Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘There’s nothing here,’ she opined to Quest as his airmaster rolled up the sky charts and passed them over to one of his jack cloudies, folding the compass back into the map table. ‘What good is your key now? There’s no lock for you to fit it into.’

‘It’s not that sort of key,’ said Quest.

‘Oh, is that so? Then why here?’ asked Amelia. ‘We’re so high up I can barely see the Sepia Sea underneath us any more.’

‘This is where we need to be, Amelia. I have had months to scrutinize the contents of the other crystal-book of the pair my antique dealer turned up for me back in Middlesteel. The second book contains the plan for the sundering of Camlantis — exactly where the rock formations would need to be split by the force of the leylines. How much earthflow energy would need to be concentrated to reverse the gravity of the rock layer under Camlantis, the trajectory, the height the city was to be set adrift at. If you know that, then you know where in the sky to search for the lost city.’

‘There’s nothing here now.’

‘That’s what the key inside the crown you brought back is for,’ said Quest. ‘The city is here, just folded away, caught between the cracks in the walls of the universe.’ He indicated the glowing crystals protruding from his machinery. ‘Stand back and watch.’

‘There’s one thing that puzzles me,’ continued Amelia. ‘As best as I can tell, the losing side in the Camlantean civil war seemed to be in the majority. Most of the Camlanteans favoured a direct solution to the Black-oil Horde when it seemed like their civilization would finally fall.’

Quest folded his arms behind his back. ‘Actually fighting the barbarians to preserve their civilization. Yes, from what I have seen, I would certainly say that was the case. The Camlanteans were desperate in their closing days.’

‘Yet, it was the few that still clung to the tenets of pacifism who attacked Camlantis, denying the city to the horde and murdering their enemies in the civil war. Doesn’t that strike you as more than a little perverse? Surely it should have been the faction that favoured violent action that should have been willing to attack their pacifist rivals with the tools of aggression, not the other way around?’

The mound of machines on the bridge began to throb, an uncomfortable sound, just drifting in and out of the range of hearing.

Robur walked over to them, tapping his trousers with a clipboard heavy with schematics. ‘You would understand such contradictions better if you had survived a decade in an organized community in the Commonshare, professor. The hand that preaches greater love for your neighbours and the forsaking of all personal gain, that hand is all too ready to turn into the fist that beats your family into submission.’

Robur’s presence made Amelia uneasy. There was something about this man, a manic energy that manifested itself like a halo of light around him. It was as if Robur was capable of doing anything, flipping instantly between moods. He might suddenly sprint away, break down crying, or fly into a fit of violence. All it would take would be a gentle push. He was clearly a broken man, his soul torn to pieces in Quatershift, hanging together by the thinnest of threads. Amelia had a terrible suspicion that thread might be her own dream of utopia. What in the Circle’s name did that say about her dream, her obsession? As it was, Robur’s attention was presently directed towards keeping Quest’s latest creation functional.

Amelia noticed a faint spark in the sky outside answering the throb of light from the machine on the bridge. Each pulse from the mechanism mirrored by a heartbeat in the thin, cold atmosphere outside.

‘It works!’ cried Robur. ‘After all this time …’

‘We both toiled on this,’ said Quest. ‘We knew that we would succeed.’

Robur watched the flickering light outside, hypnotized. ‘Without the transmetric valves of your devising this would not have been possible.’

‘I merely refined the concept on my transaction engines. The basics were published in a Royal Society paper a year or two ago,’ said Quest. ‘Increase the power. We need to match the transmission frequency precisely, or knowing the key from the crown will prove useless.’

Robur waved his clipboard at the engineers and they adjusted the wheels and levers around the pyramid-shaped contraption. The foreign mechomancer started to mumble something, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

‘Is that a prayer?’ asked Amelia.

‘I prayed to the Sun God morning, noon and night once,’ said Robur. ‘For my family to be spared. For my friends to survive. For food for them to eat. To taste the air again as a free man. But my prayers were never answered. Now I am like you Jackelians; I have made a religion out of believing in nothing. So in answer to your question, no, I am not praying. I am repeating the sequencing key for the valves.’

‘We don’t believe in nothing,’ said Amelia. ‘We believe in each other.’

‘I think I would find it easier to believe in the Sun God again.’ Robur rushed forward as a hiss of steam erupted from one of the pipes servicing his device, closing the connection while his engineers wrestled a backup duct into operation. Outside, the light was becoming more intense — almost too bright to stare at. Robur stumbled back. He was soaked in steam from the leak and his forehead was covered in sweat. ‘I have seen no evidence of the Sun God or the Child of Light in the world. But I have seen Lord Darksun in the hearts and faces of my countrymen. I have seen Furnace-breath Nick striding across the land!’

Amelia was torn between watching the spectacle outside and the scarecrow figure of Robur, shaking like a mumbleweed addict too long without a drag on his pipe. Robur snatched up Amelia’s hand and pressed it hard, a look of fanaticism crossing his face. ‘We’ll cast them out, the demons lurking in our souls. There! There are our tools to remake the world …’

Beyond the airship, the light was shifting, becoming planes of dancing energy. She had seen that light before at the bottom of the basin of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. The light had taken them somewhere else, then: might it also be able to transport something back into the heavens above their Earth?

‘Signal the other ships,’ Quest shouted at the airmaster of the Leviathan . ‘Have them move back. I don’t want their crews needlessly lost if we are wrong about this.’

A wall of light pulled away from them, moving at incredible speed, every mile it fell back revealing an incredible sight: a sight Amelia had dreamed of, a sight she had never thought she would see outside the grainy images of a crystal-book. Tears rolled down Amelia’s cheeks. ‘You weren’t wrong.’

Cheers erupted from the crew, echoes of their ovation rising up in the corridors outside. Faces throughout the giant airship and her sister craft pressed up against freezing cold portholes, for down beneath them hung Camlantis, floating in the air. Proud, beautiful Camlantis, her spindly towers and wide boulevards empty of life, her parks full of fossilized trees, starved of water and light in the folded-away pocket of a sideways universe where she had been banished for so many millennia. The people who had made her had turned to dust, but the organic lines of their city might as well have been preserved in amber. Only the underside of Camlantis showed the devastation that had struck the city, trailing girders hanging out of the sundered rock, severed atmospheric tunnels leading to twin shafts at the bottom of a lake in Liongeli a thousand miles away. There had never been a floatquake so large. Gravity reversed across a single landmass that stretched for miles. If this floating monster collapsed into the Sepia Sea now, the resulting tsunami would sink half the Jackelian downlands.