by Ed Greenwood
“I … died,” her unexpected visitor told her flatly. The man who had once been a young chimney sweep who’d made love to a much younger her on the very roofs of this grand house. While her husband snored unsuspectingly several rooms below. “Came because … lonely. Cannot go back to my Nell like this. Have needs. Needs you understand, Amelia.”
“Mister Roper! Surely you can’t—”
“Roper no longer. Steelforce now. Since I … came back.”
“And—and how did that happen, exactly? The manner of your coming back, I mean,” she asked hurriedly. She was frightened of this brute, with his burning eyes and his lurching manner. And yet … and yet … on the roof, in the moonlight. The first man who’d ever loved her, fierce and yet tender. And so endowed that—that—
That the handful of men she’d known since then had been but poor echoes.
She swallowed at the memory, and knew sadness. It had been so long since she’d known intimacy, and that last time—an admiral, whose entire dumpy, hairy body had reeked of cigars—had been a decided mistake.
A mistake she ached to rectify.
Yet … and yet …
His hand was moving across her tabletop. Walking on its fingertips like a purposeful spider. She shivered, despite herself.
Toward her, but not directly. Past the toast rack, past the jams and jellies in their fluted glass bowls cupped in silver … and stopping at the honey. To tap it, meaningfully. “Get you ready,” the dead man across the table said.
Good God!
She sat back, unable to disguise her dismay. And unable to quell a certain stirring within her, a rising excitement …
She shot up out of her chair, discarding her book with a slam, and announced, “This is all so sudden. I am not in the habit—”
“Ah,” her visitor rumbled, “but you were.”
Lady Amelia Rathercoats opened her mouth to say something severe, and noticed the door open a trifle. Enough to show her a questioning eye—and the gleaming maw of the long barrel just beneath it. She shook her head, then lifted her chin sharply to order Jenkins to withdraw.
Her mess, so hers to clean up.
The door closed again.
“I am afraid, sir,” she announced, with a calmness she didn’t feel, “that ‘were’ is the word of most capital importance. My affections were for Mister Roper, and a long while ago. A Mister Steelforce, striding unexpectedly into my today, is a different kettle of fish entirely. A new suitor, who must woo me and hope to win me, the dance between us giving us both time to foster a deepening affection for each other—or not. And I tell you plainly, sir, without that affection, no amount of force—nor all the honey in the world—shall win you willing intimacy. You may overbear and possess, but you shall not receive warmth or a welcome.”
Steelforce stood stiffly, the chair clattering to the floor behind him. “Then let my wooing begin.”
Lady Rathercoats backed hastily away, out from the table and all of its expensive glass and silver, out into the open sweep of the room where only fine Persian carpets were at risk.
And her person.
“I have never stopped thinking of you,” her visitor said. And took a step forward.
“Even in my grave, I thought of you.”
That fascinated her. In his grave?
Cold, dark, the mold … rats? Thinking of her?
“Your gentleness,” Steelforce growled. “Even when you bit me. Your … hunger.”
Lady Rathercoats reeled, remembering.
“Your teats,” the man rumbled. Opening his arms, almost beseechingly.
She backed away, but found herself adjusting an errant lock of hair.
Behind them, the door opened a crack again. Faithful Jenkins.
“I have missed you so,” Steelforce grated.
Hunh. One of the lines the writer of her current torrid book was overfond of and had his characters utter every twenty pages or so.
You’ll have to do better than that, dead man.
Or will you?
Would every bullet the long barrel could fire stop a dead man?
Or…?
“Your nipples,” the tall dark man hissed, taking one long stride toward her, “await me.”
“Mister Steelforce!” Lady Rathercoats exclaimed, scandalized. “I cannot believe what I just heard you say! And in my own home, too! How dare you?”
Bentley Steelforce paused for a moment, regarding her in flat-eyed silence. “Pray pardon,” he said slowly. “No offense is meant.”
After another moment, he added, “You mention our location. Hmm. It is evident that my offer is unwelcome, or my timing at fault. Perhaps both.”
He fell silent again, standing as still as a sentry.
Lady Amelia Rathercoats regarded him doubtfully for a moment. His gaze, now directed past her shoulder, was as unchanging—unblinking—as the eyes of the nursery dolls of her youth. Sudden fear rose in her, and she plucked up her skirts and hurried away, daring to look back only once, as she passed out through the still-open door.
Steelforce was still standing just where he’d stopped, as immobile as the great casement clock behind him.
* * *
Whipsnade scraped the last of the wax away with infinite care and added it to the softened blob. A little more of the candle flame, a deft lift of the combined wax on the point of the knife that never left this room, drop it back onto the message just so, and apply the signet ring no one knew he had. And small wonder; he’d robbed a royal tomb to get it. Done. He held the resealed message up in the best light and studied it critically. Yes, done. Uncle would never know.
He turned, set the message carefully on the velvet-covered pedestal, then moved like a hurrying wind. Extinguishing the candle, hiding away signet and the copy he’d made of the message behind the moldings only he knew how to remove, and setting all else to rights. Snuff the lamp, undo the six bolts and three locks, pluck up the message, and out and relock, then away and none the wiser.
Uncle was expecting this report, a brief coded missive from an Order member working with that rarest of treasures: a double agent among the Investigators Royal. It had taken Whipsnade considerable time to figure out the code, but he’d mastered it last fall, and so now knew what the Lady Rose Harminster was up to at Foxden and that Tempest was alive but injured and was now working closely with her. Tempest was aware of what Marlshrike was attempting—and was keeping the Prince Royal fully informed, too.
There was an art to keeping royalty and the nobility fully informed. That is, so they felt they knew everything and never suspected how much you were keeping from them.
After all, if what they knew wasn’t carefully controlled, how could they make the right decisions?
* * *
Norbert Marlshrike was sitting in his littered office, thinking hard. Pondering, the older generation would have called it.
By which they meant “thinking about possibilities, unlikely wishes, and fancies.” Marlshrike liked pondering such things. Making some of them real was what he lived for, was the only truly exciting thing in life.
Unfortunately, all too much of his time was spent pondering what he needed to live on, not for. Everything was so expensive, and bills crowded upon bills until one was soon drowning in them, if one didn’t do something drastic.
The tinkerer flipped open one of the little brass-bound boxes that was serving as a paperweight on his desk, atop an untidy stack of—yes—bills. Out sprang a severed human hand, small-fingered and soft, the hand of a young child. It scampered nimbly across the top of his desk like a scuttling spider bent on escape and made for the floor, so Marlshrike leaned over and opened a second, larger box.
“Catch,” he ordered the larger, hairy-backed hand that rose slowly out of this second container, and he pointed at the first hand. Obediently the second hand set off after the first, bounding like a small dog.
“Luckily,” Marlshrike murmured, watching them chase each other around the room and idly wondering if h
e should release more of his growing collection of animated hands to join in the fun, “I am growing increasingly experienced—accomplished, if I may be so bold—at doing something drastic.”
This current business of controlling assassins was exciting. So much power might be his, if he could keep one assassin ahead of what the Order knew he had at any given time. And for the dullest jobs, a controlled man could finally solve for him the inability of being in two places at once.
Yet even this most important matter was sidelining his pet projects. Using etheric telegraphy to operate switches from afar and detonate bombs, learning to read reflected etheric waves to locate sunken ships and other undersea features and eventually concentrations of metallic ore underground—and perhaps even figuring out how to use etheric transmissions to make a specific person’s blood boil or heart burst from afar while leaving others standing with him entirely unharmed.
He set aside all of these interests for the moment to once again take up his perennially most pressing need: to get more money, to pay his bills.
He needed to find someone wealthy but paranoid enough to keep most of their coins at home—then murder that person and take them.
Preferably tonight.
* * *
A handbell clanged with more cacophony than pleasant musicality.
“Bread’s here, ma’am!” came the cheerful call, ere the bell was rung again.
Lady Roodcannon let a pained expression cross her face for just the instant it took to stride to the window and throw it up.
“The back door is open,” she called down flatly, then closed the window again and returned to her chair, her book, and her goblet. A lamp shone over both of her shoulders, illuminating beautiful curtains that covered the wall behind them: cloth of gold and crimson leaping lions, woven in the farthest eastern reaches of the Rajahirate Empire.
A few minutes passed before she heard him coming up the stairs. Deliberately making more noise than necessary, as agreed upon. Then he rapped enthusiastically on her study door.
“Enter!” she commanded, cocking the oversize pistol that rested in a cradle on the table before her and sighting along it to make sure it was still aimed at the door.
It was the first thing Whipsnade saw as he let himself in and doffed the flat cap. He winced. “Terrible mess that might make, if it went off.”
“I am not unused to making terrible messes,” Lady Roodcannon observed darkly. Then she looked him up and down and frowned. “What a perfectly frightful disguise!”
Whipsnade shrugged.
“I’m quite serious,” she said sharply. “Arriving at my London abode as a baker’s assistant, delivering fresh bread and rolls in the baker’s cart? What precautions did you take, to ensure you weren’t followed?”
Whipsnade carefully refrained from sighing and replied, “The real baker’s assistant overcome where there’ll be no witnesses, then strangled and tossed in the Thames. The cart is soon to follow—after the harness is worn through with files rather than being cut, and the still-harnessed horses set free.”
“This must be important, for you to go to such trouble,” Lady Roodcannon said dryly. “So … what is it?”
He stepped forward and laid the copy he’d made of the report to Uncle on the table beside her cradled gun, then swiftly stepped back to stand by the door—just to one side of the pistol’s line of fire.
Lady Roodcannon half-smiled at that. When she took up the report and glanced at it, her smile went away but she bent forward in keen interest.
She looked up from it and said crisply, “You have done me a great service. Please speedily pass on to me anything else of this nature that may come within your reach.”
“Of course,” Whipsnade agreed, without the slightest hesitation.
“I’ll see your loyalty properly rewarded. Now go, swiftly; it wouldn’t do to let anyone notice their bread is getting cold.”
“Indeed,” Whipsnade agreed, and they gave each other real smiles, in the instant before the door closed behind him again.
He went down the stairs as noisily as he’d come up and slammed the outside door. Grimstone promptly emerged from behind the lion-adorned curtains, waiting, a loaded gun in his hand, and went to the window to make sure Whipsnade had departed.
“Merton will have been watching to make sure he left nothing behind, took nothing, and did us no deviltry, on his way up or down,” he said, “but … I don’t trust that man.”
“Grimstone,” Lady Roodcannon said quietly from her chair, “only fools trust anyone. I don’t even trust myself.”
Something in her tone made Grimstone turn around, frowning—only to find the lady he served was on her feet and rushing toward him.
She flung herself upon him, tearing at his clothing and kissing him fervently.
“As you can see,” she gasped into his ear, before nipping it with her teeth and proceeding with her clawing off of his clothes.
Recovering from utter astonishment, Grimstone started to respond in kind.
OCTEMBER 12
Rose winced as the loud hammering arose again, loud and insistent. It was very early in the morning. A rain-drenched morning, at that.
Chief Inspector Standish, Assistant Commissioner Drake, and a host of beagles had descended on Foxden in the wake of the attack and spent the night patrolling as if they were zealous sentries of an army encamped in enemy territory. Now, with dawn barely upon this misty corner of England, the front doors were being repaired.
Last night Straker—she’d best get used to everyone calling him Lord Tempest, she decided—and the Prince Royal had both been unyielding stones that the blustering fury of the Assistant Commissioner had crashed and broken upon repeatedly yet hadn’t managed to mar or move. Both had dismissed all criticisms of the defense of Foxden and refused to hear of the Lord Lion being moved to one of the larger castles and, there, defended by rings upon rings of airships, big guns, and soldiery.
“If we decide to behave as if we’re at war,” the Prince pointed out, “then suspicions rise everywhere, every citizen looks at every passerby differently, and there will inevitably be blunders, honest mistakes that will leave someone hurt or shot dead, someone else detained and plunged into fear and with their day’s work lost…” He shook his head, as if seeing calamities, and added, “Every decision we make affects the citizenry, high and low. We owe it to them to make the right decision, as often as we can.”
“But the Ancient Order of Tentacles—”
“Wants me dead, yes. They don’t care what their deeds do to citizens, but I do. I must, or I am no better than they are, and no more worthy to have my hand on the tiller of the Empire.”
Drake coughed. “Uh, Your Highness, that tiller is under your hand because you’re the royal heir, born to helm the Empire.”
“Yes, and I’ve been raised and trained to think as I steer, to have a care for all, highborn and low. I cannot stop doing that now—and I can’t hope to do it well if I hide behind castle walls and never even see any citizens who aren’t wearing uniforms and serving me directly. What kind of a leader does that?”
“The usual kind,” Tempest muttered under his breath, but he took care to say it quietly enough that no one but Rose heard it—and his words only reached her ears because she was leaning past his head, trying to peer around him to see the positions of the pieces on the chessboard in front of the Prince, as she wondered whether the Lord Lion was white or Lil was playing that side.
“Come,” Tempest told her then, leading the way through a door Rose hadn’t been through before and into … a map room. Hardcastle hastened to catch up with them.
Ignoring a gorgeous map laid out on a central table and a vast open rack that wouldn’t have been out of place in a wine cellar but that held not bottles but leather cylinders that undoubtedly contained rolled-up maps or nautical charts, Tempest went straight to a small corner shelf, reached down a rolled map obviously familiar to him, and passed on through yet another door.
It took them into a splendidly furnished but deserted parlor, dominated by emerald green walls and matching carpet. Tempest strode straight across it, plucking a silver bowl full of the newly fashionable sugar cubes from its central table as he went.
On through another door, into a crimson-walled study dominated by huge wingbacked leather chairs. The lord collapsed into one and told Hardcastle, “Drag that table over here, and two more chairs. We need to try to find Marlshrike’s infernal machine.”
No sooner was the table in front of him than Tempest unrolled the map, pinned one of its far corners down with the purloined sugar bowl, and waved at Rose to find objects—an ashtray here, a silver-mounted rack of quill pens there—to anchor the other corners.
“Behold Foxden,” he announced, placing a long forefinger on a small cluster of buildings. Hardcastle and Rose bent over the map with the same eager delight; it was magnificent. “One of the Prince’s best maps of Foxden and the vicinity,” the nobleman added. It was one of the very expensive “verified by airship” maps, like the two on public display at Greenwich.
Tempest bent over it and scooped up a generous handful of sugar cubes. He put one down on Foxden and another on the Barnstaple family folly. “Let us try to mark every sighting of the Assassin we know of on this map, a cube on each one as precisely as we can place it, to see if this gives us any indication as to the most likely whereabouts of Marlshrike’s etheric telegraph machine.”
“Here,” Hardcastle said immediately, putting a finger down on the map. “And here.”
Cubes were placed, and Tempest frowned and added a third far more slowly and tentatively.
“I miss Iolanthe,” Tempest muttered as they peered at the maps. “She could smell when a peer was hiding something or was more worried than his wont. Or her wont.”
“The wheels turn, and the days pass…” Hardcastle murmured.
“And the Empire endures,” Rose added the next line of that lyric.
Tempest gave her a twisted grin. “Well,” he said, “with a bit of help, perhaps.”