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Summer in London stinks. Literally.
Alek can't fall asleep with his windows closed, his room is too warm, too airless. But the stench of the Zoo wakes him early every morning, when the rising sun reinvigorates the animal miasma that subsides during the night. It's like an alarum clock ringing a particularly unpleasant bell in his nose, and it leaves him queasy and irritable.
Strong tea with breakfast helps enough that he can eat. He thinks he understands, now, why the British drink so much of the stuff, although when he shares this theory with Deryn she looks at him blankly.
"I lived above a stable once, that got whiffy," she says. "But here's got nothing on your Clanker cities."
It's Alek's turn to look blank.
"The smoke in Istanbul?" Deryn prompts. "Like standing all the time in a chimney, I'd think you'd be glad to be somewhere cleaner."
Alek honestly doesn't remember any smoke in Istanbul, just the burn of hot peppers, and the tang of the Spider's ink. Strong smells, but clean smells, not like the London streets. Every time Dr. Barlow sends them out on another errand, Alek winces a little bit more. At least at the Zoo the animals and their wastes are confined to cages. In the streets, the effluvia simmers in the gutters, and every time he breathes he's inhaling some. If he's unlucky he gets flies along with it.
Deryn, walking next to him, seems to adjust her breathing automatically so that she never inhales when they're walking through the thickest clouds of flies. And she dodges around the ubiquitous piles of clart without ever looking at her feet. Alek has abandoned hope of ever getting his shoes clean.
"How can Darwinists live like this?" he mutters to himself. Deryn is a bit ahead of him and he doesn't mean for her to hear, but she must catch something, because she slows and falls back next to him.
"Wish you were in the Alps?" she asks. It's a hot, humid day and Alek's clothes are dampening with sweat. "You're thinking, ice? snow? Why did I ever leave?"
They're suddenly worming through a crowd exiting an omnibus - unwashed Londoner, another palpable smell - so Alek just grunts and pushes ahead. He hadn't been thinking about the castle, but snow fields do sound appealing right now.
Deryn catches up with him on the other side and puts a hand on his arm. "Would you go back, if -" she starts, sounding worried.
Alek is about to answer, but he spots a swinging tail in the corner of his eye and throws himself to the side, colliding with Deryn. Hippoesques like to spread their dung when they excrete; the omnibus itself has a splatter shield, but passers-by are at risk of a foul shower.
He almost makes it out of range, but his knock into Deryn has thrown them both off-balance, and a bit of the hippo's clart lands on the legs of his trousers.
"They're supposed to have a new line of those that don't do that," Deryn says, shaking her head as he inspects the damage. "Must have been an old one."
Alek has learned by now that dabbing at the stains with his handkerchief will only make things worse and ruin the handkerchief; he resigns himself to walking home besmirched.
"You're getting the reflexes of a true Darwinist, though!" Deryn adds brightly, and whatever Alek might have said about the Alps is lost.
That night he sits in his room and looks out at the dark shapes of the Zoo. Deryn's right that he wishes he wasn't here. But it's not the castle in the Alps he thinks about, it's Konopiste. The thick stone of the walls, always cool, and the quiet of the thickly-carpeted halls; the shade of the hunting woods, and the sun on the pond, where sometimes a tutor could be persuaded to overlook a stolen hour of swimming. The pine smell of the woods, and the sweetness of the rose garden, where his father would walk with him, talking about crossbreeds and statecraft, and the pavilions where his mother would sit waiting for them. It's June, he's sure the roses are blooming now...
But instead he's in London, in this Darwinist cesspool, and he's never, ever going home.
***
The more he thinks about home, the more he notices all the ways London isn't. The weirdly different spices in the breakfast sausages. The grating sound of English instead of German. The subtly wrong color of the lights at night.
He wonders if this is why Volger travels so much, currently off to Amsterdam on some sort of business. Maybe you don't notice the differences so much if you keep moving, if you don't try to settle. But he can't talk to Volger about this. The wildcount had accepted the news that Alek was following Deryn to London with a sort of despairing hilarity and a great deal of muttering about the folly of young men. If he were to admit to unhappiness now, Volger might mock him, or pity him, or pressure him to return to Austria now that peace has been declared, even if he'd only be a private citizen and not the heir to the empire.
And despite the foulness of London, he doesn't think that's what he wants.
Although he does wonder if anyone is living at Konopiste.
He tries to keep a stiff upper lip - he supposes he's British now and it's the thing to do - but he must not be doing a very good job, because Deryn gets more and more and more solicitous as June advances. She offers him the last of the pudding. She pours him tea. She gives Bovril little nudges in his direction. And she touches him constantly, patting his shoulders, squeezing his hands, stroking his hair. One night he's standing staring out his window again and he's left his door open and she comes up behind him.
"Hey," she says, leaning in close, putting her arms around him, kissing the side of his neck, and that's it, all at once it's too much. He shrugs her off.
"Is that your answer to everything?" he snaps, and she backs away towards the door.
"Sorry," she mutters, shaking her head, "I didn't -." She ducks out.
Alek sighs. He should go apologize. He's suffering London for her; if he fights with her, then what's the point?
He flops back onto his bed instead. It should be romantic, enduring hardship for his lady, but it's really not. Muck and flies are just not the stuff of romance. They wear him down, not inspire him.
If he could bring her home to Konopiste -
"Home?" Bovril asks in the doorway.
Alek pushes himself up to one elbow and looks at the loris.
"I suppose Deryn sent you over," he says. "Are you a spy or a ministering angel?"
It clambers up onto the bed next to him and cuddles into his shoulder.
"Foreigner," it tells him.
He can't picture Bovril at Konopiste. It's hard enough to imagine Deryn there, clomping through the rose garden, flinging herself into the chairs where his mother had carefully arranged her skirts.
"You would horrify the servants," he tells the loris.
"Austria," it answers.
"Yes," Alek agrees. "Probably you would horrify all of Austria too."
"Go?" it asks him.
"Sure," he tells it, and it hops down off the bed and toddles out the door, back to Deryn, he assumes.
He can't make himself get up to follow it.
***
Deryn is tense the next morning at breakfast, silent, but shooting him wary glances, and Alek can't figure out what he should say, either. So they don't speak. Defaulting to the library, they eye each other over the tops of their books (a Latin primer for Deryn, who has been ordered to learn some; Treasure Island for Alek, who is supposed to be reading On the Origin and Fabrication of Species but just can't stomach it today).
It's a relief when Dr. Barlow sweeps in with a large envelope.
"I need you to look at these," she tells Alek briskly, oblivious to the hush of the library and the frowns of other Society members at work there.
She spreads the contents of the envelope out on a table and Alek obediently gets up out of his armchair to look.
They're photographs, of some sort of mechanikal device.
"Well?" Dr. Barlow asks. "What is it?"
Alek starts sorting through the photographs, seeing how the parts could fit together. It's been partially disassembled, but if he assumes that this piece is the other side of that one...
"It's billard Japonais," Alek announces flatly. He'd been hoping for a weapon, a new kind of clockwork servant, something exciting.
"Huh? What?" Deryn asks. She's come up to the table while he's been focused on the photographs.
"I know it's billard Japonais," Dr. Barlow says impatiently. "The question is, is it anything else?"
Alek frowns. "Why would it be?"
Dr. Barlow ticks off points on her fingers. "German manufacturer, German wholesaler here, evasive with the customs inspector, irregularities in the paperwork - if you wanted to smuggle Clanker devices into Britain, disguising them as something harmless might be easier than avoiding customs entirely."
"But what is it?" Deryn puts in.
Alek looks at her. "It's a game," he says. "There's a table, with a ball, and holes - you launch the ball - "
"Oh," Deryn says, "Bagatelle, like in pubs. Why didn't you just say so."
Alek ignores her and begins a second study of the photographs. It's certainly the most complicated billiard Japonais game he's ever seen. They'd had an old table in one of the parlors at Konopiste, all elaborately-carved hardwoods and no mechaniks beyond the spring in the plunger. He'd played occasionally but had mostly found dull, a matter of chance rather than skill. The table in the photographs is partly mechanikal, part electrikal; in addition to the main plunger, there are levers and flippers and buttons along what would be both sides, and he can see places in the underside where the ball could trigger switches to raise or lower ramps, turn on or off lights, ring bells, and more.
It does seem very elaborate for something that is just a game, and there are a few parts Alek just can't figure out, including something that looks like a small hydraulics works near the middle.
"I would have to see it in person to be sure," he tells Dr. Barlow. "Some of these parts, if you rearranged them - it's not impossible they could be something else."
"Something else like what?" Deryn asks. "A different pub game?"
"A cipher machine, maybe, if you put letters on the rotor here," Alek says, tapping one of the photographs. "Or maybe just a game, yes."
"Could you play this game?" Dr. Barlow asks. "The Exchequer would like to know whether it is a game of skill or a game of chance. Irrelevant for my purposes, but as long as we are investigating the one, we might as well settle the other."
It's an unexpected echo of his thoughts about the game at Konopiste, and Alek takes a moment to reply.
"I could play," Deryn offers.
"I'm not sure we can tell chance and skill apart in your case," Dr. Barlow murmurs. Alek doesn't know whether he's just been insulted, or Deryn has, and from the look on her face she can't tell either. She catches his glance and tries to grin at him, one of her "solidarity against the crazy boffin" faces, but he looks away.
"The shipment's been held at a customs warehouse here," Dr. Barlow tells him, tapping an address pencilled onto the envelope. "You can go have a look, put one together, take one apart, whatever you need."
"Of course," Alek agrees, cheering inside. It's been too long since he had his hands on anything mechanikal. Not nearly as good as a walker, of course, or anything with proper engines, but at least it's not going to have any slimy bits. He's already assembling a tool kit in his head.
***
Alek expects Deryn to stay behind, given the strain between them and the nature of his assignment, but she follows him when he heads back to the Lodge to get his tools, and she boards the omnibus behind him and sits down beside him without comment.
They jostle along wordlessly, Alek unsure whether he should try to hold his leg away from hers, like he would a stranger's, or let it relax into hers like he would usually do. He ends up doing something in between, knee knocking into hers intermittently. At one point she moves as though to pat him on the knee and then snatches her hand back, turning away to look forward out the front window. Alek stares forward too; it feels like the ox-thing pulling them is moving particularly slowly. In a walker, it would be so easy to speed up. A nudge to the throttle, a little push on the saunters. He's not sure what the driver here can do - does he have some kind of prod, or whip?
If he does, he doesn't seem inclined to use it. They plod along through the streets until they're as close as they're going to get to the warehouse, and get off to walk the rest of the way. When they finally get there the warehouse manager seems cross, like he's been waiting for awhile. It's a big place, dusty and a bit haphazard, and the manager ushers them over to a stack of crates and vanishes.
Alek picks one at random and pries it open. The first of the paper-wrapped pieces he unwraps looks more or less like something from one of Dr. Barlow's pictures, so he figures he's in the right place and lays out a cloth to start sorting parts.
Deryn makes herself helpful unwrapping things for a bit, but it's more work to explain how he wants the parts organized than to just do it, and he's not surprised when after a little while she excuses herself to wander around the rest of the warehouse.
The game is a nice puzzle to put together, hooking up batteries, twisting wires and marrying gears. The hydraulics-like thing in the middle is actually pneumatic and operates a set of rising and falling bumpers that can be triggered by sinking the ball into a certain hole. It looks a lot more exciting than the old wooden table in their parlor.
Alek is just closing up the backbox, which has an ingenious flipping display that can record up to four separate scores, when he hears Deryn call out "catch!"
He turns and puts his hands up just in time for something to thunk into his palms - it's an orange, fragrant and slightly squishy.
"Crates of these things just going to rot," Deryn says, peeling into hers with relish. "Go on, they're never going to miss 'em."
Alek realizes that he's surprisingly hungry - the warehouse smells like sawdust, and something chemical, but nothing animal, and his appetite is more recovered than it's been since the weather warmed up. "You're sure it's not a fabricated orange?" he asks warily.
"What," Deryn says, mouth full, "Like full of industrial acids or something?" She shrugs. "Tastes okay to me."
Alek cautiously tears the peel and fishes out a wedge. It's delicious, if a little over-ripe, juicy and sweet and tart exactly like an orange should taste.
"All kinds of crazy stuff in here," Deryn says. "Liquor and perfume and magazines." She waggles her eyebrows at Alek, from which he infers that they're the sort of magazines he would blush to be caught reading, and that she's taken a good look. "How's your bagatelle going?"
"Well enough," Alek answers. He'd had all the ramps in back-to-front, but he thinks he's got that straightened out. He fumbles for something else to say - the question is a peace offering, as much as the orange, and he owes a response in kind. But he really doesn't want to talk about magazines just now.
"I just need to level it and wind a couple of springs and it should be ready to play," he says instead.
Deryn hops up on a stack of crates and looks expectant.
Alek turns to his toolkit, feeling a little self-conscious with her watching. He wipes orange-sticky fingers on his handkerchief and makes the last few adjustments.
He runs his hands over the sides of the table, feeling the buttons for each pair of flippers, and the levers that activate little rail-switches and spinning gizmos and all the things he's just put together.
Then he draws back the plunger and shoots the first ball.
It ricochets around madly under the glass and shoots down into the gutter immediately.
Deryn lets out a huff of laughter. Alek tries again, methodically, going easier on the plunger. He slams his hands onto the buttons for the lowest flippers as soon as he releases it, and manages to bat the ball back up once before he loses it again. He tries again, and again - he's bypassed the penny slot, so he has an infinite supply of the little steel balls.
He's starting to feel a rhythm to it, the bat of the flippers, the ding of the ball hitting bells, the bzzt of the rotor that captures the ball and spins it in unexpected directions.
"Do you want to do something for the anniversary?" Deryn says suddenly.
Alek misses a flip and the ball rolls down into the gutter. "What?"
"Ma always lit a candle for my da," she says, "But - candle's just a tiny fire, you know? I wouldn't do it. I used to climb up onto the roof and just sit there all night, if it wasn't raining, watching the stars. So I thought we could do that. If you like. Doesn't look like rain. Been such a dry summer."
Alek keeps his hands and eyes fixed on the game table in front of him. Finally, when Deryn peters to a stop, he says, "You mean the anniversary of when my parents died."
"Right," Deryn says, "I just thought, you'd be thinking about it, with it coming up, and I wanted you to know you weren't alone. We don't have to watch the stars, if there'd be something else better, I don't know what you -"
"Deryn," Alek interrupts. "I just want to be alone."
"Oh," she says. "Oh." There's quiet for a moment, and then he hears footsteps; he looks up to see her vanishing towards the door of the warehouse.
He sighs and hangs his head. He hadn't actually meant right now, he had just meant on the 28th, and he's already not sure why he had said it. He feels bad that he's spent more time thinking about clart recently than about his parents. Missing them is all twisted up with missing Konopiste. He can't imagine that a whole night of Deryn being sympathetic would help.
Mindlessly, he pulls back the plunger and watches the ball carom around. He does it again and again, and his hands automatically find their way to the flippers, and he realizes he's going longer and longer between new balls.
When he looks up again he realizes it must be hours later. His hands are sore from working the flippers, and his eyes feel gritty, and all he's eaten since breakfast is an orange.
Riding back alone on the omnibus, he doesn't want to think about Deryn, so he thinks about the game. His ability to play it has improved enormously, just in one session, but there are switches and bumpers he can't manage to activate - trick shots that might only work by chance in one in a hundred games.
So he can't prove by playing it that there are no spare parts - there are places for all of them, but it could have been designed to have make-work functions for certain components. No, the next step is to take it apart (or, better, open another box, he hates to undo his work) and see if he can in fact turn it into anything more ominous than a game.
***
He manages not to see Deryn that night, or the next morning - it seems pretty clear that in the puzzle of his life, the piece that goes in next is to apologize, but that doesn't seem fair, he's the one with the dead parents, he shouldn't have to make her feel better about it. It's easier just to avoid her, so he does.
Bovril, though, is not so easily dodged. When Alek comes back to his room after breakfast to pick up his toolkit, he finds it open and full of loris.
"Adaptation," it tells him seriously.
Alek scritches its head. "Out of my box, you."
"Survival," it says. "Niche."
"My toolkit is not your niche."
"Punctuation," it tells him, extracting itself slowly. "Propagation. Preservation!" It looks frustrated.
"Don't have quite the right phrase?" Alek is sympathetic; he still has moments where the English words that would express his thoughts elude him. On impulse, he scoops the loris up to his shoulder, inviting it along.
"Symbiosis," it sighs in his ear. Alek isn't sure if it's thanking him for the ride, or continuing its previous recitation. It's quiet on the omnibus, at least, sparing Alek the hassle of answering questions about his "unusual pet".
At the warehouse, he realizes he's forgotten to arrange for the key. But Darwinist locks are uniformly pathetic: it's like they don't realize that people can own screwdrivers. He's inside before anyone on the street even raises an eyebrow.
Six hours later, surrounded by the scavenged parts of two of the game sets, he has successfully made: a fan, a rolling cart, a toy hopping frog (if you squint) and a toy flopping seal (if you squint harder). He has not made a functional cipher machine, or anything else that would justify Dr. Barlow's suspicions.
"Is that so surprising?" he mutters. All of his enthusiasm over being given a mechanikal task has evaporated, leaving resentment.
"Maybe 'Clanker' isn't synonymous with 'dangerous' after all," he argues to the empty warehouse. "Maybe impounding these games is- is one step up from painting 'Huns go home' on their shop!" He's seen it, chalked on doors. He's always turned his head. "But that's me," he tells Bovril bitterly. "The Hun who can't go home."
He realizes, awkwardly, that Bovril isn't there; that he's not sure he's seen the loris in hours.
It could be anywhere, and he doesn't want to run around the warehouse calling for it. On a whim, he picks up one of the bells from the game and rings it with a swift tap of his screwdriver.
The ding echoes through the warehouse, and the loris materializes instantly, like a bellhop at a good hotel.
"Investigated!" it announces happily.
Alek takes a step towards it to pick it up, and then reels back. The loris reeks of rum and perfume.
"Pfaugh," Alek says, waving his hand in front of his face, "What did you get into?"
Bovril, undaunted, climbs up his leg, leaving sticky handprints on his trousers. "Oranges!" it claims.
Alek blinks, eyes watering, as it settles onto his shoulder. Close up, he does think he might detect a faint whiff of oranges, somewhere in the crazy melange of alcohol and floral scents. Caramel... roses... he doesn't want to be smelling any of this, but he can't stop himself taking sniffs of it, like a tongue seeking out a sore tooth. Jasmine? he thinks. Something, nagging at him...
Bovril stretches a little, and just for a moment, Alek smells a clear note of his mother's perfume.
He's instantly back at Konopiste, a thousand evenings in the parlor, his mother reading to him...
"What is that?" he asks the loris. "Where did you find that?" He wants to own that, he wants a whole bottle of that memory.
"Follow!" Bovril commands, hopping off his shoulder. Alek follows the loris as it wends its way through boxes and barrels, all the way back to - a crate of oranges.
"Oranges!" it tells him proudly.
"No," he says, "The - the other thing," but he's already losing hope. Looking around, he can see opened boxes in every corner of the warehouse. He'd have to go through them all, one by one, to find his mother's perfume. The commingled smells of Bovril's explorations are still burning in his nose; he can't face sniffing a hundred bottles. And what if he's going numb from overload? What if he didn't recognize it when he picked it up? What if it was really never his mother's perfume at all, just some chance combination of the same ingredients, pieces of different games falling together just for a moment into a cipher machine?
He leaves. He scowls at everyone on the omnibus who makes a face at Bovril - the loris's insane marinade of fragrances still smells better than the hippoesque pulling them. He makes his way to Dr. Barlow's office to report his verdict on the games.
As he approaches, he can see Deryn through her open door, face lit up, arguing about something.
"... don't see why you want to give British money to Clankers at all," she is saying.
"Mutualism," Dr. Barlow answers. "We can have symbiosis or we can have war. Well, Alek," she adds, "Which is it today?"
Alek comes the rest of the way into her office. "It's a game," he says, omitting the formal phrases, the report of how he approached his investigation. "It's just billard Japonais, that's all."
Dr. Barlow smiles, then frowns. "Mr. Hohenberg," she says, wrinkling her nose, "What is that your loris smells of?"
"Loss," he snarls, and takes Bovril to have a bath.
***
The next day he doesn't go out at all.
***
The day after that is the 27th, and he keeps to his room again. By evening he's thoroughly sick of his walls, his books, the pungency of the Zoo out his window. Tomorrow it will have been a year since his parents died. It has already been a year since the last time he saw them, that anniversary slipped past without memorial. He can't even remember, now, where they had said goodbye, when they had left for Sarajevo. In the parlor? The rose garden? Had his mother kissed him after breakfast, had his father hugged him, or clapped him on the back and told him to be good for his tutors?
He looks around his room wildly and that's it, he can't be here a moment longer, he has to be somewhere else. Doing something else.
He recalls the feeling of the game flippers under his hands, the way time had collapsed into the motion of the little steel ball. The game. That works. Why not.
There's a new lock on the warehouse door when he gets there, but it's just as easy to defeat as the old one. Someone, inside, has clearly made an attempt to clean up Bovril's trail of wreckage. The game he assembled is still standing, though; there's a new high score on the display, which tells enough of the story.
"Not for long," he says, cracking his knuckles. He poises his hands. He releases the plunger.
Then there are buzzers and bells, bumpers and ramps, and only reaction, no thought at all.
Until a familiar "oh!" breaks his concentration.
He looks up, and it's Deryn, of course.
"I wasn't following you!" she says in a rush, holding up her hands like he's got her at gunpoint. "I had no idea you'd be here at all. I'm leaving you alone like you asked. Just, um, badly, I guess. Sorry."
She's backing away nervously, and Alek can't imagine what in the world she's doing here - from the sudden exhaustion of his body, it must be long after midnight.
"Did you sneak in to play billard Japonais?" he asks, because that's the only reason he can think to be here, and that would be rather funny, he supposes.
"No," she says, "I came to, um. Get a thing."
"Get a thing?"
"I'm stealing, okay?" she snaps. "I found out - but I can't afford - just wait here, okay?"
She runs off into the warehouse. Alek, because she asked him to, waits.
She comes back with a little bottle.
"Smell this," she orders, thrusting it at Alek.
He unstoppers it, and smells it.
It's his mother's perfume.
He sits down heavily, right there, leaning back against the leg of the billard japonais table. It's his mother's perfume. She had been wearing it, when she said goodbye, on the front steps of Konopiste.
"Bovril told me you were looking for it," Deryn says, sitting down on the floor next to him. "I - I telegraphed Volger. I figured if anyone knew what it was, he would, and I was going to go buy some, but the stuff might as well be made of gold or something, so, er. He says he's sorry his business kept him and he isn't here with you on the anniversary," she adds.
"He said that in a telegram?" Alek says, surprised.
"Well, no, he said 'absence regretted stop', but I'm interpreting."
Alek cradles the little bottle carefully. It smells like roses, of course, roses and a bunch of other things. Like home.
"How did Bovril manage to tell you?" he asks. "I didn't even think it understood what I - all I've gotten out of it lately has been cryptic Darwinist slogans, 'adaptation, propagation'."
Deryn shrugs. "Just asked right, I guess." She hesitates, thinking. "Possible I might know what it's been trying to tell you, too."
There's a pause. "Well?"
She bites her lip. "I don't think you want to hear it right now. It's nothing bad," she says hurriedly, "Just, I think, it wants you to feel better. But, you don't have to feel better right now. Yet. You can just - feel. It's okay. I think I was thinking it had been longer for you, when really, with everything, it - oh clart, I'm bollocks at this."
She's twisting her hands together in her lap, nervous, so unlike his bold Deryn. He reaches out to take her hands, and then, overcome with tiredness, slumps all the way over to lay his head in her lap.
"My father loved roses," he mumbles, "He was famous for the hunting, but he loved the garden too..."
Deryn mm-hms, and runs her hands through his hair.
***
Autumn in London is better. The unusual heat of the summer gives up and relaxes into fog and rain, and the rain sluices the streets and even seems to wash the smells down from the air. The Zoo is alive in the mornings with hoots and caws and trumpets; Alek likes it, a crazy Darwinist symphony.
He buys gaiters to wear out to protect his shoes and cuffs. He finds a secondhand silk scarf and wears it in all weather so that he can pull it up over his nose and mouth when the flies are bad. One of the Society botanists shows him her latest project, a plant with sticky mouths that can actually eat flies from the air, that she says will be planted all along the streets of London as soon as she makes it a little more cold-hardy.
Sometimes he puts a little dab of his mother's perfume on his collar when he has to go out, or on his scarf. He realizes it's a very feminine scent for a man to wear, but, well - he looks over at Deryn - he can't be too worried about that sort of thing. He likes smelling it, he likes the little ghost of his past coming with him through the gutters and crowds.
A pub near the Zoo gets one of the new billard Japonais games, and Alek plays every Saturday. Three of the four high scores are his.