Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

its gear positions, slotting it back into its lower-leftmost groove. The little engraved brass plate placed there by the manufacturer read ‘idle’, but Boxiron’s previous employers had scratched a line through the script and painted it over with the words ‘slightly less-murderous’, instead.

      ‘Boxiron can’t reach his gears by himself,’ said Jethro Daunt, apologetically.

      Or rather, no household in their right mind would ever buy a Catosian city-state manufactured automatic that left its regulation in its own iron hands. Boxiron’s leg crunched down and the suspect’s beating was over; at least, the one he was going to receive from the consulting detective and his assistant. What he was going to receive inside the cells of Ham Yard was another matter. The constable forced the suspected murderer roughly to his feet, translating her embarrassment at being taken by surprise while on duty into a rather rude handling of her prisoner.

      Boxiron turned to see Jethro Daunt and the police detective at the door behind him. Inspector Reason standing a shade under Daunt’s six foot – the inspector’s hard cynical face the polar opposite of the erudite, distinguished features of Boxiron’s beak-nosed employer. The others in the drawing room – all potential suspects – were hovering nervously, watching as the suspect was manacled.

      ‘But the Circle damn it, Daunt, how did you know that it was Spicer’s own doctor who killed him?’ asked the inspector.

      ‘He bobbed us for fools,’ explained Jethro Daunt. ‘The smell of elderflower in the library we came across wasn’t the bottle of scent that had cracked when Lord Spicer fell down inside the room. Its label read Kittle and Abrams, and their firm sell no scent with elderflower as an ingredient. The scent was a decoy to mask the smell of something else…a sleeping draught administered by the doctor to make Damson Stow fall asleep, giving the doctor time to wind back the carriage clock and make us think that the murder happened half an hour earlier than it actually did.’

      ‘But how did you know about the clock?’ asked the inspector.

      ‘Because when the doctor slipped back to reset it to the correct time, he did so using Damson Stow’s own pocket watch, and that runs ten minutes fast – she told me she kept it like that, so that she would never miss her day’s deliveries coming into her kitchen. And that’s why she also had to die. When the damson realized what the doctor had done, she tried to blackmail him over Lord Spicer’s murder.’

      ‘Poor woman,’ said the inspector. ‘She probably never knew the doctor was the illegitimate child of Lord Spicer and her sister.’

      ‘Raised with enough money to pass through the royal college of medicine,’ said Jethro, ‘but not enough to paper over the grievances of the family fortune sliding away from him and towards his half-brothers and sister.’

      ‘You almost cheated the hangman out of a handsome crowd,’ the inspector said to Boxiron. ‘They’ll pay more than a penny a seat to see a respected doctor swing outside the walls of Bonegate.’

      ‘Sorry, inspector,’ apologized Boxiron. ‘My steam was up and my gears slipped.’

      ‘No harm done, eh, old steamer.’

      Now securely restrained by the constable’s manacles, the murderer winced at the pressure his arms, bent around his back, were putting on the ribs the steamman had cracked. ‘My father said I was a god for curing him. But I cured him of everything that was wrong with him in the end. What sort of god does that make me?’

      ‘The only sort there are, I am afraid,’ said Jethro, sadly. ‘The rather dangerous kind.’

      Behind the ex-parson, the other suspects had fallen into a staccato chattering – proclaiming that they had known all along the killer hadn’t been any of those left inside the drawing room.

      Jethro Daunt shook his head at their naivety and caught up with Boxiron’s hulking form just before the heavy steamman departed the town house, his voicebox muttering to himself in machine-like echoes. When his friend’s steamman head had been attached to the centaur-like form of a steamman knight, his voicebox has possessed the power to cast a battle cry that could burst a human heart inside its chest. Now it was attached to an inferior piece of Catosian machinery, however, all Boxiron could do was whisper half-mad dialogues to himself – cursing the Steamo Loas and the cruel hand of fate for how he had ended up.

      ‘You did well enough, good friend,’ said Jethro, laying a hand on the steamman’s cold iron shoulder. ‘You prevented the doctor from escaping.’

      ‘I nearly killed him. My thoughts travel too fast for this body,’ said Boxiron, allowing only a small trace of self-pity to escape into his voice. ‘Stuck in a loop every time I overreach myself.’

      ‘The mind is willing but the flesh is weak,’ said Jethro, opening the front door onto the neat square in Middlesteel’s expensive western district, the railings of the crescent thoroughly polished, a thousand metal spears gleaming in the sunshine.

      ‘It’s not my flesh that is weak,’ said Boxiron, his legs pistoning down the wide porch steps to the cobbled pavement below. ‘That’s one burden I don’t carry.’

      Jethro angled a nose that was too proud for his kind face towards the cab rank at the end of the street, and one of the drivers flicked his whip, sending a midnight-black mare clattering forwards. Just before the hansom cab could reach the two of them, though, it was cut up by a larger coach, this one a horseless carriage with iron wheels as tall as a man at the rear. As his horse spooked, the cab driver swore furiously, shaking his fist at the whining clockwork contraption. But the new vehicle wasn’t a rival in the carriage trade, for all that its black iron matched the sheen of the hansom cab’s dark walnut exterior.

      Riveted iron doors swung open on each side of the horseless carriage, tall men dressed like Circlist monks with simple grey robes stepping out onto the street side and staring down the cabbie, who swapped his obscenities for a final scowl before driving off. On the pavement side of the carriage, a nun aged about sixty stepped out, dressed like her companions – although she had not tonsured her greying hair, but had her locks tied back in two buns above her ears. The monks stood very still, with a calmness that hung in the air like the glint of sunlight on a brandished dagger.

      Boxiron stomped noisily on the pavement, his hulking, unwieldy body swivelling to take in the ranks of monks now surrounding them – more exiting from the second iron room at the back of the horseless carriage. Some of the monks carried staffs and Jethro Daunt doubted they were intended to aid infirmities or for the long travels of a pilgrimage. He just hoped Boxiron didn’t slip a gear now.

      ‘I have been defrocked,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m no longer in the church.’

      The woman’s head rocked to one side. Of course she would know that. It would have been people rather like these pressing the ecclesiastical court to throw him out of his parsonage.

      ‘I understand you have been operating as a consulting detective for the last few years,’ said the woman.

      ‘That is true,’ said Jethro.

      ‘Of course it is. I wish to consult with you.’ There was quite a tone of menace in that single word, for all the eerie calmness in her face.

      ‘Well, well,’ said Jethro. ‘I’ll be bobbed. Of all the people in the capital I might have expected to be conversing with about my current mode of employment, your people are the very last ones I would have expected to turn up.’

      ‘As it should be,’ noted the woman. ‘Of those that know of the existence of the League of the Rational Court, there are even fewer that should be aware when they are about to be touched by our hand.’

      Jethro looked at the open door of the carriage and the woman pointing to the empty red leather seat opposite the one she had just vacated. An invitation with exceedingly little choice in it. And carriage rides with these people were sometimes one-way affairs.

      The hand of the Circlist church’s League of the Rational Court. The hand of the Inquisition.

      Hannah