Текст книги "The Return of the Discontinued Man"

Автор книги: Mark Hodder

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Trounce and Swinburne exchanged a glance.

“I told you Lorena Brabrooke is a genius,” Trounce said. “And she is. With her every successive clone, she’s increased her skills. But the problem with keeping the Cannibal Club off the surveillance net—with making us invisible—is that it creates holes. Lorena can’t fill those holes, but she can relocate them, so what you might term ‘the absences we make’ are not in the same places as we are. That’s how we evade detection.”

The king’s agent dwelled on this for a moment, struggling slightly with concepts that remained highly abstruse to his nineteenth-century intellect. Before he’d properly formulated his next question, Raghavendra asked it. “Does Spring Heeled Jack suspect the existence of the Cannibal Club?”

“Until nine o’clock this evening, for all these years, we’ve resisted taking any action against him,” Trounce replied. “We’ve been wary of drawing attention to ourselves. Had we done so, he might have hunted us to extinction, and your mission would be jeopardised. Nevertheless, he’s known for some considerable time that something was evading him, and tonight—the date being what it is—we suspected his paranoia would be at its most extreme. That’s why we feared your arrival would be detected and why we finally made a move.”

“So where will they take Bendyshe?” Burton asked.

“I don’t know,” Trounce said. Frustrated, he slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Let’s get going. Not a word in this next section. The pump room at its end is almost certainly occupied by a technician.” He turned to the door that opened onto the second length of tunnel, twisted its handle, swung it wide, and holding his torch before him, led the way in.

Burton, Swinburne, Wells and Raghavendra followed.

This stretch proved longer than the first. They traversed it as rapidly as they could until they neared the pump room, at which point they slowed down and trod with care so their footfalls wouldn’t echo. By the time the light shone upon another door, Burton’s clothes were damp with perspiration and his eyes were slightly wild. He’d been clenching his teeth so hard that his whole face ached, and he felt as if his sanity might break at any moment.

Get me out. Get me out. Get me out.

Trounce looked back and put a finger to his lips. He passed the torch to the king’s agent, but Burton’s hand was trembling so much that the illumination shuddered back and forth until Swinburne reached out and took hold of the device.

Pulling his pistol from his waistband, the cloned Scotland Yard man wrapped his fingers around the door handle, clicked it down, and put his shoulder to the portal. It swept open and he hurtled in, brandishing his gun.

The room beyond was large and humming with machinery. The wall to the right of the door was entirely covered with buttons, screens, levers and projecting valve wheels. A woman with pale, wormy blue skin was sitting on a high stool facing it. Her limbs—two legs and eight arms—were exceedingly long, thin and multi-jointed. Her slender hands bore fingers of outlandish length, extending across different sections of the control panel.

She turned her head as Trounce barrelled in. Her skull, horribly narrow and drawn upward into a pointed cranium, was dotted with a plethora of glittering black eyes. Her mouth, packed with crooked and spiny teeth, opened and produced an uncanny whistling as the detective inspector, having misjudged the force of his entry, collided with her and knocked her from her seat. She hit the floor with Trounce on top of her but immediately thrust him off with such force that he flew into the air, hit the low ceiling, and crashed back down with a loud grunt, the breath thumped out of him. His Penniforth Mark II went skittering across the floor into a corner. The woman scrabbled up, employing her arms as extra legs to quickly back away, like a monstrous arachnid.

“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but me job, m’lords,” she hissed. “I keep to the law, so I does.”

Burton stepped in and drew his weapon. “I have to render you unconscious, madam. It won’t hurt and you’ll recover in a little while.”

“Unconscious? Unconscious? I doesn’t want to be unconscious, m’lord, and I ain’t no madam.” Shook her head and put her hands to it. “I’m confused. Scared. Me head hurts.”

“The nanomechs in your system have stopped working,” Swinburne told her. “You can think freely.”

“I doesn’t want to think. You shouldn’t be ’ere. It’s the rules, m’lords.” She looked at Burton, at his uncovered face. “Oh gawd ’elp me, it’s you, ain’t it! I dunno what to do. I dunno. I dunno. I ain’t ready fer no revolution. I’m just a simple girl. I does me job an’ nuffink else. What should I do, m’lord?”

“Just sleep,” Burton said. He pointed his pistol and added, “Stun.”

Ptooff!

The technician fell backward. Her limbs spread outward. She twitched and became still.

“Poor thing,” Raghavendra said.

“The Lowlies are getting muddle-headed,” Swinburne observed. “We have to work as fast as we can. If we gain control of the Turing Fulcrum, maybe Lorena will find a way to use it to broadcast an encouraging message to them, something to calm them down.”

“And if we have to destroy it?” Burton asked.

“Then we’ll have to employ the old-fashioned method of word of mouth. We’ll recruit Mr. Grub. His was big and loud enough.”

Trounce retrieved his pistol. They moved past the prone woman and walked between two horizontal groupings of pipes to where a flat platform was positioned beneath a square hole in the ceiling.

Trounce said, “This lift will take us straight up to the second pump room on the palace roof. Inside, the air is heated and pressurised, but when we exit we’ll find the atmosphere too thin to breathe and freezing cold. Lorena will cause our BioProcs to compensate, but we’ll have to move fast, else the strain on our bodies will kill us.”

“It’s one thrill after another, isn’t it?” Swinburne commented.

The chrononauts mounted the platform, Trounce depressed a switch, and it rose through the opening into a dimly lit shaft. Looking up, Burton saw its four sides converging toward a far-distant vanishing point.

“It’s quite a way,” Trounce warned them all.

“And bloody slow,” Swinburne complained.

“When this is all over and done with,” Burton muttered, “I shall return to the desert where, in every direction, there’ll be nothing between me and the horizon.”

“Do you mean that?” Raghavendra asked. “Will you really go back?”

Burton looked into her eyes and felt a strange sensation in the middle of his chest, as if the lift was sinking rather than rising. “No,” he whispered. “I don’t suppose I ever will.”

He turned away from her.

Up and up the lift rose. After a while, the chrononauts became tired of standing, so sat and waited, glancing up frequently, hoping they’d see the top of the shaft.

“We must have travelled for miles,” Wells exclaimed after what felt like hours had passed.

“Up through the Underground,” Trounce said, “then out over the upper city, through the level of the royal parks, and on to the top of the palace. I doubt we’ve travelled a third of that distance yet, and we’ve been going for about thirty minutes, I’ll wager.”

“Just half an hour?” Swinburne protested. “Half a day, more like!”

“Funny,” Wells said, “how time feels different for everyone. I might say the day has dragged by, while you’ll say it’s raced. One man of fifty might feel sprightly, another feel that he’s in his dotage. I often wonder whether Chronos exists at all. Might it not be a figment of our imagination?”

“Could our imagination be the seed of all existence?” Burton added, remembering his earlier meditation—though it had occurred seventy-two years ago. “Is there any reality outside of it?”

“Is it possible,” Swinburne mused, “that the altitude is making you both delirious?”

Trounce chuckled. “And so the conversation is brought down to earth.”

“Great heavens!” Sadhvi Raghavendra cried out. “That’s a singularly inappropriate expression to use under our current circumstances.” She looked up. “No sign of our destination. It’s well past midnight already. It’ll be the small hours by the time we get to the roof. What can we expect, William?”

“We’re unlikely to find the greenhouse occupied at this time of night, so we’ll use it as our base of operations. Once we’re inside, I suggest you hold the fort, Sadhvi, while Carrots and I, and Richard and Bertie, split up and reconnoitre with the aim of establishing Her Majesty’s whereabouts. We may have to abduct a member of staff and drag them back for questioning.”

Raghavendra used her forefinger to give Trounce’s arm a hard prod. “So despite your childhood here in the twenty-third century, your nineteenth-century sensibilities haven’t seen any advancement. You still feel it necessary to deny the woman a meaningful role. Really, you’re thoroughly backward.”

“Not at all,” Trounce protested. “Any good general will tell you that the path of retreat must remain well guarded. If I were a chauvinist, I wouldn’t trust to leave the responsibility to you alone. If you want to exchange places with Carrots, I’ll be just as confident with you at my side.”

Raghavendra eyed Swinburne, who was compulsively drumming his left foot and wiggling his fingers.

“Thank you,” she said somewhat wryly. “I accept.”

The minutes ticked by, their number impossible to judge.

Burton squeezed his eyes shut.

You’re not underground. You’re rising high above it.

But I’m enclosed.

Not for much longer.

What if the lift mechanism freezes? What if we get stuck?

It won’t. This will end soon.

“The roof!” Wells exclaimed.

Praise Allah. Praise Jehovah. Praise Zeus. Praise every god that has or hasn’t ever existed.

The chrononauts got to their feet.

“Be ready,” Trounce whispered. “There might be another technician ahead of us.”

The platform slowed, slid up level with a floor, and came to a halt. They found themselves in a room very similar to the one they’d departed. It was unoccupied.

“Luck is with us,” Trounce muttered. He led them past heavy pipes, past a glowing control panel, and to a door. “This opens onto the roof. There’s a short distance to cross to the greenhouse.” He drew his pistol and put his finger to his earlobe. “Lorena?” then, after a pause, “We’re on the roof.” He listened to her reply then addressed his companions. “Our BioProcs are about to drive up our body temperatures and maximise our lung efficiency. It won’t feel pleasant. Follow my instructions exactly.”

Swinburne pulled his handgun from his waistband. Burton raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you sure, Algy? You’re a rotten shot.”

“Not with a pistol that does whatever I tell it.”

Suddenly, Burton felt overheated. His heart hammered. Dizziness and exhilaration gripped him. Too much oxygen!

Trounce eased open the door and led them through it. The roof beyond was clear of snow, being well above the clouds, and was illuminated by the lamps of the nearby greenhouse. The structure’s various angles and planes stood out with startling clarity in the frigid, still, and thin air.

“Softly, softly,” Trounce whispered.

Slowly, they proceeded toward the large rectangular block of glass. The light that shone from within it dazzled them, and Burton found himself squinting and averting his eyes. Nevertheless, he noticed that a plume of what appeared to be dense smoke was rising from the greenhouse’s roof.

Burton’s skin was burning, and his chest rose and fell with great rapidity, as if he was struggling for breath, though he felt no discomfort.

Swinburne whispered to him, “The upper city isn’t as closely monitored as the Underground and, as far as Lorena has been able to ascertain, the palace complex even less so. One of the benefits of elitism is that you’re granted a measure of privacy. Nevertheless, we’d be triggering alarms right now were it not for the destruction of the Embassy. Also, a full-scale information war has just commenced.”

“Information war? You mean Miss Brabrooke is accessing, infiltrating and manipulating?”

“Exactly that. She and her people are hard at work. Communications are being disrupted, reports falsified, files corrupted, diversions planted. If she’s judged it correctly—and I don’t doubt that she has—even a synthetic intelligence as powerful as the Turing Fulcrum will be thrown into confusion.”

“If the Fulcrum and Spring Heeled Jack are one and the same,” Burton responded, “then there’s a deal of confusion in it, anyway.”

“Yet still it has managed to create this ghastly world,” Wells interjected.

Trounce signalled for them to be quiet as they reached the side of the greenhouse. Crouching down, they peered through the glass.

“My hat!” Swinburne hissed. “I’m already here.”

Inside, from the waist-high growing troughs up to the high ceiling, from one side of the interior space to the other, there was a mass of red foliage, a great aggregation of fleshy leaves, tangled branches, exotic flowers, bulging pods, heavy gourds, luminescent fruits, and—especially in the upper reaches—thousands of huge fluffy seed heads. These were noticeably disintegrating, bits of them breaking off and floating out though ventilation grills to form the cloud Burton had noticed—not smoke, but seeds, red but rendered black by the starlight.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by its presence,” the king’s agent murmured. “After all, it was the jungle that brought Spring Heeled Jack’s dictatorship to my attention. We wouldn’t be here were it not for the experiences it foisted upon me.”

“I don’t see anyone inside,” Trounce said.

He moved to the right until he came to a door, opened it, and quietly entered. Burton and the others filed in after him, senses alert. The change from frigid cloud to humid steam caused them to gasp and breathe heavily. Burton’s dizziness increased, and he felt blackness pressing in at the edges of his vision.

Trounce put his finger to his ear and murmured, “We’re in.”

Burton clutched his chest as his heart skipped arrhythmically. He sucked damp air into his lungs and fought to stay on his feet.

The discomfort passed. His body stabilised. The chrononauts glanced at one another, satisfying themselves that all were well. They discarded their robes.

“Let’s make certain we’re alone,” Trounce whispered.

Carefully, without a sound, they spread out and moved through the verdant corridors, passing back and forth between the troughs. Pungent fragrances filled their lungs, and Burton felt a slight headiness, though it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as that which he’d experienced in the Beetle’s factory.

No one else was present.

The king’s agent found a door that, when he cracked it open an inch, proved to be at the top of a stairwell. He closed it and turned to Trounce. “Here’s our route in.”

“A preliminary survey then. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“We’ll go down to the next floor, split into two teams, and separate. Let’s assess how populated it is downstairs. If you can render a member of the queen’s staff unconscious without detection, do so and bring them back here.” Trounce said to Swinburne, “You stay here, Carrots. If anyone enters, stun ’em.”

“Rightio.”

Burton turned and reached for the door handle again, but before he could grasp it, it suddenly moved and the door swung inward, bumping against him. With an exclamation, he stepped back and fumbled for his pistol. Before he could retrieve it, a young woman stepped in. She uttered a small exclamation and stared at them bemusedly.

“Hallo, hallo!” Swinburne cried out. “What ho!”

Burton gasped. His mouth fell open. He was overcome by an urge to rush forward and embrace her. His heart filled with love. Tears blurred his vision.

Isabel! he thought. Isabel!

But it wasn’t Isabel. The girl was short and broad rather than tall and graceful, dark rather than golden-haired. Though curvaceous and attractive, she couldn’t match his fiancée’s beauty.

This love isn’t mine. It’s Oxford’s.

A name popped into his mind.

“Jessica,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “You—you know me, sir? My real name?”

“Jessica,” he repeated. “Jessica Cornish.”

“But—but—I haven’t been called that for—for—” She moved forward, put her hands out toward him and hesitated, her expression alternating between fear and wonder. “How?”

Trounce said gruffly, “Queen Victoria.”

“Yes.” Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “They—he—calls me Victoria. But I’m—I’m Jessica Cornish. How do you know me? Who are you people? Why are you here?”

Trounce slipped behind her and pushed the door shut. He levelled his pistol and muttered, “This is a spot of luck. But be careful, Richard.”

“Lower your weapon,” Burton said. He looked down at the queen. “For how long have you been the monarch, Miss Cornish—Your Majesty?”

“Jessica, please. Just Jessica. It feels—it’s so good to hear that name again. I was chosen five years ago.”

“And prior to that?”

“I lived in Aldershot. I was nobody. A nanny.” She clenched her hands beneath her chin. “Who are you? Can you help me?”

“Help you?”

“I never wanted to be the queen. I don’t know why I am.”

“Miss Cornish,” Swinburne said. “The proclamations. The ones you issue. Might I ask where they come from?”

“Him.”

“Him?”

“The prime minister.”

Swinburne looked at Trounce. “A prime minister? I didn’t know we had one.”

“It’s news to me,” Trounce said. “What of the Turing Fulcrum, Miss Cornish?”

“The—what?”

“The device that guides the government. Perhaps it advises the prime minister?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Trounce’s eyes moved from Jessica Cornish to Swinburne to Burton.

The queen stepped closer to Sadhvi Raghavendra, instinctively seeking the support of her own gender. Raghavendra smiled at her, laid a hand gently on her upper arm, and said to Trounce, “She’s innocent, William. A victim. It’s plain to see.”

The queen nodded. There was an almost childish pleading in her eyes, helplessness.

Burton asked, “This prime minster, when was he elected?”

“He never was.”

“I mean, when did he assume his position?”

The queen leaned closer to Raghavendra. “Um. Forty years ago, I think.”

“2162?”

“Yes.”

“The year the original Edward Oxford was born,” Burton mused.

“He’ll be angry,” the queen said. “You shouldn’t be here. When they finish with that poor man, he’ll come looking.”

“Who are they?” Burton asked. “And what man?”

“The ministers. The traitor.”

“I don’t understand you.”

She put her hands over her face and emitted a quavering moan. “Oh. Oh. They are terrible. Terrible! Their entertainments. So cruel. Torture!”

Trounce reached out and gripped her wrist, not gently. “They have a captive?” he rasped. “What are they doing to him? Tell me!”

“Steady,” Burton murmured.

Recoiling from Trounce, the queen said, “He blew up the American Embassy.”

“Father!” Swinburne croaked.

“They injected him with nanomechs. The machines are eating him from the inside.”

“And they call it entertainment?” Trounce snarled. “By God! Where?”

“In the House of Lords. Five floors down.”

Trounce’s eyes blazed. Jessica Cornish moaned. “I have to go. I shouldn’t be talking to you. I’ll be punished. Let me go. Let me go.”

“It’s all right,” Raghavendra said soothingly. “We’re here to help you, Jessica. Will you trust us? Perhaps we can give you your freedom.”

“He won’t let you. He’ll kill you all. He’ll punish me for speaking with you. You don’t understand. The prime minister is dangerous. Very dangerous.”

“Miss Cornish,” Swinburne said. “What happens here tonight will be the culmination of events that date all the way back to 1837. No danger will dissuade us from doing what must be done.”

Burton turned to speak to Trounce but stopped when he saw his friend’s eyes. The former detective appeared to be almost paralysed by anger, as if he could think only of charging down the stairs with his pistol blazing, yet knew this would be a fatal error. He stood battling with himself, trembling with fury, his mouth opening and closing.

Since being reunited with him, Burton had allowed Trounce to take the lead, conceding to his greater knowledge of this future world. Burton, though, was the commander of the mission, and he saw that he must now reassert himself in that position.

“Sadhvi,” he said, “Miss Cornish will feel undoubtedly more comfortable with you. Take her across to the pump room and wait for us there. We’ll either join you or send for you when our business is done. If neither of those happens and you judge that you’ve waited long enough, make your way back, with our guest, to the Orpheus. In the meantime, describe to her who we are and why we are here.”

The queen moaned and shook her head. “They’ll send equerries to search for me.”

“We’ll take care of that. Sadhvi, go.”

Swinburne added, “Cross the roof as rapidly as possible. Remember, the queen has no adapted nanomechs in her system. Miss Cornish, you’ll experience considerable discomfort outside. It’s extremely cold and the air is thin. Have courage. You’ll only have to traverse a short distance.”

With a brusque nod of acknowledgment, Raghavendra pulled the queen away through the foliage and toward the door to the palace roof.

Swinburne put his finger to his ear and muttered instructions to Lorena Brabrooke. Sadhvi Raghavendra, at least, would be protected out there.

“It’ll be a while before we can speak with Lorena again,” he told them when he’d finished. “She’s now setting out to disrupt all the palace’s internal communications. Our BioProcs won’t escape the effects.”

Burton raised his pistol. “We four shall stay together. The Turing Fulcrum may have been using the faux queen as its public mouthpiece, but apparently a prime minister is providing a rather more assertive one, too. We need to get at him. First, though, let’s rescue Tom Bendyshe.”

Trounce growled, “And if anyone stands in our way, by God, I’ll kill them.”

Burton, Swinburne, Trounce and Wells quietly descended from the rooftop greenhouse to Buckingham Palace’s uppermost storey. The staircase, being more of a service route than a feature of the palace’s opulent interior, did not go down any farther. In order to reach the next floors, they needed to find the grand central stairwell. There were lifts, of course, but these were more often used by the palace’s inhabitants and thus presented the chrononauts with a greater danger of discovery and entrapment.

Trounce and Swinburne both recalled from the architectural plans that the main staircase ran through the middle of the building and was located somewhere to their left. It was more for show than function, so they hoped to use it without being detected.

They moved out of the shadows at the end of the stairs and along a corridor, past the entrance to an elevator, and on to a junction with a much larger and more elegantly decorated passageway. There was a purple carpet running along its floor, its walls bore countless portraits—all of Jessica Cornish—and crystal chandeliers hung from its ceiling every twenty feet along its length. Doors gave way to rooms on either side. Narrow, baroquely carved sideboards stood between them, holding vases of red flowers, small statuettes and framed pictures, all of the queen.

Burton put his head around the corner and looked to the right. Far away, the hallway ended at double doors. He looked to the left. A white stilted figure was striding toward him.

“Stay where you are!” it shouted. “You are not recognised. Your presence is unauthorised.”

“Damn!” Burton cursed. “We’re discovered.”

Swinburne stepped past him and raised his Penniforth Mark II.

“Head. Kill.”

The pistol spat—ptooff!—and the stilted figure fell to the floor. They ran to it, and Burton saw a round hole exactly between where its eyes would be had it a human face. He stepped to a door and, holding his own weapon ready, opened it, revealing an unoccupied bedchamber.

“Drag it in here, we’ll hide it under the bed.”

While this was being done, he asked, “So constables patrol the palace, William?”

“This isn’t a constable,” Trounce responded. “It’s an equerry, one of her majesty’s personal attendants. Basically, it’s exactly the same thing but with a different title. As you can see, it’s identical to the creatures that started appearing in London back in 1860. Fortunately, they don’t carry truncheons, which makes it a little easier for us.”

“Who, besides the queen, lives here?”

“All the ministers of the government and their lackeys. The higher echelons of the Uppers. Also, I presume, our mysterious prime minister, whomever he might be.”

They closed the bedroom door and continued on along the hallway. It ended at another junction. Burton whipped around the corner, facing to the right, gun raised. Trounce did the same, facing left.

“Head! Kill!” they chorused.

Ptooff! Ptooff!

Wells helped Burton to retrieve his victim while Swinburne assisted Trounce. They hoisted the equerries back to the junction and barged into what proved to be another sleeping chamber. A man, on the bed, sat up. He was bald-headed, attired in bright-pink pyjamas, and so morbidly obese that he resembled a gigantic wobbling blancmange. In a bizarrely singsong voice, he warbled, “Hey there! What’s this all about, then?”

Swinburne pointed his pistol. “Stun.”

Outspreading ripples marked the point of impact. The man looked down at his stomach. “Ouch! That hurt! How dare you!”

His eyes rolled up into his head, and he plopped backward onto his pillows.

The chrononauts discovered that the mattress, straining beneath its occupant’s weight, was too close to the floor to provide a hiding space, so instead shoved the two equerries into a wardrobe.

“For how long will Mr. Humpty Dumpty remain unconscious?” Wells enquired.

“Long enough,” Swinburne replied. “I expect he’ll be famished when he wakes up.”

They returned to the junction. Halfway along the left-hand branch, they saw the head of the main stairwell and ran toward it, their feet padding on the soft, luxurious carpet.

They jerked to a stop at the top of the steps, weapons directed downward, but no one was ascending.

Faintly, from far below, an incoherent shout echoed, whether one of anger or merriment, pleasure or pain, they couldn’t discern.

Treading carefully, they went down, passing polished suits of armour standing on display to either side of every tenth step, gauntlets clasped around the grips of broadswords, the blades’ tips resting between pointed sollerets.

A Grecian-style statue dominated the landing of the next floor. It portrayed Jessica Cornish, naked but for flowing material around her hips and a laurel wreath on her head.

As they rounded to the next flight, two female voices floated up to them.

“Why, my dear Baroness, I feel thoroughly wearied to the bone.”

“Of course you do, my lady. It is exceedingly late. I, too, must take to my bed. This whole business has quite exhausted me. I’m certain I’ll lie awake fretting over it.”

“Nonsense! You’re being far too theatrical. It will blow over. It’s merely a hiccup of some sort.”

“Hiccup? How can a hiccup so thoroughly detach the government from its people? Do you not perceive the seriousness of our position? The palace is utterly cut off, dear thing. Utterly! Worse still, we’ve lost all control over the commoners. The implications are frightful.”

“You suggest they might break the law, Baroness?”

“No. I suggest they might indulge in unfettered breeding.”

“Heaven forbid! Now I shall have nightmares.”

Burton said, “Good evening, ladies.”

The two Uppers stopped in their tracks and looked at him. He saw them register, with mutual gasps of consternation, the pistol he was brandishing at them. Their eyes flickered as they took in Swinburne, Trounce and Wells, all standing at his back.

“If you attempt to call for help, I’ll shoot you,” he said.

Both women were exceedingly skinny—almost emaciated—and possessed of protruding joints and absurdly large breasts. Their faces were painted so heavily they resembled masks, and they had ridiculously tall and extravagant wigs balanced precariously on their heads. The pair wore gowns of a vaguely Elizabethan design.

“Who on earth are you?” the one on the left asked.

“My name is Burton. And you are?”

“I am the Baroness Hume of Goldaming, heiress to the sugar beet estates of Sir Jacquard Hume, the Marquis of Norwich and the Norfolk Broads. My companion is Lady Felicity Pye of the Brick Lane Pyes, wife of Earl John Pye, overseer of Bethnal Green Road and chairman of the Pye and Keating Corporation. Burton, you say? What more? Your title, if you please.”

“I am Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.”

“Oh my dear thing!” Lady Felicity Pye cried out. “Why didn’t you say so? Can we be of some assistance?”

“You could tell me how to find the House of Lords.”

“You don’t know? How marvellously extraordinary! Why, you must go down another three flights, turn right, go all the way to the end of the hallway, right again, and it’s straight ahead. The entertainment is already under way, so you’d better hurry up.”

“Forgive me for asking,” Baroness Hume said, “but is that a gun? Why are you pointing it at us?”

“To assure you both of a thoroughly good night’s sleep.”

“Oh, how perfectly terrific!”

“Would you both sit down, please?”

“Sit down? On the stairs? Is it a game?”

“It is.”

“Hooray!”

The women sat and clapped their hands eagerly.

Burton said, “Stun both.”

Ptooff! Ptooff!

“Take one of them over your shoulder, William. Algy, Bertie, you carry the other. I’ll find a room in which to deposit them.”

While his companions took up the two limp ladies, Burton stepped down into a vestibule from which three corridors extended. In the one to his right, two equerries were walking, heading away. They turned a corner and vanished from sight, not having spotted him.

Turning back, he gestured for his friends to follow, moved to the left, and opened a door. On the other side of it, in a room filled with what looked to be shelves of bottled cleaning fluids, an equerry stood facing him, a heavy metal case—perhaps a toolbox—in its right hand.

“You are not—” it began.

The king’s agent whipped up his pistol, saw the red dot on the creature’s face, and pulled the trigger.