LITMIR.BIZ

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the bulky walls that held the front door and the huge blast door hidden above, ready to smash down if the house’s owner decided to trigger it. ‘Even as we speak, in fact. He might turn up here later. And speaking of old friends, I suppose it is too much to hope that Professor Amelia Harsh is presently in residence within your house?’

      ‘You have missed her by three weeks, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘She’s off to the colonies with the rest of my friends. The miners out in Concorzia have found some rusting old ruin of a city out there, and so away my housemates have flown to poke about for relics and lost history.’

      ‘The professor’s favourite kind, as I recall,’ said Daunt. He bit back his curiosity and restrained himself from asking why the commodore had not transported them to the distant shores of the colonies in his own u-boat. After all, it had been on just such a mission to the dark Isle of Jago where Daunt and the old submariner had made their acquaintance. There was, Daunt sensed, something amiss in the old sea dog’s presence here all alone in the great tower.

      ‘I turned up at the university seeking the professor’s wisdom,’ explained Daunt. ‘They pointed me in the direction of Tock House.’

      ‘If it is wisdom you want, you may find a blessed library full of it upstairs,’ said the commodore. ‘The professor and my crystal-domed steamman friend Coppertracks were inside the house plotting and planning for near a month before the expedition sailed. We have half the tomes from the school of archaeology at St. Vines here, and don’t you think that Coppertracks didn’t have our shelves close to bursting with all his books before the professor turned up with a line of students carrying a mortal stationers’ worth of volumes for her.’

      ‘You can never have too much knowledge,’ said Daunt. ‘I would take it as a kindness if I might peruse her books inside your unusual home.’

      ‘Unusual is it?’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve missed that canny mind of yours, Jethro Daunt. Filled with all the cleverness of the church and honed like a sabre on a whetstone on your laws of synthetic morality. What strikes you as unusual about Tock House?’

      Daunt pointed up to the hall’s second landing as they climbed the stairs. ‘All those Gothic rose windows visible outside, illuminated with stained glass. But inside your hall, the only natural light is coming from above. The windows are fake, set in your walls’ outer layer – walls made of fibre-reinforced concrete set ten feet thick. Your home was built to resemble a rich man’s folly, but in fact, it is better fortified than a civil war pillbox. Kirkhill-period, constructed by a rich merchant after the unrest following Parliament’s victory over the king.’

      ‘Aye, you’ve the bones of it,’ admitted the commodore. ‘The windows from the fourth storey and above are real enough, and there is a courtyard in the centre of the tower that admits the sun. A weak spot if your foe climbs well enough.’ A dark thought seemed to furrow the commodore’s brow. ‘What wicked business brings you here today? The Inquisition has not engaged you again? As I recall, I barely escaped from that blasted hell-island of Jago the last time I became mixed up in your business.’

      ‘Thankfully, the patrons covering the expenses of my present case are a little more prosaic,’ said Daunt. ‘The burghers of the Middlesteel city council. You have, I trust, been following the hysteria outside … the upheavals in the city accompanying the vampire killings?’

      ‘That foolery?’ coughed the commodore, slowing on the stairs. ‘Bloodsuckers don’t leave drained bodies discarded like chicken bones outside food stalls at a winter’s fair. They’re clever and subtle and secretive. They come from the shadows to steal your body, and if your family is blessed lucky, you’re never seen again, for they turn their victims into their own kind. What I have heard reported in the papers is not vampires’ work, it’s common slaughter, bodies butchered desert-style with all their life drained by some maniacs.’

      ‘Slaughter perhaps, commodore, but the real force behind the murders is, I fear, far removed from the mundanity of broken minds with sharp blades and a depraved taste for blood.’

      ‘You don’t believe the papers’ fool nonsense do you?’ Leading them down a corridor with a polished wooden floor and oak-panelled walls, the commodore walked Daunt to a spiral staircase. ‘I had you for a sharper fellow.’

      ‘I have three sisters in the care of the church, talking in tongues, who suggest I would be wise to believe otherwise.’ Daunt pulled a notepad full of jottings out of his frock coat. ‘A set of triplets ranting in ancient languages, Jackelian dialects that predate the age of ice and the devastation of the cold-time.’

      ‘Myth and the dust of forgotten ages,’ sighed the commodore, leading him up the stairs and onto the next storey. ‘You are in luck then. That’s the professor’s passion, and my friend Coppertracks has a taste for it too. Some of the old steamer’s books are from the mountains of the Steamman Free State and as old as any I’ve seen.’

      Accompanying Daunt to the library entrance, the commodore unlocked a double pair of doors, pushing them open to reveal an extensive chamber split across two levels. Shelves lined the walls, a second-tier with hanging ladders to access the thousands of tomes racked above the room’s expensive hand-woven rugs. Like the rest of the tower, the library felt comfortably warm. Daunt took off his coat and tossed it onto the back of one of the dozens of leather armchairs scattered across the room.

      The commodore indicated the reading tables, still covered with papers, books and notes, as if the expedition to the colonies had only just left. ‘Make yourself at home, lad. This is all the professor’s on the table, as well as the books piled in the corner. Not that I have been reading any of them. My taste in printed matter bends more towards the penny-dreadfuls and rousing tales of adventure and skulduggery.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Daunt. ‘Well, I believe we both had our fill of that out beyond the Fire Sea. Without the professor to help me in my translations I may need to work late here.’

      ‘As late as you like, lad. You’ve got your pick of guest bedrooms on the next floor. I will be taking a roast chicken out of the range in an hour or two, and it’s a shame to open good red wine without honest company to honour it.’

      Jethro Daunt had, he realized, lost all sense of time in the library. He looked over to the one wall that wasn’t filled with shelves. A polished bronze wall clock was mounted there above an old royalist-era oil painting, an ornamental fireplace below. There was a dumbwaiter hatch to the left of the fireplace, and judging by the enticing smell of roasting meat emanating from it, the drop no doubt went all the way down to the kitchen in the keep-disguised-as-folly. The scene in the painting was of a boar-hunting party, the hunters unsportingly larking around in the brush wearing gas masks as their lance-carrying retainers waded through the undergrowth, eyes watering above water-soaked kerchiefs tied around their faces. In the corner of a painting, a boar slyly watched the party blundering about a mist of evil-looking yellow mustard gas, unsuccessfully trying to flush it out. Better to be the boar than the hunter, sometimes.

      Daunt stared worriedly at the clock. No sign of Boxiron yet. Daunt had told the steamman to seek him out at Tock House if he wasn’t to be found at their apartment. Yet Boxiron hadn’t turned up. Does that mean things have gone well, or badly?

      It was late, and Daunt’s progress in translating the possessed ramblings of the sisters Lammeter had been as slow as he had feared it would be without Professor Harsh’s assistance. He was trying to match his phonetic shorthand against actual words in languages that had been largely lost to the modern world. It hadn’t helped that the languages of the patchwork of tribal kingdoms that had preceded the long, dark centuries of the ice-age bore little relation to each other. He had to parse them through the descendent language of River Tongue, a trading language merchants and travellers used as a lingua franca across the continent. Surprisingly, Daunt found it easier to reference the older languages using the strange antiquarian books that the commodore’s eminent scientist friend, Coppertracks, had carried down with him from the mountains of the Steamman Free State. The steamman’s tomes sported engraved metal covers and pages made out of some composite material that felt like a mix of rubber and glass – as

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