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CHAPTER NINE


We emerged from the labyrinth of pipes and conduits in a room that looked like it was trying to eat us alive. Cogwork teeth gnashed, pistons hammered, and shafts cammed all around us. At the heart of the room was a rumbling boiler, hissing with steam. I dropped to the floor in a jumble, afraid to move on the off chance something might suck me into the machinery and turn me into knight paste. The air carried the distinct smell of boiled chicken and broth.

“What are you doing? You can’t bring them in here!” Captain Skyhook appeared in the door of the room. “They’ll gum up the whole works!”

“I got lost,” Ida mumbled. “And the skinny one was starting to panic.”

“I was not panicking,” I said. “I was just pointing out the very valid reasons that we were probably all going to die. Perfectly reasonable.”

“Just . . . get them out. Put them somewhere safe,” Skyhook said, shoving us toward the open door. “Preferably on the ground, far from my precious ship.”

“In good time, my dear captain,” Nik said, appearing from one of the many doors that lined this hallway. The rest appeared to be the crew quarters, judging by the name placards above each doorway.

“So what happened?” I asked as we stumbled into the hallway. “Why’d we drop out of the sky, and why wouldn’t our door open?”

“The seals reversed polarity,” Nik said. “I almost had it fixed. And then we ran into . . . other problems.”

“What sort of problems?” Chesa, freshly deposited in the hall by a disheveled Skyhook, asked curiously.

“The bloody engines went out. I had to bring us down in the middle of the park, like an amateur.” Skyhook closed and sealed the engine room, then shoved past us. “I have to see to the ballast, if you don’t mind. Try to get us back in the sky before someone notices and writes an article in that bloody newspaper.”

“Oh, right. Newspapers. I guess that’s still a thing in your world,” I mused. “Have they invented the comics page, yet? I miss comics.”

“Will you focus, Rast?” Gregory snapped. His marvelous hair had been mussed by our passage through the bowels of the Silverhawk, and his face was flushed with sweat. His mirror-bright armor was smeared with oil and scuff marks from our trip through the tubes. “Mr. Tesla, we need to start our investigation as soon as possible. How far is it to the patisserie where Cassius was attacked?”

“Not as close as I’d like. You’ll have to walk from here. It’s longer than I’d like to have you exposed to the Gestalt, but we’re going to be here for a while.” Nik flinched as a loud thud rang through the Silverhawk’s steel hull, followed by a string of profanity. “I’ll get Addie and The Good Doctor to lead the way.”

“I think we’d be better off on our own,” I said.

“Just give us a map,” Bethany said. “We’re good with maps.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that. At the very least, there are threats in the Gestalt that you would be ill-equipped to face, and I can’t go back to Esther and ask for replacements because I lost you to the Dire Automata, or the Metropolython, or Lord Scatter and his Seven Sinisters. No, that wouldn’t do at all.”

“Did you hear that, Rast?” Gregory asked. “They have their own monsters here. A whole new bestiary for you to be scared of.”

“Stuff it, Greg. Get stuffed. Go stuff yourself.”

“Manners, manners,” he said with a smile.

With little ceremony and a great deal of haste, Tesla escorted us through the crew quarters and to the upper decks. I caught glimpses of the rest of the ship as we went. For an airship, the Silverhawk was crowded with strange little cubbies and weird rooms that hosted everything from gardens to libraries to an aquarium made up mostly of glass tubes and pressurized tanks. It looked like a scaled-down version of some robber baron’s wet dream of a mansion.

Just before Tesla kicked us off the airship, Addie and The Good Doctor appeared, armed for bear. Or whatever the Gestalt equivalent might be.

“You’re looking properly medieval,” Addie said.

“We try to put on a good show,” I answered.

She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean it as a compliment.” She banged open the hatch, and gave the folding stairs a solid kick. The stairs unfolded like a vine, snaking its way to the ground. “After you.”

“Well, that was unnecessarily dramatic,” I said, squinting into the sudden light. A crowd of park-goers had gathered to watch us, dressed in their best La Grande Jatte finery. I had to admit, I felt a little out of place in cuirass and chausieres, even with my silk tabard. Of all of us, only Chesa didn’t look out of place, like some Arcadian dream of the warrior princess.

“We warned you about the kind of interference that can happen when we mix timelines,” Addie said as we ambled to the bottom of the stairs. She waved to the gathering crowd. “If you end up breaking the Silverhawk, you’re probably better off walking home. Ida might ‘mistakenly’ kick you out the door midair.”

“If we break it badly enough, there won’t be any midair to drop us out of,” I said.

“Well, we’re down and in one piece, so I suppose that’s something.” Gregory planted his hands on his hips and smiled brightly at a pair of young women in hoop skirts and corsets, who appeared to be taking pictures with an enormous camera. Tembo frowned at them, and the women scattered, much to Gregory’s displeasure.

“Tesla said our gear would be out in a minute,” the big mage said.

“Ah, yes. He mentioned that.” Addie squinted up at the Silverhawk. “Here we go.”

A port opened in the side of the airship, followed shortly by what looked like a blunt barreled cannon. Which is exactly what it was. With a loud thump and a pillar of smoke, the chest containing our gear was violently expelled from the Silverhawk. It flew in a high arc over the park, to land in the middle of a fountain.

“Bright Vengeance!” Gregory yelped as he ran to the fountain. “No!”

“Don’t worry. The pneumatic expulsorator is quite gentle. For a cannon,” Addie said, as she strolled after us. “I’m sure your gear is perfectly fine.”

She was mostly right. The isolation trunk had taken the brunt of the impact, along with the fountain and what remained of a decorative topiary that surrounded the pool. By the time we got there, Gregory had already dragged the trunk to dry land and thrown it open. My shield and Chesa’s armor and bow lay in a pile on the ground, along with a scattering of Bee’s knife collection. Tembo’s staff stuck out of a nearby shrub. Our rogue hopped around the garden, scooping up daggers and disappearing them, while Saint Matthew fished a handful of coins out of his pocket and tossed them, one at a time, into the fountain as he hummed to himself. Finally extracting his precious blade, Gregory lifted it to the sky.

“Never again shall I let you out of my sight, until death itself closes my eyes! Even then, my firm grip shall remain on your supple steel, lest time and memory cleave us—”

“Okay, okay, we get it.” I extracted my shield from the muddy ground and shook it off. Chesa’s arrows lay scattered about like a game of pickup sticks, and her bow dangled from a nearby bush. “This is a bloody disaster.”

“What was that you said, Rast? A baseline for misery?” Chesa plucked her arrows one at a time from the mud, grimacing as she rinsed them off in the broken fountain. “I think we’re making downward progress.”

“I would recommend opening the tap in your amulets, so we have time to accumulate a modicum of power before we reach our destination,” Tembo said. He gestured with his hand, and a flower of amber light blossomed from his chest. With a deep sigh, he smiled to himself. “Yes. That is much better.”

He activated each of our amulets in turn, walking us through the hand gestures and mental commands necessary. I hadn’t realized how drably mundane I was getting until a trickle of mythic power washed through my flesh. I breathed deeply of its energy.

“Where’s this stupid bakery supposed to be?” I asked. The Good Doctor chirruped and pointed the way. “Then let’s get going, before something else happens.”

The roads were crowded with vehicles of all shapes, sizes, and improbabilities. There were traditional carriages with ornate filigree and stained-glass windows, drawn by clockwork horses that huffed steam as they clattered down the cobblestone streets. The carriages looked like giant Fabergé eggs, and most had moving parts on the outside that seemed to serve no particular purpose. Right beside them were smaller carts that could have been cars, if Rube Goldberg had designed them. A variety of engines sputtered and hissed and clacked, their drives powered by boilers or complicated windmills; one car even looked like a motorized pipe organ, controlled by the frenetic playing of its driver.

Interspersed throughout this stream of cacophonous vehicles were smaller, single-passenger conveyances that ran the gamut from steampowered mono-wheels to bicycles tall enough to give a weather forecast, and wheelbarrow-sized carts propelled by a jet of hissing steam. The crowd was universally dissimilar, each vehicle the invention of its pilot, as unique and perilous as could be imagined.

“I feel like we’re being followed,” Chesa said, glancing behind us.

I turned to look. Sure enough, there was a small crowd of picnickers and bicyclists trailing in our wake.

“You’re a curiosity,” Addie said. “The five of you stick out like broken teeth.”

“Well, that’s rude,” I said. “The Good Doctor looks like a bloody crow, and no one seems to care about him!”

“They know the Doctor, and the Society in general. We saved them from the Rat Kingdom, and made quite a splash when the Dire Automata wrestled itself free from the distributed memechine and went on a rampage through the streets.” Addie nodded to a group of gentlemen in top hats. They quickly turned away, talking among themselves in quiet voices. “If you were taking this walk alone, there’s no telling what might happen.”

“I’m not worried about guys in fancy hats,” Chesa said.

“You’ve just described wizards,” Bethany pointed out.

“There’s a great deal more to it than hats,” Tembo harrumphed. “I don’t even wear a hat. They’re wildly overblown in the recruiting literature.”

“In this case, she’s right. Those three are members of the Brotherhood of the Prescient Light. As close to wizards as the Gestalt will allow,” Addie said. “We keep an eye on them, but they mostly do card tricks and chat with horny ghosts.”

“Still describing wizards,” I said. Addie laughed at that, and I felt a warm glow in my chest. “So what kind of thing should we worry about? You know, if we lose our escort at some point.”

“You’re not going to lose me, nor I you. The Gestalt is populated with all manner of monsters, from failed science experiments to roguish air pirates. And thanks to the Victorians’ fascination with myth, we have a persistent problem with the Unseelie Court. They have to follow certain protocols when they visit, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.” Addie resettled her revolver in its holster, probably to emphasize how quickly she could draw it. “Between Verne, Lovecraft, and Miéville, the Gestalt has plenty of horrors haunting it.”

“And here I thought it was all tea parties and airships,” Chesa said.

“I’ll take the lumbering steamwork zombies over tea parties any day of the week,” Addie said. “Those social clubs are downright brutal. Last Christmas, the Holly Heralds got into a row with the Divine Knitting Circle over bake-sale rights. Roaming gangs of armed carolers invoking the forgotten names of angels fighting in the streets with surprisingly well-armed spider-women. We had to break it up, eventually. Plus all the cookies got burned.”

“The true victims,” The Good Doctor whispered. “Sweet macaroons, black as coal.”

“He was quite upset,” Addie said. “Point is, there’s plenty of dangerous stuff out there. So don’t wander away, and if you get lost, try to find a landmark you recognize and stick close to it. We’ll come find you. And speaking of macaroons . . .” She sniffed the air, then smiled. “We’re nearly there.”


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Framed