by Stephen Hunt
Cornelius gnawed greedily on a chick leg as if he was a hound. ‘I trust that they will stay that way.’
‘I trust they will, also. A little change is always good for the system.’
‘While a lot of change is better described as a cancer,’ said Cornelius, ‘something to be dug out with a surgeon’s blade.’
‘Or a trowel, perhaps?’ said Quest. ‘Someone with your name published a paper in the Horticultural Journal many years ago on the care of trees struck by Ferniethian willow disease.’
‘You have a good memory.’
‘I have a freakishly unique one,’ said Quest, ‘although truth to tell, I find it a curse as much as it is a blessing. I can tell you the colour of the apron of the serving boy in the first drinking house I went into at the age of six. I can describe the conversations I heard there. I could tell you all of the drinks we consumed and in what order and how many pennies each of us paid for them. But, alas, all memory is dust without the wisdom to apply it. I haven’t noticed any papers published by yourself for quite a while.’
‘I like to spend my time in my garden on the Skerries on more practical pursuits,’ said Cornelius. ‘I still read the Journal, but I am afraid I haven’t had the inclination to pick up a pen since I departed Quatershift.’
‘Capital,’ said Quest. ‘Most of the people I meet at my functions think that gardening is what you do when you order the head groundsman to take the lawn roller out of the shed.’
‘You are telling me that the richest man in Jackals spends his Circleday afternoons in the rose beds behind this fortress?’ Cornelius was amused.
‘More or less,’ said Quest. ‘I have a conservatory on the roof and a collection of rare orchids up there. Their maintenance and care helps me relax. I am surprised you haven’t seen the cartoons lampooning my pastime in the Dock Street news sheets.’
‘I prefer the Quatershiftian press,’ said Cornelius.
‘Really?’ Quest raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m astonished there’s anything still coming over the border. I thought it was closed.’
‘Oh, you might be surprised at what makes it over the cursewall. One way or another.’
‘I’m sure I would be surprised by nothing where human nature is involved,’ smiled Quest. If he had been unsettled by Cornelius’s comment, he did not show it. ‘Are you familiar with orchids, Compte de Speeler?’
‘I was raised on a farm,’ said Cornelius. ‘My upbringing gave itself over to more practical horticulture. Manure and irrigation; the nurture of apple orchards, pearl barley, pear trees …’
‘I was raised in the alleys of Middlesteel myself,’ said Quest. ‘Cheap jinn and sleeping in the gutter with the other urchins. I was running with a bad crowd when I was younger. But I used to love the plants at Driselwell Market, the small flash of colour in the smoke, the traders from countries with names I couldn’t even pronounce, let alone locate in an atlas. It was one of those traders who gave me my first break — gave me an honest job and taught me to read, gave me the numbers I needed to help keep his ledger.’
‘From market-stall boy to all this,’ said Cornelius, indicating the ballroom. ‘That can’t have been an easy journey, either.’
‘Surprisingly easy,’ said Quest, ‘and diverting enough along the way. In fact, I rather think I enjoyed the journey more than the destination. When I was homeless on the streets, I couldn’t have afforded the price of the pot my orchids came to market in to piss in, let alone one of the flowers. Now I possess the rarest collection in Jackals. Perhaps I can convert you to my cause.’
‘Me?’
‘To a fancier of orchids, Compte de Speeler.’ Quest pointed up to the roof. ‘I am sure I can find time for a tour, for a fellow Horticultural Journal subscriber.’
Rare orchids and a chance to nose around for evidence of an even rarer trade in vintage steamman components. How could Cornelius refuse?
While the other drivers, footmen and assorted cabbies tossed a set of dice in the illumination of their coach lamps around the rear of Whittington Manor, Septimoth had moved to the inside of the old mail coach rather than perching on the step. He had tied up the horses inside the manor’s stables, all four of them used enough to the lashlite that they were not unsettled by his presence, not worried that he might swoop down from a height and bury his talons into their backs. This was slow work, following the precognitions of the seers of the crimson feather, trailing across Middlesteel after the corpses of steammen. How much purer was his vengeance. How much simpler to swoop out of the skies of Quatershift and pay their murderers back the blood debt he owed his clan. Killing revolutionaries and dropping the devil of Furnace-breath Nick into their midst to stir up terror and fear. That was satisfying. Almost as fine as flying on the wing of a hunt with his people.
Septimoth had thought that the hatred he felt for his people’s executioners would have faded over time. But it was only the memories of his family that seemed to diminish. He could no longer conjure up the remembrance of his mother’s face, or the features of his life-mate and their four children. He could recall events he had shared with them — his children’s first moulting ritual, the joy he had felt at their birth, their pride when he was appointed ambassador to the court of the Sun King, teaching his children the monkey-throat language so they might have an advantage in trade or service to the flight. He could recall their hatchling voices singing the tone teachings, but not their faces as they sung. How strange were these malicious games of memory. As his recollections faded, his longing for his family had increased, his hatred becoming harder, purer each week, a shining diamond seeded in the blasted wreckage of his soul. The blood of his foe no longer eased his pain, but at least vengeance distracted him from the memories. And the lack of them.
Septimoth’s trance was interrupted by voices outside, including one that he recognized. His hunter’s mind moved through the thousands of tones he had heard this year and matched them to its owner. The short thug who had led the team responsible for the kidnapping of Bunzal Coalmelter. A coach not dissimilar to the Guardian Fleetfoot was being pulled out of a passage cut into the angular walls of the manor, the original utility of the thick concrete barely concealed by the veneer of brickwork cladding. On the driver’s step sat the bludger who had led Septimoth and Cornelius to the flash mob’s riverboat in the Gambleflowers, holding the reins next to a second man he didn’t recognize. Septimoth’s ears trembled. The two were bickering.
‘Did you see the quality of the bawdy in that place?’
‘Those women were Catosian, man. They’d rip your jewels out of your trousers for staring at ’em sideways.’
‘Well, we missed out on the food tonight, too. Dragging these cargoes across half of Jackals. If I’d wanted to run a bleeding coaching business …’
‘What, you thick or something? They aren’t going to trust this lot to the penny post, are they? We’re being paid.’
‘Not enough, mate, not enough.’
The wheels of the departing coach were muffled with rags, an old coachman’s trick; not out of concern for the sleeping residents of the villages they would pass through, but to avoid giving advance notice of their approach to any highwaymen that might be out plying their trade this evening. Wherever they were heading, it wasn’t the Catgibbon’s floating jinn palace; they were making for somewhere far further out than that.
Septimoth unfastened the door on the far side of the coach and silently slipped out, vanishing into the darkness of the gardens before launching himself unseen into the air. He had a feeling that Cornelius would be driving himself back to the Skerries tonight. The wind above the downs lifted Septimoth up, buoying him effortlessly higher. He tilted his wings, feeling the glorious run of air across his feathers and scales as he glided behind the coach, a black dot below on the bare gravel road. He could hear the crack of the whip over the train of horses. The pair were driving them hard. They obviously wanted to make their journey at night under the cover of the moonless sky. Much better for
avoiding awkward questions from any county constabulary, now stabled and sleeping along with the keepers of the toll cottages on the crown roads.
But a cloudy night was better for a stalking lashlite, too.
Cornelius followed Abraham Quest out of the series of ballrooms, four Catosian soldiers saluting him as they raised an old iron blast door leading into the main body of the manor house. Quest had the women dressed in the cherry tunics of a Jackelian fencible regiment, private auxiliaries ready to assist parliament in times of war. Without the padded war jackets favoured by the free companies, their shine-swollen muscles made the fencible uniforms look five sizes too small, as if someone had dressed them in children’s clothes.
‘You value your privacy,’ said Cornelius.
‘What, my girls? They’re here to preserve my life, not my privacy. They’re very effective. I haven’t had an attempted poisoning or assassination attempt for months. Toppers very rarely get as far as we are standing these days.’
‘Who would have thought it was so arduous, being the richest man in Jackals?’ said Cornelius.
‘It isn’t my money that brings the assassins. I have no heirs, and if I should have an “accident”, how long would my commercial concerns survive in their dominant position beyond my tenure? I have no illusions about the longevity of any empire built on the hope that the children may prove to be the equal of their parents. If I had offspring, I wouldn’t wish them to follow my path, even if they could. Any venture predicated on bloodlines is doomed to fade to dust eventually, including my own. It is my labours and the course of my life that has set me here — nothing more.’
‘Thank the Circle for our great democracy over monarchy, then,’ said Cornelius.
‘Yes,’ Quest smiled. ‘Thank the Circle for that. Do you have any children, Compte?’
‘I had a wife who was with child once.’
‘Had?’
‘The revolution in Quatershift.’
‘Ah,’ said Quest. ‘I’m sorry. As you said, thank the Circle for Jackals and our democracy.’
They entered the heart of the old fortress, an atrium with a view of four storeys rising above them. A railing ran around a pit ahead of them, fencing off a dizzying vista — level after level dropping down beyond the illumination of the gaslight. The architects who had remodelled the fortress as a manor house had done their best to soften the functional lines of the ammunition lifts and military gantries, but no amount of hanging plants and ivy trellises could fully conceal the building’s severe original purpose.
Quest led Cornelius past a line of food trolleys, being wheeled from the kitchens to the party via an inspection station running random tests for poison. Quest wasn’t the only powerful notable at the manor tonight and it wouldn’t do to have some Guardian or commercial lord dropping dead on his floor.
It wasn’t the food that caught Cornelius’s eye, but the woman supervising the testing team. She glanced up, saw Quest, and nodded towards him, failing to notice the staring guest by the mill owner’s side. Not that she would have recognized Cornelius, given that the last time they had met he had been concealed underneath the mask of Furnace-breath Nick. It was Robur’s supposed daughter, no longer wearing the coy bonnet of a child desperate to have her father returned to her, but dressed instead in the crimson officer’s uniform of Quest’s fencibles.
‘I’m glad to see you look after your guests,’ said Cornelius, looking at Robur’s daughter and the poison tests.
‘What kind of host would I be if I didn’t?’ said Quest. A glass-fronted lifting room was descending down an iron rail into the atrium. He pointed at the testing station. ‘I take it you don’t have to go to these lengths on your island for a decent meal?’
‘Just the risk of my housekeeper’s cooking,’ said Cornelius, ‘and she’s really rather good.’
They stepped into the lifting room and Quest inserted a key to access the private arboretum level at the top of the manor house. ‘You can see everything from here.’
Cornelius stared out at a line of deactivated catapult arms, their grips open and still, like the claws of sleeping birds of prey. In the old days they could have risen to the roof and whirled drums of flammable oil out of hidden hatches, turning what was now the topiary gardens into a molten hell for any attackers to cross. It was a good view, but no, he could not quite see everything. Wherever the flash mob’s delivery of steammen corpses had ended up was well concealed, Cornelius had no doubt of that. Quest should have no conceivable use for their grisly remains, but then he should have had no need either to surreptitiously engage Furnace-breath Nick to spirit out Quatershift’s court mechomancer from that revolution-wracked land. Quest had helped the Levellers to power in the last general election, with Ben Carl at the helm — the father of Carlism. But old Ben Carl was no shiftie committeeman; he had proved his credentials on that matter when he had led the Jackelians in repelling the invasion from Quatershift.
Cornelius looked at his host, hiding his suspicions. Was Abraham Quest dissatisfied with the progress of the Levellers in the House of Guardians? Had Quest secretly been hoping for a bloodbath, one party dictatorship and the declaration of a Jackelian Commonshare? Surely not; for all his model work villages and paternal manufactory conditions, Quest was still the man who had nearly acquired the whole nation in a single burst of his freakish intelligence. If the radicals were to set up their Gideon’s Collars in Jackals, then Cornelius’s eccentric host clearly had a place at the head of the queue of those who would be escorted into one of the wicked steam-driven killing machines.
The lifting room opened its doors to a blast of heat, a miniature jungle hidden under acres of botanic glass. The scene was more ordered than it first appeared, curved planting troughs twisting away on neatly planned paths, a riot of colours stretching out into the distance, orchids the height of shire horses, blossoms as large as the wheels of a hansom cab.
‘What do you think?’ asked Quest. ‘I can only name a fraction of these,’ said Cornelius, genuinely impressed. ‘They’re rare, I haven’t even seen them as plates in Cheggs’ Encyclopaedia of Flora.’
‘Taken from wherever my factors have travelled on the house’s business,’ said Quest. ‘Southern Concorzia, Liongeli, Thar. Not kept in a single chamber, but in many interconnecting arboreta — each with its own humidity and temperature. A little piece of home so that each species may prosper. Do you read the scientific journals? The scholars call such a miniature world an ecos, a system of life bound together.’
‘Incredible,’ said Cornelius. ‘Even the Botanic Gardens have nothing as sophisticated as this.’
‘Interesting that you should say that.’ Quest walked across to a silver tank. ‘It was my first visit to the Botanic Gardens in Middlesteel that gave me the insight I needed to create my original fortune. The interconnectedness of all things, how the economy of Jackals resembled the complex systems we see in life, in the ecos, each market with its own predators and prey, an intricate ever-evolving environment supporting them. If a foreign garden can be transported and captured under a palace of glass, I thought, why not a simulacrum of the markets of Jackals held on the drums of a transaction engine?’
‘The whole world in your hand,’ said Cornelius. ‘And now your trading house is the top predator in the savage land of commerce.’
‘Ah, but I only ever held a shadow of the economy in my transaction engines,’ said Quest. ‘As for real predators, let me show you …’ He banged the side of a glass tank and lifted its lid. Inside, hundreds of mice flowed desperately away from his hand, climbing over each other in living mounds, each of them trying not to be the creature he would select. His hand dipped down and a frantic white mouse was removed by its tail. Quest took the rodent and tossed it over a gated enclosure. On the other side, a bed of orchids lashed out with whip-like fronds, shield-sized petals turning in search of their prey. The mouse scurried between the wavering tongues, slipping back until one plant seized the small creature and tossed it into t
he air, straight into the digestion sack around its roots. The squeaking died away as the mouse sunk below the poisonous gluey liquid, hundreds of tiny barbs impaling its body, preventing its struggles from tearing the sack wall.
‘Now there’s something you don’t see in the Botanic Gardens,’ said Cornelius.
‘Not for lack of demand, if the seats sold at our cock fighting pits are anything to judge by,’ said Quest. ‘We all love a spectacle, do we not? For me, however, this is a salutary reminder of the intricacy of our own ecos. Almost everything that exists is either the meal or it is the diner, often both at the same time. It is these complexities that engage my interest these days, far more, I can sadly say, than people.’
‘Your reputation as a humanitarian suggests otherwise,’ said Cornelius.
‘I cannot abide the cruelties of our people, the poverty and the misery we tolerate in our world,’ said Quest, ‘but alas, that is not the same thing as an endless store of empathy for those who suffer. I am not that good a person, and such a store would have to be deep indeed to cope with our world. I cannot abide our miseries because they are unnecessary, they are symptomatic of a total failure of imagination and intelligence on the part of those who shoulder the burden of leading Jackals. A different ecos could produce a different outcome, could ensure no one else would have to grow up seeing the things I did. How many times have you stepped over a body lying in the street at night wrapped up in rags, shivering and hungry and cold? How many times have you looked the other way when the street children run up to your carriage in the lanes of Middlesteel, their skeletal hands stretched out begging for a few pennies to buy them enough jinn to blot out the emptiness of their lives? How many news sheets have you turned a page on when you got to yet another story of wars, massacres and famines? How many times, Compte, how many times can you bear to see that, before you do something?’
‘I don’t get out that much,’ said Cornelius, ‘and I had my fill of utopias in Quatershift. I found utopia wanting.’