LITMIR.BIZ

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parties and the infighting among my own Levellers, it seems I am only ever allowed to achieve one tenth of what I set out to accomplish.’

      ‘Now that I understand,’ said Quest. ‘After all, look what those jiggers did to me.’

      ‘Yet, even so, you still seem to prosper. However much they trim your sails.’

      Quest filled his nostrils with the scent of the jinn. ‘Trim my sails, or confiscate them? I see things differently, Ben. To some that makes me a genius, to others a lunatic and a fool. Succeeding in my business concerns, now, that is merely a game.’

      ‘One you play so well,’ noted the politician. ‘So well, indeed, they changed the rules of the game just to fit around you.’

      ‘Time for a new game then, Ben?’

      ‘Let me tell you something.’ The First Guardian leant in close. ‘The establishment dislikes us both intensely, but with me, they at least know what to expect. Anyone with the wit to read Community and the Commons knows what I stand for. But with you, they have no reference points. You make yourself the richest man in Middlesteel and then you give your fortune away every year to the poor. They try and destroy you at every turn, yet it is always you that seems to end up taking over their bankrupted commercial concerns. You treat the greatest nation in the world as if it is a mere hand of cards, its sole purpose to serve as the source of your amusement. You scare them.’

      ‘A little mischief,’ said Quest. ‘I just need a little mischief to keep my mind fresh, to keep the black dog at bay. Everything is so flat and grey without my miserable few distractions.’

      ‘I understand that,’ said Ben Carl. ‘Just make sure your airwrights know you intend to restrict your game to the free market.’

      ‘Has someone been telling tales on me, First Guardian?’

      Carl pointed up towards the ceiling. ‘An unattributed source. A note dropped down to land on my windowsill in parliament. You need to be careful, Abraham.’

      Abraham Quest tapped the side of his nose. ‘I quite understand. Enough said.’

      Carl watched his wealthy friend departing across the clubroom. For the industrial lord’s sake, Carl hoped Abraham Quest would be true to his word. Because if he was not, the statuesque mercenary he had watching his expensive back would not be nearly enough to protect him. Not if the Court of the Air came calling on him in judgement.

      The butler returned to refill his jinn glass. His black club livery was barely enough to disguise the fact that the servant was really an agent of the political police. A g-man. Ben Carl was still not used to the fact these dogs were his hounds now, rather than part of a pursuit baying behind his own heels.

      ‘Do you think he will listen to you, sir?’

      ‘The cleverest gentleman in Middlesteel?’ sighed the First Guardian. ‘How should I know?’

      ‘We still do not know what he is up to at the Ruxley Waters airworks.’

      ‘Airships are just toys to him, like everything else,’ said Carl. ‘Toys to be made to go further, faster, higher.’

      ‘They are the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s toys, sir. He only gets to build them.’

      ‘He is a good man,’ said Carl. ‘A humane man. Half of our land’s mill workers eat better and work fewer hours because of the standards set by the model factories of the House of Quest. He has done more for the people of Jackals than I have managed to achieve with my factory acts. He is a patriot.’

      The police agent refilled the politician’s glass and gave a short bow. ‘As are we all, sir, as are we all.’

      Chivery did not like having the new boy foisted upon him like 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,

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