CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Poor lass,’ said Commodore Black, watching while Daunt tipped the potion he had concocted from the contents of the u-boat’s medical cabinet down Charlotte Shades’ throat. ‘Is her fever fading yet?’
‘Getting worse if anything,’ said Daunt. ‘But it must break soon.’ His words sounded hollow, even to him. If it was any normal fever. Not this cursed illness. Her body lying wracked by an unearthly presence, just like the poor sisters.
‘I heard a noise from her berth in here, a wicked whistling and rattling as if her cabin’s air scrubbers were about to overload,’ said the commodore.
‘She was speaking in tongues,’ noted Boxiron. ‘But this language was an ancient steamman dialect, sung in raw binary.’
‘An unholy racket, whatever,’ said the commodore.
‘It would sound better emanating from the voiceboxes of my people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but not by much.’
‘Everyone else is in the ready room,’ said the commodore. ‘Waiting on your frightful intellect to descend and solve all of life’s little mysteries.’
‘I will settle for getting to the heart of our current affair, good captain.’
Commodore Black spun the wheel on the iron door of the u-boat cabin, opening it onto the passage outside. White sodium light soaked the interior of the craft, lending everything a fine, harsh cast. Even the brown wood panels that should have softened the passage appeared bright and severe, every knot of oak throbbing under the artificial illumination. Inside the Purity Queen ’s stout hull, the u-boat hadn’t changed a jot since Daunt and Boxiron had sailed with the commodore to the Isle of Jago all those years ago. The ex-parson had noticed the changes outside, though, as they were ferried across to the submarine. Small interlocking plates, thousands of them, welded over the surface of the catamaran-shaped u-boat’s twin hulls. It was as though a smith had decided to turn the submersible’s hull into a piece of sculpture, plate upon plate, all crusted green with the embrace of the sea. In places the angles at which they joined the hull seemed random; in other spots the plates took on a swirling pattern, a fresco cut in steel. The reworking of the Purity Queen might have been mistaken for an attempt to sculpt on the scales of a fish, an organic texture to soften the warlike lines of the ex-fleet sea arm vessel, although there could be no masking of the double-prowed submarine’s torpedo tubes. It transpired that the remodelling hadn’t resulted from the artistic inclinations of an insane blacksmith. According to the commodore, the alterations were state-of-the-art theorisings of a naval architect who had been handsomely paid to ensure that the old u-boatman’s vessel could set to sea with an experimental hull able to wrap sonar waves around her length. Fold them so gently the Purity Queen might as well have been a ghost slipping through the depths.
Daunt followed the commodore through the narrow corridors, squeezing past the stripe-shirted crew going about their duties — as roguish and varied an assortment of sailors as befitted Blacky’s unorthodox cargoes and smuggler’s landings.
‘Well, this much I can tell you, lad. If my sister Gemma is involved, there’ll be a good bit of dying to be done after we’ve set a tack across her wind.’
Daunt entered the ready room with Boxiron behind him; the steamman’s clanking legs startling the boat’s cat, the surprised feline a black streak as she shot between the commodore’s legs in search of a less crowded cabin.
Dick Tull and his informant, Sadly, were waiting at the long room’s oval table, a polished wooden surface inlaid with scenes from Jackelian naval history, suiting the u-boat’s previous status as a war-horse of the state. Kingdom dreadnoughts clashed with Cassarabian paddle galleys, submersible flotillas exchanged torpedoes above an underwater mountain range, athletic u-boat men struck heroic positions of defiance on a bridge as their captain hung vigilantly onto a lowered periscope. It seemed to Daunt that the surface would be more appropriately decorated now with views of smugglers concealed beneath bushes from revenue service riders and redcoated soldiers. Although even with fresh artwork, the table would still look out of place being set, not with food, but the crown jewels of the last absolute monarch to rule over Jackals.
‘Oh, this is a rich biscuit, say I,’ moaned Sadly, his face a greenish pallor — and not just from the shade of the ocean outside the room’s armoured porthole. Even sitting down and resting his clubfoot, he clung to his cane like it was his sole handhold on the world. ‘A fortune in nicked jewels and precious metals laid out in front of me, and I’d get a fast blade in my back if I dared to set foot back home to fence it off.’
‘You’ve already got a walking stick, lad. You don’t need my mortal sceptre for a cane,’ noted the commodore, sitting himself down at the head of the table. ‘And this belonged to the royalists long before the House of Guardians laid their grubby hands on it, or the poor lass back in my cabin.’
‘She’s still not come around?’ asked Tull.
‘It’s not a physical injury,’ said Daunt. ‘At least, not as the vessel’s doctor understands it.’ Beyond any of the healing techniques I mastered in the church, too.
‘Pity,’ said Tull. ‘The girl must know something about why Walsingham is nobbing around the capital, pretending to be a royalist and helping the rebels make off with King Jude’s sceptre.’
‘I doubt, good sergeant, if Damson Shades knows any more than whatever tale she was fed to get her to steal the jewels.’
‘Your metal friend reckons that they tried to kill her. She must be good for something.’
‘Mere thoroughness on their part,’ said Daunt. ‘The Mistress of Mesmerism may not even have known that the royalists were involved, let alone the State Protection Board.’
‘Why?’ Tull laughed. ‘Because of that yarn you spun me earlier about some sisters babbling the same kind of nonsense on their sickbed that the girl’s spouting?’
‘Are you a good Circlist, Mister Tull? Holding to what is right and rational. Rejecting superstition?’
‘Do I look like I go to church regularly, amateur? I know it takes more than some ancient mumbo-jumbo to turn a ruthless sod like Walsingham. If the major’s skulking around the capital holding hands with royalist rebels, there’s more in it for him than the whisperings of shades and ghosts.’
‘Is he a good traitor?’ asked Daunt.
Dick Tull started to say something, then stopped himself. He was about to speak again when Daunt warned him: ‘Your first thoughts, if you please. What initially jumped into your mind when I asked you the question?’
‘That Walsingham isn’t the sort,’ said Dick, playing thoughtfully with the edges of his greying moustache. ‘Oh, he’s ambitious all right, and not carrying too much weight in the way of scruples when it comes to getting his way — inside the board or out. But selling the country down the river to the rebels? And to the gill-necks to boot, if they’re financing the royalist cause? I’d never have pegged Walsingham as good for that.’
Daunt stroked the sceptre. ‘Not even for a king’s weight in gold?’
Dick Tull snorted and turned to Sadly. ‘Could you fence that piece?’
‘Lever the jewels off and melt down the rest for gold, is more the way of it, Mister Tull. Who would buy that fancy piece intact, says I? Who would have the money to do the deed or the nerve to hold onto it? Maybe the caliph down in Cassarabia. He might hang it in his palace as one in the eye for the infidel northerners, but he’s about the only one.’
‘Exactly,’ said Daunt. ‘Its value, its true value is a symbol. To the caliph, or-’ he pointed at the commodore, ‘-to you, or to any royalist. But, Mister Tull, your old employer is not of a royalist bent, as you so clearly pointed out. So what is the true value of the sceptre to him?’ He turned to Boxiron. ‘I saw the way you were examining the jewel on the end of the sceptre. It seems to me, in the same manner you were inspecting the jewel around the neck of our Damson Shades.’
‘Both gems share much the same composition,’ said Boxiron. ‘Close to the reflective index of diamond, but not quite.’
‘And, as you witnessed, the jewel around her neck appeared to ward off unnatural energies from Mister Cloake’s blade which are the most likely cause of her collapse and her subsequent coma. I wonder if the sisters Lammeter were urging us to find Charlotte Shades, or the thing she wears around her neck?’ It was to his chagrin that he hadn’t been able to save the other names the sisters had been chanting. He would not fail Charlotte. Daunt lifted the sceptre up and offered it to Boxiron, the weight of the thing such that he could barely manage to pass it while sitting down.
‘Examine it closely, old friend. Set your vision plate to its maximum resolution.’
Boxiron leant in close towards the sceptre, the red dot pulsing in the centre of his visor-like vision plate
