Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Take me to the stockade,’ Amelia ordered. She glanced at the tartan on the two redcoats’ kilts. ‘Twelfth Kilkenny foot?’

‘The Crimson Watch,’ confirmed the official. ‘Devils with that cutlery on the end of their rifles, but you’d better watch your pocketbook when you’re in the garrison, damson, what? Now, I was never much of a one for books, but one thing has been puzzling me …’ He waved his hand towards the tall dark jungle squatting ominously on the opposite side of the river ‘Exactly what kind of science is your expedition proposing to conduct out there ?’

Amelia remembered a cartoon in the Illustrated poking fun at Abraham Quest’s Circleday pastime; pottering around the grounds of his mansion, personally helping the large army of gardeners he employed. A leering caricature of Quest knee deep in the mud of his pile’s grounds, a sapling growing up before his legs in a phallic manner with the label ‘money tree’ hung around it, the speech bubble reading: ‘Forsooth, my soil-fingered helpers, see here, I have grown another large one.’

‘Orchids,’ said Amelia, ‘Abraham Quest is very fond of rare orchids.’

The official looked at the line of menacing Catosian mercenaries on the Sprite’s deck, then at Bull Kammerlan’s feral-looking sailors emerging to sniff the air — blinking at the novel freedom of being outdoors after serving years of a Bonegate water sentence, followed by long weeks cooped up inside their u-boat. ‘Ah, yes, botanists. I’m surprised I did not see it before.’

A burly uplander leafed through the keys on his chain, searching for the one that would unlock Ironflanks’ cell in the Rapalaw Junction garrison.

‘He should have calmed down by now,’ the guard explained to Amelia, Veryann and the commodore. ‘Ironflanks is a bonny enough lad when he hasn’t been snorting.’

‘Snorting?’ said Amelia.

‘Chasing the silver-stack, my lady. He’s a quicksilver user, but he’s no’ been putting any magnesium into his boiler while we’ve been holding him down here. Poor old Ironflanks is on a bit of a downer at the moment.’ He pulled open the rusting door, revealing a steamman that bore little resemblance to the members of his race Amelia was used to back in Jackals. For a start, however battered and rusting the life metal became back home, they never, never, wore clothes .

The three visitors from the submarine stood there, lost for words. Ironflanks looked up at them, poking inside his filthy, bloodstained hunter’s jacket with a stick, as if he was attempting to dislodge a leech.

‘Ah, my friends from the House of Quest, I presume? You have, I trust, brought the filthily heavy chest full of Jackelian coins that I was promised?’

‘Your fee is secure in our boat,’ said Veryann.

‘That’s good, my little softbody beauty, because I have managed to mislay the agent’s fee your people sent up. Damn careless of me, I know.’ His two telescopic eyes increased their length, focusing on her in a way that could only be described as predatory. Ironflanks jangled the chains binding his four metal arms — his architecture looking like it had been modelled on a craynarbian. ‘Then let’s be about it, my good mammals. Tick tock. If we wait any longer it’ll be night, and I doubt if you three can see in the dark, even if I can.’

‘Same time next week, then, Ironflanks?’ laughed the guard, unlocking the chains.

‘I believe I shall forgo your hospitality for a while, McGregor softbody. Now be a good fighting unit and fetch me my cloak and the other property your ruffians removed from me last night.’

‘It wasnae last night, man,’ said the soldier, ‘it was three bloody days ago.’

When the uplander returned to the cell he was struggling under the weight of a gun so large it should have been classed as an artillery piece.

‘I was under the impression your people favoured pressure repeaters powered by your own bodies,’ said Veryann.

Ironflanks shouldered the weapon and then tapped the twin stacks rising from his back. ‘My boiler is not what it used to be, dear lady. Besides, a repeater might be adequate to shoot up the bluecoats of a Quatershiftian brigade, but a thunder lizard is quite a different kettle of armoured-scale fish.’

Veryann led the steamman away, his clanking metal legs leaving impressions in the dried mud under his weight.

‘You still think we need his help out in the jungle?’ Amelia asked the commodore.

‘Lass, this is a pretty pickle and no mistake.’

Amelia bit her lip. They were sailing an antique u-boat into one of the most dangerous, uncharted regions of the world; surrounded by a crew of convicts, a fighting force of hair-trigger mercenaries that even their own country didn’t want, and carrying a saboteur determined to stop them. Now they could count among their group the maddest steamman outside of a Free State asylum. Her damn luck had to turn at some point.

Not for the first time, the undermaid wished the front door of their grand house in Westcheap had a speaking tube to filter out the callers. It was bad enough that every chimney sweep and hawker on the crescent called every morning trying to convince her or Cooky to purchase their wares, now she had to deal with simpletons too.

‘This is not the house of any Damson Robur, sir. It belongs to Lord Leicester Effingham today, exactly as it has done every day for the last twenty years.’

‘You are in error, damson,’ insisted her lunatic visitor. ‘I visited the lady just a few nights ago here and this house is the residence of Damson Robur.’

‘You have the wrong address, fellow,’ said the maid. ‘All the crescents and lanes about these parts look alike if you do not live around here.’

‘Then who was staying here three nights ago?’ demanded the visitor.

‘Exactly nobody was here, sir — the place was empty. Lord Effingham was at his country residence in Haslingshire. I have only just travelled down to Middlesteel with his cook to open up the house for the season.’ She pointed to the dark rooms behind her, furniture in the hallway hung with white linen covers to protect them from the deposit left by the capital’s smog. ‘Does this look like an occupied house to you? There’s dust all over the place; Circle knows, it’s me that has to clean it all up. Try the crescent on the other side of the park, why don’t you? The lanes all look alike, especially after a night of carousing.’

She shut the door on the unexpected caller and went back to sit with Cooky and their nice pot of warm caffeel down in the kitchen. Within five minutes she would have been hard-pressed to describe the visitor’s nondescript face to anyone who might have asked. Which was precisely the point of that face.

Around the corner, her visitor entered a covered arcade of small shops selling pottery and walking sticks. Cornelius Fortune emerged from the exit at the other end, walking into the crowds of a teeming market. He feigned an interest in the long silver eels being slapped down on the wooden surface of one of the stalls, checking the reflection in a shop front to ensure there had been no watch set on the house. No tail emerged from the arcade, no confused expressions trying to locate the vanished visitor. So, what mischief was to be had out of the disappearance of Jules Robur, the continent’s greatest mechomancer? Damson Robur did not exist, and now it seemed, neither did her father. There were always complex games of deception and guile being played between the paranoid members of the First Committee as they jockeyed for power and position across the border in Quatershift. Had such a game been played with Furnace-breath Nick as one of their pawns? The thought of that ate at him like a cancer.