A Study in Ashes (76 page)

The guns of the
Athena
boomed, and she felt the recoil ripple through the drifting ship. The blast caught the foremost harpoon, knocking it from the sky, but the other three
kept coming. Evelina closed her eyes, helplessly willing the flames away.

And yet as she forced herself to open them again, the
Dawn Star
appeared, dropping out of the sky with a falcon’s grace. Evelina gasped, her throat aching with a rush of gratitude. Captain Roberts must have been hiding somewhere in the clouds, waiting for the right moment to ambush the remaining ships. He couldn’t save them, but he could still turn the tide of the fight.

The
Dawn Star
’s guns boomed, and one of the red ships shuddered, the prow of the gondola seeming to inhale a moment and then burst apart in a shower of wood and metal. Evelina felt the pulse of the lives aboard as they flared out, a faint warmth fluttering against her power.

As if kissed out of sleep by a lover, her dark magic awakened to taste the deaths. Revulsion rippled through Evelina, but there wasn’t time to think. As Roberts wheeled to fire again, she targeted the harpoons, spinning them around. The long iron shafts seemed to wobble in confusion, one of them dropping altogether, but the other two sped back toward the red ships. From somewhere inside the
Athena
, Evelina heard a cheer, and she couldn’t help a grin.

The three remaining red dirigibles scattered. The
Dawn Star
’s next shot clipped the long tail of one, sending it into a spin with the sheer force of the blow. With that much damage, the ship might make a decent landing, but it wouldn’t be maneuverable enough to fight. With a roar, the
Athena
fired again, and a second ship exploded, caught squarely in the center. They were down to one opponent.

The last of the Scarlet King’s dirigibles fired, and the
Dawn Star
was suddenly limned with brightness. Evelina watched, her breath caught in her throat, as the ship was suddenly snared in a web of arcing blue energy—the same as what she had absorbed from the blast that had hit the
Athena
. She could hear the crackle of it, like the snapping of giant sheets in the wind, or what she’d read about the aurora borealis in the far and frozen north. It resonated inside her, sending that needling energy through her once more.

A hydrogen ship would explode from that dancing blue
fire, but one that ran on distilled aether simply burned. Flames began to leak from the portholes of the
Dawn Star
like a dozen fiery wounds. Tiny specks leaped from the ship, and Evelina fully understood what had happened to Nick the year before.

Outrage coiled, a hissing, violent thing. For a moment, she couldn’t see, but then she focused with needle-sharp intensity at the vessel that had fired the shot. The
Dawn Star
, the ship that had come to their rescue, was a comet of flames hurtling earthward—and now the attacker was turning its broadside to them.

All the magnetic fire Evelina had taken in coalesced into a single upsurge of rage, and she thrust it forward. It ripped from her as if her insides were yanked through her breastbone, skin and skeleton flying apart. She screamed with the pain, but with rage as well. She’d made plenty of shields, but never used magic like a spear. But the dark power knew exactly what to do.

The last of the Scarlet King’s ships was there one moment and gone the next, a fine, powdery dust raining down from the empty sky.

THEY WERE ALREADY CALLING IT THE BATTLE OF ST. PAUL’S
. Tobias was glad to let the men and women trooping after the caterpillar rejoice in their victory, but their march westward through London felt like a journey into a mire he wasn’t sure they’d survive. Tipping those pounding machines had been costly—many had been crushed, and many more had fallen to the Blue Boys.

Plus, it had been a stroke of luck. They couldn’t count on all the steam barons’ weaponry being vulnerable to a schoolboy imagination any more than he could count on the coal supply for the caterpillar lasting all the way to wherever the Gold King was holding his son. They had been fighting their way west for hours, Moore and the other soldiers were holding the Blue Boys off their tail—but so far the rebels had only made it past the law courts of the Temple, right to the point where the Waterloo Bridge reached the north side of the Thames.

The crowd thickened and bulged, like water hitting a clogged drain. The roar of guns and voices was deafening, almost a touchable wave of pressure against his face. Tobias guided the caterpillar to a stop, unable to go further without stepping on someone. Yelland got to his feet, shaded his eyes, and swore.

“What?” Tobias demanded. Talking was more a matter of lip reading, but they bent close to each other to catch what sound they could. “Why can’t we move?”

“It’s the Gold King’s army fighting the prince’s men coming up from the south,” said the sharpshooter. “And there’s an air battle up there.”

Tobias had seen the smoke in the sky, but hadn’t had the leisure to wonder what had caused it. Now when he looked, he could see the balloons between the billows of cloud and smoke. From where he was, they looked no bigger than apple seeds, the colors lost to distance and the angle of the sun.

The army in front of them was a more immediate problem. “There are thousands.”

“Mercenaries,” Yelland spat. “And they’re sweeping the population ahead of them. The Blue Boys in particular.”

“Doesn’t the crowd get in their way?”

“Of course it does, but then they hold all the empty streets. And they know the rebels won’t fire on civilians.”

Tobias understood. Until the prince’s armies arrived with everything the rogue makers had devised, the rebels had fewer fancy weapons than the barons. The steam barons’ war machines could fire over a sea of civilians, but the rebels risked shooting innocents. The rebel army’s hands were tied.

“Listen,” said Tobias, his voice cracking with the strain to be heard. “I made a lot of the Gold King’s weapons. I can disable them, but I didn’t have time to make the devices that can do it.”

Yelland shot him a look. “And?”

“My friend was finishing them this morning. He’s going to carry them to the prince’s army.” Tobias looked at the sea of humanity surrounding them. Even if Bucky could fight through the crowd of rebel supporters, he would have to cross enemy lines first. That was going to be more dangerous than they’d assumed. “It would be very useful if we could get a few of those devices for ourselves.”

“Are you talking about Mr. Penner?”

“Yes.”

“He needs an escort,” Yelland said flatly.

“He thought he could slip by unnoticed if he went alone. And he’s good with a gun.”

“He needs an escort,” Yelland repeated.

Tobias gave the man a long look. “The plan was that if he could make it down Threadneedle to Mansion House, he could use the underground tunnels of the District Railway.
The trains won’t be running in all this”—Tobias waved a hand at the chaos around them—“but it’s a lot faster even if he runs all the way.”

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.”