The Kingdom Beyond the Waves. Stephen Hunt

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ this. It was dangerous enough making a living as a smuggler in Jackals, rolling the dice that Greenhall’s revenue agents didn’t have the smuggler’s favourite bay outside Shiptown under observation at night, looking for u-boats like theirs cutting the line. Dangerous enough, without having some green young ’un like Tom Gashford given into his care to nursemaid. A boy who talked too much when he should have been quiet and said nothing at all when he should have been talking. But it was understandable that the skipper of the Pip Sissy wanted to pair young Tom with an experienced moonlighter like Chivery. The lad needed experience of the hidden paths the smugglers took through the forest, the clearings where casks of untaxed brandy and mumbleweed could be passed onto the moonrakers’ secretive wholesalers.

      Young Tom seemed convinced that their proximity to the cursewall would lead the redcoats down upon them. Since the attempted invasion, the Frontier Foot had been reinforced all along the Jackelian border, from Hundred Locks in the north to the Steamman Free State in the south. But the tremblers that the redcoat engineers had burrowed into the ground were for detecting sappers’ tunnels deep enough to cut under the cursewall, not designed to catch a couple of smugglers out plying the coast’s oldest trade. Having the lad with him was a risk, all the same. Of all the cargoes the canny submariners of the Pip Sissy smuggled out of Quatérshift to bring into Jackals, the contents of Tom’s sack were going to prove the most lucrative this cold night. The lad kicked his heels against the frost and the darkness. He obviously wished he were bunking back in the warmth of their u-boat too.

      ‘If there weren’t revenue men abroad tonight, I’d burn this rubbish to warm my fingers and damn the risk of the firelight,’ said Tom, swinging the sack nervously between his hands.

      The older moonraker laid his hand menacingly on his belt dagger. ‘Then you’d be a right fool, Tom. It’d be a tuppence turn of a coin whether our customer would slit your throat before the skipper tied you to the Pip Sissy’s conning tower and towed you back to Quatérshift for the crabs.’

      ‘Why should someone pay us good money for this rubbish, Chivery?’ The lad pulled out a handful of yellowed pamphlets from the sack and read out a few of the titles in the moonlight. ‘Directives of the First Committee. The heroes of the Faidéaux carriage works – an exhortation to labour. Equality’s Tongue: the thoughts and purity of the revolution. There ain’t anybody in Jackals that collects this revolutionary guff anymore, not since the war.’

      Chivery lit the bull’s-eye lamp he carried with him, making the signal that they were ready to trade. He took advantage of the tightly focused light to unroll the penny sheet he had brought with him. The Northern Monitor: respectable opinions, honestly and directly expressed. Its front cover bore an illustration of the First Guardian, Benjamin Carl, holding a four-poles bat with the words Jackelian oak carved on it. Bounding off the wood was the head of one of the First Committee of Quatérshift, while various caricatures from parliament clapped politely on the sidelines. There was a speech bubble rising from the leader of the opposition, Hoggstone, which read ‘Your game m’lord.’

      The great terror was still in full swing in Jackals’ neighbouring nation. Every month the Pip Sissy made its smuggling run, and every month their friends, contacts and colleagues in Quatérshift seemed gaunter and more malnourished. Made prematurely old by the upheavals – purge after purge – famine after famine – entire families dragged from their villages to the quick, deadly mercy of a Gideon’s Collar, the steam-driven killing machines that dominated every town square in Quatérshift. As Chivery’s news sheet indicated, even a high position within the Commonshare elite was no protection against the twitchy paranoia of the shifties’ secret police units or the whims of the street mob. Quatérshift was not a functioning republic any more – it was a dog gnawing on its own wounded, diseased flesh. The smuggler shook his head sadly. People got themselves into the strangest of pickles with their damn fool passions. If anyone in Jackals started carrying on like that, why, their neighbours would sneak them a visit one evening and give them a right good dewskitching – look on it as a favour done to them, too.

      ‘What’s that noise?’ Tom looked around.

      A whistling from the sky, then a dark monstrous shape dropped through the canopy of trees, leathery wings folding up like an angel of hell. Yelping, the lad stumbled back and fell over a branch.

      Chivery picked up the boy’s fallen bag from the grass. The lad looked on in astonishment. It was not one monster – it was two. The reptilian flying creature had dropped his passenger in the middle of the clearing and stepped back, wrapping his wings around his sides. It was a lashlite. A lashlite carrying a human-shaped figure. But was it a human? Dark high boots, black cape, a face concealed underneath a devil’s mask. Now the tales came back to the boy. The scourge of Quatérshift, vengeance taken human form. Furnace-breath Nick.

      Some said Furnace-breath Nick was the ghost of a Quatérshiftian nobleman come back from hell to haunt his executioners. Others claimed that he was a member of the Carlist revolution who had been betrayed and purged by the new rulers of the land – a spirit of death hunting his old compatriots. A few maintained that Furnace-breath Nick was a dark angel of the Quatérshiftian sun god, sent to punish the newly atheist republic that shared half of Jackals’ border.

      ‘Do you have it?’ The devil’s voice echoed around the clearing as if it was being sucked up from hell. Something inside the figure’s mask was altering his voice, making his words hideous.

      Chivery was not bothered. He had gone through this ritual many times before. ‘For the money, I have it.’

      A black-gloved hand lashed out, and a purse of coins spun across to be caught by the smuggler. Chivery bounced the coins in his palm, jangling them. ‘A bargain well met.’ He tossed the sack filled with Quatérshiftian propaganda over to Furnace-breath Nick.

      ‘I trust there will be another delivery next month?’

      ‘It’s getting harder,’ said Chivery. ‘Not because of the Carlists, mind. They’re still in a right old state. The First Committee wouldn’t notice if we snuck into the Palace of Equality and painted their arses blue right now.’

      ‘There will be no extra money,’ Furnace-breath Nick told the smuggler.

      Chivery went on, ignoring the comment. ‘It’s our own damn navy. They’ve stepped up airship patrols along the coast. It’s getting so we can’t break the surface off a Quatérshiftian cove without some RAN stat chasing us down.’

      ‘When the drinking houses of Hundred Locks run dry of smuggled brandy, I shall believe it’s too dangerous for you to break the blockade,’ said Furnace-breath Nick. ‘Until then … besides, like your boy says, this literature is just worthless junk.’

      Terrified, the young smuggler tried to crawl back into the woods. Furnace-breath Nick had been secretly listening in to his conversation.

      ‘Worthless to some,’ said Chivery, clinking the bag of coins again. ‘Yet you seem to place some value on it.’

      ‘Oh yes,’ laughed Furnace-breath Nick – not an encouraging sound. ‘But sink me, don’t people say I am quite insane?’

      With that, Furnace-breath Nick was seized by the lashlite, the beating of the creature’s wings sending the two smugglers’ tricorn hats blowing off into the trees as the devil-masked figure and the winged beast that served him vanished into the sky.

      ‘That was him,’ said young Tom. ‘The one in the sheets. Furnace-breath Nick.’

      ‘It was,’ agreed Chivery. ‘And you thought moonraking СКАЧАТЬ