this place as all my people do. But I am a notorious sadist and I find its discomforts counterbalanced by the opportunities to inflict suffering on your outcast hides. To serve me is life, to fail to serve me is to fail to live.’ He paused, as if inviting comment, but none of the three of them were foolish enough to rise to the bait this time.
‘Better. You seem to have come to the attention of our royalist allies. It is not good to draw attention to yourself here. I have you marked as troublemakers.’ He examined the three of them as he swaggered past. He prodded Boxiron with his jewelled insect swatter. ‘Two years.’ Then Dick. ‘Fourteen months.’ Then Sadly, still struggling up on his cane from the dirt. ‘Six months for the runt.’
‘Our sentences?’ Dick queried.
The gill-neck commandant swivelled and punched Dick in the gut, doubling him up, and then pushed him down into the dirt. ‘A slow learner and insolent with it. That is how long I expect you to last here. Your rations are not what anyone would call generous, but I do have to account for them in my supply plans somehow.’ He knelt down next to Dick and hissed in his ear low enough that only Dick could hear. ‘Do you like this as much as I do? I have more to give you than you can take, Fourteen Months.’ Without a backward glance, the camp commandant and his retinue moved off, a human prisoner on either side spraying the officer with moisture.
‘Why did you goad him?’ Boxiron asked. ‘A broken body will not help you to survive here.’
‘Shit like that I take from the State Protection Board,’ said Dick. ‘Damned if I’ll take it from a sodding gill- neck.’
‘Your soul has pride,’ said Boxiron. ‘I used to have a measure of that myself.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘I believe it leaked away from this clumsy body I’m trapped in. I used to have raw strength too, but the gill- necks have sapped even that from me. What good am I now?’
‘Alive as a cripple is better than dead, as my ma used to say,’ said Sadly.
The light behind the steamman’s vision plate pulsed with what might have been dejection. ‘You confuse existence with living.’
‘Pragmatists often do,’ said Dick. His eyes glanced around the prisoners shuffling about the camp, the clothes of most the captives hanging as tattered rags. No prison uniforms. They would rot away in the heat and the damp. The prisoners wore what they had, until they didn’t; the state of decomposition in their clothes like counting the rings on a felled tree. And this place looks to be full of sodding pragmatists.
There was a hideous wailing from deep inside the gill-necks’ processing complex.
‘Oh, Lore,’ said Sadly. ‘What was that?’
‘The sounds of torture,’ said Boxiron. ‘The sounds of Jethro softbody.’
‘What did the amateur say to you, back in the cell before they dragged him off?’ Dick asked.
‘That to the fish about to bite a hook, its bait looks a lot like supper.’
Dick listened to the piercing yells sounding again. But who is bloody eating who? If this was some sort of plan by the ex-parson, then it had gone badly wrong.
Gemma Dark watched Jethro Daunt’s twitching body strapped seated inside the machine, a dozen crystal rings circling the man and exchanging waves of ugly green energy between each hoop, lending the ex-parson’s semiconscious form the distorted appearance of being viewed through a heat haze. The screaming had stopped ten minutes ago. Daunt had lasted a little longer inside the lashing energies than most before he surrendered to the inevitable, but not much. Not as long as Gemma had anticipated. Weren’t Circlist priests meant to have minds of steel? The teachings of their much vaunted synthetic morality giving them an almost supernatural ability to stare into the souls of their parishioners. There hadn’t been many priests among the royalists in the fleet-in-exile, not when the rebels’ work was privateering and whatever it took to survive. Circlist priests. Milksops and faint hearts. They didn’t have the guts to survive in the royalists’ cruelly altered realm, a world where the rightful heirs of the Kingdom had seen their birthright stolen by thieves and murderers. Forced into a game of hit and run for weary centuries, the royalist hegemony bleeding away, until they finally devolved into a tattered ragbag collection of pirates and slavers, antique u-boats and noble titles that weren’t worth the ink on the ancient velum of their charters.
The machine the ex-parson was confined in was connected by twisting root-like crystal cables, winding organically around each other, until they linked up with a similar machine visible behind the first. For a moment, Gemma Dark was glad that the climbing waves of energy were hiding the shape of the form inside the second machine. Her luck, her famous luck. Allies at last to turn around the declining fortunes of cause that had so nearly been lost. And if this is the price, then it is a small thing indeed.
‘Do you have his memories?’ asked Walsingham from behind Gemma.
A voice answered from within the burning cage of the second machine. ‘I do.’
‘Solomon Samson Dark,’ snarled Gemma, surprising herself by the loathing engendered simply speaking the traitor’s name. Her cursed brother. ‘Also known as Jared Black. Where is the dog and does he have my sceptre?’
‘The sceptre is still in his possession, along with the girl thief, Charlotte Shades. They were on board the Jackelian submersible, the Purity Queen, until the Kingdom’s convoy was attacked. Jethro Daunt does not know their location after that point in time.’
‘I knew it,’ laughed Gemma in triumph. ‘But the sea won’t swallow you this time, my treacherous jigger of a brother. Not with the entire gill-neck navy at my disposal.’
‘His submarine has a stealth hull designed to disperse sonar waves,’ warned the shadow inside the second machine.
‘Then it is time we committed some of our ships to the hunt. Rest,’ Walsingham commanded the thing inside the device. ‘Give the ex-parson’s memories time to settle into you. Meanwhile, we shall discover if the commodore’s rudimentary submersible also has a way of disguising its mass from our sensors.’
There was a hideous screeching noise from the cage, like a fox baying, the talons of a scaled hand reaching out towards the semiconscious form of Jethro Daunt. No, you couldn’t always choose your allies.
Walsingham listened to the screeching, a frown crossing his face. ‘Speak only in Jackelian from now on. Use your new memories.’
The thing inside the device obeyed. ‘The priest-man can sense our presence. He realized that the vice- admiral on the convoy was one of the Mass.’
‘What is it that Daunt can detect?’ Walsingham snapped, looking as troubled as Gemma had ever seen him.
‘It is what he cannot. There are signs of the body, subtle cues that he could not detect when he was standing close to the vice-admiral. The Circlist church trained him in this art. Their absence gives us away.’
‘That is not a problem,’ said Walsingham. ‘Now that we know about his profession’s skill, we can focus our attention on any priests we encounter and fill in the signals they are expecting.’
The baying sounded again, louder and more insistent.
‘He is not yours to consume,’ Walsingham commanded angrily. ‘We must keep Jethro Daunt alive in the camp for a little while longer. You may need his mind and his memories again.’
‘Not for too long,’ said Gemma. ‘Not if events go as they should.’
‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst,’ said Walsingham.
They were meant to be words of reassurance, but as Gemma considered where they had probably been dredged from, her blood ran cold. The Mass must feed.
If there was ever a reassuring face to wake up to from the burning clasp of feverish unconsciousness, then Boxiron’s silvery vision plate was hard to trump. Less so, the miserly pinched expression of Dick Tull. With one arm apiece, the two of them hauled Daunt upright. ‘How do you feel, Jethro softbody?’
‘Drained, quite literally.’
‘A day,’ said Tull. ‘That’s how long we were taught by the board to hold out under interrogation. Long enough for your side to realize you’ve been taken and compromised. Any longer and you’re broken beyond use anyway, if your captors are serious about it.’
‘They were serious, but it wasn’t that kind of interrogation.’
Dick Tull lifted the ex-parson’s arm, no doubt counting his fingernails. ‘What kind was it?’
‘They have a machine that rips out your memories, that allows them to crawl inside your mind.’ Daunt glanced around. He was in one of the prison camp’s barrack buildings, sitting on a crude bunk lashed together out of bamboo poles.
