Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (32 page)

“The food he had carried in that vision was an omen, a portent of the great famine. The snapped tusk represented the irrevocably broken link between my homeland and myself. The noose was the knot that would tie me to my new life, and also the weapon of choice of the Thuggee assassin. And the ax … the ax was a clear sign that I should make war.”

“War?”

Fereng nodded. “War with the British Empire, the vast pig-beast that befouls the world, treating entire countries as its larders and enslaving populations in distant lands to do its bidding. The Empire is corrupt and ruinous, Smith, a rapacious machine that will not be content until it has flattened the entire world beneath its bootheel.”

Smith shook his head. “Surely not…”

“You say that because you live in the comfort and embrace of Victoria’s Empire. The sun shall never set on Britannia, they say, but the shadow she casts keeps the rest of the world in miserable, cold darkness.”

“You said the famine lasted until 1878. You were freed from the camps then?”

“No. I escaped, with Deeptendu and Kalanath. They taught me the ways of the Thuggee, and one night we murdered the guards and fled the camp, taking to the hills. There Deeptendu took me to a clan of Thuggees living in a vast network of caves, among them Phoolendu and Naakesh, who then was just a babe. I joined them, willingly, and thus began our reign of terror against the Raj. From our mountain hideaway we harried and attacked the British at every turn, overturning goods wagons and redistributing the rice and grain to starving villages. We fell upon garrisons of troops like shadows in the night, slaughtering them all. We burned the houses of the governors to the ground.”

Smith straightened, shocked. “You are a villain, sir!”

Fereng smiled. “Perhaps. That is what they called me in the newspapers. The mysterious Fereng, leading his Thuggee assassins to commit terrorist atrocities. And all the while they had no idea, no notion, that it was an Englishman who waged war on them. You might call it villainy, Smith. I call it justice.”

Smith stared at the fire for a long time. On the one hand, he felt he should flee, bring the police and the law down upon Fereng’s head. On the other … something inside him burned and boiled at what he had been told. He looked at Fereng, who was keenly watching him. “In these camps…”

“Women. Children. Babies were born, and died very quickly. Men wasted away to nothing. And all for a canal, to be named after a duke, while we watched food grown by our brothers carried away across the sea to fill bellies in England.”

“It is … appalling,” agreed Smith eventually. “But why now? Why come home now?”

“Ah, that I must keep to myself until I am sure of you, Smith. What do you make of it all, though? Do you wish to join us?”

“To what end?”

Fereng shrugged. “Vengeance. Justice.”

“Not for vengeance, no,” said Smith slowly. “But perhaps for justice.”

*   *   *

A test was to be arranged, to prove his loyalty. Smith would accompany Naakesh and the scar-faced Kalanath to the surface to obtain meat for the dinosaur. Fereng said, “It will be the last time it is fed. I need it hungry for what is to come.”

“I won’t be party to killing anyone,” said Smith.

“You don’t have to, today at least. Merely be party to theft.”

“What if I try to escape?”

Fereng showed his teeth in a grin. “You are not our prisoner, Smith, you are our self-confessed compatriot.
For justice,
remember? Besides, Kalanath will see that you don’t.”

Kalanath met Smith’s eyes and pulled taut the leather thong he held wrapped around his fists. “You betray us, I kill you.”

“Then I am your prisoner,” said Smith.

“Let us say you are … on a short leash,” said Fereng. “For only two or three more days. I cannot risk you compromising my mission here. When my vengeance is satisfied, and there is no fear of you foiling me, then you may do as you wish. We will be leaving England, and I doubt we shall ever return.” He smiled. “You might decide to come with us, Smith. After all, what is there for you here?”

What is there for me here?
he thought. If only he could remember.

*   *   *

After what seemed like so long underground, the sudden sky—heavy with gray, snow-filled clouds and thick with smog as it was—almost overwhelmed him, buoying his spirits and weighing down upon him with its vastness all at the same time. With Kalanath going first and Naakesh bringing up the rear, Smith emerged with the two Thuggees from a manhole in an alleyway off a busy thoroughfare. The two men had taken him on a long and disorienting journey through the sewers before ascending to street level, he suspected so he could not find the way back to their lair with the authorities if he did somehow manage to evade them and abscond.

He took a deep lungful of air—not pure, of course, never pure in London, but of a dizzying freshness he thought he would never taste again down in the fetid sewers. It was early still, only just daylight, but the city roared with life and noise: steam-cabs and horse-drawns jostling for space on the slush-covered roads and tracks; people shouting from windows; barrow boys and flower girls flirting as they passed each other, calling their wares; distant, disembodied, singing; the sounds of anger and fighting; the relentless hammering of toil. Smith felt almost overwhelmed by something he could not remember if he had a name for.

And then he remembered Fereng’s tale, the dreadful picture he had painted of the starving masses, brutalized and worked to death for the grandeur and glory of Britain, the food taken from their mouths to fill bellies in London.

And the thing that had flooded him, the unnamed thing he had just identified as love, or something like it, retreated and was replaced by the cold, ringing black abyss that he suddenly knew must fill Fereng’s soul also, a cavernous, limitless void he thought might be hatred.

“I detest this place,” said young Naakesh, spitting into the snow. “So many people! So little space! It suffocates me, all this brick and stone.”

“And they want to dig beneath the streets, run their steam-trains through underground tunnels,” said Kalanath, displaying the first sign of humor that Smith had seen from him. “As if it weren’t enough living like rats, on top of one another, they want to run in tunnels like vermin, too!”

“We are living in tunnels,” pointed out Naakesh. “Tunnels that stink of shit.”

“Through necessity,” said Kalanath. “And temporarily. When our work here is done we can leave this place with its rivers of shit and filthy snow.”

“How did you get that scar?” asked Smith, suddenly angry with the Thuggee for his mockery, suddenly feeling defensive, suddenly wanting to needle the man.

Kalanath grinned at him. “An Englishman gave it to me. I killed him, and his father, his father’s father, too. Then I killed his son, who was only seven years old. Four generations, gone! He lopped off his own lineage, just like that, when he gave me this wound.”

“Can we get on?” said Naakesh, blowing into his hands. “It is positively freezing here. The sooner we can get food for the monster, the sooner we can get back down there. And the sooner we can all get home.”

Kalanath nodded and led the way out of the alley, pausing only to buy a copy of the morning newspaper from a vendor on the slush-filled cobbled street. Naakesh said, “Fereng does like his newspaper. I think he feels he has a lot to catch up on, having been away so long.”

“Quiet,” said Kalanath, glaring at the younger man, and led them downhill, the smell of brine on the cold air. They were near the Wapping Dock, the gray skies filled with the shrieking shapes of gulls. Smith walked with the two Thuggees on either side of him, and no one gave them a second glance. London was a mélange of peoples at any time, but here on the docks its place as the hub of the vast British Empire was never more pronounced. Beyond the chimneys pumping out yellow-black smoke and the goods sheds that lined the wharves there was a swaying forest of ship masts and a chorus of hooting horns. Not everyone flew into London by airship to Highgate Aerodrome; nor did all freight come by air. Indeed, airship travel was for the moneyed few; Smith himself had never set foot on one until—

“Keep moving,” said Kalanath with a hiss as Smith misstepped and lost his footing.
Until what? Until when?
But the tantalizingly close memory was snatched away as abruptly as it had arrived, leaving him with just a tickling sensation at the base of his neck.

Ranged along the quays, in front of the vast sheds with wheeled doors, were bales of cotton, barrels of ore, and foul-smelling bins of sulphur. They passed groups of sailors and dockers, the winter-pale native Londoners standing out against the crew of a Caribbean steamer huddled in big coats; a team of Chinese men unloading large lacquer boxes; tall, blond Germans smoking and laughing; two gangs of Spanish and French sailors being kept apart from a brewing fight by two harassed port watchmen. The cold morning air was thick with the smells of spices and coffee here, and Kalanath nodded toward the imminent trouble spilling over.

“We will take advantage of this. See that meat? Naakesh and I will take one each. Smith, you will add to the diversion.” He pointed to a brick building a little way behind the quay. “We will make for that. There is some strange gathering there; we saw it yesterday. It will allow us to evade the authorities and escape onto the street beyond; there is a manhole into the sewers immediately to the left as you exit the front doors. Deeptendu and Phoolendu should have already removed the cover and be waiting for us beneath.”

Smith looked at the racks of whole salted hogs being wheeled along a gangplank from a shabby steamer flying a German standard. Kalanath clapped him hard on the shoulder. “Now.”

“But—” he began, but the two Thuggees were already barging into the dockers wheeling down the rack of meat. Smith swore then bent to snatch up a handful of gravel from the quay. He hurled it toward the nearest of the combative sailors, earning a volley of cursing in French as it hit home. The burly, unshaven sailor turned, grimacing at him, while the Spaniards began to heartily laugh. Smith grabbed another handful of gravel and tossed it into the closest laughing Spanish mouth. For good measure he then launched himself at the astonished port watchman, punching him in the nose, then, as the whole crew fell into shouting chaos, he ducked out of the melee and followed the two salted hogs being spirited away through the crowd on the shoulders of Kalanath and Naakesh.

Kalanath looked behind him to make sure Smith was following. “Get ahead of me,” he grunted. “Up those steps.”

The brick building was some kind of mission or union hall that was playing temporary host to, according to the white banner flapping over the double doors, The First Annual World Convention Devoted to the Appreciation of Printed Ephemera Concerned Chiefly with Fantastical, Scientific, and Swashbuckling Literature. Smith raced ahead to haul open the doors, looking beyond Kalanath and Naakesh to the scrapping crowd on the quay, where the skipper of the German steamer was dispatching heftily built sailors wielding sticks and knives in pursuit of his filched hogs.

Smith shouldered his way through the doors, holding them open for Kalanath and Naakesh and following them into the vast, lamplit space filled with ranks of what appeared to be market stalls, each of them festooned with the colorful covers of what he recognized as penny dreadful periodicals. More than recognized: As the two Thuggees barged through the outraged crowd of mainly middle-aged men in top hats and middling-to-well-to-do overcoats, Smith found himself slowing and gazing at the wares of the nearest stall with a growing pressure behind his eyes.

A whole rack was given over to
World Marvels & Wonders,
dating back from the year before to up to a decade earlier, most of them proclaiming the adventures of Captain Lucian Trigger, the Hero of the Empire. He reached up and touched the cover of one, which bore a line drawing of a strong face that was like a punch to his gut. Below it there was the legend,
Also inside: Captain Trigger finds treachery at the roof of the world in “The Golden Apple of Shangri-La”!

Smith became aware of a kerfuffle beside him, and not related to the passage of Naakesh and Kalanath. A frowning, extravagantly-mustachioed man in a brown apron—the proprietor of the stall, Smith guessed—had a handful of grubby shirtfront belonging to a small, dirt-streaked boy.

“What’s going on here?” Smith asked.

The man glared at him, as though it were anything but his business. “This little brat’s trying to steal my goods!”

The boy, shivering in a shirt and ripped trousers, looked up at Smith with tearful eyes and a snotty nose. He did indeed have an armful of
World Marvels & Wonders
. Smith asked, “Is this true? How old are you?”

The boy nodded, his mouth quivering. “Ten, sir. Please, mister, I haven’t got a ha’penny piece to my name, but I do so love the penny bloods. I know all my letters, and I love to read about Captain Trigger, and…” His voice trailed off, his eyes widening. “Is it you, sir? Is it really you?”

Smith thrust his hand into his pocket and found a handful of change nestled in the corners. He thrust it at the stall holder, who looked at it in contempt. “You are jesting with me, sir. You think these meager coins are fair recompense for these highly collectable and rare issues of—”

Smith put his face close to the man’s. “They are, and you’ll take them, gladly. And if I ever again find out you have been hurting small children who just want to read, you will be answerable to me.”

Smith grabbed the boy by the shoulder and hauled him through the crowd, just as the German sailors burst through the doors, letting in a wind that riffled the magazines on the stall racks to the moans of the collectors and sellers. “Come on.”

He dragged the boy to the far doors, where he could see the turbans of Kalanath and Naakesh. He knelt down in front of the boy, who just stared, slack jawed.

“I need you to run an errand for me,” he said. The boy nodded. “You can keep all the magazines, but not this one—” he brandished the issue with the Shangri-La legend. “This you must take to…” Smith closed his eyes and pinched his nose viciously. He was on the verge of remembrance, but it danced away. “I can’t remember his name, nor why I know him. He’s a fat man. Lives in … lives in…” He snapped his fingers. “I don’t know where he lives, but he works at the magazine! Fleet Street!”