Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘There’s some good news,’ said the SOC surveillant from his bucket seat. ‘Our three missing airships are down there.’

Their mission commander wound his seat down from the pilot dome. ‘What’s the bad news, old stick?’

‘Well, I have to say, that would be just about everything else.’

A hatch opened and a head poked out from the heliograph operations room. ‘Analyst level back home have identified the style of architecture, but they pretty much had to go to the fiction shelf to do it.’ He passed up a stretch of tape that had been flashed across to the mission commander.

‘You’ve got to be bloody joking me,’ said the wolftaker reading the message. One Harold Stave. He looked down on the spires of Camlantis. ‘There’s a bit of classical history repeating down there, lads. But is it for the good or for the worse, that’s the question?’

And there was a more fundamental question that greater minds than his would be puzzling over, too. The three missing airships, property of the most glorious House of Guardians, made this their problem. Their location, far out over the Sepia Sea and well beyond the writ of Jackals, made it someone else’s.

Which viewpoint was going to prove stronger?

At one end of the sewer chamber stood a row of sentient tree-trunks — something approximating faces in the bark gurning and leering at Amelia — their branch-like limbs wavering towards her in silent agony. They put her in mind of Tree-head Joe and the Daggish, bringing back memories of Bull Kammerlan’s offhand comments concerning the ruler of the greenmesh. For a rogue and a rascal with the scruples of a Gallowhill alley cat, the hole left by the u-boat privateer’s death ran deeper than it should have.

‹ These creatures digested night soil ,› said Billy Snow. His voice in her skull was growing fainter every minute now, the echoes more distant. ‹ Filtering waste into different elementsthat could be transformed by our machinery into usefulsubstances .›

‘Keep your strength,’ said Amelia.

‹ I need to talk. Each second that passes without an activethought from me allows your neural pathways to re-establishthemselves, eroding my presence. I am decaying at an exponentialrate now .›

There! By the far wall. The dark engine she had seen in Billy’s memories, a large polygon of jet-black material, sucking down whatever small vestige of energy was still available through the glow tubes in the ceiling above. The device sat there, at least as tall as she was, distorting space itself. Tiny currents of matter rippled around the polygon. Looking at the abominable thing was like trying to stare through a wall of water. Twin horns curved out of the top of the dark engine, tapering to needle-sharp points. They were the horns of a demon.

Behind Amelia the line of filtration trees appeared to undulate in fear as she approached it. Had the trees somehow gleaned the dark engine’s purpose? Did they ascribe their millennia-long banishment and hibernation — their long dark night — to this terrible device?

‘What do I need to do?’

‹ Place your palm on the central panel on the surface ofthe engine. I am going to attempt to interface with it throughyour body .›

She laid her good hand — her right palm — on the dark object and it seemed to suck her in with a tug like gravity; then her skin started to tickle, the tickle becoming a flare of agonizing heat. ‘You could have bloody warned me …’

‹ Connecting. Blood pattern recognized .›

‘… I would have used my left hand, the acid-ridden stump of it you’ve left me.’

‹ Living cells better to maintain the — connection. Keep — hand — pressed. Maintain connection .›

Lights appeared on the side of the polygon. Red sigils. An information language similar to Simple, but evolved by a couple of thousand years. What the enginemen and cardsharps of Jackals would give to see this. What she would give to trade places with them.

‹ The energy sink has decayed ,› said Billy. ‹ There isn’tenough power left for a second stable translation .›

‘Then we’re jiggered,’ said Amelia.

The world was dead. She was dead.

‹ There’s not enough power for a stable translation ofCamlantis. There is enough left for a cruder manoeuvre intoa spin-state .›

‘Just fire up the boiler on this damn thing.’ It was taking every inch of Amelia’s willpower to keep her palm pressed against the engine. ‘Throw us as far from Jackals as you can.’

‹ My faction’s consensus was to preserve Camlantis for thosewho were to follow us .›

‘Good for your people!’ screamed Amelia. ‘If they want to book an airship berth up here they can come and vote us down. You fling Camlantis back into the bloody void.’

‹ Fling us where? ›

‘Exile! Banishment!’

‹ I can’t remember ,› said Billy Snow. ‹ I can see again. Withyour eyes. Who are you? ›

‘BILLY!’

‹ Who is Billy? ›

At last, one of the creatures that had been following the Jackelians through the sewer pipes had revealed itself, deeming the time right to claim its prey in the confusion. Damson Beeton rolled to the side, throwing the winged insect to the left. It was mosquito-fast: even fighting it in witch-time it clawed at her face with cantilevered mandibles, the agent barely turning her head in time to see its rotating teeth slip past her cheek. She danced around the thing, waiting for it to try and take her throat out with its mandibles, then, as it lashed forward, she smashed its compound eye with a fist. It twisted to bring her into the field of vision of its remaining eye, just where she had been expecting it to go — she blinded the last eye with a second crack of her hand. Kicking the thrashing thing back into the swarm of insect machines won the damson a couple of seconds as its comrades devoured the wounded creature.

Ahead of her, Ironflanks was dealing with more rotating teeth, these ones belonging to Robur’s hull-opener — the Quatershiftian swinging his weapon furiously and with little care for where it landed, the whine of high-tension clockwork intermingling with the dull thud and slap of its blades accidentally cleaving the flesh off Catosian soldiers. The knight steamman fought to pull apart the mechomancer, using the door he had torn off its hinges as a shield.

There was a grudge to be settled here. Not just between Ironflanks and the mechomancer — one of the filthy softbodies who made a trade out of turning deceased steammen out of their graves before the rites of the Steamo Loas could be followed. Not just between Ironflanks and a Quatershiftian; the perfidious neighbours of the Steamman Free State who — come monarchy or Commonshare — were always ready to throw their armies across the border in attempts to seize the alpine meadows and high peaks they believed were theirs by right. This, this was the plague creator who had schemed to utterly empty the halls of the mountain kingdom of steammen, leaving Ironflanks’ people rusting corpses too mindless even to feed fresh coke into their boilers. Carbine balls glanced off Ironflanks’ makeshift shield, while behind him a sea of mutated maintenance-level creatures advanced on both sides, the reports of the mercenaries’ weapons echoing off the enclosed space. For the first time in an age, Ironflanks invoked the battle cry of the Steamo Loas, the steam from his stacks spearing out in the forms of his ancestors, Legba of the Valves and Sogbo-Pipes.

Behind him, Damson Beeton backed into the side tunnel, nearly slipping on all the blood. She used the enclosed space of the maintenance tube to channel and slow the charge of undercity vermin. In front of her, two Catosians slipped past Ironflanks’ shield — a corner of it being chewed off by the hull-opener — and tried to bayonet the steamman’s telescope eyes. He sent one sprawling back with an upper-cut from his heavy war arm, caving in the knee bone of the other soldier and stealing her fur-lined cap with a deft snatch of a manipulator arm as she collapsed.