by Stephen Hunt
It was said even a blind man could tell when he had walked into Steamside, and Cornelius Fortune believed it. While the evening sky above the steamman enclave of Middlesteel might not have been filled with a thousand spears of hearth smoke like the quarters of their fast-blooded neighbours, the people of the metal carried their own stacks, and the smell of high-grade boiler smoke rose up to envelop Cornelius in the rooftop nest where Septimoth had landed them. It was like sitting in a drawing room where the gentlemen had all simultaneously reached for their mumbleweed pipes.
The current focus of Cornelius’s attention rested halfway across Adam Metal Square, waiting still and silent at the heart of Steamside, in the hub of a network of narrow alleys that had never once been widened in Middlesteel’s history. Lanes that had remained untouched when King Felix broadened the streets of the capital after the great plague in the year of 901, just as they remained unaltered when Isambard Kirkhill began his great programme of public works after winning the civil war for parliament. No wide new avenues in Steamside to stop the Levellers raising barricades, no new boulevards constructed to mop up the unemployed rowdies of both sides’ disbanded regiments. Steammen suffered their own plagues and were the most loyal of the capital’s constituencies – being slow to anger and measured in pondering the troves of their long memories.
It was the owner of the longest of those memories that Cornelius had come to observe. In any other area of the city, Cornelius’s surveillance would have been easy. He could have walked round the square, dipping in and out, returning each time with a fresh face borrowed from the locals. But imitating a steamman was beyond even his powers morphic.
‘It is growing quieter,’ observed Septimoth. ‘Night will soon be upon us.’
Cornelius nodded. It was still relatively busy down below. Steamside had a high population density, the people of the metal able to approximate sleep standing up a dozen to a garret.
‘And this steamman will just stay there, in the square?’ asked Septimoth.
‘So Dred Lands would have it,’ replied Cornelius. ‘Dred assured me that Bunzal Coalmelter has been standing down there in that same spot for over a hundred years.’
Septimoth’s hunting eyes focused in on the old steamman below. Weeds had grown up around his legs and a chest assembly that had once been painted a brilliant red had been reduced to a few crumbling flecks of dye by the capital’s rain and smog. Even with the lashlite’s incredible powers of magnification, he could only just discern the flicker of a single point of yellow light behind the creature’s vision plate, pulsing with the faintness of a mouse’s heartbeat. Lands had told Cornelius that the locals had tried to polish and clean Bunzal Coalmelter in the old days, but he had cursed his fellow steammen for fools and refused to dispense his wisdom until they had left him alone. Now Coalmelter was more statue than steamman, an iron sage rusting away into a monument in the middle of Steamside.
‘You watched him all last night,’ said Septimoth. ‘You should let me take this night’s duty. Return to Dolorous Hall for some rest.’
‘You don’t need rest,’ whispered his mask. ‘Not when you are wearing me. The sun is losing its power and I am gaining mine.’
‘I don’t need your power,’ spat Cornelius.
Septimoth looked curiously at his friend.
‘I mean to say we shall both stay here,’ said Cornelius. ‘They will come for him tonight. I am sure of it.’
Septimoth knew better than to underestimate his human companion’s sense for such things. Sometimes it was as if he possessed a third eye himself. There was a touch of the lash-lite about Cornelius Fortune – perhaps there was more to their friendship than just a life debt owed?
‘I could fly down there and ask Coalmelter if he thinks his kidnap is likely,’ said Septimoth. ‘There seems to be no shortage of people who seek his counsel.’
‘Much good may his words do them,’ said Cornelius. And it was true. Many of the visitors – steammen, graspers, craynarbians, the race of man – who had come to the square during the day, went away with disappointed looks on their faces. For every piece of advice Bunzal Coalmelter uttered, there were as many insults thrown at his petitioners – ‘work it out yourself, jigger’ – ‘you are too fat’ – or sometimes he turned to the obscure and the indecipherable – ‘the finger that points at the moon is not the moon.’
Whether the ossifying creature of the metal possessed real wisdom was a moot point, Cornelius knew that Coalmelter possessed cogs and crystals as old as any to be found in a steamman grave – and that should be enough to attract a different sort of seeker of knowledge this night. He was sure of it. Or rather, the part of him that was Furnace-breath Nick was sure of it, which was good enough for the hermit of Dolorous Hall.
‘Remember, we let them take the steamman when they come,’ said Cornelius. ‘It is the organ grinder we seek, not his monkeys.’
‘An apt choice of words,’ said Septimoth, ‘given that rascal hatchling Smike said the hand of the Catgibbon is involved in this.’
‘I doubt the flash mob’s interest extends much beyond the guineas they receive for the thugs they have been supplying. Robur is behind the missing steammen corpses, of that much I am certain. Let us see if Middlesteel’s gutter scum can lead us to him.’
Down below, the evening crowd had dwindled to a single group of steammen playing a game of chess on a table outside the temple of Legba of the Valves. That was when Cornelius saw it. A coal cart pulled by two giant craynarbians, a pair of vendors walking ahead of the creaking transport – a small rat-like coalman with fingerless gloves trailed by a bullet-headed colleague almost as large as the craynarbians.
‘What do you think, Septimoth?’
The lashlite’s eyes focused on the sword arms of the two craynarbians, the bony appendages swinging casually as they hauled the weight of the coal cart. ‘Chipped and worn – I doubt through honest labours. Those sword arms have been sharpened against a grinder in a muscle pit.’
‘Who will buy my high-grade boiler coke?’ called out the small coalman. ‘Smokes up as fine as mist, Pentshire mined and graded. Who will buy my lovely coke?’ Approaching the group of chess-playing steammen, the coalman dug out a pail of coke and proffered it to the table. ‘A free sample, good sirs. Once you’ve tried Pentshire fine grade, you’ll never want anything else.’
Iron hands reached out for the free samples, then clicked open furnace chutes to imbibe the fuel. As the steammen started juddering and fitting where they sat, rat-face’s bulky companion pulled out an anti-steamman grapple from under the cart and put a bolt straight through Bunzal Coalmelter’s boiler heart.
‘Quicksilver,’ said Cornelius. ‘They’ve laced the coke with magnesium.’
‘And they obviously do not require the old steamman alive,’ said Septimoth.
So stiff with age was Coalmelter, that even impaled, he did not sink to his iron knees. He remained swaying there, the grapple point showing through the back of his spine shell, crystals fizzing as black oil leaked out from ruptured pipes and onto the moss growing around his feet units. Working calmly but rapidly, the two craynarbians pulled back a false bottom on the cart, hauling the dying steamman out from the square and hiding him under the planks. Then the killers covered over the coal cart with their black produce, all four of them wheeling the corpse away. The murderous abduction was completed in a matter of seconds.
Cornelius snarled. It sat badly with him letting the flash mob do this, but it would have been difficult for the two of them to react fast enough to have saved the steamman, even forewarned, even if they had been there solely to act as Coalmelter’s guardian angels.
‘There are a hundred crimes as bad as this each night in Middlesteel,’ said Septimoth, noticing his companion’s hackles rising. ‘The weeds of your society. Thefts and petty murders. We are not mere vigilantes. We serve our people’s memories, we serve the song of the dead.’
‘All the same, some weeds demand to be cleared away,’ said Cornelius. ‘Take
me up, Septimoth. We follow them.’
Outside the temple of Legba of the Valves, only the hallucinating steammen were on hand as witnesses to a lashlite launching himself into the sky with a human passenger. Septimoth carried the man as his people had carried their prey for thousands of years. Only the two of them and the lash-lite gods of the wind knew that the true prey was yet to be claimed.
‘There is the location,’ called Septimoth, the wind and rustle of the silk wings supporting Cornelius masking the man’s reply.
The towers of Middlesteel drifted beneath, layered with smog. This high up, Cornelius was reliant on his friend’s sharp eyes, which were nearly as powerful in the dark as in daylight. Septimoth dipped down, extending the harness tether, Cornelius’s kite wings gliding behind the lashlite as if the man was a pet monkey with the gift of flight. Closer to the truth in this aerial realm than Cornelius liked to admit.
Looming out of the darkness of the Gambleflowers was the largest jinn palace Cornelius had ever seen afloat on the river – a tiered illuminated wedding cake bobbing in the tidal flow. So, the Catgibbon still retained her fondness for a river view.
‘You have seen them go inside?’ Cornelius called forward.
‘They took the coal cart into a warehouse first, switched the cover of coke for a few hogsheads of jinn,’ shouted Septimoth. ‘All four of them went into the boat by its lower boarding ramp. The steamman’s corpse is still in the cart, judging by the effort it took the four of them to pull a few barrels of drink.’
‘Cut my line,’ cried Cornelius, slipping his Furnace-breath Nick mask off and tossing it up to his friend. Stealth would serve him better than force this night. ‘I’ll go aboard and see if our old friend Robur has made himself a home by the river.’
‘Take me,’ pleaded the mask. ‘I can still be of use to you. You are stronger as Furnace-breath Nick than as a mere man.’
‘I am a man,’ shouted Cornelius.
‘I do realize that,’ Septimoth called back. ‘You are far too heavy to be any lamb I have scooped up from a farmer’s field. I should circle, you may yet need my assistance.’
‘With a full moon tonight? Too dangerous. Lashlites don’t frequent drinking houses and if they see you up here, they may take you for a spotter for Ham Yard, or worse, a scout for a gang of rival bludgers.’
Septimoth swished his devil’s tail in annoyance. ‘You are too reckless.’
‘I have stolen into the fastness of Darksun Fortress under the Commonshare’s very nose, old bird. I am sure I can safely penetrate a gang of Middlesteel cut purses. Go home to Dolorous Hall and tell Damson Beeton I will be returning shortly.’
Septimoth whistled his disapproval and then released the towline for Cornelius to glide down towards the roofs of the docks. Cornelius used his flight silks proficiently well for a wingless monkey.
Watching from the shadows of a tannery, Cornelius waited for a suitably sized reveller to leave the jinn house, then he slipped behind the man and gassed him before he could reach the line of waiting hansom cabs. He dragged his victim behind a warehouse and removed his cloak, jacket and cane, before binding and gagging the unconscious dupe. Cornelius’s features flowed like melting wax into a facsimile of his victim’s face as he donned the stolen clothes. Cornelius chafed at the high collar of his victim’s tunic – it was lined with a ring of metal, sewn into the cloth to protect its owner’s neck from the garrotte gangs that robbed worthies in the less salubrious parts of town. He tested the handle of the cane and sprung the sword concealed inside. Courtland Town steel – this fellow was not short of a penny or two.
Cornelius’s destination was moored far enough away from the affluent heart of the capital that the visitors to the jinn house were in no danger of being spotted by anyone other than their fellow revellers. He noted that the jinn house’s iron hull had once belonged to a fire-breaker. A decommissioned colony boat, no longer fit to skirt the Fire Sea, not now that her decks were fitted out with additional pagoda levels, flammable oakwood rising by the light of a constellation of paper lanterns. Her new silver nameplate had been riveted proudly above the entrance. The Ruby Belle.
On the boarding ramp the two whippers nodded at the face Cornelius was wearing, passing no comment that one of their regulars had changed his mind and decided to try his luck again. The ship’s interior bore out the impression of wealth that Cornelius had derived from its patrons’ dress. No ha’penny tumble this for dockers, riverboat crews and rookery dwellers. Her cramped colonist hold had been cut out, replaced with a set of stairs leading down to a floor of lush red carpet covered by gaming tables, mirror-backed bars and marble-surfaced drinking stalls. Another line of stairs swept up to the pagodas. The transparent silk shifts worn by the two women waiting by the flight of steps, as well as the oiled chests of the guards standing behind them, left little doubt as to the entertainments that were on offer above.
‘Canes to be checked at the door, sir,’ said one of the jinn palace hands, making it clear that they expected all their patrons’ canes to have a razor-sharp utility beyond fashion. Cornelius moved aside for a press of braying quality, rich ladies with their stud retainers close at hand. ‘Of course.’
‘Back for another crack at the whist tables, sir?’
Cornelius handed over his cape and cane. ‘Yes. I believe my luck may be about to change.’
He took a step up onto a brass dais and received a numbered wooden coin from the cloakroom assistant, noting that the room behind her was racked with purse pistols, shoulder holsters, garter guns and sword sticks. The patrons might be slumming it in this end of town, but they were careful with it, preserving their dignity – and their life – while about their sport.
‘Would you care for a masque, sir?’ asked the cloakroom assistant, indicating a range of velvet-lined masques hanging to the side. ‘To preserve your anonymity?’
Cornelius shook his head. ‘I left mine at home today, I don’t believe I would care for another.’
‘As you will, sir.’
Down below, the gambling tables were frequented by a mix of merrymakers – some concealed by masques, others openly revelling in the wickedness of the house and probably hoping they would be recognized. Plying the tables, spinning the wheels of chance and turning cards, Cornelius moved across the connected series of chambers, mapping the layout of the Ruby Belle and locating the corridors and doors used by her staff. Taking a long glass of sweet wine, he slipped out onto the promenade, bypassing laughing clusters of patrons engrossed in their own amusements. He found the blind spot he was looking for and put down his glass. Pushing on his artificial arm with a finger, he drew out a metal cord, looping it around the railing, then lowered himself down the hull of the boat on her river side. His boots pushed him out in looping arcs, quietly swinging him down the outside of the jinn house. This should be about where the boarding ramp lay on the port side of the craft.
From his thumb he extruded a rubber circle that rolled out into a dome, a thin copper wire trailing back into his arm. He hated using this, the mechomancy so obviously imperfectly reverse-engineered from a steamman’s architecture. He willed the device into action and it began to amplify the vibrations of sound in the hull, crystals in his arm flaring up as they fed the information along his nerves, a fire like heartburn withering his guts. But along with the fire came words – a male voice growling about his attentions being rejected by a croupier. Using the large rivets as footholds, Cornelius moved along the hull, flakes of paint and iron rubbing against him as he eavesdropped on the conversations and peeped in through portholes – safe enough with the darkness of night and the lapping waters of the river Gambleflowers behind him.
Midway across the hull he found them. The two flash mob enforcers that had bundled Bunzal Coalmelter into their false-bottomed cart. They had changed out of their coke vendors’ rags, and were inspecting the ruin of the steamman’s cracked chest casing as parts were being gingerly teased out into a pool of dark puddling oil. Damn. It was n
ot Robur working on the grave robbers’ dark business – instead, some gangly beanstalk of a man was poking around the steamman’s body.
‘Careful now,’ said rat-face. ‘The parts have to be preserved, removed without cracking the crystals.’
‘For that I need to concentrate,’ said the mechomancer performing the forbidden autopsy. The man spoke annoyingly quietly, his words barely carrying through to Cornelius’s vibration amplifier.
‘There’s good coin in this for you,’ said rat-face. ‘You do this job right. The client needs the parts shipped out tomorrow, cleaned and each organ labelled.’ The larger of the two bruisers cracked his knuckles. ‘You do it badly, and it’ll be your parts that’ll need work. This is the last of the steamers on our list. You won’t get a second chance now.’
‘This is delicate work,’ whispered the mechomancer. ‘Leave I to it.’
They laughed together at the sport of needling the quiet hireling, then left, shutting the door to the room. Cornelius was about to trigger the retraction wheel on his grappling line when he realized that the mechomancer was mumbling to himself. The Circle bless a mumbler. He dialled up his listening device to maximum to catch the hissed mutters, ignoring the lancing pain.
‘Turds, turds, the way they treat I. But they have no brains, no wit.’ He stuck his lips out like a fish that was about to start whistling, scratched at his head as fiercely as if he had nits, then delved back into Bunzal Coalmelter’s guts. ‘Not clever. The client wants it tomorrow. They want it tomorrow, get to stuff their face at Whittington Manor, see all the quality. All the pretties. Should be I that goes. It is I that is working for him, not the stupids. The way they treat I …’
Whittington Manor. Cornelius had heard that name recently, or had he read about it in the Middlesteel Illustrated News? Was that where Robur was holed up, playing him for a fool and possibly planning his mischief for Quatérshift’s First Committee? He willed the retraction wheel into action and, with a low hiss, he was hauled back up to the Ruby Belle’s promenade.