place for you, Badger-headed Joseph. No place for the old gods. I cast you out!’
‘You’re not a parson anymore,’ growled the voice behind the grille. ‘Make me happy, fiddle-faddle fellow; indulge your curiosity with the packet.’
Jethro Daunt woke with a start. His bedroom was dark save for the illumination of the triple-headed gas lamp in Thompson Street burning beyond his window. Just enough light to see the tightly bound folder from the Inquisition.
He looked at it, the echo of his grandfather’s warning as his hand reached for the fire grate whispering across the darkness.
Boxiron thumped along the corridor. He had trouble enough approximating sleep during the small hours, the hearing folds on the side of his head wired into the inferior routing mechanisms of the man-milled neck join randomly amplifying the sounds of the night.
Opening the door with far more vigour than he had expected – or requested – from his arm servos, Boxiron was faced with a sight strange even for their chambers at Thompson Street.
Jethro Daunt was in the middle of the floor, the folder from the Inquisition cut open with a letter knife. Papers and notes sodden with the consulting detective’s tears were scattered across a rug in the centre of the room.
Glancing up, Jethro noticed the steamman as he entered. ‘She’s dead. After all these years, she’s dead.’
The light in the centre of Boxiron’s vision plate flared with anger. This was the Inquisition’s work. It wasn’t just Jethro Daunt who was an expert at staring into a softbody’s soul. Curiosity. Curiosity could always be counted on to undermine Jethro’s resolve. Every time. The Loas damn the devious minds of the Inquisition.
‘You’re going to do what they want, aren’t you? You’re going to take their case.’
Jethro rested his spine against the foot of the bed and stared up at the ceiling, a blank look on his face. A mask. ‘Of course I am.’
And where Jethro went, Boxiron would inevitably follow. As he so often did, Jethro began to hum one of his mad little ballads as he leafed through the papers spread around him. He didn’t hum church hymns anymore, that pained him too much; but he had picked up many ditties from the drinking houses their informers frequented. ‘Well of all the dogs it stands confessed, your Jackelian bulldogs are the best.’
The steamman noticed the stack of unpaid bills on the table in the room, a little higher every day. Boxiron hoped that the League of the Rational Court could be counted upon to pay more promptly than Lord Spicer’s estate.
It was a terrible sight to see inside the cathedral – normally so tranquil and shaded – now lit by the brightly burning diode lamps of the police militia as they moved about the nave, throwing open the doors leading down to the crypt and checking the transept for any sign of ursks. Nobody was protesting the presence of the heavily armed free company soldiers with them. The green-uniformed police militia was interviewing the few monks and vergers left inside the cathedral. Hannah and Chalph pressed past for a view of the confessional booths along the side of the far wall.
‘We weren’t here,’ Hannah heard a verger telling a militia officer. ‘Hordes of people came across the cathedral’s bridges begging for help. We were out with the people carrying torches alongside the canals. Only she stayed behind.’
She. Hannah looked unbelievingly towards where the police were kneeling outside the confessional booths, blood flooded across the flagstones. Dear Circle, those were the archbishop’s robes on that stump. That decapitated stump.
‘Alice!’ yelled Hannah, trying to press forward.
‘Who let her in here?’ frowned Colonel Knipe. Jago’s imposing silver-headed police commander limped forward on his artificial leg.
‘Is it Alice?’
‘It is the archbishop’s body,’ said the colonel sadly, pushing Hannah and Chalph back.
‘Where’s her head? Where’s her head?’
‘Don’t look at the body, this isn’t something for you to see,’ ordered the colonel.
She couldn’t take it in. There wasn’t even a skull left on the woman who had raised Hannah as her own daughter. And some of their last words…The accusation that Alice had been trying to trap her here…
‘Where’s her head?’ Chalph demanded.
‘I wish I knew,’ said the colonel. ‘It’s not inside the cathedral. The ursk that did this must have ripped pieces off the archbishop to feed on later.’
Chalph sniffed the air. ‘I can’t smell any ursk scent in here.’
‘You think her head fell off of its own accord, sprouted legs and ran away?’ snapped the colonel. He tapped his metal