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
