The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [30]
The French were difficult. The words of a Carroll ditty rose in his head, and he smiled. "They are the frogs, and we have lizards," he whispered into the wind, "we play the first, and they the second fiddle."
From within the fog he heard a sound like that of a slow-moving boat, waves brushing against a hard, rocking body. He strained but could see nothing, and his thoughts returned to their meandering track. In L'Île mystérieuse, which was banned under the Empire, the author, Jules Verne, claimed to have made a voyage to Caliban's Island, though Orphan suspected it was a mere fancy of the author, who was known for his tales of wild imagination. I'd like to visit France, he thought. Then a boat came sailing out of the mist, a single person sitting in the prow, and his breath slammed into his lungs and froze his thoughts into small hard diamonds.
The person in the boat was Lucy.
She was dressed in a fine white dress that seemed to form a part of the fog, and she sat in an unnatural calm as the boat sailed without anyone to steer it, coming close to the bank of the river, close enough for Orphan to almost reach a hand and touch her. Almost.
He tried to shout her name. It came as a hoarse whisper. She was in profile to him and unmoving, and her head did not turn to him. She was staring out into the fog, into the boat's invisible path and he thought, suddenly and with a dull dread spreading through his bones, She is a ghost.
The fog hid her like a dance of scarves. The boat, the flow of the river itself, seemed to slow. He shouted, "Lucy!" and thought – for just a moment – that her face was turning to look at him.
Then she was gone, and the boat was swallowed by the mist rising from the water and disappeared like the last lingering trace of a dream, leaving only emptiness in its wake.
ELEVEN
Mycroft
You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.
– Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow
Orphan stumbled away from the Thames like a drunk, and his hand ached for paper and pen, for something to write with. It was all too much of a poem, he thought. The woman in white. It made him suddenly giggle. He was too tired, too worn-out. Hallucinating, perhaps. And perhaps, he thought, Inspector Adler was right, and the Bookman had the power of life, as well as death.
She hadn't looked at him. That was what mattered, what hurt him the most. She neither looked at him nor spoke. It was as if one of them had not existed, as if one were a ghost and the other real, and the two passed each other in two different worlds. He didn't know which one he was, the real or the ghost.
I need sleep, he thought. I need a cup of tea, a bath and a warm bed. Sleep, above all. Sleep.
But it was not to be. For, as he made his way away from the river, a piece of the black night detached itself from the sky and came floating, as silent as a dark balloon, directly above his head.
Orphan looked up.
It was a blimp.
It was entirely black, with no markings, no legend on its side, no identity code describing its existence or purpose. No beacons were lit on the vehicle: it drifted in perfect darkness, invisible and sinister, like a bat hunting in the night.
Orphan's first thought was: so I did not imagine it.
His second: so it's true!
He had been followed by one of the legendary, mythical black airships. What do they want? he thought, panic rising inside him like heated water in bottled glass. And then, government. For who else could command a ship that did not exist?
The blimp hovered above him. He could see its small gondola, as dark as the balloon,