Cgapter 10

The second principle of the forge is Method, or perhaps Technique. The artisan must be skilful in all
aspects of Her craft. Such perfection comes only from long practice, which inevitably litters the floor with
the misshapen remains of Her failures.
—V. iii
Missy had not been truly introduced to drink until she met Thomas Moore. Matron Gisella had laid
down strict rules concerning imbibing by her girls: they were not to have any at all, except if the client bid
it. Even then, they were to touch scant a tenth of what the client consumed. Missy had rarely had
occasion to even smell brandy or scotch, as the majority of the customers were upstanding, proper
gentlemen who came into the Matron Gisella’s house to vent their carnal lusts and then flee into the night
like robbers.
Sit up straight; fold your hands across your lap. Hold your head upright, your knees together. You are a
shy, naive gentlewoman.
Missy drained her glass and poured another. The brandy seared its way down her throat.
No, she had been introduced to drink truly on the third night that she had been invited to Sherwood
Forest. She’d walked in on them unannounced, unobtrusive as she had been trained. Thomas had been
caught mid-swallow, choked on his mouthful, and then scrambled to hide the glass by slipping it half full
into his pocket. Thinking back, perhaps she’d wanted to spare him the embarrassment.
She’d stepped over to him, relieved him of his drink, and tossed the whole of it down her throat without
so much as a sip to gauge it.
Your sleeves shall be crimped and even. Your hem shall be free of stray threads. Every hint of lace shall
be sparkling white.
That vile liquid had been the strongest of Tom’s collection. It had taken all Missy’s aplomb to remain
upright and charming as the fire surged into all her limbs, then her brain and her lips, and then lit her
cheeks like twin suns rising on a winter morning.
But she’d held her composure and had reigned in her laughter at their gapes. And for one glorious,
memorable evening, the matron’s voice had been silent.
You shall move to reveal not ankle nor wrist nor neck lest the client bid you or take the initiative himself.
Should your client wish you to surrender to his advances, then do so. Should he wish you to resist, do so.
The glass was full again. She started in on it without delay.
Sherwood stood empty. Heckler had taken watch at the lift with a pair of street urchins Oliver held
sometimes in his employ. The rest of the crew were likely rotting in the downstreets by now, and Oliver
with them.
She swallowed, and examined the amber liquid as it caught and mutated the light of the single oil lamp.
Always remember that your client has paid for you. I expect that he should come away satisfied and that
he should return to my house when the mood next strikes him. I expect to be spoken of highly in the
circles. A lady has only her reputation, after all.
More brandy scalded her throat. Since that third night at Sherwood, she had made alcohol her daily
tonic, to keep the Matron Gisella silent.
She poured the brandy onto the floor, for tonight it had lost its power.
A good lady doesn’t cry. Only if the client wants you to cry shall you permit yourself. Oh, don’t worry
yourselves; he will make it amply clear.
Gisella was lecturing from some long-ago memory. Missy had heard the speech dozens of times and
remembered it perfectly: always the same wording, the same sharp gestures, and the same piercing glare.
She stomped one foot into the puddle of liquor. Droplets splattered her dress and shoes.
You wouldn’t approve of this at all, would you, Witch?
My, my, isn’t someone testy? Have you a reason for throwing a tantrum like a child of six?
Missy refilled the glass. She sipped it, realising suddenly how light-headed she was.
What if they didn’t come back? What if Bailey’s mad crusade left them all corpses and Sherwood
stayed this empty forever?
Then you will come back to me, my little one. When you were brought to me, you were coated in dirt
and crawled on your hands and knees. You were born a dog, little girl, by God’s hand. That kind of filth
never truly comes clean.
She felt oily inside and out with perspiration. It was too cruel to contemplate, that her new life should be
wrested from her after three short months. Oliver had not even asked where she came from or what she
had done before. Nor would he, or any of them. Here she had found men who did not judge her, and a
place to rest her feet.
Her throat cringed as the brandy scorched it again and she refused to think on such things any further.
A rap sounded at the door.
Oliver had told her never to answer that door. One of the men should always do it and even they should
always be armed. The caller was to be checked by peeking from the second-storey windows, and the
door traps released only if it proved to be one of the neighbourhood folk.
Well, Oliver wasn’t there, and she had a gun. Even if things became dangerous, she could defend
herself. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done so before.
Gisella had been silent that night as well.
She drained her glass and tottered to her feet. The world spun. She snatched the lamp from the card
table and her handbag from the chair. She politely forced the doorjamb aside and staggered into the hall.
The rap came again.
“Hold on,” she cried, though it may not have emerged so eloquently.
Each stair smacked heavily against her feet as she descended. The railing pressed inappropriately into
her side.
The rap sounded again, suddenly pounding against her ears like thunder.
“You, sir,” she said accusingly to the door, “have no manner of patience at all.”
Her fingers found the right switches, pulled the right chords. The deafening clicks told her Heckler’s
traps had been withdrawn. She grasped the handle and yanked the door wide.
A face stepped out of her nightmares and into the foyer.
“Oh, mother of mercy!” The handbag fell from her fingers. The lamp tipped and burned her hand with its
hot glass.
“Heh. I see you remember me.”
Her knees buckled like so much wet cloth and she crashed to the ground on her tailbone. The lamp
bounced on the floor and rolled away.It can’t be real, she screamed.He can’t be here.
The intruder righted the lamp with a deft flick of his cane.
“Gisella was distraught when you left, Michelle. Even my considerable powers of persuasion were barely
enough to keep her from murdering you.”
The man closed the door.
“Imagine my surprise to find you here, of all places, in the lair of my recent rival. The Lord does indeed
move in mysterious ways. Don’t you agree?”
A hobgoblin face beneath a fur top hat. Gnarled bone-white clawed fingers reaching from a black coat
as large as the night sky. All the girls knew him, all had felt his nails tearing at them, heard his voice
commanding them. Gisella rendered them helpless with her potions and thenhe came in fevered dreams, a
visage of terror half remembered upon waking.
Sweat slicked her hands. The floor tilted and rolled as she scrambled for the bag, and for the cool,
comforting lump of steel inside. Suddenly he was in front of her, squatting. He jammed a handkerchief
over her face and a jolting ozone stench blasted up her nose.
“The yellow man calls thisbeng lie, my dear. It is Gisella’s favourite, as I recall.”
Her nails raked over the handbag’s edges, spinning it towards her. Her legs and fingers began to twitch,
then to numb.
“Gisella needed my help to train her little whores, you see,” said the man. “You were one of my earlier
attempts, as I recall. Probably, there is no one to blame but myself for your present waywardness, but I
was new to this then. One learns, doesn’t one, child?”
The clasp of the handbag fell apart beneath her fingernails and the bag yawned wide. Her fingers snaked
inside, the motion in them dying one by one. The muscles in her back jerked and she collapsed, knocking
her head on the floor.
You didn’t think he would find you, you stupid girl? You came into the world dirty and vile and pretend
at decency. It is God’s will that you be found.
The edges of her vision swam with tears. The room swung like a pendulum. The man crouched like a
gargoyle next to her, reaching skeleton hands for her face.
“Gisella will give me a tongue-lashing, it’s true, but I’m afraid I shan’t be returning you to her just yet.”
His fingers pressed into the skin of her forehead and scalp. The contact burned and sent shoots of pain
deep into her head and neck.
“I had to look to the East for this process, you know,” he said. “It requires a certain exercise of the mind
and the energies, but it makes Mesmer and Braid into simpletons by comparison.”
His words blurred, one into the other, until they hissed and crackled together. Missy slipped deep down
into a warm pool of thick liquid. His voice came to her in flickers of dream thought, as flashes of hot and
cold and terror.
“Listen, now, little one. Follow carefully my every instruction. You will not remember any of this until I
command you. When I do so, you will answer all of my questions truthfully and without evasion. You are
to remain with Oliver Sumner. Do as he asks, and act as you always have. Remember all you see and
hear.”
A pause. Mind distant across expanse. No movement.
Scared cleared his throat.
“My dear, I want you to discover why the Great Mother finds Oliver Sumner so attractive.”
Missy vomited on herself. She choked, spat, sat up.
The foyer was empty. A single lamp lit the dark from its place on the floor some three feet away.
Oh, goodness. The mess! My lord, the smell!
She scrambled to her feet, gasping in horror at the hideous stain on her blouse. She snatched the lamp
and fled to the bathroom. She filled the washbasin with water from the room’s iron bathtub, then stripped off her shirt and submerged it.
If you put your coat on and run straight home, they’ll never know. Just bundle the shirt and take it in a
basket—surely they keep a basket somewhere.
Filth follows you like a hungry dog, dirty girl.
Shut up, you shrew.
Missy held the lamp up and surveyed herself in the mirror. Her hair had fallen out of its tight bun; her
lip-stain had run down the length of her chin.
“Not right at all,” she murmured.
She screamed and jumped back, nearly dropping the lamp. She’d seen…No, it couldn’t have…But it
had been there…an ogre’s face grinning at her from the mirror.
It wasn’t him. He wasn’t here.
His voice whispered to her, from far away or from inside her own ears, she could not tell.
“Tick, tick, tick.”
At the first sound Oliver unhitched the express rifle and lugged it into his arms. At the second he had it
butt to shoulder ready to fire.
Damn it, this was not just a product of his imagination. Something had been stalking him for the past
hour.
He didn’t even know where he was. He thought he was heading northeast, though after the long,
confusing slide down to street level, he might have gone any which way. His hip-mounted lantern
provided only enough illumination to see three strides around him. He probably stood out like a
lighthouse down here, though he’d rather that than be in complete dark.
The sound came again: a heavy crunch, a shifting of debris out in the ruined buildings of Old
Whitechapel. His bandaged hand twitched on the stock and the single unwrapped finger on the trigger.
When the streak of white blasted into the light he’d let the shot off before he even had time to register it.
The heavy slug escaped into parts unknown, kicking Oliver nearly off his feet with the recoil. He
stumbled and brought his rifle to bear on the object approaching him.
It was a clickrat. Moving slower now, it tottered forward on its six legs, maw opening and closing in
random rhythm. The noise had been far too loud and slow to be from a clickrat, and that left one
plausible alternative.
He’d hoped to catch up with Bailey’s crew before the hounds found him. It should not have been
difficult to spot seven lamplights in absolute dark. Most of the buildings of Old Whitechapel had long
since decayed into lumps of sodden debris, so the terrain was mostly clear, but multiple trips to the tops
of said mounds had garnered him nothing but more black all around.
And probably brought me to the attention of every whelp creature down here. Damned foolish.
The clickrat ticked a few steps closer. It sat back on its stubby tail and wailed a low buzzing sound, then
tilted its head and regarded him in a pose resembling curiosity.
“Jeremy Longshore!” Oliver said. The clickrat bounced back to its legs and scuttled up next to his shoe.
Oliver smiled down at him. “You clever little bastard. You must mean Phin and Tom aren’t too far.Tom!
”
His voice echoed away into the dark. A growl like glass being ground down reverberated back to him.
Stupid.Oliver swung the express rifle back into position and began scanning the shadows as much as his
fogged goggles would permit.
Jeremy Longshore hopped a foot forward and bobbed his nose in a direction to Oliver’s left. Oliver
swiveled to face the rifle that way, just as a black and silver shape broke the perimeter of the lamplight.
He put a bullet into its shoulder. The hound twitched, but did not back off.
Jeremy Longshore leapt forth and confronted the creature, balancing on tail and two rear legs and
clicking into its face. Oliver shot the hound again, this time in the flank as it reared back to take stock of
its second opponent. The impact jerked it to the side, but it barely seemed to notice, its attention fixed on
Jeremy Longshore.
Oliver swept away the gun smoke with his left hand, keeping unsteady aim on the hound as it circled
right, its sleek muzzle poking into the clickrat’s striking range. Jeremy Longshore stood his ground,
emitting an unceasing string of clicks in patternless rhythm. Oliver orbited the clickrat as well, keeping it
between him and the hound.
The thing would eventually figure out that Jeremy was bluffing and crush him. Could Jeremy keep its
attention if he bolted? Oliver had no delusions about outrunning it if it chased him.
The hound paused and dipped its head. From deep inside its silvery, steel-sheathed ribs, Oliver heard a
ticking—like someone tapping a wooden spoon on a large pot. After a few moments of overlap, they
began to tick one to the other, then the other to the one. Back and forth: a conversation.
Oliver squinted hard at the pair. For an instant, the hound seemed to have a human face, indistinct and
blurred, like a botched daguerreotype. The face tilted and changed, shifting into and out of expressions
that Oliver could not quite identify. Jeremy, as well, took on an aspect far more human seeming. It was
something in his bearing, in the gestures made with his front two legs.
The conversation ended, and for a long moment the two stared at each other. Then Jeremy dropped to
all six legs again, and the hound turned and slunk out of the light. Jeremy Longshore ticked a few times
and scuttled back over to settle beside Oliver’s shoe.
Oliver remained perfectly still until the hound’s receding footsteps passed into the distance. Then he
lowered his rifle and breathed.
“You’re a handy fellow,” Oliver said. Jeremy clicked. “Remind me to stop thinking that Tom is crazy.”
Oliver considered the mechanical animal winding around his feet. Tom hadn’t had time to train the thing
to do what it had just done. Jeremy himself was different from his kin.
“Can you lead me to Phin and Tom?” Oliver asked, thinking it was worth an attempt.
Jeremy clicked and buzzed, then started off at a fair clip into the darkness.
“Slow down!” Oliver called, and limped after.
The creature led him on a chase past tumbled beams, ruined buildings, and pits of dank slime. The rotted
underworld passed through the arc of his lamp, fading into view from illuminated mist and seeping back
into the absolute shadow of Shadwell Tower that flanked him and loomed always over his shoulder.
He scrambled along as best he could, hobbling on his ankle as the pain swelled with each step. He called
out again and again for Jeremy to hold back, but the little creature tore ahead, hell-bent on whatever goal
it had chosen. It escaped the range of his lamplight as they entered what might have once been a public
square; the constant jumble of beams, debris, and upturned chunks of roadway gave way to an unbroken
succession of tightly fitted bricks.
The pace wore on Oliver’s lungs. Even through the mask, the air was coarse and heavy with
particulates. The heat, unnatural even for Whitechapel, provoked an unending sweat that beaded and ran
down his neck, slick and sticky in the oily air.
Panting, Oliver finally halted the mad dash. Holding his breath and his nose, he carefully lifted the mask
and splashed some water in his mouth. It tasted of ash, but calmed for a moment the tickle in his throat
and the rampant thirst drying out his lips and tongue.
Out in the dark, the skittering of clickrat legs faded.
No use trying to follow now.
He set himself and his rifle gingerly down on the brick and rubbed at his ankle. He scanned his
surroundings and made out nothing beyond the flickering lamplight but for a far-off glow. It might have
been a hint of the bright lights of Aldgate.
If so, then that way was northwest, where Bailey’s crew would be heading.And since I couldn’t possibly
trace my way back to the stair…
Oliver wiped his goggles, chewed a piece of jerked beef, and put some more oil in his lantern. After a
few minutes’ rest, he struggled back to his feet and began walking. For twenty or so steps the bricks
rolled beneath his feet, unchanging. Then he came to a low wall of concrete, topped with a twisted and
rusted wrought-iron fence: too tall and too uneven to climb. He unhooked the lantern from his belt and
lifted it up. The light cast dancing doppelgangers of the fence on the wall beyond. Something twisted and
fled as the light struck it.
I hope that was Jeremy,Oliver thought, knowing it wasn’t.
Oliver tilted the light farther back, revealing the façade of a building reaching high above the fence’s top.
Mortar had worn away between the blocks used to build it, leaving deep black slashes on its pale
surface.
A sudden scuffing sounded from behind the fence. Oliver hefted his rifle to face forward in one hand,
then leaned into the fence and panned his lamp back and forth. The gap between the wall and the building
seemed devoid of anything, including debris. A sparkle caught his eye at the far right of the lantern’s light.
Red?He took a few strides down the wall to the right.
Red and yellow and purple and blue, a jumble of colours glowing in the flickering light. It resolved itself
into the shape of a stained-glass window.
It’s a church,he realised, then smirked.A white chapel.
He panned his lantern upwards, revealing an arched top to the window, a peaked roof, and hints of a
steeple at the light’s farthest edge. This was not a church as he knew them, as little decrepit buildings
constructed from scrap and tolerated by the cloaks so long as they stayed that way. No, this church was
a magnificent structure, designed to stand out from the city around it, bold and proud. It was a piece of
that London spirit that Hews and Bailey always went on about. Oliver felt a welling of uncomfortable
emotion: some mixture of pride, longing, shame. What was he supposed to feel at this sight? London
wasn’t his city. England wasn’t his home.
Maybe it could be.
When the clacks sounded behind him he knew it was already too late to run. He hooked his lantern to
his belt again and wrapped both hands around the express rifle. He took a deep breath, held it, let it go.
Then he turned.
Faces: brass eyes, steel teeth, iron bones, and long snouts. Shapes: canine and simian, some hunched
parodies of human, even sporting a few last remnants of flesh and hair. Not a sound from any of them,
nor breath disturbing the air.
Oliver’s own breath and heartbeat suddenly became thunderous.
The circle was tight against the wall on either side. He counted seven hounds, maybe two dozen clickrats
of varying composition, a legion of Frankensteins behind that had once been men, fading shadow over
shadow to the edge of the light. None of the clickrats sported the silver colour of Jeremy Longshore.
He fitted his bandaged hand around the stock and curled one finger on the trigger. The barrel shook
wildly.Hold together. You’ve been in worse spots than this—remember the battle in Marlow Square?
Only that had been Boiler Men, and Boiler Men were slow. One might run away.
Oliver risked a glance over his shoulder. The fence might be scalable, if he abandoned his pack and his
rifle.
The dogs could leap it, or might simply bite through. No good.
Oliver skipped his eyes back to his grim audience. There had to be a route of escape. He noted two
gaps wide enough to run through, assuming the hounds held still. He could maybe hold them off with the
rifle…
All of them? With the clickrats and…those ghastly things?
His breath began coming in staccato pulses. There had to be something else. Could he toss them some
meat maybe? Or…
One bloody stick of dynamite.
With numbing slowness he shouldered out of his pack and slipped it to the ground. He knelt and reached
inside. The dynamite slipped into his hand as if it had been waiting for him. The matchbox he clasped
between two fingertips.
His eyes never left the horde around him. The snouts and muzzles and bared skull teeth began to shift,
taking on more human features. They became rounder and softer, a shifting image of translucent flesh
over the metal beneath, like a trick of the smoke, a trick of the light, the unhinging of a tired mind. A chill
touched the air.
Hold together,he thought, repeating it like a manta.
Oliver set the butt of the rifle on the ground and leaned the barrel against his leg. With his left hand, he
slid the matchbox open, then plucked a match out with his right.
One toss. How many could he catch in the blast?
The metallic heads continued their stares unbroken. The phantom images dipped as one, as if in prayer.
The air grew cold.
Oliver laid the match head against the edge of the box.
A wind cut across the square. Yellow-green mist began collecting in the empty space between Oliver
and the hounds. It lapped at the stones and the feet of the creatures, seeping into cracks and between
toes and claws. Oliver stayed the match, retreating back against the fence. The yellow mist, blackening as
it swept the brick, began a steady undulating pulse, propelling itself along the stones like an inchworm.
The ground began to boil.
Oliver stuffed the dynamite in his pocket and leapt for the fence. His injured hand landed on a
rough-edged slat of iron that tore into the bandages. He wrapped his other arm into a tangle of bent
crossbars and held himself up by the sheer strength of fright. His legs kicked for purchase, scuffing the
edge of the low wall.
Below, the square suddenly became a seething lake of black-yellow pus. Bubbles churned to its surface
and burst, spraying up into the air. Tendrils of yellow mist snaked up beside Oliver’s face, then swept
over him with a rank odour of decay. They got in his nose, his throat, his ears.
And something crashed through into his mind.
Not this time, by God!Oliver released one hand and grabbed for the dynamite, and at once the world
evaporated.
He was hanging above an endless sea of filth: blood mixed with oils, ashes, white and yellow ichors, and
pus. Above loomed a sky of towering grey fingers, their steel ends lancing into the ocean. Bodies swam
the seas, drowning, choking, flailing, bloated and pustulant.
Oliver hung from nothing, having lost all perception of his body. He clawed with no hands at the iron
fence he knew to be there.
A figure came walking across the ocean, stumbling over the roiling bubbles. He wore an oversized long
coat, speckled with additional pockets, which the spurting filth did not seem to touch. He fixed Oliver
with startling blue eyes.
“You’re Oliver Sumner,” he said.
Oliver clung to the invisible fence, still trying to secure his feet.
Who’s asking?
“My name is Aaron,” he said. “Aaron Bolden.”
Could I trouble you for some assistance?
His slight smile flattened. “I’m not sure how.”
Perfect.Oliver gave up on his fingers and tried to will himself to stay above the frothing liquid.You’re the
Aaron, aren’t you? You know, Hews and Bailey speak very highly of you.
“For watching, perhaps; for intelligence. I haven’t had much luck with action, I’m afraid.”
Hews mentioned that you had certain faculties of sight.
“And so I do.”
What do you see?
“Do I see you hanging off a fence, you mean? Yes, you’re there.”
With a mental sigh, Oliver concentrated on loosening his grip.
“No, no. Don’t drop down,” Aaron said hastily. “It isn’t real, but it may still harm you.”
How do you know that?
“I…” A sudden jolt of pain stole across the man’s face. “Grandfather Clock…hurt me. The noise wasn’t
real, not in the auditory sense, but it was still…I remember my bones breaking.”
Oliver looked up and down the man’s limbs. Aaron followed his gaze.
“It’s strange, I know, that they’re intact now. Though I’m not quite dead and may thus retain a bit of
myself.”
Bailey said they’d hooked you to the Chimney.
Aaron’s hands began to tremble.
“I…true…though I…” He inhaled, still shaking. “I should not be alive. A thousand times I should not be
alive.”
You seem quite alive to me.
The small smile returned.
“A conclusion drawn from observation. I suppose I can accept that.”
Oliver looked around, seeing no visible means of escape. He realised with some relief that his sense of
smell did not appear to be working, nor could he feel fatigue in his clinging arm, nor nausea in his gut from
the vile sights. The sloshing and moaning of the ocean’s prisoners echoed undiminished by distance.
Where are we, Aaron?
“We are inside his mind.”
Whose mind?
“The third one,” he said. “Not the Lord, not the Lady. Someone else.”
I would hope I heard you wrongly.
“Except that you heard perfectly.”
Aaron began to pace beneath Oliver.
“I have gathered through my limited observation of him that he is an exile of sorts. He hates the Lord and
Lady so powerfully…” Aaron’s eyes flickered almost closed. He tilted his head as if craning to hear a
sound Oliver couldn’t hear. “They’ve done something to him, I think, to hurt him, to cause him pain.
That’s what all this is.” He swept his arm to indicate the sea. “His pain.”
And those?Oliver said, casting his glance at the moaning souls slipping between the waves.
“They are those of us who have been claimed by the downstreets, and the machine disease.”
You know that?
“He…showed me.”
Has he claimed you as well, then?
The man’s face fell. “I don’t know.”
Oliver thought for a moment as Aaron stood caught in his melancholy.
Would he help us, do you think, Aaron?
“Help us? This is not some Titan that can be bribed.”
You said he hates the Lord and Lady. Well, if Bailey does his job, we will have what we need to kill Grandfather Clock, but we may need help with Mama Engine. We haven’t even begun to look at how to
deal with her.
Aaron hunched his shoulders and glanced out across the ocean. “He hatesus too, Oliver.”
Then we’ll have to deal with him as well, won’t we?
Aaron sucked in a breath. “He could very well have heard that.”
Talk to him. Offer him an…an agreement. Between him and myself. Let him know we have common
enemies.
“Are you certain about that?”
No. It may turn out to be the most fool thing I’ve ever attempted, but it’s prudent to keep your doors
open.
The cries of the damned hammered on Oliver’s ears. He struggled to keep his concentration amidst
rising panic.
At last, Aaron nodded; then his eyelids began to flicker again. Oliver hung for an endless few minutes as
his impromptu companion performed whatever inward gyrations the contact required. Doubt worried at
him—What are you thinking, allying with this horror?—but he quashed it with logic: one of these unholy
creatures was easier to deal with than three. That made sense, didn’t it?
Aaron jerked and came back to himself.
So? What’s the word?
Aaron shook his head. “I can’t tell. I know he understood.” Aaron took a deep breath, rubbed his
abdomen absently with one palm. “But this doesn’t feel right. What if he turns on us after…”
And suddenly Oliver was hanging from a fence, with his left arm cramping and a stick of dynamite in his
right hand.
The ground rushed up to meet him. He landed squarely on the already-injured ankle, toppled forward,
and slammed cheek first into the brick. His stomach clenched and he barely had time to tear the mask off
his face before yellow and white vomit surged up and out. After that, the scalding air rushed in and he
hacked up more vileness. Vomit be damned, he slapped the mask back over his mouth and took long
breaths until his lungs settled back from convulsions to mere searing discomfort.
Bugger.
He pushed himself up and leaned heavily on the wall. His pack and rifle lay where he’d left them. The
lamplight guttered out, disturbed by its rough treatment. A few minutes of exhausting struggle found a
match struck and the flame reluctantly wiggling back to life.
A silver, eyeless snout regarded him from just past his shoes.
“Jeremy?” Oliver said.
The rat shook its head.
“Aaron?”
Jeremy ducked his head and clicked backwards and sideways without turning. Oliver lifted his gaze
slightly and found the glinting brass eyes of his choir staring back. They’d stepped off to the sides. A
clear path spread in front of him, out into the dark.
Jeremy backed some more and ticked three times.
“Jesus. Give me a minute.”
Oliver took a pull from his rapidly emptying water flask and fixed his mask. Then, with aching joints and
muscles, he collected his gear and his rifle and pushed himself to his feet. He kept the dynamite and the
matches in his pocket.
Jeremy turned and scuttled away. Oliver followed at a slow limp. When he’d gone twenty feet he heard
noise and turned.
Ticker hounds and clickrats and half-human Frankensteins gathered behind him. He stepped forward
and they followed. He started again at a steady pace, and they trailed behind him like a herd of
cattle…or a pack of wolves.
Guess we know his answer, eh, Aaron?
Albright had fallen with a bullet in his throat.
Kinney had died screaming with a hound tearing into his belly.
Sims had crawled nearly thirty yards with a severed arm before the Boiler Men cooked him like a pig
with their copper rods.
Phineas had just vanished, and he’d last seen Thomas Moore assaulting a Boiler Man with his bare
hands.
And who had run away and hid himself in the shadows of old Mile End Road?
Bailey crouched behind a piece of rotted and soggy wall, once the façade of a building, and clutched his
rifle to his chest. It was an old Enfield from his days in the army, made in ’41, and it had seen him through
worse snags than this.
Worse than metal beasts impervious to bullets at war with metal men equally impervious?
He silenced his own thoughts to better hear the movements of the enemy.
The Boiler Men had been waiting right at the base of the rusted stair. Phineas Macrae had been the first
to spot them. They might have been waiting for hours, not needing air or rest or water. Luck was with the
queen’s agents, however, as the Ironboys were some ways off and facing away from the stair, as if
waiting for someone to return to it. Bailey had ordered retreat, hoping to slip away and circle around outside their field of vision.
Then the dogs had come at them, tearing out of old shop doors and from beneath the uneven flagstones
of the street. Nothing Bailey’s crew had thrown at them had done anything to slow them down. Then the
Boiler Men had caught them, charging impassively into the fray and killing everything in sight with Atlas
rifles firing as fast as Maxim guns and copper lightning rods lancing through the perpetual night. At some
point Bailey had ordered retreat and fled.
There had been noise, then silence. Now there was only the thudding footfalls of the baron’s soldiers
patrolling the perimeter of the street, and the shuffle of their guns poking into cracks and beneath rubble.
Bailey held one lapel of his vest over his mouth and sucked a breath. His mask had vanished in the
fighting, along with his lantern and half his ammunition. He squatted, sweating, and fiercely willed himself
not to cough.
He wished for a moment he was back in India, where the heat was not so oppressive and the enemy
died like men aught to. But Boiler Men did nothing like normal men. Even their movements were strange,
executed with the confident, measured precision of creatures who knew themselves to be invincible.
A foot fell on the other side of the wall. Time to move on.
Bailey sucked one last burning lungful of air, blinked the soot from his eyes, and crept backwards from
his place of concealment. The old shop’s floor had rotted and fallen through, and had formed a shallow
crater into which Bailey retreated. He slipped silently into a viscous pool at the bottom, cursing the lack
of light.
The Boiler Men seemed to have no need for illumination, and thus hid their movements. Worse, Bailey
could not see far enough through the smoke to determine how visible he might be. Did the sides of this
hole provide any cover at all?
He exhaled his held breath quietly and drew another through his lapel. The Boiler Men could not be
stopped with a single Enfield rifle. It would be at least another two or three hours trekking though these
depths to reach the base of Aldgate Tower. Bailey had no mask, no eye protection, no water, no food,
and thirty rounds of ammunition that were useless against such adversaries anyway.
But the tape had to be retrieved. No matter the cost, those horrid godlings of Whitechapel had to be
dealt with.
“Praise to England,” he muttered to himself. “God save the queen.”
The oily liquid moved.
Tentacles shot out of the pool at the base of the hole, entangling his legs with terrible speed. In an instant
the faithful Enfield was readied and a shot plunged into the opaque waters. Whatever lay beneath
spasmed with the impact. The tentacles contracted, shredding though Bailey’s trousers with serrated
metal edges. The sting of sliced skin shot up through his spine, followed by the blazing fire of slime in the
wounds. A second shot shattered the water’s surface, sending up bits of metal and gore. The tentacles
shuddered and fell limp back into the pool. Bailey staggered from the water, collapsing on the bank of the
hole.
A ness. Damn it—how could he have been so careless? He tested one leg to see if there was any tendon damage.Flesh, mostly. Good. First order is to get out of this blasted hole.
He planted the butt of his rifle in the muck and pushed himself up.
A shot rang out, and a portion of Bailey’s arm exploded.
Another, and a force like a charging elephant bore him to the ground, smothering his face in the clinging
mud. White pain flared in his back and abdomen.
His gasp drew in the unfiltered razor smoke of the downstreets. Choking, he clawed at the slick, cold
earth and cursed every machine built since the dawn of history.
The ground shook with the approach of iron boots.

Chapter 9

An hour ago I severed my left hand with a hatchet. A new one has grown in its place. I now have fingers
of brass and iron, fingers strong enough to accomplish my next task, which is the removal of my eyes.
II. vi
Oliver was afraid of heights.
“I’m not bloody afraid of heights.”
Tommy snorted politely. “Come now, Ollie. You’re white as a ghost.”
“You clam up, Tom, or so help me I’ll be riding you down like a sled,” Oliver snapped.
Defiant pride managed to rise up and choke his fear for a few seconds. Oliver stepped up to the rim of
the tiny ledge and raised his lantern high. The light, focused by a curved mirror of polished silver behind
the flame, shot out into the dark, returning visions of smoke and the occasional gleam, indicating the
presence of a sapling steel beam. Already the glass goggles Bailey had given him had begun to blur from
greasy deposits that seemed carried on the very air.
He glanced downwards as long as he dared, charting the treacherous hand-over-foot route down into
Old Whitechapel. The “rusted stair” was a path over, under, and along the maze of beams that held up
the Shadwell Underbelly and went on to support the Concourse above. The path, such as it was, had
been marked by smears of yellow paint, the legacy of some long-forgotten explorer with more gumption
than sense.
People in this city have a strange definition of the word “stair.”
Bailey had led his team down first.
“How long, Phin?”
Phineas, reclining against the ladder leading to the public house above, had Tommy’s captured clickrat,
now eerily still, out in his palm. After a few seconds, he mumbled, “Eight minutes,” and returned to his examination.
“Let’s prepare, then,” Oliver ordered. Bailey had directed them to wait ten minutes, and then start their
descent.
Oliver adjusted the bandages on his right hand and the kerchief over his mouth, then buckled the clumsy
express rifle over his shoulders, tightening the dual straps to keep it from swinging too much. He also
wore a belt of ammunition about his waist, a two-quart canteen of water at his hip, and a pack on his
shoulder into which had been stuffed dried jerky, kerosene, an extra face mask, a compass, a few more
bandages, a matchbox, and one stick of dynamite.
“Why the dynamite, sir?” Oliver had asked.
“All men in my company carry a single stick of dynamite” was Bailey’s answer.
His load secured, Oliver slipped one foot cautiously over the edge. “I feel like a packhorse.”
“And look like a Swiss mountain hermit,” Tommy contributed.
“More an Edinburgh vagrant,” Phineas said, passing the rat back to Tom. “They can’t climb either.”
Oliver found purchase on the first dull smudge of paint, set his weight on it, and slowly lowered himself
from the sane, flat, sturdy ledge into total structural madness. A gust of wind shoved him sideways like a
soft but insistent pillow and he had to scramble for some minutes to find spaces for his other foot and his
two hands.
“Bugger you both,” Oliver spat through clenched teeth, that being the most scathing comment that visited
him. He craned his neck around, spotted the next yellow marker, and began shuffling his way along the
beam, thankful for once for the constant grit and ash that gave his fingers and soles purchase. Four
agonising eternities later, he discovered two beams running parallel and almost level. Tommy trotted up
behind him an instant later.
“Not so bad a climb, really,” Tommy said, grinning.
“I always knew you were an ape, Tom.”
“Apes walk on the ground, Ollie.Monkeys swing in the trees.”
“Lionsinjure things when they are pestered.”
Tommy guffawed merrily, having no apparent need for mask or goggles. “Our regular John Bull fancies
himself a lion, then. Knighthood in the future, I’ll wager.”
“If it turns one into an arrogant sot like Sir Bailey, Her Majesty can keep it.” Oliver fished a foot down
for a suitable beam. The next marker lay some twenty feet below. Three steps later, with his nose
pressed almost flat against an upshooting beam, Oliver beheld a clickrat skitter down and stop right
before his face.
It’s going to bite me,he realised. Slowly, he peeled his left hand from its roost, leaving his injured one
bearing most of the weight, and reached for his derringer, then reconsidered and reached for the water
canteen instead. One quick swat would do the job.
“Jeremy Longshore the Third hereby names you as his first knight. Arise, Sir Lion-upon-the-Cliffs.”
The clickrat swivelled and scuttled up the beam, leaping to Tom’s arm when it got close enough, then
clambering down his jacket into his pocket. Oliver shook his head and clamped his hand back onto the
beam.
“Good God, Tom, have youtamed that thing?”
“Jeremy Longshore cannot be tamed,” Tommy pronounced. “That is the essence of him: solid will and
indomitable spirit. He is the very symbol of perseverance.”
Phin appeared behind him, panting. “Bugger that, bolts-for-brains. He don’t have muscles to ache or
bones to pop about. Jesus, but I’m old.”
“And cantankerous as well,” said Tom. “Curmudgeonly, even. Perhaps churlish, if you prefer.”
“Right, laugh. Enjoy that young body while you can. The clacks is like to eat you up by your thirty-fifth
year.”
Oliver gaped. “Phineas!”
Phineas frowned down at him. “Oh, don’t be such a woman. I expect to wake up dead every morning
with my nerves given out. Can’t be easy on them, all this seein’ and hearin’ I do.”
“But how could you say…”
Tom waved him silent. “It’s all right, Ollie. That kind of talk doesn’t bother me.”
“You know what bothersme, ” Phin said. “Your new toy, there, is what. It isn’t really a clickrat.”
“Quite right,” Tom said, warming back to his new acquisition. “He is such a picture of majesty as no
clickrat could equal.”
“I mean it in earnest, tin-teeth. It has a different seeming to it. Something different inside.”
Oliver interrupted: “May we get moving? I would not lay odds on Bailey waiting for us.”
He calculated the contortions necessary for the next step, and stretched out for it.
“In a sour mood, is our chief,” Tommy said. His voice grew faint with distance and the intervening
thickness of the air. “He needs the company of a certain good woman.”
Nothing more was heard, not that Oliver would have spared the attention to listen to it.
Four marks and a thousand drops of sweat later, the faded light of the Underbelly above had vanished,
and Oliver could not see the next mark. He unhooked the lamp from his belt and swung it in all
directions, finding nothing but serpents of dust and ash coiling and uncoiling at random. The air moved,
rolling past him like a great ocean wave. A rumbling sound passed with it, shaking the beams, like the
breath of the Mother herself.
He leapt recklessly to his next perch, skidding a bit as he landed on a moist stretch of steel. Oliver
scrambled to fight the platform’s extreme slope, his hands flying out in all directions. His nails found rivets
in the platform and dug under them. Pain pricked up his fingers; annoying, but better than the alternative.
His injured hand skittered uselessly across the surface, unable to grip to anything.
I’m ill suited to this,Oliver concluded. He slid one foot carefully towards the more level beams running
up the right side of the platform. Before him, the platform’s slope ended in grey nothingness. Some of the
toxic air slipped around his mask and down his windpipe. He coughed it out, violently, shaking as his
chest caved inward. A burning sensation flared at the back of his skull.
The smoke turned and looked at him. Or maybe it was something within the smoke. Something, in any
case, with eyes and a face resembling human. It blinked and was gone.
Oliver froze and tried not to breathe.
Memories of Mama Engine flickered across his mind and vision, playing on the currents of ash. Had that
been something real, or the product of a violated imagination?
Oliver felt unmistakably like he was not alone. Quiet, indecipherable whispers reached out to him from a
burgeoning fire at the back of his head. Eyes searching the smoke, he reached for his derringer.
When it appeared again, he swung at it—throughit—as if it had never been there. The sudden movement
twisted his left hand. Two nails tore out of place and gravity claimed him.
The face watched him slip into the dark.
Scared awoke to find the heavy curtains around his bed frayed and singed.
He sat up, wiping the drool from his chin onto his nightshirt.
You were angry tonight, my sweet. You were aggressive, savage. Quite out of character for you.
Mama Engine was not in the habit of keeping secrets from their embrace, and Scared found it irksome.
Details and schematics had always been withheld—Scared cared little for those—but not her emotions,
not her urges. Those things that wereher were his to peruse, his to catch and hold, and then release at his
fancy.
Playing a game, my love? I am very good at games.
He roused himself and shoved aside the curtains. The room was cool and dark, the fireplace empty, the
night table vacant. He dragged a knobby finger through the charcoal dust there and lamented the need to
order servants to keep out of his room, lest his lover annihilate them: the wood paneling had been
cracked and curled by heat, the floors stained with ash. The wan light of faraway electrics filtered into the
room through its single, frosted pane.
He hobbled to a low-backed plush chair in the corner and dragged the leather cover from it. Beneath
this, the fine velvet upholstery lay undamaged by heat, with a small bottle of yellowish liquid nestled
against the left arm. Scared lowered himself into the chair’s welcoming grip.
A strange night it had been. Towards the end, the nightmares had begun to creep in from the edges.
They had come through the singed curtains; he was sure of it. The burns inflicted on those curtains by the
night’s lovemaking had weakened them somehow, and they had begun to admit all those outcast thoughts
Scared had long ago banished to the far reaches of his mind.
He banished them now, clearing his head for the relentless chill of calculation. He retrieved and uncorked
the small bottle, allowing the faintest scent of the liquid within to twist into his nostrils. Scared replaced
the cork and settled back to let it do its work.
It is the chief folly of modern mathematics to confine calculation to the written page,Scared said to
himself, almost as a mantra in the fashion of the Indians ascetics.The scope of logical reasoning is too vast
to be expressed in human symbolism. All objects in the universe are data, all forces equations. All events
are the result of fast and fixed processes, algebraically perfect.
His nose began tingling, followed by the rest of his body. His hands began to shake, but he paid that no
mind now. The drug filtered into his mind, pushing the paltry needs of flesh aside, thumbing down the
trappings of morality and emotion until only the endless order of everything remained. He breathed
deeply, and dropped away from that chill, hidden room, into the spaces between molecules.
And now, my sweet, we will see what you have been up to.
He mentally pulled together the memories of her quivering essence as she had shuddered in his grasp.
These he crystallised until every detail stood out like a diamond among stones, and then delivered them to
the universe’s equations.
He held his thoughts back and let the calculations run themselves. The touch of man could only sully such
perfection.
Some long minutes he stayed in such a state. There was utter timelessness here, though mere seconds,
perhaps, passed in the vulgar world.
The calculations delivered their answer. Mysteries became knowledge, variables became constants.
Scared leapt upwards and arrived slouched in his chair, the bottle of precious fluid rolling to a stop three
yards distant—recorked, thank the Lord. He pressed his hands hard onto his thighs to keep them from
shaking. Mama Engine had indeed been hiding a secret from him.
You filthy harlot,he thought.You’ve found another.
Her eye was on another man. A sudden, unbecoming tickle of jealousy nagged him. More calculation
would be required to discover this rival’s identity, but that would have to wait. Time and hot tea were
required now to banish the remnants of the drug from his blood. He had taken too much this morning,
enough to impair the flexing of fingers and bending of knees.
He reached out to the wall and pulled on the hanging cord. A wall panel, mounted on ceramic tracks and
wooden wheels, slid aside to reveal a rack of bottles and tubes. At the base of the shelves sat a panoply
of scientific equipment and a full washbasin. Still too tired to rise, Scared slumped back in the chair and
took deep breaths to steady his heart.
The question now was what to do about his lover’s new fancy. Death would be easiest, though the fickle
Lady might take that harshly. For the meantime, information would need to be gathered, control exerted.
He might have delegated it to one of his boys, but—if shewas courting another lover, if shewas intending
to betray him, the matter was Scared’s alone to confront.
He let his body recover over the next few minutes, allowing automatic mental processes to wheel in the
background of his consciousness. He had trained his mind so well over the long years that deduction no
longer required any conscious effort. As soon as it was able, his mind would deliver to him the answers
he sought. The potion was rarely needed.
Except when the deduction concerned Mama Engine—not her plans or her children; no, those were
plain to the ordinary, mortal eye. It was the Lady herself that required the superhuman mental space
brought on by the potion, which the Chinese calledmei kuan . To fathom her, in her entirety, to know all
the nuances of her psyche better even than he knew his own…that was a feat extraordinary in any set of
lovers.
How many have you had, my sweet? How many have you burned to dust because they could not
understand you?
He forced himself up, fighting the shuddering aftereffects of the potion, and waddled to the washbasin.
He splashed the warm water across his face, letting it chase away the sweat and ashes. A yellow-skinned
ghast of the worst children’s tales scrutinised him from the mirror.
If anyone were to see me like this…
What did it mean, her thoughts of this other man? Could she be plotting to betray him?
Do you think, my sweet, that you can use me and cast me aside? It is far too late, pet, for second
thoughts.
And yet…she dared to spurn him.
Jealousy again, unwelcome and unbalancing. The calculations took space to function, and it would not
do to have his mind so crowded with petty worries and grievances.
But…he had to know.
The bottle hissed as he opened it again, its previous agitation having pressurised the gas within. The blast
of scent speared up his nostrils into the sensitive flesh behind his eyes. Gasping, he squeezed the cork
back into place with hands already trembling.
I’ve taken too much.
The bottle clattered to the floor. No tickle came this time, but a scraping fire under his skin. Scared
grappled at the arms of his chair. His knees cracked like dry tinder, and the floor rushed to meet him. A
swift strike against the boards, and he was away into that eternal, infinite space.
He had never dared consume so much before, but as the reaches of heaven glinted and soared all about
him, he never felt more regret for that decision. Even the transcendent mathematics of the clear mind
were inadequate to describe the sights he saw. More information could be packed into a single mote of
time than in all the depths of human history.
Lover, I will tear you apart.
The memories of the Lady came in full relief as he summoned them, playing before his eyes as if he were
witnessing them again from another body. The calculations whirled, visible now, spinning about him like a
flock of shining swallows, picking infinitesimal bits of data from the memories to link together and
compile.
His name,Scared demanded.
The image of Mama Engine flew apart in a ball of fire, pursued to the ends of the universe by the
relentless churning of mathematics.
His heart wavered, fluctuated, collapsed. He felt an omnipresent sting haul him back towards his lonely,
burned room. He fought it, letting that painful gravity rake through him as he awaited the answer.
His name!Scared bellowed.
Mama Engine’s flayed desires came back to him, piling one on the other in his vision, each stark and
plain. He waited for the answer to come, burning more for each moment he remained. Seconds passed,
and his mind began to shy from the vastness of the spaces about him. Fear and uncertainty crept on his
skin like living things, and his nightmares frayed the edges of his consciousness, sniffing for an entrance.
There were thousands of them—the twisted wretches of long-suppressed thoughts and memories. They
scraped with yellowed nails against his soft mind.
Unable to bear it any longer, Scared fled upwards, pursued in his ascent by screaming legions of his own
mental horrors. He swam up as fast as his wit would carry him, sinking his fingers into his own solid flesh
even as the teeth of a forgotten memory clamped on to his ankle.
He crashed back into the burned room in a spray of imagined monsters, sparkling equations, and
all-too-real vomit.
Lying on the floor, the spent remnants of the drug searing in his veins and organs, Scared began to
snicker, then to chuckle, and after a few seconds he burst into wild, cackling laughter. The calculations
had come together at the last second, and delivered him an answer even as he escaped to the
uncomfortable refuge of his body. As waves of vertigo and nausea took him, he spat the name through
crooked teeth.
“Oliver Sumner.”
Aaron was happy for a time, sleeping in his new body in the pocket of this mechanical man who called
him by another name. He dreamed of a dog, a little spotted terrier mutt of his youth that had chewed his
toes to wake him every morning, then of a sunset witnessed from atop the chimney of his childhood home
in Manchester—a moment of relaxation confounded by the dousing of the fire below.
Other dreams came to him as well, dreams of scurrying amongst garbage and dodging enormous feet, of
the odd pleasantries of scratching and gnawing, and of the luscious feeling discovered once by licking up
a sticky liquid spilled from a glass bottle.
He awoke wondering whether he had been a man or a rat, in the days before the void.
He uncurled himself and clambered out of the pocket. The world suddenly lit up with ambient vibration.
Aaron hooked his tail and his back legs into the fabric and leaned far out of the pocket to look down,
seeing only the fuzzy reflection of the streets, now not so far below, and the ghosts that haunted them.
So very many ghosts.
He looked into them, using not his body’s senses but those strange knowings he’d had as a man. These
souls had a seeming of his companion from the void, as if they were part of him, or he of them. Victims of
the disease? Wanderers lost to Purgatory?
He is the rot eating at the roots of the flower.
He clicked away the thought. What a very strange notion. A human one, perhaps.
The mechanical man dug his iron fingers into a beam and swung to the platform below with the grace of
an orang-utan.
The impact sent a vibration up the man’s legs and through his torso. The noise flashed like fireworks in
the strange eyes of Aaron’s new body. He spun his rounded snout to face his bearer’s chest and drank in
the vibrations there. Each manifested as a pulse of white across the screen of his mind, outlining skin,
bones, pumps, gears, pistons, and the other features of the man’s anatomy. There, too, Aaron perceived
the taint of the void dweller.
The void dweller had showed him this infection, had showed him how it ended.
Or perhaps showed me its purpose.
A human thought again. Stuffy. Complicated. The rat wanted to run and climb.
He scuttled out of the pocket, hooking on to the long coat, and looked about.
“Up and about are we, Jeremy?”
The mechanical man stroked him on the snout with his fleshy hand. The skidding of the hand’s rough
calluses played a music of lights across Aaron’s vision. When the mechanical man spoke, his voice
appeared as a boxed and rough image not unlike the man’s face.
“He’s got quite the lead on us. Probably your comment about the vagrant, eh?”
“Pride is the folly of all men,” said the old man, with an audible grinding of teeth. “Particularly the young.”
With a grunt, he swung himself over the same beam and dropped gingerly to the platform. Aaron scuttled
all around the rough wool of the coat, snapping at the lapels and nibbling the buttons.
“Right-oh, Mr. Philosopher,” the mechanical man said. “Still, he shouldn’t beso far ahead of us.
You…well, you don’t suppose he took a plunge, do you?”
“Unlikely, though he might have fell.”
“Now you’re playing with me, you codger.”
“No, I’m proving my superior wit. Move that two-ton cauldron you call an arse out of my way.”
The mechanical man chuckled, though it was a forced sound, betraying worry. His face creased
perceptibly and he cast a halfhearted search around him.
Suddenly eager to help, Aaron opened his jaws and emitted a click. The sound bounced back and the
area jumped to life as if lit with an electric torch. In a nest of twisting pipes some six or seven leaps
distant crouched the third of their party, struggling to right himself and moving with obvious pain. Ghosts
had gathered all around him, and floated in a rough sphere. The man pointed his rifle at one.
He should not be afraid of them,Aaron thought. He leapt from the coat to a nearby beam, clipping on to
one edge with his six limbs.
Follow me,Aaron cried, surprised to find nothing more than a click and a whirr escape his throat.
“Your pet’s escaping again,” the old man called.
“His Majesty is merely flexing his legs. Exercise serves even the greatest of men,” said the mechanical
man, “and rats.”
Aaron found himself clinging upside down as he approached the nest and the ring of ghosts. He had
never realised before that they were solid—after a fashion. Air currents shaped through them, defining
their features in layers of continually shifting ash and smoke.
He clicked at them. Two turned to look.
The sudden movement startled the besieged man, who swung his rifle about and let fly. Aaron’s senses
exploded for an instant, as if the atmosphere had turned solid. For a moment he stumbled, swaying above
the drop.
“You unsporting bastards,” the mechanical man bellowed, “hiding out there like foxes on the moor!
Have the decency to shoot me to my face.”
Another blast rang out, followed by three more. Each obliterated Aaron’s senses, until he teetered on
three limbs, tail flailing and jaws gnashing for purchase.
The beam glittered into being.
“Christ—Tommy, it’s me!”
Another shot. Another blinding field of white.
The body shuddered and gave out. Aaron dropped from his perch.
The air splayed rivers of light across his vision, rippling and gorgeous, flowing from nose to tail.
Will I die when I land?he wondered.Will the rat live? Will the man?
The rat screamed with rat terror and went limp at the behest of its instincts. The man turned his eyes
downward and despaired.
I do not want to die. There is still so much left undone.
Memories came to him, then: images of other men like himself who were his friends; of a vast city of
wasted human life; and overshadowing all, two towering creatures—one of brass, one of iron; one a
hammer to crush the soul, the other a mouth to devour it.
He remembered his own name. He remembered his mission.
Joseph! Help is coming!
His buzzing rang from the beams as he fell.
Bullets sparked off the beams all around.
Oliver squashed himself farther into the tangle of piping and clamped his hand down over his hat.
The last ricochet bounced into oblivion and the pipes hummed with dissipating vibration. It would be a
minute before Tommy’s clumsy hands could reload.
“Are you quite finished?” Oliver yelled.
The answer came back meek and wavering. “Ollie?”
“Yes, it’s me, you sot. Didn’t you hear me the first two times?”
“Well…there was a good deal of noise.”
“What, were you itching to mount me on the parlour wall?”
“You shot me first.”
“I didn’t know you were there. I was shooting at…”Ghosts? He slumped back against an irregular bend
in the pipes, wondering if he really was losing his sanity. Maybe it was the height, and the thought of all
those seconds of empty air before impact with a beam or a quick end on the streets below.
Something Tommy had said tingled his mental bell.
“Did you say that I shot you?”
“Clean through the chest,” Tommy called back. “I will, of course, be charging you for the clothing.”
“Are you all right?”
“Aside from the hole? The picture of health. I might mention, as well, that these express rifles were a fine
choice—hit like rhinoceroses.”
Oliver shook his head in disbelief. “Can you see any way across, Tom?”
“Can’t say I see much at all. Only way’s a thin couple of pipes that a monkey would balk at.”
Oliver squinted, but could make out little against the grey air. The dull glow of Tom and Phin’s lanterns bobbed in the distance like a two-headed will-o’-the-wisp. He retrieved the matchbox from his sack and
lit his own lantern, which had blown out during the fall. The light revealed only the immediate nest of pipes
and the two Tommy had mentioned, which zigged and twisted and looked thin and frail besides.
“Looks as if there’s no way across, gents,” Oliver called. “I’ll descend from here and try to meet up.”
“Aye, Captain. Last one to the ground buys the round!”
Oliver felt certain Tom was saluting.
The will-o’-the-wisp moved on downward. Oliver leaned the express rifle against two close pipes and
began to reload. He might have told them about his twisted ankle, he supposed, but that would have only
worried them enough to attempt a foolhardy rescue. What sort of leader required a rescue? And he’d
been embarrassed quite enough today, thank you very much.
In fact, it seemed all he could manage lately was to make a mess of things.
Well, I have two uninjured limbs, at least. That’s enough to affect a climb.
He made to rise, then retreated back to his uncomfortable nook as the pain flared in his ankle. He
clipped the lantern to his belt and began to massage his throbbing muscles.
After a few minutes’ rest, he tried the ankle again, finding it sturdy enough to bear weight. He rose,
buckled his sack and rifle to his back once more, and fished around for a possible route of descent.
Eventually he settled for an angular assortment of pipes and wires that resembled a ladder as one may
have looked in an opium dream. The descent proved no more or less troublesome than previous ones
had, and before long he had set foot on wide, solid beams.
He stopped to rest, sipped at his canteen, and polished his goggles to clear his vision. The
human-seeming wisps of smoke had gone, but the burning in his mind remained, dulled, as if fallen into a
light slumber.
Dark and heat and height had begun to take their toll: he felt exhausted. He downed another sip of grainy
water and thought of Missy—Michelle. She never let anyone else call her that. Why hadn’t he noticed
before?
Because it was just another of the woman’s damnable mysteries, that’s why. She liked her secrets, that
one. She had a look, he reflected, a queer expression that crept onto her face in certain instances of
Oliver’s kindness, which she hid behind a quickly crafted smile. Perhaps it was to keep him guessing,
perhaps for other reasons—he might never know.
His train of thought breached the point at which it became more uncomfortable than continuing the
descent, so Oliver stowed his water, checked his straps, and shuffled to the platform’s edge.
No more yellow paint.Nothing below but a mass of near-vertical pipes slick with condensation; nothing
to the sides but silent ashfall; the only way onward, a treacherous slide down the pipes with no peripheral
means to reduce speed. His injured hand stung just looking at it; his guts clenched and squeezed like
kneaded bread. He spoke just to get away from his own thoughts.
“For our great and noble queen,” he said to himself, then shook his head. “We’ll do the strangest things for a lady.”
He flung his feet off the edge and dropped himself over.
“Peculiar, that,” Mulls whispered.
Bergen did not bother to look. Mulls had been repeating those same words over and over for the past
hour. It was a jungle fear—the fear of silence. Those few rich men and journalists he’d taken through
Africa in earlier days had shown similar reactions, talking gaily and commenting on every damn thing as if
noise alone would keep the snakes at bay. When he told them to keep quiet, they curled up like
chastised little boys.
But he needed Mulls sharp, and so tolerated the outbursts.
By now they were well below Aldgate Tower, and it was past two in the morning. Another hound attack
had left Bergen’s shoulder burned by the heat and chafed by the steam rifle’s straps. Penny had come
through, doing much better with his flasher than with a rifle. He now held the flasher’s copper-tipped
striking rod in front of him like a knife at all times, and his other hand effected a constant slow rotation of
the charging wheel at his belt.
The boy didn’t seem to tire. He stood watch during their rest stops, took lead on climbs through rubble
and old buildings, and even ranged a bit when Bergen stopped to get their bearings. His stance never
wavered from its catlike grace, and he did not relax for even an instant.
He is an animal, that boy,Bergen thought.A predator born by accident in a human womb.
Aldgate had an underbelly, though its residents preferred to call it a “subconcourse.” In an effort,
perhaps, to raise their status, they had installed a dazzling array of electric lights all across their ceiling and
in their streets, and it leaked through the haze into the downstreets with enough power to illuminate their
route as by moonlight.
That light allowed Bergen to keep better tabs on Pennyedge. Bergen’s senses had been alert for some
time to the boy’s attempts to circle and approach him from behind.
Bergen led them beneath Aldgate to the side closest to Commercial Street Tower, where their quarry
was reputed to have fallen. The two towers were so close as to be nearly leaning on each other, with the
outward-sloping base of the Stack mingling into their support beams.
The stench was vile. Aldgate residents, with their rich variety of imported foods, produced some of the
most pungent shit Bergen had ever had to endure. Its odour cut through even the omnipresent stench of
ash and smoke. They had passed earlier one of many vast septic pools, centred seven storeys below the
primary sewer drains, and they had all nearly choked on the air.
“Peculiar,” Mulls muttered.
Bergen forgot himself and snapped: “Can you make anyother comment?”
“But that’s someone moving, that is.”
Mulls nudged his rifle to the left. Bergen’s eyes shot to the location indicated.
Someone moving. Not a hound, or a clickrat, but a man, crawling.
“Penny, flank.”
The boy vanished to the right without a second glance.
“Mulls, cover him.”
Mulls nodded, then ran off to a suitably high outcropping of rubble, where he nestled his bulk between
two rotten beams and set his rifle’s barrel atop the remains of a plaster wall.
Bergen carefully set the steam rifle down, then reached for his Gasser. His right hand shook under its
weight as he lifted it, so he decided to leave it holstered. He was a fast enough draw with his left.
He approached from an oblique angle, through ruined buildings rather than along the old street. If his
quarry noticed any of them, he gave no sign.
Bergen examined the man through the rotted holes of his hiding place: definitely human, crippled,
struggling to pull himself along on his forearms, dragging unmoving legs behind like a grotesque train.
Bergen spotted a flat, circular case wedged in the crook of his left arm.
And there’s our prise.
He stood. The quarry noticed him immediately, staring dumbstruck for a long moment as Bergen
approached. Then the man erupted with laughter.
“You find something funny?” Bergen growled.
The man gagged, coughed up brown oil, then resumed laughing.
Bergen squatted down. The man’s fit choked itself out, and between ragged breaths he tilted his face
upwards. Only one red eye blinked up at Bergen, the other having been destroyed by the fall along with
the entire right side of the man’s face.
“Yer not one of Bailey’s men, are yeh?”
Bergen shook his head.
“I should have known better than to hope. For a moment I thought the lad might have devised some
flying machine after all. Yeh here for the tape?”
Bergen nodded, and held out his hand.
“Bugger all.” The man hung his head for a moment. “Not much to be done about it, looks like: won’t be
no running, nor fighting. Just answer one question of a dying man and answer true.”
“Fine.”
“Are ye gonna use it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s a due turn o’ luck.” The man grabbed at the case with his left hand. The broken fingers
scraped over its surface, unable to close together. “Mind?”
Bergen retrieved it for him. He wiped some of the slime and blood from it on his trouser leg. The broken
man, relieved of his burden, collapsed to the concrete.
“Now,” he said, his voice muffled by the wet ground, “will it be a mite of conversation, or should we get
on with the shooting?”
Bergen slipped the sidearm out of its holster with his left hand. “I am curious how you managed to
survive the fall,” he said. “I expected to find a corpse.”
“Oddest thing,” the man said. “I’ve no heart, apparently. Rest o’ me broke like twigs, but this thing in me
chest kept pumping away. The lad knew, somehow. He pushed me over, murdering, brilliant, young man.
He knew I’d survive.” He chuckled. Oil burbled up from his mouth.
Aaron Bolden. He was an extraordinary man, my friend.
Bergen felt a powerful yearning to comfort the dying man, to tell him that his sacrifice would make the
difference in the rebellion. Bergen made a quick check of the surrounding street: empty, with twenty feet
to the nearest obstacle. If he was there, Penny would hear, and so Bergen said nothing.
“I have a daughter,” the man said. “Beautiful girl, big-boned like her mother. She was going to move to
Edinburrough with a tramp of an Englishman—a coal-backer, of all people! Loves the chap, though.”
Bergen nodded, already agreeing to the next request.
“Ellie McWhyte,” he said, “though she might be Ellie Pearson by now. Just give her me love.”
“I will.”
“Yer awfully polite for a German fellow. You have a name, so’s I can put in a good word with St.
Peter?”
He should shoot the man now—end this conversation, this dying attempt at camaraderie, before
sentiment put him in danger, but Bergen had been living amongst thieves and villains so long that a few
words of an honest man glittered like honey in his ears. It was stupid, but the man deserved to know he
was dying beside a friend.
Bergen leaned close to the man’s ear, so that his lips almost touched it as he spoke. He dropped the
German accent and let his native Dartmoor shine through.
“Nicholas Ellingsly,” he whispered. “Rest in peace, friend.”
Bergen stood and shot the man through the forehead.
The sight of the twitching body sewed shut any hint of sentiment. When Penny appeared out of the dark
at his side, Bergen’s expression had become as cold as before.
And now you know I shoot left-handed. Well, who are you going to tell?
“Five minutes for food and rest. Then we head back.”
He walked back to the steam rifle. Penny’s eyes narrowed to razor slits and followed him step for step.
Bergen stripped aside his mask and took a pull of water from his canteen, trying to quell the nagging fear
creeping up through his stomach.
For the first time, Penny had come right up behind him, and Bergen hadn’t noticed.

Chapter 8

This is the crux of my self-made oblivion: I am not Job, who can endure endless quantities of earthly
hardship, but a weak man and a slave to drink and opium. The hand that now pens these alien letters
would have been my destroyer, but that They promised me an emptiness without emotion or memory, a
release so much more profound than the restless slumber of death. How could I refuse?
And to my shame: even knowing what is to come, I do not regret.
II. iii
Oliver awoke to the cold.
It was not cold as he knew it. In the perpetual heat of the city, he knew cold to be merely a temperature
at which one did not constantly sweat. He did not know it as the shriveling chill that now assailed him.
It was as if all the strength had been sucked from his muscles, all the sturdiness from his bones. He
quaked uncontrollably, clutching feebly at his collar to draw it tighter. His heart lay still, his blood
stagnant. His lungs scraped a minimum of air through chattering teeth, when he breathed at all. His body
felt like a great hollow cavity, its sides ancient and flaking away.
He knew himself to be dying, and so did she. The subtle heat of her furnace miles distant played on the
back of his neck. It beckoned to him with the promise of its warmth.
Oliver buried his creaking, shaking fingers in his armpits and waited for the darkness to take him.
Someone shook him.
“Ollie? Still with us?”
Oliver pried his eyes open. The world swished in front of him like soapy water.
The hand shook him again. It was warm and large. Oliver drew in a lungful of scalding hot air, which
spread rapidly into his body, reviving him enough to speak.
“T-Tom?”
“He lives! Our own John Bull—knew we could count on you, chap. Looks like they gave you a grand
thumping, though.”
Two powerful hands slid under his armpits and scooped him up. Tommy’s greasy stench enveloped him.
Once released, Oliver staggered back into an uneven, moist wall. He drew in a second, deeper breath,
realizing from the taste of it that his mouth was full of blood. He rubbed his eyes until they came back into
focus.
He found himself in the courtyardlike end of a back alley that he recognised as being just off Petticoat
Lane. Tommy’s bureau-wide shoulders plugged most of the alley’s width, but Oliver made out two
smaller shapes behind him.
Tom looked like an aged sow happy her piglet had come home.
“Haven’t seen you for almost an hour, mate. Feared they’d picked you off.”
Oliver nodded but said nothing. Each breath brought him further back to wakefulness and gave his body
more life. The muscles in his arms quivered and could move again. The cold fled, burying itself in the pits
of his gut.
Someone had bandaged his burnt hand—recently, as the wraps were still free of blood and grime. The
skin he could see between the wraps and his cuff was red from exposure. In his left hand, he still clutched
a folded newspaper and his newly acquired copy of theSumma Machina .
His heart beat, and the sudden pressure of blood blinded him.
“Careful, old chap,” Tommy said, propping Oliver upright with a meaty palm to his right arm. “Better get
your head on. We’ve a slight change of plan.”
One of the smaller men squeezed past and tossed Oliver a rifle. He snatched at it and dropped it, then
bent to retrieve it and managed on the second try.
The shadows resolved themselves into Winfred Bailey Howe’s broad moustache and humourless eyes.
“Everything well in hand, I see,” he said.
That roused enough ire to bring Oliver fully back to life. “You were to be here some time ago, if I
recall.”
Bailey’s jaw muscles flexed before he spoke. “The murder of most of my men at our hideout
necessitated an alteration in the plan,” he said. “How did you come to be found in such an undignified
position?”
Oliver started as he discovered that he wasn’t entirely sure. He remembered the escape, then running
into the street, crowds of people he recognised, then charred bones, then people again, then a blur. He
tried to keep his indecision from his face as he concocted a plausible story.
It occurred to him that Bailey didn’t really want an answer: he had already concluded that some pack of
canaries had taken Oliver unawares, and that Oliver was a careless amateur.Fine by me. I’m through
trying to change your opinion, old man.
“They got the drop on me,” Oliver said.
Bailey loosed a guttural noise of frustration. “And the hand?”
Assaulted briefly by the memory, Oliver was tempted to actually tell the truth.Fine idea, man: tell him you
were visited and invaded by our mortal enemy—a sure way to earn the man’s trust.
“I burned it on a stove during the tussle.”
“And I suppose they bandaged it for you?”
“No, sir. I escaped, then bandaged it. They found me again shortly thereafter.”
Bailey nodded satisfaction, though his eyes still searched Oliver’s face. “Walk it off,” he said. “Mr.
Moore, here, Mr. Macrae, and yourself are to accompany us to the downstreets. I’ve left Heckler in
charge of the Underbelly.”
Oliver’s hackles rose. “You’ve given orders to my crew.”
“Had you been among your men and conscious, I wouldn’t have had to do it.” Bailey spun on his heel
and marched away, brushing Tommy aside with the sheer force of his presence. “We must leave
immediately. Scared’s group has several hours on us already.”
Bailey and the man accompanying him strode away towards the flickering lights of Petticoat Lane.
Tom dropped his voice.
“‘Mr. Moore,’” he scoffed. “Like I’m a gentleman or some foolishness. So what happened, really?”
Oliver felt some tension ease away in the presence of Tommy’s toothy grin. “I’ll tell you when I sort it
out.”
“That’s fair.” He indicated the book. “Never fancied you for a reading man.”
Oliver turned the book cover up. The title and author’s name glittered on the front cover—inlaid gold?
“I was talked into buying it, I’m afraid.” Oliver stowed it back under his arm. “We’ll pass it to Michelle
on our way through the square.”
Oliver gestured to get moving, and Tommy began his clunking walk out of the alley.
“‘Michelle’?” he asked.
Oliver shrugged. “She tells me that’s what she prefers.”
Tommy grinned over his shoulder. “Does she now?”
Oliver did not have the energy to scry the meaning in that statement. Echoes of the flaming hell he’d
glimpsed reverberated in his mind. It must have distracted him visibly, for when he next looked up,
Tommy loomed down at him with a quirk of concern in his perpetual smile.
“Sure you’re all right, Chief?”
Oliver nodded. “Fine enough to move my feet, Tom. I just…I never realised exactly what we were up
against before. The Lord and Lady—they’re notnatural, Tommy.”
Tommy nodded, jaw set, face grim.
Oliver sighed. “We’re in deep-shit trouble.”
“Wait until you see the Ticker Hounds” was Tom’s answer.
It was a thrill to have a gun.
Just to hold it gave Missy tingles. The cold of it, the heaviness, the etched scrollwork on the
cylinder—these things were alluring in a way, titillating almost. Her stomach burst with butterflies, and she
turned it over and over.
“It’s just a bitty one,” said Heckler, who flinched every time she waved the barrel in his direction. “Think
it might do for you, though, being not too bad on the wrists.”
“It’s marvelous,” Missy said. “No wonder men so fancy the things.” Her gloves whispered against the
wooden grip as she wrapped her fingers around it.
Heckler held his hands slightly forward, as if Missy held something fragile. “ ’S just a .38 and not much
good beyond, say, fifty yards.”
“Oh, I very much doubt I would be able to hit anything at that distance,” said Missy. She took aim at an
unfortunate sconce over a nearby doorway. “It is a fine specimen, as guns go?”
“Prettier’n most, if that’s what you mean.”
Missy sighted on a scuttling clickrat at the far end of the alley. “Forgive my ignorance, but I did not think
guns were judged on their appearance.”
“Oh…er…” Heckler shuffled a bit. “ ’S all right in terms of power.”
“How many shots would it take to kill someone?”
The American flushed. “Now, ma’am, that ain’t no proper talk…”
“Oh, hush. You’re beginning to sound like Tom and Phineas. Why lend it to me at all if you’re just going
to become squeamish and womanly?”
Missy smiled as the young man seesawed visibly between masculine pride telling him not to be womanly
and masculine pride telling him not to be talked to in such a way by a woman. Eventually, he steadied
himself, straightened his suspenders, and replied, “Depends on where you hit ’em, ma’am.”
“Where would you suggest?”
“Uh…chest is good. Head’s better but a harder shot. Stomach’s good too, but real slow.” Heckler
swallowed. “Bad way to go.”
“Is it.”
The alley had one guttering oil lantern that had not been cleaned in some time. That and the light flooding
in from Coll’s Bystreet combined to give the metal a multitoned fire.
“Look, ma’am, you be careful with it,” Heckler said. “It ain’t no toy.”
“I’m quite aware of what it is, Heckler.”
“Well…just, I’ve seen a lot of folk shoot off their own fingers, or their brother’s toes and such.”
She shook her finger playfully. “Mothering me again, little man. That will not do.” She dropped the gun
into her small leather handbag, where it landed with an energetic thump. She hefted her handbag a little to
feel the weight.
Heckler looked at her curiously.
“For protection, you say, miss?”
Missy smiled broadly. “Surely you cannot object to it in such times as these.”
“Best protection’s not to get shot at.”
Missy swept past him towards the street. “Advice I’m certain you have ignored at every opportunity.
Shall we?”
After a moment, Heckler followed her into the street.
Coll’s Bystreet murmured under the meek blaze of four oil-fed streetlamps and one eye-stinging electric.
People moved about it like shadows, spilling from the Beggar’s Parade into Marlowe Square and
washing about like leaves in a river. Hawkers, musicians, and beggars stolidly held their places, while
pickpockets floated around the crowds like hungry ghosts. In the centre of the square stood a smashed,
dry fountain. It had been a figure once, of what Missy did not know.
“There,” said Heckler.
She looked up in time to spot three canaries crossing the square. Two were toughs, the kind of men
she’d known too much of back in Shoreditch, in her previous life. The other seemed a gentleman of some
stature, sporting an immaculate grey suit and silk hat. The electric light cut severe lines across their
flowing cloaks.
“Now, where are you three off to in such a hurry?” she thought aloud, then to Heckler: “I’ll take them.”
Heckler nodded and moved off up the Parade towards the lift.
Missy took a vantage point on the front steps of a tenement on the square’s corner, where she watched
the cloaks jostle their way through the uncooperative crowd, who showed them only the barest of respects: a tip of the hat (causing the elbow to block the cloaks’ path), a slight bow (therefore remaining
in the cloaks’ way a few seconds longer than necessary), a sales pitch (louder and more insistent than
with anyone else). The tension of the crowd grew second by second.
They’ve not forgotten the Uprising,Missy realised.Not a safe place to be a cloak, I’ll wager.
They were heading directly for St. Margaret Street. Missy slipped into the crowd to pursue. She had
chosen today a large-brimmed, backwards-slanting ash hat, an oversized wool coat, and a tweed skirt.
She had also neglected any makeup, and so blended in seamlessly with the Underbelly unfortunates in the
square. Hiding from view was a new activity for her, unknown before joining Oliver’s crew.
She’d always been a feast for the eyes. In her younger years she had fancied herself a succubus, like in
the old fairy tales, stripping men of all qualities but lechery and stupidity.And it was such fun—wasn’t it,
bird—to watch them drool over you? And then things had changed, and the kindly old woman had
turned out not to be so kindly, the men cruel and lustful and endless.
She brought down a wall on the memories.It’s over, love. Another life. A bad dream. You have Oliver
now.
And she had a gun.
And she’d killed. That knowledge shivered in her stomach with excitement and revulsion. It had been
horrible, the feel of the act so base and vicious, and yet…the lecherous sot had gotten exactly what he
deserved.
She felt a flush creeping into her face and dropped the sentiment behind the mental wall, returning her
attention to her task.
Oliver’s lessons in pursuit came back to her.Stay behind crowds, greet people you know, look at shop
windows, linger sometimes. Do not watch your fox too closely. It’s your attention on them that they will
notice first, even if they don’t know you’re there.
So she greeted passing ladies, who gave her a polite smile, and passing gents, who gave her a lingering
taste with their eyes and tipped their hats. She bought an ugly tin brooch from a vendor for a penny. She
hurried when the cloaks vanished momentarily over a rise in the road or behind a group of locals, so as
not to lose them.
You’d stick out like a brass boil if anyone was watching you,she said to herself. She checked around
and found a few sets of eyes idly looking her way. Avoiding notice was not her strength.
She crested a rise in the road, where the lateral slant was so pronounced the buildings on the left were a
storey higher than those on the right. From that vantage she could see the Blink, shimmering in the
lamplight like a city of smoke—from which all the streets had been excised. The Blink’s various roofs
and balconies sported an improbable assortment of weather vanes and chimneys, lending the whole an
appearance of an oversized pincushion. The cloaks hurried towards it.
The sight of the Blink stirred up memories of the German fellow she’d followed that morning. Raw
stupidity, that was. She’d been lucky to escape with her life and person intact, and yet a part of her sat
with crossed arms and pouted at the memory.Why did he have to be such a gentleman? I could see it in
his face, that sick, sinful desire, and yet he held back and didn’t give me the chance to stick him.
She gasped at that thought. One hand flew to her lips.
Oh, poor bird. What has happened to you?Suddenly her handbag felt a much heavier burden.
Well, she couldn’t very well dispose of ithere, and quite besides: it might be needed in the crooks and
corners of the Blink. One never knew, in such a place.
She loitered out front of an apartment building—as if waiting impatiently for someone to meet her
there—until the cloaks had slipped out of sight into one of the Blink’s alleys. She counted ten heartbeats,
then stole in after them.
She dogged them through the Blink’s random turns, following with ease the tick-tock regularity of their
footfalls. After a dozen twists, they stopped, and Missy crept to the next corner to listen.
“Where are we, you dullards?” one of them boomed.
“Dunno,” said another.
“What?”
“Er…dunno, sir?”
“Harmony is built upon obedience, whatever-your-name-is. The spring turns the gear, and the more the
gear protests, the less the efficiency of the whole.” Missy heard something that could only have been a
sharp blow. “Sobe respectful !”
“Er…yessir.”
Their footsteps began again, and retreated off. Missy stepped around the corner and pursued them into
a section of alley particularly twisted and misshapen.
A hand darted from a close nook and clasped onto her shoulder.
“That’s right! Come on!” she screamed, whirling with one rapid step and plunging her hand into her bag.
Heat and rage flared up in her so rapidly that she did not recognise the wide eyes until her fingers were at
the trigger with her arm tensed to draw.
Two long-fingered hands waved surrender. “My fault. I ought to have learned from the last time I snuck
up on you.”
Missy gasped. “Oliver? You ass! Have you any idea what you almost made me do?”
Oliver grabbed her wrist and pulled her down a side alley. “Oh, I can imagine it.”
She flushed. “I don’t think you can. What are you doing here? What is all that?” She gestured to the
pack Oliver wore, and the long rifle strapped to its side.
Oliver ground his teeth a moment before replying. “Bailey’s called us in. We’re going down, Michelle.”
“Down?”
“Into the downstreets.”
Missy stood stunned a moment, as the statement sank in.
I told you it would not last, bird, this fantasy of yours.
She crossed her arms to keep them from shaking. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re coming
back?”
Oliver’s smile looked forced. “That’s my plan, even if Bailey doesn’t share it.”
“You are a poor liar, Mr. Sumner.”
Oliver adjusted his pack’s straps and regarded her with a furrowed brow.
“I should catch up. I stayed behind only to ensure they didn’t follow us.”
“I suppose you should,” said Missy hotly. “Duty to England and all that rubbish.”
“Michelle…”
“I don’t want to hear it, Oliver.”I don’t want to hear you tell me you are not going to die, that I’m not
going to have to go back to…to… “If you must follow that madman to an early grave, who am I to get in
your way?”
“I’ll be back inside a day,” he protested.
“Idon’t want to hear it! Your fool’s crusade is your own.”
“My fool’s crusade is—”
“You won’t come back. You know it; it’s written all over your face.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete—here.”
He jammed a hand at her, holding a leather-bound book. Missy looked from his eyes to the golden
letters on the cover and back.
“What kind of absurd gesture is this?” she said.
“I’m leaving this with you,” he said. “I intend to read it when I get back. I’m told”—his face relaxed a
bit—“that it’s a ripping good read.”
“Oh, nowthere’s a reason for returning,” she replied, snatching the book.
Missy knew he was staring at her, but did not raise her eyes from the golden script. As the silence
dragged, she felt an unwelcome heat creeping up her neck.
“Try not to give up on me,” he said at last. “If all goes well, we’ll be eating gruel in Sherwood by
morning.”
Missy jammed the book in her handbag.
“Hadn’t you better be off?” she said.
Oliver swallowed hard before replying. “I suppose I should.”
They shared a long look, filled with unspoken words.
Oliver turned and vanished into the alleys. Missy stood alone for a while.
Shall you make your way back to me now, little one, or will you await the news?
Be quiet.
Hewould have had faith inher, and so she would wait until morning.

Chapter 7

The first principle of the forge is Intention. It is this impulse, whimsical or practical, that has fevered Man
for all his long ages. Man would temper this impulse oftentimes with the ethics and rationality of his own
nature, but the impulse itself is slave only to its own needs. In this it is found that the words of scholar and
madman have equal weight, for all creation is Holy, and the realm of the Divine.
Curse God for giving his power to creatures such as She.
—V. ii
Far away, a ticking.
As of a single watch passing its time in a vast space. It was peaceful. He lay in the warm void and
enjoyed the sound, let it slide into him, let it overwhelm him, until he was nothing more than the watch’s
echo.
He felt a welling of sadness, as if his crushed body were weeping for him, and ignored it. All that was
past him now. He’d gone beyond the fragile identities of a cruel and vulgar world. He had the void, this
endless gap just beyond life, just before whatever came after. He revelled in the stillness, inviting it into his
broken mind and willing the few remaining pieces of himself to vanish into it. Lost in nothingness, every
vibration ended, all momentum expended.
And he was happy for a time.
Then something else found him.
He could not tell what it was, for perception was different here, but it moved through the nothingness like
a drop of dye spreading in clear water. It reached a limb for him, one too small to straddle the void.
He found no need to turn to face it, finding no existent directions to speak of. And that was beautiful in
itself.
Who are you?he asked.
Its answer floated slowly to him, buoyed on an invisible ether. He caught the answer in outstretched
limbs, hugged it, explored it. It was the frigid, shifting chill-warmth of the human body in sickness, and
oozed a clammy toffeelike liquid into the void. The answer did not speak to him, and he was grateful, for
the thought of human speech repelled and terrified him.
The answer dissolved into bubbles of oil and slipped from his grasp.
Who are you?he repeated.
His companion shifted closer, slithering through the spaces with the sinewy motions of an octopus. He
could not see it, nor hear it; rather he felt it, like a piece of coarse wool dragged across the arm, or a
trickle of sand running down the face. Its movements revealed themselves as might ripples in the wake of
an invisible swimmer.
When it reached for him again, he stretched out to greet it.
A vision came to him.
No!
Pain. Fever. Sweat. Suddenly bone and flesh ensnared him, bound him, and he was screaming,
screaming , as growths of metal broke his skin. He trembled and spasmed, scraping hot nerves against
fibrous blankets on top and beneath. He shrieked again as hundreds of growths inside his body shifted
with his shudders, tearing flesh and muscle, scraping and sawing at bones.
Light ripped into his eyes as he flung them open; noxious air seared his lungs. An unbearable cold
slapped onto his forehead. Over him, a woman cried and prayed. Behind her, two pale-faced children
wept and shivered.
Please end this. Please, I want to go back.
His stomach clenched and he vomited on himself. A rib cracked as he convulsed, and he clawed at his
own throat with hands gnarled from age.
And suddenly he toppled back into the void, leaving the world of pain and light far above.
It was not the stillness that greeted him, but a seething boil of madness. It seized him and drew him into a
fire of screeching monstrosities. Tiny metal monsters crawled all over him, biting and scratching, growling
and gnashing their teeth. He withdrew as far as he could, shrinking into himself, but they closed on him,
writhing.
Help us,they shouted.
Go away!
They howled in despair. They ran amok, driven by a ceaseless agony conjured with every movement
and every breath. Their pain bled into anger and they fell upon one another in a cannibalistic frenzy.
At length, the creatures withdrew, leaving him in a pool of his own substance. Much of him had been
broken and consumed. What little remained lay shuddering in that lightless place.
Gradually, the tick returned, and warm viscous fluid lifted him up. His companion settled into the dark
beside him.
Are you the pain?he asked.
Words did not exist in the void. His companion encircled him with sticky arms.
I understand. You are the source of the machine-disease. The Mother’s heat and the Father’s noise hurt
you, and you hurt them back, and that causes only more pain.
The thing wept tears of pus.
I will help you,he said.I will help you to end it.
Gratitude. His companion swept one long limb out into the void, and from immeasurable distance
retrieved something that it laid before them both.
A tiny metal monster: a clickrat. This one lay on its back, jaws wired shut, legs bundled against its
stomach. It did not thrash about. The bindings had prevented it from lashing out against its pain, and that
pain had consumed it. It lay now empty and inviting.
A gift.
Aaron floated up and took it.
John Scared knew he was immune to the clacks, and he did not know why. The question bothered him,
as all unanswered questions did. If he did not know the reason, he could not be sure of the result.
Perhaps that was why these poor, diseased wretches made him uncomfortable.
He leaned heavily on his cane. Below, dockworkers struggled to unload the goods descending by crane
from two zeppelins tethered to the Aldgate spire. No single class seemed as afflicted with the mechanical
growths as the dockworkers. They shambled around like parodies of men, covered in gleaming iron
pustules, hobbling on malformed brass legs, and picking at ropes and crates with hooked hands and
fingerless steel stubs.
Why don’t you tell me what they are?he asked of the hot tingling in the back of his mind.Are they the
result of inhaling your breath, my dear? Little spores cast off by the belching of your long throat, nestling
in places warm and wet and springing to vibrant life?
“Tick, tick, tick,” he muttered. A bad habit. He did it for no good reason, but that it might annoyher .
He lifted his gaze to the Stack beyond and watched it flare to crimson life. A cloud of black foulness like
the tenth plague gushed up into the air.
Ah, my lovely, my dear, my sweet mistress. I do not understand you. Any one of your beloved children
would be faithful to you until the oily grave took him, and yet you place your trust in me. You are a
stupid, stupid creature.
John Scared was not averse to stupidity, as long as it was practiced by others.
He turned from the electric glare of the dock lights, hobbling like a cripple to the opposite end of the
rooftop of the Pilot’s Club, where Boxer hung suspended by his feet from a hook.
Astride the trapdoor leading to the Club’s highest floor, where men gambled their livelihood away on fixed games, stood a broad-shouldered man in rigid military pose. Two shifting-eyed boys huddled
together just forward of his reach. Scared waved at the two children.
“Come forward, my grubbers. Time for a lesson.”
Scared read them as they advanced. Each piece of them became a variable: the motion of the eyes, the
dip of the shoulders, the speed of the breath, the weight of the footfall. These he categorised mentally and
applied against a mathematical function long ago devised, and the boys’ personalities became plain to his
understanding. The one on the left, called Shoe, was good for nothing more than spying and fodder. The
one on the right, called Tuppence—that one could be moulded. Another Penny, perhaps, if there was
time enough for more lessons.
“Did you know, children,” Scared said, “that this hook was originally added to allow a piano to be
hauled to the second storey? The piano fell and crushed the club’s original owner.” He turned to Boxer.
“An accident. And a fortunate one it was for me, as it put the club on the market. Don’t you agree?”
The man called Boxer hung mute and shirtless, facing the blackness of Bishop’s Gate tower, and beyond
that, the muted lights of London. His arms had been excellently bound behind his back by bands of
iron—pounded into shape while still hot.
“Gather here, grubbers. You must see. Come, now, don’t be shy or there may be no food at all.”
Like hungry dogs they padded up, unconsciously rubbing their little tummies. Scared swept his arms
wide, gathering them together in front of him. He settled his fingers on their shoulders, one hand on each
boy, and thrilled at the warmth and the shivers he felt. He knelt behind, leaning over them so that the folds
of his cloak encircled them like the wings of a mother bird.
“This man has done a bad thing,” Scared explained. “He has lied to me, you see. One may lie as much
as one likes, so long as one tells only the truth to me.”
He fetched his cane and poked Boxer’s shoulder. The man slowly rotated around to face them. His
chest had been opened, the skin peeled back and pinned to the edges of the torso. An iron plate had
been riveted across his mouth. The children gasped and drew back against the rough wool of Scared’s
coat. He held them steady as they tried to hide their faces.
“Yes, itis horrible, my dears. Your reaction is nothing to be ashamed of. After more lessons—and there
will be many more—I will teach you to appreciate the artistry of what our good hunchback has done
here.”
The military man behind them shifted the position of his feet.
Scared pointed forward with his cane, indicating the red glow that issued from between Boxer’s
exposed ribs.
“You see this, grubbers? Mr. Boxer’s heart is not like yours and mine. His has been replaced with a
coal-burning furnace, as have his arteries and vessels been replaced with pipes. Do you know what this
means, grubbers?”
They did not respond. Through shudders and twitches, he watched bits of both of them curl up and die
then and there.Innocence crushed beneath the red meat of reality. A thing of beauty, is the growth of a
child. Would you not agree, my love?
“It means,” he said, “that Mr. Boxer is a black cloak. He doesn’twear a cloak, of course. Being a
deceitful man, he has endeavoured to hide his nature from me since he came into my employ.”
Scared deftly flicked the latch holding Boxer’s furnace closed. Boxer growled something unintelligible.
“That was his first lie to me. But he is a bad liar, and thus I have known about his treachery for some
time now.”
Scared passed his cane to Tuppence. “Go on, now. Give him a poke.”
Tuppence reached up a shaking hand and wrapped his little stubby fingers around the cane’s silver head.
The polished mahogany gleamed red in the Stack’s omnipresent glow. Tuppence stood still, eyes fixed
on Boxer’s gaping chest, as if unsure what to do next. John placed two fingers under the boy’s arm and
urged it up. With but a few hesitations, Tuppence reached out with the cane and tapped it against
Boxer’s side. He then quickly withdrew, shrinking close to himself. Boxer made no sound.
“Good, good,” Scared said. “Did you feel the way the flesh bounces back? Elasticity, it’s called: the
pressure of moisture and fluid inside the body pushes the cane away.”
The two boys nodded slowly.
“Give the head a turn, my child. Come, I’ll show you.”
Scared placed one hand over the boy’s, gripping the cane’s length with the other. Gently, he guided the
little fingers in a slow swivelling of the cane’s head. The boy jumped as a four-inch spring-loaded blade
shot out the far end.
“Now give him another. In the same spot.”
He let his fingertips linger on the back of the boy’s hand as he withdrew. That was the softest part,
between the rough knuckles and the bony wrist.And very soft, indeed, on this one.
This time Tuppence needed no coaching. He reached out with the blade and stabbed a quick hole in
Boxer’s flank, close to the kidney. Black oil-blood spurted out. Both children jumped back and John
caught them with one hand against each small back. The blood splattered against the wall one storey
down.
Scared gently retrieved his cane from Tuppence’s shaking hand.
Using the cane’s blade, he tapped on several of Boxer’s mechanical parts as he spoke. “You will
notice,” he said, “that these parts of his shed no blood or oil, while these”—he ground the blade through
a muscle—“shed plenty.”
Boxer grunted but did not speak. John wedged the blade to a secure position between the ribs and left
the cane hanging from Boxer’s body.
“This man cannot be killed by the shedding of blood, grubbers. He has rejected the precious flesh given
him by Our Lord, and embraced the fallacy of the machine. Now pay attention. I will show you how to
kill such a man.”
Scared seesawed the cane from its resting place and deftly flicked open the slotted door covering
Boxer’s furnace, releasing a pulse of red light and a wash of heat. He then carefully scraped out a
thimbleful of embers, which fluttered down towards the glow of Aldgate Tower and vanished.
“Mr. Boxer’s body is not heated by blood, but coal. Deprived of this substance, he will cool and freeze,
and then he will rot like meat left too long untended. Whether he will actually die…” Scared shrugged.
“That is up to Mama Engine.”
And you do have a hard time letting go, don’t you, my sweet?
He scraped the rest of the coals from Boxer’s chest, leaving only a smattering of tiny embers coating the
edges of the chamber. That done, he pressed the cane’s blade into the rooftop and forced it to retract
once more.
“I have one more task for you, my grubbers, and this lesson will be over.” Scared dug out of one pocket
two lumps of coal. He passed one to each of the boys. “Both of you will stand or sit, as you please, at
the edge of the roof and offer him your coal. Hold your coal out to him as far as you can reach, and ask
him if he would like it.” He made earnest eye contact with each lad as he spoke. “Now, you are not to
give him any, no matter his answer. Simply ask him over and over. Do this until I come back to retrieve
you; then there will be as much food as you can eat.”
The boys nodded, Tuppence more confidently than Shoe. John Scared guided them to the edge of the
roof, his fingers gracing their delicate shoulders. He listened for a moment as their quiet voices made the
offers, and Boxer replied with weak, muffled squeals. Then he left them to their work and hobbled over
to the trapdoor.
“Something troubling you, Sebastian?” he asked.
Sebastian Moran rubbed his round chin before answering. “Not that I would doubt your methods, sir,
but your treatment of Mr. Boxer is…unsporting.”
Scared chuckled. “I do enjoy your outdated sentiments, my friend. I might have had him shot or tossed
from the tower, but he presented an invaluable instructional opportunity for the children.”
Scared shuffled to the dockside edge of the roof. Moran clasped his hands behind his back and kept
with Scared’s halting pace.
“Children are indeed a blessing, are they not, Sebastian?” Scared said.
Moran coughed. “I wouldn’t know, sir. They don’t make terribly sporting targets.”
“I regret never having any of my own, you know,” said John. “Though perhaps that was unavoidable, as
no woman I have ever met seemed fit to bear them. Have you any children, Sebastian?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
Beyond the docks, another zeppelin angled towards the dock’s spire, cables already descending to be
fastened on. It pitched and slid to its port as a gust of hot air from the Stack jostled it. The red, white,
and black of the German empire came into sharp relief as the vessel floated into the powerful electric
lights of the dock. The silence dragged for some moments.
Scared sighed. “No reminiscing tonight, eh, my friend? Very well. You have a report to make, I’m
certain.”
Moran nodded again, stiffly, and began in crisp military tones. “The Crown agent captured by the Boiler
Men was named Aaron Bolden. My contacts in the gold cloaks report he was hooked to the Chimney
soon after he arrived.”
“I assumed as much. Even if he hadn’t been, I don’t expect any ordinary man to long keep his secrets in
such hands.” He rubbed a dull ache out of one elbow. “Bolden, though. I wondered who could have
penetrated my defences. The man’s knack with machinery is legendary.”
“He’s still alive, sir. Boxer’s team failed to remove him.”
“That was immaterial, Sebastian. I merely had to get Boxer out of the hideout while I moved my
operations to locations unknown to him. He was a spy for the crows, and though I am unlikely to be
arrested on account of my high allegiances, I do not want the bother of some ambitious young cloak
causing trouble.”
“I see.”
“Von Herder will have a rifle for you by tomorrow evening. Are you certain everything is in place?”
Moran snorted, incensed. “My men are not to be doubted, Scared.”
Scared laughed. “A mere prick in the flank to rile you to superb performance, my friend. No disrespect
was meant.” John squinted against a gust of wind kicked up by the landing zeppelin’s propellers. “Our
dear baron has far too much loyalty to his patron deities. It is a pity his fate must be a messy one. It will
be a stain on an otherwise artful enterprise.”
“Yes, sir.”
John read the man’s sudden uncertainty without having to look at him. “Ask your question, Sebastian.”
Moran cleared his throat. “Again, sir, not that I doubt your methods, but Grandfather Clock is only half
the problem. What will we do about the Lady and the black cloaks?”
Scared looked out at the Stack’s glowing apex.What indeed, my sweet? What shall we do with you?
“Grandfather Clock is a creature of logic and precision,” John said. “He allows neither change nor error
and can be handled in no way other than destruction. Mama Engine, however, is a creature of sentiment,
a mother in truth. Leave her to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Our conference is at an end. Return to your men and prepare.”
“Yes, sir.”
Moran quit the roof by the trapdoor, leaving Scared alone with the distant clamour of the dock and the
quiet voices of the two children.
The children would run away tonight, shortly after their meal. Repulsed by horror at him and at
themselves, they would hide in those holes they knew best. And in a few days or weeks, when they got
hungry again, they would return. They would endure more lessons to quiet their hunger. They would
grow. Eventually they would see no need to leave.
Ah, I am ever accepting, my sweet. Ever patient.
The Stack threw its hellish glare into the sky. The heat in John’s brain stem quivered, like a lover
shuddering in a tight embrace.
But though we each love dearly our adopted sons and daughters, they will never be enough, will they?
Just think of what wonderful children we will make, once I have tamed you.
He turned from the docks to see if Boxer was dead yet.