Shadow of the War Machine (The Secret Order) (24 page)

Madame Boucher gave me a cruel grin. “Don’t be rude. Say hello to your uncle, Honoré.”

“
TAKE HER,
”
BOUCHER ORDERED
.

I didn’t have the chance to scream. I threw myself backward, crashing into the table and sending the chess pieces sailing across the floor.

The man in the mask, my grandfather’s bastard son, surged forward. He slammed into me, and my body was crushed against the wall. I called for help, but there was no one who could save me. The maid who had tried to warn me slipped out the door.

The man in the mask wrenched my arms behind me. He squeezed the wound on my forearm, and my legs buckled with pain. He bound my wrists as Madame Boucher stepped calmly forward and placed a sack over my head.

In an instant my world had narrowed to what little light could pass through the weave of the cloth. I could see the folds in front of my eyes, but couldn’t escape them. With each panting breath the sack grew hot. I tried to shake it off, but it was no use. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. My heart raced, and I tried to hold my breath as the rough cloth abraded my cheek. There was no escape.

I struggled and fought, flailing against my attacker and digging my heels into the floor. The bastard was too large and strong, and my dress restricted my movement. He muscled me forward, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I kept grabbing for him, pinching and scratching what I could, but I never caught anything more substantial than his thick clothing. The sack smelled like rancid smoke and onions, and my eyes watered as I coughed.

“Really, my dear. It is unbecoming to put up such a fuss. You’ll ruin your dress,” Madame Boucher said.

It had been a trap. All of it. They had worked together to lure my friends from me, then sent the one person I wouldn’t suspect to draw me in like the pied piper. I had fallen for it.

The dampness from my breath caught against my face as my half uncle knocked me against a wall.

He dragged me down a stair. The floor disappeared from
beneath my feet. I tried to find purchase again, but my uncle kept me pinned to his side. Only the tips of my toes brushed the stair as he hauled me down. I felt with every step as if I were about to fall.

That idea had merit. I tried to throw my weight so as to tip us off balance and send us crashing down the stair. I didn’t succeed before my uncle lifted me off my feet entirely. I lost the tactile connection to the ground and suddenly felt dizzy as the bastard tucked me under his arm and dragged me down like a wet sack. I tried to bite him in spite of the heavy cloth covering my head. Every jolt, every step sent some part of his body colliding with mine.

I fought as hard as I could, because I knew that if I didn’t escape now, I never would. I had to do whatever it took, but my uncle’s body felt like a machine—cold, hard, and unyielding. I couldn’t break his grip, or even throw him off balance. We descended deeper and deeper into whatever hell the old woman had in store for me.

I felt faint, unable to breathe. Bile rose in my throat, but I couldn’t succumb. I had to be strong.

He threw me to the ground. The side of my head hit hard on the stone, before he ruthlessly grabbed my upper arm and dragged me back to standing.

“Henry, my darling. We have brought you a visitor,” the old woman called, her voice echoing off the walls. Then she ripped the bag from my face.

I found myself in a dank cellar. I could see clearly. My eyes had already primed for the darkness in the sack. The room had been cut in half by the most terrifying wall of prison bars I had ever seen. Gears like spinning saw-blades moved around tracks fixed onto the bars of the cage-like device. No, they weren’t gears. They
were
saw blades. They moved up and down the bars and over the prison’s door. My heart caught in my throat as I felt alight with the fire of pure panic. Every muscle moved at once, taken with the instinct to fly as quickly as I could away from the monstrosity.

My bastard uncle held me fast, laughing low near my ear as I struggled against him.

A shadowy form emerged from the darkness.

His face appeared thin and wan, but his smooth bald head remained unbowed as he came forward into the light. The sharp angles of his brow made his eyes appear like narrow angry slits in his otherwise calm face, but there was no mistaking the fury in the set of his jaw or his proud shoulders.

“Papa!” I screamed.

He broke his composure. His gray eyes widened as he
rushed toward the killing wall. He stopped just shy of the spinning blades. “Margaret?” he shouted. “Can it be?”

I felt the sharp edge of a cold knife press against my throat.

“Back away from the door. If you make one move forward, she dies,” Boucher said. Her hand was firm and I had no doubt she meant it. I didn’t dare breathe for fear that the air passing through my throat would push my skin against the blade and cut me. A tear slipped out from my eye.

I had never seen such a fearful expression on my grandfather’s face before. He backed away with his hands held up in surrender. “I will do whatever you wish, Cressida. Just don’t harm her.”

The old woman handed Honoré the knife. He pressed even harder into my skin. I felt the trickle of something slide down my neck and prayed it was only sweat.

“You will give me anything I wish?” She offered my grandfather a wicked smile. “You shouldn’t make such tempting promises, my love.”

She glided over to a panel in the wall and opened it. I saw a set of dials. She twisted them in a pattern, but out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t make out the combination of turns.

The spinning blades on the prison bars moved off the bars of the door, then slowed and stopped.

“If you move at all, Honoré won’t stay his hand. He’s already killed your son. Don’t think he’d hesitate to kill her, too.”

Honoré ushered me forward. Before we reached the deadly prison bars, Boucher grabbed the clockwork key. “You won’t be needing this anymore.”

She snapped the chain, and I felt the sharp sting across the back of my neck. Then all at once she opened the door to the prison and my bastard uncle threw me into the arms of my grandfather, sending us both tumbling backward.

The door slammed shut with a heavy crash, and then clanked and rattled as the blades whirred once more, resuming their pattern over the bars of the prison cell. My grandfather’s arms held me tight. Then he sat up and hastily unbound my wrists. “Are you harmed at all? Did they hurt you?”

As soon as my hands were free, I flung my arms around his neck and held him so tightly, my shoulders ached with the embrace. I tucked my head against him and shook as he stroked my hair and clung to me.

He pulled me back and inspected my neck, but even that small a distance was too much. “I’m unharmed,” I said, choking on the tears that quickly formed in my throat. He was alive. Thank God, he was alive.

He wrapped me in his arms and held me, pressing his rough cheek against the top of my head. “They told me you were dead. And George? Is he alive as well?”

My tears finally spilled over my cheeks. I didn’t think I had the strength to say the words, but they came out in spite of it. “They killed him. Father and Mother both. They murdered them.”

Even as I said it, I broke into sobs, racking tears that felt ripped from my soul as I cried in the arms of my grandfather. He was shaking. I could feel his own tears in my hair as he held me, but he didn’t make a sound, and I finally succumbed to all the terrible grief I had been holding deep within my heart.

My mother was gone, taken from me by these evil people. She would never help to sew my wedding dress, or hold my child one day. Whatever children I had would have no grandparents to spoil and dote on them. My father had always been the center of our family, protecting me and teasing me when I became too serious or too full of my own pride.

I needed his guidance. I needed his love. I wanted for him to know Will. I wanted him to know that the reasons I loved Will came from the reasons I had loved him. My father had been steadfast and solid, but he, too, was gone for all time.

When I had been alone, my grief had been a terrible thing, but at the same time, it had felt as if I were the one who was lost, not my family. Now that my Papa was here holding me, the hole in my family seemed all the larger. My parents were never coming back. I could no longer share my life with them. I loved them so much. I needed them. I missed them. They were gone.

Gone.

And there was nothing I could do to ever bring them back. Papa couldn’t either. In that, we had each other. Finally my tears turned to shaking breaths, and I couldn’t cry any longer.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled against my grandfather’s damp shirt. The clean scent of lemon mixed with rosemary that had always lingered on him was gone. His clothes smelled like mold and dust, or a grave. “I tried to find you.”

“My darling girl,” he said, and in his voice I could hear all the love he’d ever held for me. “You succeeded.” He gave me a smile. He stood and helped me to my feet.

He was alive. I had found him alive. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and looked around. I couldn’t see much in the dark. The only light came from a single lamp burning near the stair. The room we were in was sparsely furnished with a
single bed and a chair in the corner. There was not much else. Nothing we could use to escape. The walls were thick stone, and the cage holding us terrified me. “It would have been better if I hadn’t ended up in here with you.”

“It was much more comfortable initially,” my grandfather explained, “but I used most of the décor to try to escape.”

I took his hands and noticed the scars crossing them. “What does that horrible woman want?”

Papa led me to the bed and helped me to sit, then took his place in the chair. “I would say revenge,” he said, “but I’m afraid the situation is more dire than that.”

“Tell me.”

Papa’s mouth set in a grim line. “She believes she can prevent mankind from ever waging another war if she can give the world a weapon so terrifying, no man would dare fight against it.”

“That’s madness.” I rubbed my sore arm as I struggled with my disbelief. “She wants to use her father’s invention, doesn’t she? What is it?”

He stood and paced only a step away from me, then turned back. “A juggernaut.”

I felt the impact of the word deep inside my chest, as if I had taken a terrible blow.

“What does it do?” I asked as the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

“It’s a vehicle.” Papa ran a hand over the lower part of his face, then turned his tight circle again. “At least it was supposed to be. Haddock corrupted the original design. Originally it was intended to clear land. It could knock over and cut down trees, and rip the ground apart in its wake, leaving a blank canvas for building.”

“You helped to design it?” I watched Papa’s face closely. The corners of his thin mouth were as downcast as his eyes. After my encounter with the wolves, I could see a dark side to my grandfather’s genius. Had he always taken things to a ruthless extreme?

I hated that I knew the answer to that question. He had abandoned his young lover to her fate, turned against his mentor, then allowed his family to believe he was dead while he’d hidden in France. Our family’s downfall had been his making, and I hated it. I hated not being able to look at him the way I always had, as if he were a hero.

I didn’t want to face my disillusion. Not yet. He was alive, and in spite of his faults, I did love him. “Did you know what the juggernaut could do?”

“I did,” he admitted with a note of frustration in his voice.
“I was in the midst of my apprenticeship, and at the time, it was common for apprentices to pair with older members of the Order for special instruction. It was often difficult to meet at the Academy during that period, and so, like true apprentices, we lived under the roof of our master. Haddock was like a father to me, much more of a father than my own blood.” He looked toward the spinning blades of the cage holding us prisoner. “I was young and headstrong and never imagined things would come to this.”

“What happened?” I was ready to know the whole truth. I had been dancing around the edge of it for far too long.

Papa sighed and crossed his arms. One hand rubbed his elbow in a contemplative way. “We were in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. Richard became fearful that Napoleon would be successful in his desire to invade England, and then the war of 1812 began. He went rogue on the project. Breaking the most fundamental laws of the Order, he took the design for the land-clearing device and turned it to a weapon for the benefit of the Crown in spite of such things being strictly forbidden.”

“That’s terrible.” I had my own experiences with Amusementists gone rogue. It never turned out well.

Papa’s brow furrowed as he watched the spinning saw
blades move along the surface of the cage. “I overheard his intention to sell modified plans for the device to a contact he had within the military. If he had succeeded, it would have exposed us, and embroiled us in the wars. I foiled his plot by locking the plans within the inner workings of the machine so that he couldn’t sell them. Fearing he might break my locking mechanism and access the plans, I confessed everything I knew to the head of the Order.” Papa turned his ring around his finger. The seal of the Amusementists flashed between his fingertips. “I only intended to alert the others to Richard’s darker nature so they could talk with him. He could have been saved, if given the chance.”

“You don’t know that,” I murmured. Papa turned to look at me and gave me a weary grin. No wonder he had been so intent on saving Rathford as well.

“There was no evidence at his trial of what he had done. When I tried to lead others to the juggernaut, the chamber was empty. The Order found nothing except for one vague message to his illicit contact. My testimony at the trial marked him. It shattered both his life and that of Cressida, which I’d never intended.” He ran a hand over his face and fell back into the chair. I left the bed to sit at his feet, then laid my hand on his knee.

“You told the Order the truth,” I said as he stroked my hair. “It should be the truth that matters.”