Читать книгу From the Deep of the Dark - Stephen Hunt - Страница 9

Charlotte glanced around Damson Robinson’s pie shop to make sure that there were no customers left inside. Then she turned the sign hanging on the door to read ‘closed’ and locked it shut. On the other side of the sawdust-strewn floor, Mister Twist laid out an architect’s blueprint for the ground floor of the House of Guardians, all of Parliament’s lintels, lunettes, elevations and eaves laid out on the ageing parchment.

‘You have not explained the details of how you expect to obtain King Jude’s sceptre for us?’ said Twist. He looked over in annoyance at the old female proprietor of the pie shop hovering nearby. ‘It would be better if you weren’t here.’

‘I am sure it would, dearie,’ replied Damson Robinson. ‘But seeing as it is the Cat-gibbon who procured Charlotte’s services for you, the flash mob would like to make sure there’s no business between the two of you going on under the counter.’ She tapped her worktop and pushed a large chopping board out of the way.

Twist shrugged and lifted up a battered red leather case, the kind clerks and civil servants used to lug paperwork across the city. Laying it on top of the counter, Twist undid the clasp and revealed a velvet-lined interior filled with neat cord-tied columns of gold sovereigns.

Damson Robinson sighed in gentle satisfaction. ‘There’s a sight to warm an old bird’s heart.’

Charlotte had to agree. The money always helped.

Twist closed the case and placed it between his boots. ‘You’ll take your share of it when I have the sceptre.’ He tapped the plans, impatiently.

‘Only I ever know the details of my jobs,’ said Charlotte. ‘A girl has to keep her secrets.’

And we wouldn’t want you copying my plan and deciding to execute it without me, would we?

‘Results are what count, Mister Twist,’ said the shop owner. ‘We don’t ask, you don’t ask. That way there’s no recriminations about who knew what, should any detectives from Ham Yard come calling at a later stage.’

‘Professional tradecraft,’ said Charlotte. ‘Just like I haven’t asked where your friend Mister Cloake is tonight.’

‘Mister Cloake and my associates will be waiting here to take possession of the sceptre when you get back,’ said Twist. ‘I have other business to attend to.’

How many rebels are there swarming over the city? Well, I don’t need to know. Just so long as that case full of money is still here when I return.

Damson Robinson came over to give Charlotte a little hug. ‘You be careful, dearie. I stepped out with a sergeant major from the house guards regiment when I wasn’t much older than you. They’re tough old buggers. You won’t find any of them sleeping at Parliament’s gate.’

‘You keep my share of that money safe,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’ll keep my soul well enough out there.’

Charlotte stepped out into the street, her mind preoccupied with all of the dangers of the night ahead of her, the floor plans she had memorized, the challenges she would face. So immersed in her own world that she didn’t notice the figure slinking back into the shadows of the alleyway on the opposite side of the road.

This was just as well, for if she had, Parliament was the last place Charlotte Shades would have visited.

Damson Robinson sighed, watching Charlotte depart with her housebreaking equipment. Then the old woman locked the door again and made them safe. All my pigeons have flown and left. But let this one come back, come back safe with a valuable little gee-jaw stuck between her talons.

‘Roll your plan of Parliament up from the counter, young man. It’s going to be a long evening and I have an order of eight pies to complete for morning’s opening.’

‘Disgusting,’ said Twist, concealing the map beneath his frock coat.

‘They’re meaty enough, if you bone the partridges properly before you boil them,’ said Damson Robinson.

‘The way you consume food, it disgusts me, eating like cattle. Crumbs and juices pouring out of your mouths, the disgusting slurping sound you make as you crunch away at the flesh and the baked seed flowers. The foul stench as you defecate your waste back out again.’

‘What are you—’ Damson Robinson turned to see Twist removing a tuning fork-shaped object from under his coat, the thing shaped out of glittering crystal ruby. ‘Is that a tuning fork? I don’t have a piano here, dearie. Not in my shop.’

Then a strange thing happened, although the queerness of it was lost on the proprietor of the shop. The client who had commissioned tonight’s pilferage disappeared, replaced by a beau from her past, young George. She was so glad to see him; it had been so many years. They had set up the shop together before he died of a bowel abscess. Passed away from her far too young. She stretched her arms out to greet him.

‘Yes, a song,’ said Twist, upon the old lady in two long striding steps, plunging the crystal prongs into her neck. Damson Robinson stumbled back, blood fountaining out across the counter, her greeting for George muffled by Twist’s hand clamped over her face. ‘A song of blood and flesh! The Mass must feed.’

Thankfully for the shop owner, the pain that should have accompanied the sight of the spinning room as her heart gave up was absent; the pressure of her rapidly vanishing blood more than her seventy-year-old body could stand. She didn’t hear even Twist’s last words as the blackness flowed over her. She was too busy kissing George.

‘No taste, you filthy old crone. Not like the girl, she’ll taste sweet for Mister Cloake, she’ll taste—’

Jethro Daunt let go of the lion-shaped handle of the bell-pull, listening to the echo of the chimes inside. The ex-parson-turned-consulting-detective smiled at the sound. It put him in mind of the bells in his old parish, back in the small northern town of Hundred Locks. The locals who complained the church’s campanologists set to ringing their bells with too much gusto, whatever the occasion – be it funerals, weddings, or Circle Day services. Before I was defrocked, before …

The door swung open and the bushy eyebrows of the bear-like man who’d answered rose in surprise. ‘Ah now, it seems to be my week for receiving old faces back into my life.’

‘I do trust I am not intruding?’

‘Far happier to see your face than the last fellow, and that is the truth of it,’ said the commodore, leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘A government officer, full of guile and treachery he was. Where is your old steamer, that great metal lug Boxiron? Is he not working with you still?’

‘He is,’ smiled Daunt as Commodore Black ushered him into the great open hall of Tock House. Daunt glanced with interest around the space, noting the bulky walls that held the front door and the huge blast door hidden above, ready to smash down if the house’s owner decided to trigger it. ‘Even as we speak, in fact. He might turn up here later. And speaking of old friends, I suppose it is too much to hope that Professor Amelia Harsh is presently in residence within your house?’

‘You have missed her by three weeks, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘She’s off to the colonies with the rest of my friends. The miners out in Concorzia have found some rusting old ruin of a city out there, and so away my housemates have flown to poke about for relics and lost history.’

‘The professor’s favourite kind, as I recall,’ said Daunt. He bit back his curiosity and restrained himself from asking why the commodore had not transported them to the distant shores of the colonies in his own u-boat. After all, it had been on just such a mission to the dark Isle of Jago where Daunt and the old submariner had made their acquaintance. There was, Daunt sensed, something amiss in the old sea dog’s presence here all alone in the great tower.

‘I turned up at the university seeking the professor’s wisdom,’ explained Daunt. ‘They pointed me in the direction of Tock House.’

‘If it is wisdom you want, you may find a blessed library full of it upstairs,’ said the commodore. ‘The professor and my crystal-domed steamman friend Coppertracks were inside the house plotting and planning for near a month before the expedition sailed. We have half the tomes from the school of archaeology at St. Vines here, and don’t you think that Coppertracks didn’t have our shelves close to bursting with all his books before the professor turned up with a line of students carrying a mortal stationers’ worth of volumes for her.’

‘You can never have too much knowledge,’ said Daunt. ‘I would take it as a kindness if I might peruse her books inside your unusual home.’

‘Unusual is it?’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve missed that canny mind of yours, Jethro Daunt. Filled with all the cleverness of the church and honed like a sabre on a whetstone on your laws of synthetic morality. What strikes you as unusual about Tock House?’

Daunt pointed up to the hall’s second landing as they climbed the stairs. ‘All those Gothic rose windows visible outside, illuminated with stained glass. But inside your hall, the only natural light is coming from above. The windows are fake, set in your walls’ outer layer – walls made of fibre-reinforced concrete set ten feet thick. Your home was built to resemble a rich man’s folly, but in fact, it is better fortified than a civil war pillbox. Kirkhill-period, constructed by a rich merchant after the unrest following Parliament’s victory over the king.’

‘Aye, you’ve the bones of it,’ admitted the commodore. ‘The windows from the fourth storey and above are real enough, and there is a courtyard in the centre of the tower that admits the sun. A weak spot if your foe climbs well enough.’ A dark thought seemed to furrow the commodore’s brow. ‘What wicked business brings you here today? The Inquisition has not engaged you again? As I recall, I barely escaped from that blasted hell-island of Jago the last time I became mixed up in your business.’

‘Thankfully, the patrons covering the expenses of my present case are a little more prosaic,’ said Daunt. ‘The burghers of the Middlesteel city council. You have, I trust, been following the hysteria outside … the upheavals in the city accompanying the vampire killings?’

‘That foolery?’ coughed the commodore, slowing on the stairs. ‘Bloodsuckers don’t leave drained bodies discarded like chicken bones outside food stalls at a winter’s fair. They’re clever and subtle and secretive. They come from the shadows to steal your body, and if your family is blessed lucky, you’re never seen again, for they turn their victims into their own kind. What I have heard reported in the papers is not vampires’ work, it’s common slaughter, bodies butchered desert-style with all their life drained by some maniacs.’

‘Slaughter perhaps, commodore, but the real force behind the murders is, I fear, far removed from the mundanity of broken minds with sharp blades and a depraved taste for blood.’

‘You don’t believe the papers’ fool nonsense do you?’ Leading them down a corridor with a polished wooden floor and oak-panelled walls, the commodore walked Daunt to a spiral staircase. ‘I had you for a sharper fellow.’

‘I have three sisters in the care of the church, talking in tongues, who suggest I would be wise to believe otherwise.’ Daunt pulled a notepad full of jottings out of his frock coat. ‘A set of triplets ranting in ancient languages, Jackelian dialects that predate the age of ice and the devastation of the cold-time.’

‘Myth and the dust of forgotten ages,’ sighed the commodore, leading him up the stairs and onto the next storey. ‘You are in luck then. That’s the professor’s passion, and my friend Coppertracks has a taste for it too. Some of the old steamer’s books are from the mountains of the Steamman Free State and as old as any I’ve seen.’

Accompanying Daunt to the library entrance, the commodore unlocked a double pair of doors, pushing them open to reveal an extensive chamber split across two levels. Shelves lined the walls, a second-tier with hanging ladders to access the thousands of tomes racked above the room’s expensive hand-woven rugs. Like the rest of the tower, the library felt comfortably warm. Daunt took off his coat and tossed it onto the back of one of the dozens of leather armchairs scattered across the room.

The commodore indicated the reading tables, still covered with papers, books and notes, as if the expedition to the colonies had only just left. ‘Make yourself at home, lad. This is all the professor’s on the table, as well as the books piled in the corner. Not that I have been reading any of them. My taste in printed matter bends more towards the penny-dreadfuls and rousing tales of adventure and skulduggery.’

‘Yes,’ said Daunt. ‘Well, I believe we both had our fill of that out beyond the Fire Sea. Without the professor to help me in my translations I may need to work late here.’

‘As late as you like, lad. You’ve got your pick of guest bedrooms on the next floor. I will be taking a roast chicken out of the range in an hour or two, and it’s a shame to open good red wine without honest company to honour it.’

Jethro Daunt had, he realized, lost all sense of time in the library. He looked over to the one wall that wasn’t filled with shelves. A polished bronze wall clock was mounted there above an old royalist-era oil painting, an ornamental fireplace below. There was a dumbwaiter hatch to the left of the fireplace, and judging by the enticing smell of roasting meat emanating from it, the drop no doubt went all the way down to the kitchen in the keep-disguised-as-folly. The scene in the painting was of a boar-hunting party, the hunters unsportingly larking around in the brush wearing gas masks as their lance-carrying retainers waded through the undergrowth, eyes watering above water-soaked kerchiefs tied around their faces. In the corner of a painting, a boar slyly watched the party blundering about a mist of evil-looking yellow mustard gas, unsuccessfully trying to flush it out. Better to be the boar than the hunter, sometimes.

Daunt stared worriedly at the clock. No sign of Boxiron yet. Daunt had told the steamman to seek him out at Tock House if he wasn’t to be found at their apartment. Yet Boxiron hadn’t turned up. Does that mean things have gone well, or badly?

It was late, and Daunt’s progress in translating the possessed ramblings of the sisters Lammeter had been as slow as he had feared it would be without Professor Harsh’s assistance. He was trying to match his phonetic shorthand against actual words in languages that had been largely lost to the modern world. It hadn’t helped that the languages of the patchwork of tribal kingdoms that had preceded the long, dark centuries of the ice-age bore little relation to each other. He had to parse them through the descendent language of River Tongue, a trading language merchants and travellers used as a lingua franca across the continent. Surprisingly, Daunt found it easier to reference the older languages using the strange antiquarian books that the commodore’s eminent scientist friend, Coppertracks, had carried down with him from the mountains of the Steamman Free State. The steamman’s tomes sported engraved metal covers and pages made out of some composite material that felt like a mix of rubber and glass – as hard to tear as steel, yet as thin as tissue paper. But as peculiar as the books’ form might be, the standardization of the people of the metal’s writing across the ages made their treatises on pre-cold time civilisations far more accessible than humanity’s volumes. The race of man’s books that survived into the modern age were copies of copies of copies, changed and mutated with the progressive errors of each new generation. In contrast – much like the steamman race – the metal creatures’ tomes were methodical, steady and full of a humble cleverness. The only grating thing for Daunt was their authors’ continual tendency to attribute events to their ancestral spirits, the Steamo Loa. If they weren’t thanking their gods, they were busy blaming, praising or censuring them. It was almost as if they had written their texts in such a way as to annoy a parson of the atheist, humanist Circlist church. Ex-parson, Daunt reminded himself. But some habits die harder than others.

Yawning, Daunt gathered up his notes and went in search of the tower’s owner. He found the old submariner in the house’s kitchen, a grand scullery with a door latched ajar onto the tower’s central courtyard, the warmth of the range evenly matched against the freezing evening breeze blowing outside. Ducking under a wooden frame dangling with dozens of pots, pans and pitchers, Daunt dropped his work down on a rectangular table in the kitchen’s centre, enough chairs to seat twelve heads at a single sitting.

‘Your cook has the night off?’ Daunt said to the commodore’s back as the large man drained a pot of steaming vegetables.

Without turning, the commodore pointed to one of the goblin-sized metal figures standing inert against the wall. ‘The month off, lad. Coppertracks’ drones will be as still as statues until he returns from the colonies.’

‘I fear I would never let Boxiron cook for me. His idea of a fine meal is a tenth of a coal box shovelled into his furnace injector.’

‘Ah, but Coppertracks is a rare genius,’ said the commodore. ‘Clever enough to have read Damson Beaton’s Household Economies and Recipes for Sustenance and passed it onto his little metal puppets here. Did you find any of the revelations you were looking for upstairs?’

‘Along with a measure of frustration, good captain. I have a little of the meaning of what the sisters have been saying, but meaning without context.’

‘A map without bearings,’ said the commodore opening the range and removing a tray of covered clay pots. ‘Blessed hard to plot a course against that.’

‘Much of what I have uncovered seems to concern a monarch who was said to have unified the tribes into the first Kingdom of Jackals before the age of ice swept the continent.’

At Daunt’s words, the commodore seemed to stumble, almost spilling the pot’s contents. ‘That would be Queen Elizica of the Jackeni.’

‘Indeed,’ said Daunt. ‘It is as if the Sisters Lammeter are possessed by her spirit, relaying her words from beyond the grave.’

‘Elizica’s whispers have been heard in our world before, lad. She took it in her wicked mind to speak through my daughter, once. Nothing good comes from possession by the spirit of the land. Elizica’s like an albatross fleeing the storm front. If it’s her mutterings that your poor lassies are babbling about, you had best close the storm shutters and start stacking sacks full of flood sand outside your door.’

‘I don’t believe in unquiet spirits,’ said Daunt. ‘And the only gods with us in the world are the ones we create in our mind.’

‘Save your Circlist cant for the archbishop,’ said the commodore. ‘I know what I’m talking about, right enough. She’s the voice of the bones of the land. Jackals itself. The Kingdom soaked with the souls and blood of a thousand generations of our ancestors before us.’

Daunt shrugged. ‘A voice that talks in riddles … of a war within a war. And riddles that point back to an ancient conflict between the tribes and the underwater people. A time when gill-necks waded up our beaches and attempted to conquer the mainland.’

‘I know a little of the legends of that time,’ said the commodore. ‘Though I wish I didn’t.’

‘The professor wrote a book on it,’ said Daunt. ‘The Fall of the Stag-lords. She hypothesized that the magma fields of the Fire Sea were expanding during that age, driving the peoples of the underwater nations onto our shores. During the confusion of that period, the hold of the druids over the land was weakened, the invaders repelled and the tribes unified under the first queen.’

The commodore looked as though this was news he did not want to hear. ‘Let it stay in the professor’s history texts, lad. Wicked times, let them stay lost and forgotten, that is where they belong!’

‘The tongues that the sisters Lammeter are speaking in would have it otherwise,’ said Daunt lifting up his notes and translations. ‘The meaning is obtuse, but they seem to suggest that those times are repeating, that the war we now face with the Advocacy is merely the turning of the circle. They warn of ancient prophecy.’

The commodore moaned and abandoned his range. He collapsed at one of the table’s chairs. ‘Damn her, damn her wicked tricks.’

‘The professor?’

‘Elizica, lad, the bloody ancient queen. Is there so little royal blood left running in our land that she must come tormenting me, sending visitors to my door until she drives me out of my peaceful rest? First poor Rufus, then that black-hearted secret policeman Dick Tull, and now you. Where was she when the royalist fleet-in-exile was broken at Porto Principe by Parliament’s airships? Where was she when my wife died, when my daughter was killed? Where was she when we stood together, Jethro Daunt, on that terrible land of Jago and faced down the army of the ursine and the terrors of that terrible singing tomb and its fearful weapon fit for dark gods? But now, ah, there’s trouble with the people of the underwater nation and poor old Blacky is meant to abandon his nice warm house and put his neck on the line again! And for what? A parliament that turned my noble ancestors out of their land and hunted me for most of my damned life. Where is the justice in that, where is the fairness in that?’

Daunt had never seen the commodore so agitated. He raised his hands placatingly. ‘Peace, good captain. Please, it is Boxiron and I who’ve been engaged on this case by the capital’s aldermen. I appreciate the hospitality of your library, but I certainly wouldn’t ask you to share whatever dangers might present themselves while resolving this case.’

‘You won’t have to, lad.’ The commodore shook his head as Daunt extended out his bag of Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops. ‘She’ll do for me, just you wait and see. There’s never a choice with her. She’s the land, and if you wait long enough the land will take everything from you, even the dust of your bones when you’ve sacrificed all that you have to give. It is my family’s fate, and I’ve run from a lot of things, but fate is one beast you can never outpace.’

‘We chart our own way on the Circle’s turn. There are no gods worth believing in. No fate save that which we will into being.’

‘I hear the parson left in you talking,’ said Commodore Black. ‘But you will see. She’ll have her way.’

‘Don’t believe in the gods, good captain. Refuse them.’

‘Too late for that, lad. For the spirit of Queen Elizica believes in me. And now, I fear, she believes in you too!’

Daunt let the calm and the quickening of the sweet’s flavour pass through his head, all the tiredness and cobwebs clearing. They tormented me once, the old gods, Badger-headed Joseph and his kin. But now I am their master. I’ve come too far to swap their tyranny for that of a queen. Even if she is the queen of our land.

‘I shall hold to what is right and rational, and you must do the same.’

Getting up, the commodore returned with a dusty bottle of wine bearing what appeared to be an intricate label written in Cassarabian script. ‘Well, that would be this, then. Let’s drink while we are able. I shall toast my unlucky stars and you may toast your synthetic morality and whatever other inventive teachings the church saw fit to squeeze into your clever noggin before they booted your arse out of the rational orders.’

The two of them sat. And they drank.

There was a chill in Dick’s room when he returned home, the kind that seeped deep into a man’s bones and numbed them from the inside out. Dick Tull might only keep two rooms in the cheap second-storey tenement he rented, but even so, his single fireplace always seemed too small to put out enough heat, no matter how much coal he piled inside it.

Dick left his greatcoat on. Thin walls. Thin floors. Thin ceilings. Cheap windows with as much frost on the inside as outside. I’ll be out of here soon enough. The report I handed into the board. Proof that the royalists and the gill-necks are conniving together. Wait till the head gets to read that. His suspicions confirmed. My promotion in the bag. Able to afford rooms in a respectable district. Not too expensive, of course. That’d be a waste. But somewhere my neighbours aren’t living twenty to a room. Screaming and shitting and crying and fighting. That’ll show that urchin Billy-boy. That’ll show that arrogant sod Walsingham.

Dick walked across to his window. He had made the curtains himself, cheap thick cloth that had come from a pawnshop around the corner. There was a fight spilling out of the tavern opposite, scattering a patrol of the local citizen’s committee. The patrol were waving kitchen knives, a few rusty sabres and one rifle that looked so old it’d be hard pressed to loose a single charge before it needed to be stripped and cleaned. Good hunting, lads. You meet a vampire tonight, you had better hope it dies from a laughing fit.

Dick glanced at his cold fireplace and the rusty quarter-full bucket of coal nestled against the grate, shook his head, then walked into his bedroom to swap his greatcoat for the soft indoor coat he kept hanging on the back of the door’s hook. Fear froze him far colder than the apartment’s chill, and it wasn’t the wintry bedroom that stopped his heart – it was the corpse sprawled across his bed, so much dried blood staining Dick’s cheap grey woollen covers that you’d think the blankets had been dyed brown. William Beresford’s throat had been neatly slit open, and the young agent had been tossed down with a knife stuck in the middle of his chest.

That looks familiar. Dick’s hand reached for the blade sheaf hidden at the back of his belt. Empty! My blade. My lodgings. Sodding hell. Dick had seen enough set-ups – arranged more than a few of his own – to know when he was being hung out to dry. There was no trail of blood across the room, so like as not, the agent had been lured here and murdered in situ. Shit me, Billy-boy, you had to let them stick you here. In the chest too. And you knew the bugger that did it, to let them get that close. My lodgings, you stupid, young—

Dick heard the poorly nailed floorboards of the staircase outside squeaking with the weight of people climbing up the stairs. He’d left the board’s pistol back with the office’s hoary old armourer, which meant he’d have to use his own ammunition tonight. How careful were the jiggers that did this, how well did they search my place?

Not thoroughly enough. Dick pulled at the bedroom’s loose skirting board, eaten away with woodworm, and dipped his hand into the empty space behind the wood, pulling out a short-barrelled blunderbuss from the gap between the bricks. He’d taken it from the carriage of a dead hansom cab driver who had been supplying a little more than rides to the Cassarabian ambassador. It wasn’t a neat gun; whatever you said about it, the weapon could never be described as that. But then, it was designed to be pushed against drunk, flailing, violent passengers in close confines, with most of the assailants’ bulk blown away by the impact of the charge. It was a terror weapon really, no range to speak of. Anyone who didn’t shit themselves just looking at it probably needed to be split in half to be stopped. There was a saying in the Jackelian regiments that it took a man’s weight in lead to stop a charging soldier. Well, here it was, a man’s weight in buckshot loaded into its flared iron barrel, and Dick reached back again for the bandoleer holding ten more charges. He slung the bandoleer over his waistcoat before concealing in under his coat.

‘Tull!’ It was his landlady’s voice. Damson Pegler, the grasping old cow. ‘Coal man’s been. How much of the black stuff are you going to take?’

‘Save it!’ called Dick, using the cover of the bellow to click back the hammer on the blunderbuss’s clockwork firing mechanism. ‘I’ve still got a quarter bucket inside here.’

‘Special price today,’ said the old crone. ‘Half full gets you a second half free.’

Special price. And you’re passing the money onto me, rather than keeping it for yourself, you cheap old cow. Almost as improbable as finding his ex-partner a corpse stretched out across his bed.

Dick raised his voice. ‘All right then, I’m coming.’ The latch on his window snapped open beneath the shout.

‘Damson Pegler.’

‘Yes?’

‘Get your sodding head down.’

The blunderbuss bucked even as Dick dropped out of the window, sending a cloud of shot through the cheap door and the flimsy walls, the brief satisfaction of hearing yells and screams outside his lodgings by way of reply. Hurling himself at the ladder on the fire escape, he kicked the ladder’s latch out and rode it all the way down to the street outside.

‘Vampires!’ Dick screamed at the patrol of the local citizen’s committee, dozens of heads turning to see where the commotion was originating. He flung his hand towards the entrance hall of his tenement building. ‘Sweet Circle, man, there’s bloody vampires inside the building, they’re slaughtering everyone. It’s a sodding massacre in there.’

Give them that much, there was only a moment of hesitation on the mob’s part, then, as one, they surged towards Damson Pegler’s building, their numbers swelled by the drunk brawlers who’d been fighting outside the alehouse. They were game for it and looking for trouble. Inside, they’d find it. Dick was reloading as a head poked out of his window, a black rubber stench-mask fixed to the face. Sod me, it’s the dustmen.

Dick fired the blunderbuss towards the head, cracking the window’s glass and throwing out a cloud of splinters from the rotting wooden walls of his building. Furious cries sounded from inside the entry corridor. The mob won’t last long against the dustmen, not waving pitchforks and sabres against a cadre of trained assassins.

Cracking open his gun as he sprinted down the street, Dick ejected the spent charge and pushed a fresh one inside before snapping the weapon shut. Bellows sounded behind him, getting louder, people coming down the street blundering out of his way as they noticed the gun in his hands and the wild look on his gasping face. Never get away from them now.

Dick almost slipped as the kettle-black careered around the corner, only just managing to halt short of the massive iron wheels crunching past his boots. He raised his blunderbuss towards the driver’s step at the front and stopped himself from firing as Barnabas Sadly’s rat-like features twitched down towards him. ‘Onto the cart, Mister Tull.’

Dick leapt for the ladder on the side, hauling himself onto the driver’s perch even as the vehicle swung around, the massive boiler and barrel-laden flatbed on the back interspersed between them and the first shots whistling down the street, bullets clanging off the heavy iron of the carriage.

‘Your people came for me, Mister Tull. The dustmen came for me when I was in my cellar, killed the brewery delivery man and two of my customers they did.’

Dick stood on his toes and risked a glance behind the kettle-black’s single stack pumping steam out into the evening air. Three men in dark coats and rubber stench masks were sprinting after them, but falling back as they lost ground to the powerful engines of the cart. And they set me up too. What was it you said, Sadly? Foxes and hounds, mousers and mice, all dancing together.

‘Why, Mister Tull? Lords-a’larkey, what have I ever done against the board? Haven’t I always given you the truth of it, at considerable risk to my own life?’

‘Damned if I know,’ said Dick. And damned for certain if we don’t find out. The dustmen. Sod it. How dead does that make us?

Retirement had finally been forced on Dick, a retirement less comfortable than even he had imagined.

In the tall, cold chambers of the State Protection Board, its head, Algo Monoshaft, whistled in anger and frustration as the steamman tried to find a place for his latest report on the paper-strewn floor of his office.

Corporal Tull’s report that detailed how Dick Tull had been accepting large bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to the royalist rebels’ activities inside the capital. The report that made clear how the sergeant had murdered his own partner when he had been found out, but only after tossing his royalist contact’s dead body into the river to ensure his treachery remained undiscovered.

Algo Monoshaft maniacally pulled at the crimson threads criss-crossing the paper fragments. Where does this go? WHERE DOES THIS GO?

There were hordes of staff working within Parliament’s walls, cleaners and caterers and the hundreds of personnel who waddled through its warrens wearing antiquated cloaks and powdered wigs. But none climbed so high or worked so cold as the bell-men who tended the intricate clockwork mechanism of Brute Julius, the massive bell tower that emerged like a brick spear from the gothic architecture of the debating chamber.

Once an hour its twenty bells chimed their resounding call across the roofs of the capital, ringing loud and clear over Middlesteel’s towers and warehouses and slums. Walking through the oak-panelled corridor of Parliament, the master of the bell’s boots echoed across the largely empty corridors and staircases, walls hung with political cartoons from the Middlesteel Illustrated Times and its rival newssheets. Strangely, the boots of the master’s apprentice made a great deal less noise, even though she was carrying a heavy toolbox. It took practice to be that stealthy.

The master of the bells pulled out a pocket watch chained to his waistcoat. ‘Nearly time for eleven-chime.’

‘No,’ said the apprentice. ‘They’ve already sounded. It’s time for the nightshift to begin.’

‘Yes,’ said the master. ‘Time to hand over to the nightshift.’

His apprentice passed over the toolbox to the old man. ‘Time to go to the Ship and Shovel for a drink. I’ll see you there.’

‘Time to go to the Ship and Shovel,’ said the master. ‘See you there?’

‘Of course,’ said the apprentice. Charlotte watched the old man walk to the red-coated sentry at the door at the end of the corridor, King Jude’s sceptre concealed inside his long toolbox, along with all the equipment she’d needed to tease open the vaults’ clever locks.

It was quite a piece, that sceptre, symbolic value aside. Discounting the intricately carved solid gold rod that made up most of its three feet of length, King Jude’s sceptre was banded by rubies with large amethysts and an egg-sized sapphire inlaid in its handle. If that wasn’t enough to get any thief salivating, the sceptre’s spear-like head was mounted by seven platinum leaves crafted like a bulb, and contained the largest diamond Charlotte had ever seen – an octahedral-shaped beauty larger than a big man’s fist. It managed to be both beautiful and strangely deadly at the same time, a spear crafted in rare metals for a warrior queen. I can almost see why Twist is willing to pay me so much money for it.

It hadn’t been simple either, getting into the vault. Even with the Master of Bells operating under the misconception that Charlotte had been his apprentice for the last three years, even with the burning weight of the jewel between her breasts to mesmerize all the guards and the attendants. The locks and tumblers set to protect the crown jewels across five vaulted passages hadn’t bent to the Eye of Fate’s hypnotic power. No, those brutes had required every ounce of Charlotte’s proficiency with tumblers and the safe-cracking equipment she was lugging along, they’d taken every drop of sweat she’d shed defusing the poison gas injectors and capture cages concealed in the false ceiling. The traps that most definitely had not been detailed on the floor plans or deactivated by the pass cards supplied by her mysterious patron. Well, if it had been easy, the royalists would have done it themselves.

A momentary sadness struck Charlotte. It would be hard to top this job. All the safes and vault rooms and cunning tripwires and ingenious traps she had faced in her career, they could all be relegated to experience now. Merely the practice she’d needed to hone her craft to the level necessary to break into Parliament and spirit away its most valuable symbol of power. Things wouldn’t be the same in a couple of months, after she’d lain low long enough for the hue and cry the newssheets would raise over this crime to fade away. Where would the fun be in facing down the run-of-the-mill protections guarding a merchant lord’s antiquities after this? It would be like a master painter reduced to setting up an easel opposite the capital’s national gallery and capturing the likeness of tourists in charcoal for thruppence a caricature. Well, at least she would always carry the warmth of her memories of having humbugged every one of the honourable members of the House of Guardians. The outrage of this crime a slap in the face to every one of the smug, superior aristocrats … the gallants who in a rightful world would have been Charlotte’s equal in station.

And she could use the time to lay low to avoid the fate the mad ex-parson Jethro Daunt and his hulking, malfunctioning half-steamman friend seemed to think was lurking around the corner, waiting to befall her. Money would help. Money always did. It was amazing how being rich could cushion you from the worst the world had to throw it to you. Charlotte could speak with authority on that. Her shameful memory of having been so hungry as an abandoned child that she had been reduced to eating grass and leaves. Grubby and crawling on her knees, cramps slicing across her stomach like a hundred knives being plunged into her. Bile rising in her throat as she tried to chew down on coarse grass. Real hunger, not just being ready for dinner. That had been close to the time when she had first found Charlotte, taken pity on her … another stab of shame, more deserved this time. The gypsy woman. The gypsy.

Money? No, money wasn’t a family’s love, but it was as much a comfort as Charlotte required. So much money she’d taken over the years. Then, in a fit of irony, she’d spread it out across all of the capital’s major banks and counting houses, just in case there was a run on one of them and Charlotte lost her savings. Security. With enough money she would have security; she would know peace. If she got ill, she could afford to pay for doctors and medicine. If she got hungry, she could pay for food to still the pain of hunger. If one of the people she cared for ran into hard times, then she could help them to survive too. Charlotte just needed a large enough amount of money and then she would be protected, for now and forever. It was strange, how she could fill her accounts with silver and gold and notes of the realm, the amount on deposit curiously swelling on its own account as interest was applied. But it could never grow larger than the fear of what might happen to a young woman all alone in the world. The fear always expanded faster than the money. Perhaps that was the nature of fear. Or perhaps it was the nature of money. Still, having money always helped. There was no doubt about that.

Charlotte’s reverie was broken by the intrusion of the red-coated sentry as she approached the end of the corridor where the Master of Bells had passed a minute earlier.

‘You, I don’t know,’ said the soldier, a ham-sized fist stretching out to halt her.

‘I’m one of the new grease monkeys working on the Bell Tower,’ said Charlotte.

‘Young for it,’ said the soldier, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. ‘Staff in the tower are mutton, not lamb. Letters after their name, with apprenticeships to their machines and a way with cogs. Now you, you look like lamb to me.’

Charlotte sighed. She was tired. Using the jewel, the Eye of Fate, so frequently in such a short space of time was a terrible drain on her, but it couldn’t be helped. Usually she embraced its touch. She became a different person when she used the jewel on the stage. More confident. The fears and worries of life a distant, fleeting thing. Her jealousies and ambitions and fears of failure and loneliness melting away. But too much use and the jewel grew heavy … ice spreading out across her blood as she shifted her blouse, the soft blue nimbus from the crystal reaching out from her chest and drifting towards the sentry as though the fog were the softest of cigar smokes.

‘Look into the light,’ Charlotte urged. ‘There’s no lambs inside the light, no mutton, no apprenticeships or cogs.’

Blinking furiously, the soldier stumbled back, the light splitting into a forest of fractal branches as it caressed the cheeks around his sideburns

‘You have a brother or a sister with children?’ Charlotte asked, trying not to grimace as the cold spread through her veins, sapping away at her strength.

‘A brother,’ mumbled the soldier, ‘with six little ones.’

‘Then you recognize your niece.’ Charlotte tried to smile, even as the pressure of the jewel pressed down against her lungs. ‘The niece who you’ve been showing around the debating chamber now that Parliament is shut for the night.’

‘Yes,’ the soldier returned her smile without any of the pain that Charlotte felt, ‘I know my niece, my Alice.’

‘We need to go,’ said Charlotte. ‘You had better get me out into the square before the colonel of the House Guards finds out that you have been larking about on duty with your family.’

‘Bloody Nora, lass, you’re going to cost me my corporal’s stripes,’ moaned the soldier. ‘Let’s go!’

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, pushing the jewel out of sight once more. ‘Let’s.’

‘Thank you for showing me around, uncle,’ said Charlotte as the soldier unlocked a sentry door in the high spear-headed railings that surrounded Parliament. ‘I won’t say a thing. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

‘Off with you, girl,’ said the corporal, nervously glancing behind him to make sure they were unobserved. ‘Don’t say a thing to your ma. You’ll get me into right trouble, you will.’

Charlotte winked at him and slipped away into the night. The force of her mesmerism was similar to a waking dream. Give it a couple of days and the soldier would be hard-pressed to tell if his niece’s visit had been real or a fancy he’d imagined. He was in good company. There would be plenty of parliamentary staff who would be experiencing the same sense of confusion over the next couple of days. But there was one man for whom the glamour she had cast would hopefully last at least a few hours more. She had made sure it was a strong one. The Master of the Bells was sitting in a nearby tavern waiting for his apprentice to join him for a last drink before he wound his way home. And Charlotte did not want to disappoint him. Not with the sceptre of the last king of Jackals wrapped up in rags inside the master’s tool case. That, surely, was worth raising a cup of ale to. She rubbed her arms as she crossed the street, dodging into the shadows of one of the tailor shops that specialized in the robes, wigs, and finery of the myriad positions filled by Parliament’s masters and servants. A warm hansom cab ride to the tavern? No, Charlotte hardly had the strength left to wipe the cabbie’s memory of the journey, and she had come too far to leave a careless trail from Parliament’s railings back to her home. Even the dullards in Ham Yard might get lucky once, and by tomorrow they would be a legion of constables and inspectors crawling over the streets desperate for witnesses. There’s a cheery thought.

Charlotte’s arm was beginning to ache from the weight of the long toolbox and the sceptre concealed within. Just another worker winding her way home through Middlesteel’s streets and lanes after a full day’s graft, nothing out of the ordinary to be remembered by the townspeople trudging their way back from mills and clerks’ rooms. Damson Robinson’s establishment still seemed to be working late, oil lamps visible through the cracks of closed blinds. Of all the things I can depend on, Damson Robinson’s waiting up to take receipt of our crime lord’s share of tonight’s bounty is pretty high on the list.

Charlotte rattled the door handle and finding it open, entered the pie shop’s front. Inside, contrary to Charlotte’s expectations, there was no sign of Damson Robinson, or indeed Captain Twist. His malevolent little toad of an assistant – Mister Cloake – was there, though, as promised along with two other men. She marked them as dustmen from the look of their dark simple-clothes and the stench masks dangling from their necks. Except that refuge collectors shouldn’t hang there so still and dangerous, like blades hovering for a belly to gut. Apart from her friend, what was also markedly absent was the case containing the gold coins that had encouraged Charlotte out of the shop earlier.

‘Are we emptying our bins early tonight, honey?’ Charlotte asked.

‘An object as valuable as King Jude’s sceptre cannot have too much protection. I trust you have it with you?’ said Cloake.

‘If I didn’t, I’d be lying gassed inside a vault under Parliament and being prodded by the guards’ bayonets, not standing here. Where’s my money and where’s Damson Robinson?’

‘Both out back,’ said Cloake. ‘Pass me over the sceptre. I need to verify its provenance.’

Out back, eh? Because you’re so very generous, you’d let her take a bath of gold guineas while the three of you wait out front for my return.

As Charlotte glanced to the kitchen door she caught the acrid smell of pastry turned to cinders.

‘Here it is, honey,’ said Charlotte, bending down and undoing the clasps along her long toolbox’s side. She lifted up the sceptre, still wrapped and swaddled with grease rags. ‘It’s heavy.’

Without a word, the two dustmen stepped forward to take the sceptre. Pretending to stumble, Charlotte closed the distance between them in a step and then continued to swing, pounding the gold handle into the first man’s navel. As he was doubling up, she rammed its diamond head into the second bruiser’s face, connecting with the nose and sending him stumbling back, the stench mask swinging wildly as the pain of a broken bone percolated through his stunned mind. ‘Damson Robinson never burnt a pie in her life, you royalist bastards.’

Cloake was advancing on her, pulling a weapon out from under the back of his coat – a wicked double-pronged thing, like a crystal tuning fork. It might be sharp, but she still had the advantage of range with the sceptre’s length.

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

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

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

‘Kill her!’ Cloake yelled through gritted teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That must come in useful.’

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

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

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

‘What, this little thing?’

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

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

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