A Matter of Circumstance and Celludrones (Dark Matters) Read online

  Lily met his eyes, her brows raised. “Apparently the McAllisters protect themselves from birds as well.”

  “What’s that?” asked Evelyn.

  Greyston frowned at her. “You didn’t feel the resistance?”

  “Sludgy air,” Lily said simultaneously.

  “A big bump,” Greyston elucidated at her blank stare.

  Evelyn rolled her eyes at him. “I’ve felt nothing but bumps since stepping onto this platform.”

  “Sorry about that. It’s meant for transferring cargo, not people.” Greyston glanced downward. “Not much further to go.”

  Kelan showed no surprise at them dropping in, literally, so soon after their hasty exit earlier. He greeted them without a single question and invited the entire troop into his house. Greyston reversed the hydraulic motor to take the platform up before following at a sedate pace. He stood on the portico, watching until the docking platform had sealed into the hull and the Red Hawk had disappeared around the headland cliff.

  Just inside the front door, Kelan waited for him. “Armand is seeing what can be done for Ana. I believe the others have congregated in the laboratory with him.” He waved a hand for Greyston to walk with him.

  Greyston stepped in line, although wary. “We’re going to your uncle’s laboratory? Just like that?”

  “There are no secrets in this house,” Kelan said. “I’ve nothing to hide.”

  “That must be why you built a lake over the top of the laboratory,” Greyston said dryly.

  “Let me rephrase.” Kelan glanced his way. “I’ve nothing to hide from you and Lily. Knowledge is power and we’re fighting a war. We need all the combined power we can get. You were always meant to be trained, both in body and in mind.”

  “To fight your demon war.” They passed through a doorway at the end of the long hallway and then down a flight of steps that branched off to the right. The door at the bottom of the steps was solid iron and open, although Greyston noted the series of dead bolts along the edge.

  Kelan stopped in the doorway and turned to face him. “It’s not only our war, Greyston, but it is a war we cannot take to the masses.”

  “Why me? Why Lily? What makes us different from the masses?”

  “You tell me.” Kelan’s eyes bore into him, navy dark and intense enough to prick. “What makes you different?”

  He doesn’t know. Greyston broke eye contact. “I have a decent pair of fists on me. Nowhere near as good as Neco in a brawl, mind you.”

  “The celludrones were meant to be the original army,” Kelan said. “It was only later that my uncle improvised on the plan and involved human subjects.”

  “We’re not rats,” Greyston muttered irritably.

  “And you were never caged.” Kelan turned from him and stepped through the doorway. “You’re not a prisoner here, you know.”

  “Neither am I free.” Greyston followed into the passage beyond, the ceiling low enough to feel oppressive. The walls, floor and ceiling were the dull grey of iron. Electric current coils looped along the wall like metallic ropes of light bathing the tunnel. Greyston had heard something of the scientific forays into electric current. This was the first practical application he’d seen, but right now he wasn’t inclined to let anything connected to a McAllister impress him. “Duncan McAllister played with our lives without any thought to the cost.”

  “Anger serves no purpose,” Kelan said coolly.

  Greyston’s hands tensed at his side. “So, I should just forget and forgive my brother’s death?”

  Kelan stopped again. The look in his eye was still dark and intense, but he wasn’t trying to read Greyston this time. “McAllisters are not in the habit of murdering people.”

  “Demons are,” Greyston said, his jaw stiff with reeling emotions. Anger was the least of them. Ye brother was all I had left and now ye’ve taken him too. Ye’ve come home ta claim yer pittance prize and ye can drag Forleough with ye inta hell fer all I care. The Almighty Lord ken I did my all ta rid the earth of ye and ye kind. I’ll be received inta Heaven and praise God that be the one place ye canna follow. The final words his da had flung at him, right before leaping to his death.

  “How did your brother die?” Kelan put his back to the tunnel wall and folded his arms.

  “Crossing the Atlantic by steam liner.” Aragon was the one person he hadn’t been able to break completely from, hadn’t been able to set aside. The last letter his brother had left for him at The Pig and Briar had begged for his address, with the promise that Aragon only wanted to know his whereabouts for peace of mind. Greyston should never have conceded, should never have mentioned Es Vedra. He’d always known he was cursed. His da had told him often enough. Death had trailed his heels often enough. And now he knew that curse went by the name of Demon. “They said the ship capsized in a storm.”

  “Demons have no power over the elements.”

  “There were no survivors, no witnesses to testify there was any storm.”

  “You think…?” Kelan shook his head. “Demons are not able to go anywhere near salt water. That’s exactly how we banish them. There’s the near impossible task of identifying the demon, the art of surviving any encounter and the ritual to trap it in place. But once we have a demon, a bucket of seawater is all it takes to banish its essence back to the dimension it crawled from.”

  Some of the weight rolled from Greyston’s shoulders. Not all. If he’d been able to cut loose from his brother completely, Aragon would be alive. But this was the truth he’d come searching for, the answer to the one question he hadn’t been able to keep running from. Perhaps he could start believing nature, or even God’s hand, had killed Aragon, and not his own.

  He leaned against the opposite wall. “What dimension do they crawl from? Hell?”

  “Does it matter?” Kelan shrugged. “We’ve spent two centuries studying them and what we’ve learnt barely fills a teacup compared to the vast ocean of what we don’t know.”

  “So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss,” Greyston quoted from the translated works of Sun Tzu. Not the modern version of The Art of War that had been reproduced around the world, but the Han Dynasty copy uncovered four years ago. The Han Dynasty copy proved Sun Tzu’s military strategy had been a nearly complete work as far back as 220AD. That the Art Of War was not, as was commonly thought, a progressive work merely built upon the foundation of his expertise. Proof that was apparently worth the value of a small country. Greyston didn’t know about that, but his part in ‘relieving’ the archaeologists of their artefact had certainly bought him a small island.

  He raised a brow at Kelan. “Seems to me, your war is half lost already.”

  “That’s what my uncle was beginning to fear,” Kelan agreed. He pushed away from the wall and continued on down the tunnel. “If I recall, Sun Tzu also proclaims the importance of responding appropriately to rapidly changing conditions in the environment of war. With you and Lily on our side, our conditions have just changed for the better. We have a concise strategy that can finally be put into motion.”

  “For all your protests,” Greyston muttered darkly, “you have no problem reaping the rewards of your uncle’s dubious methods.”

  “Families are akin to a deck of cards,” Kelan replied after a short pause. “You’re stuck with the hand you’re dealt and have no choice but to play it through.”

  “There are always choices.”

  “True enough. If the devil himself turns all your logs to gold, you either freeze to death in front of an empty hearth or use that gold to buy another source of heat.” Kelan glanced at him. “And that’s not borrowed from Sun Tzu or anyone else.”

  Few men were that saintly as to take on the world’s woes without an ulterior motive, and Greyston doubted the McAllisters were any exception. He hung back with his own thoughts, walking a pace or so behind Kelan until they reached the laboratory.

  The shelves were crammed wit
h books and loosely bound manuscripts, the desk shoved to one side in a corner. Steel cabinets lined one wall. The other walls held shadows slinking into alcoves and beyond. Ana lay upon a work bench. The celluloid skin had been sliced from armpit to waist and peeled away, exposing the smooth steel of her chest.

  Armand’s head was bent low, his fingers nimbly working to loosen the row of tiny bolts.

  Evelyn had one arm around Puppy and the other draped around Lily’s shoulders. Neither looked particularly confident with Armand’s efforts so far. They perked up when Kelan informed them that Armand had been tinkering with mechanics since childhood and had spent weeks pouring over the original celludrone schematics and his uncle’s notes.

  Curiosity drove Greyston to one of the shadowed alcoves. It wasn’t an alcove at all, but an archway into a squat room. The only light was a semi-circle feeding in from the main laboratory and dimming into the recesses, enough to see the room was an empty shell. Strange markings on the floor caught his attention. He went down on his haunches, frowning at the intricate tangle of triangles within a circle carved into the wooden floor. He shuffled around to inspect the juncture between the segregated rooms. The laboratory floor was iron, this one was wood. He pushed to his feet and crossed to the next alcove. Another room, a large space filled with the silhouettes of steel workbenches and the cylindrical shapes of scientific apparatus.

  The sudden pitch of chatter from the main chamber drew him back. Everyone, including Neco, crowded around Armand and Ana. When he joined them, he immediately saw the problem. Ana’s chest was open and her life cell had almost run dry. As they watched, pale silver droplets fell from the splintered cracks in the glass.

  “Ana,” Lily whispered hoarsely.

  “There are spare life cells in the stock closet,” Armand said, “but they need at least sixteen hours to charge.”

  Kelan rubbed his brow. “She’ll be dead by then.”

  “Dead?” Lily shrieked.

  Greyston hurried to her side. “Celludrones don’t die,” he said firmly.

  Armand pointed a slender finger at the mass of entwined steel micro tubing. “The memory sap circulates in these fibrous tubules, pumped very much like the blood from our heart. All memory will be wiped clean if the sap stagnates.” He looked up at Greyston. “We can restart her when the spare life cell is charged. We’ll reload her with the initial data they were all created with, but everything she’s learnt, everything she’s become in the intervening years, will be lost. Celludrones do die.”

  Greyston’s arm swooped around Lily’s waist as he felt her slacken beside him. The strain on her face hollowed her cheeks and made her eyes appear sunken. She looked as if she’d lost twenty pounds in the space of a heartbeat.

  He gave Armand a growling look of disapproval. And to think Lily had once accused him of having no tact. “Find something in this warren of tricks and make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “Could we connect her directly to the polarising station used to charge the life cells?” asked Kelan.

  “Not without adapter connectors.” Armand stepped back from the workbench. “We should search the stock cabinets. Duncan must have made provision for something like this.” His gaze landed on Puppy, tucked into Evelyn’s side. “The automaton. The life cell doesn’t have the capacity for regular function, but it will keep Ana’s memory sap pumping. Automatons don’t retain memories that can be lost,” he quickly added at the worry creasing Evelyn’s brow. “We’ll replace the life cell when we’re done and it will be exactly the same.”

  “Yes, of course.” Evelyn held the puppy to her face, burying her nose in the squirming fur. She looked up at Greyston as she handed Puppy over. “Who would ever have thought Puppy would be our hero?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lily observed her appearance in the full-length cheval mirror. The plain grey dress provided last night by Cragloden’s housekeeper—she couldn’t recall the woman’s name— didn’t quite reach her ankles and hung limply without the support of petticoats. She’d washed her undergarments and dried them overnight on the heating pipes, and somehow managed to ruin her silk stockings in the process.

  The image staring back at her was rather sad. The inches of bare white skin between the top of her short walking boots and the hem of the dress was shocking. Her hair, twisted into a single braid and secured at the back, had already fallen loose in places. The pitiful state of her person was insignificant in the face of everything else, but it was a symptom of the rot eating at the roots of her world.

  What had Greyston said? You have a remarkable inner strength.

  The man was deluded. She wanted nothing more than to slide into bed, hide beneath the covers and stay there until it was safe to emerge. Until the dull, thudding ache she’d awoken with quietened inside her chest. Until the demon had been evaded, trapped and banished. But never dead, according to Kelan. It’s not possible to kill a demon. The demons, unfortunately, didn’t appear to have the same problem with humans.

  She spun away from the mirror and made her way out the bedroom. They’d been put in the east wing, four bedrooms opening onto a shared drawing room. The walls were hung with scenic watercolours and the furnishing was deep sofas and ottomans in soft creams and warm browns. Lily thought to stop by Evelyn’s room, but looking at the three other doors now, she couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t be knocking on Greyston’s door instead.

  The wall curved with the staircase into a marble foyer on the ground floor. A housemaid, wearing an identical grey dress to Lily, looked up from her dusting with a curious frown. The housekeeper must have informed the staff of the situation, because she bobbed a curtsey as Lily passed. After two wrong turns, she found a footman who kindly showed her to the breakfast room.

  Greyston and Kelan were already there and both stood as she entered. Greyston had exchanged his riding breeches for a pair of black leather trousers that were, if not tight, certainly snug. His white linen shirt was buttoned up to his throat with no neck cloth in sight. The rest of him, his hair, the shadows beneath his eyes, the taut line of his jaw, made his clothes look entirely civilised by comparison.

  “Forgive the service,” Kelan said, coming around to pull a chair out for her. His attire was impeccable, a dark suit with a pristine cotton shirt, the jacket tailored to his wide shoulders and left unbuttoned for casual elegance. “My staff are specifically trained to not hover unless I’m entertaining.”

  “Dressed like this, I feel a little as if I am the entertainment,” she said with a small smile.

  Kelan studied her. “Make a list for Mrs. Locke. She goes into town every afternoon.”

  “Thank you.” She glanced down at the chair, then back up into Kelan’s eyes. They really were a proper navy. Cool and dark, so dark, she had to draw herself away from gazing deep into them.

  Kelan waved a hand over the spread of cold meats, rolls, cheeses and fruit on the sideboard. “Please feel free to serve yourself, unless you’d prefer a hot meal?”

  Lily shook her head. “I was hoping to check on Ana before taking breakfast.”

  “Armand disconnected all her functions except for the memory sap. There’s not much to see.”

  “Ana’s fine,” Greyston said. “I was with her most of the night.”

  Lily gave him a smile as she sank into her seat. Greyston was the last person she’d have imagined keeping vigil at Ana’s bedside.

  “Stop that,” he muttered, dropping into his own chair. “I didn’t stay up to take care of her.”

  “He spent the night flipping through scientific journals and poking his way through every nook and cranny in the laboratory,” Kelan supplied as he made his way to his seat. He turned to Greyston with a grin. “Armand was not amused.”

  “Then perhaps he should have gone to bed.”

  “We never leave the tunnel unlocked.” Kelan leaned in slightly and lowered his voice. “The code for the deadbolts is BREAD FEEDS CRABS, replacing the missing letters with F. You’re welcome to come
and go as you please from now on.”

  Lily reached for the pot of tea and poured herself a cup. Bread feeds crabs. She sipped on her tea, was about to ask what letters were missing, when Evelyn burst into the room, cinnamon curls plastered to her head on the one side and springing wild on the other. She wore the ruby velvet habit Lily had returned to her last night, scuffed and crumpled, but at least it fit her.

  Her wide eyes took in each person in the room. “I need to send an Aether message immediately.”

  “There’s a post office in the town,” Lily recalled.

  Kelan shook his head. “Monifeith is a small port town. The post office doesn’t have an Aether Signaller.”

  “If the hospital gets word to Devon,” groaned Evelyn, “he’ll never forgive me.”

  Lily cradled the warm cup close to her lips. “Why would the hospital contact Devon?”

  “They think Jean is the Duchess of Harchings,” Greyston supplied.

  “I knew they’d call out the royal surgeons if they thought Jean was a duchess and I just went right ahead—” Evelyn’s hand shot out “—doing the first thing that came to mind. I even gave Jean my wedding ring. I’m such a silly idiot.”

  “Not silly at all,” Lily told her. “Remarkable and thoughtful. Devon will understand once he learns the reason why.”

  “No, he won’t.” Evelyn’s shoulders sagged.

  “We have an Aether Signaller here.” Kelan stood and walked to Evelyn. “It’s not on the government frequencies, but we are connected to a residence in East Hampstead.” He offered his arm to her on the way out. “We’ll get your message passed on, one way or another.”

  “Thank goodness,” Lily declared. Despite her reassurances, she happened to agree with Evelyn’s assessment of her husband.

  “Yes, that does appear to be a McAllister speciality, solving the world’s problems, big and small.”

  “If you knew Lord Harchings, you’d appreciate this is one of the bigger problems.”