Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The surveillant’s voice came back tinny over the wire. ‘Skraypers and lashlites.’

‘You’ve interrupted me for a lashlite hunt? I logged a dozen flights out hunting in the clouds yesterday. We have missing airships and a new sky mass to consider.’

‘No,’ said the surveillant, waving up from the scope below. ‘The sky is full of skraypers. Full of them. And the lash-lites …’

‘The lashlites? How many in the flight, man?’

‘All of them!’

Around the monitors’ platform every bell started buzzing as the watchful eyes of the Court of the Air began calling up in panic at the inexplicable sight. The monitors scattered to their posts, runners from the higher levels of the aerostat city bursting from the sphere’s lifting rooms as the chamber signalled for backup.

Monitor ten caught a brief glimpse of the numbers on the report being tallied and torn off to be ferried away by the runners.

‘Skraypers and lashlites. Oh my.’

Amelia watched the last section of the sausage-shaped pocket airship being inflated above her. They were putting it together in the centre of one of the city’s squares. A semi-rigid, just large enough to lift its three cabins — one for Amelia at the very back of the craft, a rear observation post without even a gantry across to the other two cabins, one for the pilot room, and directly connected behind the crew’s bridge, a hold full of infected spastic steammen, fizzing and shaking at each other as they blundered about the storage space. The old lady from the testing rooms was being manacled to the bench alongside Amelia, the mouth slot of her hex suit just large enough to accommodate the tubes of her breathing mask.

Abraham Quest came over, his head circled by the same cloaking crown that had saved Amelia from the death mist, and stood on the steps of the rear cabin. ‘You’ve made your choice, professor. All this way to find Camlantis, only to reject it. Such a waste. I shall dream of Camlantis for you, for when I awaken, I will find it reality.’

‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘I am afraid I do.’ Quest pointed to three sailors wearing cloaking crowns, climbing up the steps to the airship. They entered through the storage hold and locked the pilot room door on the infected idiot steammen. Unlike Amelia’s window-less observation cabin, the forward pilot room was sealed with glass. Quest’s crew would travel in relative comfort while the two prisoners shivered on the seats of their exposed berth. ‘They have orders to release you on the soil of Jackals before travelling on to the Steamman Free State. You and the old lady can enjoy the countryside for the few days it will take the Camlantean mist to propagate and hunt you down. I don’t suppose the last days in Jackals will be pleasant, but you will have the solace of knowing that whatever panicked savagery you witness will be the race of man’s last.’

‘Someone will live down below,’ spat Damson Beeton. ‘Someone will survive and come back to pay you and your murdering followers back for what you’ve done.’

Quest shook his head sadly. ‘If it comforts you to think so, damson. But no, in two days’ time the only Jackelians left alive will be the ones in our little kingdom beyond the waves. In three days the last peasant in the pampas of Kikkosico will be dying. Within two weeks there will be nobody left alive in Concorzia or Thar. By the middle of the year the last u-boat of the Spumehead trade fleet will be desperately surfacing for its final taste of air and any polar barbarians remaining alive will be falling in their snow-covered longhalls. I am sorry, damson, but Isambard Kirkhill’s bankrupt vision is about to be retired, and everything else that is left-’ his hand swept across the city, ‘-will be Camlantis. A world of sanity, peace and reason — forever more.’

‹Please,› begged Billy Snow’s spectre.

‘Too late for that,’ said Quest. ‘We’re brewing up nicely downstairs. An hour for the mist to reach critical mass, another hour to bed down the first generation of our new Camlanteans in their cloaking coffins …’

Again. ‹Please.›

‘Your revolution has run its course, child of Pairdan. Your city is about to live again.’ Quest beckoned Veryann over. ‘See that our guests are sent off on their way.’ He mounted a velocipede and was driven away towards the tomb.

Veryann secured Amelia to a seat next to the agent of the Court of the Air.

‘How does his plan sit with you?’ asked Amelia.

‘It is the plan of my liege-lord,’ said Veryann.

‘That doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement.’

‘It has a cruel logic,’ said Veryann. ‘That which is fit, prevails. That which is not, perishes. It is the way of life and the code of our free company.’

‘The code of the Catosian city-states,’ said Amelia. ‘How much of Catosia will be left after the Camlantean death mist drifts across your lands and people?’

‘We will be left,’ said Veryann. She looked out. The hull was nearly ready now, the linesmen fitting in support struts to strengthen the airship’s catenary curtain. ‘And we are no longer counted as true Catosians by our people. We were banished.’

‘Banished for losing one of the codified little tournament wars your cities hold to settle disputes,’ said Amelia. ‘Hold far out on the plains, so that the cities are not damaged and the innocents in them are not hurt by hostilities. That is your warrior’s way, isn’t it?’

‘He is our liege-lord,’ repeated Veryann. She got down from the rear cabin and pushed the collapsible steps up into the pocket airship’s floor.

The expansion engines on the side of the pilot cabin coughed into life, rotors spinning up, the airship starting to rise above Veryann’s golden hair. Amelia shook her head in sadness and looked down at the officer. ‘Enjoy Camlantis.’

‘Goodbye, professor.’

Before the pocket airship could depart, one of the sailors standing by an anchor rope twisted his mooring stake back down into the ground, kicking his colleague off balance, a second boot lashing out to smash the linesman into stillness. The renegade lifted a cutlass out of his belt. ‘Let’s save our goodbyes for later, lass.’

Amelia’s heart leapt. Commodore Black!

Veryann slipped out her Catosian sabre, her eyes glancing up at the pocket airship listing at an angle against the anchor as it tried to break free of its mooring. ‘You should have stayed hiding in the apartments of this ruin, Jared.’

‘Don’t be dying for that rich madman you call master,’ pleaded the commodore.

She warily circled the paunchy submariner. ‘I don’t intend to.’

A line of soldiers running towards the two fighters from the other side of the square suddenly scattered, shouting in alarm. The heavens above Camlantis were dark with hundreds of skraypers. Steering-cables trailed up to their lashlite masters, the organic zeppelins tamed by skin hooks. Thousands more of the winged lizards rode the currents of the upper atmosphere in intricate formations, slowly drifting chevron V’s, pointed hexagons, arrow-braided columns — the talons of Stormlick and the other fierce gods of the winds.

‘It never rains but it pours,’ said the commodore. ‘They must have heard you’re holding their fine-feathered friend Septimoth in a cage.’

‘Then they’ve come a long way for his corpse. They can have his lashlite bones back for a harp,’ spat Veryann, slashing the single line holding the pocket airship to the dirt. No longer bound to the ground, the stat rose away from the square, arrowing off low to avoid the beating wings of the lashlite battalions above them.

‘Head for Mechancia,’ Veryann yelled up towards the pilot cabin. ‘Deliver those steammen to the Free State at any cost.’