by Kin S. Law
“Whatever happened to those intrepid adventurers, then? It sounds like I might like to knight this Clemens fellow.”
An involuntary shudder rippled through me, triggering peals of laughter from my Queen. I was amazed at the setting. The Queen’s teatime was remarkably down to earth. No royal “we,” no regalia, just two ladies taking tea in the pleasant April sunshine.
“I am still recovering from the ordeal, Your Majesty,” I admitted. “Pray, no shocks to my system, not yet.”
“Oh, posh. It is in the tradition of our Pax Brittania to knight those of value to the country: musicians, inventors, even writers,” Her Majesty said offhandedly. “Now stop stalling.”
“Cezette Louissaint is under my care, for now. There are technicians working on making ambulatory appendages based on Valima Mordemere’s steamcrafts. There’s talk of opening a new department, to deal with quite extraordinary steamcraft crime. I take it you have nothing to do with this development?” My question was a tactical maneuver, to put Her Majesty on guard.
There were aspects of the case I still did not wish to reveal, such as how there were numerous air pirate dirigibles involved in the final battle, all of which had managed to escape before our eventual victory. The air pirates had been instrumental to keeping Mordemere distracted, though I only found out from Captain Clemens later. How had it been done? There was much British Intelligence could learn from those swashbuckling secret-keepers. I also neglected to mention Cid Tanner was building Cezette’s new legs. The Queen left these topics alone, feigning innocence.
“And the writer?”
“Found a venue for his work immediately. Our adventures will be serialized starting in this week’s Strand. I daresay he will have plenty of material, as he will be extending his research trip indefinitely.”
“I say. That Nessie Drake character ought to be worth a trio of stories, at least. Drake…Drake…I daresay the girl might be related to an actual Countess, somewhere along the line.”
“As for the pirates….”
“Say no more. I know you would tell me, if I asked, but there are advantages to having agents on the other side of the law,” Her Majesty said.
“You are always masterful at the game,” I conceded. “Your Majesty will need it for the days ahead. Although, I should like to tell you this.”
“What is it? Hmm?” Victoria purred, the curious cat.
It was odd on a matriarch, to say the least. I giggled, and relented.
“The Manchu Marauder has a lot of work ahead of him. A girl’s wiles are much harder to ply than all the skies of the world.”
Epilogue
A Long, Bright Teatime for the Soul
Somewhere, floating in some tropical sunshine I would rather not divulge, I sneezed. Hard.
“Oy. Have you been talking about me behind my back?” I asked the luxuriously reclined Rosa Marija. She was getting a full-body tan, and there wasn’t a stitch on her.
“Nah. But you might be getting allergic to all this relaxation, gorgeous. You haven’t purloined a single freighter in days,” Rosa suggested, rolling onto her side.
“I don’t think so,” I answered, and leered quite freely.
My goggles were on. I would get pale rings around my eyes, but at least I didn’t have to squint to admire my lover’s curves. From the bemused look on Rosa’s lovely face, it was clear she found the look amusing.
“Just wondering how to go about my new life of piracy,” I said, taking a break from the beautiful helmswoman. I still couldn’t believe she was mine.
But I was wondering about other things too. Now the problem of Mordemere was taken care of, the skies were clear, the ’Berry purred warm beneath us, and best of all, the Incognito were off our back. It had been touch-and-go for a moment there, surrounded by their ships hidden in amongst the final battle. They would have struck at the Nidhogg if I hadn’t gotten the job done, riddling it with anchors until it looked like the body of Julius Caesar.
I busily twirled something in my fingers as I mused on the problem, something that refracted the light in dizzying patterns onto Rosa’s soft skin. It was about as long as my palm and thin across, the width of the scar in his shoulder. A reminder of pain. Not a memento mori, but a memento dolor.
“Put that away and come here. It hurts my eyes.”
“All right, gorgeous.”
I started to put the shard away, realized I wasn’t wearing pants, and just set it aside on my folded-up aeronaut jacket. Then I rolled over into my helmswoman’s arms, pinning them down as I did so.
Why would anyone stop flying when there were such delights to be had in the sky?
THE END
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SPECTRE OF WAR
Prelude
A Picture House Scene
A black murder rose from the wound of a cliff, a bloodstain against the royal purple of the lavender meadow. Moments later their alarm was justified by a whistle howling through the valley, long and low.
It rumbled the hill burrows and shook a family of foxes from their hole. Critters scattered through the night. Crows swooped, gathering in an ominous, squawking cloud, their congress interrupted. They hovered over the cliffs, waiting—they knew this sound, this rumble that meant a wall of iron was about to come barreling across the gap. Sometimes, it would leave behind an unlucky something for breakfast.
And then the train was upon them, a hellish clatter, a tempest of wind-scored iron. For a moment the skin of the night was given a necklace of shimmering fire, the valley lit by a glittering arc from one sheer cliff side to the other as the train crossed the trellis bridge. The wind tore ahead of it and in its passing the old steel shook with uncommon speed. The foxes fled in terror. The murder, buffeted by the wind, tumbled headlong through the air.
In the train’s wake an inky patch followed, flowing across the flowers, a soundless shadow upon the ground.
Past the valley, the train screamed through a countryside far too open to feel safe. She was fleeing something, her engine pumping away at her gilded baroque flanks. Her engines sighed and groaned through three big pairs of boxy vents in her sides. Her cars rattled and tipped as she raced. Pistons blurred. Still the shadow followed, eating up the tracks, flowing over the caboose with its oblivious diners inside. One man shuddered over his Lobster Thermidor, feeling a chill.
The shadow nibbled on the coach, and as if making up its mind, surged forward as a black patch against the gilt and glimmering passenger cars. It ignored the third, the second, and even the first class passengers, aiming for the car just behind the sleek black of the hopper car, studded with glowing coppertop fuel pods.
The meager light made the black seem to grow deeper, the shadow larger, until all of a sudden it wasn’t a shadow anymore but claws of night reaching from a vast storm cloud hovering over the train. There came a pop and a hiss. Two smaller shadows detached from the cloud and came spinning down, leaves on the wind. The car below took their landing harshly—they had barely been introduced. It shook from side to side, its protest rattling its way down the train. But the train’s visitors paid it no mind, digging their stormy claws deep into their prey. Shudders rocked the cars as their teeth bit deep, exposing the innards to the wind.
There came a flash of light, and the shadows glowed for a millionth of a second. One of the passengers had leaned out to use a photogrammer, hoping to catch a shot of the thing shaking the cars. In the next second, the hand-held bauble was gone, snatched away by the roaring wind, but not before it illuminated a lumbering and grasping thing as tall as a house: shapes of yellow and black, glistening brass tubes, exposed, rotating gears.
Eldritch fingers dipped into the ragged roof of the train car. Secondary flares shot into the night, tiny suns lighting spots on the train car. Silhouettes, shadow-puppets suddenly lit in gun flashes too small to see anything b
y. A horrible shape, like a mangled starfish, tumbled headlong to the tracks as a shot rang out: a man tumbling from the roof. Heavy shudders shook the train, sparks of metal clashing with metal. The train’s vents erupted with fire. A great red hand hung in the air, its fingers opening, descending.
And as suddenly as they had come, the shadows were gone. The gunfire stopped. The engine rumbled on, perhaps half as anxiously as before, its whistle still sounding through the night, its proud flanks scarred and pocked by the grasp of alien hands.
1
The Chambermaid of Scotland Yard
Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves sighed, fidgeting at her Norwegian pine desk. Her straight-backed chair made an easy scapegoat for her discomfort. Eventually she picked up a lighter from one of the bundles of notes and photograms spread over the otherwise-neat workspace. It was one of the old flint wheel ones with a wick, none of the newfangled liquid apertures, and it caught every time. With her other hand, she held the letter out and watched as the open flame lapped up the sparse words.
Sorry, Vanessa, you’re beautiful and a wicked good time, but I can’t wait for you forever. I’ll remember our night in Dover, how beautiful you looked silhouetted against the sunset, the smoke of the rail and the surf on our toes.
Affectionately, Martin.
Her stomach gurgled, painfully. Bad beef? Not likely.
She’d absconded from seeing Martin four times—twice for work, once for her ward, and the last because she couldn’t bear to tell him the experience was par for the course. He ought to write a book about it: Seeing Vanessa Hargreaves, a Fruitless, Lonely Endeavor. Martin was a good-looking one, too, just an inch shorter, so she was always looking into his mussed night-clerk hair. A good shag.
Worse still, he had been nice.
She simply hadn’t the time. Two days without sleep left her arms slack in their white cotton sleeves and her stomach prone to upset. Her office was small, and shelves of intelligence and constables’ reports crowded in on either elbow. By the light of her wall lamp, her flaxen strands glimmered where they escaped her neat bun. Her corset’s cheap stays dug into her back, even though she’d made it a point of fashion and progressivism to wear it on the outside, loose enough so she could avoid a stabbing if she saw one coming. Work was a weight that wrung the blood from her brow, but not one she could easily place aside.
The ghosts of profanity constantly haunted her lips. But she just let the flames lick closer and closer until the bite touched her copper rings. Then she opened her hand and let the wisp be sucked out the window.
The only consolation was the view. Victoria Embankment was a bustle of steaming hansoms, their lights rivaled by the boats on the Thames and the zeppelins drifting by overhead. Sometimes Hargreaves liked to sit on the benches and watch ladies and good-looking gentlemen come drifting by, cycling in the brisk evening. But not tonight. Tonight’s entertainment consisted of overdue reports and a plethora of cases. She picked at them halfheartedly. As true night came to the streets below rattling traps and horse-drawn carriages replaced the cycling folk. The steam engine and clocked equine were the preferred mode of travel; they were symbols of wealth and power clopping past on steel hooves, their flanks liveried to match their owners’ elegant greatcoats and modish bustles. Night blurred all the handsome lines of the vessels now, and every conveyance glittered, a constellation of gliding stars.
After five minutes, she cast aside the report with a sigh of frustration. She didn’t care what people called them, automata, gears, or steam golems, to her they still looked like Mordemere’s terrible kobolds, with their scissor claws.
Hargreaves’ thoughts drifted back to her adventure on the Huckleberry, together with the reckless Albion Clemens. Apart from a chance sighting in the paper, she hadn’t seen any of them since. Just as well—their airship had flown under no banner, which made all of them pirates. If they hadn’t also saved all of Europe, the crew would have been liable to be hanged, despite their status as cult heroes in the back rooms of pubs, picture houses, and penny dreadfuls. They had stopped a madman from… what exactly? Hargreaves wasn’t sure. Destroying the world? From the reports scattered before her, the world had not changed an iota. Far from being saved, it seemed the world was having a grand old time destroying itself.
It had only been two years. It was two years since steamcraft mogul Valima Mordemere opened the door to a Copernican revolution. Though Mordemere’s magical machine, the Nidhogg, had been lost over Eastern Europe, the alchemic madman had already sold a number of weapons to the militaristic Ottoman Empire. Much reduced by the advent of airships choking their trade, the former crossroads empire was mustering to retake its former glory. The Knights of the Round were Pax Britannia’s only edge. Still, Her Majesty would have to prepare for things to go pear-shaped.
The blueprints of Mordemere’s clanker armor, his kobolds, and various other strange inventions were on file in his old atelier in Leyland, and her boys were making a killing from the shadow of the Ottomans looming over the horizon. In the London Times at her elbow, Vanessa Hargreaves could just make out the adverts for Doctor Adams’ Miraculous Fuel Additive and Professor Dahl’s Spectacular Coal-Saving Spirits. She threw the paper aside, only for it to land with Elric Blair’s latest novella glaring at her from an ad. The air pirates were up to their old tricks, it seemed.
In a word, the world was changing. People were finally selling their horses and filling their stables with clean-puffing sedans and mild-mannered steel steeds. London’s air was cleaner than it ever had been, but it was not without a cost. The coming of the automata reminded everyone the wonders at hand were wartime steamcraft. Those iron giants, two stories tall and fearsomely strong, were essential to the rebuilding of Westminster and the other parts of Europe devastated by Mordemere. With them lumbering about even in civilian capitals, it was believed the Ottomans dared not infringe on the West.
The automata were also a double-edged sword. Clever criminals could overpower the Metropolitan Police Service simply by possessing one of these large, powerful machines. Despite the Ministry of the Interior’s adamant insistence on strict controls, one Leyland automata had already been involved in a sensational robbery. Highgate Bank’s steel vault had been emptied a month ago, the culprit making off with more than a hundred thousand pounds of notes and coin. The Highgate bank job had been done with punctures of the vault’s hinges, then ripped away with incredible force. It was an unprecedented and hence unprepared-for event. Constables arriving on scene reported the managers simply stood there, staring in a befuddled manner at their impenetrable steel door lying on the bank’s marble floor like a crumpled toffee wrapper.
Hargreaves drank deeply of her cold tea. It helped, but not by much. The night was muggy, the beautiful metropolitan cityscape in a Turkish bath. Sweat dripped down her graceful neck and pooled unladylike in her bosom, steaming up the new badge at her shirt pocket—the badge that read Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Division Six.
“Your Majesty, Your Majesty, Your bloody Majesty,” Hargreaves blasphemed casually, a daughter bemoaning a mother popular at the pub.
The fact of the matter was, Her Majesty Queen Alexandrina Edwardia Victoria III was directly responsible for the mountain of work all about Hargreaves. The queen had commissioned MD6 after the Calamity Over Europe to address steamcraft crime. What it meant, in practice, was Hargreaves had become the chambermaid of Scotland Yard. Whatever refuse the other units could connect with a newfangled steam engine or automata misuse was directed to her for disposal. Every cuckoo clock that sprung into someone’s eye was shoved at MD6. It was all she could do to document the cases, and dole out what enforcement she could under the sorely lacking framework of British law. If she could just hang one perpetrator, she would feel a bit better about her job.
A pile of documents shifted on her desk, and Hargreaves pounced on the stack of criminal case files to keep them from toppling. When they were straightened again, a fresh London Times article lay revealed, earmarked th
at very morning. She cursed—this should have been brought to her attention right away.
The story read: Witnesses at Paddington reported the arrival of the ten-thirty Montmartre Express, a fifteen-car passenger train from Paris, sans one car. When the Gallic engine glided through the glass-and-iron wall of the station, only the platform and wheels remained of a missing car, leaving a gap where Scotland Yard’s vigilance ought have been.
“My word, what a lashing,” Hargreaves sighed. It represented an odious amount of monetary damages, and bore all the marks of a golem crime. The French insurance companies had been quick to pay, but not without a smirk tangible in their telegraphed paperwork. France did not as yet possess automata craftsmen, although their engines were excellent for the purpose. The spite was thicker than Vacherin Mont D’or.
Unfortunately the case would have to wait—it was too late to call on Temple Mills, where the victimized engine had been sent. Suddenly aware of the dwindling embers, the inspector yearned for a comfortable fire. Perhaps a good book to take her mind off the case. Thankfully, there was something almost as good nearby, so she grabbed her riding coat and goggles to go to it.
Stepping into the smoothly tiled, utilitarian corridors of the Yard, she took the back stair and descended into the bowels of the building. The smoothly plastered walls became raw iron pilings and mortared brick. Damp dripped from every crack in the wall. This close to the Thames, it could not be helped. The training rooms were down here. With guilt, she remembered she hadn’t been keeping up with her judo instructor’s sparring sessions.
Past the padded practice rooms and locker areas, she finally reached her destination. Hargreaves breathed deeply. The scent of lift compound took her back to the refreshing showers aboard the Huckleberry. Camouflaged behind an old archive door, Scotland Yard had secretly hollowed out two levels of concrete and pipe. Some cheeky monkey had scribbled “You Must Be” on the office’s temporary window plaque, over the mysterious anagram: