Secrets of the Fire Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

did.’
    ‘But how did you know about the clock?’ asked the inspector.
    ‘Because when the doctor slipped back to reset it to the correct time, he did so using Damson Stow’s own pocket watch, and that runs ten minutes fast – she told me she kept it like that, so that she would never miss her day’s deliveries coming into her kitchen. And that’s why she also had to die. When the damson realized what the doctor had done, she tried to blackmail him over Lord Spicer’s murder.’
    ‘Poor woman,’ said the inspector. ‘She probably never knew the doctor was the illegitimate child of Lord Spicer and her sister.’
    ‘Raised with enough money to pass through the royal college of medicine,’ said Jethro, ‘but not enough to paper over the grievances of the family fortune sliding away from him and towards his half-brothers and sister.’
    ‘You almost cheated the hangman out of a handsome crowd,’ the inspector said to Boxiron. ‘They’ll pay more than a penny a seat to see a respected doctor swing outside the walls of Bonegate.’
    ‘Sorry, inspector,’ apologized Boxiron. ‘My steam was up and my gears slipped.’
    ‘No harm done, eh, old steamer.’
    Now securely restrained by the constable’s manacles, the murderer winced at the pressure his arms, bent around his back, were putting on the ribs the steamman had cracked. ‘My father said I was a god for curing him. But I cured him of everything that was wrong with him in the end. What sort of god does that make me?’
    ‘The only sort there are, I am afraid,’ said Jethro, sadly. ‘The rather dangerous kind.’
    Behind the ex-parson, the other suspects had fallen into a staccato chattering – proclaiming that they had known all along the killer hadn’t been any of those left inside the drawing room.
    Jethro Daunt shook his head at their naivety and caught up with Boxiron’s hulking form just before the heavy steamman departed the town house, his voicebox muttering to himself in machine-like echoes. When his friend’s steamman head had been attached to the centaur-like form of a steamman knight, his voicebox has possessed the power to cast a battle cry that could burst a human heart inside its chest. Now it was attached to an inferior piece of Catosian machinery, however, all Boxiron could do was whisper half-mad dialogues to himself– cursing the Steamo Loas and the cruel hand of fate for how he had ended up.
    ‘You did well enough, good friend,’ said Jethro, laying a hand on the steamman’s cold iron shoulder. ‘You prevented the doctor from escaping.’
    ‘I nearly killed him. My thoughts travel too fast for this body,’ said Boxiron, allowing only a small trace of self-pity to escape into his voice. ‘Stuck in a loop every time I overreach myself.’
    ‘The mind is willing but the flesh is weak,’ said Jethro, opening the front door onto the neat square in Middlesteel’s expensive western district, the railings of the crescent thoroughly polished, a thousand metal spears gleaming in the sunshine.
    ‘It’s not my flesh that is weak,’ said Boxiron, his legs pistoning down the wide porch steps to the cobbled pavement below. ‘That’s one burden I don’t carry.’
    Jethro angled a nose that was too proud for his kind face towards the cab rank at the end of the street, and one of the drivers flicked his whip, sending a midnight-black mare clattering forwards. Just before the hansom cab could reach the two of them, though, it was cut up by a larger coach, this one a horseless carriage with iron wheels as tall as a man at the rear. As his horse spooked, the cab driver swore furiously, shaking his fist at the whining clockwork contraption. But the new vehicle wasn’t a rival in the carriage trade, for all that its black iron matched the sheen of the hansom cab’s dark walnut exterior.
    Riveted iron doors swung open on each side of the horseless carriage, tall men dressed like Circlist monks with simple grey robes stepping out onto