Philip Reeve - Infernal Devices

They climbed the winding stairs behind the ballroom and passed the door to a little staircase that led down to the Cloud 9 control room; it was open, with worried-looking crewmen peering out. Lights were burning in the mayor’s office, and as they drew closer, Wren heard Pennyroyal’s voice, shrill and wobbly with alarm, saying, “The intruder may still be at large!” Slaves and militia were crowded round the open door, but they drew aside respectfully as their lady mayoress approached.

Pennyroyal was standing beside his desk, along with two officers of his guard. He looked up as his wife and her retinue entered. “Boo-Boo! Don’t look…”

Boo-Boo looked, and gasped. Wren looked too, and wished she hadn’t. Theo looked, and seemed quite undisturbed, but then he’d been in battle and had probably seen things like this before.

Walter Plovery lay on the floor beneath the open safe. He was clutching the Tin Book of Anchorage, and from the way that it partly hid his face, Wren guessed that he had been holding it up to try to protect himself. It had done no good. Something sharp had been driven through the breast of his evening robe into his heart. The smell of the blood reminded Wren very forcefully of her last night in Anchorage and the deaths of Gargle and Remora.

“Must have been a knife,” one of the militia officers was saying lamely. “Or maybe a spear…”

“A spear?” shouted Pennyroyal. “In my Pavilion? On the night before the MoonFest ball?”

The officers swapped sheepish glances. Like most of Brighton’s soldiers, they had signed up mainly for the uniforms—fetching scarlet numbers with pink trimmings and a lot of gold tassels. They had never expected to have to face dead bodies and mysterious intruders, and now that they were, they both felt a bit queasy.

“How did he get in?” asked one.

“There’s no sign of a break-in,” agreed the other.

“Well, I expect he took the spare key from the vase outside,” said Pennyroyal. “I keep a spare key there…”

The officers studied the body at their feet and nervously fingered the hilts of their ornamental swords.

“It looks to me as if he was trying to burgle Your Worship’s safe,” decided the first.

“Yes; what is that thing he’s holding?” said the second.

“Nothing!” Pennyroyal snatched the Tin Book from the dead man’s hands and thrust it back inside the safe, locking the door behind it. “Nothing of value, and anyway, it isn’t here; you didn’t see it…”

There was a thunder of fleece-lined boots on the stairs, and Orla Twombley burst into the room with half a dozen Flying Ferrets at her back. They carried drawn swords, and the aviatrix used hers to point at Wren. “That’s the girl!”

“What? I say…” Pennyroyal turned to peer at Wren.

“She came asking my lads to ready your sky yacht,” Orla Twombley explained, taking a menacing step toward Wren as if she thought it might be safest to run the girl through where she stood. “Had some cock-and-bull story about the mayoress here wanting the old sack of gas refueled so she could go shopping in Benghazi…”

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Pennyroyal excitedly. “The girl was preparing her getaway! Once a burglar, always a burglar, eh?”

Oh, gods , thought Wren. She had never imagined that her careful plan could go as wrong as this. What would they do to her? Send her back to Shkin, probably, and demand a refund…

Everybody was talking excitedly Pennyroyal raising his voice above the rest. “Plovery must have recruited her to help him rob me, only she murdered him for the loot instead! And no doubt this Mossie devil was in it with her!” he added, pointing at Theo. “Well done, Orla, my angel! Without your quick thinking, they’d have made off aboard the Peewit with the… ah… contents of my safe.”

“Rubbish!” said Boo-Boo, in a voice that made them all fall silent and turn nervously to look at her. She had drawn herself up to her full height and turned the color that mayoresses turn when they hear their husbands refer to attractive aviatrices as “my angel” right in front of them. She put her arm around Wren. “What Wren told Miss Twombley was entirely true. I did ask for the Peewit to be refueled. I was planning to go shopping in Benghazi tomorrow, though I don’t suppose I shall feel up to it now. Anyway, Wren and Theo were with me when poor Plovery cried out; neither of them could possibly have done this dreadful deed.”

Wren and Theo stared at her, astonished that Boo-Boo would lie to protect them.

“But if it wasn’t them,” asked Pennyroyal, “who… ?”

“That is not for me to find out,” said Boo-Boo haughtily. “I am returning to my quarters. Please search for your murderer quietly. Come, Wren; come, Theo. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

She turned and strode out of the room, past the chastened aviators. Wren curtsied to Pennyroyal and hurried after Theo and her mistress. “Mrs. Pennyroyal,” she whispered as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “Thank you.”

Boo-Boo seemed not to hear. “What a dreadful business!” she said. “That poor, poor man. My husband was to blame, I am sure.”

“You think the mayor killed him?” asked Theo. He sounded as if he didn’t believe it, but Wren knew Professor Pennyroyal was quite capable of murdering someone if it suited him. Look at how he had treated Dad! She could see now how he had fooled everyone in Anchorage for so long, for he was certainly a good actor. How shocked he had looked, standing over Plovery’s body…

“Old Tech!” sighed Boo-Boo. “It is never anything but trouble. Oh, I do not say that Pennyroyal wielded the fatal blade himself, but I expect he has set up some nasty booby trap to protect his safe. He would stop at nothing to protect that ridiculous Tin Book. What is so special about it, anyway? Do you know, child?”

Wren shook her head. All she knew was that the Tin Book had been the cause of yet another death. She wished she had never taken the horrid thing from Miss Freya’s library.

Outside the doors of her bedroom, Boo-Boo shooed away the guard and turned to Wren and Theo. She studied them both with a sad smile, taking Wren’s hands in hers. “My dear children,” she said, “I am so sorry that your attempt to fly away has failed. I’m sure that is what you were doing, Wren? Having my husband’s yacht fueled so that you and Theo could fly away together?”

“I—” said Theo.

“Theo had nothing to do with it!” Wren protested. “I ran into him in the corridor. We were both coming to see what had happened—”

Mrs. Pennyroyal raised a hand; she would hear none of it. She had done her best to stop this happening, but now that it had, she found that it was all rather thrilling and romantic. “You need not hide the truth from me,” she said, and tears came into her eyes. “I hope I am your friend as well as your mistress. As soon as I saw you together, your tryst interrupted by the death cry of that unhappy man, I understood everything. How I wish that I had known a burning passion like yours instead of getting married off to Pennyroyal to please my family…”

“But—”

“Ah, but yours is a forbidden love! You remind me of Prince Osmiroid and the beautiful slave girl Mipsie in Lembit Oriole’s wonderful opera Trodden Weeds. But you must be patient, my dears. What hope of happiness do you have if you escape? Runaway slaves, penniless and far from home, pursued by bounty hunters wherever you turn. No, you must stay here awhile, and meet only in secret. Now that I know how much you long to leave, I shall do all that is in my power to persuade Pennyroyal that he must set you free.”

Wren could feel herself blushing. How could anyone imagine that she was in love with Theo Ngoni, of all people? She glanced at him and was annoyed to see that he looked embarrassed too, as if the very idea that he might be in love with Wren were ridiculous.