The Iron Wyrm Affair

Chapter Twenty-Nine I Find Myself Reluctant to Disappoint

It was just as well he had taken the coja. If he had not, the ride would have been even more a nightmare. The knocking of the clocktrain’s pistons, steam and charm working together to an infernal rhythm, was enough to drive a mentath’s sensitive brain, recently bruised, into a state very near absolute madness. Still, the compartment was adequate, cushioned seats and a window he ensured was firmly shut – for he found he did not wish to see any of the flying cinders trains were famous for.

The difficulty of finding lodgings when they arrived in cold, fogbound Dover was most provoking. Valentinelli was little help, presumably because he cared not a whit where he laid his intriguing head, but Clare required a measure of comfort. There was the question of anonymity, too, but in the end, a respectable hotel was found, a room secured, and Clare gazed out of the window at the pinpricks of yellow gaslight receding down the slope of the town before the Neapolitan, making a spitting noise, shoved him aside and yanked the pineapple-figured curtains closed. Sig, who had napped on the train, took one of the beds, stretched out atop the covers without removing his boots, and was snoring within moments.

“Porco,” Valentinelli sneered, and took himself to a chair by the coal fire. Clare settled himself in the other chair, propping his feet on an uncomfortably hard hassock covered in the same pineapple fabric as the curtains. The coja still sparked, his faculties honed and extraneous clutter cleared away, every inch of his capability aching to be used.

He tented his fingers below his nose, and shut out the sound of Sig’s noisy sleep. Valentinelli watched him, dark eyes half lidded and thoughtful. The lamp on a small table at Clare’s elbow gave a warm glow, and the fire was delightful.

The entire jolting, unhappy experience of travel had almost managed to unseat the excellent dinner he’d finished. Miss Bannon’s pendant was cold against his chest, and he wondered how the sorceress fared.

Clare closed his eyes.

“Eh, mentale.” Valentinelli shifted in his chair. “Use the bed, no? I wake you, at time.”

“I am quite comfortable, thank you. I wish to think.”

“She got you too.” The Neapolitan’s chuckle was not cheery at all. “La strega, she get every one of us.”

Clare’s irritation mounted. “Unless you have something truly useful to say, signor, could you please leave me in peace?”

“Oh, useful.” Valentinelli’s tone turned dark. “We are very useful, mentale. She send us off to find a shipment of something. Bait again. Dangle mentale and Ludo, see what happens.”

“We are not bait,” Clare immediately disagreed.

“Oh no?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I believe we are Miss Bannon’s last hope.”

The Neapolitan was silent.

“Consider this, my noble assassin. We are three men against enemies who wish nothing less than the destruction of Britannia’s Empire and quite possibly the murder of Her physical vessel. Given Miss Bannon’s attachment to Queen Victrix, what does it tell you that she has left the defence of Her Majesty to us? For that is what she has done by sending us here. She is pursuing an enemy more dangerous, in her opinion, than rebellion or even assassination. The fact that she has left this part of the prosecution of said conspiracy to us I find outright disturbing in its implications. Also, did you notice the second Shield? You must have, for he was at dinner. For Miss Bannon to engage another of Mikal’s type, when by all accounts she has resisted doing so quite strongly, makes me think this situation very dire indeed.” He tilted his head slightly, his eyes still closed. The comforting darkness behind his lids held geometric patterns, interlocking vortices of probability and deduction. “Also, she left us at table and quit her home most ostentatiously, drawing off whatever pursuit she could and waving herself before possible attackers like a handkerchief fluttered out of a window. She has given us every chance, sir, and furthermore gave her word not to treat me as bait. No, my noble assassin, we are men Miss Bannon is relying upon. And I do not think that lady relies easily.”

Silence filled the room to bursting. The quiet had several components – the whisper of the lamp’s flame, the coal fire shifting and flaring briefly, a steady dripping outside the window. The fog here was not Londinium’s yellow soup, but it still pressed down on the town from white cliff to railway station, muffling the dosshouses and rollicking publics where Jack Tar drank to dry ground. It muffled the sound of clockhorse hooves and rumbling wheels outside the hotel, and it gave even the warm room a dry, bitter scent tinged with salt.

Valentinelli breathed a soft curse in his native tongue.

“Quite,” Clare commented, drily. “Now do be still, sir. I must cogitate. For I will be brutally frank: I do not see much hope of us fulfilling the task Miss Bannon has given us, yet I find myself most unwilling to disappoint her.”

Not to mention that Londinium – and indeed, all Britannia – would be distinctly uncomfortable for a good long while if Queen Victrix was removed from the living and Britannia searching for another vessel, or if the Queen were unhappy under her mother’s control again. An unhappy vessel means an unhappy Isle, whether from bad weather, crop failure, or the creeping anomie that would thread through every part of the Empire.

And, dash it all, this entire affair was simply an affront to the tidiness and public order any good subject of Britannia preferred.

Clare settled himself deeper in the chair. His breathing deepened.

There are more logic engines. I must be prepared.

An onlooker would think he slept. But it was a mentath’s peculiar doubling he performed, half his faculties engaged upon the riddle of tangling the three parties wishing harm to Britannia in their own brisket; how best to bring this affair to a satisfactory conclusion. The other half, sharpened by coja and shutting out all distractions, embarked on a complicated set of mental exercises. The equations the logic engine had forced him to solve without preparation rested on a series of mental chalkboards, and he set himself to untangling them at leisure and learning the patterns behind their hot white glare.

Motionless, sweat beading on his brow, Clare worked.

He surfaced to the Neapolitan’s grip on his arm. “Wake, mentale.” the assassin whispered. “Ships coming in.”

The lamp guttered, throwing shadows over the pineapple-embossed paper. The damn room was a shrine to tropical fruit, Clare thought sourly, and moved very gingerly, stretching his legs. The body sometimes protested after a long period of torpidity. After a few minutes of various stretches, watched by a curious and half-amused Valentinelli, he found his hat and was not surprised to see Sigmund yawning and scratching at his ribs, peering carefully out of the window.

“Too quiet,” the Bavarian muttered. “I do not like this.”

“Ludo doesn’t either.” For once, the assassin did not sound sour. “But it could be the tide. Or the fog.”

Clare washed his face at the basin, and a quarter-hour afterwards found all three of them outside in the thick fog, making for the docks. After a brisk walk, there were no more complaints of it being too quiet.

Ports, like Londinium itself, rarely slept, and the infusion of fresh seaswell into a harbour was a potent yeast. Even through the thick white-cotton vapour shouts and curses could be heard, the straining of hawsers and the heave-ho chants of hevvymancers. Saltwitches chanted too and wove their fingers in complicated rhythms, drawing the fog aside in braided strands and lighting the ships into port. Shipwitches would be standing at bows, easing the tons of wood and sail safely towards the docks; pilots cursed and spat, hawkers, merchants, and agents rubbed elbows. Bullyboys and Shanghai-men with fresh crops of charmed and coffled Jack Tars waited impatiently – they would be paid a shilling a head, in some cases, less for any with obvious deformities, and the tars would be trapped on a ship as crew for God knew how long. Those with even a small talent for sorcery were safe from the coffles; the tars were those born without. And there were many of them – for what else was a Jack Tar to do when the ship he had been chained aboard was in a foreign port? To sign on a trifle less unwillingly was his only option, either for the pay due at the end of the voyage or for the simple fact that the sea worked its way into a man’s blood.

The crowd, in short, was immense, even at this dark and early hour. Some indirect questioning brought the news that the Srkány, sailing from Old Emsterdamme, had indeed docked.

As a matter of fact, it had docked last night, and had sailed on the outgoing tide; nobody knew where, and the harbourmaster’s office was disinclined to answer such queries. Clare cared little, because Sigmund, with his usual genius for such things, struck up a conversation with a hevvymancer who had helped unload the Srkány’s cargo, among which were several crates bound for an estate near Upper Hardres. Heavy crates the hevvymancers cursed, for they behaved oddly under the lifting and settling charms.

Clare would hazard a guess that this was the very estate Masters had perfected the core at, never mind that it was a Crown property. Sig paid for the dour-faced hevvy’s next pint of ale and they plunged back into the crowd, Clare nervous without good reason. Or, perhaps, the reason had not presented itself yet, struggling to rise from an observation he had not given proper weight to.

When he finally located the source of the unease, it was marked enough to force him to lay hold of Sig’s arm and pull the Bavarian into a close, conveniently dark, reeking alley. “Look there,” he muttered, and Sigmund knew better than to protest. “And there. What do you see?”

Valentinelli swore, melding with the dimness behind them. Clare was perhaps just the tiniest bit gratified that he had seen them before the Neapolitan.

Across the street, a heavyset man with tremendous sweeping whiskers stepped sideways, as if he did not quite have his land legs yet. His coat was of a cloth not often seen on Britannia’s Isle, and his bearing was unmistakably military. He had, so far, wandered once up and down in front of the nameless inn already doing a brisk business in gin and merriment, and he turned to make another pass.

Once Clare’s attention had snagged on him, other bits of wrongness blared like trumpets. “The man in grey, across the street. See how he holds his pipe? No Englishman does so. And his boots – Hessians, and shone to a fare-thee-well. Now, look there, chap. Another one, with Hessians and his coat. You’ll notice it’s turned inside out. There, the two men in the tavern door – the same boots, the same coats. They have sought to disguise themselves, one with a kerchief and another with those dreadful breeches. Look at their whiskers. Not the fashion this side of the Channel, dear Sig. What does that tell you?”

The Bavarian spread his hands, waiting for Clare to answer his own rhetorical question.

“Prussians, Sig. Mercenaries, I’d lay ten pound on it. Look at the way those two hold their hands – they are accustomed to rifles. That one is a captain – he subtly presents his chest, so none below him in rank will miss the badge he has been forced to lay aside. And see, that one there? He is watching the street.”

“This is Dover,” Sigmund said heavily. “Different men from different countries come here, ja?”

“Indisputably.” Clare frowned. “But there are two in the door, another there standing watch, and the captain is patrolling. Looking for stragglers, perhaps? Or making certain nobody remarks that the inn there, and probably all the rooms inside it, is full to the brim with Prussian mercenaries. That is why Prussian capacitors, and that is what else was on the ship. I expected as much.”

Valentinelli swore again. “We leave now. Now.”

“Quite.” Clare jammed his hat more firmly on his head. “We must find horses. I doubt the train runs to Upper Hardres before noon.”