Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

There was a gasp of wheezing smoke from Boxiron’s stack as he shuddered back down to stillness. ‘Curse this human-milled, coal-choked malfunction of a body.’

‘I would say bless it, for I would be dead for sure without you,’ said Charlotte. ‘Although I do seem to remember telling you that I didn’t need your protection.’

‘Yes,’ said Boxiron. ‘As I was standing outside I could hear you were doing a superior job of managing to protect yourself. I merely entered to see how it should be done.’

‘Bugger you and your parson’s prophecies,’ Charlotte threw back.

‘Jethro Daunt tries hard not to believe in prophecies. I, on the other hand, have no such compulsion. The spirits are riding the sisters Lammeter and it’s still your name spilling out of their lips.’

Prophecy? This isn’t a prophecy. This is just business. Those Royalist twisters tried to double-cross me, is all. Keep their money, keep the sceptre too. So, the rebels want their ancient symbol of authority back, do they? Now it would cost that cheating dog Mister Twist three times what he’d offered her before, for even a sniff of this jewel-tipped beauty. Charlotte recalled the eerie way that Cloake had fled while escaping their duel of lightning-like energies. Moving like nothing human has a right to. Her jewel had saved her. The Eye of Fate had known. No, I’m imagining it. This was a royalist double-cross, no more, no less.

She kicked at the corpse of one of her would-be murderers on the way to the bakery. The back yard was open, cold air blowing across the room, the oven door standing ajar. Against her better judgment, she opened it wide and peered inside, having to choke back the vomit still riding her belly. Damson Robinson. What was left of her. Just like the killings in the papers. Drained of all her blood. But not a pair of fangs to be seen among these bastards. Charlotte had to stop herself from reaching out and touching the remains stuffed inside the oven. To feel the confirmation that here had been a human life, someone she had known, someone she had joked with. Damson Robinson had looked after all of her thieves. It might’ve been the kind of care that a highwaymen showed for a useful brace of pistols, oiling and cleaning and greasing them, but Charlotte hadn’t had such a great surfeit of friends in her life before that she noticed or minded the difference.

She heard the clanking legs of the steamman following her inside the bakery room. ‘There was a third man.’

Charlotte glanced outside and finding no sign of Cloake, shut the door, locking it. ‘He was on his toes fast enough after you flattened his two bruisers, the dirty jigger. And you, you followed me to the shop…’

Boxiron tapped his shiny vision plate. ‘My head is my original and I still have the sight of a steamman knight. That, at least, is not degraded. Give me line of vision and I can track you across the city from a mile away, day or night.’

‘That must come in useful.’

‘So, I have found it. But I didn’t require magnification optics to observe the Loa-cursed energies flowing between you and the leader of the ambush.’

‘I have no explanation for that,’ said Charlotte. ‘The force just appeared, crippling both of us when Cloake tried to strike me down with that queer-looking crystal blade of his.’

Boxiron reached out to rest a thick iron finger on the cloth-wrapped sceptre Charlotte was carrying. ‘And did this also appear to you in a burst of mysterious energies? Jethro softbody requested that you keep a low profile, yet you have in your possession something that looks suspiciously like it’s been removed from the Parliamentary treasury.’

‘What, this little thing?’

‘It’s many years since Jethro softbody reclaimed me from my employ as an enforcer for the flash mob,’ Boxiron wearily explained, ‘but even back in those days, it was well-known that you did not interfere or demand protection from Damson Robinson’s pie shop. Or was she no longer acting as a fence for the Cat-gibbon and her criminal faction in the underworld?’

So, it’s true. I knew you were crooked once, old steamer. ‘First time I visited the shop, honey. I just developed a hankering for an ale and beef pie, is all.’

Boxiron looked inside the oven, the wreckage of the body stuffed into the space, then fixed Charlotte with a steely stare. ‘I would suggest you switch your patronage to an alternative supplier.’

There were a lot of scenes that Dick Tull might have imagined discovering on the other side of the door when Commodore Black opened it to him and Sadly. The sight of a gorilla-sized steamman ruffian and a beak-nosed fellow sprawled across the floor of Tock House’s entrance hall pinning down a woman was not one of them. She looked young, and whoever the girl was, she was writhing on the tiles spitting out fever-mangled sentences as she twisted and turned.

‘A wicked storm crow, riding two minutes forward of the darkness,’ the commodore practically hissed at Dick. Without another word, the old u-boat man fished into Dick’s coat and came out with his hip flask. Leaving the door open, the commodore rushed back to the struggling woman, grabbing something out of a paper bag the other man was proffering towards Blacky, crushed it, mixed it with Dick’s fire water, then poured it down the girl’s throat.

Her thrashing lessened, and the commodore ordered the brutish steamman and his beak-nosed friend through to his kitchen table.

‘You and me,’ Dick called to the commodore. ‘Words, now!’

‘The board can bloody wait,’ the commodore called back as he disappeared down the corridor. ‘Lock the door behind you.’

That is what you think, Blacky. What’s coming after us ain’t going to wait, not for a second.

‘Are you sure we’ve come to the right place, Mister Tull?’ asked Sadly, disbelief wrinkling his disagreeable features.

‘Don’t you mind old Blacky, he was raised with the fleet-in-exile. Manners of a pirate, he has.’

Sadly was bending down on the floor where the girl had been seconds before, examining a long cloth-wrapped object left there. ‘Oh my giddy aunt. See here, Mister Tull. Lords-a’larkey-’ he flourished King Jude’s sceptre. ‘Oh my pretty, is this…?’

‘It’s the rope outside Bonegate jail,’ said Dick, snatching the sceptre off Sadly. ‘For anyone caught with it, if it’s real. Get your thieving hands off.’

Dick went after the commodore, the informant hustling after him, still seemingly mesmerized by the sceptre. ‘We need to be on our heels, Mister Tull. Low profile is the thing, not every Ham Yard crusher and redcoat in the regiments beating the bushes with their sabres looking for that.’

That’s Blacky all right, never a dull moment. Where did the board think he got his fortune from? Running grain shipments across the sea?

The steamman and his friend were lifting the girl onto the kitchen table while the commodore cleared it of a leftover meal by the simple expedient of sweeping the contents crashing onto the floor. She was speaking like a madwoman, her words incomprehensible, coming out garbled in a rapid continuous stream.

‘What language is that?’ Dick asked.

Before anybody could answer, her trembling hand thrust out towards Dick. ‘The spear-carrier, the spear-carrier has arrived.’

Dick glanced to at the sceptre still in his hands, the hulking steamman noting the rod in the agent’s possession and snatching it back off him. Not much of a spear. Then the girl returned to vomiting alien nonsense once more.

‘She is being ridden by the Loa,’ said the steamman. ‘She speaks the language of the spirits, the dead.’

‘Damson Shades,’ said the steamman’s friend, restricting the girl. ‘Peace. Keep still. You are going to bite your tongue off.’