bodies disappearing with each hand’s length Jethro pulled himself closer to the front of his church.
‘That was your clue, by the way,’ growled Badger-headed Joseph, releasing a stream of warm, foul-smelling liquid over the back of Jethro’s boots. ‘Don’t you dare look back at me – eyes forward, eyes on the prize. On the altar. The empty altar.’
‘I – don’t – believe – in – you!’
‘But you will. And much more, too.’
Jethro touched the altar. It became the headboard of his bed, his fingers clawing the bamboo wood. And as he woke he saw in his mind’s eye what was missing from amongst Alice’s possessions. What the police should have found but didn’t. What had been stolen from her corpse.
There was a breeze blowing in through his room’s open window, cooling the sweat-soaked sheets lying across his legs. It was an artificial breeze, the whisper of the vault’s machines.
Hannah couldn’t believe she was still arguing when they got to the rooms of this great church investigator that Chalph and Father Baine had sworn would be able to help her. She should have risked bringing Chalph along with her to help argue her case, even if the police militia guarding the hotel did get suspicious about his comings and goings.
Why couldn’t the commodore and Nandi see that she had to go back to the guild to serve out her last few days’ service before sitting the church’s entrance exam? Not because of the dangers of being arrested as a draft dodger, or even for the chance of unmasking the guild’s head as Alice’s killer – but because Hannah’s parents might still be alive. The discovery of the skipper of the boat that had disappeared with the supposed loss of all hands frozen to death in an abandoned mining station didn’t have to mean, as the commodore suspected, that Captain Maggs had arranged to murder her mother and father, and then been silenced in turn. Her parents might have bribed Maggs to fake their sinking, then disappeared. Hannah’s parents could both still be alive!
‘You can’t go back to the guild,’ Nandi insisted as Hannah knocked on the door to the hotel room. ‘They tried to kill you. If we hadn’t got off that carriage when we did…’
‘Alice was killed here in the city,’ said Hannah. ‘In the supposed sanctuary of her own confessional booth inside the cathedral. Besides, you’ll be with me for the last few days – you need my help to mine the guild’s transaction-engine archive. And I have to find out what really happened to my parents.’
‘You’ll be safer on the Purity Queen,’ lass,’ begged the commodore. ‘Papers or no, you’re a Jackelian. We’ll stow you in my cabin and let’s see which of the black-hearts on this dark isle think themselves big enough to board my boat and take you off. They’ll find not all her fangs were pulled before the fleet sea arm was done with her, that much I can promise you.’
Hannah shook her head vehemently. ‘I want to join the church here, not start a war between Jago and Jackals.’
‘An admirable aim,’ announced the beak-nosed gentleman with gently greying hair who opened the door to them. ‘As a rule, the church prefers to work towards the preservation of life rather than its extinguishment.’
So this was the man? He didn’t look much like an agent of the Inquisition dispatched to investigate the archbishop’s death as Father Baine had intimated. But then, he didn’t look much like the sort of man that Alice Gray might have once married, either. Ordinary, plain, but with a slightly vulpine face.
Commodore Black bulled his way after Hannah as she entered the room, Nandi following behind them.
‘I knew there was a blessed sight more to you than you told us on the voyage over here,’ the commodore accused Jethro Daunt.
‘I owe a certain amount of discretion to my clients, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘Much the same as you do to those whose cargoes you transport in the Purity Queen’s hold.’
A clunking metal creature entered the room bearing a tray loaded with porcelain cups, a pot and a couple of sliced bamboo pieces. So, that was what one of the Steamman Free State’s metal creatures looked like? Hannah’s reading on the subject had suggested they might be more…elegant, somehow. Or was this creature one of the Jackelian or Catosian manufactured automatics milled by the hands of man?
‘I have made tea, as is the fashion here,’ the creature’s voice projected scratchily from his voicebox.