resting there.’
‘Hang on, grandfather, do you know what hour it is?’
‘For me it is always night,’ chortled the man in the robes.
‘It’ll be the long night for you, grandfather.’ Smike tugged at the visitor’s robes. ‘You’ll get yourself in the soup so you will, tap-tapping with your cane along these avenues. There’s some right old bludgers lurking around Rottonbow. They’d think nothing of sinking a blade in your ribs and emptying your pockets.’
‘But I have so little to steal,’ said the visitor, ‘now that you have taken my money.’ The visitor’s cane darted out and spun his lifted purse back out of the folds of Smike’s tattered jacket. Like the tongue of a toad, a gnarled cold hand snaked out, catching the leather bag and concealing it under his robes again.
Smike stepped back, coughing on his mumbleweed pipe in shock. ‘You can’t blame a lad for trying, now, can you? Are you really blind, governor?’
‘Oh yes,’ the robed figure chortled. ‘The eyes are the first thing to go. The treatment preserves everything else, but not the eyes.’
Smike glanced around nervously. He had thought this blind old fool was prey. But he was mad, or something very close to it.
‘Down in the paupers’ graveyard, have they held the funeral for Sixrivets yet?’
‘The steamman?’ said Smike. ‘There’s not much of his body left in the graveyard, grandfather. After Sixrivets died, the state coroner sent his soul-board back to King Steam’s mountains like the law requires. The rest of the old steamer was so old, the king didn’t even want Sixrivets’ iron bones back to recycle.’
‘But the funeral, it has been held?’
‘Yesterday. His friends from Steamside came over and sung in their strange voices – the machine tongue. Even though Sixrivets wanted to be buried down here, rather than over in Steamside, they still came.’
‘They would come,’ said the old man. ‘Steammen never forget their own. Now, be off with you.’
Smike darted into an alley, then stopped. A thought had occurred to him. The strange old goat’s interest in Sixrivets’ corpse. He was a grave robber! Middlesteel’s mechomancers often raided the graves and corpses of the race of steammen, prying the secrets of their architecture from their rusting crystals and decaying cogs. Sixrivets had been so ancient and obsolete that the denizens of Dwerrihouse Street had thought it safe to honour the steamman’s last wish and inter him with the rest of their people down the road. But this sightless old man must be desperate, on his downers. No wonder he was wandering around at night in one of the least salubrious parts of the capital. He was about his filthy trade.
Smike stuck his head around the corner and watched the figure shuffling towards the graveyard. Smog was drifting across the cobbled streets – the miasma of industry, the currents of the capital’s factories, workshops and manufactories. The blind devil had a bleeding cheek, so he did. Sixrivets was one of their own. They said the steamman had been old enough to see the clatter of steel and puff of gun smoke as the royalist guardsmen and the new pattern army clashed on the streets of Middlesteel during the civil war, six hundred years back. Generations of Dwerrihouse Street’s children had come and gone while Sixrivets pottered about Rottonbow’s lanes. Who was this sightless goat to come and dig him out of their dirt and strip pieces off his body for souvenirs? Smike considered shouting for some of the others, but the canny old prowler might hear him and be off into the night, to return when no one was abroad. Best to watch and wait, catch him in the act, then raise the alarm.
Smike crept past the shadows of the old rookeries, his bare feet numb against the chill of the smog-cold cobbles. At the iron gates of the graveyard – two Circlist eels cast as wheels consuming their own tails – Smike heard voices whispering. He rubbed his eyes and searched for the corner plot where Sixrivets had been buried. Two shadows were there, digging. Neither of them were the old man, though. They were too big for a start. Their voices sounded familiar, too.
Smike slipped into the graveyard and used the cover of the tombs to get closer to the men. He heard the crunch of hard dirt being tossed back and a low cursing growl.
‘Can you see the body yet?’
‘It’s in here somewhere.’
‘I can see the head. The rest of it is coming. Keep at it, carefully now, don’t break anything.’
‘Break anything? Just me back, mate, just me back. This ain’t clay we’re digging through here, you know?’
Smike’s eyes widened. No wonder the voices sounded familiar. It was two of the Catgibbon’s bludgers – thugs that worked for the flash mob, and not just any gang either. The Catgibbon was the queen of the underworld in Middlesteel. They said she held the guardians and half the police of the capital in one pocket, while she kept a good share of the magistrates, doomsmen and other court functionaries in the other. Smike did not know this pair’s names, but they were a familiar sight in the daytime, knocking up pennies with not-so-subtle insinuations of what happened to shop owners who didn’t pay their ‘fire and accident’ money.
Smike was wondering where the sightless old prowler had got to, when a figure emerged from the mist behind the bludgers.
‘Good evening, gentlemen. A cold night for it.’
Startled, they whirled around, one holding his spade ready like an axe, the other dropping his sack and pulling a pistol out from his coat pocket.
‘He’s not the police.’
‘Course he isn’t a crusher; he can’t even see. Look at his cane.’
‘Away with you, blind eyes,’ said the one pointing the pistol. ‘This body is ours.’
‘That body belongs to Sixrivets, surely,’ said the old prowler. ‘And what use do you have for one of the people of the metal, now his ancient soul has passed into the great pattern?’
The spade man pulled out an evil-looking dagger. ‘Let’s do him silent, before he has half of Rottonbow up out of their beds and onto us.’
Spade man jumped across the open grave, but the old prowler had moved, moved faster than anything alive had a right to. The leaping bludger continued his motion; the top half of his body hitting a tombstone while his severed legs tumbled down across the opened grave. His colleague tried to trigger his pistol, but then it dawned on him he was holding a handle only, the other half of the weapon with the chambered crystal charge severed and falling down towards the dirt.
The old man had his legs in a fighter’s position with a silver sword turning in the air, tracing a pattern like calligraphy in the smog, before returning it gracefully to his cane sheath. Smike was about to run – this had all become a little too rich for his simple tastes – when he stepped on a branch, its snap sounding like a cannon shot even to his ears. The blind man moved his head slightly, evaluating the potential threat and choosing to ignore it, then pushed the tip of his cane in front of the frozen bludger’s face. ‘What does the Catgibbon want with ancient steamman body parts?’
Rather than answer, the terrified thug turned and sprinted across the graveyard.
‘Ah well,’ said the old man, staying put. ‘I doubt you knew much, anyway. Breaking the fingers of anyone sticking their nose into one of your rackets, that’s what your kind knows best.’ He announced to the air: ‘And why don’t you come out from behind there, now? I want to thank you for all your help.’
‘I was just keeping myself in reserve, grandfather,’ said Smike. ‘Always good to have someone watching your back. You seemed to be doing well enough against the two of them.’
‘For an old blind man, you mean?’
‘That’s a good one,’ said Smike. ‘You’re not really blind, are you? That’s just a bit of grift to get people to underestimate you. You’re good though, all that tapping you do with your cane. I couldn’t