Whitechapel Gods (4 page)

“It is a different colour,” Bergen said.

“Yes, I replaced most of it with a new alloy. Much stronger so less can be used, which should lighten it a bit. I’ve also installed a new boiler.” He indicated each section as he spoke, dancing his fingers over the components, checking fit and sturdiness. Then he gestured for Bergen to pick it up. “Test it. Test it.”

Bergen bent and hefted the monstrous weapon from the table. The stock fit perfectly to his shoulder. He gripped its two handles, one perpendicular to the barrel on the inside, the other parallel on the outside. He experimentally thumbed the trigger on the outside handle.

“It is much lighter. My compliments, Herr von Herder.”

“It will still be a heavy load to carry through the downstreets.”

Bergen smiled. “Africa has touched me, sir. It will be as nothing.”

Von Herder grinned back, displaying gums shrivelled by age. “I am told the sunsets are magnificent there.”

“There are few greater pleasures, sir.” Bergen placed the rifle back on the table. He retrieved its special holster and a band of ammunition and tossed them in a canvas shoulder sack. Bergen surveyed the rack of breech-loading rifles and air rifles and considered whether Pennyedge should be armed.

The boy would be useless against the creatures of the downstreets with just his knife, and yet Bergen felt some hesitancy at arming a boy who was under orders to kill him. The essential question was, did giving the boy a firearm make him more dangerous than he already was?

“You were from Stuttgart, weren’t you?” von Herder asked.

“Hm?” Bergen murmured, breaking out of his thoughts.

“If I recall, you are from Stuttgart.”

“That is correct.”

Von Herder tapped two fingers absently on the table. “It is puzzling me, because you do not sound like you are from Stuttgart.”

Bergen paused, wondering just how much the blind man’s ears could reveal. He chose his words carefully. “I have not been back to the fatherland for years, Herr von Herder. Perhaps you are hearing some tribal variation I have acquired.”

“Of course,” said von Herder. “I’d forgotten.”

Bergen selected one air rifle and a bandolier for the boy. “Do you have any paper, Herr von Herder?”

“I haven’t much use for it,” von Herder said with a chuckle. “But Andrew is learning his letters.” He called back for the boy to bring up some paper and a pen.

The assistant appeared, carrying a slip of paper dark around one edge with spilled ink, and a small bit of charcoal.

“Beg pardon, sir, but me pen’s been leakin’ terrible of late.”

“Well then, fix it,” von Herder snapped. “How can I let you lay your hands on firearms if you cannot even fix a lousy pen?”

The poor lad froze up for a moment. Bergen held out his hand. “Whatever makes a mark,” he said.

Relieved, the boy crammed the paper and charcoal onto Bergen’s palm and fled.

“Lad’s a dullard,” von Herder said in German, “though he’s competent enough on the furnace.”

“Hmm,” Bergen said. He laid the paper on the table and scribbled a few words.

One caught by Ironboys. One caught by Scared. They can’t hold. Third fell from tower, has ticker-paper. Leading expedition to retrieve. Cannot delay; under watch.

He blew the excess charcoal off the paper and folded it in quarters.

“What were you writing, I wonder?” von Herder mused.

“My obituary.”

Bergen wrapped the steam rifle in its holster and swung the monstrous mechanism onto his back. It really was lighter, perhaps sixty pounds. He slung the various bandoliers over his shoulder, gathered a few more packs prepacked with food, water, and supplies, and hefted Pennyedge’s air rifle in his hand.

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
said Bergen, and left.

He dropped the paper in a sewer grate on the way to the warehouse.

My professors at the college told me that my buildings would not stand up. They pointed endlessly to leaning walls and angled beams that could support no roof short of a canvas sheet. I nodded and vocally agreed, and so they tolerated me, but I always knew my buildings were exactly as they should be.

No, they would not stand as I had designed them, but they would grow, and one day they would stand on their own.

—I. xxv

Grandfather Clock was watching.

Oliver tilted his hat back enough to see the massive white marble and wrought-iron clock hanging above the entrance to the boarding platform. Its regular ticking rang like a hammer and anvil through the space above. Suspended on chains from the steel ceiling supports, it almost seemed to be leaning forward, surveying the people below.

Oliver ducked his head and pulled his hat brim down. An old chill crept up his spine, the wearing, gnawing awareness of scrutiny, and then a sharp dread at the possibility of being recognised from last night’s operation. He hurried his pace through the crowds at Shadwell Station, a sea of men and women in grey tweed and ash hats, stinking of coal smoke and grease and human sweat.

The operation
could
have gone well, if he’d only been given time to research and plan.

“It must be tonight,” Bailey had said, overpowering all objection. “England needs you. It is your duty to the crown.”

Oliver shouldered his way around a tin cart and the man pulling it, and wondered what Bailey thought he owed to the crown. Oliver was Whitechapel-born and-raised, and but for blurry glances through the smoke and ash, had never even seen this great nation he was fighting for.

Did that sour man not think Oliver had enough of his own reasons to want Baron Hume and his two gods to be cast down?

He simply doesn’t trust me. He wouldn’t trust anyone born outside his God-blessed kingdom.

Perhaps the correct question was: why was he following Sir Bailey’s revolution, instead of running his own?

Because I tried that before, and look at what came of it.

A series of rhythmic clacks and a screech echoed out of the boarding platform ahead, the sounds of brakes upon the cable, stopping the car’s descent from Stepneyside Tower. A gaunt-faced ferryman withdrew the gates from the platform’s entrance, and the crowd began to shuffle forward.

A short, round man wearing pale blue coattails and a matching silk top hat shuffled in close to him on his right side.

“Eyes ahead, lad,” the man said. “There’s trouble.”

“There’s always trouble with you, Hews.”

“Hmph. You’re one to talk of other folk making trouble.”

The pressure of the crowd eventually pushed them through the arch and onto the boarding platform, where a cable car sat ready. Pulleys and machinery chugged away on every wall. Oliver noted that the crew rushing about pulling switches and turning valves all wore the black cloaks of Mama Engine’s servants; they had some grand name in the rags, but Oliver and most folk just called them “the crows.” They were rarely seen outside the Stack, preferring, Oliver assumed, to be near their goddess, working in her furnaces deep inside that mountain of iron. The red glow of their own heart-furnaces leaked through burns and holes in their heavy clothes; some even had mechanical limbs, which held to no human shape. Last time Oliver had taken this car, the crew had been ordinary men of the working classes.

“Keep your eyes straight, lad,” Hews hissed. “They’re in a mood today.”

Oliver made to turn his head forward again, but his eyes lingered. Something on the catwalk above, half seen amongst the enormous gears and wheels that ran the car, tickled at his attention. Slowly, his eyes made out the gleam of round black armor and the long, precise line of an Atlas repeating rifle. A bolt of panic shot through him.

“What are the Boiler Men doing here?” he whispered.

“I don’t know. Now walk straight and don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Oliver felt a chill creeping through him. The Boiler Men: the baron’s personal army. Silent, unhesitating, they acted and killed with the detached ease of things wholly mechanical. Unlike the cloaks, not a one of them had ever been human. If Baron Hume had deployed them outside of the Stack, something must have happened to cause him no small worry.

A stern-faced gold cloak held the door at the entrance to the cable car, scrutinising people as they passed. Brass plates covered half his face, and his right eye had been replaced by an oversized orb of porcelain. Like most of his order, he wore not an actual cloak but a short cape over finely tailored clothes: waistcoat, jacket, slacks. Oliver had no sympathy for the cloaks. Their mechanical growths were not the painful fruits of any disease, but rather gifts from the baron and his gods, given when a once–human being walked into the Stack and took communion with Grandfather Clock or Mama Engine. Their mechanisms were their thirty pieces of silver, the price of their souls.

Oliver was glaring hard at the doorman when Hews tapped him on the shoulder to bring him out of it.

“Anonymity is your friend right now, lad,” he said. As they entered, he placed himself directly between Oliver and the gold-cloaked doorman and gave the fellow a friendly tip of the hat. The doorman’s gaze lingered on Hews long enough for Oliver to slip into the car. He came close enough to hear the man ticking.

Hews joined him a moment later.

“They’re looking for someone,” Oliver said.

“I had better not find out it’s you. Let’s retreat to the back.”

They pushed through the crowd to the end of the car, farthest from the door and farthest from the tin clock set into the ceiling at the front. They found a place in a corner, where they were pressed against the walls as the car slowly filled. Oliver turned to stare out through the wire mesh that served as a window, hiding his face from the clock. Hews did likewise.

“They came out of the Stack in force this morning.” Hews said. “I received a telegram from one of my old partners about it. Apparently there have been frequent arrests.”

Oliver felt himself flush. “And how does that differ from a normal day?”

Hews shushed him with a gesture, tilting his head back towards the car’s occupants. Oliver bit his tongue until the anger passed.

They fell silent a few minutes as the last of the passengers filed on and the gold cloak shut and locked the door. Hews slipped his fingers into the pockets of his waistcoat and rocked back on his heels.

“On a different topic,” he said, congenial once again, “how was last night’s work?”

When Oliver didn’t answer right away, Hews grimaced and rubbed his muttonchops.

“It went badly, then?”

Oliver exhaled deeply and rested his forehead on the window. “You might say that.”

“Did anyone spot you?”

“Likely.”

Hews cursed under his breath.

“Well,” he said, “nothing to be done now. This seems a lot of attention for just you, in any case. We’ll talk when we get to Stepneyside.”

The car jolted and began to move. Wheels and gears screeched away, and hidden engines erupted into deafening noise. The passengers braced themselves against the walls and against one another as the car picked up speed. In a few seconds, it cleared the boarding platform and flew out into London’s yellow-grey smog.

Oliver laced his fingers in the wire mesh as the car began to wobble side to side. Ahead, Stepneyside Tower slowly faded into life from within the clouds and the swirling ash. Its thick steel beams arched gracefully together, crossing and tangling, and at the top spilled back down in all directions, giving the tower the appearance of a huge black flower. The scattered lights of human habitation blinked between them like orphaned stars.

“Look there,” Hews said, pointing out the car’s right side. “On a clear day you can see the gun emplacements at Wapping, and sometimes the Thames.”

Oliver turned to look but saw only more grey sky, with the twisted shades of other towers lurking in that direction. Somewhere beyond stood the impassable wall separating Whitechapel from the rest of London, topped with electric defences and guarded by untiring Boiler Men. Just beyond it, human soldiers of the British army stood ever ready, standing fast against any expansion of the baron’s city.

“You’re from Wapping, Hewey?” Oliver asked.

Hews shook his head, as if ridding himself of a clinging memory. “Chelsea, actually. Someday, I’ll show it to you, lad.”

A blast of hot, oily wind battered the car. Oliver held on to the mesh and closed his mouth and eyes against the stinging ash that swirled past. A violent bounce caused screeching and twanging sounds to echo through the car’s roof.

“Haven’t I always said it?” Hews grumbled from behind his kerchief. “It’s the lifts and the cables that will be the death of us. The Boiler Men needn’t lift a bloody finger.”

A flash of red light illuminated them from the right. A half mile in that direction, Oliver made out the square and orderly Cathedral Tower, gleaming and clean despite all the grit and dirt of the air, and looming behind it, the black mountain of the Stack.

That was where Mama Engine’s inhuman children laboured without pause on her Great Work, and where, day after day, good coves worked themselves to death at her machines. Red flame blasted through the clouds around its uppermost tip. Smoke blacker than coal shot upwards, fanning out to cover the city like a shroud.

Oliver nudged Hews in the arm.

“Seems that’s been happening more often of late.”

Hews squinted at the spectacle. “Aye. Pity we can’t get a man inside. I’d love to know what they’re building down there.”

“Could always join up with the crows, Hewey,” Oliver said with a grin.

Hews’ expression laid plain what he was going to say, but after a quick glance at the men and women pressed in on them at all sides, he simply replied, “I may at that, lad.”

The Stack burst once more, then guttered and went out. Smoke continued to seep into the sky.

A few more jolts brought them into the Stepneyside station. This station was much larger than the one in Shadwell, and featured cable car passage to Montague Tower and a raised rail heading to Cathedral Tower and the Stack. Oliver and Hews stepped into the crowd and let themselves be carried along in the human current as it spilled out onto the boarding platform. Hews used the same trick to get Oliver past the gold-cloak watchman.

“Peculiar,” said Oliver. “All this for some fop bookkeeper.”

Hews snorted. “He isn’t just some bookkeeper, lad. Didn’t Bailey tell you?”

“Bailey wouldn’t tell me the bloody sky was grey,” Oliver said. Then his stomach clenched a little tighter. “Er…what was he then, if not a fop bookkeeper?"

“
Was
he?” Hews echoed, with a searching glance of Oliver’s face.

Oliver shook his head, an indication not to discuss it in the midst of a crowd. They shuffled along in silence towards the exit. Above the entryway to the station hung a montage of small clocks, all ticking out of time with one another and orbiting around a central, larger clock by the action of some mechanism hidden from the eye. To the left of the entrance stood a half squad of six Boiler Men, five holding Atlas rifles against their shoulders and one a steam hose connected to a copper boiler strapped to his back. Oliver and Hews tipped their hat brims down, flipped their collars up, and walked by without a glance or a word. Oliver felt the heat from the steam hose from a full five yards away. He wondered with a shudder if it had been fired today and tried not to remember what he’d seen it do to the human body.

They did not speak again until they had escaped the station and found a side street hidden from the view of the station’s massive exterior clock. The alley led between two tilting tenements connected by a slanting support beam that emerged from the second floor wall of one building and entered the third floor of the other.

They found a recessed doorway and took a moment to remove their hats and coats and shake the ash from them.

“I think perhaps you had better explain yourself,” Hews said.

Hews expected a direct and honest answer, Oliver saw. Oliver thought of Missy and knew immediately he wasn’t going to give one.

“I had my knife on him to keep him quiet,” Oliver said. “He just dove onto it. I think he may have been trying to strangle me.”

Hews’ face drooped. He swallowed hard several times before speaking. “So he skewered himself?”

Oliver nodded, fighting the guilt welling in his abdomen. “Without any warning at all. I made an honest attempt to pull my knife aside, but it was all very sudden.”

Hews rubbed his muttonchops and stared at the ground. Oliver felt a weight of sadness coming off the other man, feeding the gnawing sensation in Oliver’s gut.

“Sad way to meet one’s end,” Hews said. “Damned shame.”

“We got off fine with his documents,” Oliver offered. “Heckler seems to think they’re a key for translating some sort of cypher.”

“You told him who you worked for?” Hews asked.

“He can’t exactly turncoat on us now.”

Hews flapped his hat angrily. “Damn it, lad. Did you tell him who you were?”

“Hewey, that isn’t something my crew normally discusses while on mission.”

Hews flushed red. His jowls vibrated as he spoke. “Bailey’s using you on my good word, lad, and when he hears this he’ll have us both hauled off. Do you understand that?”

Oliver threw a finger into Hews’ face. “Well, if our muck-a-muck had told me anything more than a name and a time I’d have brought that fox in spit polished like a brass kettle.”

“You should have bloody told him who you were.”

“And if Bailey had trusted me, I’d have known to do it. Just because I wasn’t born in the—”

“He was one of
ours,
Ollie.”

Oliver froze. His finger wavered. “What?”

“Your fox was one of ours.” Hewey jammed his hat back onto his head and shouldered back into his coat. “He was a bloody inside man.”

Oliver’s arms dropped limply to his side. His hat slipped from his fingers and settled quietly on the pavement. “I…didn’t know.”

“Of course not. Bailey thought—correctly, I might add—that you would make a mess of it and might get caught. Aaron Bolden was running a separate operation tonight which might have thrown suspicion on your fox, so he had to be retrieved.”

Oliver moved his lips for a minute, running in his mind every conceivable apology, from humbly admitting his mistake and resigning from Her Majesty’s service to prostrating himself on the ground and wailing piteously for forgiveness.