Turnkey (The Gaslight Volumes of Will Pocket Book 1) (38 page)

Meanwhile, the
shouting officer was barking orders to the Priest.

“On your knees!”
he shouted. “That’s right, hands behind the head! Yes, like that! Now then,
tell me, are you the captain of this vessel?”

“Yes,” the Priest
said.

 “We are to
take it that you are the one known commonly as the Red Priest?”

“Yes.”

“And you are aware
of the existing charges placed against you by his majesty, God save him, the
King of England?”

“Yes.”

“And you are aware
that—“

“Yes, he’s aware
of everything!” Madame B, who apparently was also before the soldiers, snapped
out. “So enough with the damn squawking!”

I heard a few men
snicker in the distance, presumably other soldiers.

“Woman,” the man
said, “if you were wise, you would hold your tongue before I teach you how!”

There was a moment
of silence on B’s end of the conversation. I gritted my teeth. Just then, Jack
reappeared from his hole, mischievously petting a plump, little bag in his
hands.

“Excuse me,” I
heard the Madame say, “I don’t think I heard you right.”

“Woman, I don’t
have to time to waste on your empty words or your shrewish tone! Now, the both
of you, hand over whatever weapons are on your person and call forth any
passengers who may be—“

“I hate to
interrupt,” B cut in. “I really do. But I do not think you realize who you are
speaking to. And what more, I think you are going to regret your words very
soon.”

“I said, put down
your weapons.”

Hack-Jack startled
me, for at that moment he shrieked out loudly in the imitation of a bird,
making an obnoxious “caw-caw!”

“What the hell was
that?” the soldier demanded.

“Just a parrot,”
the Priest casually said. “Pretty pet parrot. Don’t you read the storybooks?
Swashbucklers always have pet parrots, right?”

“Just do as you’re
told. Disarm immediately or I—“

“Sure!” Madame B
mockingly said. “We do this, we do this. Here.”

Something metal
smacked the ground. I’m guessing her knife.

“And I have
nothing,” the Priest said. “Gentleman’s honor.”

“You think I’m
going to believe—”

“Hey, you want to
see something interesting?” B asked. “Here, I’ll show you. Look at this. You
know what this is?”

“It’s a card.”

“That’s right.
Smart one, aren’t you? You study tarot?”

“Hmph. Don’t start
with that antiquated gypsy nonsense. I have better—“

“See, this card is
called the Empress. You like it? Came from a nice deck a tea lady once gave me.
Pity though. I’ve lost so many of them. Every time I take one out, it ends up
stuck to a dead man.”

“Madame, I will
not stand for your threats.”

A warning chorus
of rifle-cocking filled the air.

“See, the Empress
is a lady to watch out for,” B continued. “You’d know that if you studied the
cards. Look at the picture here. You see that shiny scepter she’s waving in her
hand? Symbol of the lady’s power. Power over life, growth. See, that’s why
she’s sitting in such tall grass. Earthly gifts. Life.”

“Enough of this
idle babbling! You are no position to—“

“No, no, hold on
now. I haven’t gotten to the important part. What you must learn to understand
is to keep an eye on a lady’s ability. The manner she’s dealt to you. If you’re
lucky, the Empress will smile on you, give and nurture life. But if you’re not
lucky, oh, if you catch her eye in the wrong way…well, sailor boys…you’ll soon
learn that the lady’s not only a giver of life. She can just as easily steal it
away.”

An ugly stillness
swept over the sky. I was too absorbed in it to notice what Jack was doing in
the meantime.

Not at least until
he caw-cawed to gain my attention.

“Will someone,”
ordered one of the unseen soldiers, “go find that damned, shrieking bird and
plug its blasted beak shut?!?”

The look on Jack’s
face told me that he hadn’t planned for that possibility. He clenched his teeth
in apparent apprehension and clung to his bag.

“What’s wrong?” B
challenged, stalling, I imagine, for time. “Are you boys as afraid of a little
parrot as you are of a little girl? The Empress won’t like that.”

“Woman,” one of
the men threatened, “you can rest assured that it takes more than a ratty bird
or your silly mystic twaddle to put a scare into us.”

“Oh, does it now?”

Jack meanwhile was
reaching into his bag with unbridled excitement. He withdrew from the sack a
dirty handful of what appeared to be small, tin, children’s toys. Little tin
mice with little wheels in place of feet and wind-up keys in their backsides.

“Caw-caw!” Jack
shouted again.

“Maybe you’re
right!” B mock-conceded to her adversary. “Maybe the whole dirty lot of us are
just no match for you great men and your great power!”

“Silence!” her
opponent yelled. “Another word and—“

“No, no!” B
continued, dripping her words in a patronizing syrup so thick that you could
choke on them. “No, we understand. We are nothing but your brainless little
prisoners, your corrupt little captives, and you’ve got us good and pinned
beneath your big, shining, superior thumb. Would you like us to bow before you?
Is that your wish? Here, look. We’re getting on our knees.”

Jack was wildly
winding the tin mice.

“How’s that?” I
heard B say. “We lie here before you, faces to the floor. Are you not pleased?”

And that’s when
Jack released his minions. The toy rodents spun on their tiny wheels and
zippedaway toward the open deck.

“Sir!” someone
said. “Across the floor!”

“Bah!” another
scoffed. “Haven’t you ever seen a rat before? This damned ship’s probably
infested with—“

Kaboom!

The sudden
eruption shook me with a fierce jolt, nearly squeezing my soul out of my body.
I barely stifled a gasp, and the girl on my arm buried her mouth into my
shoulder to prevent the same.

A series of small
but nonetheless noisy explosions popped up all across the deck, followed by
fits of coughing and gunfire.

And then, most
frightening of all, came the quiet.

I sat rigid, my
limbs stone and linked onto the Doll’s nervous embrace. Only my eyes moved,
sliding to Jack for instruction on what to do next. He signaled for me to hold
position, then slowly took a long breath.

“Caw-caw!”

We waited and were
met only with silence.

“Caw-caw?”

Silence.

“Ca—“

“You can stop
doing that, Jack,” came the muffled voice of the Red Priest. “They’re all
down.”

“Ah!” Jack
cheered, standing up and jogging out of my sight. “Another victory in—“

“You idiot! Get
down!” I heard B shout. “The air’s still thick with those nasty vapors!”

“Eh, you worry
too…too much…” Hack-Jack stated, sounding noticeably woozier with each
syllable. “I’ve…mixed and breathed s-so much…of this…in my life…doesn’t
even…doesn’t affect…”

He then stopped
talking. I heard a solid thud followed by raucous snoring.

“Idiot,” B
repeated before calling out to us. “Anyone else over there wanna come out and
take an unscheduled nap?”

“No…no, thank
you,” Dolly meekly replied.

“Then I suggest
you keep your heads low until we say otherwise.”

“Sounds reasonable
to me,” Gren called out.

“Good boy.”

Moments and fumes
drifted by, and we were at last instructed to
carefully
slide out of
hiding. Madame B and the Red Priest were lying on their bellies with their
faces planted to the deck. Around them lay a mass of fallen bodies in
neatly-pressed uniforms, the soldiers, not dead but dead asleep, and joined in
their rest by a peaceful-looking Jack.

“Do you feel
drowsy at all?” B mumbled from the floor.

“No,” I said,
wafting the breeze away from face anyhow. “Air seems, uh, pretty clear.”

“Good.”

The lady and her
captain arose and began collecting the bodies while Quill fetched some rope.

“Hold on,” I said,
watching the pirates intricately bind the unconscious. “Can someone explain to
me what’s happened here?”

The Red Priest
giggled and made a rope loop in his hands.

“A little this, a
little that,” he smiled. “A little magic.”

“Yeah, and a
little bloody luck keeping us from getting shot by those apes in the process,”
Madame B grumbled.

“They certainly
tried,” Kitt commented.

“But what
exactly,
”
I persevered, squeezing down on the brim of my hat, “was in those…those
mouse-looking contraptions Jack was—“

“Tell me, Mister
Pocket,” the Priest cut in, “have you ever heard of an ACE?”

“A what, sir?”

“ACE. A-C-E.”

“If you want to
discuss cards, you should probably talk to Gren—“

“No, no, not
cards. ACE. It’s a mixture, a sort of…cocktail.”

“Cocktail?”

“Not a cocktail
that one drinks down,” he explained while knotting a length around a soldier’s
wrists, “but a cocktail that one inhales. As our new friends here have
learned.”

I held out my
palms, squeezed my eyes, and took a moment to translate the red beard’s cryptic
manner of speaking. It would be some time before I became fully fluent. I’ll
spare you the mental battle I was forced to wage and give you the information
directly. An ACE mixture, as I was later educated by my hosts, is a medical
anesthetic, a new sort of breathable concoction, you know, for administering
numbness and sleep prior to surgery. As least that’s what I was told. It’s
named for its components: alcohol, ether, and something called “chloroform,”
which sounds like a word someone just made up. I was told that it’s actually a
newish tool of the scientific community studied and recommended by something
called the “Chloroform Committee” initiated by something called the “Royal
Medical and Chirurgical Society of London,” which again, for my money, sounds
like something these scoundrels made up on the fly to sate me.

“So what you’re
saying,” I eventually ascertained, “is that you’ve packed the air with knockout
gas?”

“No,” the Priest
smiled. “The
rats
packed the air with knockout gas. Jack just packed the
gas into the toys first.”

“Why toy rats?” I
asked.

The captain
shrugged. “Ask Jack…eh…when he wakes up, of course.”

“Of course.”

The naval ship
started to slowly rock, having no pilot at the helm.

“Take the wheel,
Quill,” the captain instructed his navigator. “Keep that thing steady.”

“Yes sir!” Quill
responded with a nod to the command and shuffled to the edge of the deck. The
Lucidia's
railing, having sustained a direct collision, was now mashed into the
splintered edge of its attacker, and the two ships sat huddled there in the
sky. And just as the soldiers had easily boarded our ship, little Quill was
just as easily able to hop the railing onto theirs.

“Ewwww…it’s all
sticky!” she announced, trying to find a spot on the enemy wheel not dotted
with the former pilot’s blood. Madame B clucked her tongue and sauntered over
to the rails herself. The Priest followed in tow.

“And Gren,” B
ordered as she swung a leg over the side, “keep an eye on our controls as
well.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he
responded, drudging over to the appointed spot.

“Um,” Kitt asked,
“is there anything you need us to do?”

“You see that
rope?” the Priest asked, pointing to a coil behind where we stood. “Tie it
around Jack’s ankle.”

“Why?”

“Safety
precaution.”

Kitt didn’t seem
to understand, but did as he was told. Meanwhile, Madame B impatiently stood
guard on the enemy vessel while the Red Priest shuffled around on the
Lucidia,
gathering weapons from the unconscious men.

“Take your time,”
B grumbled. “It’s not like there could be others below deck over here. You
know, with more
guns.
”

“I’m going, I’m
going,” the captain casually replied, shooing her complaints away. He found
some kind of long-nosed firearm that he fancied. Forgive me, my memory fails a
bit there. But he took it, checked to confirm that it was loaded, and casually
hopped over the railing to join his second-in-command.

“Very nice,” B
dryly said, glancing at the weapon, “but can we get to business, please?”

The Priest soured
at having his fun ruined, turned, and strutted down a set of steps that led
below deck. The lady clucked again.

“Hey, tower,”
Madame B shouted over to me, “you want to assist a lady in need?”

Dolly poked me in
the side with a tiny finger. I suppressed a grunt, but not enough to keep it
from the clockwork girl’s ears. She poked me harder.

“Glad to help,” I
replied to B, trying to sound enthusiastic.

“Then move your
damn feet!”

Following the
lady’s instructions, I scavenged the
Lucidia
for some wide, sturdy
planks and together we fashioned a makeshift ramp. Then, and I swear I’m not
making this up for the sake of entertainment, Miss B had me roll the bound,
unconscious sailors up the ramp like beer barrels, shoving them one by one
until they plopped with a grunt back over onto their own ship. Many half-woke
for a second, exclaimed something angry, and then fell immediately back to
sleep. That knockout gas did one hell of a job.

“Nice work,” B
said, crossing her arms, as I finished the task.

I wheezed and wiped
a line of sweat away. “Heavy,” I muttered.

“Well, they’re
dead weight. What did you expect?”

“Maybe next time I
can help with a slightly
lighter
task?”

“And leave the
heavy lifting to the small women?” she grinned. “That’s not very gentlemanly.”

I started to say
something extremely ungentlemanly, but Dolly interrupted with a clearing of her
throat, so I dropped the fight. The Madame giggled and moved around the pile of
sleeping bodies at her feet to check on the red beard.