by Lavie Tidhar
It was a pleasant room, sparsely furnished. Gaslight illuminated armchairs in deep red velvet, a bookcase with the works, in bound leather, upon it of Dickens and Collins and Drood, another of the Brontës, yet another of Lovelace's Encyclopedia of Calculating Machines, in Seven Volumes, and her Who's Who of Mechanicals, and Darwin's banned On The Origins of Lizards, and much else besides; and the moon through the windows, with its silver light, the airship passing beyond it and disappearing; and a figure sitting by the window, in a profile known to Lucy from so many coins and stamps and her mother's china plates, collected with such love, for every Royal event, and she did not know what to say.
The Queen rose from where she was sitting and turned to them. Her long, thin, forked tongue hissed out, tasting the air. Her eyes were large and yellow, showing age. Her tail tapped against the floor, as though in thought. "Mycroft," the Queen said. Her voice was surprisingly deep, and warm. "It took you long enough."
"This is the young agent," Mycroft told her. The Queen nodded, turned to Lucy. "Your… Your Highness," Lucy mumbled, trying to curtsey. The Queen waved a meaty arm. Lucy had rarely encountered one of the royal lizards, Les Lézards: she had not realised how powerful their arms were. "Do stand up straight," the Queen said. Her head turned, to Mycroft – "This is the one? Westenra?"
"She is the one who brought back the device," Mycroft said.
"So young…" the Queen murmured. "They breed young, these days."
Mycroft shrugged.
"And that is what you had heard?" the Queen said, her head snapping back to Lucy.
"W-what?"
"A quarantine recommended? A data-gatherer in place?"
"I… Yes."
"The Bookman," the Queen said, and shuddered.
"The Bookman is destroyed," Mycroft said. But the Queen shook her head. "Something like it," she said. "A machine, to extract and store knowledge. While they decide our fate."
"Can we fight them?"
The Queen gave a short, bitter bark of laughter. "With what?" she said.
"Are there not weapons on Caliban's Island–"
"Fool!" the Queen said. "Weapons we have, but how much stronger would theirs be? No." She began to pace. "We need to convince them. We need to strike a balance. The probe in eighty-eight was a mistake."
"History moves past us," Mycroft said, and the Queen snorted. "Our history," she said, "returns to haunt us."
The Queen fell silent. She looked at Mycroft and he looked back and Lucy, looking at them both, felt fear engulf her, for their look spoke of a shared, intimate, powerful knowledge, the palpable knowledge of an end.
"No…" she whispered, and didn't know why. "You!" the Queen barked. "When the time comes, you will return here. Take this."
The Queen removed a ring from her finger. It was a strange, smooth metal ring, of the same green metal that, it was said, was brought by Les Lézards back from Caliban's Island, from the very ship with which – so forbidden rumours told – they had once travelled through space. "When the time comes, this will give you access."
"Your Majesty–"
"Go," the Queen said. And, to Mycroft, in parting – "We will not meet again."
And, or had Lucy merely imagined it, did the Queen whisper, as though to herself, Not in this life?
And so, Lucy waited.
The days passed, uneasily.
The Bureau was closed to her. There was no sign of Harker – the agent she was supposed to extract. She pictured him captured, tortured, his secrets extracted. What knowledge was he sent to find? How would he get away? The waiting lay heavily on her. And Mycroft, sitting at his club, seeing no one. Thinking. Trying to unravel a mystery, trusting no one–
Then came the day there was a knock on the door.
It was an impatient, authoritative knock. "Open up!"
She was already in motion, the gun in her hand. Edged to the door, nerves frayed. "Who is it?"
One word, travelling like a chill through the keyhole.
"Fogg."
She opened the door with one hand, kept the gun in the other. But Fogg was alone.
"Oh, do put it down, Westenra," he said, marching in. He shut the door behind him.
"What do you want?" Lucy said.
Fogg said, "I need to know what job you're doing for Mycroft."
Lucy, taken aback, though she should have suspected something like this. "I'm not doing a job for Mycroft."
"Don't lie to me!" Fogg glared at her. Tall and thin and pale, he would have made a good parish priest, or a politician… Or a mortician, Lucy thought, suppressing a shudder.
"What's going on, Fogg?" she said, trying to keep her voice cool, calm. Trying to give him nothing. "I'm in between missions."
"Are you?" Fogg said. "Are you, now, Westenra?"
"Tell me what you want," she said.
"The fat man's gone crazy," Fogg said. He waved his hands in the air, exasperated. "He sees no one! He hides at the Diogenes Club and won't come out. Almost as though he's afraid to step outside. Don't think I am a fool, Westenra. I am left running the Bureau while the fat man sits and eats and thinks who knows what. I'm in charge! And yet I get the feeling I am not. Agents missing, files disappearing, a silence so profound it is a voice unto itself. Tell me what you know."
"But I don't."
Fogg glared about the room. Nothing to see. "This is how you live?"
"On the salary you pay me?"
Fogg snorted. "We pay you handsomely enough," he said, "to sit around and do nothing. Tell me about your last mission."
"My last mission?"
"I know he sent you! I've tracked down transfer orders, the commandeering of a steamer, and one of Mycroft's damned black airships he likes to use so much. Where did he send you?"
"Nowhere," Lucy said.
Fogg's face grew red at this, and when he spoke next his voice was low, and menacing. "Sooner or later," he said, "the fat man will be gone, and I will be in charge. Don't make a big mistake, Westenra. Don't make me an enemy."
Lucy stared at him, the gun by her side. "When the time comes," Fogg said, whispering, "don't say I didn't give you a chance."
He waited. Lucy looked at him. Then, regretfully, she shook her head and said, "I don't know anything."
Fogg nodded. There seemed a world of meaning in that simple gesture, more frightening, somehow, than when he was in motion, when he was shouting. He was very still.
"Very well, Miss Westenra," he said, at last, and his cold, wet eyes surveyed her, the way a shark might look at a diver, sinking fast. "Very, very well."
And, without speaking again, he turned on his heels and marched out, shutting the door, quietly, behind him as he left.
Lucy let out a shuddering breath. She had just made an enemy… She wondered if she could have handled it better.
She hoped Mycroft knew what he was doing.
And this could have been, if only for a while, the end of it.
Only Lucy went and spoiled it by deciding to shadow Fogg.
Soho in the twilight… the smell of opium, spilt beer, lit pipes, the sound of an Edison record playing through an open window, Gilbert and Sullivan's Martian Odyssey. Fishmongers closing for the day, the smell of fish in the air, on the ground pools of melted ice, fish scales floating there like compass needles. The moon through the buildings, a scimitar sword. Fogg walking ahead with long easy strides, Lucy in the shadows, an unchaperoned lady but then this is Soho and this is, almost, the new age, a new century. Somewhere in the distance Big Ben struck six and all the other clocks followed, a cacophony of gears and bells and echoes, birds flying up in black clouds, startled, a butcher selling sausages by candle light, the gas lamps coming into life, one by one – in the distance whale song, from the Thames.
A beggar boy hiding in the shadows, pale face, big haunted eyes, watching–
She scanned the street, saw his employer standing by an upturned drum, warming his hands on the fire. Fagin, she thought, and her hand itched for her gun.
But he was considered a Bureau asset, and thus untouchable.
The boy flashed her a quick smile – Twist, was it? – then she was past, trying to track Fogg, who seemed to have merged into the shadows.
Did he know she was following?
She waited, and presently saw his thin frame re-appear, heading for the Charing Cross Road.
She followed him, at a distance. Careful now. The sky was dark. A solitary mail ship went overhead, making no sound. Above the city's skyline the Babbage Tower rose, its beacon light flashing. Booksellers on the Charing Cross Road with open carts, trying to push on her, variously, Marx's latest political tract, The Second Caliban Manifesto, Mrs Beeton's autobiography, supposedly signed, From Household Management to Running the Country: How I Became Prime Minister, an old, stained copy of Verne's early novel, Five Weeks in an Airship, P.T. Barnum's memoir, A Fool and His Money–
The books became a dark cloud; they were everywhere; their dust choked the nostrils; there was no escaping them. She saw their sellers as enslaved ghouls, shackled to their charges, the books vampiric, sucking the life out of their handlers even as they sustained them, in their turn. Fogg turned left on the Charing Cross Road. She followed. A seller came at her from the left, unexpectedly. "Mr Dickens' Reptilian House, in three volumes!"
"You should never write a third volume," someone else said, nearby. She turned and saw a young man shaking his head, sadly, and she walked past as he and the seller entered a loud argument on the merits and demerits of such a thing.
Where was Fogg going?
Up the Charing Cross Road with the bookshops crowded, books spilling on the pavement, carriages passing, horse-driven, and baruch-landaus belching steam, up past St Giles Circus, and older bookshops opening now, antiquities specialists, and objects in the windows taken from ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome, the Middle Kingdom and Nippon, and she knew where Fogg was going, even if she didn't know why.
Then it came into sight and she paused, momentarily, taking it in as she always did:
The Lizardine Museum.
The treasure chest of an empire.
It was built of the same green, alien metal of the lizards. A dome rising high into the air, its own airship landing platform extended beside it. The dome seemed to shine in the night, a beacon. Huge statues rose up in the courtyard of the museum. Giant lizards, dwarfing the people still milling there, in the open air before the steps. Henry VII, the first of the lizardkings, a severe, weathered being: they had come back with Vespucci on his ill-fated journey and in one single night reality had changed, and the King and the Queen had disappeared, and Les Lézards were there in their stead.
Henry VII, they said, had never learned to speak English properly, and had used a machine, which translated his speech to the people. Then came another Henry, and this one was almost human, in manners and speech, and Les Lézards became integrated with their human hosts, and began to expand the reach of empire. Then came an Edward, and others, but the statue that dominated them all was that of the Great Elizabeth, the Lizard-Queen, Gloriana, under whom the empire grew and the island of Britain truly became the seat of a global and far-reaching empire, the greatest the world had ever seen.
Lucy stared up at Elizabeth's statue, the inhuman figure, sculpted in the same green metal, as alien as all the rest of them, and not for the first time she wondered what her world would have been like without the royal lizards: would it have been better, worse? Would it have been poorer?
And it occurred to her that, in a very real way, it didn't matter. History took paths and forks, crossing and re-crossing, and yet the human lives lived within those brooks of time were the same. They were short, they suffered the same joys and sorrows, the same weakening of flesh and spirit, whether now or in the distant past, or in an equally distant, unimaginable future.
People didn't change. Only worlds did.
She followed Fogg, up the broad public stairs, into the building.
Worlds of antiquity, rooms full of loot…
The lizards, like their human subjects, had a passion for collecting. A huge open space under the dome and, to every side, and up and down stairs, rooms opened, rooms upon rooms offering, on display, all that centuries of conquest had to offer.
There! Egyptian mummies!
There! The Rosetta Stone!
There! Marble statues from the Parthenon!
There! Ashurbanipal's great library of cuneiform tablets! So many graves had been robbed to fill the museum, so many lands conquered, in blood and iron, and all their loot housed here, in the great museum, itself a mausoleum, a dragon's hoard, all to display, to the empire's subjects, its vast superiority, its utter control.
There was something humbling about that space, and yet, at the same time, something peaceful, soothing: the hush of a vast hall housing the past, like a church or a graveyard, and Lucy followed Fogg and only the sound of their feet on the ground could be heard – past dead Egyptian queens wrapped in bandages, past animal-headed deities and gold jewellery and ancient books, past the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac of Hans Sloane's collection of curiosities, the founding stone of the museum. Down marble stairs, away from the main hall, going underground. Lucy stuck to the shadows. Fogg marched ahead, oblivious. Through an Employees Only door, into a dusty warehouse, mysterious objects in crates, shelves upon shelves of ancient artefacts not yet catalogued or presented, the dead possessions of ancient dead cultures. Through another door and another flight of stairs. Down, down, underground. It was silent down there, nothing moving, nothing but dust.
Fogg disappeared.
In the darkness Lucy halted. Pressed herself against shelves. Where was he?
Where, in fact, were they?
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Faint light shone, from somewhere. She saw lizard-headed statues with the bodies of men, a scattering of strange coins with lizard heads on them, a script she couldn't read. Strange tapestries hanging from walls, showing reptilian warriors.
Thinking, I thought this place was a myth.
Footsteps in the dark. The sound of a heavy body, slithering. The gun was in her hand but she didn't know what good it would do.
A hiss in the darkness. "Fogg…" The voice made her shiver.
"Master," Fogg said, and the unseen voice laughed.
The room of Unnatural History, Lucy thought.
The room of apocrypha.
She had only ever heard the stories. And how had they managed to get down there, without tripping an alarm?
Fogg must have had access, somehow. And she had coattailed it, not knowing…
There had always been stories. Before Vespucci had awoken the Calibans. Before he returned with them, the race of royal lizards, Les Lézards, from that island in the Carib Sea where sand had turned to glass and where they had slept, so it was said, had slept for thousands of years…
But there were always rumours. That some of them had been upon the world, moving like shadows throughout history. Leaving strange objects in their wake. Rumours that the history of humanity and Les Lézards did not start with Vespucci, but went back, over millennia…
Foolish stories. Forbidden stories.
Just as the tale of this room, deep below the Lizardine Museum, where all such artefacts were carefully locked away…
She began to realise just how dangerous her being there really was.
And then thought – where else better to meet in secret?
And who, in fact, was Fogg meeting down there?
"Report!" that insidious, frightening voice ordered, there in the darkness. Lucy moved. She edged closer to her destination, the place the voices were coming from. Slowly, slowly… creeping like a mouse down there in the dusty depths.
There.
A small circle of wan light, Fogg standing taut–
Movement from the shadows–
She stifled a cry of horror, a deep-rooted fear, from childhood, rising up in her like bile–
An insect-like creature, gigan
tic and obscene.
Feelers moving, stroking, seeing–
A many-legged thing, like a centipede, and yet, somehow, not alive, a mechanical being–
Slithering across the floor of the abandoned warehouse–
Lucy felt faint, the gun almost sliding from her fingers–
Heard Fogg saying, "Master, I can't get the access I need, Mycroft is blocking me, I think he suspects–"
Lucy, thinking, I have to get out of here.
