In order to test my ability to post, this is a short scene which got cut out of book three and is unlikely to be put back in.
“Irene!” The shout caught her attention, and she looked up to see a cab slowing as it drew level with her. Zayanna was leaning out of the window, waving at her. Seated on the roof, the driver maintained an attitude of professional but somewhat pained disinterest. “Irene, darling! Can I give you a lift anywhere?”
Irene hesitated for a moment, as paranoia pointed out that she still couldn’t be sure of Zayanna’s sincerity, and that the whole thing might be a carefully timed trap to ensnare her while she was distracted. But it would save her time in reaching the British Library.
Zayanna swung the door open, and Irene stepped up into the cab, ignoring the shouts of the cab-drivers and cyclists behind them. The door slammed shut, and the cab jolted back into motion, picking up speed as the driver caught up with the flow of traffic.
Irene knocked on the ceiling. “To the British Library!” she called to the driver, before turning back to Zayanna. “Were you following me?” she asked bluntly.
Zayanna waved a gloved hand. She was in cream today, defying London’s smog and dirt: thick fur trimming fringed the collar and cuffs of her raw silk coat, and a fall of lace showed at her neck. Her hair was pinned up under a heavy fur hat, with a few dark curls falling loose to frame her face. “All these questions, darling. You haven’t even said what you were doing -“
“My job. And I need an answer,” Irene interrupted. “Or I get out of this cab here and now.”
Zayanna pouted. “Oh, very well. I was waiting in the cab along from your friend Vale’s lodgings -“
She knows where Vale lives, Irene registered.
“- but I didn’t try picking you up at once, because I wanted to find out if you were going somewhere, and I thought it might worry your friends. I don’t think your dragon likes me very much.”
Irene wasn’t sure whether to rate that last sentence as understatement, or as failure to appreciate just how much Kai disliked Fae. “I’m sorry that we didn’t come looking for you last night,” she prevaricated, deciding that an apology on that front, however insincere, would make the conversation easier. “Things came up and, well, there was an emergency.”
Zayanna pressed her hands to her bosom. “Did someone try to murder you?” she asked breathlessly.
“Yes,” Irene said. “Though I wish you wouldn’t sound quite so enthusiastic about it.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” Zayanna said. “But really! How exciting! I mean, obviously you survived, or you wouldn’t be here with me now, but even so, it must have been utterly intense! Were you trapped in a cellar with the water flooding in?”
“No,” Irene said dryly. “Perhaps I could lend you a good book where that happens.”
“Books just aren’t the same. So what was it?” She leaned forward expectantly.
“Poisonous spiders. We handled it.” Irene frowned. The generic traffic noise from outside had some unusual notes in it, such as crashes and screams. “Just a moment, is there something out there?”
“Excuse me, madam,” the driver shouted down from on the roof. “There’s a thing out there and it’s chasing someone on this street. Just to warn you that traffic’s going to be getting a bit rough and you may wish to hang onto the safety straps.”
There was a ping. Several leather straps fell loose to dangle from the ceiling as the cab speeded up.
“Hang on,” Irene directed Zayanna. She wound her hand into one of the straps before sliding the cab window open to look back down the street in the direction they’d been coming from.
The thing picking its way down the wide Marylebone Road in their direction looked vaguely like a giant mechanical water strider, though the gun-turrets on the nose were an addition to the classical form. It strode through the traffic on half a dozen telescoping mechanical legs ten yards long, with its main body section on a level with the second floors of the surrounding buildings. Huge glass windows gleamed like faceted eyes in its carapace. Each foot came down with a ringing clang that inspired new screaming and running from people on the pavements. Traffic was giving it a wide berth, but wasn’t stopping: it took more than that to slow down a London driver.
On the one hand, it was possible that it was chasing someone else and that its appearance in Irene’s vicinity was pure coincidence. On the other hand, Irene was not feeling optimistic.
Zayanna leaned out of the window on the other side of the cab, holding her hat on with one hand against the wind, then hastily ducked back in again, the colour draining from her face. “Faster!” she called up at the driver. “Don’t let them catch us!”
“They’re after you?” Irene asked in surprise.
“I saw them earlier, darling. I thought I’d avoided them, but they must have picked up my trail. Are they gaining?”
Irene looked out of the window again. “Yes,” she reported. The automaton’s strides were carrying it along at an unhelpfully fast pace, and since the traffic was sensibly getting out of its way, there was nothing to slow it down. Unfortunately the traffic was not getting out of the way of the cab that Irene and Zayanna were in, so they had no convenient escape route. “What did you do?”
“I? Nothing, darling! I told you, my patron cast me out! I’m sure that he’s sent his agents after me! Why else would anyone want to kill me?”
“You don’t think it’s exciting?” Irene said. She couldn’t entirely keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
“Well, not if it’s going to just shoot me down from a distance.” Zayanna sighed. “That’d be so uninteresting, and I’d be dead.” She chewed her lip nervously, eyes flickering to the window and back again. Clearly she wasn’t as calm as she was trying to seem.
Irene reminded herself that immediate survival was more important than arguing with Zayanna. “Right,” she said. She raised her voice. “Driver! Any chance of getting off the main street into a side street that that thing won’t be able to get into?”
“We could try, madam, but it’d slow us right down,” the driver called back. “The traffic, you’ll pardon my French, is bloody awful this morning, and there wasn’t no warning about mechanical attacks either, so it’s going to take a while for the police to catch up.”
