The Kraken King Part II: The Kraken King and the Abominable Worm (A Novel of the Iron Seas)

by Meljean Brook

  She cast him a disbelieving glance. “You don’t understand the meaning of ‘small,’ sir.”

  “Perhaps not. But I know it means that my worm isn’t as small as you imagined.”

  A tortured noise wheezed from her, like a strangled laugh. She stared at him with wide eyes and her lips pressed firmly together.

  He would consider this a battle won. Laughing, Ariq retreated. “Gather your things from the tent, and tell your friends to do the same. We’ll bundle Cooper up and leave for the mining town immediately. The others can break camp and catch up to us.”

  And he would have time for more battles with her. Cooper was a good man. Ariq wouldn’t wish him any pain. But Ariq would take his advantages where he could, and a visit to the blacksmith’s meant at least an extra day’s delay. He would have more time to discover what Mara had overheard and why Zenobia had pushed him away.

  She nodded and disappeared into the tent again. Ariq started across the clearing toward the walker before noting the quick—almost guilty—looks that both his people and the French aviators kept sending toward the stream.

  He scanned the trees lining the bank. Sunlight glinted against gold near Zenobia’s abandoned stool. Her pack. She’d dropped it when he’d lifted her into the tree. It hadn’t been fastened and now the spilled coins served a temptation. He doubted anyone had taken any, but it would be wise to put the gold away so they would stop thinking about it.

  Dregs. Not just a few coins spilled. She carried a fortune.

  Shaking his head, he crouched and scooped the gold into the pack. Not only the coins had fallen out. Folded letters and loose papers littered the dirt beside the stool. All in English. After a glance at the stacked pages, he tossed them in.

  The name on the back of a letter caught his eye. Zenobia Fox. An address in Denmark had been written below.

  So he hadn’t been mistaken about her name. She wasn’t Geraldine. He unfolded the letter. More English. But the name at the top was the same: Zenobia.

  At the bottom: Archimedes.

  Archimedes. Archimedes . . . Fox? Ariq had heard that name before. He couldn’t remember when. Trying to recall, he scanned the contents and his gaze slipped over another familiar name. Tension gripped his body in a cold fist.

  Temür Agha.

  His uncle’s name was written again and again, along with mention of his city, Rabat, and his personal guard, Nasrin.

  Unease coiled through his stomach. Few people know that Temür Agha was a rebel. Even fewer knew the name of his uncle’s guard. Nasrin was a shadow made of steel, an army in the form of a single woman.

  How did this person know so much about his uncle? And why would he send a letter about him to Zenobia?

  Ariq tried to read the rest, but the few words similar to those he knew in French offered little additional meaning. A glance into the satchel confirmed that the others had been written by the same hand. The pages were hers; the letters were all from the same man.

  Feeling as if he’d taken a cannonball to his chest, Ariq returned the letter to the pack. He hadn’t expected this. She had secrets. She’d known more about his uncle than she should have. But this. These letters. Did she know the danger she was in? Many people would kill for proof that the Great Khagan’s celebrated general had been a rebel. Many others would kill to keep that information secret.

  What purpose did the letters serve? Who would receive this information? Why was she carrying it?

  He didn’t know. But one thing was certain—whatever her purpose, she must have thought Ariq would stop her if he’d known about it.

  The Kraken King suspects me.

  He hadn’t. But he did now.

  Look for Part III

  THE KRAKEN KING AND THE FOX’S DEN

  Available from InterMix April 29, 2014

  Keep reading for a preview of Meljean Brook’s novel of the Iron Seas

  THE IRON DUKE

  Available now from Berkley

  By the time she and Newberry reached the Isle of Dogs, the nip of the evening air had become a bite. Not a true island, the isle was surrounded on three sides by a bend in the river. The Horde had drained the marshland and built part of it into their commercial and trading center—all looted and burned during the revolution. Afterward, the Crown had granted Trahaearn tracts of land on the island along with his title, and he’d rebuilt the docks that now serviced his trading company’s ships and the merchants who paid for the space. At the center of the island, near the Marshwall dock, he’d razed the remains of the Horde’s holdings and built his fortress on the ashes.

  The high, wrought-iron fence that surrounded his park had earned him the nickname the Iron Duke—the iron kept the rest of London out, and whatever riches he hid inside, in. The spikes topping the fence prevented anyone in the surrounding slums from scaling it, and no one was invited to his house. At least, no one in Mina’s circle, or her mother’s. She was never certain if their circle was too high, or too low.

  Newberry stopped in front of the gate. When a face appeared at the small gatehouse window, he shouted, “Detective Inspector Wentworth, on police business! Open her up!” The gatekeeper appeared, a grizzled man with a long gray beard and a heavy clanking step that marked a prosthetic leg. A former pirate, Mina guessed. Though the Crown insisted that Trahaearn and his men had all been privateers, acting with the permission of the king, only a few children who didn’t know any better believed it. The rest of them knew the story was designed to bolster faith in the king and his ministers after the revolution. Bestowing a title on Trahaearn had been one of King Edward’s last cogent acts. The crew had been given naval commissions, and Marco’s Terror pressed into the service of the Royal Navy . . . where the ship had supposedly been all along. The Iron Duke had traded the Terror and the seas for a title and a fortress in the middle of a slum. Mina wondered if he felt that exchange had been worth it.

  The gatekeeper glanced at her. “And the jade?”

  At Mina’s side, Newberry bristled. “She is Lady Wilhelmina Wentworth, the detective inspector.”

  Oh, Newberry. In Manhattan City, a title still meant something. In England, it only meant that Mina’s family hadn’t been subjected to the same horrors that the lower classes had suffered under the Horde. And when the gatekeeper looked at her again, she knew what he saw—and it wasn’t a lady. Nor was it the epaulettes declaring her rank, or the red band sewed into her sleeve, boasting that she’d spilled Horde blood in the revolution. No, he saw her face, calculated her age, and understood that she’d been conceived during a Frenzy. And that, because of her family’s status, her mother and father had been allowed to keep her rather than being taken by the Horde to be raised in a crèche.

  The gatekeeper looked at her assistant. “Then who are you?”

  “Constable Newberry.”

  Scratching his beard, the old man clanked back toward the gatehouse. “All right. I’ll be sending a gram up to the captain, then.” He still called the Iron Duke “captain”? Mina could not decide if that said more about Trahaearn’s opinion of his new rank, or the gatekeeper’s. But whatever his staff thought of his title, Trahaearn apparently didn’t force them to address him by it. The gatekeeper didn’t return—and former pirate or not, he must be literate if he could write a gram and read the answer from the main house. That answer came quickly. She and Newberry hadn’t waited more than a minute before the gates opened on well-oiled hinges.

  The park was enormous, with green lawns stretching into the dark. Dogs sniffed along the fence, their handlers bundled up against the cold. If someone had invaded the property, he wouldn’t find many hiding places on the grounds. All of the shrubs and trees were still young, planted after Trahaearn had been granted the property. The house rivaled Chesterfield before that great building had been burned during the revolution. Of gray stone, two rectangular wings jutted forward to form a large courtyard. Unadorned casements decorated the many windows, and the blocky stone front was relieved only by the window glass an
d the balustrade along the edge of the roof. A fountain tinkled at the center of the courtyard. Behind it, the main steps created semicircles leading to the entrance.

  On the center of the steps, a white sheet concealed a body-shaped lump. No blood soaked through the sheet. A man waited on the top step, his slight form in a poker-straight posture that Mina couldn’t place for a moment. Then it struck her: navy. Probably another pirate, though this one had been a sailor—or an officer—first. A house of this size would require an army of staff, and she and Newberry would have to question each one. Soon, she’d know how many of Trahaearn’s pirates had come to dry land with him.

  As they reached the fountain, she turned to Newberry. “Stop here. Set up your camera by the body. Take photographs of everything before we move it.”

  Newberry parked and climbed out. Mina didn’t wait for him to gather his equipment. She strode toward the house. The man descended the steps to greet her, and she was forced to revise her opinion. His posture wasn’t rigid discipline, but a cover for wiry, contained energy. His dark hair slicked back from a flushed, narrow face. Unlike the man at the gate, he was neat, and almost bursting with the need to help.

  “Inspector Wentworth.” With ink-stained fingers, he gestured to the body, inviting her to look.

  She wasn’t in a rush. The body wouldn’t go anywhere.

  “Mr—?”

  “St. John.” He said it like a bounder, rather than the two abbreviated syllables of someone born in England. “Steward to His Grace’s estate.”

  “This estate or his property in Wales?” Which, as far as Mina was aware, Trahaearn didn’t often visit.

  “His estate on Anglesey, inspector.”

  Newberry passed them, carrying the heavy photographic equipment. St. John half turned, as if to offer his assistance, then glanced back as Mina asked, “When did you arrive here from Wales, Mr. St. John?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Did you witness what happened here?”

  He shook his head. “I was in the study when I heard the footman—Chesley—inform the housekeeper that someone had fallen. Mrs. Lavery then told His Grace.”

  Mina frowned. She hadn’t been called out here because someone had been a clumsy oaf, had she? “Someone tripped on the stairs?”

  “No, inspector. Fallen.” His hand made a sharp dive from his shoulder to his hip. Mina glanced at the body again, then at the balustrade lining the roof. “Do you know who it was?”

  “No.”

  She was not surprised. If he managed the Welsh estate, he wouldn’t know the London staff well. “Who covered him with the sheet?”

  “I did, after His Grace sent the staff back into the house.”

  So they’d all come out to gawk. “Did anyone identify him while they were outside?”

  “No.”

  Or maybe they just hadn’t spoken up. “Where is the staff now?”

  “They are gathered in the main parlor.”

  Where they’d pass the story around until they were each convinced they’d witnessed it personally. Blast. Mina firmed her lips. As if interpreting her frustration, St. John added, “The footman is alone in the study, however. His Grace told him to remain there. He hasn’t spoken with anyone else since Mrs. Lavery told His Grace.”

  The footman had been taken into the study and asked nothing? “But he has talked to the duke?”

  The answer came from behind her, from a voice that could carry his commands across a ship. “He has, inspector.”

  She turned to find a man as big as his voice. Oh, damn the newssheets. They hadn’t been kind to him—they’d been kind to their readers, protecting them from the effect of this man. A hollow fear shivered within her, much like the first time she’d run into a razor-clawed ratcatcher in an alley—the instinctive knowledge that she faced something dangerous and that she didn’t wholly understand.

  Not that he looked strange, or mutated as those ratcatchers were. He was just as hard and as handsome as the caricatures had portrayed—altogether dark and forbidding, with a gaze as pointed and as guarded as the fence that was his namesake. The Iron Duke wasn’t as tall as his statue, but still taller than any man had a right to be, and as broad through the shoulders as Newberry, but without the spare flesh. But it was not his size that made her wary. And for the first time, she could see why his crew might follow him through kraken-infested waters or into Horde territory, then follow him back onto shore and remain with him. When he leveled that cold, detached gaze at them, as if he couldn’t care less whether they dropped dead in front of him, they would be too terrified to do anything else. He leveled it at Mina now, and the message in his eyes was clear. He didn’t want her here.

  Because of her bloodline or her occupation? Mina couldn’t decide. It hardly mattered, anyway—she was here now. She glanced at the man standing beside him: tall, brownhaired, his expression bored. Mina didn’t recognize him. Like the Iron Duke, he wore a fashionable black overcoat, breeches, and boots. A red waistcoat buckled like armor over a white shirt with a simple collar reminiscent of the Horde’s tunic collar. Perhaps a bounder and, if so, probably an aristocrat—and he likely expected to be treated as one. Bully for him.

  She looked to the duke again. Though she’d never been introduced to someone of his standing before, she’d seen Superintendent Hale meet a marquess without a single gesture to acknowledge that he ranked above her. Mina followed that example and offered a short nod before addressing him. “Your Grace, I understand that you did not witness this man die.”

  “No.”

  “And your companion . . . ?”

  “Also saw nothing,” the other man answered.

  She’d been right; his accent marked him as a bounder. Yet she had to revise her opinion of him. He wasn’t bored by death—just too familiar with it to be excited by yet another. She couldn’t understand that. The more death she saw, the more the injustice of each one touched her. “Your name, sir?”

  His smile seemed just at the edge of a laugh. “Mr. Smith.”

  A joker. How fun.

  She thought a flicker of irritation crossed the duke’s expression. But when he didn’t offer his companion’s true name, she let it go. One of the staff would know.

  “Mr. St. John has told me that no one has identified the body, and only your footman saw his fall.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did your footman relate anything else to you?”

  “Only that he didn’t scream.”

  No scream? Either the man had been drunk, asleep, or already dead. She would soon find out which it was. “If you’ll pardon me.” With a nod, she turned toward the steps, where Newberry adjusted the camera’s thermite flash. She heard the Iron Duke and his companion follow her. As long as they did not touch the body or try to help her examine it, she did not care.

  Mina looked down at her hands. She would touch the body, and Newberry hadn’t brought her serviceable wool gloves to exchange for her white evening gloves. They were only satin— neither her mother’s tinkering nor her own salary could afford kid—but they were still too dear to ruin. She tugged at the tips of her fingers, but the fastenings at her wrist prevented them from sliding off. Futilely, she tried to push the small buttons through equally small satin loops. The seams at the tips of her fingers made them too bulky, and the fabric was too slippery. She looked round for Newberry, and saw that the black powder from the ferrotype camera already dusted his hands. Blast it. She would bite them through, if she had to. Even the despised task of sewing the buttons back on would be easier than—

  “Give your hand over, inspector.”

  Mina’s hackles rose at the command. She looked up into Trahaearn’s face and heard a noise from his companion, a snorted half laugh—as if Trahaearn had failed an easy test. The duke’s expression didn’t soften, though his words did.

  “You’ll finish more quickly if I assist you. Will you allow me?”

  No, she thought. Do not touch me, do not come close. But the body on the ste
ps would not allow her that reply.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She held out her hand and watched as he removed his own gloves. Kid, lined with sable. Just imagining the luxurious softness warmed her. Mina wouldn’t have been surprised if his presence had, as well. With his great size, Trahaearn seemed to surround her with heat just by standing so near. His hands were large, his fingers long and nails square. As he took her wrist in his left palm, calluses audibly scraped the satin. His face darkened. She could not tell if it was in anger or embarrassment. However rough his skin was, his fingers were nimble. He deftly unfastened the first button, and the next. “This was not the evening you had planned.”

  “No.”

  She did not say this was preferable to the Victory Ball, but perhaps he read it in her voice. To her surprise, his teeth flashed in a smile—then his face quickly hardened again, as if his smile had surprised him, as well. He bent his head over her hand again and Mina found herself staring at his short eyelashes, so thick and black that his eyelids seemed lined with kohl. She looked away, but gold glinting through the thickness of his dark hair drew her gaze again.

  Three tiny rings pierced the top curve of each ear. His earlobes had been pierced, too, though he wore no jewelry in them. And so the newssheets had dressed him up. In a drawing, his thickly lashed eyes and jewelry would have appeared feminine. But not up close, not in person. Instead, the effect was . . . primitive. Unsettled, she focused on her wrist. Only two buttons left, and then she could work. She should be working now. “Were the dogs patrolling the grounds before the body was discovered?”

  “No. They search for the point of entry now.”

  Mina pictured the iron fence. Perhaps a child could slip through the bars; a man could not. But if someone had let him through . . . ? “Have you spoken with your man at the front gate?”

  “Wills?”

  She had not asked the gatekeeper his name. “If Wills has a prosthetic left leg, and often saves a portion of his supper in his beard for his breakfast, then we are speaking of the same man.”