Authors: Kin Law
“The laboratory should be about…” Hargraeaves mused, navigating the labyrinthine galleries of the building.
Even the interior proved tastefully appointed, built in a grand old style and not simply cut like biscuits into institutionalized blocks.
The building appeared to be a multiple-use laboratory, with several partitions and independent research
rooms behind thick steel doors. Eventually, she found the cordoned-off rubble behind two more sets of pressure seals.
“No respect for architecture. Not locals,” Hargreaves reasoned intuitively.
“But intelligent enough to make use of some very sophisticated equipment.”
Behind sheets of thin canvas, the gutted laboratory spoke volumes. A high, vaulted ceiling suggested something quite large, and the skeletons of platforms rose to the height of a dirigible’s floor at boarding. The warped, splintered corpses of workbenches lay scattered in a rough spray toward the ruined wall, which cast everything the blue of tarpaulin. Glass crunched underfoot, still marked by increment measures. One forlorn blackboard lay tumbled off its rolling frame like an ignored, senior professor in the corner of the room. From the center of the room to the ruined window, a clean swathe of flooring showed a pattern of something seemingly blown away by a strong wind.
“Hello, what’s this?” Hargreaves said aloud. Though much of what had not been annihilated in the explosion had been carefully smudged out or burned, the Inspector was able to pick her way delicately through the rubble toward signs of hasty, perhaps careless activity. Not a soul stirred in the entire laboratory, but in one corner a bureau had been tipped over and set aflame. She bent to sift through the blackened papers, by the hulking sentry of scaffolding in the high-ceilinged chamber.
“Not an explosion,” Hargreaves muttered as she searched, “One direction of destruction. The clean floor, bolt holes in the frame, looks like whatever it was had been airlifted by dirigible by the time any authorities arrived.”
Hargreaves was beginning to work out something of what had happened. Someone had been building some kind of weapon, and it had likely discharged prematurely.
The room looked well worn, as if whomever had been here made themselves quite at home. She counted seven workstations, each with a sprinkling of photogram frames, souvenir figurines and various personal charms as made a worker feel more comfortable in their place of business. It had been a carefully planned stratagem suddenly pushed into application. Such a spectacular display likely necessitated a hasty departure, and a shifting of timetables in the nefarious theft of a national landmark. Hargreaves allowed herself an amused smirk. It was like some child’s educational picture-house piece, where the mistress thief went from place to place stealing national symbols for the benefit of waifs ignorant in world geography.
“There we are,” Hargreaves whispered victoriously. She clutched in her hand a half-burned vellum folder. Surely what had protected this sheaf of documents had been the file’s very thickness. Before she could examine the contents, voices in the hall beyond signaled the Inspector’s time was up.
Hurriedly, she stuffed the leaves into one of many hidden pockets. Oxford was sadly deprived in feminine progress, in spite of, or because of academia, and she doubted the menfolk would pat her down for pockets. In a moment, the men reached the hallway just outside the canvas partitions and proved her very much correct. She thanked the antiquated forces of chauvinism for one small boon.
Hargreaves put on a mummery fit for the Globe, staggering down the hall apparently shaken and lost but none the worse for wear.
As she left the guards looking to one another in their silent pact of ineptitude, she assumed a brisk trot beneath Oxford’s famous dreaming spires, heading towards her nearby hotel room to examine her prize. It took her all of four paces before she noticed the presence of another practitioner of the feminine arts dogging her steps with a flurry of French lace. As she rounded a cramped Romanesque palazzo, she caught the reflection of a scarlet figure trimmed in black, about a street behind.
“I believe I am shadowed,” Hargreaves remarked to a stray calico, who seemed as comfortable on its patch of Baroque sculpting as Hargreaves was alienated by Oxford’s convoluted streets. Four or five blocks ago, the Inspector had already become quite lost in her attempts to lose her tail. The malicious stalker seemed content, and quite unfazed, in drifting between the colleges and universities after the Inspector. The calico yawned, almightily.
“Let us see if a change of scene will put a bee in her bonnet,” concluded Hargreaves.
When the cat had had enough of Hargreaves’ attentions, it bounded up a trellis of ivy and the Inspector continued on her way. It was still early in the afternoon, but the spires’ shadows tended to put the streets in gloom. In the fading light, a fatigued lady gesturing for a cab did not seem out of place, and so Hargreaves did so, along a busy interchange. As she got into the rumbling, bubbling carriage, the warm comfort of the cabin nearly disarmed her. Where were the cramped London rigs with their scalding pipework and hard, buckwheat seats? There were some advantages to travel, Hargreaves concluded.
She commanded the driver to proceed in a convoluted fashion through the busiest parts of the city. Barely had their gears clunked into place did she observe her tail hailing a cab of her own. Then she was lost around a corner. Hargreaves waited a good four turnings before alighting from the cab in a darkened alley full of Venetian archways. In a manner of speaking, she did not so much alight as hoist herself out of the cab’s skylight onto a passing archway.
She observed the bumbling passage of another cab, a coach, in fact, able to seat six. She dared not peer into the windows from her vantage point atop the arch, but Hargreaves possessed the single most useful tool in the Metropolitan Police Service arsenal: her notebook. Within its leaves were written a set of directions. As she did not know the way, these were taken down at the preference of her own cab driver. The middle-aged, dun-colored fellow had been quite keen at participating in some tuppenny spy fiction nonsense. Hargreaves had, of course, couched it in terms of a game between members of the idyllic gentry.
Climbing across verandas and through gardens, the Inspector soon reached the agreed spot. Her conservative travelling dress was well made for the activity, sliding in and out of place with cunningly cut panels and slits.
Between two lazy townhouses, she crouched behind a nook of masonry perched atop a loosely trafficked bit of road. In a moment, she recognized the scuffed black of her cab rumble by, followed inconspicuously by the heavy coach.
This happened twice more, before the coach overtook the little cab and swung out in front, stopping not four paces from Hargreaves’ hiding spot.
With the precision of a well-trained team, four men swung out of the coach and accosted the cab. None of them matched; they looked assembled out of various berets, suits, and jackets, from all walks of life. Her original pursuer, the black-and-scarlet woman, followed close behind. Hargreaves was treated to their shock as they opened the cab and found only her duster and some plush cushions tumbling out. She had paid the driver to continue driving about with her duster propped up in the back, in a rough facsimile of Hargreaves herself, perhaps slouched to read her recently acquired sheaf of papers. Evidently infuriated, the pursuers yanked open the driver’s side door and began to yell.
There was a moment of gut-wrenching panic. Hargreaves had formulated her plan with all the training the Service had bequeathed an Inspector of her caliber, but it had still been a plan concocted on the fly, with what resources she possessed. All manner of things could go wrong. A secondary stalker might place his hands round her neck the very next moment. There might be well-trained marksmen in the group, able to guess, then spot every place Hargreaves could be hiding. She was an Inspector, not a seasoned operative of British Intelligence. Murphy’s Law haunted Hargreaves’ brow, a spectre of uncertainty. Worst of all, she had no idea whom these people might be working for. For all she knew, they had been given leave to kill or torture someone like her innocent driver simply for crossing their path.
“Good man,” Hargreaves murmured as she watched the exchange, and breathed a sigh of relief. Her driver turned out to be a darn good thespian, feigning surprise good enough for the picture house.
Finding the driver knew nothing, the whole party piled into the coach once again and took off at steam. Hargreaves’ driver chuckled visibly to himself, waved at Hargreaves’ hiding spot and moved on. The whole affair occupied no more than two minutes.
While the incident was well within the Inspector’s control, Vanessa Hargreaves felt a little disappointed. She had hoped to learn something of her pursuers, but had only confirmed her suspicions: these were well-trained men (and woman!) deployed by a very cautious puppet master. Hargreaves counted herself fortunate, and in the manner of all those who dealt with danger regularly, she resolved to use what little luck she had while she had it. Right there on the street, she found a spot of liquid lamplight and undid the vellum file from the laboratory.
What lay within was a labyrinth of numbers: invoices, logistics accounts, expenditure records. Hargreaves feared for a moment she had defended a useless pile of beans, but the resourceful young Inspector had not risen to her rank on the merits of her golden locks alone.
It took mere minutes to find her lead amidst a pile of contractor’s invoices: Steamboat Man, a moving firm whose services seemed far too overpriced for a simple delivery service. Hargreaves was quite sure, if she cared to visit the local town registry, no such company would be logged in the Oxford mooring offices, nor any such office in Britain.
Instead, she pointed her sturdy walking boots in the direction of the nearest airmen’s pub, and another hangover. Though it cost her in Gerhardt tablets and a long soak in the hotel tub scrubbing the scent of inebriation from her body, in the morning Hargreaves had the answer.
She called for pen and paper, and wrote out a missive to Arturo C. Adler.
“Arturo. Oxford yielding dividends. Will attend Steamboat Man down to Portland; Reports of Moroccan troupe treading the boards. Our mutual friends don’t seem to like theatre. You would hate it. Will contact you when I arrive. Be assured your company, though welcome, is unnecessary.”
Which roughly translated to:
“You two-pence hack, Oxford was a good lead for once. I have a suspect under the alias of Steamboat Man, reportedly flying a ship with Morroccan colors in Portland. Pirate dirigible, most likely, and a boat our enemies don’t want me to find. Wouldn’t you just love to meet a pirate? Tough titty. I’ll write when I get there. Stay out of this! I mean it!”
As she sealed and mailed the letter via overnight Royal Mail, Hargreaves felt satisfied Arturo’s insatiable thirst for meddling now provided her a watchful guardian over her impending journey south. She was also not in the least bit surprised to learn a multiple-use laboratory building had been destroyed in a gas explosion late in the night. Innumerable Gothic arches had been reduced to rubble in a spectacular fireball.
It was the second such disaster to happen to such a grand old building, and as she remarked to a talkative gentleman later on the dirigible south to Portland, only made the case for the shift to Teslaic arc lighting over the antiquated, dangerous kerosene much more essential.
3: Paris
Cezette Louissaint looked out through her window above the Rue Fremicourt. None of the buildings were higher than her sloped room under the roof, planned to exacting aesthetics by the city’s architects. T
he sprawling wheel of Paris was called the city of lights, and wherever those lights shone there was beauty: countless mansard roofs dotted with mountainous cathedrals, broad boulevards lined with Napoleon’s arboreal legacy, and along those brick valleys the traffic of chariots, jitneys, and carriages moving between veils of scented mist. Crooked chimneys and errant steamworks only served to frame the majestic Tour D’Eiffel in the medium distance.
Cezette loved to watch the evenings. She would sit on her narrow iron bed, her chin tucked behind her boyish knees, and watch as the city streamed through the little rippled rectangle of glass. Glittering soft gaslights danced like grand belles with the brusque shadows of Teslaic lights over her whitewashed wall.
Le Tour seemed the brightest of all, lighting up Maman’s picture on the bed stand. Its gardens had always been Maman’s favorite place in the city, in spite of the tourists crawling everywhere with their clacking photogram machines. She would go there to draw everything: the Tour, the people eating crepes on the benches, the crows pecking at their leavings. Cezette still remembered her Maman’s charcoals, as black as her hair, and Cezette’s too, lying in a sheet almost blue against the white bedspread.
A distant crash below brought her shuddering and burrowing deeper inside her comforter. Was it Papa, home from the burlesque? Had he been thrown out again?
It would explain the violence: slamming the door, enraged at being spurned by another imagined paramour. She could see him hanging up his stovetop and his cane, loosening his cravat to show the curly hairs on his chest. She nearly retched.
No, it couldn’t be, it was far too early. The moon hadn’t yet appeared in the Seine, glimmering despite her rivals below. Cezette peeked once more outside the window, at the city she knew so well, yet had seldom visited. It was a constant comfort against the dread now enveloping her frail form.
Spread out before her, the beaux-arts rooftops of Paris seemed particularly jittery tonight, like hunched crows anxious of an oncoming storm. Stars shone clearly, not in the sky but in a child’s diversion of dots across the city. They were further outdone by points sprinkled overhead, from the feminine curves of airships doing circuits of the city.
The clearness of the evening only served to highlight the strangeness hanging in the sky above. For a fortnight, a mass of cumulus
had gathered, not dissipating as clouds were wont to do. Its very solidity seemed to exude a certain
je ne sais quoi
, a quality she could only describe as
eldritch
. The English word had a strange cadence on her tongue, pulled as it were from Maman’s vast, multilingual library, but it felt right.
Eldritch
befit a mass of mist seeming never to change shape, size, nor move from its position. Odd she would feel the strangeness this night, when the cloud had been there for so long already.
Another crash- this time, accompanied by the Romanian maid, Volga, cursing in bad French. So, it was only a small blunder.
Cezette relaxed a little, and she found her bedclothes damp with sweat.
Her fingers were clamped like vises round handfuls of comforter. Her favorite bear, Stefano, lay strangled in the crook of her arm. Was there no end to the night? Cezette’s eyes trailed back out over the city, as if one of the floating ships there could lift her to safety atop some haven in the sky.
Suddenly Cezette put her finger on it- the ships had moved. Though the cloud itself had not budged, all the airships in her familiar sky had given it a wide berth, forming a sort of ring. No, the sentiment wasn’t quite right- it was not a ring, but a perimeter. There was movement on the ground below. Faintly she made out the splashes of blue and red crawling across masonry and flower-clad balconies all over the city. They were the blisters of light reflected from the steam chariots of police. Cezette was intimately familiar with their silhouettes; she had seen them night after night as they combed the city for evildoers. From above, the pattern was clear- something was happening over the city.
Almost unconsciously, Cezette found herself getting out of bed, her bare feet treading three steps until she was perched at the window. She was not yet tall enough to reach the top of the slanting glass, but she could put her chin on the sill, and two hands on either side until a bird might have mistaken her for a curious cat.
She stood on her tiptoes. Up close, she had a better view of the sky, sacrificing her wonderful rooftops.
Her bedclothes hung about her ankles, their lace mottling the square of light from the window.
What could be going on outside? Cezette had never seen her Paris become so agitated. Her streets pulsed like veins and her sky seemed to fill with more of man’s stars.
Cezette’s large hazel eyes opened wide, her pupils expanding to twice their size. In particular, she scanned the web-like tracery of metal marking where the Tour D’Eiffel stood, lit from base to tip in lights. Strange it would be so bright, Cezette thought.
Her suspicions were justified; slowly, she began to notice a dimming in all the other lights of the city. They did not go out all at once, but slowly, as if a giant were drawing a curtain over them. Gas lamps flickered as their fuel was drawn away, until they petered out like dying sprites. The Teslaic lights were slow to go, dwindling to star-points before winking out entirely.
So absorbed was Cezette on the scene before her, she did not notice the soft tread of steps on the stair outside her room. As the rectangle of light grew dimmer on her floor, a faint flicker of flame drifted in from the crack of the door, then ceased as its owner snuffed the lantern.
Even as the steps halted outside her meager inch of wood, Cezette stood absolutely still at her perch, peering intensely at the world beyond. Her eyes darted left, they darted right. Yes- the ships were beginning to close in round the cloud, as a hangman’s noose might a guilty soul.
Her small, agile fingers picked out one, two, three, counting the ships in a quarter of the sky.
What had Maman taught her about counting quickly? Yes, multiply by four…. Surely there could be no less than forty small vessels hanging above Paris, and two larger ones as well. They were oddly the same, as if popped out of the same madeleine pan. She could make out the blue, red, and white of the livery, though she was far too young to understand what they meant.
Slowly, quietly, the door to Cezette’s room swung open on oiled hinges.
In the narrow room, it would have made some noise against the edge of Cezette’s bed, but the opener stopped it just clear of the iron posts.
Cezette did not turn round. Something was happening! The cloud had not moved, but the ships were now well organized into triangles of five or six. A phalanx, Cezette remembered, from a book on the Romans. It was how they had conquered the world, even the land of Gaul she was perched atop right this moment. Such a formation hanging in the sky seemed godlike to a small girl. She could not begin to guess what held those mountains of metal aloft, but she could gasp and exclaim silently as four of them flew over her room in a gale of wind. She could hear the faint howl of their engines and feel a slight tang in the air at their passing. It held her rapt.
Her nose was just touching the glass when the first reports shook the air- the ships were firing into the cloud. Cezette gave a backwards hop of shock at the first thunderous fusillade, but the other occupant of the room did not move a muscle.
In the center of the room, the sight of airships lighting up the sky did not reach, and neither was the shock of vibration great enough to cause alarm.
It certainly did not dissuade a person so rapt on the sight of Cezette’s tiny ankles peeking out of her bedclothes, her shoulders ivory in their thin sheath of fabric.
Cezette recovered from her shock, pressing as far she da
red against the shivering glass. Every cannon shook the frame a little, and the combined report of many rocked the thin pane like a concerto.
She could see them- yes, every single one of them! Each time the points of light rocketed from the ships into the cloud, she felt the corresponding shake against the glass.
She had read, of course, of sound traveling at a far inferior velocity to light, but only now could she place book learning in the real world- in the skies of her Paris, no less! The epiphany shook her, but it was an epiphany without context. Why were the ships firing into the eldritch cloud? Was there some hidden enemy inside?
It was just as she was thinking the experience felt like cowering before a storm, when everything changed. Real thunder held no candle to this fusillade, Cezette was thinking, but as if Thor wished it otherwise, there came a sudden snap of light. Cezette blinked- there was no choice about it, as her wide-open eyes would have burned at the sight. When she looked back through the echo of brilliance, she saw at once a new light in the sky. In horror, Cezette looked on as a burning phalanx of airships fell from the heavens, directly into the Seine in a plume of smoke and steam.
“What…” Cezette murmured in high-pitched French, but she could do no more.
It was at this moment a hairy palm placed itself over her small mouth, muffling any ejaculation she might have made. Another wound itself around her slim waist, and suddenly she was airborne. Dimly, she thought one of the dirigibles had lifted her away from her little room over the Rue Fremicourt; then the smell of cheap champagne and bad cheese filled her nostrils, replacing fresh horror with old dread. She had smelled this
most nights since Maman had gone, and inside the little world between her ears she was already chastising herself for becoming so lax in her vigil.
With a whump of fabric, Cezette found
herself thrown breathless back into bed. She tried to get up, but her arms were held fast by iron vices. Something prickly and warm was pushing up her bedclothes.
As with every night
it happened, Cezette fought. On nights when she was on her guard, she would have been hiding in any number of spots- the wardrobe, under the bed, one fortunate time even on the edge of the roof outside. A lock on the sill had put a stop to it, but she would make every effort not to be found, usually with some small degree of success. When she ran out of hiding places, she tried to run away, only to find all her clothes gone from her wardrobe. There was only one option, which Cezette exercised anew: she bit, she scratched, tore the iron from her bed as an improvised weapon. There is nothing so humiliating, and nothing so noble, as when something precious is defended in futility.
Outside, the sky was immolating.
Acrid trails of smoke streaked over Paris, settling as the gaseous steam coalesced to become a nauseous rain. Statues cried black as if in mourning. France’s sons were dying above her, burning inside hulks of metal and wood and canvas. Her denizens had long been evacuated from the streets, but they looked on from shelters far away, able to witness the holocaust over the well-planned boulevards of the city. They cried as the corpses of dirigibles fell onto their homes, covered their eyes at each new serpent of lightning coming from the deadly cloud. They screamed as the paintings burned in the museums. No formation remained; ships dipped and swerved in the sky, anxious to dodge the death all around them.
Then, a new horror; the cloud was
moving
. It was slow, but it moved purposefully, tracking across the sky with no observable cause. Still, the flashes of light streaked from the depths of its hidden core, striking jaggedly towards the dirigibles still hounding its fringes. It was penetrating the phalanxes like they weren’t even there. They were feeble blows at the flanks of a giant.
Meanwhile, in the little room above the Rue Fremicourt, Cezette Louissaint was screaming. Her bedclothes were now torn lace on the floor of the room, and her slim ankles were being pressed slowly, inevitably apart. Her knees kept snapping together, but she was tiring. Her wrists were already bruised. It would only be a matter of time, Cezette was sure. Tonight would be like all the other nights; when the strength fled her limbs, the end would be hellish but brief.
It wasn’t the pain, of course. It was the feeling of sweat on her, a sheen of slime and dirt she could not wash away. Cezette would give anything to be able to scrub out the film of filth, the sense of worthlessness, of being an object to be handled by another. Instead there was despair. She felt one of these nights the strength of her mind might fail as her limbs failed, and she would not even have the grit to kick out as she was doing now. Even as the thought overtook her mind, she suddenly felt her knees go limp, and the weight held so desperately aloft began to descend.
“No!” Cezette screamed, once, in desperation. Volga would not intervene. She had never intervened. Nobody else would be able to hear Cezette. Each time she held out some desperate hope of rescue, of escape. Above all, she hoped beyond hope her Maman would appear over the bed, kicking and scratching.
It was then she saw the Tour, gleaming still outside her window. If she hadn’t struggled in a particular direction, kicked in a particular way, she would never have seen it. Cezette saw. She saw the way every other light had been snuffed, yet the Tour remained.