Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The fact that its social ambivalence allowed its wearer to play either part was not lost on the other passenger, who erred on the side of caution and gave a greeting. ‘A cold night, sir, for such frivolity. It seems there is a ball on almost every piece of land along the river this night.’

Cornelius decided it would be easiest if he put his fellow passenger at ease. ‘I shall have to take my cousin to task, sir, for it seems he never entertains at Dolorous Hall.’

‘I did note the dark windows on your isle, but there is no shame in that. There is entirely too much frivolity in Middlesteel these days.’ He lifted a surgeon’s bag that had been hidden behind his seat. ‘And as a man of medicine, I have often noted the effects that intemperate spirits may have on the body. Jinn, I would say, is the curse of our nation.’

‘Ah, a doctor.’ And a temperance man to boot.

‘Not of the two-legged kind,’ said the passenger. ‘Although I did start out in that noble profession. No, I practise on animals now. A vet. I have noted those who are in a position to do so often care more for their pets than for members of their own family. Indeed, I have just come from the house of Hermia Durrington — perhaps you know the good lady?’

Cornelius shook his head.

‘Her raven is sick and she is quite distraught. But I have prescribed a restorative and I have every confidence that the bird will soon be returned to its …’

Cornelius listened politely for the rest of the journey as the doctor of animals went on to describe every sick canine, feline, bird and mammal owned by the capital’s quality. Even as Cornelius was about to depart, leaving him in the boat, the vet seemed barely aware that he had discovered nothing about his fellow passenger, or that the groans coming from the oarsman were not entirely the result of rowing against the current of the Gambleflowers.

‘I should give you a discount on that ride, squire,’ whispered the pilot as he stopped to let Cornelius alight along a row of dark steps cut into the river embankment.

Cornelius passed him twice the fare. ‘And I shall give you a tip for bearing the rest of the journey.’

As Cornelius watched the boat slip back into the darkness of the river, his face began to melt, his skin turning to streams of liquid flesh, folding and refashioning itself into an exact duplicate of the vet’s features.

‘Her raven is sick and she is quite distraught,’ Cornelius cackled. He pitched the voice again, lower, until it was an exact duplicate of the vet’s own tones.

Anybody who had been watching would have seen a surgeon of animals stroll away into Middlesteel, while the river taxi bore away its remaining passenger — presumably one Cornelius Fortune — into the stream of the Gambleflowers.

As was his habit, Cornelius Fortune assumed the face of the man he had come to visit. Unlike most of those who were on the receiving end of Cornelius’s visitations, Dred Lands — proprietor of the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard — would not be shocked to meet someone wearing his own face. After all, Dred Lands hardly had much use for it himself these days.

The outside door of the shop was a cheap wooden affair with a latch that was easily lifted by a cracksman’s jimmy, but it was the hall inside where the real security began.

Two iron doors that would have honoured the front of a bank vault barred Cornelius’s way, an old but efficient blood-code machine jutting out from the wall. Cornelius pressed his thumb on the needle, a tear of his blood trickling into its nib as the transaction engine’s drums clicked and clacked in their rotary chamber. Even Cornelius could not imitate another’s essence to the level of detail required to fool one of these machines, but deception would not be needed here. Not when it was mainly his financial resources that funded the life and occupation of one of the few individuals in Middlesteel more reclusive than himself.

On the other side of the doors a steamman waited. Not one of the incredible beings of the life metal from the Steamman Free State, but a dull automaton — little more than an iron zombie — its parts scavenged from the unreliable Catosian servant machines that were available in the more exclusive markets of the capital. Lacking a voicebox as well as the wit to use it, the juddering creature limped down the corridor, through what passed for a showroom for the Old Mechomancery Shop, little more than a warehouse of pawned items awaiting repair.

The steamman’s four arms turned in a slow windmill fashion, keeping balance and urging Cornelius down a spiral staircase. You really had to know where to look to spot the duke’s hole inside the cellar; the fact that the shop was still standing was a testament to that. Six hundred years ago if Isambard Kirkhill and the parliamentarians’ new pattern army had discovered the hidden door, they would have burned the shop down to its foundation stones, along with a few of its neighbours, as a lesson. The metal servant triggered a hidden hatch and a section of the cellar floor opened up, revealing a square of orange light. They went down a line of narrow iron treads like a ship’s stairs. Below, more metal servants tended massive night orchids behind a glass wall, feeding the plants rats — no doubt cornered and trapped in the cold shop above. The rest of the chamber was fitted out like something from a Cassarabian harem or a Middlesteel bawdy house. When the royalists in the capital had hidden down here, they had hidden in style.

Lying on a scatter of large crimson velvet cushions holding a hookah filled with mumbleweed smoke was a figure that might have been mistaken for a steamman himself, but who — as he lifted himself up — revealed a largely human body, albeit one with a metal leg and a silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins that glowed in the orange gas light.

Burned, blackened lips just visible behind the mouth slash in the mask puckered in exasperation. ‘Must you always visit me looking like that?’

‘You with your mask,’ said Cornelius, ‘why should you mind?’

‘You have a cheek, talking to me about wearing masks.’ Dred Lands got up from the cushions, a hiss of compressed steam from the artificial leg leaking out as it took his weight. ‘I need to wear a mask so that people can bear to look at me.’

‘While I need to wear one so they cannot.’ Cornelius let his features re-form, his nose shortening to lose its hook while his brow reshaped and flattened out. ‘There, I am myself again.’

‘Now how can I be sure of that?’ grumbled Dred Lands. ‘For all I know, the real Cornelius Fortune could be a corpse you came across on a battlefield, or the face of your favourite teacher from your youth, now passed away.’

Cornelius tapped his arm. ‘You are familiar enough with this, I think.’

Dred sighed. ‘Enhancements? Or repairs, again?’

‘The latter.’ Cornelius picked up the book the mechomancer had been reading as his friend limped over to the side of the room, pulling back satin sheeting to reveal a luxuriously appointed workshop. Cornelius flicked through the first couple of pages. ‘ The Queen in the Leather Mask , by M.W. Templar. You know this nearly made it onto parliament’s sedition list, Dred, the similarities between our own Queen Charlotte and its sympathetic portrayal of a sitting monarch …’

‘Pah,’ said Dred, ‘it is celestial fiction, nothing more. The queen escapes to the moon at the end of the novel. Besides, I thought you and your “friend” Furnace-breath Nick had a taste for sedition?’

‘For if it prosper, it be not treason,’ said Cornelius, quoting from the speech Isambard Kirkhill had made after the last true king had been captured, gagged, and had his arms surgically removed so that he might never again turn his hands against the people.