by Lavie Tidhar
"What?"
"Look!" Viktor said. "This is none of your concern. You're off to Vespuccia. Well, good for you." He grinned suddenly. "Did you know the lizardine court has asked for your extradition?"
That hit her hard. For a moment she forgot about the cargo or its mysterious destination. "What… what for?" she said.
"They said, and I quote: 'To assist Scotland Yard in their inquiries into the as-yet unsolved death of Lord de Winter'," Viktor said, and grinned.
"Why would they do that?"
"I sense that fat oaf Mycroft Holmes might have had something to do with it," Viktor said. "You seem to have a knack for making friends, Milady."
"Is that why…" she said, and faltered. "The asylum?"
"Keep you out of the way for a while, yes. The peace with the lizards across the Channel is fragile. They are too powerful for us to fight. What waits in Vespuccia could change that, however… which reminds me."
Around them the porters surged, the sealed casks disappearing one by one up the gangplank. "You are officially a fugitive from justice," Viktor said. "The Council will deny all knowledge of you. According to the information being sent to the lizardine ambassador as we speak, you broke out of Charenton, destroying the asylum in the process and releasing a horde of dangerous criminals into the streets of Paris. No doubt they are already well aware of the situation. That fire you started could be seen for miles."
For a moment she almost smiled. Viktor said, "You then took the train to Marseilles, and there found a ship to take you away from the continent, destination unknown. You're a fugitive, disowned by the Council. In other words, Milady – you're on your own."
She shrugged, and said, "When has it ever been different?" The last of the casks had been loaded onto the White Worm. Viktor said, "Have a safe journey."
The fog thickened around them. She could barely see his face. "What's in the casks?" she said.
"Nothing," Viktor said. "They don't exist. And neither, any more, do you, Milady."
She reached out for him but he disappeared, moving quickly, with a sort of animal grace, into the fog. She had to feel her way back to the gangplank. The chill was beginning to settle into her bones. The research station on Scab?
And she was a fugitive, she'd have no support once she reached the Long Island, once she landed in Vespuccia. Well, that, at least, was something she was used to.
Do not touch Tômas, they told her, before she left. Your mission is to obtain possession of the object. For the benefit of the Republic, for the glory of France.
They wanted her to lay off the Phantom, but she had her own ideas about that…
From above, Captain Karnstein's scratchy voice punctured the night, with two words and a final stop ending, perhaps forever, she thought, her old life. She hurried up the gangplank, scrambling to get on board the White Worm.
"Tide's up," Captain Karnstein said.
FIFTY-THREE
The Unfortunate Death of Flies
Storm lashing the sea into rebellion; waves rising dark as empty houses; the wind howled, its anger beating against the ship. Milady thought: The ocean doesn't want us here.
She had lit a candle. Now she sat up, unable to sleep, every muscle tight with anticipation. The sounds of night scuttled through the ship like rats, and every creak and groan sent a shiver down her spine.
They were coming, and she was afraid.
On that long-ago journey to France, the hold was crowded with hot and sweating bodies. Babies cried incessantly. Flies, unwelcome emigrants who had jumped onto the ship, buzzed everywhere. We are going to a better place, her mother had said, whispering, holding her tight. But young Cleo still heard the unvoiced words that hung there, at the end of the sentence, like an empty noose in the breeze: I hope.
Hope was not a commodity worth buying. It died with her mother, died with the long voyage to the cold lands of paleskinned men and plump, hard-eyed women and obtuse machines. It died on the streets of Paris, cut away from her soul with a sharpened knife. Hope was dangerous, the noose promising only one thing.
She had no use for hope.
She had been afraid on that long crossing and she was afraid again now. Outside the porthole there was nothing but ocean, the Atlantic spreading out in all directions. The water was black and there was no moon, and the wind howled incessantly, like a dying baby.
They were coming for her – and there was no getting away.
The second night out of Paris she dined with the captain at his table. Karnstein was a dour, solitary figure. She rarely saw his men – the rat men, she came to think of them for, like the rats who infested the ship, Karnstein's men were sometimes heard, but seldom seen.
They were dining on chicken. A drumstick was wedged between the captain's lips, the grease running down into his thick black beard. The chicken tasted of cloves. Beside the captain's plate stood a tall glass filled with pure lemon juice. Every now and then he would pause, banish the chicken a short distance from his mouth, and take a long swallow of lemon juice. "Scurvy," he'd announce every time, a shudder making his face move as if a sudden earthquake had taken place across its tectonic plates. "Can't be too careful with Lady Scurvy. She'd eat you from the inside and make you bleed, every time."
Milady nodded, and tore a chunk of bread, and chewed it. It was floury and hadn't been baked long enough, and there were little black dots scattered through the dough that suggested the unfortunate death of flies. It made her think of the man in the cell at the Charenton Asylum. The captain said, "You're not eating! Eat!" and pushed the chicken carcass towards her.
"I'm not so hungry…" she said. The captain shook his head. "Eat every meal as it if were your last," he said, taking another deep gulp of lemon juice and shuddering.
If I eat this meal, Milady thought, it almost certainly will be my last. The meal had the feel of a last supper served to the condemned. The small dining-room was dim and gloomy, with thick tapestries hanging over the walls. She found herself studying them, noting scenes depicting – what?
Scenes of torture and battle; helmeted men with steel spikes attacking upright lizards whose weapons breathed flames; men dying with gaping, burning wounds; a captive lizard roasted alive above a fire; a flying machine mowing down soldiers with a hail of flying, metallic arrows; men running, lizard eggs captured, broken open; lizard young being stomped on; a castle, a siege; men hanging in rows from drab black trees. She said, "What is it?" and lifted a glass of wine to her lips. The wine had a slightly rancid taste.
"That?" Karnstein said, turning – with some surprise, it seemed to her – to the ancient tapestries. "Flights of fancy," he said, waving the drumstick bone at the images. "Things that never happened."
"It looks very… real," she said. The captain shrugged. "It's called The Battle of the Borgo Pass," he said. "An old legend from my homeland… fanciful, but it lends a certain élan to the room, don't you think?"
"Quite," Milady said.
It was hard to eat one-handed, though she was getting the hang of it, slowly. Her gun-arm rested on the table. She said, "Where is the cargo headed?"
The captain put down his drumstick with some sadness and reached greasy fingers to tear a chunk of breast from what remained of the chicken. "Closed orders," he said.
"Viktor mentioned a place called… Scab?"
A grim smile etched itself, the way acid etches itself on glass, for a brief moment on the captain's lips. "Closed orders," he said again. And – "You are to confine yourself to your quarters while cargo offloads."
"Where?" she said. "We're in the middle of the ocean!"
That smile again, and the chicken disappearing into it. She decided to change tack. "Aren't you worried about the cargo?" she said.
"Should I be?"
"It could be dangerous."
"The ocean's dangerous," the captain said and then, unexpectedly: "I hate the sea."
There was something wild and uncontrolled in the way he said it. His pupils, she noticed, had beco
me dilated. His breathing grew heavy. She didn't speak again and, a short time later, excused herself from the table.
After that she took all her meals in her cabin.
And now they were coming. She listened out for their sounds. The tread of feet on boards, the ghostly whisper of an icy wind. The White Worm grunted and groaned all around her. She huddled on the narrow bed, her back to the wall. Watching the door.
Waiting.
For here, on the ship, she was no longer Milady de Winter. The years had been peeled away from her with a knife and what remained, in the small, dank cabin, was a small and frightened girl.
That same smell was in the hold of the ship when they had sailed to France… fear, sweat, bodies pressed together. "We're going to a new home," her mother had whispered to her. "A better place." Her mother's hope was like a candle. It had been easily snuffed. Or perhaps, she thought now, perhaps her mother never believed there was hope, but in pretending that for her daughter had tried to make it real, to wish it into being. Her body, like the others', was thrown overboard. By the time they arrived at port there were few enough of them left.
She rocked herself, hugging her knees one-handed, her gun arm useless by her side. The dead never truly went away, she thought.
She watched the door, waiting for them to come.
FIFTY-FOUR
Captive of the Waves
Sailing, with no land in sight, clouds in the distance assuming the shapes of imaginary continents, an entire alien cloudscape in the skies. Did someone live up there? Did cloud-women hunt amidst the grey-white landscape, did cloud-women fish from high above, dangling lines and hooks to snare a passing ship far down below? When she stood on the deck the air smelled of brine and tar and oil. It smelled cold, and she felt far away from home.
A whale in the distance, rising to the surface, blowing out a jet of water before the immense dark shape submerged into the water once more. A school of flying fish skittered over the surface like silver bullets. Steps behind her – Karnstein, wrapped in his dirty coat, a pipe stuck between his teeth: "Whales are the Queen's eyes, they say."
She didn't need to ask what queen he meant. In all the world there was only one that mattered.
She remembered Victoria. During the time of her second marriage she had often visited the Royal Palace. A tall, dignified being, her tail long and royal, her eyes hard. There were pools – swamps – in the Royal Gardens, and rocks for the royals to sun themselves on. The queen had a disconcerting habit of catching flies with her quick, long tongue… And she remembered the whales in the Thames. It was said they followed Vespucci's ship when it returned from Caliban's Island, bringing with it a strange new future…
"What's in the casks?" she said. Beside her, Karnstein chuckled. "You ask as if you already know the answer, Milady."
A clear grey sea, no land in sight… no other ships, no birds this far away from land. A desolate place – but this was only above. What lay below? The ocean had its own life-forms, its own geography, its own mysteries… ones she never wanted to know.
Somewhere deep down there, her mother–
"How much longer?" she said. Karnstein tapped his pipe on the railings. Ash and loose tobacco fell and blew away on the wind. "Making good time," he said grudgingly, then – "Might be a storm coming."
She left him there. Back in her cabin, the feeling of helplessness intensified. In the city, in the dark streets of Paris, she reigned supreme, but out here she was nothing but a prisoner, a captive of the waves…
She knew what was – what had to be – inside the casks. Biological specimens – hazardous. But she had to know for sure.
When she stepped out into the corridor there was no one there. She reached the stairs – nothing. There was no sign of Karnstein's rat men. Quietly, she began her descent towards the hold.
Why weren't they coming? She had seen them. She had made her way down into the hold. The smell of rot was strong, grew stronger the deeper she went. The darkness was near absolute – and yet, she could see.
Green jade shadows like cold shuddering flames… She saw not with her human eye but with the other, that foreign object lodged into the hollow socket of her missing eye. The thing in her skull responded to the shadows, writhing inside, and she bit her lip or she would have screamed with the pain. The jade fragment was alive, it was reaching into her brain, it was… it was excited, she thought.
Long wooden casks, bound in metal, were lined along the floor of the White Worm's hold.
But why lie? she thought. Call them what they truly were.
Coffins.
Viktor's research, the Phantom's gruesome job for the Council: the corpses of the infected, the bodies of those, like poor dead Madame L'Espanaye, who were touched by that alien illness that had entered Paris.
Though it was very dark in the hold, and the coffins were made of thick wood, she could nevertheless see them. Her jade eye showed her the interred corpses within their prisons. They were not still.
Restless, the deformed figures in the coffins writhed and fought to escape. Silver strands oozed across their dead and bloated bodies. A device, she thought again, recalling her dream, the temple on the Mekong, and the man who looked a little like her, who looked at her… a machine for recording the dead.
Or did they fail to understand it entirely?
There was a rustle in the shadows and she nearly jumped. She turned, heart beating, gun arm extended – jade-light showing her a bow-backed figure shuffling forward. Then a light flared, almost blinding her, and a gruff voice said, "Out of bounds, the hold is. What you doing here?"
In the light of the hurricane lamp the hold looked ordinary enough. There were coils of rope and fishing nets and sea chests, and the casks that weren't casks were silent and unmoving, as if they held nothing much inside. The speaker was one of Karnstein's dour rat men: whiskers grew out of his pale face and his figure was hunched as if from the weight of too many years at sea. His coat, like his captain's, was dirty, patched in places, torn in others. He wore a cap low over his eyes.
"Nothing," she said. "It was very dark, I–"
"Out of bounds," the rat man said. "Nothing to see."
"Perhaps if you could show me the way back–" she said, and then she paused.
For just a moment, the man had raised his face, regarding her through rheumy eyes – and at that moment she saw it.
A strand of silver-grey matter moving, almost sensuously, like a snake, across the man's skin.
FIFTY-FIVE
Infected
The same ocean, different skies… She was on the deck of the smaller ship and the man was there too, the man who was a little like her. Kai. Somehow she knew his name.
Kai.
The jade lizard sat in the prow, surrounded by candles. Incense wafted on the wind.
The man was leaning against the railings, looking out to sea. She approached him on soft feet. Above their heads the sky was a reddish-purple vista being slowly devoured by darkness. Stars were coming out, in ones and twos at first and then more and more of them, until the whole of the Milky Way was spread out across the sky from one horizon to the other.
"The sky was purple like a bruise, fading to black…" the man by the railings said. She noticed he was holding a book in one hand. He said, "I like that."
"Yes, Master," a voice said. She realised he was talking to his manservant, who was kneeling before the statue.
"I will be glad when this is over," the man said. He stared out across the sea, letting the hand holding the book drop to his side.
"Is it decided, then, Master?"
"They will not rest until they take it from me," he said. His voice was so sad… She had the urge to reach out and touch him, stroke his hair. "I will sell it to them, instead."
"For the right price, Master," the manservant said.
"Yes… my life," the man said.
He doesn't want it, she thought. He is a captive of this thing as much as I am. She went and stood beside him.
Together they gazed at the field of stars.
"I don't understand it," the man said. He half-turned his head. Suddenly, she was aware of him looking directly at her. "I don't understand what it wants, what it does."
She stood very still. The man suddenly smiled. "My silent ghost," he said. "Or am I your ghost?"
"Master? Is something wrong?"
"It is nothing, Manchu."
She liked his eyes. She reached a hand, her human one, to cup his face, but her fingers left no impression on his skin.
