From the Deep of the Dark (16 page)

‘Not until sodding now,’ said Tull. And quite unhappy he sounded about the matter to the ex-parson’s ears.

Boxiron laid Charlotte Shades’ body carefully in the aft of the flat-bottomed craft. ‘I do not like running away, Jethro softbody.’

Jethro Daunt patted the steamman’s hulking back reassuringly. ‘Would that we were, old friend.’

No. I fear that we are heading for the heart of this affair. May the Circle turn
us to the centre of this evil in time to stop an all-out war between the gill-necks and our people.

Charlotte could hear breathing coming from the dark between the trees; hard, rhythmic rasps, as the branches scratched and scraped at her while she forced a passage between the boughs. There was a smell of salt in the air like the sea, but how could that be when she was crashing through the night and a forest? She could sense the hunting party, flashes of distant light – from lanterns, or the pursuing creatures’ eyes. Charlotte was completely sodden, but she couldn’t remember getting wet. Had she waded through a stream to escape? The slippery mud beneath her bare feet was wet enough that there must have been a recent rainstorm sweeping through the woodland. Beating down on the roof of the one place where she could be guaranteed a warm dry bed for the night. There it was! Madame Leeda’s gypsy caravan, the two connected burgundy-coloured carriages pulled up in a glade, an antique high-tension clockwork engine in the rear carriage being wound tight by a small portable steam engine set up like a tripod on the adjacent ground. Rainwater had cleaned the gaudily colourful sign hanging on the side of the front cabin
. Madam Leeda’s Cures and Potions.
Each word in a different font, every letter in a different colour. A rainbow splash of ornament in the moonlit glade. Much like its owner, covered in a thick blanket-like hooded robe, swaying, despite her age, in a tuneless dance on wooden steps lowered from the carriage’s side.

‘Madam Leeda,’ Charlotte shouted, nearly stumbling over the partially exposed roots of a nearby oak tree. ‘It’s me, Charlotte!’ If Charlotte didn’t say anything, perhaps the old gypsy woman wouldn’t notice the state her visitor was in, clothes torn from the pursuit through the woods.

‘I see you,’ called the old gypsy, turning on the steps and peering out beyond the fire-pit she’d dug in front of the caravan, brushing the long silver hair out of her face. ‘Is that my Lotty come back to me?’

‘It is.’

Why wasn’t Madam Leeda asking Charlotte about where she had been all these years? Then Charlotte glanced down at her cold hands. Tiny, child-sized and her clothes – the same dress she’d been wearing when the family she had thought was her own had thrown her out. Just another failed crop on their farm after the payments from Charlotte’s mother to her adopted family had dried up. Charlotte’s only parting gift from them, the knowledge that she wasn’t their child … just an illegitimate bastard from an affair between Lady Mary and the scandalous lord commercial, Abraham Quest.

No wonder Charlotte had been so slow running through those woods; barely ten years old, a diet of berries and grass and leaves for week after week. She was inside the caravan, its main room crowded with cupboards, small wooden drawers by the hundred. Things to sell. Potions that could cure or curse, depending on who was buying, how much they paid, and what degree of respect they showed to the old gypsy woman selling them. The smell of herbs drying, mushrooms being cured, and a hare hanging up over a porcelain washbasin, bloodied and skinned. With so many amulets and charms, more fake than real; the belief of buyers usually all that was needed to provide the push for true love or the courage to face up to some local difficulty.

‘You may go into any of these drawers in this room,’ instructed Madam Leeda. ‘But not the ones through there.’ She indicated the slim rubberised lock that connected the lead carriage to the rear. ‘There are dangerous things inside there. Not for any child. Not for anyone not of the
Shena,
who has not mastered the old arts and the true gaze of knowing.’

‘I promise,’ said Charlotte solemnly. Though she couldn’t help but notice the intricately carved oaken box that would be removed from the second carriage’s drawers shortly before Madam Leeda was about to conduct any important piece of business. A particularly significant seance or card reading, hiring an engineer for a vital repair to the caravan’s clockwork engine, or maybe smoothing the superstitious hackles of an irate Circlist priest or a local dignitary. The well-oiled hardwood box with the carvings of ancient runes that the gypsy people called
sly-talk
. Not just a charm, the jewel inside, the Eye of Fate. Not when the crystal seemed able to bend the will of those in its presence to the inclinations of its owner. The jewel so bright, shining and calling to Charlotte, singing to her blood. Promising her a life of opulence and luxury far from the tight confines of a tiny travelling show. A life where the jewel could be worn among the high society Charlotte had been born to traverse. Not locked up, used to convince yokels that the fair price for a sack of grain was half of what it should be. If only she could have—‘taken it!’ shrieked Madam Leeda. ‘You’ve taken it.’

‘I haven’t,’ swore Charlotte, feeling towards her neck where the jewel’s chain lay, making a lie of her words.

‘I fed you,’ bellowed Madam Leeda, the outrage turning the pallid lines of her face an unsightly purple. ‘I took you in and raised you as one of the people! This is how you repay me? You were good for nothing before! Nothing but sucking on dried-up bush leaves and milking peasants’ goats. I taught you the sly arts and you’ve broken the only rule I set. You never steal from your own people!’

‘I haven’t stolen the Eye of Fate,’ pleaded Charlotte. ‘I’ve only borrowed it a little while.’

‘A while!’ Madam Leeda wailed. ‘You think I have longer than “a little while” left to my old bones? Sneaking off in the middle of the night with my living about your pretty young neck. What does that make you?’ She lunged for Charlotte tearing the jewel away from her.

‘A thief,’ yelled Charlotte, trying to snatch back the jewel from Madam Leeda’s clawing hands. ‘A common gypsy woman, like you, a dirty
roamer
, just like they shout at us in every village we pass through.’

Finally catching back hold of the Eye of Fate, Charlotte threw herself out of the carriage, but she wasn’t in the forest glade anymore, she was on the doorstep of her true mother, Lady Mary. Or rather, the house of her new husband. And there she stood, Lady Mary, holding the door of the townhouse firm against Charlotte, two of her household staff behind her, brandishing the canes they used to see away beggars and vagabonds.

‘I do not know you,’ said her ladyship, her tone superior and distant. ‘I have no daughters, only sons. Now be off with you before Lord Kane returns home and has you arrested for trespassing on his property.’

Charlotte opened her mouth to beg to stay, but she was being pulled back by Madam Leeda, the old gypsy woman’s bony fingers around the back of her neck like a collar. ‘The Eye has limits, Lotty. It can cast many a glamour, but it can’t move the heart. It can’t make a mother love her daughter, that’s one thing it can never do. Love, you must first deserve, and then it comes naturally.’

Charlotte tried to protect the jewel, but other hands were reaching for her. Mister Twist and his bludger Cloake, the pair of them turning her, jabbing her, trying to cut the Eye of Fate away from her breast.

‘Give it to me,’ Cloake demanded, ‘let me have the Eye.’

Twist’s hands locked around her neck, tightening ever closer and closer.

‘No! It’s the sceptre you want, not the Eye, King Jude’s sceptre.’

‘Don’t you see,’ laughed Twist, spit from his mouth spraying across her face, ‘they’re both the same.’

‘I’ll give it to you!’

‘You’ll give us everything,’ laughed Cloake, his hands grabbing the back of Twist’s head, pulling at the man’s hair. Ripping the skin off, scalp and the flesh falling away like flaking candle wax. Underneath the peeling skin, something black and wet and scaly swelled out, distending and growing larger. A hideous fanged face took shape; part-lizard, part-snake, part-fish, its wet scales licked by a forked tongue and its bulbous mutated head pierced by two crimson eyes that glowed like twin wells sunk into a dark, dark place. Having split Twist’s face off, Cloake’s fingers dug into the skin around his own nose and began scratching and clawing, a similar monstrosity bulging out of his own torn flesh, a hairless scaly forehead rising and rising, knobbly and pitted, a tall helmet of bone above gleaming hellish eyes.

‘Oh, that’s handsome,’ said Madam Leeda, shoving Charlotte towards the hideous pair. Charlotte was backing away from them, her mother’s townhouse replaced by the stalagmites of a dripping cave, pools of stagnant dark water enveloping the old gypsy woman’s feet. ‘They’ll take everything, all right. Nothing left of little Lotty, only a husk. See what it’s cost you, now, girl? Your big life in the city trying to be like the quality, aping their stupid, superior ways, trying to be like them that don’t even want you. You should’ve stayed in the woods with me, rolling through the villages in the sun and the snow. That’s the life for us. For a dirty little roamer girl.’

‘Save me, please—!’

In answer to Charlotte’s pleas there was a sudden explosion of light and the monsters were sent scrabbling like spiders back towards the darkness of the distant shadows. Out of the darkness emerged a silhouette, the figure of a woman, a nimbus of light at her back.

‘Madam Leeda, are you out there? Have you come to take me back?’

‘I am not your gypsy,’ said a female voice. It whispered all around her, a breeze filtering through the leaves of an ancient forest. Charlotte raised a hand to cover her eyes as she tried to gaze on the figure. ‘Mother?’

‘Mother of us all,’ hissed the reply. ‘The blood of a thousand generations squared, baked and frozen into the soil of Jackals. The memories of your ancestors’ dreams and the echoes of souls too free to fade into the shared sea of consciousness.’ As her words faded, Charlotte caught the distant repetition of the words whispering in a thousand lost languages. So many tongues, just like the church back in the capital. Charlotte remembered the fevered dreams of the three sisters; Jethro Daunt set on her trail with his strange clanking steamman friend.

‘I am Elizica of the Jackeni,’ the voice hardened, spinning around Charlotte. ‘The resonance of my soul still sings through the bones of the land, flowing through its quartz and granite. Joined with all of those who followed me, all those who preceded me.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘I have been here before you. You must follow in my footsteps.’

‘I’m no queen,’ Charlotte protested. ‘No royal blood flows through my veins.’

‘The daughter of your mother … can you be so sure? It matters not. I was the first queen of Jackals. Was I born noble? No, I was born of the land and that is all that matters. You are Jackelian and the land abides.’

‘I can’t help you, please don’t ask me.’

‘You have everything you need. Remember, you walk in my footsteps.’

‘No!’

Light was fading, the shadows growing, darkness returning while monsters circled and awaited the departure of Charlotte’s protector.

‘What do you need from me?’ Charlotte cried at the woman’s ebbing shape.

A faint whisper came from the vanishing point of light. ‘What I always ask for. A sacrifice.’

Mister Twist was upon her again, the jewel from her chain clutched in his black, clawed, scaly hands – the Eye of Fate transforming in a shimmer of light, turning red and pointed. After it had transmuted into a two-pronged blade, Twist plunged the thing into her neck, the touch of the blade burning like acid. Charlotte was impaled and falling to the cave’s flooded floor. She watched the water run red with blood,
her blood
, as the two creatures dropped and feasted on her body. Poor. Little. Roamer.

‘P
oor lass,’ said Commodore Black, watching while Daunt tipped the potion he had concocted from the contents of the u-boat’s medical cabinet down Charlotte Shades’ throat. ‘Is her fever fading yet?’

‘Getting worse if anything,’ said Daunt. ‘But it must break soon.’ His words sounded hollow, even to him.
If it was any normal fever. Not this cursed illness. Her body lying wracked by an unearthly presence, just like the poor sisters.

‘I heard a noise from her berth in here, a wicked whistling and rattling as if her cabin’s air scrubbers were about to overload,’ said the commodore.

‘She was speaking in tongues,’ noted Boxiron. ‘But this language was an ancient steamman dialect, sung in raw binary.’

‘An unholy racket, whatever,’ said the commodore.

‘It would sound better emanating from the voiceboxes of my people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but not by much.’

‘Everyone else is in the ready room,’ said the commodore. ‘Waiting on your frightful intellect to descend and solve all of life’s little mysteries.’

‘I will settle for getting to the heart of our current affair, good captain.’

Commodore Black spun the wheel on the iron door of the u-boat cabin, opening it onto the passage outside. White sodium light soaked the interior of the craft, lending everything a fine, harsh cast. Even the brown wood panels that should have softened the passage appeared bright and severe, every knot of oak throbbing under the artificial illumination. Inside the
Purity Queen
’s stout hull, the u-boat hadn’t changed a jot since Daunt and Boxiron had sailed with the commodore to the Isle of Jago all those years ago. The ex-parson had noticed the changes outside, though, as they were ferried across to the submarine. Small interlocking plates, thousands of them, welded over the surface of the catamaran-shaped u-boat’s twin hulls. It was as though a smith had decided to turn the submersible’s hull into a piece of sculpture, plate upon plate, all crusted green with the embrace of the sea. In places the angles at which they joined the hull seemed random; in other spots the plates took on a swirling pattern, a fresco cut in steel. The reworking of the
Purity Queen
might have been mistaken for an attempt to sculpt on the scales of a fish, an organic texture to soften the warlike lines of the ex-fleet sea arm vessel, although there could be no masking of the double-prowed submarine’s torpedo tubes. It transpired that the remodelling hadn’t resulted from the artistic inclinations of an insane blacksmith. According to the commodore, the alterations were state-of-the-art theorisings of a naval architect who had been handsomely paid to ensure that the old u-boatman’s vessel could set to sea with an experimental hull able to wrap sonar waves around her length. Fold them so gently the
Purity Queen
might as well have been a ghost slipping through the depths.