Whitechapel Gods Page 14

  “Bugger you both,” Oliver spat through clenched teeth, that being the most scathing comment that visited him. He craned his neck around, spotted the next yellow marker, and began shuffling his way along the beam, thankful for once for the constant grit and ash that gave his fingers and soles purchase. Four agonising eternities later, he discovered two beams running parallel and almost level. Tommy trotted up behind him an instant later.

  “Not so bad a climb, really,” Tommy said, grinning.

  “I always knew you were an ape, Tom.”

  “Apes walk on the ground, Ollie. Monkeys swing in the trees.”

  “Lions injure things when they are pestered.”

  Tommy guffawed merrily, having no apparent need for mask or goggles. “Our regular John Bull fancies himself a lion, then. Knighthood in the future, I’ll wager.”

  “If it turns one into an arrogant sot like Sir Bailey, Her Majesty can keep it.” Oliver fished a foot down for a suitable beam. The next marker lay some twenty feet below. Three steps later, with his nose pressed almost flat against an upshooting beam, Oliver beheld a clickrat skitter down and stop right before his face.

  It’s going to bite me, he realised. Slowly, he peeled his left hand from its roost, leaving his injured one bearing most of the weight, and reached for his derringer, then reconsidered and reached for the water canteen instead. One quick swat would do the job.

  “Jeremy Longshore the Third hereby names you as his first knight. Arise, Sir Lion-upon-the-Cliffs.”

  The clickrat swivelled and scuttled up the beam, leaping to Tom’s arm when it got close enough, then clambering down his jacket into his pocket. Oliver shook his head and clamped his hand back onto the beam.

  “Good God, Tom, have you tamed that thing?”

  “Jeremy Longshore cannot be tamed,” Tommy pronounced. “That is the essence of him: solid will and indomitable spirit. He is the very symbol of perseverance.”

  Phin appeared behind him, panting. “Bugger that, bolts-for-brains. He don’t have muscles to ache or bones to pop about. Jesus, but I’m old.”

  “And cantankerous as well,” said Tom. “Curmudgeonly, even. Perhaps churlish, if you prefer.”

  “Right, laugh. Enjoy that young body while you can. The clacks is like to eat you up by your thirty-fifth year.”

  Oliver gaped. “Phineas!”

  Phineas frowned down at him. “Oh, don’t be such a woman. I expect to wake up dead every morning with my nerves given out. Can’t be easy on them, all this seein’ and hearin’ I do.”

  “But how could you say…”

  Tom waved him silent. “It’s all right, Ollie. That kind of talk doesn’t bother me.”

  “You know what bothers me,” Phin said. “Your new toy, there, is what. It isn’t really a clickrat.”

  “Quite right,” Tom said, warming back to his new acquisition. “He is such a picture of majesty as no clickrat could equal.”

  “I mean it in earnest, tin-teeth. It has a different seeming to it. Something different inside.”

  Oliver interrupted: “May we get moving? I would not lay odds on Bailey waiting for us.”

  He calculated the contortions necessary for the next step, and stretched out for it.

  “In a sour mood, is our chief,” Tommy said. His voice grew faint with distance and the intervening thickness of the air. “He needs the company of a certain good woman.”

  Nothing more was heard, not that Oliver would have spared the attention to listen to it.

  Four marks and a thousand drops of sweat later, the faded light of the Underbelly above had vanished, and Oliver could not see the next mark. He unhooked the lamp from his belt and swung it in all directions, finding nothing but serpents of dust and ash coiling and uncoiling at random. The air moved, rolling past him like a great ocean wave. A rumbling sound passed with it, shaking the beams, like the breath of the Mother herself.

  He leapt recklessly to his next perch, skidding a bit as he landed on a moist stretch of steel. Oliver scrambled to fight the platform’s extreme slope, his hands flying out in all directions. His nails found rivets in the platform and dug under them. Pain pricked up his fingers; annoying, but better than the alternative. His injured hand skittered uselessly across the surface, unable to grip to anything.

  I’m ill suited to this, Oliver concluded. He slid one foot carefully towards the more level beams running up the right side of the platform. Before him, the platform’s slope ended in grey nothingness. Some of the toxic air slipped around his mask and down his windpipe. He coughed it out, violently, shaking as his chest caved inward. A burning sensation flared at the back of his skull.

  The smoke turned and looked at him. Or maybe it was something within the smoke. Something, in any case, with eyes and a face resembling human. It blinked and was gone.

  Oliver froze and tried not to breathe.

  Memories of Mama Engine flickered across his mind and vision, playing on the currents of ash. Had that been something real, or the product of a violated imagination?

  Oliver felt unmistakably like he was not alone. Quiet, indecipherable whispers reached out to him from a burgeoning fire at the back of his head. Eyes searching the smoke, he reached for his derringer.

  When it appeared again, he swung at it—through it—as if it had never been there. The sudden movement twisted his left hand. Two nails tore out of place and gravity claimed him.

  The face watched him slip into the dark.

  Scared awoke to find the heavy curtains around his bed frayed and singed.

  He sat up, wiping the drool from his chin onto his nightshirt.

  You were angry tonight, my sweet. You were aggressive, savage. Quite out of character for you.

  Mama Engine was not in the habit of keeping secrets from their embrace, and Scared found it irksome. Details and schematics had always been withheld—Scared cared little for those—but not her emotions, not her urges. Those things that were her were his to peruse, his to catch and hold, and then release at his fancy.

  Playing a game, my love? I am very good at games.

  He roused himself and shoved aside the curtains. The room was cool and dark, the fireplace empty, the night table vacant. He dragged a knobby finger through the charcoal dust there and lamented the need to order servants to keep out of his room, lest his lover annihilate them: the wood paneling had been cracked and curled by heat, the floors stained with ash. The wan light of faraway electrics filtered into the room through its single, frosted pane.

  He hobbled to a low-backed plush chair in the corner and dragged the leather cover from it. Beneath this, the fine velvet upholstery lay undamaged by heat, with a small bottle of yellowish liquid nestled against the left arm. Scared lowered himself into the chair’s welcoming grip.

  A strange night it had been. Towards the end, the nightmares had begun to creep in from the edges. They had come through the singed curtains; he was sure of it. The burns inflicted on those curtains by the night’s lovemaking had weakened them somehow, and they had begun to admit all those outcast thoughts Scared had long ago banished to the far reaches of his mind.

  He banished them now, clearing his head for the relentless chill of calculation. He retrieved and uncorked the small bottle, allowing the faintest scent of the liquid within to twist into his nostrils. Scared replaced the cork and settled back to let it do its work.

  It is the chief folly of modern mathematics to confine calculation to the written page, Scared said to himself, almost as a mantra in the fashion of the Indians ascetics. The scope of logical reasoning is too vast to be expressed in human symbolism. All objects in the universe are data, all forces equations. All events are the result of fast and fixed processes, algebraically perfect.

  His nose began tingling, followed by the rest of his body. His hands began to shake, but he paid that no mind now. The drug filtered into his mind, pushing the paltry needs of flesh aside, thumbing down the trappings of morality and emotion until only the endless order of everything r
emained. He breathed deeply, and dropped away from that chill, hidden room, into the spaces between molecules.

  And now, my sweet, we will see what you have been up to.

  He mentally pulled together the memories of her quivering essence as she had shuddered in his grasp. These he crystallised until every detail stood out like a diamond among stones, and then delivered them to the universe’s equations.

  He held his thoughts back and let the calculations run themselves. The touch of man could only sully such perfection.

  Some long minutes he stayed in such a state. There was utter timelessness here, though mere seconds, perhaps, passed in the vulgar world.

  The calculations delivered their answer. Mysteries became knowledge, variables became constants.

  Scared leapt upwards and arrived slouched in his chair, the bottle of precious fluid rolling to a stop three yards distant—recorked, thank the Lord. He pressed his hands hard onto his thighs to keep them from shaking. Mama Engine had indeed been hiding a secret from him.

  You filthy harlot, he thought. You’ve found another.

  Her eye was on another man. A sudden, unbecoming tickle of jealousy nagged him. More calculation would be required to discover this rival’s identity, but that would have to wait. Time and hot tea were required now to banish the remnants of the drug from his blood. He had taken too much this morning, enough to impair the flexing of fingers and bending of knees.

  He reached out to the wall and pulled on the hanging cord. A wall panel, mounted on ceramic tracks and wooden wheels, slid aside to reveal a rack of bottles and tubes. At the base of the shelves sat a panoply of scientific equipment and a full washbasin. Still too tired to rise, Scared slumped back in the chair and took deep breaths to steady his heart.

  The question now was what to do about his lover’s new fancy. Death would be easiest, though the fickle Lady might take that harshly. For the meantime, information would need to be gathered, control exerted. He might have delegated it to one of his boys, but—if she was courting another lover, if she was intending to betray him, the matter was Scared’s alone to confront.

  He let his body recover over the next few minutes, allowing automatic mental processes to wheel in the background of his consciousness. He had trained his mind so well over the long years that deduction no longer required any conscious effort. As soon as it was able, his mind would deliver to him the answers he sought. The potion was rarely needed.

  Except when the deduction concerned Mama Engine—not her plans or her children; no, those were plain to the ordinary, mortal eye. It was the Lady herself that required the superhuman mental space brought on by the potion, which the Chinese called mei kuan. To fathom her, in her entirety, to know all the nuances of her psyche better even than he knew his own…that was a feat extraordinary in any set of lovers.

  How many have you had, my sweet? How many have you burned to dust because they could not understand you?

  He forced himself up, fighting the shuddering aftereffects of the potion, and waddled to the washbasin. He splashed the warm water across his face, letting it chase away the sweat and ashes. A yellow-skinned ghast of the worst children’s tales scrutinised him from the mirror.

  If anyone were to see me like this…

  What did it mean, her thoughts of this other man? Could she be plotting to betray him?

  Do you think, my sweet, that you can use me and cast me aside? It is far too late, pet, for second thoughts.

  And yet…she dared to spurn him.

  Jealousy again, unwelcome and unbalancing. The calculations took space to function, and it would not do to have his mind so crowded with petty worries and grievances.

  But…he had to know.

  The bottle hissed as he opened it again, its previous agitation having pressurised the gas within. The blast of scent speared up his nostrils into the sensitive flesh behind his eyes. Gasping, he squeezed the cork back into place with hands already trembling.

  I’ve taken too much.

  The bottle clattered to the floor. No tickle came this time, but a scraping fire under his skin. Scared grappled at the arms of his chair. His knees cracked like dry tinder, and the floor rushed to meet him. A swift strike against the boards, and he was away into that eternal, infinite space.

  He had never dared consume so much before, but as the reaches of heaven glinted and soared all about him, he never felt more regret for that decision. Even the transcendent mathematics of the clear mind were inadequate to describe the sights he saw. More information could be packed into a single mote of time than in all the depths of human history.

  Lover, I will tear you apart.

  The memories of the Lady came in full relief as he summoned them, playing before his eyes as if he were witnessing them again from another body. The calculations whirled, visible now, spinning about him like a flock of shining swallows, picking infinitesimal bits of data from the memories to link together and compile.

  His name, Scared demanded.

  The image of Mama Engine flew apart in a ball of fire, pursued to the ends of the universe by the relentless churning of mathematics.

  His heart wavered, fluctuated, collapsed. He felt an omnipresent sting haul him back towards his lonely, burned room. He fought it, letting that painful gravity rake through him as he awaited the answer.

  His name! Scared bellowed.

  Mama Engine’s flayed desires came back to him, piling one on the other in his vision, each stark and plain. He waited for the answer to come, burning more for each moment he remained. Seconds passed, and his mind began to shy from the vastness of the spaces about him. Fear and uncertainty crept on his skin like living things, and his nightmares frayed the edges of his consciousness, sniffing for an entrance. There were thousands of them—the twisted wretches of long-suppressed thoughts and memories. They scraped with yellowed nails against his soft mind.

  Unable to bear it any longer, Scared fled upwards, pursued in his ascent by screaming legions of his own mental horrors. He swam up as fast as his wit would carry him, sinking his fingers into his own solid flesh even as the teeth of a forgotten memory clamped on to his ankle.

  He crashed back into the burned room in a spray of imagined monsters, sparkling equations, and all-too-real vomit.

  Lying on the floor, the spent remnants of the drug searing in his veins and organs, Scared began to snicker, then to chuckle, and after a few seconds he burst into wild, cackling laughter. The calculations had come together at the last second, and delivered him an answer even as he escaped to the uncomfortable refuge of his body. As waves of vertigo and nausea took him, he spat the name through crooked teeth.

  “Oliver Sumner.”

  Aaron was happy for a time, sleeping in his new body in the pocket of this mechanical man who called him by another name. He dreamed of a dog, a little spotted terrier mutt of his youth that had chewed his toes to wake him every morning, then of a sunset witnessed from atop the chimney of his childhood home in Manchester—a moment of relaxation confounded by the dousing of the fire below.

  Other dreams came to him as well, dreams of scurrying amongst garbage and dodging enormous feet, of the odd pleasantries of scratching and gnawing, and of the luscious feeling discovered once by licking up a sticky liquid spilled from a glass bottle.

  He awoke wondering whether he had been a man or a rat, in the days before the void.

  He uncurled himself and clambered out of the pocket. The world suddenly lit up with ambient vibration.

  Aaron hooked his tail and his back legs into the fabric and leaned far out of the pocket to look down, seeing only the fuzzy reflection of the streets, now not so far below, and the ghosts that haunted them.

  So very many ghosts.

  He looked into them, using not his body’s senses but those strange knowings he’d had as a man. These souls had a seeming of his companion from the void, as if they were part of him, or he of them. Victims of the disease? Wanderers lost to Purgatory?

  He is the rot ea
ting at the roots of the flower.

  He clicked away the thought. What a very strange notion. A human one, perhaps.

  The mechanical man dug his iron fingers into a beam and swung to the platform below with the grace of an orang-utan.

  The impact sent a vibration up the man’s legs and through his torso. The noise flashed like fireworks in the strange eyes of Aaron’s new body. He spun his rounded snout to face his bearer’s chest and drank in the vibrations there. Each manifested as a pulse of white across the screen of his mind, outlining skin, bones, pumps, gears, pistons, and the other features of the man’s anatomy. There, too, Aaron perceived the taint of the void dweller.

  The void dweller had showed him this infection, had showed him how it ended.

  Or perhaps showed me its purpose.

  A human thought again. Stuffy. Complicated. The rat wanted to run and climb.

  He scuttled out of the pocket, hooking on to the long coat, and looked about.

  “Up and about are we, Jeremy?”

  The mechanical man stroked him on the snout with his fleshy hand. The skidding of the hand’s rough calluses played a music of lights across Aaron’s vision. When the mechanical man spoke, his voice appeared as a boxed and rough image not unlike the man’s face.

  “He’s got quite the lead on us. Probably your comment about the vagrant, eh?”

  “Pride is the folly of all men,” said the old man, with an audible grinding of teeth. “Particularly the young.” With a grunt, he swung himself over the same beam and dropped gingerly to the platform. Aaron scuttled all around the rough wool of the coat, snapping at the lapels and nibbling the buttons.

  “Right-oh, Mr. Philosopher,” the mechanical man said. “Still, he shouldn’t be so far ahead of us. You…well, you don’t suppose he took a plunge, do you?”

  “Unlikely, though he might have fell.”

  “Now you’re playing with me, you codger.”

  “No, I’m proving my superior wit. Move that two-ton cauldron you call an arse out of my way.”