Sadly was on the bunk opposite, resting his chin on the top of his cane. He had kicked one of his shoes off, his clubfoot swollen larger than the shoe leather in the close heat. ‘That sounds right effective, Mister Daunt.’
‘Surprisingly so.’ Although not quite as effective as they think.
‘What were they after?’
‘They want King Jude’s sceptre back. And the commodore’s sister would like her brother’s head on a platter for betraying the royalists, not to mention getting her son killed. They also wanted to know all about my life.’
Tull grunted. ‘Of course, you’re so interesting.’
Daunt smiled. ‘Again, surprisingly so, but they forgot one thing.’
‘What is that, amateur?’
‘There is an old adage of the church. Well, actually something of a warning. Be careful when staring into the darkness, for the darkness also stares into you. What they have forgotten is that oft times, the converse can also be true.’
‘What have you found out, you devious fastblood?’ asked Boxiron.
Daunt raised his hand. ‘Have you spoken to the other prisoners about the camp and why we’re here?’
‘We are to start work later today,’ said Boxiron. ‘The camp’s task is to harvest a purple fruit from the jungle that the Advocacy calls gillwort. The juice is used to help suppress a common sickness among the gill-necks… hyperplasia. The disease attacks their respiratory system, eventually causing death by suffocation.’
‘And let me guess, our new island home is the only place where this cure grows.’
‘Correct.’
‘The guards need us here,’ said Tull. ‘They can’t stay out of the sea for more than a couple of weeks at a time without doing their nut in.’
‘The exception being the camp commandant, On’esse,’ said Boxiron. ‘It is said that he never takes any leave.’
‘And he’s as barmy as a bucket full of badgers for it,’ said Dick. ‘His guards are terrified of him, let alone the prisoners.’
‘Sometimes the job chooses the man,’ said Daunt. ‘Or should that be evolutionary offshoot of man? No matter, I am sure the beatings will continue until morale improves. There is a graveyard inside the camp?’
Boxiron raised a heavy hand towards one of the walls. ‘A sizeable one in the Northeast corner. Dysentery, malnutrition and overwork are to be our bedfellows.’
‘I rather think rust, in your case.’ Daunt stood up. ‘I suspect there hasn’t been a churchman here for years, even a defrocked and sadly wayward one such as myself. Time to pay my respects to the departed.’
‘You’ll be joining their ranks sharpish if you’re not here when the next work party is due to leave,’ warned Dick.
‘I’m sure there’ll be time aplenty to discover my humanity in simple labour.’ Daunt remembered the guard towers along the walls, the rifles and focus behind them directed outwards. A set time to go out implies a schedule. But not a timetable, methinks, for our convenience.
It wasn’t much to look at, the camp’s graveyard. Not much to mark the passing of so many lives. Hundreds of mounds crowded in with single spikes of bamboo, ranks of them crudely carved with the name of the passed and the date of their removal from the camp’s rolls. A few of the more recent graves had tiny scrolls of paper pushed into the bamboo’s hollow centre. Daunt squatted down and removed a couple, reading the messages before folding them back into place. Simple memories and farewells from friends in the camp. Standing in the far corner were the oldest graves, their bamboo markers splintered and weathered to near destruction by the passage of time. If there had been paper farewells pushed inside these, they had crumbled into dust long ago; food and nesting material for the ants crawling over the dirt.
As Daunt had anticipated, there were noble titles carved on some of the oldest markers. Only to be expected. The royalist fleet-in-exile had been trying to survive in the gill-necks’ realm, frictions were bound to erupt between the rebels and the Advocacy. It hadn’t just been Parliament trying to call time on the glorious counter-revolution. Who were the others… adventurers and interlopers? The treasure hunters the commodore had spoken of back on the Purity Queen, driven by visions of gems as large as boulders? This was their final resting-place, then. There were no gill-necks buried here, but that didn’t surprise Daunt. With the gill-necks’ worldview, the Advocacy doubtless conducted ceremonies that saw their remains scattered into the sea. Returned to the watery universe from which they came.
Daunt pulled himself up and moved along the line of graves, tracing the oldest dates back to the more recent burials. From the graveyard he could see the corner of the camp behind the gill-necks’ processing complex and beyond to the sea. There was no wall there. The camp ended in a steep cliff, jagged rocks — a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the ocean below. A constant lashing of waves on the rocks, neither the cliff nor the sea willing to compromise — the maelstrom below the result. Cranes on the cliff top were lowering barrels of gillwort juice towards the open hold of a gill-neck submersible freighter being tossed side to side by the wild sea. The processing centre looked to be a camp within a camp, only gill-necks permitted beyond the internal fence. Too steep to climb, too far to dive without snapping a neck. And even if you survived the trip down, Daunt had a sneaking suspicion escapees wouldn’t care for what was swimming around those waters — not if the presence of the guard towers bespoke what he suspected. But then, these cliffs weren’t the way Daunt was planning to leave — not if the more recent grave markers bore out his theory.
He allowed a smile to soften his face as he discovered one of the graves he had been expecting, quickly followed by a second among the more recent burials. He removed one of the markers to inspect the message.
‘I so rather hoped I would be proved wrong this time,’ he murmured to himself.
A crunching in the dirt made Daunt turn. Boxiron had come to stand by the ramshackle fence separating the graveyard’s rise from the rest of the camp.
‘What have you learned from the dead?’ Boxiron called across to the ex-parson.
‘That it is better to be among the living, old steamer.’
‘It is time. Our work party has been called and is assembling by the gate.’
‘Of course. One note of caution, old friend. The gill-neck soldiers escorting us out are not to stop us escaping, but rather for our protection.’
‘You have been speaking with the other prisoners, Jethro softbody?’
‘Not yet. What have they told you about our labours outside the camp?’
‘Tiger crabs,’ said Boxiron. ‘The waters around here are infested with the creatures. They frequently crawl up from the shoreline into the everglades to hunt. It is why no one has ever escaped from the island to tell of this cursed place.’
‘Land is only ever cursed if you are a gill-neck,’ said Daunt. ‘Have heart.’
The steamman clanged the device welded to his chest in frustration. ‘I have not enough of it, my boiler bled dry by this foul limiter. How much more reduced beyond my life as a steamman knight does the great pattern intend to see me degraded? For all the gross inferiority of my human-milled monstrosity of a body, I still had raw power… I could fight in top gear! Look at me now. I am no stronger than that wretch Barnabas Sadly. If only my ancestors had not forsaken me, I would call upon the Loa to give me the strength to rip this evil contraption out of my chest plate.’
‘We’ll find a way yet.’
‘I should be able to protect you. That I cannot is beyond shameful. Is that not why our association has proved so successful? You supply the intellect and I supply the muscle.’
‘Not just the muscle,’ said Daunt. ‘You have the boiler heart of a champion, and I have relied on the compass of your soul as much as I have relied on anything.’
The steamman did not seem convinced.
‘Listen to me, old steamer, I need you yet. We have a battle or two left before us. I glimpsed such terrible things in the interrogation machine, in the dreams and shadows of their infernal contraption. We cannot afford to lose. We cannot afford to let ourselves die in captivity here.’
‘What did you see, Jethro softbody?’
‘I believe I saw the same things that have been haunting the dreams of the Sisters Lammeter, the same things that have been tormenting Charlotte Shades.’
‘Vampires?’
Daunt joylessly shook his head. ‘Not as the florid fictioneers of the penny-dreadfuls describe them. The true
