trailing across Middlesteel after the corpses of steammen. How much purer was his vengeance. How much simpler to swoop out of the skies of Quatershift and pay their murderers back the blood debt he owed his clan. Killing revolutionaries and dropping the devil of Furnace-breath Nick into their midst to stir up terror and fear. That was satisfying. Almost as fine as flying on the wing of a hunt with his people.
Septimoth had thought that the hatred he felt for his people’s executioners would have faded over time. But it was only the memories of his family that seemed to diminish. He could no longer conjure up the remembrance of his mother’s face, or the features of his life-mate and their four children. He could recall events he had shared with them — his children’s first moulting ritual, the joy he had felt at their birth, their pride when he was appointed ambassador to the court of the Sun King, teaching his children the monkey-throat language so they might have an advantage in trade or service to the flight. He could recall their hatchling voices singing the tone teachings, but not their faces as they sung. How strange were these malicious games of memory. As his recollections faded, his longing for his family had increased, his hatred becoming harder, purer each week, a shining diamond seeded in the blasted wreckage of his soul. The blood of his foe no longer eased his pain, but at least vengeance distracted him from the memories. And the lack of them.
Septimoth’s trance was interrupted by voices outside, including one that he recognized. His hunter’s mind moved through the thousands of tones he had heard this year and matched them to its owner. The short thug who had led the team responsible for the kidnapping of Bunzal Coalmelter. A coach not dissimilar to the
‘Did you see the quality of the bawdy in that place?’
‘Those women were Catosian, man. They’d rip your jewels out of your trousers for staring at ’em sideways.’
‘Well, we missed out on the food tonight, too. Dragging these cargoes across half of Jackals. If I’d wanted to run a bleeding coaching business …’
‘What, you thick or something? They aren’t going to trust this lot to the penny post, are they? We’re being paid.’
‘Not enough, mate, not enough.’
The wheels of the departing coach were muffled with rags, an old coachman’s trick; not out of concern for the sleeping residents of the villages they would pass through, but to avoid giving advance notice of their approach to any highwaymen that might be out plying their trade this evening. Wherever they were heading, it wasn’t the Catgibbon’s floating jinn palace; they were making for somewhere far further out than that.
Septimoth unfastened the door on the far side of the coach and silently slipped out, vanishing into the darkness of the gardens before launching himself unseen into the air. He had a feeling that Cornelius would be driving himself back to the Skerries tonight. The wind above the downs lifted Septimoth up, buoying him effortlessly higher. He tilted his wings, feeling the glorious run of air across his feathers and scales as he glided behind the coach, a black dot below on the bare gravel road. He could hear the crack of the whip over the train of horses. The pair were driving them hard. They obviously wanted to make their journey at night under the cover of the moonless sky. Much better for avoiding awkward questions from any county constabulary, now stabled and sleeping along with the keepers of the toll cottages on the crown roads.
But a cloudy night was better for a stalking lashlite, too.
Cornelius followed Abraham Quest out of the series of ballrooms, four Catosian soldiers saluting him as they raised an old iron blast door leading into the main body of the manor house. Quest had the women dressed in the cherry tunics of a Jackelian fencible regiment, private auxiliaries ready to assist parliament in times of war. Without the padded war jackets favoured by the free companies, their shine-swollen muscles made the fencible uniforms look five sizes too small, as if someone had dressed them in children’s clothes.
‘You value your privacy,’ said Cornelius.
‘What, my girls? They’re here to preserve my life, not my privacy. They’re very effective. I haven’t had an attempted poisoning or assassination attempt for months. Toppers very rarely get as far as we are standing these days.’
‘Who would have thought it was so arduous, being the richest man in Jackals?’ said Cornelius.
‘It isn’t my money that brings the assassins. I have no heirs, and if I should have an “accident”, how long would my commercial concerns survive in their dominant position beyond my tenure? I have no illusions about the longevity of any empire built on the hope that the children may prove to be the equal of their parents. If I had offspring, I wouldn’t wish them to follow my path, even if they could. Any venture predicated on bloodlines is doomed to fade to dust eventually, including my own. It is my labours and the course of my life that has set me here — nothing more.’
‘Thank the Circle for our great democracy over monarchy, then,’ said Cornelius.
‘Yes,’ Quest smiled. ‘Thank the Circle for that. Do you have any children, Compte?’
‘I had a wife who was with child once.’
‘Had?’
‘The revolution in Quatershift.’
‘Ah,’ said Quest. ‘I’m sorry. As you said, thank the Circle for Jackals and our democracy.’
They entered the heart of the old fortress, an atrium with a view of four storeys rising above them. A railing ran around a pit ahead of them, fencing off a dizzying vista — level after level dropping down beyond the illumination of the gaslight. The architects who had remodelled the fortress as a manor house had done their best to soften the functional lines of the ammunition lifts and military gantries, but no amount of hanging plants and ivy trellises could fully conceal the building’s severe original purpose.
Quest led Cornelius past a line of food trolleys, being wheeled from the kitchens to the party via an inspection station running random tests for poison. Quest wasn’t the only powerful notable at the manor tonight and it wouldn’t do to have some Guardian or commercial lord dropping dead on his floor.
It wasn’t the food that caught Cornelius’s eye, but the woman supervising the testing team. She glanced up, saw Quest, and nodded towards him, failing to notice the staring guest by the mill owner’s side. Not that she would have recognized Cornelius, given that the last time they had met he had been concealed underneath the mask of Furnace-breath Nick. It was Robur’s supposed daughter, no longer wearing the coy bonnet of a child desperate to have her father returned to her, but dressed instead in the crimson officer’s uniform of Quest’s fencibles.
‘I’m glad to see you look after your guests,’ said Cornelius, looking at Robur’s daughter and the poison tests.
‘What kind of host would I be if I didn’t?’ said Quest. A glass-fronted lifting room was descending down an iron rail into the atrium. He pointed at the testing station. ‘I take it you don’t have to go to these lengths on your island for a decent meal?’
‘Just the risk of my housekeeper’s cooking,’ said Cornelius, ‘and she’s really rather good.’
They stepped into the lifting room and Quest inserted a key to access the private arboretum level at the top of the manor house. ‘You can see everything from here.’
Cornelius stared out at a line of deactivated catapult arms, their grips open and still, like the claws of sleeping birds of prey. In the old days they could have risen to the roof and whirled drums of flammable oil out of hidden hatches, turning what was now the topiary gardens into a molten hell for any attackers to cross. It was a good view, but no, he could not quite see everything. Wherever the flash mob’s delivery of steammen corpses had ended up was well concealed, Cornelius had no doubt of that. Quest should have no conceivable use for their grisly remains, but then he should have had no need either to surreptitiously engage Furnace-breath Nick to spirit out Quatershift’s court mechomancer from that revolution-wracked land. Quest had helped the Levellers to power in the last general election, with Ben Carl at the helm — the father of Carlism. But old Ben Carl was no shiftie committeeman; he had proved his credentials on that matter when he had led the Jackelians in repelling the invasion from Quatershift.
Cornelius looked at his host, hiding his suspicions. Was Abraham Quest dissatisfied with the progress of the Levellers in the House of Guardians? Had Quest secretly been hoping for a bloodbath, one party dictatorship and the declaration of a Jackelian Commonshare? Surely not; for all his model work villages and paternal manufactory
