by Kin S. Law
Hargreaves had only been able to save one thing from her heavy carpetbag; the sparker from Firearms Division. The tiny device was jammed in a loop of fabric. San Francisco had yielded a serviceable Colt to replace her Browning 9mm. Hargreaves still had her hammered bronze dagger, and one more weapon; her curves, slotted into a loose cotton chemise and riding breeches. Probably not the most formidable weapon, considering they were about to storm a house of burlesque. But a gun and fresh clothes, not a bad day shopping.
They took the back way. With no Rosa Marija to gain access, Albion simply inserted his cutlass into the doorframe. He delivered a heavy kick to the handle and the door popped open. Inside, Albion gestured to the sharp-suited guard just by the shadow of the rearmost train car. He pulled out an empty absinthe bottle, placing it by his revolver muzzle, but Hargreaves rolled her eyes at this improvised attempt at stealth. She ran, full tilt like a cat, leaped up and captured the guard’s neck between her thighs. The takedown was textbook, quieter than a church, and it only took another minute for the man’s labored wheezing to change to the regular rhythm of sleep.
“The poor man’s silencer doesn’t work,” whispered Hargreaves. “You’ll blow off your hand before you give us away.”
“Don’t knock it,” said Albion, grinning.
They made their way up a cargo gangplank, and found themselves amongst pallets of champagne, boxes stuffed with straw and crates well chilled with ice blocks. Experimentally, Albion cracked one open, and found it was a box of mushrooms. Chanterelle, if Hargreaves was not mistaken. The car was full of the sundry of a luxury lounge. Albion and Hargreaves were to sneak in with the daily bread.
Oddly, a large crossbar covered the door to the next car. They futzed with the lock, but could not get it open, and they weren’t about to shoot it. The point was to enter unnoticed. They hid amongst the crates while workers rolled in a few more pallets. None of them were interested in more than leaving the items on the car as quickly as possible. Then they sealed up the loading door, sliding it into place with a clang.
Soon the train lurched, and presumably, began to pull out of the station. The jolly whistling of the tiny engine was unbelievably rude. It put one in the mind of catcalls. Then the rails began to rattle, and the clandestine duo relaxed against the boxcar’s sides. The trip took perhaps twenty minutes, but once the train stopped, a line of men in white jackets came in and began to move the crates out. With so much to be moved, it was easy for two people to sneak out from the personnel door at the rearmost of the car. Small wonder the burlesque wasn’t besieged by stowaway young boys. As they left, they remarked on a separate gangplank going into the partitioned area. The gangplank was completely sealed up with tarpaulin, its secrets impenetrable.
They found themselves on a lone platform carved out of a cliff, with raw rock and naked pilings everywhere. A pair of swinging doors let them into a back room which led into padded, velvety hallways that were all too familiar: cologne and old champagne, the pink smells of ladies’ underthings, powder and glitter, the smell of theater.
The inside of the cabaret was damp, which suggested they were near water. The sounds of guests settling in the theater made it easier to orient themselves, and they soon discovered the layout was similar to the Luminescent Cabaret; a sprawling performance area, and behind it, little love nests secreted away in the nooks of the building. Hargreaves pressed to the walls and cleared corners. Albion walked along jauntily, his gun at his hip, cutlass in the other hand. Hargreaves scowled at this apparent laxness, but when one of the unmarked doors burst open, Albion had the upper hand. The door emitted a very satisfied-looking, corpulent man in disheveled clothes and a woman, even more disheveled in strappy heels. The guests must have been there from the night before.
Hargreaves might have fired indiscriminately from strung nerves, but Albion simply shooed the couple back inside. His smile disarmed them enough not to cry out, and for all they knew the inspector and the captain were just another amorous couple. Albion closed the door on them, putting one finger to his lips in a one-sided sign of conspiracy. Clearly, chaos was the man’s natural habitat, improvisation as natural as breathing.
Further along the corridor. Albion stopped to examine an inconspicuous locked door. After a cursory inspection, he began to jimmy the lock with his cutlass like he did before. It was not apparent to Hargreaves why Albion chose this door. There was nothing particularly striking or unusual about it. Given his success at placating the native fauna, however, Hargreaves decided to trust Albion’s instincts—and was rewarded when the door popped open to reveal a long switchback stair, leading down into a pit illuminated with dim arclights.
“Burgess’ workshop I assume.” said Albion. “He has one in New York.”
They filed down the narrow stairs. The walls reminded Hargreaves of MAD: damp worked brick, crawling with scrabbling life. At the fourth landing, Hargreaves nearly pitted the wall with her Colt when a rat the size of a cat darted out from underneath a dripping pipe.
“Easy…” said Albion. “This whole area is tidal wetlands, the wildlife will be everywhere.”
“Damn and blast!” hissed Hargreaves. “Why couldn’t he have made his lair in a tower, like any self-respecting villain?”
They continued until the walls dropped away, revealing a cavernous space evidently used for storage. There were wooden boxes, and flat objects wrapped in waxed vellum. Myriad things lay apparently forgotten down here, including an enormous signboard featuring two-story high thighs in fishnet stockings. Albion scarcely sparred the board a glance. He seemed a bit down, and Hargreaves had to wonder, not for the first time, where Rosa Marija could be.
The duo turned a corner and found themselves in a very unusual corridor. Wood lined the stone walls and the path was a raised walkway over a channel of murky water. Like Albion Clemens, Burgess had found the best way of hiding secrets in a populous city; within the warrens of her very underbelly.
“If this place is anything like New York… yes,” Albion said. They found a staging area, plausibly where the hidden goods from the barge wound up. Signs of recent activity lay everywhere: trails of cleared dust on the floor and the boxes lined up along the halls. Racks along the walls held Automata parts, bits of engines and jars for various chemicals, all neatly labeled and organized. Despite these indications of recent use, the place appeared deserted. The pirate picked up a glittering component from one shelf, made to pocket it, then looked with duper’s delight at Hagreaves.
“Even on my best day, I wouldn’t have a problem with you stealing from Burgess. He was…a dick. A loutish dick,” said Hargreaves.
As they made their way down the strangely deserted tunnel passage, she recalled Burgess in the Luminescent Cabaret on the Bowery. The odd twitches of the fingers, the soft, cultured voice, and the curt way he dealt with those he disapproved of. The habits of a gentleman entrepreneur. Disturbing undercurrents had animated Burgess, writhing serpents under his mask of civility, and those seemed now to permeate this place. Judging from this dungeon of a workspace, he and Hallow were of a feather.
There was a discipline to the place that was unnerving, emanating from the well-appointed engine bays and neat workshops off either side of the hall. Despite the sorts of louts Hargreaves knew Burgess employed, everything was carefully placed, sorted, and labeled in big hands. Only compelling reasons could make muscle behave that way, for example a massive brothel debt. One ornate door with oranges carved in it looked to be Burgess’ San Francisco quarters. Yet, not a single worker was to be found.
“They might be meeting here right now,” Albion said, stopping beside the last engine bay in the hall. Beyond it, the path dropped clear out of the world, in a dizzying chasm a hundred feet across. The filthy water dropped off the edge and disappeared into nothing.
“This must be where he moves his wares to airships,” said Hargreaves. “After he launders the Gear parts.”
Albion drew his gun, and Hargreaves rolled her eyes when she saw t
he ridiculous bottle emerge once more. For one thing, it was bloody stupid. For another, their appearance would make any semblance of stealth a moot point. They were here to stop a deal with the devil, which meant aggressive negotiations. Hargreaves was prepared to do what she must.
“They might have left. There’s nobody in these tunnels,” countered the inspector, somewhat hopefully. “Not even a guard.” It was like walking through the warrens of Burgess’s hidden mind.
Albion reached out, grasping the knob. Hargreaves’ instincts ran circles. They had the element of surprise, they had the sturdy rock doorjamb for cover…
“Snap out of it,” hissed Albion, and yanked the door wide open. He dashed inside. Hargreaves spun into it, sweeping the room with her Colt, expecting a layout much like the bays they had crossed. She was kicking herself for letting Albion take point. There were too many blind corners, too many desks and shelves lining the walls.
“There’s nobody here,” Hargreaves said finally, putting her gun down. The room was like all the others save in two respects. The far wall was open to the pit, and it was much larger, accommodating a landing platform. The long tools on the walls and the bins full of parts were just as organized, but a few items were hastily scattered on the tables. There was a feeling of fervor here, and again a sense that these things were all recently touched.
Albion looked around, and began to poke into the corners, prodding aside neatly sorted boxes of parts with his cutlass. There was a raised portion of the room that appeared to be an inventory of pipes, valves, nuts and bolts on shelves like library stacks. Tellingly, there was a whole box of adamant Gear nuts. Soon Albion disappeared around some shelves of heavy equipment, and all she could tell of his whereabouts was the heavy clanging of metal being dashed aside. Vacuum tubes scattered from beneath a shelf like colorful marbles, shattering as they rolled off the lip of the raised floor.
“What are you doing? If Burgess isn’t here, we’re shit out of luck!” Hargreaves chastised. “Let’s just get out of here before someone comes.”
She loped over to a utilitarian desk, strangely set in the middle of the room, and began to pull open the drawers. “What about the government manufactory you found? Could he be there?” It was on the other side of the country, though, which meant they were days behind and the contents of the box were lost forever. Dread began to drip down Hargreaves’ back.
“He could…” Albion’s murmur was barely audible. It grew in volume as he rounded the other side of the shelves. “But the Luminescent Cabaret was never so rowdy without Burgess in New York.”
“Don’t be daft. The man has underlings to run things for him,” Hargreaves said. She continued to move, making the most of her time exactly as she had been trained, while Albion stood there, touching a bauble here and there, never leaving the raised dais.
Why put shelves in the middle of valuable workspace? No efficiency, Hargreaves thought.
Having run out of places to look, Hargreaves joined Albion on the raised platform. The tools and parts here were well wrapped in tissue paper, and dusty. It stood to reason if Burgess spent his time on the East Coast as Albion implied, the operation here would hardly be touched. Perhaps it was used to refurbish parts sold on the West Coast?
Hargreaves stopped, nearly walking into Albion. Something had caught Albion’s attention, and she wasn’t sure what. He put one finger to Hargreaves’ lip, shocking her with its gentle reproach. Carefully, he retraced his steps, one at a time, letting his body make the deduction for him. Was it the feel of the floor? The smell of the dust?
There. He had it. She saw it on his face. She moved closer. There was a spanner on the shelf, strangely free of dust. A triangular space had been cleared, like a snow angel, with the spanner as the hypotenuse.
“Albion. I think this is a switch,” said Hargreaves.
“Care to do the honors?”
Hargreaves took a deep breath, and pulled. The end of the spanner came round, spinning by its jaws as if it were latched on to a particularly tough screw. Everything lurched. That strange lip around the shelves parted from the floor, and suddenly they were rising rapidly toward the ceiling. Hargreaves, struggling to her feet, unconsciously pulled back on the spanner. Their ascent lurched to a halt, becoming a gentle hover. The spanner had been the secret lever for some kind of elevator.
“Be ready for anything,” said Hargreaves, easing the spanner forward. Slowly, they began to rise, and this time the ceiling slid apart to accommodate them.
The lift brought them up through a stone shaft. They could not see what was supporting their ascent, but the shaft itself was smooth, and other than the tiny, winking arc bulbs at the edge of the platform, completely black. By its light, Hargreaves kept them rising at a slow pace, until a dim rectangular space opened up overhead. Mindful of any braking noise, Hargreaves eased them up into a sort of lofty warehouse.
Whereupon they were blinded by the flare of a dozen arclamps. Hargreaves felt, rather than saw, Albion whirl, and the click of both the Red Special and Victoria sounded in his hands. Shots rang, and screaming followed. How could he have done in three men at once, blinded by the lights? Of course, the bottle; he had lobbed and shot the bottle, and the shards must have cut the men to shreds, exploding like ordinance. He must have done it by touch alone.
But all was in vain. There came a sharp double clunk, a clatter of metal on floor, and then a heavier thud. Hargreaves might have bet a quid someone had just brained the pirate captain with a cudgel. Dull, hard packing sounds of someone being kicked the shit out of filled the room.
The bright lamps could only blind for a fraction of a second, but Hargreaves had the impression of support beams curving away overhead, and a sense of unimpeded enclosure that suggested a large warehouse. She raised her sparker and the Colt, but unlike Albion, she was not a glutton for violence. Murder in recent days still weighted down her trigger fingers, and that was enough for something heavy to club the guns from her stinging hands. There was a strangely smoky scent that went away as soon as the burlap bag came down, shutting out the world, but she had seen enough for Hargreaves to conclude they were near the Ghost Train: Hallow’s Conqueror Worm.
Then a familiar condescending voice rumbled through, accented by the clicks of multiple gun hammers being eased back.
“Why if it isn’t my favorite mutton-shunter!” said Jean Hallow gleefully.
Station 14
The Cavalry
Unbeknownst to Vanessa Hargreaves or Albion Clemens, help was not far away.
A fisherman was returning in the early morning from two nights’ successful haul. It was late in autumn, but the ocean had been thick with snapper, and his ice boxes overflowed. His keel rode low in the water. There had been good bycatch, octopus and sizeable crab, even a roughy, which he could not sell but would make good eating for his family. His was a multiple-use boat, and it had survived rather better than the trawlers or pelagic netters in a demanding frontier market.
As he headed back toward San Francisco, the open ocean had yielded more and more fish to the line, which let him replace the oldest catch unusually frequently. It was almost as if something was drawing the fish toward San Francisco, or as if the gray divide to the Lands Beyond was spitting more and more fish into the ocean, pushing them toward the east.
At the moment the junk was becalmed, but when the morning wind scattered the fog it would bring him along at a fast enough pace. It had been a good two weeks at sea. His daughter would be missing him. He was contemplating firing up the engine at the back of the junk when a sudden rumble overhead made him look up from the deck. Was it thunder? No flash of light came, but looking for lightning after thunder was as foolish as casting a line where the tide had once been.
The fisherman, whose name was Han, was understandably cautious. He had not braved the gray divide from the old country to die at sea and leave his family destitute. He saw what happened to the wives who had no husbands. There was demand enough both for fish and warmth in
that city.
Han navigated his ship with extreme caution. He had to be careful of other seafarers this close to the city, and the dense fog in the air made this difficult. After a short time, the mist became too much, so he dropped anchor and took down his sails. Jing and Tung, his two crewmen, looked out with him into the mist, each man in a different direction. Tung periodically sounded the foghorn, but no reply came. Jing saw the shapes first.
“Amida Buddha…” he said, loanwords flavored in Chinese. “They are dragons…”
Han did not think they were dragons, but he had to admit the shapes emerging on their starboard stern were hard to reconcile. The westerners were fond of building big. The first iron-clad obelisk certainly fit the bill of the famed Balaenopterons, until the shape of it appeared behind. The back of the ship was a mere slip of a keel, like a beetle pushing along a rolling boulder of dung. Behind it followed a more traditional corsair, its gunnery deck scaled with cannon flaps. A three-pronged swift came howling at its back, its sails ragged as if worried by wolves. After that came stranger vessels, no two alike, but all seeming prepared for war. It was a procession of gunships. With a start Han realized none of the ships touched the surf, but floated some inches above it.
“It is a fleet of the dead!” sang superstitious Tung. “We are at the entrance to the underworld!”
“You dolt,” said Han, striking his crewman over the head. If Tung was not also his cousin, he would never have had him on the junk. “They are air pirates, and they must have some dastardly purpose.”
No dirigible ever flew this low, this close to the sea, not when they could easily avoid obstacles in the fog high overhead. In the distance, the mists parted for a brief moment, revealing another string of airships gliding over the water. Han watched the last of them pass, a bulbous shape like a swollen fruit, pitted and scarred, before letting out a deep breath.