by Kin S. Law
“This is a blasted prison, it is,” I remarked, and sank into the opposite chair in despair.
Blair began to scroll through the first news pages, fiddling with the machine’s tiny brass nodules, oblivious to this Manchu Marauder’s plight.
Hargreaves
At the same moment Blair and Clemens were somewhere in the middle of their first volume of research, Rosa and I stood beside the Leyland Cross, so declared by a plaque at the base of the lonely stone monument, simply called ‘the Cross’ by the locals. The monument stood alone in a tiny enclosure without even grass on the plot of land. Past some fragile fencing that enclosed it rose tall factories, their foundations plunging some fifty exposed stories in naked supports and mined-out ground. The Cross lay completely in the shadow of these monstrosities.
“It’s a bit…”
“Sad,” I finished for Rosa.
So it was. The spindly stone cross itself was only a little taller than either of us. Beneath it sat an ignored, eroded drinking fountain gone green with moss. Not a soul would find north here. The shadows were deep enough to grow moss on all sides, and the factories soared a whitewashed gray up to block the stars.
“It’s a common story in Britain’s Steam Age,” I continued as Rosa paced the little enclosure where the Leyland Cross was preserved. I read the plaque before going on. “This Cross has stood since Saxon times. It’s the oldest thing in the city. They put it here to mark the crossroads. It used to light the way for miles around. There were shops, just there, and stockades, and a well. Leyland used to revolve around this cross. Now it just rots in this hole, eclipsed by all this industry.”
Arms crossed beneath her breasts, Rosa tapped her foot and looked off in the distance. “Look, I don’t much care,” she said. “These are some pretty big names, Ursine, Ubik, big manufacturers making Her Majesty’s guns and bombs. They can do pretty much what they like.”
“But why leave it at all? The air rights alone have got to be worth their trouble to buy.”
“Then Valima Mordemere did it. The alchemist who runs the whole of Leyland must have some reason for leaving this stupid stone cross smack dab in the middle of the city. Maybe he kissed his first date here and left it as a monument to spite your Victorian sensibilities. Right now, all this cross means is a way we can talk to this Jonah Moore person.”
I colored, distraught. There was a lot I wanted to say about my country’s history, our struggle with appropriate social behavior, the gains made by women in the intervening decades. Certainly Rosa had no right to judge me by the imperialist standards of the past. But the present was more pressing, so I let it go.
“The inebriates were agreed on one thing; Jonah Moore arrives at the Leyland Cross at exactly five-thirty every Sunday to take his tea. If we are to believe them, he is the only person who has ever actually seen the Laputian Leviathan, and he never leaves Mordemere’s atelier, except for Sunday tea,” I said.
“There’s no need to recap, I was there too,” Rosa said. When she was irritated, the tops of her breasts flushed prettily. “We went to the pub so I wouldn’t have to wait.”
“I’d say an eye witness is infinitely more valuable than written accounts.”
Rosa harrumphed.
“Moore is also a trusted associate of Mordemere. If anyone knows if and how the alchemic magnate is involved, it would be him.”
“Harumph,” repeated Rosa. But a lead was a lead, and I doubted Albion or Blair was waiting under as conditions as pleasant as these.
As if on cue, the factory nearby belched a cloud of noxious smoke that settled on the Cross like a veil.
Albion
“Hmmmph,” I said.
“Impatience won’t help matters. You’ve made that noise forty-eight times,” Blair said, mumbling the last. “You were the one who wanted to look at the records.”
“I expected some pattern to emerge immediately,” I admitted, but my brow was furrowed in sheepish thought. “It does seem like the search for the Leviathan has basically been as fruitless as our own. Other than a few fuzzy photograms and interviews, the people from the balloon seem to have disappeared.”
“So you were paying attention,” Blair remarked. “The Fanciful Bugger, yes, it was the balloon that first caught sight of The Leviathan, before pressed helium, before the first steam engine was put on the first heavier-than-air craft. At the time, they were on a scientific survey mission over the Black Sea. Crew…” Blair consulted his notes. “Captain Georg Weiss, Airman Hansel Bergman, Engineer Valima Mordemere, Photogram Technician Jonah Moore.”
“It was the beginning of an obsession,” I said. “Mordemere was a young man who saw something amazing.” It must have been like arriving onto a brand new world, seeing those iridescent towers rise out of the clouds, the galleries like translucent marble. A bit like Columbus and the Americas, or Lewis and Clark in the unexplored West. There was a reason I chose to ply the skies, quite apart from my personal history. Once I was free of Captain Sam I could have chosen to be a cobbler. Or a mailman, if not for this persistent call of the clouds. It gets in one’s blood.”
“Dent and Dahl when they discovered the Lands Beyond? I read The Adventurers when I was a boy, as well,” Blair said.
“That old magazine! The world seemed so much larger through the pages of a good romp. I assume this is the work that inspired the eventual foray into journalism?” I said. The blank stones of the old rectory room suddenly seemed like a treasure room under a lawless jungle. Blair’s eyes, in turn, seemed to range across the peaks of misty highlands.
“There were penny dreadfuls, and pulp fiction when the airships opened trade with the Americas. Where I became enamored of the printed word, you seem to have taken those stories more literally,” Blair said, turning his attention back to the micro-fiche machine.
The light threw strange, toothed shadows on the walls. Patiently clicking gears and the subtle buzz of the Edison bulb produced an atmosphere redolent of stories by the campfire. I was inclined to share, in this environment.
“I didn’t really have a choice. Captain Sam loved dreadfuls; he had boxes of them stored in a permanent corner of the hold. Reading them seemed to give me a little context. Even with no other point of reference, most boys wouldn’t think plying the high skies something normal people did,” I recalled. “When I wasn’t reading about the threat of pirates lurking behind every cloud and mountain, I was the threat of pirates lurking behind every cloud and mountain. It was an oddly contradictory and reflective thing, my childhood,” I said to Blair. There was a lot I did not want to tell him.
“But you had a cutlass?”
“I had a cutlass.”
“Lucky bastard.”
Long hours reading by starlight on deck, by some errant glowing wire or candle flame, the patient glow of the ship’s furnaces–it all surged through my memory in an instant. I sometimes regretted what I did. It had led to years of estrangement from the person who had taken me in. Captain Sam had taught me to read, to fix things, and to hold my head high as an airship pirate. To hang the rules, and do what I thought was right. Of course, he had been the one to break that maxim into a thousand hypocritical pieces.
I kept telling myself the bastard deserved it. In the end, I had called my crew together and gone to find him, landing us all in this predicament. Who knew the old codger would be involved in something as ridiculous as the theft of national monuments?
To disguise my brooding, I enjoyed a man-child guffaw over the shared fantasy. As Blair flipped through periodical after periodical, the pirate captain in me suddenly had an idea. One of the reasons interest in the Leviathan had waned was its surprising ability to stay hidden.
“Say…Blair…”
“Yes?” the researcher said as he plowed through yet another uninformative lead.
“I know this is sort of your thing, the research and whatnot, but you used to have dreams of being a pirate. Has it turned out anything like you thought it would?”
B
lair stopped scribbling for a moment, eyes distant with thought.
“In some respects. I have to say there’s a good deal more gray in it than I thought at eleven,” Blair settled.
I grinned. “Doing illegal crap is the definition of a pirate, but it’s not always a cardinal sin. There’s more than one pirate out there with a basket and balloon, going around liberating perfectly edible food waste from big cities and lifting off before anyone can catch them. There are specialists who are experts at misinformation and propaganda, and others who toss bushels of flyers over the rails of their ships trying to prove the existence of perpetual energy. I know a swarthy brother who flies around spray-painting geishas and litanies against big business. Blame your eleven year-old self for thinking too deep in the box.”
“I assume you’re about to propose something out of the box?”
“Aye!” I declared, jumping up from my seat.
The table gyrated violently from my feet leaving it.
“Oh, dear,” I heard Blair say, but I was already heading for the axe.
Hargreaves
“Aye! There he is!” Rosa exclaimed.
We two ladies, faced with the reality of mutual, profound obnoxiousness when forced to be in each other’s company, had decided to tail the mysterious Jonah Moore. By all accounts, the fellow was older than the hills, nearing ninety by now. Rather than confront the man based on a few reports from the pub hounds, I wanted a little substance to the rumor that Moore was the man to see about a dog. Mainly, I didn’t want to see if the old codger’s ticker would seize if confronted by two totally different kinds of pushy, attractive woman simultaneously.
We hid in plain sight, as two chattering acquaintances who had quite by chance encountered each other in the park. When Jonah Moore finally arrived, it was almost an anticlimax. A little gray person puttered up to the bench in front of the Cross and simply sat down.
“Wait,” I murmured to Rosa. On the outside, we still maintained the façade of hen-like patter. I wanted to see why he visited the Cross every day. Call it a hunch.
Jonah Moore sat down and opened an attaché case, which turned out to contain a sandwich and a vacuum flask of steaming beverage, likely tea. His suit was immaculately tailored the exact mountain glacier shade of his full head of hair. The curly mop was so full, in fact, it had aggressively expanded itself until it was occupying most of his face. The eyes and nose weren’t noble, but for that exact reason they were symmetrical, functional, and full of intelligence. One stylish monocle set off the feeling of academia perfectly. He was, well, exactly what one would expect of a respectable gentleman of means in one of the great technological organs of Britain.
It was a fact that naturally made me highly suspicious.
“We wanted to talk to him. I’m going to talk to him,” Rosa insisted, nearly breaking cover.
Her impatience was justified. The sandwich, though enjoyed at a thoroughly snail-like pace, was not substantial. It certainly seemed like each bite was a routine gesture, every minuscule movement a moment of savor, but soon he would be done and move on.
“Doesn’t it strike you how odd this situation is? Here is one of the foremost men in Valima Mordemere’s atelier, just having lunch at a monument like anyone else. There must be dozens of enclosures like this in the atelier’s courts,” I argued under my breath. “This feels off.”
“I would think lunch would be more enjoyable in the many dirigibles tethered over the smog. Maybe an on-deck garden,” Rosa agreed, her full lips drawing a certainly Clemens-felling pout. “It feels like a ritual. Something he has to get right every time.”
“Look at the men over on the other side of the square. They’ve been eyeing us for a long time now, but as soon as Moore appears they’ve decided to disappear. It seems more than passing strange,” I continued. Something was adding up, but I found myself in the rare occasion of not possessing the numbers. “He doesn’t look a day over sixty. There’s more than a cane supporting our Mr. Moore.”
The enigmatic Mr. Moore stood up and began to walk, though not in the direction he had arrived from. He employed a cane with a rounded knob, however sprightly, and tapped it as he walked. Rosa tugged me out of the clouds and hurried to tail the elderly gentleman through the valleys of the shadow of industry.
“Everything about him is strange,” Rosa replied quietly to my insistence. “There are no liver spots, he stands without a problem, and none of his joints seem to be stiff. Good appetite to boot. Jonah Moore isn’t nearly as Biblical as his name, but rich people keep well; it’s sort of a distinguishing characteristic.”
“He’s ninety,” I insisted. Secretly, I was fascinated with the helmswoman’s powers of observation. “The man should be an invalid at this point! Industry does nothing to keep one young.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Moore led us on a merry tour of Leyland. We walked north, with the sea at the left as far as I reckoned. Tall buildings hid the sea itself, but Mordemere’s atelier was visible all throughout the city. It served as a guidepost. Where the atelier dipped behind a spire or outcropping, there were always the cables, pipes and aqueducts converging on it like some massive web. Nearer at hand, the greasy, cabled walls were plastered with missing person’s posters. I recoiled, making Rosa look again. None of the posters featured the same person twice.
Losing us was not an issue. I was accustomed to undercover work and Rosa seemed like she was born of shadow. Tracking Jonah Moore turned into an exercise in patience. We had the luxury of looking around the city, taking in the details. The whole place felt oppressive, but also dry, as if the substance of Leyland was thinner than elsewhere.
Soon, the rhythmic clicking of Mr. Moore’s cane stopped. With Rosa in tow, I found myself at yet another cleft between the sheer cliffs of pipework and soot. This time we stood before a squat old brick warehouse. Here, Jonah Moore stooped to touch a plaque in the door before moving on.
While Rosa kept an eye on the trotting Moore, I read the plaque. As soon as I finished reading, our duo trotted after Jonah.
“This used to be one of the old nationalized carriage companies,” I said. “Mostly making lorries, buses, and trolleys before Mordemere bought out everything here under special administrative permit. I read about the workers fighting the change, but put together they didn’t have a fifth of the leverage or as big a purse as the alchemist did.”
“What was so bad about turning out dirigibles instead of lorries?” Rosa mused. She was busy choosing our next cover from Moore, though the elderly chap didn’t seem keen on turning any way but the way he was going.
“Most of the old Leyland workers were facing termination. Mordemere preferred to bring in fresh young workers at a fraction of the cost.” It was a common enough story that I saw as a member of Scotland Yard.
Rosa gave her me a look that was half-sneer and half-grin. “Sounds like there’s more than one reason to bring some piracy into Mordemere’s private kingdom,” Rosa said.
Moore led us past an area of increased activity. Everywhere things whistled and groaned the lark cry of stressed metal. Dense heads of steam built up and frothed out of windows squirreled high between groves of machinery. Where darkened windows cropped up, the shadows of bent forms could be seen laboring at tiny parts or moving silhouettes of things more at home at the top of a beanstalk. People sprawled in the streets, some begging for change, others simply begging.
We came across a set of dense double doors when Rosa suddenly cried out, “Hargreaves, down!”
And suddenly I was thrown back into my days as a fresh constabulary, for the air was thick with the sound of gunfire.
Albion
After abandoning the reading room as dutiful law-breaking investigators, I put my knack for destruction to good use. I sniffed out the desired route, literally sniffed the air, before making a beeline toward a nondescript brown door. When kicked down, the aperture led underneath the building, where Valima Mordemere had built an elaborate system of tunnels beneath Leyland.
One of the myriad cables snaking through was a private telegraph wire, which I was convinced would lead to an information hub of some kind.
“The wire does look suspicious, what with thousands already trailing from the church tower above,” Blair agreed. We probably couldn’t learn anything further from the microfiche, but a hidden under-city? If I had one that was where I would hide all my secrets.
And so we descended.
“Even though nothing too illegal is going on, you seem to be sweating bullets,” Blair observed.
“I will have you know this coat is damnably hot,” I insisted. I tugged at the collar, normally dashingly loose, now indecorously open.
Not only was the service tunnel hot and wet with steam, it was also narrow, forcing our breath back at us.
“Why not remove the coat?” Blair asked as we finally exited the tiny service passage and emerged into a sturdy, cavernous tunnel.
“Because it makes me look dashing,” I answered. “And the newest periodicals say our natural pheromones are more attractive to women than expensive cologne.” I didn’t mention that the coat had been a gift from Captain Sam. Some roads are best left untraveled.
The tunnel was modern with good steel and clockworked ventilation shafts spaced every few meters. There was space enough for us to walk with arms spread open and not touch each other or the walls, if we so chose. Some kind of track lay at the bottom. It was too small for a train, but a cart or trolley might comfortably glide along it.
“I wasn’t aware dirigibles had access to academic papers!” Blair said.
“We can usually intercept them regularly along mail routes. There are places like the Hook and the platform in Romania that more or less stay stationary, and serve as trade stops and libraries along major pirate lanes,” Clemens explained. He spun around a little, looked up, then down, and decided to go right. “It’s important to have true, reliable information if one is about to steal the latest batch of picture-house reels for early release. More importantly, it’s the only way for banned books to circulate.”