heavy chains bound across long leather robes inscribed with the symbols of the Pericurian religion. They passed closed enough to Nandi and the others for Ambassador Ortin to take a quizzical interest in one of his fellow nationals being so rudely manhandled.
‘That is a preacher of the Divine Quad you are mistreating,’ Ortin urs Ortin protested to the officer leading the way. ‘Dear boy, can you not—’
Nandi and the ambassador lurched back as the ursine priest threw herself at the new arrivals, the police struggling to hold her. ‘You filthy heretic, you’ll burn in hell for this! Your presence here is hastening the apocalypse. This is sacred soil – sacred soil that you defile. Your fur will be burnt away with the wrath of Reckin urs Reckin. You will be left as hairless as these twisted, dirty infidels, the foul descendents of Amaja urs Amaja. You will burn along with all those malignant traders with their blind eyes that can see only profit, standing on the cursed soil where our ancient temples once stood. Their eyes will burn in their sockets for their sins, then they will know true blindness!’
‘You’ve had your answer, sir,’ said the officer in charge of the group as his men fought to bundle the giant priest away. ‘Now move along.’
‘What is going to happen to that lady?’ demanded the ambassador.
‘She stowed away on the boat from Pericur,’ said the officer. ‘Now she’s going back. She attacked some of your own traders down in the main market, turning over their stalls. You know we deport any of your preachers that try to sneak in. We could have arrested her for the damage she did.’
‘A zealot,’ said Ortin, sadly. ‘Treat her as kindly as you can.’
‘Nothing for the archduchess to complain about, sir.’
Nandi watched the disappearing figure of the preacher, still yelling about the end-times and the fall of paradise, railing against the laughing Jagonese crowds who were jeering and taunting her. ‘Does all of the race of man look like devils to you, ambassador?’
‘I think there is a little bit of the devil in all of us, dear girl,’ said Ortin. ‘Whether you have a fine pelt like we do, or even if you don’t.’
Nandi nodded in agreement. So many tensions came from the misreading of history. All so avoidable.
The preacher’s voice grew fainter as they walked towards the capital.
‘The last judgement is coming, all of you…doomed!’
Jethro looked out of the window of their lodgings while Boxiron finished unpacking the last of the travel cases he had been too tired to start the day before. It was a grand hotel, the Westerkerk, but the fact that the connected rooms they had been given were almost as large as their lodgings back at Thompson Street did not disguise the fact that this place was as a good as a prison cell for them. As soon as they’d arrived they had noticed the police militia posted at all the hotel’s entrances, and while the soldiers were obviously busy turning away Jagonese claiming they had business with the Purity Queen’s crew, Jethro knew that their presence was a double-edged blade.
‘We have quite a view of the cathedral across the Grand Canal,’ noted Boxiron.
‘A view,’ said Jethro, ‘but not an unobserved way to present the Inquisition’s credentials to the cathedral staff.’
‘The law enforcers here are not like your friends back in Ham Yard,’ said Boxiron.
‘Indeed they are not,’ said Jethro. ‘If they changed the colour of their green uniforms for a redcoat’s cherry attire, they might almost be taken for a military force.’
‘You marked the coral defences ringing the island on the way in,’ said Boxiron. ‘The commodore told me they have battlements surrounding the capital’s surface structures almost as impressive.’
Jethro rubbed his chin. ‘An interesting frame of mind, don’t you think? All your enemies are external, all your defences facing out to protect you. But what do you do if you find there is a rot within? How would you cope with that?’
Boxiron did not get a chance to reply – there was a knock at their door and when the steamman opened it, Ortin urs Ortin stood there, filling the doorframe with his impressive furred bulk.
‘Good ambassador,’ said Jethro. ‘You’re not rooming in the hotel, are you? I thought your embassy would have taken you in.’
‘The deputy ambassador claims that she wasn’t told I was coming and that she’s taken the opportunity of my predecessor’s departure to remodel my apartments. I won’t be able to move into my embassy rooms for weeks.’
Jethro frowned. ‘You suspect a slight?’
‘Of course I suspect a slight, dear boy,’ said Ortin urs Ortin. ‘I am a rare male office-holder in a matriarchal society, and it seems my banishment here is not to be made a comfortable one. But even they can’t stop me taking up my duties. I have a summons to present myself to the stained senate this morning, as do you…’
‘Me? I’m a private party, good ambassador, not a representative of the Kingdom’s foreign office.’
‘There’s still a couple of reformers left on my staff here, despite the best efforts of the archduchess’s conservatives, and my house’s friends have caught wind of a few worrying circumstances brewing here,’ said the ambassador, moving to the window. ‘And that’s one of them.’
Jethro followed the direction of the large furred finger and saw an officer of the police militia striding towards the hotel.
‘Colonel Constantine Knipe, a particularly charmless fellow who seems to hold a low opinion of my appointment here that’s not far removed from that of my own enemies in Pericur. He’s already intercepted me and warned me to restrict my duties to a bare minimum and now I suspect it’s your turn. Well, at least I’ve beaten the old fruit here to you. I counsel saying little…’
True to the ambassador’s words, Colonel Knipe arrived outside their rooms a minute later, his appearance preceded by the clump-hiss of his mechanical leg. He glowered at Ortin urs Ortin as though his presence implied that all three of them were involved in some plot. Then Knipe turned his attention towards Jethro, his eyes skipping briefly past Boxiron – the steamman surely an exotic oddity on the island – and waved a sheet of paper at the ex-parson. ‘Jethro Daunt, citizen of the Kingdom of Jackals. The same Jethro Daunt, I am presuming, who was the consulting detective that retrieved the Twelve Works of Charity when the painting was stolen from the Middlesteel Museum.’
‘The same, good colonel. Although it would be truer to say that the painting never actually left the museum, it was merely switched and falsely identified as a forgery by the thief. You are exceedingly well informed.’
‘Our representatives in the Kingdom still collect your penny sheets,’ said the colonel. ‘And our transaction-engine vaults are still one of the wonders of the world.’
‘So I have heard,’ smiled Jethro. ‘And I see from the paper in your hand that their retrieval speeds match all that I have heard about their superiority.’
‘Why have you been summoned to the senate floor, Daunt?’
‘That, I’m afraid, only your stained senate can answer,’ said Jethro.
‘Your
