The Great Game (7 page)

  "Byron?"

  "I thought you were retired," the automaton said at last.

  "They brought me back."

  "A pity."

  Smith looked at him. "I don't understand," he said at last.

  "You should have stayed in the village, my friend," the automaton said.

  "Is that a warning?" Smith said, suddenly tense.

  "It's an observation," the automaton said, mildly.

  Smith sat back. He regarded the automaton for a long moment, thinking.

  He had not expected this.

  Mycroft, he knew, had strong links with the automaton movement.

  Could they be involved?

  And suddenly he was wary of Byron.

  Which, he thought, had been the automaton's intention.

  So instead he said, "Fogg."

  The automaton did not have a range of expressions. However, in the certain way his mouth moved, one could, just possibly, read distaste.

  "You have always suspected him," the automaton said.

  "It seemed clear to me he was an agent of the Bookman."

  "Ah, yes…" And now the automaton seemed thoughtful. "The Bookman."

  "Is this related to the Bookman investigation from eightyeight?" Smith said, on a hunch.

  The automaton was still. At last he said, "There are things best left in the shadows, my friend."

  What exactly
had
happened in eighty-eight? There had been the very public blowing-up of the decoy Martian probe, and a girl, Lucy, had died. Mycroft had handled it single-handedly, if Smith remembered rightly. He, Smith, had been somewhere in Asia at the time.

  Then came that strange revolution that didn't quite happen, and the new balance of power, and the fall of the then-prime minister, Moriarty. Mrs Beeton was in power now.

  But Mycroft had remained in place, ensconced in his comfortable armchair at the Diogenes Club, running the Bureau and the shadow world, playing the Great Game…

  "What are you not telling me, Byron?" he said at last. The automaton's mouth had changed again; now his expression resembled a smile. "What
can
I tell you," he said, "might be the more appropriate question."

  "What
can
you tell me, then?"

  "What I already told you. Go home. Water your garden. Watch the flowers grow."

  "I grew
cabbages
," Smith said. "And Hapsburgian agents recently destroyed the garden." He thought about it. "Not that I minded, greatly," he added, to be fair.

  "Fogg," the automaton said, "cannot be trusted. But you already know this. Then you would have also surmised that Mycroft would have been of the same opinion."

  "I had warned him several times," Smith said, the memory of old hurt still present. "He never took notice."

  "Are you working for Fogg, now?"

  "He reinstated me," Smith said. "He is acting head."

  "Then you are his tool," the automaton said, with finality.

  "I am no one's tool," Smith said, but even as he spoke he knew it wasn't true. He had always been a tool. It was his purpose. He was a shiv for someone to apply, a weapon. And only Fogg had the power to bring him back from the retirement he hated, to make him, once again,
useful
.

  "What you learn, he will learn," the Byron automaton said, and stood up. "I am sorry about Alice. But you must not follow this investigation, this time, old friend. Let it go. Light a candle in her memory. But step away."

  "What about her killer?" Smith demanded. "Shall I let
him
go, too?"

  "The killer, like you, wishes to learn much, though, I suspect, for vastly different reasons. I do not think he can be stopped, nor, necessarily, that he should be. This is bigger than you, my friend, bigger than me, bigger than all of us. Let it go, I beg you."

  Smith stood up, too. "Then we have nothing else to discuss," he said, stiffly. The automaton nodded, once. His expression, as much as it could, looked resigned. "Until we meet again, then," he said. He put forwards his hand, and Smith shook it.

  "Until then," he said.

 
 

 
 
 

  
People went past him. Mostly they did not notice him. He wore a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat that, one of the voices told him, was rather fashionable. Fashion fascinated the observer. Most everything did. He stood in the shadows and watched the building. A small man came out of it and the observer watched him with interest, noticing the way the man scanned his environment as he went, always aware of his surroundings.

  
But he had not noticed the observer.

  
A small boy was one of the few who
did
notice him. The small boy went past him and then, for just a moment, seemed to stumble against him, murmured an apology and tried to dart away. The observer, however, reached out and grabbed him by the hand and the boy found himself pulled back. "Hey, let go, Jack!" the boy said, or began to, when he saw the observer's eyes on his. He stopped speaking and stared, as if hypnotised.

  
"Give me back my things."

  
Still not speaking, the boy owned up to the items he had extracted from the observer's pocket. These may have surprised the casual watcher, had there been one. They included a dazzling green seashell, of a sort not to be found on the British Isles; a penny coin rubbed black and featureless with age, with the barely distinguished portrait of the old Lizard King William; a smooth round pebble; and a piece of cinnamon bark.

  
The observer took them and put them carefully back in his pocket. He let the boy go but the boy just stood there, until the observer made a sudden shooing motion and then, as if awakening, the boy's eyes widened and he turned and ran away, disappearing into the crowds of Covent Garden.

  
The observer watched the building and the people coming and going. He saw a dice game in progress and a man, which a voice told him was called a
mobsman
, who picked the pocket of a gentleman walking past without the man ever noticing. His nose could pick up smells that only now he was beginning to identify. Manure, of course, but also mulled cider, sold from large metal tubs to passers-by, and tobacco smoke, some of it aromatic and some of it reminding him of the sailors on the ship on the crossing over the Channel, and spilled beer, and roasting, caramelised peanuts, and human sweat and human fear and human hormones hanging heavy in the air: it was a heady mixture.

  
He stood in the shadows and few people noticed him and those who did moved aside, as though instinctively knowing not to come near. He paid them no heed. He watched until he saw a shadow come slowly out of the building and recognised him as the one he wanted but still he waited, waited for him to walk down the narrow passageway that ran alongside and only then, unhurriedly, he stepped out of the shadows and began to follow.

 

It when he was going towards Drury Lane that Smith began to have the feeling he had forgotten something. He stopped in his tracks. It was early evening and the theatre-goers and the cut-purses were out in force.

  He knew Byron did not work alone. Above him, above all the automatons, was the one they called the Turk. Once a chess-playing machine, he had quietly gained political power amongst the disenfranchised simulacra of the new age, seldom seen, always in the background. The Mechanical Mycroft, as some in the Bureau called him, snidely. If they knew he existed at all.

  What could link Mycroft and the Turk with Alice in Bangkok?

  But a more pressing question arose in his mind.

  The Byron automaton must have known what Mycroft had known.

  He turned around and began to run.

 

He could hear the distant cries even as he again approached the
Bucket of Blood
. As he ran he almost bumped into a small, undistinguished man who passed him going in the opposite direction; the man moved aside elegantly, avoiding impact, and Smith went past him, barely sparing him a glance.

  The cries grew louder; in the distance, a police siren. A crowd of people gathered outside the
Bucket of Blood
, blocking the way into the narrow alleyway beside it. He pushed his way through.

  Stopped when he came to the body.

 

  
The observer's blade was already out and so he came to the device and inserted the blade in the same place as it did all the others, the base of the head, going inwards into the brain. Only this time he felt nothing, and was momentarily confused.

  
"I am using distributed storage, I'm afraid," the device said, politely. It took the observer back, a little. None of the others spoke to him. Not until they were dead, at any rate.

  
The blade came out, went back in. A series of stabs–

 

A boy, standing in the shadows on the other side of the alley, watched this with wide-open eyes. He saw a man crouching over the fallen body of another man (it was too dark to distinguish details), savagely stabbing it, over and over and over. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came. He had followed the observer from the crowd, having tried to pick his pocket earlier. The stabbing went on and on.

 

Smith knelt beside the body of the automaton. There was, of course, no blood, through sparks flew out of the holes in Byron's body, and a viscous sort of liquid
did
, in fact, seep through the cuts and out, hissing as it touched the paved stones. Smith pushed the body onto its back. Byron's blind eyes stared up at him.

  "Byron," Smith said. And, when there was no response – "Byron!"

  But the machine was dying. Blue sparks of electricity jumped over the body and the crowd surged back, as though afraid it would explode. Smith raised his head; for just a moment he caught sight of a small, frightened figure standing at the other end of the alleyway. Then it disappeared.

  "Byron!"

  "Step aside, Smith."

  He knew the voice. But he didn't move. He checked the automaton but the blue sparks were increasing and he felt an electric shock run through him and he jumped back.

  "Everyone back!" The voice was authoritative and the crowd obeyed. Smith found himself dragged away; strong arms held him even as he fought to get back to Byron.

  But the automaton's body was aflame in a blue, electric light now, and the ground around it was hissing, yellow acidic liquid spilling out of the multiple cuts. Smith was pushed to the ground, still fighting. "Don't–" he began–

  With his cheek pressed against the cold hard stones he saw the flames begin to rise, yellow out of blue, slowly at first, then growing larger. Weight pressed down on his back; he couldn't move. He wanted to close his eyes but couldn't, and so he watched as the Lord Byron automaton burned, there in the alleyway where, centuries before, the dissident Dryden had been attacked.

  "So ends the old," the earlier voice said, close, in his ears, "to give birth to the new," and Smith closed his eyes, at last, and knew that they were wet, and he said, "Go away, Adler. Please, just go away."

 
 

 
 
 

The last time they had met she was an inspector and he was Mycroft's errand boy. Now Mycroft was gone and Irene Adler was chief of Scotland Yard, and looked it.

  They were sitting opposite each other in the bare interrogation room. When the fire had consumed the old automaton, Adler had instructed her officers to release Smith, but keep him where he was. She had secured the perimeter of the site, had officers interviewing potential witnesses, and two chattering police automatons, short squat things on wheels, were bent over what remained of the former Byron machine.

  "You," she said, turning at last back to Smith. "I thought you were dead."

  "Retired," he said, shortly, and she snorted. "Would that you were," she said.

  "Retired?"

  "Dead."

  "Adler," he said, "you need to let me go."

  "I need you to explain yourself."

  "This is a Bureau affair."

  Her eyes narrowed. "When a prominent member of society dies in the open, in
my
city, that makes it
my
affair."

  "And if he weren't
prominent
?" Smith said, knowing it was a cheap dig. She didn't dignify it with an answer. He said, "You're not handling the Mycroft investigation." Trying a different tack.

  "I've been
ordered
out of that investigation."

  "And you will be ordered out of this one."

  She smiled. There was nothing cheerful in that smile. "Until that happens," she said, "it is still mine."

  He sighed. He had been handling it all wrong, and now more people were dying. Had Byron known? he suddenly wondered. He must have known. Yet he did not appear to fight. Was he taken by surprise? Smith couldn't tell. He did not understand the mechanical, the way he thought. But it changed nothing. Byron was dead. Gone. The people at Charlie Company could build another replica but it would not be Byron, just something that looked like he had. A copy of a copy.