Black Mercury (The Drifting Isle Chronicles)

by Charlotte E. English

  Hans’s typical efficiency, damn him.

  Cas paused to think. His still drug-fogged brain drifted along at no hurried pace, and it took him a while to realise he was staring at a series of storage buildings set some way back from the lake. Their function was evident from their height, large doors, and lack of windows. He’d be willing to bet that Hans owned them; why else did he choose this particular part of the lake, other than its proximity to convenient facilities of his own?

  And why waste time and money hauling apparent waste products far off-site when you had buildings nearby to dump them in?

  Cas went back for Lukas.

  Luk heard him out in mild disbelief. “You want to break into one of Hans Diederich’s storage buildings?”

  “No,” Cas said patiently. “One of the doors is open.”

  Lukas arched a brow. “And?”

  “It can hardly be termed ‘breaking in’ when you just walk through an open door.”

  “Isn’t it guarded?”

  Cas shrugged. “There are a few people around, but nobody’s paying much attention to that building. I’d guess it’s full of things that aren’t terribly valuable. Like, I don’t know… waste products Hans is waiting to get rid of somewhere.”

  “It’s still private property.”

  “And I’ve known Hans since I was five. He’s practically an uncle.”

  Lukas rolled his eyes. “All right, I am helpless in the face of your sophistry. Let’s get it over with.” He paused, looking down at his crutches. “Um. What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Since you only came along in order to nanny me, you can be my nanny,” Cas said, beaming. “Stand somewhere convenient and make sure I don’t get into any trouble.”

  “I take that to mean I’m the lookout,” Luk translated.

  “Yep. Come on.”

  Cas led Lukas around the back, avoiding the exposure of the lake’s shore. This proved to be a fortunate precaution, for down the side of the building he’d been planning to search he found rows of stacked barrels.

  “What’s that smell,” Lukas said with extreme distaste.

  Cas inhaled, savouring the familiar acrid, coppery scent. “Black mercury.” It smelled repulsive, but since it was exactly what he was hoping to encounter he didn’t mind. A few of the barrels were fitted with spigots. Turning one, he was rewarded with a thin trickle of black mercury that poured sluggishly out onto the floor.

  “If the barrels aren’t actually inside the building, does it still count as private property?” Cas asked.

  “I suppose we don’t have to ‘pay a visit’ to Uncle Hans after all,” Luk replied sardonically. “What now?”

  “Take some out, and… um, go home?” Belatedly, Cas realised he had nothing in which to carry the black mercury, and he couldn’t exactly pick up an entire barrel and walk off with it. “I suppose I should have brought something to put it in.”

  Lukas sighed. “Yet another reason to take pain draughts in moderate quantities, don’t you think?”

  “You could’ve prompted me.”

  “I’d like to remind you that I had no idea why we were here until half an hour ago.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Never mind, wait here.” Cas circled around to the front of the building, hovering for a moment in the shadows. The doorway was clear; he ducked inside. He soon found what he was looking for: a large, lidded carton, the sort that was used to carry water for topping up steam engines. Hans had a few of them lined up near the door.

  Cas grabbed two, emptied out the water, and dashed back around to where Lukas waited with the barrels.

  “Help me hold this,” he said, fitting the first carton under the nearest spigot. Lukas balanced himself on one crutch and lent his free arm to help stabilise the carton while it filled up with black mercury. It took far too long, and Cas was beginning to get nervous by the time it was finally full. He slapped the lid on, quickly filled the second carton, and hefted them both. “Ouch, that’s heavy.”

  “You’ll have to manage it from here,” Lukas said without a trace of sympathy. “I need both my arms for this next bit.”

  “It’ll be worth it,” Cas said, his voice strained as he shifted his grip on the cartons. “Right, let’s go. Quick as we can.” He set off, his long legs eating up the distance to the train station.

  “Why should we be in a hurry to leave when we were only ‘visiting Uncle Hans’?” Lukas grumbled. Cas could hear the quick scrape of his crutches on the ground as his friend hobbled after him. “Could we slacken the pace just a bit?” he called.

  “Some nanny you are,” Cas retorted, but he slowed to wait for Lukas.

  “I’ll have the arms of a wrestler by the time my leg’s healed.”

  “That ought to impress Clara.” He hadn’t meant to sound sour, but the statement emerged all wrong.

  Lukas cast him an odd look, but he didn’t comment. “Come back to my house before you go home,” he suggested. “She’ll be happier if she can see for herself that you’re still in one piece.”

  Cas snorted. “All right, but only because your house is closer than mine.”

  “Struggling with that little weight?”

  “Of course not.”

  Chapter Six

  On the second morning after Hildegard’s flight to Inselmond, Clara set off for her mentor’s workshop wearing a dark cloak with the hood pulled up. She had to sneak out of her house to avoid being waylaid by a hopeful reporter; most of them had given up on her by now, wearied by her steadfast refusal to be interviewed, but a few particularly persistent types still popped up if she wasn’t careful.

  In the past, she had often wondered how Cas bore the media attention. To her, it looked an appalling experience, and she couldn’t understand why he appeared to love it so.

  Well, now that she’d experienced it herself, she still couldn’t.

  Only once had she been tempted to relax her strict, no-interview policy: when a couple of reporters from a paper for Shuchuni immigrants had come to her home. Unlike many of the others, these two had been polite; but they had greeted her with a Shuchuni bow and then spoken to her in their own language. Clara had had to admit that she barely spoke a word of Shuchuni; over the generations, the language had faded within her family. Mortified and uncomfortable, she had sent them away, too—for what kind of a representative of the Shuchuni community could she be, when she had never been there and didn’t speak the language? Someday, she often thought, she would rectify both of those failures. Someday, when she could afford it.

  Her care paid off: she made the journey unaccosted, and arrived at her mentor’s hidden workshop to be greeted by the smell of burning. She stopped in the middle of Hildy’s fake carriage warehouse, heart pounding, waiting for the crackling sounds, flaring lights and fierce heat of a rampant fire. But the building was cool and felt slightly damp, as usual, and after a moment the quiet murmur of voices reached her ears from the adjacent workshop.

  Soothed but still puzzled, she shrugged her left shoulder a few times, dislodging Min.

  “So rude,” the pigeon objected. “You could have just asked.”

  “Less arguing, more flying.” Clara flapped her hands at Min. “Shoo!”

  Min flew in a slow, lazy arc all the way around the building, just out of reach of Clara’s hands.

  “Min!” Clara yelled.

  Muttering something inaudible, Min soared up to her porthole near the ceiling and disappeared through it. A few moments later, Clara heard the promising scrape of a key in the lock of the hidden door. She hurried over and stepped through, almost running into Til in the process.

  “What’s happening?” she asked. “I smell smoke?”

  Til didn’t reply. He merely tilted his head in Hildy’s direction, then turned to lock the door behind Clara.

  Following the direction of his nod, Clara spotted Hildy sitting near the back of her workshop. Even at this distance, Clara could see she was tired. Her hair, never very neat, was half out of its
bindings, and her clothes were dusty and rumpled. She had a brazier going and was feeding bits of paper into it, her head propped listlessly on one hand. A small pile of papers rested nearby, ready to be incinerated in their turn.

  “Hild?” she asked, sitting down next to her mentor. “What’s happened?”

  “A few things,” Hildy said without looking up.

  “What are you doing?”

  No reply.

  Clara peered into her face, alarmed by the dark rings under Hildegard’s eyes and her drawn, fraught expression. “You’ve been here all night, haven’t you?”

  “Mm.”

  “And most of yesterday too, I’d wager.”

  Silence.

  “Those reporters are certainly determined,” Clara said, venturing a smile. “I can’t even go home at the moment. I’ve had to hide at Luk’s house just to get some peace. Such as it is; he’s been driving me crazy over what he calls my ‘secret double life.’”

  Clara was hoping that conversation would prompt some form of response from Hildy, but the older woman showed no sign of having heard. It was like her inventing trances, only the expression in her eyes suggested despair rather than incipient genius.

  Til approached and took a seat in silence. Clara cast him a pleading look.

  “She wasn’t here for the whole day yesterday,” he said. “She went out, once. To Max’s office.”

  Clara stared in astonishment. “Why?”

  Til produced a handful of seed from somewhere and trickled it over the table for Min, distracting her very neatly from her attempts to nibble, kick or scratch Hildy into paying attention to her. “Was a government summons.”

  “Oh…” That news didn’t surprise her entirely. That the government of Eisenstadt would take an interest was indubitable, though she hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. “It wasn’t good news?”

  “Good on the face of it. Higher-ups from the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Justice, and others. Inselmond must be investigated, they said, but the first expeditions ‘must be conducted safely, responsibly and in an organised fashion’. Which means, by them. There are plans to launch an official exploratory expedition as soon as possible, and of course they’ll need autogyros.” Til leaned back in his chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “They ‘asked’ her to hand over all details and patents for the autogyro technology to the government, and forbade her from sharing those details with anyone else. She countered by offering them the secret of the black mercury if they’d leave her in control of the machine. It was cleverly done, and they did agree—though the prohibition on sharing the schematics remains in place.”

  Frowning, Clara considered all of that. It wouldn’t have hurt Hildy to be restricted from giving out the schematics for her autogyro—she had no intention of doing that anyway. And she’d known that the black mercury couldn’t remain her secret for long, not after her flight to Inselmond had been witnessed.

  “So where’s the problem?” Clara prompted.

  “Hildy is to build all the autogyros for this upcoming government expedition. She’ll be provided with everything she could possibly need, and the remuneration offered is generous.”

  “But?”

  “Max,” Hildy said. “But Max.”

  “The contract was actually awarded to Goldstein Industries,” Til said. “It’s under Max’s direction as head of the company.”

  Which meant that all funds and materials provided by the government would go to Max, and he would be responsible for paying Hildy and all other engineers involved in the project.

  For all her hopes, Hildy wouldn’t be freed by the success of her autogyro. She was back where she’d always been: working for her brother, her time and funds arranged and dictated by him. Max wouldn’t be ungenerous, but it was freedom Hildy wanted, and that continued to evade her.

  “I see,” she said softly. “But, Hildy, why did you agree to that?”

  Hildy let out a long sigh. “Because I couldn’t have a flaming row with my brother over it in the presence of four government officials.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be unprofessional in the extreme,” Hildy snapped. “There’s more at stake here than my future. If the Goldsteins appear to the government like a group of squabbling children, how will that affect the family?”

  Clara didn’t doubt what she said: Hildy didn’t have it in her to be deliberately destructive of her brother’s work, whatever she thought about her part in it. But she wasn’t being entirely honest either. She had more than enough courage to get into a rickety, rapidly knocked-together flying machine and soar all the way to Inselmond with barely a second thought, but when it came to facing down her brother… old habits were the hardest to kill.

  Reaching out slowly, expecting to be stopped, Clara took a few of the papers Hildy was destroying and glanced through them. Some of them were pages of notes on the gyro, taken from her notebooks. Others were schematics, records of test flights…

  “Why burn these?”

  “It’s all I could think to do,” Hildy said. “Nobody can replace me on this when the details are all in my head.”

  “Couldn’t you just leave them hidden here?”

  “Apparently that isn’t safe either.”

  Clara blinked. “What? Why?”

  Hildy closed her eyes briefly. “Never mind. I need to get some sleep. I’ve got to have my picture taken later.”

  “You’ve had your picture taken plenty these last few days, Hild.”

  “I know, but these are official pictures, so I need to look… less wild. It’s for an announcement about the deal with Goldstein Industries and the forthcoming expedition to Inselmond.” Her lips quirked. “That’s to pacify everyone after the announcement that all further excursions to the Drifting Isle are forbidden until further notice. Max thought it would be nice to include some pictures of me with the gyro.”

  “Are you going home?”

  “Not safe. Til says it’s still swarming with reporters and other types. I’ll sleep here.” She looked squarely at Clara for the first time that day. “Clarry, I have to apologise to you for all this. I should have realised that we’d be spotted. I never meant to throw you to the media.”

  Clara patted her arm. “I know. It’s all right. They’ll lose interest in me soon. But…” she hesitated. “There is one thing I’m worried about. Did Max mention me?”

  Hildy’s face acquired a guilty expression. “Yes, I’m afraid he did.”

  A note of dread coiled in Clara’s stomach. “Was he angry?”

  “Worse: he was pleased. He thinks you should be part of the team building the autogyros for the government.”

  Clara was silent. This news would please her parents, even if it wasn’t exactly what they’d had in mind for her. A position as an engineer with Goldstein Industries would be secure and well-paid. But it would also be… claustrophobic.

  “Tell him to sod off,” Min interjected. Til had given her a lot of grain, plenty to keep her quiet for a few minutes. Now she lay replete, wings tucked up, leaning against Hildy’s arm.

  “That’s true, you can refuse,” Hildy said quickly.

  “The way you did?”

  That drew a wince from her mentor, and Clara instantly felt guilty. “I’m sorry. I’ll have to think about it.” Maybe she could use it somehow, without getting herself lastingly entangled.

  The terrifying thing about Max wasn’t that he blustered or threatened. On the contrary, he was entirely too reasonable. If he decided that something was in someone’s best interests, he could usually persuade them of it—and leave them with the impression that they were doing something heroic for the company and for Eisenstadt, to boot. Clara didn’t want it to come down to a debate with Max.

  There was silence among them for a few minutes. Even Min said nothing, apparently content to doze off her extremely generous luncheon. But Clara’s mind was busy, thinking her way through everything that had been said…

&n
bsp; “Hildy,” she said suddenly. “What had you been hoping would happen?”

  “You’ve seen the level of interest in the gyro,” Hild said promptly. “It’s not just reporters that have been swarming around my house (and yours) and laying siege to Max’s offices. I’ve had a lot of enquiries from people wanting gyros of their own. A lot.” She frowned. “With all that media attention, I was hoping for… some new opportunity. If I could get enough money to set up my own company, equip a proper manufactory…” Her voice trailed off. “Oh well. Max won’t ever let me do that. I might be competing with Goldstein Industries.”

  “What did they say, precisely? You can’t give out the schematics?”

  “I can’t share details of the technology that might allow others to build and run gyros of their own. And I must build autogyros exclusively for the government until further notice.’

  Clara grinned. “But the contract was binding to Goldstein Industries?”

  Hildy blinked at her.

  “So Goldstein Industries must build autogyros exclusively for the government, but you aren’t Goldstein Industries. You aren’t even officially employed by them. Technically, you’re a freelance contractor.”

  Til gave a shout of laughter. “That’s real cunning, Clarry!”

  Hildy began to look excited, but that quickly faded. “That’s a loophole that’s easily closed. They’d shut me down as soon as I began.”

  “They would if they knew about it. You’ve got a handy concealed workshop at your disposal, however.”

  “And the prohibition on flights to Inselmond?”

  Clara shrugged. “Who says your customers are going to the Drifting Isle?”

  A grin crossed Hildy’s face and she began to laugh. “I think you’ve some Goldstein in you after all, Clarry. That’s a beautiful piece of deviousness.”

  That observation made Clara feel oddly uncomfortable, and her answering smile was weak. It faded altogether when she remembered a further problem. “Oh, but the black mercury! I can’t imagine that’s still lying around?”

  “Commandeered,” Hildy confirmed. “Hans’s source is under police guard as of this morning, and I believe they’ve taken every bit that he’d previously dredged up. But fortunately, I was able to secure a fairly large test supply a few days ago, which I have officially used up already.”