Stephen Hunt - Jack Cloudie

Middlesteel, the Kingdom of Jackals’ capital city

Jack Keats was pushed aside by the others in the gang as the shout echoed out from the shaft in the wall. They were deep in the bowels of Lords Bank, having broken in through the sewers. But even so, if the boy kept yelling like that, one of the bank’s night watchmen would hear the racket and then every member of the young gang would be done for.

‘I told you it was a mistake bringing the boy,’ said Jack. ‘He’s too young.’

‘Shut your cake-hole,’ snarled Boyd. It was hard to tell whether the gang’s leader was snapping at Jack for questioning his authority, or venting his aggression towards the boy crawling deep into the shaft running alongside Lords Bank’s main vault. Boyd leant into the dark shaft, looking in vain for any sign of the small boy’s flickering gas lantern.

‘He’s scared down there,’ said Jack. And of course, my fingers aren’t trembling from fear. That’s just the cold.

‘He should be more scared of me,’ spat Boyd, bunching his fist in anger before turning on Jack. ‘Yeah, and you’ve got two brothers his age locked up in the sponging house. And that’s where they’ll stay unless we get inside this vault. So you think of your kin, not ’im down there.’

‘The workhouse,’ said Jack. You ignorant fathead . ‘They’re in the workhouse now, not the debtors’ prison.’

The five others standing behind the gang chief sniggered at the distinction and Jack’s superior tone of voice, all of them grimy and dust-covered from breaking through the brick foundations of the sewer to get this far. Maggie was with them and she gave him a despairing look — the kind that said this was not a good time to be wearing his education on his sleeve. She had shown him the ropes of street life in more ways than one. Eating stone-hard bread in a debtors’ prison and broken by the family debts, or washing down the same rations with the gravy water that passed for soup in the workhouse. Any difference between the two was paper-thin, and Maggie knew it.

‘Well, pardon me,’ laughed Boyd. ‘You’re not the son of a gentleman farmer down ’ere. You’re shit, just like us. On the job, on the make.’ Boyd pointed down the shaft towards the young boy. ‘He’s small, useful shit. You’re clever shit, and I need your fingers, so don’t give me no excuse to break some of ’em for you.’

Jack guessed this wasn’t the time to point out the meaning of a double negative to the hulking thug. ‘And what about you, Boyd?’

‘I’m the biggest shit of ’em all, Cracker Jack. I dream up the juicy jobs; I saw how your clever fingers might drag us all out of the gutter. After we pull off this job we’ll dress like swells and eat like lords from the best the city’s got to offer.’

Jack stared into the dark shaft where the boy was coughing. But only if their little shaft rat found the vault’s timing mechanism and managed to jam it, only if he held his nerve and kept the special tool Jack had forged wedged into the machinery for long enough. And only if Jack was every bit as good as he believed himself to be.

‘Talk to the runt,’ Boyd ordered Maggie. ‘Steady his nerves.’

Maggie moved to the hole and started whispering and cajoling. She was as much a mother as most of the young street children and pickpockets in the slums behind Sungate had known, although she was barely an adult herself. Her pleas and support must have had the desired effect, though, because Jack heard the cogs of the transaction-engine lock they had just exposed snap into place. It had shifted from its nighttime lockdown mode to its daytime setting, and that meant the vault could now be opened. Provided you bore the two golden punch cards of the chief cashier and chief clerk of Lords Bank, inserted in unison. Or, failing that, if you possessed a talent for opening such things.

The others in the group watched in quiet reverence as Jack dipped inside the toolbox he had lugged through the dark, stinking sewers, and began picking away at the exposed mechanism of the vault’s steam-driven thinking machine, taking readings from the symbols along the bank of slowly rotating drums. It took twenty anxious minutes to re-jig the punch-card reader to accept his input, but the physical work was in many ways the simplest part of this crime — pure mechanics, that any engineman skilled enough could undertake. But the next part of the job was one only the most talented cardsharp would be able to carry off. Jack would have to match his brain against the thick layers of cipher and code that lay between him and a series of steel bolts as large as his legs, persuading them to withdraw and admit the gang into the vault … into a whole new existence. Let me be good enough. Sweet Circle, let me get this one thing right. Just for today, let me be good enough.

‘That’s it, boy,’ muttered Boyd behind Jack, in what the ruffian probably mistook for encouragement rather than distraction. ‘You do this and you’ll be able to buy your two runts out of the poorhouse. You’ll be able to complete your training with the Brotherhood of Enginemen — hell, you could buy a seat on the guild’s council.’

Jack grimaced at the delinquent’s meagre conception of his life before his father’s debts had seen his family incarcerated. What comfort, to be appreciated by you, you simple-minded thug, but nobody else. This is what I’ve sunk to. Jack didn’t need to finish his guild training; he had already moved far beyond that. What he needed now was to buy his way into sitting the examinations and pay for his apprenticeship papers. Without that, no mill owner or dusty office of clerks was going to allow him within a thousand yards of any engineman’s position. A closed shop, like so many of the skilled trades.

‘Quiet,’ hissed Jack.

‘I’ve seen you do this a dozen times.’

‘Not like this.’ He brushed his dark hair out of his eyes. ‘This isn’t a lock on a jeweller’s shop or some merchant’s townhouse. This is a strong cipher, written by people who knew what they were doing. Proper cardsharps.’

Yes, the sort who were only too glad to turn him away from every job he had begged for, a ragamuffin without guild papers. Unwanted competition.

‘Please, Jack.’ Maggie’s voice sounded from next to the shaft. ‘Quickly. I can hear little Tozer down there. He’s crying.’

‘Button it up, runt,’ Boyd hissed down the shaft. ‘You keep your hand stuck in the timer as long as we need it there.’

Boyd could smell the money now, he could taste it. And the Circle knew, Jack had seen Boyd like this before. His shoulders started rolling from side to side, as if he was balancing the weight of all the mouths that needed feeding among his little mob. Boyd was always dangerous during such times. Pity the maid-of-all-works who stumbled across him rifling through her mistress’s cabinet when he had a necklace in one hand and a blade in the other.

Jack turned his attention back to the transaction engine, his clever fingers going about their work. Whatever puppy fat there had been on those fingers had disappeared years ago. He was bony now. Thin and desperate. There wasn’t a mirror in the derelict rookery apartment that Jack and the others called home, but he knew what he would see if he looked in one now. Street eyes. The trusting innocence of youth replaced by the narrow, darting glance of the slums. Old man’s eyes in a face too young for them. They were the same eyes he looked into when he saw his two brothers during the weekly visiting hour at the workhouse. Poor little Alan and Saul. Half his age, but they already had those eyes. Unless Jack could steal a different life for them. Buy time enough to forget the images of their father coughing his last breath away inside the damp confines of the sponging house. Am I any better than father was? I thought that after his death saw our family discharged from the debtors’ prison, I would be able to get a job — begin a new life, a new start. How little did I know. It was my failure that saw my brothers end up in the workhouse, my mistakes, not father’s. Trading the sponging house for the poorhouse, one low class of prison for another .