“Built for speed!” Wells announced.
“I assume we're to escape the city on these things?”
“Yes. We have to set off now while fortune favours us.”
“In what manner is it doing that?”
Wells grinned. “The lurchers are attacking the Germans! Hell's Run is clear!”
“The lurchers? Why?”
“No one knows!”
Burton turned to his escort: “You men heard that?”
They nodded.
“So get going! Get out of the city. Africa's a big continent. Find a quiet valley, build a village, live off the land, stay out of trouble.”
“And learn to speak German,” one of the men said.
“Yes, that might be advisable.”
They saluted and hastily departed.
Burton joined his friend by the giant arachnids. There were bulging pannier bags hanging against their sides. Wells reached up and patted one. “Food and supplies to keep us going for at least a couple of weeks.” He touched a long leather sheath. “And Lee-Enfield sniper rifles. I'll start the engines. You go and open up.” He indicated large double doors. Burton strode over and, with some difficulty, slid them apart. It was lighter outside: dawn was breaking. Mist rolled in around him as he returned to the now chugging harvestmen. Wells was already mounted on one. Burton reached up to the other's stirrup and hauled himself into its saddle. He took hold of the two control levers.
“Follow me!” Wells called.
The two spiders clanked out of the warehouse and onto a wide thoroughfare. For half a mile, the machines scuttled along the road, weaving in and out between other vehicles, with crowds surging along to either side of them. Then they passed the last outlying building and Wells led the way off the road and onto the dusty savannah, leaving the fleeing Taborans behind. He stopped his vehicle and Burton drew his own to a halt beside him. The mist was thinning and, through it, the huge orange globe of the sun was visible ahead of them.
“We'll go eastward across country,” Wells said. “If we stay a little north of the exodus, we'll be closer to the German forces but free of the crowds.”
“What's your destination, Bertie?”
“My only objective is to get past the end of Hell's Run. After that, I don't know. Where do we have to go to get you home to 1863?”
“To the Mountains of the Moon.”
Wells shook his head. “We'll not get through the Blood Jungle. It's impassable.”
“Nevertheless.”
The war correspondent lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “Whatever you say. Onward!”
“Wait!” Burton snapped. He pointed to Wells's left, at the ground.
His friend looked down. “What the hell?” he uttered in astonishment.
A line of poppies was sprouting out of the hard earth.
Wells looked at Burton, a baffled expression on his face.
“It keeps happening,” the king's agent said. “They bloom right in front of me, in an instant.”
“It's impossible, Richard. How can they grow so fast? Have the Eugenicists made them?”
“How is one thing, Bertie, but I'm more interested in why!”
They watched as the flowers opened, a long line of them, snaking unevenly into the haze.
“North,” Burton muttered. “Bertie, I want to follow them.”
“It will take us straight into the German trenches. If the Hun doesn't do for us, the lurchers will.”
“Maybe.”
Wells reached down and unclipped the sheath containing his rifle. He took his pistol from its holster, checked that it was fully loaded, then slipped it back into place. He looked at Burton, smiled, and, in his high-pitched squeaky voice, said, “Well then: in for a penny, in for a pound!”
The two harvestmen scurried northward, following the line of red flowers, and disappeared into the mist.
“What the devil are you playing at?” William Trounce roared. “You nearly gave me a bloody heart attack!”
Herbert Spencer lowered the pistol, which, when he'd pulled the trigger, had done nothing.
“Herbert! Explain yourself!” Burton demanded.
“I'm sorry, William,” Spencer said. “I didn't mean to scare you.”
“How in blue blazes can shooting at a man's head not scare him, you tin-headed dolt?”
“But I didn't shoot, an' that's the point.”
“Not for want of trying! I clearly saw you squeeze the trigger!”
“So did I,” Swinburne added. He'd drawn his own weapon and was pointing it uncertainly at the philosopher.
“Yus, an'—as I expected—nothin' bloomin' well happened, did it!”
Burton paced forward and snatched the gun out of Spencer's hand. “As you expected? What are you talking about?”
“When we stepped onto this rock, Boss, I felt every spring in me body go slack. We've entered the Eye of Nāga's area of influence. None o' the guns will work now. Nor will any other mechanical device. Henry Morton Stanley couldn't fly his rotorchairs any farther than this. You'll remember they was found by Arabs, an' they weren't functionin' at all.”
Swinburne directed his gun at the sky and squeezed the trigger. It felt loose under his finger. The weapon didn't fire.
Trounce scowled. “Firstly, Spencer, there was no need for a bloody demonstration, especially one that involved me! You've been fitted with voice apparatus—ruddy well use it! Secondly, why are you still standing?”
Burton answered before Spencer could. “We encountered this same emanation when we went after the South American Eye. The fact that Herbert's mind is embedded in the Cambodian stones gives him the ability to neutralise it.”
“I say, Herbert!” Swinburne exclaimed. “If you radiate an opposing force, could you cast it wide enough to make our guns work? It would give us one up on the Prussians!”
“Perhaps a gun I was holdin' meself,” Spencer replied.
“By thunder!” Trounce yelled furiously. “You see! What if your magic rays, or whatever they are, had worked on the pistol in your hand? You'd have blown my bloody head off!”
“All right, all right,” Burton growled impatiently. “Let's leave it be. But if you ever pull a stunt like that again, Herbert, I'll throw your key into the middle of the Ukerewe Lake.”
“I'm sorry, Boss.”
Leading the horses, they moved to the edge of the rock, which the jungle overhung, and settled in the shade. The trees around them were crowded with blue monkeys that had fallen silent when the men appeared but which now took up their distinctive and piercing cries again—Pee-oww! Pee-oww!—and began to pelt the group with fruit and sticks. Sidi Bombay shouted and waved his arms but the tormentors took no notice.
“Confound the little monsters!” Trounce grumbled. “We'll not get any peace here!”
Swinburne removed the dressings from the detective's legs and applied fresh poultices. He checked the wound on his friend's arm. It was red and puckered but the infection had disappeared.
They abandoned the clearing and plunged back into the jungle, the men trailing behind Spencer as he swiped his machete back and forth, clearing the route. Pox and Malady had elected to sit on one of the horse's saddles rather than in their habitual position on the clockwork philosopher's head, causing Swinburne to wonder whether Spencer had fallen out of favour with the two parakeets as well.
The poet struggled with his thoughts. Hadn't he noticed something about the brass man's philosophical treatise back in Ugogi? Something unusual? What was it? Why couldn't he remember? Why was a part of him feeling ambivalent about Spencer? It didn't make sense—Herbert was a fine fellow!
Moving to Burton's side, he opened his mouth to ask if the explorer shared his misgivings. Instead, he found himself saying, “It's awfully humid, just like in the coast regions.”