LITMIR.BIZ

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Ambitious. Well educated. All the things that Dick was not. Give it a couple of years, and if by some good chance Dick was still on the payroll of the board, then he would likely be working for Billy-boy here. If not him, someone just like him. They all got promoted over his head. And here he was, shivering on a rich man’s street, all these years later. The quality giving Dick orders, giving him long, tiring night-time surveillances with added apprentice-minding duties.

      At some point in this long dirty trade, Dick had turned around, and when he’d glanced back, his life had passed him by. The worst thing was, in retrospect Dick could gaze back and see all the decisions he’d made, settlements that he could have remade, to nudge his life towards the better. The things he should have said, the people he should have talked to, the paths he should have gone down. There was a trend now in the penny-dreadfuls – cheap fiction from the stationers’ stalls – for what were called counterfactuals, invented histories that could have been, but hadn’t. Dick could see the counterfactual for his own life – a career where he had ended up as a senior board officer, with a fat pension and a big house and a plump happy wife, smiling sunny children waiting for him when he got home. And in that counterfactual, perhaps the Dick Tull in that world was dreaming of a thin, hungry doppelganger of himself, his hair running grey beyond his years, and nothing to return to of an evening except cold rented lodgings in one of the least salubrious parts of town. A shrew of a landlady who spied on him just as he spied on the enemies of the Jackelian nation. It’s never made easy. Not for me.

      Dick glanced down the street. As late as it was, the street was still surprisingly empty – only a few street hawkers trying to entice householders’ servants to the doorstep for a final purchase of the day. And it wasn’t just because of the thin white layer of snow and frost painting the cobbles and trees along the road. There was something else stalking the streets of the capital, if the newssheets were to be believed. Vampires. Tales like that should have been confined to the pages of the penny-dreadfuls that were one of Dick’s more faithful companions in bed, but now the Middlesteel press was running with headlines as sensational as their editors’ imaginations. Bodies were being discovered in the capital of the Kingdom drained of every last vestige of blood. In the east of the city where Dick’s humble lodgings could be found, the people were patrolling the narrow streets in gangs of vigilantes – although they preferred to call themselves the ‘city militia’. The Circle help anyone that got in their way. For, like Dick, the Middlesteel mob had never seen a vampire. In fact, until now, nobody who wasn’t a fan of inferior literature had ever encountered a vampire in the Kingdom of Jackals. This presented something of a problem for the rough militia rabble … but one that had not proved insurmountable. With the mob’s usual ingenuity, they were now resorting to the simple expedient of hanging any strangers who had the misfortune to be travelling unrecognized through the streets.

      Of course, in a rich area like this, no militia had been formed of middle-class clerks, bankers, merchants and their household staff. The rich didn’t get their hand dirty, that’s what they paid their taxes for. Quite literally. For to be made a Lord in the Kingdom was not a matter of birth now, but a matter of money. The industrial purchase system. The revenue service kept a record of how much tax was paid by each citizen. Passing set amounts over your lifetime would automatically trigger a title … a small amount of tax earning a knighthood, a filthily large amount guaranteeing a dukedom.

      ‘Here we go, then,’ said Dick, the noise of iron wheels rattling on cobblestones given amplification by the cold night air. Around the corner emerged one of the more recent varieties of horseless carriages. Steam-driven, the carriage was wider, taller and a great deal less elegant than the high-tension clockwork driven vehicles that until recently had been the mainstay of traffic running through the capital’s streets. But that was progress for you. Legislation had been passed last year in Parliament allowing these ugly, cheap, steam-driven brutes to share the road, and now the capital’s crowded passages were filled with the smoke and noise of such things. The press had nicknamed them kettle-blacks and already the omnibus companies had pressed them into service for the conveyance of paying passengers. If Dick had been a real hansom cab driver, he might have been retiring in the next few years, he suspected. Always change. Never for the better.

      Pulling to a stop, the vehicle’s stacks melted a few flurries of snow drifting in the air. Down below, a heavy iron door jolted open, spilling yellow gaslight from the passenger cabin out onto the pavement. A hunched figure emerged into the light, a dull brown workman’s coat pulled tight over his frame against the cold, the man coughing in the chill air after exiting the heat circulating from the cabin’s boiler.

      Dick Tull peered from the cab halt. Damn my tired old eyes. Is that the man we’ve been waiting for, is that Carl Redlin? Ask the boy. The boy will know. ‘Is that Carl Redlin?’

      ‘I think so,’ said Billy-boy. Surreptitiously, the young agent used the cover of their hansom cab to inspect the images they had been provided of likely callers at Lord Chant’s house. He located the sheet with their mark’s likeness, excitedly tapped it, and then slipped the sheets back under the flap cabmen used to store their street maps.

      Well, then, perhaps there was some truth to this nonsense assignment their masters within the board had assigned them. Captain Twist was an old pseudonym used by royalists when they returned to the Kingdom with mischief on their minds. And now Captain Twist was abroad in Middlesteel again, with his rascally minions scuttling about the city. Dick was surprised. After all, nobody knew better than he did how far the card of the royalist threat was overplayed by Parliament to bolster its popularity. Yet here was a known royalist, Carl Redlin, calling at the residence of Lord Chant.

       I should be relieved. Now they’ll pull me off this sodding cold surveillance and put someone on the job who counts. Who would’ve thought it, after all these centuries, Captain Twist and his merry men back in the Kingdom?

      In the wall by the side of the gate there was a recess with a wooden handle to pull, and the visitor placed his hand into the niche, gave the handle a tug, then yanked his flatcap down tight as the gates moved back on a counterweight. Their mark didn’t wait for the gates to fully open, he was in too much of a hurry. As soon as there was enough of a gap for him to wriggle through the space he did so, and then he was off, down the path that led up to the white marble-fronted mansion, his footsteps dragging against the gravel. The distant barking of a dog greeted the man as the main doors swung open. Too far away for Dick to see who’d allowed him inside Lord Chant’s mansion.

      ‘Come on, sarge,’ urged William, ‘we can follow Redlin in. We might be able to see who he’s going to meet if we can get to a window.’

      ‘Are you joking me, boy?’ said Dick. ‘We haven’t been ordered to do that. Now we know that the rebels have business inside the house, there’s plenty of time to get a man inside on the staff. You don’t want to be spotted creeping around the grounds – someone’s likely to take a blunderbuss to you.’

       What was the boy like? Plenty of time for an agent with suitable references – perfectly forged, of course – to be inserted as a member of the household. Eager little sod.

      It was obvious that Billy-boy was bridling against the older officer’s orders, but he was the junior man on this watch and while he might be giving orders to Dick next year, tonight he had to bite his tongue and keep his peace.

      ‘So, what do you propose we do, sarge?’

      ‘We wait. When he comes out, we’ll follow Redlin, see where he goes. Is that enough action for you for tonight?’

      William shook his head in disgust, but Dick was beyond caring what the boy thought of him.

       You’ll see, Billy-boy. Give it a few decades, and you’ll be where I am. Making some new young fool bite on the bit while you urge caution and pull your tired bones up into the cab of the hansom, lift your boots up onto the seat opposite, and take a few more hits from the flask you’re keeping warm in your coat pocket.

      ‘Is that it then? You’re just going to sit up there in the cab and watch?’

      ‘No,’ said Dick. ‘You are going to

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