Black Swan (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow) Read online

Besides, when he was done and his work completed, he would have enough money to build his own Opera House. His butterfly collection was a rare thing but it was also complete, the specimens locked within their timeless bubbles, frozen in a moment of eternity. He needed a new challenge, a new subject to collect. Stamps, perhaps, or maybe capital cities.

  Once he was done with Paris, he could move on to Berlin, or Rome, or Madrid – see what wonders he could work abroad upon the face of the Earth. And when the Earth held no more challenges for him, he was sure there was work for him to do on the Moon. Then again, a man of his very particular talents was sure to find gainful employment on Mars.

  No, on this day Valerius Leroux would die in the disaster that would envelop Paris. But Le Papillon, like the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, would rise again in the aftermath of the catastrophe and begin his work anew, continuing in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth.

  That was one thing the disgraced former Prime Minister of Magna Britannia had been right about. The great nations of the world, humankind itself, needed to evolve or it would die like every planet-dominating species before it. Only a year before, Uriah Wormwood had offered the stagnating behemoth of an empire a unique opportunity, and the agents of order – misguided idiots hide-bound by their prehistoric concepts of order and stability – had resisted the change.

  But the world had changed nonetheless, maybe not as much as Wormwood might have hoped, but it had most definitely changed. And besides, change could only ever be diverted, slowed temporarily. It could not be stopped.

  Those who couldn’t handle that truth branded Le Papillon a villain, a terrorist, an anarchist, insane. He was a bastard, and he was happy to admit that, but then it was in his blood. He was from a long line of bastards, his grandfather the illegitimate result of the deformed genius Erik’s obsessive love for the ingénue Christine Daaé.

  Le Papillon returned his attention to Doctor Moreau. “Something is troubling you,” he stated bluntly. “Did the ape... Ishmael” – he spat the name, rather than spoke it – “complete his mission?”

  “Well...” Moreau began.

  Le Papillon bristled. “Well? Is that all you have for me? Well? A simple yes or no is all I require.”

  “No is never a simple answer, is it?”

  “When I am forced to risk exposing this whole operation prematurely, I do not expect ‘Well’ as an answer.” The man’s face was suddenly as pale as the marble from which it appeared to have been carved. He stood perfectly still, centring his anger, fists bunched, his knuckles as white as his alabaster visage.

  “Well, look at it this way,” Moreau said, still not making eye contact with the lepidopterist. “That little risk you’re talking about has led the police to the very man they were hunting for the Rue Morgue murders. So I’d say that rather gets them off our back, wouldn’t you? Besides, Ishmael will have lost those bloody gendarmes as soon as he took to the rooftops again. They’ll never catch him and they’ll never connect him to us.”

  “But what of Quicksilver? What of him?”

  “He’ll be under arrest and in police custody by now.”

  “But he met me, in person.”

  “He’ll never believe that the man who was helping him flee the country, whilst on the run from the police, was the same man who sent a cybernetic gorilla to kill him.”

  “You say that...” No plan ever survived contact with the enemy. “Where’s the ape now?”

  “Ishmael’s in the sewers, heading home.”

  “Home?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.” Le Papillon scowled. “How long until it reaches us?”

  “Ten minutes, tops.”

  “Then I want us ready to leave in five.”

  Moreau turned to face him at long last. “Five?”

  “Is the portable unit ready?”

  Moreau jerked his head towards the object on the table behind him, his eyes back on the monitoring systems. The device was the same size as a handheld kine-camera and looked like a small cathode ray screen attached to a large magnifying lens handle. It was covered in all manner of lights, switches, dials and buttons. It was also currently connected to the doctor’s control desk via a coiled cable and was humming gently to itself.

  “Yes, I can see that it’s there, but is it ready?” Le Papillon pressed.

  “It will be when it’s finished charging.”

  “And how long will that take?”

  Quitting the console with an annoyed huff, Moreau got to his feet and turned his attention to the humming device. “Couple of minutes,” he said gruffly. “How about your little box of tricks over there?” The doctor nodded towards the corrupted and cannibalised pipe organ.

  “I merely need to flick the switch to activate it,” Le Papillon said, a smirk of pride suddenly manifesting itself upon his face. “And I believe I can hear the orchestra tuning up even as we speak.”

  A monitor hidden amongst the additions Pascal had made to the grand instrument displayed the feed from a camera hidden within the orchestra pit several storeys above. On it, the anarchist could see the conductor flexing his arms as the musicians under his command warmed up.

  The strident ringing of the telephone cut through the background electrical hum taking over the cellar lair. He had built this place back up from the derelict ruin it had become following his great-grandfather’s death to the bijou abode it was now, having rediscovered it when his mother brought him to the Palais Garnier as a child.

  The telephone continued to ring.

  “Aren’t you going to get that?” Moreau asked, disconnecting the handheld unit from the main console and bundling a pile of papers into a doctor’s bag open on the workbench behind him, along with all manner of other odds and sods.

  Breathing in deeply through his nose, to demonstrate his irritation, Le Papillon strode the length of the cellar past the humming pipe organ, to his immaculate study space.

  Such rudeness! The man was an oaf, little more than an uncouth lout, despite all his obvious talent with cybernetics and its associated Babbage and Lovelace disciplines. If he hadn’t needed to keep him around in order to keep the ape in check, the anarchist would have stove his skull in there and then using his cunning box of tricks, and left him to suffer the same fate as those who were even now taking their seats ready to experience the world premiere of the late Carmine Roussel’s posthumous masterpiece.

  Soon, of course, he would need neither the ape nor the organ grinder. He would savour that moment, when it came.

  Reaching for the phone trembling on his desk he lifted the handset. “Yes?”

  “What’s going on, Le Papillon?” came the familiar, yet still unnervingly distorted English-accented voice.

  The lepidopterist hesitated, composing himself before answering.

  “Everything is still on schedule.”

  “Is it? Is it really? My intelligence would suggest otherwise,” the voice came again, its cadences a crackling snarl.

  “Your... intelligence?”

  “I have been monitoring police channels–”

  “Checking up on me, are you?”

  “And something seems to be – how shall I put this? – awry.”

  “Nothing is awry. There is nothing to worry about. Everything is going according to plan.”

  “And that includes a silverback going on the rampage through central Paris, does it? I take it that was you.”

  “Very well, there was a slight hitch – one of yours actually – nothing more than a fly in the ointment, shall we say? We sent the ape to deal with it.”

  Le Papillon could sense the tension at the other end of the line.

  “What do you mean, one of ours?”

  “An Englishman.” The tension was making him feel uncomfortable, and he didn’t like to be made to feel uncomfortable. “Name of Quicksilver.”

  “Ulysses Quicksilver? What’s Quicksilver doing in Paris?” the voice shrieked, forc
ing Le Papillon to move the handset away from his ear.

  “At this moment? Being locked away in a nice police cell, I should think.” He hoped he sounded more convinced than he felt.

  “Do not underestimate Quicksilver.”

  “Soon it won’t matter where he is or what he’s doing at the time,” Le Papillon said, his arrogant confidence returning.

  “Spare me the details, I don’t need to know. Just make sure you’ve looked his corpse in the eye before you start boasting that he’s dead. He’s been dead before.”

  “Talking of mortality,” Le Papillon interjected, “as the old saying has it, time and tide wait for no man, and so I must bid you farewell. You know how it is: things to do, an apocalypse to arrange, a populace to massacre. But before I go, can you confirm that payment will be made to the designated Swiss bank account as arranged when we first made our Devil’s bargain? After all, an apocalypse doesn’t come cheap.”

  “When Paris falls, the minute it hits the news here, the money will be transferred to your account.”

  Le Papillon heard a click and the line went dead.

  The echoing chords and opening phrases of an overture wafted through the cellar walls to the anarchist’s ears.

  “Doctor Moreau?” Le Papillon called, suddenly transfixed by one particular specimen mounted on the wall in front of him. “The swan is flying and the storm is about to break. It is time we were gone.”

  Placing the handset carefully back on its cradle, Le Papillon made his way back through the cellar, a framed specimen case in one hand.

  He stopped before the pipe organ, with its spilling cable guts and flowering trumpet horns, listening to the sounds being produced by the musicians of the orchestra and their maestro united to produce a performance of the utmost beauty and harmonious delight.

  Caught up in the rapture of the moment, he wondered if this was how his great-grandfather had felt when, lost within his music, Le Papillon’s great-grandmother had found him there and learned his terrible secret.

  His hand hovered over the activation button for a moment as a lilting refrain lifted him from the mundane into an ethereal realm of light and beauty, taking him out of the world for a moment to join the ghosts of his forebears in the eternal.

  Roussel really had been a genius. His death was such a loss to the world, and yet the world did not know it. But after today the man and his music would be remembered forever, Le Papillon had made sure of that–

  A finger descended and the deed was done. Change had won out in the end and the world would never be the same again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Final Curtain

  ULYSSES BOLDLY LED the way through the stinking darkness of the Paris sewers, impressed by Cadence’s own indefatigable resolve, his face set in a permanent grimace.

  What was it about villains and their underground lairs? Why could they only ever be reached by traversing the channels that transported society’s effluence through the dark? There was probably a moral in there somewhere, and Ulysses might have searched for it himself if it wasn’t for the vile, gag-inducing miasma that had a grip of his lungs now.

  They advanced by the light cast by one of the velocipede’s lamps. Cadence had removed it with a handy screwdriver taken from the utility belt at her waist. Its battery-powered yellow glow pushed back the gloom.

  The clopping sound their booted feet made on the railed path along which they advanced was accompanied by the gurgle of brackish water and an echoing drip.

  Progress might have been bold, but it was also slow, Ulysses half expecting the ape to jump out at them from a dismal alcove or adjoining tunnel at any moment. It wasn’t hard to follow the monster’s passage through the hidden sumps and culverts. It had clearly been forced to crouch to proceed along the mouldering brick tunnels. There were scuff marks in the sludge on the walls and scratch marks had been gouged in the brickwork by the beast’s hulking augmetics.

  And it was these scratch marks that eventually led Ulysses Quicksilver and Cadence Bettencourt to the deserted cellar.

  A wheel-locked steel door, corroded by the accumulated foetid faecal fumes of ages, opened onto a dank brick-lined passageway.

  The first thing that struck Ulysses was the music. It carried through the vaulted cellars in a polyphonic tide, one melody surging to rise above another before that too was subsumed by an alternative counterpoint phrase.

  The tunnel led into a network of vaulted cellars and sunken chambers.

  The first chamber they came to was a makeshift laboratory, complete with a metal caged gurney and Babbage-unit control desk. The darkness was permeated by a blue glow of electrical discharge that made Ulysses’ hair stand on end. He had spent more than enough time in such places to last him a lifetime – the lab under Umbridge House on Ghestdale, not to mention Doktor Folter’s torture chamber-cum-surgery at the heart of Castle Frankenstein – and so hurried on.

  From the laboratory, the cellars opened out into a wide vaulted space, lit by wall-mounted lights. The grand space looked less like a cellar and more like some kind of auditorium. It was dominated by an immense organ, a masterful creation of the organ-maker’s artifice.

  But the marvellous mechanical pipe organ had clearly been the victim of some terrible musical desecration. Its internal workings had been exposed to the world and all manner of electrical components – yard after yard of spooled wires, something that looked like a recording cylinder, not to mention several large trumpet-like protuberances – had been inserted into it. The marriage didn’t appear to have been a particularly happy one; the end result certainly wasn’t pretty, although it did possess a certain spectacular quality all of its own.

  Buried at the heart of the construction was the core of a Babbage unit, or at least some form of ordinateur processor. A mass of cabling led from the machine to great holes in the ceiling above.

  Ulysses moved on again, the waves of vibrating energy pulsing from the organ-thing giving him earache and making him feel light-headed.

  The smell of the place was a strange melange of ozone, hot metal, an acrid animal scent, camphor and furniture polish.

  Beyond the auditorium, the cellar shrank back into a passageway with arched openings leading off it, one of these leading in turn to an immaculately laid-out study. It all appeared very homely, in a clinically measured way, from the precisely mounted insect specimen cases – the majority of which were butterflies and moths – to the way the titles were aligned in the bookcase beside the spotless desk and the wingback armchair set at a precise forty-five degree angle in one corner.

  But there was something wrong, one thing out of place amidst the order that drew Ulysses’ eye in an instant. A space, a gap in the otherwise near total coverage of specimen cases.

  He resumed his wary exploration of the cellar lair, lamp in hand. There were other rooms; bedrooms – one immaculately presented as if no one had ever slept there, the other a total mess – a kitchen, a larder, a dining room, even a bathroom. But there was not another human soul present, beyond him and his companion, and there certainly wasn’t any sign of the ape.

  The place was deserted, like the Marie Celeste had been, as if whoever had been living there had just stepped out for a minute.

  “Where are we?” Cadence asked.

  “It’s hard to be sure,” Ulysses said, joining her before the peculiar organ, despite the discomfort he felt stood before it.

  He paused, concentrating on ignoring the pain and listening instead to the hum of the machine and the lilting music wafting from great sound amplification horns.

  “But given the length of time it took us to cross the city by sewer and that we suspect Leroux is behind the Rue Morgue murders, one of the victims being Carmine Roussel whose last work Black Swan is premiering this very day – right now, probably – at the Paris Opera, and considering the music that’s being piped through this pipe organ right now, if I were to hazard a guess, I’d have to say that we were somewhere beneath the Opera House its
elf.”

  The device was humming loudly, the vibration a strange counterpoint to the orchestral overture, the instrument’s open stops lending the music its own unnerving acoustic qualities. Ulysses could feel the vibration rising through the soles of his feet and making his legs feel like jelly. And was it his imagination or was the sensation intensifying?

  He looked again at the machine. And that was when he saw it.

  Resting on the upper register of the keyboard was a small, polished walnut frame, and pinned to the back board within was a single butterfly.

  It was coloured orange and black, like a leaded stained glass window at sunset on a summer’s day, with white speckles around the edge of each wing.

  “He knew we were coming,” Ulysses whispered.

  “Leroux?”

  “Or me, at least. He knew I was coming and he didn’t try to stop me. Which must mean that either he knew I’d be too late or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Oh shit!”

  “What?”

  “We’ve just walked into a trap.”

  The dandy took in the cables, the winking lights of the ordinateur, the thrumming trumpets, shifting from foot to foot at the uncomfortable vibrations passing through him now. The humming sound was rising in intensity.

  “And this must have something to do with this, must be some integral part of the snare. That’s the only explanation.”

  “Shit!” Now it was the girl’s turn to swear.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I know what this is,” she said, her wide eyes scrutinizing the design of the organ. “Uncle Gustav hypothesised that such a thing could be created but I never thought...”

  “What? Tell me!” Ulysses pressed. He could feel the fillings in his teeth vibrating in sympathy with the emanations coming from the curious device.

  “It’s a sonic bomb.”

  “A what?” Ulysses had to yell to be heard over the thrumming noise of the throbbing organ.

  “It manipulates sound waves, modulating and concentrating them until the collected acoustic force is released in an explosion that acts not unlike a massive seismic event.”