Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Daunt came up beside her. ‘I’m sorry myself and Boxiron couldn’t protect you better, Damson Shades. I did rather promise you back in Fidelia’s parish when we first met.’

He had the feeling she wasn’t used to being looked after by anyone; nor the ancient spirit haunting her, for that matter.

‘Just look after my sceptre,’ said Charlotte. ‘If I can’t melt it down for gold scrap, maybe Parliament’s posted a reward for its return.’

‘I fear no amount of money will help us now,’ said Daunt.

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Charlotte, fingering the Eye of Fate thoughtfully and staring out across the rooftops of a thousand rumbling thinking machines. ‘The money helps, it always helps.’

‘Are you still experiencing nightmares?’ asked Daunt.

Charlotte nodded. ‘It’s hard to separate all the memories sometimes. Which are mine, which are Elizica’s, which belong to the Eye of Fate’s previous owners. It’s always worse at night.’

‘I used to suffer something similar myself, I don’t envy you. The curious thing is that since we escaped from the prison camp, my own dreams seem to have been stilled. It’s as if they’re in abeyance until Boxiron returns. Damson Shades,’ said Daunt, glancing around to make sure they weren’t being overheard. ‘I need to talk with you, or more accurately, the passenger you are carrying in your mind.’ He indicated the corridor back to the surface of the volcano. ‘I have some questions about the prior invasion — a quiet state of meditation should prove conducive in winkling the answers out.’

‘Honey, I’m usually wary about men trying to get me alone.’

‘You can trust me,’ smiled Daunt. ‘After all, I used to be a parson.’

‘Yes. You did.’

Boxiron was only dimly aware of Daunt’s presence inside the large vaulted chamber, dozing in a chair next to the healing tank. The steamman’s sensory levels were set to the bare minimum, as much to protect him from the burning web of pain that was his half-grown body as any results of the damage that had been inflicted on his frame by the Advocacy soldiers. None of the Court of the Air’s scientists were in attendance now, in the middle of the night. None of them were there to see the strange luminescent shape coalescing into existence off to the side of the tank. In the presence of the ghostly child-like outline, Boxiron’s nervous system began to reawaken, a brief hot surge of pain, before easing like balm as the ethereal silhouette reached out to touch the tank’s accelerant gel. Inside Boxiron’s intact skull, a private channel opened on a very special frequency. One reserved for the creator. Reserved for King Steam.

Why have you come? Boxiron signalled. None of the people of the metal have given me succour, all have shunned me. The Loas have forsaken me, my ancestors abandoned me.

‘It is a hard law,’ said King Steam, the bronzed child-like machine’s image growing more distinct. ‘But you know why it must be. We cannot allow our race’s sentience to be copied by the fast-blooded creatures of our world. We cannot allow them to pick apart our corpses like carrion and reanimate our people as their zombie-machines. If the race of man learns how to copy our pattern, they will create a race of sentient slaves, and down that road lies perpetual warfare between the softbodies and the people of the metal. I favour the way of peace and friendship, not war.’

And I choose death, signalled Boxiron. I have tired of stumbling through life as a pale shadow of my former self, of being an outcast among the people of the metal and a brutish curiosity among the race of man. Let me honour my vows as a steamman knight; let me pass into the great pattern.

Boxiron sensed a wave of sadness from the steamman ruler washing over him.

‘It would be the right thing to do,’ said King Steam. ‘Wherever our pattern has been corrupted by outsiders, self-termination is the only honourable course of action.’

Then help me, pleaded Boxiron. Burn away this softbody gel that sustains my wounded corpse. Melt my soul-board and let me walk at last with the Loas.

King Steam’s astral projection drifted above the tank. ‘One day, Boxiron. But not today.’

Why?

‘Expedience. The cruellest of masters, and one before even I must sometimes bow my knee. I have been visited by an old acquaintance, Elizica of the Jackeni, and she has helped me travel the threads that lie before us. They were not comfortable precognitions to entertain. If you die here tonight our race dies too.’

No!

‘The enemies that walk hidden among the softbodies are as foul a race of monstrosities as creation is capable of producing and they have a deep loathing of our kind. They cannot drain our bodies for nourishment or rip memories from our encrypted minds, so terror of the steammen is their sole refuge. On all the worlds along the infinite string they have visited where they have found sentient people of the metal, they have burnt us out like a farmer pouring oil over a wasp’s nest discovered hanging inside his barn.’

This is your law, yelled Boxiron. Suffer not an abomination to exist. My pattern has been corrupted, end me!

‘My law to waive. And your sovereign to obey, by your rites of birth and your knightly vows.’

Please.

‘I created you once,’ said King Steam. ‘And now I will do something I have never done in all the history of the people of the metal. I shall create you anew.’

The astral projection cascaded into the tank and the pink gel began to change colour. Without sound it began to glitter and spark, a constellation of a million burning lights.

Exhausted, Daunt slept in his chair, which was probably just as well. Bearing witness to a resurrection was not a matter that would sit easily with a man who had once been a Circlist parson. It was always easier not to believe in gods when they didn’t come calling on you.

Daunt stood on the edge of the Isla Furia’s u-boat pens, the hull of one of the Court of the Air’s strange sleek submersibles swarming with crewmen making last minute maintenance checks before she dove. Above the pens, on the slope of the volcano, part of the mountainside had been drawn aside, camouflaged doors retracted to reveal a dark sphere, an urban legend — the gas-filled globe of an aerosphere ready to lift off when Dick Tull and Sadly boarded.

‘You shouldn’t dally,’ Sadly warned Charlotte and the commodore. ‘We’ve detected a darkship approaching the island. They know the sceptre is here and it’s only a matter of time before more of them show up to test the island’s defences.’

‘It’ll make our job easier,’ said Charlotte. ‘If they’re here, they won’t be protecting the seed-city.’

The commodore still looked ill at ease with the plan. ‘This is where we are, then. Not even waiting for the wicked demons to come and try and winkle us out of the Court’s well-defended lair, an island where a man can secure a warm berth for the night and a drop of hot totty to stave off the terrors of war. No, poor old Blacky must go out and uncover a whole nest of monsters and poke them with his sabre until they swarm out to sting him to death.’

‘That’s all you can ever choose,’ said Sadly. ‘Where you’re going to die.’

‘What do you care, Blacky?’ said Dick. ‘We’re all dead men walking now, same as you. Home, here on the island, or their hole at the bottom of the sea, the odds aren’t exactly in our favour are they?’

‘Ah,’ said the commodore. ‘All the adventures and terrible scrapes I’ve been in over the years. My luck’s dwindled away and left me beached here. Curse my mortal stars. All my luck’s been used up and this is my last throw of the dice.’