From the Deep of the Dark by Stephen Hunt Page B

left running in our land that she must come tormenting me, sending visitors to my door until she drives me out of my peaceful rest? First poor Rufus, then that black-hearted secret policeman Dick Tull, and now you. Where was she when the royalist fleet-in-exile was broken at Porto Principe by Parliament’s airships? Where was she when my wife died, when my daughter was killed? Where was she when we stood together, Jethro Daunt, on that terrible land of Jago and faced down the army of the ursine and the terrors of that terrible singing tomb and its fearful weapon fit for dark gods? But now, ah, there’s trouble with the people of the underwater nation and poor old Blacky is meant to abandon his nice warm house and put his neck on the line again! And for what? A parliament that turned my noble ancestors out of their land and hunted me for most of my damned life. Where is the justice in that, where is the fairness in that?’
    Daunt had never seen the commodore so agitated. He raised his hands placatingly. ‘Peace, good captain. Please, it is Boxiron and I who’ve been engaged on this case by the capital’s aldermen. I appreciate the hospitality of your library, but I certainly wouldn’t ask you to share whatever dangers might present themselves while resolving this case.’
    ‘You won’t have to, lad.’ The commodore shook his head as Daunt extended out his bag of Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops. ‘She’ll do for me, just you wait and see. There’s never a choice with her. She’s the land, and if you wait long enough the land will take everything from you, even the dust of your bones when you’ve sacrificed all that you have to give. It is my family’s fate, and I’ve run from a lot of things, but fate is one beast you can never outpace.’
    ‘We chart our own way on the Circle’s turn. There are no gods worth believing in. No fate save that which
we
will into being.’
    ‘I hear the parson left in you talking,’ said Commodore Black. ‘But you will see. She’ll have her way.’
    ‘Don’t believe in the gods, good captain. Refuse them.’
    ‘Too late for that, lad. For the spirit of Queen Elizica believes in me. And now, I fear, she believes in you too!’
    Daunt let the calm and the quickening of the sweet’s flavour pass through his head, all the tiredness and cobwebs clearing.
They tormented me once, the old gods, Badger-headed Joseph and his kin. But now I am their master. I’ve come too far to swap their tyranny for that of a queen. Even if she is the queen of our land.
    ‘I shall hold to what is right and rational, and you must do the same.’
    Getting up, the commodore returned with a dusty bottle of wine bearing what appeared to be an intricate label written in Cassarabian script. ‘Well, that would be this, then. Let’s drink while we are able. I shall toast my unlucky stars and you may toast your synthetic morality and whatever other inventive teachings the church saw fit to squeeze into your clever noggin before they booted your arse out of the rational orders.’
    The two of them sat. And they drank.
     
    There was a chill in Dick’s room when he returned home, the kind that seeped deep into a man’s bones and numbed them from the inside out. Dick Tull might only keep two rooms in the cheap second-storey tenement he rented, but even so, his single fireplace always seemed too small to put out enough heat, no matter how much coal he piled inside it.
    Dick left his greatcoat on. Thin walls. Thin floors. Thin ceilings. Cheap windows with as much frost on the inside as outside.
I’ll be out of here soon enough. The report I handed into the board. Proof that the royalists and the gill-necks are conniving together. Wait till the head gets to read that. His suspicions confirmed. My promotion in the bag. Able to afford rooms in a respectable district. Not too expensive, of course. That’d be a waste. But somewhere my neighbours aren’t living twenty to a room. Screaming and shitting and