A Web of Air (14 page)

“Why indeed?” said Dr Teal, raising an eyebrow.

“We Engineers should not be helping Quercus to put London on wheels; we should be advising him on how to lay the city out harmoniously on solid ground and surround it with the take-off stations for Arlo Thursday’s air machines. Can you not take him under your protection? I know that Dr Collihole would be fascinated by his discoveries…”

Dr Teal winced. “Dr Collihole… Fever, I should have told you, I completely forgot…”

“What?”

“Dr Collihole is dead.”

“Dead? How?”

“I’m not sure. It happened shortly before I joined the Guild.”

“But he was so well!”

“They just found him dead one morning. It was a heart attack, I think.”

“I mean, he was old, but he was well…”

“He was an old man. There are so many things that kill old men.”

A gust of wind blew spray from the fountain into Fever’s face and she was glad of it, because it gave her a chance to wipe her eyes before Dr Teal could see that she was weeping.

He put his hand on her shoulder, surprising her. Engineers did not usually touch one another. He said, “I’ll have Hazell send word to London about the Thursday boy. If Flynn is after him, who knows? He may have stumbled upon something after all.”

“He has,” insisted Fever.

It was frustrating. She knew that Dr Teal still doubted her. He was blinded by the stories about Arlo Thursday being mad. But there was nothing more that she could say to convince him, and she knew that there was no point in dragging him back across the city with her to see Arlo Thursday’s work for himself. Arlo would never let him in.

Dr Teal looked thoughtfully at her, and said, “I’m pleased you decided not to go down to Meriam with your friends. I would have worried that I might lose you again. I have sent word north about you, you know. Master Hazell’s courier should reach London in a day or two. Your mother and father will be relieved to hear that you are found.”

“I was not lost,” said Fever. It annoyed her that he had written to her parents. “I am not a child.”

“Clearly Ambrose Persimmon does not think so, if he has let you remain here in Mayda all alone,” said Dr Teal. He opened his book and studied his drawing of the big funicular. “Where are you lodging? A hotel? You would be better off at Jonathan Hazell’s place. I shall have him prepare a room for you…”

“No,” said Fever.

He looked up at that, surprised, perhaps a little angered.

“I am quite capable of looking after myself, Dr Teal,” Fever said. She stood up. “Please do not forget what I have told you about Arlo Thursday. Please send word to London quickly.”

“Now hang on…” the Engineer started to say, but she had already turned away.

She strode back down the stairways towards Rua Penhasco and her hotel, wondering where she would eat that night, trying to forget the patronizing Dr Teal and the sad news about Dr Collihole and regain that feeling of freedom and independence that she had felt earlier. The sun was low and red in the west now, and Mayda was filling with shadows. In the busy streets beside the harbour a sedan chair pulled out in front of her, going in the same direction. She followed it, glad of the path it cut for her through the crowd, remembering how, in London, she had always thought sedan chairs a most unreasonable mode of transport. Here in Mayda, with all these stairways, they made more sense. She guessed that this one was on its way to Bargetown, and wondered if its rich passengers would be disappointed to find the
Lyceum
gone…

But suddenly the two men carrying the chair set it down, blocking her way, and turned to meet her. One stuck out a beefy hand and seized her by the arm as she tried to step around him. “Senhorita Crumb?”

His friend opened the door of the chair. It was empty.

“Get in,” said the first man. “Someone wants to meet you.”

“Get off!” Fever was struggling to free herself, but the man was immensely strong, as you’d expect of someone in his line of work, and she could not help noticing that there was a big knife stuck through his belt. She wondered if she should shout for help, but there was so much noise all around her that she didn’t think anyone would hear. While she was trying to decide, the man pushed her at his friend, who shoved her inside the chair and closed the door. She tried to open it, but it was bolted.

A sedan chair that could be locked from outside?Fever could not see the point of that, unless these bullocks made a habit of such abductions. Worried, but uncertain what she could do to help herself, she sat down on the plush leather-covered seat and peeked out of the window as the bearers picked the chair up and hurried off with it.

They were not heading for Bargetown after all.

he street called Rua Cĩrculo ran all round Mayda, about halfway up the crater wall, even spanning the harbour mouth on a vertiginous bridge. Some stretches of this street were smart and others shabby. The stretch where Fever’s abductors finally set her down was on a boundary between the two; fine mansions with sea views to the west, to the east long rows of rundown town houses like rotting teeth. Between them a buttress of the cliff rose almost sheer, and ten or more big funiculars had been built on it. Most of these were restaurants or nightclubs, and they shuttled ceaselessly up and down their tracks, entrancing their guests with an ever-changing view, filling the night air with the grumbling song of their wheels and cables. It was a restless part of town.

The chair door opened, and the two men reached in to pull Fever out, grabbing an arm each. They did not hurt her, and to anyone watching it would have looked as if they were helping her, but their big, sturdy hands gripped like manacles and she knew that there was no hope of escape.

The chair men led her up some steps and along a pathway covered by a red awning to the door of one of the funiculars. It was a nightclub of some kind, she thought. Four storeys high, all wood, with painted carvings over the doors and ground-floor windows, the higher parts neglected, peeling. A sign shaped like a bright red fish was bolted to the wall high up on one corner, lit from within by gas. Across the portico was a name:
The Red Herring.
Fever guessed that the building was preparing to move up the cliff because she could hear the tanks beneath it emptying into some cistern beneath the street. People were queuing at the big front door, waiting to go in. Wealthy looking couples; men in leopard-print or sharkskin robes, their women much younger, with bright teeth and huge hair and gowns slit down the back and up the side. The chair men bustled her quickly past, the burly guards in the doorway ordering customers aside to make way.

A young woman who had been standing just inside the club’s big doors came out and smiled a large white smile at Fever and said, “You’re expected.”

“By who?” asked Fever, but the woman just kept smiling and turned away.

Fever’s captors let go of her and gestured at her to follow the woman. She could think of nothing else to do. One of the men walked behind her as she went after the woman past an open inner door and up a long wind of stairs, the walls and the treads of the stairs all painted black, the reedy music of flutes and drums echoing from the low and flaking ceiling. They passed through another door at the top of the stairs into a tight, unhealthy-feeling warren of corridors somewhere at the back of the building. This place was a bit like the
Lyceum,
Fever thought; there must be a gaudy, spectacular-looking bit downstairs that the public saw but all was clutter and confusion behind the scenes.

The woman opened a door, looked in, said something that Fever didn’t catch, then stood back and ushered Fever past her into a room with a big desk, a couple of chairs, stripes of red light coming through a blind on the window. A man sat writing at the desk but he looked up when Fever entered and gestured with his angel-quill pen towards an empty chair.

Fever knew him. He was the same man who had watched her the previous night as she left Arlo Thursday’s house.
Midas Flynn.
She recognized his deep-set eyes and that long, bluish jaw. His hat was off, baring a steep, domed head with five strands of black hair greased carefully across his scalp.

“Miss Crumb,” he said, still pointing with the quill. He had a high, breathy voice; a hard-to-place accent.

Fever did not sit down.

Behind her, the man who had helped to kidnap her fidgeted as he waited in the open doorway. “Want me to stay?” he asked.

“Thank you, Senhor Vigo,” said Midas Flynn. “I think I can manage. You may wait downstairs. Make sure nobody comes up.”

The man grunted and turned away, closing the door with a soft click. Fever heard him say something to the woman as they walked off along the corridor.

“It is easy to hire thugs and assassins in Mayda,” said Midas Flynn casually, blinking his big eyes moistly at Fever. “There are whole guilds of them. The Shadow Men, for instance, who dedicate all their murders to the Mother Below. The Lords of Pain, who specialize in torture, the Songbirds, who will murder or maim your enemy while singing him a message of your choice… Vigo and his friends are Shadow Men. I would not usually employ such violent fellows, but my business in Mayda places me in a certain amount of danger, and their Guild had a special offer on. They will protect me from anyone who might wish me harm, and if anyone does harm me Senhor Vigo and his chums will hunt down and kill them for no extra charge.”

Was that a threat? Fever wondered. In case she was tempted to harm him herself, with the little clasp knife in her inner pocket?

“You look afraid,” said Midas Flynn. “There is no reason to be.”

“I’m not,” said Fever, although she was, a little. “Why did your men—”

“Kidnap you? I am sorry for that, it was necessary. Please believe me, you are in no danger. We need to talk, and it might be dangerous for you if you were seen speaking to me.”

“You could have just—”

“Invited you?” Midas Flynn seemed to have a nervous habit of finishing her questions for her. “You look far too sensible to accept invitations to cheap hotels from strangers, Miss Crumb.”

Fever looked around the room. It seemed very ordinary. Shabby, like its occupant. There was a bed in one corner behind a curtain, clothes strewn on an armchair. The music from the club downstairs came up faintly through the floorboards. “Do you…?”

“… live here? No, I am in Mayda on business,” said Flynn. “The rooms here are very reasonably priced, perhaps because of the noise. You were at Arlo Thursday’s funicular this afternoon, I believe?
Please
sit down.”

Fever spread her coat-skirts and sat down carefully on the chair’s greasy edge. Midas Flynn blinked at her.
Shifty, but not the murdering type,
Dr Teal had said. She hoped he had been right as she watched Flynn’s long hands go spidering across the desk to a carafe of blood-coloured Maydan wine. He filled two glasses and slid one towards Fever, who did not take it.

“Now, Miss Crumb,” he said, “you must not think of me as your enemy. I am a scientist, like you. I worked for many years on the secret of flight. Perhaps you have heard of the Flynn Ornithopter? No? Well, that is not surprising. It never flew, and with every crash it took a little more of my money with it. But I am still determined to solve the problem! So I go hither and thither to speak with others working in the same field. And this past year I have started to find many of them dead.”

Fever said, “I know Edgar Saraband was…”

“… killed, yes.” (He pronounced it
kheeled.)
“Poor Saraband was just the latest victim.” Midas Flynn took a long drink of wine. “Before that it was Ugo Carax, who hanged himself in his studio, having burned all the plans for the dirigible balloon he had been working on. Most out of character. Before him, Caspar Delabole, crushed under his own experimental glider…” He paused, watching for Fever’s reaction, as if wondering whether she had heard these names before. She hadn’t, and he went on with his list, counting off dead aviators on his fingers. “Branscombe Dekkers’s motorized box-kite broke up on its first flight; Mindy Van Der Waal’s steam-powered triplane exploded in mid-air; Dr Preston Collihole allegedly died of heart failure…”

“Dr Collihole?” said Fever, startled. “What do you mean, ‘allegedly’?”

“Only that it seems rather an unlikely coincidence, don’t you think?” asked Flynn with a nervous smile. “So many philosophers, all working on the same problem, and all dying within a few months of each other?”

Fever tried to come up with a reply, but all she could think of was Dr Teal saying,
“There are so many things that old men die of
…” Frail as he was, it would have been simple for someone to murder Dr Collihole and pretend his death was natural.

“Somebody is killing them all, Miss Crumb,” said Midas Flynn. “Whenever a scientist starts to work on the problem of flight this killer gets to hear of him, and stretches out a hand, right across Europa, and snuffs him out.”