Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

While the sewers of Camlantis had the advantage of having been free of night soil for many thousands of years, it appeared there were disadvantages too — the eerie hissing of something in the pipes above them following Amelia, Damson Beeton and Ironflanks as they travelled down the tunnels.

‘You buried your dark engine down here?’ said Amelia. ‘You were hoping the smell would hold off your rivals in the civil war?’

‹More than a bad smell, professor,› answered Billy Snow using Amelia’s voice. ‹There were difficulties with the integrity of the systems down here, even in my time. It was never a problem when the people of Camlantis were alive. When the recycling and sewer devices bred corrupt and began running contrary to their instructions, they would be replaced by a superior generation who would eliminate the old until they too needed upgrading. But there has been nobody to control the sanitation equipment for a very long time. The ages move to a different tock and tick in the no-space realm where Camlantis was banished, but even so, the systems in the sewers have been feral for many centuries.›

‘The same as Middlesteel,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘Nobody wants to venture down into the lower levels of the city.’

‹Yes, but not all of the Camlantean undercity was ripped into the sky by our floatquake,› said Billy. ‹You see around you the distant ancestors of the Daggish and they are coming out of hibernation. Trickle-down power from the towers above is awakening their systems. We must hurry.›

‘I sense movement in the tunnels behind us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Many small things moving.’

They broke into a run, Amelia letting Billy’s lurking presence in her mind guide her. ‘You managed to assemble your dark engine down here before.’

‹Quite a few of my bodies died doing it, and the children of Pairdan were heavily armed with specialist weaponry to disrupt and subvert the systems of the sewer creatures.›

‘Sadly, I noticed your witch-blade locked up back on the Leviathan ,’ said Ironflanks.

‹My earlier copies were armed with a little more than that,› Billy told the steamman. ‹The witch-blade is a primitive weapon in comparison, intended to survive the ages in a low-maintenance environment.›

The hissing in the pipes above them grew louder.

‘I like primitive, ducky,’ said Damson Beeton, looking up towards whatever was scraping after them overhead, matching their speed exactly. ‘I can always use primitive.’

A plug in the floor of the tunnel ahead suddenly levered open. Two matt-black bodies emerged, glistening above spider-like feet, scorpion tails dangling with tunnel-scouring disks that had mutated into rotating razors.

Amelia heeded the advice given silently in her skull by the Camlantean and swivelled around to make for a side-tunnel, only to see a pack of pallid worms the size of tree trunks sliding out, forked tongues greedily tasting the air. The worms were hunting together with the bugs in front of them. Just like the damn Daggish hive.

‘There,’ pointed Damson Beeton. A series of footholds in the wall led up to a narrow walkway on a second level of the tunnel. Amelia scurried up, following the old lady’s ankles, Ironflanks climbing after her backwards using his two manipulator arms while his pair of war arms swung their weight into one of the massive worms rearing up after them.

They sprinted along the walkway, the mutants below marking their flight, hissing and drumming their limbs on the floor. Calling for more of their kind to come and consume the filth that had invaded their realm. Amelia found a service door and slapped her hand on the keypad, whispering a frantic meditation to the Circle that it would prove as functional as the sewer cleaners trying to scour the three of them away. There was a faint buzzing as the lock mechanism recognized her blood, but then the door smashed open from the other side, the worldsinger who had been pushing on it tumbling forward, off the walkway and into the claws of the monsters below, leaving the three of them standing nose to nose with a stunned line of Catosian soldiers and Robur.

The roar of a mighty steamman hull-opener firing into life cut short the split second of shock on both sides, leaving the three of them a fleeting panicked moment to try to close the door against the rush of soldiers.

* * *

‘There it is,’ cried one of the seers of the crimson feather, indicating the tomb below.

It had taken the lashlite flight longer than it should have to follow the broken leylines of the rendered land back to their source, so long had they lain dead after being ripped from the living grasp of mother Earth. But the Camlanteans had understood the secrets of earthflow only too well and, as expected, the terrible instrument of their final desperate solution lay at the centre of a web of them.

By the seer’s side, the war chief waved his baton down towards the building and a dozen flights of warriors hanging above him tilted their wings, diving onto the smoking rifles of the ground-hugging monkeys surrounding the tomb. As they dived, the roof of the tomb slowly began extruding a ring of white horns, a grille of dark holes opening along each of the horns’ length.

‘Too late,’ moaned the seer.

‘What are those things?’ asked the war chief.

‘That which has been foreseen in the Stalker Cave,’ said the seer. ‘The terrible chimneys of the dark wind which will scour our people from the nests of the world.’

‘I cannot hold them here forever,’ said Ironflanks, his voicebox trembling on full power.

It was a desperate contest of strength — the door wedged on one side by the knight steamman; his stacks burning red hot, as on the other side an entire company of Catosians pushed at the portal. Life metal versus the bull-women of the city-states.

Damson Beeton dropped to her knees, punching a fist through the armour of one the beetle things trying to pull itself up the wall’s handholds. Down below there was a feeding frenzy as the creatures chopped apart the corpse of the worldsinger who had tracked them down into the feral Camlantean maintenance levels.

‹I am fading,› said Billy Snow, using Amelia’s throat. He had to shout to be heard over the screeching din of the hull-opener coming from behind the half-closed door. ‹There is very little of my pattern left now. I am trying to preserve the knowledge of the dark engine’s location and the security protocols necessary to activate the engine’s ignition sequence.›

‘Go,’ called Damson Beeton. ‘Go. We shall keep them here.’

Amelia hesitated. Damson Beeton switched into witch-time, her arms and fists chopping down almost too fast to see at the horde of creatures trying to mount the walkway. There were few who got to observe an agent of the Court of the Air’s fighting tricks and lived to tell the tale. And unfortunately, it didn’t look like Amelia was going to be one of them.

‘Any time soon would be good, dearie,’ called the old woman.

Amelia fled along the narrow second-storey gantry — her escape feeling like betrayal even though it might be survival for the world. There was no time for farewells.

That would come soon enough, soon enough for all of them.

The Court of the Air’s black sphere hung above the city, high enough that the army of lashlite warriors and their captured skraypers were sweeping through the heavens at a healthy distance below. The sphere was drifting over the sundered land, the Special Observer Corps with their portable scopes seeking to provide an adequate reconnaissance before feeding their findings back to the Court. The models of Jackelian society that turned on the vast drums of the Court’s transaction engines needed masses of accurate data to hold the nation true to the course laid down by the late, great Isambard Kirkhill.