The Great Game: The Bookman Histories, Book 3

by Lavie Tidhar

  A man in a white robe, holding a stave in his hand. The warriors parted to let him through. His eyes were deep and dark, his face lined. The look in his eyes disturbed her.

  It was a look, she realised, of compassion.

  "I don't want to harm you!" Lucy shouted. She felt unsettled. "Step away and let us leave!"

  "You don't know what you're doing," the man said, with gravity. "The ark is holy–"

  "You and I both know–"

  A hiss of static, a voice on her Tesla communicator–

  "Major!"

  "What?"

  "We're under attack! There are… There are things outside! They just materialised, out of nowhere! Major, please–!"

  Static. Outside, the sound of giant – footsteps? The sound of an explosion, then another, and another, as if the whole city of Aksum was being destroyed, all at once.

  She grabbed the device back from Bangizwe. It felt alive in her hands. She raised it in the air. "We have it," she told the man in the white robe. "Let us pass or I'll destroy it!"

  A hush, the enemy warriors taking a step back in unison. The old man, alone, remained standing. "Fool," he said, softly. "For now you have awakened their wrath…"

  "Whose?" she said.

  "Those who will be as gods," the old man said. He nodded his head, once, with finality. His eyes were full of sadness.

  Lucy didn't know what he meant, but had a sinking feeling she would soon find out.

  The old man signalled to his own people. And, like that, they vanished, disappearing to the outside, moving like shadows, silently and quickly.

  Lucy didn't have time to breathe with relief. "Up," she ordered.

  She and her men climbed.

  Through broken windows into a night made light as day…

  Up on the roof of the church–

  Looking, in disbelief, on a city in flame.

  There were machines in the night.

  Where they came from, Lucy didn't know. The machines were huge, as tall as towers. They moved upon the earth with the legs of spiders. Beams of light came out of their heads, criss-crossing Aksum.

  The black airship hung, suspended, in the sky, unharmed. Below, the city was burning, the tripodian things moving above them while paying them little heed. As if not quite aware that, down below, people and buildings existed.

  What had the voices said?

  Send expeditionary force yes no?

  Temporary engagement authorised.

  "I have what you're after!" she cried, into the night. She pulled out the device. It felt scaly, alien. "I have it! Stop!"

  The machines seemed to sense her distress. One by one they turned, the lights moving across the burning city, converging at last on the rooftop of the church. Bosie beside her, hissing – "Major, what are you–?"

  "Shut it, Douglas."

  "We have to leave! Ma'am!"

  "All of you, now! Board the airship. Await my command."

  She felt Bosie simmer beside her, then accept the order.

  She was only half-aware of her men dragging the wounded Scot up to the roof. Climbing the rope ladders. She knew she should follow. It was a miracle the airship itself was not harmed.

  Where had the machines come from?

  And what, she thought uneasily, was the exact nature of the device she was holding?

  The tripods converged on her. On the church. And down below she thought, for just a moment, she could see a tall, stark figure, a stave in its hand, looking up at her and shaking its head mournfully.

  Voices again. They were in her head. They were emanating from the device. It felt disturbing to hold it. Somehow reptilian, and repulsive – and alive.

  Children, the voices said, dispassionately.

  Absorption?

  Insufficient data.

  Agent activated.

  Old toys. Our children, who grew old never to grow up…

  The machines had stopped firing. A silence over the city.

  "Take it!" Lucy cried at them. "Leave these people alone!"

  Intriguing…

  Signal-booster, obsolete. A lost ship, from so long ago?

  It is possible.

  The machines stopped, as one. A sudden, overwhelming sense: they had lost interest in her, were looking upwards, at the skies.

  Lunar companion?

  Fourth world.

  Seen enough.

  Absorb yes no?

  Decision deferred.

  Temporary quarantine recommended.

  Seconded.

  "Major, get up here! Now!"

  But she couldn't move. As if the lizardine device was pulling at her, robbing her of the will to move, to act. She saw, with more than human eyes. A vast disc, the size of a city, silent and dark, materialising overhead. Or perhaps it had been there all along. The machines, seeming to fade – as though absorbed, somehow, by the greater device, that impossible disc, which then, in turn, faded too and, like a dream, was gone.

  "Get up here!"

  Suddenly she was jolted into movement. She climbed up, her heart beating fast, the entire city silent below her. It felt as though she was climbing a dark and lonely well, pulling herself up all the while, and up there was a light, was the moon, if only she could keep going she would reach it. Then hands grabbed her and pulled her roughly and she fell, and landed on the deck of the airship, the device still cradled in her hands. She was breathing heavily. "Get us out of here," she said.

  She closed her eyes. In the darkness vast discs hovered, hidden on the far side of the moon. A sense of danger, fear – excitement. The airship, untethered, gathered speed.

  "Major?"

  She took a deep breath. Opened her eyes. Rose to her feet.

  "Report," she said.

  She stood by the railings and watched the night, the burning city left behind. Listening to the report: one dead, three wounded, and she would let the grief come later, when she was alone. For now she had to command, and the mission was not yet over. The airship sailed towards the Red Sea, and the waiting steamer. Lucy hoped the device had been worth it, all the dead and the wounded, on their side and on that of the church's mysterious protectors, and of the people of the city of Aksum who died that night. We are on the cusp of war, Mycroft had told her. She didn't know what war he was talking about – but she had the sense that the fat man had been wrong.

  The war had already started.

  NINETEEN

  "Westenra."

  The Bureau, London: the abandoned underground station that was Xirdal Zephyrin's laboratory.

  "Magnifique! Incredible! Erstaunlich!" The scientist was bent over the controls of various machines. Beyond them, behind a glass window, sat the object. It looked like a Buddha, the statues she had grown used to during her time with the Shaolin. A lizardine Buddha… It was disconcerting. Above it hovered a Tesla probe, and circular lightning jumped between the probe and the device. Lucy couldn't watch. She averted her eyes.

  "Come with me," the fat man said.

  She followed gratefully. They left Zephyrin's lab behind them. "You did well," the fat man said. She watched him. Knew he did not like to trouble himself away from his armchair at the Diogenes. He was sweating with the underground heat and the sweat formed rivulets that ran down his fleshy jowls. "The game," the fat man said, "as my brother would have said, is afoot." He grinned, suddenly and viciously. "The Great Game," he said. "The only game worth playing."

  Lucy thought of the tripodian machines, destroying a city… casually, the way a boy might crush a nest of ants. It may not, it occurred to her, seem like a game to the ants.

  "Sir," she said. Waiting. The fat man nodded. Wiped the sweat from his face, gently, almost fastidiously, with a handkerchief that had his initials, MH, embroidered on them by some long-gone hand. "I am awaiting a messenger," he said.

  "Sir?"

  "Six months ago I played a pawn," Mycroft said. "Not sure whether I was sacrificing a piece or making a play on the king."

  He must have been i
n conference with the Mechanical Turk earlier, she thought. Mycroft always went for the chess metaphors after speaking to the old machine.

  "And?" she said. "Which was it?"

  The fat man's eyes shone. "I don't know," he said, "but I hope for the latter."

  "You hope?"

  "I need you to pick up a message," the fat man said. "The message is the messenger. Take your team. Secure me my prize, at all costs." He waved his hand, suddenly dismissing her; his mind wandering far, to grapple with games, and kings, and machines. "Berlyne will brief you on the rest."

  "His name's Stoker," Berlyne said. He stared mournfully at a handkerchief, as though contemplating blowing his nose again. Lucy devoutly wished him not to. Not again. "Abraham Stoker."

  "A Bureau operative?"

  But Berlyne shook his head. "It was deemed too dangerous," he said. "Mycroft recruited… from outside."

  Lucy stared at him. "A civilian?"

  Berlyne looked defensive. "He was given as much training as we could, in the allotted time. The man's a theatrical manager, for God's sake."

  "How much training?"

  Berlyne shrugged. "Three weeks," he admitted.

  "But that's insane!"

  "A trained agent would have been picked up. Besides, he… There were reasons why he was chosen."

  "What reasons?"

  But Berlyne was unable, or unwilling, to answer.

  "Where did you send him?" Lucy said.

  Berlyne blew his nose. Lucy winced. "The Carpathians," Berlyne whispered.

  "Transylvania?"

  "Austro-Hungary," Berlyne said.

  "What's there?"

  "Mountains. Castles. Dancing bears. How should I know? I've never been. Oh, my cold…"

  "Just give me the dossier," Lucy said.

  "There isn't one." Berlyne stared at her – and suddenly his eyes were cold, and hard. "Besides you, me, and Mycroft, no one knows Stoker even exists."

  "What about Fogg?"

  "Fogg is not cleared for this! Do you understand?"

  Their eyes locked. After a moment, Lucy nodded. She understood, perfectly.

  "Just give me the details, then," she said.

  But details were sparse. The Bureau had lost contact with Stoker just before he had reached a small town called Brasov, in the Carpathian Mountains. Then, five and a half months later, a desperate signal over a pre-established frequency. Then a distress signal, and a second frequency that corresponded to an unregistered airship.

  "It's a waiting game," Berlyne told her. "He could be here any day. Or never. There are too many ifs. If he makes it. If he managed to escape. He has to be guarded and his knowledge retrieved."

  "Why me?"

  "You're young. Mycroft trusts you–"

  Which was to say, he trusted everyone else not at all.

  Those weeks had been the hardest of Lucy's life. The corridors of the Bureau were muted, the cipher room closed shut. Mycroft sat alone in his office, seeing no one. Fogg, filled with self-importance, ran the Bureau in his stead. Then, one day, Mycroft came for her.

  She had been living in Soho, in a small apartment, in a building shared with artists who doubled as counterfeiters, a lone Russian émigré who wrote political tracts in his room, and an Indian landlady who sang, come evening, at the Savoy. Lucy was unremarked there, hidden in plain sight. Waiting, for a mission that never seemed to come.

  She was walking down Gerrard Street when she felt rather than saw the black baruch-landau drawing near. The door opened. Mycroft's voice said, "Get in."

  She had climbed inside and sat across from him. The fat man looked tired, worn. For the first time since she had known him, when he had recruited her, he looked old. It frightened her.

  "One of my agents," he said, "has died. I have just had word."

  My agents. She noted that, frowned. Mycroft saw her, smiled thinly. "As you may have gathered by now, Ms Westenra," he said, "we are no longer operating on Bureau time. You are unsanctioned. So was my other agent." He sighed. "Alice," he said, almost reluctantly. "Her name was Alice."

  Lucy had heard the name. A legend in the service. A rare woman in this world of spies. Nothing had been heard from her in years. She found her voice. "What did she do for you?" she said.

  "I sent her to the East," Mycroft said. "Siam. Following a path even I do not yet understand. Someone – something – killed her last night. I have just received word."

  His voice was quiet, introverted. A cold gripped her and she didn't know why. Later, had she analysed it, she would have said it was self-reflection on the fat man's part – as if he already knew he would be next.

  "What's in Siam?" she said.

  "A collecting point," Mycroft said. "There is one in Jerusalem, the other in Bangkok. Siam is independent. Jerusalem belongs to the Ottomans. Both are outside of British jurisdiction. I have few eyes there. Alice was tracking the network for me. Trying to map its points. But something got to her first."

  "The opposition?" Lucy said, and a shadow crossed Mycroft's face, like a premonition, and he said, "No. At least, I don't think so." He waved his hand. "That is not your concern," he said. "We are playing the long game, the Great Game, the only game that matters. It is a game that began centuries ago, when Vespucci had awoken the Calibans, there on that cursed island, and brought them back. It began with them awakening, and taking over the throne, here, and building an empire. A war."

  He fell silent. Lucy said, "Those things I saw, in Aksum."

  "Remember the words," Mycroft said.

  She didn't need to ask which ones. They had gone over everything, over and over, in the interrogation room at Ham Common, for hours at a time, and still Mycroft wasn't satisfied. Over and over he returned to two things:

  Quarantine recommended–

  Data-gathering agent in place–

  "Ninety-three," he said. "I had handled the Emerald Buddha Affair badly. A gate had been opened. And something had slipped through."

  She didn't know what he meant. Something to do with the Quiet Council, and Vespuccia… but the words, when he spoke, filled her with a nameless dread.

  "They were not human," she said – whispered. "They couldn't be."

  "Our masters' past is returning to haunt us," he said, and then, with a sliver of a smile, as of the old Mycroft, "or, rather, our masters' future…"

  She didn't know what he meant.

  "If something were to happen to me," Mycroft said – she had wanted to protest, but he silenced her. "If something were to happen to me, I have put certain precautions in place. Certain agents have been… put in reserve, shall we say. The old and the new…" and he smiled, looking at her. "You must get hold of the Stoker information," he told her. "At all costs. Off the books, non-Bureau sanctioned. Were I to die, there is still Smith… if he is not too old." Here he smiled again. "For you, however, I have made a different precaution."

  The baruch-landau had stopped. "Come," Mycroft said. She looked at him, a query in her eyes. The doors opened.

  Lucy held her breath.

  The Royal Palace?

  And a liveried man standing outside, saying, "Her Majesty, the Queen, is expecting you."

  TWENTY

  The Royal Palace rose out of the swamps here, in the heart of the capital, a metal pyramid of stark, bright green, made of the lizards' strange, unearthly metal. Flies buzzed in the air, which was hot, humid, as if they had been transported, somehow, into another country, another continent. Rock pools and tiny streams, tall trees, the Royal Gardens, but they had come through a back gate and driven in and were parked directly outside an entrance to the palace, a place for servants, perhaps, or – from the smells of cooking emanating into the air – the Royal kitchens.

  "Follow me."

  Lucy followed Mycroft following the liveried man. In through the back entrance, a bustle of movement, steam belching through half-opened doors, the smell of cooking and the wail of machinery, worn carpets, deeper into the palace where it became quieter and the
smell changed and finally there was no sound at all and through open windows she could see the moon, the shadow of an airship crossing over it, slowly, for just a moment creating the illusion that it was on the moon.

  Then they came to a set of unremarkable doors and the servant pushed them open and stood to one side and said, "Her Majesty, Queen Victoria," and Mycroft pushed past him, without speaking, and entered the room, and Lucy Westenra followed, and the doors closed behind them without sound.