From the Deep of the Dark (44 page)

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.’