presently hundreds of miles away on the Isla Furia sent a waterfall of chills crawling down his spine.
‘What is it, Mister Tull?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.’
Reaching their destination, Dick used the butt of the rifle to hammer aside the rusty bolts securing the hatch above his head, a shower of oxidised metal flakes falling onto his sweating face. There was a clockwork box meant to trigger the escape route from outside but it had stopped functioning — possibly centuries ago. The hatch opened above the crawl space. When Dick pulled himself out he found himself in a large wardrobe littered with mothballs but no clothes — attire superfluous to a steamman’s needs. There was an oblong of angled slats in the wood giving a view out onto the room beyond.
‘Any guards?’ asked Sadly, coming up behind Dick.
Dick shook his head. ‘Monoshaft’s said to only allow a single house servant inside to clean. Doesn’t trust anyone not to nose around his papers and notes.’
‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’
Clicking open the wardrobe door, Dick was at a loss to know what cleaning the unlucky servant was actually allowed to do. All around the room, every surface was scattered with pieces of paper covered over with half-mad scrawls, annotated cutting from newssheets and pieces of string and chord connecting the scraps like veins on a drunk’s face. It was as bad as the mess back in the board’s offices. Sadly picked up a faded cartoon cut out of the front of the Middlesteel Illustrated News, a drawing of two senior members of the government pinching each other’s noses. The speech bubble had been scrawled over, frantic handwriting demanding, Why is this here? Why, why?
‘He’s not playing with a full deck of cards anymore, is he?’ said Sadly.
‘Give him his due. He’d worked out the Court was back in the great game when I thought he just blowing steam from his stacks,’ said Dick, ‘He connected the gill-necks and the royalists working together before anyone else.’
There was a noise from the connected room and Sadly unshouldered his rifle while Dick padded silently up to the door. The Court’s agent was holding his rifle ready, lowered and angled towards the floor, and Dick rested his cane against the wall, then tipped the door open before springing into the room with his gun gripped in both hands.
‘You!’ Algo Monoshaft was scrabbling around the floor, laying lengths of string around the spirals of paper littering his expansive carpet. He had a dozen pots of dye of different colours scattered around him, and appeared to be painting the strings according to the strictures of some mad colour code. Monoshaft didn’t sleep much, but at least they had caught the board’s head unawares.
‘You murdered William Beresford. I knew it would be you who came for me, sergeant.’
‘Stay where you are, sir,’ said Dick. ‘I don’t know how many hidden buttons you’ve got to call for help, but I reckon a cautious old steamer like yourself will have a few.’
‘I though you were too trivial to be turned by them,’ said the steamman. ‘But here you are to kill me, just like you slew poor young Beresford softbody.’
‘The opposite of that, sir,’ said Dick.
‘Sweet lies. Always lies, when the treasonists are everywhere.’
‘Just who do you think sent us?’ asked Sadly.
‘The vampires, of course,’ said Algo. ‘They have been turning all of my officers, corrupting them into the half- living, feeding on the people’s blood and spreading their sickness.’
‘Not quite, sir,’ said Dick. ‘But you were right about the Court of the Air, and you were right about the gill- necks working with the royalists. You were bang on about that.’
‘That’s it sergeant, flavour a lie with the truth. You can transmute your form into bats and vermin, that’s how you slipped past my soldiers outside. But you can’t drain my blood; I have only oil and vapour for you. That’s why I have to die. Then you’ll have one of the section heads replace me, they’re all your vampiric allies now. I can’t trust any of you.’
Dick lifted his rifle out and as a sign of good faith placed it on a tabletop to his side. ‘I’m not here to kill you, sir. I’m here to ask for your help. We have been infiltrated all right, but not by what you think. I’ve just come back from what passes for the Court of the Air these days and I need your help to rescue them from the gill-necks. I need the RAN and the fleet sea arm to go to sea in defence of the nation and our interests or there’ll be nothing left of the Kingdom by the end of the year.’
‘Lying,’ spat Algo with enough venom that his voicebox shook. ‘It’s a war you want.’
‘Only against the real enemy.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Sadly, raising his rifle to the ceiling and loosing a chattering burst into the plasterwork before dropping the barrel towards Dick and the steamman.
‘What are you doing?’ Dick shouted as the sound of panic and guards clattering outside the private apartments began to filter through to where they were standing.
‘It’s not a war, says I. No more than when a farmer brings his swine in from the field and takes a razor to their throats. What do you call that? A harvest?’
‘You bastard, Sadly, you’ve sold us out.’
‘I told you,’ warbled Algo. ‘I warned you to trust no one. There are treasonists all around us.’
Sadly activated the sea-bishop detection mechanism on his cane and tossed it towards Dick. The eyes in the copper-boar’s head handle were filled with orange light and burning with a fierce urgency. ‘Well, someone in the room is not of this world, and you must be fairly sure you’re still a human.’
‘You can’t be one of them,’ said Dick, reeling in shock. ‘Daunt can sniff their kind out. The amateur pegged Vice-admiral Cockburn for a sea-bishop straight away, like a walking blank he said.’
Sadly leered. ‘I find your nickname for our race almost as disgusting as having to bear your fetid appearance, cattle. We know our kind as the Mass. Our numbers are as infinite as our dominion is eternal. While you are as dull as you are repellent, so let me explain for you, we discovered Daunt’s ability back on the island. That was where Barnabas Sadly was taken — that was when I replaced him. To fool Jethro Daunt, all I needed to do was intensify my mesmeric field and convince the creature he was now seeing all the physical cues he expected to observe from his fellow cattle.’ The creature laughed without warmth. ‘Your crippled friend really shouldn’t have brought a cane filled with a tracking isotope into the prison camp, even an inert compound. You animals make it too easy. I let you escape and lead me straight back to the location of the key-gem, Mister Tull. Days spent on the Isla Furia, listening to your pathetic plans to defy the Mass, time well spent making sure the memories of the defences I ripped from the Court’s agent were reliable and up-to-date.’ The Sadly creature’s rifle barrel twitched as he saw Dick glancing towards the rifle he’d laid aside. ‘I wouldn’t reach for that gun, animal. It would be a shame if you were to die immediately. You have assisted the Mass so well. You deserve to see our people’s final victory, even if you don’t live quite long enough to fully regret it.’
There were the sounds of a door breaking, the crack of approaching boots on the floor. ‘I wanted to see how much the head of the State Protection Board had uncovered of the Mass’s activities on his own. But here he is — half-senile and blinded by the superstitious myths of your primitive land — foolish machine creature. Your kind must have built his, once, animal. He’s exceeded his creators only in longevity, not in intellect.’
‘You can’t turn me into one of you,’ said Algo. ‘I have no veins to spread your vampiric sickness.’
Sadly laughed and his shape began to shimmer, reforming as a facsimile of the old steamman. ‘I don’t need to bite you to become you, senile contraption. It’s your memories I am unable to steal. Too well encrypted by that rusted calculating device you call a monarch back in the Steamman Free State. But it matters not. Your kind is as few in number as mine is legion. Perhaps we shall keep some of you functioning as slaves — that was your original function, was it not? There is certainly no sustenance on you to feed the Mass.’ The sea-bishop jabbed his gun towards Dick. ‘You shouldn’t feel too bad, animal. You are livestock and we are wolves and that which preys on a creature is always quicker and faster and more intelligent than it. The best plan you could come up with is attempting to repeat the same trick your bitch-queen played on the Mass centuries ago, sealing us in a trap of time. Even if your friends weren’t going to be walking into an ambush, your witless scheme would never have borne fruit a second time. The shield technology she modified to trap us is under constant guard. What is it you animals say? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’
The creature kept Algo’s appearance as behind him, the room was filled with armed men, Corporal Cloake and the fake Jethro Daunt among them.
