A Study in Darkness: Book Two in The Baskerville Affair - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: The Baskerville Affair

Holloway, Emma Jane

 
9780345537195: A Study in Darkness: Book Two in The Baskerville Affair
Softcover
ISBN 10: 034553719X ISBN 13: 9780345537195
Verlag: Del Rey, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

When a bomb goes off at 221B Baker Street, Evelina Cooper is thrown into her uncle Sherlock’s world of mystery and murder. But just when she thought it was safe to return to the ballroom, old, new, and even dead enemies are clamoring for a place on her dance card.

Before Evelina’s even unpacked her gowns for a country house party, an indiscretion puts her in the power of the ruthless Gold King, who recruits her as his spy. He knows her disreputable past and exiles her to the rank alleyways of Whitechapel with orders to unmask his foe.

As danger mounts, Evelina struggles between hiding her illegal magic and succumbing to the darker aspects of her power. One path keeps her secure; the other keeps her alive. For rebellion is brewing, a sorcerer wants her soul, and no one can protect her in the hunting grounds of Jack the Ripper.

Praise for Emma Jane Holloway’s A Study in Silks
 
“This book has just about everything: magic, machines, mystery, mayhem, and all the danger one expects when people’s loves and fears collide. I can’t wait to return to the world of Evelina Cooper!”—Kevin Hearne, New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles
 
“As Sherlock Holmes’s niece, investigating murder while navigating the complicated shoals of Society—and romance—in an alternate Victorian England, Evelina Cooper is a charming addition to the canon.”—Jacqueline Carey, New York Times bestselling author of the Kushiel’s Legacy series
 
“Holloway takes us for quite a ride, as her plot snakes through an alternate Victorian England full of intrigue, romance, murder, and tiny sandwiches. Full of both thrills and frills.”—Nicole Peeler, author of the Jane True series
 
“A Study in Silks is a charming, adventurous ride with a heroine who is both clever and talented. The brushes with the Sherlock Holmes mythos only add to the fun of this tale, and readers are bound to fall in love with Evelina and the London she inhabits.”—Philippa Ballantine, author of Geist
 
“In A Study in Silks, Emma Jane Holloway has created a wonderful reimagining of the Sherlock Holmes mythos set in a late-Victorian Britain ruled by nefarious industrial titans called steam barons. Holloway’s clever writing, attention to detail, and sublime characters forge a fascinating world that combines brass-plated steampunk technology with magic. By turns a coming-of-age story, a gas-lamp thriller, and a whimsical magical fantasy, A Study in Silks is the premiere novel of an author to watch.”—Susan Griffith, author of the Vampire Empire series
 
“Holloway stuffs her adventure with an abundance of characters and ideas and fills her heroine with talents and graces, all within a fun, brisk narrative.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Splendid . . . The characters are thoroughly charming and the worldbuilding is first-rate.”—RT Book Reviews (four stars)

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ever since childhood, Emma Jane Holloway refused to accept that history was nothing but facts imprisoned behind the closed door of time. Why waste a perfectly good playground coloring within the time lines? Accordingly, her novels are filled with whimsical impossibilities and the occasional eye-blinking impertinence—but always in the service of grand adventure.
 
An award-winning author of both historical and urban-fantasy romance, Holloway has an honors degree in English literature. Writing as Sharon Ashwood, she won the RITA award for paranormal romance for the third book of her Dark Forgotten series. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and is owned by the Demon Lord of Kitty Badness.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

August 1, 1888

Over London

5:30 a.m. Wednesday

What if the skies never cleared and his quarry slipped past, swathed in cloud like a bride beneath her veil?

Or what if the enemy burst forth like a vengeful ghost, spewing a fiery retribution of lead and flame? Indeed, an airship with that much cargo would have guns aplenty on board.

There were a thousand what-ifs the captain of the Red Jack could not avoid, but that was the price Nick paid for this new life on the knife-edge of risk. But as an orphan abandoned to the circus—perhaps a Gypsy by his dark features, or perhaps something even less welcome in the world—his existence had been one gamble after another. Plundering a ship twice the size of his own craft was just one more.

Nick had called his magic earlier and raised a vision of where his quarry—the Leaping Hind—would pass, but something had gone amiss. By now the Hind should have sailed into view, engines groaning beneath the weight of all that wealth. She would be coming in off the coast, flying low and with holds crammed with clockwork, gears, and costly parts from the German states—a queen’s ransom in shining brass.

Nick shut his eyes and listened, giving up on sight. The engines of his ship were silent as it drifted with the wind. The creak of rigging was a comforting chorus, as if the Red Jack muttered to itself as it waited. Condensation dripped from the lines. He could hear the footsteps of his men moving around the ship—Digby at the helm, Beadle giving orders to the bosun and the boy, Striker cursing at some piece of equipment. Through the fresh, clear air, Nick caught the scent of gunpowder and grease.

“Athena,” Nick muttered under his breath. “Do you sense anything?”

There are birds, the air deva replied from her place of honor at the prow. Devas did not have a voice exactly, or language, though that was how Nick perceived it. The ash rooks.

“Anything else?” The rooks were always near, looking for something dead to eat. They were as much pirates as the men.

Captain Niccolo is impatient, Athena chided. For shame. A successful thief bides his time.

The elemental spirit—trapped in a half-melted metal cube—seemed female, although she possessed no physical form of her own. Before the cube had been stripped of all its golden decorations, it had been known to scholars as Athena’s Casket—an ancient Greek navigation device. Nick had started calling the deva Athena, and the name had stuck. She was the soul of the airship, its intelligence and vital force, and she made the Red Jack unique. No other ship, much less pirate ship, had a deva on its crew, and only Nick could speak to her.

Not that those conversations always went smoothly.

“I’m not impatient,” he growled. “I’m concerned.”

You are impatient. Your thoughts buffet me like a gale. There is no need.

“I have buyers waiting for what the Hind carries.”

All that metal men prize so highly. Dull stuff. But then she was a creature of air.

“Metal makes machines. Machines make power.”

And that power—heat, light, pumps to drive clean water into streets and villages—was a necessity of life. The steam barons ran the utility companies as well as the railways, dockyards, and most factories that produced weapons or mechanical parts. They were even branching into the defense industry and the telegraph. And where the barons took an interest, competition was quite literally crushed. No company dared to challenge their monopoly.

To make matters worse, conspicuous consumption of heat and light had become a hallmark of status among the gentry, and that drove up prices and left the poor to shiver in the dark. All this guaranteed an underground market for parts to build unauthorized machines—generators, windmills, batteries charged by wind, and whatever equipment a man needed for his trade. And that’s where the pirates sailed in and made their fortunes.

And what did Nick plan to do with all the profit? He wasn’t sure anymore. Every man had his dream, but he’d had to let his go. Or rather, his had walked away with a toss of her long, dark curls. Perhaps he was saving up to buy forgetfulness, for surely there must be a sorcerer who could carve Evelina Cooper out of his heart.

He felt a twinge of exasperation from the deva, equivalent to a human woman rolling her eyes. You must heed your birds, Niccolo. They have found the ship you seek.

Nick opened his eyes, looking out at the wet expanse that wrapped the Red Jack, soaking men and equipment in a clinging mist. If the other ship was invisible, so were they.

Nick’s ship was a perfect pirate vessel, small and sleek as a hawk. She had a rigid keel for mounting steam-powered thrusters and a long, thin tail that ended in a propeller. The gondola, wide and shallow, had been shaped to hug the long, thin oval of gray silk, the prow rising into a graceful raptor with outstretched wings. The ship was fancifully carved and painted in shades of white and blue. Its only splash of color was the scarlet flags around the rigging that gave the Red Jack its name. Perhaps she was far from the newest in airship design, but she was elegant, and the crew had slaved to make her shine.

“Oy,” came the soft exclamation from a few yards away. Striker, his second in command, leaned against the rail, pointing over the side. He wore a long coat covered in pieces of metal—each scrap of brass and steel representing wealth in a land where such goods were hard to get.

Nick joined him, following the line of his pointing finger. It angled down and to the ship’s starboard, where dark shapes moved among the clouds. The ash rooks hung in the air like scraps of ragged black velvet, their feathers so dark they seemed more an absence than a concrete form.

They turned, drifting down and to the right in a slow arc. “They’re leading us to the Hind,” Nick said in reply to Striker’s questioning glance.

Athena followed the flock, earning a curse from the helmsman when his careful steering was utterly ignored. Nick and Striker watched the roiling cloudscape, the mountains and pillars of cottony mist a strange and eerie wilderness.

Then Nick’s pulse began to speed, and a grin split his face. There, a little way ahead, was a shadow in the mist. The rooks swooped near it in perfect, silent formation until a rifle cracked, the sound muffled by the atmosphere. They scattered in a burst of black wings, darting safely away.

And then the Hind tore through the mist and came into view. Her balloon was sky blue striped with gold, the gondola slung below a heavier craft built for hauling cargo. The prow bore the figurehead of a leaping deer leafed with gold. A rich ship, then, flying the cobalt colors of the steam baron known as the Blue King. That was his treasure she carried.

“Got her,” Nick growled. His muscles tensed, as if his body was already leaping through the sky to take his prize. They watched as the ship passed between cloud banks, as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp.

“That’s an aether ship,” Striker said, his dark face rumpled with concentration. “We can play with things that go boom.”

Nick understood. Like the Jack, their quarry used aether distillate to keep it aloft. It would have to, with a cargo load like that. Aether systems were finicky but didn’t explode as easily as the more inexpensive hydrogen balloons. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be sunk or burned, but they were less likely to take every other ship in the sky along with...

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Verlag
Del Rey
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
034553719X
ISBN 13 
9780345537195
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
544
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Verantwortliche Person
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