Slum Chutney

Slum Chutney

A Tale of the Machine City

Now:

BETRAYAL ENCROACHES in the form of five stooped shadows. Through the smoke, they come. Betrayal. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Who? is academic. Why? is the question. From the darkness, they ooze, stinking of gin and whores and rotting flesh. Of dog. Cheap canine grafts growl in the steam mist. Rotting, those grafts, but the men attached still breathe, for now. In the Machine City, Mortise Locke, even dead things creep, and the way things look, I’ll be creeping shortly.

Gut knives and garrotes are all I see as I scramble through the cramped labyrinth. Offal and stalagmites of refuse avalanche as I smash through. The girl stumbles over a rigid corpse, but I have her by a fistful of hair and drag her on. She screams, vomits at the stench. I register it, barely. At least the corpse isn’t moving. Thank Brahma for small miracles.

They don’t want her dead. That’s the only reason I’m not scurrying through a horizontal hail of chump crumplers. On the contrary, and as always, I’m strapped. A Webley-Colt pneumatic fletcher jacked with eight broad-head fletches, which means the first one in dies, horribly. Those reinforced great coats won’t even slow the Webley-Colt. So. I’ve got the first one taken care of. The other four? Why, they’ll bum rush me, smash my skull and stab me, repeatedly. Garrote me? Only if there’s anything left. I’ll die more horribly than the first one, you bet your life on it.

These aren’t small time knuckle-dusting thuggees trawling for a clip of burnished steel. And they aren’t the brothel’s guards. Wish they were. Drop one and the rest’d scatter. But these? I can read nothing in their eyes. Vacant, empty. They’re Kalighat. Professional killers who’ve graft-altered their aspects to that of their demon goddess. Murder to them is nothing. I envy them. I consider too much, as I’m sure you savvy by now, but I play the part of the paper tiger, my sole recourse. The Webley-Colt helps in this regard. My blind grandmother could clutch one in her trembling arthritic claw, and you’d respect it if not her. Of course, my grandmother’s a better shot than me.

The door’s not far. It stands at the end of the hallway. Escape. It lies but feet away.

Think — no, survive. But why the betrayal?

An electric charge sparks for an instant in the eyes of the Kalighat, all five. I know that look. Blood in the water. Sharks. A momentary glitter or glisten akin to the twinkle of a star on a black night. Not the black ash-throttled nights we know now, but those of the twinkling stars blinking above. From before the fall. To compare such things of forlorn beauty to these husks of man is criminal, and it is in this moment I know my bluff has failed. They’ve read my bluff. Escape is all I desire. The hallway is cramped, claustrophobic and should not by rights or logic be capable of containing their cold ferocity.

A wave of crashing graft-altered flesh thunders toward us.

The hallway must expand to accommodate them. Somehow.

The girl lies between the five and myself. Quivering, she’s crouched in a puddle of her own piss. I can’t blame her. I’ve done the same on occasion.

They come.

The lead Kalighat’s left forearm is some hellish graft. It’s a pit bull or some such beast’s snout and slavering jaws, plastered in a brown film emulating human skin. No eyes, but Lords, teeth. All drooling a spittle of Brahma knows what. And as this thing of nightmares nears, I surprise you, and myself. I yank the girl behind me rather than do the intelligent maneuver, which is to use her as a shield. Or projectile. It’d buy me a second, maybe two. Maybe my life.

But I grant her a moment’s reprieve from those ghastly teeth and horrific tomorrow and thrust her behind me as I squeeze the trigger and take the lead Kalighat in the neck with a shot that severs his spinal column. A spurt and a twang. Bone blows out the back of his neck, his marionette strings clipped. His carcass tumbles jelly forward. Dead and doesn’t even know it. Legs still pumping him into me, his last will and testament, this vestigial mania.

The girl screams as I stumble backward, crashing into her then the wall. I recover by shoving back the dead Kalighat. The hallway’s tight, but not tight enough as two abreast meet their dead comrade and smash him back towards me. The carcass flips back and forth like some hellish metronome. His head’s nearly severed from my shot — my lucky shot — and this game might be droll were I viewing it from some vantage point more distant … like Australia.

I fire twice, and it seems my timely accuracy’s run out. How can I miss so close? You try it.

A Kalighat smashes me back into the screaming girl. Dimly, as though listening through a drunken haze, her fingers pop like dry twigs under the grind of my boot heel.

She screams, and my ears buzz, but I’ve matters of more import to consider, namely the door.

I’m not made for this. I’m the grease, the talker, the tumbler-tickler. I can get into places you wouldn’t think I could. Like here. There. Your mother’s Sunday brunch. I’m smooth. I’m funny, I’m rude, courteous, silent as the serpent. I’m whatever I need to be, but this is a battle, and I’m overmatched. I can’t fake this through pomp or circumstance or bristling hackle. I could pipe a broadhead into the girl and save her a great deal of pain. Might even squeeze one off into myself but I don’t. I hesitate an instant, willfully. I’m a man of broken faith but more so of bolstered cowardice.

* * * *

Before:

LORD ASHFORD STRAKE, he calls me wog and smiles whilst doing it. Thrice so far, and I’ve smiled in return at each. Worthy. Oriental. Gentleman. A title of respect. Obviously. I’m of the Kshatriya, the Hindi warrior caste, which means in my own borough of Malabar I could whack this bastard without blinking and the colonial magistrates would applaud my aplomb. But we’re across town, in Amber Torque, so I smile and play the sycophant.

Strake’s clockwork mech is top shelf, no doubt. The whirr and ratcheting of gears is barely audible beneath the sound of his smooth voice. His jaw and right half of his handsome face shine with some riveted alloy, freshly polished. A gold bas-relief display of his family crest is sculpted into his right cheek. His head’s probably worth half of Malabar. Bad ideas involving decapitation and various smelting processes course through my mind. A decade free of toil and labor. I file it under plan B and nod as Strake explains in unnecessary detail what it is he’s hiring me to do, which is locate and return his kidnapped daughter.

“…and so, of course, you must understand that no one can know a wog shall be in charge of conducting the search.” That’s four. “My wife and I are loathe even to hire someone of your … ahem … disposition. But I must admit we both have been accused, on more than one occasion, of being avant-garde thinkers.” Strake talks with a hollow metallic lisp, and he brandishes smirks like stilettos. He’s slick, pert, nauseatingly handsome. His suit once must have been immaculate but is now threadbare in spots, which he tries to conceal.

He owes bad men money and has for some time. I know that much. His wife sits by his side. Neither are her clothes immaculate, but in their used wornness they cling to her body like a second skin. I take a moment to appreciate this, and Strake appreciates me appreciating. Our eyes meet, saying more in that one instant than our entire conversation to this point.

“I am a man of discretion.” My voice conveys respect, deference. My offense is no offense because I am not a man to him, not human. But, of course, no one can know a Hindi is in charge of the investigation. To have some brown-skinned sepoy leading the charge of gleaming white English gentlemen to rescue the maiden fair would be as impossible to them as a Bantu cur leading the charge of the Light Brigade.

“I’m doing you a favor giving you this work.” Strake smooths his hair back and sits so straight I’m sure a flagpole’s been surgically grafted up his rectum. “There are others I’ve considered. Many others. Far more qualified, even. You should thank me. A wog such as yourself might incur much business and prestige were I to give you a favorable review…”

What he means is I’m doing him a favor. It’s been three days since the abduction, so all the others he’s hired before have failed. He needs me. None of his English cronies can set foot where I’m going, which is Malabar. We both know it. Even the Pinkertons can’t, not quietly at any rate, and this’ll warrant quiet, and a strong dose of it. And I know Strake tried them because it was Alan Pinkerton himself who recommended me after his own agents failed. Strake continues on with all the enthusiasm of a London moneylender vetting an Australian in need of a business loan. Strange…

“You’re sure she was abducted?” I raise an eyebrow. “Didn’t just up and bang off like so many do? Mortise Locke’s a big city. Many young ladies haul off for romance … adventure.” I address Lady Strake. She sits stiff, uncomfortable, as though upon splinters. I could make her more comfortable. Our eyes meet, and she softens an instant. I glance at Strake, who scowls. He caught it. Perhaps he considers me human after all. Avant-garde thinkers, indeed.

“Emma would never leave us.” Lady Strake dabs at her eye with a handkerchief. “She loved me. Us. She was content. She had everything she ever wanted.” Lady Strake’s been crying recently and holding back now only by the barest of margins. Strake fixes her a metallic glare and clears his throat. She stiffens her stiff English upper lip and wills her tears away somewhere cold. Somewhere distant. The English, so proper, so fake, so … content. Her daughter’s disappeared, snatched, presumably, and these two worry about appearances.

A rash of abductions has struck Mortise Locke. It’s never happened here in Amber Torque, only the poorer boroughs, which encompasses the whole rest of the city, barring the gear cities churning above. Young pretty women being snatched and sold, a lucrative trade nigh on par with opiates and alcohol. It happened in India for millennia and here in Mortise Locke for centuries, but the populace only rears up on its hind legs when the girls are white. And Emma Strake is that. In spades.

“…you’ll apprise me of your course of action.” Strake smirks like a wolf, a gleaming steel one. That smirk. “Your intentions. Methods. Plans. Contingency and otherwise. Can you do that?” I nod. “You’ll start immediately?”

“Of course, my lord.”

“I’ll expect updates.”

Their story stinks. I could smell it from the start. It’s not the lady’s fault. She’s not lying. She believes what she’s saying, but Strake? He’s selling something, and if he weren’t paying as much as he is, I wouldn’t be buying. Strake’s a swine, a dog, a mechanized whore, but I’m going to work for him. So what’s that make me?

* * * *

Now:

WE CATERWAUL THROUGH the doorway and plunge into the twilight dusk of noon. The rooftop’s wide and flat as a straight razor. The gear cities churn over us. The sun’s not even a smudge of vestigial dogstar rubbed into the black sky.

The Kalighat are upon us. Ash-hail whips across my face, blinding me an instant, but I keep moving, girl in tow, Emma Strake. She’s malnourished, which is good, for me. She’s light. Like a cricket ball, I pitch her ahead through an ash-drift a meter high. A blizzard of black whips through the air. Footsteps pound behind so close that the muscles in my back tense and my balls crawl north. I turn. I know I’m going to die.

“Run!” I scream, but it’s choked off, and if Emma’s so cowed that she doesn’t on instinct flee, she deserves her fate. I squeeze the trigger on my Webley-Colt, and a fletch disappears in the trunk of one of the Kalighats — I fire another. Neither slows him as his iron steam-jack fist connects across my jaw; it dislocates or breaks or both, but I feel no pain, only a hotness and shattering of teeth. I don’t lose consciousness. Worse, I lose my Webley-Colt.

I’m on the ground, and he’s on top of me.

No.

They’re on top of me, crushing me.

I feel the impact of a fist in my chest and dimly realize it’s actually a knife, that he’s stabbing me. Again, I feel no pain, only impact. Pressure. I’ll be dead before the rose of pain blossoms. I aim a blow at the Kalighat’s head, a feeble attempt as my arms are suddenly lead flopping about, and the Kalighats are impossibly small and distant … bendy … wavy. But another head appears behind them, and I squint and whisper a sharp prayer to Brahma that it’s true, that my cowardice and lack of faith have been rewarded.

He has come. Nikunj. My brother.

The man atop me is dead an instant later in a manner I can neither follow nor comprehend. He’s simply split. Next, I’m on my feet, yanked up like some disobedient five-year-old. The four Kalighats lie dead upon the rooftop, and Nikunj drags past them to Emma Strake.

Poor Emma, huddled like a babe against the precipice. An eighty-foot drop she huddles against without recourse or even the levity of a parapet to staunch the vertigo. Nikunj lunges like a panther, grabs her before she jumps, and hauls her back to the roof.

I can hear nothing as Nikunj roars. The dead lie scattered. Emma writhes in Nikunj’s grasp. Red pools consume grey ash. He’s screaming at me, face to face, imploring me to some action, but I can’t hear. He’s pointing, grabbing me by the shoulder, but I don’t feel it. It’s freezing out here, but I feel only warmth. Emma is crying, shivering, covered in ash. Nikunj seems concerned. Something wet trickles down my chest.

Then I’m falling.

* * * *

Before:

CALCUTTA FLATS. A massive multi-tiered slum that huddles like a cancer in the center of Malabar. Like a tumor metastasizing, the miasma of the Flats has crept beyond the slum and infected the boroughs beyond the suffocation of plague walls. One-hundred-foot walls forty-feet thick could not contain it, and thank the Gods cause there’s no money in Malabar, and I need to eat. Whores are nice, too.

I’ve found Emma Strake, or located her, rather.

In Malabar, word spreads faster than the walking death, within certain circles, certain grim circles I monitor if not frequent. A pretty rich girl from Amber Torque’s been abducted. That’s information I’ll always pay a premium for, and my junky snitches know it. I’ve noted the buzz for a day now, kept tabs, overpaid my snitch-rats to remain informed, and I’ve finally pinpointed its source.

I glance down at the slum-tower and pull up the collar on my great coat. The ash drifting down is mercifully thin, and I can see two faces of the building from my perch atop an adjacent slum-tower.

Two men, positioned correctly with monocular optics, at opposite corners, can adequately monitor most buildings. Nikunj commands the opposite corner. I’ve even paid some dalits to keep watch from the sewers, just in case. Dangerous work. I certainly wouldn’t do it, not for what I pay, anyways, but untouchables work cheap, which is why I use them. That and no one else will interact with them other than other untouchables. Closed communities mean mitigation of information leaks. Another of the caste system’s many blessings.

For me, anyways.

Emma’s been in this tenement for near a week now, and I’ve got it on good authority she’s still alive, if good authority is a dalit sewer rat named Santil who dwells beneath this slum-tower. He’s keeping watch in the sewers below.

There’s an auction tonight, and dead girls don’t fetch as much as live ones. Usually.

I chew a stick of maybe-cat-jerky and watch. The Strakes received no ransom note, so that’s not the game. Revenge? I’ve considered it. Strake has no shortage of enemies or shylocks, but there’s no clear connection to Johnny Shakespeare, the man who engineered the abduction. He’s most likely an intermediary for someone, but I’ve not had the time to untangle the knots.

Shakespeare’s a professional gangster, and he’s holding the auction today like he does every month. Why am I not in there right now bidding on Emma? You know the answer. My cowardice precedes me. It’s a closed auction, and Shakespeare’s security is first rate. His men would kill me if they recognized me, and I’m rather recognizable. Just ask Lady Strake. So we wait, and we watch, which is boring and uncomfortable, but if you can maintain focus long enough, and not miss your one opportunity, it can prove rewarding.

As it is this time.

Around two in the morning groups of men begin to pour out of the door in the north face of the slum-tower. I signal Nikunj with two quick beams of a halogen smirker. He sends back three, which means he sees nothing. They’re all exiting on my side, it seems, but I can make out nothing in the darkness below. I keep watching, waiting for a signal from Santil.

A few minutes pass, and I see it, a bulls-eye lantern shining directly up at me. It winks its orange eye, one, two, three times. I give four quick beams on the smirker to Nikunj and watch in horror as he leaps from his slum-tower roof to the one adjacent mine, then does likewise onto mine. It’s an eight-foot jump across. Not much you say? It’s an eighty-foot fall, and the roofs are a slurry slick with ash and ice.

Nikunj is insane.

We descend — I insist on taking the stairs — and slink out into the alleyways of Calcutta Flats, hot on the trail.

* * * *

Now.

I CAN’T MOVE and not for lack of trying. I’m on a table in our safe house, and my arms and legs won’t work. The doktor leans in.

He whispers. Even through my dying haze his breath stinks of ale and cheese.

“Are you ready to meet your gods?” He’s an Englishman, and his voice brims with true concern, though whether it’s for me or himself’s in hot dispute.

“Are you?” I sputter. My meaning’s not lost on him as I glance at my brother, a shadow in the corner. My mouth, my eyes, these parts alone work.

The doktor demands payment before he operates. At least half. Can’t say I blame him. Same deal I demanded before I took the Emma Strake job. In all, I don’t like my chances, but I do have one ace in the hole. As usual, it’s Nikunj.

If that doktor walks out of here without operating, he’ll be a foot shorter and eight pounds lighter when he does. Seems he gathers this as well. He turns with pursed lips and shakes his head. “I’ll be wanting five hundred.” His voice is a quivering timbre.

The price is exorbitant, but hell, I’m in no shape to haggle.

“Five hundred,” Nikunj says, “if he lives.” His voice is not a snarl, nor is it harsh; rather, it is smooth and sinuous and nigh on lyrical, but carries with it all the innuendo of a jungle cat bargaining with a hamstrung hare.

* * * *

Before:

HER SKIN IS COPPER with a golden hue that somehow glows from within. I sit still as she slides her stocking down, slowly. Her legs are crossed. I swallow. It’s part of the show, an appetizer. It works.

The women of Malabar are its sole facet of beauty, and this one’s no exception, though woman might be a bit strong. If she’s seventeen, I’m Shiva. I take another eyeful of skin and curve, inhale her perfume and underlying musk and wait another moment … then another … before I stand and slide towards the door.

She’s too good for this place. This place should belong to the amputees and lazy-eyed whores its facade would indicate — to be sure, it houses its fair share — but this surely isn’t one of them. Lords, I’ve found a diamond in the rough, and I’m bound by a timetable and possibly morals.

“Is something wrong?” She stands, and her rolled stocking holds tight in place to firm flesh. Her robe lolls open. A lick of henna swirls. Her jeweled navel sparkles. I freeze in place and try to focus on my mission … and my vision. Her eyes are wide, watery. There’s fresh hurt there. Pain. Brahma, she’s good, but I’m not looking into her eyes. I seem to have misplaced my voice.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispers.

My mission … what? Huh?

Focus, yeah sure.

The door beckons, and my mission beyond, but it can wait. But it can’t. Emma can’t. Clock-mech’s ticking. I try again not to stare and again fail. Impressively. “I’m married,” I say because I am. “I’m sorry to have troubled you, miss. I … I just can’t do this. My wife…” My lie is steeped in regret, and that’s not faked.

“For your time.” I sling a purse of steel onto the bed, and its weight and clink instantly evaporate any vestige of hurt remaining on her facade. My regret only grows as I watch her count it — I tip well — unmindful of her sudden wardrobe malfunction. It’s my last glimpse of illicit nirvana before I step stiff-legged into hell.

My cane taps on the cold concrete floor. Emma’s here. Somewhere.

The brothel’s a ten-floor maze but as luck would have it, I’m familiar with its layout. Preemptive scouting. A fair amount of it. Ravi Raveis owns it. He sells a necessary product at a premium. Hair of the Dog he calls it. Clever? Repugnant? I don’t know. The name carries with it a certain connotation that in my experience will be forever associated with whores both living and dead. Customers, too, on occasion. Ravi’s a businessman, just like Genghis Khan.

The walls on this floor are covered in graffiti. Muffled moans filter into the darkness. I try to ignore other sounds. I’m in the heart of Calcutta Flats, a scab on the taint of Malabar, in a brothel, and I’m running away from the one thing in the whole joint I don’t want to. My life in a nutshell.

* * * *

Now:

THE EXPLOSION DEAFENS. The building spasms. I almost reach the top of the flight as the roiling column of white smoke claws up the stairwell like some rabid beast. I close my eyes as it envelopes me, its soft cool embrace ghosting on past.

I’m alone in a sheen of white blindness. Cool mist kisses my skin. I drink in the silence. The peace.

It won’t last long.

It doesn’t.

Muffled roars echo from above, below. Guards. They’re generally reluctant to relinquish their post, good guards at any rate, and Raveis’ pays his well. I’ve perused his books — don’t tell him, so I’m obliged to assume they are good. To assume otherwise is to invite disaster, so I figured on the guards needing some prodding to abandon their posts. Explosives often help in this regard, and if the charges fail, them being blinded by steam won’t hurt. Me, that is. Of course, I can’t see a damn thing either, but at least I’m prepared.

Before you think me mad or homicidal, the bomb wasn’t incendiary … much. Just a couple of two-inch ceramic arc-bleves with clockmech fuses to blow a couple three-foot holes in one of the brothel’s main steam manifolds. Don’t ask me how I smuggled them in. The explosion and steam create quite a stir, but don’t you worry, the whores’ll be just fine. Cleaner, too, in fact.

A long fuse. A short walk. A big boom.

Voila.

I keep my right shoulder and arm pressed against the wall for orientation’s sake and continue up two more flights until I find the door I desire.

Voices scream and feet pound by. Shoulders slam as bodies rush past, but no one stops me. No one sees me. Then I’m through the door I shouldn’t be.

Clockmech’s ticking.

* * * *

Before:

INSTINCTS — I duck as I enter the room, some sixth sense embroidered into my being from the throwing arm of my beloved wife. A ceramic flagon shatters inches above my head. Shrapnel pierces my neck. Emma’s standing behind a bed, reloading with what looks to be a dinner plate. She’s alive, not in a good humor, but alive. I can feel the weight of Strake’s promised steel in hand.

“I’m here to rescue you,” I say. What the hell would you say?

“Piss off, raghead!” Her voice is shrill, rattle your brains shrill. She reminds me of her father somehow. Is it the shape of her eyes or simply her syntax? Perhaps both. She’s dressed like a whore, most likely not by choice.

“Lower your voice. Drop the plate. Please…” I close the door behind, sneaking a quick peak out, hoping to not end up with dinnerware embedded in the back of my skull. The hallway’s clear as far as I can see which isn’t far considering the steam. “We don’t have much time.” I’m at the bed now, and I toss my cane on it. I unscrew the handle and slide a variety of metal pieces from it, not the least among them fletches. My Webley-Colt, disassembled. Now … if I can just remember where everything goes. Screw A goes into hole B.

I think.

I hope.

“Who are you?”

“Avinash.” Slide the pneumatic piston in. A dab of oil first. “Your father sent me.”

“He certainly did not, boy.” She manages some demeanor of command despite her circumstances.

I try not to scoff. And boy? But I ignore it or at least push it back for now, in lieu of more pressing matters, like the handle and trigger. My hands shake with fury but really mostly fear. What would Nikunj do? Break her neck and forgo payment. But I’m not the breaking-the-neck type, and I certainly am not the forgo-large-amounts-of-steel type.

A door slams outside. Damn.

Hurry.

But deliberately.

“My father shall pay the ransom. He shall. He has men on it as we speak.”

“Sure, I’m them.” Screw in the barrel. “And there is no ransom.”

“Nonsense.” With such surety, she says this. The entitlement in her voice and manner sickens me reflexively despite that it’s a playact. Her lone recourse. “My father shall pay, and I’ll be released. That’s how it works.” She smiles and holds her hand out as though I might kiss the nonexistent ring on her grimy finger. Her hand is quivering. I can smell her fear. “You can go now, boy.”

“They’re going to continue raping you until you die.” Too harsh, you say? I’ve no time to mince words.

“Why, you—” Her shock is evident. Not shock at what I say but that I’d said it. It’s simply not done in her world and certainly not by someone like me. Well, this isn’t her world, but because I’m a breath of civilization amongst the horror, and she’s English, she immediately tries to dominate it. “Get out.” She rises up regal. Queen Victoria would’ve been proud, if she weren’t a shambling corpse.

I ignore her. The Webley-Colt is complete, and thank Brahma there’re no parts left on the bed. A good sign. I load it with the eight broadheads just as footsteps pound in the hall. Shouts follow. Another door slams. Seconds tick as I spin the housing and make sure everything’s running jake.

“Get out!” Emma screams.

The footsteps outside stop. Damn.

Emma glances at the door, eyebrows raised, arms akimbo, in full expectation of my acquiescence to her demand. Instead, I cross the room in three strides, grab a fistful of her hair, and drag her out the door.

Nikunj would be proud.

* * * *

Now:

THE DRUGS HAVE ADELPATED my senses, and the doktor’s dead. Cruciform, he lies dead across my legs. Rolled white eyes glare at the ceiling. His tongue lolls sorry. A third eye, a red dot, has blossomed in the center of his forehead, and for an instant, I almost laugh. The medication’s left me twisted, and the surgery’s robbed me of what little strength I’m privy to.

I elbow myself up to some semblance of a sitting and shove the doktor off me. It takes some doing, but he slides off, plunking on the floor.

It’s cold in here. I’m naked from the waist up. My stitches growl as I move. They don’t like it. Neither do I. And there’s not enough of them. The doktor died before he finished. I’m … unzipped from mid-sternum to neck.

Below, Emma Strake is dying as well.

She has to be.

This can’t get out. The word. That he sold her to Hindi scum for a couple thousand clips of tarnished steel. Him. The man who killed her stands before me, Lord Ashford Strake. Big Daddy. He stares as he reloads his fletcher. His eyes course over her shivering corpse with as little regard for her as a dying mongrel.

“The money I paid you.” Strake’s voice is clipped, harsh, aimed at me. He’s taken aback by my astonishment at his own daughter’s demise. “It’s not as though she were a son. Daughters…” He shakes his head. “My wife loved her, dearly, but then women can afford sentimentality in such things.” Yes, his wife’s name carries the family’s prestige, its holdings. It wouldn’t do for her, or anyone else, to know of this. And here in the basement of a slum-tower steeped in the dregs of Malabar, no one will. “At least I garnered something from her in the end. Which brings me to you and the steel you owe me. Tell me where it is, and you might live. I can get a doktor here. He’ll finish what this one started. You might even walk again someday.”

I tell him where to shove his doktor and his offer, but it all comes out as blobbering slobber. He cranes his neck then frowns at the expression on my face. He didn’t need to understand what I said to know what I said.

“Your will.” Strake shrugs, unimpressed. “Turn this rat’s nest inside out.” Three men set forth from the shadows and tear apart the safe room. Santil’s one of them. He won’t look at me. And there’s not much to tear. It’s nothing more than a tenement basement apartment. It’s secure. Cheap. They won’t find the steel, and they don’t.

Nikunj took it, but Strake doesn’t know about him, can’t know. Nikunj is my silent partner. Comes in handy to have a blade up your sleeve, and Nikunj is mine. Strake watches from the shadows like a spider. He steps into the light, his face reflecting the dim light. And there’s the other blade up my sleeve, or up my trousers, I should say. My Derringer. My hand lies but the breadth of woolen fabric away. The doctor slit them good. If I can but reach it…

“Your brother.” Strake’s face gleams with gold-gilt steel. “He has my steel, yes?”

Shit.

How can he know? I underestimated him, that’s how. Thought he was just another empty suit. I’m as racist as the bigot. He notes my surprise with a smirk. That smirk, that fucking smirk. I vow then and there that he’ll die by my hand. I vow hard. I vow true. My fingers tingle as they touch the grip of the Derringer … almost.

“I’ve friends in low places as well, wog,” Strake says. “Did you think I wouldn’t check your background? You told me your methods. I wanted to know your allies as well.” He opens his fletcher’s magazine and glances at it, raising an eyebrow at Santil. “Tsk. Tsk. Your own people sold you out. For a quarter clip. For twice that I hired five killers. Animals.” He frowns at his gun. Something must have jammed in it, or he just doesn’t know guns. “Your brother will be joining you shortly, have no doubt. I’ll get my steel.”

Let them find Nikunj then. It’ll be their funeral.

I’m only sorry I won’t be in any shape to attend.

Plan A didn’t work. Should I remind you of plan B? With all I have left I reach down my trousers, grasp the Derringer, tear it out, and fire two shots at Strake. We dead have no time for failure. My aim is true, just as my vow. The first bullet strikes him in the face and the second in the arm.

He screams and drops like the sack of shit he is. The other three are upon me in an instant. They hold me down. An ogre of a man shoves his fingers into my open wound, and I scream. Lords, do I scream. The Derringer’s torn from my grasp. Reality wavers. Ogre raises a huge Colt pistol overhead but freezes just shy of ending my nightmare—

“Wait. Don’t kill him, yet.”

Shit.

Strake’s still alive. He rises. The right half of his face, the metal half, is dented in, ruined. The bas-relief and family crest are shattered. Gold leaf hangs in strips, but the bastard’s still breathing. “Break his arms.” Strake orders Ogre to do this. He seems capable. More than. “I want him alive. But no more tricks. No more guns.”

“Not sure the feller’s gonna be kicking in five minutes, boss.”

“Vermin like him won’t die so easy.”

Me now? I’m not so sure.

“I can see his ribs and the squishy shit underneath.” Ogre glances down at my wrecked form. His teeth are like huge gravestone slabs. “He’s bloody finished. Ain’t traipsing nowhere but hell.”

“The last thing I want him to see before he dies is his brother walking through that door. Is the haymaker positioned?” Strake pulls steel teeth out of his wrecked face and tucks them in his pocket. Those teeth are worth a month’s pay. At least. The haymaker he’s referring to is the bomb Ogre’s sliding underneath the table I’m spread eagle on. It’s a five-pound canister of grape-shot rigged to the door via a black powder spark-line fuse. Fast. It’ll blow my body to many very small and very dead pieces. I won’t feel a thing even if somehow I’m alive when it happens.

“Haymakers live.” Ogre dusts his hands off, stands.

“His arms,” Strake reiterates.

“Boss.”

“His arms.”

“Sorry, guvnor.” Ogre grutns at me. “Business is business, and all.”

I say nothing. What is there to say? What would you?

With his bare hands, he breaks my arms in two clean snaps. The sound is sickening, but I’m so far gone I barely feel it, only a vague sense of newfound wrong. Scraping bone. Twisted sinew. I barely grunt as the world goes all wavy grey. The men shiver and wobble and fade, a mirage.

* * * *

Now:

DRIP…

Strake’s wife didn’t know of her husband’s scheme. Or did she? I sift through it all, everything I know, all the pieces, again and again and again. But the noise, the dripping, it saps my resolve twofold. It’s my blood, you see? Everything I know is a fractured mosaic in a swirling hurricane. Facts … I can’t grasp them, and if I could I wouldn’t be able to piece them together. Make sense of them. The dok’s drugs tainting my blood’ve knocked my wits to slum chutney. Everything I’ve heard. Everything I know. Put it together, you fool. Do that, at least…

Focus…

Think…

DRIP…

Okay. Women. They can playact realms of emotion, believe me. My bank account and I are well acquainted with this phenomenon, but Lady Strake was not. She was ignorant of her husband’s scheme — Brahma this hurts — I’d have read it in her eyes had it been otherwise. Or, was I blinded by her beauty? Fuck that, she was blinded by mine.

She didn’t know.

Lord Ashford Strake acted alone. The reason? Greed. Yes, certainly. He needed to buff his gold face or buy a new suit. He’d incurred debts to men no one wants debts to. That much was clear.

Desperation drives such men to dark destinations, and this is dark, indeed. Selling his own daughter into slavery. But why hire me if he didn’t want Emma found? Why the sham? Why risk the steel…?

To appease his wife, of course.

Yes.

He had to make an effort to find Emma, or at least appear to. Turn over every stone. Exhaust every avenue. And when Pinkerton offered my name to them, he had to acquiesce for his wife’s sake. Hire the Hindi boy to complete the job. It was a small risk from his point of view. His final insult. We Hindi are all incompetent simpletons destined for failure, anyways, right? And if the sepoy did somehow find his precious Emma, well, he’d just do what he did.

Murder us both.

I’ve tried to scream, but I can’t. I can barely breathe. Bubbles froth and pool in a quagmire of pink chest-swill as I do so. It’s not pleasant. The spume overflows and trickles down my arm to my wrist, across the table and to the floor.

DRIP…

I can only lie and stare at the door, at the spark-line fuse running across the room, attached to a clockwork detonator on the haymaker stowed beneath. The coming home present for me and Nikunj, who should be returning soon.

Brahma, I beg he smells this trap. Leaves me. Forgets me. Strikes out on the warpath. Kills that bastard fuck. Takes his head. Plan B. Retire. Live long. Live large. Nikunj’s too smart, too slick, to fall for something this obtuse.

Shadows moving underneath the door strike me like lightning. Whirling thoughts coalesce instantaneously into plan. Keys jingle outside the door, and the first lock is unlocked an instant later … then the second.

“Nikunj! NO!” I gurgle. He can’t hear me, and if he could?

But there’s still a chance — with everything I have left in this world I force my body wriggling off the table. The third lock scrapes open now, and I’m a cataract of flesh cascading off the table, gurgle-grunting as bone shards scrape in my arms, and my chest unzips, popping like so many fireworks down to my navel as I literally pour onto the floor while the door opens and the spark-line fuse sizzles instantly gone, all the way up to the puddle of me that’s doused it about two feet from the squat grey haymaker.

The silhouette of my brother glares down at me.

I can’t see his face.

I can’t see anything.

“Strake…” I manage to whisper once, boldly, knowing his fate’s now as sealed as my own.