From the Deep of the Dark

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I take it that those they capture are not treated with leniency, good captain?’ said Daunt.

  ‘Never seen again, is what they are,’ said the commodore. ‘The gill-necks and the people of the underwater nations are born to the sea. This is their realm. Visitors to it are all we will ever be, and blessed unwelcome ones when we trespass into their territory.’

  ‘Crystals,’ hummed Daunt. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Your sister is going to tell us what’s going on then, Blacky?’ said Tull. ‘We just sail up to her and she’ll spill her guts out about why Walsingham and the gill-necks have suddenly taken it to mind to support the rebel cause?’

  ‘There’ll be doubts,’ said the commodore. ‘In the royalist ranks, people like Rufus Symons. Tossing out a parliament of thieving tradesmen is one thing, collaborating with a foreign occupation of Jackals is another kettle of fish.’ The commodore unfolded a chart across the table and laid a finger in the ocean. ‘This is the muster point for the convoys to the colonies that are passing across the disputed waters. We can join one as a free trader, then slip away from the convoy and sneak out into the heart of the Advocacy waters.’

  ‘Won’t we be a little conspicuous sailing into their territory, good captain?’ said Daunt.

  ‘Right enough,’ said the commodore, ‘but we won’t be going in as surface traders.’ He pointed to an adjacent area on the charts. ‘This is the territory of the seanore … ocean nomads. Some of them are close enough to the gill-necks in form and tolerated as ocean dwellers; a multiracial society like the Kingdom – even a few of the race of man who’ve embraced a life on the seabed among their numbers. Humans known by the moniker of wetbacks by us salty sea-dog types. I’ve had dealings with the seanore before. If we can get in tight with the nomads, then we can travel into a gill-neck city without raising too many hackles.’ He looked over at Boxiron. ‘Apart from you, old steamer.’

  ‘I can travel underwater,’ protested Boxiron. ‘All I need is a respirator for my stacks and a buoyancy tank.’

  ‘That you may,’ said the commodore, ‘but while a seanore clan might count three or four of the underwater races among their number, one species you will never find among them is a steamman. The gill-necks will tolerate the odd wetback among the seanore as some poor unfortunate surface dweller trying to do the natural thing and return back to the sea-essence, but if they spy your metal hull bobbing along above their coral, they’ll rumble our game in a blessed minute. My sister Gemma isn’t exactly the trusting type, and we’ll have enough trouble trying to find a friendly face among the royalists without Gemma spotting me first. With a steamman by my side, I might as well swim into the gill-neck capital dragging the lion and portcullis of the House of Guardians on a standard behind me.’

  Daunt’s heart sank. Boxiron shook angrily – a mixture of anger and shame at being left out of the fray. The ex-parson had only just managed to get his steamman friend engaged with the case; occupied enough to set aside his increasingly maudlin broodings about the reduced state of his body. Boxiron had little enough to live for as it was. A once-proud steamman knight, reduced into the frame of a semi human-milled monstrosity, crude and malfunctioning.

  How can I abandon Boxiron on the Purity Queen, grieving about his exile from his people? His so-called duty to suicide? What will he do without me?

  But when it came to it leaving his friend behind, when push turned to shove, Daunt would have no choice. The stakes were too high to do anything else.

  After the others had gone, Dick noticed the commodore was watching him. The spy ran his fingers over King Jude’s sceptre, a calculating look on his face as he estimated how much he could get from melting it down and stripping it of its jewels.

  ‘Your people have already stolen the blessed thing once from its true owners,’ accused the commodore.

  Dick reached for his hip flask and took a quick hit of its warm contents. ‘And what will you be doing with it, Blacky, when all of this is done? You got the Jackelian crown squirreled away somewhere too? An ermine-lined souvenir for you to keep your brainbox warm? Settle yourself down in your favourite easychair back in the big house, wrap your fingers around the sceptre and dream of the good old days when your ancestors got to lord it over mine?’

  ‘When this is all over, lad, I’m figuring I’ll be too. I’m on my way out, but where I’ll be going, you won’t be so far behind me.’

  ‘There you’re wrong, Blacky. I’m planning on a long, happy retirement.’ He glanced at the richly appointed sceptre. A fortune waiting to be smelted into a form no policeman would be able to trace. I just need a little more money, a little more luck. Maybe I’ll take my share of yours, you old pirate. Someone’s got to come out of this ahead.

  ‘A cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea? Nosing out a previously undiscovered knack for tending roses? Men like you and me, Dick Tull, we’re good for lying and scheming and killing and trickery. Playing the great game all our lives, you think you can take your eyes off the board? It’s too late for us. This is all we know and all we’re fit for. You think you’re going to find a wife now, raise a family to replace the ones who died off or were scared off? There’s no sight as sad as a rusty old sabre trying to turn itself a garden trowel.’

  ‘You’re talking about yourself, not me,’ said Dick. But we’re not, are we? All the lies of our trade. Can we fool ourselves too?

  The commodore reached out and tugged at Dick’s jacket. ‘Cheap cloth. Taking your meals at an ordinary and telling yourself it’s where your informants are, living your cheap life. How much money do you think you need to leave the State Protection Board behind? Ten guineas a year, a hundred, a thousand? It’ll never buy you what it takes to leave.’

  ‘Says the man living in a grand tower with a private orchard to do his bloody philosophising in.’

  ‘We are what we are,’ coughed the commodore. ‘And we’re it under a roof with one room or seventy.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Dick, his confidence wavering. ‘The board’s just a job, and I won’t miss one hour of this life when I’m done with it.

  Liar, something deep within him whispered. How often have you dreamed of what you’re going to do outside of the board? Where are your hopes of another life? A man who wanted out would have a dream, wouldn’t he, a plan, something?

  ‘What happened to you, lad?’ asked the commodore. ‘We’ve done enough business together over the years, you and I. You could have been one of the great ones, but here you are at the end of the game, huddled like a miser counting coals in front of his fire.’

  ‘Give it a bloody rest. The only cause you’ve ever really worked for is yourself. You try doing it for parliament and country all your life. Not as some quality, not as officer class, but as a mere humble bloody ranker. For the last forty years I’ve done the job as fine as anyone, and watched well-connected carriage folk take the credit for every one of my successful operations while sliding me a plate of shit to eat on the failures. If my father had been an industrial lord or a bishop, I’d be a colonel in the board by now. Instead, I’m counting a ranker’s pension and nicking candlesticks to put a pair of new shoes on my tired old feet.’ Dick made to tip his hip flask to his mouth again, but Blacky stopped him.

  ‘I need the man you were, you rascal, the man you still can be. I need an ironclad Protection Board bastard by my side. Not some sot two drinks from the grave.’

  ‘Then I hope your u-boat can travel in time as well as in water,’ said Dick, ‘because that man ain’t here anymore. Just me. That’s who you’ve got. And that man’s going to take a cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea just as soon as it becomes available and leave the great game to someone else. The board’s officers can find another cow to milk for their successes and bugger the lot of them.’

  ‘Well, there’s one consolation for you,’ said the commodore, thumping him on the back. ‘Poor old Blacky won’t be around to say I told you so.’

  When Jethro Daunt entered the wa
rdroom, the only other occupant was the rat-like informant. Barnabas Sadly was standing over a table riveted to the floor, leaning on his cane, a large sea chart spread out across the table.

  ‘Can you interpret a navigation course, Mister Sadly?’

  ‘Lords-a’larkey, not the likes of I. But it makes me feel a little better, knowing that someone on this tub has an idea of how to sail through all of that out there. Have you glanced out the porthole? Valleys and mountains and forests of seaweed and fish like birds in the sky. Just the sight of it set my stomach off into a right queasy turn.’

  ‘No,’ said Daunt. ‘There can’t have been many lessons on matters nautical in your poorhouse classes.’

  ‘Poorhouse?’ said Sadly, a tone of indignation creeping into his voice. ‘I’m no poorhouse foundling. My father was a cobbler along Velvet Street.’ He tapped his boot with his cane. ‘Couldn’t take over the trade, could I? Customers would come in and take one look at my bad foot and say, well, that one don’t know anything about making a good pair of shoes. We’ll move our business down the lane.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Daunt. ‘My mistake. There must be nearly fifty cobblers’ shops and stalls along Velvet Street.’

  ‘But customers still needs to eat, and them that come into an ordinary don’t care much about the person serving them, as long as the beer ain’t stale and the meat overcooked like dry old shoe soles.’

  Daunt nodded. Blackening the meat was a favourite trick when it came to disguising rancid cheaper cuts. ‘I hope you don’t lose too much custom back home while you’re on board the Purity Queen.’

  ‘Mister Tull won’t have thought about that,’ said Sadly. ‘Not once. Any more than his masters at the board gave it a thought when they sent the dustmen over to my place to cut my liver out for what I might have told Mister Tull. I’m useful to the board, they toss me a few bones, but when it suits—’ he drew a finger across his throat, ‘—that’s the way it is with the little people. Nobody thinks about us, nobody cares if that which we’ve built is trampled underfoot by the grand schemes of the quality and the carriage folk.’

  ‘All of life is flow, Mister Sadly,’ said Daunt. ‘You can only find serenity when you accept the course of the river, rather than trying to build a home of sticks in the centre of the flow and worrying that it will one day be swept away.’

  ‘It’s true then,’ said Sadly. ‘You’re a churchman as well as a thieftaker.’

  ‘Unfortunately, the church does not permit parsons in the Circlist order to believe in gods.’ Daunt held up his hands. ‘Defrocked. They are sticklers in such matters. Abandoned, but still occasionally useful to the inquisition. Perhaps that makes both of us little people.’

  ‘Not you, says I,’ Sadly insisted, his voice lowering in awe. ‘Your name’s whispered in fear among the bad sorts back in the city. When Jethro Daunt is engaged, the villain of the piece had better scarper for the hills, for if they don’t, they’ll end up dangling in the noose outside Bonegate jail. Don’t even think of nobbling him, or that metal ogre of his will drop you off a building with your skull crushed in.’

  Daunt ran a finger across the contour lines of the chart. Feared by the underworld, abandoned by the church. Is this what my life has come to? The increasingly faint stimulation of pitting his wits against the most vicious and devious masterminds in the slums of Middlesteel. Crime spread like algae in the stagnant pools of the poor. As soon as one case was solved, there was always another. Their clients, mostly the outraged rich who could afford to pay Daunt and Boxiron’s bills; commercial lords affronted by the down and desperates’ efforts to relieve the rich of some of their wealth. Was it any wonder that Boxiron was growing suicidal with his life, crippled and crammed inside his malfunctioning frame? Any wonder the steamman felt that way when even Daunt – hale and healthy – worried that they chased ever-greater risks in the cases they accepted, just to feel the tingle of being alive. To distract them both from the truth: that for neither of them, was this the appropriate channel their short time in the world had been destined to flow down. What would Daunt’s father have thought of him now, if his bones hadn’t been long buried? His father had been disappointed enough that his son had turned his talents and intelligence towards the seminary, rather than following him into the law. But the life of an articled clerk in the middle court, even rising to be a judge – his father’s dream, never his – had held little appeal. No, it never did to dwell on the might-have-beens. If Jethro Daunt had been stuck in his father’s dusty office, stamping legal summons and reviewing court proceedings, then he would never have been able to rescue Boxiron from his previous life as an enforcer for the lords of the underworld. How many murderers would’ve gone free to kill more innocents?

  And if I weren’t here, who would minister to Damson Shades? Certainly not the drunken sop who passed for a surgeon on the Purity Queen. Dose her up with laudanum and reach for the bone saw to carve off a mangled limb. Such methods won’t keep the poor girl alive. To doubt is human, but I need a clear mind and a focused soul if I’m to get to the heart of this matter. I fear the blood of many thousands will be on my hands, should I fail.

  Daunt was reaching for the comforting round sphere of a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop when the commodore entered the room. ‘With me, lad! The girl’s fever has taken a turn for the worst!’

  The commodore stepped out of the way while Daunt felt Charlotte Shades’ forehead and then took her pulse. Her skin was soaked with sweat while her possessed ramblings had dropped away to a faint murmur. ‘Her fever is not getting worse, Jared. Quite the contrary, it is breaking. She is on the mend.’

  ‘Are you sure, lad?’ He allowed himself a burst of relief.

  The consulting detective nodded. ‘I know my previous occupation concerned itself with the state of my parishioners’ minds and souls first and foremost, but the third component of the natural trinity is the body. And I’m happy to say that young Charlotte Shades’ flesh is returning to balance.’

  Seeing Charlotte stretched out on the cot in front of him put Jared Black in mind of another woman, another time. The commodore sighed. One of the strange things about surviving long enough to see your own death swimming up in the water towards you was that the events of your early life often seemed more real and immediate than the occurrences that had happened just the day before. Maybe the brain preferred to remember the body as it had been, hale and fit and with a whole life of possibilities stretched out in front of it, denuded of disappointments. Not crumbling, a casual victim of entropy – eroded by the natural course of life and its sicknesses. Ah, it’s a tricksy thing, a man’s mind. There had been many women, of course, wives who had died and borne him children, but the first love was always the fondest remembered. Maeva, are you still alive? Still out here with the nomads of the sea? He had been in love with her from the first moment he had seen her. And who wouldn’t be? So full of fire. Calling you in like a moth to her light. What he’d felt for Maeva wasn’t just a function of the fact that she had saved his life. Pulling him from the wreckage of a broken u-boat like a fisherman levered winkles from the rocks of the shoreline. There were tales of mermaids who did that, who rescued drowning submariners, but Maeva had been entirely human. And like all the finest women, she had made him feel more human too. After the royalist-in-exiles’ hidden island base had finally been located and destroyed by parliament, Maeva had given Jared Black the thing he had needed most: a reason to go on living.

  Was our first meeting so many years ago? It feels like yesterday. There had been a blackness in the wrecked conning tower, the kind of complete, utter blackness that could only come from the sea flooding in and even the flicker of light from the instrument panels sparking out as her power drained. Legs trapped under a collapsed hull plate, he had watched as a bobbing fairy light in front of him had grown to the glow of a diving helmet’s face plate, looked on Maeva’s ethereal porcelain beauty, snowy-white like only a life lived under the sea could make a woman. How old wa
s I, twenty, twenty-one? My first command shot out from underneath me. Everyone else, my friends and family in the crew, a corpse.

  She had prodded him, checking he was as dead as all the other u-boat privateers, drawing back as she saw his mouth grimace in pain. Connecting her suit to his with a communication line. ‘You’re a u-boat pirate, I presume? Not a captive held for ransom by the marauders.’

  ‘Privateer, lass, never a pirate. Licensed to take back what’s ours by right. And you, I presume, must be one of those murderous underwater savages that roam the oceans, a seanore.’

  ‘I understand that the self-proclaimed nobles who wrote your dubious licenses of brigandage are much like this vessel, now. Dead in the water.’

  ‘So then, news travels fast.’

  ‘There are probably clans on the other side of the world who were woken by the sounds of the depth charges striking your u-boat pens.’

  ‘War’s a right noisy business. Not much quietness in it.’ He’d watched her pick up her lance. ‘Make it quick for me, lass, before you strip my boat.’

  She’d jabbed him, experimentally in the chest. ‘You’re a very unsuccessful pirate. Not a single chest of treasure I can find on board.’

  ‘Privateer, please. And I was a more successful rebel than I ever was a liberator of cargoes.’

  ‘Not very clever, either. Silks and spices always have a market. Causes are cheap. Almost everyone can invent one for free.’

  ‘I’d thank you kindly to murder me before the lecture, rather than after.’

  She raised the lance, but rather than spearing him with the deadly crystal blade, she had pushed it under the hull plate trapping his legs and begun to lever it up. ‘The price on your head makes you the most valuable thing in this wreck, surface-dweller.’

  ‘Too valuable to sell, if the truth be told.’

  ‘You’re every bit as arrogant as your people are said to be. Why would I want to keep a filthy surface-dwelling rascal around?’