From the Deep of the Dark (19 page)

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?’