From the Deep of the Dark (6 page)

‘Chant is a pottery magnate, sir. One of the richest buggers in the Kingdom. I doubt that he’s in the pay of anyone.’

‘Oh, the royalists have all the money they need, sergeant,’ said Monoshaft. ‘They are being funded by the gill-necks. I have followed the paper trail and there can be no doubt, the royalist cause is now being embraced by the great underwater nation. The Advocacy mean to use our rebels to fight a proxy war against us.’

‘Our conflict with the Advocacy is at sea, sir. What do the gill-necks care if it is Parliament or a royalist monarch who rules on land? It’s simply a dispute over whose territory is being sailed over. Taxes and trade. Parliament will reach a settlement with the gill-necks.’

Cheaper than funding a war against them, anyway.

Monoshaft bent down, urgently rearranging the papers in a symmetry better pleasing to him. ‘It’s all connected, sergeant, all of it. Haven’t you heard? The Kingdom’s ambassador has just returned from the Advocacy. Never welcome at the best of times, she was expelled by the gill-necks over the heightening tensions between our two nations. There is a pattern here, a code, if we can just crack it. Where is the other agent who was with you, where’s William Beresford?’

‘Reassigned, sir.’

‘What? Not by me. Not by me. Don’t trust him, sergeant. If he’s not here with us, he can’t be trusted.’

Now we’re getting somewhere.
‘I don’t trust him, sir. He’s not one to be relied on, definitely not officer material.’

‘Now, your royalist at Lord Chant’s residence, Carl Redlin. See where the yarn runs. Follow his trail back to the gill-necks. We have a war to avert – we have royalists to crush. If only
they
would help us.’

‘They, chief?’

‘The Court of the Air, sergeant, the Court of the Air.’

‘Ah.’
Bugger this, just how senile is he now?
The Court of the Air. The shadowy senior service, set up centuries ago with an endowment from the democratic leader who had emerged victorious after the civil war, Isambard Kirkhill. The Court of the Air. The court absolute, floating in judgement over the land in their high altitude aerial city, wreathed by the constant concealing clouds of their great transaction-engines, modelling – so it was rumoured – the possible futures of the Jackelian nation.
What did we use to call them? The wolftakers. Every enemy we faced just disappeared, vanished by the good shepherds protecting their flock.

‘They were destroyed, sir, during the invasion from the north,’ Dick reminded the old steamman. ‘Don’t you remember? We found bits of wreckage from their bloody great airship city scattered for miles. Nobody has heard of one of their agents being active for years.’

‘They look down on me, on us, on the board.’

Dick shrugged. ‘They looked down on everyone, sir.’

The head of the service continued as if he hadn’t registered the sergeant’s quip. ‘They treat us as a joke, badly funded amateurs dabbling in the great game, endangering their position on the board.’

‘The State Protection Board?’

‘The chessboard, the great game,’ the steamman’s voicebox quivered in agitation. Algo Monoshaft started tugging at the threads running through the mess on the floor. ‘And the Court are here again, I can feel them. Just follow the connections, someone else’s tugging at them too.’

‘I think it is obvious that I’m going to need to tread carefully, sir.’

‘You know what they call us down here, you know what the Court of the Air calls the agents of the State Protection Board?’

‘The peculiar gentlemen, sir?’

‘No – no! That’s them out there.’ The steamman’s iron digits stabbed out to the sprawling civil service buildings. Then, as if revealing a great confidence, he pointed up to the crystal panes arcing above their heads, stained glass scenes of civil servants diligently performing their duties at desks, other bureaucrats bustling through the halls of parliament. ‘They call us the glass men. Just like our roof. Poke, poke, and we shatter. Brittle, useless, a liability, sergeant, that’s all we are to the Court of the Air.’

And now we’re on our own. Just the board to safeguard the realm. Well, I’ve always been on my own, it’s all I’ve bloody known anyway. Who else have I got to rely on – you, you mad old steamer? Ambitious chancers like Billy-boy? Self-seeking politicians like Walsingham? Just me. And soon enough, I won’t even be a memory around here. But I want my money before I go.

Dick raised his finger to point out a particular sheet of paper, a rough daguerreotype image with his own features printed across it. Was that his service record, spooled off the turning drums of the transaction-engines below their feet?

‘Why am I down there, sir?’

‘This thread,’ the steamman hissed in satisfaction. ‘To my mind, this thread is the only one I can rely on.’

‘You can always trust in me, sir.’

‘You’re not important enough,’ mumbled the steamman. ‘Not important enough to be bribed, to be turned. Never a double agent, never.’

Dick Tull nodded grimly. That was the sanest thing he’d heard from the head of the board today.

Dick shut the door to the head’s office, finding Walsingham waiting for him with a short broken-nosed bruiser who looked like he belonged in the board’s interrogation section.

‘Well, sergeant?’

‘Apparently there are treasonists everywhere, sir.’

‘I rather hope not. The board is busy enough with the royalist threat.’

‘Nobody has been able to tell me where Lord Chant’s royalist visitor ended up last night, major.’

‘I have other people trailing Carl Redlin, Tull. We wouldn’t want to lose him, eh? Lose him like, say, certain silverware reported missing by Lord Chant.’

Dick attempted to look perplexed and shook his head sadly. ‘And all those policemen at his house last night too.’

‘This is your new partner. Corporal Cloake. Work your informants in the capital. If there are rebels in the city, then they may be spreading money among the flash mob. Find anyone looking for false papers, guns and explosives …’

Dick indicated the corporal. ‘My informants’ll get nervous if I bring along an unknown face.’

‘Your informants belong to the board, not you, Tull. You make sure they are all written up and accounted for in your duty book. You’ll be leaving us soon enough. They’re not your private property. They better get accustomed to meeting the rest of us.’

And that day will come sooner rather than later if you have your way, won’t it, you old sod?

Corporal Cloake was a taciturn bugger, which suited Dick down to the ground. If more employees of the board observed the ‘say nothing’ part of their motto, the service would be a far better place to work. They took the lifting room down to the armoury to pick up the pistols they had to check in when visiting Greenhall’s corridors. The armourer on duty was Haggerston, a gruff old devil – showing about as much care of his guns as he did of his untidy, knotted beard, rubbing his fat fingers on the leather grease-stained apron he wore as he appeared at a desk built into the equipment cage.

‘Sign the chit,’ barked Haggerston. ‘Two pistols, five charges apiece.’

‘Five?’ Dick queried. ‘And what happens if I run into six royalists.’

The armourer pointed to Corporal Cloake. ‘Get him to shoot one of them.’

Dick checked the quality of the pistol he’d been given, working its clockwork hammer mechanism to make sure it wasn’t rusted beyond use.

Skinflint. I bet he’s selling our ammunition on the side, some nice little arrangement with the gun shops along Dawson Street.

‘It fires fine,’ said Haggerston. ‘I passed it on the test range myself yesterday.’

‘You ever done a real day’s work in the field? You’re going to get me killed one day.’

Haggerston mimicked a swift drinking motion with his chubby hand. ‘That gun’s better than your aim, Tull. Now jigger off.’

Corporal Cloake checked his pistol and then slid it into the concealed holster under his black frock coat, adding each charge carefully into his belt. After he pulled his stovepipe hat down he might have passed for an undertaker. But a man like Cloake made corpses, he didn’t care for them.

‘Your informants …’ said Cloake.

Tull nodded.
Oh, you’ll meet them today, Corporal. Every penny-ante pickpocket and counterfeiter I have ever shaken down, starting with the most useless first. Let’s see how long it takes before you lose interest. We’ll hide that tree among the forest and see how you sodding like it.

Corporal Cloake, it transpired, didn’t lose interest – possibly because his stubby little skull lacked the imagination to hold much of anything in the first place. It was like dragging a lump of lead pipe around, only useful to slap recalcitrant informants around the head; but Dick didn’t doubt that the dour, uncommunicative little thug was carefully noting all the names and addresses of the contacts they were meeting. Hopefully he lacked the imagination to notice they weren’t shaking anything noteworthy out of the mob of second-raters and riffraff that Dick was leading them around.

After half a day of such profitless encounters, Dick pointed across the street – towards a sign hanging from a building, no words, only a painting of a haunch of lamb on a roasting spit.

‘Lunch?’ Dick started to cross the pebbled street, but the corporal stayed where he was. ‘You eat don’t you?’

‘Not there,’ said Cloake, ‘not serving slop …’

‘That’s value for money, that is,’ said Dick. ‘A couple of pennies for a plate and a draught. What do you want, the headwaiter at Ravelow’s to plump up a cushion and drop gilded gold pear slices down your throat? If you’re going to be working with me, corporal, you can break bread over the table of an ordinary.’

‘See you back here in an hour, sergeant.’

Dick shrugged and cut through the lane’s busy traffic, carts, milk wagons and kettle-blacks hissing steam around the hooves of shire horses. Oddly, the beasts seemed to mind the new steam-driven contraptions less than the old-style horseless carriages driven by high-tension clockwork. Always unsettled by the whine from clockwork engines, the nags were. Dick stepped out of the way of an old man under the sign of the ordinary, a face more wrinkles than skin, his clothes so tatty you could hardly tell where his original tweed began and the patching ended. Well, you didn’t eat in places like this for the company. The lack of words on the sign of the establishment gave the game away that much of its custom came from the illiterate poor. And there were few apartments in the rookeries, the city’s cramped slums, which possessed kitchens, or would have risked the dangers of fire even if they’d had the space. This is where the poor ended up. This is where Dick Tull ate.

Dick looked with approval at the scene inside. Rows of wooden tables and benches, cheap wooden plates with sets of iron cutlery chained to the boards of the table. A choice of – not just
one
, mind, but
two
– roasts turning on the spits at the other end of the long room, a haunch of pork and a whole side of lamb. How could you call this slop? It was value, value for money. And there were other things to be had here too, things that Dick had been counting on the corporal turning his nose up at inside an ordinary – its food and the cheap clothes of its patrons. Dick nodded back to a one-eyed man shovelling red meat through his broken teeth by the door. Then he approached the owner. The proprietor was currently ensuring the patrons only dipped their wooden cup once through the open barrel of budget beer, only carved off a single portion – and not too large with it – of meat. For some men, being thin was a matter of build, for Barnabas Sadly, it appeared a natural extension of his pinch-faced demeanour. Other men doing his job might’ve got fat on the greasy leftovers and natural spillage that went with the position. But not Barnabas Sadly, and this was hardly his primary source of income, either. The ordinary he minded was a gateway, a bridge between the normal life of the capital and its criminal underworld. A stroke of genius, really. Most greasers – the fixers and middlemen of the underworld – set up court in alehouse backrooms and eventually attracted the attention of the constables, no matter how dangerous the slum district. But an ordinary? Everyone needed to eat, didn’t they? Among the clank of chained spoons and the rattle of wooden plates, other business was conducted here. Well away from the detectives of Ham Yard and the corporals of the board, who, however poorly paid, were never so humble they would willingly eat in a place like this.

Sadly’s nose twitched like a rodent’s when he saw Dick bearing down on him, nervously glancing to either side of the beer barrel in search of an obvious escape route. Dick cut him off easily, the owner barely beginning to hobble away on his twisted foot and brass-handled walking cane. Dick backed him into a storeroom where long carving knives and spit sharpeners dangled on hooks. The top of Sadly’s head scarcely came up to Dick’s nose.

‘Anyone would think you didn’t want to see me, Sadly.’

‘Don’t say that, Mister Tull. I was just thinking about flagging down a brewery wagon for a fresh barrel, is all.’

‘Fresh?’ Dick growled. ‘There’s not much fresh being served in here. Not unless it’s what’s concealed in one-eyed Osborne’s bag by the door. That’s probably fresh from whichever poor sod’s house he took his crowbar to last night.’ Dick reached out to one of the hooks and lifted a knife off, scraping it along the sharpening block dangling next to it. ‘You’re not keeping this sharp enough.’

‘You’re just like all my customers, Mister Tull. I lay your sustenance down and you carve it off, one slice at a time. No thought for me, no thought for what it costs, say I.’

‘You’re a bad advert for this place, Barnabas Sadly. Customers like to see their hosts jolly and round-faced, not pockmarked and as hungry as a sewer rat.’ He thumped Sadly in the solar plexus and the man doubled up, Dick catching him almost gently before Sadly dropped his cane and then he pushed the informer back against the storeroom wall. ‘No padding around the ribs. You think the proprietor of an alehouse would have even felt that with a decent beer gut? Royalists, Sadly, royalists …’