure. I asked if there was a Sarah working there, but no one had heard of you.”
“Yes…I changed my name,” she said with a slight blush.
“And your hair,” she said with an obviously disapproving tone. “I was able to get one of the other girls to reveal who you were and where you live…Miss Standish.”
“I never thought it would be so difficult to hide in a city as big as New York,” Sarah said with a sigh. “Is there anyone who doesn't know what I'm up to?”
“Your father, thank goodness. I'm sure the shock of finding out that his daughter was a department store sales girl would be enough to drop him in his tracks.”
“How is he?”
A sharp voice cut her off. “Who's this?” Viola said, giving Jenny a dismissive sideways glance. “One of your rich friends?”
&n
bsp; Sarah's etiquette kicked in before she could decide whether or not introducing the two women might actually be a good idea. “Mrs. Jenny Farrows, this is Viola Armando.”
Jenny returned the glance and gave a slight curtsey. “Most charmed, I'm sure.” She turned back to Sarah, strategically placing her shoulder in Viola's way. “I'm sure your father would also be surprised to see you've taken up with gypsies.”
The Italian girl squinted her eyes and stared at Jenny. “Tell your fancy friend that I'm not a gypsy, rich girl.”
“She's not a gyp—” Sarah began, but was once again cut off before she could finish repeating Viola's message.
Jenny turned fully toward her now, and gave Viola the withering housemaid's stare that she had used to turn hundreds of young upstarts into crack servants. “Oh, I think I'm well aware of just what you are, Miss Armando.”
“And what's that?” Viola replied, pushing herself closer until the two women were practically nose to nose. Both of them had their chests puffed out so far that it seemed as if two mountain ranges were about to collide.
Sarah noticed an older gentlemen who seemed mesmerized by the confrontation, but her stare seemed to be enough to shame him into turning his head and harrumphing away.
“You're an Italian street-tough and a smart aleck; one who has clearly been blessed with more ability than sense,” Jenny said in succinct tones.
Viola held her gaze for a moment, nodded, and then took a step back. “She's okay by me. But no more name-calling.”
Sarah felt a sense of relief flood over her. While she had hoped that Viola would be able to maintain her effectiveness under fire, she had hardly expected her to be facing off against an opponent as formidable as Jenny Farrows. “Well, my jury is still out on you, young lady, and please don't forget it.”
Although she had repeatedly wished that she could make Viola disappear, Sarah didn't want Jenny to think that she had simply fallen in with the wrong crowd. “She and her brother saved my life.”
The housemaid clucked her tongue. “Can I assume it was from the same kind of ridiculous danger that your father is always getting himself into?”
Hearts of Smoke and Steam Page 17