by Kin S. Law
In a moment, I observed the bumbling passage of another cab, a coach, in fact, able to seat six. I dared not peer into the windows from my vantage point atop the arch, but thankfully I possessed the single most useful tool in the Metropolitan Police Service arsenal; a notebook. Within its leaves were written a set of carefully dictated directions. As I did not know the way, these were taken down at the discretion of my cab driver. The middle-aged, dun-colored fellow had been quite keen at participating in some tuppenny spy fiction nonsense. I had, of course, couched it in terms of a game between members of the idyllic gentry.
Climbing across verandas and through gardens, I soon reached the agreed spot. My conservative traveling dress was well made for the activity, sliding in and out of place with cunningly cut panels and slits. Between two lazy townhouses, I crouched behind a nook of masonry perched atop a loosely trafficked bit of road. In a moment, the scuffed black of her cab rumbled by, followed inconspicuously by the heavy coach. This happened twice more, before the coach overtook the little cab and swung out in front, stopping not four paces from my hiding spot.
With the precision of a well-trained team, four men swung out of the coach and accosted the cab. None of them matched. They looked assembled out of various berets, suits, and jackets, from all walks of life. The original pursuer, the black-and-scarlet woman, followed close behind. Soon I was treated to the pleasure of their shock as they opened the cab and found only a duster and some plush cushions tumbling out. It had been easy enough to mock up. I had paid the driver to continue driving about with the duster propped up in the back, in a rough facsimile of myself perhaps slouched to read a recently acquired sheaf of papers. Evidently infuriated, the pursuers yanked open the driver’s side door and began to yell.
A moment of gut-wrenching panic ensued. All the training in the Service had bequeathed an Inspector of my caliber, but my plan had still been a plan concocted on the fly, with what resources I possessed. All manner of things could go wrong. A secondary stalker might place his hands round my neck the very next moment. There might be well-trained marksmen in the group, able to guess, then count and spot every place I could be hiding. I am an Inspector, not a seasoned operative of British Intelligence. Murphy’s Law haunts me constantly, a spectre of uncertainty. Worst of all, I had no idea for whom these people might be working. For all I knew, they had been given leave to kill or torture an innocent driver simply for crossing their path. This sort of thing keeps me in a week’s supply of digestives at all times.
The driver slammed his hand against the offending coach, making my pursuers jump.
“Good man,” I murmured as I watched the exchange, and breathed a sigh of relief.
My driver turned out to be a darn good thespian, feigning surprise enough for the picture house. The whole affair occupied no more than two minutes. Finding the irritating driver knew nothing, the whole party piled into the coach once again and took off at full steam. My driver chuckled visibly to himself, waved at my hiding spot and moved on.
While the incident was well within control, I felt a little disappointed. I had hoped to learn something of my pursuers, but only confirmed my suspicions; these were well-trained men—and a woman—deployed by a very cautious puppet master. This Inspector counted herself fortunate, and in the manner of all those who dealt with danger regularly, I resolved to use what little luck I had while I had it. Right there on the street, I found a spot of liquid lamplight and undid the vellum file from the laboratory.
What lay within was a labyrinth of numbers: invoices, logistics accounts, expenditure records. I feared for a moment I had defended a useless pile of beans, but this resourceful young Inspector had not risen to rank on the merits of her golden locks alone. In a moment, I had a lead amidst a pile of contractor’s invoices. Steamboat Man, a moving firm whose services seemed far too overpriced for a simple airship delivery service.
I was quite sure, if I cared to visit the local town registry, no such company would be logged in the Oxford mooring offices, nor any such office in Britain. Instead, I pointed my sturdy walking boots in the direction of the nearest airmen’s pub, and another hangover.
Though it cost a fortune in Gerhardt tablets and a long soak in the hotel tub scrubbing the scent of inebriation from my body, in the morning I had the answer. With all speed I called for pen and paper, and wrote out a missive to Arturo C. Adler.
Arturo. Oxford yielding dividends. Will attend Steamboat Man down to Portland. Reports of Moroccan troupe treading the boards. Our mutual friends don’t seem to like theatre. You would hate it. Will contact you when I arrive. Be assured your company, though welcome, is unnecessary.
Which roughly translated to:
You two-pence hack, Oxford, was a good lead for once. I have a suspect under the alias of Steamboat Man, reportedly flying a ship with Morroccan colors in Portland. Pirate dirigible, most likely, and a boat our enemies don’t want me to find. Wouldn’t you just love to meet a pirate? Tough titty. I’ll write when I get there. Stay out of this! I mean it!
As I sealed and mailed the letter via overnight dirigible, I felt satisfied Arturo’s insatiable thirst for meddling now provided me a watchful guardian over an impending journey south. I was also not in the least bit surprised to learn a multiple-use laboratory building had been destroyed in a gas explosion late in the night. Innumerable Gothic arches had been reduced to rubble in a spectacular fireball.
It was the second such disaster to happen to such a grand old building, but as I would soon find, not the last to happen to me. Weeks of working in the Jilted Merman only resulted in an encyclopedic categorization of various types of lout and brute. Aristotle would have been proud. Her Majesty, less so. Then there were the rumors of some calamity making its way over Europe. The news of Big Ben had spread, weighing heavily on my brow. Even the locals were nervous about something more than the Ottomans.
Still, I managed to discover through rumors that a certain Captain Samuel Clemens was known to make use of the Steamboat Man moniker. He had a number of known associates: the Bull Shark, the Oxfordian, the Manchu Marauder. The infamous pirate who was renowned through Mississippi and all of the Americas had disappeared for some years. I knew if I waited long enough at a seedy pirate pub I would come across one of his friends.
When the Oriental came to the pub on the night after the Huckleberry had been seen near Portland, I knew it had to be him.
“I’m looking for a man.”
“Are you sure?” I had answered the Manchu Marauder, but my heart nearly beat out of my chest. Though I was elated at having found one of the Steamboat Man’s cohorts, I did make a very teensy miscalculation in confronting the pirate.
Bollocks. The tarpaulin over my hair reeked of old popcorn and fairy floss.
4
Cezette Louissaint, The Girl In The High Tower
Cezette Louissaint looked out through her window above the Rue Fremicourt. None of the buildings were higher than her sloped room under the roof, planned to exacting aesthetics by the city’s architects. The sprawling wheel of Paris might be called the city of lights, but wherever those lights shone there was beauty. Countless mansard roofs paved the way to mountainous cathedrals, broad boulevards were lined with Napoleon’s arboreal legacy, and along those brick valleys the traffic of chariots, jitneys, and carriages moved between veils of scented mist. Crooked chimneys and errant steamworks only served to frame the majestic Tour D’Eiffel in the medium distance.
Cezette loved to watch the evenings. She would sit on her narrow iron bed, her chin tucked behind her boyish knees, and watch as the city streamed through the little rippled rectangle of glass. Glittering soft gaslights danced like grand belles with the brusque shadows of Teslaic lights over her whitewashed wall.
Le Tour seemed the brightest of all, lighting up Maman’s picture on the bed stand. Its gardens had always been Maman’s favorite place in the city, in spite of the tourists crawling everywhere with their clacking photogram machines. She would go there to dr
aw everything: the Tour, the people eating crepes on the benches, the crows pecking at their leavings. Cezette still remembered her Maman’s charcoals, as black as her hair, and Cezette’s hair too, lying in a sheet almost blue against the white bedspread.
A distant crash below brought her shuddering and burrowing deeper inside her comforter. Was it Papa, home from the burlesque? Had he been thrown out again? It would explain the violence, his slamming the door, enraged at being spurned by another imagined paramour. She could see him in her mind’s eye hanging up his stovetop and his cane, and that made her want to cower in the closet again. The last time, she hadn’t come out for a week and Volga had to give her baguettes and cheese through the broken slats.
No, it couldn’t be, it was far too early. The moon hadn’t yet appeared in the Seine, glimmering despite her rivals below. Cezette peeked once more outside the window, at the city she knew so well, yet had seldom visited. It was a constant comfort against the dread now enveloping her frail form.
Spread out before her, the beaux-arts rooftops of Paris seemed particularly jittery tonight, like hunched crows anxious of an oncoming storm. Stars shone clearly. Not in the sky, but in a child’s diversion of dots across the city. They were further outdone by points sprinkled in the sky itself from the feminine curves of airships doing circuits of the city overhead.
The clearness of the evening only served to highlight the strangeness hanging in the sky above. For a fortnight, a mass of cumulus gathered overhead had not dissipated as clouds were wont to do. Its very solidity seemed to exude a certain je ne sais quoi, a quality she could only describe as eldritch. The English word had a strange cadence on her tongue, pulled as it were from Maman’s vast, multilingual library, but it felt right. Eldritch befit a mass of mist seeming never to change shape nor size, nor move from its position. Odd she would feel the strangeness this night when the cloud had been there for so long already.
Another crash—this time, accompanied by the Romanian maid, Volga, cursing in bad French. So, it was only a small blunder. Cezette relaxed a little. She found her bedclothes damp with sweat. Her fingers were clamped like vises round handfuls of comforter. Her favorite bear, Stefano, lay strangled in the crook of her arm. Was there no end to the night? Cezette’s eyes trailed back out over the city, as if one of the floating ships there could lift her to safety atop some haven in the sky.
Suddenly Cezette put her finger on it; the ships had moved. Though the cloud itself had not budged, all the airships in her familiar sky had given it a wide berth, forming a sort of ring. No, the sentiment wasn’t quite right—it was not a ring, but a perimeter. There was movement on the ground below as well. Faintly she made out the splashes of blue and red crawling across masonry and flower-clad balconies all over the city. They were the blisters of light reflected from the steam chariots of police. Cezette was intimately familiar with their silhouettes. She had seen them night after night as they combed the city for evildoers. From above, the pattern was clear. Something was happening over the city.
Almost unconsciously, Cezette got out of bed, her bare feet treading three steps until she perched at the window. She was not yet tall enough to reach the top of the slanting glass. Still, she could put her chin on the sill, and two hands on either side. A bird might have mistaken her for a curious cat. She stood on her tiptoes, up close, so she had a better view of the sky, sacrificing her wonderful rooftops. Her bedclothes hung about her ankles, their lace mottling the square of light from the window.
What could be going on outside? Cezette had never seen her Paris become so agitated. Her streets pulsed like veins and her sky seemed to fill with more of man’s stars. Cezette’s large hazel eyes opened wide, her pupils expanding to twice their size. In particular, she scanned the web-like tracery of metal marking where the Tour D’Eiffel stood, lit from base to tip in regular lights. Strange it would be so bright, Cezette thought.
She began to notice a dimming in all the other lights of the city. They did not go out all at once, but slowly, as if a giant were drawing a curtain over them. Gas lamps flickered as their fuel was drawn away until they petered out like dying sprites. The Teslaic lights were slow to go, dwindling to star-points before winking out entirely.
So absorbed was Cezette by the scene before her, she did not notice the soft tread of steps on the stair outside her room. As the rectangle of light grew dimmer on her floor, a faint flicker of flame drifted in from the crack of the door, then ceased as its owner snuffed the lantern.
Even as the steps halted outside her meager inch of wood, Cezette stood absolutely still at her perch, peering intensely at the world beyond. Her eyes darted left. They darted right. Yes, the ships were beginning to close in round the cloud, as a hangman’s noose might a guilty soul. Her small, agile fingers picked out one, two, three, counting the ships in a quarter of the sky. What had Maman taught her about counting quickly? Yes, multiply by four…Surely there could be no less than forty small vessels hanging above Paris, and two larger ones as well. They were oddly the same, as if popped out of the same madeleine pan. She could make out the blue, red, and white of the livery, though she was far too young to understand what they meant.
Slowly, quietly, the door to Cezette’s room swung open on oiled hinges. In the narrow room, it would have made some noise against the edge of Cezette’s bed, but the opener stopped it just clear of the iron posts.
Cezette did not turn round. Something was happening! The cloud had not moved, but the ships were now well-organized into triangles of five or six. A phalanx, Cezette remembered, from a book on the Romans. It was how they had conquered the world, even the land of Gaul she was perched atop right this moment. Such a formation hanging in the sky seemed godlike to a small girl. She could not begin to guess what held those mountains of metal aloft, but she could gasp and exclaim silently as four of them flew over her room in a gale of wind. She could hear the faint howl of their engines and feel a slight tang in the air at their passing. It held her rapt.
Her nose was just touching the glass when the first reports shook the air. The ships were firing into the cloud! Cezette gave a backwards hop of shock at the first thunderous fusillade, but the other occupant of the room did not move a muscle. In the center of the room, the sight of airships lighting up the sky did not reach, and neither was the shock of vibration great enough to cause alarm. It certainly did not dissuade a person so rapt on the sight of Cezette’s tiny ankles peeking out of her bedclothes, her shoulders ivory in their thin sheath of fabric. In a corner nightstand there was a framed sepia photogram, and if there had been a mirror in the room it would have been easy for Cezette to see how much she was growing to look like her mother.
Now Cezette recovered from her shock, pressing as far she dared against the shivering glass. Every cannon shook the glass a little, and the combined report of forty-two rocked the thin pane like a concerto. She could see them, yes, every single one of them! Immediately as the points of light rocketed from the ships into the cloud, she felt the corresponding shake against the glass. She had read, of course, of sound traveling at a far inferior velocity to light, but only now could she place book learning in the real world—in the skies of her Paris, no less! The epiphany shook her, but it was an epiphany without context. Why were the ships firing into the eldritch cloud? Was there some hidden enemy inside? A crook! A cheese-thief!
It was just as she was thinking the experience felt like cowering before a storm, when everything changed. Real thunder held no candle to this fusillade, Cezette was thinking, but as if Thor wished it otherwise, there came a sudden snap of light. Cezette blinked—there was no choice about it, as her wide-open eyes would have burned at the sight. When she looked back through the echo of brilliance she saw at once a new light in the sky. In horror, Cezette looked on as a burning phalanx of airships fell from the heavens, directly into the Seine in a plume of smoke and steam.
“What…” Cezette murmured in high-pitched French, but she could do no more. It was at this moment a h
airy palm placed itself over her small mouth, muffling any ejaculation she might have made.
Dimly, she thought one of the dirigibles had lifted her away from her little room over the Rue Fremicourt; then the smell of cheap champagne and bad cheese filled her nostrils, replacing fresh horror with old dread. She had smelled this every night since Maman had gone, and inside the little world between her ears she was already chastising herself for becoming so lax in her vigil. She trembled, cowering even as she found herself airborne.
With a whump of fabric, Cezette found herself thrown breathless back into bed. She did not try to get up. She would only be thrown back again. But her limbs instinctively curled around herself protectively. He hadn’t hit her in weeks, but every night felt like he would.
On nights when she was on her guard, she would have been hiding in any number of spots—the wardrobe, under the bed, one fortunate time even on the edge of the roof outside. A lock on the sill had put a stop to it, but she would make every effort not to be found, usually with some small degree of success. When she ran out of hiding places, she tried to run away, only to find all her clothes gone from her wardrobe. There was only one option, which Cezette exercised anew every evening. She sat there and shut out everything that was happening around her.
She was careful not to leave Stefano or any of her books around. Sometimes she made a few paper cutouts or left a few toys as sacrifices. The pillows and the pictures she simply learned not to become attached to. There wasn’t any point. After he was done hurling things about, there would be the yelling. Always the yelling, and worse, the blaming, as the spirits got to his head. There is nothing so humiliating, and nothing so noble, as when something precious is defended in futility.
Outside, the sky was immolating. Acrid trails of smoke streaked over Paris, settling as the gaseous steam in them coalesced to become a nauseous rain. Statues cried black as if in mourning. France’s sons were dying above her, burning inside hulks of metal and wood and canvas. Her denizens had long been evacuated from the streets. They looked on from shelters far away, able to witness the holocaust over the well-planned boulevards of the city. They cried as the corpses of dirigibles fell onto their homes, covered their eyes at each new bolt of lightning coming from the deadly cloud. They screamed as the paintings burned in the museums. No formation remained. Ships dipped and swerved in the sky, anxious to dodge the death all around them.