From the Deep of the Dark. Stephen Hunt

sight, following behind him and masked by the falling snow at night, the gaps between each gas lamp filled with shifting mists and vapours. It got easier still, once the rich residential district fell behind, pressing towards the heart of the city, where Middlesteel’s streets still had patrons falling out of drinking houses and Jackelians whistling down cabs and climbing into private coaches as they exited theatres and gambling dens. Symons was spry on his feet, doing everything correctly to check if he was being followed. All the little halts and checks, the sudden changes of direction; stopping by the harp maker’s window to snatch a quick look behind him in the reflection of the glass panes. Ducking through the tavern crowd in the Crooked Chimney and out through the drinking house’s back entrance, into the side street where Dick was already waiting. But this was bread and butter to Dick. If he had an art, this was it. Wherever Symons looked, Dick Tull wasn’t, all the way underground to the atmospheric line at Guardian Lenthall station, and then they were both just part of the throng crowding its way onto the platform. When the next capsule shunted through the rubber airlock, Dick waited for the rebel to board, spotting the heap of the hawker’s jacket shrugged off on the platform and being trampled underfoot. Then the capsule’s brass doors swung shut, a slight hiss as its airtight integrity was proved to the instruments on board, before being shunted through the rubber curtain and into the pneumatic tubes, the pressure differential building up until they were hurtling through the airless tunnels like a bullet. There was Symons, now wearing the black jacket of the middling sort of clerk who inhabited the towers of the capital’s counting houses, no sign of his hawker’s tray, his narrow cheeks having acquired a thin pair of spectacles to perch on the end of his nose.

      Rufus Symons must have been comfortable that he wasn’t being followed – there were no false exits by the door of the atmospheric capsule as it pulled into the concourses of other stations, no sudden step backs into the carriage as if he had changed his mind about his destination at the last minute. When the rebel did exit, there were enough people moving on and off the concourse that Dick’s own exit didn’t appear contrived.

      Just a tired patcher returning home, but where was home? The answer to that appeared to be at the foot of one of the tall hills that surrounded the capital, the city thinning out into a cluster of village-like lanes at its outskirts, a couple of cobbled streets surrounded by shops and homes climbing upwards on a steep incline.

      I’ve been here before. On the business of the board, too. When was it?

      The feeling of recollection grew stronger as Dick followed Symons up the hill. There were large houses at the top of the hill, he recalled, with their own grounds. Not as expensive as Lord Chant’s, but then this district was too near the outskirts of the city to begin to be considered fashionable. A place for independent thinkers, the kind of person who didn’t care what others thought of them, who valued the view over the pneumatic towers at the capital’s heart, haze rising into the sky from the heated water flowing through their rubberized skins. The sort of soul who had no use for society invites and could see poetry in the venting steam from the mills below curling into the darkening sky, obscuring the collision lamps of airships passing through heaven’s command.

       This is where I’d end up if I only had the money for it. If only I could go back in time and take my chances again. A nice clean ward. No thieves rattling my skylight, waking me up in the small hours, sending me reaching for the pistol under my pillow. No drunken singing in the middle of the night from gangs of full-up-to-the-knocker louts falling out of alehouses.

      There was a village green at the top of the hill, a duck pond frozen enough that a couple of birds were skating over its surface, using the light spilling out from the crescent of houses and cottages on the other side to try to find a break and a drink of water. Dick’s quarry was heading towards an arched opening in a brick wall on the other side of pond, the wall’s shadow just taller than a man’s height, foliage from an orchard rising up beyond the bricks, and behind that, a single large tower crowned with an illuminated clock face.

      Dick didn’t need to see the residence’s name engraved in the brass plate by the entrance, just the sight of the folly rising like a landlocked lighthouse enough to shake the memory of his single visit here years before. Tock House. The State Protection Board knew well the true identity of the man who lived behind these comfortable walls; after all, they had been using it to blackmail him into working for the secret police for long enough. Commodore Jared Black. A royalist who had changed his identity so many times in his life on the run, it was a wonder he still knew who he was. And when he’d finally stopped running, the board had eventually caught up with him and sunk its claws in his tired old flesh. They had turned him and used him to their own ends.

       You’re meant to be our asset, Blacky, you old rascal. You had better not be playing both sides of the field. Backsliding with your old rebel friends.

      Here was information worth having. But he’d have to tread softly. The commodore was as sly as a fox, and there were always wheels within wheels where he was involved. He might act like a blustering old sea dog, but the man was deadly with a sabre and cunning enough to have survived everything fate and the dangerous, unasked for duties of the board had thrown at him. There were those who played in the great game as masters, and old Blacky was one of them. Double agent, triple? Or more likely only ever on his own side? Dick’d have to play this one right carefully with the brass-buttoned officers back in the board – there were those who wouldn’t take kindly to having one of their prize chickens plucked bare by a lowly officer of Dick Tull’s standing.

      Dick patted the side-pocket of his coat where the comforting weight of the two stolen silver candles lay, and then he smiled. I’ll be back for you, Blacky. See if I can’t wipe that smug smile off of your wine-stained lips. Back to squeeze you for the truth of what you, Symons, and all your royalist friends scampering about the capital are up to. You’ve just become my ace card, you sod, and I’m keeping you tucked up my sleeve.

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘As you can see,’ said Charlotte, her husky voice cutting across the assemblage, ‘there is nothing tucked up my sleeves.’

      Not that the mostly male audience was interested in looking up her decorated sleeves when she had left so much else on show, her powder-blue dress shockingly low cut for high society’s current standards; fanning delicately over the sides of the purple crinoline skirt riding her willowy hips.

      Distraction, it was all about distraction. Especially for the sponsors of this coming-out ball, who would hopefully never piece together Charlotte Shades’ true involvement with what would really be coming out this night – and not just the dull debutante daughters of a mob of fat mill owners and merchant lords.

      ‘But—’ she continued, gesturing theatrically towards the member of the audience plucked up to the stage, ‘—while there is nothing up my sleeve, might there not be something in your pocket?’

      There was a collective gasp of astonishment from the audience as the man on stage tugged his gold pocket watch out of his pocket.

      ‘It still works,’ Charlotte reassured him. After having seen it wrapped in her handkerchief and smashed to pieces he looked at it doubtfully dangling from its expensive chain. ‘But, alas, I couldn’t fix it from being a minute slow. My skills in the sorcerer’s arts do not extend to matters horological.’

      ‘Upon my life,’ huffed the man. ‘It still works!’

      Charlotte bowed as she took the round of applause, trying to ignore the shouts for extra acts of hypnotism. That was the trouble with owning a flashy stage name such as Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism. It was catchy enough to act as a lure for invites into the grand mansions of the nobility (which proved lucrative in so many ways). But her clients always wanted to see tricks of hypnotism, and she was loath to reveal just how well she could perform her artifice. Nothing to make you think too hard about me. Distraction, it’s all about distraction. Just a performing curiosity, capering about the stage for your entertainment, my lords.

      She addressed the audience. ‘I have found it advantageous to always