From the Deep of the Dark (15 page)

‘The sceptre is more than a symbol,’ warned Daunt.

‘It is duty seeking me out,’ said the commodore. ‘The land has had her wicked way again, forcing me out of my rest and pushing me down the hard path. I told you, lad, did I not warn you that it would be this way? No choice in the matter for poor old Blacky. There never is. Always me. Always me alone.’

‘You are not alone,’ said Daunt. ‘We stand by you in this.’

The commodore stalked to one of the iron doors, seized the lock, and spun the metal weight around. ‘You stand by me, do you? No time for standing around, boys, let’s be out of here before those killers outside realize there’s nothing more upstairs than a few rusty old guns pointing out with not a defender behind their sights.’

On the other side of the door, a narrow corridor of raw rock face curved around to terminate by the waist-high gates of a lifting room. The lift looked ominously ramshackle, waiting to be activated by them.

‘Another new addition to the place, Blacky?’ Dick asked.

‘That’s the thing about living on top of the hill,’ said the commodore, ‘it always occurred to me that there should be a quicker way to reach the bottom. And since I must make the journey, it only seemed equitable for me to purchase the tavern in the village below whose cellars we shall emerge in. That way, when I entertain in an ale house, I’m not pouring my money into some other rogue’s pockets.’

How much money had the old sea dog blown on building a backdoor to his pile? Well, not so much blown,
Dick thought to himself.
No, definitely not wasted this time.

It was a tight squeeze inside the lifting room’s cage, just enough space to shut the gate behind the party after they carried the girl thief inside. As the gate clicked shut there was a lurch while the lift’s counterweights attempted to match the overloaded state of the cage, and then they were moving down, faster and faster. Dick hoped the commodore had not short-changed the builders who’d installed his escape route. It would be an ironic end to all the murderous missions he had undertaken for the State Protection Board if Walsingham and his killers broke into the tower only to discover six bodies lying mangled at the bottom of a hidden shaft.

‘Unless this tunnel drops all the way to the other side of the world,’ said Dick, clutching on tight to the railing, ‘we’re only going to be putting off pursuit for half an hour.’

The commodore appeared happy enough with that. ‘Well now, there’s luck for us. Just long enough to get to the airship fields north of the city.’

‘You have got to be joking me,’ said Dick. ‘The board is going to have their people watching the loading ramps of every ’stat in the merchant marine. You won’t even get past the ticket desk before Walsingham’s people are step-marching you outside with a pistol shoved against your back.’

Daunt appeared concerned too. ‘And there is the small matter of Damson Shades here, good captain. I doubt there will be many airship officers who would be willing to embark a young lady in Charlotte’s condition without demanding that a surgeon be sent for.’

Commodore Black just winked back at them. ‘Well now, there you might be surprised.’

The dustmen moved cautiously into the unlit room left exposed behind the kitchen’s hidden wall. A lot more cautiously since two of their number had slid down a chute in the great hall to be impaled on one foot-high steel spikes. This cursed house held a lot of tricks. What Walsingham was fairly sure it didn’t contain anymore, was Charlotte Shades, Dick Tull, the commodore and his damnable friends. In front of him, a dustman rolled dirt gas grenades down the spiral staircase, the assassins waiting a couple of seconds for the room beneath to fill with choking, cloying poison, before storming the lower-level in a disciplined formation. A line of killers filed down with carbine rifles raised, each man covering the next, their rubber nose hoses swaying under their brass goggles.

‘They’ve taken the sceptre with them,’ whined Redlin, the royalist making sure he was positioned well beyond any gunfire that might break out inside the hidden chamber.

‘If they had any doubt of its value,’ said Walsingham, a tone of weariness permeating his voice, ‘your clever demands for its surrender disabused them of that notion.’

‘I am going to suck the marrow out of that bitch Shades when I catch her,’ said Corporal Cloake, rubbing the bruise on his ribs where he had been bowled over during the fight at the shop.

‘It is a pity matters must be kept tidy,’ said Walsingham. ‘If we had only paid her off and let her live, we would have the sceptre by now.’

‘No, that bastard Jared Black knows what he is about,’ said Redlin. ‘Why else would the commodore set his steamman friend to protecting Charlotte Shades? Your clever little thief girl planned this all along, they were working together from the start.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Walsingham. ‘They are fleeing blind. They have no idea what we require the sceptre for. It is this damned land. Her soul is set against us. She senses us here and is moving against us in subtle ways.’

‘This land,’ said Redlin angrily, ‘is
ours
. It belongs to the cause. Do not forget it. When that dirty parliament of shopkeepers has being turned out and the last guardian is left hanging from a street lamp, boots twitching in the air, then the nation will rest happy enough.’

Walsingham shrugged and smiled knowingly. ‘Yes, the Baron of Lexham, aren’t you? Well, if you and all your exiled royalist friends want to play at being lord of the manor again, you had better get me that sceptre back.’ Walsingham turned to look as one of the dustmen entered the kitchen from the main corridor, clutching a box of books. ‘These were open upstairs in the library, sir. The reading lights are still on inside the room.’

Walsingham picked out the top book,
The Fall of the Stag-lords
, and opened it to where it had been bookmarked. His breath sucked in as he saw what the inhabitants of the house had been reading. ‘Curious, lucky and dangerous. That is an unfortunate combination for us.’

‘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.

J
ethro 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.’