With one hand, Shaka lifted Diamond Jubal from his lap, turned him to look deeply into his eyes, and with his huge fingertips, clapped Jubal’s hands together.
~*~*~*~*~
All conversation had died away early in the slog down the tunnel of the Tyburn. Every turning raised hopes and expectations for a glimpse of light ahead, but again and again, it was a disappointment—each turn revealed only more inky black tunnel, stretching away far beyond the light of their accompanying Friend.
At one such turning, Clemmie, leading the procession and overwhelmed by the fatigue of the long day, dropped to a seat on a brick curb. Pauline and Snug stopped beside her.
“Is there no end to this tunnel?” she complained. “It seems like we’ve been walking for hours.”
Pauline bent close and, taking her by the elbow, whispered urgently into her ear, “We mustn’t stop. We’re being followed.”
Alarmed, Clemmie looked to Snug for confirmation. He nodded, his eyes wide in the near-darkness. Cobweb chirped her affirmation.
“Who is following us?”
“The Friends call him ‘The Very, Very Bad One,’ ” Snug whispered. “A mech. One of Malieux’s.”
“The Ripper!” Pauline whispered. “Come on, Clemmie. We need to hurry. Don’t let on that we know he’s there.”
Terror caught at Clemmie’s voice. “The Ripper? How did he find us? Why is he hanging back?”
“Probably for fear of what weapons we may carry.” Pauline fingered the long, heavy steel spanner she had been carrying in her belt since the workshop. “And he doesn’t know how close he can get before we hear his clockwork.”
Clemmie jumped to her feet and bolted down the tunnel after the Friend whose flicker beckoned in the darkness, Pauline and Snug hurrying close on her heels. She gave a little cry of delight and relief when, at the very next turning, there was a welcome glimmer of light far ahead—the running lamps of a barge far out on the Thames. She surged into a trot through the shallowing muck. The firefly Friend hurried along with her. Startled, Pauline matched her pace. Snug, with a great clatter, tried to keep up, but fell a little further behind with each of Clemmie’s long strides.
When Pauline realized with a start that she could no longer hear his footsteps, she skidded to a halt and spun about, facing back into total darkness. “Snug? Snug, answer me!”
No sound.
She slid her spanner from her belt. Never had she felt so completely, utterly alone. She stood like an American baseball player with her spanner raised, senses straining into the darkness. Too inky black to see, she closed her eyes and focused entirely on her hearing, but the tunnel echoed with Clemmie’s continued progress.
Pauline felt a preternatural calm settle over her, and her sleep-deprived brain somehow shifted into high gear. The Ripper was human—if only a twisted, perverted remnant of humanity—and could no more see in the dark than she could. But now she stood between him and the glimmer of light at the mouth of the tunnel, allowing him at least a partial silhouette to home in on. She dropped to a crouch to take away his advantage, and strained to hear his footsteps, the muffled tick of his system, his breathing—anything.
Behind her, Clemmie cried out. “Oh, no! Bars!” A massive iron grate stood across the mouth of the tunnel. “Pauline? Snug?” Then silence.
All movement in the tunnel was at a standstill. For long moments, no one either moved or breathed.
From the roof of the tunnel, almost directly overhead, came the sudden shrill trill of a cricket. Close by in the darkness, Pauline discerned the slightest catch of breath. With a cry, she sprang forward, swinging the spanner with all her might. She felt the steel of the spanner connect with the steel of a mechanism, then the thwack of a glancing strike connecting with the Ripper’s head.
She raised the spanner and swung again, meeting nothing but air, then again, and connected with what could only be an upraised arm. With an overhead smash, she hammered down again and again, and was finally rewarded by the sickening crunch of a solid, crushing blow to his skull. She heard him fall with a crash. She scrambled back several steps, and for what seemed like a lifetime, she stood straining her ears for any sound. Nothing. Only the pounding of her heart in her ears. “I’ve done for you, you horror,” she muttered.
Finally, she could afford the luxury of a breath. She stood panting in the darkness. “Thank you, Cobweb. Thank you for the warning and distraction.”
She turned and called down the tunnel. “Clemmie! Stay right where you are. I’ve got to find Snug.”
“I’m not moving,” Clemmie’s quiet answer echoed through the tunnel.
As Pauline turned back up toward the exit, she felt the hammer blow of a steel fist connect with her ankle. White hot pain filled her universe. Her feet were swept from beneath her, and she landed with a heavy splash. Even as she clung desperately to her spanner, she knew that her leg was shattered. She rolled onto her back and kicked out with her uninjured leg. She felt herself propelled backward by solid contact with metal, and continued lashing out, kicking for purchase on the slimy bricks. She scrambled backward as fast as she could, away from the grating sound of Jack’s steel fingers scrabbling behind her.
She had nearly gained enough distance to try to stand up, when one last disastrous kick landed directly in a flailing, grasping metal hand.
Jack laughed, a gurgling, bloody, coughing, desperate laugh. Clearly, he was mortally wounded, but still fought on. He pulled with all the strength of his remaining hydraulic arm. Struggling to a sitting position, Pauline swung the spanner over her head as hard as she could, and felt the jar in her arm and shoulder as it made solid contact with steel. But Jack only laughed harder, and pulled again, managing to gain enough distance that his hand slid up to grasp her calf, then her thigh. Pauline kept swinging, but only managed to strike metal.
“Stupid cow!” he spat, and she felt and smelled hot blood spray. “You thought a little puke like you was going to be the one to end the Ripper?”
He cackled, gripped, pulled, and twisted, levering Pauline violently off the tunnel floor by brute hydraulic force. She felt herself shaken like a rag doll, and the long bone in her upper leg snapped.
She screamed in pain and fell backward, both legs limp and useless. Feebly, she swung her spanner, again making contact only with metal. She waited for the inevitable—for him to slam her against the brick of the tunnel, then move in to finish her off. But for some reason, he paused.
In the pitch black, she heard a sound it took a moment for her to recognize, the sound that had made Jack the Ripper hesitate—the high-speed whirring of a circular saw. The crushing pressure on her thigh was abruptly gone, and she fell to the floor with a splash. She heard the Ripper scream in terror. Then came a sound that would live in her nightmares until her dying day—the thick, wet, meaty, butcher shop sound of saw striking meat, then bone, then through into the soft, vulnerable brain.
The saw stopped. Jack the Ripper was finally finished.
All was once again quiet in the Tyburn tunnel, broken eventually by the distant rustling of a rat.
Snug’s voice came from the darkness. “Now I’ll rust for certain.” And she heard him fall.
ToC
“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
“To play them such a trick,
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!”
The Carpenter said nothing but
“The butter’s spread too thick!”
—The Walrus & the Carpenter, by Lewis Carroll
Chapter Twenty-three
Our New Friend
“Clemmie!” Winston ran down the riverbank to the outflow of the Tyburn sewer, a lantern in his hand. Clementine, clinging to the heavy iron bars, stretched an arm out to him. He reached through to caress her hair. “You made it here! Well done!”
“Not well done,” she answered, her voice shaking. “We were followed. I was a little ahead when Snug and Pauline were atta
cked. There was a fight. I don’t know what has happened. Please, Winston, please get me out of here!”
“How far back are they? Do they answer?”
“I could hear Pauline whimper, but that has stopped.”
“Pauline! Snug!” Churchill called. No response.
“They’re here!” he called up the bank, where Alex waited with the Musketeers. “We have to get in there right away, but there are bars across the outflow.”
“There must be an access for maintenance nearby,” Alex called down. “I’ll look.” He turned and ran back along the road leading to the bank.
Churchill called Quince to him. “Peter, how would you go about getting these bars out of the way?”
“Perhaps I can help with that,” said a low voice from behind them on the river.
“Captain Bertie! Right on time. Most welcome indeed, sir!” exclaimed Winston.
Bertie held himself steady against the current, as close to the muddy bank as he could get without grounding. All his running lights were extinguished.
“I’m to take you aboard straightaway and deliver you safely. But first, we must get those bars off. There is a length of stout chain in me starboard chain locker, if someone could lend Big Bertie a hand with it.”
“I’ll get it!” announced Flute, scrambling aboard. “With your permission, sir.”
“By all means,” answered Bertie. “Welcome aboard.” Flute and Big Bertie scampered away across the deck.
“I found a manhole,” Alex called down to Winston, “thirty yards back from the water. The lads are pulling up the manhole cover now.” He turned and ran back out of sight.
Flute and Big Bertie came scrambling back, dragging a heavy chain which Big Bertie made fast around the iron bars. At his word, his son began to back away from the bank.
“Best stand aside, Miss,” Big Bertie advised. Clemmie retreated into the darkness of the tunnel, and Winston took a few perfunctory steps away, anxious to charge in.
The chain came taut. Captain Bertie’s steam engine dropped in pitch and began to labor. There was creaking and popping, and the entire section of brickwork that held the bars fell outward with a resounding crash.
Winston dashed forward, all decorum lost in the moment, and gathered Clemmie into his arms, holding her close and examining her by lantern light. She clung to him fiercely.
Alex paused, startled in his hasty scramble down the manhole ladder, as the deafening crash of the brickwork and iron grate reverberated up the tunnel.
At first, all three forms that lay sprawled before him in the yellow light of his lantern appeared lifeless. Jack the Ripper lay facedown in the muck, unmoving, mostly submerged, the back of his head cut nearly away. He was pinned in place by Snug, who lay sprawled across him. Bright blood welled and bubbled from a wound in his back, just below his shoulder.
Jack’s remaining mechanical arm still had its long, built-in bayonet deployed—the bayonet that had pierced Snug through from back to front, a blow the Ripper must have thought fatal. It was difficult to tell whose blood was whose, so much of it mingled and flowed with the sewage current. To Alex’s relief, Snug groaned and stirred. The hearty mech was too tenacious to be finished off with a single stab of a bayonet.
Pauline lay against the curving brick wall of the tunnel, writhing in pain, her eyes squeezed shut, her jaw clenched grimly against the screams. One leg was bent at the thigh and buckled beneath her at an impossible angle. The other foot was twisted nearly backwards.
Alex froze. An unexpected flood of emotion swept over him. Confused, he shook his head repeatedly, attempting to clear it.
Suddenly, everything came back in a rush—the months he had spent contriving to visit the Artificer’s shop, the attraction that had grown into infatuation that had grown into admiration. Then the mounting determination to find a way to spend the rest of his life with this fascinating, capable, determined young woman. He rushed to Pauline’s side, shaking his head as he went. Clementine Hozier? he thought. A fine young woman, to be sure, but she was no Pauline Spiegel. How could he have been so befuddled?
Then he remembered the blinding flash of light, the black unconsciousness, and waking up to stare into Clementine’s kind, worried eyes. He remembered the sudden yearning, his need for her as fundamental as the air he breathed.
But now he realized that the overwhelming, automaton-induced passion paled in comparison to the rising tide of warmth and abiding affection that had grown in him over the months of getting to know Pauline. Everything he had learned about her excited more admiration, more longing to be with her forever. In the radiant sunlight of true love, the obsessive attraction to Clemmie was feeble moonlight.
He dropped to his knees beside Pauline. “Oh, my love! Forgive me! Forgive my terrible foolishness.”
Her eyes snapped open. “Alex? How—”
“I came down a manhole.”
“Clemmie? Is she—?”
“She’s fine. Winston is with her.”
“Snug?”
Alex paused. “I don’t know. It’s bad, but he’s alive. We’ll get you both out of here as quickly as we can.”
“But your change of heart . . .”
“I’ve been in a daze ever since that blasted automaton flashed in my eyes. I’m thinking much more clearly now.”
“The automaton flashed in your eyes?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? Is it important?”
“Yes! This automaton does things to your brain. Only Lakshmi knows exactly what. Oh!” she exclaimed with a start. “This means for the last twelve hours, you’ve been under the influence of the automaton, not of Clemmie Hozier. What a relief!”
Grinning widely despite the pain, she pulled him down and kissed him full on the mouth. There, in the mud and the blood and the sewage, their first kiss.
~*~*~*~*~
The deck had been turned into a field hospital. Big Bertie ferried first aid supplies from below. Pauline’s legs had been splinted and she reclined on an improvised stretcher, biting back the pain, while Alex administered medicinal brandy from Captain Bertie’s medical locker.
“Take enough to dull the pain, my love,” he urged. “But not so much as to make you sick. It sneaks up on you.”
She nodded. “Now I know what they mean by ‘take the edge off.’ ”
After the long pull through the warehouse and the alleys of the dockside neighborhood, Starveling had finally been able to lay Snout down. The joiner lay unmoving, his skin white and clammy, his breathing shallow. Starveling hovered over his stricken friend. Flute stood at their side, looking for any small thing he might do to make Snout comfortable. Quince had sagged to rest atop a cargo hatch.
Winston looked up from bandaging the bayonet wound in Snug’s chest as Bertie’s steam engine slowed to an idle. “What is it, Captain?” Churchill asked. “Where are we?”
“Mid-channel. Change of plans,” Bertie informed him. “The Friends say that patrol boats from the Hohenzollern II are heading west from Canary Wharf. And the Enforcers have reinforced the guards around St. Thomas’s Hospital. No help that way.”
Winston became aware that Snug lay staring wide-eyed at the sky, his mouth hanging open. Concerned, he waved his hand in front of Snug’s face. Thankfully, the mech reacted by pointing skyward. Churchill looked up, and his jaw dropped. Above them no more than thirty feet, floating soundlessly in the summer predawn darkness, hung Lakshmi’s dirigible, Ganesh. The Musketeers watched as Captain Bertie’s cargo arm swung out and hooked a looped hawser that hung from the nose of the airship. The dirigible’s line grew taut and the great ship settled lower and lower, until the bulkhead hatch hung a step above Bertie’s low wheelhouse. Out stepped Bottom, a great grin splitting his face from ear to ear.
Quince jumped to his feet, strode over, and clapped his friend on the back. “Bottom, my lad, you are ever a man of surprises.”
Nick saluted the lieutenant. “Sir, the waterwa
y is not safe. My orders are to take you to Her Majesty by air.”
Churchill returned the salute and issued orders.
Pauline took another fortifying draught of the brandy, and felt the pain grow a trifle more remote—her legs didn’t hurt less, but they seemed to belong to someone else. As she was lifted into the dirigible, the last patient to be loaded, she said through gritted teeth, her voice shaking, “Thank you, Captain Bertie. Once again, you have come to our aid in our time of need. Perhaps it’s just the brandy talking, but had you a face, I would kiss you roundly.”
Bertie chuckled. “Had I a face, I would let you, Miss, brandy or no.”
He cast off the hawser, ballast water poured into the river from Ganesh’s stern, and they began to climb.
In Lakshmi’s cabin, Pauline swallowed another mouthful of brandy and looked about her, grimly determined to find something to distract her from the pain. The Musketeers had accommodated themselves in the main cabin. No crew was in evidence. Suddenly, a suspicion dawned, and she spoke.
“Hello, Ganesh.”
“Howdy, Miss Spiegel. Welcome aboard,” came a bass drawl almost too low-pitched to hear. She felt it in her bones almost as much as she heard it in her ears.
“Very nice to make your acquaintance, sir. Do I address you as Ganesh? Or Captain?”
“Indeed, Missy, either one is just fine. Where I’m from, we don’t stand on ceremony.”
“And where are you from, sir?”
“America, purdy thing! The Rocky Mountains. Halfway between Denver, Colorado, and San Francisco, California.”
“An American cowboy?” Pauline blurted, brandy fumes swimming in her head. “I always wanted to meet a cowboy!”
“Born and raised!”
“Well, how does a cowboy come to be a flying mechanical?”
“We call ourselves ‘megamechs,’ me and Bertie. We’re the only two so far.”
“Ah. Megamechs. Of course. How did you become a megamech?”
“I was a young buck working my way around the world, just seeing the sights, as they say, crewing dirigibles from place to place.
A Midsummer Night's Steampunk Page 24