Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘I think you’ll find we will be able to protect your sceptre,’ said Sadly.

‘Bob my soul, but I hope so.’

The thermal barrier must have been protecting the island for the Court for centuries, designed by the mad, bad and dangerous to know. The graveyard of vessels stretching for miles beyond its curtain spoke volumes for its lethal efficiency. It took a minute to clear the corridor through the curtain of heat, walls sealing behind them as they passed, but whatever Daunt had been expecting on the other side, it wasn’t what he found himself facing.

Beyond the thermal barrier stretched the submerged ruins of a city. Much of it looked like blackened termite mounds, thousands of buildings towering and ruined and slagged. So ancient, that its structures had decayed into featureless underwater spires, only the occasional areas of surviving symmetry or flat surfaces to indicate that something sentient had once had a hand in these crags’ formation. But among the lofty termite mounds, hundreds of storeys high, were scattered other buildings — better preserved, signs of stone carvings and ornamentation visible on smooth surfaces, pitted by hundreds of oblong holes. Windows once, now glassless doorways for schools of fish to dart through, the surface light slanting down onto a grid of uneven, half-silted streets.

‘Bob my soul,’ said Daunt. ‘I have never seen its like.’

‘I have,’ said the commodore. ‘A far ways off from here, though. The ruins of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed. One of the world’s wonders.’

Sadly stood by the main view screen at the front of the bridge. ‘Ironically, our scientists believe the better-preserved buildings down there are actually the oldest. They were probably sprayed with a substance that resists age. The anthills were the last buildings to be built. They’re little more than dirt and dust held together by kelp now.’

Even the commodore seemed impressed. ‘Compared to those sunken behemoths, the tallest tower in Middlesteel would stand like a blessed blade of grass next to a sunflower. What manner of creature lived out there?’

‘You’ll meet their descendants on the island,’ said Sadly.

The Isla Furia’s underwater rock face loomed ahead, a jagged rise of dark volcanic stone holed by caves. The Court’s submersible headed for one of the openings, lanterns inside the tunnel activating as the craft entered, the vessel’s own bow lights switching off. She passed confidently through a smooth arrow-straight cavern, before passing out into another stretch of water, this revealed as an inland lake when U-boat 414 surfaced. Ahead of the bridge’s pilot screen a walled town was visible, concrete u-boat pens upon the shore waiting to receive their vessel. There wasn’t much to see of the town beyond its high fortifications. Whatever lay beyond the wall, it obviously wasn’t a land-locked counterpart of the ruined spires under the sea. They docked in the shadow of the volcano. It was a beast all right, the commodore had been right about that. Towering twelve thousand feet high, clouds of thick white smoke poured out of its throat. Current discharges aside, there seemed little sign of the violence and magma the old u-boat man claimed to have witnessed. In fact, as they docked, Daunt could see the Isla Furia’s slopes were covered with terraces growing crops, a series of metal pylons driven into the incline bearing cable cars up and down into the city below.

Daunt scratched his chin. ‘This is the Court’s?’

‘More or less,’ said Sadly. ‘We landed on the Isla Furia centuries ago, looking for a secluded ground base to support our operations. The islanders we found here are called the Nuyokians. Like all the tribes on the Fire Sea islands, they’d been locked inside the magma and boils of the ocean and trapped here. The natives were in a sorry state, dependent on the rain season for their crops on the slopes, blood sacrifices to hold off the steam storms. Over the centuries they’ve worked for us, intermarried with our staff. Agents that survive our calling often as not come here to retire.’

‘And now,’ said Daunt, ‘this is all that remains of the Court of the Air?’

‘What do you think we’ve been doing since the great war with the Army of Shadows, sitting on our arses and gossiping about the good old days?’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rebuilding the Court in the marshalling yards beyond the city, making ready to refloat a new aerial city. Recruiting agents, finding the wolftakers that were scattered across the continent and bringing them back into the fold.’

‘Did you ever think that the Kingdom doesn’t need you anymore?’ said the commodore. ‘All your tricks and sly ways. The conniving legacy of Isambard Kirkhill.’

The badinage hurled against his employer cut no ice with Sadly. ‘As long as there are wolves to prey on the flock, there’ll be a need for shepherds, say I.’

‘Wolftakers. Well, damn the lot of you,’ spat the commodore.

‘You might as well ask does the Kingdom need a future,’ said Sadly. ‘Do you think the sea-bishops would have got as far as they have done if the Court was still watching above Jackals, protecting the nation? Who would you rely on without us? The State Protection Board, civil servants and badly paid jobsworths like Dick Tull? Don’t make me laugh. I need to report in to my superiors. You’ll stay on board until we send for you.’

‘I trust you will get them to see reason,’ said Daunt.

‘Don’t you worry about that, Mister Daunt. I’m sure my nightmares are just the same as yours since I touched that cursed sceptre.’

‘And Boxiron, good agent?’

‘We’ll take care of him in the Court’s hospital. You just settle down and write me out a nice long list of all the names you saw in the prison camp’s graveyard. I have a feeling there’s a lot of nobles, industrialists and members of the government who are going to go missing in the next few months.’

‘Don’t underestimate the sea-bishops,’ warned Daunt.

‘Don’t underestimate the Court of the Air,’ retorted Sadly. ‘Reduced circumstances or no, this is what we do.’

Holding the Kingdom’s future in the Court’s hands. Well, that was true enough. If Daunt couldn’t protect the sceptre here, keep it out of the sea-bishops’ clutches. There wasn’t going to be a future for any of them.

When the call came to meet Sadly’s superiors in the Court of the Air, Charlotte was happy to be able to leave the submersible’s claustrophobic confines. It was strange to be out in the hot prickly sunshine again, her feet swaying uncertainly on the gangway across to the submarine pens. She used King Jude’s sceptre as a staff, feeling like some fraudulent prophet come visiting this lost tropical island sealed away on the outskirts of the Fire Sea. Between being confined to the tight confines of u-boats and floating through the underwater alien world of the seanore, the experience of solid land and an endless sky combined to make her homesick and unsteady on her feet at the same time.

Boxiron had already passed over this gangway, borne off in a stretcher that looked more like an iron coffin; Jethro Daunt had to be restrained when the locals wouldn’t let the ex-parson accompany the unfortunate steamman to his upgraded medical facilities on the island.

Nestling in the lee of the Isla Furia’s great volcano and encircled by a thick red stone wall, the town of Nuyok was hidden out of sight. Some fourteen metres high, the bulwark concealed all sight of the buildings within. The wall had only been constructed, Sadly had intimated, to protect the citizens of the town from the wildlife of the jungle covering the rest of the island. This would explain its parlous state of repair — cracked and overgrown by ivy in many places, while fishermen and trappers in wide-brimmed straw hats moved slowly and deliberately in the heat across the harbour. Flat-bottomed rafts, cork-lined against the heat and sporting rainbow-coloured sails, shifted across the lake where their submersible had surfaced. At the far end of the lake Charlotte could just see a series of docks controlling access to the Fire Sea beyond, too small for submersibles, but just the right size for the small fishing skiffs.