‘As late as you like, lad. You’ve got your pick of guest bedrooms on the next floor. I will be taking a roast chicken out of the range in an hour or two, and it’s a shame to open good red wine without honest company to honour it.’
Jethro Daunt had, he realized, lost all sense of time in the library. He looked over to the one wall that wasn’t filled with shelves. A polished bronze wall clock was mounted there above an old royalist-era oil painting, an ornamental fireplace below. There was a dumbwaiter hatch to the left of the fireplace, and judging by the enticing smell of roasting meat emanating from it, the drop no doubt went all the way down to the kitchen in the keep- disguised-as-folly. The scene in the painting was of a boar-hunting party, the hunters unsportingly larking around in the brush wearing gas masks as their lance-carrying retainers waded through the undergrowth, eyes watering above water-soaked kerchiefs tied around their faces. In the corner of a painting, a boar slyly watched the party blundering about a mist of evil-looking yellow mustard gas, unsuccessfully trying to flush it out. Better to be the boar than the hunter, sometimes.
Daunt stared worriedly at the clock. No sign of Boxiron yet. Daunt had told the steamman to seek him out at Tock House if he wasn’t to be found at their apartment. Yet Boxiron hadn’t turned up. Does that mean things have gone well, or badly?
It was late, and Daunt’s progress in translating the possessed ramblings of the sisters Lammeter had been as slow as he had feared it would be without Professor Harsh’s assistance. He was trying to match his phonetic shorthand against actual words in languages that had been largely lost to the modern world. It hadn’t helped that the languages of the patchwork of tribal kingdoms that had preceded the long, dark centuries of the ice-age bore little relation to each other. He had to parse them through the descendent language of River Tongue, a trading language merchants and travellers used as a lingua franca across the continent. Surprisingly, Daunt found it easier to reference the older languages using the strange antiquarian books that the commodore’s eminent scientist friend, Coppertracks, had carried down with him from the mountains of the Steamman Free State. The steamman’s tomes sported engraved metal covers and pages made out of some composite material that felt like a mix of rubber and glass — as hard to tear as steel, yet as thin as tissue paper. But as peculiar as the books’ form might be, the standardization of the people of the metal’s writing across the ages made their treatises on pre-cold time civilisations far more accessible than humanity’s volumes. The race of man’s books that survived into the modern age were copies of copies of copies, changed and mutated with the progressive errors of each new generation. In contrast — much like the steamman race — the metal creatures’ tomes were methodical, steady and full of a humble cleverness. The only grating thing for Daunt was their authors’ continual tendency to attribute events to their ancestral spirits, the Steamo Loa. If they weren’t thanking their gods, they were busy blaming, praising or censuring them. It was almost as if they had written their texts in such a way as to annoy a parson of the atheist, humanist Circlist church. Ex-parson, Daunt reminded himself. But some habits die harder than others.
Yawning, Daunt gathered up his notes and went in search of the tower’s owner. He found the old submariner in the house’s kitchen, a grand scullery with a door latched ajar onto the tower’s central courtyard, the warmth of the range evenly matched against the freezing evening breeze blowing outside. Ducking under a wooden frame dangling with dozens of pots, pans and pitchers, Daunt dropped his work down on a rectangular table in the kitchen’s centre, enough chairs to seat twelve heads at a single sitting.
‘Your cook has the night off?’ Daunt said to the commodore’s back as the large man drained a pot of steaming vegetables.
Without turning, the commodore pointed to one of the goblin-sized metal figures standing inert against the wall. ‘The month off, lad. Coppertracks’ drones will be as still as statues until he returns from the colonies.’
‘I fear I would never let Boxiron cook for me. His idea of a fine meal is a tenth of a coal box shovelled into his furnace injector.’
‘Ah, but Coppertracks is a rare genius,’ said the commodore. ‘Clever enough to have read Damson Beaton’s Household Economies and Recipes for Sustenance and passed it onto his little metal puppets here. Did you find any of the revelations you were looking for upstairs?’
‘Along with a measure of frustration, good captain. I have a little of the meaning of what the sisters have been saying, but meaning without context.’
‘A map without bearings,’ said the commodore opening the range and removing a tray of covered clay pots. ‘Blessed hard to plot a course against that.’
‘Much of what I have uncovered seems to concern a monarch who was said to have unified the tribes into the first Kingdom of Jackals before the age of ice swept the continent.’
At Daunt’s words, the commodore seemed to stumble, almost spilling the pot’s contents. ‘That would be Queen Elizica of the Jackeni.’
‘Indeed,’ said Daunt. ‘It is as if the Sisters Lammeter are possessed by her spirit, relaying her words from beyond the grave.’
‘Elizica’s whispers have been heard in our world before, lad. She took it in her wicked mind to speak through my daughter, once. Nothing good comes from possession by the spirit of the land. Elizica’s like an albatross fleeing the storm front. If it’s her mutterings that your poor lassies are babbling about, you had best close the storm shutters and start stacking sacks full of flood sand outside your door.’
‘I don’t believe in unquiet spirits,’ said Daunt. ‘And the only gods with us in the world are the ones we create in our mind.’
‘Save your Circlist cant for the archbishop,’ said the commodore. ‘I know what I’m talking about, right enough. She’s the voice of the bones of the land. Jackals itself. The Kingdom soaked with the souls and blood of a thousand generations of our ancestors before us.’
Daunt shrugged. ‘A voice that talks in riddles… of a war within a war. And riddles that point back to an ancient conflict between the tribes and the underwater people. A time when gill-necks waded up our beaches and attempted to conquer the mainland.’
‘I know a little of the legends of that time,’ said the commodore. ‘Though I wish I didn’t.’
‘The professor wrote a book on it,’ said Daunt. ‘ The Fall of the Stag-lords. She hypothesized that the magma fields of the Fire Sea were expanding during that age, driving the peoples of the underwater nations onto our shores. During the confusion of that period, the hold of the druids over the land was weakened, the invaders repelled and the tribes unified under the first queen.’
The commodore looked as though this was news he did not want to hear. ‘Let it stay in the professor’s history texts, lad. Wicked times, let them stay lost and forgotten, that is where they belong!’
‘The tongues that the sisters Lammeter are speaking in would have it otherwise,’ said Daunt lifting up his notes and translations. ‘The meaning is obtuse, but they seem to suggest that those times are repeating, that the war we now face with the Advocacy is merely the turning of the circle. They warn of ancient prophecy.’
The commodore moaned and abandoned his range. He collapsed at one of the table’s chairs. ‘Damn her, damn her wicked tricks.’
‘The professor?’
‘Elizica, lad, the bloody ancient queen. Is there so little royal blood left running in our land that she must come tormenting me, sending visitors to my door until she drives me out of my peaceful rest? First poor Rufus, then that black-hearted secret policeman Dick Tull, and now you. Where was she when the royalist fleet-in-exile was broken at Porto Principe by Parliament’s airships? Where was she when my wife died, when my daughter was killed? Where was she when we stood together, Jethro Daunt, on that terrible land of Jago and faced down the army of the ursine and the terrors of that terrible singing tomb and its fearful weapon fit for dark gods? But now, ah, there’s trouble with the people of the underwater nation and poor old Blacky is meant to abandon his nice warm house and put his neck on the line again! And for what? A parliament that turned my noble ancestors out of their land and hunted me for most of my damned life. Where is the justice in that, where is the fairness in that?’
Daunt had never seen the commodore so agitated. He raised his hands placatingly. ‘Peace, good captain. Please, it is Boxiron and I who’ve been engaged on this case by the capital’s aldermen. I appreciate the hospitality of your library, but I certainly wouldn’t ask you to share whatever dangers might present themselves while resolving this case.’
‘You won’t have to, lad.’ The commodore shook his head as Daunt extended out his bag of Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops. ‘She’ll do for me, just you wait and see. There’s never a choice with her. She’s the land, and if you wait long enough the land will take everything from you, even the dust of your bones when you’ve sacrificed all that you have to give. It is my family’s fate, and I’ve run from a lot of things, but fate is one beast you
