by Sean Wallace
Hwangbo bowed his now-bald head, a gesture that Lasher had already begun to find off-putting. What man possessed of any self-respect at all bowed his head before any save God or King? But then the boy raised his head back up again and said, “Gentlemen, I have been asked to follow you, to ensure your safety.”
“A likely tale,” MacMillan spat, retrieving his walking stick from the ground.
“A tale both likely and true,” Hwangbo replied, glowering for a moment at the enormous Scotsman before turning to face Lasher. “I have been charged with ensuring your safety, for there is someone who requires to see you.”
“Who?” Lasher asked, lowering his pistol only slightly, though MacMillan allowed his attention to wander precisely as much as was required to find, pick up and don his bowler once more.
“I cannot say her name aloud, and you would not know it in any case. But if you come with me, I shall introduce you to her,” the lad explained, glancing about at the ground for his own hat. “It will be worth the trouble, I assure you.”
As Hwangbo finally noticed his hat, and bent down to pick it up, Lasher turned to MacMillan. The Scotsman was dusting off his tweed jacket, but also smiling precisely in the way Lasher had, after so many years together, come to expect, as if some long-ago, carefully laid plan were finally coming to fruition.
“Yes, yes,” said the elder Scotsman, setting his bowler upon his crown. “Let us hurry . . .”
“Mademoiselle,” the lad said, bowing as his employer entered the room.
It was a woman, indeed, but not a Chosŏn maiden. Not purely so, at least, though Lasher imagined she might be the product of a Russo-Chosŏn cross. There was something unmistakably peasant-like in the set of her jaw, and some unmistakably oriental cast about her dark eyes, both of which shone clearly through her lavish face make-up, which was, as far as Lasher was concerned, every bit the fashion of a brazen strumpet.
Yet her face paint was contradicted by the unimpeachable finery of her attire, her lovely blue gown cut after the fashion of a European lady, adorned with what looked like silver trim and the finest of dainty embroidery. When she rose, her posture and carriage matched the gown rather than the make-up: the girl was wearing a corset, like a proper woman, and her carriage was impeccable, utterly civilized. Even her French was as clear as the tones of a bell au campagne du Provençe.
Why, then, did she fill Lasher with the vaguest of uncanny sensations? Why, the creeping sense of wrongness he felt as he gazed upon her?
“Il y a quelque chose dont je veux discuter avec vous, messieurs—” she began, but MacMillan cut her off.
“Parlez-vous anglais, lass?” he asked. His brogue relented not at all as he spoke the Gallic tongue.
She nodded. “When I must,” she told him, her face blank of any expression.
“Well, I suspect your English is better than our French, passable though it is, and so I shall have to ask you, as your guest, to humor us in this one request.”
The young and strangely pretty lady nodded again, and Lasher could all but see her holding back some sort of comment.
“My name is Mademoiselle Petrochnya,” she explained, her voice soft and smooth as half-remembered caramels. She held out her hand as one might do toward a small and fragile bird, to avoid giving it a start. With his hat in his hand – looking for all the world like a gentleman, at least for that portion of the world that did not yet know better – MacMillan gently took her hand and kissed it, letting his gaze momentarily slip up to her ample bosom as she continued, “And I am glad that you were able to come today.” As she spoke, she withdrew her hand, rubbing the back of it as if his moustaches were as rough as the bristles of a horse-brush.
She neglected to extend her dainty hand to Lasher for another kiss, smooth-cheeked though the American was; somehow, he felt prompted by this omission – prompted to speak, despite it being his custom to allow MacMillan to lead any discussion. “Lady, we are glad to help, but I cannot help but be puzzled—”
“—at your sending the particular . . . lad, shall I say, whom you did,” MacMillan cut in, raising a hand to quiet Lasher. That gesture irked the American, so that he found himself suddenly eager to speak further. Eager, though he knew better. Whatever his feelings, he knew MacMillan was the cleverer of the two of them, the more likely to draw out much-needed information, the better equipped to interrogate.
Resentment is so often the child of such knowledge when it is delivered unto one, and in Lasher’s heart an old, oft-quelled resentment flared again, despite his better nature. It was resentment both old and calm, steady as a light in the distance, and somewhat baffling to himself. Yet it nonetheless settled upon the person of MacMillan, who was speaking to the lady now, gesticulating with his hands in the air as a magician might.
The old mentor who had long ago taken him in, taught him the method of an investigator, aided him in honing his mind – such as it was – and had saved his bacon too many times for a gentleman to have maintained count. They were friends, old friends indeed, and yet there lay that resentment, hidden but at times glittering with a heat that bordered on baffling. Lasher wondered if such were, perhaps, the inevitable child of too much time spent in the company of a confirmed genius. Perhaps no man can stand alone in the presence of such unbridled brilliance for long, he mused.
One might indeed just as well consider it magic, that brilliance of his mentor’s, MacMillan’s skill at interrogation, his ability to ferret out of a bushel of lies the truth and the truth alone. Lasher had borne witness to this amazing talent, time after time, yet he now understood the skill but little better than he had when first he’d seen the Scotsman work his magic. It was a mystery, one that summoned memories that did little but thicken the startling bile that, beyond the reach of his trepidation and shame, burned within Lasher’s bosom, as a series of myriad scenes were woven together in the depths of his mind . . .
. . . a long discussion around a campfire in the dark wilderness of Texas, hunting mislaid mechanikal horses that had somehow been infested with vengeful intelligence. A long chat with a pair of mechanikal spies, cleverly disguised, in the lobby of small inn in Kandahar. An argument in the dungeon of a castle out in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, where a madman had been experimenting with the pieces and bits of random dead mechanikae, attempting to assemble them into a single, albeit mad, whole . . .
What came to Lasher was not so much the amazement he had felt in earlier days, but a fine aftertaste of sorrow. To look at MacMillan was, perhaps, something like the opposite of gazing upon a memento mori in some dreadful French cathedral, the message completely inverted: As you are, I never was. As I am, never shall you be. The brilliance of MacMillan was a thing to behold, but a bitter potion, and one laced with sorrow as well. That Lasher’s sorrow, and resentment, seemed out of proportion to his inadequacy, and unfit as a beverage to accompany the ongoing feast of MacMillan’s long friendship, Lasher could not explain – at least not to his own satisfaction. Simply, he felt it, and with a passion that discomfited him.
And so he thought back across the years to when he had first met MacMillan in a public house in Boston; to what might have happened if his young raven-haired lover of those days, young Emily, had survived that adventure, and married him as they had planned. He wondered what might have happened had he bid farewell to MacMillan that spring day, nevermore to see him, but to settle into management of his family’s brewery, taking up that task with which his father had charged him: to begin the process of integrating mechanikae into the process of brewing. He felt a faint pang of grief-laden sorrow as he imagined a houseful of little ones, each one with Emily’s eyes and his chin, running about the place and singing tra-la-la, hey-diddle-diddle . . .
By MacMillan’s side he had, no doubt, done the world of humankind enormous good; yet despite himself, this only made him all the more distraught, and somehow all the more resentful. What good was it to advance the lot of men, when . . .
He felt a sudden jolting d
izziness and his mind was, in an instant, blank. It was, doubtless, on account of this jolt that he noticed the Russo-Asiatic woman had been speaking all the while.
“. . . and that is why the deception in my letter was necessary. I hope this explanation satisfies you,” the lady said in a voice that, if it could be described as gentle, was gentle in the manner of a gentle hammer pounded against a delicate anvil.
“It does,” MacMillan was saying now to the queer, puzzling woman, and Lasher cringed, though he ought to have been used to it. Again, his mind had meandered off in the midst of something critical; indeed, probably the conversation that held the key to whatever bloody adventure they were being drawn into. This, he chided himself, is why you shall never be as brilliant as MacMillan. Not that such aspirations could be regarded as realistic, of course, but Lasher had hoped he might shine at some point, had hoped perhaps to deduce something that MacMillan might miss someday.
Not, evidently, this time around.
“Then we shall investigate the conspiracy thoroughly, although I must however first insist that you make your lad available to us. Hwangbo could prove an invaluable aid to us in our excursions about this, er . . . this city.” MacMillan raised one eyebrow as he said the word, as if to test the lady’s sense of the place.
“Of course,” the lady said with a soft laugh and a hardness in her eye that Lasher only barely glimpsed. Perhaps she, too, knew better than to regard Hanyang as anything so modern or fine as a city. “I am only sorry to have had to wait so long for your arrival. There are many tasks to which I must attend today, sirs, so I hope you will excuse me.” And, with a little bow, her hand demurely covering up her ample cleavage, she bid them adieu.
As a servant showed the three of them out MacMillan enquired, “And what did you make of that?” and popped the bowler back upon his crown, whispering so that Hwangbo could not hear.
“It was . . . interesting,” Lasher said softly, as usual, by now so used to saying this empty nothing that he did not even blush for shame.
“Yes,” MacMillan said, “indeed. I should think that she would have attempted concealment, at least attempted to seem interested in hiding her true motive, and yet . . . she all but advertised it. Such trouble she went to, just to gain an audience with me. But the lass was fetching, don’t you think? And terribly . . . interesting?”
An audience with you? Lasher thought, grinning as he turned to look MacMillan side on. The old man was smiling awkwardly, tugging at his moustaches, and Lasher sensed that something was amiss with the old boy. His companion had not realized – as he normally would have – how little Lasher had followed of the meeting. Normally, when Lasher made some meaningless comment, MacMillan lectured him, revealing just how many details he’d missed and how whatever mystery or intrigue they’d been drawn into had been almost, but not quite, solvable from a prominent clue in the first interview; but today, he only smiled, his eyes twinkling in a way that had turned Lasher slightly queasy.
Smitten, he realized, shaking his head slightly. MacMillan was smitten. With that . . . that strange Russo-Asiatic girl?
“Very interesting,” he said to MacMillan, a laugh caught in his throat. The laugh was laced with fear, of course. He’d seen MacMillan heartbroken before, sunken almost into complete uselessness. It was a dangerous thing to find oneself near the man in such a state, and to have him laid low by such despondency in a foreign kingdom was, at the very least, to be avoided. And yet . . . to see the old fellow at least showing signs of humanity, it was amusing.
MacMillan grumbled seriously, though a smile twinkled in his searching eyes. And with that, they were out on the street again, Hwangbo now once again beside them, walking at a brisk pace. Lasher knew not where or why but only that if he survived, it might well be a miracle – one more in a long string of such. He decided against reminding MacMillan of the letter, of reminding him that they had crossed the world with a purpose, since that purpose seemed to have been a false pretence. Patience apparently would have to suffice until the true agenda of the Russo-Asiatic lady came clear, and he was not about to ask the dazed MacMillan to brief him on the details he had missed.
Instead, he focused all of his meagre hopes on the possibility that his good fortune (if such it could be called) would hold out for one more investigation.
The river Han ran brown and muddy through stooping Hanyang as a deep and bloody wound runs across a soldier’s grimy corpse, and across it hung a number of gauzy bridges constructed of the most peculiar metal wirework. Crossing by day, one might (if lucky) catch glimpses of the spidery mechanikae that spun and respun the suspension cables, or vaguely sense the drift of the great stone-and-steel mechanika pylons from east to west as the bridges shifted to accommodate royal traffic and the richest merchants’ transportation needs. Commoners were few on the bridge, for there was a toll, but a number of Coreans nonetheless were on the bridge when Lasher and his companions began their crossing.
Lasher sighted nary a zoomechanika overhead, though he did for the most part keep his eyes trained on the wiry spans above. However, during a quick glance down to the river, he did briefly glimpse the legs of a fundament pylon as it marched the bridge slowly, smoothly through the water.
“The bridge will soon be south of the Great Peace Market,” Hwangbo explained, a smile on his face. Lasher had the feeling the lad rarely got to tread upon a bridge as it shifted position, especially not when it was shifting in a way advantageous to himself. “We can continue on, its movements are fairly slow and steady.”
“It is fortunate, how this shift suits us,” MacMillan said softly, the unsettling love-twinkle in his eye still unabated. Lasher was beginning to worry that the Scotsman’s famed objectivity would suffer.
“It’s nothing to do with luck,” Hwangbo said, a pert little smile curving his thin lips as he narrowed his eyes, making Lasher think of a cat on the prowl. “It is my lady’s request that we be aided in this errand.”
Worry curdled into fear in Lasher’s belly as MacMillan sighed. The old boy was skating dreadfully close to resembling a love-struck governess in some tawdry, ridiculous novel; soon, his infatuation might begin to pose a danger to his mind.
“She has connections in high places,” Lasher observed, hoping MacMillan might suddenly launch into his standard disdainful lecture on the well-placed in society, the wealthy and powerful, and find himself, by the inexorable power of his logic, disdaining the exotic object of his affections; yet, instead, the old boy only smiled softly, eyes on the upper wire networks of the bridge. By habit, Lasher adopted a contradictory pose, gazing immediately down into the waters, as if some sort of horror might surge up from below while MacMillan was occupied gazing upwards.
In the muddy waters below, he glimpsed something shocking indeed, but not a monster. Nothing more monstrous than a human body, dressed in white stained pink with river-diluted blood. Face down, it drifted out of view between the mechanikae pylons as they advanced eastward. A bit further down, he saw another body. And then another, and another. There was a cluster of corpses about a half a mile out, in the middle of the river.
“Is that . . . ?” he asked, unable to finish the sentence right away, but simply pointing at the bodies. “A common scene?”
MacMillan and Hwangbo followed his gaze, their mouths suddenly still. It was in this unusual silence that the horror of what was happening bloomed scarlet and smoky all around them: screams in the vicinity of the squat, grass-roofed houses on the north side of the river, matched a moment later with more screaming from the squat huts near the southern shore. Hwangbo blanched – his little eyes now wider than Lasher would have imagined possible – and hissed something in his native tongue. For his part, MacMillan turned to look back the way they had come. Hopelessly, of course: they were more than halfway across the bridge now; to turn back would be madness.
Much more so, as a faint tremble passed through the bridge. Lasher’s first instinct was to rush to the side of the bridge and peer down at the
pylons marching below. He could see, even before he looked down, that the mechanikae supporting the bridge on each end were moving in different directions, twisting and tearing at the bridge lengthwise.
“The pylons!” he yelled, turning to MacMillan and the translator lad, just in time to see the young boy scream as an enormous metal spider-thing swept down toward them. MacMillan leaped one way and young Hwangbo the other, so that the clockwork octoped’s razor-jaws tore into the wire-mesh surface of the bridge, tearing a gash open.
“Run!” cried young Hwangbo, as if his companions needed to be urged, and they all took off for the north side, the nearer end of the bridge.
As they ran, certain facts snapped into clarity, even to the ever-distracted Lasher, as established and certain: that although the air above Hanyang was perpetually clouded by an industrial fog fed by the coal smoke of thousands of factory fires, those fires had somehow, very recently, multiplied – that the city was, in a word, aflame; that the catapulting of bodies into the river had neither slowed nor abated, but quite certainly continued (perhaps increasing in rate) over the past few moments, so that a half-mile downstream, bodies had begun to rain down and to clog the river almost from bank to bank; that MacMillan was no longer operating at peak sensitivity, for if anyone ought normally to have realized the city was being overrun, it was he of the most delicate senses and most alert observances; and that the lad Hwangbo looked not in the least bit surprised by any of this unfolding insanity. The lad was, he deduced, in shock and no longer in possession of his wits.
With only a few moments to react, Lasher made two fists, and gritted his teeth, and leaped at Hwangbo, seizing the boy and hoisting him over his shoulder. The lad was ridiculously heavy, for such a small fellow; or perhaps, Lasher thought ruefully, that is what every man would think at a moment like this one, until he realized that somewhere along the way, he had grown older. Nevertheless, he was able to sling the translator over his shoulder, and began instantly to sprint for the north end of the bridge.