drying clothes left drooping in the warm air by whoever still lived in the crumbling apartments. The directions they were following from one of the hotel’s porters appeared accurate, as was the observation that this part of the vault’s air recycling system had broken years ago – giving its passages a close humidity that was deeply unpleasant to walk through.
If the gloom and the dereliction of this area of the capital had been intended to disconcert the two of them, then those they were meeting would be disappointed. Boxiron didn’t have much of his old steamman knight’s body left, but his skull still had the proud vision plate of a knight of the Order of the Commando Militant. Boxiron switched to his ambient light profile and the shadows around them became a bright green patchwork of clear empty passages and deserted bridges, red targeting icons for weapon limbs he no longer possessed settling over any sign of movement – the scuttling of rats or the brief flutter of curtains in a fourth-storey window above.
‘I have calculated the chances this may be a trap,’ Boxiron warned Jethro.
‘So have I,’ said Jethro. ‘But I have a feeling about the message under the seat. The sort of murderous creature that did what was done to Alice isn’t the sort to shilly-shally around with slipped notes and uncertain ambushes.’
A narrow humped bridge led across the empty canal and Boxiron detected the mass of the vault’s eastern wall looming up ahead of them. In front of the wall, a long line of stone columns stood sentry. Not holding the distant roof up, but coiled with steaming copper pipes – bleeds that would, they’d been warned, erupt with fire when the pressure inside them grew too intense. This was one part of the vault’s systems that had to be kept in good repair – the alternative being the poisoning of the population from the veins of subterranean gas that bubbled beneath their feet. The steam from the pipes grew thicker, until they were wading through a river of fog that came up to Boxiron’s chest unit. This was fast turning into the ideal spot for the out-of-the-way murder of a couple of foreigners.
Boxiron’s combat instincts automatically overlaid the shifting steam with a grid that could differentiate between gaseous and organic movement: green lines running across the dancing haze, then suddenly deforming as a geyser of flame blew out ahead of them from one of the pipes, the heat-shock rippling over Boxiron and Jethro’s heads.
Boxiron twitched. The memory, the terrible memory of a mansion burning back in Middlesteel, flames licking out of the bay windows and sparks leaping across to light bushes in the sprawling, overgrown garden.
And there she was, Damson Aumerle, a black silhouette clawing at the curtains on her great house’s third floor, transformed into a demon capering in the flames of hell, the flames of—
Old Damson Aumerle, so desperate to resurrect the ancient human-milled butler that had been in her family for generations, so starved of affection that she had come to think of the stuttering automatic servant as her—
—that she pushed aside the grave robbers she had paid to loot the battlefield at Rivermarsh for the skull unit of a steamman knight, an advanced positronic brain to replace the decayed Catosian transaction engine in her beloved friend’s—
—the hearth lighter in his hand, his metal fingers releasing the blazing hot iron towards the dry grass of the grounds. Had he done this, had he started the fire because he had been—?
‘—to see you,’ cried Damson Aumerle, her ancient eyes ablaze with relief as Boxiron raised his arm to see the primitive machine fingers of his hand for the first time. Not his hand. His hand was that of a steamman knight, not this pathetic, human-created simulacrum—
Aumerle House going up in flames. The flames of—
Jago.
‘Are you alright?’ asked Jethro, steadying his steamman friend.
‘Looping,’ said Boxiron. ‘That’s all, Jethro softbody. My combat filter is drawing too much power for the pathetic boiler of this body I find myself trapped within.’
Jethro checked that Boxiron hadn’t slipped a gear, but the steamman could feel he was still only idling in first. ‘Don’t worry about me. Movement ahead.’
A figure came out of the steam, wearing the robes of one of the cathedral’s priests.
‘And there is one still hiding back there…’ called Boxiron.
Another figure emerged, a dark leather-clad ursine. Barely an adult if Boxiron wasn’t mistaken.
‘You have good eyes,’ said the ursine.
‘My