by John Booth
He heard a door open behind him and Lord McBride walked into view. McBride appeared to be pleased about something.
“I thought I knew everything about healing, laddie, but I will admit you taught me something new today,” McBride said as he rubbed the back of his neck. “At first I thought you had killed Giles.”
“How is he?” Tom asked in concern.
“Much, much better than he was. I would have you attempt to heal Andrew as well, except you are obviously not up to it right now.”
“You must treat his vomit with great care,” Tom said urgently. “In my mind’s eye, I saw motes of a substance that shone with a painful light in his lungs. Those motes were twisting and changing the substance of his body, eating him away from the inside out.”
“Interesting,” McBride said rubbing his beard. “Hans has speculated that the dantium is giving off rays like the sun, though he believes it is more like the heat you can feel from a piece of iron taken from the forge that is no longer glowing. Hans Clerkes is my consultant on dantium and its uses.”
Tom now sensed the danger of that substance and made a heartfelt plea.
“Lord McBride, I beg of you; do not let anyone in that laboratory go near that vomit. I cannot be sure I have saved Giles, the damage to his body was so severe.”
McBride showed no concern at Tom’s words.
“Do not bother yourself about it, laddie. It has been flushed away into the castle sewers and will be diluted beyond any ability to harm. The floor has been thoroughly flushed and scrubbed. We are not amateurs in such matters.”
Tom’s concern turned to Laura and her absence.
“Where is Laura? Is she safe?”
“She is working with Gordon as I ordered. I have decided to give you a treat for saving Giles. You will come along with me on a tour of the factory. I am sure you will find it fascinating.”
Tom sat up slowly and discovered his head was no longer spinning. Lord McBride was already at the door and looking impatient.
“Come along, laddie. I donna have all day.”
The factory was impressive and unbelievably noisy. Lord McBride led Tom into the first of several immense iron clad sheds all constructed to the same specification. Their corrugated roofs were forty feet or more from the ground. Huge electric lamps hung from steel supports holding the structure together.
Cast iron steps led up to a gantry than ran along the roof of the first shed. Lord McBride took the steps two at a time in his eagerness. From the walkway, it was possible to gather a clear view of what was going on.
The first thing to surprise Tom was the railway tracks set in the floor of the shed. Two train lines ran parallel through the shed with sets of points where carriages or engine could be rolled from one line to the other. Large carthorses were pulling one of the partially assembled engines from one assembly area to another
Chain hoists were being used to lift steel panels and other large metal components into position where they were hot riveted or bolted into place. The noise in the shed was horrific as riveters smashed their hammers onto formers to give each red hot rivet a neat dome head. The workers appeared to be making copies of the steam engine that had pulled their train.
“This area is being used to make the reactatron trains.” Lord McBride shouted. Tom could barely hear him over the racket. “We are about to ramp up production and will be doubling the workforce over the next few weeks. The reactatrons are manufactured in a specialist shed that I’ll show you shortly. Come with me.”
Lord McBride led him along the walkway. At the end of the shed, the walkway crossed over the floor and went straight through the wall via a set of double doors into a shed on the other side.
The second shed proved to be blissfully quiet compared to the first. The walkway was enclosed with iron plates painted a dark green and with windows above waist height. Tom had never seen such a profligate use of glass in his life, but it served to allow them to look down at the work going on below while remaining isolated from the environment.
Men in strange clothes worked in small groups some distance apart from each other. The clothes they wore were unlike anything Tom had seen. They appeared to be made of rubber and had no visible buttons or other fastenings. They covered the workers completely, except for their faces. The men wore goggles and masks to protect their faces and lungs from anything in the air.
“It is a shame that Giles was not wearing such an outfit when he was exposed to your dantium,” Tom told Lord McBride.
“He was wearing a set of these protective clothes, including the face mask,” Lord McBride said. “I think we must assume that the protection they offer is not adequate, at least when dealing with used rods of dantium.”
“What are they doing down there?”
“They are packing crushed dantium into the copper tubes. The dantium must be stored in small amounts and that is why the teams are working so far apart from each other. It is a slow process and it will take each team the best part of a month to pack a single rod.”
“It must be horrible working in that rubber.”
“No one is allowed to work for more than half an hour at a time. The men are washed down using water jets before they are allowed to remove their garments. I have no wish to see my workers die through neglect.”
“Yet you are not above kidnap,” Tom remarked dryly.
“Not through choice, laddie. It is the Empire and the English scum who run it who force me to use despicable methods.”
Lord McBride led Tom through to the next shed where components for the steam engines were being assembled and tested.
Alice was not a happy girl. She had been taken to a small dormitory where she found she was to share a single room with three other girls around her own age. They were asleep when she arrived and there had been a fair amount of grumbling as a lamp was brought into the room to guide her to her bed.
Only a few hours later, she was shaken awake as dawn broke and ordered to wash her face in ice-cold water. Then she was hurried off to eat a breakfast of porridge laced with salt and washed down with a mug of sour tasting milk.
The other girls were extremely rude to her and pinched and pushed her. A stern looking woman dressed in black and wearing a black silk veil came into the room and ordered the girls to stand at attention. The woman carried a long thin bendy stick, which Alice soon found out was there to sting any girl who caused the lady the slightest displeasure.
Alice seemed to annoy the lady, simply by having the temerity to exist.
“My name is Madam Hulot,” the woman told Alice sternly in a heavy French accent. “You will always address me as Madam Hulot, nothing else.” Madam Hulot swung her stick so it caught Alice on the left thigh. Even through her dress, it stung dreadfully. “Is that understood?”
“Yes, Madam Hulot,” Alice answered quickly. She recognized the woman’s type and knew that her only hope of avoiding pain was to satisfy her every whim.
“If you have not already introduced yourself to the others I will do it for you now. They are Miss Trenchard, Miss Mathews and Miss Williams.” Each girl took one step forward and curtseyed as Madam Hulot spoke. “Girls, this unkempt creature is known as Miss Short.”
Alice failed to step forward and curtsy mainly because she had never practiced curtsying and did not know how to do it. A stinging pain across her backside proved incentive enough to force her to make the attempt. Madam Hulot sniffed with contempt at her efforts, but did not hit her again.
“It is doubtful whether any of you will ever reach a state of sufficient grace to be considered a lady, but it is my unfortunate task to train you in the gentle arts as three of you already know only too well. It is most inconvenient that I should have to start again with Miss Short, after all these weeks we have worked together.”
Madam Hulot smiled through her veil at them. “I expect you others to assist Miss Short in her efforts to catch up with you. As an incentive to encourage you in this onerous task, I have decided that every t
ime I have to punish her for poor understanding, I shall also punish each of you.”
The three girls stared at Alice with undisguised hatred.
By the early afternoon, Alice was wondering if she would survive until the evening. Madam Hulot seemed to take a special delight in finding fault with her during their lessons. Madam Hulot asked her questions on etiquette that Alice had not a clue about, and Madam Hulot always reinforced her eventual sneering answers with a swift swing of her stick.
If this was not bad enough, Madam Hulot would invariably punish the other girls for Alice’s lack of knowledge. By the late afternoon, Alice was wondering if the girls would try to kill her when they got her alone. She seriously considered the possibility that this might be Madam Hulot’s plan, a way of getting rid of her unwanted charge while blaming it on the children.
It was the sheer unfairness of it all that made Alice broadcast out a screaming message to Tricky. The first message she had bothered to send since the night they were on the train.
‘WHERE ARE YOU, YOU BASTARD? YOU ARE NEVER AROUND WHEN I NEED YOU.’
The cottage the team chose as theirs was the one nearest the walkway. Cam suspected that the cottages were all the same and she was anxious to get rid of the Laird’s son, so they could formulate a plan of action.
Daisy, on the other hand, seemed delighted with the presence of Dougal McBride and asked him all sorts of questions as they toured the cottage. Built with three bedrooms upstairs and a fixed enamel bath with running hot and cold water as well as a privy, the cottage was far superior accommodation to anything a worker could expect to afford.
There was a kitchen range in the well-outfitted kitchen as well as a separate dining room and study.
“You will find the larder stocked with enough food to last you a few days. With the compliments of my father,” Dougal told Daisy as he swung open the larder door to reveal cured pork and fresh bread among other things.
“Your father is a most generous man,” Daisy replied, giving him a friendly smile.
“He inherited it from me,” Dougal told her, returning her smile. “You will find me more than capable of matching his gestures.”
“I am sure that anything you were to give a woman would be well received and reciprocated in kind.” Daisy fluttered her eyebrows.
“There must be other people you need to attend to back at the station,” Cam said. “We must not keep you from your work.”
“Alas, you are right,” Dougal replied sadly. “However, we are having a cèilidh tonight at the castle, that’s a Scottish party, well mainly an excuse for the men and women to dance together. I trust you will attend, children included. It is a good opportunity for the new workers to meet with those of us who were born here. My father will certainly expect you to attend.”
“We will be delighted, Dougal,” Daisy said as she clapped her hands together in delight. “A dance, how wonderful.”
Dougal left the cottage after saying farewell to Daisy at least six times.
“We don’t have time for romance,” Cam snarled at Daisy as soon as the cottage door was shut.
“He is the Laird’s son and I am trained as a spy, remember? We can use him,” Daisy retorted.
“Girls, girls…” Arnold protested. He would have said more on the subject had Tricky not put his hands over his ears, screamed in pain and fainted. Ebb caught his friend deftly as he fell, having moved behind Tricky a few seconds before he collapsed.
31. Work
Laura had been given the finest parchment along with a calligrapher’s pen and copper ink to work her bind. The ink contained the highest concentrations of copper currently possible and was a strange brown color. It required constant stirring to stop its contents solidifying at the bottom of the ink pot,
A much healthier looking Giles Summers stood to her right, bent over so he could watch her as she performed the bind. Laura wondered if she would ever get a better chance to change everybody in the castle into some form of rodents. These men had no idea of how powerful she was or that she was here against her will and made no attempt to protect themselves.
Laura might well have done it there and then, but for the fact that she had no idea where Tom was. If he was inside the castle then she could save him and they could prepare against any counter attack from the village. But if he was outside the castle with Lord McBride, then McBride would be able to hurt him. Laura was imaginative enough to conjure up all sorts of terrible images. Tom with a severed hand, his tongue cut out in front of her, or simply killed by a vengeful Lord McBride. She couldn’t risk any of those things happening, and she was certain that McBride was capable of doing them to get his way.
Laura completed the bind as instructed and she and the two men stepped over to look through the thick plate glass window into the room beyond. They uttered a collective sigh of disappointment at what they saw.
In the room behind the glass, a copper rod filled with semi pure dantium had been placed on a thick muslin sheet stretched over the open top of one of the vats. Laura’s bind had been constructed to turn the copper and uranium to water leaving pure dantium as a solid behind.
The water would pass through the muslin leaving the dantium on it in powder form. What they saw when they looked through the protective glass was that all that remained of the rod was a tiny residue of grey powder. There was certainly only a sprinkling of the powder on the cloth. Whatever she had separated out from the rod was not the dantium they sought.
The water drained into a rod shaped clay mould. Laura tore the bind and the water solidified back into a rod, albeit with the copper casing now mixed in with the dantium.
“If we look on the bright side,” Giles said with a wan smile. “It took Andrew and me months of work to get the uranium and dantium to turn to water. You did that on the first attempt. At this rate, we will get you to our level of performance in a week or so. A Spellbinder must learn to understand the substances they manipulate before their binds will work.”
“I have little understanding of dogs or cats but I was able to change people into them from an early age without the slightest trouble,” Laura said in annoyance. Her professional pride had been hurt by the failure. It was probably the first time she had failed so completely at binding. “Let us try again.”
“I’m sorry, but we cannot,” Kemp said wearily. “We need to remove the cloth and reset the experiment. I will have to get the decontamination team in to do that and they aren’t at our beck and call. I also need to write up this experiment and find out what that material is on the cloth. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it before. You might well have discovered a new element, Laura. Hans Clerks will be all over it when he returns.”
“And pray tell; who exactly is Hans Clerks?” Laura asked.
“He is the Natural Philosopher that the Laird employs as a consultant,” Giles explained. “Right now he is off on the Laird’s business, having taken a device with him that he and the Laird refer to as Project Gomorra. I don’t know what it is supposed to do, though I must admit I always feel a certain amount of dread when I look at it.”
“You talk such nonsense, Giles,” Kemp retorted. “I admit I have no idea what the device is supposed to do either, but I feel no dread over what amounts to two cannons pointing at each other.”
“That sounds like a very foolish and dangerous thing to do?” Laura enquired.
“Only to anyone foolish enough to try to fire it, or to be standing anywhere near it when it is fired,” Kemp explained. “While I have not been taken into the Laird’s confidence, I watched as the Gomorra engine was constructed. It is a cylinder of cast gunmetal that has been bored right through from one end to the other to form a pipe.”
“The Laird had his specialist Spellbinders, the ones who make his glass and the like, create special end pieces for this pipe, which can lock with a half turn onto it creating breech’s at each end. It is the same kind of technique that modern rifle makers use to allow rear loading of their weapons.�
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“The Laird has rubber coated wires inserted through the side of the pipe so that charges at both ends can be set off using electricity. I presume because he wishes to ensure that the two ends will fire at each other at the same time. It is therefore two cannons pointing at each other that will certainly explode into a million pieces the first time they try and use it.”
“Why would anyone want to make something like that?” Laura asked in astonishment.
“This Hans Clerks is a charlatan,” Kemp said angrily. “He has played on the Laird’s desire to experiment with dantium and find new uses for it. Clerks’ is the reason that Andrew is hovering at death’s door and Giles came so close to death. It is for Project Gomorra that we must extract pure dantium.”
“It remains a mystery,” Giles told Laura. “Just as the mystery of where Clerks has taken the first of his devices. Or why the Laird is so anxious about producing enough pure dantium that he has brought you here to help with the process.”
Cam threw a large vase of water in Tricky’s face, which instantly awoke the boy. Tricky used a string of swear words that made Cam and Daisy blush as he spat water onto the floor.
“You trying to drowned me?” he asked furiously. “That were that silly bitch, Alice. She damned near split my head in two with her shouting.”
“Well, at least we know she is close,” Arnold said phlegmatically. “And I will ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head, young man, or you and I shall be taking a walk out into the woods to cut a suitable switch for your backside.”
“It weren’t me throwing buckets of water into other people’s faces,” Tricky grumbled as he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “Seems to me that it’s others who should be taken into the woods to learn them some manners.”
Tricky wisely retreated towards the back of the room away from Cam, as he saw the look in her eyes.
“What did Alice tell you?” Cam asked through gritted teeth. It seemed that even the children in the team were able to criticize her actions with impunity.
