Shadow Conspiracy (20 page)

“Remember your place, Dodd,” he said, “or perhaps you’d like to find another...position.” His kick slammed into my stomach. The unexpected move caught me by utter surprise, and the air burst from my lungs, leaving me gasping on the hard wagon floor. In an instant, Joseph was sitting atop me, my arms pinned beneath his knees. A straight razor flicked open in his hand and he set the blade against my neck. My eyes went wide. I tried to control the terror that made my heart jerk beneath his weight.

“Do you know what it’s like to share your soul?” he hissed. His eyes had gone hard and flat as blue glass. “All my life I’ve wondered what it is to think as other people,
feel
as other people. I’ve lured people into my wagon on the pretence of letting them gawp at me and then done fantastic things, intense things, trying and trying to understand what they
feel
. But it never worked. Now I’ve taken my twin’s soul for myself and kissed his catamite, and I still feel nothing. Something’s wrong.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I gasped. The blade pierced the skin on my neck and I flinched. Warm blood oozed round the razor. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it.”

Joseph shook his head. “It would be too hard to explain your disappearance. And I don’t need to kill you. Not while I have a firm hold on you.” He reached behind himself with a free hand and grabbed my groin in a strong fist. The leaden pain that twisted my lower gut made me cry out. “I know what you are, and I know what you want. You’ll do everything I say, now and forever, or I’ll reveal your filthy nature to the world. The law rightfully despises men like you. You’ll spend the rest of your life chained to a prison treadmill, letting the guards fuck you for a chance to see the sun.”

“What do you want?” I wheezed.

“Nothing at the moment,” Joseph said. His tone had turned pleasant, as if we were discussing automata gears. “But when I come for you, you’ll be ready. Just as Kalakos was.”

He gave me another hard squeeze, and then he was at the door. “I have my brother’s soul,” he said over his shoulder. “You can have his body.” And he was gone.

I lay gasping on the floor for several moments, then sat up to press a handkerchief to my neck. Fear and pain wound iron bands around me. Then I thought of Nathan, and I was out the door, rushing through the early night to the Black Tent, my spiders behind me. The flap already lay open, and I burst inside.

Nathan was gone. Kalakos sat on the empty table of his machine, face long. Beside him stood the Leyden jar with the stark initials NS inscribed upon it. The tent smelled of ozone.

“I knew you’d come,” Kalakos said. “Nathan’s in his wagon, if you want to know.”

Enraged, I rushed across the tent and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. “Tell me Joseph was lying. Tell me Nathan still has his soul and I’ll let you live!”

“I’m sorry.” Kalakos was limp and soft in my grip. “I’m not proud of it, Dodd, though the fact that I extracted Nathan’s entire soul without harm to him should be—”

“Without harm?” I cracked my fist across his jaw. The cat yowled appreciation from her cage. “How’s
that
for ‘without harm’?”

Kalakos rocked back on the table and put a hand to his face. “I deserved that. You may hit me again, if you like. I won’t stop you.”

I pulled back my fist again, and dropped it. The anger drained out of me. “Why did you do it?” I asked instead. “Why didn’t you just refuse him?”

“After all these years, I thought I’d left Dr. John Polidori behind me,” he said. “Dr. John Polidori and his gambling debts and his failed experiments and his involvement in that young baron’s death and his wonderful faked suicide. But Joseph Storm remembered me. He has letters in my own hand confessing my love for a...certain awkward person and detailing our more intimate moments. I expect he stole them when we first became friends and held onto them all these years.”

“The awkward person was George Byron?”

He looked even more pained. “I hope you, of all men, can understand. At any rate, Dr. Polidori is wanted for questioning by a number of courts—or he would be if anyone found out he was still alive.”

Trying to remain calm, I picked up the Leyden jar as if it were a priceless jewel. It was strangely light. “He’ll never let you alone, you know. Blackmailers never do. Once you do this, he’ll want something else, and then something else. You may as well put this”—I brandished the jar—“back into Nathan’s body. I
need
you to do it. I can’t operate your damned machine.”

“No.”

The anger swelled again. “Why not?”

“I’m weak, Dodd.” He looked close to tears. “I face life imprisonment at hard labour if I don’t obey Joseph Storm.”

“I know the same secrets,” I said cruelly. “What if I tell you to restore Nathan’s soul or
I
go to the police?”

Kalakos snatched the jar from me. “Don’t talk nonsense.” He set the jar behind him and grabbed my shoulders with both hands. “You’re like a son to me, Dodd. Your machines are more brilliant than mine, and you see into universes I can’t comprehend. You’ll go further than I ever did, and what father doesn’t want that for his son?”

It was the first time he had ever said such things to me, but rage overwhelmed tenderness. “What kind of father destroys his son’s chance for happiness?” I snarled.

He turned away from me then. “Trust me, Dodd. Go now. Go to your friend and tell him how you feel. Things will look different in the morning.”

“Do go, Dodd,” Joseph Storm agreed, from the open tent flap, and I wondered how long he’d been standing outside, listening. Had Kalakos known he was there? “The good doctor and I have a process to finish.”

Resolve filled me. “I’m not leaving without that jar.”

“Then I’ll go to the police.”

“I’m not Kalakos,” I growled. “I don’t care about the police.”

“Dodd,” Kalakos interjected feebly, “please.”

“In that case—” Joseph gestured and two large men in black coats entered the tent. One of them had a metal arm with claws on the fingers, the other wore a large eyepiece which I recognized as a small codex that would enhance reflexes. “Perhaps my friends here can persuade you.”

The two men moved toward me. I pulled a whistle from my pocket and blew. Instantly, my spiders swarmed into the tent. “Defend!” I ordered.

The spiders leaped. Red knocked the man with the metal arm flat on his back, and the injured spider attached itself to his face. He screamed. Eyepiece-man glided aside and flicked one attacking spider to the ground, but two more swarmed up his coat, and a third bit the back of his neck. The man grunted and snatched the biting spider, intending to fling it away, but it wrapped all eight legs around his wrist. Blood ran down his neck. The cat screeched in her cage. I reached for a heavy lead weight.

“Stop!”

I spun. Joseph was standing over the Leyden jar with a hammer.

“I’ll smash it,” he said.

“That might kill you.” I said, though my mouth had gone dry. “Or send Nathan’s soul back to his body.”

“It might send Nathan’s soul to eternity. Let’s find out.” He raised the hammer, and my talent crashed over me, showing destruction and devotion again, and I couldn’t tell them apart. Cold fear tore through me. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Worse, I didn’t know what would happen if the futures were resolved, but Nathan was clearly bent on resolving them.

“Don’t!” I cried.

Nathan paused, and the vision vanished. “The spiders, then.”

“Come!” I ordered. Instantly, the spiders left the struggling men and surrounded me. Shuddering, the man with the metal arm got to his feet while the eyepiece man wiped blood from his neck and glared murder at me.

“Shut them down,” Joseph ordered.

Hands shaking, I pressed the switch on each spider that disengaged its spring mechanism. They went still.

“Hold him,” Joseph said to his men.

“What are you doing?” I gasped as iron-hard hands grabbed me on both side.

Joseph towed an unresisting Kalakos to the table. “You’re going to watch the final process. You deserve it, Dodd.”

I fought again, but the men were too strong. Joseph lay on the table and Kalakos, working alone, connected man and jar to the machine. When I tried to close my eyes, my captors pried them open. Joseph grinned the entire time, even when Kalakos threw the final switch and he convulsed hard. The jar snapped with current, then went quiet.

I vaguely remember howling like a dog. The hired men shoved me out of the Black Tent and tossed my dead spiders after. I stumbled to my feet, feeling numb inside. By now it was nearly midnight, and barely enough yellow gaslight leaked into the Emporium from the street lamps to illuminate my way. Someone shouted in the street, and a hiss of steam gushed wetly from a distant pipe. A few sallow faces looked out of wagon windows doors or peeped through tent flaps as I ran past, but no one spoke, and I ignored them. Nathan drew me inside the wagon he shared with his brother and shut the door. The smell of cedar surrounded us.

“How do you feel?” I demanded.

“Much the same,” he said, and I touched his face. Then his chest and his arms and his hands. I thumped his sides, gently at first, then harder and harder. I slammed his shoulders. I beat my fists upon his body until he caught my wrists.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m real and solid.”

And then he was kissing me. I kissed him back, and our arms went round each other for a long, long time. His large hands ran down my back and pulled us together. My heart swelled up and I pressed against him, trying to go into him,
through
him. Occupy the same space.

“We don’t have much time left,” I said when we separated. My breath was coming in short gasps. “In a few weeks, you’ll age and die.”

“I know.”

I felt strangely free of a sudden. “We should do something fun. Fuck Kalakos and fuck the Emporium and
fuck
your brother.”

“Do you know what I want to do?” Nathan asked with a mischievous air. “I want to go into town and get drunk and kiss you with ale still in my mouth and then I want to go with you into a room with a big bed and watch you take your clothes off one bit at a time.”

“Mr. Storm!” I kissed him again, and licked his teeth. “You took the words out of my mouth.”

We stole two live horses from the stable tent and rode up Merrion Street to Westland Row and turned down George’s Quay on the River Liffey. The cobbled streets were deserted except for the occasional carriage or pedestrian, but the closer we got to George’s Quay, the busier the city became. People and horses and automata crowded the streets and walks. Light and music and drunks spilled out of open pub doors. A circle of people cheered as four men fought a brass automaton. Deep-cleavaged prostitutes called out to us. Scents of garbage and manure and piss all mixed with the wet smell of the Liffey. I guided us down a side street, where I happened to know of a series of inns and pubs that catered to men of a certain type.

Fuck that. They catered to men like me. And Nathan.

I paid a boy to watch the horses and led Nathan into the common room of the Standing Stone. The drinking was in full swing, and smells of stout and sweat hung in the air. Sailors from ships in dock mingled with tradesmen and well-dressed gentlemen in booths, at the bar, and at tables. The wooden floor was sticky, and conversation was loud. Nathan drank it all in like a boy allowed at his first grown-up party, and I loved that about him. I wanted to show him the whole world so I could see that joy cross his face every day.

I found two chairs at an already-crowded table and ordered a round for everyone seated there, which made me popular. Nathan sat down, and I flung an arm across his shoulders. He grinned.

“I’m Dodd,” I said, “and this is Nathan. We’re going to get drunk because he doesn’t have a soul.”

“Hell, I don’t either,” said a man sitting across from us, and with a start I recognized him as the man with coal-black hair. “Priest took mine years ago in a confessional.”

“And I left mine with that boy in New York,” said an older sailor. “Cheers!”

We all clanked mugs and drank. Nathan kissed me with the taste of Guinness still dark in his mouth, and the others roared their approval.

An hour later, the two of us stumbled upstairs together. In a room with a big solid bed, Nathan had everything he had wanted, and so did I. At last we lay back sleepily, our bodies dimly reflected in a cloudy mirror that hung over the wash stand. Nathan smiled in the soft light, his arm heavy across my chest.

“I never want to leave you,” he murmured. “For the rest of my days.”