can travel into a gill-neck city without raising too many hackles.’ He looked over at Boxiron. ‘Apart from you, old steamer.’
‘I can travel underwater,’ protested Boxiron. ‘All I need is a respirator for my stacks and a buoyancy tank.’
‘That you may,’ said the commodore, ‘but while a seanore clan might count three or four of the underwater races among their number, one species you will never find among them is a steamman. The gill-necks will tolerate the odd wetback among the seanore as some poor unfortunate surface dweller trying to do the natural thing and return back to the sea-essence, but if they spy your metal hull bobbing along above their coral, they’ll rumble our game in a blessed minute. My sister Gemma isn’t exactly the trusting type, and we’ll have enough trouble trying to find a friendly face among the royalists without Gemma spotting me first. With a steamman by my side, I might as well swim into the gill-neck capital dragging the lion and portcullis of the House of Guardians on a standard behind me.’
Daunt’s heart sank. Boxiron shook angrily — a mixture of anger and shame at being left out of the fray. The ex-parson had only just managed to get his steamman friend engaged with the case; occupied enough to set aside his increasingly maudlin broodings about the reduced state of his body. Boxiron had little enough to live for as it was. A once-proud steamman knight, reduced into the frame of a semi human-milled monstrosity, crude and malfunctioning.
How can I abandon Boxiron on the Purity Queen, grieving about his exile from his people? His so-called duty to suicide? What will he do without me?
But when it came to it leaving his friend behind, when push turned to shove, Daunt would have no choice. The stakes were too high to do anything else.
After the others had gone, Dick noticed the commodore was watching him. The spy ran his fingers over King Jude’s sceptre, a calculating look on his face as he estimated how much he could get from melting it down and stripping it of its jewels.
‘Your people have already stolen the blessed thing once from its true owners,’ accused the commodore.
Dick reached for his hip flask and took a quick hit of its warm contents. ‘And what will you be doing with it, Blacky, when all of this is done? You got the Jackelian crown squirreled away somewhere too? An ermine-lined souvenir for you to keep your brainbox warm? Settle yourself down in your favourite easychair back in the big house, wrap your fingers around the sceptre and dream of the good old days when your ancestors got to lord it over mine?’
‘When this is all over, lad, I’m figuring I’ll be too. I’m on my way out, but where I’ll be going, you won’t be so far behind me.’
‘There you’re wrong, Blacky. I’m planning on a long, happy retirement.’ He glanced at the richly appointed sceptre. A fortune waiting to be smelted into a form no policeman would be able to trace. I just need a little more money, a little more luck. Maybe I’ll take my share of yours, you old pirate. Someone’s got to come out of this ahead.
‘A cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea? Nosing out a previously undiscovered knack for tending roses? Men like you and me, Dick Tull, we’re good for lying and scheming and killing and trickery. Playing the great game all our lives, you think you can take your eyes off the board? It’s too late for us. This is all we know and all we’re fit for. You think you’re going to find a wife now, raise a family to replace the ones who died off or were scared off? There’s no sight as sad as a rusty old sabre trying to turn itself a garden trowel.’
‘You’re talking about yourself, not me,’ said Dick. But we’re not, are we? All the lies of our trade. Can we fool ourselves too?
The commodore reached out and tugged at Dick’s jacket. ‘Cheap cloth. Taking your meals at an ordinary and telling yourself it’s where your informants are, living your cheap life. How much money do you think you need to leave the State Protection Board behind? Ten guineas a year, a hundred, a thousand? It’ll never buy you what it takes to leave.’
‘Says the man living in a grand tower with a private orchard to do his bloody philosophising in.’
‘We are what we are,’ coughed the commodore. ‘And we’re it under a roof with one room or seventy.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Dick, his confidence wavering. ‘The board’s just a job, and I won’t miss one hour of this life when I’m done with it.
Liar, something deep within him whispered. How often have you dreamed of what you’re going to do outside of the board? Where are your hopes of another life? A man who wanted out would have a dream, wouldn’t he, a plan, something?
‘What happened to you, lad?’ asked the commodore. ‘We’ve done enough business together over the years, you and I. You could have been one of the great ones, but here you are at the end of the game, huddled like a miser counting coals in front of his fire.’
‘Give it a bloody rest. The only cause you’ve ever really worked for is yourself. You try doing it for parliament and country all your life. Not as some quality, not as officer class, but as a mere humble bloody ranker. For the last forty years I’ve done the job as fine as anyone, and watched well-connected carriage folk take the credit for every one of my successful operations while sliding me a plate of shit to eat on the failures. If my father had been an industrial lord or a bishop, I’d be a colonel in the board by now. Instead, I’m counting a ranker’s pension and nicking candlesticks to put a pair of new shoes on my tired old feet.’ Dick made to tip his hip flask to his mouth again, but Blacky stopped him.
‘I need the man you were, you rascal, the man you still can be. I need an ironclad Protection Board bastard by my side. Not some sot two drinks from the grave.’
‘Then I hope your u-boat can travel in time as well as in water,’ said Dick, ‘because that man ain’t here anymore. Just me. That’s who you’ve got. And that man’s going to take a cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea just as soon as it becomes available and leave the great game to someone else. The board’s officers can find another cow to milk for their successes and bugger the lot of them.’
‘Well, there’s one consolation for you,’ said the commodore, thumping him on the back. ‘Poor old Blacky won’t be around to say I told you so.’
When Jethro Daunt entered the wardroom, the only other occupant was the rat-like informant. Barnabas Sadly was standing over a table riveted to the floor, leaning on his cane, a large sea chart spread out across the table.
‘Can you interpret a navigation course, Mister Sadly?’
‘Lords-a’larkey, not the likes of I. But it makes me feel a little better, knowing that someone on this tub has an idea of how to sail through all of that out there. Have you glanced out the porthole? Valleys and mountains and forests of seaweed and fish like birds in the sky. Just the sight of it set my stomach off into a right queasy turn.’
‘No,’ said Daunt. ‘There can’t have been many lessons on matters nautical in your poorhouse classes.’
‘Poorhouse?’ said Sadly, a tone of indignation creeping into his voice. ‘I’m no poorhouse foundling. My father was a cobbler along Velvet Street.’ He tapped his boot with his cane. ‘Couldn’t take over the trade, could I? Customers would come in and take one look at my bad foot and say, well, that one don’t know anything about making a good pair of shoes. We’ll move our business down the lane.’
‘Of course,’ said Daunt. ‘My mistake. There must be nearly fifty cobblers’ shops and stalls along Velvet Street.’
‘But customers still needs to eat, and them that come into an ordinary don’t care much about the person serving them, as long as the beer ain’t stale and the meat overcooked like dry old shoe soles.’
Daunt nodded. Blackening the meat was a favourite trick when it came to disguising rancid cheaper cuts. ‘I hope you don’t lose too much custom back home while you’re on board the Purity Queen.’
‘Mister Tull won’t have thought about that,’ said Sadly. ‘Not once. Any more than his masters at the board gave it a thought when they sent the dustmen over to my place to cut my liver out for what I might have told Mister Tull. I’m useful to the board, they toss me a few bones, but when it suits-’ he drew a finger across his throat, ‘- that’s the way it is with the little people. Nobody thinks about us, nobody cares if that which we’ve built is trampled underfoot by the grand schemes of the quality and the carriage folk.’
‘All of life is flow, Mister Sadly,’ said Daunt. ‘You can only find serenity when you accept the course of the river, rather than trying to build a home of sticks in the centre of the flow and worrying that it will one day be swept away.’
