by Stephen Hunt
Go tell the Spartans passerby,
that here obedient to their laws we lie.
Epitaph carved at Thermopylae.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
By Stephen Hunt
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Some years ago.
Luck. Her survival was all to do with her luck. That much Gemma Dark knew, such a small hope to cling to, clutching the old lucky shark’s tooth so tight between her fingers it left an impression on her thumb. Not as much of an impression as its original owner had bitten out of the wooden paddle she’d used to beat back the great white, and certainly not as much an impression as – BANG – the thump of the distant depth charge echoing off her U-boat’s hull.
‘Exploding high,’ hissed Gemma’s first mate, wiping an oil-streaked hand against his forehead. ‘And wide.’
Not quite high enough for her tastes. Captain Dark hovered behind the pilot and navigator’s chairs on the bridge; an angel of death for submariners that believed in such things.
‘Take us down deeper,’ Gemma ordered, ignoring the rebuke sounding back from the hull, the creaking of straining metal. ‘When our friends up there don’t spot any wreckage, they’ll start setting their fuses longer.’
Gemma’s voice, so deep and rich like honey, even with the march of years, sounded hollow and tinny at their current depth. The air recycling was struggling, just like the rest of her beautiful, ancient boat. A trusted sabre to slice into enemies of the cause. But not like this. Damn the aerial vessel, a long-range Royal Aerostatical Navy scout, hanging out of sight to catch any privateer rash enough to raid the Kingdom of Jackals’ surface shipping – like the richly laden merchantman Gemma had targeted. From hunter to hunted in one ill-starred transition. Gemma’s pursuer only had to be lucky once with the depth charges they were rolling out of their bomb-bay slides, while the deeper Gemma drove her boat to escape, the more dangerous the impact of any concussion wave that found its mark.
She was ancient, their u-boat, the Princess Clara, practically a family heirloom. Hundreds of years old like all of the royalist fleet. And Gemma could hear her pain, the groaning from the hull growing louder as they sank, the ratcheting of the gas-driven turbines deep beneath Gemma’s calf-length leather boots increasingly strident with every extra fathom of depth their screws thrust against.
The boat demonstrated her petulance by blowing a valve on the pipes at the far end of the bridge, two of Gemma’s crew leaping to close off the venting steam that began filling their compartment. The Princess Clara was in the ocean’s grasp, and the ocean was slowly crushing the life out of the submersible.
‘We could jettison cargo,’ said the first mate. ‘Flood the torpedo tubes and send more junk towards the surface. We might get lucky.’
Lucky. Yes. But the clever dog of a skipper standing on the bridge of the airship would know the difference between a real hit and the Princess expelling fake wreckage. He was an experienced submersible hunter; any fool could see that from the position of his ambush and the classic stovepipe hat-shaped spread of his depth charges. Shallow brim with a deep side-band … and deep shit for all of them. He was a professional, this one. A shark, as sharp as the tooth Gemma was rolling between her fingers. Of course, he might be a she. A female airfleet officer. Someone like Gemma, a face once considered beautiful, hardened by the privations of age and the cause and the fight – not ready to be pensioned off yet, for all of her silvery grey hair.
Those who never experienced the pleasure of serving under Gemma often mistook her vivaciousness for greed, her appetite for life for swinishness. Curse the lot of them. Lubbers and cowards and weaklings, afraid of a strong-willed captain. Pirates and rebels. The two terms had become interchangeable long before she’d been born. Gemma stole every cargo she came across, and if she had to hang a couple of captured officers to make the taking of the next cargo easier, that was only to build her reputation. A privateer could never have too much of a reputation. That wasn’t vanity – hardly any compensation for her age-faded beauty at all. Just cold economic sense. Manacle a crew to their ship and send her to the bottom of the seabed with a torpedo, and the handful of survivors you let out in the lifeboat would soon spread word that resisting Captain Gemma Dark was not a safe or sensible option. Did that make her a bad person? Her crew took fewer losses that way. And when continuing an uneven conflict between the royal family and their disloyal parliament that had been lost centuries ago, well, all was fair in such a war. Sailors might call Gemma the Black Shark in harbour-side taverns, for the predatory silhouette she’d added to her house’s personal coat of arms after surviving the sinking of her uncle’s vessel as a girl, but what was in a name? Gemma had cargoes to plunder. She had a crew to feed. Did the Kingdom’s Parliament of filthy common shopkeepers think of that when they dispatched their clever dogs to hunt her titled head? Not a bit of it. And their cargoes were so luxurious … and profitable. Precious metals. Rare jewels. Fine wines. Expensive silks and spices. The latest mechanical advances from the Royal Society. And the squawks of their owners so fine as she attached a noose to a sail and watched their boots kick and struggle.
The crewman on the pilot wheel gave a yelp of alarm as one of the gas lamps illuminating the deep of the dark outside the u-boat imploded. Little pieces of hot glass showered the armoured viewing glass at the fore of the bridge.
‘We can’t keep this up,’ cried the pilot, his eyes focused on the needle of the altimeter, the little needle pushing so far into the red at the right-hand side of the brass dial, there was nowhere left for it to go.
Before the pilot could do anything about it except bitch, Gemma Dark had a pistol out and shoved into his temple. ‘Follow my damn orders. Down bubble. Gentle declination, keep on pushing deeper.’
A crack sounded behind her. One of the pieces of oak panelling that lined the bridge splintering as the metal it was riveted to tightened. The wheel shook in the pilot’s hands as he tried to fight back his fear.
‘There!’ called the first mate. The black lines of an underwater trench lay revealed by the light of their two intact exterior lamps. ‘It’s a damn big drop, not on the charts either.’
No. None of this was on the charts. The retreat of the magma of the Fire Sea to the north was leaving a whole new topography under the surface of the sea. Underwater volcanoes, mountains and valleys to be explored. Not on their charts, and certainly not on the charts of Parliament’s deadly airship circling above them.
Gemma had chased her luck, just as she always had.
‘Head into the trench,’ ordered Gemma, counting the seconds from the last thump of a depth charge in her head.
The wheel trembled in the pilot’s hands. ‘We’ll die down there!’
‘The correct response is aye-aye, captain,’ said Gemma, pushing the pistol in tight against his temple.
‘They won’t set their charges deeper than the seabed,’ growled the first mate as he realized what his captain
was looking to do.
‘No,’ Gemma agreed.
‘If we last that long,’ said the first mate, his eyes settling on the creaking armoured crystal canopy in front of them. A single piece of chemically reinforced glass. If the screen gave way …
‘Yes,’ said Gemma. If we last that long.
All around them, the Princess Clara’s complaints swelled louder and louder as the darkness of the underwater trench swallowed the vessel up. A last wave of depth charges tumbled towards where the u-boat had just been, drums buckling under extreme pressure even as the charges detonated.
Then, as the avalanche into the trench started to rain down onto her u-boat’s hull, Gemma Dark’s luck finally turned.
CHAPTER ONE
This wasn’t the normal quality of residence Dick Tull got to stake out. When you worked for the State Protection Board, the preservation of the realm was more often made in the great slums of the capital, blighted tenements their lowlife inhabitants called the rookeries. Where narrow streets and broken gas lamps simmered with the smoke of manufactories, and alehouse talk ran to rebellion and plots.
In the slums, it was easy to surveil such souls as Dick Tull’s masters suspected of treason. Anyone with a room would gratefully accept pennies from a stranger in exchange for an hour or two at a cracked window overlooking a similarly rundown tenement. Peeping Tom, arsonist, murderer, stalker, State Protection Board officer. Owners hardly cared, as long as the coin provided proved genuine. Parliament’s enemies bred like rats inside the filth and the poverty of the slums. But here? Waiting on the pavement of a well-lit boulevard? A long line of almost identical five-storey townhouses behind Dick, the fine wrought iron gates and high walls of Lord Chant’s residence in front of him on the opposite side of the street. Dick could smell their money; smell it as only someone who had never had any could. From the shining copper spears of the railings to the way manservants would imperiously emerge to greet calling guests.
Bugger the lot of them.
Dick Tull was dressed in the dark frock coat of a hansom cab driver, warming his freezing hands on the brazier at the street’s cab halt opposite his cabbie apprentice. That much of his disguise was genuine. Dick Tull was the master, while young William Beresford was standing in the apprentice’s shoes Dick had occupied some forty years before. Eager and stupid and patriotic. Too dull to realize there had never been any shine in the great game; that he and Dick were just the weight of the manacles needed to bind the common people from getting above their station. Glorified watchmen, protecting the shiny bright railings of these expensive whitewashed buildings from the forces of anarchy. And like all good watchmen, Billy-boy had been set to watch, watch with his keen young eyes.
But what about Dick? What good was it being the state’s muscle, when the muscles were growing old, aged and weak? Dick’s thin hands covered with grey fingerless wool gloves, the ageing skin on his hangdog face almost cracking in the late evening chill. Watching, always watching. Just like the State Protection Board’s motto bid them to: See all. Say nothing.
For most of his life, Dick Tull had been seeing all and saying nothing. And now he could see that he wasn’t just training another fledgling officer in the arcania and tricks of the spying trade. He was training his replacement. And where would that leave Dick? Shivering out in the cold, no doubt, like the old nag clicking its horseshoes at the front of their fake hansom cab. One step away from the knacker’s yard, that’s all Dick was.
While Dick Tull’s cheeks were pale and drawn, frigid under the long side burns, young William Beresford’s cheeks were flushed a rosy red by the cold, his eyes eager and bright. Tull could bring a flush to his cheeks too. He drew out the dented brass hip flask from under his coat and downed a burning slug of its bounty, ignoring the disapproving look from his partner.
‘Just my cover,’ said Dick.
‘There’s a lot of cover sloshing about in there, sarge.’
‘It’ll be a long night,’ said Dick.
And he was relying on the boy’s young eager eyes to memorize the faces of any royalist rebels that might come calling at Lord Chant’s place tonight.
‘Jigger this for a fool’s errand, anyway,’ Dick spat.
‘What makes you say that, sarge?’ William asked.
Dick nodded towards the mansion gates. ‘Why would rebels want to infiltrate Lord Chant’s household? If they wanted to assassinate him, they wouldn’t need to go to all the trouble of getting one of their people into his household, would they? They could just stand out here shivering their nuts off alongside us, and the first time his Lordship came out, well—’ Dick patted the side of his frock coat where his pistol was strapped, ‘—a bullet in the head is a lot less trouble than play-acting as a butler and slipping poison into his nib’s brandy glass.’
‘I hear an old man talking, sarge,’ said William. ‘Where’s your sense of imagination? Lord Chant is a force in the House of Guardians, keeper of the privy something or other. He has the keys to the parliamentary chamber. What if that’s what they’re after? The board ain’t going to want a gang of royalist scum slipping a dozen barrels of liquid explosives under Parliament’s floorboards, are they? Or they could be trying to blackmail his lordship, leverage his connections in the house.’
Yes, the boy had a point. Clever. Ambitious. Well educated. All the things that Dick was not. Give it a couple of years, and if by some good chance Dick was still on the payroll of the board, then he would likely be working for Billy-boy here. If not him, someone just like him. They all got promoted over his head. And here he was, shivering on a rich man’s street, all these years later. The quality giving Dick orders, giving him long, tiring night-time surveillances with added apprentice-minding duties.
At some point in this long dirty trade, Dick had turned around, and when he’d glanced back, his life had passed him by. The worst thing was, in retrospect Dick could gaze back and see all the decisions he’d made, settlements that he could have remade, to nudge his life towards the better. The things he should have said, the people he should have talked to, the paths he should have gone down. There was a trend now in the penny-dreadfuls – cheap fiction from the stationers’ stalls – for what were called counterfactuals, invented histories that could have been, but hadn’t. Dick could see the counterfactual for his own life – a career where he had ended up as a senior board officer, with a fat pension and a big house and a plump happy wife, smiling sunny children waiting for him when he got home. And in that counterfactual, perhaps the Dick Tull in that world was dreaming of a thin, hungry doppelganger of himself, his hair running grey beyond his years, and nothing to return to of an evening except cold rented lodgings in one of the least salubrious parts of town. A shrew of a landlady who spied on him just as he spied on the enemies of the Jackelian nation. It’s never made easy. Not for me.
Dick glanced down the street. As late as it was, the street was still surprisingly empty – only a few street hawkers trying to entice householders’ servants to the doorstep for a final purchase of the day. And it wasn’t just because of the thin white layer of snow and frost painting the cobbles and trees along the road. There was something else stalking the streets of the capital, if the newssheets were to be believed. Vampires. Tales like that should have been confined to the pages of the penny-dreadfuls that were one of Dick’s more faithful companions in bed, but now the Middlesteel press was running with headlines as sensational as their editors’ imaginations. Bodies were being discovered in the capital of the Kingdom drained of every last vestige of blood. In the east of the city where Dick’s humble lodgings could be found, the people were patrolling the narrow streets in gangs of vigilantes – although they preferred to call themselves the ‘city militia’. The Circle help anyone that got in their way. For, like Dick, the Middlesteel mob had never seen a vampire. In fact, until now, nobody who wasn’t a fan of inferior literature had ever encountered a vampire in the Kingdom of Jackals. This presented something of a problem for the rough m
ilitia rabble … but one that had not proved insurmountable. With the mob’s usual ingenuity, they were now resorting to the simple expedient of hanging any strangers who had the misfortune to be travelling unrecognized through the streets.
Of course, in a rich area like this, no militia had been formed of middle-class clerks, bankers, merchants and their household staff. The rich didn’t get their hand dirty, that’s what they paid their taxes for. Quite literally. For to be made a Lord in the Kingdom was not a matter of birth now, but a matter of money. The industrial purchase system. The revenue service kept a record of how much tax was paid by each citizen. Passing set amounts over your lifetime would automatically trigger a title … a small amount of tax earning a knighthood, a filthily large amount guaranteeing a dukedom.
‘Here we go, then,’ said Dick, the noise of iron wheels rattling on cobblestones given amplification by the cold night air. Around the corner emerged one of the more recent varieties of horseless carriages. Steam-driven, the carriage was wider, taller and a great deal less elegant than the high-tension clockwork driven vehicles that until recently had been the mainstay of traffic running through the capital’s streets. But that was progress for you. Legislation had been passed last year in Parliament allowing these ugly, cheap, steam-driven brutes to share the road, and now the capital’s crowded passages were filled with the smoke and noise of such things. The press had nicknamed them kettle-blacks and already the omnibus companies had pressed them into service for the conveyance of paying passengers. If Dick had been a real hansom cab driver, he might have been retiring in the next few years, he suspected. Always change. Never for the better.