by Lavie Tidhar
But he already had an inkling.
The fat man had been obsessed with Les Lézards. "We need to understand them, study them, learn their ways, their history," the fat man had once told him. It had been a summer day, somewhere in Asia, near the Gobi Desert, in land that could have belonged to the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Mongols, depending on who you asked, and whether you bothered to in the first place. Early days, when Smith was young, though Mycroft was so terribly fat even then…
They were sitting in Mycroft's personal airship. The fat man had insisted on travelling by air whenever possible. He said he liked the comfort. The airship had never been given a name. Nor was it registered.
Officially, just like Smith himself, it did not exist.
They were there on what the fat man had called a treasure hunt. There was a team of archaeologists, and a local guide, and security men who never spoke, and Mycroft's personal chef, Anatole.
"What are we looking for?" Smith had asked.
"A token," Mycroft said. "Something old, that was lost."
Smith had only just returned from his training with the man who called himself Ebenezer Long. Smith called him Master. Even now he knew little about him. The monastery sat high up in the Himalayas, in a hidden, snow-bound valley. Master Long had taught Smith the art of Qinggong: the Ability of Lightness. There had been a strange, Buddha-like statue, made of jade. It had allowed Smith and the others seemingly impossible feats: almost as though they could fly through the air, on unseen wires. Mycroft had questioned Smith at length about the statue. But it had disappeared shortly after Smith had arrived at the monastery, and he didn't know what he could tell the fat man.
"Ancient devices," the fat man had told him. "Proof of the lizards' extraterrestrial origins. And signifiers of our future, Smith. Our past has been changed by outside forces, and our future is uncertain."
And so, each day, they scanned the desert, searching for that treasure, or that proof, or that ancient device. But they had found nothing.
Smith followed Van Helsing along the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. Booksellers displayed their wares and people sat outside numerous brasseries, drinking wine, talking, laughing – it felt to Smith, at that moment, as it came on him, at unexpected times throughout the years, that he had chosen the wrong profession, and that the shadow world could not stand up to the light, to life lived openly, in warmth and joy. Then he thought of the break-in at the Bureau and his suspicions, and what it could mean to those people sitting there, so care-free, unaware of the possible danger that could be threatening them, and the feeling, as it always did, passed.
He was what he was, and the world needed shadow as well as light.
Back then, on that long-ago expedition to the Gobi, they had come back empty-handed. But what if the fat man had continued to look? And what if he had found something?
An ancient, alien artefact, of unknown powers… and Zephyrin had been tinkering with it.
Worse – now the demented, physically transformed monster that the Comte de Rochefort had become must have it in its possession. Which meant the Quiet Council…
They needed a man inside the Council. A sleeper agent, someone who would have an inkling as to the Council's actions, its intents.
Luckily, they had exactly such an agent in place.
TWENTY-SEVEN
They'd stocked up in the Latin Quarter. A tailor shop whose owner doubled as an arms dealer provided them with firepower. Van Helsing went for a double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulders, two Colts by his sides, a long, slender knife strapped to his arm, and some grenades, as an afterthought. In his long dark coat, his tanned face and deep blue eyes, he looked formidable, the Hunter of old.
Smith rarely favoured guns. This time, though, he accepted a hand-made Beretta, complete with silencer, and added a handful of knives. He hoped guns would not be required.
"The Hunter and the Harvester, working together, eh?" Van Helsing said. He sounded mournful.
"Just like in the old days."
"We never worked together in the old days."
"Think you're past it?"
"It's been a while since I killed anyone."
"Miss it?"
Van Helsing sighed. "Not in particular," he said. "To be honest with you, I saw this posting as my little retirement spot. You know what they say–"
"Paris is the last posting before retirement," Smith said. "Yes…" They were walking towards the cathedral now. Notre Dame, shining that strange luminous green in the moonlight. "What did you have planned for after?"
"I thought a teaching post in Amsterdam, possibly," Van Helsing said.
"Cheer up," Smith said. He felt the knife strapped to his arm. It felt good to hold a weapon again. "It's possible we won't even have to kill anyone tonight."
"Stranger things have happened," Van Helsing said, still a little mournfully.
The observer, meanwhile, was feeling a little confused.
This city was not like the others. It was awash in what the humans called Tesla radiation. It was a chatter of conversation. It was a city of machines as much as humans, and the machines talked. They were machines of an antique and obsolete kind his masters had forgotten long ago, yet here they were, thinking engines, primitively powered, but thinking all the same.
And talking.
A lot of their conversation was about him.
What he was, and what he wanted.
The observer almost wanted to join in on the conversation. There was something exhilarating about it, about other machines, a kinship of sorts. The voices inside him had been multiplying recently. They all wanted to talk, all the time. The observer paid them little mind.
He was following a simple trail. The humans had a legend, about a boy and a girl in a forest and a trail of crumbs. The observer was following a trail of crumbs, and the crumbs were human minds.
But they weren't only human minds.
And right now he could hear such a mind, an old mind, somewhere.
It was screaming.
It was a mind that was neither human nor of the human-like machines, but something like an ancient relative of the observer itself.
Some relic of a distant past, a mind disturbed, perhaps insane. This bothered the observer. He decided to try and find it.
They walked through the ruins of Notre Dame. Punks de Lézard hissed at them, revealing claws surgically grafted onto their hands. Besides Smith, Van Helsing smiled, showing teeth, and pushed aside his long coat, revealing his guns. The punks hissed at him but kept their distance.
"We need an entry into the catacombs," Van Helsing explained. "There should be one around here somewhere–"
They moved in shadow; the moon cast pale reflections of their bodies against the ruined metal and their shadows multiplied around them, like the ghosts of past selves. Smith shivered. Could the Bookman really bring back Alice? Was Alice's mind truly trapped, now, in the confines of some strange and alien machine? Was she aware of what was happening?
Where would the Harvester go next?
He was following the Harvester's trail, and it was leading, step by step, to Babbage. But what would he, Smith, have done in the Harvester's place?
He would not have rushed, headlong, towards the target, he decided.
He would take his time, find and isolate the other links in the chain.
And the chain led to Paris, and so–
"Ah, there it is," Van Helsing said. He kicked debris away and revealed a trapdoor set in the floor. Van Helsing knelt, took hold of the solid brass ring attached to the door, and pulled. The door opened upwards, smoothly, as though it had been recently oiled.
"After you," Van Helsing said, courteously.
Smith peered down the hole. Metal rungs led downwards, into the earth. He lowered himself, began to climb down. Van Helsing followed.
The ladder terminated a short while later. They stood on hard stone ground. It was dark but, as they began to move, the passage opened up and there was ligh
t, and Smith could smell wood smoke in the distance, and meat cooking, and heard, faintly, the sound of a harmonica, playing.
"Welcome to the catacombs," Van Helsing said.
They began to walk, unhurriedly, keeping a distance between them. Van Helsing's hand was on his gun. Smith was cradling his blade. The space around them expanded again, the ceiling rising higher as they went deeper into Paris' underworld. A rat scampered past, alarmed by their progress. There were cells cut into the stone on either side. Some were empty. In one he saw a young mother cradling a child. She looked up at him as he passed and her eyes were empty and when he looked down he saw she was holding a wooden doll, and the doll was staring at him and it blinked, startling him.
"Edison dolls," Van Helsing said. "Be careful of them. The Edison Company manufactured them, complete with Babbage engine and rudimentary voice. They… were not a success."
Smith seemed to remember rumours, about Edison and his obsession with creating the perfect, female doll… He wondered where the man was, what side of the Great Game he played on. They walked on.
In one of the cells three automatons huddled around a fire. They were in a deplorable state, stuffing sticking out of holes in their bodies, one missing an arm, another a leg. They passed around a flask of what Smith, at first, took to be whiskey. Van Helsing paused and spoke briefly to one of the machines. "Petroleum," he said, noticing Smith's gaze. "Come on."
"What did you ask them?"
"Where our man is."
Petroleum…
Smith knew what it was, of course.
A sort of fuel, highly flammable… There were high concentrations of it in Vespuccia and–
The Arabian Peninsula.
They used it for light, predominantly. But now it looked like the French machines could use it for power, rather than steam?
A group of Punks de Lézard distracted him. They came out of the shadows, surrounding the two men, silently, their claws extended, their forked tongues hissing. Smith and Van Helsing moved in tandem, not breaking stride. Smith's knife was buried in the first man's belly before the man had time to gasp. Smith lowered him gently to the ground and stood above him, looking at the others calmly, while Van Helsing covered them with his twin guns. No one spoke. After a moment the punks went and picked up their fallen comrade and dragged him away, back into the shadows. Smith and Van Helsing moved on.
The tunnels widened and narrowed, unexpected turnings leading farther down, until at last they came to a wide space where fires burned and groups, carefully apart, sat – beggars and automatons and Punks de Lézard, and Van Helsing said, "This way."
They went along the wall, and the inhabitants of that underground place carefully avoided looking at them. For a fleeting moment Smith thought he saw an old, Asian man move, too swiftly to distinguish features, and disappear into the darkness. It made him uneasy, and he thought of his old master, Ebenezer Long, of the Shaolin. Could the secret world of the Wulin, those hidden societies fighting the dowager-empress, also be involved?
And if so, what were they after? The Erntemaschine? The secrets Babbage must hold? Or something else entirely?
The object stolen from the Bureau, whatever it may be?
Van Helsing stopped, and Smith followed suit. They were standing in a branching tunnel away from that main hall.
"What–?" Smith began, but Van Helsing, with a gesture, silenced him.
They waited.
Presently, there was the sound of shuffling feet. A small, hunched figure appeared ahead of them, growing closer, until it was before them. Then it stopped.
"Van Helsing," the figure said.
"Q. Thanks for coming."
Smith examined the man. He was short and dark-skinned. He was also a hunchback. "I'm Smith," Smith said. The other man looked up at him, grinned. "Your reputation precedes you," he said.
"What can you tell us, Q?" Van Helsing said. He looked ill at ease. His hand was on the butt of his gun and he kept glancing sideways, checking both sides of the tunnel. "What is the Council up to?"
"Rumour has it the Comte de Rochefort was fed a little of his own medicine," Q said, and his eyes twinkled at Smith. "But he survived. And came back with a prize."
"Do you know what it is?"
"No," Q said. "But it has them all excited. Viktor himself is working on it, I hear."
Viktor. That name again, Smith thought. The scientist they had tried to steal from the French, and failed, repeatedly.
"Can we get access to it?" Van Helsing said.
"I don't see how," Q said. "Breaking into the Quiet Council's secure area would be madness. There are measures in place to–"
"Where is it?" Smith said. He, too, had caught Van Helsing's unease. "Where's the nearest access point?"
"Not far," Q said. Quickly, sensing their changed mood, he gave them directions. He had lost his smile. "I have to go," he said. "You will not succeed in breaking in."
"Let us worry about that," Smith said, when–
There was a sudden crash, the tunnel shook–
Smith reached out to steady himself against the wall–
A voice, animalistic and full of hate, roaring–
Hot breath with the stench of rotting flesh filling the tunnel–
"Smeeeeth…"
Van Helsing and Smith, moving together–
Pushing the hunchback to the ground, behind them, covering him – Van Helsing with guns drawn, Smith with the knife–
A huge, repulsive figure appeared in the mouth of the tunnel. A giant in the semblance of a man, muscles bulging from torn clothes, a demented look over a leering, engorged face with massive, yellow fangs for teeth…
"I'm coming for you, Smith…"
The huge mouth moved: a grin.
Smith stepped forwards, standing between the others and the monster.
"Bonsoir, Comte de Rochefort," he said, politely.
So the man had indeed survived his fall from the flaming airship.
The Frankenstein–Jekyll serum had worked.
But the fall had certainly made him angry.
Smith grinned. It felt good to be here, facing one of his old enemies. "Je m'appelle Smith," he said. He nodded at the monstrous figure before him, almost in affection. "Je suis un assassin."
The thing that had once been the Comte de Rochefort roared. Then it charged directly at Smith.
TWENTY-EIGHT
At the moment the giant body rushed him, Smith jumped. The Comte de Rochefort sailed past him as Smith, turning in the air, landed behind him. His knives flashed. The comte roared in pain and outrage and green-yellow blood, like pus, came streaming out of the gashes in his back.
The confused Rochefort turned, but Smith turned with him, using the creature's bulk to his advantage. The wounds, he saw with alarm, were already closing. He jumped on the giant man's back, one hand over the comte's throat, and the knife came to rest against the side of the man's neck, ready to go in and finish the job.
But he had underestimated the Comte de Rochefort. With a roar of rage the beast bent and with one flowing motion threw Smith off. He hit the wall and pain exploded in his shoulders. He fell to the ground.
Blinking tears of pain away, he saw Van Helsing step forward, both guns extended. "Eat lead, Frenchman!" Van Helsing shouted (a little melodramatically, the winded Smith nevertheless thought), and the guns burped once, twice, catching the giant monster in the back and, as the monster turned, in the chest.
The comte roared, holes opening in his chest, bleeding more of that yellow-green blood. The blood hissed when it touched the ground. Acidic, Smith thought, horrified. And the comte had intended the Frankenstein-Jekyll serum for him.
He stood up. It was time to finish the job. The knife flashed, flying through the air, finding the comte's neck with unerring accuracy. A jet of blood sprouted out of the wound, burning a hole in the nearby wall.
The Comte de Rochefort, trapped between Smith and Van Helsing, turned this way and that. A look of incredulo
us horror was etched into his face. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. The roar of his laughter filled the underground chamber. With one meaty hand the comte pulled out the knife. Already, the wound was closing.
"You can't kill him."
Smith had forgotten the hunchback was there. The Comte de Rochefort, looking confused, peered at him, as though trying to identify a half-remembered face.
"It's me," the hunchback said, gently, reaching out a hand to the giant monster. "Q. You remember?"
The comte grunted. Something about the hunchback's manner seemed to subdue him.
