Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Sadly laughed and his shape began to shimmer, reforming as a facsimile of the old steamman. ‘I don’t need to bite you to become you, senile contraption. It’s your memories I am unable to steal. Too well encrypted by that rusted calculating device you call a monarch back in the Steamman Free State. But it matters not. Your kind is as few in number as mine is legion. Perhaps we shall keep some of you functioning as slaves — that was your original function, was it not? There is certainly no sustenance on you to feed the Mass.’ The sea-bishop jabbed his gun towards Dick. ‘You shouldn’t feel too bad, animal. You are livestock and we are wolves and that which preys on a creature is always quicker and faster and more intelligent than it. The best plan you could come up with is attempting to repeat the same trick your bitch-queen played on the Mass centuries ago, sealing us in a trap of time. Even if your friends weren’t going to be walking into an ambush, your witless scheme would never have borne fruit a second time. The shield technology she modified to trap us is under constant guard. What is it you animals say? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’

The creature kept Algo’s appearance as behind him, the room was filled with armed men, Corporal Cloake and the fake Jethro Daunt among them.

‘Bob my soul,’ said the Daunt creature, its eyes lighting up with a passion that the original rarely showed. ‘It seems we have bagged a couple of intruders.’

‘This assassin broke into my apartments,’ said the sea-bishop masquerading as the head of the board. ‘One of our own officers gone rogue. Yes, there’s an execution warrant outstanding on Sergeant Tull here, and the mechanical is a poorly designed automatic engineered to impersonate me. Take them away, Jethro softbody. Consider your commission with the board fulfilled. Lock them away deep where we keep our most dangerous prisoners.’

Dick moaned. He had failed. The sea-bishops held the Kingdom and the Advocacy in their thrall, they had the measure of the Isla Furia’s defences and that old sea-goat and Charlotte Shades were walking straight into a trap. Dick’s retirement was finally upon him, and he wouldn’t end up struggling on his scanty pension. Not in the slightest.

Many cities were said to glitter metaphorically — to gleam with gas lamps and hotels and expensive restaurants and the moneyed classes chasing their dreams by opening their wallets. The capital of the Advocacy, however, didn’t need metaphors to sparkle. Lishtiken lay there on the underwater plain with its diamond towers and its ruby-shaped domes running along the seabed, silhouetted against the underwater mountains and shining like a thief’s dream. The Advocacy had grown a coral-like city out of crystals, the splendour of its gem buildings overlaid with knots of pearl-coloured spheres clustered together, fish spawn clinging to reeds. There was movement all across the vista — gill-necks swimming freely in every dimension between thousands of openings, larger chariot craft bearing citizens between buildings. Connecting everything as though a fine mesh, transparent tubes hung as a capsule-less version of the Kingdom’s atmospheric network — artificial currents sucking swimmers effortlessly on their way across the capital.

But for all its obvious wealth, Charlotte wasn’t here to loot Lishtiken, and nor were the thousands of seanore warriors picking their way carefully through the sea farms on the capital’s eastern flank.

The commodore’s voice sounded in Charlotte’s diving helmet. ‘They’re lax today, lass. All this way up to their mortal doorstep and hardly a patrol boat to make us duck on the whole journey.’

‘Their fleet will be busy and bloodied at the Isla Furia by now,’ said Charlotte. ‘With word of the sea-bishops’ presence being spread among the nomads, the monsters must be growing desperate to get their hands on the key-gem.’ Of course, the sea-bishops’ infiltrators inside the Advocacy will be quick to write such stories off as the ramblings and propaganda of superstitious savages, and that will hold up, at least for a while.

‘Ah,’ the old u-boat man grumbled, ‘in my experience, when something is too good to be true, it usually is.’

Vane came up behind them, the nomad chieftain so weighted down with rotor-spears, armour and weaponry it was a wonder he could cut through the water with the ease he did. ‘There are darkships secreted in the city?’

‘At least two of them,’ said Charlotte. She could feel the press of their presence like a cancer, an illness upon the world. ‘And their masters too.’ Ensuring their grip on the Advocacy’s leadership did not weaken at this pivotal point in the invaders’ fortunes.

‘We will give you half an hour to get inside before we begin our attack — you will find that adequate.’ He waved his arm and Maeva came forward, travelling lightly armed compared to her fellow nomads. ‘Maeva has been inside Lishtiken many times, leading our trading parties. She knows its ways best and shall guide you.’

The commodore didn’t look pleased by the prospect. ‘You don’t have to be doing this now, Maeva.’

‘You would get lost two feet behind your own sleeping bubble,’ said Maeva. ‘It’s best someone who knows which way the tide flows is on hand to guide you though the city-dwellers’ defences.’

‘You should stay here,’ he insisted. ‘I had a mortal strange dream last night. I don’t think things will end well, and I don’t want you along to share my fate.’

‘I’ve as many grey hairs as you, Jared Black. I’m not planning on living forever. It is done. I will be your scout. This is my decision to make, not yours. You don’t get to do that again to me.’

‘You will lose many fighters in the assault,’ Charlotte warned Vane.

Vane shrugged. ‘I was not planning on living forever, either.’

‘Remember, we only require a diversion,’ said Charlotte. ‘Nobody among the grand congress is expecting you to lay siege to Lishtiken and successfully seize the capital.’

Vane shivered with the thought of it. ‘Enclosed by walls and corridors, unable to feel currents running across my skin. Hiding my face from the tides like a frightened hermit crab drawn down into its shell. What would I do with a city? Such a life would be as living entombed.’

‘Remind them of the old ways then, lad,’ said the commodore.

‘I am glad you are going, silver-beard,’ said Vane. ‘If you stayed too long with the clan I would probably have ended up killing you.’

‘Better an enemy should kill me than a friend,’ said the commodore. ‘Let’s give those dark-hearted demons down there first crack at my old bones.’

‘Half an hour!’ the war leader called after them as they left. ‘Move fast and true.’

Urged by Maeva, the three of them connected voice lines between their suits and they travelled forward joined together as though by a long umbilical chord. ‘No open communications from here on in,’ ordered Maeva. ‘The edge of the city is patrolled by dolphins and they can detect voiceboxes at a distance far beyond any clansman’s hearing.’

‘It’s an exposed approach,’ said Charlotte.

‘Not through there.’ Maeva’s gloved hand indicated the vast nets of fish pens floating tethered along the sea farms. ‘We cut a small hole through the mesh and move with the schooling fish. Too much activity inside for three uninvited guests to be spotted.’ She smiled beneath the visor of her helmet. ‘We just have to hope that no farmer tries to spear us for poachers.’

They made the journey unimpeded, observed only by silvery clouds of darting garfish. All the farmers they spotted outside the nets were busying themselves by their feeding pipes, testing water inside the pens, dipping nets inside to check catches for diseases that could kill their livestock. Before they broke cover, Maeva sketched a rough outline of the city and asked Charlotte where she sensed the darkships’ presence. Charlotte tapped a section more or less in the centre of the underwater metropolis.