The Iron Assassin

by Ed Greenwood

  Suddenly, Hardcastle started chuckling.

  “What,” Rose asked him, “is so funny?”

  “You realize,” he replied, “that Drake is going to think we started all this. No matter what we do or say, he’s going to believe we defied him and deliberately—”

  The dirigible exploded, so loudly that their ears rang, and so violently that entire trees came cartwheeling through the forest, crashing enthusiastically along in a splintering, shredding chaos that clawed deep gashes through the forest, roads to nowhere opening up in a few terrifying moments.

  “You know,” Rose murmured a little dazedly, “that I once considered studying to become an arborist?”

  “Lady Harminster,” Hardcastle replied formally, “I did not. Yet I find myself entirely unsurprised. Your—someone’s coming.”

  He plucked at and caught her hand, hauled Rose to her feet as if she was a nigh-weightless child, and rushed her back along the path, so swiftly that she stumbled but had no time to fall in his suddenly iron grasp.

  “Mister Hardcastle!” she gasped, “unhand me at once!”

  He kept right on running, and now she was running beside him, as fast as she could, to relieve the strain on her trapped arm and speak to him face-to-face.

  “How,” she panted, “am I to be a Sworn Sword if I’m running away from everything? Answer me that, sir!”

  “We’re not running away,” he snapped, “we’re returning to cover.”

  And as abruptly as he’d snatched her, he turned off the path onto another, smaller one that Rose vaguely remembered seeing earlier, as they’d passed it.

  “Returning to cover? What does that mean?”

  “This,” he replied tersely, and swung her down and into a dark hole so abruptly that she had to stifle an instinctive shriek.

  Where he put an arm around her and bore her to the ground—which was hard-packed dirt, studded with the occasional small but very hard stone. They lay there together, side by side and breathing hard, and before Rose could think of how to phrase her protest, Hardcastle turned and whispered directly into her ear, the dampness of his breath tickling the inside of her head, “You will please oblige me, Lady Rose, by keeping very quiet for a time; no whispering at all. Very shortly, I suspect we’re going to have visitors.”

  Rose decided she quite liked the sound of “Lady Rose.” Why—

  Her thoughts were interrupted by another, even quieter whisper. “To soothe your curiosity, this is what’s left of an old gamekeeper’s hut. It’s on one of Jack’s maps.”

  She tapped him twice with a forefinger by way of reply, and then they lay as still and as silent as they could, their breathing gradually slowing. The ground was cold and hard, and Rose was just beginning to grow restive when they heard the unmistakable rustling of at least two people striding through dead leaves, very close by and getting closer.

  “Ah, here it is,” a man’s voice said in satisfaction, low and quiet and very, very close.

  “Here’s what?” a second voice asked irritably.

  “The hut. It’s supposed to be our rallying point. Orders.”

  “No one tells me nothing,” the second voice said gloomily.

  “Be glad of that. It means no one can ever scrag you for making the wrong decision—because they’re not letting you make any decisions.”

  “Huh. That’s where you’re wrong. You’re thinking they’ll be fair and reasonable. Tell me, would you call Old Horsley reasonable?”

  “I’m not going to be foolish enough to venture an opinion. Now shut it. We sit here and smoke and wait.”

  “Why are we doing this, anyway? All this to burn their little flitter-blimp?”

  “We’re doing this to get Marlshrike and take him away from here. Away from the clutches of Lady Roodcannon.”

  “Why? Isn’t she one of us?”

  “She says she is, but she’s been pleasing herself and ignoring what the others in the top circle—and the Elders, too!—have decided, for the better part of a fortnight now. I think they lost patience with it and confronted her, and she defied them, so now they know she’s trying to run her own affair. And you don’t do that to the Ancient Order.”

  “For we have Tentacles beyond Tentacles, and one of them’ll get you.” Those words were said in sour mockery.

  “And so we will, Mase. And so we will.”

  “And don’t you forget it.” The mockery was even stronger this time.

  “Here, now, enough of that.”

  “All right, all right … just tell me this: I unnerstand this Marlshrike’s a brainy one, a tinkerer, and worth a lot to us, but why risk shooting him, like we’re doing, just to get him away from her? Why not just take away what he makes, whenever he makes it, and let her go on feeding him and paying for all his knobs and tubes and fiddly bits?”

  “Because he’s the only real prize she’s got, and if we take him, she’ll be forced to send the Tentacles loyal to her out to try to find and recover him. Then we’ll know for sure who they are, and they’ll be sticking their necks in whatever noose we prepare where we’re holding him, and we can pick them off.”

  “Right. Got it. So what’s this hut like, anyway?”

  “Don’t be going down in there! That’s where they’ve been stashing the special acid Marlshrike needs. You break anything, and it won’t be just your clothes that start dissolving!”

  Rose froze, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Glencannon? Mason?” a new voice called, low and harsh.

  “Here,” Glencannon replied quickly.

  “Come on! New orders! Apparently this tinkerer has a metal box or some such he can hide in and scurries inside it whenever he hears gunfire … so we can shoot up the mill as much as we please. Let him hide in his box; we’re to kill everyone defending the mill, every last one of them, now that they can’t all fly away on their jaunty little flitter.”

  “Right,” Glencannon responded, and Rose and Hardcastle heard the thumps of the two men landing as they came down off the roof of the hut and then the rustling of them trudging back out onto the path. Followed by a lot more thudding, of many booted feet passing by. Heading for the mill.

  From which direction, fresh gunfire began. And built into an almost-deafening ongoing din.

  “Acid,” Rose murmured, “that dissolves clothes. You certainly know how to entertain a lady, Mister Hardcastle!”

  “We strive to give satisfaction,” he replied sardonically, helping her up. They staggered out of the hut in a crouch and peered cautiously around.

  To discover that a bright moon had arisen in a cloudless sky and that the forest was now bathed in long strips of cold moonlight—wherever the dirigible explosion had caused gaps in the canopy of foliage.

  Something abruptly blotted out much of that moonlight, and—as distant church clocks struck midnight—they looked up together.

  And beheld a large airship passing overhead. Low and slow. So low that they both recognized the ornate bowsprit of its oversized gondola.

  It was Lady Roodcannon’s airship. All of its lights were out, in defiance of the law. Like a smuggler.

  It was heading for the Tower of London.

  OCTEMBER 17

  “So we know where Marlshrike is—or was,” Hardcastle muttered, looking at Rose.

  Who looked back at him and said, “And we certainly can’t capture him in the face of an army. Still less, two armies, with both of them firing at each other.”

  They nodded in unison, and Hardcastle gestured that Rose should speak next, so it was she who voiced what they were both thinking. “Telling Tempest, the Lord Lion, and the others that Lady Roodcannon’s airship is headed for the Tower is far more important than Marlshrike.”

  “Agreed,” Hardcastle replied, and they hurried back along the path together, heading for Foxden.

  “Roodcannon or Old Horsley?” a voice snapped at them, out of the night.

  “Old Horsley!” Hardcastle barked back, not slowing.

  “So wh
y are you running?”

  “Reporting back, as ordered!” Hardcastle shot back, and they kept right on running—though Rose felt an itch between her shoulder blades, not to mention a little chill of fear, and ran along half-expecting a bullet to come out of the night to bite through her there.

  Nothing came.

  They were challenged again, and this time it began with a warning shot.

  Hardcastle answered that with a blistering string of oaths and a demand that such a “traitor to the Tentacles” explain himself.

  The voice that replied was female, cold and unfriendly, and advised him to state his precise reasons for “fleeing like a schoolboy.” Hardcastle invoked Old Horsley’s name and orders to report back something to him in all haste. The voice then demanded to know what that something was, and why she’d not been told agents of the Order would be running through her guard post. Whereupon Hardcastle turned cold and menacing himself and inquired if she was familiar with the concept of secret orders and checks and balances and the right of the leaders of the Order to determine levels of secrecy. A little silence followed, and then the female voice sullenly suggested they “be on about their errand, then.”

  So they continued along the path, running again, and once again Rose’s shoulder blades awaited ventilation that thankfully did not come.

  Their next encounter involved no bullets, but no questioning, either. There were just suddenly fists hammering on them out of the night, bushes crackling and rustling in loud chaos as assailants erupted from behind trees on this narrow part of the path.

  Hardcastle was a competent, sturdy fighter, and had at some point decided that the figurative gloves were off and it was permissible to use the brass knuckles he’d brought along on both of his hands. Yet it was Rose who surprised herself—and her foes—with her agility, fearlessness, and a certain viciousness born of her rising anger. She kicked and raked at eyes and drove hard knees into yielding guts and crushed hats down over faces and ran stumbling men face-first into trees.

  After they’d run on, leaving groaning masked men in their wake, one of them snarled, “Orders or no orders, I’m putting a bullet through that bitch. After all, who’ll know?”

  He fumbled inside his coat for his weapon—and was just dragging it out, with an air of grim satisfaction, when a skull-headed man whose limbs were encased in battered metal cages loomed out of the night, broke his neck in an instant, then tore the pistol out of his hands and apart.

  The other Tentacles men gaped as the murderous apparition stalked on down the path, in the wake of the running pair. Lurching along nigh silently, his face grim in the moonlight.

  * * *

  The docks of London never sleep—neither those lapped by the water, nor the newer masts that soar above them, where airships hang moored in the night, aloft.

  The Limehouse masts were always busy, both the cluster of five and the one off by itself made for larger vessels.

  The Mary Rose was moored to the large-vessel mast right now. Out of Portsmouth, it was a large, ruggedly built freighter, broad and fat and with a gondola thrice the width and six times the length of any passenger liner. Its crew was rather wearily watching the cranes of the dock lower the last pallets of its load of raw tin down to the waiting wagons below. There’d be the usual cursory inspection, and then its next cargo would start coming up, to be shoved and then lashed into place. Finished woolens, for somewhere on the Continent the crew didn’t much care about at this particular moment. Not that those wagons had arrived yet. Meaning they’d have to wait. As usual.

  “We’re certainly earning our cuppa tonight,” one hand grumbled. It was the last thing he ever said.

  A hired flitter passing by suddenly did something forbidden under Port of London rules. It turned in a steep climb—and passed over the moored freighter.

  Letting down a dozen lines at once as it did so, with men on the end of them. Masked men, bearing knives that were busy almost before their boot heels struck the deck of the Mary Rose. One of those knives slit the throat of the grumbling hand as he turned his head to see what the noise was, behind him, that shouldn’t be there.

  His killer obeyed orders, catching hold of the blood-spurting, choking man and lowering him to the deck to die, rather than letting him topple and thud.

  By then, however, stealth no longer mattered. The deck was swarming with masked agents, and all the crew were down with their throats open and bleeding. Their killers stepped over them without another glance and either went below to turn any still-alive crew into corpses or took over the crane lines, to begin busily loading cargo up and aboard.

  Not the waiting crates of woolens but the contents of wagons that were just creaking to a stop beneath the mooring mast. Smaller crates that were stamped with the warning DANGER—EXPLOSIVES.

  * * *

  Sir Fulton Birtwhistle seldom drank this heavily, but he was still angry—damn it, what was the Empire coming to, when a lawyer could be prevented from seeing a client at the Crown’s whim? How far was that, really, from, “Off with his head! Why? I don’t like the color of his nose. That’s why!”? And the sherry was very good.

  Winthrop’s happened to be open all night, and moreover happened to be near the Tower, so although it wasn’t Sir Fulton’s favorite of the dozen or so gentlemen’s clubs he belonged to, it would do. A haven in troubled times, as the old saying put it.

  So he’d been lurking in Winthrop’s ever since his unceremonious departure from the gates of the Tower, knocking back very dry sherries.

  Without really noticing, he’d accumulated an impressive row of empty glasses, outlasted several conversational partners who were bound for home and bed—or mistress and bed—and was now verbally fencing with old Lord Dunster, whom he’d just informed snippily, “I like to feast, yes, but not upon the latest gossip.”

  Only to have the lord come back at him sourly. “You make the cardinal mistake of the newly empowered, sir. That of believing that the bright future of the Empire is only realized if unfolding events enrich you and follow the interests you happen to hold dear. In short, you see yourself as the lion tamer, rather than one opportunistically following in the prowling lion’s wake, scooping up the scraps it lets fall. I fear you need better spectacles.”

  Sir Fulton leaned forward, enraged anew and warming to the opportunity to cuttingly put someone in his place who was deluded or mad or a dissembling liar and in any case very much in the wrong, and—

  Froze with his mouth open and his lungs puffed up full, ready to do battle, as someone tapped his shoulder firmly from behind and asked almost reverently, “Sir Birtwhistle? Magistrate Birtwhistle?”

  He turned and found himself staring into the face of a middle-aged beagle with tired eyes and an impressive brush of a graying mustache, who was busy being professionally expressionless—and doing a good job of it, too.

  “Yes?” he demanded, very much aware of Lord Dunster watching with amused interest, obviously believing Birtwhistle was about to be arrested or at any rate receive a well-deserved comeuppance.

  “I can get you inside the Tower right now, sir, if you want to come. There’s something unfolding inside you should see, sir.”

  “‘I should see’? I—but—well, how would you know? You don’t even know me!”

  “The judgment isn’t mine, sir. It belongs to someone highly placed whose name I’m not at liberty to divulge, sir.”

  Sir Fulton stared at the constable, gazing into sad eyes of infinite patience that belonged to a man now waiting without caring if the offer he brought was accepted or rejected. Well, now. Was someone appreciating him at last? Or counting on his obstinacy, his opposition to all who bent laws or trundled nonchalantly around them?

  Well, there was but one way to find out.

  He shrugged and rose to the bait, draining his last sherry and telling Lord Dunster more airily than severely, “I find events have robbed me of the time it would take me merely to elucidate the number of ways you are wrong, my lord, le
t alone enlighten you as to the errors of your judgments. Another time, perhaps. It seems the Empire calls.”

  And with those grand words Sir Fulton took his leave, striding briskly along beside the beagle, an important man on his way to be a part of important events, rather than a prisoner being taken in charge.

  Out into the night again, to find it had turned noticeably colder. His breath curled briefly in front of him in the damp air as the pace quickened once more. He was led to a steam-driven armored houndcar, one of the rugged new models. It was running, steam curling up steadily around its rear, but its headlamps weren’t lit. It promptly pulled out of the alley mouth in which it had been waiting and joined a line of identical vehicles—also showing no lights, none of them—all heading for the Tower.

  “You’re rounding up all the magistrates in England?” Sir Fulton jokingly asked the beagle who’d fetched him and was now sitting beside him on a bench seat. It was one of five such seats in the houndcar, the others all full of uniformed beagles.

  “No, sir,” the beagle replied patiently. “Just you. The units before and behind are all carrying heavily armed members of the Constabulary. And before you ask, I can’t tell you why. Yet you’ll see for yourself soon enough.”

  The line of houndcars entered the Tower at a crawl, unchallenged, and through a dark, lightless gate, driving only a short distance before stopping in the same line they’d come in by. Everyone got out—quietly, every door left open rather than being slammed shut.

  “Come, sir,” the beagle murmured, and led the way up a dank and gloomy stone stair, moving at a steady pace now rather than hurrying. Sir Fulton followed, climbing steps worn down in the center with age, then along a passage that ran for a long way and was lit only by storm lanterns swinging in the hands of every tenth beagle or so.

  The passage finally opened out into what were probably extensive stone cellars, though Sir Fulton couldn’t see their size in the gloom. He could hear beagles dispersing in all directions, though—just the rasp and shuffle of their boots, for not a word was spoken. Some climbed unseen steps to a higher level; most turned off and walked away along other passages hidden in the darkness … and Sir Fulton’s faithful beagle led him between a lot of barrels and then racks of what were probably halberds to another flight of ascending steps and up into a narrow room where light was coming in through holes in the wall. Spyholes.