“Are you sure, dear?” asked Darla, her eyes wide. “After all, there have been so many accidents!”
“Only a dozen, Mrs. Markhat,” said Trokes. “All easily explained. No doubt about it. Carelessness, and nothing more.”
Meyer came trotting back, my beer in one hand and Darla’s wine glass in another. Behind him scurried a small man in a white apron, and behind him was a boy pushing a silver cart bearing half a dozen wine bottles.
“Ah, refreshments,” I said, beaming. I took my beer and sipped it. Meyer wanted to glare at me but couldn’t quite work up the nerve so he glared at Trokes instead. “Wine, my dear?”
The cart rolled to a stop. The wine steward took his place behind it and began a detailed description of each of his bottles. Darla feigned interest and I motioned Meyer and Trokes aside.
“Thank you, gentleman, for your attention.” I shook hands with each, passing them a pair of heavy coins as I did so. Meyer’s glare vanished when he saw the first glint of Old Kingdom gold.
“Anything you need, sir, you just call for us!”
“Oh, I shall. Good day, gentlemen.”
Meyer was faster on the uptake. He took Trokes’s elbow and led him quickly away.
The wine steward had launched into a lecture on the relative soil acidity of the respective vineyards proffered. Darla was taking it all in with a perfect imitation of rapt attention, and if the little man’s chest puffed out any farther I feared he would soon burst.
“Mr. Lavit tells me the red Quinton Hollow is his favorite, dear,” she said, grinning. “But he notes that many prefer the fruitier aftertaste of the rather excellent Diamond Black. Which would you suggest?”
“Oh, I always trust my wine steward. If Mr. Lavit prefers the Quinton Hollow, that’s the one I’d try.”
Mr. Lavit allowed himself the smallest of smiles. Darla nodded, and with a practiced flourish the steward held up the bottle for inspection, waited for Darla’s approving nod, and then opened and poured.
“I surmise Sir is a beer man,” he said as he handed Darla her glass. “It so happens I have a special stock of a very rare beer on hand, in the ice room. Copeland Dark. Shall I have a barrel sent up to your room, later? I believe Sir will enjoy it.”
“I’ve never met a beer I didn’t like,” I said. A gold coin appeared on the man’s cart. “Thank you.”
A clean silken hanky made a pass across the spotless top of the cart. The coin vanished.
The little man grinned.
“I prefer beer myself,” he said, his voice a whisper. “And don’t let them serve you Elvish Garden. It’s swill-I don’t care what anyone says.”
“Duly noted.” Darla wandered off, pretending to inspect the ornate wood trim on the walls.
“So I hear the Queen is cursed,” I said.
He didn’t flinch or scoot suddenly away.
“So some say, sir.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I do not.” He lifted his hands toward the deck and the empty casino. “She is a thing of wood and glass. Beautiful, yes. She has no power to kill.”
“Still. A dozen fatal accidents? How do you explain that?”
“I do not, sir. But if anything beyond carelessness and misadventure killed these men, it wasn’t the Queen. Good day, sir. I trust you will enjoy your stay.”
And then he bowed a stiff little bow and he motioned his terrified young assistant out of the shadows and together they hurried away.
Darla joined me as they vanished into the dark.
“Did you hear all that?”
“Oh, yes. He sounded like a man with a lot to say.”
I took another draught of beer. It was dark but smooth and rich. If I was drinking Copeland Dark I was going to need more than one barrel.
“So, wife of mine, what have we learned from our little walk?”
“Well, the Arkham vineyards use far too much ash on their south-facing grapes, for one,” she said. “And the buyers at Second Palace are skimping by using cheap casks, which give the vintage a bitter tone.”
“Fascinating. Anything else?”
“Evis forgot to mention a dozen deaths and a mysterious curse.”
“Oh, he didn’t forget to mention anything.” I motioned toward the stage at the far end of the casino and we began to weave our way toward it through sheet-covered gambling tables. “He simply didn’t think it was relevant. Any construction project, even boat-building, can be dangerous. Evis dismissed the rumors as nonsense, not even worthy of mention.”
Darla nodded. “I suppose Evis would think that way.”
“Which is why we’re poking around without him. Even an honest client isn’t always going to give you the whole story, because they themselves don’t see it all.”
“So you think she’s really cursed?”
“Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t think anything just yet.”
“So where do we go next?”
I pointed toward the first door I happened to see. “Out there. And then down. Something has to move this boat, and someone has to feed it coal, and it won’t be men in suits who’ve been warned what to say and what not to say.”
“Coal, you say?”
“Coal, my dear. Or wood, or old boots, for all I know. Let’s go and see.”
She put her empty wineglass on a sheet-covered table. I put my empty beer bottle next to it and offered her my arm.
“Let’s go see the Ogres, Duchess.”
“Certainly,” she said, taking my arm.
And with that, we sought out ways down into the dark.
Chapter Eight
I was right about the coal and the Ogres.
Coal moves the Queen. It’s shoveled into three massive iron tanks called boilers by teams of Ogres that work in half-hour shifts. There is a fourth boiler tended by a pair of wand-wavers that requires no coal at all. One of the wand-wavers, a skinny lad barely out of his hundreds, tried to explain the magical heating process to me but he kept getting excited and lapsing into wizard-speak, and all I came away with from the conversation was that the single magical boiler could run the whole works in a pinch.
The Ogres were less talkative. Two dipped eyes at me, which might have meant they were Hoogas who knew my name or they were annoyed by my mere presence, and the sawdust was making them blink. I don’t speak enough Ogre to ask any questions, let alone understand the answers, so I just dipped my eyes in return and kept a respectful distance.
Keeping distance wasn’t hard above the engine deck. Up there, spacious and airy were the orders of the day. But down here, with the Ogres and the wand-wavers and the engineers and the boiler-men, Avalante hadn’t seen fit to trim the walls or even keep the ceiling at a safe height. I bumped my head half a dozen times, much to Darla’s quiet amusement.
“Where do they keep the coal?” she asked as we walked in a crouch toward another cluster of gleaming but incomprehensible machinery.
“I think Engineer Bartles mentioned something about a storage room at the fore.” I dodged another beam and wondered how the towering Ogres fared in the semi-dark maze.
“Bartles? He kept staring at my bosom. I don’t believe he leaves his post very often. And fore means front, I assume?”
“It does. Fore is front, port is left, starboard is right, and aft is where the big wheel turns.”
“Why don’t they just say left, right, front, and back, then?”
“Ask Bartles. Maybe he knows.”
“I’m not quite that curious. Although I am curious about one thing. When you mentioned the accidents, neither Bartles nor the other man seemed to know what you were talking about. Were they lying?”
I stopped at the face of the machine, which was a polished brass cabinet festooned with dials and levers and tiny red lamps that twinkled and shone in some pattern I couldn’t fathom.
“They weren’t lying,” I said. “They just didn’t know. They stay down here in the dark and they tend to their machines and what happens up there might as well happen way out west, for all they care.”