“special work” to someone who might have tried to profit from having heard it.’
‘But there’s nothing in here about who Sworph sold the items to.’
Jethro hummed and took back the book. ‘No, the sales ledger is, I suspect, no longer under this roof. I believe whoever killed our Mister Sworph made him hand his sales ledger over. Then the poor fellow was murdered anyway to stop him from talking.’ Jethro ran his furless fingers down the margins of the pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here is the purchase record for what was stolen from the cathedral. Circlist silver. Meltable. Paid two marks and twelve pence. The good man certainly didn’t believe in overpaying for what he received, did he?’
‘But the name of the seller has been crossed out,’ observed Chalph. And there was something written in black ink above the crossings out. Hugh Sworph had written the word “Dead!!!”
‘Yes, he’d heard something,’ said Jethro. ‘My pennies would be placed on something unpleasantly fatal occurring to the thieves who broke into the cathedral and fenced him the altar ornaments. Our friend suspected he was the next in line to be silenced.’
‘What’s so special about this damn painting,’ asked Chalph, ‘that people are willing to kill for it?’
Jethro held up three of his fingers. ‘Three paintings, good Pericurian. The rational trinity is composed of three paintings. Whoever killed Alice and tried to murder Hannah now has two of them.’
Chalph’s eyes narrowed in his bear-like face. Seeing what the killers had already done to get the first two paintings, Chalph didn’t need to be an investigator like Jethro Daunt to know that they would be coming back for the last one.
Coming back whoever or whatever stood in their way.
While his minions called the pot-bellied man who ruled the guild’s deep turbine halls the charge-master, Hannah quickly realized he might just as well have been the demon king of this buried dominion.
Like everyone else down in the turbine halls he had shaved his head and he strutted around the induction vault with his cowl – unusually for the guild – folded down.
The charge-master eyed the chain of new arrivals suspiciously and laid a hand on one of the great iron suits lined up behind him against the wall. ‘Which of you grubs,’ he boomed, ‘can tell me what this is?’
It seemed all the new recruits were ‘grubs’ until they graduated through sheer sweat and survival into fully-fledged turbine men, or ‘termites’.
‘It’s one of the machines the trappers use to ride outside the city,’ announced someone from within their line – Hannah didn’t see who had been brave enough to answer back.
‘Trappers, yes and city workers too when they have to clear the culverts and the aqueducts beyond the battlements.’
It looked to Hannah’s eyes like a massive version of Boxiron, or a rusty suit of armour made for a twenty-foot giant. She had heard the recruits talking about them before she came in. How you needed a lucky suit, one passed down through the generations that hadn’t killed any of its owners. One that wasn’t possessed by a suit-ghost.
‘To the trappers up top this is a Rigid Armour Motile suit, or RAM suit. But down here, it’s just iron, and pushing iron is what keeps you healthy.’ He rapped the legs of the metal giant. ‘There’s a thousand ways to die working the turbine halls – steam flash, gas build-up, false current reversals – but one thing you grubs won’t get sick from is the electric field. Sick is what you get being tickled by constant background exposure to the transaction engines upstairs. But this is the guild’s real work down here. We don’t wear lined cowls inside the halls; we don’t wear those toy lead chainmail vests the guild passes out to visiting senators. There’s a foot of lead inside your iron, and that’s thicker than your grub heads. And thick is what you are, or you wouldn’t have been given to me.’
The charge-master rested his foot on a platform and struck a rubber button, the platform lifting him out and up and towards the centre of the suit where a vault-like door had swivelled out, revealing a man shaped cockpit. Their master’s suit was painted in a distinctive red and black chequerboard pattern.
‘The suit is slaved to your movement,’ he called down to the line of initiates from inside the cockpit. ‘You move, it moves. All the extra controls are down by your right thumb.’
The door in the centre