by Mark Hodder
Perhaps Stroyan was having trouble sleeping and had left this quiet area of the vessel to join the crew on the upper deck.
No. The bedsheets. The lieutenant is as neat as they come. Army training. He’d never leave his bedding twisted and trailing off the bunk like that.
And—
Burton grunted, took a box of lucifers from the table, lit one, and applied the spitting, sulphurous flame to a lamp, which he then lowered over the thing he’d noticed on the floor.
A pillow, darkly stained.
Blood.
He straightened, looked around again, saw the speaking tube, crossed to it, whistled into the mouthpiece, then put it to his ear and waited for a response.
A tinny voice said, “Yes, Lieutenant? What can I do for you?”
It was Doctor Quaint, the ship’s steward and surgeon.
“It’s not Stroyan, Doctor. It’s Burton.”
“Good Lord! I thought you were incapacitated.”
“Not quite. Do you know where Stroyan is?”
“I haven’t seen him since dinner, sir.”
“I think someone struck him on the head and dragged him from his bed. Would you have the captain come down here, please?”
“Struck? Bed? Are you—?”
“I’m not delirious, I can assure you. Will you—”
“The captain. I’ll tell him at once, sir.”
“Thank you.”
As he returned the speaking tube to its housing, the muted chanting touched his senses again. He cocked his head and listened. It was louder now, a single voice, generally low and rhythmic but occasionally increasing in volume, as if impassioned and unable to fully contain itself.
Curiosity got the better of him, turned him around, and drew him back out into the passage. His balance was off and he stumbled along as if drunk, but pushed himself onward, spurred by a growing impatience with his own weakness and an almost vicious determination to conquer it and discover the origin of the mysterious sounds.
As he passed the passenger cabin doors, each summoned a splintered recollection, as if they opened onto memories rather than empty chambers.
Number 35: Lieutenant George Herne. Like Burton, down with fever. He’d been left at Zanzibar, where, when he recovered, he’d be taking over as the island’s new consul. Burton would miss him. Herne was a good sort. A little stolid and unimaginative, perhaps, but loyal. Unflappable.
Number 36: Gordon Champion. The airship’s chief rigger. Dead. He’d crawled out along one of the engine pylons to investigate the inexplicable power failure that had immobilised the vessel just north of Africa’s Central Lakes. He’d lost his footing. The slightest of misjudgments and—snap!—gone. That’s how quickly, easily, and apparently randomly a life could be extinguished.
Number 37: John Hanning Speke. A beetle had crawled into his ear and he’d permanently deafened himself while trying to extract it with hot wax and a penknife.
What?
No.
There was no door 37.
That last never happened.
Burton reeled as a wave of dizziness hit him. He slapped a hand against the wall and rested for a moment. Why did he keep thinking about Speke? He’d hardly known the man.
This was a mistake. He should get back to bed. He was beginning to hallucinate again. He could see Speke’s face as clear as day, the lieutenant’s pale blue right eye contrasting starkly with the dark lens of his mechanical left.
Except Speke never had a mechanical left eye.
What is happening to me?
A voice pulled him back into reality. He looked up. The double doors to the observation deck were just ahead. The chanting was coming from behind them. It had just risen in pitch.
He wiped sweat from his eyes, closed them, and concentrated on the sweet tingle of the Saltzmann’s Tincture as it oozed honey-like through his arteries. He felt it climbing his neck and easing into the back of his skull.
I’ve made history.
He would be accepted; offered an official position; hopefully, like Herne, a consulship. Damascus. He could marry Isabel and settle there; start his translation of A Thousand Nights and a Night. No one would again accuse him of being “un-English.” No one would dare to call him “Blackguard Burton” or “Ruffian Dick.” His years of exclusion and exile were over.
He tottered forward, holding tightly to the swordstick.
The chanting had greater clarity now. A man, repeating the same phrase over and over. Burton was an accomplished linguist, fluent in nearly thirty languages, but the incantation was utterly unfamiliar; a pulsating jumble of outlandish sounds and syllables, unfathomable, even to him.
He placed his left hand on one of the doorknobs, became aware of a pungent odour, paused, then twisted and pushed.
The door swung open. The explorer took two steps forward and stopped.
Laurence Oliphant halted in mid-recitation. His eyes met Burton’s. He was standing in the middle of a pentagram painted on the floor. Clouds of foul-smelling smoke billowed from small brass censers positioned at its points. William Stroyan, obviously dazed and with blood dripping from a wound on his forehead, was kneeling at Oliphant’s feet, facing away from him and toward Burton. Oliphant was gripping the lieutenant’s hair and holding a large curved knife to his throat.
He sneered and slid the blade sideways.
Burton gave a cry of horror as blood spurted and his friend collapsed to the deck.
Oliphant raised his arms into the air. His eyes blazed triumphantly. “It is done! The way is open! I await thy coming, Master! I await thy coming! Thou shalt endure until the end!”
Barely aware of his own actions, Burton lifted the swordstick and drew the blade.
“That’s my cane,” Oliphant said.
The statement, so mundane amid such extraordinary circumstances, strengthened Burton’s growing conviction that he was caught up in a fever-fuelled fantasy. He levelled the weapon at Oliphant—its tip shook wildly—and quickly glanced around, hardly comprehending what he saw. The walls of the observation room—three of glass; the fourth, at his back, of wood panels—were painted all over with squares, subdivided, each division containing a sequence of numbers. Beyond the glass, in the clear night sky, curtains of multicoloured light were materialising, shifting and folding, blocking the stars, and fast making the night as bright as day.
“Your cane?” Burton mumbled.
A horrible bubbling diverted his attention back to Stroyan. He saw the lieutenant’s life gutter and depart.
Burton’s eyes snapped up to Oliphant, who held out a hand and said, “I’ll have it, if you please. It is bespoke. The only one of its kind. I had it fashioned in memory of a white panther I once kept as a pet. Marvellous creature. Don’t you admire the single-mindedness of the predator, Captain?”
Uttering an inarticulate yell, Burton hurled himself forward, but his left knee gave way and his charge instantly became an uncoordinated floundering. He stabbed at Oliphant’s shoulder, intending a disabling wound, but his opponent slashed his knife upward and deflected the rapier, sending Burton even more off-kilter. The two men collided and crashed to the floor. They grappled, Oliphant’s weapon tangling in the explorer’s jubbah, Burton dropping the sword and seeking a stranglehold.
Oliphant cried out, “Get off me! It’s too late! It’s him you should worry about now. He knows who you are, Burton. He’ll come for you! He’ll come for you!”
Burton punched him hard on the left ear, then, as the knife came free of the cloth, caught the man’s wrist and strained to prevent the weapon from being thrust into his chest.
Who does he mean? Who’s coming for me?
Without loosening his grip, Burton jerked his arms to the side and gouged his elbow into the other’s eye.
Too fragile for this. Too damned fragile.
Oliphant twisted. The knife sliced through cloth and scraped across Burton’s ribs. The explorer yelped, rolled over until he was on top of his foe, then slammed his forehead in
to the man’s face, hearing the back of the other’s skull clunk loudly on the deck. Lord Elgin’s secretary went limp. Burton pushed himself up, sat on Oliphant’s stomach, and with all the strength remaining to him, sent his fist crashing across the man’s jaw. His opponent became still.
There. That’ll keep you quiet, you bastard.
Falling to the side, he flopped onto his back and blacked out.
The distant coughing of lions.
The soothing songs of his bearers as the safari settled for the night.
The jungle, as red as blood.
Red?
The Other Burton’s voice: Parallel all things are; yet many of these are askew; you are certainly I; but certainly I am not you.
“Burton! Captain Burton! Captain Burton!”
He opened his eyes and saw Nathaniel Lawless looking down at him. The airship captain’s eyes were of the palest grey, his teeth remarkably straight and white, his snowy beard tightly clipped. Second Officer Wordsworth Pryce and Doctor Quaint were standing to either side of their commander.
Burton moistened his lips with his tongue. He said, “The sky.”
“I know,” Lawless responded. “It’s the aurora borealis. But this bright and this far south? In all my days, I’ve never seen the like. Are you all right?” He stretched down a hand and helped the explorer to his feet.
“Comparatively speaking, yes.”
“You’re covered in blood.”
“Most of it is William’s. I have a scratch across the ribs, nothing more.”
Doctor Quaint interjected, “Let me see it.”
“Later, Doctor.”
Burton turned and saw that rigger Alexander Priestly and engineer James Bolling—both big, beefy men—were holding the unconscious Laurence Oliphant upright.
Lawless asked, “He killed Stroyan?”
“He did.”
“Why? And what are all these scribbles on the floor and walls?”
“It was some sort of ritual. A summoning, I think. William was the sacrifice.”
“Summoning? Summoning of what? From where?”
“I haven’t a notion.”
Burton picked up the rapier and its sheath, slid the one into the other, then supported himself on the cane and waited for his head to clear. The Saltzmann’s was causing a ringing in his ears and had put a strange glow around everything he saw. Or was that caused by the rippling illumination outside?
He took a deep breath, blinked, and addressed the second officer. “Pryce, would you mind fetching my notebook from the bureau in my quarters? I’d like to make a record of these diagrams and numbers.”
Pryce gave a nod and departed.
Lawless jerked a thumb toward Oliphant. “I suppose I should lock this lunatic in one of the cabins.”
Burton slipped his hand into his jubbah and gingerly touched the laceration running down his left side. His fingertips slid through warm wetness. He winced, and nodded. “Strap him down onto the bed. Make sure he can’t move. We’ll give him to the police when we reach London. I’ll have a word with Lord Elgin.”
“I can do that,” Lawless objected. “You should go back to bed. You look sick as a dog—your skin is jaundiced.”
“I’m over the worst of it, Captain. The excitement appears to have jolted me back to my senses. I’d rather see Elgin myself, if you don’t mind.”
“As you wish.”
A couple of minutes later, Pryce returned and handed over Burton’s notebook. Oliphant was hustled away. Quaint bandaged the explorer’s wound then summoned a couple of crewmembers and helped them carry William Stroyan’s corpse off to the ship’s surgery.
Burton pushed to the back of his mind the misery he felt at his friend’s death. He sketched. Each wall, he noted, had been divided into a seven-by-seven grid, the outer squares of which were densely filled with numbers. The next squares in—five by five—contained fewer numerals. They surrounded three by three, in each of which only four-figure numbers were painted.
Burton couldn’t work it out, but he felt sure some sort of mathematical formula was in operation, which led to what he guessed was the “sum” in the central square of each wall. Behind him, on the wood panelling, this final number was ten; on the wall to his left, eight; on the wall in front, one thousand; and on the right-hand wall, nine hundred.
He was aware of Lawless looking over his shoulder until the diagrams were copied, then the captain crossed the deck to one of the glass walls and stood beside it, gazing out at the sky. “You surely don’t expect me to believe he magicked up the aurora?”
Burton shook his head. “He referred to someone he called his ‘master.’ As for the lights, perhaps Oliphant somehow knew they were coming and timed his ritual to coincide with them.”
Lawless ran his fingernails through his beard. Over the course of the past year, he and Burton had become firm friends, but the airship captain still observed the proprieties and nearly always called the explorer by his rank. Now, though, he let that formality slip.
“Damnation, Richard! After all we’ve been through, I wanted to get us home quick sharp! Instead, we had to lay over in Zanzibar until Herne’s position was confirmed, wait in Aden for Elgin, and now bloody Oliphant goes batty just as we’re about to land in Vienna. I swear, if our new passengers demand yet another delay because of this, I’ll get off the confounded ship and walk home.”
“Passengers?” Burton asked. “Who’s with Lord Stanley?”
“Only His Royal bloody Highness Prince Albert.”
Burton’s eyebrows went up.
“I know,” Lawless said. “Quite a surprise, eh? I was informed less than an hour ago. Disraeli obviously considers the Orpheus—as the flagship of the fleet—the most suitable vessel to escort the prince home, no matter that we’ve been in Africa for over a year and are all sick and exhausted.” He pulled out his chronometer and clicked open its lid. “We’ll be landing in fifty minutes but our precious cargo won’t come aboard until daylight, so I suggest you get some more sleep. You look done in.”
Burton nodded. “I am. But when Elgin shows his face in the morning, send someone to wake me.”
“Righto.” Lawless glanced around at the floor and walls then out at the rainbow colours that shimmered from horizon to horizon. “Hell and damnation!”
ETERNAL REST
IN LOWER NORWOOD CEMETERY
Home to the Finest Sepulchral
Mausoleums and Monuments in London.
Privately Landscaped Memorial Gardens.
Rural Setting. Protected from Resurrectionists.
Uninterrupted Interment Assured.
Episcopal and Dissenters’ Churches.
Extensive Vaults and Catacombs
for Added Peace and Security.
Consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester
West Norwood Cemetery, Norwood Road, Lambeth.
Sir James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine, was a short and stout man, whose hair, despite his being just forty-eight years old, was as white as snow. He was bright-eyed and clean-shaven, though thick muttonchop whiskers framed his deceptively good-natured countenance.
“I suspected something had gone wrong with the lad,” he said, “but to such an extreme? By heavens!”
“In what way wrong, sir?” Burton asked. They were seated in armchairs in the airship’s plush smoking lounge. Elgin was puffing on an after-breakfast hookah. Burton had opted for a Manila cheroot. They each had a cup of coffee on the table between them.
“He was appointed my secretary two years ago and accompanied me to China, where we’ve been overseeing the Arrow War. For the first few months, he was perfectly efficient in his work and perfectly innocuous in his private life. He had, however, brought with him a book entitled The Wisdom of Angels, with which he became increasingly obsessed. He read it over and over. When I asked him about it, he became oddly reticent and refused to discuss it.”
“The author?”
“I don’t recall. Thomas some
thing. I’m not sure why, but I associate that volume with his subsequent behaviour, which, I’m bound to observe, left a lot to be desired. In fact, I was set to dismiss him upon our return to London.”
Burton ground the stub of his cheroot into an ashtray and immediately lit another one. After five hours of sleep and a hearty breakfast—it was now nine o’clock in the morning—he was feeling a little stronger. The laceration across his ribs was stinging but it wasn’t a serious wound and hadn’t required stitching.
“On what grounds?” he asked. “What did he do?”
Lord Elgin breathed out a plume of blue smoke and watched it curl toward the ceiling.
“There are a great many complications in our dealings with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “I’m returning to London to brief the prime minister and our Navy—and to request military support from the French. We must quell those Chinese forces that oppose the opening of the country to improved trade, and I fear there’s no choice but to negotiate not with a handshake but with a fist. The Sagittarius will be a fist like no other.”
“The Sagittarius?”
“A rotorship, Burton; a war machine of fearsome power. Its construction is almost completed, and it will be sent to China before the year is out.”
“Very well, but how does this involve Oliphant?”
“China will only accept payment for tea in silver. This has caused a serious trade deficit, which we have countered by exporting opium there from India.”
Burton threw his hands out in a gesture that made it clear he didn’t get the point and was confused by Elgin’s obfuscation.
“Opium, Captain!” Elgin barked. “Highly addictive! We exported it as a medicinal ingredient but the Chinese immediately started puffing on the stuff like it was cheap tobacco. Now half the damned country is enslaved by it. The Qing Dynasty isn’t happy. Not at all.”
“So?”
“So to hell with them! We’ll pump enough opium into China to make addicts of the entire nation, if necessary. We’ll even force them to legalise the trade so our private companies can profit from the poppy industry, too. By God, we’ll bring the bloody dynasty to its knees unless they give us a better deal on the export of tea.”
