‘Roll your plan of Parliament up from the counter, young man. It’s going to be a long evening and I have an order of eight pies to complete for morning’s opening.’
‘Disgusting,’ said Twist, concealing the map beneath his frock coat.
‘They’re meaty enough, if you bone the partridges properly before you boil them,’ said Damson Robinson.
‘The way you consume food, it disgusts me, eating like cattle. Crumbs and juices pouring out of your mouths, the disgusting slurping sound you make as you crunch away at the flesh and the baked seed flowers. The foul stench as you defecate your waste back out again.’
‘What are you-’ Damson Robinson turned to see Twist removing a tuning fork-shaped object from under his coat, the thing shaped out of glittering crystal ruby. ‘Is that a tuning fork? I don’t have a piano here, dearie. Not in my shop.’
Then a strange thing happened, although the queerness of it was lost on the proprietor of the shop. The client who had commissioned tonight’s pilferage disappeared, replaced by a beau from her past, young George. She was so glad to see him; it had been so many years. They had set up the shop together before he died of a bowel abscess. Passed away from her far too young. She stretched her arms out to greet him.
‘Yes, a song,’ said Twist, upon the old lady in two long striding steps, plunging the crystal prongs into her neck. Damson Robinson stumbled back, blood fountaining out across the counter, her greeting for George muffled by Twist’s hand clamped over her face. ‘A song of blood and flesh! The Mass must feed.’
Thankfully for the shop owner, the pain that should have accompanied the sight of the spinning room as her heart gave up was absent; the pressure of her rapidly vanishing blood more than her seventy-year-old body could stand. She didn’t hear even Twist’s last words as the blackness flowed over her. She was too busy kissing George.
‘No taste, you filthy old crone. Not like the girl, she’ll taste sweet for Mister Cloake, she’ll taste-’
Jethro Daunt let go of the lion-shaped handle of the bell-pull, listening to the echo of the chimes inside. The ex-parson-turned-consulting-detective smiled at the sound. It put him in mind of the bells in his old parish, back in the small northern town of Hundred Locks. The locals who complained the church’s campanologists set to ringing their bells with too much gusto, whatever the occasion — be it funerals, weddings, or Circle Day services. Before I was defrocked, before…
The door swung open and the bushy eyebrows of the bear-like man who’d answered rose in surprise. ‘Ah now, it seems to be my week for receiving old faces back into my life.’
‘I do trust I am not intruding?’
‘Far happier to see your face than the last fellow, and that is the truth of it,’ said the commodore, leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘A government officer, full of guile and treachery he was. Where is your old steamer, that great metal lug Boxiron? Is he not working with you still?’
‘He is,’ smiled Daunt as Commodore Black ushered him into the great open hall of Tock House. Daunt glanced with interest around the space, noting the bulky walls that held the front door and the huge blast door hidden above, ready to smash down if the house’s owner decided to trigger it. ‘Even as we speak, in fact. He might turn up here later. And speaking of old friends, I suppose it is too much to hope that Professor Amelia Harsh is presently in residence within your house?’
‘You have missed her by three weeks, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘She’s off to the colonies with the rest of my friends. The miners out in Concorzia have found some rusting old ruin of a city out there, and so away my housemates have flown to poke about for relics and lost history.’
‘The professor’s favourite kind, as I recall,’ said Daunt. He bit back his curiosity and restrained himself from asking why the commodore had not transported them to the distant shores of the colonies in his own u-boat. After all, it had been on just such a mission to the dark Isle of Jago where Daunt and the old submariner had made their acquaintance. There was, Daunt sensed, something amiss in the old sea dog’s presence here all alone in the great tower.
‘I turned up at the university seeking the professor’s wisdom,’ explained Daunt. ‘They pointed me in the direction of Tock House.’
‘If it is wisdom you want, you may find a blessed library full of it upstairs,’ said the commodore. ‘The professor and my crystal-domed steamman friend Coppertracks were inside the house plotting and planning for near a month before the expedition sailed. We have half the tomes from the school of archaeology at St. Vines here, and don’t you think that Coppertracks didn’t have our shelves close to bursting with all his books before the professor turned up with a line of students carrying a mortal stationers’ worth of volumes for her.’
‘You can never have too much knowledge,’ said Daunt. ‘I would take it as a kindness if I might peruse her books inside your unusual home.’
‘Unusual is it?’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve missed that canny mind of yours, Jethro Daunt. Filled with all the cleverness of the church and honed like a sabre on a whetstone on your laws of synthetic morality. What strikes you as unusual about Tock House?’
Daunt pointed up to the hall’s second landing as they climbed the stairs. ‘All those Gothic rose windows visible outside, illuminated with stained glass. But inside your hall, the only natural light is coming from above. The windows are fake, set in your walls’ outer layer — walls made of fibre-reinforced concrete set ten feet thick. Your home was built to resemble a rich man’s folly, but in fact, it is better fortified than a civil war pillbox. Kirkhill-period, constructed by a rich merchant after the unrest following Parliament’s victory over the king.’
‘Aye, you’ve the bones of it,’ admitted the commodore. ‘The windows from the fourth storey and above are real enough, and there is a courtyard in the centre of the tower that admits the sun. A weak spot if your foe climbs well enough.’ A dark thought seemed to furrow the commodore’s brow. ‘What wicked business brings you here today? The Inquisition has not engaged you again? As I recall, I barely escaped from that blasted hell-island of Jago the last time I became mixed up in your business.’
‘Thankfully, the patrons covering the expenses of my present case are a little more prosaic,’ said Daunt. ‘The burghers of the Middlesteel city council. You have, I trust, been following the hysteria outside… the upheavals in the city accompanying the vampire killings?’
‘That foolery?’ coughed the commodore, slowing on the stairs. ‘Bloodsuckers don’t leave drained bodies discarded like chicken bones outside food stalls at a winter’s fair. They’re clever and subtle and secretive. They come from the shadows to steal your body, and if your family is blessed lucky, you’re never seen again, for they turn their victims into their own kind. What I have heard reported in the papers is not vampires’ work, it’s common slaughter, bodies butchered desert-style with all their life drained by some maniacs.’
‘Slaughter perhaps, commodore, but the real force behind the murders is, I fear, far removed from the mundanity of broken minds with sharp blades and a depraved taste for blood.’
‘You don’t believe the papers’ fool nonsense do you?’ Leading them down a corridor with a polished wooden floor and oak-panelled walls, the commodore walked Daunt to a spiral staircase. ‘I had you for a sharper fellow.’
‘I have three sisters in the care of the church, talking in tongues, who suggest I would be wise to believe otherwise.’ Daunt pulled a notepad full of jottings out of his frock coat. ‘A set of triplets ranting in ancient languages, Jackelian dialects that predate the age of ice and the devastation of the cold-time.’
‘Myth and the dust of forgotten ages,’ sighed the commodore, leading him up the stairs and onto the next storey. ‘You are in luck then. That’s the professor’s passion, and my friend Coppertracks has a taste for it too. Some of the old steamer’s books are from the mountains of the Steamman Free State and as old as any I’ve seen.’
Accompanying Daunt to the library entrance, the commodore unlocked a double pair of doors, pushing them open to reveal an extensive chamber split across two levels. Shelves lined the walls, a second-tier with hanging ladders to access the thousands of tomes racked above the room’s expensive hand-woven rugs. Like the rest of the tower, the library felt comfortably warm. Daunt took off his coat and tossed it onto the back of one of the dozens of leather armchairs scattered across the room.
The commodore indicated the reading tables, still covered with papers, books and notes, as if the expedition to the colonies had only just left. ‘Make yourself at home, lad. This is all the professor’s on the table, as well as the books piled in the corner. Not that I have been reading any of them. My taste in printed matter bends more towards the penny-dreadfuls and rousing tales of adventure and skulduggery.’
‘Yes,’ said Daunt. ‘Well, I believe we both had our fill of that out beyond the Fire Sea. Without the professor to help me in my translations I may need to work late here.’
