Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  “Will you stop putting my face in that plate of treacle? I thanked you properly for your help in the Blackfriar Bludgeoner case.”

  “But not with what I was promised. I did so want to meet the Queen,” finished Adler with a theatrical longing.

  I wanted to strike him.

  The Blackfriar Bludgeoner had been the latest upset in a respectable career. The culprit was an ornery stable master, fed up with the steam cabbies taking over all his business and scaring his mares with their incessant conflagrations. He had taken a pair of heavy shoe tongs to a particularly insulting driver, and everything had snowballed from there.

  The solution to the case hadn’t been completely to my merit. I had had help, only Arturo C. Adler specialized in consultations, not public attention. Chalk one up to Vanessa Hargreaves, Scotland Yard’s fifth female Inspector, symbol of a changing Britain. Only give credit where credit is due, as I didn’t actually solve anything.

  The case of the Blackfriar Bludgeoner, while not particularly emblematic of my deductive powers, nevertheless propelled me to the attention of a certain Thelonious Thatcher. It was an alias I suspect has more to do with Her Majesty’s inner circle than British Intelligence. Oh, posh, I hear the tossers say, everyone knows Her Majesty’s secret government operates out of the Diogenes Club! If it were a secret, why should John Bull know of it at all? Long story short, when the neighborhood of Westminster disappeared overnight, I was the prime understudy to play Her Majesty’s catspaw.

  Yes, for not only was I, Vanessa Hargreaves, an Inspector of Scotland Yard (an institution with an outdated moniker; headquarters was currently located just across the Thames, on the scenic Victoria Embankment) I was also the secret confidant of Queen Victoria III, Matriarch of the British Commonwealth, Empress of India, Bastion of the Lands Beyond, titles, etc. If Adler ever got to the Queen through Hargreaves, he might very well end up ruling the country. Thankfully, the fellow seemed satisfied with the odd tease of a tea date.

  “What have we here?” I diverted instead, pointedly ignoring offenses taken. I knew Adler could never resist a mystery, or a chance to be inappropriately witty. Proper genius never could.

  “At least they didn’t take the Tower,” Adler began, swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. “Think how the ravens would have fared. Instead, the entirety of Westminster seems to have up and vanished, inconveniencing a much inferior species of congress.”

  “A couple blocks square does not an entirety make,” I griped on the technicality.

  Although, I had to admit, most of it was gone, including the Houses of Parliament and the Abbey. Again, the interrupted skyline loomed like an open wound overhead, bleeding odd dribbles of wet mist. Who could have done this? More importantly, with what instrument? Buildings did not simply disappear overnight in a flash of thunder, certainly not some of the most well-guarded buildings in all of Britain. Someone would pay for injuring my beloved England in so ghastly a manner.

  Whatever else Arturo could be faulted with, his craft of detection was indeed top-notch. Also, he always smelled a little like honey. At the moment, he was bent into a spectacular spray of velvet and lace, at the rim of the crater. Even the way he recovered evidence was flamboyant. He scattered dirt and soot with a magician’s flourish—downwind of his clothes, of course.

  “What do you see?” Arturo asked, bemused and businesslike.

  “I see fired brick and soot dust. A hot shovel, perhaps?” I was no dullard. I knew very well no engine in existence could produce such an effect. But I had learned very long ago to play to Arturo’s intellectual vanity.

  “It is not only soot, but blackened glass—a very precise line of it.”

  “No shovel could have done this,” I said, needlessly, but it did stimulate the senses. The line of glass was very particular, occurring only in a perimeter round the outermost edges of the crater.

  “It takes a very high heat indeed to melt the wet clay and sand of the Thames into glass. Steam is not capable. An arc of plasma, perhaps? Or of ether?” Arturo remarked as he paced the rim.

  “No explosive, certainly. There is no shrapnel, nor enough debris to constitute the whole.” Odd—if one wished to destroy a symbol of Britain such as Westminster, a well-placed bomb might have done the job more spectacularly, eliminating it from psyche as well as address.

  At that moment I could see a pair of other Inspectors round the other side of the crater, scattered amongst the Army and Navy men. It would not do for them to see me putting my fork in their pudding, so to speak. My status as one of few female Inspectors in the Service was insult enough to some. But the worst to happen would be the discovery of Vanessa Hargreaves as the catspaw of Victoria III. I would become useless to the Queen.

  I began to stride casually in the opposite direction. Here, a steady cascade of the Thames still fell into the vast crater, and the footing was difficult even for my sturdy, familiar boots. My dress had been cut in a very cunning manner, simultaneously at the height of English modesty while affording a remarkable range of motion. Besides the convenient hood covering the red-gold of my hair, there were several hidden pockets, and a gun holster for my favorite .22 Tranter. Its weight, and the tiny derringer in my boot, were old friends.

  “Note how the edges are cut precisely round key portions of the foundation. It appears our villain desired to keep these landmarks whole, and even aesthetically complete. Certain architectural elements are preserved. I remember Richard the Lionheart being right there,” I observed as I picked my way round, looking for all the world like a passerby trailing a violently exploding box of lace.

  “Such a thing would have been impossible for conventional tools,” Adler remarked. “If we are to presume such a ludicrous thing as the theft of architecture, the deed could only have been done from above. We live in an age of wonders, certainly, but to do such a thing is the realm of the gods, titans, giants. A burning finger, perhaps.”

  “Maybe not so high as that,” I mused. I turned upward, towards the bloated, floating shapes circling a perimeter of the area, and caught Arturo peering at me. He had once described me as leonine, though that may have been a jibe. “An airship might have done it.”

  “I grant you the bird’s eye view, but one so powerful must also be quite vast. It would not have escaped notice.”

  I sighted along the perimeter. The airships stood out as black specks against the chalk sky. Some of them were curious gentry, others hired by periodicals and gonzos to take photograms from up high. The few legitimate authorities were proper Royal Navy ships, dark with armor plate. Amongst the darting minnows trawled two vast, angled whales—the pride of the Commonwealth—each one a drifting cathedral easily several times the breadth of the Abbey. Redolent with lion and unicorn decorations, the Knights of the Round were always impressive, eclipsing other Balaenopteron-class easily with their disciplined, liveried majesty.

  Still, I could not imagine even such a ship carrying off a piece of London for its own. Besides, only seven of the Knights existed, most of them tasked with defending the far reaches of the Empire. All seven together, perhaps, but as I had only the previous evening dined with Captain Leeds of The Gwain, I doubted such a coup d’etat was possible. The Leeds’ chef produced a wonderfully timed beef Wellington, unfit for the lips of anarchists.

  “I have a few good leads,” Adler mentioned finally, as if I would not have pounced upon his neck and torn the information from his throat otherwise.

  The infuriating man! I did not fall for the ploy, choosing to wait him out. In a moment, I was rewarded with clues freely given. “Witnesses saw a ship flying Moroccan colors. Impossible, of course, with the embargo still in effect. Likely a pirate vessel. Others along the Thames report men with, quote, “picture house” accents in the area. Several of them mentioned the terrible cold this year.”

  “Puts them in Oxford. Thank you, Arturo; I’ll likely not get any better.”

  “I exist to serve,” sang Adler.

  In a moment, he had
disappeared into the gathering crowd. There were plenty of fascinating Londoners in various outlandish dress coming to gape at the calamity, and Arturo C. Adler was a master of disguise.

  3

  In Which Historic Oxford Hides Intrigue And Danger

  A fogged-over Oxford sunset found me before the grounds of one of innumerable, stately buildings of the historic city. This one in particular was fairly nondescript, one of the many dreaming spires in a late Gothic style, and as proudly inhospitable to steam carriages as any of its brothers. It would have disappeared into the harmonious beauty of Oxford, had it not been missing the entirety of its southern face. Blue tarpaulin covered up this blasphemy against architecture, and smells of damp danced with char and rotted mulch.

  “It might be overzealous of me, but it appears Arturo’s clue is paying dividends,” I murmured in the sleepy, narrow street. I recognized the coppery smell of melted glass—it was the same as Westminster. Beneath the tarpaulin, a cursory examination revealed similar burn marks. Time to avail myself of the local fauna, I ruminated. What would the birdies be whispering?

  The closest pub I could find was a classy professors’ haunt packed with leather-bound volumes in the brandy-scented walls. No catcalls here, but the concealed leering of twenty tweed-suited pairs of eyes followed me into the embrace of a Chesterfield chair. There had been little need to come in full undercover. A combination of full-figured corset beneath a navy travel dress revealed only a suggestion of ankle. Nevertheless, the golden bun dribbling tresses over my neck was sufficient to bedazzle the inhabitants. My bottom had scarcely begun to warm the excellent leather before the first drink arrived.

  Four patrons drunk under the table and some hours later, I had the inklings of a lead. Of the strange characters reported seen in London, the patrons had no clue. Admittedly, I hadn’t much of a description to work from in the first place. Reports of a brilliant light accompanied by a thunderous clamor, a fortnight ago, appeared more promising. The din had resulted from the loss of the façade I had visited earlier in the day, but nobody knew what it could be. The building itself was one of many respected laboratory facilities in a city as respectful of the sciences as Oxford.

  Such a phenomenon matched the reports of Westminster’s destruction (or acquisition?) like teeth to a gear. Had some device or contraption been tested here, discharged to disastrous effect, and rushed down to London before it could be investigated? What could possibly have produced such an astounding destructive force? The night left me with more questions than answers.

  Under a gothic arch in the gates of the laboratory the next morning, my particular brand of investigation began to catch up with me. Even the Gerhardt tablets could not suppress feelings of nausea or the almighty hammering in my noggin. Sensible women should not be gallivanting about gentlemen’s clubs at all hours of the evening, progressive England be damned! Then again, I doubted any of the Queen’s other agents could be sensible people. Morning kippers picked up my spirits a bit, but even Oxford’s legendary pax academia could not dissuade a sense of foreboding. Quite apart from my general queasiness, I felt the familiar copper tang of danger approaching.

  Entry into the laboratory proved fairly simple, at least. I dared not flash my Metropolitan Police Service identity this far from her jurisdiction, but I had not escaped the drear pits of uniformed service without the magic bullet of resourcefulness. I merely pranced through the front door and pretended to faint dead away, clutching at my corsetry in a fit of prudish martyrdom.

  “Quickly, get her out of the entry chamber!” someone commanded, directing others to pull me from the closet-sized nook just inside the door.

  I remember hearing a gush of air as I passed through. Negative pressure, gentlemen? This was fancy security, not counting the four guards attending to my lady’s needs. The fools rushed about like headless chickens, going for smelling salts, water, sensibilities best reserved for inebriated duchesses or hopeless invalids. In the hubbub, I merely rolled off the rough bench and slipped through a nearby door.

  “The laboratory should be about…” I mused, once I entered the labyrinthine galleries of the building.

  There was nobody about, and it was perfectly safe to speak to myself in hushed tones. Always speak to the most intelligent person in the room, what. Even the interior of the building proved tastefully appointed, built in a grand old style and not simply cut like biscuits into institutionalized blocks. The building appeared to be a multiple-use laboratory, with several partitions and independent research teams behind thick steel doors. Eventually, I found the cordoned-off rubble behind two more sets of pressure seals.

  “No respect for architecture. Not locals,” I reasoned. “But intelligent enough to make use of some very sophisticated equipment.”

  Behind sheets of thin canvas, the catastrophically gutted laboratory spoke volumes. A high, vaulted ceiling suggested something quite large, and the skeletons of platforms provided a degree of dimension roughly the width of a horse, and the height of a dirigible’s floor at boarding. The warped, splintered corpses of workbenches lay scattered in a rough spray toward the ruined wall, which colored everything within the lapis of tarpaulin. Glass crunched underfoot, still marked by increment measures. One forlorn blackboard lay tumbled off its rolling frame like an ignored senior professor in the corner of the room. From the center of the room to the ruined window, a clean swath of flooring showed a pattern of something seemingly blown away by a strong wind.

  “Hello, what’s this?” I said, perhaps too loudly. No aged professor appeared to chastise me, so I went ahead and poked through the room.

  Though much of what had not been annihilated in the explosion had been carefully smeared out or burned, I was able to pick my way through the rubble toward signs of a hurried activity. Not a soul stirred in the entire laboratory, but in one corner a bureau had been tipped over and set aflame. I bent to sift through the blackened papers under the hulking sentry of scaffolding in the high-ceilinged chamber.

  “Not an explosion,” I decided as I searched. “One direction of destruction. The clean floor, bolt holes in the frame, looks like whatever it was had been airlifted by dirigible by the time any authorities arrived.”

  Slowly, I was beginning to work out something of what had happened. Someone had been building some kind of weapon, and it had likely discharged prematurely. Such a spectacular display not only necessitated a hasty departure, but a shifting of timetables resulting in the nefarious theft of a national landmark. I allowed myself an amused smirk. It was like some child’s educational picture-house piece, where the mistress thief went from place to place stealing national symbols whilst waifs attempted to catch her through the deployment of world geography.

  The room looked well-worn in, as if whomever had been here made themselves quite at home. I counted seven workstations, each with a sprinkling of photogram frames, souvenir figurines and various personal charms as made a worker feel more comfortable in their place of business. It had been a carefully planned stratagem suddenly pushed into application, then. If so…

  “There we are,” I whispered, clutching in my hand a half-burned vellum folder. Surely what had protected this sheaf of documents had been the file’s very thickness. Before I could examine the contents, voices in the hall beyond signaled tea time was up.

  I stuffed the leaves into one of many hidden pockets. From my assessment of the male populace the night before, there ought to be few in Oxford suspicious of a woman having pockets. The region was sadly debased in feminine progress in spite of—or because of—academia. In a moment, the men reached the hallway just outside the canvas partitions and proved me very much correct. They swiftly escorted me away once I feigned a spell of disorientation. I had to thank the antiquated forces of fashion pigheadedness for one small boon.

  There was nothing more to do than put on a mummery fit for the Globe, staggering down the hall apparently shaken and lost but none the worse for wear. As I left the guards looking to one another in t
heir silent pact of ineptitude, I assumed a brisk trot beneath Oxford’s famous dreaming spires, heading toward her nearby hotel room to examine my prize.

  It took all of four paces before I noticed the presence of another practitioner of the feminine arts dogging my steps with a flurry of French lace. As I rounded a cramped Romanesque palazzo, I caught the reflection of a scarlet figure trimmed in black, about a street behind.

  “I believe I am shadowed,” I took the chance to remark to a stray calico, who seemed as comfortable on its patch of Baroque sculpting as I was alienated by Oxford’s convoluted streets. For four or five blocks ago, I had already become quite lost in attempts to lose my tail. The malicious stalker seemed content, and quite unfazed, in drifting between the colleges and universities after a confused London Inspector.

  The calico yawned, almightily.

  “Let us see if a change of scene will put a bee in her bonnet,” I concluded.

  When the cat had had enough of my attentions it bounded up a trellis of ivy and I continued on my way. It was still early in the afternoon, but the spires’ shadows tended to put the streets in gloom. In the fading light, a fatigued lady gesturing for a cab did not seem like it would be out of place, and so I did so, along a busy interchange. As I got into the rumbling, bubbling carriage, the warm comfort of the cabin nearly disarmed me. Where were the cramped London rigs with their scalding pipework and hard, buckwheat seats? There were some advantages to travel, I concluded.

  I commanded the driver to proceed in a convoluted fashion through the busiest parts of the city. Barely had their gears clunked into place when I observed my tail hailing a cab of her own. Then she was lost around a corner. I waited a good four turnings before alighting from the cab in a darkened alley full of Venetian archways. In a manner of speaking. I did not so much alight as hoist myself out of the cab’s skylight onto a passing archway.