Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘An island, Jethro softbody. We were on an Advocacy transport submarine for a couple of days after we were taken prisoner. That places us in the heart of the gill-neck kingdom.’

‘An area of the atlas left disappointingly vague by the Advocacy’s refusal to allow foreign surface craft to traverse their territory, old steamer.’

‘It is called Ko’marn, Mister Daunt,’ called Sadly hobbling in front of the steamman. ‘One of the gill-necks said I was welcome to the place when he pushed me off their u-boat’s gangway.’

‘Perhaps that’s their word for hell,’ Daunt mused. ‘Offered by way of irony. After all, by the lights of their thinking, only the cursed and misbegotten snub the sea for dry land.’

‘I’m wagering it ain’t their word for hotel, amateur,’ snarled Dick Tull, pulling his injured leg along. ‘I’ve never seen a prisoner of war camp that I wanted to stay in.’

Daunt bit his tongue. He had a feeling there was more to this place than a camp for holding captured surface dwellers. ‘What a pity. I was hoping we might get to see one of our captors’ legendary crystal cities. If I recall correctly from the commodore’s anecdotes, the gill-neck capital is called Lishtiken, and the few who have visited it speak of it as one of the wonders of the ocean.’

Daunt gazed at the gill-neck guards walking either side of the line of shuffling captives. The Advocacy soldiers were dripping from the heat as much as any among their prisoners of war. Their body language positively cried out with discomfort and displeasure at this duty. He noted the way their heads moved, jerking around. They were close enough to the race of man for him to be able to read them, and they betrayed their dislike for this realm with every gesture. How must the island appear to them? The claustrophobia of only being able to move in limited dimensions. No up, no down. The restrictiveness of this environment combined with the almost infinite expanse of the sky, sight-lines stretching to the horizon, rather than the restricted visibility underwater. They don’t like this, he realized. Bob my soul, but they don’t like this at all. This is a hardship posting for them. Short duration and frequent rotations of duty to stop them developing, what shall we call it, land sickness, perhaps? He murmured thoughtfully to himself. ‘There once was a gill-neck from the sea, which on the land he had to be. When he took in the air he was sick, and he could only last out of water a bit, so home he swam in time for tea.’

Daunt patted his pockets and sighed in appreciation as he discovered his aniseed balls were still in his pocket. ‘They didn’t take them?’

‘I told them it was your medicine,’ said Boxiron. ‘It didn’t seem like a lie.’ The steamman gloomily tapped his power limiter. ‘My might they had already tasted, however, and the fastblood devils were quick enough to steal that.’

‘And my sleeve gun,’ complained Sadly. ‘The blighters had that away fast enough.’

‘Ah well,’ said Daunt. ‘At least they left you your cane to march with.’

‘Wouldn’t get too far without it, Mister Daunt, my bad foot and me. Not sure how much longer I can keep up with this, truth to tell. March, march, march, all day. No water in this heat. You’d think the gill-necks would appreciate the wisdom of staying hydrated, says I.’

‘Maybe they’ll let you open up a food stall when we get to where we’re going,’ sneered Tull.

‘Quieten your incessant ramblings, you diseased surface dweller vermin,’ hissed one of the guards. He removed his mask for a couple of seconds, rubbing the chafing scales of his green skin, and spat out a stream of water at the informant’s feet. ‘There is your water. Now keep moving, you shall stop for more of it later.’

The later in question became evident with the guard’s sibilant laughter when the trail through the rainforest gave way to a stinking stretch of everglades. The water around their feet started out barely lapping around their shoe leather, but rapidly rose deeper, soaking their knees before stopping at their hips. Still the prisoners marched on, a gloomy silence fallen upon the exhausted sailors, throats dry and croaking. But however thirsty Daunt grew, he was never once tempted by the thick, badly reeking water of the everglades. Insects skimming across the surface in enough variety to have kept a Jackelian entomologist engaged for years, the majority of the bugs only too happy to add a faltering column of soft-skinned Jackelians to their diet. Would that I had an entomologist’s netted hat, gloves, and sealed linen suit. Only Boxiron was immune from these biting, annoying swarms; clouds of them bothersome enough that Daunt began to swat at his skin with every tear of rolling sweat, mistaking perspiration for bloodsucking needles.

After an hour of slogging through the glades, the trees fell away and an island of raised land appeared surrounded by tall reeds, a rough path sawn through the ground and paved by something like bamboo. The exhausted prisoners were herded up a ramp and onto the path, reeds eventually falling away to reveal a camp built across cleared land. Simple barracks of white bamboo-like material, a fence just shy of the height of a man’s head. Not much to stop a prisoner from escaping. But then, the barricade wasn’t the barrier. That would be surviving for long enough to escape off the island and then navigate across hundreds of nautical miles of an ocean that was the sole dominion of the gill-necks. Not totally unguarded though. Guard towers rose out of the fence every hundred yards or so, simple wooden platforms with roofs of thatched palm trees, the silhouettes of lounging guards and their long rifles. A camp where the guards’ rifles point out, not in. What, I wonder, is out there to engage their attention in such a manner? On the far side of the camp stood a series of larger, more permanent-looking metal structures; a small forest of cranes rising beyond that. There was a distant hammering of steam engines carried by the weak febrile wind, the drumbeat of a slave galley for the emaciated figures of captives moving around the camp, pushing carts along rails or staggering under the weight of heavy hemp sacks. Not a prisoner of war camp then, but a work camp. And these aren’t mere make-work labours to busy minds and bodies so hard they can no longer think of escape, either. I detect the whiff of serious industry on the air. Interesting. A camp where the guards are as uncomfortable as the inmates, literally fish out of water. This has a purpose to it. I wonder what I would find inside those sacks the prisoners are lugging?

Turning left at the main gate of the camp, the columns of captives were marched towards a long shed-like structure, two bamboo doors swinging open. Inside was a wheezing machine that Daunt recognized from the Kingdom. A blood-code machine, the slowly rotating transaction-engine drums of its central control panel poorly oiled and squeaking in the humid atmosphere. The sailors in front of Daunt and his friends were led before the machine in turn, their arms pushed into a rubberised hollow, the grimace on their faces indicating the moment a needle was extended to sample their blood. For Boxiron, they didn’t even need the machine, a flurry of activity among the gill-neck engineers administering the tests. One of them fluttered a white card with the unmistakable black silhouette of the steamman’s unique form.

‘This is bloody wrong,’ said Dick Tull.

Daunt reached into his pocket and palmed an aniseed ball before popping it into his mouth, half-melted and sticky. ‘I agree, good sergeant. The Advocacy shouldn’t have access to such a machine, let alone our citizen records swirling about its memory.’

Our identity details should be kept jealously guarded by the civil service’s bureaucrats back in the capital’s engine rooms, not freely floating around an enemy power.