Donnie held up the fragment. He examined the metal fitting on its end critically. “Ain’t Bodger & Bodger,” he said. “Ain’t our style. Too delicate.” He turned it over in his huge hand. “Nice work though. I have no idea what it is. Looks broken. What’s it from?”
“A flying apparatus,” Julianus said. “Possibly a large kite, designed to be folded up small.”
“Huh,” Donnie said. “Sounds like you already know what it is. Why are you askin’ me?”
“We were hoping you—” Julianus began.
“Can you tell us who made it?” Max interrupted, scowling.
Donnie shrugged, his shoulders moving like tectonic plates. “Might ought. Not many folks ’ere in London can craft somethin’ like that.” He handed the bit to Claire. “Kanda?”
Claire looked at the small broken thing, turning it around in her palm. “Kanda. Yep. Could be. Looks like her work, sure.”
“Kanda? Where is that?” Max asked, suspicious.
“Not where. Who. Chiyo Kanda,” Claire said. “She has a shop in Old New London. It’s on Highpole Street near Riverside.”
“Highpole?” Max made an expression of distaste. “I know that neighborhood. Mohammedans and the sons of Israel and other queer folk, all doing God knows what to—” Julianus laid a hand on his arm. Max glared at the hand and jerked away.
Claire handed the fragment back to Julianus. “That all you needed?”
Max pushed past her, eyes narrow. He spun around suddenly. “You having lunch?”
“Yes,” Claire said.
“Just the two of you?”
“The apprentices take their meal out back.” She waved her hand vaguely toward the back of the shop. “Is the Queen’s Guard suddenly interested in the dining habits of the commoners?”
He pointed to the workbench. “Why are there three bowls?”
Thaddeus gulped. His heart stopped. He crouched in the dark, dirty boiler, shaking.
Claire laughed. “The third one is for our new number two apprentice. His name’s Elias.”
“Who’s the number one apprentice?” Julianus asked.
“Where is Elias?” Max growled.
“Sent him out on an errand not half a minute before you got here,” Claire said. “Short lad, overalls, ’bout so high. Surprised you didn’t run right into him.”
“You sent him out in the middle of eating?”
“He’s an apprentice,” Claire said, as if that explained it.
Apparently it did, at least as far as Max was concerned. He nodded, satisfied, and spun on his heel. Julianus followed him out. Claire watched them go, shaking her head. When the door closed behind them, she said, “There’s a couple of complete tossers and no mistake.”
“Reckon so,” Donnie said. “Don’t surprise me much. Job requirement, I think.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Hope Kanda’s all right. Hate t’ see ’er mixed up in all this.”
The steam whistle blasted. Apprentices streamed back into the shop, a bit less enthusiastically than they’d left it. The great driveshaft overhead whirred and shuddered back to life.
Claire helped Thaddeus climb back out of the boiler. He was fairly gibbering with fright. Claire dusted off his clothes, sending a great cloud of dirt flecked with small bits of rust to the shop floor.
He jerked his thumb back toward the machine whose belly he had just vacated. “What is that thing?”
“Spider!” said Donnie.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“It’s a war clanker in the shape of a giant spider,” Claire said. “Some army engineers took a liking to the notion that a giant mechanical spider might be an awesome thing to ride into battle. Impress allies, strike fear into the hearts of the enemy, crush all who stand against them beneath great metal feet, you get the idea.”
“Does it work?”
Claire laughed. “Nope. Terrible idea. Too many legs. Too heavy. Too complicated. Way too hard to steer. Military technology is as much about what things look like as what really works, you know? If you’re gonna kill a bunch of folks, might as well look good while you’re at it. They paid us a huge wedge of cash and it’s complete bollocks. But we’re very hopeful about this new one.” She gestured to the machine Thaddeus had seen Elias working on.
“What is it?”
“Battle machine,” Donnie said. “Self-movin’ artillery. ’As a cannon up front on this turret here that you can turn to point any way you like. An’ see? No wheels! Just these little gears with metal tracks that go ’round and ’round. Like it takes the tracks with it, right? So it always has good footing. Near ’nuff impossible to get stuck, not like wheels or legs. Iron all ’round. Like bein’ in a fortress you can take with you.”
“Huh.” Thaddeus looked at the great iron hulk. “Does it work?”
“Dunno. Ain’t finished it yet.”
“Muddy,” Claire said, “I have a question. What did you take from Queen Margaret’s room?”
“Oh! That.” Thaddeus shrugged. “I don’t know. I just sort of, you know, grabbed the first thing looked valuable. How likely was I to be there again, right? Hold on.”
He went up to the loft to retrieve the jeweled case tucked under the mattress. When he came back downstairs, he handed it to Claire.
She opened the case and blinked. Her shoulders shook. Soon she was laughing uproariously. The sound boomed through the vast hall. Apprentices craned their heads curiously to see.
“What? What’s so funny?” Thaddeus said.
“Oh, Muddy. Only you.” She handed the case to him, shaking her head sadly. “Only you would sneak into Her Majesty’s bedroom and come out with a comb. It’s a nice comb, I’ll give you that. Lots of gold all over it. But still.” She giggled. “Limitless opportunity, and you grab a comb. Muddy, that’s so very you.”
12
Highpole Street was a miniature world unto itself, a place held apart from the rest of London. It was a chaotic, noisy place of bright colors and strange smells and the languages of dozens of far-off places. The street was jammed with people and horses and carts, so many that the hansom was forced to slow almost to a standstill. The crowd swirled around the carriage, creating little eddies and whirlpools of humanity in its wake.
Alÿs stared in fascination at the wash of people flowing around her. A tall, slender man on stilts, dressed in brilliant yellow, walked past, juggling brightly colored balls. His skin was black as night, his eyes two dark pools. He smiled, showing dazzling teeth as white as his skin was black. The horse whinnied and shied. Two men in black with long white beards and black skullcaps almost walked right into the hansom on their way across the street, so intent were they on their conversation. A woman draped in brilliant blue advertised elaborate woven rugs from a small wooden stall in front of an alley. She smiled as they passed.
Alÿs rapped on the side of the hansom. “Let me out here,” she said.
Rory pulled the cab up next to the curb. “Should I wait, my lady?” The horse snickered, tossing its head.
Alÿs shook her head. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” she said. She fished in her bag and handed him a shilling.
“It is not a problem. I can wait.”
“Thank you, but I will be fine,” Alÿs said.
“It’s just that the Cardinal…”
Alÿs folded her arms. “Yes?”
“He would be very upset if anything happened to you.”
She laughed. “He’d have to wait in line. It would be inconvenient for many people if something happened to me. Entire nations would fall, I’m sure. Really, I’m fine. I can find my own way back.”
“As you wish, my lady.” His expression betrayed displeasure at leaving Alÿs in the maelstrom of Highpole.
She watched him navigate the hansom carefully across the streaming flow of people. Before long, he was lost to
the crowd.
Alÿs walked down a sidewalk even more crowded than the street, feeling distinctly out of place. She’d heard tales about Highpole, each more lurid than the next, but even the most vivid of them was a pale shadow of the real thing.
A breath of warm, scented air, heavy with opium smoke, drifted from an open doorway. A man dressed in white sat drowsily on a bench in front of it, his eyes heavily lidded, his mouth concealed behind a bushy black beard. Further on, a woman sold grilled meats on long wooden skewers from the back of a horse-drawn cart. She waved as Alÿs passed. “Mutton? Lamb?”
“No thanks,” Alÿs mumbled as she hurried on.
She peered into each building as she walked by. She saw a long, narrow shop, open to the street, where rings, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings of gold and silver, copper and gems, were laid out on black cloth. A short, friendly looking man with a wide smile fussed over the collection, arranging and rearranging the jewelry as if looking for some secret combination that would unlock more sales. A tall, burly man stood just inside the door, glowering at the sidewalk throng, his massive arms crossed in front of him like great tree trunks. He had a long sword strapped to his back.
Further on, a haphazard collection of tables and chairs clustered on the sidewalk outside a restaurant that advertised its menu in English, French, the sinuous curves and dots she recognized as the script the Arabs used, and another language she couldn’t recognize, pointed and boxy. She was forced to detour around the nearest table, where two men dressed in clothing that might have been fashionable five years ago were arguing loudly in German. One of them thumped his fist on the table for emphasis.
She stepped out into the street. A group of women in long, floating saris pushed passed her, giggling. In a doorway across the street, a woman with almond eyes danced, her body wrapped in brightly colored silk adorned with bright gold. She locked eyes with Alÿs for a lingering moment. Alÿs looked away, blushing.
Alÿs passed a dressmaker’s shop displaying clothing in styles she had never seen before, simple one-piece garments of green and yellow held together with a cunning arrangement of knots.
On the corner of the street, a crowd had gathered around a lanky white man standing on top of an upended wine casket. He was dressed in severe black clothes and a black hat with a wide brim. Curious, Alÿs edged closer. He was shaking his fist at his audience, yelling about spiritual corruption in Paris and Rome. “They are all the same, these false prophets of God!” he shouted. “Fattening their coffers, living in corruption and sin! The final hours are upon us, oh yes, the final hours indeed! It is written that the Kingdom is at hand, and all the unrighteous shall be swept away in fire and blood!”
“How much blood?” a woman’s voice called.
“What?”
“How much blood? It takes a lot of blood to sweep someone away.”
“Oceans of blood!” the man roared. He raised his hands above his head. “A river of blood!”
“Which is it? A river or oceans? They ain’t the same thing!”
“You mean you don’t know your river from your ocean?” came another voice from the crowd, this one male. “How can you know about the future if you can’t tell a river from an ocean?”
“Maybe,” said a third voice, “he’s trying to say that there will be a river of blood that flows into an ocean of blood. Or maybe the Thames will turn into blood.” A chorus of voices murmured assent to that idea.
“Won’t do much washing,” the first woman said doubtfully. “The Thames is too slow. Besides, them church types is all up the hill. Ain’t no way the river is going to get them up there, even if it does turn into blood.”
“In God all things are possible!” the street preacher cried.
“Dunno ’bout that,” someone else said. “Seems like rivers always flow downhill to me. Otherwise they ain’t really rivers, see?” The crowd laughed.
“What about when the tide comes in?” the second voice said.
“The tide? Well, the tide don’t wash you away unless you’re just standing there. You ever know a priest to just stand there?”
“Not at suppertime,” the first voice admitted. More laughter.
Alÿs kept going, pushing through the crowds.
Eventually, she came to a shop whose front was festooned in ribbons and streamers of every color imaginable. Kites of all shapes and sizes hung from the massive black beams that supported the overhanging wood awning. The beams curved up at the ends, which were carved to look like the heads of dragons, or maybe serpents of some sort. Broad windows displayed all manner of curiosities: elaborately carved wooden boxes, small jade figures wielding curved swords, folding bamboo screens decorated with paintings of flowers. This has to be it, Alÿs thought.
She shouldered the heavy door open. A cascade of tiny silver bells on a slender wire tinkled to announce her arrival.
The door closed behind her, blocking the sounds of Highpole. Alÿs blinked. She felt a bit as though she’d stepped through a magic portal in a fairy tale and now found herself in some distant, enchanted place.
Every inch of the small shop was given over to breathtaking beauty. The floors were covered with thick, vividly colored Persian rugs, woven with swirling organic patterns. The walls were hung with silk tapestries covered with strange characters Alÿs could not identify. Shelves of black wood bore treasures from all over the world: small carvings of ivory and jade, exquisitely decorated boxes, dazzlingly intricate jewelry, cunning clockwork toys. The ceiling, braced with thick, heavy beams, was festooned with kites of every conceivable shape and size: tiny diamonds smaller than Alÿs’s hand, long serpentine dragons with heavy beards, complex box kites with ribbons hanging from their ends.
“Hello?” Alÿs said, stepping farther into the shop. “Is anyone here?”
There was a short scream from somewhere above her that ended far too abruptly.
“Hello?” Alÿs stepped still farther into the room. The shop was long but narrow, with a folding screen at the far end.
“Hello?” She approached the screen cautiously. Still no answer. On the other side of the screen, the space had been made into a workshop, filled with tiny tools, small metal fittings, bolts of silk, blocks of exotic hardwood, pieces of jade and ivory. A rickety set of stairs against the wall suggested a second-story apartment.
“Is anyone here?” Alÿs called. She started up the stairs, heart pounding. There was a sound of something scraping over wood, followed by a thump.
There was no doorway at the top of the stairs, only a heavy curtain of dark wool, woven with an image of a round red sun behind a tall, stylized mountain. She pushed her way through.
Alÿs screamed in horror.
There was a woman, barely as tall as Alÿs herself, kneeling on the floor in a dark blue kimono. Her hands were clutched to her throat. A spray of blood jetted between her fingers, reaching almost to the ceiling. She looked at Alÿs. Her mouth opened wordlessly.
She heard a thump from the far end of the room. The window stood open, looking down into a narrow alley behind the shop. Alÿs caught the briefest flicker of motion. She turned her head just in time to see a hooded, cloaked figure dart through the window, moving up, not down. A small shower of gravel fell onto the windowsill.
Something bubbled behind her.
Alÿs turned, eyes wide. The woman had fallen over onto her side. One hand still clutched uselessly at her throat. Blood was pooling rapidly beneath her. Her other hand pointed directly at Alÿs.
No, not at Alÿs, at something on the floor. A large, elaborately crafted knife, its pommel decorated with leather wound with fine silver wire. It was covered in blood.
Alÿs picked it up. She turned back to the woman. The woman’s eyes looked up at her, filled with terror and pain, and then filmed over. Just like that, she was gone.
Alÿs took a trembling step back. The blood pooled on the wood
floor, almost to her feet. She screamed and fled down the stairs. She ran, blinded by the horror, until she collided heavily with a man walking in the door.
“Hey now, what are you doing here?” Alÿs looked up with wide startled eyes into Julianus’s face, which was almost as surprised as hers. He looked down at the knife in her hands, then back into her face.
Max pushed past them, sword drawn. “Wait here,” he growled. He disappeared behind the screen.
Alÿs looked around, eyes wild with panic. “It wasn’t me!”
“I’m sorry?”
Max thundered down the stairs. “Seize her!” he cried. “She murdered the shopkeeper!”
“It wasn’t me!” Alÿs said again.
“Grab her!”
Alÿs turned, wrenching herself from Julianus’s grasp. She spun away from him, plunging through the door and out into the street. The two men chased after her, scattering the crowd on the sidewalk outside.
When she reached the street, Alÿs ran blindly. The look of naked terror on her face caused the crowd to melt away in front of her. Astonished people closed behind her, watching her speedy retreat down the street, so Julianus and Max encountered an almost solid wall of humanity. “Make way!” they cried. “Make way for the Queen’s Guard! Make way in the name of the Queen!” But Alÿs had already vanished.
Julianus and Max stood in the middle of the street, swords drawn, looking around in frustration. A space had opened up around them, surrounded by gawkers. Max snarled in fury and started down the street. Julianus put his hand on Max’s arm. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t waste your time. We know who we’re looking for. We’ll have her by night. What did you see?”
“She killed the shopkeeper,” Max said. “Covering her tracks, no doubt. Your man was right. She is in this thing up to her eyeballs. There’s no doubt.”
“Show me,” Julianus said.
A short time later they were back in the small room above the shop. Julianus crouched next to the body, his expression thoughtful. “I don’t think the Lady Alÿs did this,” he said.
Black Iron Page 12
