From the Deep of the Dark (30 page)

Daunt smiled, looking meaningfully at Barnabas Sadly. ‘Oh, I think we can do better than a shallow-beamed harvesting raft, a sail made out of tattered shirts and an old punt, don’t you?’

‘What, the cripple? You think he’s got a private sloop tucked up his shirt-tails?’ Morris scoffed.

‘Not a sloop, but a trick up his sleeve. Or rather, inside his cane. How about it, Barnabas?’

Sadly nodded thoughtfully. ‘Your reputation is well deserved, Mister Daunt. How did you work it out?’

‘Many signals, but two matters stood out rather glaringly. Firstly, your clubfoot. Those born with
congenital talipes equinovarus
in a single limb always learn to compensate with their other foot by the time they reach adulthood, leaving the heel of the good shoe worn away. Someone who came from a family of cobblers should know that. Whereas for you, sir, your good shoe’s heel stands as flat as a millpond. I can thereby deduct that you weren’t born with what is solely a congenital disease. A womb-mage’s alteration of the flesh, I expect? I doubt if that’s the face you were born with, either.’

Sadly nodded in approval. ‘And the second thing?’

‘You told me you hadn’t been born in a poorhouse. There is a good reason why Sadly is such a common surname in the slums of the capital. It is because it is the name automatically entered in the rolls by a workhouse when a male baby is abandoned at a church and handed over to the board of the poor. If you had been an abandoned baby girl, you would have been called Templar, after temple, while Sadly comes from the
Ballad of Franklin Sadly, the Saint of the Workhouse
.’ Daunt began to hum the tune. ‘In a long and hungry line, the paupers sit at their tables, for this is the hour they dine, with poor Franklin Sadly.’

‘A guinea for you to stop bleeding singing. You are quite a fount of useless trivia, Mister Daunt.’

‘I would say there’s no such thing as a piece of useless information.’

‘And what amongst your vast store of ephemera makes you think I’m going to take you with me?’

‘Us,’ said Daunt, indicating the group. ‘And I think you’ll take us with you because I know the answers to what is really going on here.’

‘Who are you?’ Dick snarled at the informant, the flush of anger rising within him as the truth of the matter started to dawn. ‘Have you played me for a mug, Sadly?’

‘Not a mug, good sergeant,’ said Daunt. ‘And he’s treated you no differently from the rest of us. That’s the purpose of bait, isn’t it? To be impaled on a hook and dragged through the water to see what bites. Well, your mission has been successfully completed. You’ve caught quite a whopper, and now you’re going to make sure that we’re the ones that got away.’

‘I’m going to need a taste of that fish,’ said Sadly. ‘Just to make sure you’re telling the truth.’

‘I would expect nothing less from a trade that deals in lies and deceits.’ Daunt reached under his breeches and removed a bamboo rod that had been tied to his leg. He tossed it to Sadly. ‘From the graveyard here. Read the name engraved on the marker.’

Sadly did so, a worried frown creasing his rodent-like features. Then he pitched it back to the ex-parson. ‘All right then, consider that your ticket out of here.’

Dick stuck his hand out. ‘Let me see it.’

Daunt passed it across and Dick scanned the name on the grave marker, then looked at the date of the burial. The feeling of confusion swelled within the sergeant. ‘How can that be?’

‘A riddle, indeed,’ said Daunt. He passed the marker across to the obviously curious steamman. ‘What do you think, Boxiron? How can Walsingham have been buried in the camp’s graveyard two years past, when the good sergeant’s employer was only just interrogating me? Quite a curiosity, and enough to stump even—’ Daunt pointed to Sadly, ‘—an agent of the Court of the Air.’

Daunt pushed back the undergrowth in his way as they cut a passage through the everglades, the harvesting machetes put to a use their gill-neck captors would not have approved of. Sadly was not limping quite so badly now, the act of his cover identity abandoned for expediency’s sake as they slashed their way to freedom.

Boxiron was hacking in front, Dick Tull and Morris behind the steamman, the State Protection Board agent surly and uncommunicative towards the man he’d believed was his informant. It was not an easy thing, to flip from predator to prey with such speed, and the sergeant’s professional pride was clearly wounded worse than anything his capture by the gill-necks had inflicted upon him. Boxiron released the exhaust of his labours from his stacks in brief, short bursts, nothing to draw attention of the pursuit by the camp’s soldiers that had to be underway by now. If the State Protection Board officer’s pride had taken a beating, Daunt hoped that Boxiron’s had been restored by his victory over Old Death-shell. Even limited by the gill-necks’ device, he was still a steamman knight.
I just hope he knows it, and that his plunge towards the tiger crab was to save me, not a suicide attempt.

‘Walsingham wasn’t the only one in the graveyard, was he?’ Sadly said, cutting at the bush with his cane.

‘No. It was a veritable notables’ list of Jackelian quality – admirals, vice-admirals, generals, industrialists, mill owners, members of the House of Guardians, and those were just the names I recognized.’

‘The Court of the Air will need them all,’ said Sadly. ‘Along with everything else you know about how they got there.’

Daunt fished in his pocket, withdrawing with a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop. He looked at the sticky mess in disappointment then replaced it back again.
Inedible
. Perhaps it would dry out later? ‘First things first, good agent. We need to locate the commodore, Charlotte Shades and King Jude’s sceptre before the commodore’s sister and the gill-necks do. Otherwise there won’t be much of a Kingdom left to save.’

‘You’ve a cheek, Mister Daunt. We’re not your bleeding private carriage service.’

‘I know what the Court of the Air is for,’ said Daunt. ‘You must have suspected that your dealings over the centuries have come to the attention of the Inquisition?’

‘What do you know of the Court?’

‘When Isambard Kirkhill seized power in Parliament’s name after the civil war, he had only one fear left – and that was the throne. The army wanted Kirkhill to become king. Old Isambard had to fight them off with a sabre to stop them crowning him the new monarch. Then there were our royalists-in-exile plotting a counter-revolution and restoration. Kirkhill knew that if Parliament’s rule was to last, it would have to resist both the plots without and the ambitions of its own politicians. So Kirkhill established a court sinister as the last line of defence, a body that was to act as a supreme authority and ultimate guarantor of the people’s rule. But it was to be a court invisible. While the House of Guardians knew the Court existed, they knew nothing of its location, its staff, its methods and its workings. If any politician were to start looking at the throne restored with envious eyes, the existence of the Court would give them pause to think.’

‘There’s such a thing as being too clever for your own good,’ warned Sadly.

‘So people keep on telling me. However, in this matter I think you will find your mission and my own perfectly aligned.’

‘Are you an Inquisition officer, Mister Daunt?’

‘Perish the thought,’ said Daunt. ‘The church wouldn’t have defrocked me so readily if I had been. They’re under the misapprehension that they employ my services every so often, and it only seems like fair play to draw upon their resources in turn. The commodore’s sister made the same mistake when she linked me up to their machine to sift through my memories.’

‘And now you’re asking the Court to repeat the error? You’re not very reassuring, says I.’

‘Oh, I’m sure the Court of the Air is far too devious for me to play you along.’

The everglades’ bush was thinning out, the orange dunes of a beach ahead and the crashing sea beyond. The danger of the place was underlined by hundreds of abandoned carapaces lying in the sand, outgrown by generations of maturing tiger crabs.
And how many tiger crabs are scuttling about out there with their shells still on, I wonder?

‘And what’s your explanation for the camp commandant burning up when he died?’

‘Patience, good agent. What exactly do you have concealed inside your cane? Not a flag rolled up with the word “help” sown on, I trust?’

‘An isotope,’ said Sadly. ‘Its signature can be followed from half an ocean away.’

Daunt glanced at the bottom of the man’s cane. It was leaking the last of a foul-looking green liquid onto the sand.

‘You’ve flushed it into the swamp …?’

‘Water nullifies it.’

‘And the signal stopping is the sign for your extraction,’ said Daunt, satisfied with himself. ‘I trust your colleagues have stayed near.’

‘You never know when you’re going to outwear your welcome.’

Any self-satisfaction vanished with the whistling of bullets past Daunt’s left ear, close enough to shave his sideburn.

‘Camp guards,’ yelled Morris, sprinting for the reedy dunes in front of them and throwing himself over the ridge. Jethro, Boxiron, Sadly and Dick Tull were fast behind the wiry convict, spurts of sand chasing their passage as they hurled themselves towards the sparse cover of the beach.
There was something about the footsteps they had left in the sand, but what?
Daunt didn’t have time to ponder. A cloud of gull-like lizards exploded into the air as the party of escapees landed close to their nests in the dune grass, bullets flitting over their heads with the buzz of roused hornets. Dick Tull pushed a shell into the stolen rifle and fired back, the gill-necks keeping cover, hunkering down along the edge of the everglades in response to this solitary, lonely voice of opposition. Geysers of sand erupted as the guards concentrated their volleys on the muzzle flash of Dick’s rifle.

‘There’s too sodding many of them over there,’ said Dick.

‘We just need to hold them off for a few minutes more,’ called Sadly. ‘Look!’

Out at sea, a u-boat was surfacing, but not any design that Daunt was familiar with … a bulbous, almost organic-shaped hull with a rotating stern composed of large metal tentacles that gave the craft something of the appearance of a steel squid. With a conning tower set as low and angular as a shark’s fin, a hatch in her lee was opening to release a pair of low metal surface boats. Both boats angled out heading towards the shore. Sailors stood on the prows with capacitor packs cabled up to tridents, the men releasing bursts of wild energy at the tiger crabs surfacing around the submarine. Old Death-shell’s kin appeared incensed at this strange metal interloper intruding upon their realm. The creatures weren’t the only ones to spot the rescue craft. More guards emerged in front of the jungle, throwing themselves down and sighting on the dunes.

‘If we try for the sea, they’ll cut us down before we make five yards,’ said Boxiron.

‘You go old steamer,’ urged Daunt. ‘The gill-necks might have dialled down your strength near to mine, but they haven’t yet exchanged your hull for flesh. Wade out there and find Commodore Black, tell him to place King Jude’s sceptre under the protection of the Court of the Air.’

‘They must have recovered the commandant’s corpse, see,’ moaned Morris. ‘We’re dead men now, whatever we do.’

As if in agreement with the convict’s prediction, the drone of the fusillade over their heads was swapped for a strident cannon-like booming, explosions of sand in front of the dunes swelling, showering them with beach debris.

‘They have brought up the heavy guns used to do business with the tiger crabs. Pass me your machete,’ Boxiron ordered Morris, feeling its heft in his left hand as the convict did as he was bid, its weight balancing the other blade gripped tight in the steamman’s right fist.

‘Boxiron,’ Daunt pleaded, ‘do not do this.’

‘What else am I for, old friend?’ asked Boxiron. He rose to his full height from behind the dunes and charged, a lumbering zigzagging assault caused as much by a lack of motor control as any desire to dodge the guards’ bullets. Shots cracked around him as he pounded through the sand, the gill-necks adjusting their range to home in on him. A couple of guards were thrown back by Dick Tull using the distraction to increase his rate of fire, reloading from his satchel of charges like a demon. Out at sea, the boats were closing on the beach, seconds away from landing. The crewmen inside were kneeling now, riding in on the jouncing waves. The tiger crabs had temporally withdrawn out of range of the sailors’ capacitor packs, bobbing around the submersible and awaiting for their food to return. It wouldn’t take long for the camp guards to redirect their fire towards the rescue boats. And if the boats were struck by something that could discourage a tiger crab, they would be in trouble.

Dick Tull rose, firing the rifle from the hip. ‘Leg it for the water.’

Boxiron had reached the line of guards, a few gill-necks standing up just in time to face his machetes, twin windmills of death as he cut and slashed about him. He was staggering back from the blasts at short range. Not even the armour the criminal underworld had fitted their hulking ex-possession with was proof against this level of abuse.

‘Move!’ called Sadly, dragging Daunt back. ‘Right now, your noggin’s the most valuable thing on this island.’

Only to everyone at home.
To Daunt, the most valuable thing on the island was the steamman about to throw his life away against the ranks of their gill-neck pursuers.

When Charlotte saw the two darkships, the only part of their description that covered what she had been expecting to see was their colour: a shining, oily darkness rippling along their featureless hulls. Nothing else about them resembled any submarine she had heard of. Pear-shaped and driving forward on the sharp of their noses, the crafts couldn’t have been more than forty feet long. Their approach was soundless. There was no sign of a means of propulsion, no portholes, no torpedo slits, no hydroplanes, no conning tower, no ventilation intakes, no rudders for steering. It didn’t take much to believe this evil pair had escaped from Elizica’s prophecy and the legends of the seanore. Demon chariots, the chasm’s seed, their skins sucked the light out of the ocean, surfaces made a rippling absence of matter, organic teardrops of devilry solidified into twin darts and sliding with pernicious intent towards the nomads’ grand congress.