Frankie Fossoyeur waves this away. “Consider… by how much might the lot of man be improved, in a world where truth was ubiquitous? One per cent? Five? How much positive adjustment is necessary to pass the tipping point and enable the spontaneous formation of a utopia?” Frankie beams. Then her face falls. “Oh. Although too much truth could create problems on a physical level. And one most definitely would not wish to create a determining cascade…” She scribbles frantically.
Dotty Catty throws her bony hands into the air. “Frankie! Commander Banister! You must leave, now!”
“I cannot, I am working—”
“Now! It must be now!”
“We could possibly wait a few hours,” Edie suggests, still looking at Frankie Fossoyeur’s smudged cheek.
“No, you couldn’t. It has started.”
This is true, but Edie catches in Dotty Catty’s voice some hint of more, and she wrenches her eyes away from the bemused Frankie Fossoyeur and looks at her guide.
“What’s started?”
Dotty Catty shrugs, a fine, unapologetic old-lady shrug, and half-turns her back.
“My plan.”
“Your plan.”
“My diversion.”
“What diversion?”
“I have created a diversion, in the finest military tradition, so that you may carry out your mission.”
“What diversion?”
“The gas taps in the kitchens,” Dotty Catty says. “I have arranged that they should catch fire.” She beams. Somewhere to one side, one of the Ruskinites makes a horrified choking noise. Brother Denis the Ruskinite stares at her, aghast.
“But this palace is constructed over a natural-gas reservoir,” he says in horror. “The entire citadel… You’ll blow the whole place like a bomb!”
“Yes,” Dotty Catty says. “It will be very distracting.”
And just like that, Edie Banister is having a really bad day.
Still swearing in terms fit to curdle whisky, Edie Banister hurtles through the burning palace with a wooden crate on wheels.
“My treasure!” the dratted old woman said, after Edie had screamed at her and put Frankie Fossoyeur in a fireman’s lift to short-circuit the escape discussion. “The last of all of them from Mansura, that is no more! In all the world, there is no greater virtue, no more splendid thing. The crate in the west chamber of my apartments—for God’s sake, take it to George in London! There are others here, but they are old, they cannot go with you. This will be their grave, one way or another. But this one… promise me!”
Edie has never been one to turn down a friend—never mind the grey-haired old tub has blown this operation to six kinds of shit with one finely judged insanity (Rig a gas explosion, you potty old trout? You’re out of your bloody head!) and never mind there may be utility in it, too, for good King George. This is a personal matter between Women of Consequence, and hell if whatever is in the crate will come to harm, even get a flake of ash on it.
She gave Dotty Catty a piece of her mind, though, while through the corridors she staggered, carrying that damned squealing scientist on her back and feeling the while a wash of sympathy for the abductors from the seraglio, and why in all the world was she running away with this bony genius without the sense God gave a hedgehog when she could be legging it out the back door with At Your Service and a couple of close friends for an entirely more agreeable adventure?
Girls wishing to serve their country… Aiee, what a mess. Although it was almost worth it to see a dozen monks hike up their habits and run for the hills with only what they could carry and Frankie’s blessed compressor—whatever that may be—on a trolley.
At her room, Edie handed the outraged Frankie to Songbird and told him to get her to the river, get help, get it now, signal Cuparah, get us the Hell out! Let’s have the marines and never mind who knows it!
Then she barged out into the corridor, demanding directions and bloody quick, smelling smoke and thinking about how many kilos of gas at how much pressure per square inch exploding with how much force? Which was about when the first explosion erupted and the whole place shook and seemed to heel over like a ship in a beam sea, and when she got to her feet again the fire was really under way and a lot of bits of palace were looking alarmingly diagonal where they should have been perpendicular.
Dotty Catty embraced her and wrapped a purple sash from her frocks around Edie’s upper arm, which was for some reason terribly significant, and hugged her again and cried “Women of Consequence!” which was very nice except Edie had a strong desire to belt her.
So here she is now making the return trip, hauling the crate along—and bloody Nora, it’s heavy, whatever it is, and something in it rattling around fair to capsize the box. No time to complain, though: get to the boat, and worry about it later. Though how she will explain herself to captain and crew in her present state, as far from covert as is easily imaginable, she has no idea.
Bugger it.
A carpet flops flaming off the wall, tries to snag her. Hah! Missed me… But oops, that was a near one for the fragile crate, oh, yes—the floating ash spreads spectral fingers. Edie wrenches the crate into motion, and this time the thing or things within are cooperating—they rebound off the inside back wall. The crate flexes, damnit, and creaks and wheezes. That’s another concern: pull too hard and it will apparently break open, slew its contents across the steaming floor and then where will we be? Fine reet’n’harsefuckered, as Songbird would have it. Edie lets the crate surge ahead of her on its lanyard, finds herself, ludicrously, admiring her own forearm against the ruddy firelight.
Focus.
Another colossal boom shakes the palace. An arch collapses to one side, great chunks of solid stone crumbling and cracking in the heat, popping as air bubbles rip them open from the inside. Edie growls sulphurously—a spark has scored her shoulder through the jacket—and gets her mind on business. This isn’t nearly the mother lode going up, this is just the appetiser, plus who knows what appalling muck lurks in Fossoyeur’s cavern, or what will happen when it is burned or crushed or otherwise perturbed? Frankie seemed to think—between bounces on Edie’s shoulder—that this was a thing to be viewed from a great distance or not at all… At this rate the place will explode long before she can get clear, and that is absolutely not on the menu for today. No immolation, so she needs inspiration… Oh ho! Induction, Compression, Combustion, Exhaust. Four stages of the internal combustion engine (which Edie learned for the purposes of sabotage) but here’s the key: locomotion. The horseless carriage. And there it is, no motor but lots of momentum and didn’t the boys back home all have one of these? A go-cart, a tray with wheels. Yes, they did, and no girls allowed to play. Hah!
Edie grabs the lanyard and braces her feet against the back of the crate, lets the thing’s weight carry them both, kicks off the ground from time to time to steer and add velocity. Escape by go-cart, not bad at all. She sniffs. There’s a strange smell, peppery and agricultural. The contents of the crate are apparently padded with river mud.
Focus.
Aye, indeed, for there’s a way to go yet, here’s the bad part starting: dead men, burning, in heaps. Cuparah’s marines at work there, or Songbird and the lads. Edie’s stomach lurches at the sweet, appetising smell, then revolts as her mind catches up with the notion, and she nearly brings up. Some friendly (if thank God not well-known to her) others not (well, mercifully neutral now) but all men and not kabob, no matter what the nose believes. She kicks hard to take the go-cart around the edge of the slaughter, don’t slow down, don’t stop, not for anything.