From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Corporal Cloake pulled back the viewing slit on the feeding pen’s heavy iron door. The sea-bishop glanced inside, noting the figure stretched out across the floor. The rest of the cattle were herding fearfully to the rear of the chamber, while the nanomechnical creature that had until recently been head of the State Protection Board was shaking near the corpse as if a disease was inflicting it.

‘I have lost my bet,’ said the sea-bishop wearing Sadly’s body. He was standing behind Corporal Cloake along with the pair of guards standing sentry on the feeding pens. ‘It seems as if the Tull animal chose to suicide.’

Cloake nodded towards the guards. ‘You two, drag it to the rubbish pile.’ He opened the feeding pen door, the stench of cattle defecation flooding out, added to by the foul reek of Dick Tull’s corpse.

‘By the dark between the worlds, what a malodour,’ grunted one of the guards, hesitating before stepping through the door.

Corporal Cloake entered the pen. As he set foot inside, he stepped into a pile of decaying feed used to fatten the cattle. Cursing, Cloake brushed his foot off against the pen’s sides. What was the point of feeding these dumb things if they wouldn’t eat? Well, they still needed to consume plenty of water. He would have to remember to order the herd master to add a hunger stimulant to their liquids. Then the cattle would be as fast at the feed as the filthy rodents scattering across the floor before him.

Cloake bent down, checking the corpse’s cold, pasty skinned neck for a pulse, before feeling for a heartbeat. Nothing. The animal had been sweating before it died, its jacket drenched in its own disgusting sweat. By Tull’s side was the cane to detect the brethren of the Mass, the pommel carving’s eyes dead, power source drained and partially disassembled to reach the suicide pill. ‘Powdered root in the suicide pill, similar to those issued by the State Protection Board. The fever stopped its heart. It’s the poison you can smell on its skin.’

‘Its blood is rancid,’ said the guard, grabbing hold of a stiff leg. ‘The Mass must feed.’

‘Indeed we will, but not on this debased flesh,’ hissed Cloake. ‘How many do you need? Animals overrun this filthy city. Breeding in their slums, lying hop-addled in the gutters outside their taverns. You can’t cross the street without tripping over sustenance.’

Sadly helped the guards drag the corpse away, while in front of Corporal Cloake, the deposed head of the State Protection Board was vibrating and shuddering, adding its mad ramblings to the insane sing-song whine from the dirty cattle clustering at the rear of the pen.

‘Treasonists, treasonists, everywhere. Vampires, vampires, on the stairs.’

‘So, your mind’s finally become as broken as your body, you primitive bucket of bolts?’ Cloake drew out his pistol. He was eager to pay back this half-witted calculating device for the ignominy of far too many years having to pretend to take orders from a mere nanomechnical, of having to subjugate the superior intellect of the Mass to this ridiculous half-sentient machine-born monstrosity. ‘Don’t you have any orders for me? Speak, tell me how you are the head of the board and I must rush to do your bidding… order me to let you live!’

Dragging Dick Tull’s corpse out of the cell, the sea-bishop wearing Barnabas Sadly’s form turned and took in the vista of the Algo Monoshaft’s violently shuddering body, Corporal Cloake standing in front of it and about to pump a bullet though its useless, shaking skull.

‘Don’t!’ shouted Sadly. ‘That’s-’

Cloake ignored his brethren. ‘We can’t take an imprint of this thing’s memories. I want to see what it looks like in pieces.’

‘-how their race use their body as a-’

With stacks sealed for hours, its boiler-heart circulating and building pressure, the pressure inside Algo Monoshaft’s frame became too much for its ageing hull-plates to hold.

‘-suicide bomb!’ The steamman transformed into a grenade, shrapnel and fire scything out, instantly killing all the cattle and cutting Corporal Cloake in two, both halves of his body collapsing across the filthy pen floor. Cloake’s mesmeric field collapsed along with the shredding of his crystal. The sea-bishop’s distended head had enough life left to watch the other guard caught in the blast. Writhing across the floor, the sea-bishop’s field flickered on and off as he lost control — switching between his human and natural form — then, judging its host life lost, the evidence removal function of the crystal activated and the guard flared into ashes. Cloake reached for his own crystal, but it had been blown to pieces, his fingers only coming away with splinters. He wasn’t going to experience the sudden clean death of the crystal’s mercy.

Sadly and the remaining guard were peering around the doorway at the silent shrapnel-embedded walls of the pen, peering horrified through the smoke at the ruins of their brethren’s body.

Corporal Cloake moaned. The last thought that flickered across his dying mind was how damned hungry he was.

Crowds snaked up on the slopes of the volcano, the hangar doors of the island’s destroyed airship squadron held open while thousands of Nuyokians abandoned their city, ordinary citizens deserting their porcelain towers and hexagonal streets for the safety of the Court of the Air’s underground chambers. Daunt considered it something of an irony they would be packing in around the house-sized transaction-engines of the Court, the steam-driven thinking machines maintaining the model of Jackelian society and the supposedly safe course the Court was charting for it. There was nothing safe on the Isla Furia anymore. The city wall overlooking the lake was holding, but only just. Mainly thanks to the fact that the parapet on the city’s jungle side had been breached in so many places that it now made sense for the gill-neck invasion force to concentrate their forces on the breaks to the north-east. Leaking invaders into Nuyok, storming the rubble of fallen battlements. It wouldn’t take long before the Advocacy commanders realized that only token militia volunteers manned the city towers in front of them. Daunt was introducing a new thing to the city today — a terrible lesson for any pacifist to pass on. Guerrilla warfare. Hit and run. It was the only way to slow down such a vastly superior force. Give the Advocacy the impression that every hexagonal tower they faced was a fortress needing to be reduced to rubble, every savage inch bled for, while small mobile companies charged across the streets, harrying the gill-neck invaders. Hope what was left of their defences held until the populace was evacuated.

It was a risky plan, but the only one Daunt had. Every minute he slowed their advance was another minute for citizens to seek out the safety of the Court’s deep vaults. Poor devils. The Nuyokians were like refugees everywhere, all the worse for being dispossessed inside their own city, the city monitors shouting at the crowds to toss aside any possessions slowing the lines down. Wrestling carts of goods away from some and pushing them off to the side of the lawns. They took it in better humour than a similar mob of Jackelians would have — no doubt a side effect of their communal society and particular ideas about ownership.

Morris counted explosions flowering around the collapsing defences on the far side of Nuyok, then looked at the mob herding up the slopes. ‘I don’t like it. That place up there might be laid out like a fortress, but the Court was never built to house so many civilians. The gill-necks will be able to wait us out for as long as it takes for us to starve. Once the hares are inside the warren, there’s no way out that won’t be weasels all the way.’

‘I’ll settle for as long as it takes,’ said Daunt. ‘Time is what we need.’

‘Time for what?’ asked Morris, wiping the sweat off his brow. He had pushed his gas mask back up his helm. ‘You don’t really think Dick Tull and Sadly are returning to the island with a flight of Royal Aerostatical Navy squadrons in tow, do you? And I don’t particularly rate your girl and u-boat skipper’s chance of rousing the nomads of the sea up against the gill-necks, either.’

‘I fear we must have faith, Mister Morris.’

‘When a Circlist parson starts talking of having that, I know we’re in bloody trouble.’ He spat onto the ground. ‘Well, at least the poor gits will be better shielded in the gas mine’s tunnels than inside the city. Porcelain walls might keep you cool from the heat, but they’re bloody shrapnel coffins in a fight, see.’ His last few words were mangled by the detonations of the two giant cannons, their artillery relocated in front of the cable car station and landing shells within the city boundary. It was a hard thing to do, to order gunners to land shells on their own people. But the forces along the jungle-flanked wall had become so intermingled that the impact of the barrage was killing as many Advocacy soldiers as locals. Out beyond the thermal barrier surrounding the island, the invasion fleet was now bridging the killing zone unopposed. More soldiers to pour across the island, more predators to prowl the set Daunt was trapping the citizens inside.

Eventually the sea-bishops hidden among the invaders would track down and eliminate the faked signals emulating King Jude’s sceptre and then there would be only one hiding place left. The volcano. They would throw the entire gill-neck military machine against the slopes, with not a care for the natives sheltering inside. It all came down to time, if only he could buy enough time. Buy it with bodies. What a bitter currency to fund my strategy. A line of detonations stitched their way across the cable car concourse, the distant whoop of gill-neck mortars falling across their position.

Daunt ducked reflexively along with Morris behind the makeshift command post in the volcano’s shadow. A hailstorm of tiny stones and dirt jounced off the sandbags and ricocheted off the cable car station behind them. As the dust of the explosions cleared, Daunt saw that the columns of fleeing Nuyokians had been broken, limbless bodies scattered as though seeds from a dandelion head, wails of moaning rising around smoking craters. The rain of mortar shells on their position had left Daunt with a dusty, gritty taste on his tongue, his clothes covered with a layer of dull volcanic dust. A sudden wave of fatigue washed over him. How long since he had last eaten or slept? Everything was war; it was as if there had never been a time when he had known peace. Daunt couldn’t faint now. This was his slaughter. He would look the refugees in the eyes as they passed. He would feel their fear and taste their pain. The Circle save him, but the ex-parson’s ear was attuned to this carnage now. Daunt could tell the difference between heavy bombards and light gallopers, between the short-barrelled cannons on the rolling-pin tanks, tracks pulling them over the rubble of the walls, and the heavy howitzers that the gill-necks had assembled on the island’s shores. The pacifist had a day of practical lessons to add to his years of book learning. A day stretched into a year, subverting the lessons of the church. From how every battle could be avoided, corrupted into by what means their lost cause might be turned around.

Running across the ground of the mud-trampled parkland opposite, one of the city engineers came skidding past the sandbags. ‘The blasting barrels you requested have been assembled, Court man.’

Daunt turned to the crumpled map of the city he had procured, laid out across a porcelain bench. ‘We don’t have much time. Bring down the towers along this line-’ he tapped the map, ‘-and then this one.’

The engineer looked indignant. ‘You are asking me to destroy our city?’

‘Walls and halls are not your city,’ snarled Daunt. He pointed to the struggling lines of citizenry pouring past their position. ‘ They are Nuyok. Bring these two districts down, collapse their under-streets into canyons and we will force the gill-necks to funnel through this central area. A mountain pass for us to defend, such as the steamman knights held in the Battle of the Gauge Heights.’ The engineer looked as if he was going to argue further, but Daunt silenced him with a jab towards the low buildings on the far side of the parkland. ‘These palaces need to come down too. The Holy Kikkosico Empire’s defence of Los Tarral showed that it’s many degrees harder to assault through rubble than through standing structures.’

‘Those are not palaces,’ the engineer sounded disgusted. ‘That is the great Library Publico of Nuyok.’

‘Good engineer,’ Daunt seized the man by his ceramic chainmail. ‘I have killed thousands of men, women and children today. Let’s burn a few of your books on their shelves too.’

The engineer stumbled back, looking at Daunt as if he was mad. ‘We will clear the shelves, where we can, where we have time.’

‘Who will read them?’ Daunt shouted as the engineer exited the command post. ‘Can corpses read your precious shelves of books?’

Morris pulled his rifle in tight on his shoulder, flashing a look of concern at the ex-parson. ‘You need to rest. I slept an hour at the back of the station on one of the spare stretchers.’

‘I can sleep when I’m dead,’ said Daunt. He pushed Morris away. ‘Monsters win battles, Mister Morris. That is the real lesson of history. Cold, heartless madmen who march innocents into the mincing machine of war. We face monsters, but what are we? What must we become? Monsters killing monsters.’

‘You won’t get the taste for it, vicar. Not you. For some this is beer and mumbleweed and sex. But you’re better than us.’

‘Better!’ Daunt thumped the map. ‘Everyone in the Northeast of the city will be cut off in a few minutes. My last order to them was to fight to the end. No quarter. No retreat. I am better. You thought we’d have folded by now, surrendered. You gave me odds on it. But the city is still fighting. How many generals could have done that? How many colonels and field marshals could have prolonged the killing here for so long?’

‘You’ll know when it’s time to stop,’ said Morris, sitting down. ‘And that’s better than most.’

One of the Court’s guards came into the post, pushing back a strange black mask that covered his face, an evil grasshopper head made of rubber and leather and twin respirators, one hanging on either side of his visor. He passed a wax-sealed tube across to Daunt. ‘Lord Trabb’s complements sir.’

‘What is it?’ asked Morris as Daunt scanned the message pulled from the container.

‘Bob my soul, but just once I would like to receive some good news today. The Court’s spotters on the rise are reporting the fall of the wall on the south side. Lord Trabb’s worried that the advance of the gill-necks towards us will trigger the Court’s defences. Their automated gun ports on the slopes won’t differentiate between refugees and Advocacy marines right now. It’ll be a hard pounding for everyone.’

‘Then turn the damn things off,’ said Morris.

Daunt handed the tube back to the Court’s messenger, addressing him directly. ‘No. Keep the artillery running. Any stragglers will have to come in under fire.’

Morris looked horrified, his eyes flicking towards the frightened women and children filing past them. Another round of mortar shells scattered across the concourse, militia yelling and screaming over the impacts, trying to shepherd the mob into the safety of the mountain refuge.

‘I won’t pick up a gun myself,’ Daunt told Morris. ‘Because I’m a good Circlist and a better hypocrite. I won’t pick up a weapon because I’ve got you and everyone else to do that for me.’ He picked up the map and left the post, glancing back at Morris. ‘On your feet, sir. It’s not time to stop yet.’

Down the darkship sank, spinning slowly, the only signs of the trench’s fierce depth the occasional animal-like tremor along the craft’s oily floor, something to accompany the creaking from its hull. Unlike a Jackelian u-boat, there were no gas lanterns to light the drop into the abyss, but the craft seemed to emit a hellish red glow which the pilot’s viewing port could translate into a form of vision. The occasional snake-like trench dweller passed the darkship in front of the jagged, falling walls of the trench, moving through a sea of blood.

Gemma Dark came strutting down the narrow cabin, cock-of-the-walk since she had captured Charlotte and Commodore Black. In a rare flash of generosity she had ordered Jared’s shoulder bandaged, although Charlotte suspected that had more to do with a desire to prolong his time under interrogation, rather than any softening of heart towards her brother. ‘You want to know an irony, brother? It was the airships of the Royal Aerostatical Navy that first chased me down here, their depth charges that set off a rock slide, breaking the ancient machines holding my allies locked in a snare of suspended time. Parliament freed them, but my wrecked u-boat was the first thing their scouts came across.’

‘A pity they didn’t gorge their chops on your bitter old bones,’ growled the commodore.

‘Oh, they killed a few of us,’ said Gemma. ‘Stripped our minds and fed on our blood. That was when they realized the similarities between our two peoples. Both of us hunted and harried to the ends of existence, persecuted for who we are. They needed allies to take their first tentative footsteps outside, re-entering our brave new era, and the cause had run out of friends a long time ago.’

‘Only because you’d seen most of them killed, sister,’ muttered the commodore.

‘Not quite as many as I should have done.’

‘You’ve made a bad bargain,’ spat Charlotte.

‘Tell me that when I am sitting on the throne of Jackals as the Kingdom’s first true queen for over seven hundred years.’

‘You won’t be queen,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘You’ll just be in charge of the abattoir for a short while.’

‘We shall see.’ Gemma pulled out Charlotte’s amulet and swung it tauntingly inches from her face. ‘What are you without this trinket? Only a petty housebreaker, and probably not a very competent one without my allies’ tricks to bend weak-willed minds to your thievery. Walsingham tells me that you’re the illegitimate daughter of an industrial lord, that filthy parliament of shopkeepers, tradesmen with their dirty stolen titles. What a fancy pair of doves flapping in my snare. A shopkeeper’s bastard, working with a traitor to the cause… a lapdog and informer for the State Protection Board.’ Behind Gemma, the cliff-face through the darkship’s port had stopped rising past, her darkship turning to reveal the trench floor. Further than any human should have been able to reach, the deep of the dark. It was still, currentless and cold, but not entirely without movement. Charlotte could see the sea-bishops’ seed-city ahead, a vast ebony disk blocking the floor of the trench. Above it, moving sedately with the vast pressure, were darkships, as well as figures wearing diving suits that looked like collections of joined spheres. They were putting the finishing touches on a massive curved arch, jagged, crystalline, an architecture of pure evil. Large enough to pass the seed-city squatting before it through the vault, and with good reason. When the gate was activated, Charlotte’s world would be joined to its dangerous mirror image across the well of infinite possibilities. How many seed-cities would pass through that gate then, how many countless sea-bishops, arriving to feast until every living creature in her world was extinct?

‘Nothing should be able to prosper this deep down,’ said the commodore.

‘Walsingham’s people like to toil far away from the gaze of their enemies,’ said Gemma. ‘And as I have had it explained to me, my allies need the incredible forces of the pressure down here to anchor the energies released when unlocking the portal to their home.’

‘How can you talk like that about helping them?’ asked Charlotte, stunned by the royalist’s disregard for the implications of her words.

‘Why don’t you ask my brother?’ laughed Gemma. ‘We were both born with a price on our head, weren’t we, Jared? The children of rebels with long-lost titles and nothing else except a world full of enemies and assassins and turncoats ranged against us. You want to know why I’ll choose those treacherous reflections of humanity as allies over my own race? Just the chance of getting my hands on my brother would be worth all that I have done in their name and all that I yet will. I would crawl across every cold inch of hell merely for the chance to tweak this jigger’s beard.’

Charlotte found it hard to believe anyone could hate the way this woman could. Beyond reason, Gemma was clinging to it like a life raft. She was hollowed out with hate. ‘Once you open that gate, there will be no closing it. The sea-bishops will come here in numbers beyond legion to feed on us.’

‘Quite so,’ said Gemma. ‘Fortunately there are so many nations around who are entirely superfluous to my coming reign. Those shiftie bastards, those king-murdering regicides on the First Committee in Quatershift, for instance. I think a world without them would be for the better, don’t you? And the Steamman Free State? Where were they when Jackelian shopkeepers were hunting my ancestors, foxes to the hounds, across the moors? An internal matter, can’t intervene. Let’s see how the steammen like a taste of neutrality from their neighbours for a change. The caliph down in Cassarabia, drip-feeding the cause crumbs of support from his table only when it suited his glorious highness? Well, he likes crafting monsters out of slave flesh, he can meet my monsters and we shall see who comes out best from the arrangement. The Mass must feed, that’s what my little darlings are always saying. Let them!’

Charlotte stared up in shock at the commodore’s sister. ‘You’ve lost your mind.’

‘Just running to the bitter, that is all. Ashes are what the world has given me. I’m only riding my luck and making the best of it.’

‘You can’t trust them!’

‘Am I an idiot, thief girl?’ snarled Gemma. ‘I trust them as much as I trust my dear brother here. But I have worked with the Mass for long enough to understand them far better than you ever will. They are cowards. They are a hundred times as far ahead of us in engineering and technology as we are above the most primitive tribe of polar barbarians, and yet the Mass will never fight until they have overwhelming numbers on their side. Even then, they prefer to sidle up behind you masquerading as your grandmother to slip one of their blood-draining daggers in your spine. They live in fear. Fear that one day they will connect to a reflection of their world carrying a race as far beyond them as they are beyond us. A race that will follow them back to their barren piss-ridden world and burn them out for the plague they have become.’ She bent in close to Charlotte and winked. ‘Every day I’ve lived I’ve faced and fought against impossible odds. The sea-bishops don’t know it yet, but they’ve found the world they’ve been dreading all these millennia. It is ours, and I shall be its sole ruler.’

‘They’re not quite the cravens you take them for,’ said Charlotte. ‘You know what happens when sea-bishops reach a world with a species judged too hostile to be conquered? They detonate their seed-city and all on board die rather than risk capture and having their home traced. Self-sacrifice, all for the Mass. They are experts at judging the odds.’ She pointed to the seed-city, its black expanse approaching closer to the darkship with every second. ‘Does that look like a race of creatures uncertain about their chances of victory against us?’

‘Suicide is usually the way cowards leave the world,’ said Gemma. She turned to her royalist sailors inside the darkship. ‘Never give up the cause. Never surrender. To live is to fight and to fight is to live!’

The u-boat crew raised their fists and punched the air, shouting back her words like a war cry, making a holy mantra of the cry. Gemma turned around and slammed her boot into the commodore, doubling him up in agony. ‘Look at you, brother. Always fighting when you should be running and running when you should be fighting.’

The commodore groaned and raised a hand weakly towards the approaching seed-city. ‘We’re like those demons lurking out there in the night, Gemma, the fleet-in-exile, the royalist cause. We should have died out an age ago, surrendered to history and the blessed march of progress.’

‘If that’s the limit of your defeatist cant, maybe you could have had the courtesy to move along the Circle before you went and got my only son bloody killed,’ snarled Gemma.

‘Bull died like a man,’ said the commodore, ‘facing down true enemies of the Kingdom.’

‘Another lie. You paroled him out of prison just to get him murdered on one of your dupe’s adventures, your pockets lined with an industrial lord’s gold to do it. Well, brother, you and your fancy piece here can share Bull’s glory. But not before you’ve seen my allies have their fun.’

‘I’m sorry about Bull; that much is true.’

‘Sorry! You’ve never had a child die. You don’t have the right to be sorry.’

‘You’re wrong about that too, Gemma.’

‘Been sowing your wild oats out there have you?’ sneered the commodore’s sister. ‘Yes, your noble bastards are probably scattered in every port from Spumehead to Thar. But don’t expect me to mourn one less of your seed, brother. Your half of the family tree is about to come to an abrupt end, while mine is only just beginning.’

‘Ah, sister,’ wheezed the commodore, ‘you’re sixty now if you’re a year. There are no more children for your old body.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. The Mass are going to alter my flesh to make me like them. I will live forever, my youth restored, my womb fertile again. By the time I am finished, this world will be filled with nothing but my descendants. You and everyone else in the world are nothing but my meal ticket to power, quite literally. So let me tell you how things sit. Your pathetically desperate plan to alert the State Protection Board to the sea-bishops’ presence has failed. The siege at the Isla Furia is about to end the only way it could, and you two fools are going to live just as long as it takes for that gate out there to be opened.’ She smiled coldly at them before she turned to watch the seed-city swallowing their craft. ‘After all, it is true. The Mass must feed.’

When the door on the seed-city’s dimly illuminated cell opened it was more like a mouth widening. The manacles were unlocked on Charlotte and the commodore before royalist sailors shoved the two of them inside. The surface of the cell was wet and slippery and a silhouette rose up out of the shadowy prisoners huddling on the floor towards the cell’s rear. As he drew closer, Charlotte recognized the man. ‘Sadly!’

Barnabas Sadly rubbed at raw red eyes, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. ‘They’ve caught you too?’

‘That they have, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘My sister and the sea-bishops both.’

‘Sea-bishops?’ said Sadly. ‘Is that what you’re calling those things?’ He saw the look of confusion on the commodore’s face and continued. ‘Those monsters have the spit of me walking around. My face, a parcel of memories they ripped out of my mind inside the gill-neck prison camp. But I, it certainly ain’t. It’s one of the wobble-headed beasts. I’ve been here ever since they stole my shape and shipped me out of the prison camp, trying to avoid looking chuffing fat enough to make a good mouthful for these monsters.’

‘That’s how my sister knew we were coming,’ groaned the commodore. ‘Sadly a cuckoo in the nest. You’re well out if it, Barnabas. The Court of the Air is about to fall to the enemy on your people’s island. Me and the girl here were the Kingdom’s last hope to survive.’

‘That’s a poor turn,’ sighed Sadly. ‘So my cover’s blown and the Kingdom’s odds are as low as the rest of ours?’ He indicated the prisoners huddling sullenly at the rear of the cell. ‘Meet the survivors of the convoy that weren’t sent to die on the Island of Ko’marn. The beasts dispatched me here along with the choice cuts, so you lot wouldn’t spy the fact there were two Sadlys limping about the prison camp.’

Charlotte looked at the whimpering mass of broken prisoners hugging the cell wall behind the Court’s agent. This was a terrible sight to see. The sailors in the feeding pen were utterly broken. Men of action and violence and discipline, used to facing death. Withdrawn into sullen madness, shaking and trembling and mercifully unable to engage with the daily routine of being available for consumption. But not Barnabas Sadly. He was still here, dirty and unkempt and soiled, still standing and thinking and ready to fight back with whatever his hands could fashion and his mind devise. ‘You’ve lasted all this time down here?’

Sadly thumped his mangled leg. ‘I think the first few weeks they kept me in case they needed to pick through my mind again. Now, I’m limping along on the fact I’m hardly choice meat. But I don’t know what’s worse. Being selected, or being left for another meal day after day. It’s as good as running mock executions for breaking prisoners’ souls. Look at these poor devils. They were our fighting men, once, the bravest of the brave.’

‘You seem to have outlasted them, lad,’ said the commodore.

‘Well, as you seem to have rumbled during my absence, I’m with the Court of the Air. They take out our souls shortly after we join.’

‘What you believe of your essence is irrelevant. We only select cattle based on your vitality,’ said a familiar voice behind them.

Charlotte swung around. Walsingham was standing at the entrance, two hideously wizened sea-bishop guards either side of him, clutching long dark rifle-shaped crystalline weapons, their elongated heads black bishops’ mitres, swaying as they stood ready to open fire. ‘Not too much fat. Plenty of tender young flesh. We can’t abide the oily taste overweight over-aged animals like you-’ he pointed at the commodore, ‘-leave on the palate. But that’s fine, your sister wishes to toy with you a little, so for the sake of diplomacy I shall humour her.’

‘Why don’t you show us your real form, Captain Twist,’ said Charlotte.

‘Oh, I am sure the members of the Mass all look alike to mere animals,’ said Walsingham.

‘You can eat my cursed sister, then,’ said the commodore, ‘and let us three go.’

‘That would be a poor decision,’ smiled Walsingham. ‘A farmer must use dogs to hunt down wolves, even if he has to eat a little hound during the depths of winter when the larder runs low.’ Walsingham raised the amulet Gemma Dark had ripped from Charlotte’s neck. ‘Not quite the gem I hired you to retrieve for me, but judging by my reports from the siege at the Isla Furia, I should hold that by the end of the day too. As for my animal semblance, it serves as a good example.’ He called out to the corridor and a miniature sea-bishop walked tentatively inside the cell, passing a pair of royalist sentries outside, the creature standing no higher than Walsingham’s waist. Like the two sea-bishop guards, it wore a rubbery skin-suit with a crystal held in the centre of its chest as though it was a beating heart. The royalist sentries outside were trying hard not to look in the prisoners’ direction. They knew what was coming next.

Walsingham placed a hand on the little monster’s shoulder. ‘This is my son, Child 722 from my twelfth brood-wife. Select your animal. Speak only in Jackelian.’

The alien child walked forward, lights in the ceiling growing painfully bright in response to an unseen command from the child’s crystal. It pointed to one of the men at the back: tall, strong, a tattered sailor’s uniform reduced to filthy rags by his incarceration. ‘That one, father.’

‘An excellent choice. Now, switch to amplification mode and focus.’

As the gem glowed in the centre of the young creature’s chest, the sailor stumbled away from the rear wall, mumbling the same name over and over again — Sally, Sally — one of his own children, perhaps. Charlotte looked on, frozen in horror. Behind the selected sailor the other prisoners were shaking and keening, an animal noise she didn’t think it was possible could rise out of any human throat.

‘Maintain your hold,’ ordered Walsingham. ‘Bring the animal in closer, closer.’

The sailor was a foot away from the miniature sea-bishop, when the child monster produced the same style of crystalline tuning fork-shaped blade that Corporal Cloake had once tried to use on Charlotte. It seemed to seal into the child’s tiny hand, growing and moulding into the veins around its black, withered wrist, then the thing stabbed upwards with the blade while the sailor was bending down, reaching out with his arms to hug whatever projection of familial love was in his mind’s eye.

‘Inject, reduce, ingest,’ called Walsingham.

Charlotte couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sickening sight, the man’s frame diminishing, blood and liquefied meat flowing up the crystalline prongs, the young creature’s stomach swelling as if it were pregnant. Flicking out talon-like, the prongs of the feeding blade withdrew and a crumpled husk, little more than sack of mummified skin, flopped to the oily surface of the cell. This is what happened to Damson Robinson back in her pie shop, the Circle preserve her soul. They did that to my friend! I never had so many I could afford to lose them.

‘Very good, child. A perfectly clean cull,’ said Walsingham, patting the hideous thing’s distended head. ‘Tomorrow we will practice feeding and see if you can push your cattle semblance into the minds of all the animals here, not just your prey’s.’ He turned to Charlotte. ‘It is relatively painless. The blade sedates as it drains, just as our mesmeric trance convinces the animal it is in the presence of its own herd.’ He pushed the sailor’s desiccated remains away with his foot. ‘Very little sustenance is wasted, which is of paramount importance.’

Charlotte bent over, clutching her heaving stomach. Charlotte had seen this in the memories Elizica had dredged up in the sceptre’s recordings, but watching it in person, the visceral sight and the stench, was almost more than she could stand.

Walsingham appeared amused by her reaction. ‘I remember the night we first met. Before you took to the stage in front of the guests, one of his lordship’s servants fetched you a plate from the kitchens and you ate. Did you weep tears for the cuts of roast pork you piled into your primitive digestive system? Did you mourn how long the animal had hung in a dirty shed, its neck inexpertly slit and its blood pouring away? Do you know how much genetic similarity you share with that swine? I could rip out its heart and have it sown into your body with as little inconvenience as changing the power cell in my guard’s rifle. But does that stop your saliva running when you smell roast crackling? It does not. This is the way of nature. Predators and prey, always.’

Charlotte glared hatred at the creature. ‘Don’t expect your prey not to go down scratching and biting.’

‘Oh, you’ve inconvenienced me quite enough thus far. You should view you and your rabble through our perspective, understand how pathetically short-lived you are. The Mass have purified our genes — we can live for thousands of years, near immortal. To us, you animals pass like mayflies in the burning of a single afternoon. You should be honoured that your flesh serves the Mass. Well, we’re preparing a recorder to rip a memory imprint from you. We will discover just what tricks you have played on us. After that…?’ He smiled at her, licking his lips. ‘My progeny shall see how the bacon sizzles.’

As the sea-bishops departed, the wall sealed up, leaving not a trace of a join behind them.

Commodore Black stumbled after the creatures, slamming his fist into the cell’s damp featureless surface. ‘Look at this foul black stuff, dripping with evil and cunning. How can I pick the lock on this? A swallowed man tickling open the guts of a whale? How am I meant to bring my mortal genius to bear on such a foul prison?’

‘Don’t worry, Jared,’ said Charlotte, laying a hand on the old u-boat man’s shoulder.

‘Why, because our worries will be short, lass? I always knew in my bones that it would be Elizica’s games that did for me in the end. All my life, running. You can escape from almost anything, but you can never escape the who or how of your birth, not who you are.’ Big wet tears tolled down his cheeks and he rubbed them away with half a sob and half a snort of laughter. ‘These tears aren’t for me, lass. Not old Blacky. Sick and dying and hardly missed when he’s gone. They’re for you and all my friends back home. I’ve saved us all Charlotte, that I have. I’ve saved us all a dozen times over. I’ve faced mad revolutionaries and madder gods, fought our enemies from Cassarabia to Quatershift, battled villains from the deserts of Kaliban to the black halls of Jago, but here’s my end. A cell with no lock is an escape even old Blacky can’t manage.’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘Housebreaker, animal, cattle, prey, bastard, thief girl — that’s all that Walsingham and your sister see when they look at me. But while I dabble as a thief, I’m also Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism. I didn’t fall onto the stage by luck. I didn’t become the quality’s act of choice just because they wanted to gawk at the bastard daughter of one of their own, fallen, capering about for their amusement. I learnt the craft the hard way: memory tricks, cold reading, sleight of hand, pickpocketing and hypnotism. I studied under the best in Jackals and stole to pay for it. And you know what, we’re the best in the world. I can read any mark for their weakness and I know what the sea-bishops’ real flaw is — it’s their bloody sense of superiority.’

‘Push a sabre in these poor old fingers and I’ll take on any horde of demons, but I can’t beat a pack of monsters with their own arrogance.’

‘I think you can,’ said Charlotte as she leant in. And began to tell the commodore the truth.