‘That’s how my sister knew we were coming,’ groaned the commodore. ‘Sadly a cuckoo in the nest. You’re well out if it, Barnabas. The Court of the Air is about to fall to the enemy on your people’s island. Me and the girl here were the Kingdom’s last hope to survive.’
‘That’s a poor turn,’ sighed Sadly. ‘So my cover’s blown and the Kingdom’s odds are as low as the rest of ours?’ He indicated the prisoners huddling sullenly at the rear of the cell. ‘Meet the survivors of the convoy that weren’t sent to die on the Island of Ko’marn. The beasts dispatched me here along with the choice cuts, so you lot wouldn’t spy the fact there were two Sadlys limping about the prison camp.’
Charlotte looked at the whimpering mass of broken prisoners hugging the cell wall behind the Court’s agent. This was a terrible sight to see. The sailors in the feeding pen were utterly broken. Men of action and violence and discipline, used to facing death. Withdrawn into sullen madness, shaking and trembling and mercifully unable to engage with the daily routine of being available for consumption. But not Barnabas Sadly. He was still here, dirty and unkempt and soiled, still standing and thinking and ready to fight back with whatever his hands could fashion and his mind devise. ‘You’ve lasted all this time down here?’
Sadly thumped his mangled leg. ‘I think the first few weeks they kept me in case they needed to pick through my mind again. Now, I’m limping along on the fact I’m hardly choice meat. But I don’t know what’s worse. Being selected, or being left for another meal day after day. It’s as good as running mock executions for breaking prisoners’ souls. Look at these poor devils. They were our fighting men, once, the bravest of the brave.’
‘You seem to have outlasted them, lad,’ said the commodore.
‘Well, as you seem to have rumbled during my absence, I’m with the Court of the Air. They take out our souls shortly after we join.’
‘What you believe of your essence is irrelevant. We only select cattle based on your vitality,’ said a familiar voice behind them.
Charlotte swung around. Walsingham was standing at the entrance, two hideously wizened sea-bishop guards either side of him, clutching long dark rifle-shaped crystalline weapons, their elongated heads black bishops’ mitres, swaying as they stood ready to open fire. ‘Not too much fat. Plenty of tender young flesh. We can’t abide the oily taste overweight over-aged animals like you-’ he pointed at the commodore, ‘-leave on the palate. But that’s fine, your sister wishes to toy with you a little, so for the sake of diplomacy I shall humour her.’
‘Why don’t you show us your real form, Captain Twist,’ said Charlotte.
‘Oh, I am sure the members of the Mass all look alike to mere animals,’ said Walsingham.
‘You can eat my cursed sister, then,’ said the commodore, ‘and let us three go.’
‘That would be a poor decision,’ smiled Walsingham. ‘A farmer must use dogs to hunt down wolves, even if he has to eat a little hound during the depths of winter when the larder runs low.’ Walsingham raised the amulet Gemma Dark had ripped from Charlotte’s neck. ‘Not quite the gem I hired you to retrieve for me, but judging by my reports from the siege at the Isla Furia, I should hold that by the end of the day too. As for my animal semblance, it serves as a good example.’ He called out to the corridor and a miniature sea-bishop walked tentatively inside the cell, passing a pair of royalist sentries outside, the creature standing no higher than Walsingham’s waist. Like the two sea-bishop guards, it wore a rubbery skin-suit with a crystal held in the centre of its chest as though it was a beating heart. The royalist sentries outside were trying hard not to look in the prisoners’ direction. They knew what was coming next.
Walsingham placed a hand on the little monster’s shoulder. ‘This is my son, Child 722 from my twelfth brood-wife. Select your animal. Speak only in Jackelian.’
The alien child walked forward, lights in the ceiling growing painfully bright in response to an unseen command from the child’s crystal. It pointed to one of the men at the back: tall, strong, a tattered sailor’s uniform reduced to filthy rags by his incarceration. ‘That one, father.’
‘An excellent choice. Now, switch to amplification mode and focus.’
As the gem glowed in the centre of the young creature’s chest, the sailor stumbled away from the rear wall, mumbling the same name over and over again — Sally, Sally — one of his own children, perhaps. Charlotte looked on, frozen in horror. Behind the selected sailor the other prisoners were shaking and keening, an animal noise she didn’t think it was possible could rise out of any human throat.
‘Maintain your hold,’ ordered Walsingham. ‘Bring the animal in closer, closer.’
The sailor was a foot away from the miniature sea-bishop, when the child monster produced the same style of crystalline tuning fork-shaped blade that Corporal Cloake had once tried to use on Charlotte. It seemed to seal into the child’s tiny hand, growing and moulding into the veins around its black, withered wrist, then the thing stabbed upwards with the blade while the sailor was bending down, reaching out with his arms to hug whatever projection of familial love was in his mind’s eye.
‘Inject, reduce, ingest,’ called Walsingham.
Charlotte couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sickening sight, the man’s frame diminishing, blood and liquefied meat flowing up the crystalline prongs, the young creature’s stomach swelling as if it were pregnant. Flicking out talon-like, the prongs of the feeding blade withdrew and a crumpled husk, little more than sack of mummified skin, flopped to the oily surface of the cell. This is what happened to Damson Robinson back in her pie shop, the Circle preserve her soul. They did that to my friend! I never had so many I could afford to lose them.
‘Very good, child. A perfectly clean cull,’ said Walsingham, patting the hideous thing’s distended head. ‘Tomorrow we will practice feeding and see if you can push your cattle semblance into the minds of all the animals here, not just your prey’s.’ He turned to Charlotte. ‘It is relatively painless. The blade sedates as it drains, just as our mesmeric trance convinces the animal it is in the presence of its own herd.’ He pushed the sailor’s desiccated remains away with his foot. ‘Very little sustenance is wasted, which is of paramount importance.’
Charlotte bent over, clutching her heaving stomach. Charlotte had seen this in the memories Elizica had dredged up in the sceptre’s recordings, but watching it in person, the visceral sight and the stench, was almost more than she could stand.
Walsingham appeared amused by her reaction. ‘I remember the night we first met. Before you took to the stage in front of the guests, one of his lordship’s servants fetched you a plate from the kitchens and you ate. Did you weep tears for the cuts of roast pork you piled into your primitive digestive system? Did you mourn how long the animal had hung in a dirty shed, its neck inexpertly slit and its blood pouring away? Do you know how much genetic similarity you share with that swine? I could rip out its heart and have it sown into your body with as little inconvenience as changing the power cell in my guard’s rifle. But does that stop your saliva running when you smell roast crackling? It does not. This is the way of nature. Predators and prey, always.’
Charlotte glared hatred at the creature. ‘Don’t expect your prey not to go down scratching and biting.’
‘Oh, you’ve inconvenienced me quite enough thus far. You should view you and your rabble through our perspective, understand how pathetically short-lived you are. The Mass have purified our genes — we can live for thousands of years, near immortal. To us, you animals pass like mayflies in the burning of a single afternoon. You should be honoured that your flesh serves the Mass. Well, we’re preparing a recorder to rip a memory imprint from you. We will discover just what tricks you have played on us. After that…?’ He smiled at her, licking his lips. ‘My progeny shall see how the bacon sizzles.’
As the sea-bishops departed, the wall sealed up, leaving not a trace of a join behind them.
Commodore Black stumbled after the creatures, slamming his fist into the cell’s damp featureless surface. ‘Look at this foul black stuff, dripping with evil and cunning. How can I pick the lock on this? A swallowed man tickling open the guts of a whale? How am I meant to bring my mortal genius to bear on such a foul prison?’
‘Don’t worry, Jared,’ said Charlotte, laying a hand on the old u-boat man’s shoulder.
‘Why, because our worries will be short, lass? I always knew in my bones that it would be Elizica’s games that did for me in the end. All my life, running. You can escape from almost anything, but you can never escape the who or how of your birth, not who you are.’ Big wet tears tolled down his cheeks and he rubbed them away with half a sob and half a snort of laughter. ‘These tears aren’t for me, lass. Not old Blacky. Sick and dying and hardly missed when he’s gone. They’re for you and all my friends back home. I’ve saved us all Charlotte, that I have. I’ve saved us all a dozen times over. I’ve faced mad revolutionaries and madder gods, fought our enemies from Cassarabia to Quatershift, battled villains from the deserts of Kaliban to the black halls of Jago, but here’s my end. A cell with no lock is an escape even old Blacky can’t manage.’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘Housebreaker, animal, cattle, prey, bastard, thief girl — that’s all that Walsingham and your sister see when they look at me. But while I dabble as a thief, I’m also Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism. I didn’t fall onto the stage by luck. I didn’t become the quality’s act of choice just because they wanted
