by Dave Butler
He shook his head and followed Brunel deeper into the mountain.
“Napoleon!” Brunel shouted.
“Napoleon what…Napoleon Bonaparte?” Charlie was confused.
“Yes, Bonaparte! He started all this mess when he invaded Russia!” Brunel charged ahead at a pace that was almost running, then abruptly spun on his heel to face Charlie. “Of course, the Romanovs stopped him cold. But that’s the problem!”
This story rang a bell. Charlie had never heard the details, but the Almanack said something about demonologists. “They used magic. They summoned something.”
“By Jove, yes!” Brunel wheeled and barreled away again. “You see, all this”—he waved both arms above his head, vaguely taking in the entire mountain—“is magic!”
“The ’eck!” Bob cried. “No, it ain’t! It’s engineering!”
This time Brunel whirled to face Bob. “Very good, lad. And every engineer worth his salt has a bit of magic in him—don’t you forget it!”
“Wait…Bap was a magician?”
“You’re a magician?” Bob added.
Brunel snapped his fingers and shook his head. “How does a magician work? She has a gift, doesn’t she? But she still works, she still applies her will and thinks about what she’s doing and says her incantations, doesn’t she?”
“Something like that,” Ollie said.
“What I do is no different!” Brunel pointed at Bob. “What your friend here does is no different! A special talent, hard work, focus, will. But where does that talent come from?”
Charlie’s head hurt. “You’re saying it’s magic.”
“And a bit of that magic is in every device I build.” Brunel stopped and faced a blank wall, jabbing it with his finger. “Look, if you were to plot on a graph the number of significant inventions made in the world every year starting back at the beginning of time, it would go like this.” He drew a flat horizontal line.
“Slow intimation.”
“Innovation, Bob,” Ollie said.
“A steady rate of new inventions,” Brunel agreed. “Slow progress. Nothing much really changing, most of the time. Until eighteen hundred twelve.”
“Napoleon invades Russia,” Charlie said.
“You’re a reader.” Brunel’s eyes twinkled. “And you’re paying attention. Good. Napoleon invades Russia, the Romanovs summon a demon, and whether or not it was what they intended, the demon unleashes a new kind of magic on the world.” He drew his finger up and to the right at a steep angle.
“Technology.” There was horror in Bob’s voice.
Brunel nodded solemnly. “A demon of frenetic invention. A demon of machinery. A creature whose power, leaking into the world and into certain people with just the right kind of talent, has led to the construction of amazing devices. Amazing, and also infernal.”
“You’re saying there’s a bit of demon in me,” Charlie said. Aunt Big Money had told him something similar. A terrible knot of hell.
“Yes!” Brunel was off again, waving his finger over his head. “And in Thomas, and in every airship you ever saw and every train you ever rode. That bit of demon is the power the Iron Cog wishes to use to rule the world. And that gives us our opportunity.”
The engineer turned a corner into a hallway that had arrow slits in one wall. Charlie pressed his face into a slit.
On the lower slopes of the mountain—he thought this was the north side—trees burned. Mounted out in the forest and on hills across the valley, guns fired in long sequences, each shell slamming into Cader Idris and ripping out bushels of rock. The mountain trembled.
In the sky above, Charlie saw airships. Zeppelins, montgolfiers, and things that looked like Bob’s flyer. Some held position and others circled, but all of them were firing on the mountain.
And the mountain was firing back. Charlie couldn’t see the gunners, or the guns themselves, but gouts of flame and projectiles and rockets flashed back from the mountain side of the engagement. Forest in the valley burned. A zeppelin, struck through the middle by a shell, evaporated instantly and dropped its gondola from a height of thousands of feet.
Charlie raced to catch up to Brunel and Thomas, who led the pack.
“Who’s shooting?” he asked.
“I am!” Brunel laughed. “That is to say, my devices are firing in accordance with my design. Though the enemy will believe they are being targeted by human gunners, because I’ve equipped each gun with a model. A simulacrum. A fake.”
Charlie and Thomas looked at each other. Charlie grinned, but Thomas looked terrified.
Brunel moved on. Charlie ran to keep up.
“I still don’t understand the plan.”
“The plan! Isn’t it obvious? The plan is to put the genie back in the bottle! I’ve collected the materials I’ll need, Thomas will need. We fly to the scene of the original summoning—”
“Russia?” Ollie asked.
Brunel didn’t miss a beat. “And Thomas takes away the Cog’s power.”
“That seems pointless,” Ollie said. “You ain’t going to stop people from being evil, mate. You ain’t going to stop crazy people from wanting to rule the world.”
Brunel laughed. “I won’t stop anyone from being evil, and I won’t even try. But what makes the Iron Cog dangerous is their machines! Without technology, that lot is nothing but a bunch of shopkeepers with funny handshakes and a few queer political connections. Ha!”
Charlie considered that. Without the fake Queen Victoria they had built, what would the Iron Cog’s plan have been in London? Just assassination. It was the ersatz queen that would have put the conspiracy in charge of Great Britain. So maybe Ollie was wrong and Brunel’s plan wasn’t pointless.
Brunel led them down a staircase and opened another door—
and then flung himself back.
Whatever had once been on the other side of that door, now there yawned a chasm. Fire-scarred rock walls offered no purchase for hand or foot, for hundreds of feet both up and down.
Brunel slammed the door. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, but then he saw Charlie looking at him and grinned. “There are other ways! No engineer worth his salt builds a system without redundancies!”
He backtracked for a minute, then climbed a ladder up through a circular shaft. The passage at the top led Charlie and his friends to a series of cisterns. Each cistern was a wide, deep shaft open to the sky, with catwalks circling it at several levels. As they crossed the pits, Charlie looked down and saw water that was reflecting the night’s starlight, as well as the bright orange streaks of flame that filled the sky.
“But wait,” he said. “If you…do that, if you carry out your plan, what happens to all the machines in the world. Do they just stop?”
“All of them? I doubt it. Some of them, certainly. Many of them. The most advanced, the things the Cog relies on, yes…I believe they stop.”
“You’re talking about a step backward, ain’t you?” Ollie said. “I mean, no trains? No airships? Is that really a better world? All the things you ever built in your whole career, won’t they all just stop?”
“The cost is great.” Brunel stopped walking and bowed his head. “It is also necessary.”
“And what happens to Thomas?” Charlie asked. “What happens to me?”
Brunel turned and met Charlie’s gaze. “I have made horrible sacrifices before today, and I know that the sacrifices I have yet to make will be even more horrible. But I will make them, by Jove. Because I must.”
“But my bap…did he…?”
Brunel didn’t answer. Slowly, he turned and led them on.
Beyond the cisterns, the engineer’s path opened onto a single large chamber. Racks of mechanical tools stood around the perimeter of the hangar, along with coils of rope, pipes, folded sheets of fabric, wheels, and other airship parts.
Above them rose the airship. It was a zeppelin that had not one but three oblong chambers to contain gas. In addition to propellers, there were cluster
s of rockets at the hind end of the craft. The gondola hanging beneath it was the size of a small house. It hung fifty feet in the air above Charlie’s head.
The airship was tethered to the hangar floor with half a dozen ropes. A wooden boarding tower rose from the floor to just below the gondola, and a gangplank ran from it to the gondola door. The tower hugged one wall, and beside it at the top was another control panel.
As Brunel and the others entered the hangar, a dwarf in a purple jacket and purple-and-white-striped trousers waved from the door of the gondola.
“Good,” Brunel said. “We’re almost ready to go.”
“Well then, I almost feel relieved.” Ollie was pale from the effort of walking so briskly on his injured leg. Bob limped, too, but her expression made Charlie think of a child at the carnival with unlimited money to spend.
“Wo-won’t the Iron Cog just shoot us if we try to leave?” Thomas shook. His eyes were as wide as saucers.
Brunel put his arm around his clockwork son. “Yes, they will, by Jove. Hmm. Come with me.”
The two climbed the boarding tower together, up the wooden steps to a flat space at the top. Charlie and his friends followed. As they arrived on the platform, Brunel pointed them toward a series of viewing scopes that ran straight up past the airship into the ceiling.
“Which one should we look in?” Charlie asked.
“All of them, preferably.”
Charlie, Ollie, Gnat, and Bob each seized a scope and peered into it.
“ ’Ey,” Bob said. “I can see my flyer.”
“What, has the Cog got it?” Ollie asked.
“Nah, it’s just sitting there where I left it, next to the door we come in by.”
“Thomas, my boy?” Brunel invited his son to look into another of the scopes, but Thomas shook his head and backed away.
Through his scope, Charlie didn’t see Bob’s flyer; he saw a cliff face. Above it drifted a pair of heavy montgolfiers. Men leaned over the edge of the airship baskets with long rifles and fired at the mountain below.
“On my count,” Brunel said. “Three. Two. One. Now.”
As the engineer said now, rockets fired from the hillside at the base of Charlie’s cliff. One of the montgolfiers exploded. The other rocked back in the heat of the explosion, and the men in the basket redoubled their efforts with their rifles.
Then the cliff face opened; a sheet of rock fell away so fast Charlie realized it hadn’t been a sheet of rock at all, but a painted canvas. As the canvas dropped, an airship launched. It was a zeppelin, and it looked just like the one that hung tethered over Charlie in the hangar, with three long gas-filled bags over its gondola and rockets at its rear.
“The ’eck!” Charlie heard behind him and guessed that the others were seeing similar sights through their scopes.
The airship’s rockets fired. Under attack from the montgolfier men, the airship shot past the corner of the cliff face from which it had emerged and raced away toward the horizon. Scrambling, the montgolfier men tried to turn their craft and follow.
“My flyer!” Bob yelped.
Charlie staggered away from his scope. “I saw an airship!” he cried. “What about you?”
“Aye, so did I,” Gnat agreed. “An airship that escaped and was fired upon.”
“My flyer!” Bob shouted. “The rock opened, an’ then there was explosions, an’ I ain’t got a flyer anymore!”
“Sorry, mate,” Ollie said.
“You launched a decoy,” Charlie said to Brunel.
“Hmm, not quite.” Brunel shifted from foot to foot in a little dance of joy. “You were all looking at quite different parts of the mountain. I’ve just launched six decoys. In six different directions. And every decoy looks just like the real thing. That should clear the skies out somewhat.”
“Wouldn’t seven have been the luckier number?” Ollie suggested. He had his arm around Bob, whose face was pale as chalk.
Brunel swept his arm at the airship above them. “I’ve saved the lucky ship for us.”
The gangplank to the gondola was attached to the tower platform by two large iron hinges. A handrail along one side of the gangplank was the only safety measure, but Thomas scooted up toward the gondola without holding on to it. Brunel followed with cautious steps and a hand constantly on the rail, beckoning Charlie and his friends to join them.
Charlie led the way, followed by Gnat and Ollie. Bob came last, a look of awe competing with one of shock on her face.
At the gondola door, the dwarf bowed to Thomas and let him in. Charlie saw flashes of purple and white through the gondola windows, suggesting the presence of more dwarfs. The dwarf at the door bowed again to Brunel, who entered.
And when the dwarf rose out of his second bow to face Charlie, he held a pistol in his hand.
Pointed at Brunel.
Charlie froze.
“Stop!” Brunel shouted.
The ceiling cracked open. It was made of canvas stretched over a framework of metal arms attached by hinges to a motor bolted to the wall. The motor whirred into action, the arms swung, and within seconds Charlie saw the night sky.
At the same time, the six ropes tethering the zeppelin swung free. Whatever clamps had held the ropes at the hangar end released, and the ropes dangled.
Then, as the airship started to rise, the dwarf at the gondola door kicked away the gangplank.
The gangplank swung to one side. It was still attached to the tower by its hinges, so it shifted and dropped, but not all the way to the floor. After striking the level of the platform, it snapped up twice and then settled, parallel to the floor, like the diving board at the swimming baths.
With the first bounce, Charlie lost his balance and fell. Grabbing blindly, he caught himself on the gangplank with one hand.
Through the gondola window he saw Brunel struggling. The old man managed to throw a dwarf to the floor and rush to the window.
Charlie dragged himself back up onto the gangplank. His friends fought to cling to the handrail, but he focused on Brunel and Thomas. He had time—he could climb up and then jump to the zeppelin—
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The dwarf in the gondola doorway shot Charlie. The force of the bullets knocked him off the gangplank. He fell hard, and landed on his back on the floor.
Above him he saw the zeppelin, framed against the night sky by the walls of the hangar. Fire and starlight lit the airship, and Brunel threw something out the window.
Charlie rolled to his feet and snatched the object out of the air as it fell.
It was a small, square object, the size of a snuffbox, and it had two switches on it. Each switch had two settings, labeled INERT and ACTIVATE, and both switches were set to INERT.
The Final Device. The ether-wave signal that would activate the piston supports in all the major passageways and collapse Mountain House.
“ ’Elp!”
Charlie looked up. Bob clung to the gangplank with one hand and had one ankle up over its edge. Her other hand swung below her, holding Gnat by her tiny arm. Ollie, in the shape of a yellow snake, wrapped around Bob’s other leg.
Charlie sprinted to a spot beneath his friends.
“Let go!” he yelled.
Bob did.
Charlie caught them. The force of their fall knocked him down, but they all rolled away from the collision and climbed to their feet.
Bamf! “You make a surprisingly good cushion, Charlie.” Ollie limped to his feet and then helped Bob stand. She groaned and rubbed her arm. Gnat was already upright and pointing at the zeppelin.
The airship burned. It still rose, but it rose into the cross fire of several other airships. Dwarfs in purple and white slid down the tether ropes or jumped from the ship and disappeared from view onto the mountaintop.
“This ain’t the way it was supposed to ’appen.” Bob couldn’t take her eyes off the disaster unfolding above. “ ’E was betrayed by those dwarfs.”
“What about Thomas?” Charlie looke
d at the Final Device and wondered when he should use it.
“Jump.” Ollie fingered Thomas’s scarf nervously. “Jump, mate, there’s time.”
Only Brunel wasn’t jumping. He was struggling with someone inside the gondola, trying to drag that person to the gondola door.
Had one of the dwarfs stayed behind?
Then Charlie realized it was Thomas. Brunel was trying to make Thomas evacuate the aircraft.
Two of the flotation bags were already deflating when a hand grenade thrown from an Iron Cog montgolfier struck Brunel’s airship right in its rockets.
BOOM!
The airship swung wildly. Flame engulfed most of the gondola.
Charlie saw Brunel one last time in the gondola doorway. He lurched forward and heaved—
and Thomas tumbled out.
But the zeppelin was passing the lip of the mountain. Thomas fell, but not back down into the hangar. He disappeared into the darkness outside, probably bouncing down the mountain and into enemy hands.
With the rocking of the zeppelin, Brunel fell backward into the gondola and disappeared.
KABOOM!
The airship exploded.
“Nooooooo!”
Charlie almost fell over.
He felt punched. He’d lost his bap to the murderous Iron Cog, then met this man, who was almost like his bap—well, like an uncle, like his bap’s brother—and then Brunel had been killed as well.
But the shouting didn’t come from Charlie. It came from Bob.
Chunks of airship rained down around them in the hangar, and Bob rushed toward the flame. She held her arms up, as if to catch each piece of wreckage as it drifted down.
Ollie grabbed her by the peacoat and tried to drag her away, but she wouldn’t budge. “Charlie,” he grunted. “A little help here.”
Charlie scooped Bob up in his arms and dashed with her underneath the boarding tower. Ollie and Gnat followed close on his heels.
Fire crashed into the tower and struck the hangar around it.
“We have to go,” Charlie said.
Bob crouched and buried her face in her hands.
