From the Deep of the Dark j-6

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I am going to lay you next to her corpse in the oven,’ Cloake leered. ‘After I have drained the last of your juices. The Mass must feed.’

  Charlotte raised the still swaddled sceptre, holding it up as a lance to impale the treacherous little thug. He turned his strange weapon in his hand, the crystal throbbing and pulsing with red light. As it sparked, the jewel beneath Charlotte’s blouse flared hot against her skin, all the cold of her weary, exhausting night’s labour mesmerizing the staff of Parliament banished in a moment. Hot. It’s never burned hot before, only cold! Two feet from her, Cloake had collapsed onto his knees, howling like a banshee. Cracking in the air, the crimson energies from his strange blade wrapped around the man, whipping and burning his skin. Charlotte was in no position to focus on his agonies. She was folding to her own knees, the blood of her body burning, running like acid inside her.

  Blue light from the crystal pendant peeled away from her chest, reaching out towards Cloake’s weapon, where its crimson sparks hissed and coiled angrily towards the Eye of Fate’s blue light, a dance of duelling vipers in the air between them.

  ‘Kill her!’ Cloake yelled through gritted teeth.

  Confused by the strange ethereal duel of energies in the air, the dustman Charlotte had winded was getting to his feet.

  Charlotte couldn’t move. Her body was paralysed, supplying the life force the jewel was draining, channelling. Cloake cursed and yelled again, and this time his words seemed to percolate through his henchman’s bewildered brain.

  Drawing a hunting blade almost as long as a forearm from his belt, the dustman carefully avoided the coiling lashing energies striking across the air and darted forward. He pulled his arm back to slash down on Charlotte neck and near decapitate her.

  ‘This is it, Mister Tull,’ said Sadly, sounding impressed that Dick knew someone who lived in so grand a residence on the outskirts of town.

  ‘Big it may be, but the coin that paid for this pile is as dodgy as its owner,’ said Dick as Sadly threw the lever to release pressure from the kettle-black’s traction mechanism. Their great iron carriage slowed up outside the wall.

  Dick glanced around the open stretch of the duck pond and the crescent of hilltop houses opposite. No sign of the dustmen, but that doesn’t mean they’re not coming here. Young Billy-boy carved up like a slaughtered pig on my bed, Rufus Symons’ corpse found fished out of the river. Everyone who’s touched this affair is being cleaned up. Careful, I have to be careful, before my last surviving lead is tidied out of existence.

  Sadly stood up on the driver’s step, gazing down on the gaslights of the capital, the length of Middlesteel spread out beneath a full moon. ‘That is a sight, that is, Mister Tull. Must be nice having that at the end of your drive, says I. They won’t be coming here, will they, the dustmen? The board doesn’t mess with the quality, do they? Not the folk with money, not carriage folk?’

  Dick thought of the murder of Lady Florence Chant that young William had reported. It had been shortly after that that his old partner had been reassigned, then murdered. Maybe Dick has been too quick to dismiss the story of the killing as a prank by the boy to land him in trouble with the board’s officers. Dick shrugged. ‘It’ll take more than a few notes from Lords Bank to buy off the board’s band of killers.’

  The little rat-faced man seemed unnerved by the prospect of being pursued inside. ‘Let us be away then, Mister Tull. We don’t need to be bottled up inside that old place. The steam is still up on the carriage. Roll the weight of the barrels off the back and we can make it across two counties on the coke left inside our coal box.’

  ‘Running blind, that’s running to your death,’ said Dick, checking his blunderbuss had a fresh charge resting in its breach. ‘Old Blacky inside there has answers. And if you’re right about the gill-necks being involved in this mess, then we are going to need a u-boat to follow their trail.’

  ‘Lords-a’larkey,’ coughed Sadly, beating his chest. ‘He’s not a submariner, is he? I’m no good on the water, Mister Tull. I gets sick taking a wherry to cross the river, I does.’

  ‘I need you alive to testify for me,’ said Dick, ‘and I’ll take you seasick and without a bullet in your back over the reverse. Don’t you worry, when it comes to piloting the seas, old Blacky is as slippery as they come. He was born with a smuggler’s soul and a privateer’s silver cutlass under his royalist cot. That’s what the board has mostly been using him for, running cargo no one else would touch. You’ll like him — he’s a snitch and a turncoat, just like you.’

  ‘That, Mister Tull, right offends me. I just work the middle and I’ve always been true to you.’

  ‘The middle doesn’t get to be offended,’ said Dick. ‘And I think we’ve both fallen off the fence now.’

  Well off and hanging over the ledge, that’s what we sodding are.

  Wrapped in the fire of her jewel, joined in agony with Cloake by the snaking energies that connected the thug to the Eye of Fate, Charlotte could hardly muster the strength to raise her eyes towards the assassin about to plunge his long-bladed knife into her neck.

  Even with the pain, Charlotte’s ears still worked well enough to be near deafened by the sudden splintering explosion of the pie shop’s front door. If Damson Robinson had been alive she’d be spitting blood. As it was, enough of that splattered over the sawdust as Boxiron continued his lurching charge through the entrance. The steamman connected with the first of Cloake’s thugs, the surprise that was no doubt on the man’s eyes hidden by his stench-mask as Boxiron ploughed through where he was standing. The assassin was lifted into the air as if he had been upended by the horns of a charging bull. The blade that had been seconds away from slicing through Charlotte’s neck somersaulted upwards and embedded itself in the ceiling’s oak beam. There was no scream. There was no time.

  Kneeling, Charlotte just managed to use her hands to stop herself falling forward and colliding with the floor. It was gone — the interweaved bridge of coiling, lashing energies joining her in suffering to Cloake. Her jewel had turned cold almost the instant that the spinning body sent flying by the steamman collided with Cloake. He’d dropped his double-bladed knife, but Cloake wasn’t out of the fight. He didn’t so much move as scuttle, like a spider or a crab, his body scurrying across the sawdust-strewn floor, seizing the crystal blade and speeding towards the door into the bakery room. There was something ill about the way he moved so strangely, so quickly. Something sickening. The backdoor. The yard. Bastard. Maybe it was the shock of being disconnected from the surging force, but Charlotte worked hard to hold down the vomit.

  He was quick, the second thug, Charlotte gave him that. Even with the sight of the steamman bearing down on him like a loosed crossbow bolt, he maintained his poise and pulled out a pistol concealed behind his back. It sported a long black barrel with a serrated knife fixed underneath, but whether there was a charge loaded into its breach or not was a moot point, as the steamman slowed not a jot, simply running the killer down like a charging war-horse flattening a victim on the battlefield. He spun with the impact, the thug, and a spray of blood painted the floor followed by a sickening thump of cracking bones as Cloake’s man barrelled back into the far wall. It wasn’t so much a fight at a demonstration of the laws of physics. Half a ton or more of unstoppable force murderously impacting with a skin-covered sack of flesh, blood and bones. A strange, low whine like an annoyed cat came from the body. No man would die like that, surely?

  Charlotte shivered to her feet, still clutching the sceptre. I have it. No buyer, no patron, no case full of gold coins, but I still have King Jude’s bloody sceptre.

  ‘Help me!’ The first noise to sound from the steamman beyond the initial explosion of physical violence, his voicebox quivering with a plaintive, pleading quality. Boxiron was flailing his brick-sized fists at the counter, smashing chunks out of the worktop, little clouds of masonry and flour spraying into the air. ‘My gears have slipped.’

  As Charlotte got closer s
he saw there was a lever on the back of the steamman’s smoke stack, a plate cut with gear positions. The little engraved brass plate placed there by the manufacturer read ‘idle’ at its lowest position, but Boxiron’s previous employers had scratched a line through the script and painted it over with the words ‘slightly less-murderous’. Right now the lever was quivering energetically in five, locked in top gear. She threw the lever down, twisting it around to ‘idle’.

  There was a gasp of wheezing smoke from Boxiron’s stack as he shuddered back down to stillness. ‘Curse this human-milled, coal-choked malfunction of a body.’

  ‘I would say bless it, for I would be dead for sure without you,’ said Charlotte. ‘Although I do seem to remember telling you that I didn’t need your protection.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boxiron. ‘As I was standing outside I could hear you were doing a superior job of managing to protect yourself. I merely entered to see how it should be done.’

  ‘Bugger you and your parson’s prophecies,’ Charlotte threw back.

  ‘Jethro Daunt tries hard not to believe in prophecies. I, on the other hand, have no such compulsion. The spirits are riding the sisters Lammeter and it’s still your name spilling out of their lips.’

  Prophecy? This isn’t a prophecy. This is just business. Those Royalist twisters tried to double-cross me, is all. Keep their money, keep the sceptre too. So, the rebels want their ancient symbol of authority back, do they? Now it would cost that cheating dog Mister Twist three times what he’d offered her before, for even a sniff of this jewel-tipped beauty. Charlotte recalled the eerie way that Cloake had fled while escaping their duel of lightning-like energies. Moving like nothing human has a right to. Her jewel had saved her. The Eye of Fate had known. No, I’m imagining it. This was a royalist double-cross, no more, no less.

  She kicked at the corpse of one of her would-be murderers on the way to the bakery. The back yard was open, cold air blowing across the room, the oven door standing ajar. Against her better judgment, she opened it wide and peered inside, having to choke back the vomit still riding her belly. Damson Robinson. What was left of her. Just like the killings in the papers. Drained of all her blood. But not a pair of fangs to be seen among these bastards. Charlotte had to stop herself from reaching out and touching the remains stuffed inside the oven. To feel the confirmation that here had been a human life, someone she had known, someone she had joked with. Damson Robinson had looked after all of her thieves. It might’ve been the kind of care that a highwaymen showed for a useful brace of pistols, oiling and cleaning and greasing them, but Charlotte hadn’t had such a great surfeit of friends in her life before that she noticed or minded the difference.

  She heard the clanking legs of the steamman following her inside the bakery room. ‘There was a third man.’

  Charlotte glanced outside and finding no sign of Cloake, shut the door, locking it. ‘He was on his toes fast enough after you flattened his two bruisers, the dirty jigger. And you, you followed me to the shop…’

  Boxiron tapped his shiny vision plate. ‘My head is my original and I still have the sight of a steamman knight. That, at least, is not degraded. Give me line of vision and I can track you across the city from a mile away, day or night.’

  ‘That must come in useful.’

  ‘So, I have found it. But I didn’t require magnification optics to observe the Loa-cursed energies flowing between you and the leader of the ambush.’

  ‘I have no explanation for that,’ said Charlotte. ‘The force just appeared, crippling both of us when Cloake tried to strike me down with that queer-looking crystal blade of his.’

  Boxiron reached out to rest a thick iron finger on the cloth-wrapped sceptre Charlotte was carrying. ‘And did this also appear to you in a burst of mysterious energies? Jethro softbody requested that you keep a low profile, yet you have in your possession something that looks suspiciously like it’s been removed from the Parliamentary treasury.’

  ‘What, this little thing?’

  ‘It’s many years since Jethro softbody reclaimed me from my employ as an enforcer for the flash mob,’ Boxiron wearily explained, ‘but even back in those days, it was well-known that you did not interfere or demand protection from Damson Robinson’s pie shop. Or was she no longer acting as a fence for the Cat-gibbon and her criminal faction in the underworld?’

  So, it’s true. I knew you were crooked once, old steamer. ‘First time I visited the shop, honey. I just developed a hankering for an ale and beef pie, is all.’

  Boxiron looked inside the oven, the wreckage of the body stuffed into the space, then fixed Charlotte with a steely stare. ‘I would suggest you switch your patronage to an alternative supplier.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There were a lot of scenes that Dick Tull might have imagined discovering on the other side of the door when Commodore Black opened it to him and Sadly. The sight of a gorilla-sized steamman ruffian and a beak-nosed fellow sprawled across the floor of Tock House’s entrance hall pinning down a woman was not one of them. She looked young, and whoever the girl was, she was writhing on the tiles spitting out fever-mangled sentences as she twisted and turned.

  ‘A wicked storm crow, riding two minutes forward of the darkness,’ the commodore practically hissed at Dick. Without another word, the old u-boat man fished into Dick’s coat and came out with his hip flask. Leaving the door open, the commodore rushed back to the struggling woman, grabbing something out of a paper bag the other man was proffering towards Blacky, crushed it, mixed it with Dick’s fire water, then poured it down the girl’s throat.

  Her thrashing lessened, and the commodore ordered the brutish steamman and his beak-nosed friend through to his kitchen table.

  ‘You and me,’ Dick called to the commodore. ‘Words, now!’

  ‘The board can bloody wait,’ the commodore called back as he disappeared down the corridor. ‘Lock the door behind you.’

  That is what you think, Blacky. What’s coming after us ain’t going to wait, not for a second.

  ‘Are you sure we’ve come to the right place, Mister Tull?’ asked Sadly, disbelief wrinkling his disagreeable features.

  ‘Don’t you mind old Blacky, he was raised with the fleet-in-exile. Manners of a pirate, he has.’

  Sadly was bending down on the floor where the girl had been seconds before, examining a long cloth-wrapped object left there. ‘Oh my giddy aunt. See here, Mister Tull. Lords-a’larkey-’ he flourished King Jude’s sceptre. ‘Oh my pretty, is this…?’

  ‘It’s the rope outside Bonegate jail,’ said Dick, snatching the sceptre off Sadly. ‘For anyone caught with it, if it’s real. Get your thieving hands off.’

  Dick went after the commodore, the informant hustling after him, still seemingly mesmerized by the sceptre. ‘We need to be on our heels, Mister Tull. Low profile is the thing, not every Ham Yard crusher and redcoat in the regiments beating the bushes with their sabres looking for that.’

  That’s Blacky all right, never a dull moment. Where did the board think he got his fortune from? Running grain shipments across the sea?

  The steamman and his friend were lifting the girl onto the kitchen table while the commodore cleared it of a leftover meal by the simple expedient of sweeping the contents crashing onto the floor. She was speaking like a madwoman, her words incomprehensible, coming out garbled in a rapid continuous stream.

  ‘What language is that?’ Dick asked.

  Before anybody could answer, her trembling hand thrust out towards Dick. ‘The spear-carrier, the spear-carrier has arrived.’

  Dick glanced to at the sceptre still in his hands, the hulking steamman noting the rod in the agent’s possession and snatching it back off him. Not much of a spear. Then the girl returned to vomiting alien nonsense once more.

  ‘She is being ridden by the Loa,’ said the steamman. ‘She speaks the language of the spirits, the dead.’

  ‘Damson Shades,’ said the steamman’s friend, restricting the girl. ‘Peace. Keep
still. You are going to bite your tongue off.’

  ‘Poor lass,’ said the commodore. ‘She has it bad, she does. Pass me another one of your foul little sweets Jethro, so I can mix it with a drop of the hard stuff.’

  Dick saw the bag of Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops about to exchange hands and he grabbed the commodore’s arm before the old u-boat man could accept it. ‘No more of those for her.’

  ‘Are you the doctor we sent for?’ asked the man.

  ‘Doctor my arse. He’s the wicked rascal I told you about,’ said the commodore. ‘Dick Tull, a filthy government officer come along to disturb my quiet.’

  ‘I know enough about drugging a body and keeping ’em alive enough to answer questions at the end of it,’ said Dick. ‘You give the girl another dose of whiskey and opiates and she’ll die on you. The booze jolted her out of her fit, give the opiates another five minutes to pass through her blood and stop her whispering that nonsense.’

  ‘I can assure you there are no opiates in any Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops,’ said the beak-nosed man. ‘That is merely a scurrilous rumour spread by their competitors inside the trade.’

  Dick shook his head in annoyance. ‘Who are these two damn jokers, Blacky? A music hall act?’

  ‘I am Jethro Daunt,’ said the man proudly, as if he was announcing he was a prince among men. ‘And along with my colleague Boxiron, we’re protecting the young Damson Shades here. She is in the care of our agency for private resolutions.’

  Private resolutions… a consulting detective with delusions of grandeur. How sodding fine.

  ‘Then I suggest you care for her elsewhere, Daunt. Amateur hour is over. Blacky, you and I have business to discuss.’

  ‘Hang your business,’ said the commodore. ‘I told you before; I’m finished with the board.’

  ‘Truer than you know,’ said Tull. ‘Whatever mess you’ve got yourself into with your old royalist friends, it’s put you on the murder list. The board tossed Rufus Symons’ corpse into the river, and they tried to top me just for reporting that pack of lies you passed on to me.’