Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

There had been a bit of excitement earlier in the day when the engineers from the cannon works had arrived on the isolated downs and found one of Quest’s armoured carriages nearly intact in the debris. But that was as exciting as this duty was going to get — without the warmth of a proper barracks fire to shield against the cold Jackelian autumn nights, or the distractions of a town’s drinking houses nearby. He sighed contentedly as the first puff of mumbleweed warmed his chest and hardly noticed the hand that reached out from behind him and massaged his neck, felling him onto the wet grass instantly.

A figure stepped out of the ruined airship; his blind eyes turning across the moonlit downlands to see if any of the other sentries had noticed their comrade was sleeping. A second man dressed in monk-like robes emerged from between the steel ribs of the Leviathan’s ruins, nearly identical in every way to the first intruder, except that his back was weighed down by a sack stuffed full of crystal-books, not to mention a rather buckled crown with an information gem glittering in its centre. With the right tools, the plunder would crack and be exposed to information blight, ending up as useless curios on the mantelpiece of a Jackelian cottage.

The first intruder pointed towards the distant south and his twin nodded, jerking his thumb towards the east and his own journey. Theirs was a lonely calling. Meetings between their kind were rare. With so few of them left now, having even two in the same location was an appalling risk.

‘Where are you travelling to next?’

‘Back to the wild north. I’m presently serving as a shaman for a tribe of polar barbarians.’

‘Ah, you live an enviously simple life. I came over by clipper from Thar as a trader, but I suppose I shall have to stay by the coast in Jackals now and make sure that nothing too dangerous is recovered from the old days. It’s been a long time since I needed to be a fisherman. The knowing of it will come back, and I won’t be sorry if I never have to pick up a merchant’s ledger again. I’ll confer with you in a hundred years or so.’

His compatriot leant on his cane, listening peacefully to the break of the sea on the rocks on the opposite slope of the downs. It was a beautiful sound. The kind of sound you could lose yourself in. The crash of eternity on cold coves, a reminder that the land was here before them and would be so long after they, as nearly immortal as they were, had gone. But no time to dawdle. They were close to the port towns here; there was always the danger that someone in this county might mistakenly identify either, or both of them, as Billy Snow.

The first one rubbed his scarred blind eyes, so empty of one sight and full of another, and answered. ‘The next century, then, brother.’

By the time the Second Foot’s sergeant found his careless corporal asleep on sentry duty, the two children of Pairdan were long gone.

There was a frothing in the warm waters as the pearl diver cleared the surface. She blinked the itching salt water from her eyes then swam back to her boat. Her sister sat on one of the hulls of the catamaran, cleaning the bronze diving helmet that belonged to the strange foreigner who had paid the two of them for a week of their time. The foreigner wasn’t used to the heat off the shallow Catosian coastline, sweating like a pig at the slightest exertion; wearing clothes that seemed too thick and hot, just like all the stupid Jackelians that visited their land.

‘It is where you said it would be,’ the pearl diver called. She did not ask what the glider craft — obviously fallen from one of the bloated aerial vessels that the city-states had forbidden to overfly their lands — was doing sunk in Catosian waters. She and her sister were being rewarded for this work to such a degree that their discretion was taken as granted.

‘Of course it’s down there, lass,’ said the Jackelian. He glanced across at the other Catosian. ‘Now help me squeeze into my sea-skin and I’ll show you how an old u-boat hand dives for his pearls.’

The woman passed him the antique helmet, crowned with a brass moulding of an octopus, watching her sister climb up onto the deck.

Still dripping, the diver looked with disapproval at the lumbering Jackelian sea gear. Was that really the best their clumsy mills could manage? None of the elegance or mini aturization that her own people were capable of crafting. ‘Coral has already started growing over the wreck of the glider. Opening the hatch down below will be difficult.’

‘Ah, the coral loves the warmth. Your proximity to the Fire Sea keeps everything growing and a-bubbling at a fair old rate of knots.’

The Jackelian picked up a towel and wiped the sweat off his brow. Was that a tear she caught sight of rolling down his fat cheek? She saw the stranger had noticed she’d become aware of whatever unvoiced sentimental musings were swimming around his mind.

‘You put old Blacky in mind of someone, is all.’

The pearl diver did not ask. And he did not tell. It was not the time for the tale of a woman who had saved her nation and all its inhabitants by falling on a rusty cutlass, letting in a thrust that she could have so easily parried. There should have been a blessed great statue raised to her in every city square in Catosia, but they did not raise monuments to warriors who had betrayed their sworn liege-lord — even by so subtle a degree as throwing a duel.

Checking the foreigner’s neck seal after he had shouldered the helmet, the pearl diver raised a thumb to her sister. ‘What is inside that wreck down there, old fellow?’

‘Ah, a paltry few pennies,’ smiled the Jackelian from inside his helmet, ‘to help keep a poor seadrinker in his dotage. That’s not too much to ask, is it? A modest pension to provide a full pantry and a little jinn to warm my lonely nights?’

As usual after an ambush, the siltempters stood in a crude circle, pushing and shoving each other above the corpses of the dead craynarbians while Lowbolts rifled through the cart of pelts and furs, searching for the choicest, rarest pieces to incorporate into his monarch’s cloak now he had declared himself the Grand Duke of Liongeli.

Lowbolts’ stacks steamed in the excitement of the raid on the craynarbian trading party, and he waved his hulking war-arms at any of the other steamman-like creatures that strayed too close to his plunder. He was the strongest, the most brutal. This was his right .

From somewhere deep within the canopy came a cry from a voicebox that shook the creepers and caused an explosion of fear among every jungle dweller within earshot. It wasn’t a sound Lowbolts had heard for many weeks now, not since he had stripped the last siltempter reckless enough to call a challenge against him down to the fool’s components, the new ruler giving the loser’s parts out as gifts to his courtiers at a feast.

‘Who dares ?’

Swinging into the clearing on a vine, the impudent stranger dropped just outside of the line of slain craynarbians, his powerful legs landing him with the dexterity of an ape.

‘I dare,’ said the newcomer. ‘I have heard that you have declared yourself Grand Duke of the siltempters, Lowbolts, and there is only room in this land of ours for a single Lord of Liongeli.’

Lowbolts released a spear of steam from his stacks in angry derision. ‘Lord! I see no lord. I see dead metal walking. Have you actually sought me out to call the right to challenge, you four-armed freak?’

‘We have.’

Lowbolts swivelled his head unit to look for encouragement among his followers, who clutched their airguns and hooted monkey-like noises of support back at him. ‘We? I see only a lone, foolish mongrel, defective after too many seasons of rain without resealing.’