Nickleby lit his mumbleweed pipe and the sweet smell filled the room. He picked a rifle from the commodore’s pile and offered it to Molly like he was proffering a plate of cheese at the dinner table.
‘I’ve never used a gun before,’ said Molly.
‘Lass,’ Commodore Black called from his position at the window. ‘In ten minutes’ time, you are going to have a whole blessed world of experience.’
Oliver noticed that fewer people were passing through the main square of Rattle. The day was wearing on and there was still no sign of the man they were waiting for. Rattle was the last hamlet before Shadowclock, a farmers’ market where the drovers could trade their poultry and swine without having to pay the toll on the city road. Their gypsy travelling companions had avoided the main crown highway too, heading south over the hills of the downlands that morning. Paying a levy to the local board of roads held as much attraction to the nomads as swapping their bright wooden caravans for one of Rattle’s thatched cottages.
The copper hands of the square’s clock reflected the last ember of the sunset from their burnished metal.
‘Is your contact likely to answer his summons?’ asked Steamswipe.
Harry nodded. ‘If he knows what’s good for him he will.’
‘Can you be sure he’ll get the message?’ said Oliver.
‘I still have a little faith in human nature, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘And a little more in the purchasing power of the Jackelian shilling I gave that trader for taking him the word.’
Lights were beginning to appear in the windows of Rattle, the smell of slipsharp oil rising from the tavern behind them as the coaching inn’s staff lit their own lanterns. Finally a wagon hove into view, creaking at a stately pace, and Harry rose to greet it. Behind the reins sat just about the oldest man Oliver had ever seen — his face fissured with age, part covered by a white beard trimmed into a fork. He was wearing a grey dog collar with the infinity symbol and fish of the Circlist faith on his waistcoat. The man nodded at the disreputable Stave.
‘Harold.’
‘Reverend,’ said Harry.
The preacher cast a languid glance at Oliver and the knight steamman. ‘I thought you worked alone.’
‘The lad is almost family, reverend. And my friend of the metal … well, you could say he is something of a favour.’
The preacher grunted and looked at Steamswipe. ‘Those saddlebags would be
‘You would be correct,’ said the steamman.
‘Saw a fox wearing a hat once,’ said the reverend. ‘It was still a fox. You can ride alongside us, my dangerous friend. Unless you fancy taking a turn pulling my wagon. Harold, boy, in the back.’
With the nag pulling the cart — nearly as toothless as the churchman — they made a slow arc around the village square, then began trotting down the hamlet’s lanes.
‘You think I would come, Harold?’
‘When you got my message,’ said the wolftaker.
‘Damn presumptuous of you. But then you always were a chancer.’
‘I think I’m on safe enough ground,’ said Harry. ‘Hallowed ground in fact. We need to get into Shadowclock and I don’t have city permission papers this time. We also need a place to hide while I conduct a little business.’
‘Has the Court lost its taste for forgery, Harold, or are you running something off the ledger?’
Harry scratched his nose. ‘You just worry about blagging us past the gate constables, reverend. Leave keeping the ledger straight to me.’
To Oliver’s surprise the Circlist churchman turned the cart away from the main road and into a wood. When they emerged from the press of pine, the high walls of Shadowclock rose before them, a pall of engine smoke hanging over the city. Contained by ramparts sixty feet high the town sat crowded across three hills, tall buildings of Pentshire granite and steep, narrow streets stained with soot. Even though it was late evening Oliver could still hear the muffled thumps and whistles of machinery from the gas mines.
They rolled down the slope towards the city, Steamswipe’s red visor gleaming as he scanned the substantial walls for sentries. Counting the towers visible on the highest of the hills, the knight noted every bloated warship docked inside the city, aerostats drifting in and out of view as clouds of smoke from the mines wafted in the still summer air.
Towards the bottom of the slope the reverend’s cart rolled past the gates of a graveyard and into a field of head stones, well tended but stained black by their proximity to the city. Two bare-chested graspers with rippling muscles stopped digging a fresh hole to wave at the churchman, then recommenced their labours.
‘I wasn’t too sure if we were going to find you filling one of your own plots,’ said Harry.
‘The Circle still has a little work left for me to do here,’ said the reverend, ‘before the wheel turns for me.’
Tying the cart up in the shadow of a temple the reverend unlocked a door and led them into a cool chamber, the centre of the room filled with a stone sarcophagus, a couple carved out of stone lying serenely in the shadows. Reaching down to the platform of the sarcophagus, the reverend grasped the infinity symbol carved into the marble and twisted it, then stepped aside as the sarcophagus crunched back on rollers.
He waved them down the hole that had been uncovered, yellow lamplight flickering below. They climbed down a ladder and Oliver found himself face to face with more graspers, whiskers twitching as they unpacked the contents of a coffin into the underground passage. Not a cadaver, but bottles of jinn, unlabelled and full of the pink liquid.
Harry scooped one of the bottles up and cracked it open against the wall, emptying it down his throat in one easy movement. ‘And here’s me thinking the governor was running a dry city.’
The reverend took the bottle off Harry. ‘He will be again if you keep consuming the victuals.’
Following the slope of the tunnel for a couple of minutes, their passage widened into a series of cave-like catacombs and Steamswipe unhunched his back, the low hiss of his boiler the only sound in the cavern. Spared the soot of the engines above ground, the cave walls gleamed white as the churchman’s torch passed them.
Harry tapped a pile of barrels as they navigated through the cave tunnels. ‘All this money — one day I’ll visit and you’ll have disappeared. Where’s the reverend, I’ll ask? Oh, they’ll say, he’s retired to the colonies. Left a legacy by a nephew. Bought a plantation he did.’
The reverend snorted. ‘You know where the money goes, Harold. If you didn’t, you’d still be waiting back in Rattle. Not all our coffins are full of contraband. By the Circle, I wish they were.’
The reverend led them through the cold twisting tunnels of the catacombs, passing as many chambers filled with moon-raker’s produce as littered with bones — a smuggler’s fortune hidden beneath the surface of Shadowclock. The reverend seemed to have moved from preaching against sin to controlling it inside the city. His Circlist position was the perfect cover. Oliver wondered if the vicar back in Hundred Locks had been helping the moonrakers land illegal cargoes in the bay of the dike too. Perhaps the whole Circlist church in Jackals was a front for the flash mob, the crime barons of Middlesteel all surreptitiously sitting as bishops and prelates.
Surfacing in the basement level of a church, Oliver stepped out of a hidden door in the wall, into a room piled with old pews and a crowd of broken oak-carved gargoyles.
‘You can stay in the hospice rooms at the back,’ said the preacher to Harry. ‘They’re not fancy, but I figure for a queer-looking party like yours, it’s better than the questions you would get trying to room at an inn or boarding house.’
The reverend went to leave but Harry stopped him. ‘There’s someone we need to meet, reverend.’ He unfolded a scrap of paper and showed the churchman the scar markings Oliver had drawn back on Harry’s narrowboat. ‘He’ll have a high position in the grasper warren and mining combination. A few years on him.’
The reverend took a seat on an old stone chair from the high Circlist days, thinking. He looked like a monarch from the ancient age of Jackals, a fissured old prophet sitting in judgement. ‘You’ve come a long way for nothing, Harold. I know the man with these warren scars. He’s dead. I buried him myself.’
‘Dead how, old man?’
‘Officially it was a cave-in. Unofficially, well, I’ve seen my share of rock wounds and what was left of him to bury didn’t have them. I would say someone dropped your miner down a very long mineshaft. I didn’t hold an open- coffin wake if you know what I mean.’
