Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection Read Online Free PDF Page B

there's anything you can remember, any places he used to frequent, other people he used to see..."
    "Well, there's this church down in Southwark-"
    "We've already been there." I shook my head.
    "Oh. Hm. Then what about his daughter and grandson's mausoleum?"
    "They were transported to London for burial?"
    "Well, no. There wasn't anything to bury. But he had a monument built to them in Abney Park."
     
    ***
     
    "The more I consider the matter the more sense it's beginning to make," Bartleby said as we entered the cemetery.
    "What is?"
    We walked along the main path through the Egyptian-inspired gates. I was half-listening to Bartleby, enamoured of the fact that the trees around Abney Park seemed to have been planted in alphabetical order. It appealed to my driving need for orderly structure. Acer... Alder... Apple...
    "Everything. A brilliant engineer, his daughter and grandchild killed in a war, grows disenchanted by the political world of man. He disappears from the world and comes back to kill the politicians and industrialists who represent the powers that be."
    "I don't know, Bartleby. Where has he been keeping himself the last thirty years?" Birch... Beech... Box...
    "Doing what you do. Playing the hermit, forgetting the world, losing himself in his work. Building himself the perfect assassin."
    Cherry... Elm... Hawthorne..." Building? Bartleby, do you mean to suggest that the Spider is some sort of advanced clockwork automaton?"
    "Why wouldn't it be?"
    "Because it's not possible. Even the most advanced of clockworks can only run simple mechanical routines. They can't react to stimuli. They can't make choices. They just do whatever it is that they've been built to do."
    "I'm disappointed in you, James." Bartleby laughed lightly. "Nothing's impossible in this age, you've told me so yourself. What if you combined a clockwork with one of Babbage's difference machines?"
    I scoffed. "I would hardly think that--"
    "And what could you do if you were locked down in your workshop for thirty years, uninterrupted?"
    The only answer I had to that was "a good deal." Bartleby was correct-- every day the limitations of science and technology were being pushed further and further back. One simply had to look at the work of the chemist Jekyll or the galvanic tragedies in Germany over the last century to see that the world as it is bears little resemblance to the world as it could be. An autonomous clockwork-- it wasn't entirely impossible, even if I myself couldn't see a way to do it. Remembering the complexity of Whitney's masterwork, I had little doubt that if anyone could manage it, it would be he.
    The Whitney mausoleum was Gothic in its architecture, long with a high pointed front archway. Its exterior carvings mimicked a trellis of interlaced tracery with a repeating pattern of trefoils and quatrefoils. The doors in particular were made to resemble cathedral doors, and upon inspection, we found them to be slightly ajar.
    Bartleby drew his pistol as I shouldered the heavy doors open. A lantern in one hand, I hefted a pry-bar across my shoulders and entered. Despite the length of the chamber within, the interior was sparse and empty, containing but two sarcophagi-- one of which was open. I approached it cautiously, length of iron raised, but found that instead of a corpse swaddled in funerary shroud it held a spiral staircase descending down into darkness. Bartleby stuck close to my light, and together we descended deep into the earth.
     
    ***
     
    A small light from below grew more visible as we descended, and we found Hector Whitney waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, in what appeared to be a subterranean workshop. He greeted us with a pistol levelled at my chest.
    "Stop right there." His hands were gnarled but steady. "I'll shoot if you come any closer. Drop your weapons."
    Bartleby slowly put his gun down on the steps, and I followed suit with my pry-bar and lantern.
    "What happened, Whitney?" I asked. Bartleby isn't