The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3

by Nicholas Erik

  He turned back to Strike, who was preparing to lift the opium pipe again to her lips. Keene considered stopping her by force, but that could cause a scene. The extended conversation at the door had him nervous, if only because he caught Lao sneaking occasional glances back at the table.

  Lao didn’t seem worried about the tiles being moved, only that Keene and Strike were still present. Keene waited until Strike brought the candle’s flame upon the sticky brown narcotic, then he slipped his hand into her waistband and slid the pistol out.

  Under normal circumstances, Strike would have rebuffed the move instantly, giving him a dirty look. Instead, even with the cool metal pressed up against her thigh, she didn’t seem to notice its sudden disappearance.

  Another hit gave Keene the opportunity to loot her leather jacket for the two clips.

  “That tickles,” Strike said, way after he was finished repossessing the firearm, “stop it.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Keene said. He slipped around the chair and whispered in her other ear, “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “It’s already been a second.”

  Keene threw another look over his shoulder. He kept moving towards the curtain, even as he processed the implications of what he had seen—or hadn’t.

  Lao was gone, as was the guard. The silk curtain sat still, unperturbed. A cluster of icicles settled within Keene’s gut. He stared at the pistol in his hand, then gave a final look at his surroundings. A dozen pirates, most of them stoned into oblivion. But still, the odds weren’t great.

  Meanwhile, Strike was so blitzed it was doubtful she could even walk. Taking an ex-junkie into an opium den had unsurprisingly produced negative consequences and a relapse.

  He pushed through the curtain fashioned of golden silk, dampening its movements as he edged into the room. No bigger than a closet, and plainly furnished, Keene had little idea if useful details were present here.

  Hell, he’d risked coming here without even knowing if Lao was important enough to know about Reynolds’ deal. It was a leap of faith from the get go. Keene walked behind the plain desk, which contained only one drawer. A single flickering lamp sat at its edge, but the surface was otherwise clean.

  With shaking hands, Keene tried the drawer.

  It creaked open, scraping against the sides of the imperfect wooden frame. Keene grabbed the candle from the desk’s edge, the blurry glass diffusing the soft light across the papers within the drawer. He took them out, laying them across the empty surface.

  Accounting information, ledgers of payments known. All sundry business documents, except for the last sheet of parchment.

  On it was sketched a magnificent design of a ship, fully colored, its silver finish gleaming even in two dimensions. The design was the work of an engineer, not unlike the sketches of fantastic and impossible creations from Da Vinci’s notebooks. In the corner, in neat Chinese characters, was written The Silver Songbird.

  Keene started at the masthead. An exact match of the statue he had received from Fox, the one that had set this whole journey in motion. It was clear that it had broken off this ship—perhaps when it had run against something, or maybe just by an uncaring deck hand.

  Here it was. The ship that could travel anywhere in time. It was real—or, at least, someone had done a mock-up, imagined it to be so. But the presence of the masthead, which Keene had seen with his two eyes, was all the confirmation he needed.

  He flipped the parchment over. On the back, written in an ugly and blotted hand, was a set of instructions. Keene translated.

  You are to send the majority of your men to stand guard over this ship on the Gray Isle until the deal between the pirate queen and the governments is completed at midnight on the last day of August. Some hours thereafter, in the early morning, a woman of white complexion and strange speech will come and take control of the Silver Songbird, and your men are to help her in any way she—or her Redcoat partner, Mr. Reynolds—requires. Once this transaction is completed, we will all be free, with amnesty, and all our affairs will be legitimate.

  If you are unable to fend off any attackers, no one shall have the ship. Your honor depends on its defense, for Ching Shih’s possessions shall not come under the possession of another through force.

  It was signed by Cheung Po Tsai—Ching Shih’s husband.

  So it was simple—Lorelei had found Reynolds, brought him back with her, and installed him as a higher-up in the British Army. Or perhaps he had simply conned his way into the ranks. Then, as a British officer, he was able to get an audience with Chinese government officials. They wished for Ching Shih to halt privateering, as it was terrible for business. She wanted her business interests to be legitimized without penalty. For brokering this deal, Reynolds—and Lorelei, by proxy—would be rewarded with this silver ship, which to the best of anyone’s knowledge was simply made of precious metal.

  This was the reason for an inflection point. The fate of the ship itself hung in the balance. Presumably lost to the sands of time before, it now threatened to unmoor all of human history.

  Keene heard a commotion outside, and he snapped back to more immediate problems. While the deal would happen at midnight, he still needed to escape from this particular predicament before he could abscond with any temporal watercrafts. And Strike would be a problem.

  He rolled up the parchment and jammed it into the back of his pants. Catching sight of a billowy black silk shirt hanging from a rack in the corner, Keene walked over and took it. Not a great fit, or his style, but it would do.

  Keene emerged from behind the curtain to find one of the men trying to kiss Strike. A thick dribble of saliva dangled from Strike’s lips as she made weak attempts to fend him off. Keene marched over, smacked the lecherous bastard in the head with the butt of the gun, and grabbed Strike’s arm.

  “We’re leaving.”

  A few of the pirates made weak efforts to protest, stumbling in front of the pair with their arms raised, feigning combat, but these threats had no teeth. The opium’s effect was staggering, Keene having far underestimated its powers of debilitation. Keene propped Strike up against his shoulder and started toward the black curtains. He pushed through, half-expecting the mountain man to cold-cock him.

  But no one was there.

  He pressed on, through the next hanging bunch of silk, and looked into the alleyway.

  Half a dozen Redcoats, marching forward, bayonets pointed towards Keene. Boxing him in, advancing slowly from the only exit. He gulped.

  “This him?”

  “Yeah, Ren told us just as he was bleeding out from his arm that this was the guy,” another soldier answered. “Ran to us and died about on the spot.”

  “Halt.” When Keene didn’t move, or make any gesture of surrender, the leader said, “You are wanted for the kidnapping of a British Imperial officer, Captain Reynolds.”

  Maybe Keene should’ve gone after that third man in the forest. Although he had been right. The bullet had gotten this Ren fellow in the end, although not quite soon enough.

  Reynolds, Ching Shih, Lorelei—they had eyes everywhere in this foreign land, better than the security cameras, server logs and wanted lists of the twenty-first century. Then again, neither a beautiful blonde woman nor a pale, black haired man were terribly hard to point out.

  In fact, when Keene considered it, their stunning lack of precaution—or use of any disguise—was basically like flipping the bird at fate. But such concerns hadn’t really struck him as pressing, so much as the more existential ones regarding his own place in this messy state of affairs.

  “How is Captain Reynolds?” Keene said.

  The men stepped forward in deliberate, soldierly unison, their footsteps beating out a rhythmic cadence.

  “He is recovering nicely,” the leader said. “And he would like a word.”

  “Take this word.”

 
Keene brought the pistol up, struggling to aim with Strike hanging on his shoulder. He squeezed off two shots, felling the lead man. His fellow soldiers did not break ranks, instead stopping to load their muskets with what seemed to Keene like startling efficiency.

  Pressing the trigger again three times, he managed to drop another one of the soldiers. But now their ramrods were out, and they were leveling their muskets toward him.

  “Aim for the legs, men. We want them alive.”

  Keene stared down the barrels like he was facing a firing squad. There wouldn’t be enough time to pop in another clip. In the darkness of night, lit only by the moonlight, Keene shivered, wondering what would happen next.

  He dove back into the silk curtains, Strike landing on top of him as a chorus of shots boomed down the narrow alley. The wind pushed out of his lungs, and Keene clawed at the ground, trying to right himself.

  Looking up, he found himself staring at one of the mahjong players, who had a doped up glint of malice in his eyes.

  Keene saw a pistol butt flash through the air.

  Then the world went dark.

  19 | Prison

  A rat bit Keene’s pinky, and he shot upright. An attempt to smack the critter yielded little in the way of retribution. He stared at the blood oozing from the little teeth marks. He was thankful that, like most citizens of Apollus, he’d received immunizations to most of the common diseases transmitted by vermin.

  Still, his finger hurt. He shook the injured digit out, the movement alerting him to the fact that the side of his head was actually in far more pain. Bringing his fingers to his temple, he located a large egg, wincing as he felt where the pistol had connected.

  Which was when he realized where he was. On a dirt floor, behind rusted wrought-iron bars, a single faint torch—barely an ember—hanging on the wall. Keene glanced around the shadows, his eyes adjusting to the low light.

  No benches.

  No bed.

  Not even a bucket or a pot.

  Nothing other than Strike, who was still chasing the dragon in the land of opium dreams.

  “Hello?” Keene got up and pressed his face against the bars, rust flaking off against his skin. He scanned the short hallway left to right. The ground beneath him bobbed up and down, almost imperceptibly. But Keene, with no other distractions—and being well-acquainted with crafts of all stripes—understood that the subtle motion could only mean one thing.

  They were on a boat. Still docked, judging from the cadence of the movement.

  But that could change. A lot of things could change, Keene had discovered just within the past day. History. Circumstance. Even fate.

  At least no prisoners were in the other cells. Or shared this one.

  Keene slumped against the rotting wooden wall and tried to think of a plan. Thus far, his ideas and machinations hadn’t panned out that well. He did, however, know that the Silver Songbird existed—that it wasn’t a fever dream or some sort of myth. Unfortunately, while his jail cell looked pretty gray, Keene hardly thought that this could be considered the Gray Isle.

  He took stock of his situation.

  The gun was gone, as were the clips. He squinted in the darkness, trying to figure out how long he’d been out. Maybe the midnight hour had already passed, and Lorelei was well on her way to disrupting the historical record. But without any windows in the dingy cell, any sort of timeline was an impossibility.

  Strike stirred on the ground, groaning.

  “My head hurts,” she said, her voice still slow, doped with opioids, “I need another hit.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Don’t talk so loud.”

  “I’m talking normal.”

  “Come on, just a little hit. Just one,” Strike said in a plaintive tone. She got to her knees and heaved. Keene slid closer to the bars, in case she actually had anything in her stomach. After a minute of nauseous episodes, Strike slumped and sat cross legged.

  “You done?”

  “I…I’m—I, I don’t know.” She held her hands out, turning them palm side up slowly, like meat on a rotisserie spit. Then she reversed the motion. “I just need something to level out.”

  “We’re in a jail, not a pharmacy.”

  A heavy door slammed shut, reverberating throughout the small hallway. Two pairs of footsteps cut through the darkness, stopping just outside the cell.

  “Please, I need some—”

  “Shut up,” Keene said. He mashed his face against the bars, trying to get a look at who was on the other side. His efforts at reconnaissance, however, proved as unfruitful as they had been minutes before. The darkness and the angle made it impossible to see much more than the shadowy suggestion of people.

  Light breaths punctuated the silence, Keene’s heart quickening with dread as his thoughts turned over what they could possibly want. He’d killed two of their men, yet the soldiers had insisted he be brought in alive.

  For what purpose?

  Torture and other methods of revenge certainly had their appeal—and lack of regulation—in this day and age, although Keene reasoned that two bodies was a rather steep price to pay for vengeful catharsis.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, he said to the darkness, “Tell me what you want.”

  More breathing and an eternal silence greeted him. Strike gave a light moan, and Keene jumped a little, shivering despite the stale, humid air. The two figures didn’t move. Then, one stepped forward, past the light, the illumination granting Keene just enough detail to recognize the man as Captain Reynolds.

  But Reynolds’ companion didn’t step in front of the cell, instead choosing to stay put with eerie calm.

  “You.”

  “You are really quite a foolish lot,” Reynold said, his lips widening to display a row of carnivorous looking teeth, “asking all about the town for opium and Ching Shih. I would have tracked you down even without Ren’s noble sacrificial run.”

  “Didn’t have many options,” Keene said. “No one told me to pack a bag.”

  Reynolds gave a hoarse laugh. “I suppose that’s true about this time travel business.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Monitoring the situation,” Reynolds said. “You should thank her, by the way.”

  “For my stunning accommodations?”

  “For saving your life,” Reynolds said. “She insisted.”

  “I didn’t know Ching Shih was so concerned about me.”

  “Ching Shih?” Reynolds gave a derisive snort. “She knows nothing. Only that you mysteriously appeared on her waters, escaped her scouts and tried to sabotage her deal.”

  “So that means it’s you back there, Lei.”

  The other figure said nothing. Keene couldn’t tell if she moved.

  “Why bother? You know I’m trying to stop you.” Keene waited, but still received no reply. “You could kill me like Fox. Gun me down. Get rid of me.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” came the thin, almost sub-vocal reply from the shadows.

  “How magnanimous,” Keene said. “What do you want?”

  “Your little blonde friend here knows what she wants.” Reynolds mimed a smoking motion, followed by a series of crazy eye rolls. “Naughty girl.”

  “If you’re finished, I’d like to get back to sleep.”

  Instead, Reynolds smiled. “You’ll remain here until we have recovered the ship. On behalf of crown and kingdom, I managed to get the little beauty and strike a peace accord.”

  “The hell do you care about peace in South China?”

  “I don’t know,” Reynolds said with a slightly confused shrug, “But it got this Silver Songbird.”

  “And then what?”

  “You’re free to go, of course.”

  “Sounds likely. Why risk it?”

  “Because,” Lorele
i said from the shadows, bolder this time, making Keene’s heart leap and sink all at once, “you’re my brother.”

  Then Lorelei Keene and Captain John Reynolds walked out of the room, slamming the door shut behind them as Keene felt his entire world crumble.

  20 | Barroom Brawl

  Wade Linus pushed the white rice around his bowl with the splintering chopsticks. He looked around at the other tables, smelling the meats and sauces that he couldn’t afford. They made his tummy rumble, and the bland, sticky rice even less appetizing.

  Chen, on the other hand, was taking full advantage of the endless refills, bland or not. His chubby jowls flapped as he shoveled the mushy grains in, deftly scooping them into his mouth without losing even one.

  The merchant held up his hand and beckoned for another bowl. A teenage boy—the tavern keeper’s unlucky assistant—came over and removed the vessel, retreating to the kitchen. Wade poked at the meal, pounding it into something that resembled glue.

  A creaky clock hanging off the wall chimed, indicating that it was four in the morning. The drunken vagabonds, drifters and merchants at the other tables showed no indication of slowing down, however, the wine and spirits still flowing freely at the late hour.

  This wasn’t Wade’s primary concern, however. Keene and Strike were clearly not coming back for him, though he had held out a faint hope that they would. And the way Chen was glaring at him, it seemed their merchant associate believed that the two had run off.

  Wade shook his head and said, “Something’s wrong.”

  Chen responded in angry Chinese, Wade understanding nothing. He shrugged and stared deeply at the bowl. He needed to get out of here—for his own sake as much as the rest of the team’s. No telling what Chen might do, and it wasn’t like Wade had enough money to stay at the tavern indefinitely.

  Chen had paid.

  Wade glanced up when the boy set another rice bowl on the table. Chen’s eyes weren’t focused on the food. He hadn’t even picked up the chopsticks. Instead, for a minute, his eyes bored into Wade’s.