Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘You’re nothing but a pathetic little shopkeeper,’ Bull yelled and struggled as they dragged him after Amelia. ‘You’re not fit to run a sewer works, let alone a new world.’

‘You don’t approve of my calculations either?’ said Quest. ‘Let me give you a new sum, then, something that even a lowlife royalist like you should be able to understand. One crown and two souls that need cloaking. You do the maths.’

Amelia was shoved, struggling, into the cell, Bull Kammerlan thrown onto the floor beside her and the room sealed.

‘One crown, dimples,’ said Bull, ‘and two of us. That sum isn’t going to change.’

‘I opened this tomb for him,’ groaned Amelia. ‘I’ve murdered everyone in Jackals with my obsession for Camlantis. You take the damn crown and survive.’

A slot in the wall began to open where it joined the floor.

Bull shook his head. ‘From where I’m standing, there are two of you on your side of the room.’

‹If I was by myself, my belief system would require me to give you the crown.›

‘But you’re not by yourself, are you?’ said Bull. ‘You always were a queer one, Billy Snow, with your strange tales and your taste for damn vegetables, but I never knew the half of it.’

The black liquid started to puddle across the floor, the very sweat of hell.

Amelia kicked the crown towards Bull. ‘I don’t want it.’

The vapour was forming around their feet. At close quarters Amelia could see it was a soot-storm of a billion dark flecks. Tiny living machines — Billy revealed their construction within Amelia’s mind — designed to take apart that which was sentient one cell at a time, to breed, to spread, to absorb, until anything more intelligent than a Jackelian rat-pit terrier was scrubbed from the face of the world.

Bull picked up the crown. ‘My family were stewards of our land once, until Quest’s kind decided it would be better run by counting-house clerks.’

The cloud was starting to rise, becoming two mocking silhouettes, as if both the prisoners’ shadows had grown detached and insane.

Bull proffered the crown to Amelia. ‘And haven’t they done well with it?’

‘I opened the tomb.’

‘Then between you and that mad old coot riding around your skull, you’ve got what you need to close it.’

Bull tossed the crown towards Amelia as the cloud formed into a lance and hissed viper-like towards his chest. ‘You be sure and tell that fat oaf of an uncle of mine how I died.’

‹ One must live .›

Her hands struck out of their own will, seizing the cloaking crown and jamming it over her mane of hair.

The mist wrapped itself around the slaver, concealing him, followed by a macabre fizzing sound, like bacon on the griddle. It grew darker and denser, absorbing the new matter, swirling around in a frenzy. When the mist dispersed the slaver had vanished. A conjurer’s trick. No blood, no bones, not a trace that he had ever existed. Bull Kammerlan had died without even a cry leaving his lips. Hovering in front of Amelia, shapes formed and flowed within the inky motes. There had been someone else here. Someone the mist was required to feed on. But now there was nothing. It circled the room for a couple of minutes. Then it retreated, confused, towards the floor, reforming into a liquid that flowed repellently out of her cell. The slot sealed shut.

Bull was gone. T’ricola dead, Ironflanks left a helpless cripple, the face-shifting madman and his lashlite pet murdered. Just one left alive, Amelia and the ancient Camlantean ghost echoing around her skull.

Amelia sunk to her knees. ‘What now?’

‹ Now Quest will activate the ignition process in the nanofactury buried below ,› whispered the voice in her mind, showing her an image of the death mist’s huge breeding tanks. ‹ And he will remake the world. After he has first slaughteredit .›

From the safety of his tower roof, the commodore pulled out a telescope from his bag of purloined supplies and extended the brass tube, training it on the street below. It was obvious where the tomb Billy Snow had warned them about sat; you just had to follow the trail of carriages and material being moved across the city, ant-like columns of vehicles leaving the airships on the ground.

He focused on the group of figures moving to the edge of Camlantis. It was nearly dawn now, the waters of the Sepia Sea just visible beneath the gaps in the cloud, a mirror of crushed diamonds glittering far below.

‘Ah, no,’ Commodore Black cursed beneath his oxygen regulator.

It was the face-changing lunatic Cornelius Fortune, being dragged along by a guard of airship sailors. And if Fortune was no longer at liberty, then it could only mean that devil Abraham Quest was still alive. The trail of fresh vehicles shuttling out from the airships surely meant that Billy Snow must have failed in his attempt to prevent the expedition accessing the tomb too.

Two of the three escapees finished. So it was all down to him again, then? Would the world give him no blessed rest? Hadn’t it had enough of him perched on the edge of this floating mausoleum, signalling the Court of the Air to no avail? Their wicked eyes had had little trouble noticing him when brave old Blacky had worn the name of Solomon Dark and harried parliament’s shipping with his royalist freebooters. Now, the one time in his life he actually needed the Court’s people to come calling with their dark ships and their cunning weapons, they were all asleep on their watch deck.

He shook his head sadly and pressed his eye to the telescope. With a brief struggle the airship sailors unlocked the chains binding the prisoner then tossed the figure off the edge of the city — walking the air , as the jack cloudies called it when they executed a sailor sentenced to death in the sky.

Jared Black got a brief glimpse of a Furnace-breath Nick mask flapping on the madman’s head, caught behind his neck on its ties, the winds playing with the tumbling body like a cat clawing a mouse. Cornelius Fortune had freed a bone-white pipe from his belt as he tumbled down, growing smaller and smaller, and the commodore heard a faint whistling as the fierce cross winds blew a funeral ditty through the pipe for him on his fall. Smaller and smaller, then the carpet of clouds swallowed the dwindling dot.

Commodore Black tugged a flask of the airship sailors’ rum rations out of his stolen sack. Blackstrap, they called it. As thick as treacle and filthy cheap stuff, but beggars could not be choosers. He took a swig and raised a toast to the last survivor — well, the last but one — of their brief intrepid jailbreak from the Leviathan .

‘You got the best of that one, you daft daring loon, leaving poor old Blacky to face these devils alone. Always me alone, always alone to save us all, damn my stars.’

The staff in the Court of the Air’s monitorarium huddled together in an unauthorized conference on the gantry. Rarely had the handover between the day watch and the night watch in the massive spherical chamber become so heated.

‘Floatquake lands tend towards the static.’

‘But they can follow the leylines, we’ve seen that happen.’

‘There’s no sky mass of such a magnitude even recorded.’

‘It could be a fresh floatquake …’

‘Then where’s the devastation on the ground? And there are buildings on this one.’

A hornet-like buzzing came from the bell near the speaker wire and monitor ten broke away from the exchange to look over the gantry, the slowly rotating scopes and their riders below like a carnival carousel embedded within an inverted planetarium.

Monitor ten picked up his speaking trumpet and phones. ‘What is it?’