Brasswitch and Bot

by Gareth Ward

  Despite his jocular tone there was an edge to Plum’s words. He couldn’t possibly know of her dream; he would have said something if he did. So that left the unpleasant thought that he’d been a victim of torture. What had happened to him before he’d been recruited to Cabal Thirteen? Had Bot rescued him from Flemington’s clutches too? Plum was no fan of the captain but that was hardly an exclusive club. He’d not shown any fear or hatred when they’d joined Flemington outside the church, or at least no more fear than his baseline level of mild terror.

  Wrench had always been able to keep her peculiarities secret, but Plum, with his violet eyes, was going to stand out. Even now, when he was part of the regulators, he wore his large dark glasses everywhere. If you accidentally do magic, bad things can happen; that’s what he’d said earlier. She hadn’t picked up on it at the time, but perhaps that wasn’t just a warning, perhaps he was talking from experience.

  “Lordy-Lawks! This you need to see,” shouted Plum.

  Wrench stuffed the sheaf of papers back onto the shelf and hurried into the adjoining room. It contained a narrow bed pushed up against one wall and a simple Elmwood wardrobe into which Plum gazed.

  The half-open door obscured the cabinet’s interior. Wrench moved further into the room, eager to see what had Plum so transfixed. When working at the coachworks she had prided herself on her unflappability but as the wardrobe’s contents came into view her hand went to her mouth, stifling a gasp. It contained not clothes but a montage of photographs, letters, documents and drawings, pinned to the wood. Connecting various items were lengths of knotted string, labelled with neatly written index cards. And in the midst of it all, a spider’s web of strings emanating from its centre, was a large photograph of Wrench, the one they’d taken when she joined the coachworks.

  “Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer,” said Plum.

  With trembling fingers Wrench traced a string back from a photograph of the mangled remains of the Drake. She grasped the label tied halfway along the string, holding it so she could see the words: Is the Brasswitch to blame for the crash?

  She staggered backwards into the bedframe. Her legs gave out and she slumped onto the mattress. “It wasn’t my fault. I was just a child,” she mumbled, cradling her head in her hands.

  Plum joined her, sitting on the bed. “Are you all right?”

  “No. I’m bally well not.” Wrench lifted her head. “A sadistic psychopath has been prying into my life.”

  “I know. It’s just wrong snooping into people’s private possessions. Who would do such a thing?”

  Wrench’s fingers tightened on the edge of the mattress. “We’re not snooping. We’re investigating.”

  “Yeah, well, Flemington’s been investigating you and that doesn’t bode well. Bot carries clout with the Grand Cabal but there’s only so much he can shield you from.”

  “What do you mean shield me? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “We’re aberrations. We were born a crime.” Plum gestured towards the wardrobe. “Although this goes way beyond that. Even for Flemington it’s obsessive. He must reckon you’re pretty special.”

  “Is there anything on Carwyn or the NIA?”

  Plum scanned his gaze over the documents. “No. It’s all about you.”

  Why was Flemington so obsessed with her? There had to be a reason. It was more than just the fact that she was a remarkable, it had something to do with the accident that had killed her parents. She needed time to study the documents. She checked her fob watch – time that they didn’t have.

  “Bot is going to want to see this. We’d better take it all,” she said.

  Plums fingers twitched nervously into a succession of shapes. “We’re not supposed to leave any sign we’ve been here.”

  “Well, that went out of the window when those crossbow bolts put whacking great holes in the wall.”

  “That could have been ordinary housebreakers. If we take all the stuff about you, Flemington’s going to suspect it was Thirteen.”

  Wrench began unpinning the documents. “He’ll never know. I’ve got a plan,” she said.

  “Why are you smiling?” asked Plum nervously. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  “You don’t have to like it. You just have to do a tiny bit of magic.”

  Bot stormed into the briefing carriage where Plum and Wrench waited. “How does setting fire to Flemington’s rooms fit in with the modus operandi of stealth and guile?” he bawled.

  Wrench glared at the mechanoid. The moment she’d seen the contents of the wardrobe she’d known she was taking the documents; there had been no other option. When she’d been strapped in the electric chair Flemington had shown that the regulators had a file on her. However, what she’d retrieved from the wardrobe went well beyond the call of duty and was straying very much into the behaviour of a lunatic.

  Besides, who was Bot to lecture her? He’d blown up the Epochryphal Brotherhood’s manor house without a second thought. He’d nearly blown them up too in the process. At least she’d thought her plan through. Like the best machines, it possessed a simple elegance.

  “No one saw us go into his rooms, so that was stealth,” said Wrench.

  “And the guile?” asked Bot.

  “Plum left sooty shapes on the wall like the ones in the Minster and the church. Flemington will think it’s a remarkable like Carwyn seeking revenge. And while he’s busy chasing his tail we can find out what he’s up to,” said Wrench.

  Bot loomed over Plum, who concentrated on the cat curled in his lap. The strange-looking beast purred contentedly.

  “What is that thing and why is it on my train?” said Bot.

  “She’s not a thing.” Plum toyed with a silver name tag on the madder-red collar the cat wore. “She’s called Lady Lovelace and I rescued her from the fire.”

  “The fire which I thought you were merely ineffectual in stopping but are apparently complicit in starting.”

  Plum scratched Lady Lovelace behind the ears. “I didn’t have any choice. Wrench made me do it,” he mumbled.

  “You were the senior regulator on the scene. I trusted you to keep her out of trouble,” said Bot accusingly.

  “Stop being such a big brass baby.” Wrench slapped Bot’s arm. “You sent us in there to gather information and that’s what we did.” Plum swallowed loudly beside her, his body trembling. Wrench clenched her teeth and squared her shoulders towards Bot. She didn’t care that the robot could crush her with a single blow; she wasn’t scared of him. Being in charge didn’t give him the right to bully them. Plum might not stand up to Bot, but she refused to submit. He was only a machine, and she controlled machines, not the other way around.

  Bot raised a hand and Plum flinched backwards, his arms curling protectively over Lady Lovelace. The carriage lights flickered. Wrench remained staunch. The robot rapped a finger against his skorpidium-carbide skull. “I’m not actually brass,” he said.

  “On the inside you are.” When Wrench had reached into him on the way to the Minster, the brass gears and clockwork had felt shiny and bright, glowing with a sheen she’d not encountered before; not until she’d visited the Artificer.

  Bot’s eyes narrowed. The seconds stretched out for an eternity, then his face broke into a smile. “And you are skorpidium-carbide all the way through, Brasswitch.”

  Suddenly aware that she’d been holding her breath, Wrench inhaled sharply. Her pulse slowed, and the carriage’s lights shone steady again. She glanced at Plum, who had gone deathly white and looked like he might spew. A feeling of guilt rose up in her. She railed against Bot’s bullying, yet she wasn’t any better. The thaumagician had been deadset against her plan to burn Flemington’s rooms and she’d intimidated him into complying. She wanted to tell Bot how brilliant Plum had been in localising the burning, so it hadn’t spread to the adjacent properties or the sweet shop below, but she sensed a line had now been drawn under the incident, so she held her tongue.

  “Brasswitch,
Ops room one is now yours. Take what you’ve found and recreate it exactly as it was.”

  Wrench looked at the mess of papers and string laid out on the desk. “I’ll try, but I only saw it briefly. It may not be an exact replica.”

  “Plum will help you. He has a knack for remembering things. Isn’t that right, Plummy?”

  “Master Tranter says it’s a photographic memory. I don’t really see pictures. It’s more like patterns, Sir.”

  “I don’t need the details – just get it done. I expect a full briefing in the morning.”

  “A briefing?” said Wrench. “We should drag Flemington in for questioning and find out what he’s up to.”

  “And how’s that conversation going to go?” said Bot. “Please don’t tell the Grand Cabal but we illegally searched your lodgings before burning them down and kidnapping your cat. However, if you’d like to answer a few questions for us that would be splendid.”

  “He’s up to no good. Look at what we’ve found.”

  “Which is precisely the point of the briefing. We need to continue our investigations and find some evidence we can actually use. Cabal Thirteen survives on the goodwill of the Grand Cabal. I’m not jeopardising it on a witch-hunt. Even if the person we’re hoping to burn is Flemington.”

  Wrench pinned the last string in place and stood back. The corkboard covered one wall of the Ops room, which was a triple-locked train compartment not much bigger than her sleeper cabin. “What do you think?” she said.

  Coddled by Plum, a loud thrum issued from Lady Lovelace. “It’s good. Maybe not aligned precisely as it was in Flemington’s rooms but it’s all joined up the same.”

  Plum was right: the Ops room board was bigger than the wardrobe and so where the paperwork and photographs had previously overlapped they’d had the luxury of spreading them out. Corners of documents that hadn’t seen daylight for years were now revealed. Rectangles of white paper, in otherwise yellowed documents, stood out proud with their crisp dark blue ink. Wrench stared at the discoloured documents and an idea began to form. She moved closer to the board, squinting at the photographs and papers.

  “What are you doing?” asked Plum.

  “Flemington’s been documenting me for years, ever since the crash of the Drake. Based on the fade of the documents I can build up a timeline of his research and determine what his most recent activity was. What he’s most interested in.”

  Plum nodded, seemingly impressed, then reached inside his jacket and pulled out a battered black journal. “Or we could just look in his investigation diary,” he said.

  Wrench grabbed the book. “Where did you get this?”

  “It was beside his bed. I pocketed it before I torched the place.”

  “And you didn’t tell me because?”

  “I didn’t want to.” The corners of Plum’s mouth turned down and he shuffled his feet.

  Was this another example of the thaumagician trying to obstruct her? Probably not. Despite having only known Plum for a short time, she’d come to think of him as a petulant child. “Are you sulking with me?”

  “Bot hasn’t forgotten this, you know. It’ll be held over us until we retire.”

  “Not if we get the better of Flemington; find out what he’s up to.”

  Plum motioned towards the journal. “So, what is he up to?”

  Wrench turned to the last page in the diary. “Astrology,” she said.

  “Astrology is phooey.” Bot’s voiced boomed around the Ops room, trapped by the reflective soundproofing on the walls. Octavia placed tentacles in her ears and Plum pulled the hood on his suit over his head.

  As an engineer, Wrench had always been sceptical too. Astrologists were charlatans who played on people’s superstitions, making ludicrous predictions based on the alignments of the planets. However, after the things she’d witnessed over the past few days she wasn’t ruling anything out. Maybe they did have some arcane knowledge passed down through the generations, and one man’s madness was another man’s genius. She glanced at the bleary-eyed Plum. He wasn’t a morning person, although to be fair he wasn’t really an afternoon person either. An air of grumpiness hung around him like a cloud over a cricket match. He scowled, seeming to blame Wrench for the fact that he’d been dragged out of bed at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning.

  The thaumagician was living proof that the world was more complex than she’d always believed. After all, she’d thought witchcraft and magic were nothing but folktales. And she’d been wrong about that.

  “My horoscope appears to be part of his obsession,” said Wrench. “I was born on August the fourth when Bailey’s comet was closest to the earth. The comet has a fourteen-year cycle so it’s close again this year. Although, why that has any significance I have no idea.”

  Wrench had stayed up late into the previous night scouring Flemington’s notes but either by design or accident they were somewhat cryptic and subject to a good degree of interpretation. They also suffered from the bias of Flemington’s own skewed world view, as exampled by the last entry in his diary.

  The aberration Chattox claims to be affected by the comet; was WCH affected too and what will happen when the comet returns? Leech has been sniffing about. I’m sure he knows something. Damn Thirteen and its freaks will be the death of us all. Perhaps the astrologers at the Celestines can confirm my fears and give me the evidence to act.

  Octavia flicked through the investigation log. “The last entry is two days before Flemington arrested Wrench. Perhaps he found what he was looking for at the Celestines.”

  “The Celestines are a cult of lunatics,” said Bot.

  “I believe they refer to themselves as a religion,” corrected Octavia.

  “Cult, religion, they’re just words. You can’t trust people who claim to predict the future from the astrological positioning of the stars and planets.”

  “The future,” echoed Wrench. The Epochryphal Brotherhood had been trying to view the future and Flemington had paid them a visit too. It wasn’t documented in his investigation log, but the monk Bot rescued from the manor house had mentioned a badly burned regulator making enquiries. What was Flemington up to? And what was his obsession with Wrench and the future? “Are there remarkables among the Celestines?” she asked.

  “Aberrations? We don’t think so,” said Bot. “Octavia, you’ve visited them before. What do you think?”

  “I didn’t sense anything more than the background level of aberration you find on any street in York,” said Octavia. “Although, they did claim that their horoscopes could predict the birth of aberrations.”

  Bot’s gears ground, making a noise like a snort. “I’d like to see that in the papers. Gemini; Mars is in its first ascendancy and the alignment with Jupiter means you are going to meet a tall dark stranger – who can breathe fire.”

  “We don’t understand why some people are born aberrations; who’s to say the planets don’t play some part?” said Octavia. “No one understood the effects of the moon on the tides until Newton’s gravitational theories.”

  “All right. All right. My mind will remain open to all possibilities,” said Bot, rapping his knuckles against his head. “Tomorrow we’ll visit the Celestines. Today, I’ve been summoned to the Grand Cabal and I’m hoping it’s nothing to do with your incursion at Flemington’s.”

  “Nobody saw us. We were careful,” said Wrench.

  “Oh, you were the epitome of discretion, torching his place and making snowstorms in the street.”

  Wrench’s head snapped around to look at Plum. He shrugged sheepishly.

  “Don’t blame him. He’s fast becoming our best thaumagician. I doubt even Master Tranter could do what Plum did with that fire.” Bot pointed at Wrench. “You, on the other hand, need to get a hold of your magic. So today, and indeed every day, you will practise.”

  Anger coiled inside of Wrench like a nest of vipers. Plum had betrayed her. Octavia had been right to pass on Pippa’s concerns about the thaumagician; t
his was another example of him trying to thwart her.

  Plum skulked behind a sackcloth target on the weapons range. He clutched his arms defensively across his chest and stared at the ground.

  “I can’t believe you dobbed me in,” said Wrench, prodding Plum in the shoulder. She hardly touched him, yet the force of the blow knocked him off-balance and he tumbled to the floor. Plum stared up at her with a look of wounded hurt in his eyes and her anger transformed to shame. She reached out a hand to help him back up. “I’m sorry.”

  Plum stood shakily. “That’s twice in two days you’ve knocked me to the ground.”

  “To be fair, the first time I saved you from a crossbow bolt.”

  “And the second?”

  “Saved me from doing something worse. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t realise I’d pushed you that hard.”

  “You didn’t. Like I told you, the magic weakens me. Newton says for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Well, for every spell there’s an equal and opposite price to pay. You can’t create energy; it must come from somewhere, and the place it comes from is me. I’ll be alright in a couple of days but controlling that blaze has left me spent.”

  Wrench remembered the light-headed euphoria she’d experienced when she accidentally made it snow, and her fatigue climbing the stairs afterwards. She’d done no more than a few seconds of magic and it had wearied her. Plum had controlled the blaze for well over an hour while the fire brigade brought the inferno under control. No wonder he was exhausted. “I had no idea. I guess I don’t have an idea about a lot of things,” she said, pulling up a chair from against the wall. “Take the weight off your pins while I practise.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Plum slumped onto the chair. “Try to recreate the feeling you had in Humbug and Mints and then focus on drawing moisture out of the air.”

  From her pocket Wrench pulled out the bag of sweets. She popped a pineapple lozenge in her mouth and rolled it around, savouring the bitter flavour on her tongue. She visualised the water in the air, tiny particles, joining together, forming raindrops, but to no avail. “It’s not working,” she said disappointedly. “The snow must have been a fluke.”