The Iron Duke, page 14
The bitterness in his voice startled her. He’d been angry about this once, she thought. But now there was more resignation than fury.
And he probably had it exactly right. While the Horde had occupied England, the navy had become the merchants’ muscle in Manhattan City. But it didn’t have to stay that way.
“That should change now that the Crown is funding naval operations again.” At least she hoped so. The taxes squeezed out of her had to be doing some good—and right or wrong, loyalty very often followed money. Even if she felt the pinch of it, Mina preferred that the navy took money from the Crown’s purse than from the merchants. “And England’s interests will be put ahead of the merchants’ again—and already must be. Not every commander is the merchants’ tool.”
“No, not all of them. But there’s one fewer now.”
Baxter, Mina realized. “There will soon be more like him.”
“That won’t help us today.” Trahaearn lowered the spyglass. His fingers curled around the side of her waist. “You’ve got armor. And your constable?”
She remembered to breathe. “He does, too.”
“All right.” His voice lowered against her ear, though no one could possibly have heard him before. “I’ll keep you safe, inspector.”
How? He was a danger to her, just by being who he was. Moving away from his hand, she said, “I’ll do that myself, sir.”
The captain cut Lady Corsair’s engines a mile from the shore and let the sails take them in. In the sudden quiet, Mina stared out over bow, entranced by the thin ribbon of yellow sand, and the tangled marsh surrounding Calais’s ruins, now little more than stone rubble. Beyond it, a forest stretched to the horizon. Never had she seen so many trees, gnarled and twisted near the sand, becoming fuller and greener farther away from the beach.
Zombies could hide between those trees. But how could an airship?
She looked to Trahaearn, standing beside her. “Where is Bontemps?”
He pointed to the west of Calais’s ruins, near the edge of the marsh, where the growth of trees didn’t seem so dense. “The old fort is there. They maintain the walls to keep out the zombies.”
Using the spyglass, she could just make out the stone remains—worn and weathered, but not rubble. Gray stone walls surrounded the ruins of long structures supported by crumbling arches. Aqueducts, maybe. As they drew closer, she spotted a few sheep grazing in the yards, and small wooden shacks that probably housed chickens, but nothing inhabitable by humans.
“Where do they live?”
“Underground,” Trahaearn said. “Evans settled here because he wanted to dig a tunnel under the Channel from the fort to Dover—”
A laugh burst from her. She couldn’t have heard that correctly. “A what?”
He grinned. “A tunnel under the Channel.”
“Did he actually try?”
“Yes. But it filled with water even before he reached the shore. He blamed the marshes.”
No. Shoulders shaking, Mina steepled her hands in front of her mouth, laughing silently. When her stomach hurt and she couldn’t take another breath, she pushed up her goggles and wiped her eyes. “Oh, he is insane.”
“But brilliant,” Trahaearn said. “When his tunnel failed, he kept digging. This area is a maze of underground chambers now. His generators power electric lights and continually pump the water seepage into the steam engines, so that all he has to do is keep the furnace stoked.”
Mina looked out over the fort again, eyes wide. “Are you certain that’s not just a drunk’s tale?”
“Three years ago, one of the Dame’s aviators went in to the Blacksmith’s for a new leg. Scarsdale found out, and chatted him up at the Hammer & Chain.”
More drunken stories then, but from a different source. “But where would Evans find enough fuel? That much coal would—Oh,” she realized. “The trees. But how does he avoid the zombies?”
“Evans built a harvester—an armored tank that saws down the trees and drags them back to the fort.”
Just like the Horde was rumored to do in other parts of Europe. Giant machines harvested their crops, and stored the food within walled settlements until it was shipped east.
“Inspector.” Trahaearn’s eyes were narrowed as he looked toward the fort. “The spyglass.”
She passed it to him, and watched his face as he peered through the telescope. Whatever he saw didn’t please him. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure.” He shook his head. “No one is manning the walls. There should be at least two lookouts—one for the forest, one for the sea.”
Uneasy, Mina watched the fort for any signs of humans—or zombies—but not a single one appeared as they flew closer.
They were passing over the fort walls when Newberry came up on the main deck, carrying two machetes, a gun belt with holsters, and a fat-barreled blunderbuss. He offered them to Trahaearn.
“Captain Corsair said that these were for you.”
Trahaearn nodded and shrugged out of his long overcoat—and then his short one, followed by his waistcoat. A white lawn shirt stretched over his broad back, doing little to hide the heavy muscles beneath . . . yet she would have liked to see them, anyway. Mina turned away, gripping the rail. Newberry joined her, his face red as a plum.
He cleared his throat. “I don’t see the airship, sir.”
Buckling the holsters around his hips, Trahaearn glanced over the side and nodded. “It’s there. The main yard.”
Puzzled, Mina stared at the ground before realizing that a fence surrounded a long, rectangular section of the yard, preventing the sheep from straying into that area. The oddly mottled ground surface in that section was sunken . . . as if a painted canvas had been stretched across a large hole.
Unbelievable. If the airship was anchored beneath that, she could hardly imagine the size of the underground chamber.
“Yasmeen will wait for us near the fort’s south wall,” Trahaearn said, pushing the machetes through leather loops on each side of the gun belt. “We’ll ride Lady Corsair’s cargo platform down into the compound rather than taking the ladder one at a time. The walls should keep out the zombies, but if one comes over, shoot it on sight. Aim for the head. We run straight for the cover over Bontemps, and drop in on the Dame from there.”
He hefted a coil of rope over his shoulder. Mina looked back toward the sea. The fort only sat five hundred yards from the beach, and the navy ships were drawing quickly nearer. “How long?”
“The wind picked up,” Trahaearn said. “They’ll be ready to anchor in twenty minutes, but it’ll take them longer to row into shore and to cross the marsh. So we need to be done in forty. Ready, then?”
With a nod, Mina followed him amidships, where two aviators waited at the platform’s control lever. With a rattle of chains, the cargo platform rose even with the decks. Bracing his hand on the gunwale, Trahaearn vaulted over the side onto the platform, and turned to help Mina while Newberry clambered over.
She looked back at the airship and blinked. All along the wooden sides, small gunports had opened. At each one, an aviator stood with a rifle, watching the ground below.
Trahaearn must have noted her surprise. “Worth every denier,” he said.
Apparently. Mina braced her feet as the platform began lowering. Trahaearn held the blunderbuss loosely in his left hand, barrel pointed toward the ground. Behind her, she heard Newberry draw in a deep, steadying breath.
The platform touched the ground, and she felt the vibration under her feet. She glanced at Trahaearn. “The generators?”
“Yes.”
“Then someone must be here.” A furnace didn’t stoke itself.
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
A sheep bleated as they raced across the yard. Mina’s heart pounded, but there were no shouts, no gunshots. Trahaearn reached the fence and lifted Mina over before she could protest. Three feet away from the fence, the painted canvas cover had been fastened to a metal frame with hook-and-eye loops. Mina quickly freed one corner, folding back a triangle of heavy canvas. She peered down into the chamber.
Bontemps’s white balloon almost reached the chamber’s canvas roof, and obscured most everything below. Squinting, Mina made out a few large crates stacked on the floor near the corner. No movement, no lights.
Trahaearn crouched beside her, the coil of rope in hand, and Mina saw that he’d tied the other end around the thick fence post. He tossed the rope into the chamber. “I’m down first. I’ll wave you in when it’s secure.”
Her heart leapt into her throat as he backed up and jumped in—not using the rope to climb down, but to slow his fall. On her knees, she braced her hands at the edge, looked over, and saw him land near the crates. The tension on the rope slackened. She tracked him by his white shirt as he walked along the wall of the chamber, until he disappeared from view beneath the sides of the balloon.
Glancing back, she checked on Newberry. The constable had apparently shed his nervousness. Weapons ready, he stood near the fence, quietly scanning the yard. Good man.
She looked into the chamber again as Trahaearn walked into view again. Mina took hold of the rope when he waved her down.
“Follow as soon as I’m at the bottom, Newberry.”
He nodded, and Mina eased herself over the side. Though her bugs made her strong enough to support her weight, they couldn’t guard against a friction burn. She clamped the rope between the sole of her boot and her leather-covered ankle, and eased down slowly. Dim light spilled into the chamber at the opposite end, and once Mina could see past Bontemps’s balloon, she saw that it came from a corridor leading east. Trahaearn stood near an unlit corridor at the near end.
As she reached bottom, he told her quietly, “I don’t hear any noises from this direction.”
They’d go the opposite way, then. She looked around the chamber while Newberry descended. Though damp, its stone walls faintly wet, the air didn’t smell of must or mildew. The chamber was warm, as if heated—but if so, the heat had to have been coming from the opposite corridor.
Newberry dropped the last few feet to the stone floor. Mina looked to Trahaearn, and gestured toward the lighted corridor. He nodded and led the way.
Unlike the straight rectangular walls in the chamber, the passageways were rounded at the top and sides, as if an enormous drill had passed through the stone, and the floor squared off later. A wire ran along the ceiling, connecting small bulbs that glowed with yellow light that flickered and buzzed. Incredible. She’d seen electric lamps before, but always used as novelties, and never put to practical use—that was, if burning a few trees every day in order to light an underground compound could be considered practical.
Halfway down the corridor, she noticed the smell. Sweet, pungent—and as familiar as an opium den. Someone had stopped here to smoke.
“Is Evans a pipelayer?” she whispered.
Trahaearn shook his head. “The Dame isn’t, either—and she’d be damned before allowing her crew to smoke. They can’t work if they’re blissed.”
The scent dissipated as they emerged into another large chamber—this one with a ceiling. Either a workspace or for storing Evans’s inventions, the chamber had been packed full of machinery. Steelcoats stood among piles of scrap metal. Flying autogyros lay against the wall, their bladed rotors propped beside them like steel daisies. A two-seater balloon with a flat envelope had been parked atop a hulking cylindrical vehicle that might have been a submersible. Two more lighted passageways led from the chamber: one directly across, and the other to the right. Mina followed Trahaearn across the chamber, picking her way through the machines. Accustomed to her mother’s meticulously organized attic, the place seemed a disastrous—and dangerous—mess.
A faint yell sounded from the passageway in front of them. Trahaearn paused. Mina did the same, listening as the yelling continued. Male, young, but not angry or panicked—the shouts had an unmistakably bored and insolent tone.
“That’s the yell of someone looking to make his jailer’s life hell, sir,” Newberry said behind her. “But he doesn’t truly think he’s getting out.”
Her pulse racing, Mina nodded. Andrew hadn’t been named among the boys held for ransom . . . but maybe he’d been left off the list.
She had to hope.
Trahaearn slowed at the mouth of the passageway. Turning, he tossed the blunderbuss to Newberry and drew a machete. “Walk backward, constable,” he said softly. “Watch this end of the corridor, and blow the head off anything that enters.”
The muscles in the back of Mina’s neck tightened. Another scent greeted her as she entered the passageway, more familiar than an opium den—and becoming stronger as they approached the next chamber.
There were dead here.
Trahaearn paused at the end of the corridor. “Inspector.”
She joined him, breathing through her mouth as the odor became overwhelming, and looked into the chamber. Oh . . . blue heavens. What had once been a chapel had become a morgue. Four wooden pews had been pushed to the walls, and on the floor lay three rows of sheet-wrapped bodies—fifteen in all.
“Cover me,” she said softly. She crouched next to the first body. Her fingers found the edge of the sheet beneath stiff hair and pulled the linen back from his face. He hadn’t been dead for more than a few days. She pushed aside his collar. Round pustules ringed with crimson had formed a rash beneath his jaw. His swollen tongue was dark red, the vessels in his eyes shot like scarlet starbursts. Unusual, but she’d seen it before.
She covered him and looked to Trahaearn. “Bug fever.”
“And the others?”
Probably not the fever. It wasn’t contagious—and usually only occurred when a severe injury forced the nanoagents to overextend their healing capabilities and to replicate too quickly, burning the body up from the inside.
She pulled the sheet back from the next. Ice slid down her spine. “This one, too.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were all caught in an explosion, or all injured at the same time.”
Ripping the rest of the sheet away, she looked for blood, bruising, anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing to account for the fever—and nothing on the next body.
“I couldn’t find any evidence of injury on Haynes’s body, either,” she realized.
“Haynes died of bug fever?”
“No. Absolutely no.” She shook her head, looked up at him. “Even frozen, the fever would have left its mark on him.”
Mouth set in a grim line, Trahaearn nodded. Pulling back sheets from faces, he checked each body. A few looked as if they’d only been dead for hours.
“Evans and the Dame aren’t here,” he said. “Fifteen men and women . . . this must be her entire crew.”
And there was nothing to be done for them now. Mina stood. “Let’s keep going.”
Through another chamber that had served as a dining room and parlor, Trahaearn found a short corridor that terminated at a wooden door inset with a barred window. A face peered between the bars. A moment later, cheers and whoops sounded. Mina gestured for them to quiet, to no avail.
Damn and blast. With Newberry guarding the head of the corridor, Mina approached the cell door and glanced through the bars. Though they appeared tired and hungry, the boys were yanking on boots and shirts, hugging each other—and still yelling. None looked injured. None were young enough to be Andrew.
Three boys crowded the window, fingers wrapped around the bars as they peered through. She tried the door. Locked.
“Who has the key?”
“The Dame,” one said. “Around her neck.”
Lovely. Mina gripped the bars and pulled. The door creaked but didn’t give, and earned her a disbelieving snort from one of the boys.
“Do you imagine we didn’t try that?”
Ungrateful toe-rag. She resisted the urge to bare her teeth at him and to point out that as bounders, they probably weren’t infected—which meant that her strength doubled theirs.
“Inspector.” She felt Trahaearn’s hand against her waist, gently guiding her to the side. He spared a glance for boys. “You’d best stand back.”
Mina waited, heart pounding. Bracing his feet, Trahaearn lowered his shoulder and shoved his weight into the door. Wood cracked like a shot, splintering the jamb. Trahaearn drew back. His great booted foot slammed beneath the lock. The door crashed open to more cheers. Eight boys boiled out, grabbing the duke’s hand to shake, whooping.
She hissed for them to quiet. Half did. She gritted her teeth and looked to Trahaearn.
“Pipe down!” His quiet command snapped like a whip. Silence immediately fell. Some looked to him wide-eyed, and others with dawning realization. Mina stepped forward before they could begin fawning at the Iron Duke—or sneering at His Bastard Grace. With bounders, one never knew.
“Are the Dame and Jasper Evans still alive?”
Nods all around. All right. Then she and Trahaearn weren’t leaving yet, but these young men were.
She gestured to Newberry and spoke loud enough for him to hear. “The constable will lead you to our airship. You will not make noise. You will follow his directions without hesitation. Your way out is via a rope. I’m ordering him to climb up first, so that he can haul you up—he’s not leaving you down here. Understood?”
More nods. Good enough.
She led them to the end of the corridor. Still holding the blunderbuss at ready, Newberry looked down at her. She read his reluctance—not to lead the boys out, but to leave her. She reassured him with a glance.
“All set, constable?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll see you on Lady Corsair, then. I recommend that you move at a trot.”
