Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

Gemma didn’t deign to reply. They headed through the dark, unpopulated lower levels of the seed-city. Water dripping from its black, bony organic hull. This was where her allies made their royalist puppets live and work. Indicative of how they viewed their relationship. Tossing Gemma meagre scraps from their table. She got to the room she had readied, pushing the commodore inside. At her command, the floor of the middle of the chamber rose, forming the shape of a chair. She pushed the commodore savagely down into it, and at her direction, it wrapped tentacles of black coils around her brother’s chest and arms, sealing him in its grasp as securely as if she had whittled both chair and sibling out of obsidian. A curving table shaped into existence just in front of them, rising out of the floor’s oily substance.

‘In an hour the Star Chamber will arrive here to try you. There are a few old faces you’ll recognize, Jared. Crew that served with the fleet-in-exile. They’re not up to much, to be honest. All the good ones stayed and fought and died at Porto Principe.’ She walked to the edge of the chamber and returned with a long length of black metal. ‘You recall what used to be done to traitors to the cause, brother? We saw it done ourselves often enough in front of whichever captains were in harbour at the time.’

‘Why do you think I left, lass? We’d become no better than murdering pirates.’

Gemma leant forward with the pipe and casually winded him in the pit of his gut with the end of it. ‘Pirates steal what is not theirs. Any shipping that fell to the fleet-in-exile’s u-boats was already ours!’ Gemma didn’t give him time to reply, but lashed down against his kneecap, hearing the crack of it shattering with as much satisfaction as she was capable of. ‘Stealing from thieves who had stripped us of everything we possessed, executing all the prisoners we took. That wasn’t piracy. That was pure justice.’

The commodore moaned something and she shut the filthy turncoat up with a quick slap of the bar across his mouth, blood and teeth flying over her boots. ‘How did my boy look when he died? Something like you, or do I need the rest of our hour together to work towards that?’

‘Shoot me,’ mumbled the commodore, the words lisping and mangled through what was left of the lower part of his face. ‘I’ll tell you anything.’

‘Of course you will,’ said Gemma. ‘But that’s not really the point of this, is it? You’ve never known anything worth knowing. Only how to run and lie and betray.’ She jerked up his scalp and looked him straight in his pathetic, puffy face. ‘And that’s not enough, this time. You’ll get your bullet after your trial, after my coronation. Unless I decide to bring back disembowelling for treason as my first act as sovereign.’

The door opened behind her and Walsingham entered. She slapped the bar across her brother’s ribs, laughing as they shifted and snapped, then turned to face the creature.

‘What are you doing?’ Walsingham demanded.

‘Exactly what we agreed,’ said Gemma, raising her bloody length of metal. ‘I don’t need his mind ripped to administer royal law.’

‘You are beating an empty chair,’ said Walsingham.

Gemma looked confused towards her brother’s beaten body lolling in the clutches of the seat. ‘What are you talking about? I’m working to keep my brother breathing; just alive enough for his trial, just alive enough for him to see my victory.’

Walsingham strode forward in fury and slapped Gemma, knocking her to the floor. ‘You foolish animal, what have you done here?’ He pulled out the pendant hanging around his neck and shouted at it. ‘Send a fully armed cohort to secure the feeding pens. Send another to the engine rooms. Order all guards on duty to admit no one. There are escaped animals on board who have possession of one of our chameleon crystals. No shield generation equipment is to be removed under pain of execution!’

‘My brother,’ moaned Gemma pointing at the bleeding figure slumped in the seat.

‘Is not there! You have been mesmerized, animal.’ He kicked Gemma in rage. ‘You are talking to thin air and attacking an empty chair.’ He knelt, his human form vanishing to be replaced by the dark leathery-faced features of a sea-bishop, fangs glistening at Gemma. ‘If the savages on this world succeed in locking us away in eternity’s cold grasp again, I can promise you and your royalist herd, it will feel so much longer than forever for you!’

Dick Tull had acquired a heavy blanket from the doorman of the Embassy of the Steamman Free State, though the Circle knows where from. It was not as if the sentient metal creature had much use for it.

He felt like a beggar as he was ushered shivering in front of the ambassador. The transparent dome-skull of his Excellency Grinder Longbody sparked with unrestrained curiosity as Dick was ushered into the ambassador’s office.

‘Your possession of the embassy’s pass code would have gained you an audience by itself,’ announced the steamman official, ‘without the ridiculous notion of a Jackelian citizen wanting to claim political asylum with us.’

Dick coughed, still trembling. ‘Belt and braces, your Excellency.’ He reached inside his pocket and removed a slim oblong of semiconductor substrate inlaid with a fine filigree of glowing lines.

‘And by the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, what would that be?’

‘A soul board,’ said Dick.

‘I know that, you impertinent softbody,’ snapped the ambassador. ‘Are you a common gravedigger, violating our corpses in the hope of a reward? Which of our people’s cadavers did you violate to steal that soul board?’

‘It was freely given while its owner was alive,’ said Dick. ‘And it contains more than the soul of Algo Monoshaft. It contains a suggested modification for your brains, courtesy of the Court of the Air.’

‘Algo Monoshaft, the head of the State Protection Board?’ crackled the ambassador’s voicebox. ‘If he gave you this, then he is dead! He could not live for longer than an hour without it.’

‘Indeed he didn’t. He blew himself up, turned himself into a suicide bomb.’

‘But such an extreme end can only be granted with the permission of our maker, King Steam — it is almost unheard of?’

‘Your king’s spirit visited Algo Monoshaft in the cell of our enemies. Royal sanction was secured. Algo’s sacrifice was necessary to guarantee the survival of both your people and mine.’

‘How am I to believe these outrageous claims, softbody?’

‘Algo said you could verify my words by lifting the seal on this thing’s circuits and reading his final memories.’

‘What possible modification to our hallowed architecture would be important enough for Monoshaft to pass into the Hall of Ancestors for?’

‘Let’s just say you’ll be able to see more clearly,’ coughed Dick. Clearly enough to see the monsters walking among us. ‘And after you do, the head of the State Protection Board has petitioned King Steam for every steamman living inside the Kingdom to go out into the streets on a bit of a hunt. You see,’ said Dick, leaning in close, ‘and this is the nub of the thing. There are treasonists everywhere.’

Charlotte, Sadly and the commodore moved down the darkship’s corridor as fast as they dared. To anyone who caught sight of the three of them, hopefully all they would notice was a sea-bishop, the commodore in a purloined royalist sailor’s uniform and their prisoner — Sadly — being taken to an interrogation room to have his mind probed. Hopefully, that is, as long as Charlotte’s control over the Eye of Fate stayed strong.

It didn’t come easy to Charlotte. She was using the amulet constantly now, as a sea-bishop would. It was intensely painful keeping up the appearance of a sea-bishop, pushing the mesmeric field out. Her head was aching from it, throbbing with the mother of all headaches. Charlotte’s usual acts of mesmerism were restricted to ten-minute turns of a stage, and more often than not, one-to-one acts of suggestion. She had a new-found respect for the sea-bishops’ abilities. To be able to walk undetected among the race of man’s teeming masses unnoticed for months at a time without letting the illusion slip. No wonder they needed skull cases as tall as a stovepipe hat to hold such powerful brains.