The Constantine Affliction

by Tim Pratt

  Pimm frowned. “What factory is that?”

  “The one where Oswald makes the clockwork whores,” Ben said. “I went there once or twice with Mr. Value.”

  “Ah.” Pimm smiled. “Yes, Ben. Yes, we should go there straightaway.”

  “At least give us the picnic basket, Carrington,” Winnie demanded. “We’re starving. You interrupted our lunch, as you may recall.”

  Carrington chuckled. He lifted the basket to his lap, opened it, removed a few of the choicer items for himself along with the plates, knives, and other silverware—even the spoons! He then placed the basket just outside the bars of the cage and returned to his chair. Winnie reached through the bars, opened the basket, and pulled out the remaining cold chicken and hard-boiled eggs, passing them over to Ellie. “We’ll need water, too,” Winnie said.

  Carrington rolled his eyes and wandered off into the darkness. There was the sound of a pump being operated, and then he returned, carrying a sloshing bucket and two tin cups. He put the bucket outside the bars, and tossed the cups through them. “You may have noticed there’s another bucket in the corner,” Carrington said. “That should suffice for what happens after lunch. Tell me, Freddy, do you piss sitting down now, or do you still try to do it standing up? Old habits die hard, I should think.”

  “You are a thoroughly objectionable person, Mr. Carrington,” Ellie said. “You should be ashamed.”

  “My master has taught me the folly of shame.”

  “And here I thought your nastiness was a natural trait, not an acquired one,” Winnie said. “Don’t worry, Ellie. We may have to relieve ourselves in a bucket, but Mr. Carrington will be the one charged with emptying our waste.”

  Carrington made a point of ignoring her, then opened a magazine on his knee and began to read, chuckling to himself.

  Winnie sat back against the bars and ate her chicken. Ellie lowered herself beside her. “So,” Winnie said quietly. “Do you despise me now, knowing me for what I truly am?”

  “You are the victim of an illness,” Ellie said, keeping her own voice low. “That hardly makes you despicable. And, I must say… you have adapted marvelously well to being a woman.”

  “I was fortunate,” Winnie said, “having made the detailed study of women my entire life’s purpose before my transformation.” She grinned. “Pimm likes you, you know.”

  Ellie paused in her chewing for a moment, taken aback at the sudden change of subject, then continued, swallowed, and said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Pimm. I daresay he’s taken with you. You made quite an impression on him.”

  “He… told you this?”

  “He tells me everything. He thinks you are intelligent, formidable, and beautiful. Well, all right, he didn’t say ‘beautiful,’ but I could tell by the way he said the other things. And, of course, by the evidence of my own eyes.”

  Ellie opened her mouth to object—He is a married man—and then realized the absurdity of that statement.

  “I do not know what you think of him, but Pimm could use a good woman in his life—other than me. He’s terribly unhappy, much of the time—whenever he isn’t pursuing a case, really. He tries to bury the feelings in drink and social events and so on, but it’s always there, a dark undercurrent. He cared very much for a young woman when he was young, not even twenty, and I don’t think he’s ever gotten over that. She was killed, you see, and her murderer was never found. I think that’s why Pimm developed his interest in criminology, though of course he brushes off the suggestion as nonsense. He doesn’t often like to talk about her, but I knew him back then, and he was devastated.”

  “I… did not know that,” Ellie said, thinking of her own lost fiancé. “Winnie, are you suggesting that I might view Pimm… Lord Pembroke… romantically? Even if such a thing were true, given our current predicament this hardly seems the time—”

  “Oh, we’ll get out of this,” Winnie said airily. “I have three plans for escape in mind already, and once Pimm realizes we’re gone, he’ll formulate twice as many to find us. You can’t let little everyday problems like being kidnapped get in the way of truly important things, like love.”

  “I hardly know the man!” Ellie said.

  “Oh, I know. All I wish to convey is… perhaps you should try to get to know him. Speaking as his wife, I’d just like you to know, I have no objection.”

  Ellie laughed bitterly. “And suppose we fell madly in love? What then? In the eyes of the world, he is married.”

  “I have already falsified my own death once,” Winnie said. “I daresay it would be easier the second time. If love were to blossom between Pimm and anyone else, I would find a way to step aside. He is my best friend. He has denied himself happiness too long. I should never have let him marry me at all, but I was a bit desperate and frantic at the time, and it seemed quite the lifeline.”

  “Are you two talking about me?” Carrington called. “Speculating, perhaps, on the girth of my manhood?”

  “He sickens me,” Ellie said.

  “Yes,” Winnie agreed. “Two of my escape plans involve hitting him over the head with a bucket full of urine. The third is far less easy on him, you’ll be pleased to know.”

  A Noteworthy Prisoner

  “Are you armed, Ben?” Pimm squinted at the squatting gray hulk of the warehouse, as menacing as a temple to dark gods in the late afternoon gloom. The sounds of activity on the London docks were audible but distant, like echoes from another world.

  “I have a cosh,” Ben said, patting his jacket pocket. “But my fists suffice, most often. Sometimes just the threat of them.”

  “I can see there are advantages in being a person of unusual size,” Pimm said.

  “Good and bad points, sir, like anything,” Ben said philosophically. “Shall we creep around to the side entrance, then?”

  Pimm let Ben lead the way, curving obliquely toward one side of the long warehouse. He was hopeful about the possibility of finding evidence of Oswald’s perfidy. Ben said the man kept an office here, and liked to oversee the construction of his courtesans personally. Ben had seen Oswald writing in a ledger once, then putting the book away in his desk. Oh, it was possible the ledger was just a manifest of deliveries or something similarly non-incriminating, but Pimm felt the odds were good he might find something he could use. His head was fizzing like he’d had a bit too much champagne, which was odd, because he’d had barely enough of anything to drink, in his opinion—it must be the old thrill of the chase.

  They crept, insofar as a man with a walking stick and another man the size of a draft horse could creep, along the graying wooden wall of the warehouse. “Here we are.” Ben tested the latch on a small door, but it was locked. “It’s all right, the frame’s a bit warped,” Ben said. “You can get in if you know the trick of it…” He grasped the door handle and pulled hard, opening a gap between the door and the frame almost big enough to slip one’s fingers into. Ben grunted and strained, the muscles standing out in his neck, until finally the lock pulled far enough away from its groove for the door to pop open. Ben didn’t even go stumbling backward when the door swung free.

  “You’ve had some practice with this sort of thing, I see.”

  Ben shrugged. “You should see what I can do to a door with a short length of metal. I can get into all sorts of places, so long as you don’t care if the door ever latches right again.”

  Pimm peered inside, but saw only gloom. “What awaits us in here?”

  “It’s partitioned up into rooms, like, with walls that only stretch partway to the ceiling,” Ben said. “Oswald’s office is in the back corner here. They build the courtesans up closer to the front. The rest of it’s just filled with spare parts and all kinds of rubbish from the previous owners, broken bits of engines and things.”

  “Do you think anyone’s here now?”

  Ben shrugged. “Seems quiet.”

  “Yes. Into the breach, then.” Pimm slipped into the dimness, Ben coming after him and pulling
the door closed. They waited a moment for their eyes to adjust, and though the only light came from the high dusty windows, Pimm was soon able to see the shape of walls, heaps of what might have been equipment or trash, and a path trod in the dust on the floor. He set out along that path, feeling absurdly like Leatherstocking on the trail of some prey in the forest. A little room had been constructed against the back wall, a rectangular, windowed office raised up on a high platform, presumably to allow a supervisor to keep an eye on the workers toiling below. “Oswald’s office,” Ben said. The office was as dark as the rest of the warehouse, and Pimm and Ben made their way toward the stairs that led to its door.

  A voice called to them from the darkness of the space under the platform. “You there!”

  Pimm and Ben froze, and Pimm peered at what appeared to be a heap of stacked crates. Except there, on the bottom, partially covered by a tarp, was that… a box with vertical iron bars? Was it some kind of cage?

  A figure in a white gown pressed itself to the bars and stretched out a hand. “You will release us at once,” the man inside said, in a voice that brooked no disobedience.

  “You stand guard,” Pimm whispered to Ben. “Any prisoners of Oswald’s are potential allies of ours.”

  Ben grunted and slipped off into the dark, while Pimm went to the heap of boxes, which were indeed supported at their lowest level by an immense iron cage that would have comfortably held a hippopotamus. He reached into his pocket and removed a tiny alchemical light the size of a pocketwatch, opening the lid to illuminate the cage and allow him to examine the cage’s occupants—or, as it turned out, occupant, since as far as he could tell, the cage held only a single man. He was stout, middle-aged, and wearing a dirty dressing gown. His eyes were profoundly blue, his cheeks flecked with stubble and flushed red from either exertion or outrage (Pimm guessed the latter), his chin disappearing into jowls. He squinted in the light. “You are the youngest son of the Marquess of Bredon, are you not?”

  Pimm frowned. “Sir, I am afraid you have the advantage of me—”

  The man in the cage drew himself to his full height, and though that was no more than five feet, he somehow contrived to seem to be looking down at Pimm, from a position of breeding and status if not actual altitude. “You may not address your sovereign in such a casual tone.”

  “Sovereign?” Pimm said weakly.

  “We are your Royal Majesty the Queen Victoria, Princess of Hanover, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duchess of Saxony, Brunswick and Lunenburg. You may address us as ‘Your Majesty.’ We insist that you release us at once.”

  “Forgive me, Your Majesty,” Pimm said weakly. “I did not recognize you.”

  Was this merely a madman, or, as Pimm feared, the Queen herself, altered by Oswald’s terrible plague? That would certainly be one way to replace the Queen without murdering her: change her sex, and smuggle her out of the royal residence. The palace was full of middle-aged men going about inscrutable business—one more such would hardly be noticed, especially if drugged, say, or just weak and disoriented from the effects of the illness, and escorted out by a medical man like Oswald. Even if the victim broke free and ran through the halls, a man raving that he was the Queen of England would certainly be removed from the palace with all due haste. Oswald could have poisoned the Queen during one of their private moments, then simply unpacked her automaton doppelganger from a crate while the Queen underwent the transformation.

  “We have been ill,” Her Majesty said. “We have been betrayed. Set us free.”

  “I had no hand in your imprisonment, Your Majesty, and I do not have a key to this prison, but I will endeavor to find one forthwith.” Freddy had a knack for picking locks, but Pimm had never been particularly good at such things—his hands tended to be slightly unsteady from either lack of drink or excess of drink, with only a brief window of perfect balance on any given day, and he’d never had the patience to overcome that handicap in the development of his housebreaking skills. Talking his way inside was generally simpler. “Perhaps there is a key in the office…”

  “Pray go and apprehend Mr. Oswald,” the Queen said. “He possesses the key. We will see him executed for his treason.”

  Pimm went still, and closed the lid of his lamp. He listened intently to the silent darkness, and then whispered, “Do you mean to say Sir Bertram is—”

  “Mr. Oswald,” the Queen said, making no effort to lower his voice. “We shall revoke his knighthood, of course.”

  “Yes, of course, Your Majesty, but do you mean he is here? In the warehouse? Now?”

  “I am indeed, Lord Pembroke,” a voice purred from the darkness behind him.

  Pimm turned, reaching into his pocket for one of Freddy’s weapons, but found himself staring into the barrel of a peculiar-looking gun—more a contraption of pipes and valves than a pistol. The dim shape holding the weapon must have been Oswald.

  “Did you know my specialty, as a scientist?” Oswald said. His voice was strangely muffled, as if he wore some sort of mask.

  “Pneumatic chemistry, I believe,” Pimm replied.

  “Very good,” Oswald said. “That is, of course, the study of gases. I am good at gases.” A mist began to pour from the barrel of the strange weapon, hissing as it came, and Pimm’s head swam much as it did partway through a third bottle of champagne… and then his head seemed to float away entirely, drifting up, up, up into a warm and welcoming dark.

  Our Heroes Reunited

  “Just toss him in with the others,” Carrington said, and reappeared from the gloom followed by Crippen and one of the clockwork courtesans, who carried a limp, unmoving human figure between them.

  “Pimm!” Ellie shouted, but he did not stir at her voice. Was he dead? The avalanche of feelings that idea set off inside her was more powerful than anything she’d felt since hearing her fiancé had died: a sensation of dark forces inside her gathering momentum, of titanic masses pressing unstoppably down upon her. She barely knew Pimm, but somehow the thought he might be dead seemed like the collapse of a pillar of the Earth.

  “Oh, he’s not hurt. Not seriously.” Carrington twirled Pimm’s clever walking stick inexpertly, then leaned it against his chair. He was carrying Pimm’s coat over his arm, and he shook it out, checked the pocket, and drew out a pistol. “Just what I needed.” He draped Pimm’s coat over the back of his chair, then pointed the pistol at the cage. “Move back, Miss Skye, Freddy. No sudden lunges for freedom, all right?” They complied, and he advanced on the cage, then fitted a great iron key into the door and swung it open, never letting the pistol waver from Winnie.

  Crippen grunted as he and the courtesan lowered Pimm to the ground and half-shoved, half-rolled him into the cage. Crippen groaned and stretched out his back. “Going to get the other one,” he said. “Give us a hand.”

  “I must watch our prisoners,” Carrington said. “I’m sure you can manage.”

  Crippen cursed him, then went back into the dark, followed by the automaton. They returned carrying an enormous unconscious man, and heaved him into the cage as well, his legs landing atop Pimm’s chest. Carrington closed and locked the cage door, then went with Crippen off into the shadowy depths of the warehouse.

  Ellie and Winnie rushed to the unconscious men, Winnie rolling the big man over so he no longer rested half on top of her husband. Ellie tended to Pimm, leaning to put her ear against his chest so she could listen to his heart. It was beating, and quite strongly. Pimm exhaled, and his breath was oddly sweet and chemical. Not quite ether, but perhaps he’d been drugged with some other substance that rendered him unconscious?

  “Do you know this one?” Winnie prodded the giant of a man in the side, making him emit a vast snore.

  “I do not,” Ellie said. “But if our enemies have chosen to render him unconscious, he is in my good books already. Do you think we can wake Pimm?”

  “He’s a fairly light sleeper, unless he’s very drunk, but who knows what substances they’ve pumped into him?” Winnie picked up
Pimm’s hand, then let it drop. She leaned toward his ear and shouted “Pimm!” but the only response was a faint moan and stirring. “He looks so peaceful when he sleeps, doesn’t he?” Winnie said. “Like a baby hedgehog.”

  “Not the comparison I would have made,” Ellie said. “But, yes, he does look relaxed.” She realized she was clutching one of his hands very tightly, but chose not to release it.

  “I can’t abide it, either,” Winnie said. She went to the bucket of drinking water, dipped in a tin cup, and brought the dripping freight back to Pimm. She dashed the contents into Pimm’s face, and he gasped, bolted upright, and stared around, water streaming down his collar.

  “Freddy!” he shouted. “How often have I told you, I do not like to be awakened in—” He stopped, peering at Ellie, then looking around, comprehension slowly filling his face. “Ah, yes, of course, I remember. Forgive me. Oswald exposed me to some horrid gas, I am still disoriented from its aftereffects.”

  “The principal things you should know,” Ellie said, “are that we are locked in a cage, and Oswald intends to keep us here for some time.”

  “How beastly.” Pimm ran a hand through his damp hair, and the gesture struck Ellie with the force of the best poetry. He was alive, disheveled and as trapped as she was, but alive, nonetheless. “Freddy, how do you rate our chances of escape?”

  “Oh, quite good,” Winnie said. “I was just waiting to see if Oswald captured you, really, so we wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of rescuing you later. He told us he was searching for you. It seems he found you.”

  Pimm sniffed, then squeezed Ellie’s hand—reminding her she was still holding it, which made her drop it immediately—and rose a bit unsteadily. “I’ll have you know I came to this warehouse in the course of my inquiries, looking for proof of Oswald’s crimes. I was not abducted—merely drugged and transported across a warehouse. At least, I assume this is the same warehouse. You won’t believe what Ben and I—”