Authors: Kin Law
“7
th
generation,” the clerk said proudly. “We’ve gotten the magnification down to about one to five hundred or so, at one-thousandth scale.”
“So these volumes…the squares….” Clemens said hesitatingly. Blair clicked open the dispatch case to reveal a contraption of fine slivered metal. There was a small lever to notch into place, ready for cranking, and a drum of fine coppery fibers connected to an Edison bulb.
“Quite correct,” the clerk filled in. “Each square contains approximately five hundred pages of material. I’ve collected volumes relating to the years Master Mordemere and the mainstream community of dirigible enthusiasts most actively searched for the Leviathan. There are records and periodicals from all across the world, as well as journals, special reports, and a few books on the subject.”
It might have been Clemens’ imagination, but the clerk certainly seemed to be well satisfied with himself as he closed the door, leaving Albion and Elric in the room.
“Do you think he heard us outside?” Clemens remarked, dropping the tome he held with a bang.
“Undoubtedly,” Blair said absently, slotting one of the squares into the machine’s emission port. He cranked the lever, and an abrupt light shone from the bulb, pasting a large block of text onto the white wall before them. For the first time, Clemens noticed the room had no windows.
“This is a blasted prison, it is,” he remarked, and sank into the opposite chair in despair. Blair began to scroll through the first news pages, fiddling with the machine’s tiny brass nodules.
At the same moment Blair and Clemens were somewhere in the middle of their first volume of research, Rosa and Vanessa were standing beside the Leyland Cross, so declared by a plaque at the base of the lonely stone monument, simply called ‘the Cross’ by the locals. Standing alone in a tiny enclosure, not even grass grew on the tiny plot of land. Past some fragile fencing, the monument was by surrounded by tall factories, their foundations plunging some fifty exposed stories in naked supports and mined-out ground. The Cross lay completely in shadow.
“It’s a bit…”
“Sad,” Hargreaves finished for her.
So it was; there was the spindly stone cross itself, a little bit taller than either of them. There was an ignored, eroded drinking fountain gone green with moss. Not a soul would find
North here; the shadows were deep enough to grow moss on all sides, and the factories soared a whitewashed gray up to block the stars.
“It’s a common story in Britain’s Steam Age,” Hargreaves continued as Rosa paced the little enclosure where the Leyland Cross was preserved. She was reading the plaque. “This Cross has stood since Saxon times. It’s the oldest thing in the city. They put
it here to mark the crossroads. It used to light the way for miles around. There were shops, just there, and stockades, and a well. Leyland used to revolve around this cross. Now it just rots in this hole, eclipsed by all this industry.”
“Look, I don’t much care,”
Rosa said callously, and impatiently.
“These are som
e pretty big names, Ursine, Ubique, big manufacturers making Her Majesty’s guns and bombs. They can do pretty much what they like.”
“But why leave it at all? The air rights alone have got to be worth their trouble to buy.”
“Then Valima Mordemere did it. The alchemist who runs the whole of Leyland must have some reason for leaving this old stone cross smack dab in the middle of the city. Maybe he kissed his first date here and left it as a monument to spite your Victorian sensibilities. Right now, all this cross means is a way we can talk to this Jonah Moore.”
Hargreaves colored distraught, but opted to pursue the present, not the bygone past.
“The inebriates were agreed on one thing: Jonah Moore arrives at the Leyland Cross at exactly five-thirty every Sunday to take his tea. If we are to believe them, he is the only person who has ever actually seen the Lapis Leviathan, and he never leaves Mordemere’s atelier- except for Sunday tea.”
Rosa paced impatiently.
“Moore is also a trusted associate of Mordemere. If anyone knows if and how the alchemic magnate is involved, it would be him,” continued Hargreaves, settling on a bench.
“Harumph. I went to the pub so I wouldn’t have to wait,” replied Rosa.
“Hmmmph,” Albion Clemens said for the forty-eighth time. Elric Blair knew the number for a fact- he had been counting.
“Impatience won’t help matters,” Blair said. “You were the one who wanted to look at the records.”
“I expected some pattern to emerge by now,” Clemens admitted, yet his brow was furrowed in sheepish thought
.
“It does seem like the search for the Leviathan has basically been as fruitless as our own. Other than a few fuzzy photograms and interviews, the people from the balloon seem to have disappeared.”
“So you were paying attention,” Blair remarked. “
The Fanciful Bugger
, yes, it was the balloon that first caught sight of the Leviathan, before pressed helium, before the first steam engine was put on the first heavier-than-air craft. At the time, they were on a scientific survey mission over the Black Sea. Crew…” Blair consulted his notes. “Captain Georg Weiss, Airman Hansel Bergman, Engineer Valima Mordemere, Photogram Technician Jonah Moore.”
“It was the beginning of an obsession,” Clemens remarked. “Mordemere was a young man who saw something amazing. It must have been like arriving onto a brand new world, seeing those iridescent towers rise out of the clouds, the galleries like translucent marble, if you believe the stories. A bit like Columbus and the Americas, or Lewis and Clark in the unexplored West, or…”
“Dent and Dahl when they discovered the Lands Beyond? I read ‘The Adventurers
’
when I was a boy, as well.”
“That old magazine! The world seemed so much larger through the pages of a good romp. I assume this is the work that inspired your eventual foray into
journalism?” Clemens said, his eyes traversing the blank stones of the old rectory room as if scouring a lawless jungle. Blair’s, in turn, seemed to range across the peaks of misty highlands.
“There were penny dreadfuls, and pulp fiction when the airships opened trade with the Americas.
”
“
Where I became enamored by the printed word, you seem to have taken those stories more literally,” Blair said, turning his attention back to the micro-fiche machine.
The light threw strange, toothed shadows on the walls. Patiently clicking gears and the subtle buzz of the Edison bulb seemed to produce an atmosphere redolent of stories by the campfire. Albion Clemens seemed inclined to share, in this environment.
“I didn’t really have a choice. Captain Sam loved them. He had boxes of them stored in a permanent corner of the hold. Reading them seemed to give me a little context. Even with no other point of reference, most boys wouldn’t think plying the high skies something normal people did,” Clemens recalled. Long hours reading by starlight on deck, by some errant glowing wire or candle flame, or the patient glow of the ship’s furnaces, surged through Clemens’ memory.
“When I wasn’t reading about the threat of pirates lurking behind every cloud and mountain, I
was
the threat of pirates lurking behind every cloud and mountain. It was an oddly contradictory and reflective thing, my childhood.”
“But you had a cutlass?”
“I had a cutlass.”
“Lucky bastard.”
Blair and Clemens enjoyed a man-child guffaw over the shared fantasy. As Blair flipped through periodical after periodical, the pirate Captain suddenly had an idea.
“Say… Blair…”
“Yes?” The researcher said suspiciously, blithely plowing through yet another uninformative lead. One of the reasons interest in the Leviathan had waned was its surprising ability to stay hidden.
“I know this is sort of your thing, the research and whatnot… but you used to have dreams of being a pirate. Has it turned out anything like you thought it would?”
Blair stopped scribbling for a moment, giving their recent forays a good think.
“In some respects. I have to say there’s a good deal more gray in it than I thought at eleven,” Blair settled.
“Doing illegal crap is the definition of a pirate, but it’s not always a cardinal sin. There’s more than one pirate out there with a basket and balloon, going around liberating perfectly edible food waste from big cities and lifting off before anyone can catch them. There are specialists who are experts at misinformation and propaganda, and others who toss bushels of flyers over the rails of their ships trying to prove the existence of perpetual energy. I know a swarthy brother who flies around spray-painting geishas and litanies against big business. Blame your eleven year-old self for thinking too deep in the box.”
“I assume you’re about to propose something out of the
box?”
“Aye!” Clemens declared, jumping up from his seat. The table gyrated violently from his feet leaving it.
“There he is!” Rosa Marija exclaimed, gyrating impatiently in place.
The two ladies, faced with their mutual, profound obnoxiousness when forced to be in each other’s company, had decided to mount a sting on the mysterious Jonah Moore.
By all accounts, the fellow was older than the hills, nearing ninety by now.
Mainly, the ladies held back because they didn’t want to see if the old codger’s ticker seize when confronted by two totally different kinds of pushy, attractive woman simultaneously.
They hid themselves in plain sight, as two chattering acquaintances who had quite by chance encountered each other in the park: hours of conversation, thus, hours of cover.
When Jonah Moore finally arrived, it was almost anticlimactic. Neither Hargreaves nor Rosa had really expected to see a little gray person putter up to the bench in front of the Cross and sit down.
“Wait,” Hargreaves murmured to Rosa. On the outside, the two still maintained the façade of henlike patter. Jonah Moore sat down and immediately opened an attaché case, which turned out to contain a sandwich and a vacuum flask of steaming beverage, likely tea.
His suit was immaculately tailored and the exact mountain glacier shade of his full head of hair. The curly mop was so full, in fact, it had aggressively expanded itself until it was occupying most of his face.
The eyes and nose weren’t noble, but for that exact reason they were symmetrical, functional, and full of intelligence. One stylish monocle set off the feeling of academia perfectly. He was, well, exactly what one would expect of a respectable gentleman of means in one of the great technological organs of Britain.
It was a fact that naturally made Vanessa Hargreaves highly suspicious.
“Wait what? We wanted to talk to him, I’m going to talk to him,” Rosa insisted, nearly breaking cover
. Her impatience was justified.
T
he sandwich, though enjoyed at a thoroughly snail-like pace, was not substantial. It certainly seemed like each bite was a routine gesture, every miniscule movement a moment of savor, but soon Moore would be done and move on.
“Doesn’t it strike you how odd this situation is? Here is one of the foremost men in Valima Mordemere’s atelier, just having luncheon at a monument like anyone else. There must be dozens of enclosures like this in the atelier’s courts,” Hargreaves argued under her breath.
“I would think lunch would be more enjoyable in the many dirigibles tethered over the smog. Maybe an on-deck garden,” Rosa agreed reluctantly, her full lips drawing a certainly Clemens-felling pout. “So what?”
“Look at the men over on the other side of the square. They’ve been eyeing us for a long time n
ow, but as soon as Moore appeared they’ve decided to disappear. It seems more than passing strange,” Hargreaves continued, contemplatively.
Something was adding up, but the Insp
ector found herself in the familiar occasion of not possessing the numbers. “He doesn’t look a day over sixty. There’s more than a cane supporting our Mr. Moore.”
At this
point the enigmatic Mr. Moore stood up and began to walk, though not in the direction he arrived from. He employed a cane with a rounded knob, sprightly, and tapped it as he walked. Rosa tugged Hargreaves out of the clouds and hurried to tail the elderly gentleman through the valleys of the shadow of industry.
“Everything about him is strange,” Rosa replied quietly at Hargreaves’ insistence. “There are no liver spots, he stands without a problem, and none of his joints seem to be stiff. Good appetite to boot. Jonah Moore isn’t nearly as biblical as his name, but rich people keep well, its sort of a distinguishing characteristic.”
“Hes
ninety
,” Hargreaves insisted. Secretly, she was fascinated with the helmswoman’s powers of observation. “The man should be an invalid! Even industry quails at defying entropy.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Moore was leading them on a merry tour of Leyland. They walked north, with the sea at their left as far as Hargreaves reckoned.