The Great Game: The Bookman Histories, Book 3

by Lavie Tidhar

  The comte grunted. Something about the hunchback's manner seemed to subdue him.

  "I helped Viktor with the experiments, you know," Q said. He was speaking softly, as to a child. "He tested animals at first, rats, then rabbits, then monkeys. Then he began to test it on people."

  The hunchback approached the Comte de Rochefort, and the great hulking beast let him. Smith remained in place. He was winded, and his knees hurt, and he was out of breath.

  Getting old.

  "They suffered," the hunchback said. "Do you know how they suffered? They used to scream, in their cages. For hours and hours and hours, there in that underground facility, where there is no day, only night." He looked up at the comte, and his big, innocent eyes were tranquil. "I used to sing to them," he said, softly.

  Van Helsing had been cautiously moving away from the comte. De Rochefort, suddenly noticing, hissed. "Shhh…" Q said. Then he began to sing.

  Paris, the catacombs, night.

  Smith, slowly, cautiously, rising from his fall.

  Van Helsing, sliding against the wall, blood on his lips.

  In the centre of that underground tunnel, two figures, facing each other. The giant, deformed, hulking figure of the man who had once been the Comte de Rochefort.

  And, facing him, the diminutive, hunchbacked figure of Q, of Notre Dame de Paris.

  Who was singing.

  The comte growled. Q, undeterred, kept singing. He had a high, reedy voice, not unpleasant. It seemed to fill the small, enclosed space.

  "Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot," Q sang. "Prête-moi ta plume, pour écrire un mot."

  Under the moonlight, my friend Pierrot, lend me your pen, so I could write a word.

  "De la lune…" the Comte de Rochefort said. The words came out of his misshapen mouth with difficulty. Smith could only stare at the giant, no longer bleeding, as it knelt down to be closer to Q.

  "Ma chandelle est morte," Q sang, my candle is dead.

  "Je n'ai plus de feu ouvre-moi ta porte pour l'amour de dieu."

  There was something chilling in the innocent words, this lullaby for children the hunchback was singing. My candle is dead, I have no more fire. Open your door for me, for the love of God.

  "L'amour…" the Comte de Rochefort said, captivated. Q did not turn away from him. "Go," he said, in the same soft, singsong voice. "Go, find Viktor's lab. Finish your mission. Go!"

  Van Helsing came to Smith and, supporting each other, they limped away, the clear sound of Q's singing following them all the while.

  "Eat lead, Frenchman?" Smith said. "Really?"

  Van Helsing had the grace to look embarrassed.

  They found the place, but they got there too late.

  The door would have been hidden in the rock bed, but it had been blasted open, from the inside. The security would have been a nightmare to break through, even with an F-J serum, but there was no longer any need.

  The door had been blown, the metal oozing on the ground as from an unimaginably strong source of heat. Van Helsing and Smith exchanged glances, then Van Helsing gestured with his head at the opening. Smith nodded.

  He stepped carefully over the still-steaming door, and into the dark opening. He went to one side then and Van Helsing, following, took the other. They stood, silently, trying to evaluate the scene before them.

  "What," Van Helsing said softly, "has happened here?"

  Smith shook his head. He couldn't imagine.

  They were standing in a large, open cavern. The ceiling of bedrock extended high above their heads. A pool of light engulfed a surgeon's workspace, large metal dissection table, while against one wall a series of cages stood.

  Smith gestured. Van Helsing followed him, along the wall, to the cages. They were full…

  Smith did not know what they were. Perhaps, once, they had been people. Now they were changed, each one differently. Man-machine hybrids, a child with the sad beak of a parrot and small, grimy wings sprouting from his thin naked shoulders, a woman in a black iron mask, rocking her knees, humming tunelessly, something that looked like a human-sized frog, an automaton with a human face–

  What joined them all together was the silence. Smith had expected screams, a cacophony of sound. But the caged creatures did not make a sound, and when he approached closer they shied away, pressing themselves against the walls, trying to stay as far away from the bars as they could.

  "What–"

  "Look," Van Helsing said. He pointed at the far wall. A hole had been blasted into it, by the same unknown source of heat. Yet the chamber was quiet, and there was no sign of an intruder, or a device capable of generating such power…

  Smith, for the moment, gave up on the beings in the cages. He went over to the operating theatre–

  Which was where he found the body.

  Almost tripped over it, in fact.

  "Over here!" he called. Van Helsing came running. Together, they looked down at the man on the floor. He was wearing a white lab coat that was no longer white. It was stained a deep, crimson red.

  Blood.

  Smith knelt down, put his fingers to the man's neck. There was a pulse, weak but steady. He looked up at Van Helsing.

  "Viktor," Van Helsing said.

  Smith nodded.

  "What happened here?" he said.

  Van Helsing said, "I don't know."

  "Search the chamber," Smith said. "I'll see if I can wake our friend here."

  Van Helsing was already moving. "We haven't got long," he said. But Smith shook his head, though the other man couldn't see it. "It's too quiet," he said, but softly. A breach like this should have alerted seven kinds of security forces by now. That no one had showed up…

  Suddenly he was very concerned.

  A sense of urgency gripped him: that this was beyond a confrontation with de Rochefort, this was something larger than a break-in into the Quiet Council's secure research facility. For the Great Game was exactly that, a series of moves and counter-moves, quantifiable and understood: a game.

  But this was something else, something he could not understand. He ran his hands over the fallen man, searching for wounds, then tore open the lab coat.

  Underneath it the man's body was singed, and the smell filled Smith's nostrils, making him gag. He stared in horror at the man's burns. They had to get him to hospital, to a doctor.

  The famous Viktor…

  He said, softly – "Can you hear me?"

  Van Helsing, circling – "Smith, I can find nothing."

  "The object?"

  Van Helsing didn't answer, and Smith knew they were both thinking the same thing.

  Could the object have done this? Had Viktor, somehow, managed to activate it?

  He shook the fallen man. How could he be burned under the lab coat? Why wasn't the coat burned, too?

  Had he put it on later? Had someone else dressed him?

  Suddenly he was afraid of a trap again. Feeling his heart beating fast he tried to shake the scientist. "Can you hear me? Viktor!"

  Suddenly the man's hand shot up and caught hold of Smith's wrist. Smith shouted, surprised. Van Helsing ran over, the sound of his feet on the hard ground filling the cavern with echoes. Viktor's eyes shot open, staring straight at Smith. The man's hold on Smith's wrist was supernaturally strong.

  Had he been experimenting with the serum on himself?

  "They're here," Viktor said. His face twisted. Smith could not release himself from the man's fevered grip. Viktor's burned chest rose and fell painfully.

  "Who's here?"

  "They're here! You have to warn…"

  He faltered. His eyes lost their focus. His grip slackened. Smith released his hand. "Serum," he said. "Get him some serum!"

  "I'm looking," Van Helsing said, sounding irritated.

  "Viktor. Viktor! Can you hear me?"

  "Viktor…" the man whispered. He licked his lips.

  "What did you do, Viktor? What happened here?"

  "Voices… I heard… voices."
>
  "I don't know what these things are," Van Helsing said. "There's enough medication here to start a hospital, but nothing's properly labelled."

  "Yellow… serum… top left… marked… privés… tell… tell him."

  Smith repeated the instructions. Van Helsing returned. "What is it?" he asked, curious. And – "Should I give it to him?"

  "It can't hurt…" Smith said. The sense of urgency, of wrongness, had not left him. Why had they not been disturbed? Why had no one come to the scientist's aid?

  "Viktor," he said, speaking gently. "Do you want your medicine?"

  "Medicine…"

  "What happened here? Did you activate the device?"

  "The device!" Viktor's face underwent a transformation. And now he looked frantic. His hand shot out again but this time Smith was prepared and avoided it. "They came! They're here! Run!"

  "He's insane," Van Helsing said.

  But Smith had a feeling something had gone very wrong indeed.

  "Give him the serum," he said. "I think we need to leave. Now."

  Van Helsing shrugged. He primed the syringe, pulled up Viktor's sleeve and, without due ceremony, inserted it into Viktor's arm, pushing the liquid in.

  They watched the scientist's body shudder. And now Smith noticed that Viktor's exposed arm was filled with similar signs of injections.

  "My God," he said.

  "What?" Van Helsing said, still sounding irritated.

  "He's been using this stuff for months," Smith said. "If not years. It's probably the only reason he didn't die."

  Viktor's eyes opened again and a new light shone in them. Smith noticed, with sick fascination, how their colour changed. They were becoming yellow. And now Viktor smiled, his body shuddering. His smile reminded Smith of a rabid dog he had once had to kill. Suddenly revolted, he got up to his feet. "Let's go," he told Van Helsing.

  "What about him?"

  "He'll live."

  "The Bureau would have wanted him."

  "We have no time for that," Smith said. "Leave him."

  The scientist on the ground screamed suddenly, startling both of them. His body twisted and jerked, and he began to howl, and the caged creatures began to howl along with him, filling the air of the cavern with a sudden, unbearable cacophony of screams. Smith shuddered. "Come on!" he said. He moved, suddenly desperate to get away. Van Helsing followed and they left the chamber, the screams continuing behind them as they began to jog down the dark tunnels of the undercity.

  "We were fools!" Smith said.

  "I don't understand–" from Van Helsing.

  "We need to get outside."

  Was it Smith's imagination, or were there far more people down below than there had been before? They stared at the two old men, running, and made no move but to shy away from them. Desperation drove Smith. A feeling he had been late, too late for far too long. They ran, following high ground. At last they came to one of the exits out of that subterranean maze.

  "I… could do with… a break!" Van Helsing said, panting.

  Smith pushed open the door. They were on the right side of the Seine, having traversed the underground passages below the river, coming out near the grand municipality building, the Hotel de Ville.

  Which was on fire.

  "Why is it so light?" Van Helsing said.

  Smith, panting, had his hands on his knees and was sucking in air. But the air was full of smoke and it made him cough. The Hotel de Ville burned and, as Smith straightened, he saw it was not the only building on fire.

  He looked up, not believing what he saw. All over the city skyline, flames were pouring upwards, bellowing like demons – from the Louvre, to Bastille, to the Place de l'Opera and to Concorde. And now Smith could hear the screams–

  "Look!" Van Helsing said. He raised a shaking, pointing hand in the air.

  Smith raised his head, shaded his eyes. And now he saw them. Giant, hulking shadows moving in the sky above the city. They were vast, inhuman machines, giant tripods moving jerkily, like metal spiders, over the Parisian skyline, belching fire in all directions.

  "We're too late," Van Helsing said, softly.

  And Smith, numb, could only echo what Viktor had said.

  "They're here."

  PART V

  The Further Chronicles

  of Harry Houdini

  TWENTY-NINE

  Where the hell was his contact? Harry Houdini thought irritably. England was cold and wet and the streets were unsafe, and he was shivering now, his clothes damp, as he skulked outside a Limehouse tavern, the Lizard's Claw. The unmistakable smell of opium wafted out from within the establishment, quite pleasant, really, and in the sky above the city a silent storm of lightning played in silence, reminding him uneasily of that night on another island…

  He palmed coins and practised sleight-of-hand as he waited. His instructions had been very clear. He had followed standard procedure from the moment he had disembarked at the docks. Ensured he was not being shadowed. There was no reason for him to be, of course. No one knew who he was, or his purpose here. At least, no one should.

  He had made his way to this place, getting lost on the way. But he made it. Only there was no sign of his contact, and Harry's busy hands suddenly stilled, and his short hair, cut from that thick dense of curls that was his heritage, prickled.

  Something was wrong.

  He hugged the shadows. Alarm was telling him to leave, to try and make the fall-back meeting, but curiosity got the better of him. Slowly, as unseen as he could make himself be, he circled the Lizard's Claw, scanning his environment, shadows and fallen masonry and piles of refuse: this was certainly not the high-end part of town one imagined when one thought of the Old World.

  In the distance, the whales sang, plaintively. There was something haunting about their song, and for a moment the world around him dematerialised, and he saw, instead, the same world with no humans in it, an ocean-world for which the land masses of continents were but a fleeing distraction, a great and deep blue world in which giant beings moved in the depths and sang across thousands of miles, calling to each other…

  Then it passed and he went around the back of the Lizard's Claw where the smells coming out of the kitchen made him suddenly hungry, and he almost stumbled over a prone object.

  He cursed, and righted himself.

  The carcass of a boar or a deer, perhaps.

  Did they have wild boars, here?

  Sounds of singing from inside. Someone came out from the kitchen and Harry froze, but the figure merely threw a reeking bucket of dirty water onto the street – narrowly missing him – and went back inside, leaving the door slightly ajar.

  Harry cursed all Englishmen, but quietly. The sliver of light traversed the dirty back yard of the tavern and came like the blade of a knife to rest against the hurdle Harry had hit.

  He drew in his breath in a short, sharp intake like a gun shot.

  Not a deer. Not a boar, either.

  A human leg, in sensible grey trousers, and a sensible black shoe, polished, though scuffed at the heels. Harry knelt to take a better look.

  A human body, the leg twisted unnaturally. The street was very quiet. All his senses were alert, for the most minute sound, but there was nothing. The body had been wedged, without ceremony, into a crumbling break in the low stone wall of the street, which the tavern staff probably used to put rubbish in. The smell, indeed, suggested rotting offal, and that was mixed with incense ash and cheap oil that had been reused so many times it was mostly burned fat. Grimacing, Harry pulled at the leg, drawing the corpse out, slowly. It was lying on its front. As he dragged it out he was aware of a dark, viscous liquid that had pooled around the corpse. Blood. The man was young and had worn a cheap but respectable suit. There was something strangely familiar about him. His left hand had been outstretched in death, one finger, dipped in his own blood, pointing helplessly at nothing. Harry retched without sound, the smell suffocating him. Then, gently, he put his arms under the dead man's body a
nd turned him over.

  The man's head lolled back, dead eyes staring at Harry, and he bit down on a scream, hard.

  No no no no no.

  He stood up. It was too dark. Yes, he thought, helplessly, it is too dark to see clearly. I am hallucinating. The brain finds patterns in the dark that don't exist.