Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

“Pennyroyal!”

“Yes, dearest?”

“I have been looking over the arrangements for our Moon Festival ball,” said Boo-Boo, “and I could not help noticing that you have invited the Flying Ferrets.”

Pennyroyal made a sort of shrugging motion with his entire body.

“I’m not sure we should be entertaining mercenaries, Nimrod.”

“I just happened to invite their leader, Orla Twombley,” Pennyroyal protested. “I may have said she could bring a few of her friends if she wanted. Wouldn’t want her to feel left out, you know… She’s a famous aviatrix. Her flying machine, the Combat Wombat, downed three air dreadnoughts at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal.”

As he spoke, a vision of the female air ace filled Pennyroyal’s mind, sleek and gorgeous in her pink leather flying suit. He had always prided himself on how popular he was with the ladies. Why, in his younger days he had enjoyed passionate romances with exotic and beautiful women (Minty Bapsnack, Peaches Zanzibar, and the Traktiongrad Smolensk Ladies’ Croquet Team all sprang to mind). He’d been rather hoping that the dashing Orla Twombley might soon be added to that list.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” said Boo-Boo frostily.

Pennyroyal shifted awkwardly in his chair. “Can’t say I’ve ever really noticed…” he mumbled. He hated scenes like this. That nasty, suspicious look in Boo-Boo’s eyes was just the sort of thing, he thought, to put a chap right off his breakfast. Luckily he was saved from any further interrogation by one of his house slaves, who opened the breakfast-room door and said, “Mr. Plovery to see you, Your Worship.”

“Excellent!” cried Pennyroyal, and leaped up gratefully to greet his visitor. “Plovery! My dear fellow! How splendid to see you!”

Walter Plovery, an antique dealer from one of the fouler warrens of the Laines, was the mayor’s advisor on Old Tech, and he had helped Pennyroyal to make himself a tidy little nest egg by secretly selling off items from the Brighton Museum. He was a small, nervous man with a face that looked as if somebody had molded it out of dough and then forgotten to bake it. He seemed startled by Pennyroyal’s exuberant greeting—people weren’t usually so glad to see him, but then, people weren’t usually being quizzed about lovely aviatrices by Mrs. Pennyroyal when he walked in on them.

“I have been doing some research into that item Your Worship showed me,” he said, sidling closer to Pennyroyal. His eyes flicked uncertainly toward Boo-Boo. “You remember, Your Worship? The item?”

“Oh, there’s no need for secrecy, Plovery,” Pennyroyal told him. “Boo-Boo knows all it about it. Don’t you, my little upside-down cake? That metal book affair I swiped off of old Shkin last week. I had Plovery take a look at it, just to see what he thought…”

Boo-Boo smiled faintly and reached for the newspaper, turning to the gossip page. “Do excuse me, Mr. Plovery. I find talk about Old Tech so dull…”

Plovery nodded, bobbed a bow in her general direction, and turned back to Pennyroyal. “You still have the item?”

“It’s in the safe in my office,” said Pennyroyal. “Why? Reckon it might be worth something?”

“Po-o-ossibly,” said Plovery cautiously.

“The Lost Girl who came with it seemed to think it had something to do with submarines.”

Mr. Plovery allowed himself a chuckle. “Oh no, Your Worship. She clearly knows nothing about the machine languages of the Ancients.”

“A machine language, eh?”

“A code, which would have been used by our ancestors to communicate with one of their computer brains. I can find no example of this particular language anywhere in the historical records. However, it is similar to certain surviving fragments of American military code.”

“American, eh?” said Pennyroyal, and then, “Military? That should be worth a bob or two. This war’s been dragging on for fourteen years. People are desperate. The R D departments of the big fighting cities would pay a fortune for a sniff at a super-weapon.”

Plovery’s face grew ever so slightly pink as he imagined his percentage of a fortune. “Would you like me to try and arrange a sale, Your Worship? I have contacts in the Mobile Free States…”

Pennyroyal shook his head. “No, Plovery, I’ll handle this. There’s no point doing anything until after Moon Festival. I’ll keep the book in my safe until the celebrations are over and then get in touch with a few of my contacts. There’s an archaeologist of my aquaintance, a charming young woman named Cruwys Morchard; she often stops in Brighton in the autumn time, and she always seems to be on the lookout for unusual bits of Old Tech. Yes, I think I can arrange a sale without troubling you, Plovery.”

He shooed the disgruntled Old Tech dealer away and sat down to continue his breakfast, only to be confronted with the Palimpsest, which his wife was holding up for him to see. There, on the front page of the gossip section, was a full-length photograph of himself entering a casino in the Laines on the arm of Orla Twombley, who was looking even more goddesslike than Pennyroyal remembered.

“Well,” he blustered, “she’s not really what I’d call pretty…”

“Poor Boo-Boo!” said Wren, standing unnoticed on a gallery high above the breakfast room beside her new friend Cynthia Twite. Pennyroyal’s chat with Plovery had been too quiet for her to overhear, but she had listened to every word of the exchange about Orla Twombley. “I don’t know how she puts up with it…”

“Puts up with what?” asked Cynthia innocently.

“Didn’t you hear? Boo-Boo thinks he’s been having a liaison with Orla Twombley!”

“What’s a ‘liaison’?” asked Cynthia, frowning. “Is it a sort of cake?”

Wren sighed. Cynthia was very sweet, very pretty, and very dim. She had been a house slave at the Pavilion for several years, and when Wren arrived, Mrs. Pennyroyal had asked her to be Wren’s friend and explain the workings of the household to her. Wren was glad of the companionship, but she felt she already understood more about the life of the Pavilion than Cynthia had ever known.

“Boo-Boo thinks that Pennyroyal and Ms. Twombley are having a fling,” she explained patiently.

“Oh!” Cynthia looked scandalized. “Oh, poor Mistress! To think, a man of his age throwing himself at slinky aviatrices!”

“I could tell you some things about Pennyroyal that are a lot worse than that,” Wren whispered, and then stopped, remembering that she must not tell Cynthia anything. To everyone on Cloud 9, Wren was just a Lost Girl who knew nothing about Pennyroyal beyond what he’d written in his silly books.

“What?” asked Cynthia, intrigued. “What things?”

“I’ll tell you another time,” Wren promised, knowing that Cynthia would forget.

To change the subject, she said, “Who is that boy behind Boo-Boo’s chair? The one with the fan? I saw him at the pool the other day. He always looks so sad.”

“Oh, he’s another new arrival, like you,” said Cynthia excitedly. “He’s been here for only a few weeks. His name’s Theo Ngoni, and he used to be a Green Storm aviator! He got captured in a big battle somewhere, and Pennyroyal bought him for Boo-Boo as a birthday present. It’s meant to be ever so stylish to have a captured Mossie as a slave, but I think it’s scary. I mean, we could all be murdered in our beds, couldn’t we! Look at him! Don’t he look vicious?”

Wren studied the boy. He did not look vicious to her. He was no older than she was, and far too young to be fighting in battles. How terrible it must have been for him to be defeated and dragged away from his home and sent here to wave a fan at the Pennyroyals all day! No wonder he seemed so miserable. Wren felt sorry for him, and that soon made her feel sorry for herself too, and reminded her that she should be looking for a way to escape from this place.