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,
