by Stephen Hunt
‘You still believe they don’t know anything?’ asked Corporal Cloake.
‘Not quite enough. Not yet.’ Walsingham rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Double the watch on the State Protection Board, search out anybody who is an asset and contact of Dick Tull. Not a piece of paper or a person is to get close to Algo Monoshaft’s office that we have not first checked, cleared and frisked for any warnings, coded or otherwise.’
‘That senile old mechanical,’ said Cloake. ‘I would love to push him out of his window and watch his cables scatter across the civil service’s front yard.’
‘He is not Lady Florence or Lord Chant,’ warned Walsingham. ‘Such a pity we cannot handle his kind using the old ways.’
‘That coward Blacky won’t stay around to try and warn anyone in the board, he’ll run,’ said Redlin. ‘It’s what he does best.’
Walsingham shrugged languidly, as if that should have been obvious, peering down the staircase. ‘Of course he will. He knows as well as Dick Tull that if he stays inside the Kingdom, the board will hunt him down in quick order. Unfortunately, the commodore has run business for the State Protection Board in Concorzia, Pericur, Quatérshift, Jago, Cassarabia, the Catosian City-states … well, it would be far easier to list the countries he does not have friends and contacts in.’ Coming to a decision, Walsingham pointed to the intelligencer who’d been watching Tock House before the dustmen arrived. ‘Send descriptions back to the board of the visitor to the house and his steamman bodyguard. I want to know who that pair is within the hour. As far as the rest of Tull’s renegades are concerned, have posters of them hanging at every coastal port and airfield, every coaching inn, every canal lock house, every police station, every tollbooth and regimental barracks from the uplands to the northern border.’
‘Taken alive or dead?’ asked the intelligencer.
Before Walsingham could comment, the tower shook with the force of a vicious explosion, a lick of fire and rubble exploding out of the spiral staircase inside the concealed chamber.
Walsingham picked himself up from the floor, strips of rubber from the dead assassins’ masks floating out of the smoke, twisting and burning in the air.
‘I told you to be careful!’ Corporal Cloake shouted into the smoke. But he was slaking his anger against corpses and rubble.
‘The former if you please,’ said Walsingham brushing the explosion’s dust off his breaches. Yes. It was hard to interrogate corpses if they were dead before the torture began.
CHAPTER SIX
Jethro Daunt pulled the greatcoat in tight against the cold of the night air. It still had the epaulets of the Royal Aerostatical Navy on its shoulders.
If it wasn’t for Boxiron carrying the semiconscious form of Charlotte Shades across the cliff-top fields, any late-night drinkers leaving the tavern on the other side of the hill might have spied the group under the blue moonlight and mistaken them for a group of Jack Cloudies on leave. Even Dick Tull and his complaining rat-faced informant friend wore RAN-issue great coats, Barnabas Sadly nervously glancing down at the waves of the sea breaking against the bottom of the coves below.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised Daunt that the commodore had friends in the Royal Aerostatical Navy, welcoming him like a conquering hero – peculiarly under the impression that he was called John Oldcastle and held an officer’s rank in the high fleet. A nudge and a wink and a tap on the side of the nose and the mere mention of State Protection Board business enough to secure them passage across half the Kingdom. The one thing you could say about being transported by a military airship like the RAN Iron Partridge – apart from the warmth of its jackets against the cold – it was a most effective way to circumvent the checks on their identity papers that a flight with merchant carriers would have entailed. There was little about the commodore that dumbfounded Daunt, apart from perhaps one thing, and there would be time enough to talk about that later. Behind them, the tavern’s sign was swaying in the wind, the creaking carrying across the damp grass a counterpoint to the gentle lapping of the waves below and the distant murmur of voices from the ale room.
‘An unusual location for a rendezvous with your boat, good captain,’ noted Daunt. ‘No docks, no jetties.’
‘I’ve a mortal aversion to paying harbourmaster’s fees.’
‘No doubt,’ said Daunt. And a similar one to paying the revenue service’s duties on cargoes, I wager.
They followed a rocky path down from the cliffs curving around to the shale-covered beach of the cove below. Waiting for them was a handful of locals, oiled leather coats marking them as fishermen. Although it clearly wasn’t local fishing boats one of their number was signalling as he pulled the lid off a covered lantern and waved it aloft. There was an answering light from the darkness of the waves, lost beyond the crashing surf. Bright and high. Just where a conning tower would be if a u-boat was lurking out beyond the margins of the coast.
Daunt looked across to Boxiron, and the steamman nodded. ‘It is the Purity Queen,’ he confirmed, voicebox set low, as if he didn’t want to trouble the bundled body of Charlotte Shades folded over his iron arms. The steamman’s vision plate could see almost as well at night as during the day, and a lot further than any mere ex-parson from the race of man. And he had known the commodore’s craft well before the two of them had taken passage on the u-boat a couple of years earlier, heading for the dark isle of Jago. Daunt smiled to himself. The usual thought of most men in his current predicament would be simpler days, but their time on the island had proved anything but. Embroiled with the schemes of the Inquisition and the local ruler and a pantheon of the ancient gods besides.
Daunt smelt the approaching flotilla of longboats from the Purity Queen before he saw them, a bad egg reek from the small gas-driven paddle wheels carried ahead on the sea wind. Almost silently, four tiny craft pushed up onto the beach close to the man with the signal lantern. Without conversation, the group of locals standing around Daunt began to haul the boats out of the reach of the surf, sailors inside pushing out loading ramps and commencing the decanting of cargo. Whatever the contraband – brandy, mumbleweed, wine – barrels rolled down rapidly into the cove. Each wooden cylinder was small enough that it could be hefted up with built-in straps and tied to the back of a labourer before disappearing into a dark cut in the cliffs behind. Where did that cave end up, Daunt wondered? The cellar of the local tavern? Somewhere far out of sight of any riding officers from the revenue service, of that much the ex-parson was certain. For a royalist scoundrel like the commodore, the avoidance of Parliament’s taxes was a duty as much as an income stream, a warm glow of satisfaction supplied with each pint of cheap alcohol and discounted ounce of weed that made its way into the hands of a grateful populace.
The commodore indicated his longboats with a generous sweep of his arm. ‘There we are then. The board can watch every port from now until winter, but they can’t spy on every cove along the coast.’
Sadly was moaning about having to take to the water, until Dick Tull gave him a shove in the direction of the small boats. The little rat-like fellow limped unhappily forward on his cane.
‘So this is how you pay for your fine living, Blacky?’ asked Tull.
The commodore shrugged. ‘The board isn’t so mortal fussy about the Purity Queen’s schedule when it comes to dropping off agents on foreign shores, nor running sealed message bags and crates of rifles sent to those it supports.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Tull. ‘I only ever got to nobble people on our own shores.’
Using the sceptre like a walking stick, the commodore boarded a craft now emptied of barrels. ‘Then lucky you are for it. Nobody would hang you for spying in the Kingdom’s green and pleasant fields. Not when it’s your people with their hand on the lever of the gallows’ trap door.’
‘Not until sodding now,’ said Tull. And quite unhappy he sounded about the matter to the ex-parson’s ears.
Boxiron laid Charlotte Shades’ body carefully in the aft of
the flat-bottomed craft. ‘I do not like running away, Jethro softbody.’
Jethro Daunt patted the steamman’s hulking back reassuringly. ‘Would that we were, old friend.’
No. I fear that we are heading for the heart of this affair. May the Circle turn us to the centre of this evil in time to stop an all-out war between the gill-necks and our people.
Charlotte could hear breathing coming from the dark between the trees; hard, rhythmic rasps, as the branches scratched and scraped at her while she forced a passage between the boughs. There was a smell of salt in the air like the sea, but how could that be when she was crashing through the night and a forest? She could sense the hunting party, flashes of distant light – from lanterns, or the pursuing creatures’ eyes. Charlotte was completely sodden, but she couldn’t remember getting wet. Had she waded through a stream to escape? The slippery mud beneath her bare feet was wet enough that there must have been a recent rainstorm sweeping through the woodland. Beating down on the roof of the one place where she could be guaranteed a warm dry bed for the night. There it was! Madame Leeda’s gypsy caravan, the two connected burgundy-coloured carriages pulled up in a glade, an antique high-tension clockwork engine in the rear carriage being wound tight by a small portable steam engine set up like a tripod on the adjacent ground. Rainwater had cleaned the gaudily colourful sign hanging on the side of the front cabin. Madam Leeda’s Cures and Potions. Each word in a different font, every letter in a different colour. A rainbow splash of ornament in the moonlit glade. Much like its owner, covered in a thick blanket-like hooded robe, swaying, despite her age, in a tuneless dance on wooden steps lowered from the carriage’s side.
‘Madam Leeda,’ Charlotte shouted, nearly stumbling over the partially exposed roots of a nearby oak tree. ‘It’s me, Charlotte!’ If Charlotte didn’t say anything, perhaps the old gypsy woman wouldn’t notice the state her visitor was in, clothes torn from the pursuit through the woods.
‘I see you,’ called the old gypsy, turning on the steps and peering out beyond the fire-pit she’d dug in front of the caravan, brushing the long silver hair out of her face. ‘Is that my Lotty come back to me?’
‘It is.’
Why wasn’t Madam Leeda asking Charlotte about where she had been all these years? Then Charlotte glanced down at her cold hands. Tiny, child-sized and her clothes – the same dress she’d been wearing when the family she had thought was her own had thrown her out. Just another failed crop on their farm after the payments from Charlotte’s mother to her adopted family had dried up. Charlotte’s only parting gift from them, the knowledge that she wasn’t their child … just an illegitimate bastard from an affair between Lady Mary and the scandalous lord commercial, Abraham Quest.
No wonder Charlotte had been so slow running through those woods; barely ten years old, a diet of berries and grass and leaves for week after week. She was inside the caravan, its main room crowded with cupboards, small wooden drawers by the hundred. Things to sell. Potions that could cure or curse, depending on who was buying, how much they paid, and what degree of respect they showed to the old gypsy woman selling them. The smell of herbs drying, mushrooms being cured, and a hare hanging up over a porcelain washbasin, bloodied and skinned. With so many amulets and charms, more fake than real; the belief of buyers usually all that was needed to provide the push for true love or the courage to face up to some local difficulty.
‘You may go into any of these drawers in this room,’ instructed Madam Leeda. ‘But not the ones through there.’ She indicated the slim rubberised lock that connected the lead carriage to the rear. ‘There are dangerous things inside there. Not for any child. Not for anyone not of the Shena, who has not mastered the old arts and the true gaze of knowing.’
‘I promise,’ said Charlotte solemnly. Though she couldn’t help but notice the intricately carved oaken box that would be removed from the second carriage’s drawers shortly before Madam Leeda was about to conduct any important piece of business. A particularly significant seance or card reading, hiring an engineer for a vital repair to the caravan’s clockwork engine, or maybe smoothing the superstitious hackles of an irate Circlist priest or a local dignitary. The well-oiled hardwood box with the carvings of ancient runes that the gypsy people called sly-talk. Not just a charm, the jewel inside, the Eye of Fate. Not when the crystal seemed able to bend the will of those in its presence to the inclinations of its owner. The jewel so bright, shining and calling to Charlotte, singing to her blood. Promising her a life of opulence and luxury far from the tight confines of a tiny travelling show. A life where the jewel could be worn among the high society Charlotte had been born to traverse. Not locked up, used to convince yokels that the fair price for a sack of grain was half of what it should be. If only she could have—‘taken it!’ shrieked Madam Leeda. ‘You’ve taken it.’
‘I haven’t,’ swore Charlotte, feeling towards her neck where the jewel’s chain lay, making a lie of her words.
‘I fed you,’ bellowed Madam Leeda, the outrage turning the pallid lines of her face an unsightly purple. ‘I took you in and raised you as one of the people! This is how you repay me? You were good for nothing before! Nothing but sucking on dried-up bush leaves and milking peasants’ goats. I taught you the sly arts and you’ve broken the only rule I set. You never steal from your own people!’
‘I haven’t stolen the Eye of Fate,’ pleaded Charlotte. ‘I’ve only borrowed it a little while.’
‘A while!’ Madam Leeda wailed. ‘You think I have longer than “a little while” left to my old bones? Sneaking off in the middle of the night with my living about your pretty young neck. What does that make you?’ She lunged for Charlotte tearing the jewel away from her.
‘A thief,’ yelled Charlotte, trying to snatch back the jewel from Madam Leeda’s clawing hands. ‘A common gypsy woman, like you, a dirty roamer, just like they shout at us in every village we pass through.’
Finally catching back hold of the Eye of Fate, Charlotte threw herself out of the carriage, but she wasn’t in the forest glade anymore, she was on the doorstep of her true mother, Lady Mary. Or rather, the house of her new husband. And there she stood, Lady Mary, holding the door of the townhouse firm against Charlotte, two of her household staff behind her, brandishing the canes they used to see away beggars and vagabonds.
‘I do not know you,’ said her ladyship, her tone superior and distant. ‘I have no daughters, only sons. Now be off with you before Lord Kane returns home and has you arrested for trespassing on his property.’
Charlotte opened her mouth to beg to stay, but she was being pulled back by Madam Leeda, the old gypsy woman’s bony fingers around the back of her neck like a collar. ‘The Eye has limits, Lotty. It can cast many a glamour, but it can’t move the heart. It can’t make a mother love her daughter, that’s one thing it can never do. Love, you must first deserve, and then it comes naturally.’
Charlotte tried to protect the jewel, but other hands were reaching for her. Mister Twist and his bludger Cloake, the pair of them turning her, jabbing her, trying to cut the Eye of Fate away from her breast.
‘Give it to me,’ Cloake demanded, ‘let me have the Eye.’
Twist’s hands locked around her neck, tightening ever closer and closer.
‘No! It’s the sceptre you want, not the Eye, King Jude’s sceptre.’
‘Don’t you see,’ laughed Twist, spit from his mouth spraying across her face, ‘they’re both the same.’
‘I’ll give it to you!’
‘You’ll give us everything,’ laughed Cloake, his hands grabbing the back of Twist’s head, pulling at the man’s hair. Ripping the skin off, scalp and the flesh falling away like flaking candle wax. Underneath the peeling skin, something black and wet and scaly swelled out, distending and growing larger. A hideous fanged face took shape; part-lizard, part-snake, part-fish, its wet scales licked by a forked tongue and its bulbous mutated head pierced by two crimson eyes that glowed like twin wells sunk into a dark, dar
k place. Having split Twist’s face off, Cloake’s fingers dug into the skin around his own nose and began scratching and clawing, a similar monstrosity bulging out of his own torn flesh, a hairless scaly forehead rising and rising, knobbly and pitted, a tall helmet of bone above gleaming hellish eyes.
‘Oh, that’s handsome,’ said Madam Leeda, shoving Charlotte towards the hideous pair. Charlotte was backing away from them, her mother’s townhouse replaced by the stalagmites of a dripping cave, pools of stagnant dark water enveloping the old gypsy woman’s feet. ‘They’ll take everything, all right. Nothing left of little Lotty, only a husk. See what it’s cost you, now, girl? Your big life in the city trying to be like the quality, aping their stupid, superior ways, trying to be like them that don’t even want you. You should’ve stayed in the woods with me, rolling through the villages in the sun and the snow. That’s the life for us. For a dirty little roamer girl.’
‘Save me, please—!’
In answer to Charlotte’s pleas there was a sudden explosion of light and the monsters were sent scrabbling like spiders back towards the darkness of the distant shadows. Out of the darkness emerged a silhouette, the figure of a woman, a nimbus of light at her back.
‘Madam Leeda, are you out there? Have you come to take me back?’
‘I am not your gypsy,’ said a female voice. It whispered all around her, a breeze filtering through the leaves of an ancient forest. Charlotte raised a hand to cover her eyes as she tried to gaze on the figure. ‘Mother?’
‘Mother of us all,’ hissed the reply. ‘The blood of a thousand generations squared, baked and frozen into the soil of Jackals. The memories of your ancestors’ dreams and the echoes of souls too free to fade into the shared sea of consciousness.’ As her words faded, Charlotte caught the distant repetition of the words whispering in a thousand lost languages. So many tongues, just like the church back in the capital. Charlotte remembered the fevered dreams of the three sisters; Jethro Daunt set on her trail with his strange clanking steamman friend.
