Rebel Fire (18 page)

He began to walk forward, swinging the spanner.

Sherlock looked around frantically for something he could use to fight with. It looked like fighting was his only option now.

Clang!
The spanner hit an iron pipe, sending shock waves reverberating around the engine room.

“Just look at me,” Grivens said in a calm, low voice. “Just look at me, kid. Look me in the eye. Don't look for a means of escape. Accept the inevitable, yes?”

Sherlock felt the calmness of the voice, the reasonableness of the words, and the heat of the engine room lulling him into a trance. He shook his head abruptly. He couldn't let himself be hypnotized by the steward.

He glanced desperately from side to side. Something caught his eye—something leaning against a ladder. A shovel! One of the stokers must have left it there at the end of his shift. Its handle was black with coal dust and its blade was partly melted, as if it had been pushed by accident too far into the flames. Sherlock reached out and grabbed it, holding it across his body with the blade up by his face.

“So the cur's got some spirit in him, yes?” Grivens's face was set into a grim mask. “Just means I have to work a bit harder for my cash.”

He lunged forward and lashed out with the spanner, trying to catch the side of Sherlock's head. Sherlock ducked back, and the spanner hit the side of an iron tube. Sparks flew across the room. Sherlock felt them burn his face. He brushed at his hair in case any of them had caught in it.

Grivens snarled and pulled the spanner back. Raising it over his head, he brought it crashing down towards Sherlock's scalp.

Sherlock blocked the blow clumsily with his shovel. The spanner hit the wooden shaft at its halfway point and dented it, nearly knocking Sherlock to his knees. The vibration transferring from the shovel felt like it might tear his arms from their sockets. He managed to bring the shovel around and caught Grivens's kneecap with the blade. Grivens screamed and staggered back, mouth open in an “O” of disbelief.

“You little beggar!” he cursed. Swinging the spanner like a club, he lunged at Sherlock again.

Sherlock brought the blade of the shovel up to meet the spanner. The two connected with a sound like the crack of doom. Grivens bounced backwards, the spanner whirling away from him and disappearing into the darkness of the engine room. Sherlock's suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the shovel on the floor.

Grivens was standing in a half crouch, cradling his right elbow in his left hand. His face was twisted into an animalistic snarl.

Sherlock turned and ran.

The alley ended in another junction, with more alleys heading left and right. Sherlock took the right-hand one and tore along it, stopping only when he came to a ladder leading upward. He glanced back over his shoulder. No sign of Grivens. Feeling the weakness in his shoulders from where the steward had brought the spanner down on his shovel, he clumsily climbed up the ladder to a walkway.

The walkway ran parallel to the main axle that crossed the room, exiting through a gap in the engine-room wall and driving one of the paddle wheels. Sherlock had lost track of which way was forward and which was back. He wasn't sure which paddle wheel the axle was turning. Maybe both of them. Not that it really mattered. The axle turned slowly alongside him, as thick as his body, glistening with grease. Further back towards the centre of the engine room was the complicated arrangement of toothed gear wheels, pistons, and offset cams that drove it.

Leaning over the barrier that ran alongside the walkway, he tried to see where Grivens was. No luck. The steward had vanished.

The fight seemed to have attracted no attention. Was the engine room always this deserted, or had Grivens bribed the crew to stay out while he dealt with Sherlock?

Something grabbed at his ankle and pulled. Sherlock fell to the walkway, feeling his leg being tugged over the edge. He grabbed hold of the barrier to stop himself being pulled over. Grivens's face was pressed up against the metal grille of the walkway. It was his hand that had grabbed Sherlock's ankle.

“You're really going to make me earn this money, aren't you?” he hissed. “Just for that, I'm going to make the Yank and his daughter suffer. Just think about that as you're bleeding to death here.”

Sherlock's only response was to kick out with his other foot, scraping the sole of his boot down his leg until it hit Grivens's fingers. Grivens grunted in pain and released his grip. Sherlock rolled away and pulled himself to his feet.

Grivens's face appeared at the top of the ladder, followed by the rest of him. His teeth were exposed by the grimace of hatred on his face.

“This isn't about money anymore,” he hissed. “This is personal.”

Sherlock backed away slowly. The steward reached the top of the ladder and moved on to the walkway. His shoulders were hunched, his fingers curled into claws. His previously immaculate white uniform was now grey and streaked.

Sherlock felt something hard pressing into the small of his back. He glanced down quickly. He'd reached the end of the walkway. He was pressed into one of the wheels that controlled the flow of steam through the pipes. Alongside him, the massive cylindrical axle rotated endlessly around on its bearings. He'd reached the area where the offset cams transferred the linear motion of the pistons into rotary motion, driving the axle. There were several of them, and they looked like grease-smeared metal horses' heads bobbing up and down in a complicated rhythm. For a second Sherlock found himself appreciating the sheer brilliance of the engineering at work in the ship. How could people just assume these things worked without wanting to know how?

Not that he would be getting the chance to ever learn anything again. Grivens was still stalking towards him, closing the gap. He reached out for Sherlock's throat with both hands.

“I should get a bonus for this,” the steward whispered. His fingers closed around Sherlock's throat and he squeezed tight. Sherlock felt his eyes bulge with the pressure. His chest wanted to suck air in, but no air was getting through. Frantically he clutched at Grivens's wrists, trying to pull them away, but the steward's muscles were locked tight, hard as iron. Sherlock shifted his grip to the man's fingers. Maybe he could pry them away from his throat. His vision had turned red and blurred, and black dots were beginning to swim around in front of him, obscuring Grivens's face. His chest burned in agony.

Desperately he twisted his body with his last ounce of strength. Caught off balance, Grivens half fell onto the barrier running along the side of the walkway, but his grip on Sherlock's throat did not slacken. The cams were pumping up and down beside them now: chunks of metal pounding the air just inches from their faces. Grivens's expression was feral, his eyes pinpricks of black hatred.

Sherlock let his body drop, as if he'd run out of energy. Grivens, taken off guard, let him drop. Instead of falling to his knees, Sherlock shifted his hands from the steward's fingers to his leather belt. Grabbing the belt, he straightened up again, pushing as hard with his legs and pulling as hard with his arms as he could. Grivens's feet left the walkway as Sherlock lifted him up by his belt. Already twisted around as he was, the weight of Grivens's body carried him sideways to the edge of the barrier. Sherlock expected him to let go then, scrabbling for purchase on the barrier, but he kept his grip on Sherlock's throat, pulling him over as well.

Until his sleeve caught in one of the pounding cams. It caught the material and pulled. Grivens screamed—a short, despairing cry of fear and rage—as his body was jerked off the walkway and into the machinery. Sherlock let go of the man's belt and brought his arms up, knocking the steward's hands away from his throat and allowing him a lifesaving breath as the steward's body was pulled away, wrapping around the rotating axle and catching in the cams as they hammered up and down.

The engine didn't even falter, but Sherlock had to turn away before he had seen more than a fraction of what happened to Grivens's body as it was pulled into the rotating metal.

Sherlock bent over, hands on his knees, trying to pull as much of the hot air into his lungs as possible. For a few moments he thought he was going to suffocate as his body demanded more oxygen than he could give it, but gradually his gasping subsided. When his vision wasn't red and blurred anymore, and when he could breathe without his chest hurting, he straightened up and looked around.

There was no sign of Grivens. The black grease on the axle and the cams looked redder and shinier than it had before, but that was all.

Eventually Sherlock climbed down the ladder and crossed the engine room, looking for a way out. He wasn't sure if the door he found was the one he'd entered through or another one, but it didn't matter. Outside, it was cool and the air was fresh. It was like leaving Hell and entering Heaven.

People stared at him when he emerged on deck, but he didn't care. He just wanted to get back to his cabin, wash the grime and the grease off his body, and change his clothes. He would put the ones he was wearing in the laundry. Maybe the laundresses on board could clean them, maybe they couldn't. In the end, he just didn't care anymore.

Amyus Crowe was in their cabin when Sherlock pushed the door open. “I think someone's been in here, searchin',” he said, then turned and saw the state of Sherlock's face and clothes. “My God, what happened?”

“The people we're following to New York—they spread some money around the port,” Sherlock replied wearily. “There's probably one man on every ship leaving this week who's been promised money if he kills the three of us.”

“At least one,” Crowe said. “But we can worry 'bout that later. Who was it?”

“One of the stewards.”

“An' where is he now?”

“Let's just say they're going to be down one member of staff at dinner,” Sherlock said.

He told Crowe the story while he washed off and changed clothes. The big man listened silently the whole time. When Sherlock started repeating himself, Crowe raised his hand.

“I think I understand the full story,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Tired, dehydrated, and sore.”

“That's understandable, but how do you
feel
?”

Sherlock glanced at him in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

“I mean a man's died, an' you were the cause. I've seen men spiral into a morass of guilt an' sadness after an event like that.”

Sherlock thought for a minute. Yes, a man had died, and Sherlock was responsible, but it wasn't the first. Baron Maupertuis's thug Clem had almost certainly drowned when he fell off Matthew Arnatt's boat, but that had happened because Matty had hit him on the back of the head with a metal boathook. Maupertuis's right-hand man, Mr. Surd, had been stung to death by bees, but that could arguably have been classed as an accident—he'd fallen backwards into the hive. And there were the people who'd been on the Napoleonic fort when it had exploded in flames—they may have burned to death or drowned when they jumped into the sea, but their fates seemed several steps away from anything Sherlock had directly done. Was Crowe right? Was this the first death he'd directly and unequivocally caused?

“I'm not what you'd call religious,” he said eventually. “I don't believe there's a God-given instruction that ‘Thou shalt not kill,' but I suppose I believe that society functions better when there
are
laws and when people can't just go around killing other people. That's part of what Plato argues in
The Republic
, which my brother gave me to read. But the steward
was
trying to kill me, and if I hadn't done the same to him then he wouldn't have stopped. I didn't
choose
to kill him. He picked the fight, not me.”

Crowe nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Was that the right answer?”

“There is no right answer, son; least, not as far as I can make out. It's a dilemma—society works because people follow rules an' don't go round murdering each other, but if people choose to live outside those rules, what do you do? Let them get away with their behaviour, or fight them with the same weapons they use to fight you? If you follow the former course, they get to take over society, 'cause they're always prepared to fight harder and dirtier than you are. If you follow the latter course, then how do you stop yourself becomin' as bad as them?” He shook his head. “In the end, the only advice I can offer is—if you get to the stage where a man's life don't matter to you, then you've gone too far. As long as death bothers you, as long as you understand it's your last resort, not your first, then you're probably on the right side of the line.”

“Do you think Mycroft knew something like this would happen?” Sherlock asked. “Do you think that's why he gave me the book?”

“No,” Crowe replied, “but your brother is a wise man. I think he knew that at some stage you'd be askin' yourself these questions, an' he wanted to make sure you had the tools to answer them with.”

 

T
EN

He slept for a while, even though it was only mid-afternoon: a disturbed sleep, full of images of Matty, tied up and helpless in the dark, crying to himself, wondering where his friends were. When Sherlock awoke he found his cheeks were wet with sympathetic tears, and it took him a few moments to remember where he was and what had happened.

His muscles ached and his lungs burned, and he could feel the bruises on his throat from where Grivens had clutched at it. He tried to find some trace of horror inside him over what he'd done, but there wasn't anything that strong. Regret, yes. He regretted the fact that a man was dead, but that was about as far as it went.

Lying awake and thinking about Grivens, to distract himself from worrying about Matty, Sherlock found himself thinking about the iridescent blue tattoo on the man's wrist, the one that had first made Sherlock realize that the man had been watching him. If he'd thought of tattoos at all, then he'd thought of them as something decorative, but there was obviously more to them than that. They were a means of recognition, of identification. In this case, they'd led him to identify a man who might be watching him on behalf of the fleeing Americans. And, based on what the steward had said, you could recognize a tattooist by his style, just like you could recognize a painting by Vermeer or Rubens. Or, Sherlock thought, remembering the paintings in the hall at Holmes Manor, by Vernet. His mind was filled with the idea of an encyclopedia of tattoos, cross-referenced back to the places they were done and the artists who did them. Would such a thing even be possible?