Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  Arturo had been teaching her the craft of detection in spare moments on the airship across the Atlantic. She looked around, trying to get the feel of the place. There were drops scattered some distance apart—two people? Scuffed rugs. An unlocked door, and a recently picked one, that was clear from the scratches. But the rooms themselves were empty, without a single sock even in the wardrobes.

  There was also a lock of blonde hair caught on a door hinge. Cezette smelled it carefully: airships’ aeon steam, and the faint perfume of lilac, some days old. Even though she hadn’t mastered the art of detecting completely, she knew one thing immediately: Maman had been here! But where had she gone?

  “If there’s been a theft, follow the money. If there’s a body, follow the blood.” Arturo’s maxim. She followed the blood, leading her around the corner and smack dab into a dead end. The hallway terminated at a little nook, with a decorative table set against a blank wall.

  “Sacre bleu!” Cezette cried, but softly. She rubbed her knee where it had banged it, though it didn’t hurt. She was simply rather protective of Cid’s gifts. But as she looked down, she observed the droplets of blood go right up to the wall. Tellingly, one of the tiny, perfect circles was cut in half by the edge of the wainscoting.

  Cezette felt around. Under the lacy edge of the table’s doily, she discovered a tiny toggle switch made of brass. When she tripped it, there was no visible change or sound, but the wall felt just a little bit looser, as if no longer part of the inn’s firmament. Cezette pushed. The section of wall fell back, taking the table with it to reveal a secret passageway.

  “Alors,” murmured Cezette. “Won’t Arturo be jealous?”

  She slipped inside, her lithe body finding the crawlspace quite spacious. A man would have trouble with the low ceilings, she surmised. Once between the bare slats, she found there were cunning slits in the walls to let in the light. At the moment, they were showing scuffs, drag marks, old tears in the wadding of the wall. Cezette gasped, but she kept her head, looking for the fresher blood. And it was there, now outlined in a footprint. No, two. There was the trace of a large shoe. Heavy tread—a large man? Or someone struggling…

  Cezette followed the crawlspace well past the physical limits of the inn. At this point, she must be in the adjacent building, which was, as she recalled, a mixed-use residence with a general store on the first floor. What she would call une epicerie. She was about to feel for a door seam or catch when suddenly the space opened up into a room about the size of a large closet. The wall simply ended, slats sticking out of the plaster like ribs. She was looking at a room with white walls and a single object in it.

  When she got close, the object turned out to be a wooden horse, dark with old blood. Not the kind she looked for in a toy shop window, but the kind Cezette only knew from a book on medieval torture her tutor Jean Hallow had accidentally brought her. Victims would be sat, naked, on the sharp triangular block and given weights to hold. The torture took days, and it would be agonizing, until the person simply died from the blood loss or infection. How much of the torture was simply the knowledge that, even if the tortured survived, they would never be the same again? Why did Hallow have such a tome to begin with? Cezette hadn’t dared ask.

  Now Cezette covered her mouth, feeling her gorge rise. Had Maman been subjected to this?

  The fresher drops led around the horse, thankfully. Cezette stepped carefully around the terrible thing, trying not to let it touch her pinafore. She arrived at another blank wall. Puzzles upon puzzles…but the person who was bleeding had been careless. A splatter of blood showed where he had stumbled, and Cezette placed one dainty shoe against the board outlined there. The wall fell back, again impossibly quietly, and there before her was another tiny, cramped crawlspace.

  As she passed by a cleverly hidden panel, a bear trap tripped on utterly silent, oiled hinges, its teeth glinting cheerfully in the dark.

  “La vache!” cried Cezette in surprise. The cow!

  Steeling herself, she looked down—to find she was quite all right. If she were all flesh and blood, her ankle would have been crushed. But she was steel and enamel below the knees, and the teeth of the trap merely made her stumble, biting ineffectively on her shin. Cid’s steel was better—it chipped the rusted teeth of the trap. Clearly, the thing had been meant to maul, not to sever.

  Gingerly, Cezette extracted herself, careful not to snag her long, raven hair on the edges of the walls. Pulling the trap out of its hiding place, she tossed it forward down the crawlspace. And it was a good thing too. The contraption triggered two more traps: a cutting wire that struck sparks against the bear jaws and a deadfall sandbag that dropped from the ceiling, swinging back and forth through the passage. As the bear trap landed, it crashed through a false floor and made a clattering noise. When Cezette moved carefully to the lip, passing a few other rooms, she saw there were sharpened stakes on the next floor down, ready to impale someone who fell through. The place was a house of horrors. What sort of perverted mind would build something like this?

  She didn’t know what to expect after that, but she picked carefully forward, with her toes first, and discovered a convoluted passageway full of blind corners and dead ends. Ladders ascended toward the roof, and parts of the hall sloped disarmingly. On the other side was a steep metal slide leading down to the first floor, or more likely a basement, where the fresh blood made a wet skid on the surface. The steel dropped away into the darkness, and there was a foul smell, like bad eggs and pennies.

  Cezette placed herself at the top of the slide and looked. She was no fool. Cezette was well aware there might be more traps below. But her days of being trapped in her room above the Rue Fremicourt had honed her sense of danger to a fine edge. Even so, when she slid carefully down the slide, she became aware of something else in the room and gasped, nearly falling over her own feet.

  Just beside the bottom of the slide was a body.

  Voices and a rustling above caught her unawares. A door somewhere was opening!

  Startled, Cezette’s heel fell on something uneven on the floor. She felt the weight shift through her hips, her legs unable to compensate, and she caught a nearby shelf for balance. There were unsavory things on the shelf, brown with old blood.

  “What was that noise?”

  “There’s somebody downstairs!”

  The loud shifting brought the voices closer. A basement stair? She had surely slid for more than two stories. But in the time before the voices arrived, Cezette quickly took in the dim room for anything useful. The smell was stronger, choking in the enclosed space. The body was a man, his chest a ragged wound, but fresh—the smell could not be from him. His head looked wrong, misshapen, and there was a wet-looking hammer shining at his side. Signs of a struggle: an upset workbench, scattered tools. And, mon dieu, were those rags, or bodies? More blood, old, some of it on the shop stair. There! A second stair, with daylight peeking through the trap door at the top.

  Just before she ran to the stair, Cezettte managed to scoop the object that had tripped her off the floor and into the front of her pinafore. Maybe it was instinct, or a vindictive sense of needing to know what had befuddled her beautiful prosthetics, but she did it without quite knowing why. Then, she confronted her only means of escape.

  It was locked. A heavy brown chain linked the handles of the trap door.

  Cezette wasted no time. She took off her shoe and kicked with her hard metal heels. The chain crumbled into rust, and she was outside even as the basement began to fill with the footsteps of officers. She closed the doors behind her quietly, put her shoe back on and walked casually around to the front of the building.

  Then Cezette disappeared, blending into the crowd.

  Cid had just come back with coffees for everyone in pasteboard cups plastered with some obnoxious green branding when Cezette sauntered up to the old cab.

  “The tea they serve up here is beastly, some faded ghost of a Keemun or a Ceylon. But the lattes are not bad. What do y
ou have there, Cezzy?” said Cid. He said it with concern, but Cezette appreciated the fact that he didn’t make a grab for it. She was visibly flustered, she knew, and her leggings on one side were chewed to threads. But Cezette managed to climb into the cab, and they eased off down the road even as the officers began to pile out of the front of the general store, some of them vomiting into the bushes.

  “A notebook, I think,” Cezette said. “From the crime scene.”

  “Hum,” Arturo said. He shifted a blind inside the cabin of the taxi, and a beam of light lanced into his lap. “Give it here.”

  “What happened?” asked Hallow.

  Cezette filled them in, trying to keep to the facts as Arturo had taught her. But their conclusion was the same as her own.

  “This man in the basement must have been killing people for ages with his beastly torture house,” summed up Cid, clearly disgusted. “Funneling people from the inn. A hotel where you check in and never leave.”

  “And for once it went horribly wrong,” finished Arturo. “My, my, our Inspector Hargreaves would have beat seven bells out of a serial murderer.”

  “Is it Maman?”

  “We shall see,” said Arturo, opening the notebook.

  Inside they found a few torn pages, a scribble of some aborted poetry, some lists of numbers and calculations done in a hurried pencil. The rest of the book was blank.

  Cezette slumped back in her seat, disappointed. It was merde like this that convinced a girl her instincts were useless, she thought to herself.

  Arturo’s amused mumbling brought her out of her slump.

  “Well, hullo, Inspector. I believe we are not far from you at all,” he said.

  “Show me!” Cezette demanded. She lunged out of her seat, and her skirt rode up over the part of her leggings that was ripped.

  “Girl! What did I say about taking care of those legs!” shouted Cid. There was a moment when the whole cab shuddered with Cid’s angry piloting, and everybody else tumbled about inside the cabin. The notebook went flying out of Cezette’s hands.

  Once things were put right, Arturo explained he had been on the receiving end of Hargreaves’ missives before. Once he pointed out the straight, clear strokes and the no-nonsense block print, her handwriting was as plain as day. The calculations were promising. It was Cid who proposed they could be fuel and distance figures. Arturo pulled out their map.

  “Assuming your maman was there in the shop, almost the victim of a current-day Pit and Pendulum, and further, managed to dispatch the torturer, she would want to put as much distance as she could from it as soon as possible,” Arturo said. He pointed to a wriggling India ink line he had drawn, one of several highlighting various routes. They wound through mile after mile of untamed lands, wild forests and proud mountains surely unfriendly to any steam crafts.

  “If she started one night ago, she may be on this road here,” Cid filled in. “The grade is level, and it has short intervals between towns where she can find coal, water, and food.”

  “Those figures are enormous,” said Hallow. “Hundreds of miles at the least.”

  “We will never reach her in time,” Cezette bemoaned. She thumped the side of the poor suffering taxi.

  “Where the devil are you going, Hargreaves?” Arturo asked. “Where are you dumping the box?”

  His finger traced the map routes spread out between them in the cabin. Cezette imagined his gentle digits flying over the pines, giant, manicured tips brushing the rocky heights of the Appalachians, and into the vast flats beyond, the plains and the desserts. There would be no automata there, just lengths upon lengths of endless distance to keep the world from the terror riveted inside Maman’s iron box. Only waystations marked the interminable distances, beacon towers that only existed to field the vast plains dirigibles on their slow crawl from one middle of nowhere to another. Cezette looked at the veins spread out over the vastness, and the capillaries below them crawling where Arturo’s finger lay. Then she looked over the coast, to the Pacific, and past it, towards the gray veil hiding the interminable vastness of the Lands Beyond.

  The perfect place to dispose of the Cook box.

  Arturo’s face spread into a roguish grin. The grin soon spread to Cid’s lips, and the two of them sat there, teeth bared like baboons. Then they both looked outside, to a road sign just coming round the bend.

  “What is it about Britons and trains?” Cezette said aloud, and sighed pleasurably.

  They might have missed Maman in New York, but she could feel their reunion coming now, like the undeniable rush of a locomotive engine.

  Station 3

  Montana

  Vanessa Hargreaves’ breath came in a ragged wheeze, so loud she was terrified of it bouncing over the mountains and into keen ears.

  She risked a glance out of the stand of trees; nothing, no more gunshots, though because this state had legalized hunting with silencers, the quiet was far from reassuring. The last scream had come from at least thirty yards down, difficult to gauge with the thick temperate arbor pressing in on all sides. It was pitch black, even though in the day she would have been in sight of the town. The town’s leaders hadn’t wanted to make it easier for bandits, and had installed no gaslights along its streets. An antediluvian attitude at first unbelievable, until the sun set and she was left with the blanket of night that had comforted cavemen so many eons ago. It made staying hidden a cakewalk, but Hargreaves imagined she saw the shapes of wild things, restless spirits perhaps, abandoned idols cantering with eagle-feathered antlers.

  She considered making a break over the next ridge. It would be an ankle-breaking climb over rocks, in the dark, sliding down the slippery rot of leaves. In this part of the country, the snow had not descended across the plateaus. Alphonse was waiting for her behind a ridge near the road, an impervious titan. The only problem now was running through those wolf-infested woods without getting shot to bits by her pursuers.

  How had she arrived at this unenviable pickle? She hadn’t stopped asking herself since coming to this confusing place, this mournful place, so at odds with itself, this town of Spelter, Montana.

  After the dreadful business at the waystation, Hargreaves took the next woolly bear out as far as it went, over the desert, and then took off on Alphonse alone. She couldn’t risk being connected to a murder, or running into the Ripper. Following a dim notion of keeping the Cook box from seeing the light of day, she turned west, where the world stretched out and the distances between places were still full of places to hide. She hired a man with a lorry, loaded Alphonse on the back, and at the first opportunity drove away alone, leaving the driver on the side of the road. It had been easy—she had simply asked him to close his eyes and take off his trousers, then turned and walked quickly to the cab. She had felt little guilt, which in itself made her feel terrible.

  And so, eventually Hargreaves reached the beautiful state of Montana, which seemed to her an open ocean on land: miles and miles of murderous golden desert gradually fading to rolling waves of hilly green grass in the western part of the state. Majestic plateaus skewed across the endless horizon, vast, flat ships of slate braving the waves. Roving schools of wild horses and bison occasionally came into view. Hargreaves had been reading on the Red Indians who lived here, books snatched from waystation parlors mostly. It was easy to see where their idea of a Great Spirit had come. Winter had come, but the life hadn’t gone from the lowlands. She wondered if the spirits knew her mission, if they would aid her in her quest.

  Eventually she entered those mountains and plateaus, larger than any she had ever seen. And here she saw the majesty of the American spirit for the first time, for there were signs of life clinging to those naked rocks. It showed itself in the bright green of garden plots high on the cliffs, basin-like scaffolds that irrigated and watered the crops, and the slab-like homes wedged into the crags of the cliffs. They had long, smooth roofs to catch the sunshine for the boilers inside. The whole flat table of the mountains was their home, and
on the roofs stood tall, spire-like balloons ready to fly in the clear sky, their rounded tops shaped with wagon-wheel frames of spry wood. Aeon farmers, by the look of them. And by hearsay. Hargreaves could only deduce at a distance the great condensing sails that drew the stratosphere down along the narrow envelopes and the great tanks that would hold that fortune, just like the waystation pamphlets had advertised. As they filled, they would slowly draw the balloons back to the mountaintops, where the tanks could be unhitched and the balloons fitted again. In the distance, a slew of tall balloons were descending on farther peaks, and the stone framed the brilliant blue horizon with stark ruby beauty. As she watched, an airship drifted slowly by on spinning square sails, like a great windmill that had torn loose from the rolling green hills.

  The inspector turned her eyes from the spectacle with difficulty and tried to keep her mind on the small roads. These were a challenge, meandering, rocky paths bravely cut from the great American wilderness. She fancied there were bears and wolves peering out at her from the bushes. But when she looked closer, she instead came upon herds of penned-in cattle, gleaming with velvety brown flanks and shining, well-kept hooves. Perhaps one in ten glinted with the unmistakable rust-red of steamworks that had been left in the rain for some years, though the cattle did not seem to mind. They were hard to make out, but Hargreaves found a cow quite close who had a shoulder covered with a pitted, rust-dappled plate. The thing seemed to be riveted onto the animal’s shoulder bone, though it displayed no discomfort as it chewed its cud placidly.

  Hargreaves discovered just what they were when she stopped to buy a cannister of milk and some finely ground cornmeal from a farmer who was stopped with his cart. A cow and an ox grazed nearby, unhitched from their yoke. The heifer was a lovely caramel red, but the other bore a hodge-podge of metal in lieu of his back leg. When the animal’s rump settled on the leg, it hissed softly through a round copper valve. The farmer laughed when she asked about it.