“Let go!” I shouted, and kicked out at the native Martian. He kept his eyes turned away as he shook us. My neck creaked and for a moment my vision went dark.
With his thin, stretched limbs, the native Martian should have been frail and weak, but this man was far stronger than me. He heaved us out of the bushes, then dumped us into the clearing. Putty’s elbow caught me on the ear as she fell on top of me. My face thumped into the ground. I saw grass and dark shadows, and the legs of the Martian’s frog-faced companion coming toward us.
I rolled away, but Frog-face was already on me. He kicked me, and I collapsed again, losing my breath. Through streaming eyes, I peered up at our captors. They were standing over us, just out of reach, so I couldn’t even kick at them.
“You know what I think?” the Martian said, still not looking directly at us. “I think that with these two little fish, we can get whatever we want from that inventor. We don’t need to break in. He’ll just hand it over and say thank you.”
Frog-face shook his head. “That’s not our orders. We’re not to be seen.”
“We’ve been seen,” the Martian said. “Unless you want me to cut their throats, that’s not going to change.”
I put a protective arm around Putty. If they tried anything, I would throw myself at them. Putty was fast and slippery. If I gave her a couple of seconds, she’d be away. She’d raise the alarm.
“Don’t be stupid,” the other man said. “We’ll take them back with us. Get new orders. See what he wants to do with them. If he says he doesn’t want them, then you can cut their throats.” He turned to us. “Get up.”
He aimed a kick, and I scuttled back.
The Martian’s strong hand closed on the back of my neck again and pushed me across the clearing. From what I remembered about the fern-tree forest, we weren’t far from the road. I glanced at Putty. She was walking bent over, as though every step was painful. There was no way she could run like that.
She turned her face toward me and winked. I hid a grin. She was faking it. I should have realized. Now all we had to do was overpower our captors, knock them out, and get away.
Easy …
Frog-face walked a couple of steps ahead of us. His broad, muscular shoulders looked as solid as the Great Wall of Cyclopia. The Martian hadn’t loosened his grip an inch. He was marching us like a pair of geese on the way to market.
Up ahead, the fern-trees thinned, and I caught the first glimpse of the road and the hulking steam carriage beside it. We were out of time.
I stepped across a fallen branch and pretended to stumble. The Martian’s hand instinctively tightened as I fell, and my momentum dragged him forward a pace. He lost his balance, and I kicked out, slamming my bare foot into his knee. I heard a crack, and the man shouted in pain. His hands let go. Putty slipped free, and I threw myself at Frog-face.
I caught the back of his shirt and let my weight drag him down.
With a roar, the Martian was on me, gripping me by the arm and pulling me up. His hand came toward me in an open-handed slap. I jerked away, but the blow still snapped my head back. I squinted through the tears to make sure Putty had gotten away.
She hadn’t. She was standing behind us, a branch in her hands. As I staggered away, she cracked it against the back of the Martian’s head. He collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
“No!” I shouted. “Get away!”
She shook her head and stepped toward Frog-face, her branch coming up and around again. This time, she didn’t have surprise on her side. The man caught the branch in his left hand. He curled his right hand into a fist and jabbed at Putty’s face.
My legs felt like they were made of paper, and my knees didn’t want to hold me up. I half lunged, half fell in front of Putty. Frog-face’s fist caught me on my shoulder. He leaped over me, right for Putty.
I grabbed his legs and hung on. He crashed down. His knees thumped into my chest. Air shot from my lungs. I couldn’t see. My arms loosened even as I tried to hold on.
Then there was a sharp crack, and something fell across me.
Everything swirled into darkness. I subsided on the grass.
* * *
I awoke to find someone patting my face. In fact, they were patting it quite hard. More like slapping it.
“Come on, Edward! Get up!”
I forced my eyes open. Putty stood above me, holding her branch in one hand while bringing the other up to slap me again.
“All right, all right,” I mumbled. My whole body was battered, bruised, and throbbing.
Both men were lying knocked out on the ground. Putty must have hit Frog-face across the back of his head while I was hanging on to his legs.
“Should I tie them up?” Putty said. “I don’t have any rope, but we could use their clothes.”
I struggled up. I felt like a landfish that had been trampled by a pack of hungry buffalo-wolves.
“No,” I said. “They might wake up. Let’s just get out of here.”
Putty put her shoulder under my arm to help me upright.
“You’re not very good at fighting, are you?” she said. “You were lucky I was there.”
I glared at her, and she grinned back.
After a few minutes, the house came into sight through the drooping fern-trees. Lights glowed from the dining room and filtered faintly through the conservatory from the drawing room beyond, but otherwise the house was in darkness.
“At least we know one thing,” Putty said.
I stared at her through exhausted eyes. “Huh?” I said, showing my usual instinctive grasp of what Putty was talking about.
“We know where those men were from.”
“We do?”
“Honestly, Edward. Don’t you listen?”
I frowned and tried to pull my battered brain cells together.
“Their accents,” Putty said. “They were both from Lunae Planum. Anyone could have told.”
Anyone except me, it appeared. The Lunae Planum was an enormous desert far to the north, made up mostly of red rocks and sand. It would have been stunningly boring if it hadn’t been for the river valley that cut through its heart.
Not that river valleys were particularly exciting in general. I mean, you have a river, and a valley, and, well, there’s only so much of that kind of thing you can be expected to take.
But this one was different. The river had once been one of the centers of Ancient Martian civilization. It was lined with ancient, ruined temples, and in the desert around it were the dragon tombs. When Sir Stanley Robinson, the British explorer, had first discovered the river in 1648, he had named it the Martian Nile. But as it turned out, there was a lot more to the Martian Nile than a bunch of old ruins. The dragon tombs were stuffed full of incredible inventions and devices that had been preserved through the centuries by the dry, hot desert air. Nobody on Earth had ever dreamed of such technology. It had changed everything.
Even when the Ancient Martian Empire disappeared, the native Martian people had remained, in small towns and villages beside the ruins. I supposed there must be an accent native to the area, but I had never thought about it.
“How do you know what a Lunae Planum accent sounds like?” I said.
“Really, Edward,” Putty said, managing to look superior even though she was shorter than me and wearing a sodden, grass-stained nightgown. “The foreman of Mama’s workers is from Lunae Planum. Didn’t you notice how similar they sounded to him?”
I wasn’t sure I had ever heard the man speak, and I couldn’t have pointed him out if you’d asked me to.
“Mama told you not to bother the workers,” I said as we approached the house.
“I didn’t! I just overheard. That’s all.”
“Well, don’t overhear again. They’ve got work to do.” I sighed. “You know we’re going to have to tell Papa?”
Putty perked up. “I could do it, if you like. I’ve had lots of practice at waking people up. It’s one of my specialties.”
“Actu
ally,” I said, “I’ve got something else for you to do.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Because I’ve been thinking and I figured something out.”
Her eyes widened. “You have?”
“Yes. I figured out that you took my Thrilling Martian Tales. Now you’re going to get it and give it back.”
Putty’s jaw dropped. “But I haven’t even read it yet!”
“Exactly. I want it back before you spoil it for me.”
We slipped in through the conservatory door, locking it firmly behind us, and doused the gas lamps in the drawing room.
I was about to turn to the stairs when a faint glow down the corridor caught my eye. Maybe it was the automatic servants still cleaning. Except it didn’t look like candlelight, and it was coming from Papa’s laboratory. I touched Putty’s arm and stilled her.
“Wait here,” I whispered.
She followed me as I made my way down the corridor.
What if those men hadn’t been alone? What if while we’d been chasing them through the forest, their accomplices had been continuing their work? They could be in there right now.
The heavy blood-oak door was fastened with four solid padlocks. The first had been levered free by brute force, but the other three were unlocked and hanging loose.
Maybe it was Papa. If he’d heard the noise, the first thing he would have done was check on his water abacus.
I eased the door open and crept down the stairs. Halfway down, where the stairs switched back, I crouched to peer into Papa’s workshop.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have seen pictures of mechanicians’ workshops. All right, you probably won’t have had a clue what you were looking at. Most mechanicians’ workshops looked like something just exploded. They’re full of weird brass contraptions, glass funnels, pipes, gauges, and steam engines perched on benches or standing against walls. I mean, you know they’re supposed to be something, but for all you know, all those cogs, tubes, levers, chains, and springs might just be a device for hanging up socks. Or they might be a machine to shoot people at high speed down tunnels. Papa tried that one once, but only once. All I can say is, it’s lucky I managed to stop Putty having the first go.
But if you thought those workshops were confusing, you haven’t seen Papa’s.
At first glance, Papa’s workshop looked like what would be left if the workshops of half a dozen other mechanicians had been dropped into a single room and stirred madly. There were bits of machinery everywhere. There were contraptions held together by wire and set into polished mahogany, as well as discarded dials and pendulums, glass tubes bent in strange angles, shaped brass, cast-iron shafts, valves, and heaps of the finest cogs, springs, gears, and hinges.
Permeating it all was the bitter smell of hot oil and raw metal.
If you looked more closely, though, you’d realize that all those bits were actually part of dozens of incomprehensible devices that were just waiting for steam or spring power to set them whizzing into motion.
At the back of the workshop stood Papa’s pride, the water abacus.
I didn’t understand exactly how the water abacus worked. Much to Papa’s disappointment, me and machines never really understood each other, but I’d picked up a little. It all started with a tank full of water that was pumped down through a series of pipes. These pipes were joined to all sorts of valves, switches, and miniature reservoirs. When Papa set the dials at the top, the water squirted through different pipes at different pressures. The switches would switch, changing the direction the water flowed, things would gurgle, water would rise and fall, and somehow, from all of this, the answer to some calculation would emerge.
Yeah, I didn’t understand how, either.
Papa had invented the water abacus two years ago, and ever since, he had been hard at work, automating the input of the calculations and speeding up the flow of water, to increase the number of calculations that could be performed each second.
The gas lamps in the workshop were lit. Water flowed from the tank, through the pipes. And instead of Papa standing before the water abacus, there was Cousin Freddie.
“What on Mars are you doing?” I demanded, stomping down the last of the stairs, into the workshop.
Cousin Freddie jumped. “Ah-ha-ha. Cousin Edward. And Cousin Parthenia. Well, you see, there’s a funny story there.” He looked around guiltily. “You see, I was sleeping upstairs and having this rather peculiar dream about … well … I’d best not say what it was about, when I awoke and heard noises downstairs. So I thought I’d better come down and have a look at what was going on.” He scratched his nose. “Didn’t want to miss breakfast, and you do all have it so unfashionably early on Mars. A man who starts the day without a kipper is a man who will feel like a smoked fish until bedtime! So says Plato, or, er, someone. Anyway, when I got down, it was dark, and the automatic servants were all busy cleaning—dashed funny time to be doing it, if you ask me…”
“Freddie…” I warned.
“Yes. Right. Right. Well, the door to your papa’s workshop was open. ‘Funny thing,’ I thought. ‘I wonder if old Uncle Hugo is still up,’ and seeing as I was awake, I thought I’d see if he wanted company. Anyway, when I got down here, it was quite empty and this confounded machine was gurgling away. I’ve been trying to get it to stop ever since.”
“Oh, honestly,” Putty said, pushing past me. “It really is quite easy, Cousin Freddie.”
“Wait!” I said, but as always, Putty ignored me. She nipped around the piles of half-finished inventions and tugged a lever at the side of the water abacus. With a last gurgle, it shut down and the dials clicked back into place.
“Ah. Good gracious,” Freddie said. “Well, well.”
I swore silently. Now we would never know what the water abacus had been set to do, and that was something I very much wanted to find out. Because I knew as sure as I knew my own name that the intruders hadn’t opened the door to Papa’s workshop.
Freddie had opened it. Freddie had set the machine running. And one way or another, I was going to find out why.
5
The Great Sir Titus Dane
It took me nearly half an hour to wake Papa and explain what had happened. By the time he’d stopped patting me on the head and vaguely calling me a “good fellow” and I’d persuaded him to send an automatic servant with a message to the local magistrate, I could have sworn the first glow of morning was seeping into the sky. I hadn’t even had the chance to get my Thrilling Martian Tales back off Putty. I went to bed anyway. It didn’t last long.
Before I realized it, Mama was calling through my door. “Edward! Where are you, child? It’s almost dawn!”
“But not quite,” I mumbled into my pillow.
If I could have asked for one thing above all else, it would have been an extra hour or two of sleep to make up for what I’d lost. Well, that and another uninterrupted hour in bed with my copy of Thrilling Martian Tales, finally, finally finding out what had happened to poor old Captain Masters since I’d left him hanging there on the mountainside.
And a cup of really strong tea.
Some hope.
Today was Mama’s garden party. It might not start until midday, but Mama wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Even with hired laborers and the automatic servants hard at work, no one was staying in bed.
During the night, my muscles had seized up. I felt my face with my fingertips. My jaw was sore and so was one of my cheeks, but I couldn’t feel any swelling. With luck, the bruises wouldn’t show. I rolled out of bed with a whimper and pulled on my clothes. The worst part was my ribs. They were tender to the touch, and when I fastened my waistcoat, I had to grit my teeth against the pain.
I wiped my face with a wet flannel, tried to untangle my hair, then gave up.
The automatic servants were already preparing breakfast and carrying trays of food out to the lawn when I got downstairs. Maybe it was just me, but I thought the sun looked tired this morning.
“Edward!”
Papa was approaching from the back of the house, his face creased in worry. He didn’t look like he’d slept since I’d woken him. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him about the intruders after all.
“What if they come back?” He ran his hands through his thick gray hair. “They are after my water abacus. I knew this would happen!”
“That’s why you called for the magistrate,” I said. “I’m sure he’s sending guards.”
It had been the only way to protect the family. Putty and I wouldn’t be so lucky against the intruders again.
“Guards? Yes, of course. But there’s something even more important.”
“There is?” I eyed him suspiciously. This wasn’t good.
“We shall have to cancel the garden party.”
I blinked. That bang on the head last night must have scrambled my brains, because I was sure he’d said we should cancel the party. I peered at him. “Did you say cancel it?”
He nodded. “We can’t possibly allow strangers on the grounds. Not now.”
“Cancel it,” I said again. Mama had been planning it all year. She had almost bankrupted us with it. Olivia had been in tears over the household accounts, trying to make it all add up.
Papa looked shifty. “Yes. So, perhaps you’d be good enough to inform your mother, while I, er, inspect the workshop.” He backed away. “There’s a good lad.”
I stared after him. Break the news to Mama? Did he think I was mad?
Perhaps I could persuade Putty to tell her for me.
I had just started up the stairs to look for Putty when the door knocker sounded, twice. The sound echoed through the house. I froze with my foot in the air. On the landing above, the noise of Mama and my sisters abruptly ceased. The sun had hardly risen, and someone was knocking on the front door. No respectable visitor would dream of calling this early.
The ro-butler trundled past me.
Secrets of the Dragon Tomb Page 4