“I understand, sir,” he said, which was not entirely true. “Perhaps we could also fortify ourselves?”
Figary pointed vaguely. “Larder,” he said. “Washroom. Wardrobe. Have at them, youngsters.” He glared pointedly at Chevie. “Most especially the wardrobe for you, mademoiselle. You appear to have neglected to don outerwear. I shall never think on the letters F-B-I from this moment forth without a shudder.” And to illustrate, Michael Figary shuddered as though a dram of tar water had slithered down his gullet, then he left Malarkey’s guests to their own devices.
“I still like him,” said Chevie. “Are you hungry?”
“I was,” replied Riley. “But then I thought on the squirming piles of maggots feasting on Otto’s rancid flesh. You?”
“I was,” said Chevie. “Then I remembered being stuffed into that dumbwaiter the last time I was here, listening to a murdering goon named Barnum talk lovingly to the knife he planned to dismember me with.”
Riley grimaced. “Maybe we could shift ourselves to the drawing room. Perhaps have a medicinal drop of the craythur or two for our nerves and a catch-up until Otto comes back to the land of the living?”
Chevie draped her arm around her only real friend. “A catch-up, at least. I like your cloak. The Great Savano, eh?”
“Do you approve of the moniker?”
“I am flattered, kid.”
“I was considering a savage Injun costume.”
“I am less flattered.”
“One gin?”
“No.”
“Fine. Beer it is.”
“No drinking, Riley. We need to be sharp for Moley and GooGoo.”
This stopped Riley in his tracks. “Moley and GooGoo? You have not previously mentioned this pair.”
Chevie steered him to the door. “Oh, a person needs to be sitting down in a bright room before I fill them in on Moley and GooGoo.”
“No time like the present.”
This casual remark set Chevie laughing until the tears coursed down her sallow cheeks.
Centuries before these events took place, in 1306, King Ned so detested the impenetrable fogs that regularly settled over the low-lying city that he banned coal fires entirely. It was the interaction of smoke with haze from London’s myriad rivers and streams that formed the infamous pea-soupers that held river commerce for ransom more effectively than any army of buccaneers could ever hope to.
But Ned’s mortality tripped him the following year, and his decree sailed down the river with no return ticket, and with it the city’s brief respite from the damp grip of its indigenous fog, which descended vengefully. Charles Dickens described it like a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Clover Vallicose and Lunka Witmeyer were fogbound now, as they grimly trudged to return Anton Farley to their savior and spiritual leader: the blessed Clayton Box, who planned on saving the world from the sins of man.
Vallicose had risen joyfully to this new challenge. Indeed, the Thundercat could not remember ever feeling so utterly righteous in the execution of her duty. The vapors of all niggly concerns and confusions were burned away to reveal the instrument of steel purpose that she had become. It was nothing short of a metamorphosis. The past did not matter, and neither did the future. All that mattered was purpose. Clover barely considered herself human anymore.
I am truly an angel for Box. Plucked from my universe to serve Him.
Because she was worthy. That was the only possible reason she had been chosen.
Vallicose carried Farley on one shoulder, easily bearing his weight—joyfully bearing it, in fact. Hoping for discomfort, so that she could offer it up as a personal sacrifice.
Witmeyer forged their path, ranging ahead through the mist that seemed to paw at her face and hands; and where it settled, she swore it hissed and burned like acid. In one respect she had been glad of the fog, for it reduced all persons to ghostly shapes. Everyone loomed and lurched and seemed a monster; therefore there were no monsters, and a couple of Thundercats could move as freely as any other unfortunate with no other choice than to traverse the city on such a befuddled evening. But she quickly forgot this boon and began to resent the sulfurous miasma that reeked of river sewage and coated the tongue and nostrils with bitter resin.
Lunka’s faith was not as strong as that of Clover Vallicose. She had always believed that there had indeed been a Colonel Box, who rallied an army to the oldest banner on earth—holy war—and who conquered far-off lands in much the same way the Crusaders had centuries before. Good luck to him, Lunka had thought, and all who sailed with him. Some men sleep better with a cause as their pillow. But Witmeyer’s cause had always been her personal well-being, and her credo was as short as it was simple: Be on the winning side.
And all her life she had performed enthusiastically for that side, exceeding her masters’ expectations, willing to stamp on any who would topple her chosen regime. To the ends of the earth Witmeyer had traveled, wearing the Box symbol on her lapel, indistinguishable from her evangelical teammates on the outside. But behind the splashback visor, Witmeyer liked to think that her eyes were open. She saw the truth. She saw them all for the animals they were.
Be on the winning side.
But here, now, in this time, the winning side had not yet won.
Could their being here change the ordained outcome?
Was it ordained anymore?
It seemed to her now that Cadet Savano’s babblings were visions of an alternate future.
Could it be that here, in this brave old world, there was something different to be found? Something actually worth fighting for?
“Which way?” Witmeyer called back, twisting her mouth to avoid turning her head, though what difference did sight really make down in the dregs of the pea soup?
Vallicose repeated the question to Farley, who was somewhat conscious, and eventually she deciphered his mumblings and passed them forward.
“Keep west. Follow the canal.”
The same instructions for the past hour. Simple enough, one might think; but with the early winter night and a wash of gray fog on the banks, following the canal was accomplished more through sound and smell than sight, for nothing could be seen but the dull hulks of barges and narrow boats that could have been sea monsters if not for the glow of fog lights slung from mast and gunwale. The water itse
lf stank like a field latrine, and what cobbles there were squelched in their housings when trod on, as though the entire basin had become an open sewer.
Follow the canal? Follow the stench is more like it.
There were many things about this version of London that already irritated Witmeyer, but the stink, which ranged in notes from rank to odious, was top of the list.
These are not the glorious beginnings we read about in the academy.
Witmeyer stepped on something that first squeaked and then splattered; and though she had been in worse situations on many occasions, Lunka sensed that she was very close to the end of her tether.
It is the lack of control, she realized. I have always understood my situation until now. But here, in this malodorous world, I am as ignorant and helpless as a newborn.
How was a simple soldier supposed to know whom to kill in all this damned fog?
Onward along the canal bank they inched, Witmeyer with her gun arm rigid before her, and Vallicose behind, who had shifted Farley so that she tenderly cradled him in her arms like a babe. They had been walking for hours, first down the alley behind the Orient Theatre and then north away from Holborn, sticking to the alleyways and tumbledown brick mazes off the main avenues, avoiding any unnecessary contact with the locals, though they seemed a dull bunch and difficult to inspire into any sort of action beyond a leer or malformed insult. There was no prettifying on this side of the Great Oven. Goods were not displayed in shop windows but laid out on boards or slabs. The lanes were not washed cobblestone but packed earth with a river of sludge running down the center of each walkway. Men did not sport top hats and tails but flat caps and sackcloth and a mouthful of raw gums or blackened tooth stumps. And the women were not society ladies in buttoned-up bodices and blooming skirts but fishwives with veined forearms and matted nests of hair that would never smell of anything but mackerel.
Night was already dropping down to meet the rising fog, so the Thundercats did not attract as much attention as they might have, but even so, Witmeyer was forced into a fight with a couple of drunks on a fishing jetty. Though perhaps Lunka Witmeyer was not forced, perhaps she was glad of the diversion. Certainly the crash of the second man into a tower of crates made her smile for the first time since their jaunt through Smart’s tunnel.