The Iron Assassin
Page 25
Beagles looked his way, but no one answered. He saw some of the constables were uncoiling mooring lines from the deck capstans, wrapping the ends around their waists and thighs in loose and untidy belays, and jumping over the side.
What were they doing?
As Sir Fulton swarmed along the railings, not daring to let go for an instant as the flitter deck tilted alarmingly again, he saw something else.
The sky above and ahead was very dark, blotted out by the huge bulk of Lady Roodcannon’s airship. It was coming around in a great sweeping curve to head for them again.
He could feel the flitter under him sinking fast—and shuddering, too, reacting to dozens of sharp little tugs in this direction and that. What—?
Oh. The beagles, on their lines. Sir Fulton peered gingerly over an edge of the deck and saw that all the beagles were kicking and waving their arms, trying to—nay, succeeding—make their lines swing back and forth, back and forth, in ever longer arcs.
The flitter’s wandering fall had taken it a long way west, crossing the serpentine Thames several times, out beyond the city to the heaths, woodlots, and straggling villages. They were barely above treetop level now, and as Sir Fulton watched, he saw one of the beagles brush some tree branches with his boots, his swing noticeably faltering—and then, on the return swing, that same constable let go and flung himself at another treetop, arms spread to try to grasp.
Branches shattered as the man plunged through them, starting to tumble, and then the flitter started to tilt the other way and hid the man’s fate from view.
Sir Fulton Birtwhistle started to look for an unused mooring line of his own. Flitters had a lot of them, so they could be tied in tandem with others of their kind in tight quarters around—
Gunfire blazed out of the night, bullets humming like angry hornets across the flitter deck and stitching holes across the cabin roofs in brief dins of splinterings and the tanging sounds of metallic ricochets.
Those guns—five, no, six of them—were fitted to Lady Roodcannon’s airship, and the gunners were sweeping the decks of the flitter … and now dipping below.
Sir Fulton’s wild scramble to the only capstan he could see that still had cable wrapped around it ended in a bruising meeting with his destination, as the flitter yawed suddenly and side-slipped across the sky.
A dark line of trees—no, more than that, a wood of considerable size—rushed up darkly to meet the starboard side of the deck. Luckily, his capstan was on the port side. He clung to it, clawing at the mooring line, trying to start its uncoiling as Lady Roodcannon’s guns spat. Beagles on the lines in midair jerked as bullets tore into them or lost their grips and fell, some screaming and some limply silent.
The airship passed over him, vast and terrible and no more than twice his height above his head, its guns falling silent. For now.
Sir Fulton stared up at its stern as it scudded away. At its helm, her long hair stirring in the wind of her ship’s passage, Lady Roodcannon looked back at him over her shoulder. Back and down, and … was that a sneer?
The mooring line moved at last under his hands, and thankfully he set about uncoiling, uncomfortably aware of how close the ground was and how swiftly it now seemed to be rushing up to meet the stricken flitter. Whose decks were already a mass of splinters and wrack that could thrust through him as keenly as any sword or pike, if—
The Steel Kiss was banking in the air, turning with slow, menacing majesty. Coming back to strafe everyone on or hanging from the flitter again.
Which meant he probably didn’t have long to live, at all.
Sir Fulton Birtwhistle said a word that would not have been appreciated in court, softly but deliberately, wound the end of his mooring line thrice around his chest, undid a lot more of it by walking around the capstan, made sure he had firm hold of the end of the line by wrapping it around his fist, and jumped over the edge, kicking off as the flitter dipped and trying to get as far away from the edge of the falling ship as he could.
The moment he was off the deck, he became aware of two things: just how fast its dive was, as he was far behind it in an instant and being towed along, hard, and that something behind them all was flashing wildly in the distance.
Signal lamps, from atop the Tower of London. Winking on and off as they were unhooded, being rushed into different patterns with an urgency he’d not seen for a long time.
Not that he knew how to read them. For him, as for most Londoners, the lamps were just there, every night, part of the unsleeping arm of government and the mails and the Crown alone knew what else.
Someone aboard The Steel Kiss did, though.
The great dark airship’s nose lifted, and it came out of its tight turn and the descent that would have brought it just astern of the flitter to riddle the last of the flitter’s crew with its guns, to head toward those urgently flashing signals.
Deliverance for him, but probably doom for the Queen and Prycewood and the rest he’d left behind in the Tower.
Abruptly, a branch raked Sir Fulton. He was being towed through the edges of a row of trees. He looked ahead, managed to kick air enough to turn himself until he was being pulled through the air boots first, then waited for the large oak he was now sweeping down to meet.
And as it rushed up to meet him, he spared an instant or two to wonder gloomily about the sort of England he’d find himself in, if he lived through this night.
And whether it would still have an Empire or would be plunged into endless wide-ranging war in which everything was lost, the world was changed, and many dreams drowned in blood.
Then the oak put a sudden and painful stop to such thoughts.
“Dashed inconsiderate of it,” Sir Fulton thought aloud, as he crashed through branch after branch, scratched and bedraggled and tumbling helplessly—and lost his grip on the mooring line.
It spun him around like a top as it let him go, snatching his breath away in a few frantic blurred instants, and then dumped him on the ground with a solid but surprisingly gentle thud.
Leaving one of England’s foremost magistrates bruised and of torn wardrobe, but surprisingly intact, to wobble dazedly to his feet and witness the rending keerrraaahsh of the flitter into the trees a mile or so distant. Its boiler burst with a deafening hiss of steam jetting in a dozen directions, and …
Around him in the night, bedraggled beagles were staggering nearer, converging grimly in what seemed to be a field of lavender—lavender?—and looking to him for guidance.
“Orders, sir?”
Sir Fulton Birtwhistle opened his mouth, without a thought in his head as to what he’d say.
“Foxden, sir?”
“Foxden,” he heard himself agreeing firmly. “We have to get to Foxden, as fast as possible.”
“The road’s yonder,” one constable said, pointing at the dark line of trees that bounded one edge of the field and then waving his pointing arm along it. “And it’ll be that way.”
“Then let’s go there,” Sir Fulton announced, and started trampling lavender in that direction.
It was hard to say who was more surprised, some minutes later, when the battered group of beagles was almost run over by a trap being driven at speed along the road. Algernon Hartworth was more than a little startled to find constables blocking the road, and the amorous and decidedly tipsy young lady he was taking home from a house party was both dumbfounded and scared.
It all turned to excitement, however, when Sir Fulton Birtwhistle and the senior beagle clambered aboard and crisply commandeered the trap, retaining Algernon as their driver and his ladylove as a willing but unable navigator, and hastened for Foxden.
The other beagles, trudging along far behind the speeding conveyance, ran to rather darker emotions than excitement.
* * *
Behind the Iron Assassin, the door crashed open again.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the Prince Royal. “Tempest, did you lose your temper? We heard you smashing your machine, and—”
The Lord Lion stared into the eyes of the man from the grave who’d been sent to kill him more than once, and the Iron Assassin stared silently back.
Then the man in the exoskeleton took a lurching step sideways. Every pistol in the room came up, but he ignored them, taking another step, and then another.
Out of the ruin of the machine he went, away from the Prince and Tempest and the rest, to thread his stiff and unsteady way through the armed soldiers to the door.
The Prince lifted a hand to quell any firing, and in deepening silence they watched the Iron Assassin shoulder his way through the door and then start to run, loping lopsidedly away.
“No one,” the Prince Royal commanded, “is to fire.”
And no one did.
* * *
“Most of the men firing at us in the woods were fellow members of the Order!” the larger masked man snapped angrily. “Treachery among the Tentacles, as we’ve feared for so long!”
“Obviously,” Marlshrike said soothingly, “we were right about those fears. Yet you said ‘most,’ by which I take it that there were Crown agents lurking about? Sworn Swords?”
“There were,” the smaller masked men said grimly. “And so far as we can tell, they got away.”
“After accomplishing what?” Marlshrike asked sharply. “Did any of them get close to here? Do you think they know I’m here?”
The larger masked man shrugged. “They were searching for something. We don’t think they managed much searching or found out anything much.”
“But they were looking in these woods?”
“They were.”
Marlshrike sighed heavily, shook his head to try to quell his surge of anger, and snapped, “My thanks. Now go away; you’ve given me much to ponder, and I need to get to thinking about it. Alone.”
Without waiting for a reply, he mounted the stairs that led, floor by floor and flight by flight, to the top of the old mill. He did think best alone, and up here he knew he’d find solitude. The stairs all creaked, and so did most of the floors; he’d soon know if anyone was up here.
It was almost dawn, and the first birds were awakening. Their squawks contrasted with the silence all around him, whenever he stopped his climb.
Which he did in the upper hoist room, at the very top of the mill. Yes, he was alone.
He went to the topmost window, his favorite view. It looked toward London, and he liked to gaze out of it, safely hidden here in these woods, up above the rabble, and contemplate his rise.
He didn’t want to rule or to have any political presence at all. That meant endless time wasted talking to people, and he detested most people. Nasty, grasping, small-minded rats—or, worse, dim-witted sheep whose uninformed prejudices always stood in the way of progress, always …
Bah! He’d been through such thoughts a thousand times upon a thousand more! His plans were advancing at last, and that meant real danger—and excitement, too. Yet just now he had to get his hands on ever more money. He might be a far wealthier Norbert Marlshrike than he’d been a month ago, but he was now caught in this ticklish stage he’d foreseen where he was still essentially alone, and so too weak to defy the Ancient Order, yet he had to show these same Tentacles—ruthless cretins who could butcher him in any angry moment—genuine results in order to keep their support. And real progress in any hurry meant buying what he needed, and when it came to his sort of work that meant money. Lots of money. And Pauncefoot’s gold was running out so, so fast …
He sighed and thrust that thought aside for a moment. He liked to look out of this window best by night, when instead of distant airships, plumes of smoke, and tiny smudges on the horizon that might be church spires or might be mooring masts, London showed him its lights.
Twinkling, glittering, splendid, and on rare occasions even mysterious, they were the lights of progress. The lights of dreams, dreams energetically made reality, the sort of energy he could subvert and harness and ride on into riches and eventually glory, a time when Norbert Marlshrike would be a name uttered with reverence, when he would be recognized as the preeminent tinkerer of all time, when men would turn to him for advice and solicit his skills for handsome fees to guide teams of welders and foundry casters, wire makers and riggers and all the rest …
He loved watching the lights. They were an exciting comfort, if such a contradic—
What by the dancing imp of steam was that?
He peered at the flashing cluster of lights. Flashes that shifted slightly from blink to blink, in a tight and repeating pattern—signal lights of the Constabulary. From their Wandsworth tower, but sent in this direction, out into the countryside.
He snatched out his ever-present spyglass, focused it on the lights to make absolutely certain of their message, and read the repeating message with great care.
Alone in the silent upper hoist room of the mill, he murmured the message aloud like a schoolboy, twice through, then lowered his spyglass and thought hard.
So it had come at last. The Ancient Order of the Tentacles was trying for the Lion Throne.
And if they failed, but only just, the result would be war. If they succeeded, one Tentacle would turn upon the next, and again: war.
Strife right across the Empire, a nasty, endless, bloody skirmish in which tinkerers would become pawns.
Which meant he should get away from here and into hiding just as fast as he could. Pack only what was most vital and get gone, right now.
He was rarely awake at dawn—a chilly time when he was usually deep in his slumbers, thanks to being late abed and chronically short of sleep—but when he was, he liked to watch it break slowly over England.
Not today. He turned away and started hurrying down the way he’d come, to assemble the few things he couldn’t do without.
Behind him, dawn came, unregarded.
* * *
“Oh, it can be rebuilt,” Tempest assured the Prince Royal. “When we need it again. Right now, I rather fear we have—”
There was a stir at the door, beagles speaking sharp challenges and being snapped at in reply. Out of that knot of stern armed men burst a breathless Sir Fulton Birtwhistle, crying, “The Prince Royal is summoned!”
“Sirrah!” Chief Inspector Theo Standish rebuked the flushed-faced magistrate sharply. “No one ‘summons’ the Prince Royal.”
“The Queen does,” Sir Fulton shot back. Then caught sight of the Lord Lion, squared his shoulders, and addressed royalty directly.
“Your Highness, sir, the Queen desires your presence at her side immediately. She says to tell you she is dying and to use all speed, for she would see you again ere—”
“Thank you,” the Prince cried, rushing past him to the door.
“Gilreth!” he bellowed, before he was all the way through it. “Your fastest horse!”
* * *
Aboard the Mary Rose, one masked figure rushed up to another who stood at the helm.
“Explosives all wired.” The report was given tersely.
“The boats?”
“Last two being lashed down right now.”
From the helm, they could see the cranes swinging away from those last two getaway boats. Crude glider gigs that had steering rudders operated by crew members pedaling as if they were riding penny-farthings. At the last moment, they’d slice those lashings with the sharp knives every man carried, kick off hard to get clear of the decks, and hope.
Most of them would probably get caught in the blast, but—
The men at the helm looked at each other and shrugged. They planned to depart a little earlier, and every endeavor has its price.
Sever a Tentacle, and six more rise to take its place …
There was a shout and a brief signal flash fr
om the deck. Last boat tied down.
The men at the helm called their own orders, and the Mary Rose lifted off its moorings into the chill dawn. After a moment of drifting, it gathered sudden speed as steam jets fired, almost leaping through the air.
It seemed in a hurry to head to its own immolation.
* * *
Jack Straker shook his head. “I don’t like this,” he snapped. “I smell treachery.”
“Treason at the Tower?” Rose murmured. “It’s a fitting place—the fitting place.”
“Indeed. We must get there, and faster than the Prince!”
“Impossible!” Hardcastle protested, flinging his arms wide to express impossibility.
“Not with an airship.” His friend smiled. Attacking his ruined machine, he tore open a compartment in its depths, snatched out some small, heavy cloth bags, and hurried for the door with them. “Come on! Grab pistols, but not if you have to rummage or turn aside to do so!”
Chief Inspector Standish silently handed the tinkerer his own gun.
“And just where are you going to get an airship?” Hardcastle demanded, reaching out imploringly to the nearest soldier for a firearm—and receiving one.
Tempest turned in the doorway to give him a wider smile. “The mail run.”
Standish gawped at the tinkerer noble. “Now hold hard, there, sir! There are laws about interfering with Her Majesty’s mail—”
He found himself talking to empty air. The Lady Harminster had passed him like a rushing wind—a hastening gale that blew Hardcastle and Tempest, ahead of her, through the door. The three of them hurried to get out of Foxden, Tempest thrusting the cloth bags into Hardcastle’s hands as they went.
The senior beagle stared after them, listening to the dwindling sounds of their headlong departure.
Then he shrugged, shook his head with a wry smile, and started barking orders. The soldiers could do as they pleased, but every constable here at Foxden was going to get to the Tower as fast as possible, in a proper armed force, to support the Prince.
* * *
Lady Constance Roodcannon finished the plate of Stilton and pears, sipped her favorite cordial, its ruby fire sliding warmly down her throat—ahh, most welcome in the chill air of dawn—and sent the servant away with a nod.