Angel of Brass (9 page)

“I’m coming with you,” she said firmly.

“But—”

“We’ve already had this argument. Don’t waste
time, when we both know I’m going to win anyway.”

Jin’s shoulders shook, and after a moment she
realized that he was laughing silently. “I don’t see what’s so
funny,” she muttered.

“Let’s go,” he said, avoiding the
question.

They made their way cautiously to the section
of wall facing a side street. Looking up at the high brick barrier,
Molly began to rethink her earlier insistence. “I’m not sure I can
climb that,” she admitted.

“That won’t be a problem.” Jin removed his
gloves and boots. His claws gleamed faintly as he unsheathed them.
“Get on my back.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I’m made to climb,” Jin said with an air of
patience. Crouching down slightly, he nodded over his shoulder.
“Wrap your arms around my neck, and your legs around my waist, and
I should be able to get us both to the top.”

Molly felt her face heat and cursed herself
silently. Hoping that the darkness hid her reaction from him, she
did as he suggested.

His skin felt hot through the layers of
clothing separating them, and when he sank his claws into the
crumbling mortar and started to climb, she was acutely aware of the
play of hard muscle in his shoulders and torso. She did her best to
grip with her legs, but it was impossible not to put some pressure
on his windpipe. When they reached the top of the wall, he clung
for a moment, whispering: “Can you get over from here?”

She moved quickly, hauling herself onto the
top of the wall, then dropping over the other side. She landed
awkwardly in the midst of tall weeds. A moment later, Jin leapt
down with the grace and silence of a cat.

Darkness swallowed the yard, relieved only by
the faint flicker of candles from within the house and the dim
illumination from the rising moon. A faint whiff of decay clung to
the property, as if too many of the dead had passed within to ever
quite get rid of the smell.

“Now what?” she whispered to Jin.

He peered up at the crumbling gambles and
rusted downspouts of the main house. “I’ll see if I can go high and
find a way in,” he murmured. “You take the low road. Don’t get
caught.”

“I figured that part out myself,” she
muttered back. With a laugh, Jin slid away through the tall grass.
An instant later, he flashed up the trunk of one of the towering
trees like a giant squirrel.

Molly took a careful look around. If she had
to guess, the resurrectionists would bring their carts in the
front, which meant that they’d want a convenient place to drop off
the bodies. Squaring her shoulders, she crept toward the front of
the house.* * *The porch roof groaned softly beneath Jin’s weight,
and the worm-eaten wood crumbled around the tips of his claws.
Hoping that the decaying structure didn’t give way and dump him to
the ground far below, he wedged his body beneath a cornice and
surveyed the house.

The sound of voices drifted from the front
yard, interspersed with the occasional pungent curse. Those
probably belonged to the grave robbers they’d followed, who would
be busy offloading their grisly cargo. Other voices sounded from
inside, but it was difficult to tell where in the house they
originated. It seemed likely that the basement and first floor
would be given over to the grunt work portion of the business. No
one would want to lug a heavy body upstairs, after all. If his
reasoning was sound, then any offices would be located on the upper
floor.

The smell of death permeated the air, and he
wondered if the neighbors ever complained.
If it smells like
this now, when it’s cool, what must it be like in high
summer?

Jin made a face at the thought. At least
Malachi had been fastidious about such things. The manor had always
looked and smelled immaculate. It made it easier to pretend that
there weren’t horrors going on in the basement.

Sinking his claws deep, Jin climbed the rest
of the way up to the roof proper. From there, he could peer over
the rusted gutters get a look at the upper rooms. As it turned out,
a single flickering candle showed from the back window. All but
holding his breath, Jin leaned over the roof edge and caught the
faint murmur of voices.

Curse it. I can’t hear anything clearly. I
have to get closer.

Praying to any saints who might be listening,
Jin eased over the edge and made his way toward the window.

* * *

Molly crouched behind what had once been a
hedge bordering a garden, but which had long ago turned into a
tangled wilderness of sprawling shrubbery. On the other side of the
concealing plant life, she could see the carriage drive, leading to
a covered portico. The resurrectionists’ cart had come to a halt
below the portico, and as she watched, the two grave robbers
unloaded the shrouded corpses and carried them inside one at a
time. When the cart was at last empty, they paused beside it. There
came the flare of a match, then the orange glow of a lit pipe,
smoke curling languidly up.

“Need to hose down the cart,” the pipe-smoker
said.

The other snorted. “I’m not doing it. The
delivery boys can see to it, if they’re wanting to. I’m for getting
our payment and heading to the pub.”

Their voices faded as they headed toward the
side porch. For a long moment after they were gone, Molly crouched
in her hiding place, frozen with indecision.

Should I go in? It sounds as if there’s no
one with the...the bodies.

I didn’t come here so that Jin could take all
the risks, while I hide in a hedge. But I really don’t want to see
what’s in there.

It isn’t as though I’ve never seen a body
before. They had Grandma Beatrix propped up in the front parlor for
two days, while everyone came to pay their respects.
But that
had been different, somehow, surrounded by family and ritual.

There’s still no reason to be afraid of what
I’ll see. They’re dead, and no matter how badly they died, they’re
past all suffering and caring. Certainly they can’t hurt me.

Even so, her hands shook badly as she let
herself in through the door. The room beyond was dark, so she
paused long enough to pull her electric torch from her tool belt,
hoping that the light wouldn’t be easily spotted if she shielded it
from the windows.

The small beam revealed a large, wooden
table. Two forms lay on the table, their shrouds dirty and torn,
one so much so that a limp arm dangled over the edge. More bodies
had been piled along one wall, as though they were so much
firewood.

The smell of decay turned Molly’s stomach,
and for a horrible moment she thought she might be sick. Trying to
breathe through her mouth, she inspected the room, keeping her eyes
averted from the lifeless husks sharing it with her. A wooden box
stood in the corner, filled with items that had evidently been
stripped from earlier bodies: stained clothing, shoes with their
laces tied together to keep them in pairs, a wig, and even a set of
false teeth. There was a grate set into the floor near the table,
and a rusted sink with buckets and scrub brushes along the outside
wall.

She almost missed the discreet door near the
innermost corner of the room, but her small light found a
reflection in the worn brass knob. Even though she knew it probably
only led to a storage closet, Molly carefully eased the door
open.

The beam of her torch passed over a tool
bench laid out with dozens of screwdrivers, pliers, wire cutters,
and various other instruments. Beside it, a second bench displayed
an assortment of scalpels, knives, and wicked-looking scissors. A
metal table dominated the center of the room, and the floor again
had a drain set into it. A coiled hose dripped water mournfully
into a deep iron sink. Shelves of specimen jars lined the walls,
and a metal cabinet with a padlock on the front lurked in the
corner. If there had ever been any windows, they had long ago been
bricked over.

It’s a lab,
Molly realized, and felt
the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

But I thought resurrectionists sold corpses
for dissection, not performed dissections themselves.

I guess these have decided to branch out.

There was yet another door in the opposite
wall. When she pressed her ear to it, she heard nothing but a faint
humming, as of some sort of machinery. She hesitated a moment—the
longer she wandered around, the more likely she was to get
caught—but so far she hadn’t found anything to link the
resurrectionists to the conspiracy.

A gust of cold air blew her hair back from
her face when she opened the door. In front of her, a rickety set
of wooden stairs led down into the basement. The rumble of
machinery was much louder now that the door was open, and sounded
as though it came from somewhere near the foot of the stair. The
scent of dampness and rot wafted from below and made her shiver as
much as the cold.

I don’t want to go down there. If the heroine
of a penny-dreadful did that, I’d throw the book across the room in
disgust at her stupidity.

But if I leave without finding out what sort
of machinery the resurrectionists might have in their basement, I
could be turning my back on an important clue.

Hoping that she wasn’t about to do something
truly foolhardy, Molly started down the stairs. The steps creaked
under her boots, and as she passed below the level of the floor,
she sensed the space around her open up. The basement was floored
with packed dirt, and had been divided by a metal-clad wall set
with a large door with a rubber seal around it. The whump and groan
of a compressor sounded nearby, coming from what appeared to be a
large refrigeration unit.

Her skin crawled when she looked again at the
rubber-sealed door. Some sort of cold storage room must be on the
other side, and there was only one thing the resurrectionists would
need that for.

Saints watch over me
. Taking a deep,
steadying breath, Molly grasped the heavy handle and pulled open
the door.

Cold air flooded out. As she had expected,
the room was packed with corpses, stacked up to the ceiling in the
back, but with space left at the front for more. Dozens of sunken
eyes stared at her, and limbs of every shade pressed together in
the pile. A few of them still wore at least some clothing, but most
were either missing their shirts or had them rent open and hanging
loose.

Molly pressed a hand to her mouth and took a
step back, meaning to let the door fall shut again. But the gleam
of metal caught her eye, and she saw that some sort of device had
been attached to the back of the nearest corpse. Wires ran from it
like insect legs, sinking into the bloodless flesh surrounding the
spine.

Feeling a chill sweep over her that was far
greater than that caused by the refrigeration unit, Molly played
the beam of her torch around the room a second time. Although some
of the corpses were packed too closely to tell, every one of those
whose spines she could see had one of the devices attached.

What’s going on here?

Movement caught her eye, and her heart
jerked. Even so, for a moment she thought it had just been an
illusion created by the beam of the torch.

Then the nearest body reached out and grabbed
her ankle.

Chapter 7

Jin clung to the side of the old house and
hoped that the shadows of the looming trees would keep anyone in
the yard from spotting him. Moving as slowly and quietly as
possible, he eased across the façade toward the window, careful to
keep the claws of three limbs sunk deep into the rotting wood at
all times, just in case something gave way.

Although the window was closed, he could make
out voices through the thin glass once he drew near. “...better
accommodations soon enough,” said a man.

Another man, his voice slightly higher,
replied: “I look forward to it. All this lurking about doesn’t help
our image at all, despite the valuable service we provide to
society.”

The light coming through the window shifted,
as if someone had passed in front of the candle. “Indeed, my
friend. So long as things here are progressing well, you’ll soon
quit these dreary lodgings for something far more appropriate.”

Holding his breath, Jin crept as close as he
dared. Then, very, very slowly, he craned his head to peer
inside.

The glass was filthy, but he could still see
the two men well enough. They sat to either side of a wide desk,
sipping whiskey from dirty tumblers. One of them was a stranger to
Jin: a portly man dressed in fine clothing, with receding sandy
hair and a face like a full moon.

The other, he recognized instantly. He’d last
seen the man in the foyer of Dr. Malachi’s house, bidding farewell
after an afternoon of discussing treason.

Rage caught him unexpectedly.
Curse you.
If you’d just stayed here in Chartown, if you’d just left us alone,
none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have had to kill
anyone. And neither would Del.

“They’re progressing well enough,” the
resurrectionist said in his high, soft voice. “Would you like to
inspect the troops, as it were? We have to keep them in a
refrigeration unit downstairs, I’m afraid. If we were in Valin, it
would be a different matter, but Chartown’s winters are too mild to
depend on the weather to keep things...fresh.”

The other man made a small moue of distaste,
but nodded. “Yes, I’ll inspect them. I don’t want there to be any
unpleasant surprises.”

From somewhere deep within the house, there
came the muffled sound of a scream.

* * *

Molly was unable to hold back the shriek of
pure terror that ripped from her throat. She jerked back
instinctively; fortunately, the corpse hadn’t yet gotten a good
grip on her ankle, and she managed to pull free. Shaking violently,
she slammed the door and bolted back up the stair.