Black Mercury (The Drifting Isle Chronicles)

by Charlotte E. English

  Faulkner didn’t move. It was Matilda who stepped forward, surveying Clara critically. “You haven’t brought the ransom, I see.”

  Clara wished, fleetingly, that there had been time to collect the black mercury they’d found. In her hurry she hadn’t paused to think of it.

  Not that it mattered. They hadn’t managed to collect anywhere near enough of it.

  “Couldn’t… get hold of it,” she panted, winded from her frenzied drive and then the sprint afterwards. “It’s not that easy to get pure black mercury.”

  “It’s not that easy to get a new Caspar Goldstein either, is it?” Matilda smiled. “With your connections I’d have expected better.”

  Clara’s heart stopped. “Is he… have you… is he dead?”

  Faulkner put a staying hand on Matilda’s shoulder and said something in an unintelligible language, gesturing at the waiting gyro.

  Matilda sighed. “It would have been nice to get a little more. But…” she checked her watch. “It’s not quite midnight. Maybe this is but the vanguard, hm? It’s worth waiting a little longer.”

  “Yes!” Clara said, grasping at this straw. “Max is coming. He’ll bring the ransom.” She could only hope Max was coming: with the ransom, or with some kind of help.

  Matilda’s brows lifted. “Max Goldstein is on the way. Hear that, Wrede?”

  Faulkner shook his head, his grip tightening on Matilda’s shoulder.

  “Don’t be such a coward,” said Matilda coolly.

  Hildy came puffing and panting up to Clara just then, and the attention of the two kidnappers focused on her. Hildy dropped two dark objects onto the ground. “Barely half a gallon, but it’s something.” Clara stared, bemused, at the bottles. When had Hildy loaded those into the autocarriage? While she’d been talking to Min? It took a lot to dampen the wits of Hildegard Goldstein.

  Faulkner obviously considered this sufficient, for his efforts to drag Matilda away became more urgent.

  But Matilda pursed her lips. “If Max Goldstein comes, we could have almost double the amount we asked for. Caspar’s stolen goods, plus the ransom.”

  Faulkner raised some new objection, gesturing at Hildy’s bottles this time.

  “Good point,” Matilda said crossly, and jabbed a finger at Hildegard. “Can the machine carry two people plus a few gallons of black mercury?”

  Hildy’s eyes flashed with anger. “If you’re expecting a helpful answer to that question, you’re a fool,” she said coldly.

  Matilda shrugged. “Then we’ll chance it.” She took the two bottles and carried them over to the gyro to load it up. Faulkner kept a cold eye on Hildy and Clara.

  “Tell us where Caspar is,” Clara said when Matilda returned. “We’ve done everything we could to meet your demands.” She did her best to conceal her anxiety, but her traitorous voice shook anyway.

  Matilda gave her a cat-grin. “Not until the ransom’s been paid in full.”

  “A clue. Please,” Clara begged.

  Matilda’s eyes narrowed and she shook her head. Clara felt ready to despair, until she noticed that Faulkner was making strange gestures behind Matilda’s back, his gaze fixed on her. He acted as though he held something in his hands and was thrusting it towards the ground. She frowned, puzzled.

  “Stop it,” Matilda snapped, turning on Faulkner. She said something else in his own language, and his face tightened in anger.

  Clara stared. What had that been about? Faulkner had seemed as though he was trying to communicate something—to her. If Matilda hadn’t interrupted… she wanted to run at the woman and tear her smirking face off, but she controlled herself.

  “Dig,” said Til suddenly. It obviously cost him an effort to speak at all; when Clara looked at him she saw moonlight glinting faintly off the sweat pouring down the big man’s face.

  “Dig…” she repeated in a whisper. What did Til mean? Frantic, she replayed Faulkner’s gestures in her head.

  He’d mimed as though he was holding some kind of tool…. a spade.

  “You didn’t,” she whispered. “You mean literally dig?”

  Matilda’s gleeful smile told her that Til was right.

  Cas was buried somewhere. Buried. And they were in a cemetery! She turned sick with horror at the picture in her mind: Cas lying stretched in a grave, possibly already dead as Matilda threw earth down upon him… she swallowed hard against a strong desire to retch, clapping a hand over her mouth.

  She began to turn in circles, panicked, trying to think where to begin. “Where did you put him, you insane bitch of a—”

  “Clarry!” Hildy grabbed her arm and turned her to face away from Matilda and Faulkner. “There’s no time. Think.”

  Clara forced back the panic and thought. “Nobody would risk getting caught digging in a cemetery at night, so they’d pick the quietest part—this area. And a reasonable person would want to keep the various parts of an operation in the same place, so they can monitor everything successfully.”

  Hildy nodded. “Remember the note. Rafael Bauer’s grave is the meet point, which will be one of these near ones, I’m guessing. They’d put him somewhere close by—just out of sight but within hearing.”

  Clara nodded. “But it could be in any direction!”

  “Then we’ll hurry. This way first. Go!”

  Clara broke into a run, but she soon had to slow down again. The moonlight wasn’t strong, and she couldn’t check each grave closely enough if she moved past it too fast. Impatience chafed at her as she walked slowly down rows of graves, checking each one to her right as Hildy examined each one to the left. She was looking for signs of disturbance, she supposed, but they all looked the same, all unbroken earth and grass and creeping moss… they’d walked almost a full half-circle before Clara’s foot hit something that clanged and she stopped, frowning.

  The sound had been metallic. Why was there metal on the ground here? It took a moment for her to discern a specific shape in the darkness: a long handle of a pale hue suggesting wood, and at the end of it something dark.

  It was a spade.

  “Hildy!” she hissed, grabbing the other woman’s sleeve. She showed off the spade.

  Hildy instantly dropped to her knees in the mud to inspect the surface of the nearest grave. “It’s fresh earth,” she reported. “Dig! Quickly!”

  Clara began digging, feverishly hurling piles of earth out of the grave. Her hands were unused to this form of manual labour and they soon blistered, but she ignored them. How long had Cas been under there? His air could have run out long ago and they’d find nothing but a corpse… could she really hope to find him alive? Matilda’s cruel smile clearly said that she didn’t care whether he lived or not.

  Her spade thudded dully as it hit something hard. Scraping the soil aside, she saw a panel of wood.

  “Help me!” she cried, dropping the spade. She and Hildy dug with their hands, sweeping aside the loose earth as fast as they could to expose the box. “Cas!” she called frantically. “We’re coming!”

  ***

  Each time Cas took a new breath, he was surprised. The paralysis had worn off and his chest had lost that frightening constricted feeling, but he knew that his air wouldn’t last long underground. He was pathetically grateful for every successful inhalation.When would the last one come?

  He had no way to determine the passage of time, and it already felt like he’d been down here for days. That couldn’t be true, of course; if it had been days his air would have run out long ago. He’d be dead.

  Perhaps he was dead. There was no sound down here, no movement, no light; nothing but the strong smell of damp earth and wood filling his nostrils, and his own panicking thoughts turning circles in the silence of his mind. Maybe this was what death was like. He thought of the cemetery around him filled with decaying corpses, all dead without knowing it, waiting endlessly for someone to come to their aid. Horrific. A shudder wracked his body, setting his various aches alight with new pain: he welcomed this. Did corps
es feel? Perhaps he was still alive. He pinched himself to test this theory, but found it inconclusive. Had he actually done it? Maybe his mind had just persuaded itself that he had.

  He began to think about his life, and the things he loved about it. The list was disconcertingly short. The track? He didn’t care about that anymore. His autocarriage? He’d loved the machine but it was no longer his. It never would be again. His home was someone else’s now. He had no future laid out for him—at least not one that he cared to take up. His family? All he had was his father, and that amounted to very little.

  Well—there was also Hildy. She would be sorry; she’d always had a bit of a soft spot for him. But it wouldn’t impact her life very much. She’d go back to her engines and Til, and soon forget.

  He was shocked to realise that his death would leave scarcely a ripple in the world he’d so recently left. How could he have reached the age of thirty and made so little impact on the people around him? His fans, well… they would be sad for a little while, then they’d find some other autocarriage hero to worship. The only two who would be truly affected by his passing, he thought—he hoped—were Lukas and Clara.

  Clara. Would she ever know what had happened to him? Probably not. He would simply disappear, as others had from time to time. There might be a sensational news story. Clara would read every word of it, and probably blame herself. She’d take it as a personal insult, too. How many years had she spent looking after him, only for some bastard to carry him off?

  Come to think of it, why had she always cared for him so well? Because it was her job? Or because she cared? She was so damned hard to read, with her calm smile and her composed manner. He knew that more went on under that cool demeanour than he could see, but he couldn’t guess at what it was.

  His thoughts eventually faded to nothing, Clara’s face hovering in his mind’s eye. He fell into a half-sleep, some kind of trance, and time slipped past unnoticed. He began to dream: scenes from his life flashed through his thoughts in a tumbled mess, out of sequence. There was Clara, picking him up after he’d crashed his autocarriage. Had that only been a week ago? There she was again, bending to kiss Lukas. His best friend. He saw her sitting in the stands, watching as he prepared for another race. She wrangled with Min in his memory, arguing skilfully with the maddening bird, outwitting her in the end—as she always did.

  He didn’t know where the thudding came from, but he accepted that as the product of his muddled state of mind. It was oddly rhythmic, thud-pause-thud-pause-thud. It didn’t seem to mean anything, so he dismissed it.

  Then he thought he heard Clara’s voice, muffled as though she had something over her face. Or maybe she was on the other side of a door. What did this mean? She was calling his name. It was nice, in a way. She sounded anxious, as though she cared quite a lot.

  Then came a terrific scrabbling and scrambling and thumping that scared him half to death. He yelled, kicking instinctively, and when light flooded down on him he threw his arms over his face to shield himself from…

  …from what? Clara’s voice came again, louder this time, like someone had opened the door. Were those her hands on his arms, pulling them aside? Was that her touching his face? He blinked stupidly up into a sky that seemed drenched in light to his starved eyes, though he gradually realised that he was looking at a moonlit sky. Two faces stared down at him: Hildy’s and Clara’s.

  “This isn’t fair,” he croaked. “I’m dead. I should be spared this.”

  “You’re not dead,” Clara said, and a little sob crept into the middle of the sentence from somewhere. “This isn’t death, Cas.”

  “Come on, little man,” Hildy said gently, joining her efforts to Clara’s to pull him out. Little man. That was what she’d called him when he was a child.

  “Aunt Hildy?” he whispered.

  “Come on,” she repeated. “You’re all right. Out you come.”

  He allowed himself to be pulled to his knees as awareness started to creep back. He was kneeling on something wooden. It was enclosed, this space, wood on either side and lots of earth…

  He was kneeling in his own grave.

  He gave a great shout and leapt out, knocking Hildy and Clara aside as he did so. His brain was beginning to shake off its peculiar trance at last, and Cas remembered everything. The gyro. The black mercury. Matilda Nacht, Wrede Faulkner, the kidnapping…

  His thoughts were interrupted. Clara had stood at a distance for a moment, her dark eyes wide as she stared at him. Perhaps she had been assessing the damage, or something, because she threw her arms around him with enough violence to wind him slightly. She was shaking—or—no, it was him shaking. She was leaking a bit, though; he felt dampness on his neck where she’d put her face. Leaking from the eyes? Over him?

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get you out sooner,” she mumbled. “We didn’t know—we never imagined—”

  He’d wrapped his arms tightly around her, mostly a matter of instinct on finding himself embraced. But her words brought him back to business and he released her. “Clar. How long was I down there?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Did you bring the ransom?”

  She nodded, then shook her head. “Yes. Well, some of it.”

  He swore. “They got away with it?”

  “I don’t know—they were still here a little while ago—”

  “Show me,” Cas said tersely. His mind was still reeling from the horror of his premature burial and a huge part of him wanted to just go home. Forget the black mercury. Forget Faulkner and Nacht. Now that they’d got what they wanted they’d go away and leave him in peace.

  But going away meant going to Inselmond, with a supply of pure black mercury. He still didn’t know what they wanted it for, but he’d be willing to bet it wasn’t just about fuel.

  He’d also be willing to bet it meant very bad news for somebody.

  He couldn’t just let that go.

  “Show me!” he repeated more urgently, when Clara just stared at him in concern.

  “All right,” she said reluctantly. He followed her across the cemetery, and as they walked the grumble of an engine reached his ears. It sounded like an autocarriage, but not quite—the pitch was higher.

  “Oh, for—who gave them an autogyro?” he snapped.

  “They took it,” Hildy said quietly. “My gyro.”

  “We’re getting that back.”

  They rounded the trunk of a particularly old, gnarled and massive tree and he saw them to his right: a pair of shadows near the rear gate, and beyond them the bulk of a waiting gyro.

  And something else was happening. Lights winked into view to his left, more and more of them bobbing through the trees and the graves. A shout went up. “I see them!” somebody yelled, and several of the lights began to bob and weave as their bearers broke into a run.

  “What on earth…?” he whispered.

  Hildy was staring at the lights with an expression of mesmerised amazement. “He came after all.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  Cas blinked. “Those are police?”

  “Quite a few of them. Thank goodness.” Hildy’s eyes closed and she sagged. “I don’t think I could have gone much further.”

  But the police weren’t advancing fast enough. Nacht and Faulkner had seen the lights, too, and they were making a run for the gyro. They buckled themselves in and the machine began to creep forward, picking up speed.

  “They’re going to get away,” he growled. “I’m not having that.” Seeing his tormentors in Hildy’s stolen gyro… well, it was like setting a match to a heap of dry kindling. A tide of rage swept through him, and Cas didn’t even try to control it. The surge of anger and violent energy swept his tiredness and his aches away; grinning, he flexed his stiff hands and curled them into fists.

  Then he ran.

  He hurled himself in the direction of the rear gate at a dead sprint. He was fast, but the autogyro was faster—he couldn’t c
atch it—try harder—he threw himself down the street after it. Two more steps—one—he went into a dive, arms outstretched.

  He caught the tail of the gyro just as it began to rise. Could he ground the thing with his weight alone? He hung on, praying, as the gyro shuddered and wobbled—and kept rising.

  Crap.

  Matilda was in the rear seat, directly in front of him. She turned and swatted at him, but she was hampered by her seatbelts. While she sought to free herself, he had time to swing his legs up, hook his feet over the rear of the gyro, and haul himself inside.

  His wildly swinging progress sent the autogyro dipping from side to side, and he heard Faulkner swear as he fought with the controls. The man wasn’t exactly an experienced pilot, he could see that immediately. Good. That might help him.

  Cas stood gripping the tail of the gyro, trying not to look down as the beleaguered machine fought a weaving, laboured path steadily upwards. Matilda grabbed his foot; he kicked her in the head. She stood up unsteadily, readying herself for a strike that would send him sailing out of the gyro. Both his hands were occupied: if he let go of the gyro now, he’d fall. He kicked her in the leg, a move both awkward and futile; she merely smirked at him.

  He had less than a second to come with something. Hands busy, feet too encumbered to be effective…

  Huh. Hadn’t people kept begging him to use his head?

  He slammed his forehead into hers, throwing the full weight of his rage behind it. She reeled back, thrown off-balance, her eyes wide with shock.

  Cas immediately threw himself forward, using his weight to tip the autogyro into a dip. Facing him, her back towards the ground, already off-balance, Matilda couldn’t save herself in time. She fell out with a shriek, her hands flailing for a grip on the gyro—and missing.

  “Bye,” Cas growled as she disappeared into the night.

  The loss of her weight sent the gyro swinging back in the other direction, and Cas had to work to avoid falling out himself. When he felt stable once more, he turned his attention to Faulkner.

  The Inselmonder was obviously torn between maintaining his grip on the controls and dealing with Cas; the gyro dipped and swerved every time he glanced over his shoulder.