Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘They will come?’

‘They always do. We can be certain of their pursuit — even if we were not holding a handful of the Court’s agents prisoner. Their telescopes can point across as easily as they point down.’ Quest indicated his mobile fortress and the material being unloaded. ‘But I have a few military innovations waiting for them that they won’t find deployed by the new pattern army down in Jackals.’

Robur accepted a roll of fresh reports from one of their scouts. ‘We shall find it, yes, we shall.’

‘Leave the location of the tomb to our scouts,’ said Quest. ‘That’s what they have been trained and briefed for. You have other more pressing matters to attend to. The second stage of our scheme; the reason why I went to so much effort to free you from your captors in the Commonshare …’

‘I shall keep up my end of things. I have my equipment and test subjects already loaded onto your armoured carriages,’ said Robur, his eyelids blinking nervously. ‘They are just waiting for the tomb to be sited. With all your resources behind me, achieving my vision was only a matter of persistence and application.’

‘I think you overestimate the worth of my Jackelian shillings. You could just as easily have completed your work for the Commonshare.’

‘I would have done so for the Sun King,’ said Robur, ‘but for the revolutionary scum that stole his throne? They were more interested in completing Timlar Preston’s designs for his supercannon and vicious toys like these-’ the mechomancer pointed to the iron carriages being assembled.

‘For every idea, there is a time,’ said Quest. He stared up at the spire where the Leviathan lay docked. ‘This is your time, Jules. And mine. The dream that is Camlantis is about to be reawakened and your vision shall come to fruition alongside it.’

‘We would need a hundred years of uninterrupted peace to even begin to understand the knowledge contained in this city.’

‘A hundred?’ said Quest. ‘Why ask for so little? I shall give you a thousand.’

From the south came the unoiled squeal of a six-wheeled velocipede, its back wheels turning on a fan belt, propelling a vehicle little more than an open frame with an iron umbrella to shield its two occupants. One of which was Veryann, the Catosian officer leaping out as she drew up in front of Quest. ‘We have a situation.’

Quest adjusted his breather unit. ‘Has the Leviathan sighted the Court’s aerospheres so soon?’

‘This is more a disaster of our own making,’ said Veryann. ‘The cell level on the Leviathan has gone into lockdown.’

‘A breakout? I thought the cursewalls my sorcerers had laid around the high security hold would contain a five-flower worldsinger?’

‘They would have,’ said the officer, ‘but they were facing the wrong way. The breakout came from the standard secur ity cells. I don’t have all the details yet; half the guards up there are dead, but it looks like three of our prisoners managed to get beyond the cell deck before it was sealed down tight — Cornelius Fortune, Commodore Black, and worst of all, the thing that calls itself Billy Snow. All the other prisoners were caught by the lockdown and are back in custody.’

Robur had gone albino pale. ‘Furnace-breath Nick! Furnace-breath Nick is out to pay me back for having played him false!’

Veryann looked with disgust at the quaking mechomancer. ‘He is merely a man in a carnival mask.’

‘I agree,’ said Quest. ‘Fortune and that fat fool of a submariner are of little account. It is the child of Pairdan we need to worry about — this is his city. He may well know where the tomb is, and he absolutely must not be allowed to reach it before we do.’

‘You don’t understand,’ moaned Robur. ‘Furnace-breath Nick is walking this land with the darkness inside his heart. I have seen him. He is real, he is real. Don’t be fooled by that man-suit he wears.’

Quest grimaced. ‘Pull yourself together, Jules. Besides, I know exactly what Furnace-breath Nick is going to do.’

Robur looked horrified at the unholy perception of the mill owner. ‘You do?’

‘Yes. He’s going to come here to try to kill me.’ Quest’s hand lashed out, striking Veryann’s nose, unleashing a fountain of blood and disarming her with a nerve-strike to her wrist. ‘Although, if he had ever seen Veryann train with practice swords, he would have known she was left-handed.’

The two figures joined in a blur of limbs, the Veryann impersonator kicking out, trying to shatter Quest’s knee and bring him low enough to step forward and snap his neck, but Quest caught the boot and turned it high, pushing back to overturn his assassin. Another kick swept out to try to bring Quest to the floor, but he leapt over it, both legs frogging up to his chin. Then Quest flipped back. Behind them, Catosian soldiers from the airship ran over with their rifles drawn, but the free company fighters were hesitating, both figures too close to one another to risk a shot. Robur was quivering behind the camp table, oblivious to the fact that Furnace-breath Nick had come to kill the organ grinder, not the monkey.

The Veryann doppelganger had a boot dagger out, moving in for a professional cut — low into the stomach and up, aiming to spill the contents of Quest’s gut with a single stroke. A flurry of blows, rapidly exchanged, Quest blocking each knife flick with the heel of his hand. The mill owner possessed the luxury of long months of training, with the money to hire the greatest sword masters and pugilists of Jackals’ duelling halls and the intellect to integrate their skills into a scientific fighting system that had been merged with the Catosian free company’s own austere regime of war. This was the first time Quest’s combat method had been matched against the dirty fighting style of the Jackelian underworld — a nameless system filtered through the rookeries, jinn houses and lean-tos of the slum areas of Middlesteel, as if it were the sewage that ran underneath the capital. A system not perfected on the polished wooden floors of duelling halls, but that survived and prospered with the blood of its practioners — mutating and evolving along with corpses left face-down in the puddles of Driselwell and Sling Street. Abraham Quest had risen from the gutter. Now the gutter had returned to strike back at him.

Quest left a small opening in his defence and Furnace-breath Nick lunged in to push his blade into the mill owner’s heart, realizing too late that it was a trap — Quest’s hands crossing and capturing his assassin’s wrist, turning the bone at an angle the body was never meant to withstand. Quest stepped back, twisting his would-be killer’s arm to his side, keeping him pinned to the ground with a pressure-hold as his soldiers rushed up and seized the assassin. Sophistication had triumphed over savagery. As the female soldiers pulled Furnace-breath Nick away he snarled and struggled like a wild animal. The city had never witnessed such a display of animal passions, not even during the horrifying advance of the Black-oil Horde.

‘Keep him away from me!’ begged Robur. ‘He’s come for me.’

‘Every heaven must have its devils capering around the walls of paradise, it seems,’ said Quest.

One of the Catosians raised her rifle to the assassin’s head and slid the safety catch off her gun’s clockwork hammer mechanism. Quest shook his head. ‘Not yet. There’s time enough to cast down our demons. You should have stuck to terrorizing Commonshare committeemen on the other side of the border, Cornelius Fortune. You’ve interfered in my plans once too often — but I shall permit you a small glimpse through the gates of paradise before I expel you.’ He turned to one of the airship crew. ‘Signal the Leviathan . Find out if he was telling the truth about exactly who escaped from the cells. Then find the real Veryann and have her send a company to protect Amelia Harsh’s group.’