The Great Game

by Lavie Tidhar

  "Well," Berlyne said. "Good luck with it." He took out an enormous, not-too-clean handkerchief, blew his nose noisily, and departed down the corridor. Smith looked after him suspiciously for a moment, then went in search of Fogg.

  "Ah, Smith. You've finally decided to show up."

  Fogg's office had a fake fireplace, all the rage two years before, and the hiss of gas filled the windowless room. "What took you so long?"

  Fogg looked irritated. He was leafing through a sheaf of papers on the desk. A chart behind him had names, and places, linked by lines. Smith saw ALICE – BANGKOK, a trail leading to HOLMES – LONDON.

  Something else, too, which gave him pause.

  AKSUM – WESTERNA – DEVICE.

  He wondered what it referred to. Filed it away.

  "Someone's been trying to kill me," he said.

  Fogg snorted. "Well," he said. "That's only to be expected, isn't it."

  Smith said, "Is it?"

  Fogg said, "I imagine there are plenty of people who wish to kill you."

  "Why now?"

  And then he thought – that trail of bodies, Alice to Holmes – where will it lead to next? And it occurred to him it was just possible Fogg thought – or hoped – that it was leading to him, to Smith.

  Was that possible?

  He kept his face carefully blank as he thought. Did Fogg wish to use him as bait? It almost made Smith laugh. Almost. And could Fogg be right? Could this new, unknown Harvester be heading his way?

  It didn't make much sense. He didn't know anything. He was not a part of whatever it was this Erntemaschine was looking for. Which meant Alice had been. And Mycroft.

  And suddenly Smith wanted, very badly, to know what it was.

  Fogg said, "It was not inconceivable that other powers would become involved. Our side is not the only one to have suffered… unexplained deaths."

  "But why go after me?" Then– "Wait, you knew?"

  Fogg looked amused. "We figured you could take care of yourself," he said. "Clearly, since you are, in fact, here right now…"

  Smith was almost flattered. He said, "Who else has died?"

  Fogg pushed a sheet of paper in his direction. Smith took it.

  "There's a list," Fogg said. "Make sure it does not leave the building."

  Smith looked at the page, memorised it. Handed it back. He would review it later.

  "Come with me," Fogg said. He pushed himself out of his chair. "Something I want you to see."

  They were never going to give him all the information about a case. Smith didn't expect them to, either.

  We're pieces in their game, he thought. They send us off into the field and let us find the questions for ourselves. No preconceptions.

  So Fogg would be keeping information from him. He expected that. He'd give him just enough to follow his own chain of reasoning. Die in the process, possibly. Fogg should be happy with either outcome.

  He followed the tall man down the corridor, a left before the still-closed cipher room, and down a flight of stairs. He knew then where they were going.

  The Bureau's own mortuary.

  It was icy down there and the light was cold and white, running on Edison bulbs, powered by the Bureau's own, hidden steam engines. Fogg pushed the metal door open and Smith followed him inside.

  He did not like mortuaries.

  Which was ironic, he knew. Just as he knew that, one day, sooner or later, it would be his turn to end up in one. He suppressed a shudder as he walked into the cold room. Metal cabinets set in the stone walls. An operating table sitting unused. Fogg went to one of the metal drawers and pulled it open.

  A large corpse lay on it, covered by a sheet. Smith came and stood close to Fogg, looking down at the body. Fogg, with a moue of distaste, lifted up the sheet.

  Mycroft.

  The fat man looked peaceful in death. Fogg said, "Help me turn him over," brusquely. Smith complied.

  Mycroft's flesh was soft and pliable and cold to the touch. The room stank of disinfectant. Carbolic acid, if Smith was right. The fat man moved surprisingly easily. "There," Fogg said, pointing.

  Smith bent down closer. Looked at the fat man's neck.

  A tiny hole, dug into the base of the skull.

  So someone had stuck a stiletto blade into the man's remarkable head, piercing the brain in the process.

  And had he seen something like that before?

  "Is this what killed him?"

  "There are no other marks," Fogg said.

  Smith straightened. If he'd hoped for any sudden revelations, none were forthcoming.

  Do it the hard way, then.

  The way he'd always done it.

  "What are you not telling me?" he said.

  Fogg shook his head. He looked tired, Smith suddenly realised. And worried. It ill-suited him. "You're on your own," Fogg said. "As of this moment you're back on active. You report to no one but me. Get what you need from Accounting. I'd tell you to sign up with Armaments but I know your preferences. You'll be issued travel documents as needed, and currency – but do keep all the receipts, would you, Smith? These aren't the old days."

  Smith gently rolled the fat man back over and covered him again with the sheet. Goodbye, Mycroft, he thought.

  Fogg pushed the trolley back into the wall.

  "Let's go," he said.

  NINE

  Smith sipped a rare cup of coffee, in the continental style, as he waited for his contact to come in.

  He was thinking through his meeting with Fogg.

  The man had seemed nervous, Smith thought. He was sparse with information, almost too sparse. Smith had tried asking what Alice had been working on, before she was killed. Fogg only said, "She was like you. Retired."

  He didn't know, Smith thought. Something linked Alice and Mycroft, but Fogg had not been a part of the chain.

  He couldn't picture Alice as ever retiring. What had she got herself into, that got her killed?

  And that hush at the Bureau. The sort of hush that came with bad news. Before he left he had run into Berlyne again. "Watch your back," the man advised him mournfully, rubbing his hands together against the chill. He had regarded Smith for one long moment before adding, almost too softly to hear – "Mycroft's not the only one who's no longer around."

  Smith sipped his coffee and thought about his next steps and waited for his contact. He'd signed up with Accounts, waved away the offer of weapons at Armaments, and was out of the building before he knew it. The door shut behind him softly and he had the sudden, sinking feeling it would not be opening again.

  He was not a fool.

  He knew Fogg was using him. As bait, or decoy, he didn't know. Fogg was in over his head.

  And it made Smith think of something else that had been bothering him, namely, the attempts on his own life.

  Why go for him now, after all these years?

  If it wasn't something in the past then he had to conclude it had to do with this new investigation.

  Which suggested some interesting possibilities…

  The most prominent of which was the simple assumption that, whatever Alice and the fat man had been killed over, someone, or several someones, wanted very much to keep it a secret.

  He was sitting upstairs at the Bucket of Blood, by Covent Garden. They staged bare-knuckle boxing there but that would be later and for now the place was quiet. They served good pie and bad coffee and they didn't serve bluebottles, crushers, coppers, or whatever your term for the agents of the law may have been.

  Which suited Smith.

  He waited and presently there came the soft steps he had been waiting for, and he saw him – it – he never really knew what they preferred – come up the stairs.

  He stood up. The other came and stood by him. His gait was slow and mechanical, and his blank eyes always terrified Smith, false eyes that were meant to suggest humanity, but somehow didn't.

  "Byron," Smith said.

  The Byron automaton extended his hand for a shake. His fl
esh was soft and warm. It was made of rubber of some kind, Smith knew. The automaton, despite his age, looked younger than Smith remembered. Clearly he'd been well maintained. He had ascended in power since the council of eighty-eight brought an end of sorts to lizardine control of the empire, and had given human and machine, for the first time, equal say. The Queen still reigned, of course – but the machine faction had grown stronger, though it was not like France, where it was said the Quiet Council held absolute – if quiet – power.

  "Smith." Byron's voice was still the same old voice, scratchy in places, a voice made of numerous recordings of a real human voice, mixed together, played endlessly back. Babbage Corps. – Charlie Company, they used to call it in the old days – had built him, one of the early prototypes, and he was, Smith knew, second in command in the automatons' mostly hidden world. Machines feared humans, relying on them for survival. Byron – and his master – preferred to act, as much as possible, behind the scenes. "It is good to see you again."

  They had crossed paths a couple of times, the automaton and him. No one knew the city better, nor had a wider net of informers and listeners. Machines listened, and most people never gave them a glance. They had worked the Prendick case together, successfully fighting the Dog Men Gang, a case which had left its scars on both of them. Smith had been taken captive by the gang and flayed, and on some nights he still felt the fine, white criss-crossing network on his back as though it were inflamed… "I wish I could say the same," he said, and the Byron automaton nodded mechanically. He understood.

  "I am sorry about Mycroft," the automaton said. "He was a good man."

  Smith snorted. "That's a lie, and you know it."

  "Very well," the Byron said. "He was a useful man, an empire man. His loss is our loss."

  He was speaking for the automatons. And Smith nodded, understanding.

  "What do you know of his demise?" he said. The automaton didn't reply. His strange blind eyes moved as though scanning the room. How the automatons saw was a mystery to Smith. He knew that, between themselves, they communicated by means of in-built Tesla sets, and that was something he needed to find out about. There had been more and more traffic on what was coming to be called the Tesla Network, and while most shadow operatives dismissed the automatons, Smith didn't. He knew better than to underestimate Byron and his kind.

  "Byron?"

  "I thought you were retired," the automaton said at last.

  "They brought me back."

  "A pity."

  Smith looked at him. "I don't understand," he said at last.

  "You should have stayed in the village, my friend," the automaton said.

  "Is that a warning?" Smith said, suddenly tense.

  "It's an observation," the automaton said, mildly.

  Smith sat back. He regarded the automaton for a long moment, thinking.

  He had not expected this.

  Mycroft, he knew, had strong links with the automaton movement.

  Could they be involved?

  And suddenly he was wary of Byron.

  Which, he thought, had been the automaton's intention.

  So instead he said, "Fogg."

  The automaton did not have a range of expressions. However, in the certain way his mouth moved, one could, just possibly, read distaste.

  "You have always suspected him," the automaton said.

  "It seemed clear to me he was an agent of the Bookman."

  "Ah, yes…" And now the automaton seemed thoughtful. "The Bookman."

  "Is this related to the Bookman investigation from eightyeight?" Smith said, on a hunch.

  The automaton was still. At last he said, "There are things best left in the shadows, my friend."

  What exactly had happened in eighty-eight? There had been the very public blowing-up of the decoy Martian probe, and a girl, Lucy, had died. Mycroft had handled it single-handedly, if Smith remembered rightly. He, Smith, had been somewhere in Asia at the time.

  Then came that strange revolution that didn't quite happen, and the new balance of power, and the fall of the then-prime minister, Moriarty. Mrs Beeton was in power now.

  But Mycroft had remained in place, ensconced in his comfortable armchair at the Diogenes Club, running the Bureau and the shadow world, playing the Great Game…

  "What are you not telling me, Byron?" he said at last. The automaton's mouth had changed again; now his expression resembled a smile. "What can I tell you," he said, "might be the more appropriate question."

  "What can you tell me, then?"

  "What I already told you. Go home. Water your garden. Watch the flowers grow."

  "I grew cabbages," Smith said. "And Hapsburgian agents recently destroyed the garden." He thought about it. "Not that I minded, greatly," he added, to be fair.

  "Fogg," the automaton said, "cannot be trusted. But you already know this. Then you would have also surmised that Mycroft would have been of the same opinion."

  "I had warned him several times," Smith said, the memory of old hurt still present. "He never took notice."

  "Are you working for Fogg, now?"

  "He reinstated me," Smith said. "He is acting head."

  "Then you are his tool," the automaton said, with finality.

  "I am no one's tool," Smith said, but even as he spoke he knew it wasn't true. He had always been a tool. It was his purpose. He was a shiv for someone to apply, a weapon. And only Fogg had the power to bring him back from the retirement he hated, to make him, once again, useful.

  "What you learn, he will learn," the Byron automaton said, and stood up. "I am sorry about Alice. But you must not follow this investigation, this time, old friend. Let it go. Light a candle in her memory. But step away."

  "What about her killer?" Smith demanded. "Shall I let him go, too?"

  "The killer, like you, wishes to learn much, though, I suspect, for vastly different reasons. I do not think he can be stopped, nor, necessarily, that he should be. This is bigger than you, my friend, bigger than me, bigger than all of us. Let it go, I beg you."

  Smith stood up, too. "Then we have nothing else to discuss," he said, stiffly. The automaton nodded, once. His expression, as much as it could, looked resigned. "Until we meet again, then," he said. He put forwards his hand, and Smith shook it.

  "Until then," he said.

  TEN

  The observer watched this new quarry with interest. The voices in his head had been quiet of late, for which he was grateful. The country had a fascinating weather system, with frequent rain and an amassing of clouds that hid both sun and stars. Islands, he had learned, generated their own miniature weather systems. There was so much to learn.

  People went past him. Mostly they did not notice him. He wore a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat that, one of the voices told him, was rather fashionable. Fashion fascinated the observer. Most everything did. He stood in the shadows and watched the building. A small man came out of it and the observer watched him with interest, noticing the way the man scanned his environment as he went, always aware of his surroundings.

  But he had not noticed the observer.

  A small boy was one of the few who did notice him. The small boy went past him and then, for just a moment, seemed to stumble against him, murmured an apology and tried to dart away. The observer, however, reached out and grabbed him by the hand and the boy found himself pulled back. "Hey, let go, Jack!" the boy said, or began to, when he saw the observer's eyes on his. He stopped speaking and stared, as if hypnotised.

  "Give me back my things."

  Still not speaking, the boy owned up to the items he had extracted from the observer's pocket. These may have surprised the casual watcher, had there been one. They included a dazzling green seashell, of a sort not to be found on the British Isles; a penny coin rubbed black and featureless with age, with the barely distinguished portrait of the old Lizard King William; a smooth round pebble; and a piece of cinnamon bark.

  The observer took them and put them carefully back in hi
s pocket. He let the boy go but the boy just stood there, until the observer made a sudden shooing motion and then, as if awakening, the boy's eyes widened and he turned and ran away, disappearing into the crowds of Covent Garden.

  The observer watched the building and the people coming and going. He saw a dice game in progress and a man, which a voice told him was called a mobsman, who picked the pocket of a gentleman walking past without the man ever noticing. His nose could pick up smells that only now he was beginning to identify. Manure, of course, but also mulled cider, sold from large metal tubs to passers-by, and tobacco smoke, some of it aromatic and some of it reminding him of the sailors on the ship on the crossing over the Channel, and spilled beer, and roasting, caramelised peanuts, and human sweat and human fear and human hormones hanging heavy in the air: it was a heady mixture.