Boneshaker

Thirteen


Briar downed first the one mug, then a second one filled with water. She asked about the beer.
“Do you want some?”
“No. I just wondered why it was an option.”
Swakhammer served himself a taller mug filled with sour-smelling ale and pulled up a chair across from Briar. He said, “Because it’s easier to turn Blight-bitter water into beer than it is to purify it. Distilling makes for a nasty brew, but it won’t kill you or turn you rotty.”
“I see,” she said, and it made perfect sense. But she couldn’t imagine swilling the urine-yellow beverage except under the most dire of circumstances. Even at a distance, it had a scent that would peel paint.
“It takes some getting used to,” he admitted. “But once you do, it’s not so bad. And you know, I never did catch your name.”
“Briar,” she offered.
“Briar what?”
She gave fast consideration to inventing a new identity, and discarded the idea just as quickly. Her experience with the Namaah Darlings captain and crew had been an encouragement. “It was Wilkes,” she said. “And now, it’s Wilkes again.”
“Briar Wilkes. So that makes you… all right. No wonder you were keeping it to yourself. Who let you down here—Cly?”
“That’s right. Captain Cly. He’s the one who dropped me down, on his way elsewhere. How’d you know?”
He took another swallow of beer and said, “Everybody knows how he escaped the Blight. It’s no secret. And he’s not the worst sort of guy. Not the best, but definitely not the worst. I trust he didn’t give you any trouble? ”
“He was a perfect gentleman,” she said.
He smiled, revealing a bottom row of teeth that fit together strangely. “I find that tough to believe. He’s a big son of a gun, ain’t he?”
“Enormous, yes, though you’re no small fry yourself. You gave me a hell of a scare, bursting in like that. As if your voice weren’t awful enough in that mask, it makes you look like a monster, too.”
“It does! I know it does. But it keeps me breathing better than that old contraption you were wearing, and the suit keeps the worst of the rotter bites from landing. They’ll eat you up whole, if they can catch you and bring you down.” He rose to refill his drink and stayed standing, striking a thoughtful pose with one arm folded and the other holding the mug. “So you’re Maynard’s girl. I thought you looked familiar, but I wouldn’t have placed you if you hadn’t said anything. And that makes your son who’s missing—”
“Ezekiel. His name’s Ezekiel, but he goes by Zeke.”
“Sure, sure. And Zeke is Maynard’s grandson. You think he’s making a point to tell people about it?”
Briar nodded. “He must be. He knows it might help him here, and he doesn’t realize—not fully, I don’t think—how it could also hurt him. Not that he’s Maynard’s, I mean. About his father.”
She sighed and asked for more water. While Swakhammer refilled the mug, she said, “It’s.not his fault. None of it’s his fault; it’s all mine. I should’ve told him… God. I never told him anything. And now he’s on this mission to root through the past and see if he can find anything that’s worth having.”
Another mug of stale water landed on the table in front of her. She took it, and drank down half its contents.
“So did Ezekiel come here looking for his father?”
“Looking for him? In a way, I suppose, he thinks he can prove his father was innocent if he can find proof that the Russian ambassador paid to have the Boneshaker tested before it was ready. He came here wanting to find the old laboratory, so he could hunt for some way to clear Levi’s name.” Briar drank the rest of the water. Swakhammer offered her more, but she waved her hand to tell him no.
“Can he do it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can he do it? Can he prove Blue was innocent in the Blight affair?”
She shook her head and almost laughed. “Oh no. Oh God no, he can’t. Levi was as guilty as Cain.” Almost immediately, she wished she hadn’t said that last part. She didn’t want her new companion to ask any questions, so she hurriedly added, “Maybe, deep down, Zeke knows it. Maybe he only wants to see where he came from, or see the damage for himself. He’s only a boy,” she said, and she tried hard to keep the exasperation out of her words. “Heaven only knows why he ever does anything.”
“He never knew his dad, I guess.”
“No. Thank God.”
Swakhammer leaned against the back of the chair across from Briar. “Why would you say that?”
“Because Levi never had a chance to corrupt him or change him.” That wasn’t all she could say, but it was all she could muster for this stranger. “I keep thinking, maybe one day this war back east will end—and then I can pack him up and head somewhere else, where nobody knows about either one of us. That would be better, wouldn’t it? It can’t be any worse than being here.”
“Being here’s not so bad,” he argued with a sardonic grin. “Just look at this palace!”
“It is bad, and you know it as well as I do. So why do you stay? Why would you live here—why would anybody?”
Swakhammer shrugged and finished his beer. He chucked the mug back into a crate and said, “We all got our reasons. And you can make it down here, if you want to. Or if you have to. It’s not easy, but it’s not easy anyplace, anymore.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Anyway, there’s money to be made. There’s freedom, and plenty of opportunity if you know where to look.”
“From what? From how?” Briar asked. “From looting the old rich places? One day, that money will run out. There’s only so much you can steal and sell inside the walls, or so I’d think.”
He shifted on his feet. He said, “There’s always the Blight. It’s not going anywhere, and no one knows what to do about it. If you can’t turn a buck off the sap, then it really isn’t any use to anyone.”
“Lemon sap kills people.”
“So do other people. So do dogs. So do angry horses, and diseases, and gangrene, and birthing babies. And what about the war? You don’t think the war back east kills people? I promise you this—it kills them by the score, and it kills more of them than the Blight does. More by thousands, I bet.”
Briar shrugged, but it wasn’t a dismissal. “You’ve got a point, I’m sure. But my son isn’t going to die in childbirth, or in war—not yet, at least. At the moment, he’s much more likely to sicken himself to death with that stupid drug, because he’s only a child, and children do stupid things. And please understand, I’m not accusing you of anything. I understand how the world works, and I know plenty about doing what you must in order to get by.”
“I don’t owe you an explanation.”
“I’m not asking you for one. But you seemed mighty ready to offer one in self-defense.”
He pushed at the chair and gave her a look that was almost a glare, but wasn’t quite. “That’s fine. As long as we understand each other.”
“I think we do, yes.” She rubbed at her eyes and scratched at her thigh, where the little cuts from the window were itching like mad; but least they weren’t bleeding anymore.
“You hurt?” Swakhammer asked, eager to change the subject.
“Just a few cuts. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the gas rubbing in it. You don’t have any bandages around here, do you? I’ll need some for decency’s sake, if nothing else. My pants are going to come apart before long, so I could use a needle and thread, too.”
His crooked-toothed smile warmed its way back onto his face. “Sounds like you need a secretary, or a nice hotel. I’m afraid I can’t give you much along those lines, but now that I’ve decided where to take you, I think we can get you patched up.”
Briar didn’t like his phrasing. “What do you mean by that? Where are you going to take me?”
“You’ve got to understand,” he said. He shouldered his armor and stuffed his mask up under his arm. “This is a… well, let’s call it a controlled community. It’s not for everyone, and we like it just fine that way. But every now and again, someone drops down off an airship or wriggles up from down by the water, wanting to make a change. People get the idea that there’s something valuable in here, and people want to get their fingers in that pie.” He cocked his head at her mask, and at the bag and rifle that were sitting on the table beside her. “Get your stuff together.”
“Where are you taking me?” she asked more urgently, wrapping her fingers around the gun.
“Sweetheart, if I was going to do you any trouble, I would’ve taken that away.” He pointed at the Spencer. “I’m going to take you to your daddy’s place. Sort of. Now come on. It’s afternoon now and it’s getting dark, and it gets even worse out there when it’s dark. We’re walking underneath the really bad parts, but this time of day, everybody and their brother is dropping down into the tunnels.”
“Is that bad?”
“It might be. As I was going to tell you, before you distracted me, we’ve got plenty of problems down here already. That’s why we have to watch the new folks so closely. We don’t need any more trouble than we already got.”
Briar felt somewhat refreshed, but not much reassured by the conversation’s faintly sinister turn. She shouldered the rifle, slipped her-self through the strap of her satchel, and stuffed the mask inside it. Her father’s old hat fit much better without the mask, so she put the hat back on rather than tie it to her satchel.
She told him, “All I want to do is find my son. That’s it. I’ll find him, and get out of your city.”
“I think you underestimate the trouble a woman like you can cause without even trying. You’re Maynard’s girl, and Maynard is the closest thing to an agreed-upon authority down here.”
She blinked hard. “But he’s dead. He’s been dead for sixteen years!
Swakhammer pushed aside a leather curtain and held it for Briar, who was now more reluctant to let him follow her. But there was no graceful way around it. She took the lead, and he dropped the curtain behind them both, casting the corridor into darkness except for his lantern.
“Sure he’s dead, and it’s a good thing for us. It’s hard to argue with a dead man. A dead man can’t change his mind or make new rules, or behave like a bastard so no one will listen to him anymore. A dead man stays a saint.” He tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the lantern. “Aim this over here so I can see.”
As if he’d forgotten something, he held up a finger that asked her to wait. He ducked back through the curtain and reappeared a few seconds later, chased by the smell of smoke.
“Had to put out the candles. Now bring that up close.”
Next to the leather curtain a long iron rod was propped against the wall. Swakhammer took it and threaded it through a series of loops at the bottom of the leather curtain.
“Are you…” Briar wasn’t sure how to ask the question. “Locking the curtain?”
He grunted half a laugh. “Just weighing it down. The more barriers we keep between the undersides and the topsides, the better the air stays; and when the bellows kick on and off, they blow these curtains all over the place.”
She watched him work, paying close attention. The mechanics of it all fascinated her—the filters, the seals, the bellows. Seattle used to be an uncomplicated trading town fed and fattened by gold in Alaska, and then it had dissolved into a nightmare city filled with gas and the walking dead. But people had stayed. People had come back. And they’d adapted.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Just hold the light. I’ve got it.” The curtains were anchored and bound by the rod, and he jammed the rod’s end into a groove beside the doorjamb. “That takes care of that. Now let’s go. Keep the light if you want. Go straight up here, and take the right fork, if you would, please.”
Briar wandered through the damp, moss-covered hallway that rang with the distant, perpetual drip of water. Sometimes from above, a thud or a jangling clank would sound, but since her escort paid the noises no attention, she did her best to tune them out too.
“So, Mr. Swakhammer. What did you mean when you said we were going to… to my father’s?” She looked over her shoulder. The jagged lantern light gave the man’s face a hollow, haggard appearance.
“We’re going to Maynard’s. It used to be a pub, down on the square. Now it’s the same as everything else here—dead as a doornail—but down in the basement there’s a crew of folks who keep the place running. I figure we’ll try that first because, well, for one thing you’re going to need some better filters and maybe a better mask. And for another, if your boy was out here telling people he’s Maynard’s grandson, the odds are good that someone would’ve brought him there.”
“Do you think so? Really? But he was trying so hard to find his way back to Levi’s house.”
The corridor opened into a three-way split. “Take the middle,” Swakhammer told her. “The question is, does the kid know where the house is?”
“I don’t think he does, but I might be wrong. If he doesn’t know, then I can’t imagine how he’d begin to start looking.”
“Maynard’s,” he said with confidence. “The pub is both the safest place he could end up, and the most likely place he’d end up.”
Briar tried not to let the lantern shake when she asked, half to herself and half to her companion, “What if he’s not there?”
He didn’t answer at first. He sidled up next to her and gently took the lantern away, holding it up higher and out as if he were looking for something. “Ah,” he said, and Briar saw the street name and the arrow painted on the wall. “Sorry. For a minute there, I thought we’d gotten turned around. I don’t come out this way often. Mostly, I stick closer to the square.”
“Oh.”
“But listen, as for your boy, if he’s not at Maynard’s… well, then he’s not at Maynard’s. You can ask around, see if anyone’s seen him or heard about him. If nobody has, then at least you’re spreading the word—and that can only help him. Folks down at Maynard’s, when they hear they’ve got flesh and blood to the old lawman lost or wandering here in the city, they’ll move hell, high water, or Blight-wash to find him, just to say they’ve seen him.”
“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Why would I bother?”
Above them something heavy fell, and the pipes that ran along the walls shuddered in their posts.
“What was that?” Briar demanded. She skidded closer to Swakhammer and resisted the urge to ready her rifle.
“Rotters? Our boys? Minnericht testing some new toy? There’s no telling.”
“Minnericht,” Briar repeated. It was the third time she’d heard the name. “The same man who made your… your Daisy?”
“That’s him.”
“So he’s a scientist? An inventor?”
“Something like that.”
Briar frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s a man with many toys, and he’s always unveiling new ones. Most of his toys are dangerous as hell, though a few of them are kind of fun. He does little mechanical things sometimes, too. He’s an odd bird, and not always a friendly one. You can say it out loud, if you want.”
“Say what out loud?” She stared straight ahead, into the damp, faintly noxious distance.
“What you’re thinking. You’re not the first person to notice it—how much Minnericht sounds like your husband.”
“My former husband. And I wasn’t thinking that,” she lied.
“Then you’re a damn fool. There’s not a man down here who hasn’t wondered about it.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” she protested, though she was deathly afraid that she did. “Seattle wasn’t a huge city, but it was big enough to have more than one scientist living here, I bet. Or this Minnericht might’ve come from someplace else.”
“Or he might be old Levi, dressed up different and wearing a new name.”
“He isn’t,” she said so quickly that she knew it must sound suspicious. “My husband is dead. I don’t know who this Minnericht may be, but he’s not Levi, I can promise you that.”
“Down this way.” Swakhammer urged her toward a darker path that ended in a ladder. The ladder disappeared into another brick-lined tunnel. “You want to go first, or do you want me to?”
“You can go first.”
“All right.” He put the lantern’s wire handle in his teeth, leaned his head forward, and descended with the light almost singeing his shirt. “How? ” he asked from down below.
“How what?”
“How do you know Minnericht isn’t Leviticus? You sound pretty certain, Widow Blue.”
“If you call me that again, I’ll shoot you,” she promised. She set her feet on the rungs and climbed down after him.
“I’ll keep that in mind. But answer my question: How do you know it ain’t him? Far as I know, no one ever found Blue’s body. Or if anyone did, no one announced it.”
She hopped down off the last rung and stood up straight. At her full height, she barely came up to his shoulder. “Nobody found him because he died here in the city at the same time so many other people did, and no one was willing to come back to look. Rotters probably got his body, or maybe it’s just decayed away to nothing. But I’m telling you, he’s as dead as a stone, not down here living inside these walls that are all his fault. I can’t imagine why you’d even wonder such a thing.”
“Really? You can’t imagine?” He gave her a smirk and shook his head. “Yeah, it’s real hard to imagine… one crazy scientist makes crazy machines and destroys a whole city, and then as soon as the dust settles, there’s a crazy scientist making crazy machines.”
“But surely someone has actually seen Minnericht? Everyone knew what Levi looked like.”
“Everyone knew what Blue looked like, sure. But no one knows about Minnericht. He keeps his lace covered and his head down low. There’s a girl who used to lurk down here, Evelyn somebody, he used to have a good time with her, every now and again, before she got herself too junked up on the Blight and started to turn.”
He looked down at Briar and said quite pointedly, “That was a few years ago, before we had a good idea of how to breathe down here. It took some trial and error, it did, and this is a place where only the strong survive. And Evie, she just wasn’t strong. She got sick and started slipping, so the good doctor shot her in the head.”
“That’s…” Briar couldn’t think of a response.
“That’s plain old practicality, is all. We’ve got plenty of rotters shambling around; we didn’t need one more hanging about. Point is,” he tried again, “before she went down, she told folks she’d got a look at his face, and it was all scarred up—like he’d been burned, or like something else bad had happened to him. She said he almost never took off his gas mask, even when he was underside here in the safer places.”
“Well, there you go. He’s just an unfortunate man who’s hiding some scars. There’s no reason to assume the worst.”
“No reason to assume the best, either. He’s a madman, sure as your husband was. And he’s got the same knack for building things, and making things work.” Swakhammer seemed on the verge of saying something else. “I’m not saying that’s who he is, for sure. I’m just saying that lots of people think he might be.”
Briar sneered. “Oh, come on. If you folks really thought he was Blue, you’d have dragged him into the street and fed him to the rotters by now.”
“Mind your step,” he told her, indicating with the sweep of the lantern the way the tunnel was broken up into an uneven floor. “And it didn’t come to us all of a sudden—how we got thinking this stranger might not be such a stranger. It happened real gradual, over a couple of years. One day two folks who’d been thinking about it in private shared their thoughts, and from then on out, it was a runaway rumor that nobody could stop.”
“I could stop it.”
“Maybe you could; maybe you can’t. If you’re that sold on taking the trouble, I’d like to see you try it. Last few years, the old doctor’s been more trouble than he’s worth down here—useful instruments aside.” He patted at the Daisy and shook his head. “He does good work, but he does bad things with his good work. He’s got a bit of passion for being in charge.”
“You said yourself, nobody’s in charge down here except a man who died sixteen years ago.”
He grumbled, “I didn’t say that exactly. Come on. Not much farther, I swear. Can you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Even as she asked the question, she could hear strains of music. It wasn’t loud and wasn’t too melodic, but it was distinct and cheerful.
“Sounds like Varney’s playing, or trying to play. He can’t pound out a song worth a damn, but he’s doing his best to learn. There was an old player piano in Maynard’s, but the mechanism inside it rotted out. A few of the boys rigged it up so you could play it like a regular instrument. The poor machine hasn’t been tuned since before the walls, but you can probably hear that for yourself.”
“I’m surprised you’re comfortable with that much noise. I’d think you’d spend your days staying quiet. The rotters seem to have good ears.”
“Oh, they can’t hear us so well when we’re down here. The sound travels underground more than it carries up there.” He cocked his head at the ceiling. “And even if they do get a hint of what we’re up to, they can’t get at us. Maynard’s—well, most of the old square, really—is reinforced like nobody’s business. It’s the safest part of what’s left, I’ll tell you that much.”
She was reminded of Zeke, and again she offered a silent prayer to anyone listening that perhaps the boy had found his way to the fortress within the fortress. “And if we’re lucky, we’ll find my son there.”
“If we’re lucky indeed. Is he the resourceful sort?”
“Yes. Oh God, yes. Too much so for his own good.”
The music was brimming up louder, spilling out around the edges of a round door that had been sealed on both sides. Swakhammer picked at the flaps and fumbled for a latch.
Briar spied a mark on the door. It was geometric and sharp, a zigzagged line that reminded her of something. She pointed at it and asked, “Mr. Swakhammer, what’s that? What does that mark mean?”
“What, don’t you recognize it?”
“Recognize it? It’s only a jagged line. Does it mean something?”
He reached out for her and she almost backed away out of reflex, but she held still while he poked at her belt buckle. Using one finger, he tipped it up so she could stare down at it and see for herself. “It’s your own daddy’s initials, that’s all. It marks this place as a safe spot, for people who’ll keep the peace.”
“So it is,” she murmured. “And don’t I feel like a dummy.”
“Don’t feel too silly about it. The poor quality of Willard’s handwriting is a thing of legend. Stand back, if you don’t mind. These doors are sealed from both sides, just in case.” And he pulled the latch, tugged the door, and leaned on it to hold it open.
“In case of what?”
“In case there’s a breach. In case the bellows fail, or the cleared-out spots upstairs are busted open and contaminated. Just in case, that’s all. Around here, anything’s possible.”
She stepped through the door, and she believed him.