Emma Holloway - A Study in Ashes

Tobias would have gone that way himself, if he’d been a well man, but he didn’t have the strength to run or the ability to shoot anymore. The poison had taken too much. He was far more useful as a decoy.

“Bloody dangerous if he gets trapped down there. The steam barons will post guards.” Yelland looked at the position of the sun. “I’m guessing it’s not too late. We should send men down to watch for him. There’s an entrance at the Temple.”

“Do it,” Tobias said. He wasn’t technically in charge of the soldiers, but the fact that he led the procession gave him authority.

Yelland reached down to grab someone’s collar and issue orders while Tobias squinted at the mass of armed men ahead. The air stank of panic, blood, and the smoky, minty stench of aether weapons. His skin itched with sweat and he thought briefly how much he wanted something to drink, but the thought faded the moment he grasped what he was looking at.

The Gold King’s army was ahead, the Blue King behind and to the north, where Covent Garden sounded like a war zone. The Thames was to their south. They were boxed in.

And Jeremy was somewhere ahead, on the other side of the Yellowbacks. He’d had no idea Keating’s army was so vast. He’d made pieces of it, but never seen it all at once. With a sinking sensation, he recognized the fruits of his own genius trundling toward them. There were the wheeled domes of steel and brass, equipped with gunports on top, the knobs of the aether devices looking like shiny hats. He would have been proud if the bloody things weren’t opening fire.

Men were grabbing objects from everywhere—chairs, crates, broken carriages, and dead bodies—and piling the mass across the road. The barricade offered some protection and would slow down anything with wheels. A handful of Moore’s soldiers crouched behind the makeshift wall and braced their rifles in a ready position.

Someone waved a Union Jack. “Down with the Steam Council!”

Tobias took up the cry, raising his fist in the air, then ducked when a bullet whizzed by. Yelland returned the compliment, and the bullets stopped.

The domed devices were every bit as dangerous as Tobias had made them. They were manned from inside, combining the best of human intelligence with mechanical durability. Even more worrisome were the small clockwork explosives that could scurry about like mice. He’d been particularly pleased with the cleverness of the concept, but now he saw a swarm flowing toward the Blue Boys. It was war, and the Blue King was his enemy, but how many lives would be lost, Tobias wondered, because he’d had a clever idea one afternoon?

The only mercy was that the rebels weren’t the primary target of either army; Blue and Gold were most intent on killing one another. Bombs struck, fountaining flesh and masonry into the air. The merciless noise intensified and Tobias’s body tightened until every muscle ached. Primal instinct begged to flee, but he was trapped and all they could do was fight to the end.

He aimed one of the mounted aether guns that formed the caterpillar’s antennae and searched for a target. A brass-plated dome came into sight. It seemed wrong to destroy one of his own creations, but he fired anyhow, aiming for the spot where he knew the aether distiller hid behind the metal plates. He was rewarded with a bright, hideous flash as the thing went in a glory of fire. Someone screamed, “Vive la révolution!” as if suddenly they were in Robespierre’s France.

The moment Yelland understood the device’s weakness, he began aiming at its cousins. Unfortunately, ordinary bullets couldn’t penetrate the shell. Even worse, the devices began firing back in double time.

It took him a moment to realize that the rebels weren’t the target. Tobias swung the gun around, using its sight to get a better view of the battlefield. He nearly staggered back when he was suddenly confronted with the hideous, sweat-slicked visage of King Coal himself. Tobias raised his head to see where the Blue King was and made an inarticulate moan of dismay.

So far they had only seen half the Blue army. The other half was rolling across the Waterloo Bridge, the weight making the old pilings shake. They were huge monsters of steel—every one a gigantic engine trapped in a spherical metal cage as tall as a house. Each cage rolled forward like a ball, the engine inside suspended upright as its latticework superstructure crawled ahead. Twin channels had been left free of the crisscrossing steel bars of the globe, accommodating huge magnetic aether cannons jutting from the core of the engine. Tobias counted. There had to be two dozen of the things surrounded by ranks of armed Blue Boys. At the front of the column, the foremost of the rolling spheres was occupied by the Blue King, who peered out from the thing’s cockpit like a malevolent frog. Directly beside him marched Moriarty in steel and leather armor.

The sight rendered Tobias dizzy with disbelief—if he’d been trapped before, now he was all but pinned in place. And they were coming straight at his left flank.

What else could go wrong?

EVELINA WAS HUDDLED under Nick’s arm, but the joy and relief of their reunion had been short-lived. Striker was hunched over the aether distillers, as close to tears as Evelina had ever seen the man. “All three of them are blasted to pieces, and we’re down to fumes in the engines. Athena can hold the ship together for a bit, but we’re going to sink without more aether.”

“How long?” Nick asked in a leaden voice.

“Not long.”

Evelina blinked unsteadily. She had just come inside from the roost, and the interior of the ship was murky, robbed of the green underwater glow of the distillers. But she could see well enough to grasp the damage to the Athena . Part of the rigid honeycomb inside the balloon had been torn, allowing about a third of the gas to escape. In addition, the tall glass distillers had cracked and would need to be replaced.

“Our best chance is to boil up some of this stuff.” Striker kicked a sack at his feet.

“What is it?” Evelina asked.

“It’s a powdered form of aether.”

Evelina slipped from Nick’s grasp and bent over the bag. She picked up a few grains that had escaped onto the floor, rolling them between her thumb and forefinger. She gaped, realizing that it was precisely the same stuff she’d used in her chemistry experiments at school. “I wouldn’t suggest boiling it,” she said in a small voice, realizing that she’d never actually completed the assignments without flames or explosion. “I could help you if you like.”

“The instructions are on the bag,” Striker grumbled, leaning against the walls to cradle his head. “I can’t remember the formula right now.”

He’d taken a bad blow when the ship had been hit. He was still on his feet, but Evelina suspected he’d been struck harder than he was letting on. Combined with the fact that he couldn’t read, he wasn’t the best candidate for mixing up a highly combustible stew.

“How much do we need?” Nick asked.

“A few barrels should do it,” Striker said. “Enough to fill the pumps a few times over.”

A few barrels? Professor Bickerton’s face filled Evelina’s mind, and she suddenly began to giggle. She put a hand over her mouth to silence it. Nick and Striker wouldn’t understand.

I wanted the freedom to conduct experiments on my own. Who knew all I had to do was blow up an air fleet to get it?

“All right,” she said more calmly, hoping she remembered everything she’d learned at Camelin. “The first thing we’ll need is the exact proportion of water and alcohol.”

“What kind of alcohol?” Nick asked. “A lot of the stores were destroyed in the blast.”