by Stephen Hunt
‘Been disavowed have you?’ laughed Commodore Black. ‘Your badge melted for scrap. All the shit you’ve done in your life, how can you even tell where the smell’s coming from?’
Dick yanked out the blunderbuss from under his greatcoat, grabbed the commodore’s lapels and shoved him against the kitchen wall, the barrel pushed under his throat. Boxiron lurched forward towards them, but Sadly had a tiny sleeve-pistol out and pointing at Jethro Daunt’s head. ‘Not another step, see. I have got your back, Mister Tull.’
The head of the spring-loaded arm hidden up his sleeve quivered as the little rat-faced man kept the trembling pistol pointed at Blacky’s friend. Bloody Nora. Never knew Sadly kept a sleeve gun. Never knew he had a gun at all for that matter. Never realized he had the balls for it.
‘Your friend Rufus Symons is dead. My old partner is lying back on my bed sliced up like a side of pork belly on a butcher’s slab. The board tried to kill my little acquaintance Sadly here just because I talked with him. Everyone who’s had anything to do with your royalist accomplices has been left for a corpse. I should be one! You think because you’re dying that you’ve got nothing left to live for? Let’s put it to the test. I’ll do you now before the board comes for you. I’ll put a charge’s worth of lead shot through your fat, thick, wealthy head and decorate the expensive tiles of your nice warm kitchen with a new pattern. Blacky red. It could be a new style. What do you say?’
‘Trigger your weapon,’ Boxiron threatened, ‘and you join him in death a second later.’
‘This is not a rational course,’ protested Daunt from the other side of the table. ‘From what you have said I believe our causes are linked.’
‘Shut your cake-hole, amateur. I’m looking for the reason why I’ve been placed on a death list. I’ve not been engaged by a rich widow to track down her bloody missing cat.’
‘Missing pets and errant spouses do not engage my professional interest. Missing citizens who are absent of blood are another matter,’ said Daunt.
The vampire slayings. That’s what the head said, too, the mad old steamer.
‘Lower your wicked gun,’ wheezed the commodore. ‘I wouldn’t insult my gravestone by having it recorded that my life ended at the hands of a two-penny ruffian like Dick Tull.’
You think? Dick pulled back the hammer on the clockwork of firing lock as if he was going to shoot, and then pushed the safety forward. Many would say that would be a fitting end to your life.
As Dick lowered his gun, a loud bell started filling the kitchen with its clamour. ‘You got another houseguest inside here Blacky, sending down to the kitchen for their soup?’
‘Perimeter alarm,’ said the commodore. ‘Someone’s jumped my wall and is coming through the woods.’
There was a series of thumps throughout the house, the kitchen floor shaking as a heavy metal blast door dropped out of a slot within the wall, sealing off the inner courtyard. They’re locked out, or we’re locked in, depending on your point of view.
‘It’s the board, Mister Tull.’ Sadly looked panicked. ‘They’ve come for us.’
‘Surely it could be a fox, good captain,’ said Daunt. ‘A false alarm?’
Another thump, louder, the distant rain of falling rubble following it.
‘Wouldn’t be heavy enough to set off my minefield,’ said the commodore.
‘Bloody hell.’ Sadly looked at the tiny pistol in his hand, as if he was realising this was all he had to stop the dustmen. ‘Mines.’
‘This isn’t my first ride at this carnival, lad,’ said the commodore, opening the door to his pantry and fiddling with something hidden under the shelves inside. ‘I’ve grown mortal tired of receiving the wrong sort of visitor at Tock House. Boxiron, lend me the weight of your shoulder plates here.’
Boxiron and the old u-boat man pushed at the shelves and they swung to one side, revealing a concealed room on the other side, iron railings surrounding a well-like opening in the middle of the floor — spiral stairs leading downwards from the pantry.
A hidden strong room. ‘Where’s your treasure, then?’
‘Is the preservation of your miserable life not booty enough for you, Dick Tull?’ The commodore waved them inside the room, lighting its gas lamps with a spark switch while the steamman and his consulting detective friend carried in the murmuring girl. Once inside, Dick helped the commodore push shut the concealed door. No wonder it was so heavy. Five inches of reinforced metal on the other side of the shelves, riding large rollers across the flagstones.
Sadly was sweating. ‘This isn’t right. We’re as tight as rats in a pipe here. Just like when the dustmen came for me in my cellar.’
‘Tight as the sweet decks of a boat,’ said the commodore. ‘Down the stairs and let’s see if we can’t make a little mischief for them.’
There was another room below, larger, windowless and with a series of doors leading off that that might’ve belonged on a submersible, solid riveted iron with wheel locks to open them. Racks had been built into the walls between the doors, canned food, barrels of water, guns, charges and equipment piled from floor to ceiling. Dick ran his finger along one of the shelves. Not much dust. Less than a couple of years old down here.
‘You are well appointed for a siege,’ said Daunt.
‘Life gives you what you expect,’ said the commodore, lifting a dustsheet off a bank of equipment. ‘And well glad I am for my preparations, too, we’ll give them a few licks before we go down.’
‘That’s the spirit, good captain,’ said Daunt. ‘There’s no bad weather, only bad clothes.’
With the commodore pulling and tugging at the control panel that stood revealed, a screen came to life showing the exterior of Tock House and the tower’s grounds. There were figures moving about in front of the tree line, but the colours of the monitor seemed all wrong, the whole scene coloured in a green tinge, while the lights thrown by the house shone like flares.
‘This equipment was constructed by the people of the metal,’ said Boxiron, helping Daunt lay down the girl’s body.
‘So it was,’ agreed the commodore. ‘A little project for my friend Coppertracks. Something more practical than his usual fancies and forays into high science.’ He fiddled with a lever and the speaker a voicebox mounted above the screen crackled into life.
‘-want the sceptre. We know you have it. You have five minutes to surrender it and then we’ll burn you out of there.’
I recognize that voice. Dick lent forward to look at the figure standing in front of the house. Bugger the lot of them. It was him. ‘That’s Walsingham, one of the State Protection Board’s section heads.’
‘Oh, law,’ Sadly squeaked. ‘We’re dead down here, says I.’
‘That’s not the name he was using earlier today,’ said Boxiron.
Dick turned to look at the steamman.
‘That man is the leader of the gang that set the ambush for Charlotte softbody. His fighters called him Captain Twist.’
Dick swore under his breath. ‘You’re sure?’
Boxiron tapped his hearing manifolds. ‘Perfectly. I was using my voicebox to reflect a low-frequency carrier wave off the shop window he and his soldiers were hiding in. It is an old steamman artifice to eavesdrop at short range.’ Boxiron indicated one of the other figures on the screen. ‘And that’s the fighter he left in charge of the ambush after he departed. His name is Cloake. He is lucky to be alive after facing my fury.’
Dick looked closer, noting the stocky short-arsed figure standing by Walsingham’s side. ‘Sweet Circle.’ Corporal Cloake.
‘They’re your people…?’ said the commodore.
Dick nodded.
‘Captain Twist is a pseudonym,’ said Daunt. ‘A royalist figure of legend who led Parliament on a merry dance centuries ago.’
‘I know that, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘And more recently than that, too. Didn’t I wear the proud title once in my youth?’
On the screen another figure emerged from the tree
line, his voice carrying over to Tock House.
‘King Jude’s sceptre is not just another bauble for you to pawn, commodore. You will hand it over, by order of the Star Chamber!’
‘Carl Redlin,’ spat Dick.
The miserable royalist bastard who started all of this. If only I hadn’t been on duty that night, waiting for Redlin to turn up at Lord Chant’s mansion. None of this would have happened, or at least it would have happened to some other poor sod of an officer. How fine would that be?
‘I told you Mister Tull,’ moaned Sadly. ‘Foxes and hens dancing together. Royalists and the board, both working hand in glove. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’
The commodore angrily pulled a speaking pipe out of the console, his voice carrying over the garden from behind the intruders, silhouetted figures jumping as his voice boomed from hidden speakers inside the wood. ‘I know you well enough, Carl Redlin. A lickspittle of a skipper who wouldn’t raise a periscope without first sending for sealed orders from the Star Chamber. Has the blood of the cause run so thin that you’re letting a dirty secret policeman wander around calling himself Captain Twist? Did you murder poor young Rufus, or did you let your new board friends do it for the sport?’
Redlin looked furious. ‘I’ll take no lessons from you, you cowardly turncoat bastard. We will have the sceptre from you now!’
‘Found a backbone, have you Carl Redlin? Now that your pockets have been stuffed full of gill-neck gold? Here’s your answer and it’s good for you, my wicked sister, the gill-necks and your State Protection Board bully-boys, all.’ He threw a switch and there was a cackle of rifle fire from the top of Tock House, the figures on the screen diving for cover among the trees.
‘Won’t hit a blessed one of them,’ sighed the commodore. ‘The guns in the rifle slits need Coppertracks’ drones to man them. We’re firing blind, but it will keep their thick heads down until they realize we’re not upstairs.’
Daunt held up the sceptre, regarding it with a mixture of dismay and reverence. ‘So this is the real article then, after all. King Jude’s sceptre. I fear my deductions about the nature of Damson Shades’ true vocation are proved correct. I take no pleasure in it.’
Dick looked at the girl, still comatose and muttering in tongues. ‘She’s a bloody good thief to have lifted the sceptre out of the House of Guardians. How did she end up like that?’
‘She collapsed as she was walking through the grounds towards the house,’ said Daunt. ‘Boxiron had only just carried her inside before you arrived.’
The hulking steamman nodded. ‘Charlotte softbody was injured in the ambush, but she suffered no normal wound, no physical injuries. She and the man called Mister Cloake appeared to be fighting with dark powers, unnatural energies flung and exchanged between them.’
Dick snorted. ‘Him? Corporal Cloake would stick a blade between your ribs as soon as look at you. There isn’t any more to him than that. He is one of Walsingham’s knifemen, that’s all.’
Commodore Black lifted the sceptre out of Daunt’s hands. ‘I’ll be keeping hold of this.’
‘The sceptre is more than a symbol,’ warned Daunt.
‘It is duty seeking me out,’ said the commodore. ‘The land has had her wicked way again, forcing me out of my rest and pushing me down the hard path. I told you, lad, did I not warn you that it would be this way? No choice in the matter for poor old Blacky. There never is. Always me. Always me alone.’
‘You are not alone,’ said Daunt. ‘We stand by you in this.’
The commodore stalked to one of the iron doors, seized the lock, and spun the metal weight around. ‘You stand by me, do you? No time for standing around, boys, let’s be out of here before those killers outside realize there’s nothing more upstairs than a few rusty old guns pointing out with not a defender behind their sights.’
On the other side of the door, a narrow corridor of raw rock face curved around to terminate by the waist-high gates of a lifting room. The lift looked ominously ramshackle, waiting to be activated by them.
‘Another new addition to the place, Blacky?’ Dick asked.
‘That’s the thing about living on top of the hill,’ said the commodore, ‘it always occurred to me that there should be a quicker way to reach the bottom. And since I must make the journey, it only seemed equitable for me to purchase the tavern in the village below whose cellars we shall emerge in. That way, when I entertain in an ale house, I’m not pouring my money into some other rogue’s pockets.’
How much money had the old sea dog blown on building a backdoor to his pile? Well, not so much blown, Dick thought to himself. No, definitely not wasted this time.
It was a tight squeeze inside the lifting room’s cage, just enough space to shut the gate behind the party after they carried the girl thief inside. As the gate clicked shut there was a lurch while the lift’s counterweights attempted to match the overloaded state of the cage, and then they were moving down, faster and faster. Dick hoped the commodore had not short-changed the builders who’d installed his escape route. It would be an ironic end to all the murderous missions he had undertaken for the State Protection Board if Walsingham and his killers broke into the tower only to discover six bodies lying mangled at the bottom of a hidden shaft.
‘Unless this tunnel drops all the way to the other side of the world,’ said Dick, clutching on tight to the railing, ‘we’re only going to be putting off pursuit for half an hour.’
The commodore appeared happy enough with that. ‘Well now, there’s luck for us. Just long enough to get to the airship fields north of the city.’
‘You have got to be joking me,’ said Dick. ‘The board is going to have their people watching the loading ramps of every ’stat in the merchant marine. You won’t even get past the ticket desk before Walsingham’s people are step-marching you outside with a pistol shoved against your back.’
Daunt appeared concerned too. ‘And there is the small matter of Damson Shades here, good captain. I doubt there will be many airship officers who would be willing to embark a young lady in Charlotte’s condition without demanding that a surgeon be sent for.’
Commodore Black just winked back at them. ‘Well now, there you might be surprised.’
The dustmen moved cautiously into the unlit room left exposed behind the kitchen’s hidden wall. A lot more cautiously since two of their number had slid down a chute in the great hall to be impaled on one foot-high steel spikes. This cursed house held a lot of tricks. What Walsingham was fairly sure it didn’t contain anymore, was Charlotte Shades, Dick Tull, the commodore and his damnable friends. In front of him, a dustman rolled dirt gas grenades down the spiral staircase, the assassins waiting a couple of seconds for the room beneath to fill with choking, cloying poison, before storming the lower-level in a disciplined formation. A line of killers filed down with carbine rifles raised, each man covering the next, their rubber nose hoses swaying under their brass goggles.
‘They’ve taken the sceptre with them,’ whined Redlin, the royalist making sure he was positioned well beyond any gunfire that might break out inside the hidden chamber.
‘If they had any doubt of its value,’ said Walsingham, a tone of weariness permeating his voice, ‘your clever demands for its surrender disabused them of that notion.’
‘I am going to suck the marrow out of that bitch Shades when I catch her,’ said Corporal Cloake, rubbing the bruise on his ribs where he had been bowled over during the fight at the shop.
‘It is a pity matters must be kept tidy,’ said Walsingham. ‘If we had only paid her off and let her live, we would have the sceptre by now.’
‘No, that bastard Jared Black knows what he is about,’ said Redlin. ‘Why else would the commodore set his steamman friend to protecting Charlotte Shades? Your clever little thief girl planned this all along, they were working together from the start.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Walsingham. ‘They are fleeing blind. They have no idea what we require the sceptre for.
It is this damned land. Her soul is set against us. She senses us here and is moving against us in subtle ways.’
‘This land,’ said Redlin angrily, ‘is ours. It belongs to the cause. Do not forget it. When that dirty parliament of shopkeepers has being turned out and the last guardian is left hanging from a street lamp, boots twitching in the air, then the nation will rest happy enough.’
Walsingham shrugged and smiled knowingly. ‘Yes, the Baron of Lexham, aren’t you? Well, if you and all your exiled royalist friends want to play at being lord of the manor again, you had better get me that sceptre back.’ Walsingham turned to look as one of the dustmen entered the kitchen from the main corridor, clutching a box of books. ‘These were open upstairs in the library, sir. The reading lights are still on inside the room.’
Walsingham picked out the top book, The Fall of the Stag-lords, and opened it to where it had been bookmarked. His breath sucked in as he saw what the inhabitants of the house had been reading. ‘Curious, lucky and dangerous. That is an unfortunate combination for us.’
‘You still believe they don’t know anything?’ asked Corporal Cloake.
‘Not quite enough. Not yet.’ Walsingham rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Double the watch on the State Protection Board, search out anybody who is an asset and contact of Dick Tull. Not a piece of paper or a person is to get close to Algo Monoshaft’s office that we have not first checked, cleared and frisked for any warnings, coded or otherwise.’
‘That senile old mechanical,’ said Cloake. ‘I would love to push him out of his window and watch his cables scatter across the civil service’s front yard.’
‘He is not Lady Florence or Lord Chant,’ warned Walsingham. ‘Such a pity we cannot handle his kind using the old ways.’
‘That coward Blacky won’t stay around to try and warn anyone in the board, he’ll run,’ said Redlin. ‘It’s what he does best.’