Читать книгу From the Deep of the Dark - Stephen Hunt - Страница 8

In Greenhall, the heart of the Jackelian civil-service, you could always hear the beat of government – even here on the top floor of the jumble of buildings that sprawled for miles, the throb of the transaction-engines housed in the underground chambers could be felt underfoot. Unlike the great towers of the capital’s business district, the natural order of the placement of offices was inverted here. Those government departments with the most pull and political capital got the rooms closest to the eternally warm underground chambers housing the house-sized thinking machines. Those with the least got the unheated rooms near the top of the civil service’s spread out complex. It was not by accident that the State Protection Board occupied the unheated rooms under the great glass palace that formed the roof.

Dick Tull looked out of the crystal panels as he waited for his meeting with the head of the service, playing with the edges of his greying moustache. If he looked carefully through the forest of chimneys venting steam, he could just make out the network of canals running between the Greenhall buildings, navvies with axes chipping away at the ice. Even now, in the depths of winter, the great engines of government needed to be cooled with water.

Miserable, cheapskate jiggers, those engine men are. Sweating in comfort down in their echoing caverns, shovelling coal into their furnaces while they let me freeze up here. They get paid more than me too, closed shop with guild exams to get in. Sods. That’s why they give out regimental ranks in the board, so they don’t have to pay me civilian civil service rates.

And here, walking down the corridor, was a prime example of the board’s officer class. Another one of the chinless wonders who had joined after him, then unfairly risen so far above Dick’s position in life: Walsingham. He stopped before Dick, scratching his dark sideburns, his neat moustache twitching as if it had a life of its own. Walsingham’s face was so vague and nondescript that in his absence you could usually only recall him by his fussy manners and over-neat clothes, every fold tucked, every crease ironed to tight angles. Never what he looked like. A little walking blank passing through life unremembered.

‘Sergeant.’

‘Major.’

‘Last night,’ said Walsingham. ‘The surveillance at Lord Chant’s residence. It was badly done.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Were you drinking?’

Had that young sod Billy-boy ratted Dick out about his hip flask too?

‘Of course not, sir. Is Beresford not coming in with me to see the head?’

‘He’s been reassigned, Tull. To someone who can tutor to him in more than the art of skiving.’

Of course he has, conniving young sod. Already William Beresford was being pushed onto a trajectory that would carry him far beyond Dick.

‘I’ll try to manage without him, major.’

‘Better you had. Watch what you say in front of the head, he’s feeling a little … withdrawn, today.’

Circle’s teeth, not another one of the old steamer’s funny turns?

Dick tapped the side of his nose. ‘See all, sir – say nothing.’

We wouldn’t want to confuse the head with details, would we? Not when you’ve got your ambitious little gaze set on his position. That would suit you, wouldn’t it, making sure you get the glory for bagging the royalists? Another success to bolster your section, to polish your already well-honed reputation. Well, the transaction-engine chambers will run cold below your feet before I help you inflate your pension any more, you supercilious old bugger.

‘Best you had Tull, and when you’re finished in there, I’ll introduce you to your new partner. Someone to make sure you don’t get into any more mischief behind my back.’

‘You can rely on me, sir.’ Just as sure as I can rely on you.

When the clerk outside the head’s office bid Dick enter, he found Algo Monoshaft bent down on the floor, the gas lamps in the room turned down low, allowing the natural light of the glass architecture to spill across hundreds of pieces of paper connected by thin crimson yarns. Daguerreotype images of faces, newspaper cuttings and scraps of paper scrawled with the steamman’s own iron hands littered the floor. Algo Monoshaft had started off in the board’s cipher section – no finer mind for cracking enemy codes. But that had been centuries ago, and now the steamman was well past his best years. The single stack rising from his spine trembled as his boiler heart struggled to fully power the creature of the metal’s ageing systems. Where once the single steel sphere mounted to his traction unit had spun smoothly, now the unit matched Algo’s state of mind, lurching and catching his falls and stumbles as he rummaged through the papers spread out before him.

‘It’s here,’ said the head of the board. ‘Can you see it?’

‘I’m not sure, sir.’

‘Sergeant Tull,’ said Monoshaft, glancing up, the flicker of recognition on his metal skull’s vision plate. ‘You must be able to see it?’

‘It, sir?’

‘Treason, sergeant. Treasonists, all around us. All connected, all of them in the pattern down there, if only I could see the devils clearly enough.’

Oh Circle, one of his funny turns all right. Why me? Why couldn’t it be Billy-boy in here, having to humour the old fool? ‘See everything, sir.’

‘We see nothing, Sergeant Tull. Nothing!’

‘Well, we did see one of the royalists on the watch list, sir. Carl Redlin. Making contact with someone at the residence of Lord Chant.’

‘I’ve read the report you sent in. The rebel helped murder Lady Florence.’

‘That was a mistake, sir. My mistake. Lady Florence is very much alive.’

‘No,’ the steamman’s voicebox trembled with agitation. ‘She is dead, dead for sure and to my mind, Lord Chant is a treasonist, no doubt working in the pay of the rebels.’ He tapped one of the pieces of paper, following the trail of the thread along the oak floor. Dick looked at the document. A clipping from the Illustrated, the bodies found drained of blood near Cripplefield, the work of the so-called vampires. Monoshaft had scrawled “War war war” by the margins.

‘Chant is a pottery magnate, sir. One of the richest buggers in the Kingdom. I doubt that he’s in the pay of anyone.’

‘Oh, the royalists have all the money they need, sergeant,’ said Monoshaft. ‘They are being funded by the gill-necks. I have followed the paper trail and there can be no doubt, the royalist cause is now being embraced by the great underwater nation. The Advocacy mean to use our rebels to fight a proxy war against us.’

‘Our conflict with the Advocacy is at sea, sir. What do the gill-necks care if it is Parliament or a royalist monarch who rules on land? It’s simply a dispute over whose territory is being sailed over. Taxes and trade. Parliament will reach a settlement with the gill-necks.’

Cheaper than funding a war against them, anyway.

Monoshaft bent down, urgently rearranging the papers in a symmetry better pleasing to him. ‘It’s all connected, sergeant, all of it. Haven’t you heard? The Kingdom’s ambassador has just returned from the Advocacy. Never welcome at the best of times, she was expelled by the gill-necks over the heightening tensions between our two nations. There is a pattern here, a code, if we can just crack it. Where is the other agent who was with you, where’s William Beresford?’

‘Reassigned, sir.’

‘What? Not by me. Not by me. Don’t trust him, sergeant. If he’s not here with us, he can’t be trusted.’

Now we’re getting somewhere. ‘I don’t trust him, sir. He’s not one to be relied on, definitely not officer material.’

‘Now, your royalist at Lord Chant’s residence, Carl Redlin. See where the yarn runs. Follow his trail back to the gill-necks. We have a war to avert – we have royalists to crush. If only they would help us.’

‘They, chief?’

‘The Court of the Air, sergeant, the Court of the Air.’

‘Ah.’ Bugger this, just how senile is he now? The Court of the Air. The shadowy senior service, set up centuries ago with an endowment from the democratic leader who had emerged victorious after the civil war, Isambard Kirkhill. The Court of the Air. The court absolute, floating in judgement over the land in their high altitude aerial city, wreathed by the constant concealing clouds of their great transaction-engines, modelling – so it was rumoured – the possible futures of the Jackelian nation. What did we use to call them? The wolftakers. Every enemy we faced just disappeared, vanished by the good shepherds protecting their flock.

‘They were destroyed, sir, during the invasion from the north,’ Dick reminded the old steamman. ‘Don’t you remember? We found bits of wreckage from their bloody great airship city scattered for miles. Nobody has heard of one of their agents being active for years.’

‘They look down on me, on us, on the board.’

Dick shrugged. ‘They looked down on everyone, sir.’

The head of the service continued as if he hadn’t registered the sergeant’s quip. ‘They treat us as a joke, badly funded amateurs dabbling in the great game, endangering their position on the board.’

‘The State Protection Board?’

‘The chessboard, the great game,’ the steamman’s voicebox quivered in agitation. Algo Monoshaft started tugging at the threads running through the mess on the floor. ‘And the Court are here again, I can feel them. Just follow the connections, someone else’s tugging at them too.’

‘I think it is obvious that I’m going to need to tread carefully, sir.’

‘You know what they call us down here, you know what the Court of the Air calls the agents of the State Protection Board?’

‘The peculiar gentlemen, sir?’

‘No – no! That’s them out there.’ The steamman’s iron digits stabbed out to the sprawling civil service buildings. Then, as if revealing a great confidence, he pointed up to the crystal panes arcing above their heads, stained glass scenes of civil servants diligently performing their duties at desks, other bureaucrats bustling through the halls of parliament. ‘They call us the glass men. Just like our roof. Poke, poke, and we shatter. Brittle, useless, a liability, sergeant, that’s all we are to the Court of the Air.’

And now we’re on our own. Just the board to safeguard the realm. Well, I’ve always been on my own, it’s all I’ve bloody known anyway. Who else have I got to rely on – you, you mad old steamer? Ambitious chancers like Billy-boy? Self-seeking politicians like Walsingham? Just me. And soon enough, I won’t even be a memory around here. But I want my money before I go.

Dick raised his finger to point out a particular sheet of paper, a rough daguerreotype image with his own features printed across it. Was that his service record, spooled off the turning drums of the transaction-engines below their feet?

‘Why am I down there, sir?’

‘This thread,’ the steamman hissed in satisfaction. ‘To my mind, this thread is the only one I can rely on.’

‘You can always trust in me, sir.’

‘You’re not important enough,’ mumbled the steamman. ‘Not important enough to be bribed, to be turned. Never a double agent, never.’

Dick Tull nodded grimly. That was the sanest thing he’d heard from the head of the board today.

Dick shut the door to the head’s office, finding Walsingham waiting for him with a short broken-nosed bruiser who looked like he belonged in the board’s interrogation section.

‘Well, sergeant?’

‘Apparently there are treasonists everywhere, sir.’

‘I rather hope not. The board is busy enough with the royalist threat.’

‘Nobody has been able to tell me where Lord Chant’s royalist visitor ended up last night, major.’

‘I have other people trailing Carl Redlin, Tull. We wouldn’t want to lose him, eh? Lose him like, say, certain silverware reported missing by Lord Chant.’

Dick attempted to look perplexed and shook his head sadly. ‘And all those policemen at his house last night too.’

‘This is your new partner. Corporal Cloake. Work your informants in the capital. If there are rebels in the city, then they may be spreading money among the flash mob. Find anyone looking for false papers, guns and explosives …’

Dick indicated the corporal. ‘My informants’ll get nervous if I bring along an unknown face.’

‘Your informants belong to the board, not you, Tull. You make sure they are all written up and accounted for in your duty book. You’ll be leaving us soon enough. They’re not your private property. They better get accustomed to meeting the rest of us.’

And that day will come sooner rather than later if you have your way, won’t it, you old sod?

Corporal Cloake was a taciturn bugger, which suited Dick down to the ground. If more employees of the board observed the ‘say nothing’ part of their motto, the service would be a far better place to work. They took the lifting room down to the armoury to pick up the pistols they had to check in when visiting Greenhall’s corridors. The armourer on duty was Haggerston, a gruff old devil – showing about as much care of his guns as he did of his untidy, knotted beard, rubbing his fat fingers on the leather grease-stained apron he wore as he appeared at a desk built into the equipment cage.

‘Sign the chit,’ barked Haggerston. ‘Two pistols, five charges apiece.’

‘Five?’ Dick queried. ‘And what happens if I run into six royalists.’

The armourer pointed to Corporal Cloake. ‘Get him to shoot one of them.’

Dick checked the quality of the pistol he’d been given, working its clockwork hammer mechanism to make sure it wasn’t rusted beyond use.

Skinflint. I bet he’s selling our ammunition on the side, some nice little arrangement with the gun shops along Dawson Street.

‘It fires fine,’ said Haggerston. ‘I passed it on the test range myself yesterday.’

‘You ever done a real day’s work in the field? You’re going to get me killed one day.’

Haggerston mimicked a swift drinking motion with his chubby hand. ‘That gun’s better than your aim, Tull. Now jigger off.’

Corporal Cloake checked his pistol and then slid it into the concealed holster under his black frock coat, adding each charge carefully into his belt. After he pulled his stovepipe hat down he might have passed for an undertaker. But a man like Cloake made corpses, he didn’t care for them.

‘Your informants …’ said Cloake.

Tull nodded. Oh, you’ll meet them today, Corporal. Every penny-ante pickpocket and counterfeiter I have ever shaken down, starting with the most useless first. Let’s see how long it takes before you lose interest. We’ll hide that tree among the forest and see how you sodding like it.

Corporal Cloake, it transpired, didn’t lose interest – possibly because his stubby little skull lacked the imagination to hold much of anything in the first place. It was like dragging a lump of lead pipe around, only useful to slap recalcitrant informants around the head; but Dick didn’t doubt that the dour, uncommunicative little thug was carefully noting all the names and addresses of the contacts they were meeting. Hopefully he lacked the imagination to notice they weren’t shaking anything noteworthy out of the mob of second-raters and riffraff that Dick was leading them around.

After half a day of such profitless encounters, Dick pointed across the street – towards a sign hanging from a building, no words, only a painting of a haunch of lamb on a roasting spit.

‘Lunch?’ Dick started to cross the pebbled street, but the corporal stayed where he was. ‘You eat don’t you?’

‘Not there,’ said Cloake, ‘not serving slop …’

‘That’s value for money, that is,’ said Dick. ‘A couple of pennies for a plate and a draught. What do you want, the headwaiter at Ravelow’s to plump up a cushion and drop gilded gold pear slices down your throat? If you’re going to be working with me, corporal, you can break bread over the table of an ordinary.’

‘See you back here in an hour, sergeant.’

Dick shrugged and cut through the lane’s busy traffic, carts, milk wagons and kettle-blacks hissing steam around the hooves of shire horses. Oddly, the beasts seemed to mind the new steam-driven contraptions less than the old-style horseless carriages driven by high-tension clockwork. Always unsettled by the whine from clockwork engines, the nags were. Dick stepped out of the way of an old man under the sign of the ordinary, a face more wrinkles than skin, his clothes so tatty you could hardly tell where his original tweed began and the patching ended. Well, you didn’t eat in places like this for the company. The lack of words on the sign of the establishment gave the game away that much of its custom came from the illiterate poor. And there were few apartments in the rookeries, the city’s cramped slums, which possessed kitchens, or would have risked the dangers of fire even if they’d had the space. This is where the poor ended up. This is where Dick Tull ate.

Dick looked with approval at the scene inside. Rows of wooden tables and benches, cheap wooden plates with sets of iron cutlery chained to the boards of the table. A choice of – not just one, mind, but two – roasts turning on the spits at the other end of the long room, a haunch of pork and a whole side of lamb. How could you call this slop? It was value, value for money. And there were other things to be had here too, things that Dick had been counting on the corporal turning his nose up at inside an ordinary – its food and the cheap clothes of its patrons. Dick nodded back to a one-eyed man shovelling red meat through his broken teeth by the door. Then he approached the owner. The proprietor was currently ensuring the patrons only dipped their wooden cup once through the open barrel of budget beer, only carved off a single portion – and not too large with it – of meat. For some men, being thin was a matter of build, for Barnabas Sadly, it appeared a natural extension of his pinch-faced demeanour. Other men doing his job might’ve got fat on the greasy leftovers and natural spillage that went with the position. But not Barnabas Sadly, and this was hardly his primary source of income, either. The ordinary he minded was a gateway, a bridge between the normal life of the capital and its criminal underworld. A stroke of genius, really. Most greasers – the fixers and middlemen of the underworld – set up court in alehouse backrooms and eventually attracted the attention of the constables, no matter how dangerous the slum district. But an ordinary? Everyone needed to eat, didn’t they? Among the clank of chained spoons and the rattle of wooden plates, other business was conducted here. Well away from the detectives of Ham Yard and the corporals of the board, who, however poorly paid, were never so humble they would willingly eat in a place like this.

Sadly’s nose twitched like a rodent’s when he saw Dick bearing down on him, nervously glancing to either side of the beer barrel in search of an obvious escape route. Dick cut him off easily, the owner barely beginning to hobble away on his twisted foot and brass-handled walking cane. Dick backed him into a storeroom where long carving knives and spit sharpeners dangled on hooks. The top of Sadly’s head scarcely came up to Dick’s nose.

‘Anyone would think you didn’t want to see me, Sadly.’

‘Don’t say that, Mister Tull. I was just thinking about flagging down a brewery wagon for a fresh barrel, is all.’

‘Fresh?’ Dick growled. ‘There’s not much fresh being served in here. Not unless it’s what’s concealed in one-eyed Osborne’s bag by the door. That’s probably fresh from whichever poor sod’s house he took his crowbar to last night.’ Dick reached out to one of the hooks and lifted a knife off, scraping it along the sharpening block dangling next to it. ‘You’re not keeping this sharp enough.’

‘You’re just like all my customers, Mister Tull. I lay your sustenance down and you carve it off, one slice at a time. No thought for me, no thought for what it costs, say I.’

‘You’re a bad advert for this place, Barnabas Sadly. Customers like to see their hosts jolly and round-faced, not pockmarked and as hungry as a sewer rat.’ He thumped Sadly in the solar plexus and the man doubled up, Dick catching him almost gently before Sadly dropped his cane and then he pushed the informer back against the storeroom wall. ‘No padding around the ribs. You think the proprietor of an alehouse would have even felt that with a decent beer gut? Royalists, Sadly, royalists …’

The informant’s eyes darted away from Dick’s. A little too quick. What do you know?

‘Captain Twist and his noble troublemakers are back on the streets of Middlesteel, Sadly. And the board’s not happy with the thought of it. Because, if Parliament gets a whiff of the royalist rebels’ malarkey, we’re going to get—’ Dick tightened his grip on the man’s shoulder until he winced with pain, ‘—squeezed.’

‘This isn’t the old game anymore,’ complained the rodent-faced little man. ‘Things are going on, that—’

‘That?’

‘They’ve got money this time, the royalists. Normally nobody in the flash mob would give them the time of day, you know that. Blowing things up is bad for business. Leave it to the politicals and the anarchists and the bloody Carlists, say I.’

‘But Captain Twist is being flasher with the contents of his purse this time?’

‘Lords-a’larkey, but I don’t know what’s going on, Mister Tull. There are people getting together with no cause. Foxes and hens, say I. Mousers and mice. What do you think when you see those two dancing together?’

Foxes and hens. Lord Chant and his mysterious royalist visitor, Carl Redlin. Another royalist, Symons, spying on them, snooping on his own people. Strange days, indeed.

Dick brushed the dandruff from Sadly’s patched collar. ‘And what do you think, my limping little friend?’

‘I heard the board is involved, Mister Tull. Your people. And I think I should keep my head down. There’re people being pulled out of the river, and not just tramps accused of being vampires, beaten to death with pipes and sticks, either. Some of the floaters are royalists.’

‘I haven’t heard of any royalists being fished out of the Gambleflowers?’

‘There was another one this morning, Mister Tull. Third this week as I count it. Rufus Symons, a notable rogue. Raised to manhood with the royalist fleet-in-exile and dedicated to the cause.’

Rufus Symons. Sweet Circle, and if I’d followed him for a couple of hours longer, told the board and handed him over, then we would’ve found out who … Dick’s ace-in-the-hole had just been swept off the card table.

‘You look like you knew him, Mister Tull?’

‘I know he shouldn’t have died last night.’ Not until he spilled his guts to me. Not until he made me look good in front of the officer class. Who did it? You, Blacky? Did you put a bullet in his back and then roll him into the river? And now, if I tell anyone about following him out to your house in the hills, I’m going to look like the stupid jigger who messed up everything again. It’s never made easy. Not for me.

‘And this time, the rebels aren’t after guns and explosives. Nobody in the flash mob’s been asked for them. And why is that, ask I? Because the royalists are already being supplied with weapons by the gill-necks. Looks like it could be war, Mister Tull. Us against the Advocacy, and the gill-neck leadership have found some friends among our own dispossessed, dissatisfied nobles, I say. Arm our rebels, stir them up, and set them off against us before war breaks out between the Kingdom and the underwater people.’

The same nonsense that the old steamer was spouting back in the board. Maybe there’s something to it after all, then?

‘You said you thought the board was involved in this. What makes you say the board’s involved?’

Sadly tried to point back at one of the tables, his walking cane twisting in his hand. ‘One of my regulars is a news sheet man for the Garrotter’s Gazette – says the board has served his paper at least three times recently with a section thirteen notice gagging the paper. All for stories about royalists fished out of the river. He didn’t complain as much as he should’ve done; not now there’s a public disorder gag on the vampire slayings too. Nearly got hanged by a mob down the road myself yesterday.’

‘I told you, you’re too thin and pale by half.’ Dick opened his coat and hung the two silver candlesticks up on the hooks. ‘I want a good price for that pair. I can’t use the pawnshop because they’re on the constables’ watch list. When a squat little thug with a board corporal’s badge comes to ask where I am, tell him I paid for a couple of flagons of beer and stumbled out to sleep it off before he arrived.’

‘And where would you be going, Mister Tull?’

‘Fishing,’ said Dick. ‘I’m off to land me a nice fat fish.’ A duplicitous fish by the name of Commodore Black.

Charlotte Shades stepped out of the palatial expanse of Middlesteel Museum. Her mind spun with the architect’s plans for Parliament she’d been consulting, the great House of Guardians nestling in the shadows of the bell tower of Brute Julius. Of course, none of the plans detailed the security measures and mechanisms defending the crown jewels, the last sceptre of the last absolute monarch. But there was a lot you could infer from the spaces that had been left blank on the layouts. And in those voids, you just knew there was going to be trouble. Why had she ever agreed to go along with the mysterious Mister Twist? Well, there was the obscenely large amount of money being offered. And the implicit threat of violence if she didn’t acquiesce. But it was more than that. The challenge of it. Something she couldn’t take; something far beyond her station. There was probably a breed of mouse in the world, the sort of mouse that saw a mousetrap baited with cheese, the sort of mouse that tingled with the sight of what was forbidden and dangerous. That mouse never lived too long, but there were things far worse than dying. Like boredom, being really poor and looked down upon.

And then the mouse saw the cat.

Charlotte started as the steamman lumbered up in front of her, her mind instantly clearing of Parliament’s plans and levels and scales of distance. But this isn’t a steamman, is it? None of the organic, smooth movements of the people of the metal down from the Steamman Free State. This was one of the clumsy, hulking, man-milled mechanical servants surely? But it had the head of a steamman, polished and out of place on the rest of the body, and its voicebox vibrated with the words of something clearly sentient.

‘Damson Shades? Charlotte Shades? Known by the stage name of the Mistress of Mesmerism?’

Should I deny it? Nobody knows that I’m here. Not the flash mob, not even that devil Twist.

She nodded.

‘I have been sent for you, Damson Shades. My name is Boxiron.’

‘I’m as curious to understand how you knew where to find me as to know who sent you, old steamer.’

‘Your name is being whispered by demons, Damson Shades,’ said the hulking creature. ‘You are marked for death.’ Then, as if it had just occurred to him that she might find this ever so slightly alarming, he added. ‘And I have been sent to protect you as we travel.’

‘Travel?’

‘Travel to church, the man I work with must speak with you. He has a warning for you …’

A warning of a psychotic metallic servant on the loose, perhaps?

‘Church? Is your friend a vicar?’

‘He used to be a parson,’ said Boxiron. ‘But he was thrown out by the rational synod when he started believing in gods.’

‘I can see how that would be a problem.’

The Circlist order and their atheist church had no room for heretics behind the pulpit.

‘And let us say I don’t care for a sermon today?’

‘Then regretfully,’ said Boxiron, a wild clicking coming from the rotating calculation drum in his chest, ‘I shall carry you the distance.’

‘How delightfully direct. Then by all means, let us attend church this afternoon.’

Following the lumbering curiosity, she walked in the dust raised off the road by his two clanking claw-like foot plates and a distant memory began to rise through her mind, something told to her by one of the Cat-gibbon’s enforcers, eager to impress her with his knowledge of the capital’s criminal underworld.

‘I seem to recall there were tales of a steamman knight whose head was transplanted onto the body of a human-milled mechanical by grave robbers after a battle. And that this steamman later worked as an enforcer for the flash mob, cracking skulls and suchlike.’

‘And where did you hear that story, Damson Shades?’

‘I believe it was a penny-dreadful,’ Charlotte lied. ‘Mayhew’s Tales of Mechanical Mayhem.’

‘I can see how that would make a good story,’ said Boxiron. ‘But my body is that of an old butler unit – a family heirloom.’

And haven’t all the bullet holes and axe dents been neatly hammered out of it.

It was an old city church that the clanking creature led her to, walls, roof and chimneys wedged between two modern buildings. So ancient that its lines appeared organic; flats and verticals given life by so many sags, curves and tilts. Charlotte almost expected to see the building breathe. Inside, round glass windows in the ceiling brought coloured light down like pillars, the formula of the church’s mathematics mottling the humble olive-wood pews below. There was a middle-aged man standing in the illumination of one of the lights, a female figure hovering nervously at his side.

Charlotte indicated the metal creature pulling up behind her. ‘You have a novel way of filling your congregation.’

‘My apologies, Damson Shades,’ said the man. ‘I have found time can often be of the essence in these matters. Do you object if I use your stage name?’

‘It’s the only one I have, honey,’ said Charlotte. ‘And yours is?’

‘Jethro Daunt,’ he replied, then indicated the female figure. ‘And my friend here is Fidelia, the Reverend Felknor, the vicar of this parish.’

Charlotte felt the pit of her stomach tighten. Jethro Daunt. That was a name she had heard far too many times. ‘You’re the consulting detective who recovered the Twelve Works of Charity when the painting was stolen from Middlesteel Museum?’

He seemed pleased at being recognized. ‘The same. Although of course, the painting never physically left the museum. The reverse of its canvas was painted over with a new work, and then it was turned around and rehung for removal later. Are you interested in art, Damson Shades?’

She smiled. ‘I can take it or leave it.’ Normally the former. ‘Your old steamer said something about my life being in danger, and some craziness about demons …?’

At those words, the female vicar made the sign of the circle and wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘The demons of ignorance are the ones we battle.’

Daunt rested his hand reassuringly on the cleric’s shoulder. ‘Boxiron still sees things through the eyes of a steamman, the ancestral spirits of his people.’

‘Then how would you explain what is happening in the back room, Jethro softbody?’ Boxiron asked.

‘Let’s start with the rational and work our way out from there,’ said Daunt. He looked at Charlotte. ‘It will be easier to show you, Damson Shades. If you would be so good as to accompany us to the infirmary.’

Charlotte followed the vicar and the consulting detective through a narrow brick-lined corridor, Boxiron’s weight thumping behind them. Daunt talked as he went. ‘I used to be a parson, Damson Shades. In fact, I studied at the seminary with Fidelia here. Knowing my esoteric interests, she asked me to help with a little problem she’s having with a family here in the parish. Her problem seems to coincide with a case I am currently engaged upon.’

Charlotte’s heart jumped. Damn my luck. Not only a consulting detective, but an ex-churchman. And would your case have anything to do with the Lords Commercial I’ve been working this year, notorious Mister Daunt? She had to be careful around the man. He would have been well-trained in synthetic morality by the church, equipped with a mind like a steel trap. The atheist church of Circlism venerated science and learning. Its parsons, priests and vicars were trained as scientists and philosophers, as doctors of the flesh, mind and spirit. It was said a Circlist priest could read the soul of a person as if it was a map. Healing minds wracked by faith in false gods as proficiently as they healed sick flesh. Their insights could be preternatural, almost telepathic. And mine is one soul that I don’t want read by any consulting detective. How many cases has he taken where my dirty mitts were the real hands behind the job?

‘A problem?’ Charlotte said it nervously, as if just speaking would be enough for the man to pounce on her, pronounce her body language that of a criminal, and drag her to the nearest police station.

‘The unknown, Damson Shades. The uncomfortably unexplainable, a walk through the darkness.’ He dragged a paper bag out of his jacket pocket, rustled it and proffered it in Charlotte’s direction. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop, my dear?’

‘Put those filthy opiate-riddled things back in your pocket,’ complained the vicar. ‘You are standing on rational grounds.’

‘Scurrilous scare stories manufactured by their competitors, my precious Fidelia,’ said Daunt. ‘Weights and Measures would have banned the sweets long ago, if there was any truth to that title tattle. Besides, they help my mind come to clarity.’

‘They have been banned,’ the vicar muttered as the private investigator rustled the bag back out of sight. They started to climb up, an enclosed spiral staircase twisting around to the church’s upper level.

‘Your case, Mister Daunt?’

‘The mayor and the city elders have engaged my services. The current plenitude of bodies being discovered around the capital with an absence of bodily fluids is not good for trade, and it is all about trade these days, isn’t it?’

Thank the Circle for that! So you’re not onto me after all. Charlotte breathed a silent sigh of relief, confusion about her role in his affairs replacing the blade of fear that had been sliding into her side. ‘You don’t believe in that nonsense the newssheets are printing do you? Vampires stalking the Kingdom?’

‘I have little choice but to believe in the corpses being found,’ said Daunt. ‘Boxiron and I have become quite the regular visitors at the public mortuary, have we not? As to the cause of the deaths, well, we shall see.’

Charlotte stepped into the church’s infirmary, a number of clean white-sheeted beds lying empty apart from three occupied cots at the end of the hall, a little cluster of old but functional-looking medical equipment arranged in an arc around the bunks. As she got closer, Charlotte saw each bed held an identical-seeming girl a couple of years younger than Charlotte herself, their pretty brows soaked with sweat under long flaming red curls of hair.

Triplets?

She noticed they were tied to the bedposts, hands and legs restrained by leather straps, and they seemed to be mumbling in a unison so synchronized it was uncanny.

‘Who are they? What is it that they’re saying?’

Daunt bent forward and wiped the sheen off the nearest girl’s forehead. ‘Meet the sisters Lammeter, daughters of this parish’s undertaker. When they got sick, a doctor was consulted who was left quite baffled by their condition. Supernatural forces were suspected, religious infection, so their girls’ parents brought them to the church to see if it could help. And as to what it is they are saying, that is rather the nub of the issue.’

‘They are possessed,’ said Boxiron, his metal bulk swaying slightly at rest. ‘They are talking in tongues. It is as if Radius Patternkeeper is riding them, Lord of the Ravenous Fire himself.’

‘Watch your words, steamman,’ snapped the vicar. ‘As a believer, I’m tolerating your presence here on sufferance.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Daunt, raising his hands placatingly. He turned back to Charlotte. ‘Where we can even identify their ramblings, the dialects and languages being spoken are very old. I’ve been recording the words phonetically in the hope of having them translated.’

‘And what does this have to do with me?’ Charlotte demanded. ‘Do I look like a professor of ancient languages?’

‘In truth, you’re barely old enough to have matriculated, Damson Shades. But there are certain words that we do recognize. People’s names being shrieked out in the dark of the night. Your name, as a matter of fact. As well as Nancy Martense’s. Andrew Dunsey’s. Emma Osgood’s.’

Those names sounded familiar. Charlotte raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

‘You’ll find them all laid out on the mortuary slab, Damson Shades. All very pale, as you would expect for a body totally drained of blood. Little more than empty sacks of flesh.’

The newssheets. I’ve read those names in the Illustrated.

‘You’re the only name we’ve managed to trace who is still alive.’

As he stopped talking, the three girls started shaking uncontrollably, and as one they began chanting: ‘Shades. Shades. Shades. Charlotte Shades. Mistress – of – Mesmerism. Mesmerism. Mesmerism. Shades. Shades. Shades.’ Charlotte recoiled physically at the unholy wailing, her name passing across the lips of these three restrained banshees. As quickly as it started, the noise fell away to be replaced by a guttural alien chanting, unknown words hanging in the air like intruders in the calm sanctuary of the Circlist church.

Beneath Charlotte’s dress, the gem around her neck was burning cold again, just like it had been when she had met the mysterious Mister Twist and his pet thug, Mister Cloake.

‘That demon song,’ said Boxiron, ‘told us where we could locate you.’

‘I don’t suppose their rants have given you the name of the lunatic running around Middlesteel with a taste for human blood?’

‘I’m working on translating it,’ said Daunt, tapping an open notebook on a bedside table, full of shorthand scribbles of the girl’s mad ramblings, ‘with high hopes. In the meantime, I would like you to accept the protection of Boxiron. I would not be here if it was not for my friend’s rather direct methods, and I would like to offer his talents for your service also.’

A copper’s bloody nark following me around while I housebreak into Parliament? I don’t think so.

‘That would not currently be convenient, Mister Daunt. I have professional obligations to keep. After I have fulfilled them, your metal friend may burn his coal outside my bedroom door if it suits you to do so.’

‘Please,’ Daunt pleaded, pressing his card into her hand. ‘Reconsider. The murderer –or murderers – behind this wave of slayings may be privy to your engagements. They could well be counting on you fulfilling them.’

‘I’ve been looking after myself for a lot longer than the Illustrated has been scaring the city with vampire tales.’

Besides, there are plenty of thugs in the pay of the flash mob who can match any madman in town with their taste for blood, butchery and fancy knife work. Charlotte had to resist the urge to skip happily out of the room like a little girl, suppressing a sneer at the much-overestimated abilities of these church-trained meddlers. Read me like a book, indeed. Please. My body language couldn’t have been guiltier when I was hauled in here by that iron brute, and those three buffoons have nary a clue.

Boxiron watched the young girl leave the church, his neck joins juddering intermittently as if he was inflicted by palsy. ‘She is only a child – she failed to take your warnings seriously.’

‘Oh, I think she took them seriously enough, old friend,’ said Daunt. ‘But not as seriously as she takes her living. Driven to it, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You read her body’s cues, didn’t you?’ said the vicar. ‘There wasn’t much she said that was true.’

Daunt shrugged. ‘Yes indeed, I did read her. Still, she is old enough to decide to put her living before her life, whatever that living may be.’

‘You’d know all about that, Jethro.’

‘That’s hardly fair, Fidelia. I’ve been putting my mind to the best use I can, since the Inquisition revoked my parsonage and tossed me out of the rational orders.’

‘Do you still hear the old gods?’

‘Actually, not for some time now.’ Daunt glanced back to the three sisters, their synchronized ranting rising and falling with an almost hymn-like quality. At least, not directly. And not until I came back here.

‘Why didn’t you tell her what you’ve already discovered, you and that filthy book of yours?’

‘It’s the Inquisition’s bestiary,’ said Daunt. ‘Not mine. It’s merely on loan to me.’

‘Semantics won’t help the sisters recover.’

Sadly, not much will. ‘One thing is true, however. Damson Shades certainly believes she can handle herself. Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Fidelia.’

‘I am sorry?’ said the vicar.

‘And that is not something the Mistress of Mesmerism learned while being groped in music hall dressing rooms by over-eager stage managers,’ Daunt continued, half talking to himself. He popped a sweet from the bag hidden in his pocket and rolled it around his mouth. ‘It is a curious thing, but many of the grand houses that young lady has entertained have exhibited an unfortunate tendency to fall victim to housebreakers. Either during or shortly after her performances at them. Who would suspect such a young flower, eh? But then, perhaps that is the point.’

‘Is it possible she’s connected to the killings?’ Boxiron asked.

‘In this instance, I think not. Damson Shades is guilty only of being reckless and impulsive. Youth personified. Were we ever that guileless at the seminary, Fidelia?’

‘Not you. You always were a queer fish,’ said the vicar. ‘Even before the gods sent you insane with their mad whisperings.’

‘I’m recovered now,’ said Daunt.

‘They are sulking,’ Boxiron explained to the vicar. ‘Your people’s ancient deities. Jethro softbody upset them.’

‘I know how they feel,’ sighed the vicar.

‘Look after the sisters, Fidelia. No more sedatives. Tonics and herbs won’t suppress what these poor girls are channelling. The Mistress of Mesmerism is my problem now.’

The vicar jerked her head towards the infirmary door. ‘If Charlotte Shades is murdered, will the sisters get better?’

Jethro Daunt shook his head. ‘Goodness, no. The sisters will, I suspect, only recover when we find and defeat the dark force their possession is attempting to warn us of. And as far as deaths go, I fear we haven’t even begun taking a true tally yet.’

Dick removed his hand from the bell pull, the peels still echoing on the other side of the tower-like building’s front door. After a minute there was a slow, heavy shuffling on the other side and the door swung open to reveal Jared Black, the bear-like man in the unbuttoned jacket of a civilian u-boat captain.

‘Blacky,’ said Dick. ‘Answering the door yourself these days are you? Hard times is it? Where’ve all your metal servants got to?’

The submariner scratched at his unkempt forked beard and eyed his unexpected visitor with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. ‘Dick Tull come visiting. Is the board out to disturb an old man’s rest again? Can you not let me have any peace? I’m done with the great game and all your lies and your schemes.’

‘That, we can talk about,’ said Dick, entering the grand hall of the tower. Iron drones stood like sentries around the sweeping walls of the oak-panelled staircase, powered down. Warm in here. Decadently warm. Your boiler chewing its way through a couple of normal men’s salaries. Not shivering like me, are you? What have you ever done that I haven’t, to end up here in this bloody grand palace of yours? ‘Your steamman friend is out of the house, then? And the writer girl who lives here? They finally got tired of your whining and complaining?’

‘Coppertracks and Molly are away in the colonies. Off on an archaeological dig accompanying an old friend of mine.’

‘Looking for old bones,’ grinned Dick, ‘while your old bones rest here. But you’ve been keeping busy, Blacky, haven’t you? And not just on keeping the town’s vintners solvent. Give me a spot of the good stuff, then. Let me drink just a little of your unexplained wealth.’

The commodore reluctantly led Dick through to the kitchen and pantry, coughing and complaining all the way.

That cough. I have heard that kind of sodding chest before. Yes, indeed.

Sitting down at a long oak table, its surface a battlefield of chopping knife scars, Dick watched the commodore’s chubby fingers pouring a measure of wine into a clear crystal glass, and Dick kept his fingers raised until the glass was sloshing with the thick, ruby liquid.

‘Drink up,’ said the commodore. ‘And I’ll tell you what I told Algo Monoshaft last time I saw the old steamer. I’m done with the blessed board. I’ve put my carcass in the way of assassin’s blades and foreign powers’ bullets for the last time for you and yours. I have lied and fought and spied in foreign fields from Cassarabia and Pericur through to the black shores of Jago and I am too mortal old for the great game anymore.’

Dick sloshed the wine about the glass, watching the liquid run slowly down the sides of the crystal. Good legs on it. Expensive. ‘You don’t need a board pension, Blacky. Not sitting in this pile. And we don’t give them out to royalist turncoats anyway. Here’s the thing, I think you’re still in the great game, but playing for whom, that is the question?’

The commodore started to cough, slugging a measure of wine to still his hacking. ‘I’m out of it.’

‘Is that what you told Symons when he came visiting?’

Watch his face closely now. See how he reacts to me knowing about his late night royalist visitor.

‘Did you catch him, then? Poor old Rufus. How many of his fingernails did you have to remove before he blew on me?’

He’s already dead, you old pirate. Did you kill him? Let’s see how much you spill when you’re on the defensive and shook up. Let’s press my advantage. ‘No more than he deserved. But you know how it is. I need your story to match Symons’. Come on, I need to know you’re still on Parliament’s side.’

The old man’s face flushed redder still with anger. ‘I’ve never been on Parliament’s side. Your people winkled me out of hiding and strong-armed my poor carcass into your service. Anything I did, I did for the people of Jackals, not your parliament of shopkeepers and mill owners. The Lords Commercial have paid for your wicked soul, not mine.’

‘What did Rufus Symons say to you last night?’

The commodore folded back into his chair, toying wistfully with a plate of cold sliced beef sitting between them. ‘There’s been a split in the cause. A dividing of the ways over how the rebels should seize the Kingdom back from Parliament.’

‘That we knew,’ Dick lied. ‘Why did Symons come to you?’

‘To ask for help. And I told him the same thing I told you. I’m out of it.’

‘Why would you want to help him and not the rival royalist faction?’

‘Because it’s my sister who’s been helping the gill-necks, Tull. Gemma Dark, captain of the fleet-in-exile now and war leader of the Star Chamber.’

Sweet Circle. The underwater nation, the Advocacy. It was true then. The head’s paranoid rantings. But which side had Symons been serving?

Dick felt the lines of his greying moustache. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

‘Well, there’s a blessed good question. It makes no sense to me. The gill-necks had no time for us surface-dwellers when I skippered for the cause. The Advocacy called us pirates too, hunted our u-boats as keenly as Parliament’s fleet ever did. As for helping the cause overthrow Parliament, why should we trust the gill-necks? Why should they trust us? Symons felt the same way. So did a lot of rebels. Helping the Advocacy fight the Kingdom felt a might too close to treachery to him. My sister and her new allies purged the royalist dissenters, and now they’re on the run from her, you, and the gill-necks both!’

‘What about your sister? Why would you—’

‘Didn’t they let you read my file, Tull? Gemma’s a hardliner. When Parliament broke the back of the fleet-in-exile at Porto Principe, I fled for my life. As far as my sister’s concerned, I’m a traitor and a coward. And that was before I got her son killed on some fool adventure and the board started blackmailing me. I’m never going to be on the same side as Gemma again. Not unless it’s planted in a grave four feet beneath her boots.’

Dick supped greedily at the rich wine. ‘That’s quite a story.’

‘It’s the blessed truth.’

‘I know it is,’ said Dick.

‘Ah, poor little Rufus. I remember him as a lad on Porto Principe, always running around the corridors of the u-boat pens, always firing a thousand questions at us. How long did he last with the interrogation section?’

‘I know it’s the truth,’ continued Dick, ‘because you’ve got nothing left to lie for. You’re dying, aren’t you?’

Commodore Black coughed and refilled his glass, a tired expression crossing his face. ‘Rufus didn’t tell you that … I never told the lad I was sick.’

‘I watched my mother die of black rot in her lungs. I know that cough.’ And you’re just like her, aren’t you? You haven’t told anyone, not your friends or your family. You were planning to drag yourself away one night like a wounded animal and die alone. Exactly like she did. That’s why your housemates are in the colonies and you’re finishing your cellar off alone here. Just like ma did to me. They don’t know about you, you old sod, do they? ‘But you’ve got the coins to pay for a good doctor?’

‘Lying rascals with their hands in my pocket,’ said the commodore. ‘There’s nothing the likes of them can do for me. I’ve seen a lot of sailors with black rot. If you spend long enough under the seas, the dust from a boat’s air scrubbers always clogs you up in the end.’ The old u-boat man raised his glass in a mocking toast to Dick. ‘I’m due a grand long rest, and that’s why the board’s threat of tossing my poor bones in jail doesn’t hold any water with old Blacky anymore. Because you give it a year, and bones are all you’ll have left of me.’

‘Any more of your old rebel friends show up, you send for me,’ ordered Dick. ‘The board can help them. You don’t want the gill-neck fleet and your sister bombarding our harbour towns do you?’

‘Fight my sister without me,’ coughed the commodore. ‘I’m not going to be around to save your skins anymore.’

Maybe not, but you’ve saved mine, you old sod, you and your breakaway royalist friends. This intelligence is going to salvage my career and give me a pension worth more than half a penny to leave with.

Dick glanced back at the illuminated clock face at the top of the tower as he walked away through the grounds of the house, steam venting into the cold air from grilles around the building’s basement level. All that money it costs to heat a tower that large. Lucky, wine-warmed bastard. He’s passing away in comfort. More comfort than old ma had. More than I will.

Corporal Cloake watched from the shadows of the trees as Dick Tull emerged from the tower opposite the house’s orchard; the corporal noting the silhouette of Commodore Black at the open door spilling heat into the cold winter air. What had they discussed? Well, it really didn’t matter. Another one who would have to die, along with the snitch back in that cheap slop-house of an eatery that the corporal had been watching. But that was the nice thing about being employed by the board. They had a special section that specialized in disposing of rubbish.

It was time to call in the dustmen.

Boxiron cradled the volumes in his iron hands, the books of forbidden knowledge that Jethro had asked for shaking slightly as he navigated his way across their apartment’s worn red carpet. There were so many ironies here. Once he had been a proud warrior, a steamman knight of the order militant. But that body had long since been destroyed, only his skull and his soul-board salvaged by the human scavengers who arrived like crows at the aftermath of a battle. Stripping the dead steammen for parts that could be sold to the devilish human tinkers in artificial life, their Loa-cursed mechomancers. What had been left of Boxiron’s body had been amateurishly joined to the defunct body of a treasured family servant, the warrior’s memories suppressed and left to haunt the human-milled body like a ghost. But ghosts had a way of coming back to haunt their owners, and so it was with Boxiron, the first true memories of his reawakening returning as he stood in an inferno, his hands clutched around a can of lamp oil, the widow Aumerle’s grand house burning down around his metal frame. The screams of its owner upstairs, crying for help from the ageing mechanical she had grown up with from a girl. The only thing she had truly loved in her barren, childless life. The mechanical she had spent a small fortune reanimating with stolen steamman body parts.

Boxiron had stood there in the grounds, watching her crazed silhouette flapping at the window against a backdrop of flames. Is this hell, he had wondered, is this the dark realm of Radius Patternkeeper, Lord of the Ravenous Fire? Hell had yet to find him, although he had come close to purgatory wandering the streets of Middlesteel, turned away from the temples of the people of the metal, outraged that this desecration, this walking corpse, should come to them begging succour. This metal zombie who should have deactivated himself rather than violate the perfection of the design blessed upon him by King Steam and the Hall of Architects. Was it any wonder he had drifted into the clutches of the only society who would accept him – the human capital’s underworld? The flash mob, only too glad to allow their mechomancers to soup up his ill-fitting frame. Giving Boxiron power enough to break the arms and legs and skulls of those who would not pay protection money. Giving him the skill to crack locks, both physical and those rolling on the calculation drums of the race of man’s primitive steam-driven thinking machines.

Oh yes, the irony. Once a proud warrior of the people of the metal and now barely able to navigate a true course across a drawing room without spilling what he carried or upending the table where Jethro Daunt was working. It was the eccentric ex-parson who had saved Boxiron from the life he’d fallen into. Allowed the soldier to reclaim some sliver of honour. It was the challenges of the cases that they undertook together that allowed Boxiron to feel a vestige of the thrill of the battlefield that had been the purpose of his old existence. That gave him direction enough to keep on going, rather than taking the path of honourable deactivation that the people of the metal’s code demanded of a desecration.

Increasingly, however, Boxiron found this was not enough. His mind clear, his body so wrecked and inferior. The juxtaposition grew heavier with each year. Much how a young softbody might feel, once fit, gazing upon withered limbs made sick by a wasting disease. He hated his shaking fingers, so slow and brutish. He loathed his pistoning legs, so heavy and so inelegant. He hated his weak boiler heart, puny and pitiful and so incapable of supplying a strong, regular flow of power. He hated the way he would direct his body to action only to have it respond milliseconds too slow to react to a threat, lurching and reeling from foot to foot. Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t that incoming shell have destroyed my mind and left my body intact for the scavengers. Why must I be imprisoned inside this pitching, stumbling corpse? Would dying be so bad? I’m hard to kill, but not that hard. I could climb to the top of one of the city’s pneumatic towers, so high that the shadow of the airships darken the air vents, leap from the roof. The impact would kill me, surely? My skull smashed. My mind at peace. My ancestors have forsaken me. My people wouldn’t miss me, only—

Daunt looked up from the table and smiled, pushing aside the volume from the inquisition’s forbidden library that he was browsing. Here was another irony. The human’s Circlist religion, the church that denied all gods, with all the knowledge and lore of their old ways, their superstitions, wrapped up and concealed in these goat-leather bound tomes. Devils and demons and monsters and legends. Some real, some legends. It was wise of the Inquisition to conceal them, for it was only the power of belief that could animate gods, and the distinction between what existed in truth and myth was often blurred. You couldn’t always predict what people would believe in.

‘These are the last of the books,’ said Boxiron.

‘Thank you, old steamer. The longer I look at them, the more I feel the answers we seek are elsewhere.’

‘Are there any superstitions and irrationalities of your people that the Inquisition have not secreted away inside their pages?’

‘What those poor possessed girls are screaming at night has its roots in history, I am convinced of it.’

‘The hysteria sweeping the city grows worse,’ said Boxiron. ‘Our landlady took great delight in describing how a local mob chased a dog to his death under the wheels of an omnibus. It was a vampire apparently, a shape-switcher changed form, and the crowd swore they heard it beg for mercy as they beat the piteous, wounded animal.’

‘Poor fools.’ Daunt took his reading glasses off and rubbed his tired eyes. ‘What are the vicars of their parishes doing? They should be calling the people to meditation, balancing their souls. Healing their minds.’

‘There is an old saying in the Steamman Free State,’ said Boxiron. ‘When you cease to believe in the ancestors and the Loa, you do not believe in nothing. You believe in anything.’

‘We don’t believe in nothing, old steamer. We believe in each other, and we believe in rationality and our own power to make things better. It is always a hard thing to ask a person, to climb the mountain alone with empty hands.’

Boxiron shrugged. ‘Yet, it is not steammen who are chasing hounds through the streets with clubs and pitchforks.’

Daunt smiled kindly. ‘You have no blood to suck, old friend. Maybe a little oil, but I doubt there is much sustenance in that.’

‘There will be little left in you, either, Jethro softbody. If you sit there hour after hour staring at tales of garden sprites and witches’ spells.’

Daunt nodded and shut the book, collecting up the notes he’d made from the possessed sisters’ ramblings. ‘I have to agree. I believe it time to seek help from an expert in antiquarian matters.’

‘Do you wish me to return these books to the Inquisition?’

‘Not yet,’ said Daunt. ‘I have another task in mind for you, old steamer. One a little more suited to your … unique talents.’