Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Tell the lashlites to bring us down!’ Amelia cried down to the commodore on the ground. ‘We’re a steamman plague ship, we’re-’ then the craft was pulling away into the sky, the rest of her words muffled by her air mask and the crosswinds blowing over the city.

Amelia was gone, the pocket airship diving between the spires to evade a passing skrayper, destined for Jackals and the Steamman Free State. Death and plague for both lands following close in their wake.

Commodore Black turned a sabre cut and pulled his cutlass back as Veryann tried to catch the edge of the sword and rotate the blade out of his hand. ‘This is a very different board for our little game of chess, lass.’

The air above them was afire as the Minotaur launched a series of aerial harpoons at the skrayper formations, but there weren’t nearly enough of the weapons in the exploration fleet to slow down the mass of creatures. One of the lead skraypers made it through the volley unscathed and brought its tentacles down across the middle sphere of the airship, ripping her hull and spilling a flock of ballonets into the air. The high-lift globes rose up like a line of air bubbles shooting for the surface of a lake.

Veryann’s form angled sideways and her blade cut ahead and forward, her right boot stamping down with each flourish. Commodore Black wheezed as he parried the attack.

Veryann struck again with renewed vigour. ‘Yes, but you’re twenty years and as many pounds ahead of me on this board.’

It was true. Her shine-swollen muscles made her a tigress, a living weapon of muscle, trained and honed for a singular purpose: war and its victory. An airship sailor reloading his rifle to their side spun around behind Veryann as a plummeting lashlite lance found its mark in his chest.

Commodore Black mustered his strength and ignored the ache in his arms, giving her a taste of her own medicine, but she was so much faster than him, meeting each blow with a clang of steel and pushing him away every time with an intricate counter lunge.

He was soon back on the purely defensive, the vapour from his regulator soaking his forehead. ‘You’ve a sophisticated style about you, lass. As befits a Catosian maiden.’

She feinted left then cut up, severing one of the tubes from his mask, the rubber cable hissing half his precious air reserves away into the thin atmosphere. ‘Yield now, before your heart gives out.’

‘Ah, you’ve already broken that, girl.’

Their swords sparked in the centre of the ancient Camlantean square, the clashing of steel lost behind the rumble of one of Quest’s tracked carriages as it cut a corner, its stubby cannon emptying a shell towards the lashlite formations spiralling above.

‘Yield, and I can hide you away in one of our spare sleeping capsules.’

‘Your blessed new world would be a sight too tame, clean and quiet for old Blacky,’ wheezed the commodore, the mask hanging off his face. ‘A sight too quiet for a Catosian fighter, too.’

She closed in for the kill. ‘Then it’s time for a different kind of sleep, old man.’

Amelia jerked against her wrist ties, but the leather loop was too firmly stretched between her hands and the chains on the wall. She tried yelling and whistling for the lashlites, but failed to attract their attention over all the carnage in the sky. Two of the Jackelian airships were still in the air — the Minotaur just barely, broadsides from her cannons being answered by diving skraypers controlled by seemingly suicidal riders. The Leviathan was still tethered to the central spire and her three interlinked globes were crawling with lashlites tearing and breaking through her hull, like ants swarming over a picnic left on the grass.

Rifle and cannon smoke drifted over the city. Flights of the winged lizards dived down, striking with unerring accuracy from their gliding formations, leaving hails of lances falling behind them, any lashlite warrior who survived the answering volley fire from the ground pulling up to rejoin the sky-borne armada. Camlantis had known centuries of peace locked to the Earth and centuries more in her cold banishment; it had never seen an explosion of violence of this magnitude. No quarter was asked for. No quarter was given. Wounded Catosian mercenaries inching bloodily across the white pavement were left still and pin-cushioned by swooping keen-eyed lashlite braves. Lashlites unlucky enough to be downed alive were mobbed by Quest’s academy soldiers and airship sailors, their wings torn by bayonets, skulls crushed in a frenzied flurry of rifle butts.

Amelia yelled out again to the lashlites, her voice cracking with the effort.

‘We’re too far away, dearie,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘And lashlites are too proud to hunt a fleeing pocket airship. The god Stormlick fills the wings of those who hunt worthy prey, and that does not include chasing cowards who flee a fight.’

Amelia struggled vainly. ‘The people of the winds have got to stop Quest.’

‹ They are too late ,› said the voice in her skull. ‹ The chamberyou saw in that tomb was designed to withstand all the ingenuitymy rebel grouping within the Camlantean polity couldthrow at it. The House of Quest can seal their people insideand release the death mist at their leisure after it has beenproduced in sufficient quantities to guarantee the exterminationof the world. Lashlite lances will not break their way in .’

‘There has to be a way to get inside it.’

‹ There may be an alternative. But to get to it we need tobe free and back down on the streets of the city again. Whichof your hands do youvalue the most ?›

‘What?’

‹ Left or right ?›

‘I’m right-handed.’

‹ Left it is. Grit your teeth. Your screams will draw theattention of the crew .›

They did. One of the sailors put down the sounding scope he was using to guide the pocket airship between the Camlantean spires and turned around.

‘Have we been boarded?’ demanded the bosun, his peaked cap swapped for one of the soul-cloaking crowns.

‘It’s that bloody university woman,’ replied the sailor, staring out of the porthole. ‘Yelling like she’s being rogered by a pike.’

‘Go back and see what she’s about,’ ordered the bosun. ‘Unless she behaves, I’ll put her off early-’ he made a tipping motion with his hand, ‘-and give her a little wash in the sea without the bother of a landing.’

Unhooking one of the pistols from the gun rack on the wall, the sailor slipped a glass charge into the weapon’s breech, then unlocked the door to the storage cabin. Black oil washed the floor of the next compartment, thirteen imbecile steammen juddering about and spitting system fluids over the cargo hold, their voiceboxes humming in the nonsense tongue of a low-order language. Thirteen of the damn infected things. Unlucky for them and the future of the Steamman Free State both.

A tri-wheeled creature of the metal slipped up in front of the sailor, its dome of a head rotating before it pissed a stream of dark oil up at the airship sailor’s striped shirt.

‘Oh, you dirty little bugger,’ cursed the sailor.

One of the jack cloudies stuck his head through the pilot room door and laughed at the sight of his colleague. Humiliated, the fouled sailor kicked the idiot thing over with an angry lash of his boot, then squeezed around the steel box in the floor where the clockwork of the rudder guidance system was clacking away in response to the helmsman’s touch. Making enough of a noise that the sailor didn’t hear the strange whining from the steamman lying in the corner. Not that he would have recognized the sound if he had heard it. There wasn’t a mechomancer in the world — let alone an airship sailor — who would have recognized the noise of siltempter components resetting to zero in a final attempt to clear away the putrid steamman infection; for no mechomancer had ever been to the Liongeli jungle and made it back alive from the realm of Prince Doublemetal. And the annoyed skyman was many things, but he was no mechomancer.