Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘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, Quatershift, 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.

Jethro 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.