by Dave Butler
“How did you survive?” Charlie shouted into the wind.
“The regimental dragons, you mean?” Ollie asked. “Easy, mate. I turned into the tiniest snake in the world. You know what that is?”
“No!” Charlie shouted.
“It’s the Leptotyphlops carlae. Read that in the Almanack. Thick as a bit of noodle, about the size of a guinea. And I became that tiny thing and just fell.”
“What if one of the dragons had noticed you and eaten you?”
“I reckon even if they’d only hit me with the flap of a wing, I’d have been dead. But they didn’t, and just before I hit the water I turned into a sea snake. Swam away.”
“That doesn’t sound all that easy,” Charlie said.
“It wasn’t, mate. It left me knackered and aching. But I’m proud I did it, and that makes it feel easy after the fact. Know what I mean? Now where am I going?”
“Hampstead Heath!” Grim and Charlie shouted at the same time.
“The new pumping station,” Charlie said.
“They’re setting fires on purpose,” Grim said. “Water from the new pumping station will be pumped by fire bobbies and turn into steam, all over the city.”
“If they put that powder in the pumping-station water,” Charlie added, “people all over London will breathe it in, in the steam.”
“And if they don’t breathe it in today, they’ll drink it eventually,” Grim concluded.
“Not if we can help it!” Charlie cried.
Ollie soared northward, over long rooftops, Sky Trestle tracks, and twisting lanes. Ahead, Charlie saw green. Wind slapped Charlie’s hair and face, and to his right the clouds began to scatter, letting in brilliant shafts of yellow sunlight.
“Uh-oh,” Ollie rumbled.
“What?” Charlie looked.
Ahead of them, between Ollie and the wooded green hill that was Hampstead Heath, he now saw four dragons. They had large guns mounted on their backs, and they all flew toward Charlie and his friends.
Ollie flew faster, and straight toward the dragons.
“This is insane!” Charlie cried.
“I’m not looking!” Grim roared, burying his face in the hair to which he clung.
“Get in close,” Gnat cried, brandishing the Hound’s tooth, “and I’ll board one of them!”
“They can’t fire those cannons straight forward,” Ollie bellowed. “Or anything north of ten o’ clock or two, if you get my meaning. Stops ’em from blowing off their own heads, but what it means is they are best at shooting at targets on their flanks. Like a broadside from the old sailing ships, you know?”
“Don’t they also spit fire?” Charlie asked.
“Well, yeah,” Ollie admitted. “But I’m a dragon, mate. How’s that gonna hurt me?”
“I am not a dragon!” Charlie yelled.
“Good point,” Ollie agreed. “You should probably stay down.”
Charlie and his friends ducked behind Ollie’s dragon shoulders just as the lances of flame reached them. Ollie laughed.
Beneath and ahead, Charlie saw where the city abruptly ended and the green of Hampstead Heath began. He saw lines of carriages and people walking on the grass, and an enormous tank like an upside-down teacup. At a platform at one edge of the tank sat a row of dignitaries behind a podium, and a man in bottle green stepping forward to take the lectern. William T. Bowen, the Welsh speculator and member of the Iron Cog who had kidnapped the dwarf child Aldrix? On top of the teacup-shaped tank, he saw a tall man in a long black cape and, beside him, a much shorter person.
The Sinister Man, Gaston St. Jacques. And perhaps a kobold?
He also saw, left and right and beneath him, fires.
“We’ll pass them, though,” Charlie yelled. “Then what’s to stop them from shooting us from behind?”
Ollie laughed, a sound like thunder. “Bob!”
Charlie raised his head to look. At some unimaginably high altitude, he saw a tiny dot. The dot was a dark shadow, an object blotting out the bright sky, but it was rapidly growing in size as it fell. It kept its circular shape, and then Charlie realized what he was seeing.
It was the Pushpaka vimāna. It was ambushing the army’s dragons by swooping down on them from directly above.
“Time to dive.” Ollie dropped just before reaching the line of oncoming dragons. He passed beneath them, still racing toward the hill and the platform and the tank, and Charlie leaned away from Ollie’s body to watch. The attacking dragons angled up, their gunners swiveled their weapons around, the long guns pointed at Ollie—
ZOTTT-T-T-T-t-t-t-t!
Four bolts of lightning slammed into the four dragons. This was no flash, illuminating the sky and then disappearing, but a sustained burning. The dragons twitched and shuddered and then began to lose altitude, arcing away from Ollie and his riders and down toward London.
“Bob!” Charlie cried.
The Pushpaka vimāna spun past Ollie, curved around, and headed north with him toward Hampstead Heath. It moved like nothing Charlie had ever seen, spinning constantly and turning tight corners with ease.
Charlie watched over his shoulder. Two of the dragons crashed into the Thames. The third hit a stone bridge, and the fourth slammed against the side of a large building that looked like a factory.
The vimāna flew just below Ollie. Bob stood at the controls with a broad grin on her face; she wore airman’s goggles but no bomber cap, and her long brown hair flew out behind her like a flag, whipping sideways each time Ollie flapped his wings.
Bob shouted something, but the wind snatched away her words. Then she pointed, and Charlie saw additional regimental dragons rising up into the air on the other side of the hill. Bob shifted her gaze to the dragons, and the Pushpaka vimāna leaped forward. It looked, improbably, like a gigantic golden birthday cake, glittering in the sun as it flew about, hurling lightning bolts out of the spikes protruding from its sides.
“I’ve got to help Bob,” Ollie rumbled. “Where shall I set you down?”
“Grim!” Charlie yelled.
“I’m not opening my eyes!” he roared back.
“I need you to arrest William Bowen,” Charlie told him.
“In the name of the same committee that wants you arrested?” Grim asked.
“However you have to do it!” Charlie said. “Ollie—the platform first, and then the tank!”
When Ollie alighted without warning at one end of the stage, William Bowen leaped backward, surprised. The women and men in formal clothing sitting on the stand sprang to their feet and edged away.
The crowd—large, wildly varying, and London to its bones—oohed in wonder. They thought the dragon was part of the show.
Gnat dropped to the stage.
“Are we landed?” Grim asked. In answer, Ollie shrugged one massive shoulder forward and tossed him to the floor too.
Grim stood and stepped to a speaking tube that projected his voice to a loudspeaker. “Please, everyone remain calm. My name is Grim Grumblesson, I’m deputy chairman of the Committee for the Investigation of Anti-Human Crime, and, for starters, that man there is under arrest.”
Gnat leaped to the shoulders of the Welsh incorporator and grabbed him by the ears.
“Go, Charlie!” she cried.
“Ollie!” Charlie cried. “The tank!”
Ollie leaped into the air, carrying himself in a single leap above the water tank. At the height of the dome, Gaston St. Jacques and the shorter person with him worked at something that looked like a hatch with a wheel attached. Charlie saw now that the shorter person was Heinrich Zahnkrieger.
As Ollie glided down to the tank with opened wings, Charlie watched the scene on the stage unfold.
“Listen,” Grim continued. “You’ll have noticed there are fires breaking out in London.”
> Gnat dragged Bowen to the floor and stood on his neck, pinning him.
A short man with a blue top hat joined Grim at the podium and leaned forward into the speaking tube. “Good thing we’re about to open the new pumping station!”
The crowd cheered.
“No, Your Lordship,” Grim said, coughing to hide his feelings of awkwardness. “In fact, I’ve come with my associates to shut down the pumping station. We’ll have to fight the fires the old-fashioned way, I’m afraid. The important thing is that the fires were not started by anything called an Anti-Human League.”
“The important thing,” the man in the blue hat said, leaning in again and looking at Gnat and Bowen with a frown on his face, “is that we’ve built this new pumping station, and we’ll use it to put out the fires!”
“Sorry, Your Lordship.” Grim picked up the man in the blue hat by his jacket, lifted him entirely off his feet, and tossed him off the stage and into the crowd. “Run home!” he called to the crowd. “Fight any fire you find and put it out, but don’t use water, and don’t call the fire bobbies! Shovels and buckets, my friends, shovels and buckets!”
Ollie landed on the broad, flat top of the dome. The two mechanical boys and Jan Wijmoor slithered down, landing with a series of metallic booms. Above, Bob in the Pushpaka vimāna dodged dragon attacks and fired back with electric bolts. Charlie saw airships closing in on her too, with guns on their decks and rockets bolted onto their sides.
“Careful, Ollie,” Thomas said.
“Weather wizards,” Charlie said.
“Excuse me?” The dragon looked at Charlie blankly.
“The fires,” Charlie said. “The Royal Magical Society is great at changing the weather. If one of you can get away and get a message to the Royal Magical Society…maybe they can put out the fires with some hard rain.”
Ollie nodded his enormous dragon head and leaped into the sky.
From the very top of the tank, in the center, rose a wheel-shaped metal control. As Charlie and his friends advanced on the Sinister Man and Heinrich Zahnkrieger, St. Jacques finished turning the control wheel and then bent to lift up the hatch.
Zahnkrieger stood beside several large sacks.
Sacks that were together about the size of the white stone in the Marburg Library, the stone that had held the soul of Wilhelm Grimm, the stone out of which a key part of Charlie—his mind, his heart, and his soul—had been fashioned.
“Come on, Thomas!” Charlie cried, and he leaped forward.
Thomas raced with him, and for a moment Charlie felt glee, and a sense that victory and relief were finally within his grasp. Then Heinrich Zahnkrieger said something the Babel Card couldn’t make out—
and Charlie and Thomas both fell immobile to the steel under their feet.
“Ah, Charlie.” The Sinister Man removed a clasp knife from his pocket and unfolded it. “What a delight you are. From the beginning, you have been so predictable.” He slit the tops of the bags, and Charlie saw white sparkling stone inside.
Charlie felt as if he were seeing his own insides.
Lying on his back, Charlie was able to move his head, but nothing else. He watched the Pushpaka vimāna shudder as rockets exploded against its exterior. And what if one of those rockets struck the top of the so-called chariot, where Bob stood unprotected?
“Please!” Jan Wijmoor called. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”
The Sinister Man placed his foot against one of the bags and kicked it forward. Clouds of white rock dust escaped as it dropped, falling into the tank. “There, it is done.” Gaston St. Jacques pulled his long pistol from inside his cloak and pointed it at Wijmoor.
Heinrich Zahnkrieger chuckled and shifted from foot to foot. He couldn’t look at Jan Wijmoor, and looked down at the bags of white stone instead. “Perhaps we don’t have to kill him.”
“I have orders,” St. Jacques said. “I carry out my orders. Don’t you?”
Zahnkrieger grunted. “But look, just shoot the boys. They’re only machines, after all. We can let Wijmoor go.”
St. Jacques stepped back, circling around the open hatch. “The thing is, I have orders about you, too, Zahnkrieger.”
“No.” Zahnkrieger’s face showed shock.
“They warned me you might get softhearted,” the Sinister Man said. “You should have killed them all while you had the chance, in the Russian pit. Now stand over there with the other gnome.”
Jan Wijmoor rushed to Zahnkrieger’s side, but he yelled at the Frenchman, “You don’t have to do any of this!”
St. Jacques smiled, a grin as wide as a crocodile’s. “Some things I don’t do because I have to. Some things I do because I want to.” He pointed his pistol at the two kobolds and began to fire.
Jan Wijmoor jumped into the path of the bullets, and with a strangled cry he collapsed.
“No!” Heinrich Zahnkrieger cried. The kobold knelt beside his old mentor. “What have you done, St. Jacques? This was completely unnecessary!”
The Sinister Man kicked the rest of the sacks of ground stone down into the water, one at a time. Charlie watched his friends in the sky, who seemed to be slowly losing to the army’s airships and dragons, and retreating.
How long until the Royal Aeronautical Navy landed soldiers on top of the tank? Or until the army arrived?
Charlie would be arrested; he might be destroyed. It didn’t matter, anyway, since he’d failed to stop the Iron Cog. The stone was in the water now. Whatever Grim told people, the fire bobbies were out trying to extinguish fires. And if their hoses drew water through this pumping station, they would shortly be pumping contaminated water into the air all over the city.
It made Charlie much sadder to think that his failure also doomed Thomas to die.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Only Thomas heard him. “I can move three fingers,” his brother said. “It’s too late to stop the Iron Cog, but maybe I can drag myself over there and gouge out that man’s eyes.”
“Not worth it,” Charlie said. “They’d probably just replace them with mechanical eyes anyway.”
Smoke dirtied the horizon in all directions now. A fire had broken out in a street of row houses just a block from the edge of Hampstead Heath.
“You tried to kill me!” Heinrich stood and faced the Sinister Man.
“Yes.” The Frenchman was reloading his pistol. “But I get paid whether you live or die, so yes, I was a little indifferent as to whether I hit you or not. You’re not running away right now, so maybe you’re indifferent too.”
“Paid?” Heinrich Zahnkrieger looked paler than usually.
“Yes, paid!” St. Jacques finished reloading his gun and cackled. “Do you think I long for this better world that the Cog and its minions plan? Do you think I believe they can end poverty and sickness, and put smiles on all the little children’s faces? Perhaps I have a sick grandmother, and only the Iron Cog can heal her? No, my tiny little engineer, I have done what I did for you and your friends because I got paid to do it, and nothing more. For money I arranged the kidnapping of Joban Singh. For money I had the Hound and the machine soldiers built. For money I found a shaitan assassin to track and kill the mechanical boys!”
“Your shaitan failed!” Charlie yelled.
“And who fails now?” the Frenchman screamed back.
“You can’t treat me like this!” the kobold snapped. “You can’t treat my life so casually!”
Jan Wijmoor was dragging himself across the top of the tank. The Sinister Man and his accomplice didn’t notice, but Wijmoor was almost to Charlie and Thomas.
He left behind a trail of his own dark blood.
“I’m disappointed that you’re even surprised,” the Frenchman said. “The Iron Cog treats everyone like this, its own people and others. All folk and all individuals are to live
or die, to be fed or starved, according to the complete whim of the Cog and its plans. No individual matters, not Joban Singh, not Queen Victoria, not you. It’s a beautiful plan, precisely because it’s so consistently ruthless! Shall I kill you or not?”
“I’ll see you don’t get paid at all,” Heinrich snarled.
The Frenchman shook his head slowly. “Those were the stupidest words you have ever spoken.” He raised the pistol—
Heinrich muttered—
Click!
The Sinister Man’s gun didn’t fire. He tried again, and again, grimacing with anger.
Click! Click! Click!
Nothing.
The row-house fire had arrived at the edge of the trees.
Wijmoor reached Charlie. Hands trembling, he popped open Charlie’s back and reached inside.
Charlie found he could move.
With an abrupt roar, the Frenchman charged Heinrich Zahnkrieger. He raised his pistol over his head as if it were a club and he intended to beat the kobold to death with it.
Charlie sprang to his feet, and leaped.
He flew through the air headfirst and tackled the Frenchman. They rolled across the steel of the tank, banging elbows and knees on the metal in a clattering racket.
Wijmoor began dragging himself slowly toward Thomas.
Charlie stopped his sideways roll by throwing out a leg, which left him sitting on the Sinister Man’s chest. He grabbed the man’s arms and thumped him in the nose with his forehead. “It’s too late to stop your plan, but I can see to it you go to prison for a long time!”
Gaston St. Jacques laughed. “How, you idiot, since it’s too late to stop the plan?”
“It’s not too late!” Heinrich Zahnkrieger cried.
The kobold who had once been Raj Pondicherry’s business partner began muttering. As he spoke, he took long, deliberate steps toward the control wheel and the open hatch at the top of the tank.
“No, Herr Doktor!” Jan Wijmoor reached out a bloody hand, begging. “No, Heinrich!” Zahnkrieger ignored the other kobold, and his chant grew louder.
“Let him do it!” Thomas shouted.