Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The commodore peered inside the dark recesses of Ironflanks’ opened chest. ‘You said yourself you have siltempter components, and don’t those rascals swap parts of their bodies like the urchins along Pipchin Street trade marbles?’

‘There is still part of me that is a steamman knight,’ protested Ironflanks. ‘The Pathfinder Fist do not submit to such indignities.’

‘Ah, well that part of you had best stay very still while I see if I can do this.’ The commodore glanced irritably across the cell towards where Cornelius Fortune sat, rocking and moaning. ‘Be a good fellow now, I need to concentrate. How long is he going to stay like that, calling like a blessed crow that has lost its mate? He’ll bring the guards in on us with that hullabaloo.’

‘There were times in the organized community in Quatershift when he would stay in such a state for weeks,’ said Septimoth. ‘That’s why the community committee ordered his arm to be cut off. They thought he was shirking his duties in the camp and the threat of amputation would be enough to make him stop faking illness. As with so much else, they were wrong about that, of course.’

‘I know a way to shut him up,’ said Bull Kammerlan, bunching his hand menacingly into a fist.

Septimoth flicked a talon towards Bull. ‘If you lay a finger on him, I promise you it will be your last act, little monkey.’

‘You can’t fly away from me in here, lashlite,’ spat Bull, ‘and-’

‘Belay that talk,’ ordered the commodore. ‘We’ve got enough problems with an airship full of Quest’s soldiers and jack cloudies to contend with. My nephew makes a rough point, old bird, but he does have one. If we’re to get out of this cell, we’re all going to need to be pulling on the anchor rope at the same time. Your friend isn’t going to get very far like that.’

‘There is another way,’ said Septimoth, looking at Cornelius hunched and whimpering in the corner. ‘But it loses its potency if it is used too often, and the one suffering can go mad — visited by the gods of the wind in their dreams.’

‘If ever there was a time for your medicine, this would be it,’ said the commodore. ‘And as for madness …’ he nodded towards the shivering form of their cellmate.

Septimoth sighed in agreement, pulling out his bone flute and raising it to his beak. He sat himself opposite Cornelius and began to play a low, haunting melody, so gentle that it barely registered on the ears at all. Everyone in the cell had to stretch their hearing to focus on the melody, losing themselves inside the tune as they spread their senses to catch it.

Bull began to make a disparaging remark, but T’ricola hushed him with a whisper. ‘I’ve seen a lashlite play a half-crazed exo-beast to sleep with one of their pipes. Keep quiet for once.’

‘This is no ordinary song,’ said Ironflanks in awe. ‘There are Loas being called. I can feel the power of it echoing within my boiler-heart.’

Around their feet a gentle wind began to circulate, warm to the skin, blowing at their trousers, flowing with the cadence of the unearthly tune leaving Septimoth’s flute. It rustled the feathers along the lashlite’s folded wings and swirled around Cornelius, his keening growing lower as the swish of air surged stronger. Wrapping itself around Cornelius like a cloak, the air seemed to solidify, pulling at his clothes and levitating him an inch off the ground. He stopped moaning and with a sudden inrush of air the wind filled his mouth with its power, disappearing inside the man. Cornelius’s chest expanded as his lungs bulged with the unexpected blessing of the lashlite gods of the wind and he slumped back to the floor, gasping as if having just survived drowning.

Septimoth lowered the bone flute, leaving his alien tune still whispering in the minds of the other prisoners even though his pipe had fallen silent. ‘How do you fare?’

Cornelius blinked and looked around the cell at the faces staring at him. ‘We are still on Quest’s airship?’

‘If the guards’ chatter is to be believed, we have landed on Camlantis,’ said Septimoth. ‘But you are correct. Our position as prisoners here is unaltered. They dragged you out to see Abraham Quest …’

‘Yes, I remember that. He wanted me to save the world.’

‘There’s a coincidence,’ remarked the commodore. ‘For I was going to ask you the very same thing. You with your strange rubber face, you’re just the fellow to do it.’

Cornelius pulled himself to his feet. ‘The world doesn’t need saving: it needs punishing. And this isn’t my face. Quest still has it.’

The commodore resumed his probing within Ironflanks’ innards. ‘Well, let’s be saving ourselves first. We can debate about what to do with our mortal freedom after we are well out of here. Now, there’s the fellow …’ he removed a skein of crystalline cable, a thin wafer of dark silicate etched with delicate golden metal attached to the other end. ‘If only my darling Molly were here by my side, her with her fierce quick affinity for the life metal. She would be able to do this far faster than a weak old fool who has allowed himself to be tricked into this terrible adventure. Betrayed by his greed for Quest’s pennies and his deep, pure love for the Sprite of theLake .’

Cornelius noticed the wall behind where the commodore was fiddling: the panel to the transaction engine lock had been levered off. ‘You can break the lock on the door?’

‘I forced the panel open. He’s been trying to crack the combination for most of the day,’ said Bull. ‘And we’re still here.’

‘You’ve got not a whit of appreciation for the art behind this, nephew of mine,’ complained the commodore. ‘If you had, you wouldn’t have been languishing in the tanks at Bonegate Prison waiting like an idiot for your sentimental old uncle to come and rescue you from parliament’s bully boys. You could have swum up to the surface and tickled their clumsy gates open for yourself. This lock is no humble standalone affair, the transaction engine sitting behind that panel is a slave to the great monsters Quest has steaming away in the heart of his flagship. It draws on all the power and quickness of his main transaction-engine chamber. Fuelled by their potency, this abominable lock is almost a living thing, its mathematics able to roll and change to counter every drop of cunning I can squeeze out of my poor, tired mind.’

‘Then we’re finished,’ said Cornelius.

‘Not yet,’ said the commodore. ‘When you can’t win at the game, it’s time to play a new one. Ironflanks, step closer to the lock. T’ricola, I’ll ask you to hold the cable straight while I work, hold it as still and as gently as if it were a ruptured gas line back on your engineering deck. You may blow me a little tune if you like, Septimoth. A tune for luck and to steady my old fingers while I try to avoid setting off the hundred alarms and tripwires Quest has paid to be installed behind that panel.’

‘The music of the race of man is too simple,’ said Septimoth. ‘Your notes possess no power and having forsaken your ancient gods, you Jackelians no longer play in worship of them, as is proper.’

‘That’s a pity, then. A nice shanty, that’s what I could do with. Are you sure you don’t know My U-boat, She’s No Sinker? No matter, no matter.’ Sweat trickled down the commodore’s forehead as he worked the wafer from Ironflanks’ body deep inside the transaction engine, then spent half an hour fiddling and cursing Quest’s mechanism and all the cunning of the merchant lord’s transaction-engine chamber. At last he nodded and reached inside Ironflanks’ chest, changing the configuration of a cluster of crystals and completing his travails.