Chapter 1
Chapter One
There was blood everywhere.
Maxham stood in the middle of the room, the two bodies on either side of him. Blood had splattered on the walls and even the ceiling, but the majority of it pooled on the mold-dampened floor.
It was beautiful.
Maxham didn’t mind getting blood on himself, but in this instance, there were only a few drops on his coat sleeves. He stepped gingerly—even with his superior strength, he could still slip in the blood and sprain his ankle.
When he first arrived, he had searched for more than the two guards, but he had quickly realized that the Ramparts had not assigned any others. They had likely trusted in the secrecy of the location of Jack’s prison, which was near the Thames.
The place had not been very secure, and Maxham had broken in quite easily.
The prison consisted of the remnants of a basement on top of which a previous building had been built, and when that burned down decades ago, a warehouse was erected over the remains.
Only a few hints of sound from the basement could filter up through the stone, which would be lost amongst the cacophony of sound in the warehouse during the day.
At night, no one lived or worked nearby to hear the occasional faint screaming from a prisoner.
All that was left of the ancient basement was a single room for the guards and another stone room for the prisoner, and the small space made the stench seem to hang thickly in the air.
Maxham plucked up the lantern on the small table and made his way to the door, obviously newer than the walls, which had a small window with bars set into it.
He peered inside but saw only a figure huddled on the floor.
Maxham knocked on the wood, like a servant on the door of his master’s bedchamber. “Jack? Are you still alive in there?”
“No,” a voice moaned from the floor.
Maxham had been curious why Jack had not broken free any time in the weeks before this, but as he raised the lantern to peer into the cell, he realized that nearly his entire body had been encircled with heavy iron chains. He tugged at the handle of the door and found that it was securely locked.
As he searched the pockets of the guards for the key, he expected to hear Jack cursing at him, but strangely, he was silent.
He opened the door, then knelt to unlock Jack’s chains, working quickly because the reek of the small cell was suffocating.
He had thought at first that the guards had simply neglected to empty the chamber pot, but now he saw that Jack had not bothered to use it for some time.
Perhaps he thought his disgusting condition would force the guards to remove him and dunk him in the river, offering him an opportunity to escape?
However, as the last links of the chain dropped away from Jack’s body, Maxham saw that Jack did not look to be in any condition to think of such a plan. He lay limp on the stone floor, his eyes wide open, his mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for every breath.
He had occasionally seen Jack enter into this unresponsive state. He usually awoke as soon as Maxham spoke to him, but this time, he remained the same after his name was spoken several times.
Maxham crouched on the dirty floor, uncertain what to do. Jack would be no use to him like this. He was tempted to simply leave him lying here—Jack would either wake up and make his own way out of the cell, or he would not, and he would eventually be recaptured.
But the inconvenience of finding another botanist caused Maxham to exert a little more effort. He slapped Jack’s face, lightly at first, then with increasingly harder blows. “Jack!” he shouted.
Something flickered in the glassy eyes, and his mouth closed with a snap. He focused upon Maxham’s face. “What are you doing here?”
Maxham sighed and stood. “Releasing you from prison.”
Jack placed his hands in the muck to lift himself to his feet, and he grimaced. He groaned as he stood with stiff limbs. “How long have I been here?”
“Almost four weeks.” To be exact, twenty-five days.
Norton had told Maxham the location as soon as he found it in Sir Derrick’s office and killed the leader of the Ramparts, but Maxham had needed to deal with a rebellion amongst some of Jack’s men, which required a few days.
And so, he had been unable to spare the time to find Jack’s prison and make plans to free him.
He had been almost disappointed to discover the prison was so lightly guarded.
“Four weeks?!” Jack bared his teeth at Maxham and moved forward clumsily as if he would attack him, but the pain in his muscles and joints prevented him from taking more than a single step. “Why did you wait so long?”
“We expected you to free yourself when you had had enough of playing with them.”
Jack took another painful step toward Maxham. “You abandoned me! In the burned warehouse!”
Maxham remained calm in the face of Jack’s anger. “I did not abandon you. You know that it was necessary for me to escape with the notebooks, and I did not think I could fight them all.”
“You made three Berserkers to help you!”
“They were newly awakened, and so I was not certain how helpful they would be. Besides, I knew that we could easily free you from prison later.”
Jack’s anger was suddenly gone, snuffed out like a candle, and he instead stood there like a lost little boy. “You chose the notebooks over me?” he asked in a plaintive voice.
“You know that we would have a harder time trying to recover the notebooks if the Ramparts managed to capture me, as well.”
The truth was that Maxham had originally left Jack behind because he didn’t believe he needed him anymore.
After all, the botanist he had hired in the Colonies was successfully growing the Goldensuit.
Maxham had also hired a gardener to take care of Jack’s hybrid plants that were used to make the Root, so the Citadel could still fulfill the contract with Napoleon once they received their first payment.
But the gardener had grown careless and breathed in some of the pollen. Not only had he grown violent, but he went on a rampage and destroyed nearly two-thirds of the plants in the greenhouse.
So now, Maxham needed Jack once again to grow more of the hybrid plants.
Rescuing him had been easier than he expected, and it also saved Maxham the effort of finding someone else to create the Root.
He had considered kidnapping the young woman from Drydale’s team—although Norton hadn’t said so, Maxham suspected the woman knew how to make the Root, and her efforts would likely have been even better than Jack’s potion.
But in the end, he decided that it was easier to deal with Jack than a young society miss.
“Can you move?” Maxham asked. “I’d prefer to leave the prison as soon as possible. The smell is appalling.”
Jack stretched his muscles by twisting his limbs in strange, unusual poses, then he headed out the door. Maxham waited as Jack searched the dead men, stealing a dagger and a set of boots that were too large for him, since he was barefoot.
“You got blood on them,” Jack complained, waving the boots in Maxham’s direction.
Maxham ignored him and led the way up the narrow flight of stone steps.
At the top, they opened a heavy wooden trapdoor that led to the newer-built basement above the prison. When they entered the low-ceilinged storeroom, Jack demanded, “And how are my plants faring?”
Maxham coughed. “I’m afraid you’ll have to grow more of your hybrid plants.”
He expected Jack to explode in anger, but Jack reacted contrary to his expectations, which was what he should have expected instead.
Jack’s eyes narrowed as they regarded Maxham. “What happened to my plants?”
“I watered the plants in your small greenhouse here in London, but I was forced to hire a gardener to care for the hybrid plants in your greenhouse in the country. I warned him, but he breathed in some of the pollen.” Maxham need say nothing more.
Jack groaned, then he began weeping so violently that Maxham would have thought he was an actor in a play except that real tears rolled down his grimy cheeks. “My poor plants,” he moaned, “victims of a berserksgangr.”
Now it was Maxham’s eyes that narrowed. “Were you aware that people could go mad after breathing the pollen just once?”
“No,” Jack said miserably before he continued crying.
But there had been that slight hitch in his breath before he answered that made Maxham fairly certain that he was lying. It was difficult to tell with Jack, because no matter what he said, his heart rate never changed.
Maxham didn’t understand how that could be. He had long wondered if it meant that Jack completely believed everything he said, even if he wasn’t telling the truth.
“If you are quite finished mourning your lost plants, may we continue?” Maxham indicated the second set of stone steps that led up to the warehouse above.
Jack tried to skip up the stairs, but he groaned and stumbled when his stiff muscles refused to oblige him. He began plodding up, stomping in his oversized boots. Giving Maxham a sly look over his shoulder, he asked, “Speaking of the notebooks, how did you like them? Did you enjoy reading them?”
Maxham flatly regarded Jack, who giggled and turned around, continuing up the stairs.
When Maxham had taken the notebooks with him, he’d had plans for the gardener to follow Bianca’s instructions for growing her hybrid plant, Snow. But he was soon dismayed to find that his plans were for naught. “Did you know that they were in cipher?”
“Cipher? They weren’t just lines and lines of numbers? I thought maybe Bianca loved numbers even more than Ward.”
“You know she didn’t.” Maxham hadn’t realized that Jack may have seen the notebooks before the exchange. “Did they show the notebooks to you?”
“A few pages.” Jack sniffed petulantly, and Maxham guessed he’d gone wild with dismay upon seeing them. Jack quickly asked, “Could you read anything in them?”