by Kin S. Law
I got a chill under my duster just thinking about Sam and Nessie flirting with each other. Nessie was just about Rosa’s age, and Sam was—no! I didn’t think of him as my father any more. But I knew he needed Nessie and her contacts. There was no way he could fence the Leviathan on his own, not without sending waves through the ether. That would have tipped us off at the Straight Hook. Maybe he hadn’t stolen it to sell, but I couldn’t believe that of Sam. I kept yelling, and kept my eye out for any bolt holes for useful hiding places. To the others, I said, “Maybe Nessie doesn’t have enough biscuits to host us.”
“If the fare is lead-flavored, I would rather that be the case,” Blair said now.
It seemed as if Nessie Drake really was not in residence. I expected a hiss of steam, maybe, or some fanciful piston action from a section of umber shadow directly above us. The cathedral-like shadows of La Maere high above us could have hosted clutches of gargoyles. I thought I saw Hargreaves clutching something like a rosary and uttering clipped words in hushed tones. A prayer? Nessie Drake wasn’t an actual vampire. I think.
Instead, there came a gravelly voice somewhere to the left. When we looked, there was a man in one of the alleys between two abandoned buildings.
“The Countess will see you now,” the voice said, directing our attention to the tall man in a stovepipe hat. His suit was immaculate, but there was a subtle effect to the fabric, making it gray at the edges, like he had been buried in it. He sidestepped between two buildings and vanished.
“Gothic wanker,” Hargreaves pronounced, falling into step behind Rosa as the group followed the gaunt gentleman.
Inside the alley, there seemed no sign of the host, until our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Then, it became readily apparent that a manhole gaped not two inches from Hargreaves’ boot.
“Of course! What else would it be?” Vanessa griped aloud as she looked down.
Rosa followed silently, now that her objective of being noticed had been achieved. Blair took a moment while we took turns climbing into the dank hole.
“What do you have against Goths?” Elric Blair asked.
Under a past Victoria, a unique culture had come about. Based on spirit photography, alchemy, and the ostentatious presence of Aleister Crowley, a fascination with the macabre had persisted to the present. They styled themselves after the historic Goths, the first Germanic peoples to become Christians. Beliefs in paganism, vampirism, and their place as outcasts under an Abrahamaic God had resonated with the social outcasts of the day: the atheists, the homosexuals, and the social pariahs. Nessie Drake, in a word.
When I was after a bit of booty some time ago in Cornwall, I had stumbled across a group of Goths. It was a point of professional pride that I read up on them. I joined their group of black-suited grims long enough to find the treasure. The Steam-Age toff styled himself a Byronesque hero, and that was easy enough to flatter. In England, Blair’s prowling grounds, the better-educated Goths living in the reign of Victoria III would stage elaborate bone-chilling activities. Exclusive parties were hosted, complete with blood fountains and black drapes. They would lie six feet under in safety tombs, engaging in conversation with passers-by through a narrow copper breathing tube. One can imagine how easy it is to steal from wealthy idles interred under six feet of dirt.
Bearing all this in mind, I stopped climbing to chime in with Blair.
“Didn’t you hear Rosa’s story? Nessie’s a Gothic revivalist. You ought to have expected this.”
“But this…this is bollocks! How do you expect me to take someone seriously who dresses like a Gorey illustration?” Hargreaves protested.
Eyebrows raised, I looked at her for a moment, then climbed out of the hole.
“I am, at this moment, wearing a bright red buccaneer coat, bandanna, yellowed linen shirt, and a damn cutlass. I would not look out of place climbing a mast and spitting onto the head of Edward Teach. Do you take me seriously?”
“Not a jot,” Hargreaves answered with a straight face.
“Fair enough. At least you’re consistent,” I yielded. “Maybe you were bullied by fanged freshmen in secondary. Who knows?”
“If you must know…” Hargreaves started, and thought better of it. She put her heels onto the ladder and started to climb down. With her eyes level to the street, she stopped, and finished. “I was one in secondary.” Then she slid the rest of the way down, with a little “ow!” as she hit the floor below.
“Ah. I must admit, the thought of the Inspector in black fishnets and corset is an attractive prospect,” Blair remarked, peering into the hole.
I was laughing too hard to answer.
16
Bats in the Belfry
“Ah, bollocks,” I said as my ankles hit the bottom of the ladder. I was still laughing, and botched the landing a little. Some airship captain.
Inside the manhole, the group reconvened to discover we were not in some disgusting sewer. Instead of a filthy river of slime, the passage we had entered was of clean dirt, stretching absolutely straight as far as we cared to see in either direction. The tunnel had been lined with arclight—flameless underground—but only for a few lengths. Past the light the passage continued on into abysmal darkness.
“There,” Rosa said, and continued her march down the passageway. Despite the amount of metal she carried, her footsteps made very little sound.
“Miss Marija seems to be unusually serious,” Blair remarked. “Nessie Drake must be very important to her.”
“You seem bloody chuffed,” Hargreaves said to me. She frowned.
I had taken to giggling every time I looked at the Inspector. It was hard not to imagine her serious expression painted over with black eyeshadow.
“I keep seeing that blonde mop done up in black ribbons,” I answered, extracting a huff and a blush. “Seriously, though, what Rosa didn’t say was how old they started. Nessie’s been her on-and-off partner since they were six. They grew up on the streets, city-hopping from place to place.”
“Orphans?”
“Not sure. In any case, Nessie Drake is the closest thing to family she’s got.”
We reached a turn in the tunnel where the passage opened onto a vast chamber. The roof was sloped, like a vaulted church, and the walls had been cut perfectly straight. A broken cross taller than I was lay in a corner.
“This is too good. Nessie couldn’t have built all this herself,” Albion said. I hooted, and the call bounced all over the room.
“You are a child,” Inspector Hargreaves huffed.
A high, piercing voice, cut us off, quiet but perfectly audible in this space. “No, of course we did not. The living quarters are nearly unchanged from the aeon miners. Except for my chamber, of course. The Szekler Hungarians built most of this starting in 1562, under special provision, and before that it was the Bulgars and Avars, who laid their tunnels on top of the original Roman excavation. Very likely the salt of Transylvania lay fallow the fields of Gaul. Fitting, no? The Lovelorn was originally a French vessel.”
“Nessie!” Rosa Marija cried, turning.
Atop a sort of stone dais, Nessie Drake sat on a throne of ruin. Whether the Szekler had built it, or if it was some special apparatus for the processing of aeon stones, I could not guess. Rust and neglect had obscured its original purpose. The mass of timber beams and two-foot steel nails reared out of the ground and seemed to flower into the ceiling far above, stretching out its limbs like a nightmarish, many-armed crucifix.
In the thick of it, a pile of furs had been laid on an arrangement of beams, where Nessie Drake sat, stiff-backed, arms laid out straight on two rests. Her dress was suitably Gothic. Layers of matte and filigree black spread around her, picked out with infinitesimally small rubies and garnets. Her face was deathly pale, her eyes and mouth extended into a skeletal grin with some sort of ashen makeup. Her hair was done up to match a halo of ribbed collar, worked in a finger-prickling pattern of lilies. I didn’t fancy girls with boyish bodies, but the lace flattered her s
hape and made me think of obscene things done in the back rooms of funeral parlors.
There was a nude Adonis sprawled at her feet, casually licking her toes.
“Well, Countess, you’ve done well for yourself, considering you’ve been warring with Lovelace for half a decade,” I commented. Mostly, I did it to stop Rosa from rushing the throne. The women could see each other, but Nessie was pointedly addressing me first. As one ship captain to another, more or less.
“Thank you. Captain, is it now?” answered Nessie. “How have you been? With this terrible Calamity ravaging Europe, it has been hard to entertain old feuds in the style and elegance one is accustomed to.”
“Well enough. Airmen are accustomed to an unsteady deck underfoot.”
Nessie gestured with fingers tipped in viciously sharp, silver talons. Real silver, I noted, crow-like, from the shine. In a moment, the stovepipe gentleman reappeared with a tray of crystal goblets. I hadn’t seen him disappear, but now I noticed it was bloody creepy. The liquid in the goblets sloshed about thickly, leaving a crimson wake.
“Wine,” Nessie explained.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nessie, what the blazing fuck?” Rosa Marija interrupted, finally exhausting her store of patience. “Picking a fight with someone who regularly takes down terrorists for the German GSG?”
“I am perfectly safe in this underground lair. Lovelace is used to aerial raids, not a prolonged subterranean siege,” said Nessie.
“Your back is to the wall and you know it,” Rosa spat.
“Rose Cottage, please,” Nessie scoffed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know I hate that name.”
“You’ve killed enough people to deserve it.”
There was silence as the two women fumed at each other, one regal and dark, the other a simmering pot of coffee curves. Drake’s crew—if those were the sharp-suited trio of men in the room with them—seemed a little ill at ease. Then, Rosa stalked forward up to the throne in even, brisk steps. The naked crewman slipped away, very intelligently. Nessie drew back, stiffening.
“Nessie,” Rosa said with tenderness.
Then she reared back and slapped Nessie Drake across her bony mouth, cursing as the sharp chin cut across her palm.
“Hey!”
“Just a minute!”
“Countess!”
Practically everyone in the room began shouting, but Rosa had moved too fast and without warning. Nessie’s crew began to converge. My misfits drew on them. The naked man began to run across the cavern in wet slaps of bare feet.
“Stop!” Nessie Drake commanded, cutting everyone off.
Her eyes were bared large. Her mouth glittered with a single drop of blood. I could see plainly the emotion hidden behind all the makeup. Certainly a dram of hatred, yes, but also guilt, and warmth. At that moment, for the two women on the dais, their lives so different from one another, were mirrors of each other.
Suddenly Nessie and Rosa embraced, the years visibly melting off until the tension was nonexistent.
“I’ve missed you, you gorgeous girl,” Rosa Marija replied. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“I told you, sister, never,” Nessie answered. Rosa sighed, seeming to deflate.
Everybody stood around, looking away, except for some reason Hargreaves, who was crying unabashedly, tears flowing down a still face. I felt suddenly like I didn’t belong, like I was seeing something that was best left in private.
A short while later Nessie Drake arranged for rooms in her subterranean kingdom for the whole crew, and for The Huckleberry to park below the winged bulk of La Maere. Plenty of Nessie’s crew helped. While we anchored my ship, we couldn’t help but notice the sharp-suited crewmen nearby lugging around Gatlings and Howitzers to mount in the abandoned buildings. Rosa Marija disappeared into Nessie’s quarters for two hours, during which a lovely dinner of whole roast suckling pig, borscht, and potatoes was served to go with everyone’s wine.
They probably had a lot to talk about, but that didn’t stop me having a few ideas. What did Rosa look like in a cravat and a high vampire collar? A French aristocrat’s knickers, a riding crop, and Nessie’s pale hands reaching up from under her...it was dangerous stuff, this Goth business. It left me wondering about Rosa’s past, and why she chose to fly with me of all people. Visiting me in my quarters to share a bottle of whiskey, teasing me with a different outfit every day...I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t even know everything that she had gone through with Nessie Drake during those conning and thieving years.
In the evening, everyone convened in the throne room again, though of course it was impossible to tell the difference underground. Someone even retrieved the naked man, who turned out to have brilliantly blue weepy eyes and was called Steve. He had thrown on some tight trousers and a corset. Now they were allies, I saw Hargreaves sneek peeks across the table at his sculpted musculature.
“Basically,” Nessie Drake explained from her throne once everyone had perched somewhere around her.
The mass of beams turned out to be a very practical conference location, featuring comfortable perches all around Drake.
“The Lovelorn shot us down a little while ago, and we were able to limp our way to my lair here in the Romanian forest. La Maere’s fangs are clipped; she will never fly again.”
“The primary screw assembly is melted to slag,” Rosa translated for everyone.
“So my only option is to bed down and wait for Ada to arrive, whereupon I will put down The Lovelorn like a rabid wolf,” Nessie concluded with a straight face.
“You can’t expect us to stay for the carnage,” Rosa Marija said. She looked towards me, her captain. Nessie raised an eyebrow. “We have a mission of our own.”
“Mais oui,” Nessie agreed. “My drones inform me we will come under attack some time tomorrow evening. The Lovelorn is accustomed to tracking hidden prey. You may stay as long as you like.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Drake,” Inspector Hargreaves interjected.
“Countess!” Steve corrected.
Remembering his intense nudity, Hargreaves could only back down. “Countess. We cannot wait for this…personal matter to be over. And permit me to say this–no conflict was won from a defensive position. In case something unfortunate were to happen, I would like to get to the point of our visit.” Hargreaves explained about Captain Sam, and about how someone had begun to steal the landmarks of Europe.
“You are extraordinarily gracious, Inspector Hargreaves, and a credit to your nation. It is unfortunate,” Nessie remarked. “Your Captain Sam did visit me not too long ago, just before our last date with Ada over the Mediterranean. He seemed intent on continuing to move, as if something were chasing him. He was also guarding a parcel quite intently, and I doubt he noticed I saw it.” She held up her talons, to indicate a package about two and a half feet long and quite narrow.
“Was he trying to sell it to you?” I said, and was taken aback as Rosa gave me an intense look. Her eyes went wide and a little wet. Did I sound that bitter?
“No,” said Nessie. “He seemed intent on keeping it safe. But he also mentioned something very interesting, as he was sleeping. It was difficult to hear. He was quite troubled, but I made out some very distinct words.”
My eyes shot a mile into the air, but I let the implication of Nessie watching Sam sleep hang. Blimey, he was probably three times her age! Instead of dwelling I let Nessie speak.
“He said, ‘The Leviathan won’t come just because you’re looking for a way back.’”
“Shit,” I cursed.
At once, I spun on my heel and made for the exit, not toward Nessie’s residential quarters but toward the tunnel to take me back to the street, and thence to the Huckleberry. I knew then that I didn’t have much time.
17
Sunset Over The Grave of La Maere
“Albion! Alby, gorgeous, what’s wrong? You left that room so quickly Nessie was afraid
she had upset you!” I said as I stormed across the deck of the ’Berry. Through the window, I could see my captain flicking toggle switches all over my consoles. I could also see myself in the reflection, still in my battle gear, my tall boots clicking as I crossed the wooden deck. Anybody else seeing us together would think we were two of a kind. There was the bittersweet taste of longing under my tongue. But now was not the time for romance.
“We have everything we need. We take off in twenty minutes,” Albion said as I arrived on the bridge.
Prissy Jack’s voice came stuttering out of the speaking horns, replying to Albion from the engine room. My apprentice helmsman owned vintage copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and he had been dying to meet Nessie Drake, the Gothic Pirate Princess. This news of take-off had him wide-eyed and flushed. Albion was being unusually harsh, snapping at the man and taking to the controls with a business-like fervor. Despite his anxiety, I found myself terribly attracted to the man. He looked quite dashing with a bit of flush in his cheeks.
“Hey! Albion! Stop! What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled, slamming one booted heel on top of a panel in front of Albion. “We’re leaving Nessie already? I’ve barely spoken to her in years!”
To my amazement, the captain simply brushed my foot off and continued to work.
“Why you little—!” I cried, and reached out to touch him.
Albion whirled about and glared, freezing me in my tracks. “You heard. The Lovelorn intends to be here tomorrow evening. I bet you anything they are actually only twenty minutes away. Lovelace is a mistress of misinformation.”
“I thought…”
“I know. I’m worried about Nessie too, but I had to get the information about Captain Sam first. Unless we are in the air when The Lovelorn gets here, we’re sitting ducks.”
“Does Nessie know? Know that Ada is coming for her?”
“Of course. She wanted us to stay so we would be involved. You ought to know better, but you love the little Lolita too much to notice.”