Brass and Bone Read online

  “Showy,” said Abigail, barely glancing at it. “But such is your style.”

  I admit, with a blush, that it is so. I was once a ragged child from the workhouse, a memory I shall never lose, and showy is just my style.

  And the thing was a bit flashy, perhaps, gaudy, but beautiful as well. A fat circle of embossed and filigreed silver, it was fully as large as my palm. The silver chain composed of tiny intricate links snaking from a ring on the top looked too frail to support the heavy watch. At the other end of the chain, a series of fobs dangled: old coins pierced and captured, a silver-encircled cameo and more I could not in the dim light precisely make out in a jolting steam cab. Old Lamentation, like time, stopped for no man but moved on in his course.

  But the huge pocket watch itself—and I spared a moment for a deep feeling of regret—would only have fit in a gentleman’s vest pocket if he were a veritable giant. Indeed, it was even heavier that the other article Abigail and I had been hired to procure.

  I turned the watch over in my hands, my fingertips tracing the carvings and raised sections. “I cannot think how anyone could carry it with any kind of elegance, but it is a lovely piece of silver.” I sighed.

  “Perhaps it chimes or some such,” Abigail said. However, I could tell by the very tone of her voice that she had little interest in the matter. “Though it is massive enough, by all that is holy, to have a sound like Big Ben or contain a veritable drum-and-fife corps.”

  Just as the last word came out of her lips, I pressed the catch to open this wonder of a watch.

  Wonder indeed. Or horror, rather. When would I learn? For the thing popped open with a grind of complaining gears, and a series of tiny segmented silver spears seemed to leap out at my face.

  I jerked my head away from the thing, but the spears were not after my eyes—my first horrid thought. Instead, with a near-silent yet strangely sinister series of clicks and clacks, they ratcheted out in a circular motion, as if unwinding themselves from a too-tight coffin.

  “Drop the damned thing, Simon,” Abigail hissed.

  But alas, her warning came too late: I could not drop the damned thing. The speed with which the sharp silver slivers erupted caused the watch to jerk up on its fat edge in my palm, and the silver segments wrapped around my wrist, embedding their needle tips into the very flesh of my arm. In an instant, the pocket watch resembled nothing more than some sentient silver spider, its gleaming legs forming a cage around my entire hand. Droplets of bright blood welled from my wrist at the points of the multiple piercings from each segmented leg.

  For a moment, the pain was no more that that suffered from a bee sting, hot and irritating and mildly unpleasant. Then I saw, at the umbrella of another convenient street lamp, the tiny glass vial in the center of the device, a vial filled with a vile green fluid.

  Abigail reached for it with a muffled oath.

  “Don’t!” I said, and gritted my teeth against the pain as the tiny sharp points dug ever deeper into my flesh. “It may well be poison!”

  “Of course it’s poison, you fleawit,” she snapped. “What else would it be in such a fiendish device?”

  She ignored my pleas as she reached inside the hellish silver spider and grasped the tiny vial between two long fingers. With her other hand she pushed the cork stopper—which I saw, with a thrill of the most utter and abject terror, had been easing out as if of its own volition—back tight and yanked the vial free of its prison.

  “You will note, Simon,” Abigail said through gritted teeth, “the legs are obviously hollow. No doubt the struggles of the victim would cause the stopper to release and this fluid to be injected into the bloodstream.” She held the minute vial up to a stray beam of yellow gaslight.

  “Make sure the fing is closed!” I gasped. “Thing, dammit, thing!”

  “Let’s not worry about proper pronunciation just now.” Abigail wrapped the vicious vial in a dirty handkerchief and tucked it beneath the seat cushion. “For, as you are no doubt aware, that thing still has a death grip upon your arm. Jeremiah?” she called as she rapped on the roof of the cab.

  A tiny window slid open. “M’lady?”

  “Change of plans. Elephant and Castle can wait. One-eleven, if you please, and don’t spare the steam man!”

  Mr. Slice, I thought groggily. It must be bad if she’s taking me to the underworld’s most notorious surgeon.

  ***

  By the time we arrived at Mr. Slice’s residence du jour—called always, regardless of its location, by the number 111—the pain in my pierced arm had increased tenfold. This was due, no doubt, less to the fact that Abigail had not been able to remove the spider and more because the legs continued to ratchet out in small increments, driving through overcoat and jacket and shirt ever farther into my flesh.

  “At last,” said Abigail when Jeremiah stopped Old Lamentation, who gave a gurgle of what sounded like relief. “Will you wait here while I fetch us some help, Simon, or do you think we can get inside without it?”

  I blinked at her in the sickly rays of a single flickering street lamp. The heavy door to one-eleven was up five steps from the street. The steps looked far too high for normal legs. I opened my mouth to point out the fact, but little more than mumbled gibberish came out. My wrist felt as if it were on fire in a dozen spots where the silver points dug in, but the heat became a sort of burning ice as it moved up my arm. I felt dazed and sleepy and yet full of a fierce kind of fear, as if my entire soul were being drained into that silver spider.

  “God damn the infernal artificer who created this monstrous thing,” Abigail muttered as she half-dragged, half-carried me out the open door beside which stood Jeremiah, looking concerned. “Grab his other arm,” she ordered. Between them, they got me standing and we began our journey to the door. I fear I was of little assistance; my mind seemed to be wandering, fixing on the oddest things—I observed, for example, Old Lamentation tipping his hat to me as we walked by him. Oddly enough, this did not surprise me. Still, we moved and with both of them helping me up those incredibly tall steps, we reached the door at last. “What ails Mr. Simon, m’lady?” I heard Jeremiah whisper.

  “Remnants of some drug or poison residue left in the hollow legs of that hellish thing,” she snapped as she seized the door knocker and gave the wood a resounding volley of blows, followed by a kick or two.

  The door opened on silent hinges. Three massive men swarmed out, surrounding us in less than a heartbeat.

  “Too much noise,” rumbled the largest of them all.

  I distinctly heard the sound of a pistol cocking. I had an irresistible desire to laugh, it sounded so like a cork popping from a champagne bottle. But the pain in my arm chose that moment to flare up and I gasped instead.

  “Get us to Mr. Slice’s surgery.” Abigail pushed forward, paying no attention to them.

  Amazingly, the wall of flesh melted away before her, and I heard the door shut behind us.

  I drifted away into a darkness composed of the odor of wet wool and gin…

  ***

  “Simon?”

  Someone called me, doubtless to breakfast. Good thing, too, as I was ravenous. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could utter a word, rough hands began to shake me.

  “Enough!” snapped a voice I knew as well as my own.

  “Abigail?” I managed to say, fighting against the darkness that seemed to press against my eyelids. “Abigail?”

  The darkness fled, becoming an actual feather pillow, I noted with some concern. Were they trying to smother me? Surely Abigail would allow no such thing?

  Her worried face chose that instant to swim into view. “Thank all the gods that ever were,” she said, and I rejoiced at the concern in her voice. Abigail is naturally phlegmatic. Not unfeeling, mind you, but strangely averse to showing any sort of emotion.

  “Sorry about the pillow, dear boy. You were making some rather irritating yodeling noises, and we were using it as a bit of a muffler, if you take my meaning? You know
how Mr. Slice’s customers are offended by the notice of the peelers.” She seized my hand and, again, I rejoiced at her obvious concern. Then I realized she had taken my left hand, the one so recently imprisoned by the silver spider-cum-pocket watch.

  “It’s gone, by Jove!” I shouted.

  Abigail eyed my heavily bandaged hand with a critical eye, turning it this way and that, and none too gently either. However, I bravely suppressed any signs of pain—in truth, the pains were few—and watched her face.

  I am, I will confess and as you no doubt already ascertained, most desperately in love with Lady Abigail Moran. She, I fear, because of the early age at which we became acquainted, coupled with a trifling difference in our ages, regards me as some sort of combination of younger brother, assistant and general irritation. I have hopes her opinion of me will undergo a sea change—sadly, those hopes are thus far unrealized.

  “Where is the damnable thing?” I asked, and I will admit my voice was somewhat shaky.

  “Mr. Slice was able to remove it with very little damage,” Abigail said as she laid my arm across my chest.

  “Well, thank the gods for that, at least. I’m glad my arm is not ruined.”

  “With little damage to the device, you ninny,” Abigail replied, though she gave me a crooked grin to remove the sting of her words. “Good thing, too. When we return it to its creator, I’ll have his skull for a soup bowl, as my dear departed grandpapa was wont to say.”

  Having known Sir Agamemnon Moran, captain of the airship Invincible, I could not agree on the dear but was—secretly, to be sure—quite delighted about the departed.

  “Do both things go to the same customer?” I asked as I began to wriggle the fingers of my left hand in an experimental fashion.

  “They do indeed, dear boy.” Abigail stuck one hand in her pocket and half removed a reassuringly thick bundle of bank notes. “Not to worry, we’ve already been paid. In fact, Mr. Slice didn’t even put your rescue on our bill; he was so excited about your little parasite. Now, if you can walk, I believe we should be going. Eggs and bacon and lashings of coffee, perhaps with a tot of brandy. That’s what is called for, I do believe. And then…” She paused to help me to my feet, which held me, I was glad to learn.

  “And then?” I prompted as we headed out of Mr. Slice’s house.

  “And then, my dear Simon, we deliver the box and that damned spider.”

  Outside, the first faint rays of dawn struggled to break through the sooty London air.

  “And when we do?” I asked.

  “Why then, my dear boy,” said Abigail cheerfully as she beckoned a lonely hansom cab our way, “at the first opportunity, I shall take a deep and personal pleasure in locking the thing onto the owner’s wrist. Mind the steps, old thing.”

  Chapter One

  Cynara des Jardin

  The great city of London was a dangerous and deadly place. I knew this, and I had no desire to be here. But I had been forced to desert my beloved Paris to come to this dark and dirty city. Forced by one man, my once-lover and present worst enemy: Henri d’Estes.

  He was the nephew of my darling Comte des Jardin, the man who had saved me from a life of crime, trained me, raised me from the gutters of my native city and taught me to be a lady. And now, Henri was on my trail. This I knew as well as I knew my own name and my own nature.

  I ran from my former life through London’s filthy streets. I kept slipping against the cobblestones and nearly falling, catching myself only at the last minute. I did not care to know why the stones were so slippery, whether it was from the oils which drained from the tin men pulling the carriages, the mysterious slurry running freely in the streets throughout London’s working class district, or less savory substances.

  At that moment all I was concerned about was escaping from those who sought me and were trying to strike me down. Evidence of an almost-successful effort on their parts now stained dark the blue of my dress, and the hilt of a blade extending from my side spoke of their intention.

  They hadn’t expected me to fight them. I was meant to come with the unresisting passivity of a highborn lady. Witch though I was, we all had roles we were supposed to play. But when I faced the men my lover had betrayed me to, I failed in the pretenses of society. I fought them until one lay dead in the gutter, while the other ran after me with such tenacity it was as if his life were in danger instead of mine.

  Perhaps it was. There was no limit to the damage Henri d’Estes would cause if my death warrant went unsigned. He had warned me, told me to leave England.

  I didn’t listen. No, I refused to, for I was as determined to see him meet his end as he was for me to meet mine. And though I had the wealth to ensure his passing, I would not allow a stranger to take his life.

  That was a pleasure I wished to reserve entirely for myself.

  It appeared Henri did not share my sentiments or care how I died. He had sent others after me. I stumbled forward, weakness beginning to overcome my anger. I turned into an alley cluttered with a troop of the trollops who walked this section of London. If I fell here, I knew they would pick my body clean the moment my breath left it. As it stood, they simply stared aghast as I stumbled against the rough brick wall.

  “Help me,” I begged them. But my words drowned in the blood flowing from my mouth.

  “There you are, my pretty,” came a voice so close behind.

  I slid down the filthy wall as I lost even the little strength I’d reserved. The sound of the trollops’ scurrying feet was followed by a deafening silence. I was quite alone with my attacker. I focused my dimming gaze to see him kneel down before me. A shudder rippled through my body when he grabbed the knife’s hilt, twisted it with a sort of unholy glee and pulled it free.

  Pain filled me. Had I had my voice, my scream would have filled the lonely silence. That agony was nothing compared to what would follow.

  Of this I had no doubt.

  My powers as a witch were taking over, knitting my skin together to close the wound. To heal the damage. To make me whole once more.

  The man watched with fascination, grinning as he observed the spectacle of my magic. His happiness startled me, as did his next words: “Oh, the Witchfinders will pay a great deal to have you in their stock, my pretty.”

  Witchfinders…qui…not Henri? Mais…

  The man lifted me before I could stop him, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to even if I tried. My strength abandoned me, and with each jolting step, so too did consciousness flee.

  Sleep, heavy and fierce, came to release me as death had failed to do.

  ***

  I did not again see the man who first captured me, though I cursed him often during the abuses I suffered for the endless days and weeks.

  Witchfinders, they called themselves. When I overheard them speaking of the great WFG, a business known throughout Europe for its ties to England’s wealth, the pieces fell together. These men would take my wealth, and in the end my very life because of nothing more than my nature.

  I should have feared them. Cowered when they performed their tests to discern my powers. Screamed when they hurt me, laughed at their surprise when their marks faded from my skin. Instead, I froze my heart and mind against them. Never once did they hear me cry for mercy. Never once did I demand they cease their evil. My benefactor, my beloved count, had trained me never to show weakness, though I was but a woman.

  I was in the water tank in their laboratory, surrounded by three scientists in frock coats covered by stained aprons. I understood what they were doing: studying the effects of ice water on the body. But my realization didn’t make the chattering in my teeth any less as the large contraption of pipes and gears worked to fill the glass box. For you see, I have a deathly afraid of water. Of drowning. This glass prison made it all the worse, since I could see everything and everyone, none of whom would assist me when my lungs filled.

  “Forgive me, sir,” he said as he bowed to one of my torturers. “Sir Eli has need of this o
ne. He wants her prepared within the hour.”

  “Prepared?” I managed between my teeth, grateful to all the gods that the tank wouldn’t be filled to its capacity.

  The scientist nodded, pushing a pair of shiny brass goggles from his face to the top of his head. He stepped over to a set of levers controlling the water and pushed one of them up. I couldn’t help gasping as a blast of the cold water rained upon my head. Nor could I control the coughing fit overtaking me as the assault stopped and the icy liquid lapping at my knees began to drain out of the tank. “Pity.” The scientist sighed as if the interruption meant the end of a great experiment. “We still have so much to learn from this one.”

  The water gone, the front of the glass cage opened, and the guard yanked me out. I was shaking so hard from the cold, I paid no mind to the collar he placed around my throat. I did cough once more as the wretched man jerked me forward, leading me out of the laboratory and back to the cell that had become my home.

  With my capture, I’d become nothing more than a guinea pig to these horrible men. The only thing needed to cement my new status in life was a large wheel to run on.

  The guard opened the door to my cell, unbound my hands and throat then shoved me inside. He threw what looked like fresh clothes on the floor beside my straw pallet, followed by a bundle of rags. “Dry yourself and change. The Witchfinder General wishes to see you.”

  I shook my head, blowing on my hands to warm them. “I don’t understand.”

  The guard smiled coldly, sliding the bundle forward with one booted foot. “You’re the only one we have who has survived, and the master needs one of your kind. Now, you can do this yourself, or I can do it for you. Your choice.” He leered at me, his dirty face slashed in half by a mouth full of rotten teeth.

  I pulled the rags to me and listened to his laughter as he left the room. I dried off the best I could, grateful for this new twist in my fate. Perhaps this general would know Henri. Perhaps he would listen to reason and release me from my plight. I changed into the simple linen dress with trembling hands, tightening the white skirt around a waist molded by the years spent wearing corsets. I was dry but still cold, my skin horrid shades of blue and red from the chill that had settled into my bones. It seemed it would take some time for my powers to erase the evidence from my time in the lab.