by Sean Little
Clarke bounced and rolled beneath the coach, but avoided the wheels. The horses, no longer attached to the coach, continued to run in front of it, but started to out-pace it, propelled by fear of fire. When the road veered to the right, the horses followed the road, but the coach kept going straight. It plunged off the road, slamming into trees and rocks. Paschal was thrown from the seat and into the forest. The coach was almost cracked in half when it connected with a tree. The two lanterns on the front of the coach had fallen from their lamp-poles and into the dried detritus on the forest floor. Flames were fueled by the spilled kerosene and quickly spread to the leaf-litter.
Bobbins and Shaw pulled their horses to a stop. Bobbins leapt down from the seat of the wagon. “Mr. Clarke? Are you alive?”
Clarke was on his back in the middle of the road. “Somewhat.” He was officially tired of falling off things for the day.
“Enough resting, man! Things to do!” Bobbin clapped his hands.
There was a high-pitched scream from the woods where the coach crashed. The flames were spreading rapidly through the brittle, dry leaves. Paschal was trapped in the middle of a burgeoning inferno.
“Oh, dear.” Bobbins brought a hand to his mouth. “That doesn’t look very good, does it? Mr. Clarke, would you be a lamb and handle that before our new friend is turned into a table-side saganaki?”
Clarke rolled to his feet. He stumbled toward the fire, but Shaw was quicker and uninjured. She leapt the initial wall of flames and made it to Paschal’s side. Half-carrying, half-dragging, she somehow powered the friar to his feet and through the flames with minimal damage. She unceremoniously deposited the friar at Lord Bobbins’ feet.
The portly priest was coughing and groaning. His forearms were cut and bloody from breaking his fall. He flopped on the ground like a fish. “I think I have broken ribs.”
Shaw hauled back and kicked him hard in the chest. Paschal flipped over, clutching his ribs and shrieking. “If you didn’t before, you do now. Spill it. What’s going on in Cărbunasatul? What’s your part in it?”
Paschal gasped for breath, his shoulders hunched. His wild hair and beard were flecked with leaves and dirt. His face was bleeding from some abrasions on his cheek and a split lip. He spat a gob of blood. “My part is that I’m a pawn in a great man’s game, nothing more, nothing less. I was the man who kept an eye on town. A servant. A man of the cloth who vowed to help the world, and I saw this was my best chance to serve the world as a whole. Only that.”
“What do you mean? If you know about nethercrystal, then you know its potential for ending the world.”
“Dr. Enwright thought bigger than that, Mr. Clarke. Much bigger. You are too provincial to appreciate a great man’s vision. He is a man of peace and foresight, a man who will build the future. He is not a man of destruction.”
“So why blow the church, then?” said Bobbins. “Seems a waste of a perfectly good building.”
“There was an entrance to the caves somewhere beneath it,” said Clarke. “Has to be. Could be the whole town is sitting above a network of tunnels.”
Paschal’s eyes darted to Clarke. He said nothing, but the look alone was enough to let Clarke know he was right.
“There’s another entrance in Bobbins’ castle, isn’t there?”
Paschal’s eyes narrowed. Another hit. Clarke was good at this game. It wasn’t his first rodeo with guessing the plans of delusional asylum-bound lunatics, though.
“Enwright. Who is he?” said Clarke. “Where can we find him?”
“And why is my castle so important?” said Bobbins. “It’s about the nethercrystal, isn’t it?”
Paschal looked to Bobbins. “You don’t know?”
“Know what? What am I supposed to know?”
Paschal rolled his head back and laughed two short chuckles before clutching his chest again. “I wish I could be there to see when you find out…if you find out.” Paschal made a fist and there was a heavy crunch. When he opened his fist, Clarke saw the remnants of several dark blue glass tubes. Fear gas.
“Don’t breathe!” Clarke shouted. “Get away!” He shoved Shaw away from Paschal and dove for the side of the road, trying not to inhale.
The gas was too potent. In the winds and the flames, it aerosolized instantly and filled the area. Banshees made of flame flew out of the woods, their screams louder than the fire, louder than the wind.
Clarke squeezed his eyes shut. He could hear the cries of the two horses. He could hear Shaw’s rage and Bobbins’ alarmed shouting. Shaw fired her revolver three times into the air.
“They’re not real!” Clarke shouted. “Close your eyes! Cover your ears! There is nothing there! It will be done soon!”
The flames of the forest fire were fanned by the winds and the heat became inescapable. When Clarke risked a glance, the winds had dissipated the gases and the banshees were gone. The fire was still very real.
Paschal was limping down the road, trying to escape. He wasn’t going with a lot of speed, though. Clarke helped Shaw to her feet.
“It would be easier to just shoot him, wouldn’t it?” she said. She sighted down the barrel of her little Colt army pistol.
“Probably. But I’ve never shot a man in the back, and I don’t aim to start now.”
Shaw sighed, pulling the gun to a rest position. “Fine. I’ll get him.” She started jogging down the road after the friar.
Bobbins was still hunkered in a crouch on the side of the road. He had his eyes closed, his hands clamped over his ears, and he was humming Jerusalem loudly. Clarke tapped his shoulder and Bobbins’ eyes popped open. “Oh, Mr. Clarke. Good to see you. Well done, and such.”
“It’s over,” said Clarke. He pulled Bobbins to his feet.
The Brit straightened his clothes, brushing dust from them. “It’s getting a bit smoky around here, wouldn’t you say? I’m going to have to have Sandsworth air these clothes well lest I walk around smelling like an open-pit roast. It would take a gallon of cologne to bury the smell, wouldn’t it?”
Shaw caught the friar and grabbed his shoulder. She spun him around, put him in a headlock, and marched him back Bobbins.
“No one had to get hurt,” Paschal said. “Dr. Enwright wanted to do this quietly, peacefully. No one had to get hurt. You are going to cause the town’s destruction!”
“You’ve a lot to answer for, vicar,” said Bobbins. “Mr. Clarke, would you be so good as to chase down that wagon so we can haul him back to town.”
“There won’t be a town for long,” said the friar. “That land is too valuable.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Bobbins.
“You won’t,” said Paschal. “You don’t know what you’re sitting on, and you never will.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Bobbins. “I may be slower than the average monkey, but I get the banana eventually.”
Paschal smiled at Bobbins. “No. Not this time.”
Clarke, twenty feet away and leading the horse and wagon, saw the next events in slow motion, powerless to stop it. Paschal whipped up his arm, the blasted Pinker in his hand. He was drawing on Lord Bobbins, but Dolly Shaw threw herself in front of him, drawing her revolver as she did. Both lupara barrels roared, a sickening comet of pink light belching from the muzzle. Shaw squeezed off a pair of shots. The first shot hit Paschal in the shoulder, the second in the throat. He died quickly, soundlessly, a lump of former human in the middle of the road. The shotgun blast hit Shaw in the right thigh, the close distance and the brutality of the lupara’s power sheared her leg below the hip and spun her to the ground in a circle.
Clarke watched helplessly as the woman’s leg ripped clean from her body and she fell motionless to the ground. Clarke had seen that happen on the battlefield—a rogue cannonball would often end the war for a half-dozen men if it was bouncing and rolling at speed. None of those hit by the cannonballs survived. The shock of the injury combined with the sudden blood loss—it was an infallible reci
pe for death.
Clarke ditched the reins and ran to Shaw’s side. He cradled her in his arms and tried to be there so she wouldn’t go into the darkness alone. It was the least he could do. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It will be all right.” Lies told on the battlefield weren’t lies if they gave comfort; one of his commanding officers had told him that.
Bobbins felt his own body, patting his thighs, stomach, and chest. “No holes! I daresay that was a close one.”
“What?” Clarke glared at Bobbins. He hissed through his teeth. “Ms. Shaw is going to die!”
Bobbins rolled his eyes. “Not this time. She got hit in the right leg.”
“What the hell difference does that make?”
Shaw opened her eyes and pushed Clarke away from her. She pulled up what was left of her shredded pant-leg to reveal a mangle of steel, cogs, and wires. “Because my right leg left this world a long time ago.”
Clarke was rarely caught off-guard, but that revelation did it. He gaped like a fish. “You’re a…a clockwork girl?”
“Clockwork woman, if you please,” said Shaw. “And only my leg. The rest of me is natural as rain. Now help me to that bloody wagon and then fetch the other half of my leg.” She fingered the mangled ends of the main supports on the leg. “Shame. This is going to take a while to fix, I’m sure.”
“Nicky will get on it,” said Bobbins. “I’ll pay him double.”
“Someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?” said Clarke.
“Not particularly,” said Shaw. “Get the wagon. Get me back to the castle.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Secret of the Castle
“I first became aware of Ms. Shaw because her family served my family,” said Bobbins. Clarke was driving the wagon back, letting the horse take its own pace. Bobbins was on the seat next to him. Shaw sat on the back clutching her severed mechanical leg.
“Not servants, mind you—but they helped oversee a large parcel of my family lands. They were employees, to a degree, but it felt much more like a partnership. Good people, the Shaws. Years ago, I was in a bit of a kerfuffle and Ms. Shaw sacrificed her leg to save me—much like she did now. It was a horrible incident, and I felt terribly guilty. To make it up to her, I summoned the greatest minds from around the world and together, they were able to knit together one of the most magnificent prosthetics you’ve ever seen. Under her skits, it’s invisible. It makes no noise. Some would say she can actually move with it better than she could with her normal leg.”
Clarke gave a low whistle. Bobbins paused in his story to light his pipe. The lighter sparked impotently several times, flashing brightly but yielding no flame. He shook it hard several times. “Blasted thing.” It lit, and he was quickly smoking his slim ebony pipe. The tobacco smelled heavily of cherries.
“Is that the only part of her that’s clockwork?” asked Clarke.
“For now,” said Bobbins. He glanced over his shoulder and gave Shaw an affectionate smile. “I’ve encouraged her to lose another limb or two, but so far she has not consented to that.”
“A leg is enough,” she said.
“And this is why you got stuck in the caves? It wasn’t fear, was it? It was the sound interfering with your leg?”
Shaw put her finger on her nose. “You are correct, sir.”
“How did the original injury happen?” said Clarke.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Shaw.
“When we got attacked by the hallucinations last night—when I asked you what you saw, you said that you saw a man that hurt you. Was this what he did?”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.” Her voice was low and flat. He looked over his shoulder and Bobbins gave him the slightest shake of his head. Leave it alone. Clarke did not press further.
“What do you think Paschal meant?” said Clarke. “What’s going on with your castle?”
“I do not know,” said Bobbins. “But I intend to find out. Immediately.”
The castle was dark and silent when it came into view, a starless monolith in black that stood out against the forest behind it. Clarke took the darkness as a good sign initially. However, as they got closer it became concerning. There were no lights in any of the windows, not even the glow of light sneaking out from behind shuttered windows. The large bonfire, which had been kept up in the bailey of the castle each night, was not burning.
“Something is wrong,” said Clarke. He drew the Colt, checked the rounds in the cylinder, and slipped it back into the holster. “It’s too dark.”
“Maybe they’re all asleep,” said Shaw.
Bobbins was on a knee behind the driver’s seat surveying the castle from over Clarke’s shoulder. “No, Mr. Clarke is right. No light. No nothing.”
“Maybe they went to town?”
“Vasile, Chef, and Sandsworth?” said Bobbins. “No. They would not have left unless commanded to directly. I know those men. Something is definitely wrong. With haste, Mr. Clarke! With haste!”
They raced to the gate of the castle. The portcullis was closed. There was no way to open it from the outside. The bailey was dark. The wind was the only sound. Or was it? Clarke tried to turn his head to a point where the sound of wind was muted. He listened hard. There was a low hum, almost indiscernible, especially with the sibilant hiss of wind in the treetops muffling it.
“There’s someone here,” said Clarke. “Something’s going on. Listen.”
Shaw turned her head. After a moment she said, “That’s a stealth engine on a zeppelin.”
Bobbins looked to the sky. “A Dark Runner,” he said. “Painted black, black trim, even the windows are dark, smoked glass. From a distance of a couple hundred feet, they are invisible at night. Smugglers favor them, of course. Technically, they are illegal unless they have running lights, but that defeats their very purpose, doesn’t it? I have one or two in my personal fleet—but we shan’t discuss them.” He laid a finger alongside his nose.
Clarke was doing the mental math. It wasn’t a complex puzzle. “Enwright is here; he has to be. Paschal’s job was to lead us away from town, prevent us from returning to the castle. Enwright is going for whatever is under the castle.”
“How do we get past the portcullis?” said Shaw.
“Easily enough,” said Bobbins. He walked to the portcullis, touched a spot, and then walked back to Clarke. “Mr. Clarke, back up about thirty or forty feet and please put a bullet on that rung I just touched.”
Clarke raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me,” said Bobbins.
Clarke drew his Colt, sighted down the long barrel, and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion from the end of the gun, and then a second, larger explosion from the portcullis. Wood, stone, and steel shattered and ricocheted back at them. The shockwave blew Clarke out of the driver seat, dumping him unceremoniously to the ground. The horse panicked and bolted. Shaw and Bobbins were both thrown to the ground, as well. The portcullis was devastated. Stonework surrounding the portcullis was cracked and shattered. The entire arch of the gate was gone.
Clarke picked himself off the ground, rubbing at new cuts and abrasions on his face. Shrapnel from the explosion had cut his face and hands in a half-dozen places. He spat rock and splintered wood. “What the hell, man? Did you lose your mind?”
“I had a small shard of nethercrystal in my jacket,” said Bobbins. “Or did you forget? I think I misjudged how powerful a shard that size would be. That one is on me. Bad mistake. Very sorry. Live and learn!”
“You could have killed us!”
“Yes…but yet, I didn’t! Honestly, Mr. Clarke—you could sit here and be angry, or you can get inside and do what I pay you to do. The choice is clear.”
“Go inside,” said Shaw. “It’s easier than trying to debate him.”
“That’s true,” said Bobbins. “I am a master debater.”
Shaw rolled her eyes. “Well played, m’lord. You didn’t think that one through in your head first, did
you?”
“Think what one?”
“Never mind.”
“I’m going in. You stay here and take care of Ms. Shaw,” Clarke told Bobbins.
“Certainly,” said Bobbins. “Keep your head down.”
“If you don’t hear back from me in thirty minutes or so, head to town and fetch the cavalry.”
“Ms. Shaw is the cavalry, Mr. Clarke. And she’s not in the best of shape now,” said Bobbins. “I suppose she could frog-hop her way to you. Are you up for that, Ms. Shaw?”
“No.”
“No. Sorry, chap. You’re on your own.”
“That’s fine,” said Clarke. “Expected even.” It was a running theme in his life.
Clarke ran into the bailey, gun drawn. He ran to the large pit where Vasile and Csupo stacked the nightly bonfire. The wood was usually prepared in the morning, so a large pile of it was stacked, ready to burn. In Csupo’s little quarters at the stable, Clarke found a kerosene lantern and used the fuel to soak the wood. He found a box of matches, struck one, jammed it into the box still-lit, and tossed the whole burning bundle onto the logs. The kerosene lit instantly and the bonfire roared to life in a quick fwoosh! In the light of the flames, Clarke could make out the blocky shape of a large, black zeppelin anchored to the top of the ramparts with taut hemp lines, hovering just above the castle walls. It stood out like a shadow against the night sky.
The door to the great hall stood open. There were no lights inside. Even the grand hearth stood dark with only a few red embers in the ashes. Clarke moved to the wall, pressing his back against it and Colt at the ready. He fought the urge to call out for Chef or Sandsworth. They could be dead. They could be gagged. It wasn’t worth it to reveal his position to someone who might have a gun.
Clarke could see a lump in the middle of the great hall. He moved to the lump and found an unconscious Vasile, a large knot on the back of his head. There was a pitchfork in his hand. He’d tried to defend the castle, but had failed. The groundskeeper’s breath was shallow, but he was still breathing. He probably needed a doctor and a bag of ice to press on the back of his skull, but that would have to wait.
