Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘I think it’s because your ancestors were outcasts who slunk into the sea because they were too lazy to survive on the surface. They were sitting in a bath for weeks and discovered they enjoyed it too much to ever go back to the hunt. And look at you, the mighty Vane, unable even to defeat the young fancy-piece of the man that got your father killed,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘I can taste your blood in the water, Vane, and it runs true. Your father was probably sitting on his fat arse when the tiger crabs turned up for him.’

Vane yelled in fury, closing with her. Rather than avoiding him, Charlotte stepped in, her body matching his in a supple grip of angles and joint-locks, twisting him about, stealing his momentum, thieving his considerable strength. There was a groan as Vane hit the rocky seabed, a shower of sand rising up from the slam. Charlotte had him pinned beneath her boot, the blade of her spear pushed a fraction of an inch underneath the green scales of his bare neck, ready to be hammered through his thyroid cartilage if he so much as quivered.

‘The silver-beard tricked me,’ moaned Vane. ‘You’re not what you appear to be.’

‘Which of us is, leader of the Clan Raldama?’ Her fingers fumbled with the speaker box, adjusting it back to its normal range and she called out. ‘Do I hold his life before my blade?’

Cries of confirmation returned from the seanore, uncertain at first, then louder and clearer as the magnitude of the turnaround in the arena became apparent to the clan.

‘Finish me,’ demanded Vane.

‘But I am not finished with you,’ said Charlotte. ‘I have need of you.’ She pushed her palm out. ‘I have need of you all!’

Tera had entered the arena through the space in the fence of rotor-spears, the wise woman swimming in above the pinned leader and the challenge’s victor. ‘Who are you, creature? What is your true name?’

‘Would you know me better if I carried a silver trident down from the surface? Would you know me better if I entered the ocean from a beach, two lions walking by my side? Lions that swam alongside me?’

Tera fell back, shocked.

Charlotte nodded. ‘It is good that you still sing the songs from the time before the sides of the sea froze. I am returned.’

‘What else, what else has returned?’

‘You know the prophecy of the shadowed sea.’

Tera cowered above the rocks. ‘A thief shall walk among us. A thief to fight the greater thieves, the thieves of life!’

Dick groaned as the two guards dragged his beaten body out into the light, throwing him onto the ground in front of Boxiron and Sadly. The two of them were helping him out of the dirt when the silhouette of a gill-neck loomed in front of Dick’s vision, light from the high, hot sun glinting off his metallic vest. Dick didn’t need to note the creature’s finery, his jewelled insect swatter or the entourage hanging back from him. The swagger of the gill-neck was easy to read. Another bloody officer.

‘You have missed my welcoming speech to the other surface dwellers,’ said the gill-neck officer, as if the fact of their imprisonment in the camp cells had been an act of provocation on their part. ‘I am On’esse, the camp commandant. I only ask two things of my prisoners. First, you do what any gill-neck orders you to do. Second, you work until you die. There are only two punishments for breaking these rules. One is death. The other will make you wish for it.’

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Sadly. ‘But what is this work, I ask?’

‘A pertinent question,’ said the gill-neck. He moved forward and kicked the cane out of Sadly’s hand, sending him falling to the floor; then he lashed into the informant’s stomach with his boot, Sadly rolling away in agony. ‘But I am not here to answer your questions. Anything you need to know, you diseased surface-dwelling scum, you will be told when we require it. Anything else, you can beg or steal from the other inmates here.’ He clicked his fingers and a prisoner ran forward, her tattered uniform laden down with a silver tank. She hosed the officer with a thin mist of water and his face bobbed in pleasure as he absorbed the moisture. ‘Barely tolerable, much like life here. I loathe this place as all my people do. But I am a notorious sadist and I find its discomforts counterbalanced by the opportunities to inflict suffering on your outcast hides. To serve me is life, to fail to serve me is to fail to live.’ He paused, as if inviting comment, but none of the three of them were foolish enough to rise to the bait this time.

‘Better. You seem to have come to the attention of our royalist allies. It is not good to draw attention to yourself here. I have you marked as troublemakers.’ He examined the three of them as he swaggered past. He prodded Boxiron with his jewelled insect swatter. ‘Two years.’ Then Dick. ‘Fourteen months.’ Then Sadly, still struggling up on his cane from the dirt. ‘Six months for the runt.’

‘Our sentences?’ Dick queried.

The gill-neck commandant swivelled and punched Dick in the gut, doubling him up, and then pushed him down into the dirt. ‘A slow learner and insolent with it. That is how long I expect you to last here. Your rations are not what anyone would call generous, but I do have to account for them in my supply plans somehow.’ He knelt down next to Dick and hissed in his ear low enough that only Dick could hear. ‘Do you like this as much as I do? I have more to give you than you can take, Fourteen Months.’ Without a backward glance, the camp commandant and his retinue moved off, a human prisoner on either side spraying the officer with moisture.

‘Why did you goad him?’ Boxiron asked. ‘A broken body will not help you to survive here.’

‘Shit like that I take from the State Protection Board,’ said Dick. ‘Damned if I’ll take it from a sodding gill-neck.’

‘Your soul has pride,’ said Boxiron. ‘I used to have a measure of that myself.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘I believe it leaked away from this clumsy body I’m trapped in. I used to have raw strength too, but the gill-necks have sapped even that from me. What good am I now?’

‘Alive as a cripple is better than dead, as my ma used to say,’ said Sadly.

The light behind the steamman’s vision plate pulsed with what might have been dejection. ‘You confuse existence with living.’

‘Pragmatists often do,’ said Dick. His eyes glanced around the prisoners shuffling about the camp, the clothes of most the captives hanging as tattered rags. No prison uniforms. They would rot away in the heat and the damp. The prisoners wore what they had, until they didn’t; the state of decomposition in their clothes like counting the rings on a felled tree. And this place looks to be full of sodding pragmatists.

There was a hideous wailing from deep inside the gill-necks’ processing complex.

‘Oh, Lore,’ said Sadly. ‘What was that?’

‘The sounds of torture,’ said Boxiron. ‘The sounds of Jethro softbody.’

‘What did the amateur say to you, back in the cell before they dragged him off?’ Dick asked.

‘That to the fish about to bite a hook, its bait looks a lot like supper.’

Dick listened to the piercing yells sounding again. But who is bloody eating who? If this was some sort of plan by the ex-parson, then it had gone badly wrong.

Gemma Dark watched Jethro Daunt’s twitching body strapped seated inside the machine, a dozen crystal rings circling the man and exchanging waves of ugly green energy between each hoop, lending the ex-parson’s semiconscious form the distorted appearance of being viewed through a heat haze. The screaming had stopped ten minutes ago. Daunt had lasted a little longer inside the lashing energies than most before he surrendered to the inevitable, but not much. Not as long as Gemma had anticipated. Weren’t Circlist priests meant to have minds of steel? The teachings of their much vaunted synthetic morality giving them an almost supernatural ability to stare into the souls of their parishioners. There hadn’t been many priests among the royalists in the fleet-in-exile, not when the rebels’ work was privateering and whatever it took to survive. Circlist priests. Milksops and faint hearts. They didn’t have the guts to survive in the royalists’ cruelly altered realm, a world where the rightful heirs of the Kingdom had seen their birthright stolen by thieves and murderers. Forced into a game of hit and run for weary centuries, the royalist hegemony bleeding away, until they finally devolved into a tattered ragbag collection of pirates and slavers, antique u-boats and noble titles that weren’t worth the ink on the ancient velum of their charters.