by Kin Law
Almost immediately, they saw Nessie had not set down in a region of wilderness. The valley showed heavy, old tracks and soot from wheeled engines and steam tractors. The wilderness had simply grown over the old activity.
In a moment, there rose around them the straight, planned grids of man’s residences in square pits on both sides of the road.
There were signs of older structures, in the worked-over ground, but these had long been dug out and built over. As they approached La Maere, these buildings rose in gray, deserted obelisks.
Rosa Marija began to yell, and this time nobody tried to stop her.
“According to the map,” Elric Blair said, inspecting Prissy Jack’s careful handwriting. The apprentice helmsman understandably preferred the run of the ship to trekking through wolf-infested mountains into certain danger.
“This is a small worker’s village for the Salina Praid, a salt mine prized since the Roman times. The majority of the village is below ground.”
“Let me guess… they found aeon stones,” Albion Clemens said, pointing towards an abandoned lorry lying to the side of the road, its wheels rusted, its tires rotted off. The lorry was specially equipped with the isolating cages of aeon working, to prevent the stones from floating off when exposed to steam equipment. Curiously, natural steam did little to aeon stones, but engines made them shoot off into the sky.
“Same old story,” Blair agreed. “Aeon stone dust means easy wealth, and so the place shifted entirely over to mining them. After the place was dry, it was no longer profitable to hire back the old salt workers or rework the equipment.”
“Blood suckers,” Hargreaves said coldly, easily critical of foreigners.
They continued forward, into the shadow of La Maere. Rosa’s profanity-strewn calls echoed off the street ahead, where industrial arclights had been strung in a barely visible glow. Nessie Drake had parked the ship on top of three buildings. Everything surrounding it was overgrown; from the sky, it would have been hard to see her. From below, the massive airship hovered like a monstrous bat.
“If it were me, I would have stationed snipers there… there… and there,” Hargreaves remarked.
“She knows we’re here. Maybe she doesn’t have enough crew to host us,” Albion said. He also began to yell, only for Captain Sam, instead.
“If the fare is lead-flavored, I would rather our host be a little tardy,” Blair agreed.
For a moment, it seemed as if Nessie Drake was not in residence. Albion expected a hiss of steam, maybe, or some fanciful piston action from a section of umber shadow directly above them. Perhaps a slew of the stalactites forming the keel of the ship would drop down to imposingly receive them. Instead, there came a gravelly voice somewhere to the left.
“The Countess will see you now,” it said, directing their attention to a tall man in a stovepipe hat. His suit was immaculate, but there was a subtle effect to the fabric, making it gray at the edges. Combined with the pinstripes and his sunken cheeks, the man looked like a walking corpse. He sidestepped between two buildings and vanished.
“Gothic wanker,” Hargreaves pronounced again, falling into step behind Rosa as the group followed the gaunt gentleman.
Inside the alley, there seemed no sign of their host, until their eyes adjusted to the gloom. Then, it was readily apparent there was a gaping manhole not two inches from Hargreaves’ boot.
“Of course! What else would it be?” The Inspector griped aloud once more. “Perhaps there is even a cemetery down there. How about a haunted cathedral, hmm? Sacrificial altars? An ossuary!”
Rosa followed the stovepipe man silently, now her objective of being noticed had been achieved. Blair took a moment while she climbed into the dank hole.
“What do you have against Goths?” Elric Blair asked, using news nomenclature.
The Goths were inclined towards the morbid styling of a bygone era, under a different Victoria.
In England, Blair’s prowling grounds, the better educated ones would stage elaborate recreations of the aspects they found most bone-chilling: lying six feet under in safety tombs, engaging in conversation with passers-by through a narrow copper breathing tube. Other, less devoted folks simply used the style as an excuse for hosting exclusive parties, complete with blood fountains and black drapes.
Halfway into the hole, Albion stopped to chime in. “Didn’t you hear the story? Nessie’s a Gothic revivalist. You ought to have expected this.”
“But this… this is bollocks! How do you expect me to take someone seriously who dresses like a Gorey illustration?” Hargreaves protested. Albion looked at her quizzically. Then he climbed out of the hole.
“I am, at this moment, wearing a buccaneer coat, bandanna, yellowed linen shirt, and a damn cutlass. I would not look out of place climbing a mast and spitting onto the head of Edward Teach. Do you take me seriously?”
“Not a jot,” Hargreaves answered with a straight face.
“Fair enough. At least you’re consistent,” Clemens yielded. “Maybe you were bullied by fanged freshmen in secondary. Who knows?”
“If you must know…” Hargreaves started, and thought better of it. She put her heels onto the ladder and started to climb down. With her eyes level to the street, she stopped, and finished. “I was one in secondary.” Then she slid the rest of the way down, with a little ‘ow!’ as she hit the floor below.
“Ah,” Blair remarked, peering into the hole. “I must admit, the thought of the Inspector in black fishnets and corset is an attractive prospect.”
Albion was laughing too hard to answer.
Inside the manhole, the group reconvened to discover they were not in some disgusting sewer. Instead of a filthy river of slime, the passage they entered was of clean dirt, stretching absolutely straight as far as they cared to see. The tunnel had been lined with flameless arclight only for a few lengths. Past it, the passage marched on into abysmal darkness.
“There,” Rosa said shortly, and continued her march down the passageway. Despite the amount of metal she carried, her footsteps made very little sound.
“Miss Marija seems to be unusually serious,” Blair remarked. “Nessie Drake must be very important to her.”
“You seem bloody chuffed,” Hargreaves said to Clemens, who had taken to snorting every time he looked at the Inspector.
“I keep seeing that blonde mop done up in black ribbons,” Albion answered, extracting a huff and a blush. “Blair, what Rosa didn’t say was how old they started. Nessie’s been her on-and-off partner since they were six. They grew up on the streets, city-hopping from place to place.”
“Orphans?”
“Not sure. In any case, Nessie Drake is the closest thing to family she’s got.”
Meanwhile, the group reached a turn in the tunnel, where the passage opened onto a vast chamber. The roof was sloped, like a vaulted church, and the walls had been cut perfectly straight.
A broken cross lay in a corner, just big enough to nail a man.
“This is too good. Nessie couldn’t have built all this herself,” Albion said, and then began to play with the acoustics in the massive chamber.
“You are a child,” Inspector Hargreaves huffed. Clemens simply hooted in reply. They were cut off by a high, piercing voice, quiet but perfectly audible in this space.
“No, of course we did not. The living quarters are nearly unchanged from the aeon miners’, except for my chamber, of course. The Szekler Hungarians built most of this starting in 1562, under special provision, and before that it was the Bulgars and Avars, who laid their tunnels on top of the original Roman excavation. Very likely the salt of Transylvania lay fallow the fields of Gaul…. Fitting, no? The Lovelorn was originally a French vessel.”
“Nessie!” Rosa Marija cried, turning.
Atop a sort of stone dais, Nessie Drake sat on a throne of ruin. Whether the Szekler had built it, or if it was some special apparatus for the processing of aeon stones, they could not guess. Rust and neglect had obscured its original
purpose. The mass of timber beams and two-foot steel nails reared out of the ground and seemed to flower into the ceiling far above, stretching out its limbs like a nightmarish, blasphemous crucifix.
In the thick of it, a pile of furs had been laid on an arrangement of beams, where Nessie Drake sat, stiff backed, arms laid out straight on two rests. Her dress was suitably Gothic, in layers of matte and filigree black, picked out with infinitesimally small rubies and garnets.
Her face was deathly pale, her eyes and mouth extended into a skeletal grin with some sort of ashen makeup. Her hair was done up to match a halo of ribbed collar, worked in a finger-prickling pattern of lilies.
“Well, Countess, you’ve done well for yourself, considering you’ve been warring with Lovelace for half a decade,” Albion commented.
“Thank you, Captain,” answered Nessie gracefully.
She gestured with fingers tipped in viciously sharp, silver talons. Crow-like, real silver, Albion noted, from the shine. In a moment, the stovepipe gentleman reappeared with a tray of crystal goblets, filled with some crimson liquid.
“Wine,” Nessie explained, and everybody but Albion breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nessie, what the blazing fuck?” Rosa Marija interrupted, finally exhausting her store of patience. “Picking a fight with someone who regularly takes down terrorists for the German GSG?”
“I am perfectly safe in this underground lair. Lovelace is used to aerial raids, not a prolonged subterranean siege.”
“Your back is to the wall and you know it.”
“Rose Cottage, please,” Nessie scoffed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know I hate that name.”
“You’ve killed enough people to deserve it.”
There was silence as the two women fumed at each other, one regal and dark, the other a simmering pot of coffee curves. Drake’s crew, if those were the sharp-suited trio of men in the room with them, seemed ill at ease.
Then, Rosa stalked forward, up to the throne, in even, brisk steps. Nessie drew back, stiffening further.
“Nessie,” Rosa said with tenderness. “I’m not that person anymore.”
Then she reared back and slapped Nessie Drake across her bony mouth, cursing as the sharp chin cut across her palm.
“Hey!”
“Just a minute!”
“Countess!”
Practically everyone in the room was shouting, but Rosa had struck too fast and without warning. The situation was suddenly dire.
Nessie’s crew began to converge, Albion’s misfits were drawing on them, somewhere a naked man ran across the cavern in wet slaps of bare feet.
“Stop!” Nessie Drake commanded, cutting everyone off. Her eyes were bared large, and her mouth sensually glittered with a single drop of blood, but Albion could see plainly the emotion hidden behind all the makeup. The face tilting up at Rosa certainly bore a dram of hatred, yes, but also guilt, and warmth. At that moment, for the two very different women on the dais were mirrors of each other.
Suddenly Nessie and Rosa were embracing, the years visibly melting off until the tension was nonexistent.
“I’ve missed you, you gorgeous girl,” Rosa Marija replied. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“I told you, sister, never,” Nessie answered.
Rosa sighed, seeming to deflate.
Everybody stood around, looking at anything but the dais, except for some reason Hargreaves, who was hiding her face.
Later, Nessie Drake arranged for rooms in her subterranean kingdom for the whole crew, and for the Huckleberry to park below the winged bulk of La Maere. There were plenty of Nessie’s crew to help. Some sharp-suited crewman was always nearby lugging around heavy gun barrels to mount in the abandoned buildings. Rosa Marija disappeared into Nessie’s quarters for two hours, during which a lovely dinner of whole roast suckling pig, borscht and potatoes was served to go with everyone’s wine.
In the evening, everyone convened in the throne room again, though of course it was impossible to tell meal times underground.
Someone even retrieved the naked man, who turned out to have brilliantly blue weepy eyes and was called Steve.
“Basically,” Nessie Drake explained from her throne once everyone was perched somewhere around her. The mass of beams turned out to be a very practical conference location, featuring comfortable seats all around Drake. “The Lovelorn shot us down a little while ago, and we were able to limp our way to my lair here in the Romanian forest. La Maere’s fangs are clipped, and it will take more than a tub full of blood from the Countess Bathory’s own stock to revive her.”
“The primary screw assembly is melted to slag,” Rosa translated for everyone.
“So my only option is to bed down and wait for Ada to arrive, whereupon I will put down the Lovelorn like a rabid wolf,” Nessie concluded with a straight face.
“Am I missing something here?” Blair asked. “You’re all standing around looking suave, but I know for sodding sure Inspector Hargreaves at least has no idea why we’re all sitting around waiting for an aerial bombardment to arrive.”
Hargreaves scratched her chin, looking anywhere but at him or the naked Steve. Rosa shot him a dark look, but Nessie Drake herself peered between them, like a porcelain caricature of a young girl caught between feuding parents. It was Albion Clemens who stepped into the breach.
“Ada Lovelace is the Captain of the Lovelorn.” Albion said. “She was the one who betrayed Nessie, and the two of them have traded blows ever since.”
“ It would be easier if they just sat down and hashed it out, instead of sacrificing good pirates as cannon fodder. Then again, their crews are drawn to the dramatic…” Rosa said flatly.
Nessie whipped around, her face as smooth and varnished as usual, but the eyes were raging like hellfire. She gestured her long, chrome fingernails at the stovepipe men, as if to say they were her willing martyrs, and her servants bowed agreement.
“You can’t expect us to stay for the carnage,” Rosa Marija said, colder than ice. She looked towards Albion. Nessie raised an eyebrow. “We have a mission of our own.”
Nessie nodded, suddenly amiable. “My drones inform me we will come under attack some time tomorrow evening. The Lovelorn is accustomed to tracking hidden prey. You may stay as long as you like.”
“Drones?” Blair inquired, but understood as he caught the amorous glance of Steve. He could certainly appreciate places where young men of the type could be useful in reconnaissance.
“I’m sorry, Miss Drake,” Inspector Hargreaves interjected.
“Countess!” Steve corrected. In the face of his intense nudity, Hargreaves could only back down.
“Countess. We cannot wait for this… personal matter… to be over, and permit me to say this: no conflict was won from a defensive position. In case something unfortunate were to happen, I would like to get to the point of our visit.” Hargreaves explained about Captain Sam, and about how someone had begun to steal the landmarks of Europe. She finished with an appeal to the Countess Drake’s fondness for a morbid Gothic flair. Apparently, there was a bloody history about to be lost with every landmark, and Hargreaves knew every purple spot.
Blair occasionally agreed, supplying a juicy tidbit such as the exact number of falling deaths involved with building the Eiffel Tower.
“You are extraordinarily gracious, Inspector Hargreaves, and a credit to your nation,” Nessie said, breathing a little harder.
Rosa was rolling her eyes.
“It is unfortunate. Your Captain Sam did visit me not too long ago, just before our last date with Ada Lovelace over the Mediterranean. He seemed intent on continuing to move, as if something were chasing him. He was also guarding a parcel quite intently, and I doubt he noticed I saw it.” She held up her talons, to indicate a package about two and a half feet long and quite narrow. “He also mentioned something very interesting, as he was sleeping. It was difficult to hear. He was quite troubled, but I ma
de out some very distinct words.”
Albion’s eyes shot a mile into the air, but he let the implication hang in favor of the lead.
“He said: The Leviathan won’t come just because you’re looking for a way back.”
“Shit,” Clemens cursed. At once, the pirate Captain spun on his heel and made for the exit, not towards Nessie’s residential quarters but towards the tunnel to take him back to the street, and thence to the Huckleberry.
“We have everything we need. We take off in twenty minutes.”
Rosa Marija arrived on the bridge of the ‘Berry just in time to hear Albion ordering Prissy Jack about. The helmsman owned vintage copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and had been dying to meet Nessie. Now the news of takeoff seemed to take him by surprise. He was scurrying about, harried and unsure.
Albion was being unusually harsh, snapping down the speaker tubes for everyone to come aboard, and taking some of the controls himself.
“Hey! Albion! Stop! What do you think you’re doing?” Rosa yelled, slamming one booted heel on top of a panel in front of Albion. To her amazement, the Captain simply brushed her foot off and continued to work.
“Why you little-!” Rosa cried, and reached out to touch him. Albion whirled about and glared, freezing her in her tracks.
“You heard. The Lovelorn intends to be here tomorrow evening. I bet you anything they are actually only twenty minutes away. Lovelace is a mistress of misinformation.”
“I thought…”
“I know. I’m worried about Nessie too, but I had to get the information first. Unless we are in the air when the Lovelorn gets here, we’re sitting ducks.”
“Does Nessie know?”
“Of course. She wanted us to stay so we would be involved. You ought to know better, but you love the little Lolita too much to notice.”
Rosa waited one moment, looking at the busily flitting Albion with naked admiration. He had even taken off the ridiculous coat, exposing the cutlass and Colt, and his sleeves were rolled back. Then she jumped in, tackling the nitty gritty of preparing for battle.
