Camera Obscura (18 page)

 
 

"Drink?"

  She swirled round – and found herself at last facing the elusive fat man. "Mr Holmes," she said, and the man smiled. Unlike the rest of the crowd, he was not wearing a mask. "Always a pleasure to be recognised," he said, though she thought a hint of irritation had crept somewhere in there. And, "Please, call me Mycroft."

  "Mycroft," she said. "In our line of work it doesn't pay to be recognised too often."

  "Yet who could fail to recognise such a beautiful woman as yourself, Milady de Winter?" he said, and she smiled back, the boundaries stated, the chess pieces aligned.

  "You are British Intelligence?" she said. He shrugged, and she said, "They say it is an oxymoron."

  His face wore a pained expression. "Please," he said. "Let us not engage in hostilities."

  "Yet," she said. "Is that what you mean?"

  "I'm not sure I follow…"

  "Are we heading to war?" she said.

  "You and I, Milady? Never."

  "Britain and France," she said. "Lizard and machine. Is that

what this has all been about?"

  "Please," he said. "Relieve me of my burden–" handing her a flute of champagne which she accepted but did not drink. "The white man's burden…" she said, and he laughed. "I want to know how Yong Li died," she said, watching him carefully. The fat man's face became carefully blank. "I am not familiar with that name…"

  "The man you met at the Clockwork Room," she said. "The man who showed you an impossible thing, the pictures of another world. Am I correct so far?"

  "I'll admit I'm impressed," Mycroft Holmes said. "I take it from what you say that Captain Li is dead?"

  "Please," she said. "We can speak candidly, here."

  The fat man took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "Very well," he said. Around them dancers moved, the music played. The harmless lightning flashed overhead.

  "Did you kill him?"

  "No."

  She nodded slowly, approving. "A straight answer," she said.

  "Then I shall be candid further with you," Mycroft Holmes said. "I do not know who killed him. It was not… it was not our work."

  "Did he show you what you wanted to see?"

  "What we
wanted
to see?" He made a helpless gesture with the hand holding his almost-empty glass. "I did not want to see what Captain Li had to show. But to close one's eyes, Milady, does not make unpalatable things go away."

  "And what," she said, "did you see?"

  Mycroft's face a sudden grey cloud…

  
Imagine a camera obscura,
Mycroft told her.
Imagine a box of
wood through which light travels. An image is projected onto a
screen. Imagine a series of such images, flickering like grey shadows
on a wall – what do they show? They are not reality, are not, per
haps, even an accurate representation but something else, an
obscurity of form that hides rather than reveals. What do you see?
What lies beyond, in the source of the light, beyond the images
revealed?

  "I saw the future," he said, very softly. The silence, grey and featureless, grew a gulf between them. "You saw another world," she said.

  "Yes. Almost within reach…"

  She said, "What do you intend to do with such knowledge?"

  "What will your own Council do?" he said. And now she had to consider him, looking down at the fat man, thinking – "But what makes you think the Council is aware–" she began, and he interrupted her. "Please, Milady. Let us not play games. This was not the first approach made, nor the last. A door has been opened, and it lies – for now, at least – in the east. What may come through it is a worry and a danger – but what may be gained by passing through it to the other side, now, that is another matter altogether…"

  "Could you take control of it, though?" she said, and saw she had hit a spot with him. "You will try," she said. "And so will we…"

  "And so will the Chinese," he said. "Unless we can all work together…"

  "Is that likely?"

  "No," he admitted.

  "You would try to use it?" Another thought struck her. "Or close it?"

  He smiled, and there was nothing pleasant in the expression on his face. "That is the question…" he said softly. "Would you excuse me? There is someone I must see…"

  "Of course," she said, and he nodded to her. "Please remain well," he said. "It would be a shame…"

  He turned away before she could reply. It did not entirely surprise her to see him, moments later, chatting quietly to Madame Linlin on the other side of the hall.

  This was how matters of politics and diplomacy were decided – how lives were added and subtracted, wars decided upon, like this – in a ballroom full of music and dancing and drink, in a civilised manner – in the manner of people who decided others' death without risk to their own.

  And what would be the end result?

 
 

 
 

She waited and the dancing grew more frenetic around her, the drinks liberating the crowd, the dresses twirling, the music loud, the masks slipping as the humans celebrated – what? The air was thick with cigar smoke and a hint of opium, with spilled wine and the combined sweat of so many people. She needed fresh air. She turned to leave. She stood by the cloakroom and it was quiet there, and a little cool air came in from the outside, refreshing her.

  A step beside her. She turned and saw a man wearing an iron mask, the way prisoners were once masked.

  "Milady de Winter," the voice said. It was a familiar voice. He was dressed as an automaton, the iron mask covering his whole face. His hands were encased in gloves. "Tômas," she said. And now a dormant suspicion became more than that…

  "Milady."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Drinking, dancing – watching the fools for an easy mark. The usual."

  She watched him but the iron mask never smiled. She thought about the man she knew, the man he'd been – a murderer, a thief, but human. The thing she had met in Place Pigalle was no longer that.

  She said, "Let me see your hands."

  "You wish to become intimate?" And though she couldn't see it she could hear the leer in his voice. She kept her voice level, said, "I need to see your skin."

  "Many women have told me that," he said. "But you, I never expected–"

  Before he finished speaking a gun was pointing at him. "
Now,
" she said. Suspicion turning to understanding, but horrified – she had not thought of another Council agent…

  "You want to shoot me?" he said, and his voice was low and husky, and he bent towards her and put his forehead against the muzzle of the gun. "You did before…"

  And now she noticed how elongated his skull seemed–

  She reached for his hand, tore away the white glove–

  His hand rose up, freed. She saw the grey swirling on the metamorphosed skin–

  His hand closed to a fist and swung at her. His knuckles were like metal, and he knocked her back and there was blood on her cheek. She fired, point blank. She felt him sag against her–

  And rise again, laughing, a wild inhuman sound – and now he reached for her, and a tongue licked her cheek, tasting her blood, and his voice said, close to her ear, "And all the time you thought you were hunting, it is I who has been hunting you…"

  She fought against him but couldn't break free. "And now I am tired of the game," he said. "Now I wish to enjoy the rewards of winning…"

  His hand grabbed her by the throat. She watched the grey swirls climb up his wrist and onto his fingers. "The Council set you to catch
me
?" he said. "Me! Did they really think a girl like you could stand up to what I've become?"

  He shoved her, hard, and she stumbled, gasping for air. "I'll give you," the thing that had once been Tômas said, "one more chance. It will be… how do the English say? It would be sporting. Come and get me. I'll be waiting for you, Milady de Winter."

  She raised the gun and fired, and fired, and fired. There were screams in the distance. The man in the iron mask laughed and ran, his gait that of a strange lithe animal, jumping impossibly off the walls of the hall and out through the open door, where the rain was falling down. He ran through the crowds and they scrambled away from him, and there were more screams. She ran after him, firing until there were no bullets left, not heeding the crowds.

  Far away, the figure that had been Tômas turned to face her. He had pushed up his mask, and now she could see him for what he was, a grey, wolf-like thing, that grinned at her with wet teeth in the thin moonlight. "Catch me if you can…" his voice came, like a whisper, on the wind.

  Then he was gone.

 

There was a commotion in the hall, and now she saw the watchers coming outside, and now she knew why the Council truly set her to find Yong Li's killer. She was their bait, to flush out the Phantom – but not only him, all the other watchers too. The Council had used her twice, to identify the other players and draw out their rogue agent – two birds with one stone, and she was the worm. Outside the gates she saw an old Asian man with one eye, sitting in the shadows. Ebenezer Long, watching. She went to him and dropped a coin into his begging bowl, and his serene face smiled up at her. "The darkest hour," he said, "is the one before dawn."

  "Spare me," she said.

  "We will protect you," he said, "if we can."

  "I won't hold my breath."

  She turned away from him. There, on the steps, watching. Viktor, still holding a drink in one hand. He had known, and hadn't told her. The Council had set her searching, in ignorance, counting on her to stir up events. Whether she lived or died mattered little to the machines.

  "But you would do the right thing," Master Long said. "You always do, Xiake."

  Then he, too, was gone, a whisper on the wind.

  Her hand closed around the other gun, the one she hadn't used, the one she
should
have used: the Toymaker's gift. She would use it, and she would destroy the menace that the Phantom represented. She would hunt him down, out of compassion, and put a bullet in his head and watch him die.

  She knew where he would go.

  And now her sense of urgency was gone, replaced with a cold expectation. She summoned her coach and it came. The crowds had gone, the music had died behind her in the hall. A fearful, expectant hush…

  "We're going back to Montmartre," she told the silent coachman.

  She watched the lights of the Hotel de Ville recede in the darkness. They would all be mobilising too, she thought. All of them who wanted the key, the thing that was stolen when Yong Li died. The Council must have been furious when their own agent turned on them. When the other world reached out and touched him, and remade him in the process, a key of their own to open this world…

  She sat back and closed her eyes, and her fingers tightened around the gun.

 
 

 
 

The thunder still rolled over Montmartre Cemetery; lightning continued to flash above the caretaker's miniature castle, and the night was dark and full of menace. Or so it felt to Milady. She listened out for bird cries but heard none. The cemetery was silent, the graves almost unseen but for when the lightning illuminated the headstones. Such an elaborate façade, she thought, for a depository of dead things… They were all gone and finished with, the men and women who lay there. Their minds had gone, and what was left crumbled slowly, flesh peeling, blood draining, only the bones remaining – but they, too, would turn to dust. Only the headstones remained, names and dates inscribed in stone, signifying nothing.

  She wondered how many of the grey-infected corpses had initially come here. And where had the initial infection come from? Did the Man on the Mekong, Tom Thumb's mysterious contact in the east, send other keys, other couriers? How long had the Council known – and how long had the lizards?

  She made her way through the graves slowly, her gun drawn. She was watching for the Phantom. She remembered the first time she had met Tômas. Down in the under-morgue, a young man with an unremarkable face, a face that could transform – with a hint of rouge, a false moustache, a wig, an expression, into someone else's face. He had been a murderer; a blackmailer; a thief and a robber; the Council found him highly useful and had recruited him – where and when she never knew. Just as she had been recruited, when she first came to their notice, before her travels in Vespuccia, before Lord de Winter – before her first husband, even. A brat in the under-city, who did what she could to survive… They had liked that. They had fashioned her, in their way, into a gun.

  Now she hunted a comrade; another like her; and yet nothing like her, she thought. She stalked toward Ampère's castle. As she passed a large headstone the lightning flashed and she saw the name inscribed there.

  André-Marie Ampère. So it was true, and the man's simulacra had made its home right beside its one-time owner.

  She came to the door. When she knocked there was no answer. She kicked it open. "Ampère!"

  No answer, but something moving in the darkness. Lightning flashed and the light came through the open doorway and she saw the thing on the floor.

  The automaton had been sliced open, its insides showing, gears and wheels changing even as she watched, becoming a strange, grey mist. And, as if prompted by the lightning, a blue electric light began to glow around André-Marie Ampère, spilling out from his insides. The automaton's mouth moved, but no words came out. She stepped closer.

  "I take it Tômas has already paid you a visit," she said. The thing on the floor groaned. Grey clouds spilled from its insides, and now she could see what she had missed before – there was a fragment of a green stone embedded into the automaton's stomach, the smoke and the light falling from it, growing…

  
Awakening
, a voice said. She took a step back. It did not quite speak. Somehow the words were in her mind. Lights, flickering. Static pictures, hovering in the mist. A camera obscura, she thought. But this was more. And it was real.

  
Home…

  There was more than one voice. They sounded… lonely?

  She stared into the automaton's belly, where a sun was rising in dark space, illuminating… what?

  A vista of impossible structures, floating in space…

  "What are you?" she said.

  
Worlds within worlds… old beyond time… we are ghosts, nothing
to be frightened of… for ourselves, we want nothing.

  She took a step closer to the corpse; and now she was standing directly above Ampère. He was no longer moving. The machine was dead.

  "Awakening," she said, echoing them. "Why? Why now? Or…" Not now, she realised. "Three years ago. What
happened
?"

  A sense of a vast intelligence turning over her question, tasting it, polishing it like a stone, examining it in a dim light. No answer. Then,
A signal. Chrono-spatial; anomaly; awakening; birth;
child; like us not us; close – we must find it!

  "I don't understand."

  
In the place you call…
A vast mind rifling through a catalogue of names and meanings, searching.
Oxford.

  "What happened there?"

  Again, the words dizzying her, the voices swallowing her, and she found herself bent down, her face so close to the dead machine's open belly, where the jade-green flashes seemed to shape themselves, suddenly, into the shape of a key…
Birth.
Multi-form intelligence infant anomalous same same different dimen
sional representation insufficient–

  "You don't know…"

  A shriek of anger, a sense of waiting, and she reached out to the fragment of jade, compelled to touch it–

  Her hand froze above it. She thought – the Phantom had put it there. He had killed Ampère. He had set it for her, to touch. What would it do?

  And she thought – it would make me like him.

  "No," she said. The voices silenced. The Colt was in her hand without her knowing it. She fired – again and again.