The Infernal Aether Box Set: All Four Books In The Series

by Peter Oxley

  “Would it surprise you to know that there is no record of a ‘Dr Smith’ in any of the official papers, and nor is there any record of him being assigned to the role of Mr Potts’ physician?”

  “Well, yeah, that would surprise me,” I said. “He’d been let through all the checkpoints to come down here, so we didn’t think to question it. Max needs constant check-ups: we weren’t going to start asking to look at his papers or references.” I shook my head. “Look, what’s this got to do with me? It’s not my fault if you’ve lost some records or them upstairs let in someone they shouldn’t have.”

  “But you did have contact with this doctor, correct? And none of the guards upstairs have any memory of admitting a doctor called Smith or otherwise over the past few weeks.”

  I laughed. “Then they’re fibbing! He’s been here pretty much every day!”

  “And yet the only people I have spoken to so far who claim to have seen him are you and Captain Pearce…” He stared at me.

  I kept my mouth shut, determined not to give him the satisfaction of a response. “You calling us liars?” I asked eventually when the silence dragged on for too long.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Captain Pearce has satisfied me that he is telling the truth, and I have no doubt you are doing likewise. But the mystery remains.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you need to ask more of the soldiers, find someone who did see him.” My mind was racing through the soldiers’ faces, those I’d seen every day over the past few weeks. I tried to think of anyone who would have spoken to the doctor or seen him, but I kept coming up with blanks: Dr Smith always just seemed to… appear. I felt the colour drain from my cheeks. “You think he’s a demon?”

  “I do not know. You are better versed in these things than me.”

  I frowned and stared at the wall. “There was something about him… he seemed fine, did all the things you’d expect a doctor to do. But… he had a way about him that wasn’t quite right. Can’t describe it, just not right.”

  “Could you give me an example?”

  “Yeah, like when N’yotsu was ill, just before I headed down south on Max’s… orders, Dr Smith was really keen for me to leave him alone with N’yotsu, even though I wasn’t in the way.” I shuddered as I remembered the dream I’d had when I drifted off in that room. “And then there was the way he was always so keen to get Max out of this place, and he was really interested in the bracelet Max wore…” The world felt like it was spinning around me. “Shit. The bracelet: the one N’yotsu gave Max to make sure no demon could harm or take him. The doctor was really keen to look at it. Max never let him, but…” I looked back up at the Inspector as my thinking caught up with something.

  “Just me and Albert?” I asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You said that the only people you’d spoken to who’d seen the doctor were me and Captain Pearce.” I leant over the table. “What about Max?”

  “In good time,” he said. “Tell me when you last saw Mr Potts.”

  “No!” I shouted. “Not until you tell me what’s happened!”

  He stared at me and then put his eye glasses down on the table. For a moment I thought he was going to walk out the room but instead he nodded. “Mr Potts—Maxwell—has disappeared. As has N’yotsu and Dr Smith. We have people out looking for them. When we examined the laboratory, though, we found this.” He pulled something out of his pocket and put it on the table. It was Max’s bracelet.

  I stared at it, not wanting to touch it in case it made this whole strange nightmare real. Every word he’d said had blown another hole in the bottom of my world so that it seemed like there was nothing left. First Gus, then N’yotsu’s illness and now this. It was the same old story: just when I thought I’d got everything worked out, life came along and messed it all up.

  I wanted to shout, I wanted to kick something, I wanted to weep. But no: that wouldn’t help anything or anyone. I was hit with the image of Max being taken away against his will, helpless in his wheelchair, to God knows where. Probably a big den of demons or something. We needed to do something. Now.

  I stood up. “Then I need to help,” I said. “Let me see the lab. I might find something you’ve missed: I’ve pretty much lived there these past few years. I can help walk the streets, I might know some places they’ve gone.”

  “That is what we’re hoping,” he said. “But first I need to be satisfied that I know everything about this case.” He picked up another piece of paper and put his glasses back on, motioning for me to sit down. I stared at him, clenching and unclenching my fists. I wanted to scream at him: my friends were out there—weak, alone, with God knows who or what—and he wanted to read me questions from his bit of paper. Instead I controlled myself and sat down slowly, clenching the corners of the table until my knuckles turned white.

  “So you last saw Mr Maxwell Potts…?”

  “Just before I left for Portsmouth, a couple of days ago,” I said slowly. “Max wanted me to take Joshua and Lexie with me. I told him one of them should stay with him, but he wouldn’t have it. He can be pretty pig-headed when he wants to be. So I left, and that was the last I saw of him.”

  He nodded slowly. “What do you know of the obsidian stone?”

  “What, N’yotsu’s special rock? It’s where he put all the bad bits that made him into Andras. But that’s locked away—we’ve not seen it in years.” I frowned as something twitched in my mind, a nagging memory.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Is there something else?”

  “No, well, I suppose… that day when I was at N’yotsu’s bedside and the doctor wanted me out. I wouldn’t leave him so I had a lie down instead and, well, I had a bit of a nightmare.” I blushed. “It sounds silly, but I remember dreaming that the doctor was talking to N’yotsu, asking him if he wanted to die, saying he could help him…” I shook my head. “Didn’t say anything at the time as it was just a dream and anyway next thing I knew I was being sent to Portsmouth. But in the dream the doctor turned to look at me and he did seem pretty frightening, almost demonic…” My heart pounded as I realised what I’d done; I could have stopped all this from happening if I’d just said something to someone. I gripped the table even harder, the wood digging into my fingers as I fought the urge to shout or punch or throw something.

  The Inspector opened his mouth but it was me that spoke first.

  “The stone,” I said.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “N’yotsu was weak, right? And getting weaker all the time. We didn’t really understand it, but it had something to do with what he’d done to get rid of the evil bits that made him Andras. By taking them out of himself and putting them in the stone, it made him weaker. It was like he was fading away over time. But there was one thing that would stop it: if he undid all that and went back to being Andras. But N’yotsu would never…” I paused and looked at him, a cold chill running down my back. “You’re not just here because some people have gone missing, are you?” I said slowly.

  He put down the sheet of paper again. “I am afraid not. Just as pressing is the obsidian stone. You see, it has also disappeared.”

  Chapter 16

  Our carriage swung down Tower Hill, but rather than carrying on along the Thames it turned off towards the Tower itself.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are we going in here?”

  “As I said, the obsidian stone has been taken,” said Detective Inspector Simmonds. “We are going to inspect the place that it was taken from.”

  “But it was being held in the Mint,” I said.

  “It was,” said Pearce, “but then it was moved here.”

  “When?”

  “The day before it was stolen.”

  I laughed. It was always down to me to put two and two together. “Well, there’s your first suspect, ain’t it? What idiot made that decision and why weren’t they stopped?”

  Pearce cleared his throat. “It was moved here on the orders of Her Majesty,
Queen Victoria. People don’t tend to question authority like that.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe you should go to the Palace and ask her.”

  I pulled a face at him. “No need to be snippy. But you have to admit this don’t make sense.”

  Simmonds leaned forwards, clearly trying to break up our little spat. “My people are making enquiries of Her Majesty’s staff.”

  The Tower of London loomed over us as we passed under the Middle Tower archway and then over the mud-and-grass ditch that was all that was left of the Tower’s moat. The next archway was thick, dark and oppressing and I held my breath as we passed through, half-expecting the portcullis to crash down and trap us in there.

  Safely through, we clattered along the cobblestones running through the inner and outer battlements, high walls on either side of a carriageway that had more the feel of a long alleyway than a Royal castle. After a couple of hundred yards we swung left, turning sharply through a low archway.

  “The Bloody Tower,” said Pearce, nodding at the left-hand side of the arch as we passed through the other side.

  “No prizes for guessing what they do in there,” I muttered as I felt the familiar dread that came from being surrounded by thick stone walls and huge towers, as though all the centuries of pain and torture were bearing down on me. As a kid I’d heard about the beheadings and torturing that happened in the Tower in years gone by—some said they still carried on even to this day—and my folks would threaten to haul us off to the Tower if we were naughty. It said a lot that that threat usually worked a lot better than the beatings Pa would regularly hand out.

  “It is where Richard III had the Little Princes murdered, so they say,” said Pearce. “Pretty apt name, all things considered.”

  I grunted, pleased that he had forgotten to mention Traitors’ Gate as we’d passed it. I still remembered a boatman pointing it out to us as we’d drifted by when I was a little girl, telling us how all those who went through that water-bound gate were never seen again. I’d had nightmares for weeks after about being dragged along the Thames and through the arch, the muddy water washing over me as the gate dropped down behind, cutting off the world and all hope with it.

  The carriage bounced to a halt at the foot of a wide flight of stone steps leading up into the main open square in the centre of the castle walls. As we climbed out I looked round: it seemed so much bigger than usual.

  “I’m not used to seeing this place without tourists,” I said.

  “We shut the place down as soon as we realised the stone was missing,” said Pearce.

  I looked around as we climbed the steps, taking in the sights of the main part of the castle, a mishmash of towers, crenellated battlements and rows of domestic houses clustered in a rough square around the sides of the inner walls. Neat lawns and rows of trees made me think more of a country park than a centuries-old castle, although the effect was spoilt by the soldiers searching the grounds. To our right, not quite in the centre of the walled space but still looming over the rest of the buildings like a mother hen surrounded by her chicks, was the White Tower. It was more light browns and creams than white, a huge square thing with tall towers at each corner and long thin arched windows dotted all the way up the sides until they reached the battlements at the top.

  We entered through a tall, thin door at ground level that was being guarded by a flustered-looking soldier. Steps led down from the door into a series of caverns with walls that were white at the bottom but grew darker with soot stains as they reached up to the vaulted ceilings. At the bottom of the stairs we passed a long lead trough that had intricate patterns picked out on its sides. I looked inside to see that it was filled with dirty water.

  “Cisterns,” said Pearce. “For putting out fires.”

  “You expect many down here?” I asked, looking around at the stone walls.

  “This is where we keep the ordnance,” he said. “Guns and gunpowder don’t tend to mix well with flames.”

  We walked through the first room and then under a rough stone archway into another long chamber. Racks of rifles and muskets filled every wall, while the floor was crammed with boxes that I guessed contained gunpowder and ammunition.

  A man had joined us, an officer who looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “This is where it was kept,” he said, pointing to an empty table in the corner.

  I had made a point of counting all the doors and checkpoints we’d passed on our way in. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “The country’s finest guarding six gates, doors and checkpoints, and someone still managed to waltz in here and blag the stone?”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t as simple as that,” said Pearce.

  “As I explained before,” said Simmonds. “There did appear to be extenuating circumstances.”

  I shot them both disbelieving looks. “Yeah. So Max disappears, there’s a big hue-and-cry and in all the confusion the next thing you know, N’yotsu goes and then so does the stone. That about right?”

  “The disappearance of Maxwell caused a large amount of concern, coming so soon after Gus disappearing too,” nodded Pearce.

  “So the whole of London got distracted?” I asked.

  “Not quite the whole,” he snapped. “But everyone was on alert to look for him. Resources are stretched very thin, and so some of the guards from the Tower were sent out to join in the search. It would appear that our thieves were aware that this would happen and were ready to take advantage when it did.”

  “So we can be pretty sure that the two disappearances are linked,” said Simmonds.

  “And Dr Smith is the main suspect,” I said.

  “Well, not quite,” said Simmonds. “After all, N’yotsu had the most to gain from the stone being liberated.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “Albert, you saw N’yotsu. He wasn’t able to walk, let alone rob a place like this.”

  “She’s right,” said Pearce. “If it was N’yotsu, he would have needed help.”

  “But N’yotsu was dead-set against going back to being Andras,” I said. “There’s no way he would have agreed to take the obsidian stone.”

  “Unless someone persuaded him when he was at his weakest?” asked Simmonds. “Such as when he was at death’s door?”

  I shook my head. “He said loads of times that he’d rather die than go back to being that… thing.”

  “Let us hope you are right, Kate,” said Pearce.

  Just as with Max’s lab, there was nothing we could spot in the Tower that hadn’t already been identified by the soldiers and policemen who’d combed through the place over the past day or so. Max’s lab had looked like it had been burgled, with stuff thrown all over the place, and there was a worrying amount of blood splattered around the room. The Tower, on the other hand, looked like a targeted raid with nothing untoward apart from the missing stone.

  After an hour or so, I sat down on a stone step, drained to the point of wanting to keel over but knowing I couldn’t do that until I’d found my friends.

  I looked around the room and spotted Lexie picking her way through the bustling soldiers like a lost child looking for her parents. “You, genius girl,” I called to her. “You got any bright ideas on how or where we’ll find them?”

  She picked her way over to me. “I’d probably consider places of importance to them, somewhere they would be most likely to want to visit.”

  “We’ve already tried Max’s old house at Bedford Square,” said Pearce. “Nothing there. Same for Gus’ apartment.”

  “But what if, for argument’s sake, N’yotsu had got the obsidian stone,” said Simmonds. “Where would he go then?”

  “As far away as possible,” I muttered. Then, louder: “Greenwich. That’s where it all happened, where he spat out the stone and got rid of Andras. He’d go to Greenwich.”

  I’d not been back to Greenwich since that final battle just over two years ago, being more than happy to just get reports from Albert about how they’d clea
ned up the place and started turning it from a battlefield back into a town and a collection of grand old buildings. As our coach wound its way through the clustered streets and the hills that stood over them, I kept thinking back to that day when we fought against Andras and his army, the boys travelling up by boat while I hitched a lift on the back of my friend Derek the golem. I wished I had him with me at that moment; I felt like I was fast running out of friends.

  The image of Max alone and helpless in a den of demons slammed into my mind again and I bit back the urge to shout in frustration. We were doing everything we could to find him, but that still felt like bugger-all to me.

  As we walked up the hill and squinted through the wind and rain towards the Royal Observatory I felt like I was stepping back in time. The Queen’s House had been spared the worst of the fighting and so had suffered little damage, standing proud behind us in its gardens. Groups of people gathered round the doors and on the lawns, as the palaces were now mainly used as houses for all those still homeless thanks to the demon invasion.

  I held my breath as the onion dome of the Observatory came into view over the trees: the squat, round building still partly demolished thanks to Andras’ portal and our own little fight with him. I looked round, remembering walking back down the hill with Gus, both of us still smarting from the fight with Andras, while Derek held Max’s broken body in his hands. That was when it had all been over, or so we’d thought.

  Once again a lump rose in my throat. Where was Max now? What were they doing to him?

  Pearce pointed at the roof of the building. “There’s someone up there,” he said.

  I squinted to see a figure dressed in a top hat and long coat, holding a cane in his right hand. “N’yotsu,” I breathed, my heart skipping a beat as I realised that maybe things weren’t as bad as we’d thought. If he was well enough to climb up on that roof then he was well enough to join the search for Max and Gus. We’d get the old gang back together and then we’d save the world all over again.