Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

A pity those within the Advocacy have forgotten, and the Kingdom of Jackals too, for that matter.

‘Those who insulate themselves with the warm walls of civilization are apt to forget the lessons of the past. Lessons become words in books, and the books are quickly burnt for kindling when the world freezes. Ink runs when the seas shift and paper crinkles into dust when the world warms. But the songs of our forefathers are not so easily forgotten when they are sung well and passed down the generations. So many centuries have passed. Even my resonance fades, captured in the granite of our mountains and the flints of our fields and the stone circles of our tors.’ There was a sadness in the ancient queen’s voice, and a longing too, but Charlotte wasn’t sure if it was for the echo’s passing — that she would no longer able to watch over her people, or a yearning for the serenity of silence and a final passing after so many aeons of duty binding her to the land.

Charlotte touched the Eye of Fate, pressed tight against her skin under the diving suit. Sometimes she could feel the presence of its previous owners, all the gypsies who had held onto it over the centuries, passing the gem down their line. Madam Leeda hadn’t had any children to pass it onto, nor nieces and nephews. Perhaps Charlotte had been the closest thing the old woman had to such a relative. And how had Charlotte repaid Madam Leeda? With the theft of the precious stone she used to influence the outcome of her bartering with the often hostile towns and villages she passed through. If a surrogate daughter Charlotte had been, she had proved a pretty poor one of the old gypsy — no better a daughter than the farming family had been to her. Charlotte just another crop, to be uprooted and tossed out when the rent on her field was stopped. Her real mother, Lady Mary, discarding her bastard offspring, in case Charlotte’s existence embarrassed her ladyship’s new husband into a divorce. Perhaps this was how history repeated itself. In the small things as well as the large. Every one of those abandonments and misfortunes rolled up into Charlotte until all she was capable of was betrayal and disappointing those that tried to show her any kindness. What use was the Eye of Fate when it could mesmerize a person in so many ways, but it couldn’t make them give you the love you were owed?

‘We shall find a better use for the crystal, you and I,’ said Elizica, intruding into Charlotte’s maudlin gloom as she followed the commodore and Maeva swimming down towards the grand assembly.

It can bring me anything except what truly matters.

‘The Eye of Fate was created by the sea-bishops, never forget that,’ said Elizica. ‘What your heart feels is not within their understanding. All that is left of their kind is endless hunger and the desire to spread and disperse their seed across every corner of existence.’

But they used to be us — the race of man?

‘Something as close to it as to make no difference,’ said Elizica. ‘Now I fear all they are is an abject lesson on why we should always seek to live in balance with our world and never presume ourselves masters over it. The sea-bishops are the distorted reflection in a mirror we need to stare into to know what we must never become. They have become thieves of life itself. Our worst impulses given free reign and distilled over millennia into a dark, unthinking core of pure selfishness. Countless billions of sea-bishops clawing at each in cities so dense with their evil kind that bees in a hive might marvel at their fecundity. Even the walls of reality are no barrier to their dark cravings, the infinite chain of existence reduced to mere connected storehouses of fodder for them to feast on. Waiting for a doorway to open to somewhere, anywhere they might spill out for a temporary abatement of their numbers. Waiting for their scouts to signal that there is a new world fit for the feeding. Vampires in the truest sense of the world. They would suck the spark of existence out of your body and discard the marrow of your corpse as though you were a corn husk.’

Perhaps this was what Charlotte had been destined to fight after all, the magnified reflection of all the small cruelties that had been inflicted upon her.

‘Your family chose to abandon you,’ said Elizica. ‘I did not. I have selected and saved you, Charlotte Shades, kept you in my pocket like a lucky penny for this moment. All the years you were moving through the city as its most notorious thief, you were actually training for the greatest theft in history. You’re going to steal our future back from the sea-bishops, just as I once did. You will need every iota of your talent and your instincts to succeed, for the sea-bishops are the most peerless thieves of them all, and they have been stung once in the past already. I had it easy; you are going to repeat my feat when they suspect you are coming to rob them!’

Charlotte caught echoes of the ancient queen’s life as she whispered through her mind. A young chieftain’s daughter living a life not so different from that of the seanore — albeit one on land, in the deep endless forests of what had been the Kingdom before it had a monarch. Fighting the rule of an order of druids, one already corrupted long before the sea-bishops turned up to infiltrate its ranks. A war between the gill-necks and the tribes of the Jackeni, both sides pushed towards a conflict that could have no victor save the sea-bishops. Charlotte saw glimpses of the strange people who had helped the queen in that fight — bandits from the margins of a cursed marsh. A man who could run faster than the wind, faster than time itself. Another able to cast a lance through a mountain and see it emerge from the opposite face. A woman whose voice was able to crack steel and whose breath could blast down oak trees. Heroes that made today’s people appear like pale shadows compared to such titans. What did Elizica of the Jackeni have to work with today? Not legends. Just a thieving bastard of a girl who cared merely to feather her own nest; an aging u-boat privateer on his last legs, only distinguished by being even more reluctantly involved in this madness than Charlotte.

‘The passage of time breeds legends,’ Elizica’s reply came, ‘and makes diamonds from even the crudest of coals.’

And Elizica had known tragedy too. Her father murdered by the treachery of allies who had swapped sides on the battlefield, her mother slain defending her family when the druids came to snatch the defeated chieftain’s children to sacrifice on the bloody altars of their ancient oaks. Had Elizica’s life played out any better than Charlotte’s? She had lost a family whom she had years to love deeply, while Charlotte’s had only ever been an illusion, no more real than the Eye of Fate’s mesmerism. Which of them had mourned more, which of them deserved to feel more cheated by events?

‘Everything that happened to me, tempered me, cast me into a woman fit to become the first queen of the Jackeni.’

And what have I done with my life?

‘What you needed to do. And if you succeed in this one thing, nobody who matters will ever question your worth again.’

And what if only I live long enough to see it done?

‘Then you have answered your own question, girl-child.’

There was little of the finery Charlotte had observed the first time among those assembled under the domes of the grand congress. This time, the leaders of the nomad tribes had gathered with a common purpose and their deliberations already decided. No need to impress with diamond broaches and fine seal skins and ornamental crustacean armour when there was killing to be done and a serviceable rotor-spear was all the embellishment needed to gain status over a neighbour. Word of Charlotte’s arrival had spread like wildfire when the Court’s sleek, strange craft had returned to their territory, and now the domes were packed with a throng of clan leaders and their war-parties’ lieutenants.