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
