The Iron Assassin Page 7

  * * *

  Sometimes Jack Straker enjoyed being Lord Tempest, dashing darling of the gossip press, handsome and sought-after lordling. Most of the time, however, he frankly preferred being plain Jack Straker, the untidy tinkerer, the little boy lost in the wonder of what clockwork and salvaged mongery and a little steam could do.

  Sitting alone in the moonlight, imagining, examining. Thinking.

  He quite liked this little rock outcrop in the woods. Always had. Mainly because the moonlight, unhindered by leaves and boughs, could flood it with cold, clear light. And because no one else seemed to know about it, so he could always find solitude there.

  Alone with his thoughts, as he was now. Sitting on a rock in the moonlight, examining the key—the mechanism, that is, freed now from its box. Not just staring, but fondling. Turning it over and over in his hands, gently tugging on this and trying to slide that, seeing if anything … moved.

  Quite suddenly, something did. It glowed, stroked his palm with the gentlest of vibrations, and opened in his hand like a little metal clam. As he peered into it, fascinated, it moved its contacts by itself. Click-click.

  “Oho,” he breathed. “That’s how they’re doing it!”

  He sprang to his feet, thrust the key into his pocket, and told the moon, “I must secure my spares!”

  And, as the gutter press put it, rushed off into the night.

  He’d always been able to think while running, fighting for breath and slamming along, in this case stumbling over roots and ducking boughs, shredding more than a few leaves in his wake.

  Whoever was trying to control the Iron Assassin from afar—almost certainly Marlshrike; no one else really knows how, and he’s almost undoubtedly working with the Tentacles—must be using etheric telegraphy. Had to be. What other invisible waves were all around us in the air? Oh, von Bezold, James Clarke Maxwell, Hughes, and Sir Oliver Lodge might call them by different terms and try to put them to very different uses, but it was all the same thing. At least it was to anyone hereabouts, groping blindly to harness the unseen and half-understood.

  His own meddlings had resulted in an unreliable control over the exoskeleton, across a fairly small room at best, and fitful at that. The difficulty was generating the signals; it took an apparatus of three strong men vigorously peddling wired-up bicycles, or a huge steam-driven machine bigger than the boiler of a Thames barge.

  Ah, that latter approach would be Marlshrike’s way; the man loved big, noisy, complex steam piles. That sort of contraption would fill a room and generate the necessary pulse with a spectacular crackling electric arc between exposed poles. And it would have an effective range far greater than his own across-the-room efforts. Greater still when a storm was brewing and the air was alive in its approach …

  Which meant Marlshrike’s machine had to be nearby, hidden in some shed or cellar. Higher would be better, but it would take a stout floor to support the weight. Just how near, only Marlshrike knew. Which meant a certain Lord Tempest would just have to guess at how far afield he must search.

  And if Marlshrike succeeded in making his own new key, it would not be just poor Bentley that the Empire would have to worry about. It would be an army of precise and deadly assassins under the control of Norbert Marlshrike.

  Straker shivered, despite himself. The thought of anything or anyone being under thin-lipped, thinner-skinned, vindictive Marlshrike’s control …

  It did not bear thinking about. So, panting and ducking his hurried way along a dark but long-familiar path, he returned to thinking of the fastest way to get from here to his workshop.

  In his haste and preoccupation, Straker barely noticed a brief but utter darkening of the sky ahead, through the dark cloak of many massed forest leaves in the night—as a small dirigible briefly blotted out the moon.

  OCTEMBER 6

  The church bell tolled once. Noon.

  Lady Rose peered around the trunk of the only tree in the thicket large enough to entirely conceal her. The bridge was empty, with not a soul in sight, but—hark! Hooves, clopping nearer, in the distance.

  A lone phaeton, with a bowler-hatted man in an expensive suit sitting in it, the whip stowed upright rather than in use, not hurrying.

  Lady Rose nodded approvingly. So this would be Mister Bleys Hardcastle. She peered this way and that, trying to see as far as she could down the road in either direction. Other than her expected conveyance, she could see no one, so she stepped briskly out through the trees, sprang over the ditch in its narrowest place, and presented herself in the road, well ahead of the horse.

  Which took no notice of her, plodding along as if well-dressed ladies leaped into its path every few minutes, dumping two satchels against one ankle so as to raise their arms uncertainly in the summons for a hansom cab.

  Mister Hardcastle smiled, nodded to her, and lifted his hat, clucking the horse to a halt.

  It obliged unhurriedly; Hardcastle sprang eagerly down to offer her a hand with the bluff, open welcome of a man who desires to be friends; Rose tossed her satchels in and followed them briskly, giving the hand she’d spurned a dazzling smile so as not to offend; and in a trice they were clopping along toward Foxden again.

  Rose looked back only once, to see no one within sight, but she did so well before a dead-looking man in a metal exoskeleton rose with silent, baleful menace out of the riverside reeds to watch the phaeton dwindle down the lane.

  * * *

  The Foxden gates stood open between the two rather battered stone pillars Rose had passed hundreds of times in her life. She didn’t remember ever seeing them open before, though.

  Hardcastle directed their aging horse to enter with the easy familiarity of someone coming home. It clopped along a drive of fine oiled gravel that, once inside the gates, immediately swept around in a sharp curve to the right, past a tall and impenetrable yew hedge, then wheeled around the end of that wall of greenery to double back to the left and run along a second hedge even taller and thicker than the first—neatly trimmed, the both of them, but standing like castle walls against all intruders.

  At the far end of this second hedge, the drive doubled back again, this time to run only a short distance, up to where a closed and sternly guarded gate—two high, metal-sheathed doors between tall, new-looking stone pillars—awaited.

  Unsmiling men who carried hunting rifles and had several pistols each thrust through their belts appeared along the fieldstone wall that flanked the gate. Striding along it from both directions, they converged grimly on the phaeton.

  “Your business?” one asked, cocking his gun but keeping it pointing skyward.

  Hardcastle nodded calmly to him and announced crisply, “Gone to earth.”

  The man gave them both a hard look, peered at the satchels behind them—Hardcastle appeared to have no bag or trunk at all—and then stepped back and waved a hand at the gate.

  Where someone unseen did something to make the metal doors open outward, admitting passage to Foxden beyond—a pleasant-seeming house of many gables and chimneys flanked by cedars, its broad front doors opening out onto a large graveled turning circle that would have accommodated carriages far larger than their own, drawn by long teams in harness.

  As the phaeton crunched to a stop, the front doors opened—more men with guns—and an immaculately dressed man in a tailcoat, white gloves, and the thinnest of lip-line mustaches, his oiled hair arranged just so, stepped out and snapped to attention.

  “Well, now,” Hardcastle murmured, “the butler of butlers.”

  Lady Rose hid a smile and accompanied him to the door, catching up her satchels before the row of footmen now marching out of the front door could reach them to offer assistance.

  “Welcome to Foxden, doctors.” The butler greeted them with cold correctness. “I am Malmerston, and you may rely on me or any of my staff.”

  For what, he did not say, but turned as smartly as any soldier on the parade square and marched into the house.

  There were ar
med and uniformed soldiers inside the house, firmly ushering them along in the wake of the coldly correct butler, who set a brisk pace.

  Once, as he lifted a large ring of keys out of a pocket to unlock a door, Malmerston was heard to mutter disapprovingly under his breath, “A lady doctor; whatever next?”

  Lady Rose held her peace, but she doubted very much that this man ever did anything carelessly or absently. That opinion had been voiced to be heard.

  The unlocked door led into a pleasant parlor, off which several bedchambers opened; the butler unlocked each of them in turn, then turned to Hardcastle. “I trust this will be satisfactory for your needs?”

  Hardcastle silently deferred to Lady Rose with a slow, firm gesture.

  “Capital, Malmerston, capital,” she said briskly.

  “And how am I to address you, madam?” the butler inquired glacially, obviously irked at being spoken to by her as if she was a member of the upper class.

  “Lady Rose is fine. Lady Harminster if we’re being formal,” she told him.

  The butler’s eyes flickered in obvious startlement.

  “If your ladyship doesn’t mind me saying so,” he ventured tentatively, “your ladyship has changed greatly since I saw you last. If you are of the Harminsters who are near neighbors to us here.”

  “I am,” she replied simply, “and I have.”

  A ghost of a smile rose to her lips. “We all do. Change, I have found, is the one constant in the Empire of the Lion.”

  * * *

  “Here now,” said a voice very close behind Oswald Smedley’s ear, “will you look at that?”

  The cracksman froze, fear like a sudden leaping fist closing around his heart. He’d been half-expecting this since putting the bundle of writings into Whipsnade’s hands in a dark doorway, and had in fact been tramping hurriedly across London, avoiding his usual haunts, in hopes of buying a ticket to a train west and getting himself on it just as fast as he could.

  He started to run, but a firm hand had hold of his collar. Its mate was pointing out of the mouth of the alley, at something black, gleamingly new, and wheezingly noisy. A fine steam-driven carriage of the latest make.

  “Look you!” the man behind Smedley said insistently. “Isn’t that someone you know driving it?”

  Indeed it was. Whipsnade, in a finer jacket and hat than Smedley had ever seen on him before, was perched at the tiller.

  It swept past with a muted hiss and thunder, its tarred rubber-coated wheels quieter on the cobbles than any hansom, and Smedley knew the chill of fresh fear as he recognized the passenger looking serenely out the nearside window of the carriage: Lady Iolanthe Hailsham. Why, if Whipsnade knew the noblewoman that well … Oh, Lord …

  “On the way back from Pitt’s, they are,” the man chuckled.

  And just how did he know that?

  “Wh-who are you,” Smedley managed to husk out, his mouth suddenly as dry as old bone, “and how d’you know they’ve been to Pitt’s?”

  “Ah,” the man said, dragging Smedley back from the alley mouth with swift ease—steam-driven hell, but he was strong!—and spinning him around to march him deeper into the narrowing gloom of the alley, where the smells grew strong. “As to that, Whipsnade told me. My name’s Dyson. They call me Dyson the Knife.”

  Smedley tried to scream, but all that came out was a sort of muted squeak, because he was shivering so hard and was being run along the alley so fast he was short of breath. That iron-strong grip on his collar became viselike fingers digging into the back of his neck. He kicked out wildly behind him, struck a shin—and was rewarded by being turned and slammed face-first, and hard, against a wall. Teeth chipped and blood spurted, Smedley hoarsely panting for breath around his now-broken nose.

  “You’ve heard of me, I see,” Dyson growled, sounding pleased. “Aye, I’m a snuffer, right enough, sent to slit the throats of them as knows too much. Which now, regrettably, mate, includes you.”

  Something flashed, Smedley shrieked as something like ice seared his ear and he clapped his hand to it and discovered his ear was gone, and then—

  The ice returned, right across his throat, and he was choking too much to care about anything else, ever again …

  The last thing he heard, faintly and as if from a great distance, was Dyson saying jovially, “And there it is, right enough. Sixty sovereigns, just as Whipsnade promised. Handsome pay for a simple job like this. And it’s not as if the meat came by it honestly, hey?”

  * * *

  “Lord Winter, that was a superb meal,” Lady Hailsham said happily. “I’ve never had pheasant so succulent. Yet as I recall you wrote that it was important to see me. On a particular matter, I assume?”

  “Ah, yes,” her dining companion of the evening said smoothly. “A matter we’ll entertain once we’re aboard.”

  “Aboard?”

  “My treat, my dear: an airship ride in the moonlight. Aboard my latest. I call her the Bright New Emperor.”

  The lord pointed out the carriage window as Whipsnade turned off the street and through a gate that had just opened on their right, into a moonlight-flooded cobbled yard. Rising above them was a magnificent bowsprit that would have seemed fitting for the grandest admiral’s flagship on the seas. It was the front end of the largest gondola Iolanthe Hailsham had ever seen, its proud lines gleamingly new, and above it rose an airship of truly massive size, its mooring lines snaking down all around them as Whipsnade brought the carriage to a smooth halt.

  “Come, my dear,” Lord Winter said fondly, opening the door and handing her down. A chill breeze brought them the unmistakable and unpleasant reek of the Thames. “The champagne, Whipsnade?”

  “Is aboard and ready, milord,” came the prompt reply.

  The cabin to which Lord Winter conducted his guest was dimly lit by half a dozen lanterns and was dominated by glossy quilted-leather seats and large windows commanding views of the night outside.

  The champagne was waiting.

  Lord Winter and Lady Hailsham clinked glasses. The airship quivered twice around them as key moorings were let go, and shortly thereafter Whipsnade’s head appeared in the companionway, to give his master a nod.

  Lord Winter smiled, turned to his guest, and said, “I very much enjoyed our evening together, Iolanthe. A great pity it’s your last.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked.

  “That’s one thing, Lady Hailsham, you may not have,” he replied calmly, lunging at her like a tiger. Even as she wriggled like an eel, trying to get out from under him and off the seat, his hands closed around her wrists like heavy irons. “You have learned, as they say, far too much for your own good. So now, I fear, it is time for you to go. Farewell … forever.”

  He leaned forward. She tried to head-butt him, but he was ready for that. She tried to knee him in the groin—and discovered, painfully, that he was wearing a hard metal codpiece under his evening-dress trousers.

  “Lord Winter!” she protested desperately, but he forcibly kissed her—and before she could bite him, drew his head back again and just held her, superior strength against straining effort, overpowering her as they struggled—and Whipsnade almost gently pulled a chloroform-soaked cloth over her mouth from behind, and with his two smallest fingers drove it up her nostrils.

  Lady Iolanthe Hailsham shook and fought in one last, brief frenzy, then went limp.

  Lord Winter did not hurry about letting go of her. When he did, he caressed her with an air of regret, then rose and told Whipsnade, “Do it properly. Enjoy the champagne.”

  Then he left the airship without looking back and departed in the carriage.

  When the yard was empty, Whipsnade let go the last mooring from the ship end, watching it whip about as it fell. Then he turned to the wheel that controlled the steering vanes, to fly along the Thames.

  And take the senseless Lady Hailsham well out to sea, to drop her in the dark and icy brine to drown.

  * * *

  Jack Straker often too
k different routes to his workshop. Not out of any particular sense of caution, but merely because there was a lot to see amid the warehouses of Limehouse. Some of it even savory.

  On this brightly moonlit night he took streets and alleys he’d not seen in some time, and arrived at the familiar nondescript warehouse wherein his workshop was hidden in a back room sooner than he’d expected to. It was near the docks, and always smelled of old mold, dust, rat droppings, and the Thames.

  When he unlocked the office door at the far end of the warehouse from his rooms, however, a faint, acrid, and unfamiliar scent overlaid the usual reek. Nothing seemed amiss as he crossed the office, let himself out its rear door, and threaded his way through the dark and silent main storage floor. This was still a working storehouse, but his tenant dealt in season-long layaways, not wares that were needed night and day.

  Rats scuttled unseen in the loft, pigeons dozed, and … Lord Tempest shot two bolts that were in far better repair than their rusty appearance suggested, swung open a panel soundlessly to reveal a door behind it, unlocked that door, and reached out into the darkness for the oil lamp that he always left ready on the edge of the bench.

  Halfway there, his hand met a line in the air that should not have been there—a taut waxed cord, running crosswise.

  Tempest flung himself backward and to one side, trying to get around behind the wall and the open panel as he spun on his heels to flee, knowing he’d not have time but also aware that every foot farther away was—

  Behind him, the darkness exploded with a roar that he felt more than heard, a hammer blow that smote his ears an instant before the foremost wave of the blast shoved at his back, snatching Tempest off his feet and flinging him back across the storage floor like the proverbial rag doll, to rebound off the flimsy office wall and the sacks of grain thankfully piled there.

  His workshop was ablaze, an inferno of blazing beams, exploding vials, and … his keys!

  His ears were ringing and his legs weak, but the dump door and its chain was a mere three strides yonder.