by Stephen Hunt
‘I am Elizica of the Jackeni,’ the voice hardened, spinning around Charlotte. ‘The resonance of my soul still sings through the bones of the land, flowing through its quartz and granite. Joined with all of those who followed me, all those who preceded me.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I have been here before you. You must follow in my footsteps.’
‘I’m no queen,’ Charlotte protested. ‘No royal blood flows through my veins.’
‘The daughter of your mother … can you be so sure? It matters not. I was the first queen of Jackals. Was I born noble? No, I was born of the land and that is all that matters. You are Jackelian and the land abides.’
‘I can’t help you, please don’t ask me.’
‘You have everything you need. Remember, you walk in my footsteps.’
‘No!’
Light was fading, the shadows growing, darkness returning while monsters circled and awaited the departure of Charlotte’s protector.
‘What do you need from me?’ Charlotte cried at the woman’s ebbing shape.
A faint whisper came from the vanishing point of light. ‘What I always ask for. A sacrifice.’
Mister Twist was upon her again, the jewel from her chain clutched in his black, clawed, scaly hands – the Eye of Fate transforming in a shimmer of light, turning red and pointed. After it had transmuted into a two-pronged blade, Twist plunged the thing into her neck, the touch of the blade burning like acid. Charlotte was impaled and falling to the cave’s flooded floor. She watched the water run red with blood, her blood, as the two creatures dropped and feasted on her body. Poor. Little. Roamer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Poor lass,’ said Commodore Black, watching while Daunt tipped the potion he had concocted from the contents of the u-boat’s medical cabinet down Charlotte Shades’ throat. ‘Is her fever fading yet?’
‘Getting worse if anything,’ said Daunt. ‘But it must break soon.’ His words sounded hollow, even to him. If it was any normal fever. Not this cursed illness. Her body lying wracked by an unearthly presence, just like the poor sisters.
‘I heard a noise from her berth in here, a wicked whistling and rattling as if her cabin’s air scrubbers were about to overload,’ said the commodore.
‘She was speaking in tongues,’ noted Boxiron. ‘But this language was an ancient steamman dialect, sung in raw binary.’
‘An unholy racket, whatever,’ said the commodore.
‘It would sound better emanating from the voiceboxes of my people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but not by much.’
‘Everyone else is in the ready room,’ said the commodore. ‘Waiting on your frightful intellect to descend and solve all of life’s little mysteries.’
‘I will settle for getting to the heart of our current affair, good captain.’
Commodore Black spun the wheel on the iron door of the u-boat cabin, opening it onto the passage outside. White sodium light soaked the interior of the craft, lending everything a fine, harsh cast. Even the brown wood panels that should have softened the passage appeared bright and severe, every knot of oak throbbing under the artificial illumination. Inside the Purity Queen’s stout hull, the u-boat hadn’t changed a jot since Daunt and Boxiron had sailed with the commodore to the Isle of Jago all those years ago. The ex-parson had noticed the changes outside, though, as they were ferried across to the submarine. Small interlocking plates, thousands of them, welded over the surface of the catamaran-shaped u-boat’s twin hulls. It was as though a smith had decided to turn the submersible’s hull into a piece of sculpture, plate upon plate, all crusted green with the embrace of the sea. In places the angles at which they joined the hull seemed random; in other spots the plates took on a swirling pattern, a fresco cut in steel. The reworking of the Purity Queen might have been mistaken for an attempt to sculpt on the scales of a fish, an organic texture to soften the warlike lines of the ex-fleet sea arm vessel, although there could be no masking of the double-prowed submarine’s torpedo tubes. It transpired that the remodelling hadn’t resulted from the artistic inclinations of an insane blacksmith. According to the commodore, the alterations were state-of-the-art theorisings of a naval architect who had been handsomely paid to ensure that the old u-boatman’s vessel could set to sea with an experimental hull able to wrap sonar waves around her length. Fold them so gently the Purity Queen might as well have been a ghost slipping through the depths.
Daunt followed the commodore through the narrow corridors, squeezing past the stripe-shirted crew going about their duties – as roguish and varied an assortment of sailors as befitted Blacky’s unorthodox cargoes and smuggler’s landings.
‘Well, this much I can tell you, lad. If my sister Gemma is involved, there’ll be a good bit of dying to be done after we’ve set a tack across her wind.’
Daunt entered the ready room with Boxiron behind him; the steamman’s clanking legs startling the boat’s cat, the surprised feline a black streak as she shot between the commodore’s legs in search of a less crowded cabin.
Dick Tull and his informant, Sadly, were waiting at the long room’s oval table, a polished wooden surface inlaid with scenes from Jackelian naval history, suiting the u-boat’s previous status as a war-horse of the state. Kingdom dreadnoughts clashed with Cassarabian paddle galleys, submersible flotillas exchanged torpedoes above an underwater mountain range, athletic u-boat men struck heroic positions of defiance on a bridge as their captain hung vigilantly onto a lowered periscope. It seemed to Daunt that the surface would be more appropriately decorated now with views of smugglers concealed beneath bushes from revenue service riders and redcoated soldiers. Although even with fresh artwork, the table would still look out of place being set, not with food, but the crown jewels of the last absolute monarch to rule over Jackals.
‘Oh, this is a rich biscuit, say I,’ moaned Sadly, his face a greenish pallor – and not just from the shade of the ocean outside the room’s armoured porthole. Even sitting down and resting his clubfoot, he clung to his cane like it was his sole handhold on the world. ‘A fortune in nicked jewels and precious metals laid out in front of me, and I’d get a fast blade in my back if I dared to set foot back home to fence it off.’
‘You’ve already got a walking stick, lad. You don’t need my mortal sceptre for a cane,’ noted the commodore, sitting himself down at the head of the table. ‘And this belonged to the royalists long before the House of Guardians laid their grubby hands on it, or the poor lass back in my cabin.’
‘She’s still not come around?’ asked Tull.
‘It’s not a physical injury,’ said Daunt. ‘At least, not as the vessel’s doctor understands it.’ Beyond any of the healing techniques I mastered in the church, too.
‘Pity,’ said Tull. ‘The girl must know something about why Walsingham is nobbing around the capital, pretending to be a royalist and helping the rebels make off with King Jude’s sceptre.’
‘I doubt, good sergeant, if Damson Shades knows any more than whatever tale she was fed to get her to steal the jewels.’
‘Your metal friend reckons that they tried to kill her. She must be good for something.’
‘Mere thoroughness on their part,’ said Daunt. ‘The Mistress of Mesmerism may not even have known that the royalists were involved, let alone the State Protection Board.’
‘Why?’ Tull laughed. ‘Because of that yarn you spun me earlier about some sisters babbling the same kind of nonsense on their sickbed that the girl’s spouting?’
‘Are you a good Circlist, Mister Tull? Holding to what is right and rational. Rejecting superstition?’
‘Do I look like I go to church regularly, amateur? I know it takes more than some ancient mumbo-jumbo to turn a ruthless sod like Walsingham. If the major’s skulking around the capital holding hands with royalist rebels, there’s more in it for him than the whisperings of shades and ghosts.’
‘Is he a good traitor?’ asked Daunt.
Dick Tull started to say some
thing, then stopped himself. He was about to speak again when Daunt warned him: ‘Your first thoughts, if you please. What initially jumped into your mind when I asked you the question?’
‘That Walsingham isn’t the sort,’ said Dick, playing thoughtfully with the edges of his greying moustache. ‘Oh, he’s ambitious all right, and not carrying too much weight in the way of scruples when it comes to getting his way – inside the board or out. But selling the country down the river to the rebels? And to the gill-necks to boot, if they’re financing the royalist cause? I’d never have pegged Walsingham as good for that.’
Daunt stroked the sceptre. ‘Not even for a king’s weight in gold?’
Dick Tull snorted and turned to Sadly. ‘Could you fence that piece?’
‘Lever the jewels off and melt down the rest for gold, is more the way of it, Mister Tull. Who would buy that fancy piece intact, says I? Who would have the money to do the deed or the nerve to hold onto it? Maybe the caliph down in Cassarabia. He might hang it in his palace as one in the eye for the infidel northerners, but he’s about the only one.’
‘Exactly,’ said Daunt. ‘Its value, its true value is a symbol. To the caliph, or—’ he pointed at the commodore, ‘—to you, or to any royalist. But, Mister Tull, your old employer is not of a royalist bent, as you so clearly pointed out. So what is the true value of the sceptre to him?’ He turned to Boxiron. ‘I saw the way you were examining the jewel on the end of the sceptre. It seems to me, in the same manner you were inspecting the jewel around the neck of our Damson Shades.’
‘Both gems share much the same composition,’ said Boxiron. ‘Close to the reflective index of diamond, but not quite.’
‘And, as you witnessed, the jewel around her neck appeared to ward off unnatural energies from Mister Cloake’s blade which are the most likely cause of her collapse and her subsequent coma. I wonder if the sisters Lammeter were urging us to find Charlotte Shades, or the thing she wears around her neck?’ It was to his chagrin that he hadn’t been able to save the other names the sisters had been chanting. He would not fail Charlotte. Daunt lifted the sceptre up and offered it to Boxiron, the weight of the thing such that he could barely manage to pass it while sitting down.
‘Examine it closely, old friend. Set your vision plate to its maximum resolution.’
Boxiron leant in close towards the sceptre, the red dot pulsing in the centre of his visor-like vision plate narrowing in size until the light was barely visible. ‘Yes, there is something inside the jewel – a pattern, finely etched. So fine I can barely distinguish it at my optic’s maximum resolution, and on that setting, the side of a hair appears like the contours of a mountain.’
‘Is it an image perhaps, or cursive script?’
‘No,’ said Boxiron. ‘It’s circuitry, I’m sure of it. But on a granular scale unlike anything I have heard of. The crystal boards designed by the architects of my people are as cave paintings compared to the sophistication responsible for this.’
‘The sceptre’s a bloody antique,’ said Tull. ‘How can that be?’
‘Ah, this is a dark business,’ said the commodore. ‘All the rightful queens and kings who have held that sceptre over the millennia, wielded it in good faith, and you are telling me it is etched full of wicked sorcery?’
Daunt scratched his chin. ‘Yes, all those hands. All the way back to the Queen Elizica, before the cold time and glaciers covered the world. All the way back to the first war between the tribes of the Jackeni and the gill-necks. A war then, and a war now.’
‘Let’s not be digging up old history,’ said the commodore. ‘No blessed good can come of it. You remember the trouble we got into on the black isle of Jago when we started disturbing dark ruins.’
‘I believe it was the professor who told me that those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it,’ said Daunt.
‘History books won’t bleeding keep us alive,’ said Tull. ‘What’s this mess got to do with yourself and the old steamer anyway? You’re meant to be tracking down a nest of bloodsuckers for the town’s alderman, not prancing about taking on bent board officials and royalists backed by the Advocacy.’
‘I believe the victims of the vampire slayings are collateral damage, good sergeant,’ said Daunt. ‘A few poor souls good for the pot. Those who knew too much, or perhaps too little. Much like yourself. And from what you said, it was what you and your fellow intelligencer saw on the night of your surveillance at Lord Chant’s residence that got your partner killed and would have seen you assassinated too. And as for the rest, yes. The pieces are starting to fall in place.’ Daunt rummaged around in his pocket for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop, then offered the bag in the direction of Dick Tull.
‘You’ve got to be joking me, amateur. Those things’ll rot your teeth and your mind.’
‘Lubrication of my mental processes, harmless stimulation only,’ said Daunt. He sucked on the sweet and looked over at Commodore Black. ‘There wasn’t much in the books at Tock House about the modern gill-necks, good captain. Beyond the fact that the Advocacy’s ancestors were once driven onto our shores by changes in the magma currents of the Fire Sea, and the tribes living on our land united to drive them away.’
‘Nor will you find such learnings in the university’s dusty towers,’ said the commodore, tapping his skull. ‘It’s all up here. In the heads of a few honest skippers, in the noggins of adventurers like me who brave the sea.’
‘It is said that the Advocacy are an insular people.’
‘Ah, a little beyond that. The gill-necks of the Advocacy live their lives by a book of rituals and law called the Misleash – and according to its teachings, there is an eternal cycle of life where mankind abandons the sea and returns to the land, before returning to the sea again. Their words for home, universe and sea are one and the same, and if that doesn’t tell you all you mortal need to understand about how they think, then I’ll add that their word for land has another meaning which is “torment”. There’s blessed little the Advocacy need from us to live below the waters – they only tax the shipping that passes over their territory to discourage visitors.’
‘But they’re an evolutionary offshoot of the race of man,’ said Daunt. ‘Just like the graspers or the craynarbians.’
‘Aye, not that you would know it to look at them, stubby muzzles and skin like sharks. The proof of the pudding is that the gill-necks can interbreed with us, although such misbegotten babes as result only gives truth to the notion of us surface dwellers as accursed. A mewling, twisted babe ill-suited to land or sea, that’s the sad result of any union between man and gill-neck. Your Circlist friends should be pleased by them; they don’t have any gods, just the sea as their great mother.’
‘A noble race, then,’ said Daunt. ‘Ruled by law, and no heaven or hell.’
‘Ah, well, they have a measure of hell. They believe that the dark of the abyss sends devils to punish them when they abuse the seas.’
‘Even more intriguing. But I see why you are uneasy about the idea of an alliance between the royalist rebels and the gill-necks.’
‘There is no royalist rebellion, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Not anymore. Parliament’s airships broke the fleetin-exile when they took Porto Principe. All that survived of the cause are a few submarines whose crews turned to slavery and privateering. The gill-necks are meant to be breathing life back into the cause all these years later? Why? The Advocacy doesn’t give a fig who rules the land, not when they call the sea their realm. The ocean’s magma fields are in retreat now, not expanding, there’s no trouble to drive the gill-necks in desperation towards our shores.’
‘They have a king, don’t they?’ said Tull. ‘Maybe the gill-necks decided they’ll be safer in their land with a friendly monarch sitting on the throne of Jackals again.’
‘Pah, that’s parliamentary propaganda, you old rascal,’ said the commodore. ‘What you call a king, the gill-necks call the Judge Sovereign. They’re not ruled by a royal cou
rt, but a court of law. A supreme mucky-muck selected from the bench of the four Princes Intercessor, the Bench of Four, appointed by their societies of ritual. The bench interprets their laws and set out the rituals and ceremonies that every guild and clan must abide by. The Advocacy know as little of our affairs as you do of theirs – or at least that was the way it used to be. How my sister got in tight with them is beyond my tired old noggin. And that Parliament has let a trade dispute escalate close to war is wicked foolery even the idiots in the House of Guardians should be ashamed of. Like watching a squid and an albatross fighting over whether the squid should live in the sky and the bird under the water.’
Daunt nodded his head sadly. ‘Bob my soul, so here we are. Teetering close to a war with no cause and no real prize for its victor.’ The ex-parson ran his hand along King Jude’s sceptre. And this is the glue that binds the mystery together. Are you what this conflict is being fought for, or the key to halting it? If we’re ever to return to the Kingdom, if we’re to stop this senseless war, we need to find out. ‘The gill-necks have no fondness towards surface dwellers?’
‘They have a mortal aversion to our people, which is a pity for us, as the Advocacy experiences more than its fair share of surface-dwelling fortune hunters trespassing across their territory.’
‘What does the Advocacy have that’s so valuable?’ Sadly asked, his interest perking up at the mention of fortunes.
‘Their engineering’s based on crystals. They grow what they need near high-pressure fissures on the seabed. Gems like diamonds and as big as boulders. Common to them, but rare enough to us to bring a constant stream of fool lubbers trying to sneak into the gill-necks’ waters, thinking how easy it’ll be to pillage their crystal fields.’