Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Charlotte’s reverie was broken by the intrusion of the red-coated sentry as she approached the end of the corridor where the Master of Bells had passed a minute earlier.

‘You, I don’t know,’ said the soldier, a ham-sized fist stretching out to halt her.

‘I’m one of the new grease monkeys working on the Bell Tower,’ said Charlotte.

‘Young for it,’ said the soldier, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. ‘Staff in the tower are mutton, not lamb. Letters after their name, with apprenticeships to their machines and a way with cogs. Now you, you look like lamb to me.’

Charlotte sighed. She was tired. Using the jewel, the Eye of Fate, so frequently in such a short space of time was a terrible drain on her, but it couldn’t be helped. Usually she embraced its touch. She became a different person when she used the jewel on the stage. More confident. The fears and worries of life a distant, fleeting thing. Her jealousies and ambitions and fears of failure and loneliness melting away. But too much use and the jewel grew heavy… ice spreading out across her blood as she shifted her blouse, the soft blue nimbus from the crystal reaching out from her chest and drifting towards the sentry as though the fog were the softest of cigar smokes.

‘Look into the light,’ Charlotte urged. ‘There’s no lambs inside the light, no mutton, no apprenticeships or cogs.’

Blinking furiously, the soldier stumbled back, the light splitting into a forest of fractal branches as it caressed the cheeks around his sideburns

‘You have a brother or a sister with children?’ Charlotte asked, trying not to grimace as the cold spread through her veins, sapping away at her strength.

‘A brother,’ mumbled the soldier, ‘with six little ones.’

‘Then you recognize your niece.’ Charlotte tried to smile, even as the pressure of the jewel pressed down against her lungs. ‘The niece who you’ve been showing around the debating chamber now that Parliament is shut for the night.’

‘Yes,’ the soldier returned her smile without any of the pain that Charlotte felt, ‘I know my niece, my Alice.’

‘We need to go,’ said Charlotte. ‘You had better get me out into the square before the colonel of the House Guards finds out that you have been larking about on duty with your family.’

‘Bloody Nora, lass, you’re going to cost me my corporal’s stripes,’ moaned the soldier. ‘Let’s go!’

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, pushing the jewel out of sight once more. ‘Let’s.’

‘Thank you for showing me around, uncle,’ said Charlotte as the soldier unlocked a sentry door in the high spear-headed railings that surrounded Parliament. ‘I won’t say a thing. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

‘Off with you, girl,’ said the corporal, nervously glancing behind him to make sure they were unobserved. ‘Don’t say a thing to your ma. You’ll get me into right trouble, you will.’

Charlotte winked at him and slipped away into the night. The force of her mesmerism was similar to a waking dream. Give it a couple of days and the soldier would be hard-pressed to tell if his niece’s visit had been real or a fancy he’d imagined. He was in good company. There would be plenty of parliamentary staff who would be experiencing the same sense of confusion over the next couple of days. But there was one man for whom the glamour she had cast would hopefully last at least a few hours more. She had made sure it was a strong one. The Master of the Bells was sitting in a nearby tavern waiting for his apprentice to join him for a last drink before he wound his way home. And Charlotte did not want to disappoint him. Not with the sceptre of the last king of Jackals wrapped up in rags inside the master’s tool case. That, surely, was worth raising a cup of ale to. She rubbed her arms as she crossed the street, dodging into the shadows of one of the tailor shops that specialized in the robes, wigs, and finery of the myriad positions filled by Parliament’s masters and servants. A warm hansom cab ride to the tavern? No, Charlotte hardly had the strength left to wipe the cabbie’s memory of the journey, and she had come too far to leave a careless trail from Parliament’s railings back to her home. Even the dullards in Ham Yard might get lucky once, and by tomorrow they would be a legion of constables and inspectors crawling over the streets desperate for witnesses. There’s a cheery thought.

Charlotte’s arm was beginning to ache from the weight of the long toolbox and the sceptre concealed within. Just another worker winding her way home through Middlesteel’s streets and lanes after a full day’s graft, nothing out of the ordinary to be remembered by the townspeople trudging their way back from mills and clerks’ rooms. Damson Robinson’s establishment still seemed to be working late, oil lamps visible through the cracks of closed blinds. Of all the things I can depend on, Damson Robinson’s waiting up to take receipt of our crime lord’s share of tonight’s bounty is pretty high on the list.

Charlotte rattled the door handle and finding it open, entered the pie shop’s front. Inside, contrary to Charlotte’s expectations, there was no sign of Damson Robinson, or indeed Captain Twist. His malevolent little toad of an assistant — Mister Cloake — was there, though, as promised along with two other men. She marked them as dustmen from the look of their dark simple-clothes and the stench masks dangling from their necks. Except that refuge collectors shouldn’t hang there so still and dangerous, like blades hovering for a belly to gut. Apart from her friend, what was also markedly absent was the case containing the gold coins that had encouraged Charlotte out of the shop earlier.

‘Are we emptying our bins early tonight, honey?’ Charlotte asked.

‘An object as valuable as King Jude’s sceptre cannot have too much protection. I trust you have it with you?’ said Cloake.

‘If I didn’t, I’d be lying gassed inside a vault under Parliament and being prodded by the guards’ bayonets, not standing here. Where’s my money and where’s Damson Robinson?’

‘Both out back,’ said Cloake. ‘Pass me over the sceptre. I need to verify its provenance.’

Out back, eh? Because you’re so very generous, you’d let her take a bath of gold guineas while the three of you wait out front for my return.

As Charlotte glanced to the kitchen door she caught the acrid smell of pastry turned to cinders.

‘Here it is, honey,’ said Charlotte, bending down and undoing the clasps along her long toolbox’s side. She lifted up the sceptre, still wrapped and swaddled with grease rags. ‘It’s heavy.’

Without a word, the two dustmen stepped forward to take the sceptre. Pretending to stumble, Charlotte closed the distance between them in a step and then continued to swing, pounding the gold handle into the first man’s navel. As he was doubling up, she rammed its diamond head into the second bruiser’s face, connecting with the nose and sending him stumbling back, the stench mask swinging wildly as the pain of a broken bone percolated through his stunned mind. ‘Damson Robinson never burnt a pie in her life, you royalist bastards.’

Cloake was advancing on her, pulling a weapon out from under the back of his coat — a wicked double-pronged thing, like a crystal tuning fork. It might be sharp, but she still had the advantage of range with the sceptre’s length.

‘I am going to lay you next to her corpse in the oven,’ Cloake leered. ‘After I have drained the last of your juices. The Mass must feed.’

Charlotte raised the still swaddled sceptre, holding it up as a lance to impale the treacherous little thug. He turned his strange weapon in his hand, the crystal throbbing and pulsing with red light. As it sparked, the jewel beneath Charlotte’s blouse flared hot against her skin, all the cold of her weary, exhausting night’s labour mesmerizing the staff of Parliament banished in a moment. Hot. It’s never burned hot before, only cold! Two feet from her, Cloake had collapsed onto his knees, howling like a banshee. Cracking in the air, the crimson energies from his strange blade wrapped around the man, whipping and burning his skin. Charlotte was in no position to focus on his agonies. She was folding to her own knees, the blood of her body burning, running like acid inside her.