Black Mercury (The Drifting Isle Chronicles)

by Charlotte E. English

  Lukas spoke up. “What about Geiger?”

  Hildy blinked at him. “Albert Geiger? Uninvolved. He’s been either at home or at the track for the past three days, with plenty of witnesses to the fact.”

  Lukas shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  “So we’re stymied there?” Clara prompted.

  Hildy nodded. “I think so. How much mercury have you found?”

  “Still only the half-gallon.”

  “Right.” Hildy sat up. “Max is still inflexible. He swears he can’t get hold of any more even if he wanted to, which might even be the truth.”

  “Something Max can’t get?” Clara said in disbelief. “Surely not.”

  “I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that the mercury’s in high demand. The Ministry’s got it locked away somewhere even I don’t know about, and I doubt Max does either. They won’t release any to me—not until the gyros are all built, which will take at least another two or three weeks yet. And with news of Cas’s kidnapping and the demands made, security’s tighter than ever. Max may be powerful, but he isn’t omnipotent.”

  “The police aren’t willing to consider paying the ransom?”

  “They won’t discuss it yet—pursuing all other avenues, etc. Perhaps they’ll consider it if we haven’t made any progress by tonight. But that’s too late for me.” She looked at Clara very seriously. “Do you think this message is legitimate?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s really from Cas?”

  “Yes, I think it really is.”

  “Right, then we’re following it up. Do either of you know what kind of help he’s looking for?”

  Clara and Lukas both shook their heads.

  “In that case…” Hildy stood up. “I need to talk to Albert.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It didn’t matter how he arranged them: the strings dug into Cas’s shoulders and arms, biting into his flesh even through the fabric of his shirt. They hurt.

  He scowled down at the four full flagons that were strung on a makeshift net over his shoulders. In theory, the net made it easier for him to carry them. Actually, the net just made it possible for him to carry them. This left Matilda’s hands free, which she insisted was necessary in case she had to defend them from Faulkner.

  Maybe she was right, but Cas felt that making a pack donkey of him was more for her amusement than anything else.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take one of these?” he called to her. “I really don’t mind.”

  Matilda ignored him, again. She’d been doing that more and more over the course of the day, ever since his failure to produce another bottle at the track. He’d found the spot easily enough, but where there had been a bottle before, he’d found only an empty hole.

  Matilda had not been pleased.

  “It makes perfect sense!” he’d protested. “This is where I crashed. Clara and Hildy were here when it happened; of course it’s the first place they’d look.”

  Matilda had merely lifted her brows at him, her blue eyes hard. For a split second, he’d wished she’d put the mask back on instead.

  “Who searched your house?” she’d said suddenly.

  Cas’s mouth had dropped open in surprise. “I thought that was you.”

  “It wasn’t me; it wasn’t Faulkner. Who searched your house? Did they raid this hiding place too?”

  “No! I mean, I don’t know who it was but they couldn’t have known about this place. Only Clara could’ve known that.”

  Matilda’s expression turned murderous. “I hope this was your friends’ work,” she spat, “because if we find too many more of your hiding places empty, you and I will have to renegotiate our agreement.”

  Thus had followed the most alarming afternoon of his entire life. When a second bottle had turned up missing later on, he’d fully expected Matilda to just kill him. He’d gone through the hours in a state of extreme apprehension, cheerfully wishing the most impenetrable stupidity on his dearest friends. How far had they got with the search? If they’d found too many, their efforts to save him might end up killing him instead.

  If only he’d thought to include something about that in the message! The message that might not arrive, he reminded himself. He had no guarantees. Relying on it would be a mistake.

  It didn’t help that he’d had to draw out the search for as long as possible, just in case the message did get through. His instincts were to dash about the city, collecting up at least four of his bottles before his friends could get to them first. Instead he’d had to stall Matilda at every opportunity, or he would be forced to take her to Hildy’s workshop far too soon. Why had he said dusk? It had been the first idea that had occurred to his panicking mind, and he hadn’t had time to consider.

  Obviously he didn’t think well under pressure.

  As a result, the afternoon had been at least three weeks long and Cas was exhausted. But now they had a gallon of black mercury for her, and the sun was finally sinking towards the horizon. Time, Cas thought, to move on to Hildy’s workshop.

  Only Matilda had changed the plan. A crow had come winging in ten minutes earlier, carrying a note. She’d held some sort of consultation with it, none of which Cas could hear, though her irritation was obvious. Then the crow had flown away again, and Matilda had thrust the note into a pocket and approached him.

  “Follow me,” was all she had said, and he had been left with no choice but to do so. She had spent the past ten minutes striding some fifteen paces ahead of him, apparently absorbed in her own thoughts and oblivious to his doings. More than once he’d thought of making a run for it, but he knew that several more crows watched his back, ready to raise the alarm should he do anything suspicious; and besides, Matilda was a Shadow. She might look distracted, but he’d already learned that this didn’t mean much with her.

  So he stumbled along, hating the ridiculous contraption she’d saddled him with, constantly trying to adjust the strings so they didn’t cut into his flesh.

  And wherever Matilda might be taking him remained a mystery.

  “You could tell me where we’re going,” he called. “It might even help, I mean, I might know a quicker way to get there.”

  A certain tension in Matilda’s shoulders proved she’d heard him, but she didn’t respond, nor did she slow down. Cas sighed and stumbled on. They’d left the nicer parts of the city behind; now they were making their way through one of the more run-down areas that he usually avoided. The darkening streets were quiet and they passed few people.

  Darkness had fallen completely by the time Matilda finally slowed, and stopped. Cas came to a halt too with a feeling of relief; they would be late getting to Hildy’s workshop, but not too late. Hopefully his friends would still be there when he arrived—supposing they had got his message and gone there in the first place.

  Cas was rapidly learning how much he hated uncertainty.

  “So, time to go after the gyro?” he asked hopefully.

  Matilda didn’t answer. She was busy forcing open the lock on a pair of tall and unpromisingly rusty iron gates that led away from the street into… Cas peered through.

  Into a cemetery.

  A cemetery.

  “Um,” he said nervously. “What’s this about?”

  Matilda pushed open the gates, ignoring the squeal the decaying hinges made, and shoved him through. “Just keep moving.”

  Cas heard the harsh laughter of crows wheeling overhead. For the first time, he began to wonder whether his programme of apparently passive acceptance had been wise after all. He’d assumed he’d have some advantages at his disposal when they arrived at the workshop: his friends for a start, and whatever help they could bring with them (police perhaps?). Failing that, he’d at least have the advantage of lots of Hild’s inventions close to hand—machines he was probably much more familiar with than Matilda was.

  Ending up at a cemetery long after dusk had not been part of his plan.

  “I’m not going an
y further until you tell me what’s going on.” Cas planted himself on the pavement, hefted the bottles, and tried to look intimidating.

  Matilda pulled out her coilgun and aimed it at his heart.

  So much for that.

  “Fine,” he sighed. “Where am I going?”

  “Just walk,” she snapped, falling in behind him.

  Cas walked, his thoughts bitter. How had he, of all people, ended up in this situation? When things like this happened in stories, they happened to people who knew how to deal with them. He ought to be somebody with great strength and brilliant fighting skills; he would have some dramatic and exciting struggles with the Shadow, ultimately winning a heroic victory. Later, someone would make a stage play out of it.

  Or maybe he could have been someone of intelligence and cunning, outwitting Matilda and Faulkner’s wiliest plans with ease, quipping wittily all the way.

  Those were the sorts of heroes people wanted to read about in their weekly newspapers, or see upon the stage. He was just a driver.

  He was probably about to become a dead driver.

  Walking past rows of silent graves, Cas began to panic. He’d need to get rid of the bottles if he wanted to run; they were awkward and heavy and they weighed him down. But Matilda had strung the net in such a way as to make it impossible for him to easily shrug it off (all part of her wily plan, that, obviously). It would take him a minute or two to figure out how to rid himself of it, and he could hardly expect to do that without attracting her notice. He couldn’t hear her soft tread behind him but he could feel that damned coilgun still pointed at his heart. And the graveyard was absolutely teeming with crows.

  That made running away impossible. Could he overpower her? The only way he could do that was by securing some kind of advantage for himself; his superior height and weight had already proved useless against her far superior ability to kick people in the face. Could he get the gun off her? It would have to be done fast enough to take her by surprise, and there again he was hampered by the net.

  Panic, panic. He tried to school himself to calmness as Matilda barked directions from behind him. Helplessly, he followed. They reached one of the oldest parts of the graveyard; the stones around him were crumbling with age, some of them faded to illegibility. Crows sat atop several of them, jeering at him as he passed.

  “Looks heavy, mate!” cackled one.

  “Got yerself in a fix, eh?” shrieked another.

  Cas tried to ignore them, fixing his thoughts on the problem of escape. Could he wait until Matilda liberated him from the net, then take her by surprise somehow? No; she’d be ready for that. Could he distract her with something? Maybe, but with what?

  “Stop,” Matilda suddenly called.

  Cas stopped. He’d arrived at the foot of a crumbling gravestone, old but not as badly eroded as some of the others around him. Moonlight shone weakly on the inscription: he could just make out the beginning of a name: Alfred… something.

  Lying beside the grave was a spade.

  “Start digging,” Matilda said, drawing level with him.

  Cas blinked at her. “What?”

  “Dig,” she repeated.

  “Dig? You want me to dig up someone’s grave?”

  Her silence was answer enough.

  “This has got to be a joke,” Cas spluttered.

  “Get on with it.”

  Cas looked around. As far as he could tell, they were alone except for the crows.

  “No,” he said firmly.

  She blinked.

  “I mean, what are you going to do if I say no? Shoot me? I can’t dig up anybody’s bones if I’m dead or injured, can I? You’d have to do it yourself.”

  “I don’t actually need you at this point,” Matilda said coldly. “I could kill you and dig the grave myself, but I’d rather you did it. Consider it a reprieve.”

  Cas shrugged. “Then why haven’t you shot me already? Why drag me all the way out here? You still need me, or you don’t get your gyro.”

  Her only response to that was a chilling smile, and his stomach sank. She didn’t need him anymore? Why would she say that, given the deal they’d made? Either she didn’t need the autogyro after all, or she already knew where to find it. This whole thing had been a way to force him to co-operate over the black mercury.

  Probably she hadn’t had a fight with Faulkner at all. That conversation in the truck? He realised with a sinking feeling that it had been staged, purely for his benefit: it couldn’t have been a real conversation between them, because if it had, he wouldn’t have understood a word of it on either side. Matilda had spoken Cas’s own tongue back to Faulkner—so that Cas would understand. Her tale of double-crossing Faulkner had been a complete lie through and through. They’d cooked this up between them, and Cas had thought himself so clever with his plans to turn it to his own advantage.

  In actual fact, he’d fallen for it like an idiot. He’d let her lead him around by the nose all day, waiting for his big chance that wasn’t coming.

  “Oh, for…” he muttered. “I know I’m crap at this intrigue stuff, but do you have to keep rubbing my face in it?!”

  She smiled humourlessly. “Ready to start digging?”

  “No!” he yelled. “So you don’t need me anymore; fine. Shoot me. I’m not going to keep making this easy for you.” He waited, braced for the shot.

  Instead, Matilda withdrew the weapon. She didn’t say anything, but he sensed that he’d irritated her. She messed about with the coilgun for a minute, doing something he couldn’t see. Then she levelled it at him again.

  She pulled the trigger.

  A searing pain shot through Cas’s ear and he shrieked. “What was that?” he bellowed. “You shot me through the ear? My ear!” He felt warm blood pour down onto his neck. Lifting a hand to check the damage, he found a hole in the upper part of his ear, just under the curve. A needle had passed straight through.

  “Now, there was no venom in that one,” she said. “You won’t die, or pass out. But it does hurt, doesn’t it?” She moved the gun over to level it at his other ear. “How do you feel about digging now?”

  Cas swore, and grabbed the spade. He had no doubt she’d cheerfully shoot the other ear too; then she’d start on any other body parts that could take an injury without either killing him or interfering too much with his ability to dig.

  He wasn’t really up for that.

  “Dig faster,” she said, when he rather desultorily stuck the spade into the earth.

  At last, Cas’s bitterness overwhelmed his dejection and turned to anger. Rage shot through him, so intense that he began to shake with it.

  He shifted his grip on the spade, gripping it like a weapon.

  “Shut up,” he growled. “You’ve won: we both get it. Any more taunts from you, though, and I’ll be delighted to beat your charming head in with this tool you’ve kindly provided. No doubt you’ll shoot me a few times as I do it, and maybe you’ll hit something vital and I’ll die before you do.” He paused to grin, knowing it wasn’t a pleasant one. “But then again, maybe not.”

  He received no response to that; he hadn’t expected to. But the way she tightened her grip on the coilgun told him he’d got through to her.

  “Great!” he said with a big, false smile. “I’ll just carry on digging, shall I? Why don’t you pull up a chair, have a picnic, make yourself comfortable?”

  He turned back to the earth, doing his best to ignore her. He was still shaking with fury, his heart pounding, his thoughts full of violence. He ached to throw himself at her and do just what he’d promised: beat her senseless, and then beat her some more. She’d earned it.

  But she actually would shoot him, and while the needles she’d loaded didn’t have venom, they were still more than enough to kill him if she shot him somewhere important. And for all her words, he didn’t believe she really wanted to kill him yet; she had another use for him.

  As long as that was the case, he had a chance to survive—if he coul
d only keep hold of himself and not do anything stupid and reckless. He had to calm down. He threw himself into the digging, channelling the energy of his anger into that instead. Generous measures of sun and rain over the course of the spring had left the earth fairly soft, and the hole soon deepened under his efforts.

  To his disgust, he began to find human bones in the soil.

  “That will do,” Matilda said a small eternity later. He’d been a long way out of it while he’d been digging; some kind of trance had come over him as he’d got into the rhythm of digging and throwing aside the dirt. He had little idea how much time had passed. Standing back from the grave, he was surprised to find he’d dug quite a deep hole.

  He also noticed something else. At some point, Matilda had produced a long wooden box. She’d had it hidden somewhere behind the other stones, he supposed; he certainly hadn’t noticed it before. It was quite long, and just wide enough to accommodate one human body.

  He looked up to find that Matilda had aimed the gun at his heart again.

  “Well?” he snapped. “What’s next? Don’t tell me you brought that gift for me.” His anger had mostly dissipated; what remained was a simmering resentment that energised rather than hampered him. He didn’t try to dampen that; it might help him later.

  “That depends on your friends,” Matilda said. Before he could reply, she pulled the trigger and shot him.

  Agony exploded in his torso, rapidly spreading to every part of his body. His muscles seized up all at once, and within seconds he was paralysed from head to toe; he couldn’t move, couldn’t even throw out a hand to stop himself as he fell. He could only watch in horror as Matilda stripped the bottles off him, then kicked him into the coffin. She allowed the momentum of his fall to help her tip the box into the hole he’d dug.

  “In a little while,” she said, staring down at him, “somebody ought to turn up here looking for you. If we’re lucky, they’ll have all or part of your ransom with them. Even if they don’t, a gallon of pure black mercury isn’t a bad payoff.