The Clockill and the Thief

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1: LESSONS IN DEATH

  CHAPTER 2: SAFETY THIRD

  CHAPTER 3: THE SKY PALACE

  CHAPTER 4: THE NET TIGHTENS

  CHAPTER 5: MUM’S THE WORD

  CHAPTER 6: THESE BOOTS WERE MADE FOR FALLING

  CHAPTER 7: MIXED MESSAGES

  CHAPTER 8: TICK-TOCK, CHIP-CHOP

  CHAPTER 9: A SINKING FEELING

  CHAPTER 10: MONEY PROBLEMS

  CHAPTER 11: THE LION’S DEN

  CHAPTER 12: TOWER OF DOOM

  CHAPTER 13: THE MESSAGE

  CHAPTER 14: DEADFALL

  CHAPTER 15: QUACK, QUACK, WHACK

  CHAPTER 16: SKY PALACE, SPY PALACE

  CHAPTER 17: GUN SHY

  CHAPTER 18: LIGHTER THAN AIR

  CHAPTER 19: A FIERY EXCHANGE

  CHAPTER 20: THE SWORDFISH

  CHAPTER 21: CAPTAIN’S ORDERS

  CHAPTER 22: BLUE WITH COLD

  CHAPTER 23: BLUE-EYED BOY

  CHAPTER 24: FIREWORKS

  CHAPTER 25: HIDDEN DEPTHS

  CHAPTER 26: DEAD MAN’S RUN

  CHAPTER 27: LIGHTNING STRIKE

  CHAPTER 28: STOLEN TIME

  CHAPTER 29: RUNNING REPAIRS

  CHAPTER 30: PIRATES, AHOY!

  CHAPTER 31: THE QUICK WAY DOWN

  CHAPTER 32: STENCH OF DEATH

  CHAPTER 33: TRAPPED

  CHAPTER 34: CLOCKILL

  CHAPTER 35: MIRROR, MIRROR

  CHAPTER 36: BOOM! BOOM!

  CHAPTER 37: TEA FOR TWO

  CHAPTER 38: LEMON SCENT

  CHAPTER 39: HEROIC COWARD

  CHAPTER 40: ENGINE FIRE

  CHAPTER 41: NOT-SO-HEAVY METAL

  CHAPTER 42: RESCUE

  CHAPTER 43: HEROES BALL

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sin hated the house of a thousand deaths. It was his least favourite lesson, even worse than double Latin. The traps and tricks didn’t bother him; with his ability to slow time he always managed to avoid them. No, what bothered him was his friends dying. He understood the need for the house. As students at the Covert Operations Group, they had to train hard to ensure they were ready for the spy missions they would be sent on. But Sin doubted he’d ever get used to the death of a friend.

  Once finely decorated, the mansion’s upper landing was now worn and shabby. The oak panels cladding the walls bore the scars of years of abuse, as did the pitted and stained floorboards. A musty smell hung in the damp, chill air. Sin adjusted his goggles and flexed his shoulders against the protective leather suit he wore. Keeping his back pressed against the wall, he reached for the brass doorhandle, fashioned in the shape of a dragon’s head. “You ready?”

  Opposite waited his mission partner and best friend, Zonda Chubb. Straggles of blonde hair escaped from beneath her padded leather helmet. “Absolutamon,” she said, brushing a stray strand clear of her ironglass goggles.

  Sin shoved the door open and noted the room’s details in an instant. There were no other doors, but two long windows opposite offered a possible means of escape. A large bookcase occupied one wall, while a soot-stained painting of a horse adorned the other. Ahead, Staff MacKigh relaxed in a tattered armchair, his luminous ginger hair glowing like a beacon. His plaid blazer pulled tight across his barrel chest, the Scottish weapon instructor’s stocky build better suited to military fatigues than formal dress. Across his tartan-trousered knees rested a briefcase.

  Behind MacKigh towered the metallic black form of a clockwork soldier, one of the feared watchmek. They weren’t too smart, but they were tough, and recent upgrades by the eccentric inventor Nimrod Barm had made them faster than a whip crack.

  Zonda rushed alongside Sin, framed in the doorway. The sharp tick of spinning clockwork cut the air, and quick as a piston the watchmek’s steamrifle was at its shoulder.

  Time slowed. Except, as Nimrod had explained, time wasn’t slowing, Sin was speeding up, super-adrenaline flooding his system, tripling his heart rate and accelerating his brain activity.

  A white cloud mushroomed from the watchmek’s steamrifle, a nail punching through the vapour. His arms outstretched, Sin cannoned into Zonda, knocking her across the doorway. They crashed onto the landing’s floorboards and time snapped back. Loud as bellows, Zonda’s strained breathing pained Sin’s ears, his senses always more acute after the super-adrenaline rush.

  “That wasn’t the planerooney,” said Zonda, pinned beneath Sin in the relative safety of the corridor.

  “Plan changed. We weren’t getting in the room without dying.”

  Opposite the open doorway, two nails protruded from the landing wall. Plaster motes drifted in the air around them. The practice nails were deliberately blunted, and fired at a lower pressure, the intention being to hurt rather than kill. It still wasn’t good to take a direct hit; the bruises lasted for weeks. No one really died in training – not intentionally, anyway – but every simulated fatality reminded them that on an actual mission, there were no second chances.

  Sin pushed himself off Zonda and helped her to her feet. She dusted off her suit and said, “We need a Plan B.”

  “No way through that door without getting nailed, and we aren’t allowed back outside to try the windows.”

  “If only we had a gorgiferous slice of angel cake.” Zonda patted the pockets on her snug suit. “I ate my last bit in the axe attack room.”

  “Cake won’t get us through the door.”

  “At least I’d die happy.”

  From a pouch on his belt, Sin removed a circular mirror attached to a telescopic rod. With the quiet tick of clockwork, the rod extended. Sin eased the mirror into the open doorway and inspected the room’s reflection. The watchmek stood on aim, its steamrifle trained on the doorway. The machine could remain like that indefinitely; it wouldn’t get tired or bored or hungry, and it certainly couldn’t be bribed with cake.

  “You have ten minutes left,” shouted Staff MacKigh, his tiny reflected image replacing a pocket watch in his blazer.

  “Fantaberooney! You’ve given me an idea.” Zonda shuffled along the corridor to where a large gilt-framed mirror hung on the wall. “We can use this as a shield.”

  Sin examined a crack in the mirror. “This ain’t ironglass. It wouldn’t stop a sneeze; it’ll never stop a nail.”

  “It doesn’t have to. It’s cover from view, not cover from fire.”

  Sin lifted the mirror from the wall. They’d learned about cover from view the hard way. A few weeks earlier, MacKigh had told them they were playing hide and seek in the ornamental flower gardens. Once all the candidates were hidden, he’d proceed to unload on them with a belt-fed steamrifle. The training nails had ripped through the flowers and thudded into the students, hammering home the lesson. Cover from view didn’t mean cover from effective enemy fire.

  “So, what’s the plan?” asked Sin.

  “We advance into the room, hiding behind the mirror.”

  “No danger.” The corners of Sin’s mouth turned down. “The mirror’s antique. What happens when the watchmek lets rip?”

  Zonda’s green eyes sparkled. “It won’t. Trust me.”

  Having grown up living rough on the streets of Coxford, Sin was slow to trust, but Zonda was one of the few people who had won his confidence. Crouching low, he manoeuvred the mirror into the doorway. Although cumbersome, it wasn’t heavy. Zonda tucked in behind him, the strawberry scent of her hair filling Sin’s nostrils. She rested a gloved hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  Adopting an awkward shuffle to ensure they both stayed hidden, Sin slid the mirror across the parquet floor. His throat tightened and a dryness parched his mouth. With no view of the watch
mek he’d have no forewarning should the machine decide to shoot. Expecting an explosion of steam at any moment, followed by the intense pain of impacting nails, he moved further into the room.

  With Zonda directing them, they circled sideways until they were to the rear of the clockwork soldier. She removed a large neodymium magnet from the field toolkit strapped to her leg and pressed it to the back of the watchmek’s head. With a thunk, the tick of turning cogs ceased and the mekanika slumped.

  Sin lowered the mirror and drew alongside Staff MacKigh. “Professor Haber, I’m from COG and I’m here to rescue you,” he said, delivering the message he’d memorised from their briefing earlier that afternoon.

  MacKigh opened his briefcase and slid a hand inside. “Danke schön,” he responded in perfect Teutonian. He stood, letting the briefcase drop to the floor. Clutched in his hand was a stubby four-barrelled steampistol, pointed straight at Sin.

  Dodging sideways, Sin slapped the back of MacKigh’s hand, just like they’d been taught. Steam jetted from the barrels and the pistol flew from the Sergeant’s grip.

  Zonda screamed, a quartet of nails protruding from her torso.

  Shouldering the inert watchmek aside, Sin grabbed its steamrifle and sighted down the barrel at MacKigh.

  The Sergeant raised his hands in surrender. “End-Ex,” he shouted, all hints of Teutonian replaced by his thick Scottish intonation. “COG Chubb, you are dead. Rule Two of any rescue mission, ne’er trust the person you are rescuing.”

  “Ow.” Zonda plucked a nail from her suit and tossed it on the ground. “What’s Rule One?”

  “Dinnae get killed,” said MacKigh. “COG Sin, well done. You have removed Professor Haber from his Teutonian masters and prevented their use of necrotic gases on the battlefields of Europe.”

  Sin rubbed a gloved hand over his forearm. He hadn’t stopped anything. It was only an exercise. Perhaps at some point COG would mount a mission to rescue or remove the real professor. After all, that’s what COG did: sabotage the military machines of Europe in an attempt to stop the next Great War. For now, Professor Haber was still developing his chemical weapons.

  Staff MacKigh clasped Sin on the shoulder. “If you dinnae mind me asking, how the hoots did you know the mirror would work?”

  “Beats me,” said Sin. “Zon?”

  Zonda winced, tugging the final nail free. “Last term, when I fitted the camera-nocturna to the watchmek for the Major, I discovered their bio-chemical retinas really are jolly primitive. I suspected the mirror’s reflection would confuse its clockwork.”

  “You suspected?” Sin kicked the mirror’s frame. “You made us come in here protected by a quarter inch of glass and a hunch?”

  “It was more of an educated guess than a hunch. Advanced as the watchmeks’ clockwork gearing is, they’ll never be able to do what we do,” said Zonda, tapping a finger against her temple. “So, we’ll always be able to beat them.”

  “Yeah. Until the military figures out how to wire a human brain into a machine,” said Sin. “Then we’re doomed.”

  Surrounded by fine ornamental gardens, Lenheim Palace sat in two thousand acres of private parkland on the outskirts of the city of Coxford. Once the home of the Duke of Marlborough, it had been gifted to COG by eccentric billionaire inventor Nimrod Barm. As the threat of war in Europe loomed ever nearer, it now formed the organisation’s main training establishment. The palace had been Sin’s home for a little over three months, and every day he lived a lie to keep from being thrown out.

  On his last mission, he’d been captured by scientists working for the King’s Knights, a shadowy organisation committed to expanding Britannia’s military might. They’d transfused him with a prototype blue blood that made him immune to poison and increased his strength and stamina. Their intention was to make him into a super soldier, but there was always a price for such advances, and Sin was paying it.

  Feeling a combination of anticipation and shame, Sin depressed the syringe’s brassanium plunger, shooting sapphire liquid into his forearm. The fluid snaked up his veins, a darkening network of guilt beneath his swarthy skin. He shivered as the life-giving chemicals rushed through his body. Lying back on the bed in his palatial room, he stared at the four-poster’s canopy before letting his eyelids drift closed. Released from his worries, he savoured the moment of bliss. Free from the world. Free from the pain. Free from the past. Thoughts of his murdered mother melted away. The secret he’d sworn to keep, that Nimrod Barm was his father, evaporated like morning dew. The terrible deeds he’d done for his old gang boss, the Fixer, dissolved into mist. He floated, unconcerned and uncaring.

  A knock at the door shattered his tranquillity.

  “Lessons in five,” shouted Zonda.

  Sin’s eyes flickered open. Five minutes before he had to face the world and pretend that everything was normal, that he was normal. But if what Nimrod had told him was true, he’d never be normal, and now with the injections, that was doubly so.

  He slid the needle from his arm. “I’m nearly sorted. I’ll meet you in the common room.”

  “Get a wiggle on. I don’t want to go on my own, I look like a banana.”

  The canary-yellow flight suit hanging in his wardrobe was designed for purpose rather than style. Sin smiled despite himself. “I’ll be there in a minute. Just don’t split without me.”

  “If that was a fruit-related joke it wasn’t funny.” Zonda harrumphed and her footsteps echoed along the corridor.

  Sin placed the empty syringe back into a velvet-lined case, where it nestled alongside four full counterparts. The solution glimmered within the ironglass like a magic potion from a fairytale. But unless Nimrod synthesised an antidote soon, Sin couldn’t see this story ending happily ever after.

  He pulled the winding crown from the medicament-chronograph inset in the case and reset the hands to zero. The device looked like a pocket watch, although, unlike Phineas Pines’ Technological Timepieces, the chronograph counted not in seconds, hours and minutes, but in heartbeats, tracking the time until his next injection was due. Sin clicked the ribbed metal button back into position and watched the scarlet hands tick in a double beat, slicing away time. Five hundred thousand beats before his next fix. He tried to think of it as only four and a half days. Already, it felt too long.

  He fastened the lid shut and hid the case beneath a sheaf of papers in a desk drawer. Another secret to be kept.

  A giant lozenge-shaped training balloon filled the cavernous gymnasium hall. Significantly smaller than a real airship, its highest point was still a good ninety feet above the candidates.

  Sergeant Stoneheart prowled along the rank of nine East Wing students. Sin stood smartly to attention at one end of the line, Zonda next to him. At the other end, waiting nervously for the Sergeant’s steely glare to pass over him, was Sin’s arch rival, Jasper Jenkins. His mop of curly white hair contrasted starkly with Stoneheart’s jet black skin as she leaned in to inspect the polished metal “E” on the collar of his flight suit.

  Before Stoneheart’s recruitment as COG’s physical training instructor, she’d been a ruthless Zulu champion. Feared by the students, she was as harsh with them as she’d been with the impi of warriors she’d commanded on the plains of Afrikania.

  “That needs repositioning by a quarter of an inch, COG Jenkins,” commanded Stoneheart.

  “Yes, Staff,” answered Jasper, his voice trembling.

  Progressing to the rank of eight West Wingers in the second row, Stoneheart addressed the candidates as she continued to inspect them. “Just because you have completed the first stage of training, don’t think that makes you special. Don’t think it means you’ve made it.” Pacing past the blonde-bobbed Trixie Asp and the thickset bruiser Skinner Grundy, she came to a halt in front of Claude Maggot, a pink-cheeked candidate who looked too young to be in COG. With fingers strong as steel, she tugged at the metal “W” on Maggot’s collar, checking it was secure. “The real hard work is about to begin. Eyes up
and pay attention to Captain Hawk while I fetch the safety equipment.” Hardly giving the remainder of the West Wing students a glance, Stoneheart marched from the hall, the metal claws of her chunky rigair boots clacking against the gymnasium floor.

  The candidates’ heads tilted. Captain Felicity Hawk stood atop the curved balloon, her boots locked onto the web of litanium ratlines that criss-crossed the structure. Unlike the near-luminous hue of the students’ pristine flight suits, years in the air had faded her leathers to a warm bronze that complemented her sky-tanned skin and short copper hair.

  “Airships are an excellent means to infiltrate foreign countries, gather intelligence and extricate compromised operatives.” Hawk clapped her hands together, ensuring she had the candidates’ full attention. “They also boast a variety of new and interesting ways in which to die. This is why we must teach you every detail of air stewardship, starting with the correct terminology. What I am standing on is not the balloon or the skin – it is the envelope.” She unclamped one boot from a ratline and prodded the silver material with her toe. “What is it?”

  “THE ENVELOPE, STAFF,” shouted the students.

  “Excellent.” Hawk realigned the furrow in the rubber sole of her rigair boot with one of the ratlines. She pressed it down and the boot’s clockwork-powered jaws clamped around the cable. Lifting her other boot free, she re-clamped it further along. Step by step she methodically walked down the curve of the envelope. “In two weeks’ time, you will be crewing the Swordfish, the finest airship in the Empire and, more importantly, my airship.”

  Sin felt an elbow in his ribs and he turned to see Stanley Nobbs grinning at him. Stanley was a beanpole of a boy with cropped dark hair and a face for whom the term “cheeky monkey” was surely invented. “I am definitely marrying that woman,” said Stanley.

  “She’s old enough to be your mother,” said Sin.

  Velvet Von Darque, a beguilingly beautiful West Winger and Zonda’s nemesis since long before they’d joined COG, shoved Sin. “She’s far too striking to be related to him. Nobbs’s mother was probably a bag lady, or possibly even Simian.”