Camera Obscura Read online

  And now the other two shadows were retreating, disappearing as if they'd never been there. The lone remaining assailant lay on the ground clutching his leg. Still no sound. She was impressed.

  She was breathing heavily now, and she needed to pee. Her head echoed with pain, and her side burned. She went to the man, from behind, the gun ready to discharge, and pulled off his black mask.

  An Asian face, and somehow she was not surprised. Not unhandsome – young, clean-shaven face, mouth clamped shut to stop him from screaming. She smiled at him and shot his other knee.

  This time he did scream. She grabbed his head. "Who sent you?" she said. "What do you want?"

  He spat in her face. She back-handed him. Wiped away blood, some of it his, some of it her own. "Tell me."

  "The key," he said, and then he smiled. His face was a death mask. "See you in the other world," he said, and then he bit hard on something in his mouth. She smelled bitter almonds, watched his face relax, and now his eyes saw nothing, and she let him go.

  She was left standing there, breathing heavily, her head ringing, two corpses on the ground beside her. He had spoken perfect French, she thought. And in a Parisian accent. She searched him, then the other man. Nothing on them. But she did find something.

  Both men bore identical tattoos on their left wrists.

  NINE

  Notre Dame de Paris

  She copied down the tattoos, then left. A little down the road, finding a dark corner, she squatted, feeling relief as she peed. As she was walking away she could see the first gendarmes coming up the hill. There was a swelling on her face, and her ribs hurt. Still, she thought – she had come off lightly, and she wondered why. They could have taken her out easily enough with a gun, or even by themselves.

  A warning, then?

  Again, she walked, the distance clearing her head slowly. It was a long night and dawn was still far away. She had a lot to do.

  For one thing, she needed to see the doctor.

  A sense of revulsion, but she knew she had to go down there. And he might have something for her by now.

  She walked back towards the Seine, gliding through shadows, avoiding the few passers-by on the streets, late-hour drunks and those who preyed on them, knowing everyone else was ensconced behind locked doors. Everyone who could afford a lock, or a roof…

  Blessed be the Quiet Revolution.

  Gaslight, reflected in the surface of the Seine. The bookseller stalls closed for the night, their gaunt owners sleeping inside the little makeshift stalls, wrapped in words for warmth and comfort. Fat lot of use it did them. She remembered the stories about the assassin they called the Bookman, and the confused reports coming from across the Channel for a while, three years back, that said England had a new, human king, stories that quickly ebbed away and finally disappeared. Victoria was still on the throne, the lizard queen, though it was said the balance of power had shifted, that the British had had their own Quiet Revolution, human and automata joining forces – she had not been back there in a long time, not since her husband's…

  Dark thoughts for a dark night. She crossed and came to the ruins of Notre Dame, eerie in the gaslight coming from the banks of the river. The ruined cathedral glowed the bright sickly green of the lizards' strange metal, and in the tumbleddown structure she could see figures moving stealthily, and fires burning. Lizard boys and night ghouls and tunnel rats… She walked through them and they shied away from her, knowing her for what she was, recognising in her what they saw in themselves.

  She walked past fallen gargoyles, their heads staring in bemusement into the sky, past toppled columns and the remnants of a giant bell. It must have been magnificent, once…

  It had been built by Les Lézards, long before the Quiet Revolution – a potent symbol of the power beyond the Channel, that some said had come from the stars… She had heard the stories of Caliban's Island, of Vespucci's ill-fated journey when he awoke the slumbering creatures on that far-away island – but that's all they were to her, stories, and of little concern to her.

  She had had her own ill-fated journey on the seas, the one that had brought her here, just as it did all those other migrants, the Mexica and Aztec and Kampucheans, Zulu and Swahili and Nipponese, some curious, some eager, and some without hope… Migrations went one way and then the other, the poor of Europe heading out to the same kingdoms from which others came in the opposite direction, ships crossing in the night, across the seas. As she had come here from far-away Dahomey, that great kingdom that was once, so long ago, her home.

  Now she was no longer sure what she was, where she belonged. Serving the Quiet Council, hunting down such cases as belonged in the files no one ever saw, the ones kept only in the under-morgue… Something inside her longed for a journey, to be somewhere far away. A place without cities, without gaslight and smoke and steam, away from the complex incomprehensible schemes of humans and machines. Instead she walked through Notre Dame until she found the hidden door and spoke to it, and the door opened for her and she walked inside, and down.

  Down into the under-morgue.

  TEN

  Into the Catacombs

  The tunnels stretched for miles under Paris. She knew them well enough, but thought it was impossible to know them all. They were not empty. There were people down here, too. Hers was not the only entrance, and there were plenty who came here and some who made it their home.

  Tunnel rats, grimy and dark with the stench of the sewers about them, those who hunted in the refuse of the city for whatever they could find. There were treasures and bodies buried, it was said, in equal measures in the catacombs… There were vast old cemeteries, dumping grounds for ancient skeletons, an entire city of child-sized coffins from some longago plague. There were the old mines, depleted now, but still worked sometimes, in secret, by those poor and desperate enough. There were times when sections of the under-city collapsed and caused holes to appear in the above-ground world – disrupting lives and traffic and offering a glimpse into what lay just below the city, its dark underbelly – these had to be covered up quickly. There were trains down there, mines, sewers, cemeteries, streets that once lay in the sun above-ground, long ago… She walked through the tunnels and watched its denizens. In a room branching to the left four old men sat around a fire, roasting a rat on a wooden stick. They toasted her as she passed them, and she noticed the man holding the bottle they were drinking from had lost several of his fingers.

  She passed orderly piles of skulls and the entrance to a sewer where children were chasing rats, making no sound as they hunted. She saw their faces, briefly, moving from light to shade – grime-streaked, serious, intent – children in body only, with a childhood that had drowned long ago in these same sewers.

  There were lights, here and there, in this under-city of permanent dusk. Camp fires, stationary, and bobbing torches. The glint of a knife, too – and other metal.

  She came across the first of the automatons past the sewer entrance. Once it had been human-shaped, from whatever factory or lab had made it, one of the discarded, now lying there, a broken-down old machine, staring at her with eyes that couldn't be read. It was impossible to say if it could see, if the eyes still functioned. Some had lain there unmoving for years, were finally picked apart for what might still work, might fetch a few coins from the dealers in such things. It was another difference between here and across the Channel. There, they did not have many automatons, the bias running deep, enforced by the lizard queen and her get. It was rumoured they were afraid of such machines.

  Not so here. Vaucanson's Heirs, they were called, these derelicts – the product of another time, a vision of the world that was brighter and cleaner than the real. The new machines were slicker, different somehow. She had heard they had begun to build themselves.

  Not in the under-city, though. She threw the beggar a coin and it snatched it from the air, surprising her. "Thank you," it said, the voice a scratchy echo of a long-dead recording. She walked on, someh
ow disturbed by his response. There were others like it down in the catacombs and they banded together when they could, fighting off those who would break them down for parts. The gendarmes never came down into the under-city. The law here was not of the world above, and so the Quiet Council found it useful, and had appropriated a substantial area for its own secret purposes. But she was not there yet.

  She walked past a brook, the water surprisingly clear, a hidden river under the city that had been forgotten long ago by those above. A family was washing in the thin stream, a man and a woman and three children, their few possessions lying on the bank beside them.

  She came to a crossroads and went left, when she had the feeling of being watched. She walked a little further then turned and glided into shadow, her gun out, waiting, tense, when a voice close to her ear said, "Hello, Milady."

  She said, "Damn," and reholstered the gun. "It's you."

  "I saw you walk past," he said, by way of an explanation. "You on Council business?"

  "I'm always on Council business," she said, and he grinned, a sad grotesque expression in that ruined face. "You should marry," he said. "Again."

  "I like the freedom."

  "Free to roam the underworld? What sort of freedom is that?"

  She looked at him and knew that what was for her a rare freedom was to him a prison, and one he could not escape. She shrugged, acknowledging a point.

  "So what's happening, Q?" she said. "Have you got something for me?"

  He frowned, said, "Let's you and me walk a little way."

  They walked side by side, the tall woman with the gun and the squat hunchback beside her. She never knew his history, only that he had come from a place near Dahomey, Dugbe it was called, but whether as a child or a man she had no idea. He never referred to his origins. He haunted the catacombs, trading in favours and knowledge the way others traded in stocks and shares.

  "There's been rumours," he said.

  "There're always rumours," she said.

  "And more than rumours," he said, "there have been people down here, moving like shadows through the under-city. Strangers, with a lighter step than I have ever heard."

  "Oh?" she said, her interest quickening, and he said, "The way assassins move. They are searching for something."

  "Do you know what?"

  "No," he said. "All I know is that you should be careful. The under-city is dangerous – well, more dangerous than usual."

  "I can take care of myself."

  "Yes," he said, looking at her bruised face, and she grinned, and he grinned back. "I can't help the way I look," she said, and the hunchback, his grin dissipating like smoke, said, "Neither can I."

  "I know," she said, and reached out, squeezing his arm. "Q, if you hear anything else–"

  "I'll find you," he said. Then he grinned again. "Unless that policeman finds you first."

  She said, surprised: "The Gascon?"

  "I think he likes you," the hunchback said, his grin holding. Then, curiously, "What is it between the two of you?"

  She sighed. "It's an old story," she said. Then, into his silence, "He was a friend of my first husband."

  The hunchback nodded. "Just look out," he said. "Be careful of the shadows."

  "Always," she said. He half-turned away. "I better get back," he said. "Esme will be waiting."

  She watched him go, and felt a momentary pang of envy.

  ELEVEN

  The Under-Morgue

  She walked on, and into a dead end – a tunnel sealed with a solid wall, leading nowhere. She spoke to the wall, then put her hand on one of the stones and pushed. A small door swung open and she went through it, the door shutting noiselessly behind her.

  Welcome to the under-morgue.

  The first thing she always noticed was the smell. It made her want to retch.

  Formaldehyde was a part of it. Ammonia, oil, burning coal – there were steam engines deep underneath, below the bedrock, hungry beastly things always feeding, always moving, and the smell seeped through. There was also manure, fresh, and the scent of rot – the smell of growing things and dying things commingling in the under-morgue, the Quiet Council's secret domain: she always thought of it as the place they kept to throw away the dirt and guts and blood, the refuse the rest of the world didn't need to see. She looked around her.

  The cavern opened before her, larger than the largest ballroom. Gaslight globes glowed on the walls, but the place was always in gloom despite them. The gardens in the distance – she shuddered, thinking of what grew there – and the cages nearby, the cages where they kept the–

  "Milady!"

  Straight ahead was the lab area, and a figure in a dirty-white smock was coming towards her, smiling happily in the wan light. His face was not unhandsome, though almost comical in the thick lips, the small but pronounced nose, the mess of hair, eternally shocked, that stood above his head. He carried an assortment of pens in the front pocket of his smock. His teeth were bright and his eyes brighter – insane-bright, as she thought of them.

  "What happened to you?" he said as he came closer. The smile was replaced with a concerned look and she sighed and said, "Hello, Viktor."

  "We must fix you up!"

  "No," she said, a little too quickly. And, "I'm fine."

  "Nonsense! Come with me."

  She followed the scientist along the hard floor of the cavern, toward his open lab. Viktor favoured steel. There were steel desks and towering banks of instruments, gauges and blinking lights and enormous switches, all set into steel cabinets twice her height. There were steel surgical instruments and steel beds, an entire operating theatre lying there – thankfully unused, for once.

  There were refrigeration units, powered by the hiddenbelow engines. When they arrived at the lab area it only took Viktor a moment and when he turned back to her he was holding a syringe in his hands and she almost shot him. She had the urge to shoot him every time she came there.

  "It's a rejuvenation serum," he said, proudly. "Still experimental, of course, but…"

  "I just want a cup of coffee," she said. Viktor's face fell. "This will revolutionise medical science!" he said.

  "I have no doubt it will."

  "Of course," he said, putting it carefully away, "I still need to iron out some of the more unfortunate side effects…"

  "You do that," she said.

  "Coffee," he said. "Coffee, coffee… where did I put that machine?"

  "You now need a machine to make coffee?" she said.

  "Milady," he said, turning to her with a curiously serious expression on his face, "we must show respect to our machines."

  "I wonder if they are indeed ours," she said, but softly, and he didn't seem to hear her. "Or if we're theirs, and don't yet know it…"

  "Aha! There it is." Viktor had found a (steel, naturally) machine in one corner and pulled down a lever. There was a crack as if of lightning, and a gurgling sound could be heard. "Won't be a moment. Milk?"

  "No, thank you."

  He spoke French well, but with an accent. He had once been a baron, for what it was worth. He always insisted on Viktor. He was as egalitarian as if he had personally fought in the Quiet Revolution.

  And just as dangerous.

  He brought her a cup of coffee – china, mercifully, and not steel, in that at least – and took one for himself. "Are you sure you don't want me to do something about your face, at least?" he said. "Your poor face. I could hasten the healing process considerably–"

  "It's fine," she said. "Honest."

  "A modification of my own based on the early Hyde formula," he said. "Really, it's perfectly safe."

  She let it go.

  He took a sip from his coffee, made a face, and looked at her. "The Council is very concerned," he said.

  "About my face?"

  He shook his head, fighting off a half-smile. "About the missing object. I take it you haven't found it."

  "Yet," she said. He nodded. "Of course."

  "No," she sa
id. "I haven't found it. Yet. It would help, perhaps, to know what it is."

  He shrugged, expansively. "What does it matter? You need not worry about what it does, only that we have it, and not–"

  She watched him. He blinked and looked away. "Not who?" she said.

  "Well, anyone else, obviously," he said, sounding a little irritated. Sounding like he had given away more than he was meant to.

  She watched him over her coffee. The scientist could not sit still. Already he was fidgeting, the coffee a distraction, conversation an effort. Wanting to go back to his work, his knives, his electricity… She said, "Was Grimm here?"

  "Grimm!" Viktor beamed at the name. "Yes. He dropped off the samples. Fascinating. Fascinating!" Happy again, he abandoned the coffee and wandered off to a long work table where test tubes, a microscope and various instruments lay in apparent disorder. "Fascinating!"