From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Poor 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.

Daunt followed the commodore through the narrow corridors, squeezing past the stripe-shirted crew going about their duties — as roguish and varied an assortment of sailors as befitted Blacky’s unorthodox cargoes and smuggler’s landings.

‘Well, this much I can tell you, lad. If my sister Gemma is involved, there’ll be a good bit of dying to be done after we’ve set a tack across her wind.’

Daunt entered the ready room with Boxiron behind him; the steamman’s clanking legs startling the boat’s cat, the surprised feline a black streak as she shot between the commodore’s legs in search of a less crowded cabin.

Dick Tull and his informant, Sadly, were waiting at the long room’s oval table, a polished wooden surface inlaid with scenes from Jackelian naval history, suiting the u-boat’s previous status as a war-horse of the state. Kingdom dreadnoughts clashed with Cassarabian paddle galleys, submersible flotillas exchanged torpedoes above an underwater mountain range, athletic u-boat men struck heroic positions of defiance on a bridge as their captain hung vigilantly onto a lowered periscope. It seemed to Daunt that the surface would be more appropriately decorated now with views of smugglers concealed beneath bushes from revenue service riders and redcoated soldiers. Although even with fresh artwork, the table would still look out of place being set, not with food, but the crown jewels of the last absolute monarch to rule over Jackals.

‘Oh, this is a rich biscuit, say I,’ moaned Sadly, his face a greenish pallor — and not just from the shade of the ocean outside the room’s armoured porthole. Even sitting down and resting his clubfoot, he clung to his cane like it was his sole handhold on the world. ‘A fortune in nicked jewels and precious metals laid out in front of me, and I’d get a fast blade in my back if I dared to set foot back home to fence it off.’

‘You’ve already got a walking stick, lad. You don’t need my mortal sceptre for a cane,’ noted the commodore, sitting himself down at the head of the table. ‘And this belonged to the royalists long before the House of Guardians laid their grubby hands on it, or the poor lass back in my cabin.’

‘She’s still not come around?’ asked Tull.

‘It’s not a physical injury,’ said Daunt. ‘At least, not as the vessel’s doctor understands it.’ Beyond any of the healing techniques I mastered in the church, too.

‘Pity,’ said Tull. ‘The girl must know something about why Walsingham is nobbing around the capital, pretending to be a royalist and helping the rebels make off with King Jude’s sceptre.’

‘I doubt, good sergeant, if Damson Shades knows any more than whatever tale she was fed to get her to steal the jewels.’

‘Your metal friend reckons that they tried to kill her. She must be good for something.’

‘Mere thoroughness on their part,’ said Daunt. ‘The Mistress of Mesmerism may not even have known that the royalists were involved, let alone the State Protection Board.’

‘Why?’ Tull laughed. ‘Because of that yarn you spun me earlier about some sisters babbling the same kind of nonsense on their sickbed that the girl’s spouting?’

‘Are you a good Circlist, Mister Tull? Holding to what is right and rational. Rejecting superstition?’

‘Do I look like I go to church regularly, amateur? I know it takes more than some ancient mumbo-jumbo to turn a ruthless sod like Walsingham. If the major’s skulking around the capital holding hands with royalist rebels, there’s more in it for him than the whisperings of shades and ghosts.’

‘Is he a good traitor?’ asked Daunt.

Dick Tull started to say something, then stopped himself. He was about to speak again when Daunt warned him: ‘Your first thoughts, if you please. What initially jumped into your mind when I asked you the question?’

‘That Walsingham isn’t the sort,’ said Dick, playing thoughtfully with the edges of his greying moustache. ‘Oh, he’s ambitious all right, and not carrying too much weight in the way of scruples when it comes to getting his way — inside the board or out. But selling the country down the river to the rebels? And to the gill-necks to boot, if they’re financing the royalist cause? I’d never have pegged Walsingham as good for that.’

Daunt stroked the sceptre. ‘Not even for a king’s weight in gold?’

Dick Tull snorted and turned to Sadly. ‘Could you fence that piece?’

‘Lever the jewels off and melt down the rest for gold, is more the way of it, Mister Tull. Who would buy that fancy piece intact, says I? Who would have the money to do the deed or the nerve to hold onto it? Maybe the caliph down in Cassarabia. He might hang it in his palace as one in the eye for the infidel northerners, but he’s about the only one.’

‘Exactly,’ said Daunt. ‘Its value, its true value is a symbol. To the caliph, or-’ he pointed at the commodore, ‘-to you, or to any royalist. But, Mister Tull, your old employer is not of a royalist bent, as you so clearly pointed out. So what is the true value of the sceptre to him?’ He turned to Boxiron. ‘I saw the way you were examining the jewel on the end of the sceptre. It seems to me, in the same manner you were inspecting the jewel around the neck of our Damson Shades.’

‘Both gems share much the same composition,’ said Boxiron. ‘Close to the reflective index of diamond, but not quite.’

‘And, as you witnessed, the jewel around her neck appeared to ward off unnatural energies from Mister Cloake’s blade which are the most likely cause of her collapse and her subsequent coma. I wonder if the sisters Lammeter were urging us to find Charlotte Shades, or the thing she wears around her neck?’ It was to his chagrin that he hadn’t been able to save the other names the sisters had been chanting. He would not fail Charlotte. Daunt lifted the sceptre up and offered it to Boxiron, the weight of the thing such that he could barely manage to pass it while sitting down.

‘Examine it closely, old friend. Set your vision plate to its maximum resolution.’

Boxiron leant in close towards the sceptre, the red dot pulsing in the centre of his visor-like vision plate narrowing in size until the light was barely visible. ‘Yes, there is something inside the jewel — a pattern, finely etched. So fine I can barely distinguish it at my optic’s maximum resolution, and on that setting, the side of a hair appears like the contours of a mountain.’

‘Is it an image perhaps, or cursive script?’

‘No,’ said Boxiron. ‘It’s circuitry, I’m sure of it. But on a granular scale unlike anything I have heard of. The crystal boards designed by the architects of my people are as cave paintings compared to the sophistication responsible for this.’

‘The sceptre’s a bloody antique,’ said Tull. ‘How can that be?’

‘Ah, this is a dark business,’ said the commodore. ‘All the rightful queens and kings who have held that sceptre over the millennia, wielded it in good faith, and you are telling me it is etched full of wicked sorcery?’

Daunt scratched his chin. ‘Yes, all those hands. All the way back to the Queen Elizica, before the cold time and glaciers covered the world. All the way back to the first war between the tribes of the Jackeni and the gill-necks. A war then, and a war now.’

‘Let’s not be digging up old history,’ said the commodore. ‘No blessed good can come of it. You remember the trouble we got into on the black isle of Jago when we started disturbing dark ruins.’

‘I believe it was the professor who told me that those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it,’ said Daunt.

‘History books won’t bleeding keep us alive,’ said Tull. ‘What’s this mess got to do with yourself and the old steamer anyway? You’re meant to be tracking down a nest of bloodsuckers for the town’s alderman, not prancing about taking on bent board officials and royalists backed by the Advocacy.’

‘I believe the victims of the vampire slayings are collateral damage, good sergeant,’ said Daunt. ‘A few poor souls good for the pot. Those who knew too much, or perhaps too little. Much like yourself. And from what you said, it was what you and your fellow intelligencer saw on the night of your surveillance at Lord Chant’s residence that got your partner killed and would have seen you assassinated too. And as for the rest, yes. The pieces are starting to fall in place.’ Daunt rummaged around in his pocket for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop, then offered the bag in the direction of Dick Tull.

‘You’ve got to be joking me, amateur. Those things’ll rot your teeth and your mind.’

‘Lubrication of my mental processes, harmless stimulation only,’ said Daunt. He sucked on the sweet and looked over at Commodore Black. ‘There wasn’t much in the books at Tock House about the modern gill-necks, good captain. Beyond the fact that the Advocacy’s ancestors were once driven onto our shores by changes in the magma currents of the Fire Sea, and the tribes living on our land united to drive them away.’

‘Nor will you find such learnings in the university’s dusty towers,’ said the commodore, tapping his skull. ‘It’s all up here. In the heads of a few honest skippers, in the noggins of adventurers like me who brave the sea.’

‘It is said that the Advocacy are an insular people.’

‘Ah, a little beyond that. The gill-necks of the Advocacy live their lives by a book of rituals and law called the Misleash — and according to its teachings, there is an eternal cycle of life where mankind abandons the sea and returns to the land, before returning to the sea again. Their words for home, universe and sea are one and the same, and if that doesn’t tell you all you mortal need to understand about how they think, then I’ll add that their word for land has another meaning which is “torment”. There’s blessed little the Advocacy need from us to live below the waters — they only tax the shipping that passes over their territory to discourage visitors.’

‘But they’re an evolutionary offshoot of the race of man,’ said Daunt. ‘Just like the graspers or the craynarbians.’

‘Aye, not that you would know it to look at them, stubby muzzles and skin like sharks. The proof of the pudding is that the gill-necks can interbreed with us, although such misbegotten babes as result only gives truth to the notion of us surface dwellers as accursed. A mewling, twisted babe ill-suited to land or sea, that’s the sad result of any union between man and gill-neck. Your Circlist friends should be pleased by them; they don’t have any gods, just the sea as their great mother.’

‘A noble race, then,’ said Daunt. ‘Ruled by law, and no heaven or hell.’

‘Ah, well, they have a measure of hell. They believe that the dark of the abyss sends devils to punish them when they abuse the seas.’

‘Even more intriguing. But I see why you are uneasy about the idea of an alliance between the royalist rebels and the gill-necks.’

‘There is no royalist rebellion, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Not anymore. Parliament’s airships broke the fleet-in-exile when they took Porto Principe. All that survived of the cause are a few submarines whose crews turned to slavery and privateering. The gill-necks are meant to be breathing life back into the cause all these years later? Why? The Advocacy doesn’t give a fig who rules the land, not when they call the sea their realm. The ocean’s magma fields are in retreat now, not expanding, there’s no trouble to drive the gill-necks in desperation towards our shores.’

‘They have a king, don’t they?’ said Tull. ‘Maybe the gill-necks decided they’ll be safer in their land with a friendly monarch sitting on the throne of Jackals again.’

‘Pah, that’s parliamentary propaganda, you old rascal,’ said the commodore. ‘What you call a king, the gill-necks call the Judge Sovereign. They’re not ruled by a royal court, but a court of law. A supreme mucky-muck selected from the bench of the four Princes Intercessor, the Bench of Four, appointed by their societies of ritual. The bench interprets their laws and set out the rituals and ceremonies that every guild and clan must abide by. The Advocacy know as little of our affairs as you do of theirs — or at least that was the way it used to be. How my sister got in tight with them is beyond my tired old noggin. And that Parliament has let a trade dispute escalate close to war is wicked foolery even the idiots in the House of Guardians should be ashamed of. Like watching a squid and an albatross fighting over whether the squid should live in the sky and the bird under the water.’

Daunt nodded his head sadly. ‘Bob my soul, so here we are. Teetering close to a war with no cause and no real prize for its victor.’ The ex-parson ran his hand along King Jude’s sceptre. And this is the glue that binds the mystery together. Are you what this conflict is being fought for, or the key to halting it? If we’re ever to return to the Kingdom, if we’re to stop this senseless war, we need to find out. ‘The gill-necks have no fondness towards surface dwellers?’

‘They have a mortal aversion to our people, which is a pity for us, as the Advocacy experiences more than its fair share of surface-dwelling fortune hunters trespassing across their territory.’

‘What does the Advocacy have that’s so valuable?’ Sadly asked, his interest perking up at the mention of fortunes.

‘Their engineering’s based on crystals. They grow what they need near high-pressure fissures on the seabed. Gems like diamonds and as big as boulders. Common to them, but rare enough to us to bring a constant stream of fool lubbers trying to sneak into the gill-necks’ waters, thinking how easy it’ll be to pillage their crystal fields.’

‘I take it that those they capture are not treated with leniency, good captain?’ said Daunt.

‘Never seen again, is what they are,’ said the commodore. ‘The gill-necks and the people of the underwater nations are born to the sea. This is their realm. Visitors to it are all we will ever be, and blessed unwelcome ones when we trespass into their territory.’

‘Crystals,’ hummed Daunt. ‘Interesting.’

‘Your sister is going to tell us what’s going on then, Blacky?’ said Tull. ‘We just sail up to her and she’ll spill her guts out about why Walsingham and the gill-necks have suddenly taken it to mind to support the rebel cause?’

‘There’ll be doubts,’ said the commodore. ‘In the royalist ranks, people like Rufus Symons. Tossing out a parliament of thieving tradesmen is one thing, collaborating with a foreign occupation of Jackals is another kettle of fish.’ The commodore unfolded a chart across the table and laid a finger in the ocean. ‘This is the muster point for the convoys to the colonies that are passing across the disputed waters. We can join one as a free trader, then slip away from the convoy and sneak out into the heart of the Advocacy waters.’

‘Won’t we be a little conspicuous sailing into their territory, good captain?’ said Daunt.

‘Right enough,’ said the commodore, ‘but we won’t be going in as surface traders.’ He pointed to an adjacent area on the charts. ‘This is the territory of the seanore… ocean nomads. Some of them are close enough to the gill-necks in form and tolerated as ocean dwellers; a multiracial society like the Kingdom — even a few of the race of man who’ve embraced a life on the seabed among their numbers. Humans known by the moniker of wetbacks by us salty sea-dog types. I’ve had dealings with the seanore before. If we can get in tight with the nomads, then we can travel into a gill-neck city without raising too many hackles.’ He looked over at Boxiron. ‘Apart from you, old steamer.’

‘I can travel underwater,’ protested Boxiron. ‘All I need is a respirator for my stacks and a buoyancy tank.’

‘That you may,’ said the commodore, ‘but while a seanore clan might count three or four of the underwater races among their number, one species you will never find among them is a steamman. The gill-necks will tolerate the odd wetback among the seanore as some poor unfortunate surface dweller trying to do the natural thing and return back to the sea-essence, but if they spy your metal hull bobbing along above their coral, they’ll rumble our game in a blessed minute. My sister Gemma isn’t exactly the trusting type, and we’ll have enough trouble trying to find a friendly face among the royalists without Gemma spotting me first. With a steamman by my side, I might as well swim into the gill-neck capital dragging the lion and portcullis of the House of Guardians on a standard behind me.’

Daunt’s heart sank. Boxiron shook angrily — a mixture of anger and shame at being left out of the fray. The ex-parson had only just managed to get his steamman friend engaged with the case; occupied enough to set aside his increasingly maudlin broodings about the reduced state of his body. Boxiron had little enough to live for as it was. A once-proud steamman knight, reduced into the frame of a semi human-milled monstrosity, crude and malfunctioning.

How can I abandon Boxiron on the Purity Queen, grieving about his exile from his people? His so-called duty to suicide? What will he do without me?

But when it came to it leaving his friend behind, when push turned to shove, Daunt would have no choice. The stakes were too high to do anything else.

After the others had gone, Dick noticed the commodore was watching him. The spy ran his fingers over King Jude’s sceptre, a calculating look on his face as he estimated how much he could get from melting it down and stripping it of its jewels.

‘Your people have already stolen the blessed thing once from its true owners,’ accused the commodore.

Dick reached for his hip flask and took a quick hit of its warm contents. ‘And what will you be doing with it, Blacky, when all of this is done? You got the Jackelian crown squirreled away somewhere too? An ermine-lined souvenir for you to keep your brainbox warm? Settle yourself down in your favourite easychair back in the big house, wrap your fingers around the sceptre and dream of the good old days when your ancestors got to lord it over mine?’

‘When this is all over, lad, I’m figuring I’ll be too. I’m on my way out, but where I’ll be going, you won’t be so far behind me.’

‘There you’re wrong, Blacky. I’m planning on a long, happy retirement.’ He glanced at the richly appointed sceptre. A fortune waiting to be smelted into a form no policeman would be able to trace. I just need a little more money, a little more luck. Maybe I’ll take my share of yours, you old pirate. Someone’s got to come out of this ahead.

‘A cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea? Nosing out a previously undiscovered knack for tending roses? Men like you and me, Dick Tull, we’re good for lying and scheming and killing and trickery. Playing the great game all our lives, you think you can take your eyes off the board? It’s too late for us. This is all we know and all we’re fit for. You think you’re going to find a wife now, raise a family to replace the ones who died off or were scared off? There’s no sight as sad as a rusty old sabre trying to turn itself a garden trowel.’

‘You’re talking about yourself, not me,’ said Dick. But we’re not, are we? All the lies of our trade. Can we fool ourselves too?

The commodore reached out and tugged at Dick’s jacket. ‘Cheap cloth. Taking your meals at an ordinary and telling yourself it’s where your informants are, living your cheap life. How much money do you think you need to leave the State Protection Board behind? Ten guineas a year, a hundred, a thousand? It’ll never buy you what it takes to leave.’

‘Says the man living in a grand tower with a private orchard to do his bloody philosophising in.’

‘We are what we are,’ coughed the commodore. ‘And we’re it under a roof with one room or seventy.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Dick, his confidence wavering. ‘The board’s just a job, and I won’t miss one hour of this life when I’m done with it.

Liar, something deep within him whispered. How often have you dreamed of what you’re going to do outside of the board? Where are your hopes of another life? A man who wanted out would have a dream, wouldn’t he, a plan, something?

‘What happened to you, lad?’ asked the commodore. ‘We’ve done enough business together over the years, you and I. You could have been one of the great ones, but here you are at the end of the game, huddled like a miser counting coals in front of his fire.’

‘Give it a bloody rest. The only cause you’ve ever really worked for is yourself. You try doing it for parliament and country all your life. Not as some quality, not as officer class, but as a mere humble bloody ranker. For the last forty years I’ve done the job as fine as anyone, and watched well-connected carriage folk take the credit for every one of my successful operations while sliding me a plate of shit to eat on the failures. If my father had been an industrial lord or a bishop, I’d be a colonel in the board by now. Instead, I’m counting a ranker’s pension and nicking candlesticks to put a pair of new shoes on my tired old feet.’ Dick made to tip his hip flask to his mouth again, but Blacky stopped him.

‘I need the man you were, you rascal, the man you still can be. I need an ironclad Protection Board bastard by my side. Not some sot two drinks from the grave.’

‘Then I hope your u-boat can travel in time as well as in water,’ said Dick, ‘because that man ain’t here anymore. Just me. That’s who you’ve got. And that man’s going to take a cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea just as soon as it becomes available and leave the great game to someone else. The board’s officers can find another cow to milk for their successes and bugger the lot of them.’

‘Well, there’s one consolation for you,’ said the commodore, thumping him on the back. ‘Poor old Blacky won’t be around to say I told you so.’

When Jethro Daunt entered the wardroom, the only other occupant was the rat-like informant. Barnabas Sadly was standing over a table riveted to the floor, leaning on his cane, a large sea chart spread out across the table.

‘Can you interpret a navigation course, Mister Sadly?’

‘Lords-a’larkey, not the likes of I. But it makes me feel a little better, knowing that someone on this tub has an idea of how to sail through all of that out there. Have you glanced out the porthole? Valleys and mountains and forests of seaweed and fish like birds in the sky. Just the sight of it set my stomach off into a right queasy turn.’

‘No,’ said Daunt. ‘There can’t have been many lessons on matters nautical in your poorhouse classes.’

‘Poorhouse?’ said Sadly, a tone of indignation creeping into his voice. ‘I’m no poorhouse foundling. My father was a cobbler along Velvet Street.’ He tapped his boot with his cane. ‘Couldn’t take over the trade, could I? Customers would come in and take one look at my bad foot and say, well, that one don’t know anything about making a good pair of shoes. We’ll move our business down the lane.’

‘Of course,’ said Daunt. ‘My mistake. There must be nearly fifty cobblers’ shops and stalls along Velvet Street.’

‘But customers still needs to eat, and them that come into an ordinary don’t care much about the person serving them, as long as the beer ain’t stale and the meat overcooked like dry old shoe soles.’

Daunt nodded. Blackening the meat was a favourite trick when it came to disguising rancid cheaper cuts. ‘I hope you don’t lose too much custom back home while you’re on board the Purity Queen.’

‘Mister Tull won’t have thought about that,’ said Sadly. ‘Not once. Any more than his masters at the board gave it a thought when they sent the dustmen over to my place to cut my liver out for what I might have told Mister Tull. I’m useful to the board, they toss me a few bones, but when it suits-’ he drew a finger across his throat, ‘-that’s the way it is with the little people. Nobody thinks about us, nobody cares if that which we’ve built is trampled underfoot by the grand schemes of the quality and the carriage folk.’

‘All of life is flow, Mister Sadly,’ said Daunt. ‘You can only find serenity when you accept the course of the river, rather than trying to build a home of sticks in the centre of the flow and worrying that it will one day be swept away.’

‘It’s true then,’ said Sadly. ‘You’re a churchman as well as a thieftaker.’

‘Unfortunately, the church does not permit parsons in the Circlist order to believe in gods.’ Daunt held up his hands. ‘Defrocked. They are sticklers in such matters. Abandoned, but still occasionally useful to the inquisition. Perhaps that makes both of us little people.’

‘Not you, says I,’ Sadly insisted, his voice lowering in awe. ‘Your name’s whispered in fear among the bad sorts back in the city. When Jethro Daunt is engaged, the villain of the piece had better scarper for the hills, for if they don’t, they’ll end up dangling in the noose outside Bonegate jail. Don’t even think of nobbling him, or that metal ogre of his will drop you off a building with your skull crushed in.’

Daunt ran a finger across the contour lines of the chart. Feared by the underworld, abandoned by the church. Is this what my life has come to? The increasingly faint stimulation of pitting his wits against the most vicious and devious masterminds in the slums of Middlesteel. Crime spread like algae in the stagnant pools of the poor. As soon as one case was solved, there was always another. Their clients, mostly the outraged rich who could afford to pay Daunt and Boxiron’s bills; commercial lords affronted by the down and desperates’ efforts to relieve the rich of some of their wealth. Was it any wonder that Boxiron was growing suicidal with his life, crippled and crammed inside his malfunctioning frame? Any wonder the steamman felt that way when even Daunt — hale and healthy — worried that they chased ever-greater risks in the cases they accepted, just to feel the tingle of being alive. To distract them both from the truth: that for neither of them, was this the appropriate channel their short time in the world had been destined to flow down. What would Daunt’s father have thought of him now, if his bones hadn’t been long buried? His father had been disappointed enough that his son had turned his talents and intelligence towards the seminary, rather than following him into the law. But the life of an articled clerk in the middle court, even rising to be a judge — his father’s dream, never his — had held little appeal. No, it never did to dwell on the might-have-beens. If Jethro Daunt had been stuck in his father’s dusty office, stamping legal summons and reviewing court proceedings, then he would never have been able to rescue Boxiron from his previous life as an enforcer for the lords of the underworld. How many murderers would’ve gone free to kill more innocents?

And if I weren’t here, who would minister to Damson Shades? Certainly not the drunken sop who passed for a surgeon on the Purity Queen. Dose her up with laudanum and reach for the bone saw to carve off a mangled limb. Such methods won’t keep the poor girl alive. To doubt is human, but I need a clear mind and a focused soul if I’m to get to the heart of this matter. I fear the blood of many thousands will be on my hands, should I fail.

Daunt was reaching for the comforting round sphere of a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop when the commodore entered the room. ‘With me, lad! The girl’s fever has taken a turn for the worst!’

The commodore stepped out of the way while Daunt felt Charlotte Shades’ forehead and then took her pulse. Her skin was soaked with sweat while her possessed ramblings had dropped away to a faint murmur. ‘Her fever is not getting worse, Jared. Quite the contrary, it is breaking. She is on the mend.’

‘Are you sure, lad?’ He allowed himself a burst of relief.

The consulting detective nodded. ‘I know my previous occupation concerned itself with the state of my parishioners’ minds and souls first and foremost, but the third component of the natural trinity is the body. And I’m happy to say that young Charlotte Shades’ flesh is returning to balance.’

Seeing Charlotte stretched out on the cot in front of him put Jared Black in mind of another woman, another time. The commodore sighed. One of the strange things about surviving long enough to see your own death swimming up in the water towards you was that the events of your early life often seemed more real and immediate than the occurrences that had happened just the day before. Maybe the brain preferred to remember the body as it had been, hale and fit and with a whole life of possibilities stretched out in front of it, denuded of disappointments. Not crumbling, a casual victim of entropy — eroded by the natural course of life and its sicknesses. Ah, it’s a tricksy thing, a man’s mind. There had been many women, of course, wives who had died and borne him children, but the first love was always the fondest remembered. Maeva, are you still alive? Still out here with the nomads of the sea? He had been in love with her from the first moment he had seen her. And who wouldn’t be? So full of fire. Calling you in like a moth to her light. What he’d felt for Maeva wasn’t just a function of the fact that she had saved his life. Pulling him from the wreckage of a broken u-boat like a fisherman levered winkles from the rocks of the shoreline. There were tales of mermaids who did that, who rescued drowning submariners, but Maeva had been entirely human. And like all the finest women, she had made him feel more human too. After the royalist-in-exiles’ hidden island base had finally been located and destroyed by parliament, Maeva had given Jared Black the thing he had needed most: a reason to go on living.

Was our first meeting so many years ago? It feels like yesterday. There had been a blackness in the wrecked conning tower, the kind of complete, utter blackness that could only come from the sea flooding in and even the flicker of light from the instrument panels sparking out as her power drained. Legs trapped under a collapsed hull plate, he had watched as a bobbing fairy light in front of him had grown to the glow of a diving helmet’s face plate, looked on Maeva’s ethereal porcelain beauty, snowy-white like only a life lived under the sea could make a woman. How old was I, twenty, twenty-one? My first command shot out from underneath me. Everyone else, my friends and family in the crew, a corpse.

She had prodded him, checking he was as dead as all the other u-boat privateers, drawing back as she saw his mouth grimace in pain. Connecting her suit to his with a communication line. ‘You’re a u-boat pirate, I presume? Not a captive held for ransom by the marauders.’

‘Privateer, lass, never a pirate. Licensed to take back what’s ours by right. And you, I presume, must be one of those murderous underwater savages that roam the oceans, a seanore.’

‘I understand that the self-proclaimed nobles who wrote your dubious licenses of brigandage are much like this vessel, now. Dead in the water.’

‘So then, news travels fast.’

‘There are probably clans on the other side of the world who were woken by the sounds of the depth charges striking your u-boat pens.’

‘War’s a right noisy business. Not much quietness in it.’ He’d watched her pick up her lance. ‘Make it quick for me, lass, before you strip my boat.’

She’d jabbed him, experimentally in the chest. ‘You’re a very unsuccessful pirate. Not a single chest of treasure I can find on board.’

‘Privateer, please. And I was a more successful rebel than I ever was a liberator of cargoes.’

‘Not very clever, either. Silks and spices always have a market. Causes are cheap. Almost everyone can invent one for free.’

‘I’d thank you kindly to murder me before the lecture, rather than after.’

She raised the lance, but rather than spearing him with the deadly crystal blade, she had pushed it under the hull plate trapping his legs and begun to lever it up. ‘The price on your head makes you the most valuable thing in this wreck, surface-dweller.’

‘Too valuable to sell, if the truth be told.’

‘You’re every bit as arrogant as your people are said to be. Why would I want to keep a filthy surface-dwelling rascal around?’

‘So I can look at you, lass. So I can just look at you.’

How many years did we have together? No more than two, as I remember it. Jared Black felt a brief stab of pain. He’d vowed to Maeva he would never leave her. He had vowed to himself that he would never flee from parliament again. But when he had been recognized by a trader, sold out to parliament’s agents for the price on his rebellious head, then he had abandoned her. For how could he bear to witness what had befallen his family and comrades-in-arms happen a second time to the simple nomads of the sea? Bombed and ruthlessly hunted for harbouring a notorious royalist captain? No, that was never going to happen. The commodore had cut and run from their gloriously uncomplicated existence together. He had run and he had kept on running, and perhaps he had never really stopped. Changing identities like other men changed overcoats. There were many prices that fate demanded of a man. None so painful as a life he had never had a chance to live.

The hammock Charlotte Shades was lying in rocked as the Purity Queen’s hull shifted, bringing the commodore back to the present with a jolt as the floor’s angle shifted to an incline then jarringly righted itself.

‘We’ve surfaced,’ said the commodore. ‘Time to signal the ships out there we’ve a mind to join their convoy.’

‘A mind for one last voyage, Jared?’

‘What’s that, lad?’

‘I heard what our friend from the State Protection Board said when he had you pinned against the wall at Tock House with a gun in your chest. Before he even said it, I had noticed that you were down a couple of pounds in weight. Your lungs are broken; I can hear it every time you cough.’

‘Is that why my mortal trousers no longer fit me?’

‘It’s a serious matter.’

‘No, Jethro Daunt, it is not. Dying comes to us all, sooner or later. You cannot cheat it. The life I’ve had foisted on me, I should’ve been dead a dozen times over. I should’ve died with the fleet-in-exile at Porto Principe; I should’ve died in the dark halls of Jago or the sand dunes of Cassarabia or the foreign fields of a dozen other rotten countries. You can’t choose not to die, only where you stand when you blessed do. It’s my time, and even the land has seen fit to turn me out of my rest, to see out my last days with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other.’

‘There are medicines that could be tried.’

‘And my ill-gotten gains have paid for them all, lad. You’d be better off turning back to those old gods who haunted you out of your parsonage. Put in a word with them for poor old Blacky.’

‘After what you and I did to them on Jago, even they have deserted me now.’

‘Ah then, matters of death I shall leave to the church and the graveyard diggers. Life I understand well enough, and this I know to be true. With my unlucky stars I was never fated to die peacefully curled up underneath a warm blanket with my wife and daughter sitting by my side. I’ll go like I lived and sell myself dear with it.’

Daunt seemed concerned by Jared’s evident lack of care in this matter. The Circlist church would have it that after the commodore’s death, his soul would be tipped out and poured into the one sea of consciousness, mingled with all that was, is, and was yet to be, before being poured back out into all the myriad lives still to be born. But somehow, the commodore couldn’t imagine that fate suiting the audacious, coarse trajectory of his life. It was the most basic Circlist teaching that all that was living was joined, the same, indivisible. Jared Black’s life felt too dark to be diluted and combined with the rest of humanity. Yet, the end had to come eventually. Nobody could capture the river. Every time you knelt by the stream and cupped your hand in it, all you could ever come out with was water. Not the river. The river was flow and movement, just like the life they had been given.

In the hammock, Charlotte Shades’ eyes flickered open and she moaned and moved a shaky hand out to cover her eyes from the light. Her other hand, the commodore noticed, went to the chest to check the jewel on her chain was still there. She did it barely consciously. A reflex; but an instinctive touch that spoke of its value to her.

‘Where am I?’

‘Safe, Damson Shades,’ said Daunt.

‘There are monsters here, I have seen them. Their skin’s peeling off. The monsters.’

‘Not yet, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But we will be sailing towards them. You can count on my poor unlucky stars to guarantee that.’

There was a silence on the bridge as the commodore explained the nature of the message he’d received from one of the navy convoy’s surface vessels. Flashed across by the light of a gas lantern as the Purity Queen crashed through the waves topside, conserving her air and fuel supplies.

‘It is normal practice, good captain?’ asked Daunt. ‘For a convoy commander to invite the masters of the vessels under his charge to dine on board the flagship?’

‘I would have to say no, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Usually, the fleet sea arm treats trader convoys with all the love and affection a drover shows towards his geese, the flat of his boot and the sharp of his stick to keep them together while driving them to market.’ The old u-boat commander tugged on his big silver beard thoughtfully. ‘But then, normal convoys don’t sail so large. This convoy’s been named Operation Pedestal, as I’ve been signalled it by our navy friends. Forty tramp freighters, six paddle liners and close to a dozen seadrinker boats like our own, not to mention the navy ironclads, support ships and coalers running by our sides. With such a fleet, the House of Guardians is making a statement to the Advocacy about who controls the blessed oceans. Yes, I would say the vice-admiral is sailing under parliamentary orders, keeping the shipmasters sweet and sucking up to his shopkeeper masters in the ruling party. You don’t climb so high up the greasy mast without learning whose arse to kiss.’

‘Best you trim your beard then, Blacky, before the flagship’s launch comes to pick you up,’ said Dick Tull. ‘You don’t want to be embarrassing us all when you’re nibbling on the vice-admiral’s plump partridge breasts.’

‘I wouldn’t be getting as far as the captain’s table if I accepted his invite,’ said the commodore. ‘Vice-admiral Cockburn used to be plain speaking Captain Cockburn, and the last time we met it was the at the end of a round of depth charges after he’d spent near fourteen months chasing me across the world’s oceans, trying to stretch my neck for a privateer. Fortunately for us, our little contretemps was in my previous boat, the Sprite of the Lake, or we might have found our place in the convoy occupied by a spread of mines!’ The commodore swept his large fingers to take in the bridge crew, the sailors hunched over their boards and navigation panels. ‘While the half of my crew that didn’t once sail for the cause are known to a mite too many ports and courts as smugglers, privateers, mutineers and deserters.’

Daunt raised an eyebrow. ‘Will the absence of the Purity Queen ’s officers from the vice-admiral’s table not create a few suspicions?’

Commodore Black tossed his skipper’s cap at Daunt. ‘Well, that I don’t believe it will, Captain Daunt!’

Daunt placed both hands on the boat’s rail, the deck heaving with the roll of the waves. Apart from the jouncing of their launch in the dark waters, the sight of the convoy on the sea might have been Middlesteel viewed at night, so tight were conning towers, masts and superstructures packed in, hundreds of portholes and wheelhouses aglitter under the stars. Of course, if it had been the capital they were travelling towards, Barnabas Sadly wouldn’t be moaning and retching over the side. The oiled seaman’s coats they had borrowed seemed scant protection against the crashing waves. They had developed a false perspective of the sea travelling on the u-boat. It was only when you were tipping up the crest of waters as tall as a hill and sliding down the other side that you caught a glimpse of all its dangers and immensity. Not even the darkness can hide how vast it is.

Daunt might only have been masquerading as a skipper, but he had no trouble in identifying the convoy’s flagship, The Zealous, an ironclad with a radical new design the newssheets had termed a ‘wheelship’. A platform weighted down with mighty guns and a citadel-like superstructure, she was pierced with six slots that held a series of twinned hundred-foot high spherical wheels on either side. Turning and churning the sea, her six wheels provided both buoyancy and propulsion. Rotated by powerful steam engines pouring smoke into the sky, balance in the water was provided by a series of hydrofoils on either side. Launches that had made their rounds among the convoy waited in the shadow of lifting cranes, escaping the thunderous waves as they were winched up into the docking cradles of a boat bay under the flagship’s platform. Larger shadows hovered over the bow of the flagship, pocket airships returning from patrol to seek out the safety of the vessel’s hangars. Unconventional and ugly, The Zealous was said to be the lion of the waves, unmatchable by the men-o’war of any other nation’s fleets. She reared out of the waters as she powered forward, her guns given a stronghold’s commanding view over the ocean, contemptuous of the waves below. Unsinkable.

Boxiron moved to stand by Daunt’s side. ‘I fear I make almost as unconvincing a seaman as Barnabas Sadly.’

‘With this many vessels in the convoy commander’s care, I trust the vice-admiral will have too many guests to hone in on our nautical deficiencies,’ said Daunt. ‘Besides, the commodore’s crew appear to my eye as varied an assortment of chancers and rogues as our own company.’ He glanced back at Barnabas vomiting over the side. ‘And as the good captain assured me before we departed, some of the greatest naval commanders in history have suffered from a “mortal spot of seasickness”.’ Although, I will admit, not with quite so much gusto as Barnabas. Daunt adjusted a peaked cap slipped over the steamman’s head, a faded badge in its centre with the arms of an anchor and seahorse on the cap’s crown. And at least we look the part.

‘When a steamman starts to wear clothes,’ said Boxiron, touching his cap, ‘it is usually taken as a sign of mental illness.’

Daunt indicated the exploding waves. ‘Chased out of home by an unlikely alliance between royalists rebels and the secret police, with us heading into the heart of a war waiting to be declared, I thought that might be taken as a given.’

‘It should prove to be quite a distraction.’

‘I’m not sure I follow you, old steamer?’

‘My body may be the ramshackle product of your people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but only below my neck. My vision plate is still fully functional. I am not yet blind or insensible to what is going on. We have had many offers of work this year, yet you only accept the most dangerous and challenging of cases.’

Daunt shrugged. ‘They pay the most.’

‘We do not need the money. You are seeking to distract me from my predicament — the mind of a magnificent steamman knight inexpertly fused to this stumbling monstrosity of a body.’

Daunt tapped the hulking creature’s chest plate, just above the squeaking transaction-engine drum rotating in his centre. ‘But it is our mind that makes us who we are, old friend. Our memories, not this. All flesh is dust.’

‘In my case,’ said Boxiron, ‘I believe all flesh is rust. There are those among your race who suffer from wasting diseases, and they sometimes count it as a kindness when family and friends cut short their thread on the great pattern.’

Daunt sighed. He knew that steammen who had their design violated, corrupted outside of the pattern laid down by King Steam and his Hall of Architects in the Steamman Free State were expected to seek suicide. It was a hard code, but one a warrior of the commando militant was expected to adhere to. ‘You might be diminished, but you are by no means a cripple. You share some of the memories of the human-milled automatic whose body your head was grafted onto. You are a unique being in your own right. Hardly perfect, but which of us can say such a thing?’

‘I am neither one thing nor the other,’ said Boxiron. ‘I am stuck in an existence I did not ask for.’

‘Yes, I believe I know how you feel.’ Is that it? Daunt mused. Are you merely the steamman reflection of myself? Poor Jethro Daunt. Cast out of the church, seeking redemption where he can find it? No, there must be more to it than that. We’ve come so far together since I found you working as a hulking enforcer for the flash mob; too far for it to end like this.

‘Have I ever thanked you for saving me?’ asked Boxiron.

‘I believe we’ve saved each other,’ said Daunt. ‘Many times in fact, over the years.’ He looked at the steamman. Daunt knew his friend well enough to know what he was thinking. How easy it would be to fall over the side, allow the fury of the waves and the depths of the seas to claim his walking corpse of a body.

One day, this won’t be enough.

For Dick Tull, having a believable alias was second nature in his line of work. Second officer of a u-boat or an anarchist with a taste for sedition and assassinating parliamentarians, you observed the traits and tricks of the type, then you mirrored them right back. When you were dealing with amateurs like the ex-parson and his metal mate, you had to work with what you’d been given. A brief, tight cover story that was easy to hold onto and remember under duress. Jethro Daunt was now masquerading as a wealthy eccentric who had decided to sink the greater part of his fortune in a shipping concern, transporting high value caffeel beans and tea powder between the colony plantations and the Kingdom. A part that the churchman played to perfection with his strange habits: humming nonsense ballads and limericks to himself; the way he would drift off into a daydream and start pointing and wagging his finger as if he was conducting a debate against an invisible opponent, lecturing unseen students. Meanwhile, the steamman’s cover story was that he was the brute of a first mate whose clinking metal fist kept the unruly crewmen in order. Barnabas Sadly was the general officer who kept the stores, ran the books and oversaw the galley. There was one thing none of the party from the Purity Queen had to fake. All the u-boat crewmen in the gathering carried the same untidy, dishevelled air compared to the officers from the convoy’s surface freighters, paddle ships and liners. Living cheek by jowl in the cramped, sweaty confines of a submersible had that effect on a sailor, and even a cursory attempt to scrub up for an engagement couldn’t quite remove the impression.

Four of us hard-pressed to tell stem from stern. It’s a good thing the convoy’s brass seem more interested in the spread of food than the conversation.

‘It don’t seem right, Mister Tull,’ Sadly whispered by Dick’s side. ‘All this food laid out and nobody with a care to charge by the plate.’

Dick found it hard to contradict his informant. The main mess of The Zealous had been arranged with linen-covered tables and a sizeable buffet set across its surface. Sailors in white dress uniforms and enough braid to befit an admiral served behind the tables, lifting silver domes to reveal slices of lamb and beef roasted to perfection, meats swimming in their own juices. There were plates with cheeses from every county in Jackals, others overflowing with oranges, grapes and exotic fruit that Dick couldn’t even put a name to. The crew on the ship wouldn’t get to eat like this normally, that was a given. Probably not the officers, either.

All the money it costs for the state to mollycoddle a few rich merchants on this tub, and they’ll still make me scrabble like a swine in muck for a decent pension.

Every few minutes the distant sound of whining stabilisers swelled above the rumble of chattering guests, the flagship’s platform adjusting its angle to match the pitch of the seas she was cutting across. Officers from The Zealous were circulating through the hundred or so guests, making polite conversation with hands steadied on dress cutlasses hanging from their belts. Braying arses. They moved with an easy confidence, as if they were born to command. And in a sense they were. Mill-owners’ sons, wealthy quality, carrying the clout to launch them into an officer’s career in the fleet sea arm. How many of them’ve had to start as a common sailor and work their way up the ranks? How many of them’ve had to pull an honest day’s duties on board this tub? This is what my ancestors fought on Parliament’s sodding side for? To swap one bunch of masters for another? That was Dick Tull all right. Always the tenant, never the landlord. But your ancestors weren’t sitting on a comfortable saddle behind the lines waving an expensive sabre in the air, needled an envious little voice inside him. His ancestors? Just muddy-fingered citizen soldiers, clutching a pike or balancing an old heavy rifle on a tripod as they faced their mirror image across a field. Peasants who happened to be in the pay of gentlemen factory owners rather than gentlemen farmers when the war started.

There was a loud clinking on a glass as one of the officers called for silence. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests of The Zealous. Pray silence for Vice-admiral Cockburn.’

Stepping forward, the vice-admiral looked more like a pugilist than a navy officer. Short and stocky, he had shoulders wide enough for his crew to build seats above his lapels and place a sailor on either side to mount the vessel’s watch. Hard, ruthless eyes swept across the convoy’s visiting officers and Dick had no problem imagining his tenacious pursuit of old Blacky across half the world’s seas. The old sod resembled a pitbull, and once a pitbull sank its teeth into your flesh, it never let go until it’d claimed a healthy-sized chunk of meat.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of Operation Pedestal. I trust you are finding the wardroom’s hospitality as abundantly in your service tonight as our guns are in your vessels’ safe passage. The majority of you standing here today are merchants, and you do not need reminding that the prosperity of our nation has been built on free trade. That prosperity depends on the free passage of our vessels. But it seems there are some who need to be reminded that we will not suffer its impediment lightly. We lay no claim to what is under the waves. We cast no nets for fish here. We send down no divers to explore for minerals. However, where the Fire Sea has withdrawn, opening up a passage free of the need of firebreakers, we will allow no nation to extend its territorial limits and then demand a bandit’s toll priced in threats for transgressing open waters. We braved these currents when they were threatened by volcanoes and fire, and any enemy who seeks to close them to us now will find that we carry with us fire of our own. Fire enough for all foes foolish enough to play the privateer against our people!’

Polite applause echoed around the mess hall and the vice-admiral circulated through the crowd, shaking hands with a firm grip and making reassuring noises to the commercial masters. Spoken like a reliable little politician on the make.

Jethro Daunt’s beak-like nose appeared to be twitching in distaste. ‘There is something amiss here,’ he whispered.

‘You’re not wrong, amateur. It’s my tax brass being used to fatten up a mob of merchants who don’t need a crumb of it.’

‘No,’ said Daunt, sotto voce. ‘It’s the vice-admiral. He’s a blank to me — his body language, all of the tells that should be in his gestures and his voice, none of them are present. According to my finer intuition, it is as if he doesn’t exist.’

‘You might be having a bad day with that mumbo jumbo you’re taught in the church, but he looks solid enough to me.’ Solid enough to thump a shark unconscious with one hand and make a soup out if it with the other.

‘Synthetic morality is hardly mumbo jumbo,’ protested Daunt. ‘My skills in these matters have never failed me before.’

‘Maybe you’ve eaten a bad prawn,’ said Dick, toying with his greying moustache. He was enjoying needling the ex-churchman.

Sadly clung to his cane, waving away a sailor circling the room with a tray of drinks. ‘I don’t blame you, Mister Daunt. All that pitching and rolling in the launch to get across here. It’s enough to muck up anyone’s plumbing.’

Daunt peered across the room. ‘But it’s only the vice-admiral. Everyone else I’ve observed at the function is reading normally by my faculties. I wonder? I think it’s time that the master of the Purity Queen was introduced to our host for the evening.’

Dick groaned. They were meant to be keeping a low profile on the warship. Just enough for their absence not to be noticed and the Purity Queen ’s position in the convoy fall under suspicion. Having the ex-parson bearding the commanding officer in his own lair just because the amateur’s church senses were running spiky was hardly part of the plan. It wouldn’t take much for Daunt’s ignorance of the smooth running of a u-boat to be called into question, the kind of conversation that would be expected to pass between two nautical masters. Dick was desperately casting for a way for a first officer to divert his skipper without arousing additional suspicions when the ship’s siren sounded and did the job for him.

A voice followed the alarm, reverberating around the room from wall-mounted speakers. ‘General Quarters! All hands, all hands man your battle stations!’

Saved by the bell, except I don’t think this indicates any improvement in my sodding fortunes.

Two officers came running into the mess deck, out of dress uniform, a seriousness of purpose as they whispered to the vice-admiral. He nodded grimly and then departed with one of the pair trotting after him, leaving the task of explaining the situation to the remaining lieutenant. Even the vessel’s stabilisers couldn’t disguise the fact that the warship was picking up speed, the mess slanting upward as the ship rose higher on her aquaplanes. Outside her portholes the spray of stars in the sky flitted past as the flagship pressed on faster, the sounds of water churning under her monstrous propulsion wheels swelling to a crescendo. The assemblage fell into a hush for an explanation. As the strident wail of the alarm dropped away, the silence that replaced it hung heavy enough in the air for the Purity Queen ’s screws to carve slices out of it.

‘Quiet, please. We’ve picked up the sonar signature of Advocacy war craft ahead of the convoy. When we attempted to alter course to bypass them, other elements of the gill-neck fleet rose to the surface to our bow and stern, blocking our safe passage.’

Sounds of panic started to rise among the merchant crewmen.

‘They mean to extract their toll,’ noted Boxiron. It sounded as if the brute was relishing the chance for battle.

‘Send us back to our ship,’ someone shouted. The cry was picked up and began to echo out among the milling merchants and trader officers.

‘We are manoeuvring too fast to drop our launches,’ called the lieutenant. ‘You’ll need to stay confined to the wardroom until we’ve outrun the gill-necks.’

Angry shouts came from the guests, demands to slow down and sail them back to the vessels where their responsibilities lay. Used to unquestioning command on their own ships, hard men who could command coarse sailors, this wasn’t, Dick considered, the kind of crowd you wanted to turn ugly on you.

Dick watched the sailors who had been acting as stewards and hosts vanishing purposefully into the bowels of the ship, called to their battle stations. Not sprinting, but hardly slouching either. Well trained. Cogs in a machine that’s been greased by practice. ‘We need to get back to the boat bay.’

‘I concur,’ said Daunt, his gaze flitting between the angry faces of the convoy’s shipmasters. ‘It’s only a matter of time before someone on the bridge thinks to assign a company of marines to ensure the safety of their guests — not to mention our compliance.’

Sadly groaned and extradited himself from the comfort of a chair where he had sunk. ‘I’m not one to shy away from a little aggro, Mister Tull, but does it have to kick off at sea?’

‘I won’t let you die,’ said Dick, pushing his informant towards the door they had used to enter the mess hall. ‘I still need you to testify for me, don’t I?’

‘My word won’t count for much, says I.’

‘It’ll count for a lot less if I let Walsingham’s assassins toss your corpse in an alley back home.’ And it’s not as if I’ve got that many friends left alive, is it?

Boxiron closed the door behind them. The four of them were standing in the open on a deck gantry, the ship’s aft lanterns running behind them. Dick stared out between the flagship’s churning wheels. Nothing. How could you hope to spot anything out there? Just dark crashing waves, the night sky’s canopy only set apart from the sea by stars. No sign of the gill-necks. No sign of a war brewing.

‘They haven’t tried to stop a convoy before, have they?’ Sadly asked.

‘Harried only,’ said Boxiron. ‘I believe this counts as an escalation in tensions.’

It’s never made easy. Not for me. But it was more than that. Something about tonight felt wrong, and it wasn’t only the ex-parson’s odd reaction to the vice-admiral. The gill-neck force just happened to have chosen the precise time to corral the convoy when the masters of the convoy were off their bridges and on the flagship. Even at the best of times, moving a convoy was more akin to a drover driving his flock to market. With the captains gathered here, it wasn’t so much a convoy, as a seaborne shooting gallery. And as used as Dick was to bad luck, this felt too much like it was straying from coincidence into the realm he specialized in. Treason.