Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

As Daunt had anticipated, there were noble titles carved on some of the oldest markers. Only to be expected. The royalist fleet-in-exile had been trying to survive in the gill-necks’ realm, frictions were bound to erupt between the rebels and the Advocacy. It hadn’t just been Parliament trying to call time on the glorious counter-revolution. Who were the others… adventurers and interlopers? The treasure hunters the commodore had spoken of back on the Purity Queen, driven by visions of gems as large as boulders? This was their final resting-place, then. There were no gill-necks buried here, but that didn’t surprise Daunt. With the gill-necks’ worldview, the Advocacy doubtless conducted ceremonies that saw their remains scattered into the sea. Returned to the watery universe from which they came.

Daunt pulled himself up and moved along the line of graves, tracing the oldest dates back to the more recent burials. From the graveyard he could see the corner of the camp behind the gill-necks’ processing complex and beyond to the sea. There was no wall there. The camp ended in a steep cliff, jagged rocks — a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the ocean below. A constant lashing of waves on the rocks, neither the cliff nor the sea willing to compromise — the maelstrom below the result. Cranes on the cliff top were lowering barrels of gillwort juice towards the open hold of a gill-neck submersible freighter being tossed side to side by the wild sea. The processing centre looked to be a camp within a camp, only gill-necks permitted beyond the internal fence. Too steep to climb, too far to dive without snapping a neck. And even if you survived the trip down, Daunt had a sneaking suspicion escapees wouldn’t care for what was swimming around those waters — not if the presence of the guard towers bespoke what he suspected. But then, these cliffs weren’t the way Daunt was planning to leave — not if the more recent grave markers bore out his theory.

He allowed a smile to soften his face as he discovered one of the graves he had been expecting, quickly followed by a second among the more recent burials. He removed one of the markers to inspect the message.

‘I so rather hoped I would be proved wrong this time,’ he murmured to himself.

A crunching in the dirt made Daunt turn. Boxiron had come to stand by the ramshackle fence separating the graveyard’s rise from the rest of the camp.

‘What have you learned from the dead?’ Boxiron called across to the ex-parson.

‘That it is better to be among the living, old steamer.’

‘It is time. Our work party has been called and is assembling by the gate.’

‘Of course. One note of caution, old friend. The gill-neck soldiers escorting us out are not to stop us escaping, but rather for our protection.’

‘You have been speaking with the other prisoners, Jethro softbody?’

‘Not yet. What have they told you about our labours outside the camp?’

‘Tiger crabs,’ said Boxiron. ‘The waters around here are infested with the creatures. They frequently crawl up from the shoreline into the everglades to hunt. It is why no one has ever escaped from the island to tell of this cursed place.’

‘Land is only ever cursed if you are a gill-neck,’ said Daunt. ‘Have heart.’

The steamman clanged the device welded to his chest in frustration. ‘I have not enough of it, my boiler bled dry by this foul limiter. How much more reduced beyond my life as a steamman knight does the great pattern intend to see me degraded? For all the gross inferiority of my human-milled monstrosity of a body, I still had raw power… I could fight in top gear! Look at me now. I am no stronger than that wretch Barnabas Sadly. If only my ancestors had not forsaken me, I would call upon the Loa to give me the strength to rip this evil contraption out of my chest plate.’

‘We’ll find a way yet.’

‘I should be able to protect you. That I cannot is beyond shameful. Is that not why our association has proved so successful? You supply the intellect and I supply the muscle.’

‘Not just the muscle,’ said Daunt. ‘You have the boiler heart of a champion, and I have relied on the compass of your soul as much as I have relied on anything.’

The steamman did not seem convinced.

‘Listen to me, old steamer, I need you yet. We have a battle or two left before us. I glimpsed such terrible things in the interrogation machine, in the dreams and shadows of their infernal contraption. We cannot afford to lose. We cannot afford to let ourselves die in captivity here.’

‘What did you see, Jethro softbody?’

‘I believe I saw the same things that have been haunting the dreams of the Sisters Lammeter, the same things that have been tormenting Charlotte Shades.’

‘Vampires?’

Daunt joylessly shook his head. ‘Not as the florid fictioneers of the penny-dreadfuls describe them. The true enemy is something else. We have to escape, old friend, we have to locate the commodore and carry the sceptre to safety.’

Boxiron indicated the sea beyond the cliff. ‘Where will be safe? We are hunted in the Kingdom of Jackals, my people in the Steamman Free State will not help me. Where can we go in this world that will be safe?’

‘I think there might be a place, and the person who can help us is closer than you think.’

‘Is this another ploy to engage my interest?’

‘No ploy, old friend.’ But bob my soul, how I wish this all was just an entertainment for your distraction.

I’ll never complain again about working for the bleeding board, Dick promised himself, swinging his machete against the clusters of leathery purple fruit hanging in beards around the tree. Every weary bite of his blade released an unpleasantly bitter smell, thin fronds attaching the fruit to the trunk seemingly as tough as steel.

Immediately below Dick, another prisoner was sawing off low-hanging fruit while Sadly, Boxiron and the ex-parson stood in the water and caught the gillworts, piling pear-shaped fruit in their shallow-bottomed boat. Not that the craft was there for their comfort and transportation through the humid flooded world of the everglades. No, it was only with them to keep the fruit from being soaked and spoiled. Shortly after a gillwort made contact with water it flowered as it bobbed on the surface, releasing a pungent smell to attract lizard-like fish to disperse its seeds; making quick work of the fruit, not to mention trying to take chunks out of any convict pickers’ legs.

It was an old lag, Roald Morris, who had been assigned to convert the newcomers into an effective component of the camp’s harvesting machine. Only too glad to stick to the sides of the boat and issue advice, he had at least warned them to enter the everglades only wearing their breeches. After all, their clothes would be reduced to rags soon enough and they didn’t need any extra layers to perspire like pigs out here. Only Jethro Daunt refused the advice, the eccentric ex-parson pushing their harvesting raft in his full tweeds, sweat rolling off his forehead like a waterfall. A life where the State Protection Board paid a man to stand outside suspected treasonists’ lodgings and watch through the long night hours seemed a world away from the fatiguing labours the Advocacy demanded of its captives.

Morris had lasted in the camp for six years. Supposedly a pearl diver who had lost his compass during a storm and ended up deep inside gill-neck waters, Dick could tell that the man’s story sounded as flimsy to his ears as it no doubt had to the gill-necks who’d discovered Morris’s little ship bobbing in their territory. He had admitted he had once served as a corporal in the regiments back home, and his presence here on the island probably meant he had been a deserter before drifting into smuggling and developing a taste for the gill-necks’ crystals. But Morris had endured out here and had the knowledge of how to live in this hell, which made him someone worth listening to. Surviving had taken its cost, though: Morris’s skin worn as brown and wrinkled as leather from working in the sun every day of the week. He had been fat once, too. Dick could see it in the way skin hung in jowls down the man’s neck. If the sister he talked of so mournfully saw Morris now, she wouldn’t recognize him. She’d walk right past without a hint of recognition. At least he has someone who cares. Who will remember me? Who’s there to miss Dick Tull when he’s gone? Only Damson Pegler in her slum for the last week’s rent he never paid.