As the skyline of the grand metropolis stretched out before them, Aidan stood at the front of the bridge, clutching at the balustrade meant to keep him from falling into the nose cone, bouncing up and down and cheering: “Blackwood! Blackwood! Blackwood!”
From up here one could see the walls partitioning the city into nine boroughs: the crumbling medieval mortarwork sectioning off Blackwood I, the masonry marking the boundaries of the ancient City; the terraced triangular-cannonaded battlements surrounding Blackwoods II through V; the tasteful Georgian brickwork separating II from III, IV from V, and VII through IX from each other; and the massive concrete bulwark stretching from the southwestern tip of VII, along the great bulge of IX, all the way to the northwestern tip of VIII, delineating definitively the outermost edges of the sprawling city-state. Beyond the oldest parts of the city, the western sea shimmered pink and orange as it prepared to swallow a weirdly crimson sun. It was a vista the crew had seen many times, but Aidan was absolutely enthralled, leaning way over the railing as the Argus drifted over the city centre. His eyes widened seeing the fantastic structures he’d only ever seen in grainy sepiatone photographs: the gleaming art deco skyscrapers of downtown, the improbable decorative windmills of the bohemian hilltop district of Hilaria, the grand colonnaded Royal Blackwood Library, the great gothic spire of the Cathedral, the colossal rotunda of the ancient Temple of Praxa, the palatine hillside mansions of Blueberry Hill—and at the highest point in the city, overlooking the low tile roofs and winding cobblestone streets of the Old Town, sat the fabled Jewel Atop the Crown: Blackwood Castle, the administrative nerve centre of the entire Blackwegian Empire.
Eli lounged on the couch as Lacey steered the Argus towards the Cigar Box, across the wide and winding Boughbridge Sound that cleaved the metropolis in two, and whose various tributaries and fjords divided the city further still. The Cigar Box was a sub-district of the Docklands comprising thirty identical warehouses, long and low and laid out side-by-side; the area got its nickname because each warehouse had an airship mooring station on the roof. The Argus’s berth was Warehouse 27, and Lacey and Jose exchanged rapid strings of aeronautical jargon Eli couldn’t begin to understand as they carefully eased the ship into position. As the zeppelin descended atop Warehouse 27, a wide section of the roof dropped down into the building: this was the freight elevator, and as the Argus touched down it came back up, bringing with it a team of stock workers to unload the ship’s cargo.
“Okay,” Lacey said to Mrs. Cartwright once the ship was moored. “Just try and make sure the kid stays out of your way. Once the shipment’s unloaded, set him up in the cabin nearest the engine room.” She paused: “And for God’s sake, show him where the showers are.”
“You know Price really isn’t an unreasonable guy,” Eli said as they descended the winding stairway into the shadowy, amber-illuminated warehouse, where workers and forklifts milled through aisles stacked high with crates marked with customs stamps from across the known world. “You remember like six months back when Xiang sniped us for the big Royal Ornithological Society Annual Gala buy, he compensated us for the lost commission and he got rid of all the stock himself. I mean he’s not going to throw us to the wolves here, he knows we work hard.”
“Throwing us a bone after we worked our asses off and got shut out anyway is one thing,” Lacey said. “Letting us play our own hand, well, he’s not exactly the type to throw caution to the wind, don’t you think? He runs a pretty tight ship. Literally as well as figuratively. He’s Type A, you know? He needs to be in control. He doesn’t care much for surprises.”
“Yeah, but we’ve set up a pretty attractive proposition for him, right?”
“Be that as it may,” Lacey said, “I just can’t help the feeling that if things go south I’m going to be the one cleaning up the bullshit. I mean, supposing he says no. Price is—sure, he’s not an unreasonable guy, but he’s an aristocrat, y’know, problems don’t exist until they start leaving flaming bags of shit on his doorstep. So supposing he says no: are you going to take a special trip back out there to take the kid back to his parents? You gonna shell out to put him on a train back home? ‘Cause I don’t know about you but I got rent to pay and groceries to buy. Don’t take this the wrong way, don’t think I’ve gone soft, but the one thing I’m not going to do is throw that starry-eyed little hick out into the streets to starve. This city will eat him alive if he’s on his own, and you know it. At the same time, though, I need the added burden of taking care of a kid like I need a goddamned hole in the temporal lobe. Does one perchance begin to see the predicament I’m in?”
“Well, yeah, sure.”
“Does one thence begin to comprehend why I’m so fucking annoyed right now?”
Eli shrugged. “I’ll buy you a drink after.”
Outside Warehouse 27 there was a cab waiting for them, a gleaming black Austin Twenty saloon with white letters painted on the front doors:
Thurn Und Taxi Co.
Tel. BRixton-5143
The taxi took them to Hythalia, the aristocratic neighbourhood where the company’s office was located. Compared to the parts of the city they’d driven through to get here, this place seemed almost artificially grand: the streets had gone from uneven ravines to straight, wide, tree-lined boulevards, and the rundown pubs and brothels had been replaced by charming sidewalk cafés and five-star hotels. The architecture was uniform and well-planned, a noble but soft-spoken Georgian carved out of a pale sandstone that would have been black with soot and grime anywhere else in the city.
The office was located above a high-end furniture store, accessible by a stately but easily overlooked black door wedged between two shop fronts. Above the doorbell was an engraved brass plaque that spoke of culture and refinement:
ASHFORD & HALIFAX
Wholesale Distributors
• Est. 1867 •
Up the stairs and at the end of the hall was a small foyer guarded by a secretary, a teenaged flapper of Asian heritage with a short bob of straight black hair sticking out from under her low cloche hat. Her nameplate read K. SHEN. She didn’t greet them or even look up from her paperwork, she just waved them into Price’s office—thankfully she seemed too busy and tired tonight for the usual inquisitional zeal for which Price retained her services.
The office floor was in the shape of an octagon, with a high mural-painted domed ceiling and carved marble walls. There were floor-to-ceiling French windows in the walls on either side of Price’s enormous rosewood desk, straight across from the doorway; the bright arc lighting of the street lights outside filtered in through gauzy damask curtains to illuminate the room. Eli had always thought everything in this office looked terrifyingly expensive.
Vincent Price was a tall, slender man in his early thirties, dressed smartly in a very nice suit—but not too obviously nice, there was a certain understated elegance to it: it was the fashion of a young aristocrat who was trying not to look like an aristocrat. His short brown hair was cut in a similar spirit, liberated without being vulgar, and his clean-shaven face seemed to suggest that he was somewhat younger than he really was.
“Honestly,” he said, his accent crisp and refined and his manner dignified and well-studied, “we ship the wildest delicacies and depravities imaginable from the most far-flung and exotic reaches of the empire, and Lord Montague wants oranges from the Pale.”
“We were hauling oranges?” Lacey said.
“Sixty crates of Pale oranges,” Price sighed, shaking his head in disdain.
“His money spends,” Eli shrugged. He glanced at Lacey: “And hey, speaking of money.”
Price looked worried. “What have you done to me now?” he demanded, only half-jokingly.
Lacey said: “We, uh, found our new engineer, I hope.”
