Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Oh, that’s handsome.’ He settled the hat on his metal skull and pulled down the earmuffs while blocking the thrust of another bayonet.

‘I’ll take your boiler heart for my collection,’ shouted Robur, a scream of metal sounding above the melee as his hull-opener cut another hole in Ironflanks’ improvised shield. ‘Your steamman cogs and crystals will allow me to perfect the destruction of your kind.’

‘First you must show the heart necessary to take it,’ roared Ironflanks, ‘and you will find me both more and less than a steamman now. I am a siltempter!’

Robur cut down, holding the whirling collection of steel teeth and rotating blades with both hands — shattering through Ironflanks’ shield and severing three of the steamman’s manipulator-arm fingers, oil pumping out of the severed metal.

‘Well, you bleed like a steamman,’ laughed Robur, ‘and I’ll dissect the rest of your secrets on my mechomancer’s slab.’

A pair of Catosians slipped past the savage duel — to be clear of the wild cuts of Robur’s blade and to murder the agent of the Court of the Air guarding the steamman’s rear. Damson Beeton stepped back and freed two belt daggers from the corpses of their fallen comrades, the insects feasting on their bodies snapping at her hands. Their three-pronged blades fair danced in the agent’s palms, rotating with an artist’s flourish. The Catosians came in silently and professionally, no wasted moves, from two angles simultaneously to make it harder for her to parry. Damson Beeton caught the bayonet of the first one’s carbine and kicked out at the tunnel, running along its roof fast enough to take her over the heads of her opponents. Now the two Catosians were the ones facing a wall full of slavering fury coming down the tunnel and Damson Beeton abandoned them to their fate at the jaws of the artificial insects as she rolled under the whirling blades of the hull-opener being thrown about by the shiftie. More Catosians were reloading their carbines on the other side and if they had been expecting a seventy-year-old to dive into their ranks with twin blades slicing through their thick high-altitude coats, they did not show it.

Robur’s brutal hull-opener battered down and down, the wounded steamman finally collapsing to his knees, a swarm of metal fragments from his shield showering his head. Robur kicked the broken remains of the door out of Ironflanks’ hands. ‘There we are, my sweet. Let’s see what’s inside you that enabled you to resist my plague …’

The mechomancer raised his hull-opener, ready to drive it straight down through the fur-capped skull of the kneeling steamman. Ironflanks swivelled his voicebox up, towards the rattling pipe above, emitting a screech that severed the duct’s bracket stays. The battle cry spilled a mosquito-like pair of wings onto Robur’s head — a twin of the wicked thing that had struck at Damson Beeton earlier — the creature sinking two fangs into the shiftie’s neck. Robur’s body went rigid, struck by poison and instant paralysis.

‘That was the steamman part of me,’ said Ironflanks. He rose up from his knees and head-butted the machine insect burrowing into Robur, sending it tumbling away. Ironflanks lifted Robur up and wrapped him with all four arms in a fierce bear hug, squeezing until the mechomancer’s ribs broke, a crackle of splintering bone rustling down the man’s chest. ‘And that’s the siltempter part of me.’

What was left of Robur dropped to the floor. Ironflanks picked up the two-handed hull-opener, its multiple teeth rotating to a halt now the trigger was no longer being clutched. He smashed the buckler of the weapon on his chest and let out a victory roar that filled the tunnel with the hooting of thunder lizards and the whine of sleekclaws.

The music of the Liongeli jungle had come to the ruins of Camlantis.

Abraham Quest glanced up from his console, counting the seconds down to the start of his new world. There was so little time left now. The end of poverty. The end of war. The end of famine. That the start of this age of glory meant the end of everything else, well, that was such a small and fleeting price to pay.

Veryann came down into the control chamber and was issued with a cloaking crown by the sentries on the door. She looked perfect. An amazon queen to complement his coronation as the creator of a perfect new society.

‘How goes it up there?’ asked Quest.

‘Fierce work,’ said Veryann. ‘But the free company is holding, just. Are we close to releasing the Camlantean mist now?’

Quest pointed to the thousands of green glowing coffins in the chasm below. Their people, sleeping, protected and cloaked from the mist. All that had gone before would be a bad dream. They would wake up to paradise. ‘Soon. Everything we need is with us here. You have done well, Veryann. Of all the things we had planned for — pursuit by the RAN, intervention by the Court of the Air — to think that our plans were nearly upset by a handful of lance-wielding tribesmen from Jackals’ own mountain nests. Savages, nothing but savages.’

‘History likes to repeat itself,’ said Veryann. ‘The Black-oil Horde …’

A siren sounded from the chasm below, a long string of icons in red appearing on the console in front of Quest. Critical mass had been reached in the underground mills producing the black mist. He only had to enter the ignition code that had been teased from the crystal-book discovered in Jackals. It was time for the end and the beginning of the world.

‘Yes, we have come full circle.’ Quest’s hand slid back the firing panel. ‘And now it is time to heal the world of all sickness.’

‹ I remember the sea ,› said Billy Snow. ‹ Or was it a river,with a u-boat ?›

‘Remember this!’ shouted Amelia, her palm pressed down on the dark engine, her life force being drained from her by the second. ‘Camlantis. Remember Camlantis.’

Behind Amelia the limbs of the twisted trees walling the chamber undulated towards her. Imploring her Camlantean blood to release the sewage of her kind for them to filter. Imploring her for purpose.

‹ Yes, Camlantis. It has been so long .›

‘Make it even longer, Billy. Activate this engine of yours and send Camlantis back to the long night.’

‹ An engine. Is this thing an engine ?›

Damn him. Amelia glanced desperately around the chamber. How many thousand years had Billy Snow haunted the Earth as guardian of the Camlantean civilization’s secrets only to choose now to fade into oblivion? Centuries as a living weapon. Yes, of course, a weapon . A weapon that could be transferred upon the failure of its host. She raised her acid-wrecked hand and plunged it down on one of the dark engine’s horns, impaling her swollen palm on the razor-edged thing. It was like bursting a balloon.

‘Time to move on, Billy,’ Amelia yelled through gritted teeth. ‘This thing has got the equivalent of a transaction engine turning in there, I can sense it. Combat transfer, Billy.’

Waves of pain flared through the acid-ridden ruin of a hand, slicks of her blood pouring down the spike and feeding the horn. She nearly passed out with the agony, black spots dancing around her eyes. The engine’s horns battered her with waves of gravity, gripping her with nausea, making her body part of its antennae, joining her crucified hand to the skin of the universe, drinking the energy and soul from her body, and her blood — the blood that was still fizzing with whatever was left of the ghost of Billy Snow.

Amelia had to fight to keep her remaining good hand pressed to the central panel of the dark engine, shivering until the icons flickering there started to blur and reform in front of her eyes, changing into Jackelian common script.