The ladder was descending through bones. Legs, ribs, arms, skulls, and spines, some intact, some just chunks and parts. The faint light showed rusted metal, and a bit of cloth with a tarnished button, but mostly they were pieces, human beings gone yellow-brown and shiny with age, piled as far as I could see on both sides of the ladder. Something glittered at me from an eye socket and then scuttled away, making the bones rattle. I measured my breaths.
“Katharine?” Lane’s voice came down from above.
He must have seen that the candle wasn’t moving. I tilted up my head. “It’s only bones,” I hissed, though the words left out much that could have been said. These people had been tossed down a hole to rot by the hundreds.
“What?” he called.
“Bones,” I said slightly louder, and held out the candle again, hoping he could see what I did. The words echoed more than I’d wanted, probably more than either of us wanted, because we both chose not to speak again. And then I realized that all around me was silence; Uncle Tully had gone quiet.
I stepped down eleven more times, faster now, the bone piles growing closer and closer on each side, and then I was at the bottom, trying to let nothing touch me. The candle glow showed a few feet of narrow path between the disarticulated bodies, extending only in one direction. I walked as quickly as I was able, feet crunching on a fine, gravelly surface that I chose not to contemplate, instead wondering if my uncle Tully had seen this. Would it have frightened him, or would he think of the bones as merely parts, cogs and wheels broken loose from their machines?
The bone piles tapered down and then away, ending in scattered bits, and the tunnel turned left into a dark, much narrower passage. Uncle Tully had been silent for some time now. I prayed he had not wound down, as I thought of it, as he’d been known to do before, like a clock that has not had its key turned. He would need to be carried out if that had happened, and I was not going to be capable of that.
I wanted to hurry but I remembered Henri’s warnings and moved quietly down the passage, watching where each foot hit the ground. Surely Uncle Tully had to be close, but the underground of Paris seemed to be a maze, not only side to side, but up, down, and in depth as well; the proximity of noise might be deceptive.
The candle dripped wax on my hand, a brief, intense burn that faded almost instantly as the molten liquid hardened, and then I discovered a glow that was not my dripping candle, an unnatural shining in the tunnel far ahead of me. It was gaslight, coming from a passageway on my right. I became aware of a
It was a cavern, huge, with a round, domed ceiling soaring at least thirty feet in the air, where the limestone had been quarried out, but it was also a workshop, the likes of which I had not seen since I first went to Stranwyne, blazingly lit with hanging gas lamps. Cut shafts shot upward through the ceiling, gas pipes running down from the surface and across the walls, tacked straight into the rough stone, both rock and pipes dripping with condensation. I blinked, disbelieving, at the steam engine, quiet at the moment, its brass gleaming with polish, and the many tall conglomerations of greased pulleys and iron wheels that I knew were machines for shaping metal. How many people walked above us, not knowing what was beneath their feet?
My eyes gathered all this in a few precious seconds, just before they became riveted to the very center of the room. There, propped up on a stand and stretching the length of what must have been a ten-foot table, was a fish. It had almost none of its metallic skin, was mostly cogs and guts, but I knew exactly what I was seeing, just as I knew the white head bent over the table it sat on. I flitted into the room, threading my way around worktables and a stack of brass bars and little piles of metal shavings and scrap.
“Uncle?” I whispered.
He did not look up. He was on a stool, and to my surprise he was working feverishly, assembling a mass of incongruous parts on the table, working as if his life depended on it. Perhaps it did.
“No, no, NOT!” he shouted suddenly. “That is not right!” His voice bounded off the walls, but there was no movement in the room besides the two of us. Now that I was inside the cavern, there was a faint whiff of something chemical, something putrid. I knew the smell; I could never forget it: guncotton.
“Uncle Tully?” I said, hunching down next to him, sheltering from the sight line of the entrance behind the metal fish. I was relieved to see that he hadn’t bloodied himself. His face was deep red, veins popping out in his temples, frightening if you did not know him, but that was not what had my breath coming hard, my pulse skipping madly in my veins. Uncle Tully was in a tantrum, a full-blown tantrum, and he was working. Never had I seen him do both those things at once. But if Uncle Tully was working, that meant I was expendable. It was time for us to go.
I avoided touching anything near him and whispered, very calmly, “Uncle Tully, would you like me to take you away from this place? If we go right now, I can take you.”
“Go away, Simon’s baby. It is not the right day.”
He was using his hot pen, a curl of smoke twisting up as tiny bits of lead melted beneath it, and his hands were a little shaky, probably from the contents of the green bottle. My internal clock said that maybe half my time had gone. “Uncle, do you know who is waiting for us right now? It’s Lane. He’s come back, just as he said he —”
“NO!”
I paused, unsure whether he had been responding to his work or to me. “He came back, just as he said he would, Uncle. He’d like for you to come and see him.”
“Go away. This is not right, little niece. It is never the right day. Never the right place. You said it would be right and it wasn’t.”
I agreed with him there. “No, Uncle, it isn’t right,” I replied, darting a glance at the empty entrance to the cavern. “But I’m trying very hard to fix it. Do you remember how some days it is right to wind all the toys, and see what is needed? It is a time like that right now. Time to fix things, just like when one of your toys isn’t working properly. Let’s go back and fix things, and get Lane, and some tea, and find all your toys. Marianna says —”
“The fish wasn’t working.”
I looked up at the smudged, oil-spattered monstrosity on the table, and saw with relief that the chamber for the guncotton was empty. Something this large would not just blow a hole in an ironclad ship; it would obliterate it. “This fish doesn’t need to work, Uncle Tully.”
“NO!” he shouted, his fingers never slowing. “It must! It should! Toys should work!”
“But this toy could hurt someone, Uncle.” I tried to hold my voice low. “Marianna says we shouldn’t make this one work.”
“Clocks should be wound and people should be splendid! Go away, little niece. It is not the right day.”
I could feel desperation creeping around the edges of my words. “I would be splendid if you could come with me now, Uncle. It would make me very happy. You like to —”
“And yet it would not make me happy, Miss Tulman, to be deprived so soon of your company.”
I straightened. Ben Aldridge was coming across the cavern, almost to the other side of the table that held the fish. He was elegantly dressed, as if he’d come from a party, his blond hair combed back, the side whiskers neat. I searched again but I could see no other entrance. Had he come from the crypt, or from the other direction, farther down the passage? Uncle Tully’s fingers did not slow, and he did not acknowledge Ben’s presence.
“I thought it must be you,” Ben was saying, sounding pleased, as if I’d happened to drop in for tea just when he wanted me for business. “But where is your entourage? Don’t you keep a string of suitors about you these days? Or have you discouraged them all by running about in caps and trousers?”
I did not answer, just watched him warily as he came around the fish to my side of the table. I had no idea what to do, other than stay alive until my hour was up. At least Ben seemed to be alone. The room was deeply quiet beneath the hiss of gas and my uncle’s distracted muttering. I backed into the table as Ben reached around my neck and pulled off Lane’s cap, clucking in disapproval as he tossed it to the table.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, reminding me weirdly of Uncle Tully. “Never braids, Miss Tulman. I liked you better as a wood nymph, like the last time, when you came to my cottage all dirty and wild and with leaves in your hair.”
Thankfully he did not touch my hair.
“You quite impressed my father the other night. The emperor was rather taken with you, I think.”
