Sadly’s nose twitched like a rodent’s when he saw Dick bearing down on him, nervously glancing to either side of the beer barrel in search of an obvious escape route. Dick cut him off easily, the owner barely beginning to hobble away on his twisted foot and brass-handled walking cane. Dick backed him into a storeroom where long carving knives and spit sharpeners dangled on hooks. The top of Sadly’s head scarcely came up to Dick’s nose.
‘Anyone would think you didn’t want to see me, Sadly.’
‘Don’t say that, Mister Tull. I was just thinking about flagging down a brewery wagon for a fresh barrel, is all.’
‘Fresh?’ Dick growled. ‘There’s not much fresh being served in here. Not unless it’s what’s concealed in one- eyed Osborne’s bag by the door. That’s probably fresh from whichever poor sod’s house he took his crowbar to last night.’ Dick reached out to one of the hooks and lifted a knife off, scraping it along the sharpening block dangling next to it. ‘You’re not keeping this sharp enough.’
‘You’re just like all my customers, Mister Tull. I lay your sustenance down and you carve it off, one slice at a time. No thought for me, no thought for what it costs, say I.’
‘You’re a bad advert for this place, Barnabas Sadly. Customers like to see their hosts jolly and round-faced, not pockmarked and as hungry as a sewer rat.’ He thumped Sadly in the solar plexus and the man doubled up, Dick catching him almost gently before Sadly dropped his cane and then he pushed the informer back against the storeroom wall. ‘No padding around the ribs. You think the proprietor of an alehouse would have even felt that with a decent beer gut? Royalists, Sadly, royalists…’
The informant’s eyes darted away from Dick’s. A little too quick. What do you know?
‘Captain Twist and his noble troublemakers are back on the streets of Middlesteel, Sadly. And the board’s not happy with the thought of it. Because, if Parliament gets a whiff of the royalist rebels’ malarkey, we’re going to get-’ Dick tightened his grip on the man’s shoulder until he winced with pain, ‘-squeezed.’
‘This isn’t the old game anymore,’ complained the rodent-faced little man. ‘Things are going on, that-’
‘That?’
‘They’ve got money this time, the royalists. Normally nobody in the flash mob would give them the time of day, you know that. Blowing things up is bad for business. Leave it to the politicals and the anarchists and the bloody Carlists, say I.’
‘But Captain Twist is being flasher with the contents of his purse this time?’
‘Lords-a’larkey, but I don’t know what’s going on, Mister Tull. There are people getting together with no cause. Foxes and hens, say I. Mousers and mice. What do you think when you see those two dancing together?’
Foxes and hens. Lord Chant and his mysterious royalist visitor, Carl Redlin. Another royalist, Symons, spying on them, snooping on his own people. Strange days, indeed.
Dick brushed the dandruff from Sadly’s patched collar. ‘And what do you think, my limping little friend?’
‘I heard the board is involved, Mister Tull. Your people. And I think I should keep my head down. There’re people being pulled out of the river, and not just tramps accused of being vampires, beaten to death with pipes and sticks, either. Some of the floaters are royalists.’
‘I haven’t heard of any royalists being fished out of the Gambleflowers?’
‘There was another one this morning, Mister Tull. Third this week as I count it. Rufus Symons, a notable rogue. Raised to manhood with the royalist fleet-in-exile and dedicated to the cause.’
Rufus Symons. Sweet Circle, and if I’d followed him for a couple of hours longer, told the board and handed him over, then we would’ve found out who… Dick’s ace-in-the-hole had just been swept off the card table.
‘You look like you knew him, Mister Tull?’
‘I know he shouldn’t have died last night.’ Not until he spilled his guts to me. Not until he made me look good in front of the officer class. Who did it? You, Blacky? Did you put a bullet in his back and then roll him into the river? And now, if I tell anyone about following him out to your house in the hills, I’m going to look like the stupid jigger who messed up everything again. It’s never made easy. Not for me.
‘And this time, the rebels aren’t after guns and explosives. Nobody in the flash mob’s been asked for them. And why is that, ask I? Because the royalists are already being supplied with weapons by the gill-necks. Looks like it could be war, Mister Tull. Us against the Advocacy, and the gill-neck leadership have found some friends among our own dispossessed, dissatisfied nobles, I say. Arm our rebels, stir them up, and set them off against us before war breaks out between the Kingdom and the underwater people.’
The same nonsense that the old steamer was spouting back in the board. Maybe there’s something to it after all, then?
‘You said you thought the board was involved in this. What makes you say the board’s involved?’
Sadly tried to point back at one of the tables, his walking cane twisting in his hand. ‘One of my regulars is a news sheet man for the Garrotter’s Gazette — says the board has served his paper at least three times recently with a section thirteen notice gagging the paper. All for stories about royalists fished out of the river. He didn’t complain as much as he should’ve done; not now there’s a public disorder gag on the vampire slayings too. Nearly got hanged by a mob down the road myself yesterday.’
‘I told you, you’re too thin and pale by half.’ Dick opened his coat and hung the two silver candlesticks up on the hooks. ‘I want a good price for that pair. I can’t use the pawnshop because they’re on the constables’ watch list. When a squat little thug with a board corporal’s badge comes to ask where I am, tell him I paid for a couple of flagons of beer and stumbled out to sleep it off before he arrived.’
‘And where would you be going, Mister Tull?’
‘Fishing,’ said Dick. ‘I’m off to land me a nice fat fish.’ A duplicitous fish by the name of Commodore Black.
Charlotte Shades stepped out of the palatial expanse of Middlesteel Museum. Her mind spun with the architect’s plans for Parliament she’d been consulting, the great House of Guardians nestling in the shadows of the bell tower of Brute Julius. Of course, none of the plans detailed the security measures and mechanisms defending the crown jewels, the last sceptre of the last absolute monarch. But there was a lot you could infer from the spaces that had been left blank on the layouts. And in those voids, you just knew there was going to be trouble. Why had she ever agreed to go along with the mysterious Mister Twist? Well, there was the obscenely large amount of money being offered. And the implicit threat of violence if she didn’t acquiesce. But it was more than that. The challenge of it. Something she couldn’t take; something far beyond her station. There was probably a breed of mouse in the world, the sort of mouse that saw a mousetrap baited with cheese, the sort of mouse that tingled with the sight of what was forbidden and dangerous. That mouse never lived too long, but there were things far worse than dying. Like boredom, being really poor and looked down upon.
And then the mouse saw the cat.
Charlotte started as the steamman lumbered up in front of her, her mind instantly clearing of Parliament’s plans and levels and scales of distance. But this isn’t a steamman, is it? None of the organic, smooth movements of the people of the metal down from the Steamman Free State. This was one of the clumsy, hulking, man-milled mechanical servants surely? But it had the head of a steamman, polished and out of place on the rest of the body, and its voicebox vibrated with the words of something clearly sentient.
‘Damson Shades? Charlotte Shades? Known by the stage name of the Mistress of Mesmerism?’
Should I deny it? Nobody knows that I’m here. Not the flash mob, not even that devil Twist.
She nodded.
‘I have been sent for you, Damson Shades. My name is Boxiron.’
‘I’m as curious to understand how you knew where to find me as to know who sent you, old steamer.’
‘Your name is being whispered by demons, Damson Shades,’ said the hulking creature. ‘You are marked for death.’ Then, as if it had just occurred to him that she might find this ever so slightly alarming, he added. ‘And I have been sent to protect you as we travel.’
‘Travel?’
‘Travel to church, the man I work with must speak with you. He has a warning for you…’
A warning of a psychotic metallic servant on the loose, perhaps?
‘Church? Is your friend a vicar?’
‘He used to be a parson,’ said Boxiron. ‘But he was thrown out by the rational synod when he started believing in gods.’
‘I can see how that would be a problem.’
