Whitechapel Gods Read online

“He is a rebel and a murderer. For your sake, I hope you are not concealing him.”

  “Your accusations are unwarranted, and frankly, insulting, Westerton. He’s in the back. Browsing, he said.”

  Oliver drew the derringer. Two shots, and small ones at that. What good would those do against a man who could be shot to death and be taking a sprightly stroll a few hours later?

  The proprietor raised his voice again. “If he must be shot, please do it on the front steps.”

  “Quiet!”

  Conversation ceased. Only the faint taps of the cloak’s shoes remained. Oliver was sure he had that oversized weapon of his out. He fished in his pockets for his flick knife, and found it missing: he’d left it on the floor of the warehouse. He snatched a heavy book off the shelf instead, almost laughing at himself. A book and a gun shorter than my index finger. Always prepared, eh?

  A pile of books blocked the other end of his hiding spot, so he positioned himself to face the aisle he’d come from. His motion, though careful, stirred up the dust and the scent of paper and old leather.

  The footsteps reached the aisle just beyond. Oliver raised the derringer, wishing it were a rifle. With only two shots, he would have to take his enemy through the eye or forehead. Any shot to the torso would probably end up lodged in springs and gears.

  A gold glove appeared, followed by a grey trouser leg. Oliver’s hands tightened on the derringer.

  The barrel of the man’s weapon poked into the space, followed by his face. The dull whirr of the man’s inner workings spread into the hole, buzzing icily in Oliver’s ears.

  Go on, in the face.

  Oliver sat frozen.

  And then? Rush a man who can’t be killed wielding nothing but a book?

  The cloak scanned the interior of the hole briefly, flicked his gun’s barrel at the floating dust particles, and then withdrew.

  “He isn’t here.”

  “You’re disturbing me again, Westerton.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He must have left. Probably robbed me as well. I was in prayer, Westerton. I didn’t hear.”

  Oliver dared to breathe. How on earth had the man not seen him?

  “Well, my boys will catch him if he’s taken to the street. The Brothers of Time thank you kindly for your service.”

  “The Brothers of Creation thank you kindly for leaving me in peace.”

  “You are a cantankerous fool, Fickin.”

  “Then it seems your manners are also in limited supply. Now, will you be going or shall we continue this transgression against common etiquette?”

  The little bell dinged. The muted noise of the street filtered in. The cloak spoke once more, with a dangerous edge in his tone.

  “You have no clock, Fickin. It isn’t proper not to have a clock. People will talk, you know.”

  The door closed. Silence descended. Oliver waited for the shop owner to retreat back into whatever room he took prayer in, but heard only the buzz of the electric lamp and the scritching of rats inside the walls.

  He should get back on the street, he knew. Find the crew, locate Westerton and somehow detain or eliminate him. Otherwise, Oliver could not move safely in the open street. But how long to wait before attempting an exit? He couldn’t very well stay too long in the abode of a crow, but he had to give Westerton and his cronies time to move off a few blocks.

  Eventually his cramping muscles decided for him, and he shuffled out of his place of concealment. Instantly, the proprietor was there, poking his gnarled head from behind a bookcase. Oliver’s fingers clenched on the derringer.

  The old man smiled without guile. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed the gun.

  “I wondered if you had left or not,” he said. He shuffled silently up to Oliver and offered a hand. Oliver did nothing for a moment, waffling between a feeling of knotted suspicion and an inbred impulse to politeness. As the silence stretched, etiquette won the field. Oliver dropped his weapon casually in his pocket as he accepted the man’s hand.

  His shake was frail, the skin seeming to swim on top of the bones without the intervening benefits of flesh and sinew.

  “Grimsby Fickin, at your service.”

  “John Bull, at yours, sir.”

  The man winked. “Risqué to be using such a name, don’t you think? I don’t mind, though. I understand the old patriotism dies hard, just like the old religion. You’ll be taking that, then?”

  Oliver blinked. The book.

  “Ah…certainly,” he replied congenially. “What are you asking for it?”

  He reached out a hand to the book, which Oliver passed over to him. The man let the book fall open and flicked through several gold-coloured pages marked with angular symbols in thick black ink.

  “This is a fine edition,” he said. “There’s real brass in the pages, you know. I can’t part with it for less than a crown.”

  Oliver coughed up the requisite coins, mentally despairing at how light his pocket had become.

  Mr. Fickin vanished the money into his clothing somewhere. Oliver noticed then that the man, as well as dressing all in black, wore no trousers. Instead, a canvas skirtlike garment hid his lower extremities. Smoke trickled idly from the man’s nose and ears, and he emitted an unpleasant, lingering heat.

  “Good to see the younger generation taking an interest in scripture,” Fickin said. “You’ll be taught to read it only after you’ve taken your vows, but there is much to be learned through simply becoming familiar with the symbols.”

  Oliver nodded as if he understood. He glanced down to find himself holding a copy of Atlas Hume’s Summa Machina, the sacred book of the golds and blacks.

  Treat carefully with this one, a little voice warned him, but the man seemed nice enough and a few minutes’ further delay seemed prudent, so Oliver embellished a tad.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what it’s about, you see. The Guardian rarely gets into specifics.”

  “Of course,” said Fickin. He turned and led Oliver back through the stacks. “The bloody canaries print it. Bunch of self-important bureaucrats. I don’t know why the Lady keeps them around.”

  Oliver’s interest piqued. Yet more dissention? A lovely day this is, indeed. “Beg pardon, sir, but isn’t that a bit blasphemous?”

  The man snorted, shooting smoke out like the puff of a cigar. “Says who? Those fops are like their namesake: pretty to look at but fragile. Now, black! That’s the colour of iron, my lad, a sturdy and enterprising material worthy of emulation. That’s something a man can build a dynasty on.”

  Oliver suffered a sudden chill. Dynasty? “Then, you have children, sir?”

  The man halted his soundless floating and winked over his shoulder. “It’s not really mine.”

  As they navigated to the rear of the shop, Oliver noticed increasing layers of dust on the floors, shelves, and rafters, undisturbed by the tread of man or rodent. The air also became increasingly thick and hot, and heavy winds meandered through the aisles, reminiscent of the skies around the Stack. Mr. Fickin led him to a mahogany door on the rear wall. It must have at one time been quite lavish, but now sported the first pits of rot on its panels, and dark burn marks around its edge.

  The old man reached for the door handle, hesitated. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m aiding an accused murderer?”

  I wasn’t going to bring it up, in fact. “I’m no murderer, sir.”

  He waved off the comment. “Likely you murdered Westerton himself. This would be his sixth time, I believe, and I wish him a dozen more. And you, lad: a young man who reads the Guardian and the scriptures and murders canaries in his spare time? A fine postulant, I say. Mighty fine.”

  Oliver alternated between marveling that the rebellion’s great enemy could be so divided and marveling at his own near-mystical ability to draw paternal responses from aged men.

  Fickin’s hand clenched and unclenched on the doorknob. “You wanted specifics, Mr. Bull. Well, what you are about to see is my own humble
part of the Great Work.”

  Choking back his excitement, Oliver answered, “I’m honoured, sir.”

  He waved that away as well. “It seems the Good Lady favours you, my boy. You’ll find, once you have one, that the furnace”—he tapped his chest—“guides your decisions sometimes. You’ll learn to trust it. The Mother is quiet, true. She doesn’t demand things of you like her consort, but she still tells you what to do, if you listen.”

  He turned the knob.

  “And she’s telling me, furnace or no, that you’re ready.”

  The door swung wide. Oliver staggered back, his hand shooting into his pocket and snaring his gun. Beyond the door loomed a monster, a grotesque giant of cast iron, reaching two storeys in height. In its centre hung a black globe twice the width of a man, studded everywhere with brass rivets and covered in bulbous glass eyes. From this central point issued a mangled array of limbs, ranging in form from humanoid to tentacular, tipped with claws and blades and spikes of steel. Lengths of chain tethered the creature to the ceiling, while the glow of open furnaces on all sides cast it in a hellish red light.

  Fickin glided into the room, across a floor littered with tools and bits of scrap metal.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked.

  Oliver could not find an answer. Fickin did not seem to expect one.

  “It’s finished,” he said. “For near a fortnight now, finished.”

  “What is it?” Oliver choked out.

  “A child of the Great Lady,” Fickin said. “Incubated in the hands of her adopted son. These are her seeds, and when they are sufficient in number, they will roll out over the world and grow gardens for the Mother to dwell in. All the Earth will be made a paradise in the image of her great city.”

  Oliver took a step back. The words escaped his mouth of their own accord. “A dynasty.”

  Mr. Fickin looked up at the beast with tears in his eyes. “Now kneel with me, Mr. Bull. Pray to the Great Mother.”

  Not waiting for a response, Fickin lowered himself closer to the ground. The skirt he wore flared out in a wide circle, revealing ominous bumps and edges.

  “Blessed and holy Mother,” he began, “who loveth boundlessly…”

  Oliver jumped as the furnaces in the room’s four corners flared, blasting him with heat.

  “Praise to your sacred womb,” Fickin continued. “Praise to your Great Work.”

  The furnaces flickered and their light changed from dull red to scorching orange and Oliver decided it was time to leave. He spun to find the door shut behind him.

  He leapt for the knob. As his fingers closed over it a horrid electric heat shot up his arm, searing him through skin and bone. He screamed in pain and terror, plucking his hand away.

  Fickin cried out suddenly: “Mother! You’re here! You’ve come to me.”

  A sound like the tolling of a bell smothered the howl of the furnaces, fading away into a watery thrumming.

  Fickin’s voice echoed as if heard from the end of a long pipe.

  “We, your children, who love you to the coming of winter…”

  Rigid with fright, Oliver watched as the shadows on the wall before him retreated before an intensifying light.

  Reach for the door, he urged himself. Escape.

  He extended one shaking hand, balking at the cracking skin of its palm. The ferocious heat bit at him, reddening the back of his hand, blackening the knuckles. Oliver dared not breathe.

  “Forgive us our faults,” Fickin cried. “Forgive us our imperfections. We wish only to be humble…”

  Inches from the knob, Oliver’s fingers froze. The heat dribbled like a thick stew into his mind, erasing thoughts as it progressed.

  Move! Oliver screamed inwardly, but the fingers would not budge. With mechanical precision, the heat slipped into every chink in his mental armour, exploiting every fear and doubt to gain entrance.

  And then Mama Engine was in his head. The horrid infernal vastness of her tore apart all comprehension and blasted away his sense of the space around him. Oliver beheld a savage universe of pulsating desires given form in random and hideous shapes of iron, linked across distant leagues by strings of luminous, fiery coal. Through these tumbled the charred bodies of so many souls, worried at by shapeless creatures of molten glass.

  The closest corpse turned to him and grinned.

  “She fancies you, Mr. Bull.”

  Oliver squeezed his eyes shut against the sight, but it would not leave him.

  The blistering heat on his neck woke him just enough to see the door shimmering through the shifting air before him.

  The doorknob! He lunged forward. His hand exploded in a flaming ruin, but the door opened, and he toppled out into the shelves. Books fell on him. The floor struck him in the face. The floorboards scratched at his knees and palms.

  He shouldered aside a bookcase that toppled into his path, kicked at another that reached for him from the side, struck a third with his fist. The lamp leapt from above in an effort to strike him, but he dodged aside and bolted for the door. It, too, defied him at first. Then he wrapped his charred fingers around the handle, planted one smouldering boot on the frame, and tore it open.

  The little bell dinged. He was free.

  Chapter 7

  The first principle of the forge is Intention. It is this impulse, whimsical or practical, that has fevered Man for all his long ages. Man would temper this impulse oftentimes with the ethics and rationality of his own nature, but the impulse itself is slave only to its own needs. In this it is found that the words of scholar and madman have equal weight, for all creation is Holy, and the realm of the Divine.

  Curse God for giving his power to creatures such as She.

  —V. ii

  Far away, a ticking.

  As of a single watch passing its time in a vast space. It was peaceful. He lay in the warm void and enjoyed the sound, let it slide into him, let it overwhelm him, until he was nothing more than the watch’s echo.

  He felt a welling of sadness, as if his crushed body were weeping for him, and ignored it. All that was past him now. He’d gone beyond the fragile identities of a cruel and vulgar world. He had the void, this endless gap just beyond life, just before whatever came after. He revelled in the stillness, inviting it into his broken mind and willing the few remaining pieces of himself to vanish into it. Lost in nothingness, every vibration ended, all momentum expended.

  And he was happy for a time.

  Then something else found him.

  He could not tell what it was, for perception was different here, but it moved through the nothingness like a drop of dye spreading in clear water. It reached a limb for him, one too small to straddle the void.

  He found no need to turn to face it, finding no existent directions to speak of. And that was beautiful in itself.

  Who are you? he asked.

  Its answer floated slowly to him, buoyed on an invisible ether. He caught the answer in outstretched limbs, hugged it, explored it. It was the frigid, shifting chill-warmth of the human body in sickness, and oozed a clammy toffeelike liquid into the void. The answer did not speak to him, and he was grateful, for the thought of human speech repelled and terrified him.

  The answer dissolved into bubbles of oil and slipped from his grasp.

  Who are you? he repeated.

  His companion shifted closer, slithering through the spaces with the sinewy motions of an octopus. He could not see it, nor hear it; rather he felt it, like a piece of coarse wool dragged across the arm, or a trickle of sand running down the face. Its movements revealed themselves as might ripples in the wake of an invisible swimmer.

  When it reached for him again, he stretched out to greet it.

  A vision came to him.

  No!

  Pain. Fever. Sweat. Suddenly bone and flesh ensnared him, bound him, and he was screaming, screaming, as growths of metal broke his skin. He trembled and spasmed, scraping hot nerves against fibrous blankets on top and beneath. He shrieked
again as hundreds of growths inside his body shifted with his shudders, tearing flesh and muscle, scraping and sawing at bones.

  Light ripped into his eyes as he flung them open; noxious air seared his lungs. An unbearable cold slapped onto his forehead. Over him, a woman cried and prayed. Behind her, two pale-faced children wept and shivered.

  Please end this. Please, I want to go back.

  His stomach clenched and he vomited on himself. A rib cracked as he convulsed, and he clawed at his own throat with hands gnarled from age.

  And suddenly he toppled back into the void, leaving the world of pain and light far above.

  It was not the stillness that greeted him, but a seething boil of madness. It seized him and drew him into a fire of screeching monstrosities. Tiny metal monsters crawled all over him, biting and scratching, growling and gnashing their teeth. He withdrew as far as he could, shrinking into himself, but they closed on him, writhing.

  Help us, they shouted.

  Go away!

  They howled in despair. They ran amok, driven by a ceaseless agony conjured with every movement and every breath. Their pain bled into anger and they fell upon one another in a cannibalistic frenzy.

  At length, the creatures withdrew, leaving him in a pool of his own substance. Much of him had been broken and consumed. What little remained lay shuddering in that lightless place.

  Gradually, the tick returned, and warm viscous fluid lifted him up. His companion settled into the dark beside him.

  Are you the pain? he asked.

  Words did not exist in the void. His companion encircled him with sticky arms.

  I understand. You are the source of the machine-disease. The Mother’s heat and the Father’s noise hurt you, and you hurt them back, and that causes only more pain.

  The thing wept tears of pus.

  I will help you, he said. I will help you to end it.

  Gratitude. His companion swept one long limb out into the void, and from immeasurable distance retrieved something that it laid before them both.

  A tiny metal monster: a clickrat. This one lay on its back, jaws wired shut, legs bundled against its stomach. It did not thrash about. The bindings had prevented it from lashing out against its pain, and that pain had consumed it. It lay now empty and inviting.