Dick looked at the girl, still comatose and muttering in tongues. ‘She’s a bloody good thief to have lifted the sceptre out of the House of Guardians. How did she end up like that?’
‘She collapsed as she was walking through the grounds towards the house,’ said Daunt. ‘Boxiron had only just carried her inside before you arrived.’
The hulking steamman nodded. ‘Charlotte softbody was injured in the ambush, but she suffered no normal wound, no physical injuries. She and the man called Mister Cloake appeared to be fighting with dark powers, unnatural energies flung and exchanged between them.’
Dick snorted. ‘Him? Corporal Cloake would stick a blade between your ribs as soon as look at you. There isn’t any more to him than that. He is one of Walsingham’s knifemen, that’s all.’
Commodore Black lifted the sceptre out of Daunt’s hands. ‘I’ll be keeping hold of this.’
‘The sceptre is more than a symbol,’ warned Daunt.
‘It is duty seeking me out,’ said the commodore. ‘The land has had her wicked way again, forcing me out of my rest and pushing me down the hard path. I told you, lad, did I not warn you that it would be this way? No choice in the matter for poor old Blacky. There never is. Always me. Always me alone.’
‘You are not alone,’ said Daunt. ‘We stand by you in this.’
The commodore stalked to one of the iron doors, seized the lock, and spun the metal weight around. ‘You stand by me, do you? No time for standing around, boys, let’s be out of here before those killers outside realize there’s nothing more upstairs than a few rusty old guns pointing out with not a defender behind their sights.’
On the other side of the door, a narrow corridor of raw rock face curved around to terminate by the waist- high gates of a lifting room. The lift looked ominously ramshackle, waiting to be activated by them.
‘Another new addition to the place, Blacky?’ Dick asked.
‘That’s the thing about living on top of the hill,’ said the commodore, ‘it always occurred to me that there should be a quicker way to reach the bottom. And since I must make the journey, it only seemed equitable for me to purchase the tavern in the village below whose cellars we shall emerge in. That way, when I entertain in an ale house, I’m not pouring my money into some other rogue’s pockets.’
How much money had the old sea dog blown on building a backdoor to his pile? Well, not so much blown, Dick thought to himself. No, definitely not wasted this time.
It was a tight squeeze inside the lifting room’s cage, just enough space to shut the gate behind the party after they carried the girl thief inside. As the gate clicked shut there was a lurch while the lift’s counterweights attempted to match the overloaded state of the cage, and then they were moving down, faster and faster. Dick hoped the commodore had not short-changed the builders who’d installed his escape route. It would be an ironic end to all the murderous missions he had undertaken for the State Protection Board if Walsingham and his killers broke into the tower only to discover six bodies lying mangled at the bottom of a hidden shaft.
‘Unless this tunnel drops all the way to the other side of the world,’ said Dick, clutching on tight to the railing, ‘we’re only going to be putting off pursuit for half an hour.’
The commodore appeared happy enough with that. ‘Well now, there’s luck for us. Just long enough to get to the airship fields north of the city.’
‘You have got to be joking me,’ said Dick. ‘The board is going to have their people watching the loading ramps of every ’stat in the merchant marine. You won’t even get past the ticket desk before Walsingham’s people are step-marching you outside with a pistol shoved against your back.’
Daunt appeared concerned too. ‘And there is the small matter of Damson Shades here, good captain. I doubt there will be many airship officers who would be willing to embark a young lady in Charlotte’s condition without demanding that a surgeon be sent for.’
Commodore Black just winked back at them. ‘Well now, there you might be surprised.’
The dustmen moved cautiously into the unlit room left exposed behind the kitchen’s hidden wall. A lot more cautiously since two of their number had slid down a chute in the great hall to be impaled on one foot-high steel spikes. This cursed house held a lot of tricks. What Walsingham was fairly sure it didn’t contain anymore, was Charlotte Shades, Dick Tull, the commodore and his damnable friends. In front of him, a dustman rolled dirt gas grenades down the spiral staircase, the assassins waiting a couple of seconds for the room beneath to fill with choking, cloying poison, before storming the lower-level in a disciplined formation. A line of killers filed down with carbine rifles raised, each man covering the next, their rubber nose hoses swaying under their brass goggles.
‘They’ve taken the sceptre with them,’ whined Redlin, the royalist making sure he was positioned well beyond any gunfire that might break out inside the hidden chamber.
‘If they had any doubt of its value,’ said Walsingham, a tone of weariness permeating his voice, ‘your clever demands for its surrender disabused them of that notion.’
‘I am going to suck the marrow out of that bitch Shades when I catch her,’ said Corporal Cloake, rubbing the bruise on his ribs where he had been bowled over during the fight at the shop.
‘It is a pity matters must be kept tidy,’ said Walsingham. ‘If we had only paid her off and let her live, we would have the sceptre by now.’
‘No, that bastard Jared Black knows what he is about,’ said Redlin. ‘Why else would the commodore set his steamman friend to protecting Charlotte Shades? Your clever little thief girl planned this all along, they were working together from the start.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Walsingham. ‘They are fleeing blind. They have no idea what we require the sceptre for. It is this damned land. Her soul is set against us. She senses us here and is moving against us in subtle ways.’
‘This land,’ said Redlin angrily, ‘is ours. It belongs to the cause. Do not forget it. When that dirty parliament of shopkeepers has being turned out and the last guardian is left hanging from a street lamp, boots twitching in the air, then the nation will rest happy enough.’
Walsingham shrugged and smiled knowingly. ‘Yes, the Baron of Lexham, aren’t you? Well, if you and all your exiled royalist friends want to play at being lord of the manor again, you had better get me that sceptre back.’ Walsingham turned to look as one of the dustmen entered the kitchen from the main corridor, clutching a box of books. ‘These were open upstairs in the library, sir. The reading lights are still on inside the room.’
Walsingham picked out the top book, The Fall of the Stag-lords, and opened it to where it had been bookmarked. His breath sucked in as he saw what the inhabitants of the house had been reading. ‘Curious, lucky and dangerous. That is an unfortunate combination for us.’
‘You still believe they don’t know anything?’ asked Corporal Cloake.
‘Not quite enough. Not yet.’ Walsingham rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Double the watch on the State Protection Board, search out anybody who is an asset and contact of Dick Tull. Not a piece of paper or a person is to get close to Algo Monoshaft’s office that we have not first checked, cleared and frisked for any warnings, coded or otherwise.’
‘That senile old mechanical,’ said Cloake. ‘I would love to push him out of his window and watch his cables scatter across the civil service’s front yard.’
‘He is not Lady Florence or Lord Chant,’ warned Walsingham. ‘Such a pity we cannot handle his kind using the old ways.’
‘That coward Blacky won’t stay around to try and warn anyone in the board, he’ll run,’ said Redlin. ‘It’s what he does best.’
Walsingham shrugged languidly, as if that should have been obvious, peering down the staircase. ‘Of course he will. He knows as well as Dick Tull that if he stays inside the Kingdom, the board will hunt him down in quick order. Unfortunately, the commodore has run business for the State Protection Board in Concorzia, Pericur, Quatershift, Jago, Cassarabia, the Catosian City-states… well, it would be far easier to list the countries he does not have friends and contacts in.’ Coming to a decision, Walsingham pointed to the intelligencer who’d been watching Tock House before the dustmen arrived. ‘Send descriptions back to the board of the visitor to the house and his steamman bodyguard. I want to know who that pair is within the hour. As far as the rest of Tull’s renegades are concerned, have posters of them hanging at every coastal port and airfield, every coaching inn, every canal lock house, every police station, every tollbooth and regimental barracks from the uplands to the northern border.’
‘Taken alive or dead?’ asked the intelligencer.
Before Walsingham could comment, the tower shook with the force of a vicious explosion, a lick of fire and rubble exploding out of the spiral staircase inside the concealed chamber.
Walsingham picked himself up from the floor, strips of rubber from the dead assassins’ masks floating out of the smoke, twisting and burning in the air.
