From the Deep of the Dark (11 page)

‘I don’t believe in unquiet spirits,’ said Daunt. ‘And the only gods with us in the world are the ones we create in our mind.’

‘Save your Circlist cant for the archbishop,’ said the commodore. ‘I know what I’m talking about, right enough. She’s the voice of the bones of the land. Jackals itself. The Kingdom soaked with the souls and blood of a thousand generations of our ancestors before us.’

Daunt shrugged. ‘A voice that talks in riddles … of a war within a war. And riddles that point back to an ancient conflict between the tribes and the underwater people. A time when gill-necks waded up our beaches and attempted to conquer the mainland.’

‘I know a little of the legends of that time,’ said the commodore. ‘Though I wish I didn’t.’

‘The professor wrote a book on it,’ said Daunt. ‘
The Fall of the Stag-lords
. She hypothesized that the magma fields of the Fire Sea were expanding during that age, driving the peoples of the underwater nations onto our shores. During the confusion of that period, the hold of the druids over the land was weakened, the invaders repelled and the tribes unified under the first queen.’

The commodore looked as though this was news he did not want to hear. ‘Let it stay in the professor’s history texts, lad. Wicked times, let them stay lost and forgotten, that is where they belong!’

‘The tongues that the sisters Lammeter are speaking in would have it otherwise,’ said Daunt lifting up his notes and translations. ‘The meaning is obtuse, but they seem to suggest that those times are repeating, that the war we now face with the Advocacy is merely the turning of the circle. They warn of ancient prophecy.’

The commodore moaned and abandoned his range. He collapsed at one of the table’s chairs. ‘Damn her, damn her wicked tricks.’

‘The professor?’

‘Elizica, lad, the bloody ancient queen. Is there so little royal blood left running in our land that she must come tormenting me, sending visitors to my door until she drives me out of my peaceful rest? First poor Rufus, then that black-hearted secret policeman Dick Tull, and now you. Where was she when the royalist fleet-in-exile was broken at Porto Principe by Parliament’s airships? Where was she when my wife died, when my daughter was killed? Where was she when we stood together, Jethro Daunt, on that terrible land of Jago and faced down the army of the ursine and the terrors of that terrible singing tomb and its fearful weapon fit for dark gods? But now, ah, there’s trouble with the people of the underwater nation and poor old Blacky is meant to abandon his nice warm house and put his neck on the line again! And for what? A parliament that turned my noble ancestors out of their land and hunted me for most of my damned life. Where is the justice in that, where is the fairness in that?’

Daunt had never seen the commodore so agitated. He raised his hands placatingly. ‘Peace, good captain. Please, it is Boxiron and I who’ve been engaged on this case by the capital’s aldermen. I appreciate the hospitality of your library, but I certainly wouldn’t ask you to share whatever dangers might present themselves while resolving this case.’

‘You won’t have to, lad.’ The commodore shook his head as Daunt extended out his bag of Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops. ‘She’ll do for me, just you wait and see. There’s never a choice with her. She’s the land, and if you wait long enough the land will take everything from you, even the dust of your bones when you’ve sacrificed all that you have to give. It is my family’s fate, and I’ve run from a lot of things, but fate is one beast you can never outpace.’

‘We chart our own way on the Circle’s turn. There are no gods worth believing in. No fate save that which
we
will into being.’

‘I hear the parson left in you talking,’ said Commodore Black. ‘But you will see. She’ll have her way.’

‘Don’t believe in the gods, good captain. Refuse them.’

‘Too late for that, lad. For the spirit of Queen Elizica believes in me. And now, I fear, she believes in you too!’

Daunt let the calm and the quickening of the sweet’s flavour pass through his head, all the tiredness and cobwebs clearing.
They tormented me once, the old gods, Badger-headed Joseph and his kin. But now I am their master. I’ve come too far to swap their tyranny for that of a queen. Even if she is the queen of our land.

‘I shall hold to what is right and rational, and you must do the same.’

Getting up, the commodore returned with a dusty bottle of wine bearing what appeared to be an intricate label written in Cassarabian script. ‘Well, that would be this, then. Let’s drink while we are able. I shall toast my unlucky stars and you may toast your synthetic morality and whatever other inventive teachings the church saw fit to squeeze into your clever noggin before they booted your arse out of the rational orders.’

The two of them sat. And they drank.

There was a chill in Dick’s room when he returned home, the kind that seeped deep into a man’s bones and numbed them from the inside out. Dick Tull might only keep two rooms in the cheap second-storey tenement he rented, but even so, his single fireplace always seemed too small to put out enough heat, no matter how much coal he piled inside it.

Dick left his greatcoat on. Thin walls. Thin floors. Thin ceilings. Cheap windows with as much frost on the inside as outside.
I’ll be out of here soon enough. The report I handed into the board. Proof that the royalists and the gill-necks are conniving together. Wait till the head gets to read that. His suspicions confirmed. My promotion in the bag. Able to afford rooms in a respectable district. Not too expensive, of course. That’d be a waste. But somewhere my neighbours aren’t living twenty to a room. Screaming and shitting and crying and fighting. That’ll show that urchin Billy-boy. That’ll show that arrogant sod Walsingham.

Dick walked across to his window. He had made the curtains himself, cheap thick cloth that had come from a pawnshop around the corner. There was a fight spilling out of the tavern opposite, scattering a patrol of the local citizen’s committee. The patrol were waving kitchen knives, a few rusty sabres and one rifle that looked so old it’d be hard pressed to loose a single charge before it needed to be stripped and cleaned.
Good hunting, lads. You meet a vampire tonight, you had better hope it dies from a laughing fit.

Dick glanced at his cold fireplace and the rusty quarter-full bucket of coal nestled against the grate, shook his head, then walked into his bedroom to swap his greatcoat for the soft indoor coat he kept hanging on the back of the door’s hook. Fear froze him far colder than the apartment’s chill, and it wasn’t the wintry bedroom that stopped his heart – it was the corpse sprawled across his bed, so much dried blood staining Dick’s cheap grey woollen covers that you’d think the blankets had been dyed brown. William Beresford’s throat had been neatly slit open, and the young agent had been tossed down with a knife stuck in the middle of his chest.

That looks familiar.
Dick’s hand reached for the blade sheaf hidden at the back of his belt. Empty!
My blade. My lodgings. Sodding hell.
Dick had seen enough set-ups – arranged more than a few of his own – to know when he was being hung out to dry. There was no trail of blood across the room, so like as not, the agent had been lured here and murdered in situ.
Shit me, Billy-boy, you had to let them stick you here. In the chest too. And you knew the bugger that did it, to let them get that close. My lodgings, you stupid, young—

Dick heard the poorly nailed floorboards of the staircase outside squeaking with the weight of people climbing up the stairs. He’d left the board’s pistol back with the office’s hoary old armourer, which meant he’d have to use his own ammunition tonight.
How careful were the jiggers that did this, how well did they search my place?

Not thoroughly enough. Dick pulled at the bedroom’s loose skirting board, eaten away with woodworm, and dipped his hand into the empty space behind the wood, pulling out a short-barrelled blunderbuss from the gap between the bricks. He’d taken it from the carriage of a dead hansom cab driver who had been supplying a little more than rides to the Cassarabian ambassador. It wasn’t a neat gun; whatever you said about it, the weapon could never be described as that. But then, it was designed to be pushed against drunk, flailing, violent passengers in close confines, with most of the assailants’ bulk blown away by the impact of the charge. It was a terror weapon really, no range to speak of. Anyone who didn’t shit themselves just looking at it probably needed to be split in half to be stopped. There was a saying in the Jackelian regiments that it took a man’s weight in lead to stop a charging soldier. Well, here it was, a man’s weight in buckshot loaded into its flared iron barrel, and Dick reached back again for the bandoleer holding ten more charges. He slung the bandoleer over his waistcoat before concealing in under his coat.

‘Tull!’ It was his landlady’s voice. Damson Pegler, the grasping old cow. ‘Coal man’s been. How much of the black stuff are you going to take?’

‘Save it!’ called Dick, using the cover of the bellow to click back the hammer on the blunderbuss’s clockwork firing mechanism. ‘I’ve still got a quarter bucket inside here.’

‘Special price today,’ said the old crone. ‘Half full gets you a second half free.’

Special price. And you’re passing the money onto me, rather than keeping it for yourself, you cheap old cow.
Almost as improbable as finding his ex-partner a corpse stretched out across his bed.

Dick raised his voice. ‘All right then, I’m coming.’ The latch on his window snapped open beneath the shout.

‘Damson Pegler.’

‘Yes?’

‘Get your sodding head down.’

The blunderbuss bucked even as Dick dropped out of the window, sending a cloud of shot through the cheap door and the flimsy walls, the brief satisfaction of hearing yells and screams outside his lodgings by way of reply. Hurling himself at the ladder on the fire escape, he kicked the ladder’s latch out and rode it all the way down to the street outside.

‘Vampires!’ Dick screamed at the patrol of the local citizen’s committee, dozens of heads turning to see where the commotion was originating. He flung his hand towards the entrance hall of his tenement building. ‘Sweet Circle, man, there’s bloody vampires inside the building, they’re slaughtering everyone. It’s a sodding massacre in there.’

Give them that much, there was only a moment of hesitation on the mob’s part, then, as one, they surged towards Damson Pegler’s building, their numbers swelled by the drunk brawlers who’d been fighting outside the alehouse. They were game for it and looking for trouble. Inside, they’d find it. Dick was reloading as a head poked out of his window, a black rubber stench-mask fixed to the face.
Sod me, it’s the dustmen.

Dick fired the blunderbuss towards the head, cracking the window’s glass and throwing out a cloud of splinters from the rotting wooden walls of his building. Furious cries sounded from inside the entry corridor.
The mob won’t last long against the dustmen, not waving pitchforks and sabres against a cadre of trained assassins.

Cracking open his gun as he sprinted down the street, Dick ejected the spent charge and pushed a fresh one inside before snapping the weapon shut. Bellows sounded behind him, getting louder, people coming down the street blundering out of his way as they noticed the gun in his hands and the wild look on his gasping face.
Never get away from them now.

Dick almost slipped as the kettle-black careered around the corner, only just managing to halt short of the massive iron wheels crunching past his boots. He raised his blunderbuss towards the driver’s step at the front and stopped himself from firing as Barnabas Sadly’s rat-like features twitched down towards him. ‘Onto the cart, Mister Tull.’

Dick leapt for the ladder on the side, hauling himself onto the driver’s perch even as the vehicle swung around, the massive boiler and barrel-laden flatbed on the back interspersed between them and the first shots whistling down the street, bullets clanging off the heavy iron of the carriage.

‘Your people came for me, Mister Tull. The dustmen came for me when I was in my cellar, killed the brewery delivery man and two of my customers they did.’

Dick stood on his toes and risked a glance behind the kettle-black’s single stack pumping steam out into the evening air. Three men in dark coats and rubber stench masks were sprinting after them, but falling back as they lost ground to the powerful engines of the cart. And they set me up too.
What was it you said, Sadly? Foxes and hounds, mousers and mice, all dancing together.

‘Why, Mister Tull? Lords-a’larkey, what have I ever done against the board? Haven’t I always given you the truth of it, at considerable risk to my own life?’

‘Damned if I know,’ said Dick.
And damned for certain if we don’t find out. The dustmen. Sod it. How dead does that make us?

Retirement had finally been forced on Dick, a retirement less comfortable than even he had imagined.

In the tall, cold chambers of the State Protection Board, its head, Algo Monoshaft, whistled in anger and frustration as the steamman tried to find a place for his latest report on the paper-strewn floor of his office.

Corporal Tull’s report that detailed how Dick Tull had been accepting large bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to the royalist rebels’ activities inside the capital. The report that made clear how the sergeant had murdered his own partner when he had been found out, but only after tossing his royalist contact’s dead body into the river to ensure his treachery remained undiscovered.

Algo Monoshaft maniacally pulled at the crimson threads criss-crossing the paper fragments.
Where does this go? WHERE DOES THIS GO?

There were hordes of staff working within Parliament’s walls, cleaners and caterers and the hundreds of personnel who waddled through its warrens wearing antiquated cloaks and powdered wigs. But none climbed so high or worked so cold as the bell-men who tended the intricate clockwork mechanism of Brute Julius, the massive bell tower that emerged like a brick spear from the gothic architecture of the debating chamber.