Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) Read online

  At their opponent’s advantage—their umpteenth of the game—Sonja and Derek combined to devastating effect. First she slugged a forehand return up the line, which left Wilhelmina groaning as she slid low to recover it...barely. Then Derek hacked at the slack ball as though he were swatting a dangerous and elusive wasp. It landed under Eustace’s stepping foot—the timing could not have been reproduced—and the oaf went over sideways. His palm slapped the floor and his racquet clattered away across court.

  Gasps from the crowd, and the odd muted titter, dampened Sonja’s enjoyment of the moment. It had to have hurt, damn it. He trembled in agony, the creature, inching his arm and knee together so the one could nurse the other or vice versa. Derek vaulted the net without pause and actually reached Eustace before his wife did. The organiser and a few other gentlemen ran onto the court to help.

  Sonja, on the other hand, stood her ground. After all she was only sixteen and knew nothing about treating injuries or broken bones, and stares from the crowd were boring into her back now and she couldn’t care less and anyway she was only sixteen.

  She looked across to where Merry...had been.

  Sleeves rolled up, Father was still busy tinkering with his lunk of a drill. A rack full of spanners and screwdrivers on his workbench was already half-emptied. A ginger-bearded fellow in grimy overalls yanked at his own hair when Father took an unceremonious hammer to the whirling conical contraption.

  But where was Merry? In the combined din caused by a shrieking train whistle and Father’s drill clap-clapping as it struggled to maintain an even spin, an array of well-dressed men closed in behind him. Nothing about them gave anything away individually. One munched on candy floss. Another fiddled with his leather gloves. Another blew his nose on a handkerchief. But their combined idiosyncrasies, the direction of their gazes, and the rather obvious converging formation stood out a mile. To someone not already vigilant it would not have registered. Sonja, however, saw right through it.

  “Father!” A chorus of hearty steam whistles now sounded across the field, drowning her shout. She dashed off the court, screamed behind her, “Derek, it’s Father! Help him!” Amused faces dropped with concern as she barged through, teeth bared, her heart all a-riot.

  No sooner had she breached the crowd when the men attacked Father. The huge iron drill head planted itself into the ground and wreaked unpiloted carnage on the surrounding area. It dragged its steam engine around by the ruptured, spitting pipe. Thwhump-whump-whump went the drill as it burrowed, tossing up chunks of soil by the barrow load. Tools clattered everywhere.

  Meanwhile, Father backed away as the five attackers tried to encircle him. One lay motionless under the dirt flung up by the drill, next to the lifeless ginger-haired mechanic. The others might have rushed in to finish Father but he brandished his hammer convincingly—and now a crowbar in his other hand as well.

  Yet they each boasted sandsayers—knuckledusters tipped with poisonous injectors, named after the Sandman, instant bringers of sleep—similar to those she and Merry had used on the Sorensens but far more lethal. Assassins’ weapons, designed for stealth, for brushing against one’s prey. A single strike could stop a man’s heart in a matter of seconds. Father must have spotted them in time. They now stalked him around the workbench, waiting for their chance to—

  One of them lunged, received a hammer blow to the wrist. Another slipped in the mud as he tried to make room to strike. Step by step, Father gave ground to the vultures. Soon he would be surrounded and at their mercy. Incensed, Sonja snatched a large feathery hat from an elderly woman’s head, folded it to double the thickness, and ran up behind the attackers, making as little sound as she could.

  Thwack!

  She clocked one with her racquet, right on the ear. He wheeled to one side and immediately swiped at her with his sandsayer, but she caught the injector in her hat feathers. Feigning to one side, he ducked her best forehand and shuffled to get in close. All it would take was one prick on her skin. Luckily she had more than two limbs. Clamping his weapon between the folds of her hat, she served him an ace with her foot, right in his pair of deuces.

  “Foot fault,” she hissed—dumb, but it was the first thing that sprung to mind. Then she unleashed an overhead smash to die for. This was no time for catgut. Her wooden frame hit his skull with unreturnable venom, and the man slumped into the dirt, out cold.

  The chorus of steam whistles had ceased, while the unmanned drill was now well on its way to Subterranea. For a moment she wondered why no one else was helping her. Then she glimpsed Father kicking up from the ground, on his back, fending off the remaining attackers with his boots. “Father! For God’s sake, somebody help him.”

  She screamed and slammed her racquet frame into a man’s face. He snatched it from her hand, so she feathered him instead, and included a desperate southpaw punch behind it. Annoyed, he grabbed her by the throat, ready to administer the toxin at his leisure. His grip hurt like hell. Kick and thrash as she might, he had her to do with as he wished. He was, after all, twice her size and deranged.

  From out of nowhere the steam engine half of the drill came crashing down on his skull, its scalding liquid drenching him. His scream outpitched the chorus of steam whistles from a moment ago. Sonja went to shield her eyes from the hot spray. It didn’t touch her. Derek barged the man aside and dove into the other attackers like one of Haggard’s fictional ruffians.

  “Get clear, Sonja. Get yourself—” He dodged a sandsayer aimed for his midriff and leapt onto its wielder, immediately incapacitating him with a powerful choke-hold. But it also left Derek vulnerable to attack from behind.

  “Quick! Watch your stern.” Her dumb penchant for nautical terminology was a useful ally for the first time in her life. Derek let go his hold and threw the man into his onrushing colleague. Leaving three against three—and one of them a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with a feathery hat for a weapon.

  By this time Father had fought his way back to his feet. He circled slowly to Sonja, out of breath. “Who are you bastards? What have I done—why do you want to kill me? And in front of my daughter.”

  No response. The assailants were all between twenty-five and forty-five, had been impeccably well-dressed before the fight, but otherwise bore no resemblance to each other. One had a dusky, Mediterranean look, another appeared bookish, with spectacles and a grey goatee, while the third survivor had thick curly hair and massive broad shoulders like a thrower in the Highland Games. Then it dawned on her—the other thing they had in common—identical cravats, black and silver, with the tower emblem embroidered on the knot.

  They were Leviacrum agents?

  “The police are on their way,” Derek said, accepting the crowbar from Father and facing the others, “so you have two choices: the fight of your lives, which you won’t survive now that I’m protecting the woman I love; or you can wise up and flee, and live a little longer. It’s your choice.”

  Sonja gripped his upper arm, hoping the gesture might help bolster his ultimatum. If his crowbar wasn’t in that fist, she’d have held his hand for the whole world to see. But mostly for herself, and for Derek Auric, the man she’d chosen, the only man for her.

  No move proved a good move on the part of the assassins, and the standoff continued for the best part of a minute, a massing horde of witnesses, probably over a thousand strong, encircling them at a distance. The assailants shared a three-way glance. Time had run out; their game was up.

  So why in the next moment were they rushing Father with suicidal abandon, sandsayers cocked at their sides, dying to strike? Sonja’s heart froze. This didn’t make a jot of sense, not one, not with all London watching. Or maybe it was because all London was watching? Their superiors would know if they failed their mission and their lives would be forfeit? Derek leapt in front of her, and Father in front of Derek.

  “No!”

  She went to break free of Derek’s hold, to do all she could to protect Father where no one else in London seemed capa
ble of lifting a finger to help, when...

  A taut length of rope brushed the tops of their heads and lowered just ahead of Father, then shot forward. Either side, a man was running with an end of the rope. They managed to clothesline the onrushing attackers, wrap the rope around them and yank them off their feet. Keeping out of range of the sandsayers, these two brave interlopers dragged the assassins through the grass as far as they could, then one of them whipped steam-pistols from his waistcoat to complete the victory.

  But still the assailants would not relent. They threw themselves at the pistoleer, who now had no choice. Hiss-crack! Hiss-crack! Hiss-crack! A bullet apiece finished the agents. Tiny columns of steam rose from the gun chambers. Father checked to see if the assassins were dead, while Derek, shivering despite his stoic heroics, held Sonja close to him.

  From those crouched over the bodies, she counted the faces she knew: Father, bloodied and caked with mud, but miraculously untouched by the poison; a greying, middle-aged black man whom she’d seen at one or two of Father’s lectures—he carried the pistols; Merry, out of breath, perhaps after fetching these men to help her; and young William Elgin, Sorensen’s ward from Niflheim, who seemed to have developed a habit for helping Merry when she needed it. Sonja, too. And was it just her or had William grown taller and broader since they’d last seen him?

  “Are you hurt, Sonja? Did they—”

  “Just hold me.” She squeezed her arms around Derek, pressed her cheek to his breast. A section of canopy had peeled loose from the Roundhouse Circus, and the afternoon’s first golden sunrays penetrated the gap. The steam cloud overhead dissipated further, flooding the entire structure with brilliant light. Cheers went up from inside the great arena, from patrons awaiting the next performance. The goodwill seemed to spread to spectators around the field, who began clapping and yelling “Huzzah! Huzzah!” for the victors of the brave fight they’d just witnessed.

  “This isn’t quite what we had in mind, is it, sir?” Sonja gazed up into his livid brown eyes, searching for the sweet and nervous biology teacher she’d had a crush on all those months. Who was this she’d found in his place?

  “No, Sonja, not altogether, no.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  He didn’t respond. She couldn’t blame him. Not with the whole of London closing in around them, camera flashes dazzling from every direction.

  Chapter Seven

  Legacy

  “Southsea, Miss McEwan?”

  Meredith masked a yawn with her loose frilly cuff—it had ripped on the door of the Black Maria as she’d alighted outside the police station. “Yes, Inspector. For the eighty-ninth time, I live with my sister and father, and when he’s away, my Aunt Lily takes care of us.”

  “And you’re from where, Elgin?”

  “Currently residing in Niflheim, sir, ward of Professor Sorensen—it’s all legal-like.” At least William seemed to have infinite patience with their obtuse interrogator.

  His liver-spotted pen hand trembling between scribbles in his notebook, the bags under his keen, quizzical eyes drooping onto high cheekbones, shoulders hunched and not at all frail-looking despite his age, about seventy, Senior Inspector Baxter was a hard man to read. He gave nothing away in his gentle, monotone delivery, and the citations dotted around his walls were for military service abroad, not police work.

  “I’m sure it is, son. Now, what can you tell me about the men who attacked Professor McEwan and his daughter, Sonja?”

  “I don’t know nothing, sir. Just did like Miss McEwan here asked me, and Simeon was a big help, too.”

  “And he is?”

  “My guardian for the trip, a good friend of Professor Sorensen’s. I’ve known him a long time. A right good bloke to have around.”

  “I can see that. And you,” Baxter flicked Meredith a glance while he wrote on his pad, “Miss McEwan? What alerted you to the likelihood of those men being a threat? Several witnesses saw you run from the scene before the attack began. Did you perhaps recognise one or more of them?”

  “My sister and I thought we recognised one of them, yes, a man who’d been spying on my father in Norway.” She gave his brief description, omitting the Atlas pin she’d clocked on his cravat—Father had warned her not to mention that society to anyone. “But we lost him in the crowd. It wasn’t until Sonja was playing tennis that I spotted him again, clearly signalling to the others with hand gestures. As they were between me and father but didn’t appear to be making a move, I thought it best to fetch help immediately, rather than alert Father and risk panicking them. I thought that if they saw Father had seen them, they might become desperate. With Simeon and Mr. Elgin at his side, they would be less inclined to attack.”

  “It was a gamble, aye.”

  “Yes.” And one a part of her wished she hadn’t made. Sonja had rushed into the fray without thinking twice, had risked her life to protect Father personally—what she, Meredith, should have done. But her answer had been to enlist the help of others first, to leave Father alone and unwarned rather than put herself at risk. God help her, she was yellow to the bone, a bloody disgrace to the McEwan name and to Mother’s legacy. Utterly shamed by her younger sibling’s courage.

  One more thing they no longer had in common.

  “But it saved the day in the end. I dare say it was the wisest choice. And you, Mr. Elgin, that was a brave show. A damn brave show. How old are you again? Eighteen?”

  “Seventeen, sir.”

  “Fine lad. Wish I had a hundred like you.”

  “Thank you.” William tried to suppress his beaming pride with a manly frown but it didn’t wash. He was as pleased as punch, and even solicited an encore from Meredith—such a preening tilt of the head she’d never seen—so she obliged.

  “You were splendid. We’re very much in your debt,” she said.

  “Wasn’t nothing,” he muttered to himself, preferring his Lancashire brogue over his affected Queen’s today. Strange lad. Sweeter than she’d realised, with his newfound pride and his rural humility vying for supremacy.

  “I have one more concern, Miss McEwan.” Baxter leaned back in his chair until his double chin became a treble one, and he laced his fingers on the bulging belly of his waistcoat. “More of a precaution really. With your Father set to leave England right away—”

  “Yes, he fears for the safety of his expedition should he remain here any longer.”

  “Indeed. But what will become of you and your sister?”

  “Well, Father has wired Aunt Lily, so she will be back home in two days.”

  “And for security’s sake, you’re satisfied with that arrangement? Bearing in mind the rise in kidnapping and ransom cases these past few years—rather alarming figures, if I’m being honest. After what happened today, my advice is to hire yourselves a professional chaperon, a live-in protector. I can recommend one or two, if you’d like?”

  “That would be very kind.”

  “And for tonight?”

  William cleared his throat. “That’s me and Simeon. We’ll be accompanying Miss McEwan and her sister back to Southsea while their father stays on in London. The next airship to Portsmouth isn’t until the morning, which won’t do, so Professor McEwan has hired a buggy for Simeon to drive us through the night.”

  “Oh?” It was the first Meredith had heard of that.

  “Shall we?” The boy perched on the edge of his seat, waiting for her to get up. She did, somewhat flustered, the day’s dramatic events catching up with her through a sudden, hot brain shower that left her prickly and tired.

  “Thank you for your concern,” William said as he leaned over the desk to shake Baxter’s hand, his accent now proper, overdone.

  “My pleasure, lad. Take care of them now, and yourself.”

  “Much obliged, Inspector. Good day to you.” Meredith gave a polite bow, then levered the door open with the tip of her parasol.

  “Good day to you, miss. And good luck.”

  Hmm...luck
. The one thing in precious short supply of late. First Niflheim, then Sonja’s Lake District ordeal, now this: forces natural and unnatural had clearly fixed their eyes on the McEwan family.

  What secrets were they trying to protect?

  A choking blanket of London smog lay over the flat, empty acres of the area formerly known as Whitehall and Westminster. Jagged ends of copper piping, all that was left of the buildings’ plumbing, pierced clumps of weeds dotted here and there, while the derelict remains of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, collapsed to a height of about twenty feet for safety, were a sad reminder of the splendid monuments they’d once been, and of the horrific tragedy surrounding their devastation.

  Meredith had only been ten at the time, an utterly precocious ten if she were honest. News of the sudden disappearance of this three-quarter-mile heart of British heritage had excited her and Sonja something rotten, mainly because of the implications for what it had made possible in the world. For future science and, well, magical things in general. Because someone, somewhere had at last figured out the secret of large-scale time travel, and things would never be the same again.

  The six oversized wheels of their hired buggy pottered over the cobbles parallel to the Thames. It was the only vehicle anywhere around—the hour was late, yes, but even during the day few people ventured near Hell’s Foyer, as it had been dubbed by an indignant archbishop after he claimed to have seen phantom beasts and ghostly human figures wandering the site. Others had made similar claims. Not terribly well-supported claims, mind, but who knew what was possible if a huge slice of London could be transplanted a hundred million years into the past.

  It wasn’t until they passed the only building left standing in the Foyer, Reardon’s factory—the heart of the time jump phenomenon—that William began wrestling with his collar. He couldn’t be hot, though, as it was chilly inside the buggy; Meredith, Sonja and their driver, Simeon, were muffled to the gills.