Black Iron Read online

  The Cardinal stepped in beside Alÿs, so smoothly it almost seemed he had simply materialized out of the mist next to her. He looked at Roderick. “Shouldn’t you be helping to escort the Queen to her tower?”

  “I’ve been ordered to…” He glanced at Alÿs. “That is, the Queen told me to make sure Alÿs didn’t jump out of a window. And she said she would decide what to do with her when we landed.”

  “I’m not sure the Queen will be deciding any such thing at the present moment. So I assume your duty has been discharged?”

  “I—” Roderick looked back and forth between him and Alÿs.

  “Did she jump out a window?”

  “No, Your Eminence.”

  “Or out a door?”

  “No, Your Eminence.”

  “Well then,” the Cardinal said with the tone of a man who has just pronounced a matter settled. “Your job here is done.”

  “But, Your Eminence…” Roderick said helplessly.

  “Are you familiar with the history of the Reformed Holy Catholic Church?” the Cardinal asked casually.

  “Um…it split off from the Roman Catholic Church a couple hundred years ago,” Roderick said cautiously. “Big to-do about the French cardinals not being at a meeting or something.”

  “Ah,” said the Cardinal, “it was more like three hundred years ago, but no matter. Now, do you know what I have learned during the time I have served the Reformed Holy Catholic Church, helping to guide her through her dealings with the heretics and usurpers in Rome?”

  “What’s that?” Roderick said.

  “The world respects a man of God,” the Cardinal said, “but it respects a man of God with an army at his back far more.” He glanced at the two men with red robes and rifles, who, like him, seemed to have the disconcerting skill of materializing right out of a space where you were sure a moment ago there was naught but darkness.

  “Ah. I see. Good lesson,” Roderick said. “I guess now that my oblegash—obilgash—my duty is discharged…” He looked around. “Good evening, Your Eminence. My lady.” He tipped his helmet to Alÿs and hurried away.

  The Cardinal smiled at Alÿs. At least, that’s what she thought the expression was supposed to be. “Regina in tribulatione arma indiget auxilio?” he said.

  “Your Eminence?” Her expression revealed nothing.

  “The Queen is in trouble, I gathered that,” he said, switching to their native French. “But I’m not sure it was her weapons that needed help. You do have an idiosyncratic relationship with the Church’s Latin.”

  Alÿs stopped and spun on her heel to face him, addressing him in French. “You let them arrest her! You know she’s not a Roman sympathizer.”

  “Do I?”

  “These charges—it’s absurd!” she said. “Something’s going on. Find the man who jumped out of the airship. He wasn’t supposed to be there. I bet it has something to do with him.”

  “Ah, yes, a mysterious man who jumps out a window. Excuse me, my lady, my mistake. A door. Of an airship. In flight. Yes, I’m sure such a man could answer many questions.”

  Alÿs stomped her foot. “Queen Margaret is not a heretic! Or a traitor!”

  “Then I’m sure she has nothing to worry about.” The Cardinal took her arm. “But you, my dear, have other things to focus on.”

  “Such as?”

  “Covering your tracks. Let’s start with Latin conjugation.”

  5

  It was the banging that woke him. Loud, repetitive, metallic banging that echoed through the vast brick space, came sideways into his head, and took up bouncing around inside his skull.

  Thaddeus opened his eyes. He was sprawled on a simple bed, just a cloth mattress stuffed with straw over a rude cast-iron frame. The place smelled of industry. Industry had a certain essential odor, made up of equal parts machine oil, grease, burning coal, and steam, seasoned generously with the metallic tang of hot iron.

  He was lying on his back, staring up at the distant ceiling. The space above him was packed with a mind-bending array of machinery. An enormous engine, not steam powered but electrical, spun a gigantic iron wheel wider than Thaddeus was tall. A belt from that wheel fed power to a huge shaft that ran nearly the entire length of the building. From that axle sprouted a bewildering profusion of pulleys, driveshafts, and gears, which turned still more axles that fed power down to who knew what down below. A complex network of ladders and catwalks was strung throughout the ceiling like strands of a great metal spiderweb.

  He swung his feet off the bed and stood. He was on a platform high up on one wall of the shop, looking down over the main floor of Bodger & Bodger below. There were two narrow beds on the loft, the one he had slept in and a second just like it. A rickety flight of stairs made from planks of wood driven into the wall led down to the floor below.

  He had vague memories of Claire half-carrying him up the stairs and dumping him without ceremony into her bed. He wondered where she’d slept. Probably hadn’t, he thought.

  Thaddeus had slept the dreamless sleep of the exhausted and terrified. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes, with those ridiculous shoes still on his feet. Thaddeus had heard that the winds of fashion shifted rapidly for those at the pinnacle of society. For people of his socioeconomic stratum, fashion seemed entirely too persistent.

  His eyes followed the path of a belt that led from the great drive­shaft overhead down to a smaller shaft, where a smaller belt fed power to another, smaller driveshaft that turned a wheel that drove an even narrower belt that spun a still smaller shaft, until finally a thin chain no bigger than his pinkie descended to the loft, where it disappeared into a round white fountain-shaped bowl on the floor. Water circulated in the bowl, emerging from a jet in the top and flowing into a shallow depression in the front. A large, surly-looking orange cat was curled up on the floor beside the bowl.

  “Shoo!” Thaddeus said. He pointed. This might have worked with a dog; after all, dogs will usually look in whatever direction you point. Cats merely look at your finger.

  The cat stared at Thaddeus for just long enough to convey that it was not impressed, then yawned and went back to sleep.

  The metallic hammering filled the building, bouncing off the walls and reverberating through his aching head. His eyes vibrated in their sockets. Thaddeus put on his top-hat on and looked over the edge of the rough wooden balcony into the yawning space below.

  The main workshop of Bodger & Bodger was a throng of activity, a huge, noisy, open space, lit by giant electric arc lamps that hung from the ceiling, filled with all manner of machinery. An assortment of clankers, both two-legged and four-legged, were scattered across the workshop floor in various states of disassembly, access plates removed to reveal boilers and handles and great iron gears. Workbenches, covered with tools with purposes Thaddeus couldn’t even begin to guess at, lined both walls.

  The Bodger twins were both hard at work. Claire had opened the shutters that led into the courtyard behind the building, where the enormous brick forge squatted, belching fumes. She was banging a long, flat strip of red-hot iron on one of those big metal things with the pointy bit on the end—an anvil, that’s what it was.

  The apprentices swarming around the various machines were as varied as the machines themselves. They were all boys, but quite a collection of different sorts they were. Thaddeus saw Scots with fair skin and ginger hair, dusky Moors, and a couple of people of ancestry as muddled as his own. There was even a young man with long black hair and a face that suggested he might be a native of one of the New World colonies. The Bodgers cared for little beyond technical skill and enthusiasm. Rumor had it that they would even employ an Italian, if he knew his way around a forge and had an interesting technique or two to teach them.

  A boy of perhaps fourteen, wearing grubby overalls and a striped cap, was halfway inside a bizarre iron vehicle that rested on a strang
e, continuous steel belt wrapped around a row of small gears, quite unlike any clanker Thaddeus had ever seen.

  Of course, there was quite a lot Thaddeus had never seen. He wasn’t the most inventive soul ever to walk the noisome streets of London. Which is not to say he lacked the creative spirit; he just typically applied it to the area of financial affairs, and more specifically to property allocation, rather than to the making of things. In fact, he was a bit foggy on the whole process by which the making of things happened. It seemed to him that a lot of it involved beating glowing metal with a hammer, though to what purpose he had never quite grasped. He didn’t know if this was because the metal needed to be hammered into submission before it agreed to become other things, or if the hammering was some bizarre ritual designed to vent frustration when things went wrong, which they seemed to do quite often for those who, like the Bodgers, practiced the mechanical arts. Claire had tried to explain it all to him, using words like “malleability” and “forging,” but the arcane knowledge of ironworking never found a home within Thaddeus’s head.

  Donnie Bodger walked by beneath the loft, dragging a wheeled cart filled with enormous gears and pulleys and something that looked a little bit like an ox head made of steel.

  The Bodger twins were both formed of the same mold, roughly speaking. There was a familial resemblance, but you had to look pretty closely to tease it out. They’d started from the same template: strong, dark of skin, with wavy black hair. They both had eyes the color of the sky at midnight. They both had round faces that smiled easily.

  But at some point after the template had been made, the gods had decided to do some customization. Claire Bodger had been stretched tall and thin, where her brother had been squashed a bit, giving him a lower center of gravity. Where she looked like someone built for speed, he more resembled a cross between a barroom brawler and one of those breeds of dog that’s wider than it is tall and can pull a steam locomotive out of a ditch.

  Not that anyone would say that to his face.

  One thing they shared in common was the sort of intellect that can look at a pile of levers and springs and see something that nobody had seen before. Their devices were legendary among the tinkers of London. Some of them even worked.

  Donnie looked up at Thaddeus and waved. Thaddeus waved back, his mind elsewhere.

  Going home seemed a bad idea. Not just on account of the two, or perhaps three, inconveniently deceased would-be assassins who were probably in that stage of death where they’d gone all stiff and were beginning to smell a bit fusty, but also because they had known where he lived. Which meant that their employer, who had, from the look of it, recently been his employer as well, also knew where he lived.

  Rule one of staying alive: don’t be where the men who want you dead want you to be.

  Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. Claire’s hammer argued with hot metal, coaxing it into submission.

  Claire and Donnie would be happy to put him up for a time, but only for a time. They were the sorts who, if he stayed too long, might start talking about “work” and “rent” and other uncharitable things that made one despair at how the milk of human kindness had been squeezed from the hearts of man.

  Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank.

  The whole thing had been weird from the get-go. Thaddeus liked to think he had a certain reputation among London’s underworld. Thaddeus Mudstone, the man who gets things done! Thaddeus Mudstone, the man who sneaks into and out of impossible places! Thaddeus Mudstone, the one to turn to if nobody else can do it! So of course, when someone wanted something placed among the Queen’s personal effects, his was the first name that came up, right? Doing it on an airship and sneaking away uncaught, well, that required no ordinary man. Who besides Thaddeus would even consider such a thing? That had to be it.

  Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank.

  Thaddeus took the object he’d stolen from the Queen’s personal effects out of his pocket and looked at it. He’d been right there, on the Queen’s airship, in the Queen’s chambers. Her quarters on the zeppelin were more spacious than any place Thaddeus had ever lived in. Hell, they were probably bigger than the last three places Thaddeus had lived, put end to end and then doubled. And so much gold! And silk! Monarchs were, as a species, known to have an affinity for gold and silk. It was a well-known affliction of royal blood. Thaddeus shared that affliction, but that was beside the point. Margaret took the general monarchical tropism for precious metals to a whole new level. Thaddeus didn’t know how the airship could even get off the ground, what with all the gold that covered every surface in the Queen’s quarters.

  Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank.

  He had been right there, and it had been right there, sitting on a shelf next to the Queen’s jewelry box. It was handily pocket-sized, and Thaddeus was firmly of the opinion that pocket-sized objects of obvious value that weren’t already in his pockets rightfully belonged there. So by taking it, he was righting a universal wrong. Dynamic reallocation of resources, that’s what it was.

  Thump thump thump.

  He had snuck aboard—well, really, walked aboard, holding an invitation given to him by his employer, with an official seal and everything, albeit a bit stiffly with the folded-up kite neatly strapped to his back underneath his tailcoat. But that was okay; it lent him a far more solid, imposing appearance than his compact frame might otherwise have commanded. He’d done the job, then made good his escape, with nobody the wiser except for that noblewoman who didn’t really count because she was scarcely more than a child and no one listens to children, and that guard who also didn’t count because he was a member of the Queen’s Guard and everyone knew they weren’t, you know, real guards. The Queen’s Guard was there for show, or why else would they have those ridiculous plumes on the tops of their helmets?

  That was the easy part. The part where his employer kept sending people to kill him was the hard part.

  Thump thump thumpthumpthump.

  Well, there was just nothing for it but to get to the bottom of what was going on, then. Clearly, he would—

  Bang bang bang.

  Thaddeus became aware of a great deal of shouting down below. It sounded like only one person was shouting, but that person was doing quite a lot of it, and pounding on the door while he was at it. “Open up in the name of the London Metropolitan Police!” he was saying.

  Cold fear grabbed Thaddeus by the spine and squeezed.

  He peered cautiously over the rail. The whole workshop had stopped working. Everyone was looking at Donnie.

  Donnie wandered unhurriedly to the door and opened it. “Ah, Commander,” he said, his voice carrying easily over the hum of machinery. “Welcome. Couldn’t hear you o’er the hammerin’. What can I do for you fine upstandin’ protectors of civility?”

  Thaddeus stashed the jeweled, enameled case under the rough mattress he’d slept on. Donnie glanced up toward him, then back down.

  Three men pushed their way past him. This was no mean feat, given how the entryway was piled high on both sides with ingots of metal that formed a narrow corridor almost completely filled by Donnie’s broad bulk. The fact that all three of them were holding swords probably didn’t hurt.

  Donnie stood aside and let the men pass, his face a mask of calm, trustworthy, and above all law-abiding helpfulness. He’d learned that when you’re built like a rottweiler, people tended to treat you like a rottweiler, no matter how nonthreatening and cheerful of disposition you happened to be. Where other people might have learned to behave more aggressively, Donnie had taken the opposite lesson. Sure, he built machines that could fling a manhole cover through a brick wall at two hundred yards, but he would smile at you beatifically even as he pulled the lever. In person, he tried to be as unassuming as his inventions were intimidating.

  The three men fanned out. Donnie glanced up at the loft again. One of the men followed the direction of the glance and immediately heade
d for the stairs.

  Bugger.

  Thaddeus brushed dirt and straw off his trousers, placed the top-hat atop his head, and plastered his best nonthreatening smile on his face. He feigned surprise at seeing the policeman. “Good afternoon!” he said. “Always pleased to see an officer of the peace. What brings you here?”

  The man looked him up and down. “Oi!” he called. “Found him! Looks just like the description! You, sir, come with me. We have some inquiries we would appreciate your assistance with.”

  “Of course,” Thaddeus said in what he hoped was a reasonable tone, rather than a slightly panicky and desperate one. “Always happy to assist.”

  The cat opened both golden eyes. Calmly, deliberately, it stood. It carefully folded its ears back, one after the other. It arched its back, stuck its tail in the air, and spat at the policeman. Then, having expressed its opinion to its satisfaction, it curled back up again and went to sleep.

  Thaddeus followed the constable down the steps. The other two policemen converged on him in a way that made his heart leap into his throat. It was that expression, polished to perfection by police the world over, that said This is it, the jig is up. Thaddeus wondered if they all practiced it in the mirror.

  “I believe this is the suspect, sir!” said the man leading Thaddeus. The smile froze on Thaddeus’s face.

  The three were standard-issue London Metropolitan Police, which is to say, they were nothing at all like the Queen’s Guard. No ceremonial armor and long white robes for them, oh no. Those things were for people who rarely grappled with anything more dangerous than an overbaked loaf of bread. These representatives of London’s finest looked out at the world with the alert, wary eyes of men who had seen real scuffles and come out on top.

  The commander surveyed Thaddeus silently, stroking his chin. That chin was covered in a day’s worth of stubble, except where it was creased with a small scar almost exactly in the center. His lips were thin and pressed tightly together in a disapproving frown. His eyes were deep brown and seemed permanently cast in a slight squint.