Whitechapel Gods Page 5

  But not my queen. Not my country.

  He plopped it back in and followed after.

  “I don’t like the look of it,” Hews said.

  Oliver bit into the ha’penny biscuit he’d bought, and spoke around the dry crumbs. “Not a coincidence, today of all days.”

  Hews faked a jovial smile for the benefit of the two gold cloaks prowling the opposite side of the street and took an altogether too-large bite of the sausage roll he’d bought. The canaries were in what they must have considered disguise, having traded their gold livery for identical suits of brown and fur hats. They still moved in short jolts of motion like all of their ilk and their coats showed the conspicuous bulges of weaponry.

  The gold cloaks didn’t seem interested in Hews or Oliver. Rather, they scrutinised the people passing close to the building across the way, which was also Oliver and Hews’ destination: a warehouse with a condemned store in its front, which narrowed like a pyramid towards its top floor.

  Oliver turned to stare down the length of the concourse, so as not to draw the cloaks’ attention. “Do you think we’ve been discovered?”

  Hews licked a bit of grease from his lips. “Possibly, though Bailey’s always careful. Would be a tough bit of deduction, that.”

  But what else could it be? The warehouse was one of Bailey’s safe houses, a hideout for him and the agents loyal to Queen Victoria. Bailey’s safety measures were extreme: he enforced anonymity and held all his information in his head. He kept no documents, no records, spoke to no one outside his organisation. In fact, other than Bailey and Sims and a few others, Oliver didn’t even know who the other crown agents were, or what they looked like. The cloaks knew of Bailey’s crew and had been hunting them for more than a decade, but had always, always come up empty. The thought that the cloaks had found Bailey out was unthinkable. Yet…there they were.

  Oliver turned back to Hews. He faked a smile and their talk took on the outward cast of a friendly conversation between gentlemen.

  “Well, they don’t seem likely to be off anytime soon. Is there a back entrance? Or a subterranean one?”

  Hews tipped his hat to a passing lady, who glanced at him fearfully and hurried her pace. Hews sighed, and picked some ash off his roll.

  “Now that isn’t proper,” he said. “Out in London we’d have shared a smile and a few kind words.”

  “You’ve told me.”

  “All this,” Hews went on. “Baron and Ironboys and cloaks and clocks and all—it has everyone fearful beyond their wits. If there’s any reason you need to be doing this, lad—that’s it.”

  “I’ve always had reasons, Hewey.”

  “Aye. I suppose you have.”

  Oliver watched the lady stride away, her skirt stirring up dust and fallen ash from the sidewalk.

  He’d never believed Hews’ tales of London. In Whitechapel, anyone a man spoke to could be an informer to the baron and thus to his divine masters. Granted, that wouldn’t be the case outside the walls, but even then, what guaranteed that the hawker one was speaking to one moment wouldn’t turn villain and rob him the next?

  He failed to mention this to Hews, who pulled himself out of his melancholy in due time. Then Oliver asked again:

  “Are there any other entrances, Hewey?”

  Hews nodded, then stepped closer to Oliver and dropped his voice. “There is a way in from below, though I don’t care for it owing to the fact that it’s little more than a few thin beams.”

  Oliver gulped down a sudden burst of fright. “Do you think we have any other option?”

  Hews sighed. “I suppose not. Just let’s finish our breakfast first.”

  A few minutes later, they started off towards the far end of the concourse. The street rolled up and down in this section of the tower, tilting and curving to take best advantage of the support of the beams beneath it. Electric lights blazed down from above, accompanied by the occasional fuzzy hint of sunlight bleeding though the incomplete ceiling.

  After two or three buildings, Hews turned between two shops. He led them down the alley, kicking a path through skittering clickrats, to where the pavement ended and the street fell away.

  Oliver leaned over the edge as Hews paused to catch his breath. He saw a small tangle of beams just beneath, then a drop into the murk of the downstreets dozens of storeys below. He clamped his hat on against the gusting wind and clutched the wall for support.

  A curse escaped him.

  “You were never afraid of long drops as a child,” Hews snorted. “Made a habit of trundling along the ledges as I recall. There’s a fine stair on the left.”

  By “fine stair,” Hewey must have meant a set of beams crossing in a kind of thatch pattern. They descended it carefully, Hews huffing the whole way and Oliver clamping white-knuckled fingers onto any hold he could find. When they had gone twenty or so feet, they came to a horizontal beam wide enough to walk abreast.

  “Mind the wind,” Hews said.

  Stepneyside Tower did not have an underbelly. Over the side was nothing but a drop to the invisible streets and buildings of old Whitechapel far below. Oliver paused at one point to look over the edge, instantly regretting it.

  The braced concrete floor of the concourse blocked all the light from above. They worked their way by feel along the beam to its opposite end, where a wooden ladder stood, tied to a crossbeam by lengths of weathered and stained twine. Hews climbed the first few rungs and felt around on the underside of the concrete above.

  “Always bloody hard to find…”

  Oliver crouched down at the foot of the ladder, trying not to acknowledge the queasiness of his stomach.

  “You may want to check before we go up,” Oliver suggested, “what with the gold cloaks out front and all.”

  Hews snorted. “I was just doing that.”

  Oliver hunkered down and waited.

  After a few minutes, Hews descended the ladder and squatted beside him.

  “I’m hearing unfamiliar voices,” he reported. “Bailey is still up there, playing the role, trying to blather his way out.”

  Oliver shook his head. “And after he’s done that he can convince the sun to take a loaf for the day.”

  “Bailey’s pigheaded enough to try it anyhow. This door opens quietly enough, and comes up through a cabinet on the back wall. We’ll have a plain view of the warehouse.”

  Already beating quickly from their precarious walk across the beams, Oliver’s heart jumped into a yet faster rhythm. “You expect to just rush them?”

  “By the saints, no.” Hews reached beneath his coat and withdrew a .45-calibre revolver from inside his vest: a Webley British Bulldog. “But this may lend some perk to Bailey’s lack of eloquence, eh?”

  “Just the one? And how many canaries do you think?”

  “One?” Hewey said. “Aren’t you armed, lad?”

  Oliver swallowed hard, then reached into his pocket and produced a four inch wood-handled flick blade. Next to a firearm, the weapon looked more fit for sticking sausages than fighting. Hews’ face constricted in a pained expression for a moment. Oliver stared dumbly down.

  “I haven’t carried an iron since the Uprising,” he said.

  Hews sighed and shook his head. “Just stay behind me and look like a mean-spirited Scot, or something.”

  Hews mounted the ladder again. Shortly, two clicks sounded and a faint square of light materialised above Hewey’s head.

  “Quickly, now.”

  After some few seconds of manoeuvring his belly through the tight trapdoor, Hews slid up and disappeared. Oliver clenched his miniature weapon tight in his right fist and steeled himself against the quivering fear in his gut. Just up the ladder and to it.

  He ascended.

  The cabinet turned out to be not quite large enough for the two of them. Oliver had to bend his knees and neck at an unnatural angle to fit entirely inside. Hews had a similar problem, being quite unable to bend forward to the small crack between the cabinet’s two s
winging doors on account of his belly. Hews gestured at the trapdoor, and Oliver closed it silently by lowering it with his foot.

  Bailey’s wine-rich baritone rumbled from beyond the doors.

  “Well, I do take it as an affront, sir. You and your ilk have no respect for the sanctity of a man’s property.”

  Another voice answered, punctuated by a springlike clicking sound on every glottal syllable.

  “I’ve shown more respect than you rightly deserve, being traitors and spies.”

  Bailey harrumphed. “How dare you, sir, after damaging my door and assaulting my comrades?”

  As the crack between doors was out of Hews’ reach, Oliver bent his neck farther and lined up his eye with the soft orange light filtering through. Already his neck had begun to ache.

  Just beyond the door sat wooden boxes half the height of a man. The room seemed to extend perhaps thirty yards to the other end. A jowled, sour-faced man stood perhaps halfway across, dressed in a grey suit and bowler hat. He wore no cloak to signify his position but had enough gold on his person in terms of hat ribbon, cuffs, chains, gloves, and tie to make up for it. He brandished a revolverlike weapon the length of Oliver’s forearm.

  When the man spoke, his facial muscles moved in tiny stops and starts like the hands of a clock, eventually resting in a configuration resembling a tense grin. “I’ll savour dashing that out of you before we hand you over to our brothers in armour.”

  “You have made a threat on my person, sir,” Bailey said. Oliver heard something that might have been Bailey spitting. “And that I will not tolerate. Let’s settle this without delay, hand to hand, as God intended.”

  The gold cloak squinted suspiciously. “I’ll not have you starting a ruckus and warning your coconspirators.”

  Oliver felt a poke in his ribs and turned to Hews, who spoke in a whisper that was little more than an exhalation shaped by the lips.

  “A view of the room.”

  Oliver moved his head left to right, swinging his small slit of vision to encompass as much of the room as possible. In order to do this without sound, he and Hews squashed and bent themselves into poses that became downright painful. It was also getting uncomfortably hot. Oliver bent low, further craning his neck, to whisper into Hews’ ear.

  “Bailey and Sims on the left, possibly another—I saw a hand. The chief canary’s just out front, beyond a set of boxes. Two more at the door with Enfields. Can’t see right or left wall.”

  Hews nodded. “I can’t believe you don’t have a gun, lad,” he whispered.

  “I’ve had enough of them,” Oliver shot back. “What now?”

  “Sit tight. Ready when I say.”

  Oliver nodded.

  Outside the cabinet, tempers were flaring.

  “I call you coward!” Bailey roared. “Pass me a pistol. I challenge you, sir.”

  The gold cloak emitted a noise like a sputtering engine. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you filthy renegade? You’d play me for a simpleton.”

  “You doubt my honour, sir, only because you have none of your own. Tell me, when they cut out your heart, did they relieve you of your manhood as well?”

  Hews held up one finger and gestured at the door. Oliver readied his knife.

  “You fucking rotter,” the gold cloak bellowed. “I’ll kill you right here, Ironmen or no.”

  “Praise England!” Bailey cried. “Long live the queen!”

  Hews jabbed his finger forward. Oliver’s heart leapt into his throat as they crashed pell-mell out of the cabinet. Hews fired two shots the instant the doors swung clear, then hurled himself down hard behind the two crates. Oliver stood dumbly for a moment, watching the chief canary topple backwards, then plopped down flat to the floor as the gold cloak on the right brought his rifle to bear. The cabinet door splintered an instant later.

  Sims dove in next to Hews. Bailey followed, rolling on his shoulder and coming to one knee suddenly armed with a derringer in his right hand. The third man—Kerry—produced a .38 from his coat and fired several times as he moved to join them. Then his back exploded and he dropped to the floor like an abandoned marionette.

  Things became quiet for an instant.

  Groans and noises like the breaking of violin strings sounded from beyond the boxes. To Oliver’s left, Bailey rose to an apelike crouch, muscles and tendons rigid under his sun-worn skin. The expression in his eyes denied the age that showed in the spots at his hairline, the grey in his moustache. Silently, he tossed Oliver the derringer and reached to the back of the second crate. He jammed his fingernail between two slats and levered it open, revealing a set of pistols. He passed one to Sims and clasped the other in both hands.

  Bailey and Hews shared a silent look. Oliver scrambled to right the derringer and fit his long fingers around the handle. Muttered curses accompanied sounds of movement over the crates.

  Bailey counted down on his fingers. Oliver turned himself over into a squat and got ready. Three. Two. One.

  They all leapt up at once, and the room filled with light and noise. Oliver’s first shot went into the ceiling. Then he took aim on the gold cloak who’d shot at him and let fly with the second. The cloak went down, tumbling backwards. The chief cloak, his fine coat a mess of blood, brown grease, and black oil, staggered to the door despite the bullets slamming home in his broad back. The cloak on the left spun and fell, his rifle tumbling from his hands.

  Suddenly all firing ceased. Oliver brandished his empty derringer as fiercely as the others now held aim on their last quarry.

  “Buggers, all of you,” the man said. He grasped the door frame to stay upright, and shot a snarl over his shoulder at them. Streams of oil streaked his face. “The noble Grandfather will bring me back, and I’ll execute you all.”

  The two cloaks from outside appeared in the doorway, eyes wide in alarm. Bailey and Hews, who, Oliver realised, had been saving their last rounds, shot the two men through their foreheads.

  “You don’t even die like a man,” Bailey scoffed, lowering his now-empty weapon.

  The gold cloak’s sneer dissolved into a slack, vacant expression, and he slumped to the floor with a sloshing sound that chilled Oliver’s bones.

  Hews relaxed his arms. “Perhaps he does.”

  Bailey turned to Kerry’s sprawled body. Only a small black-rimmed hole marred Kerry’s chest, but beneath him lay a slowly spreading pool of blood.

  Not a bad way for it to end, Oliver thought. Better than the Chimney or the steam guns or any of the other horrors of this city.

  The other three faced their fallen comrade and bowed their heads. Hews removed his hat.

  “A great honour to die in the service of queen and country,” Bailey said, voice hard. “We salute this man who gave his life for the cause.”

  “Flights of angels,” Hews muttered. “We shall see you at the gates, my friend.”

  Bailey turned to face the rest of them, dismissing Kerry’s body like so much scenery. He gestured towards the cabinet.

  “Everyone down.”

  One by one they fled through the trapdoor. Hews came last, sealing it behind and fastening the unseen catch. They knelt and huddled close against the stinking, grime-heavy wind that greeted them below. Everyone took a moment to hide their weapons away and draw handkerchiefs to cover their mouths against the sickening air.

  “How did they find you?” Hews asked, pressing his hat down to keep it from flying off.

  Oliver almost reeled back at the anger that flashed in Bailey’s eyes. Bailey made a fist with his free hand. “Aaron has been captured.”

  Oliver knew the name, having heard it passed in casual conversation between other revolutionaries. As usual, they hadn’t trusted him with the details of Aaron’s role. Oliver had assumed he was another agent like himself, but Hews’ startled gasp indicated otherwise.

  “Lord in heaven,” Hews muttered.

  “Contact your people and order them into hiding,” Bailey ordered. “Reconvene at the den in Dunbridg
e Tower.” He and Sims backed up, dropped off the edge of the beam, and disappeared.

  Oliver turned to Hews. “Hiding? What did he mean?”

  Hews ground his teeth, staring inwardly. “If Aaron gave up this hide, he’ll give up the rest of them, lad. Not a one of us is safe now.”

  Oliver’s heart leapt back to a racehorse pace. “This man didn’t know my crew, Hews.”

  “We can’t take any chances. Let’s get up and find a telegraph.”

  Hews touched Oliver on the shoulder and pointed back the way they’d come.

  “How’re we to get all the way to Dunbridge?” Oliver asked. “They’re certain to be watching the cars.”

  Hews broke out of an internal reverie. “They didn’t seem to know our faces. It’s Bailey and Sims who have to be careful.”

  They crawled in silence for a moment, walking on three limbs to counter the wind. Oliver glanced over several times at Hews, whose brow grew more and more wrinkled, and his manner drew more withdrawn.

  “Hewey, who was this Aaron?”

  Hews loosed a long, frustrated sigh.

  “Our hope, lad. Our best bloody hope.”

  Chapter 4

  The first principle of the machine is Purpose. The machine designs itself to this chosen end, aligning all functionality to a single outcome. The machine, by its nature, cannot fathom or choose its purpose. It must be handed down, as revelation or as doctrine, from a being of higher stature. In this way could it be considered divine.

  —IV. ii

  Ticking: a thousand clocks echoing into endless dark, the motion of a million gears grinding and churning, a morass of straining forces clashing against shaped metal, a finely tuned symphony of coordinated motion, culminating in a single tick—repetitive, deafening, implacable.

  The mind of Grandfather Clock.

  Aaron had imagined himself shrieking and writhing, struggling against the bonds that held him. He imagined a line of Boiler Men at the entrance to his prison, standing ready with rifles, rods, and steam guns to block his eventual escape. He’d imagined a door locked with steam-powered bolts, to seal in this man who was such a danger.