Brilliant Devices: A steampunk adventure novel

by Adina, Shelley

  Alice wobbled dangerously close to losing hope. “I’m going to give her another five minutes and then I’m going up there myself.”

  “Wot ’ud you do?” Lizzie asked from within her turquoise-and-lace cloak. “Come to fisticuffs wiv that lot?”

  “No, but I have a set of lock picks and I know how to use them.”

  “Right, and they’ll ’ave left ’em unguarded.”

  Alice exhaled in lieu of snapping at the child. “How can someone so small know so much about lockups?”

  “Did the Lady ever tel Lang l you about Dr. Craig, and ’ow we broke ’er out of Bedlam?”

  And she made the mistake of saying, “No,” and some while later when the two of them wrapped up their tale, Alice realized that the little scamps had actually made her forget what they were all doing there.

  “Tell ’er about the time Lewis rescued all our poor ’ens off that barge, Liz,” Maggie said. Lizzie opened her mouth to do so when they heard a thump from the ground above them.

  “Sssh! Wot were that?” Lizzie hissed instead.

  “And which way did it come from?” Alice whispered.

  Now they could hear a commotion—boots and angry voices and what sounded like fists landing.

  “There!” Maggie pointed down the corridor. “The next set o’ steps, I’m sure of it.”

  The girls scrambled out of the silken embrace of Alice’s skirts and all three ran down the corridor. Maggie was right—as they climbed the steps, they could hear snatches of people talking. Or shouting, more like.

  “Leave them here,” an imperious female voice said quite clearly through the panels of the hidden door at the top of the steps. “My father and Mr. Penhaven will be along shortly to deal with the nasty miscreants. He plans to give them a fair trial, right there in the boardroom.”

  “We’ll give ’em fair!”

  “Just as fair as they gave our boys on the digger—a long dance on a short rope!”

  “But the earl’s dressing room, Miss Meriwether-Astor?” said a calmer voice, more worried. “Is that quite proper?”

  Meriwether-Astor? Alice’s mind felt like an unmanned dirigible being batted around by high winds. Where had the girl come from? And what did it mean that she was doing exactly as Claire had said? How could she? She was their enemy’s daughter!

  So where were Claire and the earl? Had something gone dreadfully wrong?

  Mumbletythump! A body landed against the door, then another a little distance away. And a third beyond that. Someone groaned right next to the panel against which Alice pressed her ear, and it was all she could do not to jerk back and send herself tumbling down the steps.

  “Oh, yes. Why should they have the dignity of a drawing room, or even an office? A latrine is good enough for them.”

  “I’d say so. Nothing but dung, they are!”

  “Hey, don’t insult good dung!” Raucous laughter greeted this witticism.

  “Come along, gentlemen. If you will arrange the boardroom and see that this door is securely locked, with a guard posted outside it and outside the window, I will inform my father that his wishes have been carried out.”

  “Right you are, miss. Careful. Don’t step in the blood and spoil your pretty dancing shoes.”

  “Thank you, Alan. You are the kind of gentleman I desentstep in paired of ever meeting in these parts.”

  The door slammed, and the lock turned over.

  Alice took a breath and listened. Nothing moved on the other side.

  Oh, please don’t let him be dead. Please. I’ve only had a day …

  She leaned gently on the lever next to the panel and the door eased open toward her, allowing a crack of light through from the electricks in the dressing room.

  The man on the other side sucked in a breath through his nose, no doubt thinking he was suffering from both nausea and vertigo.

  Perhaps he was.

  Through the crack, she got a glimpse of matted blond hair.

  “Pa?” she whispered. “Pa, can you hear me?”

  He stirred, and clutched his arm against his ribs. “Alice?” he breathed. “Where are you?”

  “There’s a movable panel behind you. We’ve come to get you out. Easy now, not so fast. The steps go straight down.”

  “But what—I don’t understand.”

  “We’re breaking you out of gaol, Pa. But you have to be quiet. Rouse the other boys and come away quick, before they decide to check to see if you’re dead.”

  “I think Alignak might be hurt. Ribs. And Tartok took a pretty bad hit to the head. He’s out cold.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m fine.” Gasping, he pulled himself to his feet while Alice swung the panel open.

  He was not fine. But it was brave of him not to show it.

  She wriggled out of her topmost petticoat. What a lucky thing both she and Claire had lots of them, with multiple flounces of gathered eyelet. At the rate they were going, they’d use every yard for bandages before they got away from this inhospitable country.

  “Girls, take this to the bottom of the steps. I want it ripped into strips by the time we get the men down. We’ll patch them up as best we can. Then we’ll have to hoof it before Penhaven and his bunch come back and find the room empty.”

  Alignak had heard their whispered exchange and was already on his feet by the time Alice poked her head into the next latrine compartment. He limped out and went immediately to the third one.

  “Tartok sleeps,” he whispered, his sloe-black eyes worried. “A demon sleep.”

  “Demons made him that way, that’s certain,” Alice whispered back. “Pa, can you lift him with just one arm?”

  “Yes.”

  Alice helped him shoulder the young man and bit back a cry when she saw her father lose all color and gasp in pain. But he said not a word. He maneuvered Tartok through the opening and took the steps carefully. Alignak followed right behind, holding his ribs as if trying to keep them in place.

  Alice brought up the rear and closed and fastened the door. If only there were a way to block it! But thock place.

  Only cold silence, and the yellow ribbon of electrick light fading into the distance.

  A click sounded above them, at the top of the steps leading to her ladyship’s dressing room. Alice fell to her knees as her father put Tartok down, and began binding up wounds as fast as Lizzie could hand her the torn strips of eyelet. Maggie went up to investigate.

  “Lady!” Alice heard her whisper. “Come quick!”

  “Do you have them?” came Claire’s quiet voice.

  “Aye. That Meriwether-whatsis mort ’ad ’em put right where you said.”

  “Are they hurt?”

  “Aye. Come away down, Lady. We gots to get out of ’ere.”

  Chapter 23

  Claire wasted no time in assisting Alice, fabricating a sling out of a length of white voile for Chalmers’s arm, and binding up Alignak’s ribs with half a second petticoat.

  “What luck you’re still in evening dress,” she whispered to Alice. “This rig doesn’t allow for petticoats—though I’m tempted to add a number of layers of ruffles. They seem to come in handy rather regularly.”

  “It’s this place,” Alice whispered back. “Once we’re clear of assassins, our clothes ought to be fine.”

  “Speaking of assassins, were you able to speak to the count?”

  In the dim light, Alice looked stricken. “I forgot all about him,” she said in horror.

  Frederick Chalmers looked up from tightening the knots on his sling. “You what? You mean you didn’t warn him to lift?”

  “No, Pa, I was too busy trying to save your hide.”

  “But this is terrible! We must—”

  “We must do nothing but get you out of here before you’re recaptured and hanged,” Claire said briskly. “We’re not likely to get a second chance to spirit you out of a locked room. I will see to Count von Zeppelin.”

  “And I will get you all in the air wi
thout delay.” Alice’s gaze was as stony as the one her father leveled upon her. There was no doubt in the world that the two of them were related. Claire wondered who would win this contest of wills.

  “But—”

  “Chama,” Alignak interrupted, “we must get Tartok to Malina or his spirit will leave him. And we must warn the village so the goddess whales may sail.”

  Frederick Chalmers gazed from the young man to his daughter, clearly torn between two equally important choices. But to Claire, there was only one.

  “You leave the count to me,” she repeated. “I will have him in the sky within the hour, I promise you.”

  “Do you know where he is?” Alice asked.

  “No, but it cannot be difficult to find out.”

  “Just look for an assassin,” Maggie put in helpfully.

  Tartok stirred, but then his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness again. “We must go,” Alignak said, his voice hoarse with anxiety.

  Alice helped heft Tartok onto her father’s back, his wrists tied together with a bit of lace to form a loop under Frederick’s chin. Then they set off down the corridor. Claire visualized the route in her mind’s eye as they traveled under the mine offices, under the parade ground, and paused at a cross-corridor with another tiny sign.

  Dining was indicated to the left.

  Supplies lay to the right.

  “The supply warehouse is not a hundred yards from end of the airfield where the Stalwart Lass is moored,” Claire said, keeping her voice low. “That way, as fast as we can.”

  It couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile, but to Claire it seemed endless. At any moment a door could open at the top of any of these flights of stone steps, and a horde of angry men pour through clamoring for the immediate deaths of Frederick Chalmers and the Esquimaux men—to say nothing of the girls attempting to save them. Alice reached the final stair first and darted up it, opening the hidden panel with caution as she tried not to gasp for breath.

  It opened in a small storage room directly across from an exterior door. The warehouse was pitch black except for a small electrick lamp glowing over the door.

  “Come on—” Alice began, when Maggie and Lizzie slipped past her. “Girls, wait—”

  Claire touched her arm. “Let them do what they do better than any of us.” Then she turned to Frederick, who emerged slowly from the staircase with Tartok’s head lolling on his shoulder. “Mr. Chalmers, are you all right?”

  “Fine. Alignak?”

  “I am able.”

  Maggie materialized out of the dark. “All clear, Lady, but we’d best be quick. We c’n ’ear voices behind this building, as if someone’s coming to get summat.”

  They ran through alleys of pallets and crates filled with supplies—food, flour, spare parts. They gained the door and Claire had enough time for a frantic glance across the airfield. “Alice, do you hear that?”

  An engine.

  Even as they ran, peering past the light cast by the lamps on the mooring masts, the Skylark lifted, sailing straight up into the night sky and blotting out the stars.

  Frederick gasped. “Isobel!”

  Alignak let out a low cry of despair.

  What…? But there was no time to ask questions, for someone was running across the field toward them. Two someones—one tall, o—width="2emne lanky and shorter.

  Claire pulled the lightning rifle out of its holster and took aim.

  “No, Lady, don’t!” Maggie cried. “It’s our Jake and Mr. Malvern!”

  But they could still hear an engine, even though Skylark had passed out of sight and out of all hope of assistance.

  “Someone’s fired up the Lass’s boiler,” Alice said. “Jake, you get double pay for this.”

  “Here, sir, let us take him,” Andrew said to Frederick, and in a trice he and Jake had the unconscious Tartok between them, jogging across the field to the battered old airship. Alice and the men followed, tumbling up the gangway into the gondola.

  Claire grabbed the Mopsies by the hand. “We must untie the ropes. I shall attend to the mooring mast. Run, fast as you can.”

  “Claire!” Alice leaned out of a porthole. “I never got a proper engine in here to replace Dr. Craig’s power cell!”

  “Take it!” she called, scrambling up the ladder to the rope looped through the Lass’s nose ring. “I can make another one.”

  “I need to make some room and ditch some ballast on the double quick—I’m sending out Seven and Eight. Take care of ’em, will you?”

  Must she? Ugh. “Fine!”

  “And what about Jake?”

  “I’m goin’ and that’s that!” came a stubborn shout from somewhere within.

  “Feed him and teach him, and turn him into a capable man,” Claire called, “and I shall be satisfied.” She untied the rope. “Free to lift when ready, Alice. Fair winds!”

  She heard a clanking crash and the scrape of gravel—the automatons, no doubt, being unceremoniously unloaded in a heap.

  “To you, too! Up ship!”

  The Mopsies and Andrew ran clear of the gondola as Claire climbed to the ground. The Lass fell up into the night sky, her engine running as smoothly as a sewing machine as Dr. Craig’s cell gave it more power than it had ever had before this stage of its life. And as the craft turned its bow to the south, Claire saw movement in the sky behind it.

  Andrew drew in a long breath.

  “Lady, what are they?” Maggie asked in awe.

  A cluster of silver craft floated purposefully after the Stalwart Lass, their silver fuselages rippling with the speed of their going, for all the world like elongated bubbles swimming through the cold air. The gondolas clinging to the undersides were sleek and shallow, each one ribbed like the skeleton of a long-dead creature.

  Ribbed like the interiors of the Esquimaux longhouses.

  Like the interiors of great, long-dead creatures.

  The goddess whales.

  “They live in their ships,” Claire breathed on a note of discovery. “That’s what Alignak meant by the village lifting. He meant it quite literally. The entire village has pulled up ropes and gone with Alice and Frederick.”

  “And, I assume, Isobel Churchill,” Andrew said. “She sent a pigeon not half an hour ago to warn them.”

  “So they will all be safe?” Maggie asked, her forehead creased in concern even as she watched the majestic sight of the Esquimaux craft sailing through the stars.

  “They will all be safe,” Claire echoed. “I do not know where they are going, but with Malina and Alice in charge, they will find a quiet harbor somewhere.”

  “But our Jake,” Lizzie wailed. “They’ve took our Jake!”

  “He has his duty as navigator, Lizzie,” Andrew told her gently. “He chose his course like a gentleman, and he will keep to it until his captain releases him from duty.”

  “Besides, someone’s got to look after our Alice,” Maggie said, taking her twin’s hand. “Wiv Tigg on Lady Lucy, we’ll be the Lady’s seconds in ’is place, won’t we, till we gets ’ome to Snouts?”

  “I wouldn’t have anyone else.” Claire laid a gentle hand on each of their shoulders, feeling both girls lean into her skirts as if unconsciously seeking the comfort of someone who would not leave them.

  The Esquimaux fleet glimmered one last time, as if in farewell, and passed out of sight over the black shapes of the hills to the south.

  Claire took a fortifying breath. “Now, then. I think it is time we located Count von Zeppelin and made sure of his safety, as Mr. Chalmers wished. Even though we have no proof whatsoever that he is in danger, except the evidence of our own eyes.”

  “Isobel told me that he has been Her Majesty’s liaison with the Esquimaux nation for some seven years,” Andrew told her. “If he believes the count is in danger, I think you may take that as proof.”

  They crossed to the small heap of bronze limbs and torsos, and assisted the automatons to their feet.

 
“Has he?” The mystery of Chalmers’s life here began to make a glimmer of sense. “No wonder the Colonials wanted him to take the blame. They would not only discredit the Dunsmuirs, but throw a spanner into Her Majesty’s works as well.”

  “So what is our plan?” Andrew asked her, quite seriously.

  She had no idea. But it would never do to say so in front of the children.

  She straightened her shoulders, and the automatons turned their blank faces toward her as if waiting for instructions. “I think Maggie had the right of it. This whole affair began with a gun that makes no sound. Do you not agree that if we can find that, we might find a clue that will lead us to the count?”

  *

  It was fortunate indeed that, while someone had unloaded an enormous number of trunks and cases from the Meriwether-Astors’ ship, it appeared no one knew exactly what to do with them afterward. So they sat upon the gravel some distance from the ship, in the inky shadow of the fuselage, providing enough cover for two small figures and two larger ones, with a view of both that ship and the motley group of cargo ships moored around it.

  Claire had told Seven and Eight to wait by Lady Lucy. The thought of a pair of clanking shadows following them about when a man’s life might be at stake made her shiver with revulsion.

  “Mopsies, what do you make of our situation?” she whispered.

  “This Astor bloke, ’e’d want to keep ’is treasures close, yeah?” Lizzie said in a low tone. “Lightning Luke kept ’is treasure box where ’e slept, innit?”

  “So your guess is that the count would be upon Mr. Meriwether-Astor’s ship?”

  “Aye.”

  “Which is guarded,” Andrew put in. “They’ve posted a watch.”

  That was true. A man sat upon the gangway smoking a Texican cigarillo, the noxious fumes of which they could smell from here.

  “Ent much of a watch,” Lizzie said with some disdain. “Pity we just lost Jake. ’E were a dab hand at dealing wiv such.”

  “We might shimmy up a mooring rope,” Maggie suggested.