Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Have you seen him, Septimoth, have you seen the master? It’s well past time for supper.’

‘He is about the house,’ said Septimoth.

‘Is that so, butler? About our corridors, is he? About our empty dusty rooms? How easy it seems to be for him to dis appear into the vastness of this cold, dark place. This place which he seems unwilling to pay to adequately heat, staff, or adorn with the niceties of society.’

‘He will return when he is ready, damson.’

‘Of that I have no doubt.’ The old lady carved off a quarter of the pie for Septimoth, pushing a chunk of warm bread onto his plate. Then she separated out a generous portion for Cornelius Fortune and tucked it into the warm oven, keeping the slimmest portion for her own supper. ‘Point him in the direction of the oven when he appears, old bird. I have no doubt you will still be about when he chooses to show himself.’

‘It shall be as you say,’ noted Septimoth.

Before she turned in for the night, Damson Beeton produced a crimson feather. ‘Have you been moulting. Septimoth?’

Septimoth stared intently at the semi-scaled feather. ‘Where did you find that?’

‘With a handful of others like it, you old pigeon. In the shrubbery in front of the house.’

Septimoth’s tucked-back wings seemed to shiver with anticipation. ‘In the garden?’

‘Just so.’ She placed the feather on the table. ‘If the master will hire nothing but day labour to tend the garden, is it too much to ask you to drop your feathers in your own tower, or better yet, in the compost heap behind the lake?’

Septimoth watched the housekeeper waddle off to the warmth of her quarters at the far end of the house. He picked up the crimson feather from the table. This was something he had not seen for a long time, not since Quatershift. Nor was it something he had expected to see in Jackals for the remainder of his lifetime. He was tempted to ignore the call. He was an outcast, so let him act like one. But it was too powerful a totem to resist.

Falling upon his slab of pie, he devoured it in a display of rapaciousness that would have turned Damson Beeton’s stomach and earned him an admonishment had she still been in the room. Then he removed the portion that had been set aside for Cornelius Fortune and took it towards the lifting room in the corridor outside. There were only three storeys to Dolorous Hall, but the mansion’s current owner had paid for an eyrie tower to be built for Septimoth, the round stone construction lancing out of the roof like a black finger. Septimoth corrected himself; at least, there were only three storeys that were visible . Once the lifting-room doors had closed, Septimoth pulled out an ivory handle from the copper wall panel, twisting a second handle counter-clockwise. Rather than rising up to his quarters, the room started to descend, falling through the bedrock of the island with the hiss of counter weights rising in the opposite direction and the clack of the turning clockwork cable feeder.

After three minutes the lifting-room doors opened onto a long corridor, rough-hewn rock walls dotted with flickering oil-fed lanterns mounted below the lead pipe that fed them. Before the capital’s river had been artificially widened to prevent flooding, the islands of the Skerries had been hills, prosperous enclaves looking across the nearby Gambleflowers and the city below. Septimoth emerged in a large hall, briefly glancing up at the fish and the dark course of the river flowing over the atrium skylight of the old Middlesteel Museum. It had not taken much to seal the abandoned building underwater and pump it free of water. Even Jackals’ most secret of police forces, the Court of the Air, were unable to peer beneath the Gambleflowers with their sorcerous watchers.

It was amazing how much of the old museum’s stock the curators had abandoned in the basement chambers, before moving to their acreages of new marble over in the west of the capital. Unfashionable royalist statues and artefacts mostly — a cavalier on horseback, waving a carbine at a rearing goreback; the massive lion-headed iron expansion engine that had taken the royal airship Scramblewolf across the ocean to discover Concorzia and the other colonies. Now the abandoned museum had only one patron and a couple of regular visitors. Cornelius Fortune was in the museum’s main hall at the centre of the building, sitting in the shadow of a large transaction engine that should by rights have been delivered to the endless engine rooms of Greenhall, but had instead been diverted to their island — piece by stolen piece. Septimoth placed the plate of supper next to the boxes of purloined punch cards that his friend had acquired from the civil service.

It never surprised Septimoth how easily such things came into Cornelius’s possession. Before Quatershift, before the mask, his friend had been Jackals’ greatest thief. The thief with a thousand faces, with an identity so fluid he had flowed across the capital, taking what pleased him, making any mischief that entertained him. The Nightshifter . Many years ago. Before the curse of love.

‘Your supper, sir.’

‘You play the butler poorly, old friend. I’ll take it in a little while.’ Cornelius pointed at the pile of glossy gutta-percha punch cards, each one proudly embossed with Ham Yard’s coat of arms in one corner. ‘There’s a pattern to the grave robbing. It’s always steammen being turned out of their coffins and it’s always the oldest corpses being taken. Where there’s a young cadaver, the body is left untouched.’

‘Young is a relative concept when applied to the people of the metal,’ said Septimoth. ‘Steammen outlive our flesh by many spans of both our races’ lifetimes.’

Cornelius showed his friend the list he had compiled. ‘None of the officers at Ham Yard know what to make of this.’

‘Are you sure these crimes are linked to Robur?’

‘Even if I hadn’t been tipped off by that young urchin from Rottonbow … I can feel it, Septimoth. In my bones. He is behind it. You carried Robur’s body over the cursewall, what do you think?’

‘I have no talent for pre-vision now,’ said Septimoth. He placed the crimson feather down on the table next to the plate. ‘But there are others who have.’

Cornelius raised the feather between his fingers. ‘Your people? I thought you carried the death mark, old friend? You’ve been exiled. They’ll kill you if you fly into one of their nests, rip you to pieces.’

‘I will not need to travel to one of our villages. They will come for me.’

‘Let them bloody wait,’ said Cornelius. ‘Let them fly in circles around Middlesteel until their wings turn blue with cold and ache with tiredness. What do you owe them?’

Septimoth pulled out his bone pipe, turning the flute sadly in his long talon-like fingers — all that remained of his mother, the squadron-queen, his whole tribe. ‘You know what debt I owe my people. Did we not escape from Quatershift together, after you broke the door to my cage?’

‘Sweet Circle,’ Cornelius swore at his friend’s stubbornness. ‘You are dead to them, Septimoth. Your people’s rulers can go jigger themselves, the way they have treated you.’

‘The spirits of the wind still whisper to me,’ said Septimoth, ‘I can hear my gods again. Stormlick has not yet abandoned me. I must answer the mark of the crimson feather.’

‘If you must,’ said Cornelius. ‘But if your people want you to go off on some mystical sky quest hunting for skraypers to bring down, you tell them you are otherwise engaged. We have work to do. I have compiled a list of locations where our grave-robbing friends are likely to strike next.’

‘I shall be back in good time,’ said Septimoth. ‘There will be hours enough for me to ride the fog above Middlesteel’s graveyards for you.’