– revealed a largely human body, albeit one with a metal leg and a silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins that glowed in the orange gas light.
Burned, blackened lips just visible behind the mouth slash in the mask puckered in exasperation. ‘Must you always visit me looking like that?’
‘You with your mask,’ said Cornelius, ‘why should you mind?’
‘You have a cheek, talking to me about wearing masks.’ Dred Lands got up from the cushions, a hiss of compressed steam from the artificial leg leaking out as it took his weight. ‘I need to wear a mask so that people can bear to look at me.’
‘While I need to wear one so they cannot.’ Cornelius let his features re-form, his nose shortening to lose its hook while his brow reshaped and flattened out. ‘There, I am myself again.’
‘Now how can I be sure of that?’ grumbled Dred Lands. ‘For all I know, the real Cornelius Fortune could be a corpse you came across on a battlefield, or the face of your favourite teacher from your youth, now passed away.’
Cornelius tapped his arm. ‘You are familiar enough with this, I think.’
Dred sighed. ‘Enhancements? Or repairs, again?’
‘The latter.’ Cornelius picked up the book the mechomancer had been reading as his friend limped over to the side of the room, pulling back satin sheeting to reveal a luxuriously appointed workshop. Cornelius flicked through the first couple of pages. ‘The Queen in the Leather Mask, by M.W. Templar. You know this nearly made it onto parliament’s sedition list, Dred, the similarities between our own Queen Charlotte and its sympathetic portrayal of a sitting monarch …’
‘Pah,’ said Dred, ‘it is celestial fiction, nothing more. The queen escapes to the moon at the end of the novel. Besides, I thought you and your “friend” Furnace-breath Nick had a taste for sedition?’
‘For if it prosper, it be not treason,’ said Cornelius, quoting from the speech Isambard Kirkhill had made after the last true king had been captured, gagged, and had his arms surgically removed so that he might never again turn his hands against the people.
Cornelius sat down while Dred fixed a magnifying lens over his mask and began to unlock the skin-coloured gutta-percha panels from Cornelius’s artificial arm.
‘Parliament really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Queen Charlotte,’ said the mechomancer. ‘After they discovered the Commonshare had run the majority of the royal breeding house through a Gideon’s Collar during the invasion.’
Cornelius winced, but not from the pain in his shoulder.
‘Sorry, I forgot. But the point is, the Middlesteel Illustrated is still running editorials saying there’s as much royal blood in the queen’s veins as there is in your bath water. Rumour has it that she was found in the baggage train of the retreating Quatérshiftian army – that one of the shiftie officers had taken her from the breeding house and only kept her alive because she was a pretty little thing; well, that was when she still had her arms, of course.’
‘The House of Guardians needs a symbol,’ said Cornelius.
‘Aha.’ The mechomancer removed a lead ball with a pair of tweezers, and then pulled out another from Cornelius’s arm. ‘Talking of our compatriots in Quatérshift, I presume these two rascals are cast from Commonshare lead?’
‘I may have made a flying visit there recently.’
Dred tutted. ‘Your arm is rare, Cornelius – my skill combined with Catosian high-tension clockwork. I would rather you did not throw it away. One day the First Committee is going to get wise to those tricks of yours with your damn face. Their pamphleteers will stop flattering the egos of the leading Carlists with real-box pictures of the heroes of the revolution, leaving you to impersonate committee members from Gilroy’s cartoons in the Illustrated. Their spies will stop trying to hunt down émigrés over here and start trying to steal the plans for a working blood-code machine.’
‘Can you repair my arm?’ asked Cornelius.
‘Of course I can. You know, you never did tell me how you do your face thing – did you learn the sorcery from a worldsinger? Were you caught in a feymist as a child? Did you travel south to see a womb mage? There are back-street sorcerers who can change a face just the once, but they say you feel agony for the rest of your life …’
‘I feel the pain,’ said Cornelius. ‘The difference is, I like to share it around.’
Dred pulled over a steam-powered winding machine and began to de-tension the clockwork inside the arm, still wary of another explosion, even after all these years. ‘The Commonshare will fall one day, you know. Helped along by you, or more likely because they can’t feed their own people. Or perhaps the God-Emperor in Kikkosico will tire of their insults and bypass the cursewall, land his legions on their shore and finish off Quatérshift for good. What will you do then, old friend?’
‘Retire.’
Dred Lands teased out part of the arm mechanism, laying it down on the workbench. ‘All right, don’t tell me. I’ll fix you up for your next attempt at suicide all the same.’
‘You should be more appreciative of what I do,’ said Cornelius. ‘I even rescued one of your own from Quatérshift a couple of nights back. Jules Robur, the mechomancer. He would not have lasted another year in the Commonshare’s “organized community” system.’
Dred’s hand slipped on the wire cutter he was twisting. ‘Sweet Circle, you got Jules Robur out of Quatérshift? I thought he was dead for sure. His designs, his technical architectures. He’s the greatest of us, Cornelius, the greatest! Are you sure he’s alive? Dear Circle!’
Cornelius had never seen Dred so animated. It was as if he had rescued the mechomancer’s own father from the work camp. ‘He is alive, have no worries on that account. When he woke up in Jackals, he could not stop expressing his gratitude, talking about the devices he could tinker into life now, with all of Jackelian industry and science at his disposal.’
‘Tinker, indeed! You must bring him here to me; just convince him to visit me. I shall offer all my tools to his service. Do this one thing for me, Cornelius, and I shall work for you for the rest of the year for free.’
‘You can go and see him yourself. He’s here in the capital. I left him at his daughter’s house in Westcheap.’
‘His daughter? There must be some mistake.’
‘No mistake,’ said Cornelius. ‘I saw him walk through the door of her house myself. It was his daughter who convinced me to rescue the man from Quatérshift.’
‘But it was Robur’s daughter who denounced him,’ said Dred. ‘She’s a Carlist, married to a general in the revolutionary army. She was the bloody reason he was in the camps in the first place. She blew him out to their secret police, led the crushers to the home he was hiding in. Look—’
Dred went to a bookshelf and returned with an old volume of the Journal of Philosophical Transactions, then opened it to a page with a cartoon. A man in Sun Court finery, Robur down to his hook nose, was being dragged away by soldiers of the revolutionary army as a woman watched. A speech bubble from the struggling mechomancer proclaimed: ‘Now this is a pretty penny in return for your mother’s labours.’ The woman was calling back, ‘And now your labours shall belong to the commons, you royalist dog.’ Pursed lips, staring eyes and wild hair – the daughter’s caricature bore no relation to the elegant creature who had implored him for his help in the rear yard of a jinn house.
‘It’s not the same woman.’ The anger leaked through Cornelius’s steely demeanour.
‘Keep your hair on, man,’ said Dred. ‘If she was an agent of the Commonshare, my fine arm and your strange bones would be lying dead in a ditch in Quatérshift by now. She was probably his young mistress. Would you have risked your neck so readily for a lover as a daughter? You rescued