Whitechapel Gods Page 18
“Boy, rush him,” Bergen whispered. “Mulls and I will pin him down.”
Penny turned his head just enough to examine Bergen in his peripheral vision, and did not move.
“What are you waiting for, boy?”
Penny’s fingers flexed on the handle of his knife.
He knows. It must be now.
He reaimed his weapon and fired at Penny’s back, but simultaneously, the youth darted to the left, ducking under the swing of Bergen’s arm and dodging entirely the arc of fire. A clean miss.
Mulls, perhaps misinterpreting the action, fired his rifle at the hidden man on the mound.
Penny had spun about, quick on his feet like a dancer, and had already covered one of the two strides necessary to slip his blade into Bergen’s throat. Bergen flicked his arm into position and discharged directly into Penny’s chest. A spark exploded there, and the bent remains of the flasher’s striking rod flew smoking from Penny’s hand as he closed the final step.
Quick.
Bergen slammed the butt of his pistol onto Penny’s stabbing arm as it swung in. The strike cracked soundly on bone, but an instant later Bergen’s flank split with the passing of the boy’s blade. Numbing shock spread like lightning into his left leg and arm. His follow-up swing went wildly askew as Penny darted past.
Another shot rang out and Mulls tumbled to the street in a spray of blood and oil. Penny pivoted on the ball of one foot and plunged the knife towards Bergen’s belly.
Bergen locked the fingers of his right hand around the boy’s wrist, keeping the knife still. Penny yanked away but was held prisoner of the older man’s greater strength. With a kind of calm and deliberation, Bergen planted his revolver against Penny’s chest and blew a hole in him.
The youth spasmed and fell, releasing the knife. Penny writhed and sputtered across the flagstones, gurgling and choking—the first genuine sounds Bergen had ever heard him make. Bergen raised his weapon and sighted on Penny’s head.
“Don’t move!” came the command from atop the mound. The hairs on Bergen’s neck tingled.
“Lower your weapon,” Bergen shouted. “In a moment we will talk face-to-face, but these two must be eliminated first.”
“No one else dies without my say” came the reply. “Throw that pistol on the street and we’ll converse like civilised human beings.”
Penny gasped in a shuddering lungful of air. He began to look around and take stock of his situation; his right hand fished into the pocket of his ragged trousers while his left clutched at blood streaming from the bullet hole.
Bergen held his aim steady. “I am an ally,” he yelled. “A comrade of Sir Winfred Bailey Howe. I am not your enemy.”
Unsteady footsteps approached from behind, twitching at Bergen’s instinct to spin and face the danger. The unseen man did not sound experienced in combat; Bergen could probably cut him down before the man got a shot off, but he dared not take his eyes from Pennyedge. At his left, Mulls began to stir.
“What you are,” the voice said, closer now, “is a man who just gunned down one of his own.”
“Weren’t you listening? I am a comrade of Winfred Bailey—”
“Don’t think that tossing that name about gives you any clout with me,” the unseen man snapped. “Place your firearm on the street. The boy isn’t going anywhere.”
“You are a damned fool,” Bergen growled. He sank slowly to his knees and planted the barrel of his pistol against the street. Slowly, eyes on Pennyedge, he unwrapped his fingers from the grip one by one.
Something of the predator slipped back into Penny’s expression. Bergen locked gazes with him, trying to read into Penny’s eyes. The boy’s gaze broke for a moment and flicked to their captor, now only a few paces behind Bergen.
I am the only danger to you in the next few seconds, boy. Attacking him will only gain me the time to kill you. You must attack me.
Penny’s right arm tensed. Bergen’s fingers tightened back around the pistol’s grip.
Penny’s throw was awkward and slow. Bergen had his weapon up and aimed by the time the small knife departed Penny’s hand. His finger yanked back on the trigger.
A blast splintered Bergen’s left ear. White muzzle flash blinded him. Chips of stone and concrete exploded up from the street and Bergen’s shot went wildly right.
Cursing, he blinked the sparks from his eyes and fired blindly after the blurred shape fleeing into the dark. An instant later, the gun smoke cleared and the only available targets were a red stain on the street and a cast-off electric lamp rolling to a tired stop.
With a burning fury Bergen stood, whirled, and cracked his captor across the face. The man clattered to the street, a heavy express rifle spinning from his grip. Bergen straddled him as he fell and jammed the pistol against the man’s nose.
He was tall, over six feet, and thin. A flat-topped ash hat, slightly askew, barely hid his tangle of unkempt hair. Goggles and a mask mostly obscured his features, but he appeared to be smiling.
“You seem to have me at a disadvantage,” he said.
Something yanked at Bergen’s heel. The other man slapped Bergen’s pistol aside and scooted from beneath him with surprising speed. Bergen ignored him for an instant and kicked away the clickrat gnawing on his boot.
He swung his weapon back towards the other man before even turning his head.
“He’s developing a taste for shoe leather,” the tall man said.
Bergen squinted at the man’s firearm.
“My two shots to your one,” the man said, with almost a shrug. He held a two-shot derringer in his right hand—a hand bandaged and obviously injured.
“You’ve been counting,” Bergen said. “Do you honestly mean to hold me hostage? It is a long way back to the Shadwell stair.”
“It’s only until we decide what to do with you. Do you have a name?”
“I am Bergen Keuper, originally of Stuttgart, recently of Egypt and Sudan. And yours?”
The man considered a moment. “John Bull.”
“That was impolite,” Bergen said. “I spoke truthfully.”
“We’re spies, my friend. None of us are generally truthful.” He gestured with his weapon. “Don’t pretend ignorance when I ask this: do you have the ticker-paper?”
“Yes, I have it.”
“Lay it on the ground.”
“Herr Bull, you seem to be under the impression that you have an advantage over me. Allow me to elucidate our situation. Your derringer, while sufficient to wound me at this range, is no match for my Gasser. You must also realise that, as I am losing blood, I will be forced to end our standoff in short order. If you will not step down I must kill you.”
“And you, Mr. Keuper,” the man said with a twitch of the eyebrow, “seem to be under the impression that I am here alone. As I said, we have you surrounded.”
“Do not try to bluff me, Herr Bull. If there were other men in your party, I would have heard them.”
“I don’t doubt it—if they were men.”
Bergen squinted at the man. He’s bluffing, surely. I’d have heard…
He let his senses expand, let the focus of his hearing drift and the primeval jungle awareness of ancient man predominate. Silence—but not empty silence. The silence of a tiger watching its prey. The silence of an unseen snake curled to strike. Dozens of watchers, all around.
“Jeremy,” Bull called. “Bring a few up closer, if you’d be so kind.”
A sudden string of ticks; the skittering crawl of a clickrat; heavier steps following. Into the light lumbered two monstrous hounds, a full hand taller than any that they’d fought earlier, with exposed gears churning along their shoulders and back. Soundlessly, they opened their enormous jaws and let oil-saliva slide out between savage teeth. The silver clickrat scuttled forth.
“Thank you, Jeremy,” said Bull, then to Bergen: “There are quite a few more.”
“Yes, I know.” Reluctantly, Bergen lowered, then holstered, his firearm. “How?”
Bergen kneeled and began to shrug off his pack and the steam rifle. “I must know who you work for.”
Bull considered a minute, then nodded. “I work for Bailey. Against my better judgement sometimes, I admit. I assume you work for John Scared.”
Bergen snorted. “No longer.”
“You were the inside man, then.”
“I was.”
“That settles that, I suppose,” Bull said. “Since you can imagine what would happen to you were you to turn on me, I suppose I can trust you at least that far, eh?”
Bergen grunted. He reached into his pack to retrieve the tape. His first impulse was to unravel the steam rifle and try to make a fight of it, but he stifled that. “I have told you the truth. You have not even told me your name.”
A muffled crack sounded from the right. Bergen and his captor spun to see Mulls, silhouetted by his own lamp, firing his air rifle into the dark.
Bull was the first to react. “Stop! They won’t hurt you if you don’t…”
Bergen turned his eyes away and said nothing.
A half-dozen scraping growls went up, followed by a crash. Then Mulls’ lamp sparked and died, and Mulls’ screams began.
“Jeremy!” Bull cried. “Stop them! Get them off him.”
The silver clickrat sat still and did nothing.
He had to die, Bergen reminded himself. If only the bullet had done its work.
Bull stepped closer to retrieve his rifle. Bergen clamped it to the brick with one powerful hand.
“What are you doing?”
Bergen set his face and eyes grim. “He is loyal to Scared. This cannot be avoided.”
What’s one more atrocity, after all the murder I have done for that man? Bergen thought. He stared into the younger man’s eyes, wide and quivering behind the goggles, until the screams stopped and the tearing and crunching began.
“He could have been taken prisoner,” Bull said quietly, venomously.
“He would have realised that bullets do not kill him and then turned on us.”
Bull faced the horror perpetrated upon the dead man’s corpse, though the dark hid it. With the breaking of that gaze Bergen felt something die inside him. He quashed the sting of it, and refused to mourn. I sacrificed my soul to this work long ago.
They sat in reverence until the feast ended and the silence rose once more.
Bergen released his grip on the man’s express rifle. Bull held out his hand.
“The tape.”
Bergen handed it over. Bull slipped it into a pocket, then snatched up his weapon and his pack.
“Gather your property and let’s go.”
“I know the way back.”
“Then you lead.”
Bergen hefted the steam rifle and his supplies back onto his shoulders and pulled the straps tight across his chest. They secured their burdens in silence. The younger man oozed regret and anger. Bergen steeled himself against his own sense of shame and said what needed to be said.
“I apologise in advance for asking this, but I must know.”
Bull nodded for him to continue.
“Your hounds—did they get the boy?”
Bull’s stare was granite. “We’d have heard it, don’t you think?”
“Easy, Tom. Sit on up.”
“Ollie? Ollie! Jesus, I can’t see.”
“You’re breathing. That’s a start.”
“They got me! They got me with their damnable flashers and…Lord Almighty, it was like being burned alive and…They’re guarding the stair, Ollie—the Boiler Men! They were waiting and we…”
“Calm down, man.”
“Bailey’s dead, Ollie. I saw it happen. And Phin’s gone, and the other chaps, too. They’re guarding the stair. We won’t make it back to…”
“Don’t worry about the Boiler Men, Tommy. Jeremy’s new friends can handle them.”
“Jeremy?”
“We ran into each other.”
“I’m glad. But…Ollie, I can’t see. I can’t feel anything. I…I’m frightened.”
“You’ll be all right. Let’s see if you can’t walk and we’ll get you back to Sherwood.”
“Thanks, Ollie. Knew I could count on you. Always looking out for us, you are.”
“Always.”
Oliver had never seen a dead Boiler Man before.
This one lay sprawled across a decayed mound that might once have been a wooden cart. In his hands, he still clutched a spear-length, copper-tipped flasher hooked to a machine on his back by a length of rubber hose. His eyes had cracked, and his black armour was marred by deep, gleaming slashes and dents. His chest plate splayed out in ribbons where Bergen’s rifle had cracked him like a walnut. Oliver leaned over the hole. The scent of dry dust and spent gunpowder crinkled his nose.
Ten feet onward, the road dissolved into a jumble of bricks mired in mud, afterward stretching into an uneven field of forgotten trinkets and stinking human refuse. There was some light here, shed by seepage through the domino hole above. It illuminated a thousand half-buried items cast off from the city above: pots, hats, empty matchboxes, bags and boxes of all description, wagons—whole or in pieces—and the occasional corpse. What a strange disconnection of the mind it was to think that the things one tossed from the towers were instantly gone forever.
Across that small plain, the soldiers of Jeremy’s army wandered, stepping over the broken bodies of both their comrades and their enemies without so much as a glance. Oliver could hardly believe that twenty minutes ago these horrid gargoyles had been swarming the Boiler Men like a legion of hellish rats. The first wave had been shattered by the Ironboys’ Atlas rifles. The second as well. But there were more, so many more, that the rifles simply ran dry of ammunition. And as they fell silent, the horde of screeching, buzzing, clawing, biting inhuman doom poured over hastily constructed defences and bore the baron’s soldiers to the ground.
Even then it hadn’t been over. Possessed of an unnatural strength, the Boiler Men had, one by one, tossed off their harassers and regained their footing. And then Bergen had blown them to pieces with his shoulder cannon.
Oliver shuddered to recall the look on the man’s face: like a statue, eyes colder than those of the half-human wretches the downstreets had claimed.
He navigated between the remains of six or seven hounds, a good dozen of the Frankensteins, and two more Ironboys, eventually finding a clear path, and worked his way back to Tom. The big man sat leaning back against the oxidised remains of a copper boiler, arms piled in his lap, head lolling to the side.
The light danced over Tommy’s features and Oliver felt his heart clench up. Tom’s clothes had been burned through by flasher strikes to his belly and shoulders. Wormlike scorch marks had been seared into his one real hand and the skin on his neck and face; some had cracked and were leaking runny brown grease.
Oliver had seen Tom injured before, had seen him with wounds much graver than these. It was Tom’s posture that alarmed him: he sat with hunched shoulders and raised knees, shaking like a beaten child. To see this happy soul so lost and afraid brought tears to Oliver’s eyes. He blinked them back, swallowed hard against the quivering in his gut, and knelt by Tom’s side.
The big man started. His eyes flew open, panicked. “Ollie?”
Oliver laid a heavy hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Easy, chum. It’s me.”
Tom shakily exhaled. He reached up and clasped Oliver forearm with his real hand. “Jesus. Gave me a start, there. It was so quiet, I’d wondered…”
As Oliver looked on Tommy’s face he felt the tears welling again. Tom’s entire left eye had been burned away from the inside, leaving only an oozing scab over most of that side of his face. The right eye moved around with random jerks, squirting oil with each movement.
Oliver gave the shoulder a squee
ze.
“The battle’s won, Tommy. You should see it—Ironboys rusting in the mud. It’s positively the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in years.”
Tom’s face fell. “I’d rather have fought.”
“Buck up, man,” Oliver said. The encouraging tone came automatically, quite in spite of any rational evaluation of Tom’s condition. “Hews knows a doctor. I’ll post him a telegram when we get back to Sherwood and we’ll have you fixed up in less time than it takes to down a pint.”
It was a weak lie weakly presented, but it seemed enough for Tom, who managed a smile.
“If you say it, Chief, then I’m game.”
“There’s my lad,” Oliver said. He clapped Tommy on the back. “Now, let’s get you on your feet. You still owe me that round.”
Tommy’s face crumpled in concentration. “How do you figure that?”
“I beat you to the ground, Tommy. And a gentleman like yourself’ll surely keep to our bargain, eh?”
“Codswallop. You probably tiptoed like a ballerina down the whole route. There is no earthly way you could have beat me to the ground.”
“Perhaps. But seeing as there is no apparent way for us to compare our arrival times, the round still goes to me.”
Tommy frowned, adjusted his hat. “Again: how do you bloody figure that?”
“Simple: I now have to haul your not-inconsiderable bulk up that whole blasted stairway.”
Tommy cracked a smile at that. He threw off Oliver’s hand and lifted himself up to perch on unstable knees.
“A round says you’ll have to do nothing of the kind.”
“Double or nothing, then?”
“A deal, Chief.”
Oliver held his hands ready to provide additional stability to his friend as Tom tested the motion of his legs. His joints shrieked terribly.
Tom chuckled. “Like a banshee. Hee, hee.”
Oliver looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps.
“Twelve of them dead,” Bergen said, in the manner of a soldier giving a report. “That is their full number. A lucky thing, since I am nearly out of ammunition.”
Bergen’s eyes had not changed. They were stone, lifeless, emotionless. The rest of his body kept perfectly still like a compressed spring, as if the man was still expecting battle.