Camera Obscura (14 page)

 
 

"Yes," Ip Kai said, sounding surprised. He was looking at the sketch of the men's tattoos. "There are opposing factions to us. The Five Poisons Cult, the Sharks Sect, the Blood Sabre, the Ancient Tomb Sect, the Demonic Cult… but this I have not seen." His lips curled in a grimace. "Its meaning is clear, at least," he said, with evident distaste. "They seek that which lies beyond the gate."

  Milady grimaced too, at that. It'd been another long night, she had another death on her hand, and was no closer to locating the missing object – nor did she feel much inclined to, any more.

  Tom Thumb's death had made it personal.

  She didn't know where the object was but she knew a killer was out there, hunting down everyone who had come near it. A killer who knew her, and wanted to send her a strong, clear message when he dumped Tom Thumb in the Seine, ensuring the corpse would float past her at the right time. He could be out there right now, in the shadows of Chinatown, watching her, waiting…

  She needed a way to kill something that couldn't be easily killed.

  There were several options.

  But now she sat with Mistress Yi of Shaolin and her companion, Ip Kai of Wudang, in a small but comfortable tea room decorated with spread-open fans printed with images of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and so on, and lanterns, and it was empty apart for them, and the old woman who seemed to run the place brought her a coffee, not tea, without being told.

  And so things were looking up – though not, admittedly, for Tom Thumb.

  And not for Milady's peace of mind, either.

  "I have seen this before," Mistress Yi said, examining the sketch, and her face was troubled. "It is the emblem of the Grey Ghost Gang. But they have not been seen for many–"

  Her eyes widened.

  She was looking past Milady.

  Milady knew something was wrong–

  She felt the window explode a split second before the glass burst.

  She ducked and glass fragments showered her, and she could feel a sudden pain in her cheek, a shard of glass cutting her–

  She swore, a burning fury rising inside her, and coupled with it was a wild, unconstrained joy.

  She was finally going to shoot someone.

  "The Grey Ghost Gang!" Mistress Yi said, and followed it with something in Chinese that sounded like a curse.

  When Milady looked up the gun was in her hands and dark shapes were streaming into the room. She fired and watched the first one drop to the floor, a flower of blood spreading on his chest. They were dressed in black, of course they were dressed in black, and she knew with absolute certainty that, if she only looked, she'd find a grey tattoo on the man's arm.

  Mistress Yi leaped into the air. Milady had never seen someone move the way she had. She bounced off the wall and spun and kicked, and her foot connected with one of the attackers' heads and knocked him out flat. She landed but it only lasted a fraction of a second and she was airborne again, spinning, her legs catching two more of the attackers–

  And Ip Kai had joined her, moving like a ghost, appearing behind two more attackers – there was something in his hands – like tiny needles – both went in simultaneously, into the men's necks–

  And they both fell. Milady fired, and again, and watched another man fall.

  How many
were
there?

  "Get out!" Mistress Yi shouted, suddenly very close. She threw a metal star, lightning-fast, and another man dropped down. The small tea room was fast filling up with the dead. "The back door! We'll hold them!"

  Milady said, "Later," and rose. She had a second gun strapped to her leg and now it was in her hand and both her hands were full and both her guns were loaded and she fired, left, right, left, turning with each shot, moving forward to catch as many of them as she could–

  A kick connected with her legs and swept her down to the floor and she roared, the guns forgotten as she found her feet and rushed her assailant, grabbing his head with her arms and she
twisted–

  There was a sickening sound–

  She reached for the Peacemaker on the floor, the other gun lost, and held it by the barrel and used it as a club and bashed a man's head in–

  Something cut her arm then, deeply–

  Ip Kai was flying through the air and his bare hands were weapons–

  But there were so many of them, so many more coming in to replace the fallen–

  "Get
out
, damn it!"

  And then Mistress Yi was there again and somehow the small girl was dragging the much larger woman,
away
from the fighting, towards the back of the room–

  "We'll. Hold. Them.
Off!"

  And threw her through the kitchen door.

  The desire to fight left her suddenly. She scrambled to her feet (noticing the kitchen was empty, the door to the back open wide) and went through the door, fast.

  Behind, a dark alleyway that was
very
empty.

  Why would they be chasing her?

  She didn't have the key.

  A key. A key to what? None of it made any sense. She thought of what the girl, Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, had told her. What she saw in the room at the end of the corridor, at the Clockwork Room…

  
Shadows flickering on a wall, light and shades, moving shapes.
"Like a camera obscura."

  A projection. Not a key, but a – what?

  And she thought – perhaps it was showing what is behind the door.

  She had to find the fat man.

  And she had to talk to Viktor again.

  And to the Council.

  But first, she needed a new gun.

 
 

 
 

She was not pursued and she was thankful for that. She sensed her time in Chinatown was coming to an end and was not unpleased. Her arm still stung from the cut it had sustained, but she was fine otherwise. She hoped Yi and Ip Kai would be, too. She needed to go down to the catacombs and there was a way down nearby, a way that would lead her under the river, and luckily – or perhaps not, depending how you felt about it – it was through the Toymaker's shop.

  When was she last there? Two, three years before? And that was on Council orders. This was not her part of town and the Toymaker wasn't someone she looked forward to seeing – usually.

  Now she needed him.

  The Toymaker had been a magician, and he had been a builder of automata; and for a time was very well known. His name had been Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. He had once been known as "The heir of Vaucanson", he who had been the father of the Republic.

  That had all been a while back. Before the incident with the Eve, and the subsequent scandal…

  The Toymaker's shop sat on its own in a pool of darkness by the river. Clocks were set on the otherwise impassive façade, clock-faces showing the time around the world, staring at the passers-by as if challenging them to step inside. To do so, they seemed to suggest, would be to challenge time itself.

  There was no sign to advertise the Toymaker's craft. A single black door was set into the building and it was closed.

  But the Toymaker seldom slept…

  The door had no handle. Milady knocked, and somewhere inside an ominous martial music rose like a waking dog.

  All suitably orchestrated. She banged on the door and shouted, "Council business, open up!"

  The door swung open without a sound. And now that she could see into the inside of the shop she saw nothing but darkness. Yet there was a sense of intelligence inside, of hidden eyes watching, and the faint sounds of movement could be heard – if she concentrated – of gears and wheels, as unseen shapes flitted away in the darkness.

  She came inside. The door closed behind her.

  "Show yourself," she said.

  "Milady de Winter," a voice murmured, close to her ear, "what a pleasant surprise."

  It had startled her.

  Which had been the intention.

  "Houdin," she said, and the voice said, "No!" and then, more quietly, "Not any more."

  He had built her Grimm. He had built many things. Once, he had been head of the Council…

  Not any more.

  "I need something from you," she said, into the darkness.

  "That is always what brings them to my shop," the voice said. Farther now. "Always they want something. My only desire had been to build that which resembles the human. Tell me –" the voice said, moving even farther away – but then, one could never trust the source of the voice, as she had no doubt machines could replicate it across the dark space, only one of the magician's many tricks – "if it acts like a man and sounds like a man – how do you know it is not a man?"

  "As I recall," she said, "it was not
men
that were your problem."

  A short, dry laugh. And now lights sprang into existence across the shop, illuminating–

  He stood at the far end, dressed in a black suit and a top hat. A white handkerchief was in the breast suit of his pocket. In one hand he held a cane. His face–

  The shop was filled with mechanical toys. Trains began to run suddenly across what seemed like miles of miniature rails, climbing walls and descending mountains of furniture. Airships glided in the air, black mechanical things resembling insects. Toy soldiers marched towards her, guns raised. On the wall, the only clock was half-melted, frozen at the time of–

  "I tried to save my child," he said. "That was all."

  "She could not be allowed to–" she said, but he was not listening.

  When his wife had died giving birth he had enlisted Viktor's help. The two of them had created something–

  In the secret records of the Quiet Council it was referred to as The Affair of the Bride with White Hair.

  There had been several dozen victims before–

  The old magician stepped forward. And now she could see his face, and wished she couldn't.

  The man was wearing a mask. It was not like Madame Linlin's face, half-alive, half-metal. His was the mask of humanity, a shifting rubbery façade such as was used for one of his automatons. It could pass for human – in the dim light. If one did not look too closely, and saw the ripples on the false skin, the way the eyes moved across the face, the dance of the shifting mouth…

  She said, hiding a shiver, "Is this your boy?"

  A smaller figure had appeared beside the magician. Like Houdin, it too was dressed in evening dress and top hat, with the same white handkerchief, the same cane. But the figure was very still, with the frozen countenance of the dead.

  "Say hello to the nice lady," the magician said, speaking gently. The little figure moved forward – and now she caught the look in the magician's eye, saw the glee there, and the anger. He knew she was repulsed, and both enjoyed and was angered by it.

  "Shake hands," the man said, and the little boy reached out a hand, mechanically, and Milady shook it. The hand felt soft and smooth – would always feel soft and smooth. It would never grow, never change – and now it held her hand and
pressed
, and there was strength beyond a boy's strength in it, the little hand beginning to crush the bones in her hand–

  She cried out and the magician hissed a command. The boy released her hand and turned around. His hair was black, cut short at the back. It would never grow, never fade.

  "What do you want?" the magician said.

  "There is a killer in the city," she said, and the magician laughed. "There are many killers in the city," he said. "You should know. You're one of them."

  It had taken all their efforts to halt the man's creation. The bride with white hair did not go quietly…

  But it had been
her
work that had finally terminated the creature's "life".

  She said, "This killer is different."

  "I see," the magician said with a strange, sing-song voice, "a long journey in your future, and a tall dark stranger."

  "I didn't come to have my fortune told," she said. "I need a weapon."

  "You are going to need more than a weapon," he said, in the same voice. "You are going to need to
become
a weapon."

  It was told that, in the darkness and isolation of his shop, he

had perfected machines that could read the future in numbers, predict events and patterns of history beyond even the abilities of the famed Mechanical Turk. And yet he told her nothing…

  "I still have my sources," the old man said. "I was once of the Council, and that is not something abandoned lightly. I know about your killer. I know more than you do. I–"

  "You've seen the corpses," she said. Thinking of the corpses in the under-morgue, the shifting greys…

  "Are they not beautiful? So beautiful… I wish to find where they are going, where they had gone. But the door is not here, it is far away."

  "Tell me what you know."

  He laughed. The silent boy beside him never stirred again. The magician ruffled the boy's hair and said, "It would take a lifetime and you would be none the wiser at the end of it."

  She said, "You know who the killer is." Watched him as the left eye drooped downwards and trailed across his face. He reached, unhurriedly, and put it back. "Will you find him," he said, "– or will
he
find
you
, Milady?"

  "I need a weapon," she said, and the old man seemed to droop, the fight – if that's what it was – going out of him. "Of course," he said. "I was told you would come. I have it ready."

  "Told by whom?"

  He shrugged. "The Council."

  She felt suddenly trapped in a web of lies. Deceit – she was being led along a path she didn't choose to follow, her every stepped marked in advance by machines more powerful than could be imagined. The old man, as if reading her mind, said, "Sometimes I wish I had no part in it. Our children always supplant us, don't they, Milady? It is the way of the world…"

  He spoke to the boy. The boy turned and, without a sound, disappeared into the darkness. "The children…" the old man said.

  "He could have grown to be a man, one day," she said. "I'm sorry."

  She said it every time and they both knew it made not an ounce of difference.

  "Let me give you your gun," the old magician said.