“I have come to set the world on fire. How I wish it were already ablaze!”
-Luke 12:49
Gloucester, England
August 1, 1898
Through the curtain of smoke and dust, the Tripod looked like a charcoal sketch come to life. It advanced down the street, unhurried, methodically picking its way over mounds of rubble and avoiding the unstable lips of shell craters. Never did it remove more than one leg at a time from contact with the pavement, a stark contrast to their galloping advance up the Cotswolds a day ago. Finally, the machine halted just before the intersection.
The twelve men hidden on the fourth floor of the Crowne & Stilworth building held their breaths. Any one of them could have reached his hand through an empty window frame and brushed the film of pulverized masonry off the tripod’s armored hood.
“It knows,” whispered one of the men.
He was pressed flat against a stretch of brick wall between two vacant windows, cradling his Lee-Metford rifle, his head angled just enough to see the swaying war machine. He crouched and turned his massive head, as broad and flat and sour as a bulldog’s, back toward his comrades. “It knows.”
Indeed, the tripod--one of the smaller walkers used for scouting, only 30-feet at the shoulder and lacking the full panoply of steel tentacles--seemed almost to be wary, hesitant to step out from the security of the low canyon of buildings that flanked it. The low, droning hum of electric motors filled the silent street as its turreted head angled down, surveying the roadway. Perhaps it had noticed the tripwire or some other indication of the impending ambush. Perhaps it only searched for movement amid the scattered corpses, blackened by a layer of toxic powder.
“Wait,” commanded a second man. His face was shadowed by a dusty hood, but his eyes seemed to flash golden, not like the reflective sheen on a dog’s eyes at night, but as from an internal source. The still, hazy air around his body likewise glowed with an amber haze. The phenomenon was so subtle that one might have easily dismissed it as the mischief of fatigued and inflamed eyes, but the men who accompanied him knew better.
His pale hand moved silently at the buckle of the strap that slanted across his chest, unfastening a peculiar-looking triangular lantern with three overlapping lenses set in its center.
“What is it doing now, Drummond?” the Signalman asked.
Drummond stood up carefully, turned his attention back to the window and waited. Slowly, the tripod lifted its center leg. For a moment, its pendulous foot, like a great inverted tea cup with three cantilevered toes, hovered just above the tripwire. Then it hiked the foot higher and kicked out, avoiding it entirely.
“It’s over the tripwire!” Drummond yelled.
The Signalman turned to an eight-year-old boy huddled over a box in the corner of the room. “Blow the secondaries!”
The lad’s soot-covered hands were frozen on the detonator. He looked across the room at his father, his eyes wet and small with fear.
“Do it, boy!” snapped Drummond.
His small hands flew down on the plunger. The roar of the explosion shook the building. Then a second, louder explosion followed and the men watched the tripod stagger backwards, careening into the brick edifice of the building directly across from the street. The wall crumbled under the collision, and the machine swayed drunkenly before steadying itself on its two remaining legs. The blackened stump of its rightmost stilt dangled ten feet above the ground, gushing syrupy fluid onto the debris-choked avenue. The Martian, unnerved by the first explosion, must have stumbled backward into the tripwire, demolishing the leg. But the battered machine was still standing.
“Open fire!”
The men rushed to the windows, lighting the rags of their ‘Cheltenham Cocktails’--glass bottles filled with naphtha--and hurled them onto the bronze dome of the tripod. A blanket of flames swept across the armored hood and licked the sky, excited by the rush of air as the Martian’s turret swiveled to bring its heat ray to bear on the building.
But at the same moment as the improvised grenades broke on the tripod’s hood, the heavy Nordenfelt secreted in the cupola of the library at the opposite side of the square opened fire. The four-barreled gun was one of dozens of pieces of quick-firing artillery brought up the Severn by Royal Marines and sailors detached from the gunboat squadrons of the Channel Fleet, originally intended to destroy torpedo boats and mines. But here the volley of one-inch shells did admirable work, punching through the segmented plate of the tripod like it was made of cheap tin. The shells struck between the pilot box and the pivot of the damaged leg, one blowing right through the turret ring. There was a cacophony of grinding metal as the turret seized, unable to swivel more than a few degrees in either direction. Ruptured valves around the ragged holes released wispy tendrils of green smoke, the vaporous blood of the stricken war machine.
A high-pitched ululating cry filled the air, shattering the remaining glass and sending men to the ground with their hands pressed over their ears. The machine was crying for aid.
Immediately, a large, grated cylinder attached to the tripod’s waist clanked and hissed. Thick clouds of the Black Smoke rolled out like a wave of molasses, lapping at the sides of the buildings before slowly oozing down.
Some of the toxic cloud splashed up into the open windows and coiled around the men as they readied more incendiary bombs, but as the men fell back, choking and yelling in panic, the Signalman rushed forward, his lantern held above the creeping fog of death. A blue flare lit the room, then a nimbus of cerulean light, almost a solid thing, enveloped the men. Everywhere the lethal fluid ran up against that curtain of light it was repelled and appeared to froth and burn away, reduced to a fall of harmless black dust.
“To the roof, men!” the Signalman cried. “Move from building to building if you must, but for God’s sake, stay above the smoke! To descend means death!”
There was a mad rush for the stairwell. Drummond grabbed his son roughly by the arm and yanked him off his feet, dragging him along. A second later, he stuck his head back in the room and shouted for the Signalman. “Aren’t you coming, Doyle? We could use that magic lamp of yours, caught out in the open up there!”
“I must see that this stool is brought down, first. I’ll join you presently.”
Across the street, the Nordenfelt barked again. Both men ducked as hot metal fragments sizzled through the air. The Signalman looked out into the street through fresh holes blasted through the brick.
“There’ll be more strutters coming!” yelled the elder Drummond. He shook loose flecks of plaster from his tawny beard.
“I know it,” the Signalman said cooly. He cocked his head, said, “Go. See young Hugh and the others to safety. I’ll join you as soon as I can. Trust in God, Drummond!”
His lantern held out before him, the Signalman stepped through the window into the open air, floating on the aetheric current, and observed the melee. He was just in time to see the Tripod lurch into the square, no doubt seeking room to reposition itself now that its turret was immobilized. Below the height of the machine’s knee joints, nothing was visible beneath the creeping mat of poison gas. Well above that suffocating blanket, the crew of the Nordenfelt and snipers in other buildings continued to pour fire on the burning war engine. The mechanical derricks on the front of the strutter were elevated to the maximum, but the hobbled machine could not turn quickly enough to bring its heat ray into firing position. Suddenly, a fourth volley of one-inch shells cleaved through its collar and exploded somewhere inside, sending the whole affair up in a great white flash of flame and smoke. The tripod toppled over, and what was left of its armored hood and control room crumbled accordion-like against the marble coping of the old courthouse.
A cheer went up from the gun crews and the men crowded along the rooftops. Doyle cast his grateful eyes to the heavens and said a silent “Deo gratia.”
Then the sky split with the buzzing shriek of dancing rockets and the cupola of the library disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flame. Doyle could still see the twisting vapor trail of the buzz-bombs hanging in the still summer air when he heard the roar of a hurtling freight train. Eyes wide, his face drawn in deadly fear, he blasted through the broken windows across the street just as the suffocating funnel of the heat ray passed. The roofs of the buildings across the square exploded, their brass rooftop ornaments pouring down the scorched walls like water.
That was a full-powered blast, and Doyle knew that it hadn’t been aimed at the buildings; death had missed him by bare inches.
He pushed himself up from the dirty, debris-covered floor just as a second blast raked the side of the building. A tidal wave of heat hurled Doyle against the far wall and then the collapsing vacuum threw him back towards the center of the room. Flames surrounded him. The lacquered wood floor had become a crackling hellscape, the walls of once-red brick were charred black and flaking into powder. Doyle’s coat and pants had already kindled, and he beat futilely at them with his blistered hands. Each breath seared his lungs with furnace heat and toxic fumes, and he soon found that he could not draw breath at all, for the leaping flames devoured the oxygen as fast as it could enter through the shattered windows.
Doyle knew what survival required, but even on the precipice of the most horrible death he could imagine, he resisted it. He knew that there were fires hotter and more unquenchable than those which threatened to cremate him. But he could not resist for long. Fear and pain multiplied his anger until he embraced the terrible rage that flowed down from the outer world. The red Lens of God’s Wrath blazed forth from his lantern and his golden halo transformed into a tumultuous roiling of crimson light. As the change swept over him, Doyle recalled the passage from the 12th chapter of Hebrews: For our God is a consuming fire.
A gigantic rush of wind blew out the flames along with a portion of the damaged wall, and the Signalman soared out on its wings, darting bolts of scarlet lightning into the street. Doyle could not see his foe through the thick smoke, but his onslaught was guided by a will that dwarfed his own. The crimson flame cried out to be unleashed, to scour clean all that it encompassed, and he was at the very limits of his strength to deny it that pleasure. Lest the bolts should strike the men of his own company, he drew on his last reserves of patience and fortitude to hold back that ocean of wrath.
By turns, the heat of his own rage abated, and with it the fury of the Crimson Lens. The scarlet bolts split and turned to orbs of flame on his finger tips. The red lamp on his lantern dimmed. He landed on the steaming rooftop and caught his breath, forgetting for a moment the peril of the enemy.
Shouted cries from the opposite roof and an enormous screeching clank of metal soon returned that threat to the fore of his mind. The mixed cloud of steam, smoke, and toxic gas was parting, and he spied the moving outline of some vast, irregular bulk. It was less tall than the three-legged Martian ‘fighting-stools’ they’d everywhere encountered, barely reaching to the tops of the two-story buildings, though it was twice as broad. When the machine was still two blocks distant, it cleared the smoke completely. The sight gave Doyle occasion to gawk. Compared to the tall, spindly war machines they were used to, it didn’t look Martian at all; its stance was wide-set, and heavy, sloping armored plates projected like battlements from the front of the machine. Yet Martian it must be, for it walked on giant legs -- six, instead of the usual three -- and it bristled with Martian weaponry. Doyle counted four of the boxy, camera-like apparatuses that he knew to be the heat ray projectors, as well as a triad of projectile-launching tubes slung midway between the two triads of legs. Sprouts of greenish-smoke jetting up from somewhere on the rear of the machine identified the rough proximity, if not the exact location, of its buzz-bomb launchers.
Doyle wasted no time time diving for cover, throwing himself flat on the rooftop and scrambling close to the coping. The red lamp extinguished and the blue lamp flared as the noisy explosives burst above him. Just as it earlier burned away the toxic smoke, the azure aura deflected the thousands of metal darts that would have otherwise reduced him to tenderized carrion. Steeling his nerves with a battle cry, he dove off the roof and, igniting the Golden Lens, soared high into the air. He spiraled on the aetheric current, dodging clouds of flechette and the lancing heat rays. When he gained position directly above the hexapod, he shifted once more to the Crimson Lens and stabbed back with the sturdy bolts of scarlet lighting. The first bolt struck a buzz-bomb just as it left its tube, swallowing the entire launcher in a ball of fire. The secondary explosions pounded on Doyle’s chest, even two hundred feet above.
He continued to fire as he plummeted under the relentless pull of gravity, determined to activate the golden Lens of God’s Providential Hand only at the last moment, after he had poured sufficient fire into the machine to disable it. But to his dismay, these bolts splintered on its armored carapace, making a spray of sparks as their energy spread across the surface of the armor. Again and again he struck, but the stout Martian armor defied his blows.
The gold lamp flared and the Signalman swooped up and rocketed away from the war machine. He banked behind a half-demolished building just ahead of a stream of explosive shot. Once again, the thin edge of death’s scythe glanced him. Pain shot up Doyle’s leg; he could feel the whipping air through the holes in his boot and the hot blood soaking into his socks.
His gambit wasn’t working. None of the Martian strutters had ever been able to deflect the fire of the Crimson Lens before. He wondered if even the Nordenfelt gun had the firepower to pierce the armor of this new war machine. The question was academic: gun and crew had been destroyed by the buzz bombs. His small force had no more artillery, and no time to rig explosives. Exposed on the rooftop, caught between the blanket of black smoke and the weapons of the hexapod, his small troop had no chance of escape.
Doyle soared back towards them. He could shield them, hide them, get them far enough away to escape on foot, unnoticed. There were so many holes to hide in on the ruined streets of Gloucester. He could distract the hexapod, perhaps even lead it away into the Severn, where it might founder, or else trap it amid the ruins. It would follow him. He was the one it was after.
As he cleared the buildings that intervened between him and his men, Doyle gaped in horror. The hexapod had turned its attention to his company, raking the rooftop with its heat rays. Those men closest to the beam simply exploded while those farther back burned like ants under a magnifying glass, some leaping to their death over the edge.
The red lamp ignited. Doyle no longer had any thought of restraining it.
The air itself boiled. Pillars of celestial fire two yards in circumference smashed into the machine. The indomitable armor rent and exploded upward amid jets of flame and green vapor, their fractured edges glowing like magma. The bolts bore right through plate and boilers and machinery, striking smoking craters in the pavement that became visible as the front third of the war machine crashed to ruin, severed from the main body. A firestorm of aetherial flame swept the hexapod’s chassis from neck to tail, making its exotic metal hide scream as if in agony. A final blast struck it in the side. Its three left legs buckled and then the machine toppled over to its final destruction.
Wreathed in a rainbow of translucent flame, fingers of white lightning arcing from point to point across the destroying tempest that surrounded his body, the Signalman descended to the rooftop of the Crowne & Stillworth building to stand before what was left of his men.
“Christ Almighty!” one of them gasped.
Doyle thrust a finger at him and the man screamed, swatting at the tip of his blackened tongue. The Signalman looked down at the whimpering soldier. “For blasphemy.”
The others drew back and crowded together, each wondering whether it was the Martians or the fey railman with the magic lantern that they ought to fear more. Each of them except for Harry Drummond, that is.
“By God, Doyle! That was a right, proper English kicking you gave them Sprogs!” Drummond said, pushing to the front of the crowd. “Now you can boil off that smoke and we can get out of here, the quicker the better.”
Doyle glared at Drummond, saying nothing.
For the first time, a hint of fear crept into Drummond’s voice. He addressed the Signalman in a hushed voice, meant only for the two of them. “You can let it off now. Most of these lads don’t know what to expect from you, and you’re scaring them. Even I wasn’t prepared for all that, and I’ve seen your stuff a’fore.”
“And I see your ‘stuff’ for the first time, Harold Francis Drummond!” Doyle’s voice sounded like thunder caught in a bottle. It retained his characteristic cadence and the slight Irish accent, but was far deeper and more resonant than he -- or any other man, for that matter -- should have been capable of. “And yours, Blake! And yours too, Henshaw, Rogers! I see you all very clearly, indeed.”
The Signalman turned his fierce, penetrating gaze on each man in turn, and each man shrank back. It was like an icy cold fingertip had touched their hearts.
“Your sins run out behind you. I can see it, the spoor of iniquity. There is stain on your souls. The stench of your rot wafts to Heaven, crying out for vengeance!” The Signalman raised his lantern. The handle shook noisily as it dangled from his clenched fist, waves of ethereal fire boiling from the red portal. Doyle’s voice trembled as the flames writhed up his limbs. “And my own sins cry out, louder than most.”
He was in an ecstatic agony, the just recompense for his sinfulness. The fire seared his soul, burning off the scabs of corruption until old wounds flowed new and fresh. The sacred pain was unendurable, and yet also exquisite. His spirit wanted to recoil from the fearsome presence, but the compulsion to embrace it, to dive headlong into its annihilating power was stronger, for this was not a fire of malice, but the hotter flame of perfect justice and love all-consuming.
Doyle fell to his knees, his boiling tears cutting deep red channels down his cheek. In an anguished, quavering voice he cried out. “Lord, take this burden from me!”
Drummond impulsively reached to lift Doyle, but the flame leapt at him. Harry Drummond was a man of hard physicality and even harder mentality; without so much as a twitching lip he had endured hardships which would have broken most men, but now he wailed in dismay. The Signalman’s gloved hand lashed out and tightened around his neck, lifting all 15 stone of him off his feet.
“Your hands drip with blood, Drummond. You don’t even try to wash it out anymore. You’re a thief, an adulterer, an oath-breaker, and a brigand. You’ve murdered men for money, and then murdered again to hide your crimes. You’ve done it so often you thought you were going to get away with it. Fool! Only now you see how wrong you were!
The otherworldly voice had returned to the Signalman as he lifted Drummond, and now it boomed: “For we know Him that hath said: Vengeance belongeth to me, and I will repay. The Lord shall judge His people.”
Drummond’s eyeballs rolled back in his head, his breath whistling through his constricted throat. Doyle effortlessly pulled him against his chest and whispered into his ear. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, Drummond.”
“No!” The thin, shrill cry stunned the Signalman. He looked down at the small boy hurtling across the roof toward him, and for a moment the fire cleared from his eyes.
“Stop it! Release my dad, you devil!” Hugh Drummond screamed as his shoulder slammed into Doyle’s thigh. The Signalman staggered back as the lad slashed his stomach, the thin point of a bayonet ripping through his vest and carving a bright red line from his waist up to his ninth rib.
While the other men of the patrol, grizzled warriors all, had stood frozen in fear of their lives, young Hugh Drummond had flung himself into the maw of death to save his father.
The red lamp winked out and the elder Drummond dropped to his hands and knees, gasping for breath. Doyle retreated to the edge of the roof. It seemed as if he’d shrunk by half a foot. His whole body quaked violently.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped, his voice barely audible. He tried to wet his scorched lips with a dry tongue. “Forgive me, Drummond. I beg you all, please forgive me. And pray for your own forgiveness.”
Doyle buried his face in his hands and wept.
But the Signalman would receive no solace that day, either from men or heaven. While one turned away in fear, the other, as it so often did, stood silent. Below him, the smoke-veiled waterfront was still, too. But the streets of Gloucester sprawled for miles, and elsewhere men went on killing and dying.