Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘That is the heart of the Judge Sovereign’s rule,’ said Maeva. ‘The Temple of Judgements, or somewhere very close to it.’

The commodore groaned. ‘Poor old Blacky and his unlucky stars. Why could these demons not be hiding their wicked darkships in a cavern on the outskirts of Lishtiken? They have to be in the best-defended spot in the whole nest of gill-necks.’

Charlotte shrugged inside her diving suit. ‘Honey, the sea-bishops feed on power as much as blood. I wouldn’t expect them to be anywhere else.’ She tapped the crystal hanging around her neck, a small bulge beneath her suit’s fabric. ‘If it comes to it, I can use the Eye of Fate to convince any Advocacy soldiers we meet that I’m the Judge Sovereign himself.’

‘What about the sea-bishops, lass, will that little geejaw of yours work on them?’

‘Queen Elizica once used it to convince the enemy that she was a sea-bishop wearing a human form,’ said Charlotte. ‘I hope I can do the same. Their minds are a lot stronger than ours are — bred to be resistant to their own trickery.’ But I’ve been using the crystal for far longer than Elizica when she crept into the seed-city. Surely that must count for something?

‘Hope? On such a small hope swing the lives of us all. The blessed Eye of Fate is well named, so it is.’

Maeva pointed to a stretch of Lishtiken’s waters that seemed darker than the rest of the sea. ‘That is where we must go. There is a way to bypass the city’s defences and patrols over there.’

‘That’s a cloud of plankton, Maeva,’ noted the commodore. ‘Is it doing what I think it’s doing?’

‘Maybe. Do you believe it’s feeding on the city-dwellers’ waste?’

The commodore’s face frowned inside his rebreather. ‘Crawling along pipes full of turds. Is that what you want to inflict upon me? Is this your revenge on poor luckless Blacky for taking off all those years ago?’

‘It’s a start, Jared. A start only.’

Shortly after the gill-necks’ rolling-pin tanks had dragged up large black spheres studded with spikes, the lines of ugly globes began launching out fizzing rockets which landed harmlessly enough, leaving each rocket pouring out smoke cover to mask the invaders’ exposed position in front of Nuyok. Unable to effectively sight on the invaders, the militia along the wall had been reduced to firing blind into the fog, emptying magazines into the billowing clouds. The battlements themselves were now shrouded inside the choking veil, and Daunt’s war had been reduced to a couple of feet’s visibility either side of him, stumbling through a hell he had been trained to deny.

Out beyond the wall the Advocacy forces had assembled gallopers — small mobile cannons that could be broken into pieces, transported by the landing boats, and then put back together to hurl small but deadly projectiles towards the city. Daunt couldn’t see them, but the effects were being felt around the city, shells tearing into the walls, others passing overhead and wrecking devastation amid the towers’ clean white porcelain spires. Particularly devastating was the enemy’s chain shot, twin cannon balls linked by thick rusty chains that rotated as they flew, deadly bolas decapitating defenders where they stood.

Nuyokians were heaving out poles designed to push back scaling ladders being lifted up against the walls, others lugging drums of acid-like oil to pour through siege drains, spraying their deadly contents out onto the assault. From the anguished screams and yells that greeted the dispersal of each drum of corrosive liquid, the gill-neck sappers and engineers were hard at work on the ground below. It was only a matter of time before the attackers managed to successfully set enough explosives to blow open a breach in Nuyok’s walls.

Daunt was moving along the battlements, thick with smoke carrying the distorted cries of the attackers and the defenders’ curses and rifle fire. Militiamen bent over the ramparts and emptied their magazines in a desperate attempt to halt the surge of numbers coming at them, heaving out at siege ladders with their y-shaped poles, others hacking at grapple cables sunk into the stone walls. Each of the gas guns contained a bayonet, spring-mounted to extend like a penknife’s blade. Many of the militia had triggered theirs, adding a foot of serrated steel to the length of their rifles, hacking out at the crystal-helmed gill-neck faces trying to struggle over the wall.

Weighed down by a medical satchel given to Daunt by a surgeon at the aid station below — one of the Court’s personnel, not a local — he crab-crawled his way toward the next cluster of men shouting for assistance, bullets whining like hornets past his helmet.

This was far removed from the Circlist church’s medical training. The priests back at Daunt’s seminary would have been horrified at the scale and severity of the injuries. A world apart from the delicate balance of pastoral care, diet, exercise, meditation exercises and identification of physical ailments that could throw out of kilter the miraculously sophisticated organism that was the race of man. Soldiers blinded by shards of stone from cannon impacts, missing arms and legs from the bombardment, punched down by rifle balls, felled by grenades and blade cuts, bones broken and spines shattered slipping from the battlements. Already the orders had gone out from the mayor’s command post that wherever they could, the injured should make their own way down the wall’s stairs to the aid posts. So hard-pressed on the battlement that no fighters could be spared to supplement the stretcher-bearers by carrying down their wounded comrades to the Spartan medical facilities. Daunt reached the militiamen yelling for a medic, half of the company jabbing out with bayonets, the remainder standing back and aiming shots over their comrades’ shoulders. At their boots was a militiaman doubled up on the rampart, surrounded by nets filled with the ammunition drums and gas propellant canisters he had been distributing among the defenders.

Daunt rolled the body over; only noticing the fourteen-year old’s agony-contorted face after he had pulled his hand away from the bubbling ruin of his chest. Try as he might to suppress it, Daunt felt the wave of anger rise within him like an overwhelming tide. ‘What’s he doing here? He’s too young to be fighting.’

‘His city too, Court-man,’ snarled one of the fighters, not looking away from sighting his rifle. ‘Take him to medicos.’

‘I can’t bandage him up; I can’t move him by myself. Damn your eyes.’

The soldier pulled off his empty ammunition drum and threw it over the parapet as if it was a discus. ‘Damn theirs instead.’

‘I can’t die,’ moaned the boy, as if the fact of his mortality was more of a shock to him than his wound. ‘I can’t.’

What had this been to the child, a game? A chance to show off to his friends, to impress his elders in the city? The chance to get a piece of cannon shrapnel lodged in his gut, the random hand of fate selecting who survived and who didn’t. Daunt felt like screaming out at them to stop, begging both sides to end this butchery. But this slaughter was necessary to hold onto the Isla Furia, to keep the sea-bishops’ prize out of the invaders’ clutches for as long as possible. This is my doing, my design, and all I can do to assuage my guilt is wrap bandages around the limbless cripples I am creating here today. Maybe I should have tried to run with the sceptre? Led the sea-bishops on a merry chase across half the world. Bought time with my shoe leather, not the blood of these poor islanders.

With the militiamen fully engaged by the gill-necks crawling up the siege ladders, Daunt yelled out to Morris to help him shift the wounded boy, the Jackelian setting the timer on a stick grenade before tossing it over the parapet.