“Evelina!” Imogen cried.
She darted aside as the automaton finally unstuck and thumped its fist into the ground where she had been standing a moment before. Then she waited patiently as it creaked to an upright position again.
“I’ll be done in just a tick,” Evelina replied.
As it raised its arm for another attack, she unlatched the chest panel—standing on her toes and cursing as she burned her thumb—and disconnected the main pneumatic line. The automaton froze, arm raised. She squinted up to read the date of manufacture on the back of the panel: 1856. No wonder the thing was so slow. It was ancient. The maintenance label read Fitzgerald’s Gravel Works.
“I think this fellow was designed for breaking up rocks,” Evelina announced when Imogen reached her side.
“It’s not much of a guard.”
“It looks impressive. That’s probably good enough for casual passersby. One look at this and your common bully-boy would stay away—at least until he figured out he could run circles around this thing.” That means the real antitheft protection is inside with the magic.
Evelina’s palms were sweating.
“Well,” Imogen said brightly. “That wasn’t so hard. Now what?”
“Now I have a look around.”
“I’m coming with you.”
Evelina stepped away from the machine, dread crawling up her scalp. The sunshine seemed suddenly thin as watered soup. “No, there’s no telling what’s in there.”
“I’m not going back to the carriage to sit there like an obedient spaniel.”
Evelina gave her a baleful look, but Imogen didn’t budge. Evelina relented, imploring the gods that she wasn’t putting her friend in danger. “Then stay close.”
The warehouse door wasn’t locked, but came open with a creak of hinges. Sunlight fell in filmy banners from windows set high in the unfinished walls. Evelina felt a prickling against her face, as if she’d walked into a swarm of biting insects. Whatever caused that was the real guardian. She swallowed, but there was nothing to ease her dry throat.
She held up a warning hand, listening for movement, hearing nothing.
“Go slowly,” she spoke in a whisper. “There’s definitely magic in here.”
Imogen stopped. “What kind did you say it was?”
“I don’t know yet.” Evelina tugged her close. “Just stay with me. We might have to leave in a hurry.”
Crates were stacked at one end of the space, some with the lids pried off to reveal tufts of packing straw and sawdust. A crowbar leaned against the wall.
“This doesn’t look like the draper’s stock,” Imogen said. “I don’t see any cloth. I actually don’t see anything that looks like merchandise for a store. What is this?”
“An importer’s wares, perhaps? There are all kinds of languages on the labels of these crates. I think that one is Greek.”
They stuck close together as they moved quietly between the rows of wooden boxes. The loudest sound was the hem of their skirts dragging through the old sawdust that littered the floor. As Imogen said, there were no stacks of dishes or furniture or other household goods. It was as if whatever had been unpacked had already been removed.
“What’s all that?” Imogen asked, indicating a workbench and racks of carpentry tools at the other end of the building.
“It looks like a workshop, maybe? Perhaps some items are sent in parts, and they assemble them here?” There was a fascinating pile of old gears and wheels, as if someone had disemboweled an entire showroom of clocks. “I wonder if the Gold King knows about all this machinery. You could build half a factory from these scraps.”
“He knows about everything, doesn’t he?” Imogen said dryly. “I checked the list, you know. He was never invited to Mama’s party.”
Evelina drew closer, wanting a better look. Some of the parts were shiny and new, others old and misshapen with time. Corrosion reduced what might have been gears to jagged skeletons. Images of shipwrecks and treasure hunters played in her imagination.
“There are bloodstains underneath the sawdust,” Imogen said with disgust, scraping at the floor with her boot.
“One of the workers must have been hurt.”
Evelina barely gave the blood a glance. She’d seen plenty of mishaps at the circus, and even had a few of her own—like the time she’d tried one of Nick’s knife tricks without supervision. She still had a faint scar across the palm of her hand. I want to see Ploughman’s again. The truth was, she wanted to see Nick again. The need burned inside like a fever—consuming everything, leaving nothing but pain and weakness behind.
It was folly. Wanting Nick was selfish, hurtful to her and worse for him. She had gone over it in her mind a thousand times, and she’d decided to take the hard road for both their sakes. She had a future, better than what she’d left, and she should be grateful. Still, sadness lanced through her like a knife.
She bowed her head, slowly forcing away the idea by concentrating on the jumble on the shelf in front of her. And something reached out to her mind. She recoiled as if she’d been shocked with Aragon Jackson’s evil machine.
“What’s wrong?” Imogen demanded.
“There’s something here.”
“Your magic mustard plaster?”
No, it wasn’t the biting, swarming sensation. It was something more. Something very, very old. She drew near once more to the shelf with the clock parts, summoning the courage to tentatively open her awareness a bit further.
There it was again, reaching up like a baby wanting to be held, but oh so ancient. So lonely. It wanted her to find it, amid the wreckage and dross of forgotten machines. It was one of them, but much, much more. It told her all that, not with words, but with an ache in her heart so sharp her eyes stung with sorrow.
She inched nearer still, reaching out her hand.
“Evelina?”
She brushed aside a litter of screws and wheels, sending them bouncing to the floor with a clatter and ping. Her fingertips sought the source of the thoughts, blindly groping to quiet its plea. She felt her hand connect with it. The sensation was odd—a duality of cool metal and warm energy, not unlike the combination of the mechanical bird and its deva. Curiosity vibrated through her as she realized that this was another combination of magic and machine. Someone else had done what she had done, and put a spirit into a mechanical body—but long, long ago.
She brushed away the surrounding bits and gears and lifted the chunk of metal in both hands. It didn’t look like much, just a brass and iron cube about eight inches across. The surface was lumpy and irregular, as if molten metal had been dripped over a piece of crude clockwork, or else the surface of the cube had corroded away to expose what lay beneath.
Whatever was in the cube reached up to her with a profound and archaic intelligence. Now that she’d found it, was holding it, she could sense more than just its loneliness. There was a feeling of depth, or maybe just vastness. It was like reading an entire library at once. It was like falling into a sky of stars.
“Evelina!”
She started, looking up at Imogen. “Pardon?”
“What is that thing?”
“I’m not sure, but it wants to come with us.”
Imogen looked dubious. “It does?”
“I think someone was about to put it in the scrap bin.”
“Really?” Her friend’s face said that was a reasonable plan.
“But it’s alive,” Evelina explained. “Like my bird, only much more sophisticated than that.”
Imogen blinked. “Sophistication which sadly didn’t extend to wings or wheels. Or much else, for that matter.” She pulled off her shawl. “Knot this around it and it will make a reasonable carrier.”
Evelina took the shawl almost hesitantly. “Thank you. I’m afraid your shawl might be soiled, though.”
Imogen shrugged. “Just hurry. This place is starting to give me the shivers.”
She was right. The warehouse seemed to be growing darker, th
e shadows creeping in from the corners. It was also growing warmer, as if a boiler had been switched on beneath the floor. Evelina felt a sense of alarm from the cube, and shared it. The stinging, biting presence that must have belonged to the guardian of the place was no longer merely annoying. It had increased from the scrape and poke of crawling ants’ feet to something sharper, like a thousand tiny blades glancing along her skin.
“I think we had better leave,” Evelina said quietly, folding the cube in the shawl and knotting the ends of the soft fabric into a handle. Once again, she was sorry she’d brought her friend.
Imogen opened her mouth to answer, but no sound came out. Evelina spun to see what her friend saw, and froze. Straight ahead, their path had vanished in a haze, as if night had fallen on the far end of the warehouse. It took a moment to figure out why, but when Evelina did, her gut turned icy with alarm. The shadows were moving, rolling end over end to form a long tube of smoky darkness.
Chapter Twenty-one
“What is that?” Imogen asked hoarsely.
“Remember I told you about the devas?”
“Yes.”
“This is the biggest damned deva I’ve ever seen.”
Imogen didn’t even blink at the curse. There were far greater things to worry about. The rolling shadows were arching up from the floor with serpentine grace, seeming to grow thicker and more solid every moment. The front end wavered in the air like a questing worm. The back end grew a long, snapping tail as she watched. A fire drake.
This was no countryside deva of tree or spring, small and formless and more or less harmless, but something ancient. The ability to assume physical form took enormous power, and such creatures were rare. She’d only met an eyewitness once before—an old man who told of the great bear spirit who roamed the north. The rest were just legends—until now. This creature had powers straight out of Gran’s fairy tales.
The touch of its magic grew sharper, scraping along her flesh. Evelina glanced down at her arms, half expecting to see a tracery of blood seeping through the fine sleeves of her gown.
“Back the way we came,” she gasped.
“Sounds good.”
They turned tail and scampered for the door, the rustle of their petticoats loud in the cavernous space. They had gone a half dozen yards when Evelina caught darting movement from the corner of her eye. The roll of shadow slid, gliding along the floor with an undulating slither. Evelina caught her friend’s arm, stopping her just as the thing reared up, blocking their escape.
She had the impression of vast, whiskered jaws and eyes the color of peridots. Red scales glittered from the darkness like flakes of burning coal, as if the thing were made of a living hide of banked fire.
Imogen shrieked, jumping backward in terror. Evelina pushed her to the side, stepping in front, ready to defend her just as she had in the school yard. Evelina weighed the cube in its sling of fine cashmere. She wondered how the entity inside that would feel about doubling as a weapon.
“We can’t go back,” Imogen said, her voice quaking. “It will just outrun us that way, too.”
The thing lunged, snapping fangs that curled up and outside its mouth like tusks. Short, muscular legs churned the air as it reared and lunged again. Evelina ducked, pulling Imogen down with her into the safe space between two piles of crates. The beast lashed its tail, leaving a trail of heat behind it. Evelina could smell sawdust burning. All it would take was the right spark, and the creature would set the whole warehouse on fire.
The tail lashed again, and a small crate crashed to the floor. A clay jar broke open, spraying tiny glass beads everywhere. Evelina ducked, wincing as one stung her cheek. What looked like a giant paw smashed down on the rolling spheres, curved talons emerging from the dark, glittering form. She heard the glass crunch as it was ground to powder.
The urge to flee wafted up from the cube. Run fast, run desperately, run into the jaws of the beast, but definitely run. She wasn’t about to argue.
Evelina began to inch backward, thinking they could sneak out the other side of the crates. Suddenly, hot breath blasted her back. She whipped her head around to find herself staring into the creature’s glowing green eyes. They were slitted like a cat’s. The long, sinewy body was wound over the pile of crates, feet on one side, head peering in the other side.
Evelina’s pulse thundered in her mouth, coppery fear fouling her tongue.
“What do we do?” Imogen was panting, her fingers digging painfully into Evelina’s arm. “What can it do to us?”
Frozen with fear, Evelina could barely move her lips. “The only reason it would be here is because someone bespelled it into serving as a guardian. If we want to leave, we have to make sacrifice.”
“Such as?”
“I need something sharp. Something metal.”
“I have a hat pin.”
“Something more like a blade.”
“That’s more in your line.”
The next words came out in a croak. “Anything that will slice. I need blood and lots of it, so it has to be more than a poke or a scratch.”
She heard the rustle of Imogen searching. It was ironic, given the amount of gears and wheels and metal debris in the warehouse, that they would be stuck in the one spot without a scrap of anything useful. “I just have my card case.”
“Give it to me.”
Imogen did as she was told. The case was a pretty thing of gold and blue enamel forget-me-nots. Evelina peeled off her gloves, flipped it open, and emptied out the calling cards into Imogen’s hands, spilling them so Imogen had to scrabble to pick them up. Then she snapped off the lid. It was a thin sliver of metal, and the broken hinge was sharp. In one quick swipe, she dragged it deep across the meat of her palm, using all the strength she could muster. Blood welled up in a red gush, and she let it drip onto the floor.
The beast began lapping it up like a cat, the thick black tongue darting.
“Run,” Evelina said in a tight voice, her throat aching with tension.
Imogen ran. Evelina wormed her way from between the crates and followed, the cube swinging in the shawl and banging against her leg. The beast bounded after with a hungry mewl, its back humping as it half ran, half slithered on its stumpy legs.
It was fast. Evelina barely made it across the threshold before the blare of sunlight stopped it in its tracks. They kept going, putting the length of the alley between them and the warehouse before Imogen had to stop. She was wheezing, the exertion too much for her.
“That. Thing. Was a deva. Like your bird?” she gasped.
“No. It was far more powerful.” Evelina cradled her hand, feeling her heartbeat pulse in the wound. She realized her teeth were chattering, fear finally catching up to her body. “I remember Gran Cooper talking about creatures like that. Some call them demons. Some dragons. I don’t know if either is the right name, but they can be summoned and controlled if you’re strong enough and know the right spells.”
“And they can’t go into sunlight?”
“That’s not it exactly. They’re set to guard something. As long as you’re off their territory, they don’t care, unless …” Evelina looked down at the cube-shaped lump in the shawl.
“You took something.”
Evelina swore, feeling hot, wet tears trickle down her cheeks. “Oh, no.”
The strange, mewling cry echoed through the alley. The dragon was considering its options. What little noise there was in the alley went dead, as if all of London was holding its breath. There was no one and nothing in sight but the singed brick buildings.
She looked around, realizing they had run farther than she’d thought. The smell of baking perfumed the air. It seemed surreal, a homey touch that clashed with the grim, sooty space. Then, as suddenly as it had disappeared, the chatter of excited voices started up from the open door ahead. She cudgeled her brain for an idea. “Isn’t that the back of the tea shop?”
“I think so.”
Evelina grabbed Imogen and pushed her th
rough the open door. “Go straight through the shop to the street, find the carriage, and wait for me there. Don’t argue.”
Imogen gave her a startled look. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll be fine, and I’ll tell you all about it later.”
“Why don’t you just run?”
Evelina swore under her breath. “That thing’s not going to stop coming for me, no matter where I go. I can’t leave here without putting other people in danger.”
Evelina gave Imogen another shove, bodily moving her along as she marched through the door after her. Her hand was bleeding again, no doubt drawing the beast with the smell of her blood.
A blast of heat smacked her skin when she pushed through the door, floating tendrils of hair back from her face. Two burly bakers gawped, eyes wide, at the sight of the disheveled Society ladies. Evelina gave Imogen a last shove, sending her trotting through the curtain to the front of the shop.
Evelina stayed behind, glancing frantically around the worktables. In moments, she saw what she wanted—a bag of salt, still half full. She snatched it up. One of the bakers shouted a protest, but she was already in motion, diving back into the alley. The contents poured over the lip of the bag into her cut, stinging hard enough to make her eyes water.
It was an odd weapon, but the only one she could think of to confront the dragon. Evelina wasn’t sure how the salt worked—chemistry or magic or rules of engagement—but it seemed to nullify the energy that kept creatures like the garden devas alive. One sure way to kill earth or fire spirits was to drown them in the sea. An ocean sprite, of course, was a different problem.
She made it back to the alley in time to see the dragon’s approach. In the sunlight, it looked less distinct, like a cloud of thick smoke, but its magic was no less powerful. This is insane. For a moment, she considered simply tossing the cube its way and running.
A Study in Silks tba-1 Page 27
