by Dave Butler
“Ram off!” Sweat poured from Egil One-Arm’s face.
“Cavendish Hats!” Grim thundered, twisting again. His hat tumbled to the floor, and he squashed it with a heavy boot. “Why the explosives? What are you doing? Who’s paying you, you worthless scum?”
“Milk yourself!”
“The Iron Cog!” Grim rumbled, and gave such a twist to the arm that Egil nearly fell off the bed. “The Anti-Human League! Who are they and what do they want?”
Egil One-Arm attacked.
He spun inward and smashed his left forearm against the mechanical arm, wrenching it out of Grim’s grasp. With the backward twist of the same movement, he slammed the shoulder end of the mechanical arm against the Eldjotun, just as Grim raised it to fire.
BANG!
The bullet chomped a hole the size of Charlie’s chest right in the center of one of the shutters. The gun sailed through the air in one direction, while the arm released its death grip on Egil Olafsson’s face and went spinning in the other. With its first twirl, the mechanical limb struck Natalie de Minimis, slamming her to the floor.
Egil sprang forward. He rammed his head, horns first, into Grim’s forehead. Grim staggered back.
Bob charged. Ollie was right behind him, the tip of the umbrella in his hand and the curved handle swinging through the air like a lasso.
“Milker!” Grim bellowed.
“Rat!” Egil leaped forward again. He plowed shoulder-first into Grim’s chest, knocking him down.
Charlie took a swipe with his clasp knife at One-Arm’s heel, but missed. Then the two trolls were thrashing on the ground in a thicket of fists and boots and horns, and he was afraid to try again. He didn’t want to stab Grim by accident.
Bob slashed at the tumbling trolls, but his attacks were tentative. Ollie was bolder, and managed to hook the umbrella handle around one of the hulders—Charlie wasn’t sure which one—but then the trolls rolled over, and the sudden motion hurled Ollie across the room.
Charlie had to do something. Even with one arm, Egil was winning, and however frightening Grim might have become here in the dairy, he was still on Charlie’s side.
As Charlie looked for Grim’s gun, he met Henry Clockswain’s gaze. “I’ll get the Fire Giant,” the kobold told him. “You get the arm!”
Charlie scrambled for the corner. The big brass limb shuddered and twitched at the base of the wall like a wounded snake.
Charlie hesitated. Could it be true that he was really no more than this arm? No more than the mechanical songbirds in Lucky Wu’s Earth Dragon Laundry, or the Articulated Gyroscopes?
It couldn’t be.
“Thor’s hammer!” he heard Grim shout.
Charlie picked up the arm. It was so heavy, he was surprised he could get it off the floor. But Charlie ignored his doubt and lifted, and found that he could stand and hold it very well.
He was, after all, very strong.
And that made him feel bad. Maybe it was true: he wasn’t his bap’s son.
BANG!
“Aaarrgh!”
Charlie spun around in time to see Grim Grumblesson crash to the floorboards, one white kid glove clapped to his chest. Red welled around Grim’s fingers, and the hulder struggled to rise onto one elbow.
Bob crouched against the wall with Henry Clockswain. Charlie couldn’t see the aeronaut’s sword, and he didn’t see Ollie. Gnat lay on her face, back arced in pain and wings fluttering.
One-Arm stood over the lawspeaker, the Eldjotun in his single fist. Egil’s shaking, spastic eyeballs looked even scarier in the yellow-green light of the room’s glowbugs.
Egil thumbed the hammer back on Grim’s hand-cannon. “Let’s see if you got any bullets left, you stupid toff.”
“No!” Heaven-Bound Bob shouted.
He threw Ollie in snake form.
Egil turned just in time to take the incoming serpent right in the face. Ollie was a constrictor again, and he wrapped around the troll’s neck as he hit.
“Ayyyayaaaaaayaaagh!” The shrieking voice belonged to Ollie.
In a puff of smoke and stench of eggs, Charlie’s friend became his boy self again. He was still wrapped around Egil One-Arm’s head, but he jerked back, straightening out and snapping his body as he hollered and fell to the floor.
“Ow,” Ollie moaned.
Charlie saw blood on Egil’s snaggled tusks and a low, cunning grin on his lips. “Serves you right, you stupid French git.” He kicked Ollie, who rolled across the room and plunked against the wall, clutching his stomach.
Bob crouched to look at his injured friend.
Grim struggled into a sitting position. He was gasping, and the puddle surrounding him, black in the dim light, was frighteningly large. The room reeked with the ripe stench of blood.
The troll lawspeaker held up a hand and pawed at the air in Egil’s direction. His swipe fell several feet short.
Charlie’s heart sank.
“Where was I?” One-Arm rumbled. “Oh, yeah.”
He raised the Eldjotun again, pointing it at Grim’s head.
Charlie charged. “Pondicherry’s of Whitechapel!”
He tucked the mechanical arm’s shoulder up into his armpit and held it like a lance, like he’d seen in his father’s big illustrated copy of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. As Charlie galloped across the room, the claws clenched, unclenched—
Egil snorted and turned to face Charlie—
clenched, unclenched—
Egil pointed the gun at Charlie and frowned—
clenched, unclenched—
“Pondicherry’s!” Charlie yelled again, and jumped.
Too late, Egil One-Arm tried to dodge. Charlie adjusted his own aim as the troll slipped sideways, and rammed the mechanical arm into Egil’s crotch.
Clench.
“Hrooooowwwwwwghaaaagh!” Egil roared.
BANG!
Charlie’s John Bull hat was whipped off his head by the hurricane force of the sixty-caliber bullet. His scalp burned; he yelped, but he didn’t fall down or let go. Pride kept him on his feet.
Egil One-Arm dropped the gun, went slack, rolled his eyes up into his head, and toppled to the floor.
Charlie dropped the arm. “Yes!” he shouted.
Henry Clockswain ran forward to check Egil One-Arm.
“Charlie!” Bob hollered. “Your ’ead’s on fire!”
Charlie smelled a bitter stink, so bad it cut through the cloying sweet-rotten-bloody smells that choked the air of the little room.
No wonder his scalp hurt.
“It’s the gunpowder!” Bob cried. “It was so close, it lit you on fire!”
Charlie’s head burned. He raced around the room, looking for anything to put out the fire. On his second circuit, Bob grabbed Charlie by the arm and steered him toward the hall.
“Milk!” Charlie gasped. “Water! Something!”
“No time!” Bob snapped as they pushed through the curtain into the hall. “Keep a secret,” the aeronaut chimney sweep hissed, “or else!”
Bob whipped off his leather bomber and clapped it down over Charlie’s head. Charlie felt the flames smothered instantly.
Then Bob’s hair fell down to his shoulders. It was long and curly and brown, and even in the dark it shone.
And Charlie noticed, as if he’d never seen them before, that Bob’s lips were heart-shaped and sweet.
And his fingers were gentle on Charlie’s cheeks, clamping the hat down and saving him from the fire.
Charlie nearly fell over, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before.
Bob’s hair was down to her shoulders.
Heaven-Bound Bob was a girl.
“Keep a secret,” Bob hissed again. She piled her hair back under her bomber cap. For good measure, she buckled the chin straps. “Do it for a mate. You know I just saved you from burning up; don’t you even think about saying nothing to nobody about me being anything but a lad.”
&
nbsp; “Bob?”
Bob sighed. “Roberta. Roberta Alice Micklemuch. But the odds ain’t good with any orphan in life on the streets, an’ they’re longer still against a girl. You call me Bob, you ’ear?”
“Bob.” Charlie could barely speak. “Your hair…”
“Yeah. Don’t really want to be a boy, do I?”
“Does Ollie know?”
Bob shook her head. “Keep a secret.” She led Charlie back into the milking room.
Egil One-Arm slumped dazedly against the wall. Henry Clockswain held Bob’s sword in both hands over the troll. Ollie and Gnat struggled to help Grim Grumblesson sit up. Grim thumbed caps onto the chambers of his Eldjotun.
Egil’s mechanical arm lay still on the milking bed.
“That is one ugly seafood,” Bob swaggered as she came back into the room.
“I’ve had a rough day,” Grim said.
“Nah, I mean old One-Arm ’ere.”
“Seafood?” Charlie asked.
“Seafood bowl, troll,” Ollie explained. “Is there anybody in the hall we ought to worry about?”
“Nah,” Bob said. “The ’ulders must be all milked out, an’ Ingrid an’ Sal are minding their own business.” She laughed. She looked completely different to Charlie now, and he had a hard time not staring.
“Right.” Grim put one arm against the wall and lurched to his feet.
“Careful, Grim,” Ollie said.
Grim pointed his big pistol at Egil One-Arm and thumbed back the hammer. “Last chance, dirty milker,” he growled.
“The Jubilee.” Egil still looked dazed. “They wanna replace the queen.”
“The Anti-Human League?” Bob asked. “Replace ’er with what, a troll? A kobold? A dwarf? ’Ow on earth could anybody get away with that?”
Egil laughed. “No such thing as the Anti-Human League. They’re gonna blow something up. I don’t know, maybe Parliament. And then they’re gonna kill Pondicherry. Dump his body at the scene. Blame it all on the Anti-Human League, but it’s a fake. The explosion is to distract everybody, so they can get at the queen.”
Charlie sat down so he didn’t fall down.
“Who are they, milker?” Grim snarled. “Stop talking in riddles.”
Egil hesitated. His gaze wandered aimlessly over the room. “The Iron Cog. The Frenchman. I do what he says, and I get paid. He talks about the Iron Cog.”
“The French!” Ollie spat on the floor.
“What do they need Pondicherry for?” Grim pressed.
“Replace the queen, isn’t it? Only Pondicherry knows how to make the inside bits right. So they need him to make the fake work.” Egil shook his head. “That’s what I hear from the Frenchman.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ollie complained.
“Rule Britain,” Bob said. “Makes enough sense to me.”
Charlie shuddered. “The garden party.”
“Goodness gracious!” Henry Clockswain gasped. “You don’t think they’ll use this replacement queen to…er, er…murder all those foreign leaders, do you?” Charlie wasn’t sure who the kobold was talking to. “Prince Bismarck, and the Emperor Franz-Joseph, and the Italian king?”
“Humberto,” Bob said. No one corrected her.
“That would mean war.” Grim’s voice was quiet and sad.
One-Arm shrugged. “My job was get Pondicherry, then get his boy.”
“Freya’s frisky tail!” Grim cursed.
“Why Charlie?” Gnat asked. “Why would you want the boy?”
“They want to inverse interfere ’im,” suggested Bob.
“Reverse engineer, you mean,” Henry Clockswain said. “Take him apart to, ah, see how he works. You might be right. Sounds like the Iron Cog, whoever they are, are building a fake Queen Victoria. Sounds like they haven’t quite figured it out yet. Maybe she’s a clockwork creation.”
“Like Charlie,” Ollie said.
“I’m a boy,” Charlie insisted. He desperately wanted it to be true. Especially now. “If they take me apart, I’ll die.”
“Nobody’s taking you apart,” Grim reassured him, “unless they take me apart first.”
“The Frenchman’s at Waterloo,” Egil One-Arm volunteered. “Down with the trains, there’s a maintenance door. It’s at the end of platform thirteen. He’s got a…a place…”
“A lair,” Grim suggested. “A hideout. A safe house.”
“Yeah,” Egil agreed.
“Pitcher of milk, Bob,” Grim instructed the aeronaut. She nodded and slipped out into the hall.
One-Arm licked his lips. “What you gonna do?”
“Who else is at this lair, besides the Frenchman?” Grim asked.
“Nobody.”
“Not a gang of men with swords?” Gnat asked. “You sure? Not any more trolls like yourself either?”
“Policemen,” Charlie said.
“Yeah,” Egil admitted. “Off-duty coppers and toughs like me. He hires us when he needs us. So unless he has some job going on I don’t know about, he should be there alone.”
Grim pulled his watch from his waistcoat. “Nearly morning,” he announced. “The Jubilee and the progress flotilla and the garden party and everything else are tomorrow.”
“The bar exam is today,” Gnat said softly.
Bob returned, holding a pitcher in each hand.
“Yes.” Grim laughed. “It is. But the examiners will be happy to accept my fee again next year.” He sighed. “I don’t think we can count on any help.”
“I see now that we can’t, er, go to the police,” Henry Clockswain agreed.
“Can’t raise the hue an’ cry,” Bob pointed out, setting the pitchers down on the milking bed. “It ain’t an ’ulder affair, is it?”
“There’ll be no help from my cousin Elisabel. Nor from her rat friends.”
“On the other hand,” Grim said, “if we act now, we catch the Frenchman alone. We rescue Raj Pondicherry and we stop the Iron Cog from replacing the queen with some sort of…of…” He looked at Charlie and flailed.
“Machine,” Charlie finished for him. “Assassin.” Bob put her hand on his shoulder.
Grim nodded, then picked up one of the pitchers. “Right, you,” he snarled. “Drink up!”
He poured both pitchers down Egil One-Arm’s throat. One-Arm drank eagerly, the milk overflowing, spilling down his chin and onto his shirt. As Grim dropped the second empty pitcher, One-Arm let out a long, rumbling belch and collapsed. They left him leaning against the wall and slobbering on himself.
When they walked through the front, Ingrid looked up with something on her face that might have been relief. The room was dimly lit, but Charlie thought her lip was bleeding and the cherries on her cheeks were smudged.
“Grim…,” she said softly.
Grim kept walking.
When they emerged into St. Arnfinn’s Lane in the gray predawn light, the big troll sighed heavily, removed his crumpled top hat, and ran his fingers through his hair. It had escaped its queue in the fight, and he managed to chase some of it back into place.
“Sky Trestle will be running,” Ollie said. “That’ll take us straight to Waterloo.”
“ ’Ome.” Bob laughed.
“You live at Waterloo Station?” Charlie asked.
“Nah,” she answered, “but close by. An’ I keep my wings there, to be ready for the flotilla. They’re in a locker.”
“The boy,” Henry Clockswain said to Grim. “He’s been put into enough, ah, danger already tonight. We can take him to his father’s shop. Or to my place, Grim, or to yours.”
“Not on your life,” Charlie said. “I’m coming.”
“It isn’t safe, Charlie.” The kobold’s eyes blinked like hummingbird wings. “Think how sad your father would be if you were hurt.”
“My father would be sad just to know that I had left the house.” Charlie laughed. “He’d probably pinch me. But my father’s been kidnapped, and I’m going to rescue him. This is my business as much as it is any of
yours. More. I’m going to Waterloo Station.”
“Charlie—” Mr. Clockswain tried again.
“Enough!” Grim roared. “The lad says he’s coming, so he comes.” The troll dropped to one knee to talk to Charlie. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you have a weapon earlier,” he said. “I was confused and surprised and, well, uncertain what to make of you after Bob said…after Bob showed us you could hold your breath. But you’ve proved yourself.”
“I don’t need a sword or a gun,” Charlie said. “I’ve got a good knife. A good knife is all a fellow needs.”
Grim threw back his head and laughed.
“Fine.” Henry Clockswain fussed with his jacket collar. “But stick close to me, Charlie.”
“Too right,” Ollie said. “Charlie’ll keep you safe.”
They boarded the Sky Trestle at a station a few streets away. Charlie tried not to look at the automaton token dispenser, but at least it couldn’t notice how bloodied and bedraggled Charlie’s friends were. Other passengers did, and they squeezed close to each other to huddle together at the far end of the car as Charlie’s friends climbed aboard.
This time Grim managed to keep one eye open so he could duck when they climbed onto the train. Once they were all sitting down, he shut them both again.
Charlie pressed himself to the window as the train chugged slowly into motion. Limehouse passed beneath them, and Wapping, under sheets of coal smoke. Then Charlie was beyond the little area of his hard-earned knowledge of the streets of London, and everything was a maze.
Church bells tolled and brass angels sprang out of a bell tower’s windows to wave their trumpets as the train rumbled by. “St. Mary-le-Bow,” Bob said proudly, and jerked a thumb at herself. “Born within the sound.”
The sun came up as the train rolled by a great stone cupola. In the square below, Charlie saw idling steam-carriages throw open their doors to deposit their owners, who were beginning to straggle into morning services. “St. Paul’s,” Ollie told him, scratching behind his ears.
“Fleet Street,” Henry Clockswain pointed out. Charlie was amazed at the thickness of the crowd that began to clog the streets. Its many colors astonished him, too. What he had seen of Whitechapel had been dirty and gray, but London had its scarlets and whites and purples, too. “And the Embankment.”