Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Amelia looked at the people left standing on the platform, empty vessels trying to remember what it was to be human. The freed slave who had once been a river pilot was being led down the platform. How much comfort had she bought that little girl and her mother? Not nearly enough, Amelia suspected. ‘If it comes to it, Billy, you shoot me rather than let me be taken alive as a slave by the Daggish.’

Suddenly Gabriel McCabe appeared, one of the Sprite’s sailors frantically shouting for him across the press of the market.

Billy Snow recognized the first mate by the weight of his footsteps alone. ‘Gabriel?’

‘Trouble in the town — one of Bull’s people.’

Amelia followed after McCabe as he pelted through Rapalaw’s gates, heading for the main square. At the centre of the town a small brawl had broken out, sailors from the Sprite fighting with craynarbians, a small patrol of uplanders trying to pull them apart.

Gabriel McCabe waded in, lifting one of the crewmen off his feet and spinning him around in the air. The craynarbian the sailor had been fighting tried to slash at McCabe, perhaps thinking the giant was one of the brawler’s friends. McCabe’s leg had a longer reach than the craynarbian’s sword arm and the first mate booted the craynarbian in his crotch shell, keeling him over. More uplanders arrived, the redcoats pushing the two sides apart with the butts of their rifles.

‘Who started this?’ boomed McCabe. ‘You know the commodore’s orders — you’ll taste the cat-o’-nine-tails for this.’

‘It was that thing.’ One of the sailors pointed at an old craynarbian, hardly an inch of his shell not covered by rainbow-bright whirls of paint, hundreds of illustrations of eyes detailed on the creature’s exo-armour. ‘Bloody witch doctor! Said the potion he sold me would see me stay perky all night in the bawdy house … instead, I’ve been pissing out green water since yesterday.’

‘It is not my fault,’ said the craynarbian sorcerer, shaking his two manipulator arms while his sword and club arms remained vertical in anger. ‘I warned this fool that the ways of magic and the worldsong work differently in our land. Leylines do not draw earthflow along predictable channels in Liongeli; the jungle drinks our power and radiates it. You use magic at your peril here.’

‘Dear Circle,’ Amelia swore in exasperation. ‘Is that all you seadrinkers think about? Someone take this idiot away to a jinn house and buy him a stiff drink.’

The redcoats from the Crimson Watch hooted with laughter and a few flashed up their kilts in the traditional upland gesture at a joke well-appreciated. As the witch doctor noticed Amelia for the first time, his eyes widened in shock, then he slowly dropped down on his knees, human lips keening like a hound through his face’s bone plate. As he did this the other craynarbians followed his lead and buried their knees in the dust of the square, bowing down before Amelia and half-howling, half-singing in nervous voices.

Bull Kammerlan appeared in the square with more sailors, some carrying cudgels and obviously ready to aid their shipmates. The convict leader took in the scene with bemusement. ‘Everyone likes a lass with big arms, eh?’

‘She is marked,’ said the witch doctor, barely able to look up at Amelia. ‘Do you not see it? She carries the mark of the south, the mark of the ancients. What can the presence of the mark mean for our people?’

‘The south?’ Amelia remembered the wild woman of the sands who had saved her from the burning desert. And the cryptic message she had given Amelia before she disappeared back home.

‘On your knees, you river dogs,’ the witch doctor shouted up at the sailors. ‘Can you not see she has the mark of the ancients?’

Some of the submariners were backing away uneasily from Amelia, the murmur of ‘Jonah’ on their terrified lips.

Bull Kammerlan rounded on his men. ‘Keep your heads, you damn fools. This old shell has been smoking some bad mumbleweed and you sorry lot start acting like the crew of a laundry house. Was it bad luck that saw us all freed from jail at Bonegate and put on the deck of a u-boat again?’

An old sailor scratched at his grizzled silver beard. ‘This is bad, oh this is bad.’

‘Hold your tongue, Roth,’ ordered Gabriel McCabe.

‘Do not show disrespect to the mark of the ancients,’ warned the witch doctor, ‘or you will invoke punishment.’

As soon as the craynarbian finished speaking a strange whining filled the air, coming from a small black dot in the cloudless sky that was gradually growing larger and larger. The whistle ended in a gurgle as an arrow as long as a spear thudded through the chest of the sailor Roth. He looked down at the projectile in disbelief, his fingers touching the carved bone arrowhead to see if it was real. His blood was flowing onto the ground from the arrowhead’s fluted holes, pierced to sing a victory song to the jungle.

‘Oh — jigger — that.’

Dark clouds of whining arrows filled the sky as the sailor fell face-first into the dirt, quite dead. On the town walls someone began ringing an alarm bell, the warning of a tribal assault echoing over the adobe and timber walls of Rapalaw Junction’s buildings.

‘Back to the Sprite ,’ Bull shouted, ‘before they shut the town gates.’

‘How safe will we be there?’ said Amelia. ‘We can’t submerge yet, and the garrison may-’

‘Roger that for a laugh, dimples,’ said Bull, pulling out a pistol. ‘I’m not camping down here. This place comes under siege by the feral shells at least once a year, and the attacks usually last until the RAN diverts one of the Fleet of the East’s airships up here to rain fire-fins down on the craynarbians’ armoured noggins. You want to be stuck inside Rapalaw Junction for the next two months, chewing on rat meat and hoping our well water lasts out until the relief force arrives?’

Amelia jolted left, a long arrow banging into the ground where she had been standing. ‘I thought hunkering down here would suit you just fine, sailor boy.’

‘Not me, girl,’ said Bull. ‘The richest man in Jackals didn’t get to be that way by sending us up the Shedarkshe on a fool’s errand. He knows that old sea dog Black has a nose for treasure, and he’s paid a pretty farthing to make sure we get to it. Maybe there’ll be enough left to fill me and my boys’ pockets too, eh?’

By the docks, Quest’s private army had taken up positions around the Sprite of the Lake . Her tanks had been partially flooded, leaving just her twin turrets visible and the deck an inch out of the river.

Veryann appeared, still serene in the face of the afternoon heat and the impending attack. She might as well have been carved from ice. ‘Into the boat. We cast off within the half hour.’

Amelia unbuttoned the flap on her leather pistol holster, the heft of her old Tennyson and Bounder reassuring in her hand. ‘We’re days away from completing the repairs.’

From the jungle on the opposite side of the river, an armada of rafts was being pushed out into the Shedarkshe, each vessel filled by huge craynarbians, a blaze of war-painted shells.

‘Chief T’ricola has the scrubbers running at ten per cent of their capacity,’ said Veryann. ‘Enough to get us out of the field of battle. The remaining repairs can be made during the voyage.’

Amelia looked across at the heavily armed tribesmen shaking their spears and spring-guns, thousands of them appearing on the opposite riverbank now. If they had half an hour before the Sprite’s hull and Rapalaw Junction’s walls were swarming with craynarbian warriors, siege ladders and hostile witch doctors, she could not see it.