From the Deep of the Dark. Stephen Hunt

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СКАЧАТЬ hawker had been watching them, coming and going, Billy-boy and Dick, then the extra two bruisers from the board, just a single cab at the halt, with a supposedly lame horse that was suddenly able to follow their mark exiting the mansion. Dick’s frock coat exchanged for a nondescript great coat to blend in as one of the plainclothes’ inspector’s men when the police had turned up. The hawker had been watching the agents, and he’d pegged the peculiar gentlemen for what they really were, and now he was pretending to do a stock-take on the other side of the road so the agent wouldn’t see his face … his face. His face that had been one of the mugs on the sheets of known royalist rebels! Rufus Symons, that was the bogus hawker’s name. A descendent of the old aristocracy, the kind that hadn’t needed to pay an industrialist’s share of taxes to purchase their baronial titles. The forty-second Baron of Henrickshire, in fact. The county didn’t even exist any more, while the fury at being disinherited of its wealth centuries ago still festered on.

      But why would a royalist covertly watch his fellow rebels? Did the silly buggers suffer from the same factional infighting that the civil service saw? Only one way to find out the answer to that question, and in its answer, perhaps a chance for Dick to divert the board’s wrath when they brought him in to answer why the capital’s constables had been sent calling on Lord Chant for the sake of a slipped heel in the garden.

      Dick headed off in the opposite direction from the hawker and then doubled back on his tracks using the street behind the townhouses, following the rear of the crescent around to where he could catch up with the honourable Rufus Symons. As Dick suspected, once he’d left the cab halt, the fake hawker had wasted no time leaving the scene of his own watch. Symons hadn’t been brave enough to trail the exiting mark, not with his fellow rebel being followed by the secret police – or attempt to warn him, for that matter, that the authorities were following his tracks. But perhaps that merely showed a measure of sensible caution. They were rare creatures, now, royalists – supplanted by the lords’ commercial for centuries, hunted down and vilified with all the sins of the Jackelian nation still lumped upon their heads. You couldn’t blame Symons for wanting to preserve his own skin, whatever his motive for mounting a surveillance alongside the secret police.

      Dick hung back from the rebel, not wanting to get too close, the weight of the stolen candlesticks still swinging heavy inside his coat. When he had a moment, Dick changed the coat’s pattern by reversing the garment, warm brown fur on the outside – the kind of garment that might be worn by one of the repair crew of patchers that climbed the city’s towers. He changed his gait, too, a confident strut to match the expandable low-crowned John Gloater top-hat that was now covering his silver hair. There was no longer much of the hansom cab driver about Dick.

      It wasn’t difficult to stay out of the rebel’s sight, following behind him and masked by the falling snow at night, the gaps between each gas lamp filled with shifting mists and vapours. It got easier still, once the rich residential district fell behind, pressing towards the heart of the city, where Middlesteel’s streets still had patrons falling out of drinking houses and Jackelians whistling down cabs and climbing into private coaches as they exited theatres and gambling dens. Symons was spry on his feet, doing everything correctly to check if he was being followed. All the little halts and checks, the sudden changes of direction; stopping by the harp maker’s window to snatch a quick look behind him in the reflection of the glass panes. Ducking through the tavern crowd in the Crooked Chimney and out through the drinking house’s back entrance, into the side street where Dick was already waiting. But this was bread and butter to Dick. If he had an art, this was it. Wherever Symons looked, Dick Tull wasn’t, all the way underground to the atmospheric line at Guardian Lenthall station, and then they were both just part of the throng crowding its way onto the platform. When the next capsule shunted through the rubber airlock, Dick waited for the rebel to board, spotting the heap of the hawker’s jacket shrugged off on the platform and being trampled underfoot. Then the capsule’s brass doors swung shut, a slight hiss as its airtight integrity was proved to the instruments on board, before being shunted through the rubber curtain and into the pneumatic tubes, the pressure differential building up until they were hurtling through the airless tunnels like a bullet. There was Symons, now wearing the black jacket of the middling sort of clerk who inhabited the towers of the capital’s counting houses, no sign of his hawker’s tray, his narrow cheeks having acquired a thin pair of spectacles to perch on the end of his nose.

      Rufus Symons must have been comfortable that he wasn’t being followed – there were no false exits by the door of the atmospheric capsule as it pulled into the concourses of other stations, no sudden step backs into the carriage as if he had changed his mind about his destination at the last minute. When the rebel did exit, there were enough people moving on and off the concourse that Dick’s own exit didn’t appear contrived.

      Just a tired patcher returning home, but where was home? The answer to that appeared to be at the foot of one of the tall hills that surrounded the capital, the city thinning out into a cluster of village-like lanes at its outskirts, a couple of cobbled streets surrounded by shops and homes climbing upwards on a steep incline.

      I’ve been here before. On the business of the board, too. When was it?

      The feeling of recollection grew stronger as Dick followed Symons up the hill. There were large houses at the top of the hill, he recalled, with their own grounds. Not as expensive as Lord Chant’s, but then this district was too near the outskirts of the city to begin to be considered fashionable. A place for independent thinkers, the kind of person who didn’t care what others thought of them, who valued the view over the pneumatic towers at the capital’s heart, haze rising into the sky from the heated water flowing through their rubberized skins. The sort of soul who had no use for society invites and could see poetry in the venting steam from the mills below curling into the darkening sky, obscuring the collision lamps of airships passing through heaven’s command.

       This is where I’d end up if I only had the money for it. If only I could go back in time and take my chances again. A nice clean ward. No thieves rattling my skylight, waking me up in the small hours, sending me reaching for the pistol under my pillow. No drunken singing in the middle of the night from gangs of full-up-to-the-knocker louts falling out of alehouses.

      There was a village green at the top of the hill, a duck pond frozen enough that a couple of birds were skating over its surface, using the light spilling out from the crescent of houses and cottages on the other side to try to find a break and a drink of water. Dick’s quarry was heading towards an arched opening in a brick wall on the other side of pond, the wall’s shadow just taller than a man’s height, foliage from an orchard rising up beyond the bricks, and behind that, a single large tower crowned with an illuminated clock face.

      Dick didn’t need to see the residence’s name engraved in the brass plate by the entrance, just the sight of the folly rising like a landlocked lighthouse enough to shake the memory of his single visit here years before. Tock House. The State Protection Board knew well the true identity of the man who lived behind these comfortable walls; after all, they had been using it to blackmail him into working for the secret police for long enough. Commodore Jared Black. A royalist who had changed his identity so many times in his life on the run, it was a wonder he still knew who he was. And when he’d finally stopped running, the board had eventually caught up with him and sunk its claws in his tired old flesh. They had turned him and used him to their own ends.

       You’re meant to be our asset, Blacky, you old rascal. You had better not be playing both sides of the field. Backsliding with your old rebel friends.

      Here was information worth having. But he’d have to tread softly. The commodore was as sly as a fox, and there were always wheels within wheels where he was involved. He might act like a blustering old sea dog, but the man was deadly with a sabre and cunning enough to have survived everything fate and the dangerous, unasked for duties of the board had thrown at him. There were those who played in the great game СКАЧАТЬ