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.’
CHAPTER FIVE
There were
