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Authors: Paul Crilley

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BOOK: The Osiris Curse
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“Nothing's happening,” said Octavia Nightingale in a bored tone of voice.

Tweed glanced up from the newspaper he was reading. “It will. It's statistically proven that more crimes are committed between two and three in the morning.” He frowned thoughtfully. “And on a Tuesday, strangely enough.”

“Tweed, it's
Thursday
,” said Octavia in exasperation. “And it's
after
three. The only suspicious people lurking around in the dark are
us
. All the villains are in bed. Where it's warm. And dry.”

Tweed sighed and pushed the muddy slush around with his boot. She had a point. He fished out his pocket watch and flicked the cover open.

3:25.

In the morning.

In mid-January.

Tweed slipped the watch back into his pocket. He'd give it another half hour then call it a night. By the time he got home and into bed it would be after five, and that meant he'd sleep most of the day away, which was a bonus. Loneliness tended to be worse during the day. Sitting alone in the house, listening to the huge grandfather clock in the hallway—that was when he started brooding, contemplating who he really was, how he had been created.

He shied away from the thought, shivering and pulling his greatcoat tighter around his body. No. Much better to keep occupied. It kept the dark thoughts at bay.

He tilted the newspaper toward the street light outside the alley. “Listen to the rubbish they print nowadays,” he said, hoping
to distract Octavia. “‘The airship
Albion
, widely acknowledged to be a triumph of design and engineering, is due to make her maiden voyage this very Saturday. The
Albion
is a first of its kind, a luxury airship capable of carrying over a thousand guests. Kept afloat by one hundred sturdy gasbags and powered by Tesla Turbines, the mile-long airship was built in the factories of Dundee and towed to London by the Royal Navy's own airships.'”

“What's wrong with that?” protested Octavia. “It gives background information.”

“Ah, I see. Is that's what it does?” Tweed found his place again. “‘The launch of the
Albion
is the hottest event of the social season. Those who can afford the tickets will travel to Egypt, where they will rest for a few days in Tutankhamen's View, the controversial hotel built inside the refurbished Great Pyramid of Giza. The
Albion
will then tour Europe before returning to England, where a welcoming party will await the
Albion
's proud cresting of the chalky cliffs of Dover.'”

Tweed glanced at Octavia. “
Can
an inanimate object be proud?”

“Be quiet,” said Octavia.

“I ask merely for information. As you're always so keen to point out, my education is sorely lacking. I just wondered, what with you being so clever and everything, whether I should write a letter to
The Times
and complain about one of their reporters taking such artistic license with the English language.” He frowned. “What
is
the reporter's name, anyway?” He squinted at the byline, then looked at Octavia in mock surprise. “Why, this journalist, this…
butcherer
of the English language, has the same name as
you
, Nightingale. You should sue.”

A handful of slush hit him in the cheek. He spluttered and wiped it away, then grinned at her. “Bet you've already cut this out and framed it, haven't you?”

Octavia said nothing.

“Where is it? Above your bed? No—above your desk, yes?”

“Possibly,” said Octavia reluctantly.

Tweed tucked the newspaper into one of his voluminous pockets. For all his teasing, he really was proud of Octavia. Even if she was only a junior reporter given the task of rewriting press releases, she was still the youngest person ever to have that kind of job at
The Times
. He would keep the article himself as a memento.

To remind myself how terrible I'm doing in comparison
.

The thought slid into his mind, dark and insidious. He tried to push it away, but it wouldn't budge. And why should it? It was the truth, after all. Octavia had a job, a life, proper friends. He had…well, he had nothing much, to be honest. An empty house that depressed him. A father who was never there. One friend who was so busy at work he only saw her when they trained together, which was only for a few hours every other day.

He was wallowing in melancholy. Which was
incredibly
annoying. For himself and for others.

More than that, he feared his melancholy was turning to depression. He spent most of his time sleeping, and when he woke up it was with a heavy ball of lead in his stomach that wouldn't shift no matter what he did. He found his thoughts turning to the future, a future where he wasn't sure he had a place. What could he do, after all? He had no real skills. No
honest
skills, anyway. A life spent running cons with his father had ill-prepared him for a life on this side of the law.

Worse than all that, though, (and it was here his thoughts always led), he wasn't sure he was actually a real person.

Well, he
was
.
Technically
. But the truth was, he had no soul of his own.
His
soul used to belong to Sherlock Holmes. Tweed, in fact,
was
Sherlock Holmes. The man's soul had been drawn from his body after he died at Reichenbach Falls and placed inside a nine-month-old
clone of Holmes. That clone was Tweed. The insertion into so young a body wiped Holmes's memories, giving baby Tweed a clean slate, a fresh start.

But Tweed couldn't avoid the fact. He wasn't his own person. He was living in someone else's body with someone else's soul. A cuckoo who had raided someone else's nest to make his own life.

What kind of existence was that? He didn't
belong
. He felt as if he hadn't earned his place in the world, that he hadn't earned his right to
exist
.

“Just admit it, Tweed,” said Octavia, breaking into his thoughts. “You were wrong. If it was going to happen tonight it would have happ—”

The wall of the building opposite them exploded outward, bricks and stones tumbling into the road. There was a metallic grinding noise, then a burst of steam that came from nowhere, mixing with the dust clouding the air. The sound of heavy, clanking footsteps stomped into the road and moved slowly away from them.

The only problem was, there was nothing there.

Tweed and Octavia stared. An empty street. A ragged hole in the wall. A slowly dissipating steam cloud, and grey dust settling into the snow. That was it.

“That's…rather odd,” he said.

More bricks flew suddenly out of the wall, and those already lying in the snow burst apart, reduced to rubble and powder seemingly of their own volition.

Again, they heard the hissing of steam and the
thunk thunk
of heavy footsteps.

“Look!” whispered Octavia.

Tweed glanced along the street. Large footsteps were appearing in the muddy slush that coated the road. Two sets, moving away from their location.

Tweed lifted his gaze higher and squinted. He could just make out a distortion, a portion of air that twisted slightly, bent and shivering, like light refracted through thick glass. He followed the outline of the anomaly, tracing it as it formed the shape of what he knew to be a rather large, rather dangerous automaton.

Hah! He had been right after all.

“They've got some kind of invisibility thing going on,” he said. “Like in Wells's book. Look how the air is distorted above the footprints.”

“I can see,” said Octavia grumpily.

Tweed grinned at her. “You owe me a florin.”

“Not yet I don't. It might not be Harry Banks's constructs.”

Over the past month or so there had been a series of bank robberies, crimes so filled with mayhem and destruction that Tweed had reckoned it couldn't be the work of a human. Even a
gang
of humans wouldn't be able to cause so much damage.

But Tweed had figured it out. He had come to the conclusion that it was Harry Banks, the man who had betrayed them to Lucien a few months back.

Why had Tweed suspected the man in the first place? Because he had been into Banks's gambling den, had witnessed massive automata fighting each other in illegal boxing matches. Harry had a scam going, where the automata were controlled from a hidden room by real boxers strapped into pneumatic rigs, their movements and punches transmitted to the constructs so it looked as if the punters were betting on illegal automaton fights.

When Tweed had seen the chaos at the first robbery, how the vault doors had been ripped from their hinges, the walls of the banks simply bashed down, he'd immediately thought of Harry Banks.

Octavia disagreed. If ten feet tall automata were smashing down walls and making their escape through the streets of London,
someone
would have seen it.

Now they had their answer. Harry Banks had somehow found a way to make his automata invisible. That
had
to be Ministry technology. Which meant Banks had stolen it, or rather more worryingly, that there was a leak in the government department.

Tweed made a mental note to mention it to his dad. Barnaby Tweed was the man in charge of the Ministry now. He would have to look into it.

But that was for later. Right now they had a bank robbery to foil.

“Come on,” he said, slipping out of the alley. Once he got used to the strange rippling effect in the air, it was easy enough to keep an eye on the constructs. The robbers moved slowly, trying to keep as silent as possible, pausing when they heard a noise, then moving on when the coast was clear. They kept to the back streets, traveling along a path where all street lights, both gas and Tesla-powered, had been put out of commission.

“You wanted to know how I knew which bank would be hit next?” Tweed whispered.

“I wouldn't say
wanted
to know. But I'm mildly curious, yes.”

He nodded at the street lights. “I visited the other banks—the ones that had already been robbed. The street lamps along the most likely escape routes were all broken. I've been checking the other banks every night, looking for one with a similar pattern.”

Octavia narrowed her eyes. “Are you
honestly
telling me you spend every night walking around checking all the banks in London?”

“Don't be ridiculous. How would I do that? I'm not Atticus Pope, you know.”

“Yes, I
know
you're not Atticus Pope,” said Octavia. “Because Atticus Pope isn't actually real.”

“Some people think he is,” said Tweed defensively. Atticus Pope was a popular character who starred in his own pulp novels. Crime fighter, investigator, all round bad-guy catcher. Tweed loved the books. He was currently reading
Atticus Pope and the Men from Mars
.

Octavia gave Tweed what he had come to call “the look.” He reckoned it was a skill passed down through the female bloodline or something, because he had seen Jenny Turner give her husband, Carter Flair, the exact same look on numerous occasions.

“If you really want to know, all the robberies were close to each other. I've just been checking the banks that fall within a two mile radius of the others.”

“Clever boy. How many were there?”

“Eight.”

“Eight! And you've been checking them for how long?”

“About three weeks,” said Tweed, peering around the corner of a red brick warehouse. A shadowy alley filled with moldering crates and rotting garbage stretched ahead of them. He could smell decaying vegetables, the sickly sweet smell of fruit well past its date.

He frowned as he scanned the alley. “I can't see them,” he whispered.

“Let me look.”

Tweed bit his tongue. Octavia
never
trusted anything he said. She always had to see for herself.

“I can't see them either—No wait, there they are.”

Tweed leaned around Octavia's shoulder, noting absently that her hair smelled rather pleasantly of oranges. He saw the ripple in the air, the heat wave effect that betrayed Harry's automata.

Except…

“There's only one,” said Tweed.

There was a slight noise behind them.

Tweed and Octavia whirled around to find the second automaton towering over them, its invisibility cloak switched off. The construct was terrifying, a hulking, broad-shouldered figure about twelve feet tall, its dark blue paint chipped and battered. The automaton had been modified since Tweed last saw it fighting in the ring. A glass-covered
cage had been built into the construct's chest. A thin man sat in this cage, strapped into a cracked leather seat. His hands hovered over a set of controls.

“Boo,” the man said.

He twitched the control and the automaton swung its massive arm. Tweed and Octavia ducked. The arm smashed into the corner of the wall, gouging a huge hole out of the building.

Tweed and Octavia scrambled to their feet, darting to either side of the construct. It whirled around, following their movements a lot faster than Tweed expected. Not only outside modifications, but internal as well.

BOOK: The Osiris Curse
10.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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