Large copper pipes emerged from the roof, lined the walls, and appeared to feed these crater hubs. What did they bring? Oil? Gas? Psammeticum?
Figures appeared in one of the observation windows opposite. She ducked out of sight, clamped a hand over her thumping heart. There were several well-dressed men and women toting pens and clipboards. No sense in dawdling here—she’d seen all she came to see. Meredith dashed past the elevators and across the bridge and back to the central corridor, her mind spooling theories.
Luckily the corridor was still empty. The sect members all had to be engaged elsewhere. Were they evaluating the various experiments? Maybe some of them. What about the others?
She decided to press on a little, to see as much as she possibly could before heading back to the cemetery. Ahead on the left, a locked wooden door was marked Southwest Administration. Directly facing the end of the magnetic track stood a green octagonal building. Lights were on inside, and through one of its porthole windows she spied a plush, oak-panelled conference room.
Four people sat around the octagonal table in the centre. A further two men and a woman stood apart from the table, scrutinizing a wall map of Great Britain; they smoked cigars and cheroots and sipped brandy as they listened to the only speaker at the table, a scowling old woman who was reading a sheet of paper through her Atlas monocle.
Of the others, she recognised Frank, aka Thurston Kingsley, pensively biting his nails, the boorish Mr. Slocombe, who glared at the old woman as though she was reading his worst school report out loud, and the impatient elderly driver who’d thrown away his flat cap at the front gate. While it appeared official and all—identical letters and paraphernalia had been left for each of them at their places at the table—it somehow didn’t strike Meredith as particularly...intimidating. Only two of the members were over thirty years of age, fully three of the seven were women, and in a society replete with veteran scientists, businessmen, politicians and warmongers, these did not seem to represent the power elite of such a monumental organisation.
Heck, Slocombe was more than enough proof. These were second, maybe third-tier Atlases at best. Maybe even familiars granted access but awaiting promotion to the premium ranks of their particular sect.
Meredith crept around the left side of the octagon, to see what lay on the other side. There she found another corridor, half as wide as the previous and much shorter, less than a hundred yards to a bare brick wall and a steel gate on the far side. Kingsley and his cronies couldn’t see her. She hung her sled on a rack next to a few dozen others and continued on.
“...Ethel Dockery and those pesky unionists, damn their hides,” a disgruntled voice emerged from the first open doorway ahead. Meredith froze. She thought about squirming away as fast as her boots would flap.
No, you couldn’t outrun a corpse from one of those jars.
She caught sight of the brim of a large touring hat, then turned on a sixpence and slumped back the way she’d come—if her disguise worked at all it would have to be now, while they couldn’t see her face. Her sister knew how to walk like a boy; Meredith only had to copy that and she might be all right.
“Come, let’s to the lounge,” a woman said. “We’ve barely said hello. It’s been all business, business, boo and bye.”
“Ha! D’you hear that, Denton? The lady and I are in agreement at long last. It’s what I’ve been saying for months: we need to pace these meetings so that one doesn’t sneeze and miss half the docket.”
“We’ll have to see about that.”
When Meredith heard their footsteps grow fainter, she loitered at the sled rack until the group had exited through the steel gate. Then she made her way to the room they’d emerged from. They’d left the light on inside, but the door was locked. She moved on to the next, hoping to find an office, a filing room, anywhere she could slip inside and retrieve some proof that this place existed, proof that she’d been here, in the heart of Atlas, and that there was more going on here than mere rumours and whispers.
No luck with the next door, nor the next. Strangely, the steel door at the end of the passage had been left slightly agape. She frowned, took her hands out of her deep overall pockets. The one gate in the entire complex left open—and the farthest gate at that? Nah, not a chance. Not unless they’d left someone else...
“Oi, fella, what are you doing this far in?” Oh, God. She shrugged without meaning to. The hoarse male voice sounded as though it belonged at a derby race, vocal chords worn to gravel by incessant yelling. “Won’t turn around, eh? You’re either lost or you’re about to be...from this earth. Who are the devil are you?”
Meredith shut her eyes, mashed her lips together. He would be upon her any moment, and she would never see daylight again. See Sonja again. The echoing click-click of his heels on the concrete belonged to a giant, Atlas himself, rearing up behind her. Size was all that mattered, and she had none.
Size?
Her right foot pressed onto the side of her left Wellington before her brain had fully comprehended. The boots were far too big for her, easy to step out of. The left peeled off with a single tug.
“Oi, what are you up to? Stop that.”
Not likely. She kicked the right boot off and, without even turning to see his face, bolted for the steel gate. The click-click was right behind, growing quicker and closer. He could reach out and snag her. But he didn’t. He couldn’t? Meredith dodged through the open gate and tore up the winding steps behind it, watching the ground and only the ground, its slippery, depressed-by-wear stone increments leading her...where exactly? Hot on her heels, demonic clicks. Above, demonic laughter. She either had a quick way out at the top of these stairs or she had to make up a story, a plausible story, for the real eight of the Eighth.
She clattered into upside-down wooden chairs stacked on a circular wooden table before she realised the staircase had ended. A soft carpet broke her fall. She rolled aside, hid her face with the flat cap so the people sitting on barstools couldn’t identify her. Gasping, she snatched up a chair and hurled it with all her might through the nearest stained-glass window. It smashed. A strong gust threw biting smithereens at her, so she shielded her face with the baggy sleeves of her overall.
“Quick, someone grab her!”
Her, yes. Without the flat cap she was a woman again. The smoky taste of night air beckoned. Meredith was in mid-vault over the jagged shards when strong arms lashed around her midriff and yanked her back inside.
“Get off, bastard. Let go, you son of a—”
A slap to her face stung like crazy, smarted as the group manhandled her across the lounge.
Anxious voices overlapped: “Who is she?—Let me see!—How on earth did a little girl?—Girl my foot, she’s a Coalition minx, come to bury us—That right, Minx? You aim to do away with the Eighth, do you? Well, you’re ours now, and you’ve no more hours left. Ha! Ha! Hours—do you smoke it?”
“If you morons plot as badly as you pun, the rest of the world has nothing to worry about.” She spat. Another stinging slap made her cry out, and she had to blink twice as hard and twice as fast to demist her vision.
“As chairman, it’s your decision, Denton. How do we do away with—”
Meredith head-butted behind her, caught her captor square on the chin. He yelled and let go. She fled for the open window, this time managing the leap outside, where she instantly collapsed under the gouging pain of her soles being cut to ribbons on shattered glass. She crawled on her knees and sleeve-covered hands—the turn-ups had unravelled to full length—out into a cloistered courtyard on a blustery night. A measure of how far she’d travelled since the cemetery, where it had been misty and still.
Rough hands picked her up again. This time she trembled, balled her feet to lighten the agony—it only compounded the multiple wounds, as many of the shards were still embedded. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. Everything she was and had ever been did not permit it, not tonight, not in the face of bullies.
“Slit her
throat and have done with it,” said Denton, a slight, very short man well past retirement age, whose Slavic face was framed by enormous mutton chops. “I don’t have the stomach to torture any more young girls. They can endure the devil’s own punishment, and you get nothing from them.”
“Let me try, then,” replied a hawkish-looking woman of about forty-five. Her smooth husky skin and lifeless dark eyes belonged at the prow of a barge on the River Styx. “Maybe you’ve been missing a woman’s touch.”
“Come now, Cybil, that isn’t your game,” said Denton.
“No, but I have a feeling this one knows more than we suppose. What say we take her to one of the new labs, see if we can’t get her to...open up a little. Cathy, Lily, it’s time you got your hands dirty as well. There are dark times ahead, and wars are not won by parlour games.”
Cathy? Lily?
“I’ve seen her before. I believe I know her,” said the taller of the two.
Meredith blinked twice. Bitterly. Twice more. She backtracked in her mind, trying to remember where she was—not at home in Southsea, nor in her house near Vincey Park in London. But—but Lady Catarina and Aunt Lily were here in the flesh, not ten feet away, gazing at her with such disdain, such contemptible contempt, she might as well be nothing more than an insolent tweenie maid from their long-forgotten past.
This had to be a bad dream. Cathy and Aunt Lily...Atlas members? Sonja would laugh herself silly...or spontaneously combust in horror.
“No, I must have been mistaken,” Aunt Lily corrected herself. “The girl has gumption, though, twenty-four carats of the stuff, whoever she is.”
“Gumption or not, we should find out what she knows,” Cathy replied.
“Cathy? Aunt Lily?” Even speaking their names out loud could not pierce the unreality of them being here.
“She does seem to know you.” Denton pinched Meredith’s cheeks together, shook her head until her teeth rattled. “You mean to say you’re this woman’s niece?”
“No!” Meredith replied instinctively.
“So why the ‘aunt’?” demanded Cybil.
“Why the ugly face?”
“You’ll answer me, or by God you’ll wish you’d never been born.”
“How many guesses do I have?”
Cybil dropped her shawl from her shoulders. “Smythe, hand me one of your pistols.”
“With pleasure.”
“You’re not interrogating her after all?” The Right Honourable Denton sounded a little put-out.
Cybil leaned forward, pistol in hand, and gave a hateful ugh noise, as though the very thought of Meredith being alive any longer in her presence made her retch. She leaned closer, her French perfume invading Meredith’s nostrils. Her bosom swelled in the centre, between her breasts. The fabric of her dress continued to bulge, to tent outward, almost as if...
The blade tore through her dress from behind at the same moment blood ran from the corner of her mouth. The same ugh noise sank deep, more prolonged, a heavenward scream trapped in a bileful bubble on its way to hell.
“Traitors!” Denton yelled, and his throat opened wide, gushed crimson at the slash of a blade. Blood slapped the floor before he did.
A flurry of deadly action erupted around Meredith. Cathy wielded the blade—unsheathed from her parasol—like a vengeful Valkyrie, felling Smythe before turning to spar with a large man who swung a barstool at her. It was an uneven fight, as Cathy’s agility and footwork had him swinging at air.
Meanwhile, Aunt Lily hitched her skirt and petticoats up and pulled a derringer from her garter belt. One shot, right through his forehead, freed the desperate hold of Meredith’s captor. He flopped onto the shards of broken glass at her feet.
The man swinging the barstool got lucky, clipped the hilt of Cathy’s blade, knocking it from her hand. In ducking his next swipe, she tripped backward over the fallen bodies of Cybil and Denton, and lay spreadeagled on the ground, at his mercy.
Furious, Meredith snatched up the pistol Smythe had given Cybil and shot Barstool Man through the chest. Twice. Three times. Four. She wouldn’t give up the gun to Aunt Lily, not even when blood blossomed as a dark rose on the ground around him. Aunt Lily had to prise it free.
Unfortunately, one of the group had escaped. He’d been injured during the fight but now limped away across the courtyard, screaming for help. Meredith had no idea whereabouts in London they were, but any assistance he managed to procure here, in this vicinity, would not be to their benefit.
“Finish him,” Aunt Lily said to Cathy—one tigress to another.
My Aunt Lily? My Cathy?
The only thing Meredith knew for certain was that she’d brought this on herself. Curiosity hadn’t killed the cat tonight, but it had certainly skinned it, left it doubting even its closest kin. Aunt Lily draped Cybil’s shawl over Meredith, held her tight, not saying a word.
Under a gibbous moon, on the far edge of the gothic quadrangle, Lady Catarina ran down the last member of the eighth sect. There was a glimmer of steel above her head. The man screamed and wailed and screamed.
Then he didn’t.
Chapter Thirteen
Hits and Misses
“You had to do it, didn’t you? Couldn’t leave it alone like you were told.” After a brief scan of the corpses both in and out of the bar room, Aunt Lily slapped Meredith’s cheek with extreme viciousness. It didn’t just sting, it throbbed against the bone. “You always were a wilful child, but this—words can’t even begin to...” She held a trembling forefinger and thumb to her brow. “You may have killed us all. And for what? So you could play at Wilkie Collins, solve a piece of a puzzle you had absolutely no hope of getting to the bottom of. You selfish little bitch!” Another fully swung slap, this time spilling stars from Meredith’s left temple, knocked her sideways into a table.
Hot tears welled in Meredith’s eyes. Her only resistance to convulsive sobs was the sobering thought of where they were, the impossible and immediate bind she’d put Aunt Lily and Cathy in, which they now had to somehow escape from—and quickly. For this was a place deep in enemy territory, behind multiple locked gates, girdled by the secret underground roots of London. “Is there another way out?”
“You came in via the cemetery, I take it?” Cathy didn’t stop rifling through the corpses’ clothes as she spoke. “Impressive, Meredith. When you appeared just now, I assumed you’d followed me directly from the party. But seeing how you’re dressed, you had to have found your own way in from the opposite end.”
“Is your exit nearer?”
“Yes, but it’s out of the question. You can’t see it from where we’re stood, but behind the cloistered building to your right is the Leviacrum tower itself.”
“Impossible. That was at least a mile across the river.” Meredith considered the geography, the journey she’d taken. “You mean the tunnel goes under the Thames?”
“More than one of them. There are eight tunnels in all, each leading to the tower. So in effect they all have two ways in and out—but only the senior members are granted access to and from the tower. Certainly not filthy girls in overalls.”
Aunt Lily plucked as many glass shards as she could out of Meredith’s soles, with little remorse. The excruciating pain would haunt her forever, if she even survived the night. After bandaging her feet with strips cut from a bar towel, Aunt Lily then rummaged through the pockets of Denton and Cybil, tossed their wallet and purse onto a table. “Gather all their valuables,” she said to Cathy. “It will add fuel to our story.”
“Good. I may have found something here.” Cathy collected the wallets and keys and pocket watches, then handed Meredith a small, riveted brass object shaped like a fat cigar. Several tiny wheels protruded at one end. After seeing Meredith’s frown, she took it back, held one end of it up to her eye, pointed the other end at a wall lamp and fiddled with the wheels, demonstrating its use. “It’s a sort of microscope, for reading miniaturised plans and diagrams. Guard it closely. We may have something ther
e.” And to Aunt Lily, “Who wants to go first?”
“I will. There’s no time to draw straws.”
For some reason, scissors-paper-stone flashed through Meredith’s mind. She kept it to herself.
“Blade or bullet?” Cathy asked.
“Oh, blade. Please God, don’t put a bullet in me.”
“Wimp.”
“Tramp.”
“I should shoot you for making sure I get the bullet,” Cathy said. “Now, you want it in the arm or the side?”
Aunt Lily caressed her own waist, chewed her lip. “Which is safest?”
“The arm is safer. The side is more convincing.”
“You won’t nick anything vital? I’ve always had a waist to die for.”
“Trust me.”
“You’re sure, Cathy? I mean if you’re in any doubt, I’d rather flee the scene, dispense with the wounds altogether. All three of us.”
Meredith liked that idea—one hundred percent less organs nicked was fine with her.
“We’d be bowled out immediately and hunted to our dying day. They saw us enter. It has to be this way, I’m afraid.” Cathy tilted her head back, sucked in a night of cool air, then cast Meredith a forlorn look. “The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll be safe. The familiars haven’t come to see what’s happened. Either they didn’t hear the shots, or they’re too frightened to do anything about it. Either way, you’ll need to be armed. Here.” She passed over one of the steam-pistols. “Don’t worry about us, dear. This is what we do.”
“And what is that?”
“Why, play-acting, of course.” Aunt Lily paused, held up a finger. “When this is over, I promise to explain every last detail, but for now—” The manic speed and efficiency with which she stripped Denton of his trousers, jacket and shirt was stunning, “—you can be in charge. Get out of those filthy things—they’re far too big for you. These are more your size.” More like the Aunt Lily she knew, chastising Meredith’s sloppy appearance as she tossed her the small gentleman’s togs. “Change on the go. We’re out of time.”
Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) Page 18
