From the Deep of the Dark. Stephen Hunt

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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

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