The Great Game by Lavie Tidhar Page B

and an amassing of clouds that hid both sun and stars. Islands, he had learned, generated their own miniature weather systems. There was so much to learn.
    Â Â  People went past him. Mostly they did not notice him. He wore a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat that, one of the voices told him, was rather fashionable. Fashion fascinated the observer. Most everything did. He stood in the shadows and watched the building. A small man came out of it and the observer watched him with interest, noticing the way the man scanned his environment as he went, always aware of his surroundings.
    Â Â  But he had not noticed the observer.
    Â Â  A small boy was one of the few who did notice him. The small boy went past him and then, for just a moment, seemed to stumble against him, murmured an apology and tried to dart away. The observer, however, reached out and grabbed him by the hand and the boy found himself pulled back. "Hey, let go, Jack!" the boy said, or began to, when he saw the observer's eyes on his. He stopped speaking and stared, as if hypnotised.
    Â Â  "Give me back my things."
    Â Â  Still not speaking, the boy owned up to the items he had extracted from the observer's pocket. These may have surprised the casual watcher, had there been one. They included a dazzling green seashell, of a sort not to be found on the British Isles; a penny coin rubbed black and featureless with age, with the barely distinguished portrait of the old Lizard King William; a smooth round pebble; and a piece of cinnamon bark.
    Â Â  The observer took them and put them carefully back in his pocket. He let the boy go but the boy just stood there, until the observer made a sudden shooing motion and then, as if awakening, the boy's eyes widened and he turned and ran away, disappearing into the crowds of Covent Garden.
    Â Â  The observer watched the building and the people coming and going. He saw a dice game in progress and a man, which a voice told him was called a mobsman , who picked the pocket of a gentleman walking past without the man ever noticing. His nose could pick up smells that only now he was beginning to identify. Manure, of course, but also mulled cider, sold from large metal tubs to passers-by, and tobacco smoke, some of it aromatic and some of it reminding him of the sailors on the ship on the crossing over the Channel, and spilled beer, and roasting, caramelised peanuts, and human sweat and human fear and human hormones hanging heavy in the air: it was a heady mixture.
    Â Â  He stood in the shadows and few people noticed him and those who did moved aside, as though instinctively knowing not to come near. He paid them no heed. He watched until he saw a shadow come slowly out of the building and recognised him as the one he wanted but still he waited, waited for him to walk down the narrow passageway that ran alongside and only then, unhurriedly, he stepped out of the shadows and began to follow.
    Â 
    It when he was going towards Drury Lane that Smith began to have the feeling he had forgotten something. He stopped in his tracks. It was early evening and the theatre-goers and the cut-purses were out in force.
    Â Â He knew Byron did not work alone. Above him, above all the automatons, was the one they called the Turk. Once a chess-playing machine, he had quietly gained political power amongst the disenfranchised simulacra of the new age, seldom seen, always in the background. The Mechanical Mycroft, as some in the Bureau called him, snidely. If they knew he existed at all.
    Â Â What could link Mycroft and the Turk with Alice in Bangkok?
    Â Â But a more pressing question arose in his mind.
    Â Â The Byron automaton must have known what Mycroft had known.
    Â Â He turned around and began to run.
    Â 
    He could hear the distant cries even as he again approached the Bucket of Blood . As he ran he almost bumped into a small, undistinguished man who passed him going in the opposite direction;