brother,’ mumbled the soldier, ‘with six little ones.’
‘Then you recognize your niece.’ Charlotte tried to smile, even as the pressure of the jewel pressed down against her lungs. ‘The niece who you’ve been showing around the debating chamber now that Parliament is shut for the night.’
‘Yes,’ the soldier returned her smile without any of the pain that Charlotte felt, ‘I know my niece, my Alice.’
‘We need to go,’ said Charlotte. ‘You had better get me out into the square before the colonel of the House Guards finds out that you have been larking about on duty with your family.’
‘Bloody Nora, lass, you’re going to cost me my corporal’s stripes,’ moaned the soldier. ‘Let’s go!’
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, pushing the jewel out of sight once more. ‘Let’s.’
‘Thank you for showing me around, uncle,’ said Charlotte as the soldier unlocked a sentry door in the high spear-headed railings that surrounded Parliament. ‘I won’t say a thing. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’
‘Off with you, girl,’ said the corporal, nervously glancing behind him to make sure they were unobserved. ‘Don’t say a thing to your ma. You’ll get me into right trouble, you will.’
Charlotte winked at him and slipped away into the night. The force of her mesmerism was similar to a waking dream. Give it a couple of days and the soldier would be hard-pressed to tell if his niece’s visit had been real or a fancy he’d imagined. He was in good company. There would be plenty of parliamentary staff who would be experiencing the same sense of confusion over the next couple of days. But there was one man for whom the glamour she had cast would hopefully last at least a few hours more. She had made sure it was a strong one. The Master of the Bells was sitting in a nearby tavern waiting for his apprentice to join him for a last drink before he wound his way home. And Charlotte did not want to disappoint him. Not with the sceptre of the last king of Jackals wrapped up in rags inside the master’s tool case. That, surely, was worth raising a cup of ale to. She rubbed her arms as she crossed the street, dodging into the shadows of one of the tailor shops that specialized in the robes, wigs, and finery of the myriad positions filled by Parliament’s masters and servants. A warm hansom cab ride to the tavern? No, Charlotte hardly had the strength left to wipe the cabbie’s memory of the journey, and she had come too far to leave a careless trail from Parliament’s railings back to her home. Even the dullards in Ham Yard might get lucky once, and by tomorrow they would be a legion of constables and inspectors crawling over the streets desperate for witnesses. There’s a cheery thought.
Charlotte’s arm was beginning to ache from the weight of the long toolbox and the sceptre concealed within. Just another worker winding her way home through Middlesteel’s streets and lanes after a full day’s graft, nothing out of the ordinary to be remembered by the townspeople trudging their way back from mills and clerks’ rooms. Damson Robinson’s establishment still seemed to be working late, oil lamps visible through the cracks of closed blinds. Of all the things I can depend on, Damson Robinson’s waiting up to take receipt of our crime lord’s share of tonight’s bounty is pretty high on the list.
Charlotte rattled the door handle and finding it open, entered the pie shop’s front. Inside, contrary to Charlotte’s expectations, there was no sign of Damson Robinson, or indeed Captain Twist. His malevolent little toad of an assistant – Mister Cloake – was there, though, as promised along with two other men. She marked them as dustmen from the look of their dark simple-clothes and the stench masks dangling from their necks. Except that refuge collectors shouldn’t hang there so still and dangerous, like blades hovering for a belly to gut. Apart from her friend, what was also markedly absent was the case containing the gold coins that had encouraged Charlotte out of the shop earlier.
‘Are we emptying our bins early tonight, honey?’ Charlotte asked.
‘An object as valuable as King Jude’s sceptre cannot have too much protection. I trust you have it with you?’ said Cloake.
‘If I didn’t, I’d be lying gassed inside a vault under Parliament and being prodded by the guards’ bayonets, not standing here. Where’s my money and where’s Damson Robinson?’
‘Both out back,’ said Cloake. ‘Pass me over the sceptre. I need to verify its provenance.’
Out back, eh? Because you’re so very generous, you’d let her take a bath of gold guineas while the three of you wait out front for my return.
As Charlotte glanced to the kitchen door she caught the acrid smell of pastry turned to cinders.
‘Here it is, honey,’ said Charlotte, bending down and undoing the clasps along her long toolbox’s side. She lifted up the sceptre, still wrapped and swaddled with grease rags. ‘It’s heavy.’
Without a word, the two dustmen stepped forward to take the sceptre. Pretending to stumble, Charlotte closed the distance between them in a step and then continued to swing, pounding the gold handle into the first man’s navel. As he was doubling up, she rammed its diamond head into the second bruiser’s face, connecting with the nose and sending him stumbling back, the stench mask swinging wildly as the pain of a broken bone percolated through his stunned mind. ‘Damson Robinson never burnt a pie in her life, you royalist bastards.’
Cloake was advancing on her, pulling a weapon out from under the back of his coat – a wicked double-pronged thing, like a crystal tuning fork. It might be sharp, but she still had the advantage of range with the sceptre’s length.
‘I am going to lay you next to her corpse in the oven,’ Cloake leered. ‘After I have drained the last of your juices. The Mass must feed.’
Charlotte raised the still swaddled sceptre, holding it up as a lance to impale the treacherous little thug. He turned his strange weapon in his hand, the crystal throbbing and pulsing with red light. As it sparked, the jewel beneath Charlotte’s blouse flared hot against her skin, all the cold of her weary, exhausting night’s labour mesmerizing the staff of Parliament banished in a moment. Hot. It’s never burned hot before, only cold! Two feet from her, Cloake had collapsed onto his knees, howling like a banshee. Cracking in the air, the crimson energies from his strange blade wrapped around the man, whipping and burning his skin. Charlotte was in no position to focus on his agonies. She was folding to her own knees, the blood of her body burning, running like acid inside her.
Blue light from the crystal pendant peeled away from her chest, reaching out towards Cloake’s weapon, where its crimson sparks hissed and coiled angrily towards the Eye of Fate’s blue light, a dance of duelling vipers in the air between them.
‘Kill her!’ Cloake yelled through gritted teeth.
Confused by the strange ethereal duel of energies in the air, the dustman Charlotte had winded was getting to his feet.
Charlotte couldn’t move. Her body was paralysed, supplying the life force the jewel was draining, channelling. Cloake cursed and yelled again, and this time his words seemed to percolate through his henchman’s bewildered brain.
Drawing a hunting blade almost as long as a forearm from his belt, the dustman carefully avoided the coiling lashing energies striking across the air and darted forward. He pulled his arm back to slash down on Charlotte neck and near decapitate her.
‘This is it, Mister Tull,’ said Sadly, sounding impressed that Dick knew someone who lived in so grand a residence on the outskirts of town.
‘Big it may be, but the coin that paid for this pile is as dodgy as its owner,’ said Dick as Sadly threw the lever to release pressure from the kettle-black’s traction mechanism. Their great iron carriage slowed up outside the wall.
Dick glanced around the open stretch of the duck pond and the crescent of hilltop houses opposite. No sign of the dustmen, but that doesn’t mean they’re not coming here. Young Billy-boy carved up like a slaughtered pig on my bed, Rufus Symons’ corpse found fished out of the river. Everyone who’s touched this affair