Authors: Kin Law
Nobody had complained, but the air had also gradually become thick and burned-tasting, compounding his foul mood.
“Care to weigh in, Inspector?” Clemens whisked backward, not looking away from the paved road. He was clearly enjoying this far too much.
“If I’m not mistaken, those would be Mordemere’s famous Clankers,” Hargreaves supplied, quite keen on the subject of peacekeeping. All three of his companions made Elric Blair extremely nervous; he was the only one worth naught in a fight. He had of course heard of Clankers, but he lacked the sense of danger to tell when one was close, no matter how keen his writer’s eyes were.
“Wankers, if you enjoy the nomenclature,” chuckled Clemens.
“And my gorgeous enjoys his nomenclature,” Rosa Marija chimed in.
“You two remind me of a certain criminal clown couple from the pictures,” Blair whinged. “I wasn’t aware there were so many. Where does Mordemere get his Clankers?”
“Killers, mostly,” Hargreaves explained. Blair thought everyone in the Fjord was getting far too comfortable with each other; everybody seemed adept at cutting off each other’s annoying habits. Maybe it was the air piracy, seeming to pull people together through a mutual desire to commit debauchery and not fall out of the sky.
“Disenfranchised marines, exiles and special operatives lured by high wages and th
e swagger of pulling a trigger,” Rosa Marija answered.
“Some of them are pirates who’ve run out of places to run. Their wanted posters hold up bars in every way station.”
Rosa Marija flipped round in her seat, put two hands together, flat, until they were separated by a book cover’s distance. It looked like she was peering out through the slats of a fence.
“We found a piece of their greaves, for sale, once, at the Straight Hook. Cid wouldn’t stop pestering us for the funds. Really weird stuff, the Clanker armor, It’s a lightweight sandwich of flexible hexagons. Looked like pencil lead, but didn’t make a mark. We shot it, of course, tried setting it on fire, set a steamthrower on it-“
“Steamthrower?”
“High-pressure, high-heat vitriol spray.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Anyway,” Rosa Marija went on, “none of it made a mark on the armor itself, but the goods it was supposed to protect tended to be vulnerable to large-caliber firearms. We had to peel bloody bits off it before Cid finally confiscated his toy from us.”
“Clankers wear heavy chrome gauntlets and greaves,” Clemens said gravely. “They’re pushed around with pressure pistons fueled by a tank on their backs. Not to mention, those hoods and masks don’t let you see the man inside. Who knows if there’s a black belt or a garotte commando behind there?”
Suddenly everything in the Fjord went a little quiet. Blair knew everyone was pondering the same dilemma.
Though they knew little about the Laputian Leviathan, if Mordemere was the one behind the theft of Europe’s landmarks, at the least it made Inspector Hargreaves his enemy. Captain Samuel was definitely involved in this somehow, which made Albion Clemens inextricable from the situation. Maybe Elric Blair, small-time scribbler for a no-name counterculture press, had no place in a fight between armored mercenaries with rifles and steam-throwing pirates.
Albion pulled the rickety Fjord up to a stop before the remains of a charming village church.
Its stately square tower had long ago been converted to a convenient
telegraph center, sprouting wires and large Morse lamps for signaling to the distant airship docks. Rusty wire grating covered up places where ornate stained glass once depicted biblical mysteries. No vegetation grew at all.
Gratefully, Blair vaulted out of the vehicle, followed closely by a surprisingly sympathetic Hargreaves, who rubbed the journalist’s back with care close to maternal. Even with his head over a sewer, Blair could make out the thud of Clemens’ heavy boots, and the graceful stride of Rosa Marija’s heels clicking.
“Riding from shore to shore through thin air, you can handle, but the feel of England’s roads does you in?”
“I apologize, Inspector,” Blair managed.
“From here, we can ask a clerk to pull up records of all the recent activity involving the search for the Leviathan,” Clemens said briskly, ignoring Blair’s plight.
The big Oriental threw his arm around the paler-than-usual Englishman’s shoulders. “This would be a good time for you to assist me, by the way. Put those researching skills to good use.”
This seemed a little out of character for the dashing pirate, but Blair thought a stint in a cozy reading room poring over periodicals might put his stomach more at ease. Oh, if they had some tea, as well…
“That sounds simultaneously tiresome and tedious. Do you mind?” Rosa complained, head rested back on arms, the picture of idle apathy.
“Fine, get a little pissed, Rosa.”
“I believe I will go with you, Miss Marija,” Vanessa Hargreaves spoke up alarmingly. An interesting series of expressions crossed Rosa’s face, but she settled on bemused intrigue in the end.
She motioned towards a nearby pub, and the ladies set off towards it an unusual duo.
“Well then. There go the peacock and the crow,” Clemens said, indicating Rosa’s colorful, beribboned hips and the Inspector’s dark silhouette. “Shall we?”
And so the gentlemen were off to the library, and the ladies to the pub.
“We aren’t really having a pint, are we?” the Inspector mentioned as soon as they were out of earshot. In the distance, their cohorts were winding their way merrily through an ancient lich yard as if they were coming off a six-pub crawl.
“Damn it Hargreaves, I’ve just come off a long drive in a small cabin with those two. I need something to get the smell off me,” Rosa Marija announced.
“But yes, after a cold one I would like to poke around a bit. Up for a jaunt?”
“It was my intention, yes,” Hargreaves agreed. “Past the public sphere, very little is known about Mordemere’s little empire up here.”
“Alby might be a bit dense, but he can play his cards. We should be able to shake loose some information from the locals.”
Hargreaves pulled up the collar on her long, tight coat a little further; Leyland was in Lancashire, as wet and cold as it got in Britain without being in Scotland. Amazingly, Rosa Marija was sauntering about with her shoulders bare and legs in sheer stockings under a knee-length skirt.
Thankfully, the cold stopped at the door. If they knew anything, the Celts knew how to keep out the damp.
Inside the pub, there was a roaring fire, big squashy armchairs and a ruddy, snow-capped barkeep.
There was already a mid-afternoon congregation, consecrating themselves with the blood of Christ. Hargreaves realized it was a Sunday; she hadn’t been to church since she was a little girl.
“Oy! Two!” Rosa hollered across the pub, instantly at home. They collected libations, Hargreaves reminded of a certain undercover operation, and parked close to the fire.
Instantly, a crowd of unruly, well-watered dunderheads materialized around the attractive ladies.
Suddenly the air was full of ‘bonny lass’ this and ‘a buss for a codger!’ that and then ‘ah was just coddlin’ the lady, yer chump!’
“My dear Inspector, your interrogation begins,” Rosa presented to a knowing Hargreaves, and at once proceeded to charm the nearest handsome fellow. Hargreaves undid her coat, revealing a prim travelling dress that nevertheless showed off her long limbs.
Two hours later, the ladies reconvened outside the back door of the pub, breathlessly shooing the patrons back inside with a dab hand.
“Those… boys… are persistent,” Hargreaves managed. “Shall we compare notes?”
“Aye,” Rosa Marija replied, adjusting her ribbons. “I believe the tall brown one, Nigel, was the grabby one. Paul might have had a handful while I wasn’t looking, but he knew what he was doing so I’m not too upset about it. Look at you, hoarding the straight and narrow types.”
“I meant about the city, Miss Marija,” Hargreaves said with some amused ire.
“Getting to it, Inspector,” Rosa said, straightening up. The two of them exchanged a look, and strode off purposefully- in opposite directions.
“Where are you going?” Hargreaves demanded.
“I was about to ask the same of you!”
“I think we both heard it when-“
“Nigel said there was a-“
“But we should head-“
“Likely as not-“
Both ladies stopped, glaring at each other through swimming eyes. What rivalry and suspicion they had shed during their stay aboard the
Berry
, and the subsequent bonding during the Nessie Drake episode, was back in spades.
There was pure frustration beneath a thin veneer of politic. Ale wafted through the pub’s windows.
“Okay,” Rosa said first. “It doesn’t matter. You go your way, and I go mine.”
“What is this, a picture house drama? That’s your way, the pirate way. Why can’t we share the information like responsible investigators?” Hargreaves reasoned.
“Because we’re pirates? If Captain Sam had a shittier relationship with Cid and the others, they would be running away with Albion’s ship.”
Hargreaves sighed.
“All right. On three. One… two…”
“The Cross!” both women shouted.
“Ah. Well, that would be this way,” Hargreaves added, pointing to a nearby tourist’s sign, well worn and in need of repair.
“Shit. I’m bloody wasted. Lead on, Inspector.”
As the ladies got to know the locals, Elric Blair was desperately trying to stop a blatant act of vandalism, and possibly blasphemy.
“Trust me, Captain Clemens, we will find what we want quicker if we let the clerk do his job,” Blair reasoned, taking the axe away from Albion’s loose fingers. The pair backed away from the wooden records door, a thin, fragile plank that used to be a portal between the church proper and a rectory building.
“He’s been in there a whole hour!” Clemens complained.
“Sometimes the filing mechanisms get stuck. Even alchemists can’t keep up with all the maintenance. Besides, we’ve asked for some very old records,” Blair advised, placing the axe back atop a special fire brigade rack, alongside a first-aid box and a bottle of laudanum some enterprising employee had squirreled away. Albion appropriated the bottle on sight.
The two backed away from the counter, and into the chapel- a sort of waiti
ng room, empty. No priest flitted before the simple altar.
“I bet you five quid he’s in there holed up with another bottle. Something nicer, even, like a Scotch.”
Elric sighed. In close contact, Captain Clemens turned out to resemble more an irreverent child than a swashbuckling adventurer.
Before Elric had to come up with another appeasement, the door in question opened. The clerk looked around, as if expecting something out of place, but finding nothing, held the door open.
“All the material you requested is in reading room six. If you require any specific records, please pull the bell rope and I will be with you shortly,” the clerk said curtly.
Blair and Clemens swept through the door (literally swept, as Clemens’ buccaneer coat brushed both sides of the frame. The clerk raised one eyebrow.)
The room was further back, furnished only with hard wooden chairs and a table heavy with bound volumes and a solid black trunk, about the size of a dispatch case.
“There’s less here than I thought,” Clemens remarked, picking up a volume and leafing through, only to turn to Blair, stumped by the rows of tiny black squares within.
“Brilliant! Micro-fiche!” Blair exclaimed.