Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  The silken sheets were too freeing on his bare skin, and he had trouble sitting up. When he finally got the hotel’s plush robe on and padded into the bathroom, he found Jean Hallow standing before the mirror.

  Hallow had the lobotomy needle up to his face, his fingertips gently touching the steel, and was staring down over the point. The tip brushed one of his eyelashes. It fell like a leaf in autumn, drifting to settle on the pure white countertop.

  “Still sharp,” Hallow said, and set the needle down to take a drink from the bottle.

  14

  Inside the Rose Cottage

  While Arturo and Hallow made ready to rejoin Cezette and Cid in the morning, a bulbous airship hull bobbed up and down over the brilliant orange foliage of the Hudson banks. Her port manipulator dangled, scraping the treetops, like a gimp’s crippled arm. Her screws churned a broken staccato. The deck tipped starboard, spilling a brackish drip. It threatened to dip below the Hudson’s calm surface, there to fill with water and drag the ship to its depths.

  Inside the Berry, the situation was no less dire. Rosa Marija was strapped behind the helm, her adept hands busy in the quagmire of controls. Half of them were useless, shifting loosely in their mountings, some twitching dementedly from the Berry’s mangled steam lines. Rosa’s mascara had run, in black streaks down her cheeks. She had to keep this ship, Alby’s ship, in the air, for as long as she could. Every so often, the helmswoman found fresh salty droplets on the panels, but her sleeve soon put it right.

  Hargreaves would have offered some kind of commiseration, but Rosa was a cruel taskmaster as she doled out the things that needed done. Where to patch the boilers, which valves to shut and which to open. If the veins of the ship stopped circulating the vital aeon steam the ship would fall, and fall fast.

  In the corridors of the Berry, Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves’ long legs took her through in bounds and strides. The ship opened up to her, guiding her along unlocked portals and around buckled bulkheads. Occasionally the corridors would become crumbling deathtraps, but the Berry was careful, even so badly wounded. Hargreaves skid to a halt as a panel before her slammed nearly on her toes, the space beyond filling up with boiling steam.

  “Thanks, old girl,” Hargreaves said, giving a nearby bulkhead a good thump. She darted into a side corridor, ripping a grate aside to thrust a long pair of clamps onto a quivering nut. Four deft turns closed the line, but whistling tore through the corridors, signaling another leak. Thick work gloves shielded Hargreaves from the worst of the hot metal, but shiny burns still spotted her arms pink. It was far too hot for the jacket at her waist, and she ran about in a linen chemise, her corset ribs popping up through the damp material.

  “Rosa! Trees!” Hargreaves hollered into a speaking tube between sealing breaches. The pointed treetops she glimpsed through the misted portholes were alarmingly intimate.

  In the echoes from the bridge, the harsh bark of Cockney Alex and the wheeze of a running Blair could be heard, interspersed by Auntie’s calm, matter-of-fact damage control. As usual, the massive, burly Londoner had been impossible to find until the ship needed him. Hargreaves began to wonder if he was tied to it somehow, as if it birthed him from her bulkheads when needed like some attendant drone. All of them were, now, scrambling through the Berry, desperately healing her hurts.

  “Forty yards and I can set her down,” Rosa hollered through the brass of the ship. Her voice was terse, tinny, like they had been dropped into a void.

  Rosa was good as her word. Before the Berry burst apart at her seams, Rosa landed her in a jarring skid through a gauntlet of creaking, breaking pines. Their flexible limbs held the Berry’s bulk. A last jerking halt nearly threw the inspector from where she clung, tangled in a nest of cold pipes. Her joints threatened to tear from her sockets, but after a nerve-wracking thirty seconds, the ship settled to a halt.

  Hargreaves bolted up to the bridge, where the cracked, bullet-pocked windows showed a dense sea of leafy branches. If she looked behind them, the sky was a riot of color from the rooster tail of pine needles and fall leaves thrown up by their passing. Rosa was still busily throwing switches, one of which released a cloud of dense steam into the forest. The plume seared the branches naked, making the treetops sway and roil like a real ocean. At the edges of the venting, the white waves were freezing boughs solid. Cid had once explained it was an effect of the steam rapidly cooling to liquid water.

  “Rosa,” Hargreaves said, slowing to a stop. Her sweat dripped on the wood floor.

  Rosa was restless, moving from still gauge to still gauge. None of the needles showed any sign of quivering, but the helmswoman still plunged through the grove of instruments, tinkering.

  “Rosa!” Hargreaves repeated, but the helmswoman would not stop.

  The inspector stepped up and put her hands round Rosa’s middle, halting her clicking boots mid-step. It was a smart decision. Had she struck her, or simply stepped in her way Rosa might have become violent. There was no Captain Clemens to arrest her excesses this time, Hargreaves knew. After a while, the helmswoman’s tears began to cool through Hargreaves’ damp shirt, and she knew it was all right to let go.

  “He’s all right,” said Hargreaves.

  All the steel had gone from the normally adamantine Rosa Marija. The inspector stood stunned, holding her limp, sobbing form. Then a warm wetness began to dribble down her cheeks, empathy blowing the dam of pragmatism in a torrent of quiet tears. It wasn’t just empathy. In small moments in her bed in Kensington, Hargreaves had entertained guilty thoughts of Albion as her own white knight. Between her disparaging quips she’d grown used to the idea of the Manchu Marauder in the world, drinking hard, cracking heads, and righting wrongs where the law wouldn’t reach. Most of all, he said the things Hargreaves never could, purged the ghosts from her conscience. The Berry put to her bed with the forest in early winter all around them, the two women began to weep, and it seemed the ship wept tears of aeon water with them.

  They found tea in abundance in the galley, and blankets. The fireplace was undamaged, and soon they had a roaring fire going. Hargreaves balanced the teapot on a poker, holding it over the flames. The others had gone to replenish the ship’s water stores, wisely leaving them alone.

  “I had nowhere to go,” Rosa said after awhile. Hargreaves finished setting out the chipped cups and plates, being mother.

  “Nowhere to go. Nessie Drake had gone, setting up her empire. I’d cheated half the airmen in the sky, scorned the other half. And then there was my moniker….”

  “Rose Cottage,” Hargreaves said. “I remember Drake mentioning it. I don’t know what it means,” she added hastily.

  “You would be the only one who doesn’t,” Rosa said. “Most of the underground knows the name, even if they don’t know my face. It was before I met Albion, when I was running with Drake and a couple other like-minded individuals. Grifters, to put it bluntly.”

  “There was Eyre Cantilly, you might know her as the Francisco Fraulein, with a dozen formerly rich, formerly alive divorcés to her name up and down the West Coast. Johnny Bracken, oh, he was a card, with his fake Aussie accent and the way he used to smirk when you caught him looking at your bottom. And then there was Sister Anna Marie Clementine, the one who got us all together….” Rosa drifted off.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Eyre Cantilly got stabbed through the liver two years ago. She picked the wrong gentleman millionaire, either that or her legendary physique could no longer keep up. Nessie, we know is still out there, curse her undead Lolita heart. It’s no surprise Johnny Bracken got caught in Mexico City, in a shitty brothel with a teenage señorita. Her father was the leader of El Gancho, the local Mexican gang. El Gancho means ‘hook,’ in Spanish. You can imagine what happened. As for the Sister….” Rosa paused, realized she had got ahead of herself. “We were sixteen? Seventeen at the time. Long story short, we put together a heist.”

  And so Rosa told the tale.

  “It was supp
osed to be an honest job, but the Sister was a bird of another feather. She showed up in a dive, at the dirigible port in Baltimore, walked straight through those jeering aeronauts, and posted a job with Blue Crab, in the back. Crab, now, he wasn’t particularly bright, but he had been around the block, and he had this low sort of cunning that made you comfortable knowing exactly how you couldn’t trust him. He wasn’t ever quite liberal with the details of the job, information being his trade, but you could count on him not to screw you if you’d ever bought him a drink.

  “There were plenty of suspicious characters in the bar that day, men bitter with the weight of the world. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing the Sister ought to have done. Crab, well, he knew a determined face when he saw one, and he took her money, which for me was a sign of earnest employment. Good as gold.

  “Nobody else seemed to see it, but I could tell right away, the old codger had his claw clamped tight around this one. It was just as well; most of the numbskulls there thought the Sister too green to work with and too poor to con.

  “So, I say to him, ‘Cough it up, Crabs, she’s on to something big, isn’t she?’

  Well, that crusty crustacean put his big wooden leg up on the bar and dug a little deeper into his bottle of rum, flicking soft-shells out of his teeth. Crabs are cannibals, you know.’

  “He works the bolt in his leg, because we didn’t have those fancy jobs you said Cid was building for Cezette Louissaint. Blue Crab had a piece of an airship’s mizzenmast, the bit with the big coil in it, attached to the stump of his right hip. Every time the spring caught he had to work the bolt, so he wouldn’t be walking round sideways. If the cannon had taken him any higher, he used to say, he’d be standing on a very different sort of wood.

  “‘Rosie,’ he says to me, ‘you stay ’way from Sister Anna. The woman done showed me what it meant to be a man.’

  “‘I don’t know what that means. Don’t even think about telling me,’ I answer him.

  “‘’Aight, I won’t tellsya,’ Crab says, and leans back, dead to the world, his leg going creak-creak as he works the bolt.

  “Well, I didn’t have any choice, now, did I? I laid on some persuasion, not too heavy. With my knuckles skinning his fresh-shaved head, he gives in.

  “‘Give! Give! Uncle!’ he cries, and I let him up. ‘Not doinya any favors, ya hear? The Sister is lookin’ to pull a job. A thievery, a rustlin’, a good old-fashioned burglary.’

  “‘What sort of a job?’ says Nessie, who just rolled in, lolly in hand. I could pass for a twenty-something back then with the right heels and eyeliner, but Nessie didn’t even try. She was wearing an upended crucifix, the same color as her carbuncle eyes. She had an affectation for the upsetting that drew more trouble than Nessie was worth. It did no good to nettle her about it. Even in those days, before the Lovelace business, all her black lace and white trim made her stand out, let alone the gothic paraphernalia.

  “Oddly, Crab looks her up and down, nodding. ‘Aye, ya’ll do fine! The sister might not have requested y’all specifically, but in the absence of an altar boy….”

  “‘A priest? We’re robbing a priest?’

  “‘An orphanage, to be precise,’ Crab says, looking up from Nessie’s flat, beribboned bosom. He showed no guilt about it. I knew for a fact what Crab’s type was, and I propped one leg up on a chair, an incentive on two fronts.

  “Crab noticed. I also had enough of a reputation, and he valued his remaining limbs.

  “‘The job needs Nessie, but it don’t need you, Rosa. Ye’re too much of a loose cannon,’ Crab says.

  “‘There are others,’ I deduce.

  “‘Aye. She’s got a tank already, and a fingerman. She don’t need a pepperpot spicing things up. What she does need–’ Crab leers at Nessie again ‘–is a trapper.’

  “‘I can handle it,’ Nessie says nonchalantly. ‘But Rosie’s my partner. She goes, or I don’t.’

  “‘Too smart for yer own good, ye are,’ groans Crab. ‘Most girls yer age are playing dolly, or worryin’ about yer pretty ball gowns, not coverin’ each others’ fannies. Here be the meeting place. Make sure ye get there on time.’

  “I snatch the slip of paper from him, a slip he evidently kept to hand for the minute I showed up. Blue Crab was an old, cynical pervert, but underneath, he had a weary, beaten heart of gold. I suspect he thought we could stop the Sister from what she wanted to do, but even he didn’t know the extent of her plan. We turned to leave, flicking him the requisite fee. Honor amongst thieves, and all that.

  “‘Oh, and girls?’

  “We turn at the door.

  “‘Be careful with this one. Jesus might have saved a spot in heaven for a thief, but his followers? They’re like to send you straight to hell,’ he says, counting his money and downing the rest of his pint.

  “We rendezvoused with the Sister at a library near Baltimore’s historic district in broad daylight. It made us uncomfortable. There were lots of straight-laced suits around, and plenty of police. A raised thoroughfare blocked the front of the library’s beautiful clock tower, progress slowly eating the city’s beauty from the inside out.

  “‘I did not sign on to babysit children!’

  “Eyre Chantilly was the first to notice, and it was only by the virtue of the private reading room’s thick walls she did not topple the whole building on top of us. She was in her prime then, a regal figure exaggerated to epic proportions by medieval corsetry.

  “‘And we are not in the profession of caring for the elderly,’ Nessie Drake shot back, her voice sharper than cheddar bay biscuits. I giggled. We had had this conversation before, and I loved to sit back and watch.

  “‘Ladies.’ The Sister’s voice was firm, stern, betraying none of the madness we would know all the more keenly later. She was young, in her early twenties, but her gaze was stern. ‘I am sure they are simply lost, from a school group. Kindly move on; I have reserved this room for private business.’

  “‘We are your private business,’ I answered her, and it was just as well I had come along with Nessie Drake. Simply by flashing the wristlet I palmed from Chantilly, I was able to convince the Sister of our unique talents. She seemed to disapprove of Nessie, who wore a backless dress that day, with an exaggerated bustle that showed off her concave spine.

  “‘Let’s not waste time bickering,’ Chantilly said. She displayed one elegantly manicured hand, with three of my own throwing knives pinched between her fingers.

  “‘The fingerman,’ Nessie said.

  “‘And the tank,’ said a man who had, by a remarkable feat of stealth, managed to hide amongst the stacks. When he moved, he shed a brown cloak to reveal about a mile of stubble. Bracken crossed the room, and in an instant, had my chin in his right hand. I felt the left start to slide up my thigh. ‘Why don’t you show me what those fingers can do?’

  “‘You mean these fingers?’ I asked, but I didn’t really expect a reply. I had a cold stiletto between his thigh and scrotum. Johnny Bracken’s ice-chip eyes were full of low cunning, like an animal calculating whether he could snare the bait before the trap fell on him.

  “‘Hmph,’ Bracken answered, and backed off.

  “The Sister, on the other hand, was looking at us with naked fear.

  “‘No. Never,’ she said. ‘You must leave right away. I cannot use you for this.’

  “‘You posted the bill,’ I pointed out.

  “‘Never played this game before, have you?’ Nessie said, hopping into a chair. She could have been a student, out for the day on a research trip. ‘If Crab gives us the job, it’s ours.’

  “‘It is not a game for children!’ the Sister insisted, but when she looked into the eyes of the adult shysters in the room, she found there was nobody in her camp. Protection of children only existed within the bounds of schools and nurseries. Hell, in Bracken’s eyes, we were old enough to breed. They all knew the rules, and were indifferent.

  “The Sister sighed, and began to unfurl a map
she carried in a dispatch case. We crossed to inspect it, but were careful not to gather too close. There was nothing in the Sister’s clothes to show who or what she was. Plain, conservative clothes, yes, but no habit, no cross, just a straightness to her back. A whip-smart quality to her wrists that made you want to move all the rulers away from her.

  “What she unfurled, at first glance, were plans to a heavily fortified gaol. The thick walls, barred windows, and the lack of emergency exits were clear. There were larger rooms, with observation levels built in, looking eerily to be surgical theaters. Then the clues began to click: the long wings, tacked onto the short central hall, the dots showing reinforcing supports all along the walls, and the tall tower in the middle of the building, with an empty space within. Nessie was the first to catch on.

  “‘This is a church,’ she said.

  “‘No—this is something else,’ Chantilly corrected. She pointed to the rooms along the flying buttresses, each one reinforced with steel bones and concrete.

  “‘It may once have been a church. Now it is an abomination,’ the Sister said, bitterly. ‘There is something of great value in this room here. I need you to steal it.’

  “Though the Sister would not give us any more information than we needed, she had planned the heist to meticulous detail. Nessie and Chantilly were to infiltrate the building, posing as mother and daughter, and charm the authority there to a private interview. Apparently a lecher and predator of children, he would no doubt want to get Nessie alone, giving Chantilly the time to scour his rooms for a most essential key.

  “Johnny Bracken, Sister Anna Marie, and I would storm the inner sanctum through an external storm drain. There would likely be guards, which we would readily dispatch. The meeting point was in one of the cellars. Nessie would hand off the key. Then the three of us would enter the hall of reinforced rooms, entering a certain one and liberating a certain item.