Camera Obscura Page 12

  When was she last there? Two, three years before? And that was on Council orders. This was not her part of town and the Toymaker wasn't someone she looked forward to seeing – usually.

  Now she needed him.

  The Toymaker had been a magician, and he had been a builder of automata; and for a time was very well known. His name had been Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. He had once been known as "The heir of Vaucanson", he who had been the father of the Republic.

  That had all been a while back. Before the incident with the Eve, and the subsequent scandal…

  The Toymaker's shop sat on its own in a pool of darkness by the river. Clocks were set on the otherwise impassive façade, clock-faces showing the time around the world, staring at the passers-by as if challenging them to step inside. To do so, they seemed to suggest, would be to challenge time itself.

  There was no sign to advertise the Toymaker's craft. A single black door was set into the building and it was closed.

  But the Toymaker seldom slept…

  The door had no handle. Milady knocked, and somewhere inside an ominous martial music rose like a waking dog.

  All suitably orchestrated. She banged on the door and shouted, "Council business, open up!"

  The door swung open without a sound. And now that she could see into the inside of the shop she saw nothing but darkness. Yet there was a sense of intelligence inside, of hidden eyes watching, and the faint sounds of movement could be heard – if she concentrated – of gears and wheels, as unseen shapes flitted away in the darkness.

  She came inside. The door closed behind her.

  "Show yourself," she said.

  "Milady de Winter," a voice murmured, close to her ear, "what a pleasant surprise."

  It had startled her.

  Which had been the intention.

  "Houdin," she said, and the voice said, "No!" and then, more quietly, "Not any more."

  He had built her Grimm. He had built many things. Once, he had been head of the Council…

  Not any more.

  "I need something from you," she said, into the darkness.

  "That is always what brings them to my shop," the voice said. Farther now. "Always they want something. My only desire had been to build that which resembles the human. Tell me –" the voice said, moving even farther away – but then, one could never trust the source of the voice, as she had no doubt machines could replicate it across the dark space, only one of the magician's many tricks – "if it acts like a man and sounds like a man – how do you know it is not a man?"

  "As I recall," she said, "it was not men that were your problem."

  A short, dry laugh. And now lights sprang into existence across the shop, illuminating–

  He stood at the far end, dressed in a black suit and a top hat. A white handkerchief was in the breast suit of his pocket. In one hand he held a cane. His face–

  The shop was filled with mechanical toys. Trains began to run suddenly across what seemed like miles of miniature rails, climbing walls and descending mountains of furniture. Airships glided in the air, black mechanical things resembling insects. Toy soldiers marched towards her, guns raised. On the wall, the only clock was half-melted, frozen at the time of–

  "I tried to save my child," he said. "That was all."

  "She could not be allowed to–" she said, but he was not listening.

  When his wife had died giving birth he had enlisted Viktor's help. The two of them had created something–

  In the secret records of the Quiet Council it was referred to as The Affair of the Bride with White Hair.

  There had been several dozen victims before–

  The old magician stepped forward. And now she could see his face, and wished she couldn't.

  The man was wearing a mask. It was not like Madame Linlin's face, half-alive, half-metal. His was the mask of humanity, a shifting rubbery façade such as was used for one of his automatons. It could pass for human – in the dim light. If one did not look too closely, and saw the ripples on the false skin, the way the eyes moved across the face, the dance of the shifting mouth…

  She said, hiding a shiver, "Is this your boy?"

  A smaller figure had appeared beside the magician. Like Houdin, it too was dressed in evening dress and top hat, with the same white handkerchief, the same cane. But the figure was very still, with the frozen countenance of the dead.

  "Say hello to the nice lady," the magician said, speaking gently. The little figure moved forward – and now she caught the look in the magician's eye, saw the glee there, and the anger. He knew she was repulsed, and both enjoyed and was angered by it.

  "Shake hands," the man said, and the little boy reached out a hand, mechanically, and Milady shook it. The hand felt soft and smooth – would always feel soft and smooth. It would never grow, never change – and now it held her hand and pressed, and there was strength beyond a boy's strength in it, the little hand beginning to crush the bones in her hand–

  She cried out and the magician hissed a command. The boy released her hand and turned around. His hair was black, cut short at the back. It would never grow, never fade.

  "What do you want?" the magician said.

  "There is a killer in the city," she said, and the magician laughed. "There are many killers in the city," he said. "You should know. You're one of them."

  It had taken all their efforts to halt the man's creation. The bride with white hair did not go quietly…

  But it had been her work that had finally terminated the creature's "life".

  She said, "This killer is different."

  "I see," the magician said with a strange, sing-song voice, "a long journey in your future, and a tall dark stranger."

  "I didn't come to have my fortune told," she said. "I need a weapon."

  "You are going to need more than a weapon," he said, in the same voice. "You are going to need to become a weapon."

  It was told that, in the darkness and isolation of his shop, he

  had perfected machines that could read the future in numbers, predict events and patterns of history beyond even the abilities of the famed Mechanical Turk. And yet he told her nothing…

  "I still have my sources," the old man said. "I was once of the Council, and that is not something abandoned lightly. I know about your killer. I know more than you do. I–"

  "You've seen the corpses," she said. Thinking of the corpses in the under-morgue, the shifting greys…

  "Are they not beautiful? So beautiful… I wish to find where they are going, where they had gone. But the door is not here, it is far away."

  "Tell me what you know."

  He laughed. The silent boy beside him never stirred again. The magician ruffled the boy's hair and said, "It would take a lifetime and you would be none the wiser at the end of it."

  She said, "You know who the killer is." Watched him as the left eye drooped downwards and trailed across his face. He reached, unhurriedly, and put it back. "Will you find him," he said, "– or will he find you, Milady?"

  "I need a weapon," she said, and the old man seemed to droop, the fight – if that's what it was – going out of him. "Of course," he said. "I was told you would come. I have it ready."

  "Told by whom?"

  He shrugged. "The Council."

  She felt suddenly trapped in a web of lies. Deceit – she was being led along a path she didn't choose to follow, her every stepped marked in advance by machines more powerful than could be imagined. The old man, as if reading her mind, said, "Sometimes I wish I had no part in it. Our children always supplant us, don't they, Milady? It is the way of the world…"

  He spoke to the boy. The boy turned and, without a sound, disappeared into the darkness. "The children…" the old man said.

  "He could have grown to be a man, one day," she said. "I'm sorry."

  She said it every time and they both knew it made not an ounce of difference.

  "Let me give you your gun," the old magician said.

  THIRTY-
ONE

  The Code of Xia

  She went into the underworld through the Toymaker's shop. The wide stone stairs were wet with moisture and when she finally reached the dark floor she knew she was under the Seine.

  The gun was with her. It was a strange contraption, more similar to a blow-pipe. She had five bullets. The bullets were grey. The grey moved as if it were alive upon the metal. "Whatever you do," the Toymaker said, "never touch them with your bare hands."

  Wearing thick gloves, he had loaded the weapon for her. "I don't know if it would kill him," he told her. "But it might just slow him down."

  Which was not all that reassuring.

  She walked in the darkness under the Seine. Gradually, lights came on, small fires burning – for even here, in the secretive tunnels below the river, there were lives, the refugees from above-ground, those who had nowhere else to go but down into darkness.

  She paused there, under the river, imagined she could hear the tug-boats passing overhead, the fish swimming. The British had their whales in the Thames; the Seine, so it was said, had bloated corpses.

  She thought about Tom Thumb. She had no doubt he was not killed for his involvement, or rather, not entirely: he was killed as a message for her.

  The killer knew her. And she thought – he does not want the missing object. His goal is different than that of the rest.

  There were many searchers, she thought. The Shaolin girl, and the Empress-Dowager's emissary. Herself, of course. But not the killer.

  And not, she realised, the lizards. Or, if they were, they were doing it very quietly…

  There was the Grey Ghost Gang… She did not understand the world she was entering. Mistress Yi had tried to tell her, a little, on their way from the riverbank. She spoke of Wu Xia, which meant something like Honourable Fight. She spoke of the Code of Xia, of warrior monks without regard for whoever sat on the Imperial Throne in – the Forbidden City? – but only for righteousness, and for–

  There was an ancient object that these societies had been guarding. Yet it was – stolen? Had somehow disappeared? – and this all came back to that. The object gave the adherents of Xia power, of sorts, something the girl called Qinggong – The Ability of Lightness. She had seen them fight with the Grey Ghost Gang–

  It was all too much. None of it concerned her. Only the killer did. She walked on under the Seine and the ceiling dripped water as she passed.

  The denizens of this subterranean world were all around her. Shadows fleeing from shadows… A girl holding an eyeless doll stared at her as she passed. Milady knew that if only she turned to the girl, the girl would flee – just as she herself would have done, at her age. It could have been her standing there – it had been her. A metal beggar shuffled past in a series of click and whirrs. Through a natural opening in the rock face she saw two lizard boys, moving away as she spotted them. She wondered if the killer would come for her here, in this twilight world. She hoped he would.

  Instead, it was a beggar who came to her.

  She had crossed the river and the tunnel branched ahead. A lone, elderly beggar was sitting cross-legged against a wall. He had long white hair, a black eyepatch over his right eye, and he was dressed in a loose-fitting robe, like a monk's. His eye was closed, but opened at the sound of her footsteps.

  An Asian man, but then more than several of the underworld's denizens here had escaped from the above-ground Chinatown. His eye was very bright. His mouth curved into a smile and he said, "Milady de Winter," with only the trace of an accent.

  She stopped. The man remained serene. "I had hoped you would come this way," he said. "We have much to talk about."

  "Not again," she said, and his smile grew wider. "You think there are many of us searching," he said. "And you are right. You have entered the world of the Jianghu, Milady." The smile faded a little. "It is a dangerous world."

  "Which world isn't?" she said, and the man nodded. "Please," he said. "Sit down with me. We will not be disturbed."

  She said, "Jianghu?"

  "The followers of Xia," he said. "Beings like yourself, Milady."

  "I follow no code–"

  "No code but the one that matters," he said. "You are Xiake – a follower of Xia, whether you know it or not. Though you lack the skills of the initiates – of those of the Wulin – nevertheless you are one of us."

  "And you are?" she said.

  "Please, sit down, for just a moment. The night is ending, and the day is near, and you are tired. The one you seek will not reveal himself this close to dawn."

  And now he had her interest. But – was dawn so near? She suddenly realised how tired she was. Time had slipped her by, and she hadn't noticed.

  "Please," he said, gesturing with his hand, and she nodded, and came closer. When she sat down, opposite him, the old man nodded approvingly. "You move in the way of a cat," he said.

  "I'll take that as a compliment," she said dryly, and he laughed. "Who are you?" she said again.

  "My name is Long," he said. "Master Long. Here, I go by Ebenezer. Ebenezer Long. Are those enough names for you?"

  "You have others?"

  "I have many names. Names are… fluid. What, after all, is in a name? You yourself have had several, have you not?"

  "Master Long…" she said. "You seem very well informed."

  "I have been around for a long time," he said.

  "And you are from – what?" She tried to recall the names. "Wudang? Shaolin?"

  He laughed. "As much as I belong," he said, "you could say I am of the Beggars' Guild."

  She said, "Just how many guilds do you have?"

  He shrugged. "Over the centuries there have been hundreds. Some change, some disappear. New ones are formed. We are all of us of the Wulin, the followers of that which is now lost."

  "And which you are all trying to recover?"

  "Indeed. Though it is not here, in Paris, that it lies. What came here, I suspect, is only a fragment of the object called the Emerald Buddha – though its outer casing is made of pure jade, not emerald, despite the name – an object which should not have existed and, though it does, should have never been activated."

  "You talk as if it is a kind of machine."

  He said, "Oh, it is most certainly that."

  So the object had a name. And what had been surgically inserted into Yong Li's belly – was that a fragment of this thing? She said, "What is the Emerald Buddha?"

  Master Long said, "That is a good question. I am not sure I know – that anyone truly knows."

  Riddles upon riddles… She said, "So what do you know?"

  "It is the pure jade statue of a royal lizard," he said. "Pure on the outside, at least. Its eyes are emerald. Its inside had never been examined, though not for lack of trying. It was found…"

  And there, in the darkness of the catacombs, he told her a story.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Master Long's Story

  The Emerald Buddha was found one day by a boy walking along with his camel in the desert. The desert was a great one and the boy loved it. He loved the wide open expanse of sky, the endless horizon, the always-shifting nature of the land. There were sand dunes that rose into the sky and when the boy slid down their sides on his back they made a deep, rumbling sound, as if the sand itself was talking. There were low-lying, evergreen hills, and a place where, between two mountains, a river snaked in frozen splendour, and you could walk upon its surface and, reaching the end, drink ice-cold water as it slowly melted… There were rivers and lakes, and places where nothing grew. There was everything in the desert.

  The boy came from a migratory people. For untold generations they had wandered the desert, through harsh summers and brutal winters, through extremes of heat and cold, pitching their great tents wherever they went, their horses and camels and cattle with them. They made alcohol from the milk of the camels, and drank it on the long nights. The camels were double-humped. The boy's camel – his first one, and his alone – was an ill-tempered beast, but th
e boy loved him for all that. The boy's family were passing through one of the most arid parts of the desert, and the boy had become fascinated by his grandfather's stories, which told of a place far away where the bones of giant creatures jutted out of the sand. They were of some enormous beasts that had walked the world long ago, when the world was young.

  The boy had decided to see them for himself.