Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Quest walked over to Amelia, taking her hand. ‘Are you all right, professor? You look faint.’

‘I can’t believe we’ve done it.’

‘Your dream,’ said Quest, ‘and mine. We’ve always known the city was there.’

‘Look at the size of it. We can’t keep this a secret. Every paddle steamer making a course for Concorzia will be landing in colonial harbours with stories of a new floatquake land hanging in the heavens.’

‘I think we’ll have the run of the place for a while yet,’ said Quest. ‘Time enough to explore the ruins.’

It was true. They were beyond the reach of the RAN, beyond the reach of almost everything except the obsession that had driven them both here, that and … something else that counted itself master of these empty skies.

‘Skrayper!’ cried one of the sailors, her head covered with bulky earphones. ‘Word from the aft watch on the Minotaur . Skrayper sighted at four o’clock.’

‘I have it,’ confirmed one of the crew, letting go of his arm-mounted telescope. ‘Two miles away and heading straight for us.’

The airmaster pulled his cap down tight. ‘This high up, it was only a matter of time. Damn my eyes, but I warned you, Mister Quest, those monsters are fiercely territorial.’

Amelia took the abandoned telescope and twisted it down to where the watchman had been pointing it. There. An elongated tube of transparent flesh as large as one of their own colossal airship flotilla, organic gas twinkling inside its body like a thousand star motes in the painfully clear sunlight. Jellyfish-like tentacles dangled from its belly, deceptively thin at this distance. Amelia had read enough tales of skrayper attacks on Jackals’ aerial shipping in the penny dreadfuls to know that those arms were covered in wiry toxin-filled hairs that could lash apart the catenary curtain of an airship. Normally the sunlight feeders only came low enough to maul aerostats when the creatures were wounded or dying. But then, Quest’s exploration squadron was operating at no normal altitude.

‘Sound action stations,’ ordered Quest. The undulating scream of a siren broke across the bridge, the sound of air-boots stamping past in the corridor outside. One of Quest’s young academy boys — almost too small for his green uniform — came running past, handing a breather mask to Amelia. She copied the other sailors and pulled the strap over her head, letting the leather cup dangle under her chin, the flask-sized oxygen canister tied to lie across her chest. A token, only. If they were holed at this height, the decompression would take care of her long before she needed tanked air to breathe.

‘The Minotaur will have field of fire first, sir,’ the airmaster informed Quest.

‘Signal her, then. Make ready on the harpoons and prepare our own too, in case the Minotaur’s aim proves unsteady.’

‘Harpoons?’ questioned Amelia. ‘We’re no slipsharper out of Spumehead hunting for blubber and oil.’

‘High altitude flight has its perils,’ said Quest, ‘and we have not come unprepared. This far above the ground I was anticipating at least one attack a day until the skraypers recognize this is our territory and learn to respect our limits.’

‘And how are you going to teach them that?’

Quest pointed to their sister airship manoeuvring beyond the bridge’s viewing platform. The Minotaur shuddered as she released two rockets from her belly battery, twin lances pulling away on spouts of fire and heading straight for the glistening shape closing in on the flotilla. Both rockets impaled the skrayper and exploded inside its transparent body, the shimmering sun-feeding gas turning a dull green in the detonation’s aftershock. The infection of colour spread throughout the creature’s bulk quickly, like dye in water, then the whale of the sky began to slowly rotate, the diaphanous wing-like fins on its flank crumpling and folding up in agony. The skrayper’s trajectory changed, arrowing down towards the carpet of cloud cover far below.

‘Basic chemistry,’ said Quest. ‘Altering the composition of the gas that keeps a skrayper aloft and allows it to feed. Now, every time the poor creature tries to draw sustenance from the sunlight, the energy is transformed into a level of voltage that is higher than its body can tolerate. It’s burning itself out with every new breath it takes.’

Amelia looked on, not sure whether to feel relief at the end of one of the legendary krakens of the heavens, or pity for such a cruel end. ‘You thought of that?’

‘Admiralty House has been offering a prize for a weapon capable of driving skraypers off our airships for three centuries,’ said Quest. ‘One of the members of the Royal Society bet me that I couldn’t claim it.’

A bet. He had developed a method of securing Jackelian aerial shipping for a mere wager. Amelia shuddered. Sometimes it was the small things that served as a reminder that this was the man who had tried to buy the nation just because he could ; who had nearly bankrupted the Jackelian economy and destroyed her life before they had even met. He belonged here in the clouds thinking his wild thoughts, too large for the nations of the ground below to contain. But it was Quest’s storm-basin of a mind that had led them here, where no one else could tread. He had found the foundations of Camlantis where no one before would have dreamed looking — at the bottom of a rotting jungle. It was he who had set her on the path to the key to unlock the ethereal ruins of this city, as surely as his pilots had plotted a course in their flotilla of high-lifters — riding at altitudes that nobody would have previously believed feasible.

Quest nodded to a sailor on the helioscope platform and he began to flash a message to the other airships in their small fleet. In front of them, the Minotaur switched course, drifting above the city’s towers and seeding it with glider capsules, triangle wings folding out of the iron craft, white silk chute tails popping out to brake their descent. Amelia could hear a bass rattle in the heart of the Leviathan and guessed that they were also emptying their rails in the hangar below.

‘We’re here to explore the city,’ Amelia said. ‘Not occupy it.’

‘You archaeologists do the same thing at your dig sites,’ replied Quest. ‘You lay out a grid and explore each sector in turn.’

‘We use trowels and brushes. Not Catosian free company fighters and your poorhouse academy cadets.’

‘They have orders not to break anything,’ said Quest. ‘I’m an impatient man and they will be our scouts. We already know the rough shape of the city from the outline of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo and with the landmarks contained in your crown and our two crystal-books, we should be able to orient ourselves very quickly after we land.’

The Leviathan was heading across the metropolis towards the centre of Camlantis where a massive spire-stalk stood, towering high above the surrounding city, a furl of flower-like petals starting to rotate around the building’s apex.

‘Sweet Circle.’ Amelia watched a series of golden lights patterning up the huge tower.

‘The crystal-books were true,’ said Robur. ‘The buildings do feed on the light of the sun. Just like a skrayper.’

‘The city has been in hibernation,’ said Quest, ‘awaiting the return of its people.’

‘We’re not its people,’ said Amelia, ‘we’re just pilgrims come a-visiting.’

Quest shrugged. ‘Well, actually …’

Amelia looked restlessly at the merchant lord. ‘What is it, Quest? You’ve been holding out on me again?’

‘I told you when we first met that yours was not the only academic heresy I have been funding the investigation of. What do you know of the Maitraya?’