“Thank you for what you did,” she said simply. “That was a terrible risk you took.”
It had been, but he shrugged. The one good thing was that the Gold King had wanted the sorcerer dead. There was a chance he’d step in if they were caught, though Striker had his doubts about anything Jasper Keating promised. There was no love lost between master and man.
Evie took his arm, guiding him through the big house. He’d been inside a few times now, but never with permission. With no active threat to counter, it was all he could do not to stare around him like a farmboy on his first trip to market.
“My uncle wants to talk to you.”
“Sherlock Holmes?” He stopped in his tracks, bringing her up short. Her skirts swung like a bell.
“Who else? Uncle Mycroft never goes anywhere, much less to visit me.”
Let himself be grilled by Evelina’s genius uncle? Not bloody likely. But then he’d always had a curiosity to meet the man.
“Please, Nick.” Her eyebrows puckered the same way they had when she was two feet tall. “He’s trying to solve this once and for all.”
Nick’s side hurt enough that he was sure it was making him stupid. “All right.”
He’d walked into Dr. Magnus’s lair. He could do this. But pain and fatigue had robbed a lot of the swagger that had seen Nick through that encounter.
Still, Sherlock Holmes was alone, and he was not the imposing figure Nick had expected. The Great Detective was swatched in a silk brocade smoking gown, looking bloodless and weak, but his eyes glittered with the kind of focus Nick had seen in birds of prey. Evie said Holmes had been shot, and he believed it. Every so often, the fine skin around her uncle’s eyes contracted as if he managed a wave of pain.
She marched Nick forward, a bit like a mother presenting her child. “This is my friend Nick.”
The man’s uninjured fingers drummed briefly on the arm of the chair. “The Indomitable Niccolo.”
“The world’s greatest consulting detective, I presume.” Nick’s side throbbed. He had been stitched and bandaged, but he was running a fever and the colors in the room were a little too bright.
Holmes studied him, and Nick looked back. There was a family resemblance between Holmes and Evelina, something in the shape of the eyes, but he had to look for it. The bigger resemblance was in their circumstances. They were gentry. He was not. His envy tasted bitter on his tongue.
Holmes flicked his fingers, as if dismissing preliminaries. “I asked you here because you knew the man they called Magnus better than the rest of us.”
Evie released him, stepping back until she found a chair to sit on. Keeping a safe distance between them.
That left Nick standing like a prisoner in the dock. “I did a bit of work for him, that’s all.”
Holmes lifted a brow. “My niece is very discreet, and avoids telling me a great many things I already surmise. Magnus threatened her, so I will agree for now that you worked for him, and had nothing to do with his death.”
Nick kept his face utterly still. Evie remained immobile as the potted fern in the corner, her expression worried.
Holmes nodded, as if this was no more than he expected. “Magnus was, for want of a better term, an inventor. What was he working on? I understand he has made clocks and automatons, but what else?”
Nick brought the townhouse with its massive library into his mind’s eye. “A lot of things. He had electric light. Chemical experiments. He had plans for an airship.”
“The police found no such plans found in Dr. Magnus’s possessions. It was the one thing I had expected them to find.”
Once more, Nick kept his face perfectly still.
“May I see them?” Holmes asked. He beckoned impatiently. “Come, come.”
The plans were incriminating, stained with his blood and fresh from the house of a dead man. Nick had been afraid to leave them with his gear at the circus, just in case anyone went through his things, so he’d kept the plans inside his coat. He should have thrown them in the fire, and would have to eventually, but they were too beautiful to destroy. Slowly, he drew out the mechanical scroll and unlocked the mechanism.
“Please unfold them,” Holmes asked, nodding ruefully at his injured arm.
Nick did as he was asked. The brass arm unrolled in sections and unfurled the silk drawings from what seemed an impossibly small space. “This seems a long way from a dead kitchen maid.”
“But it is all of one piece, and this is perhaps a closer link than most.”
Evie rose, moving to the other side of her uncle’s chair. The three of them studied the plans.
“There has been much talk about Athena’s Casket and its special powers,” Holmes said. “Mycroft first brought the rumors to my attention when word got about that Schliemann had discovered where it had been buried. The casket seems to be a mythical beast-machine that holds the secret of limitless power by uniting magic with gears and pistons. But the one fact that keeps getting ignored is what Athena’s Casket was actually used for.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked, forgetting about whom he was talking to and falling into the beauty of the neatly drawn airship plans.
Evelina tucked a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear. “Wasn’t it for navigation?”
“If you believe the approved texts. Possibly more, if one accepts sketchier accounts.” Holmes scowled at the plans. “And here we are. This ship has no power source.”
“But that’s the boiler there.” Nick pointed. He could read and Striker understood mechanics. Together they had figured out most of what was on the scroll.
“The boiler is not big enough for significant propulsion. Furthermore, this has a large balloon, but it’s not enough to lift a gondola this size. It would need an alternate source of lift.” Holmes indicated a spot at the very front of the ship. “Here. All the power, lift, and navigation needed. An air deva.”
Nick and Evelina both looked at him, startled. Nick found his voice first. “Pardon me, sir, but what would the likes of you know about that?”
Holmes’s voice was sharp. “I have no affinity or understanding of the magical sciences. That does not mean I do not know of their existence, or of the theories surrounding certain inherited abilities.” He gave them a significant look.
Evie opened her mouth, then closed it again when Holmes lifted a quelling finger.
“For now,” he said, “all I need to know is that Magnus and others gave credit to old legends. So did Archimedes of Syracuse, who wrote the first accounts of flying ships and devices with the speech of men.”
Nick’s pulse quickened, which set his wound throbbing even harder. “But other men—here and now—want the casket, don’t they?”
“An airborne war machine that requires next to no fuel? One with native intelligence?” The detective barked a laugh. “I can safely say that talk of it extends clear to Bohemia. Armed airfleets exist, but nothing with this potential. The steam baron who acquires the knowledge to create such ships will possess the nucleus of an unstoppable invasion force.”
“Magnus said he wanted to put a spoke in their wheels.”
“Dr. Magnus was a madman who would have used our outrage at the barons to open the doors to his own invasion.” Holmes gave the plans back to Nick. “You had best keep these safe from official eyes. There is no telling who might wish to make use of them.”
“Where is the casket?” Nick asked. “Do we have any idea?”
“You tell me.” Holmes indicated a table with a lazy wave of his good hand. A book lay open on it, open to an engraving of a small chest richly decorated with gems and carved owls.
Nick shook his head. “I don’t remember seeing anything like this in Dr. Magnus’s things.”
Holmes leaned back, clearly tired. “He never found it. An archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann excavated it in Greece and shipped it to London. It was closely guarded, but supposedly never arrived. What do you think happened?”
Nick couldn’t see why his opinion mattered, but he gave it anyway. “Who is to say that is true?”
“Precisely,” Holmes replied. “I am beginning to suspect that the entire operation was an elaborate scheme
