From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dick and Sadly stood in the shadows of an alleyway, occupying one of the narrow passages between the imposing marble facades of the capital’s moneyed districts, a wide boulevard disgustingly well-lit by gas lamps even in the middle of the night. As head of the State Protection Board, Algo Monoshaft was entitled to a grace and favour residence supplied by the state. In this case, a series of rooms atop Victory Arch.

Dick had always considered it fitting that the civil servant charged with the protection of the realm from its enemies should be ensconced inside a monument built to celebrate Parliament’s victory in the civil war. If me and Sadly get in there alive, who knows, maybe the old arsehole’ll continue doing the job. That didn’t mean Dick failed to begrudge Algo Monoshaft his polished walnut floors and his servants and his expensive antiques and every penny of the luxuries he enjoyed while Dick had shivered in the cold comfort of Damson Pegler’s cheap boarding rooms. Perched in gilded opulence atop the ceremonial gateway’s four arches. Well, at least Dick knew where to find the senile sod, even if it was in the lap of state-patronized luxury. They might have had an easier job of it, if the head had lived in Steamtown with the majority of the capital’s other steammen. But Algo Monoshaft was living high on his perks, so here the head was, and across there Dick and Sadly would have to go.

Sadly checked outside the alley. ‘Nobody watching that I can see, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there to get us.’

‘Oh, they’re watching all right,’ said Dick. ‘Walsingham isn’t going to let anyone he doesn’t trust within a country mile of the old steamer.’

‘They can’t all be sea-bishops across there,’ said Sadly. ‘They don’t have the bleeding numbers to impersonate everyone, says I.’

Dick cradled the heft of the Court’s heavy gas rifle. It was a queer-looking weapon, but it’d plough a furrow through anyone standing between him and the master of the board. ‘Doesn’t matter. There’s an execution warrant out on the both of us. If there’s dustmen inside the arch, they’ll cut our throats first and ask questions later. Won’t have time to separate intentions inside there.’

‘Well then, Mister Tull, some good men are likely to die for a misguided cause.’

Sadly’s rodent-like features were darting about and he looked like he was ready to sprint out to the cover of the nearest building, but Dick laid a hand on the Court agent’s shoulder. ‘We’re not going to run up to the front and shake scullery windows looking for a way in. If it’s an assault you’re after, we could’ve landed that aerostat of yours on the roof and kicked in a skylight.’

‘How then?’

‘I don’t know what trade-craft they taught you in the Court, but me, I was taught by good old Sergeant Childers back in the day. I’d say he was a grim old bugger, except I think I’ve turned into him.’ Dick led Sadly down the narrow passage and into a small square off the side. There was an oblong of grass bounded by seats on four sides, the kind of place clerks and clackers would come during their lunch to sit and stare at the prestigious volume of pigeon droppings painting the marble statues lining the path. ‘Always good for a lesson, was Childers, and a kicking if his education didn’t stick in the head of the young fools palmed off onto him to train.’ Dick approached a life-sized statue of a man clutching the pommel of a great sword with two mailed hands. He eased himself behind it enough to slip his fingers towards a shadow on the statue’s back, twisting his hand around an awkward angle to reach inside the hidden shelf — feeling for the cobweb-ridden rusting lever he had once been shown. ‘Lessons like never enter somewhere you haven’t located the back door.’ As Dick twisted the lever, the statue ground forward on its plinth, revealing a square well with a metal ladder riveted into the shaft. ‘And a back door can be a front door too, when you don’t want to be seen going in.’ Maybe I would have shown it to that young oaf William before I’d retired. Not that Billy-boy would’ve listened. He hadn’t thought there was much that Dick knew worth the passing on.

Climbing down into it, the shaft led to a narrow tunnel, a ceiling low enough they both had to stoop. Dim shafts of light emerged from vents intended for ventilation and there was a layer of dust thick enough to indicate the tunnel hadn’t been used in quite a time. Sergeant Childers had been right about this, but then the sod had been old school. It was a depressing thought to Dick, but now, so was he. As long as you didn’t count getting ahead in the board, there were quite a few tricks and skills he would be taking with him unpassed when he left. Plenty about doing the job right. Not that effectiveness counted for much among the quality that ran the civil service. Being in the appropriate place to take credit with the right accent was more important to preferment than anything so grubby as consistently getting results. That was what the proletariat was for. But if Dick lived through this, if he got this job right… they won’t be able to steal the credit for this result. Rooting out conspiracy within the board; nobs like Walsingham not just exposed as enemy agents, but revealed as abhuman. The state had awarded large discretionary pensions to fools for far less than Dick was attempting to do.

There was another vertical shaft at the end of the narrow corridor, a claustrophobic climb up into the bowels of Victory Arch, then a series of horizontal passages branching out which the two of them had to traverse crawling on all fours. Built into the floor at irregular intervals were little wooden flaps that could be lifted up, revealing small eyeholes giving onto the rooms below. When it came to tradecraft, you had to forget what you read in penny-dreadfuls and saw on the stage. No self-respecting spy would order a builder to construct a surveillance hole in a wall, much less behind the eyes of a strategically placed oil painting. Marks waiting in a room would get bored, would look around — and wandering eyes were quick to spot little flickers of movement on supposedly static surfaces. But a ceiling? Nobody looked up at ceilings; crane a neck for too long and all you were going to get for your trouble was a neck ache. And sounds, they carried up quite naturally — just ask anyone in the slum tenements of the rookeries about how noisy their neighbours were. Of course, sound carried down too, which is why the dusty passage Dick was squeezing through was lined with a stretch of cork across its floor and walls.

Dick was in the lead and he laid down his gentleman’s cane and indicated to Sadly that they should halt, taking the time to lift the wooden flap off a surveillance hole. It proved to be a good spot, right above a chandelier, the top of which had a hidden ring of mirrors around the crystals, giving angled views of the entire chamber below. There were glass cases containing old swords, armour and a variety of personal items that had belonged to prominent parliamentarians centuries ago. They were still above the public part of the arch, where the idle and curious could pay a penny or two to gawk at the faded glories of the monarchist’s defeat. He closed the flap. They continued on their way, ignoring the hatches in the passage’s roof that would lead up into concealed entrances inside the apartments. Dick had been here twice before, inside the arch, not its hidden passages. Both times when he was starting out in his career with the board, bearing official document pouches for the head to peruse and sign. From what Dick could see of the rooms through the surveillance holes, they hadn’t changed much in all those years. Burnt larch panelling, antiques on display, the occasional night watchman patrolling with a gas-fed lantern and a belted cutlass. The private apartments above were much the same, except the watchmen were board officers. Far too many of them for a normal night’s duty in this place; far too alert and well armed.

Dick lowered the wooden flap on the surveillance hole. ‘They really don’t want any bugger getting in to see the head.’

‘Then they’re due a disappointment, says I.’

‘Sergeant Childers told me the head’s private rooms have an escape hole. He’s up top, we have to climb another two storeys.’

‘Let’s be about it, then, eh, Mister Tull.’

It was slow, careful work. Dick hoped that Monoshaft would be able to squeeze though these passages on the way down. They had been built in an age before the old steamer had taken charge of the board’s resources. They reached the staff quarters below the head’s private apartments, and surveying the corridors, Dick spotted Corporal Cloake sitting at a table in the main corridor, a number of burly-looking men lounging about, some playing cards next to a pile of coins. Dick lifted his cane up and made to activate the sea-bishop detection mechanism, but Sadly tugged on the cane to stop him.

‘Don’t be wasting its charge,’ whispered Sadly. ‘That one’s got to be one of them. He was at Tock House when they came for us.’

‘You’re right, some of the guards too, probably.’ But not all of them, or I doubt if they’d be playing cribbage on the table.

Sadly pulled the gas gun slung across Dick’s back. ‘This’ll sort ’em out, either way. Come on.’

Dick was about to shut the surveillance flap when a figure walked down the corridor and the sergeant had to stifle his reaction. Jethro Daunt. It was one thing to know at the back of your mind that people like Cloake and Walsingham had been murdered and replaced by doppelgangers — Walsingham had never seemed particularly human to him in the first place. But to actually see one of the sea-bishops mimicking a man Dick knew was presently hundreds of miles away on the Isla Furia sent a waterfall of chills crawling down his spine.

‘What is it, Mister Tull?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.’

Reaching their destination, Dick used the butt of the rifle to hammer aside the rusty bolts securing the hatch above his head, a shower of oxidised metal flakes falling onto his sweating face. There was a clockwork box meant to trigger the escape route from outside but it had stopped functioning — possibly centuries ago. The hatch opened above the crawl space. When Dick pulled himself out he found himself in a large wardrobe littered with mothballs but no clothes — attire superfluous to a steamman’s needs. There was an oblong of angled slats in the wood giving a view out onto the room beyond.

‘Any guards?’ asked Sadly, coming up behind Dick.

Dick shook his head. ‘Monoshaft’s said to only allow a single house servant inside to clean. Doesn’t trust anyone not to nose around his papers and notes.’

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

Clicking open the wardrobe door, Dick was at a loss to know what cleaning the unlucky servant was actually allowed to do. All around the room, every surface was scattered with pieces of paper covered over with half-mad scrawls, annotated cutting from newssheets and pieces of string and chord connecting the scraps like veins on a drunk’s face. It was as bad as the mess back in the board’s offices. Sadly picked up a faded cartoon cut out of the front of the Middlesteel Illustrated News, a drawing of two senior members of the government pinching each other’s noses. The speech bubble had been scrawled over, frantic handwriting demanding, Why is this here? Why, why?

‘He’s not playing with a full deck of cards anymore, is he?’ said Sadly.

‘Give him his due. He’d worked out the Court was back in the great game when I thought he just blowing steam from his stacks,’ said Dick, ‘He connected the gill-necks and the royalists working together before anyone else.’

There was a noise from the connected room and Sadly unshouldered his rifle while Dick padded silently up to the door. The Court’s agent was holding his rifle ready, lowered and angled towards the floor, and Dick rested his cane against the wall, then tipped the door open before springing into the room with his gun gripped in both hands.

‘You!’ Algo Monoshaft was scrabbling around the floor, laying lengths of string around the spirals of paper littering his expansive carpet. He had a dozen pots of dye of different colours scattered around him, and appeared to be painting the strings according to the strictures of some mad colour code. Monoshaft didn’t sleep much, but at least they had caught the board’s head unawares.

‘You murdered William Beresford. I knew it would be you who came for me, sergeant.’

‘Stay where you are, sir,’ said Dick. ‘I don’t know how many hidden buttons you’ve got to call for help, but I reckon a cautious old steamer like yourself will have a few.’

‘I though you were too trivial to be turned by them,’ said the steamman. ‘But here you are to kill me, just like you slew poor young Beresford softbody.’

‘The opposite of that, sir,’ said Dick.

‘Sweet lies. Always lies, when the treasonists are everywhere.’

‘Just who do you think sent us?’ asked Sadly.

‘The vampires, of course,’ said Algo. ‘They have been turning all of my officers, corrupting them into the half-living, feeding on the people’s blood and spreading their sickness.’

‘Not quite, sir,’ said Dick. ‘But you were right about the Court of the Air, and you were right about the gill-necks working with the royalists. You were bang on about that.’

‘That’s it sergeant, flavour a lie with the truth. You can transmute your form into bats and vermin, that’s how you slipped past my soldiers outside. But you can’t drain my blood; I have only oil and vapour for you. That’s why I have to die. Then you’ll have one of the section heads replace me, they’re all your vampiric allies now. I can’t trust any of you.’

Dick lifted his rifle out and as a sign of good faith placed it on a tabletop to his side. ‘I’m not here to kill you, sir. I’m here to ask for your help. We have been infiltrated all right, but not by what you think. I’ve just come back from what passes for the Court of the Air these days and I need your help to rescue them from the gill-necks. I need the RAN and the fleet sea arm to go to sea in defence of the nation and our interests or there’ll be nothing left of the Kingdom by the end of the year.’

‘Lying,’ spat Algo with enough venom that his voicebox shook. ‘It’s a war you want.’

‘Only against the real enemy.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Sadly, raising his rifle to the ceiling and loosing a chattering burst into the plasterwork before dropping the barrel towards Dick and the steamman.

‘What are you doing?’ Dick shouted as the sound of panic and guards clattering outside the private apartments began to filter through to where they were standing.

‘It’s not a war, says I. No more than when a farmer brings his swine in from the field and takes a razor to their throats. What do you call that? A harvest?’

‘You bastard, Sadly, you’ve sold us out.’

‘I told you,’ warbled Algo. ‘I warned you to trust no one. There are treasonists all around us.’

Sadly activated the sea-bishop detection mechanism on his cane and tossed it towards Dick. The eyes in the copper-boar’s head handle were filled with orange light and burning with a fierce urgency. ‘Well, someone in the room is not of this world, and you must be fairly sure you’re still a human.’

‘You can’t be one of them,’ said Dick, reeling in shock. ‘Daunt can sniff their kind out. The amateur pegged Vice-admiral Cockburn for a sea-bishop straight away, like a walking blank he said.’

Sadly leered. ‘I find your nickname for our race almost as disgusting as having to bear your fetid appearance, cattle. We know our kind as the Mass. Our numbers are as infinite as our dominion is eternal. While you are as dull as you are repellent, so let me explain for you, we discovered Daunt’s ability back on the island. That was where Barnabas Sadly was taken — that was when I replaced him. To fool Jethro Daunt, all I needed to do was intensify my mesmeric field and convince the creature he was now seeing all the physical cues he expected to observe from his fellow cattle.’ The creature laughed without warmth. ‘Your crippled friend really shouldn’t have brought a cane filled with a tracking isotope into the prison camp, even an inert compound. You animals make it too easy. I let you escape and lead me straight back to the location of the key-gem, Mister Tull. Days spent on the Isla Furia, listening to your pathetic plans to defy the Mass, time well spent making sure the memories of the defences I ripped from the Court’s agent were reliable and up-to-date.’ The Sadly creature’s rifle barrel twitched as he saw Dick glancing towards the rifle he’d laid aside. ‘I wouldn’t reach for that gun, animal. It would be a shame if you were to die immediately. You have assisted the Mass so well. You deserve to see our people’s final victory, even if you don’t live quite long enough to fully regret it.’

There were the sounds of a door breaking, the crack of approaching boots on the floor. ‘I wanted to see how much the head of the State Protection Board had uncovered of the Mass’s activities on his own. But here he is — half-senile and blinded by the superstitious myths of your primitive land — foolish machine creature. Your kind must have built his, once, animal. He’s exceeded his creators only in longevity, not in intellect.’

‘You can’t turn me into one of you,’ said Algo. ‘I have no veins to spread your vampiric sickness.’

Sadly laughed and his shape began to shimmer, reforming as a facsimile of the old steamman. ‘I don’t need to bite you to become you, senile contraption. It’s your memories I am unable to steal. Too well encrypted by that rusted calculating device you call a monarch back in the Steamman Free State. But it matters not. Your kind is as few in number as mine is legion. Perhaps we shall keep some of you functioning as slaves — that was your original function, was it not? There is certainly no sustenance on you to feed the Mass.’ The sea-bishop jabbed his gun towards Dick. ‘You shouldn’t feel too bad, animal. You are livestock and we are wolves and that which preys on a creature is always quicker and faster and more intelligent than it. The best plan you could come up with is attempting to repeat the same trick your bitch-queen played on the Mass centuries ago, sealing us in a trap of time. Even if your friends weren’t going to be walking into an ambush, your witless scheme would never have borne fruit a second time. The shield technology she modified to trap us is under constant guard. What is it you animals say? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’

The creature kept Algo’s appearance as behind him, the room was filled with armed men, Corporal Cloake and the fake Jethro Daunt among them.

‘Bob my soul,’ said the Daunt creature, its eyes lighting up with a passion that the original rarely showed. ‘It seems we have bagged a couple of intruders.’

‘This assassin broke into my apartments,’ said the sea-bishop masquerading as the head of the board. ‘One of our own officers gone rogue. Yes, there’s an execution warrant outstanding on Sergeant Tull here, and the mechanical is a poorly designed automatic engineered to impersonate me. Take them away, Jethro softbody. Consider your commission with the board fulfilled. Lock them away deep where we keep our most dangerous prisoners.’

Dick moaned. He had failed. The sea-bishops held the Kingdom and the Advocacy in their thrall, they had the measure of the Isla Furia’s defences and that old sea-goat and Charlotte Shades were walking straight into a trap. Dick’s retirement was finally upon him, and he wouldn’t end up struggling on his scanty pension. Not in the slightest.

Many cities were said to glitter metaphorically — to gleam with gas lamps and hotels and expensive restaurants and the moneyed classes chasing their dreams by opening their wallets. The capital of the Advocacy, however, didn’t need metaphors to sparkle. Lishtiken lay there on the underwater plain with its diamond towers and its ruby-shaped domes running along the seabed, silhouetted against the underwater mountains and shining like a thief’s dream. The Advocacy had grown a coral-like city out of crystals, the splendour of its gem buildings overlaid with knots of pearl-coloured spheres clustered together, fish spawn clinging to reeds. There was movement all across the vista — gill-necks swimming freely in every dimension between thousands of openings, larger chariot craft bearing citizens between buildings. Connecting everything as though a fine mesh, transparent tubes hung as a capsule-less version of the Kingdom’s atmospheric network — artificial currents sucking swimmers effortlessly on their way across the capital.

But for all its obvious wealth, Charlotte wasn’t here to loot Lishtiken, and nor were the thousands of seanore warriors picking their way carefully through the sea farms on the capital’s eastern flank.

The commodore’s voice sounded in Charlotte’s diving helmet. ‘They’re lax today, lass. All this way up to their mortal doorstep and hardly a patrol boat to make us duck on the whole journey.’

‘Their fleet will be busy and bloodied at the Isla Furia by now,’ said Charlotte. ‘With word of the sea-bishops’ presence being spread among the nomads, the monsters must be growing desperate to get their hands on the key-gem.’ Of course, the sea-bishops’ infiltrators inside the Advocacy will be quick to write such stories off as the ramblings and propaganda of superstitious savages, and that will hold up, at least for a while.

‘Ah,’ the old u-boat man grumbled, ‘in my experience, when something is too good to be true, it usually is.’

Vane came up behind them, the nomad chieftain so weighted down with rotor-spears, armour and weaponry it was a wonder he could cut through the water with the ease he did. ‘There are darkships secreted in the city?’

‘At least two of them,’ said Charlotte. She could feel the press of their presence like a cancer, an illness upon the world. ‘And their masters too.’ Ensuring their grip on the Advocacy’s leadership did not weaken at this pivotal point in the invaders’ fortunes.

‘We will give you half an hour to get inside before we begin our attack — you will find that adequate.’ He waved his arm and Maeva came forward, travelling lightly armed compared to her fellow nomads. ‘Maeva has been inside Lishtiken many times, leading our trading parties. She knows its ways best and shall guide you.’

The commodore didn’t look pleased by the prospect. ‘You don’t have to be doing this now, Maeva.’

‘You would get lost two feet behind your own sleeping bubble,’ said Maeva. ‘It’s best someone who knows which way the tide flows is on hand to guide you though the city-dwellers’ defences.’

‘You should stay here,’ he insisted. ‘I had a mortal strange dream last night. I don’t think things will end well, and I don’t want you along to share my fate.’

‘I’ve as many grey hairs as you, Jared Black. I’m not planning on living forever. It is done. I will be your scout. This is my decision to make, not yours. You don’t get to do that again to me.’

‘You will lose many fighters in the assault,’ Charlotte warned Vane.

Vane shrugged. ‘I was not planning on living forever, either.’

‘Remember, we only require a diversion,’ said Charlotte. ‘Nobody among the grand congress is expecting you to lay siege to Lishtiken and successfully seize the capital.’

Vane shivered with the thought of it. ‘Enclosed by walls and corridors, unable to feel currents running across my skin. Hiding my face from the tides like a frightened hermit crab drawn down into its shell. What would I do with a city? Such a life would be as living entombed.’

‘Remind them of the old ways then, lad,’ said the commodore.

‘I am glad you are going, silver-beard,’ said Vane. ‘If you stayed too long with the clan I would probably have ended up killing you.’

‘Better an enemy should kill me than a friend,’ said the commodore. ‘Let’s give those dark-hearted demons down there first crack at my old bones.’

‘Half an hour!’ the war leader called after them as they left. ‘Move fast and true.’

Urged by Maeva, the three of them connected voice lines between their suits and they travelled forward joined together as though by a long umbilical chord. ‘No open communications from here on in,’ ordered Maeva. ‘The edge of the city is patrolled by dolphins and they can detect voiceboxes at a distance far beyond any clansman’s hearing.’

‘It’s an exposed approach,’ said Charlotte.

‘Not through there.’ Maeva’s gloved hand indicated the vast nets of fish pens floating tethered along the sea farms. ‘We cut a small hole through the mesh and move with the schooling fish. Too much activity inside for three uninvited guests to be spotted.’ She smiled beneath the visor of her helmet. ‘We just have to hope that no farmer tries to spear us for poachers.’

They made the journey unimpeded, observed only by silvery clouds of darting garfish. All the farmers they spotted outside the nets were busying themselves by their feeding pipes, testing water inside the pens, dipping nets inside to check catches for diseases that could kill their livestock. Before they broke cover, Maeva sketched a rough outline of the city and asked Charlotte where she sensed the darkships’ presence. Charlotte tapped a section more or less in the centre of the underwater metropolis.

‘That is the heart of the Judge Sovereign’s rule,’ said Maeva. ‘The Temple of Judgements, or somewhere very close to it.’

The commodore groaned. ‘Poor old Blacky and his unlucky stars. Why could these demons not be hiding their wicked darkships in a cavern on the outskirts of Lishtiken? They have to be in the best-defended spot in the whole nest of gill-necks.’

Charlotte shrugged inside her diving suit. ‘Honey, the sea-bishops feed on power as much as blood. I wouldn’t expect them to be anywhere else.’ She tapped the crystal hanging around her neck, a small bulge beneath her suit’s fabric. ‘If it comes to it, I can use the Eye of Fate to convince any Advocacy soldiers we meet that I’m the Judge Sovereign himself.’

‘What about the sea-bishops, lass, will that little geejaw of yours work on them?’

‘Queen Elizica once used it to convince the enemy that she was a sea-bishop wearing a human form,’ said Charlotte. ‘I hope I can do the same. Their minds are a lot stronger than ours are — bred to be resistant to their own trickery.’ But I’ve been using the crystal for far longer than Elizica when she crept into the seed-city. Surely that must count for something?

‘Hope? On such a small hope swing the lives of us all. The blessed Eye of Fate is well named, so it is.’

Maeva pointed to a stretch of Lishtiken’s waters that seemed darker than the rest of the sea. ‘That is where we must go. There is a way to bypass the city’s defences and patrols over there.’

‘That’s a cloud of plankton, Maeva,’ noted the commodore. ‘Is it doing what I think it’s doing?’

‘Maybe. Do you believe it’s feeding on the city-dwellers’ waste?’

The commodore’s face frowned inside his rebreather. ‘Crawling along pipes full of turds. Is that what you want to inflict upon me? Is this your revenge on poor luckless Blacky for taking off all those years ago?’

‘It’s a start, Jared. A start only.’