From the Deep of the Dark. Stephen Hunt

step, gazing down on the gaslights of the capital, the length of Middlesteel spread out beneath a full moon. ‘That is a sight, that is, Mister Tull. Must be nice having that at the end of your drive, says I. They won’t be coming here, will they, the dustmen? The board doesn’t mess with the quality, do they? Not the folk with money, not carriage folk?’

      Dick thought of the murder of Lady Florence Chant that young William had reported. It had been shortly after that that his old partner had been reassigned, then murdered. Maybe Dick has been too quick to dismiss the story of the killing as a prank by the boy to land him in trouble with the board’s officers. Dick shrugged. ‘It’ll take more than a few notes from Lords Bank to buy off the board’s band of killers.’

      The little rat-faced man seemed unnerved by the prospect of being pursued inside. ‘Let us be away then, Mister Tull. We don’t need to be bottled up inside that old place. The steam is still up on the carriage. Roll the weight of the barrels off the back and we can make it across two counties on the coke left inside our coal box.’

      ‘Running blind, that’s running to your death,’ said Dick, checking his blunderbuss had a fresh charge resting in its breach. ‘Old Blacky inside there has answers. And if you’re right about the gill-necks being involved in this mess, then we are going to need a u-boat to follow their trail.’

      ‘Lords-a’larkey,’ coughed Sadly, beating his chest. ‘He’s not a submariner, is he? I’m no good on the water, Mister Tull. I gets sick taking a wherry to cross the river, I does.’

      ‘I need you alive to testify for me,’ said Dick, ‘and I’ll take you seasick and without a bullet in your back over the reverse. Don’t you worry, when it comes to piloting the seas, old Blacky is as slippery as they come. He was born with a smuggler’s soul and a privateer’s silver cutlass under his royalist cot. That’s what the board has mostly been using him for, running cargo no one else would touch. You’ll like him – he’s a snitch and a turncoat, just like you.’

      ‘That, Mister Tull, right offends me. I just work the middle and I’ve always been true to you.’

      ‘The middle doesn’t get to be offended,’ said Dick. ‘And I think we’ve both fallen off the fence now.’

       Well off and hanging over the ledge, that’s what we sodding are.

      Wrapped in the fire of her jewel, joined in agony with Cloake by the snaking energies that connected the thug to the Eye of Fate, Charlotte could hardly muster the strength to raise her eyes towards the assassin about to plunge his long-bladed knife into her neck.

      Even with the pain, Charlotte’s ears still worked well enough to be near deafened by the sudden splintering explosion of the pie shop’s front door. If Damson Robinson had been alive she’d be spitting blood. As it was, enough of that splattered over the sawdust as Boxiron continued his lurching charge through the entrance. The steamman connected with the first of Cloake’s thugs, the surprise that was no doubt on the man’s eyes hidden by his stench-mask as Boxiron ploughed through where he was standing. The assassin was lifted into the air as if he had been upended by the horns of a charging bull. The blade that had been seconds away from slicing through Charlotte’s neck somersaulted upwards and embedded itself in the ceiling’s oak beam. There was no scream. There was no time.

      Kneeling, Charlotte just managed to use her hands to stop herself falling forward and colliding with the floor. It was gone – the interweaved bridge of coiling, lashing energies joining her in suffering to Cloake. Her jewel had turned cold almost the instant that the spinning body sent flying by the steamman collided with Cloake. He’d dropped his double-bladed knife, but Cloake wasn’t out of the fight. He didn’t so much move as scuttle, like a spider or a crab, his body scurrying across the sawdust-strewn floor, seizing the crystal blade and speeding towards the door into the bakery room. There was something ill about the way he moved so strangely, so quickly. Something sickening. The backdoor. The yard. Bastard. Maybe it was the shock of being disconnected from the surging force, but Charlotte worked hard to hold down the vomit.

      He was quick, the second thug, Charlotte gave him that. Even with the sight of the steamman bearing down on him like a loosed crossbow bolt, he maintained his poise and pulled out a pistol concealed behind his back. It sported a long black barrel with a serrated knife fixed underneath, but whether there was a charge loaded into its breach or not was a moot point, as the steamman slowed not a jot, simply running the killer down like a charging war-horse flattening a victim on the battlefield. He spun with the impact, the thug, and a spray of blood painted the floor followed by a sickening thump of cracking bones as Cloake’s man barrelled back into the far wall. It wasn’t so much a fight at a demonstration of the laws of physics. Half a ton or more of unstoppable force murderously impacting with a skin-covered sack of flesh, blood and bones. A strange, low whine like an annoyed cat came from the body. No man would die like that, surely?

      Charlotte shivered to her feet, still clutching the sceptre. I have it. No buyer, no patron, no case full of gold coins, but I still have King Jude’s bloody sceptre.

      ‘Help me!’ The first noise to sound from the steamman beyond the initial explosion of physical violence, his voicebox quivering with a plaintive, pleading quality. Boxiron was flailing his brick-sized fists at the counter, smashing chunks out of the worktop, little clouds of masonry and flour spraying into the air. ‘My gears have slipped.’

      As Charlotte got closer she saw there was a lever on the back of the steamman’s smoke stack, a plate cut with gear positions. The little engraved brass plate placed there by the manufacturer read ‘idle’ at its lowest position, but Boxiron’s previous employers had scratched a line through the script and painted it over with the words ‘slightly less-murderous’. Right now the lever was quivering energetically in five, locked in top gear. She threw the lever down, twisting it around to ‘idle’.

      There was a gasp of wheezing smoke from Boxiron’s stack as he shuddered back down to stillness. ‘Curse this human-milled, coal-choked malfunction of a body.’

      ‘I would say bless it, for I would be dead for sure without you,’ said Charlotte. ‘Although I do seem to remember telling you that I didn’t need your protection.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Boxiron. ‘As I was standing outside I could hear you were doing a superior job of managing to protect yourself. I merely entered to see how it should be done.’

      ‘Bugger you and your parson’s prophecies,’ Charlotte threw back.

      ‘Jethro Daunt tries hard not to believe in prophecies. I, on the other hand, have no such compulsion. The spirits are riding the sisters Lammeter and it’s still your name spilling out of their lips.’

      Prophecy? This isn’t a prophecy. This is just business. Those Royalist twisters tried to double-cross me, is all. Keep their money, keep the sceptre too. So, the rebels want their ancient symbol of authority back, do they? Now it would cost that cheating dog Mister Twist three times what he’d offered her before, for even a sniff of this jewel-tipped beauty. Charlotte recalled the eerie way that Cloake had fled while escaping their duel of lightning-like energies. Moving like nothing human has a right to. Her jewel had saved her. The Eye of Fate had known. No, I’m imagining it. This was a royalist double-cross, no more, no less.

      She kicked at the corpse of one of her would-be murderers on the way to the bakery. The back yard was open, cold air blowing across the room, the oven door standing ajar. Against her better judgment, she opened it wide and peered inside, having to choke back the vomit still riding her belly. Damson Robinson. What was left of her. Just like the killings in the papers. Drained of all her blood. But not a pair of fangs to be seen among these bastards. Charlotte had to stop herself from reaching out and touching the remains stuffed inside the oven. To feel the confirmation that here had been a human life, someone she had known, someone she had joked with. Damson Robinson had looked after all of her thieves. It might’ve been the kind of care that a highwaymen showed for a useful brace of pistols, oiling and cleaning and greasing them, but Charlotte hadn’t had such a great surfeit of friends in her life before that she noticed or minded the difference.