Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Take on the Catgibbon and the flash mob? Sweet bloody Circle,’ said Cornelius.

‘The monk appears dangerously well informed about our real purpose here and our activities,’ said Septimoth. ‘Even if his warning about rescuing Robur from the Commonshare finds us a little late.’

‘Quite. But rotting steammen being turned out of their graves?’ Cornelius scratched his unshaven cheeks. ‘What do we know about the people of the metal? None of them stayed long in Quatershift after the revolution, not after the Commonshare was declared. The Sun King used to treat the Steamman Free State as if it was just another of his dominions, and the Commonshare’s First Committee act little differently now. The shifties have started more wars with the steammen than they’ve ever fought with Jackals, but why would their agents want to sponsor a spate of steammen grave-robbing?’

Cornelius sighed. He might have a scant understanding of the people of the metal, but he knew someone who did: at the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard.

‘I shall ponder the matter in my eyrie,’ said Septimoth. ‘You had your dream again, didn’t you?’

Cornelius said nothing.

‘You should try and dream less,’ advised Septimoth, leaving and closing the door.

‘Yes, I should.’

Cornelius got back into bed and tried to nod off to sleep again, a near impossible task. This was all wrong. Grave robbing, the game of mirrors that had been played on him across the border in Quatershift to free Robur, a monk who knew all about his secret life as the scourge of the shifties. It was all wrong. Were the monsters coming to Middlesteel again?

Veryann’s fighters had taken up positions on the dock, sheltering from the storm of darts being launched from the wild craynarbians’ spring-guns. They returned fire in a smooth rattle; slipping crystal charges into their rifles, ejecting broken glass around the pier, burning blow-barrel hissing as it struck the planking. Above them, a short-nosed cannon had been pushed up to the fortifications of Rapalaw Junction, geysers of water erupting around the tribe’s war rafts as the trading post’s defenders tried to deny the tribesmen a firm foothold below the town’s walls.

Amelia kept her spine pressed up against a low adobe wall, the thud of darts on the other side dissuading her from doing more than snapping off the occasional shot at the lead boats with her pistol. One of the sailors broke cover and tried to run across the boarding ramp to the Sprite , two darts spearing him in his chest and hammering him down into the water. There was a thrashing in the river as something small and hungry finished off the howling submariner in a froth of bubbles.

‘Stay low,’ shouted Bull Kammerlan. He pulled the ejector rod on his carbine and a shower of broken crystal sprayed back as the clockwork mechanism forced the expended charge out. ‘We need more covering fire from the walls before we can run for the boat.’

‘Their rafts are going to be landing along the town’s front within a couple of minutes,’ said Amelia. ‘Best we were gone from here before then.’

‘Really? There’s me thinking that the boys and me would be doing a bit of fishing along here later,’ said Bull. ‘You write a paper on it, dimples; leave the killing to the men.’

A ricocheting arrow interrupted Bull’s stream of sarcasm — it glanced off Ironflanks, the steamman wandering out from the town’s closing gates as carefree as if he were taking a stroll along Goldhair Park back in Jackals. Dart heads bounced off his iron body, one piercing his wide-rimmed hunter’s hat. The steamman went up to the corpse of a fallen uplander in front of their adobe barricade and began tugging the soldier’s long leather army boots off, a task made more difficult by the amount of blood soaking the pin-cushioned uniform.

He looked down at Amelia, crouching on the other side of the wall. ‘Waste not, eh? Fine pair of boots, as fine a pair as I’ve ever seen.’ He slid out a machete and began to hack the corpse’s ankles away.

‘Ironflanks!’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Ironflanks, mistaking the professor’s disgust for concern about their predicament. He vaulted to their side of the wall. ‘These mammal-shells attack every other season. They get their fever up listening to their gods’ calls for sacrifices, get tired of eating their own braves out in the jungle. They’re inconveniently early this year, I must say.’

Down the shoreline, the first rafts began to thump against the line of piers, craynarbian warriors that must have been twice the size of the largest of the defenders leaping out — some with grappling claws to scale the walls, others with heavy sacks connected to vine-woven ropes. These they whirled around their heads, releasing them up towards the battlements. As each vine snapped taut, it unplugged a valve in the attached bag — two chambers of blow-barrel sap mixing and exploding against Rapalaw’s walls in a shower of clay fragments. ‘To the u-boat,’ shouted Ironflanks, tucking the bloody boots under his belt. ‘I’m going to get my steam on.’

Amelia cracked a pistol shot off, ducking as a wave of darts answered back. ‘It’s suicide. There’s too much fire coming across the Sprite’s hull.’

Bull Kammerlan pointed up towards the battlements, where squat, toad-like mortars were being pushed forward. ‘Dirtgas, dimples. Once the feral shells hold this side of the shore, our garrison will soak the whole river in dirt-gas. Unless you’ve got a mask hidden underneath that blouse of yours, you’re going to want to be breathing the wind from the commodore’s arse inside the Sprite . It’ll be a damn sight better than the air out here.’

On the exposed ground between the sailors and the Catosian fighters’ position, Ironflanks danced a jig, his twin stacks glowing white-hot as he fed power to his ancient boiler. ‘Now I’m sizzling, now I’m burning!’

Two craynarbians leapt from the prow of their canoe, Ironflanks meeting them in a fiery arc as he vaulted over the makeshift barricade protecting the expedition. Each of his four arms had produced a weapon, machetes and long knives blurring as he cut off the nearest of the warrior’s heads, blocking a bony sword-arm and smashing down on the remaining fighter’s knee joint with a cudgel. Both craynarbians were falling while the steamman sheathed two machetes, unslinging his thunder-lizard gun from his shoulder and jetting the canoe with its charge. Even in the steamman’s manipulator hands the rifle bounced, the recoil sending Ironflanks back by a couple of steps. He had loaded a tree shredder — a jungle special — half a pound of shot humming down the length of the war crew like a nest of hornets. Screaming craynarbians fell into the water, their armour shells ruptured and torn by hundreds of lead balls.

Amelia had seen steammen knights fight before — awesome, powerful, a force of nature — but this was different. Even in their battle rage King Steam’s knights retained a vestige of control; they fought like a focused storm of tonne-weight steel. But Ironflanks seemed to relish the danger as if he were a savage, bounding onto the raft with his rifle shouldered and his blades drawn, sadistically crushing falling braves under his metal feet, the craynarbians’ blood splattering his safari suit as he laughed and danced and hacked his way through the ranks of struggling attackers.

‘Now I’m burning,’ called the steamman, his voicebox on full and a whistle on his back lifting in a victory scream, superheated air spearing upwards. ‘I’m on fire.’

One of the surviving craynarbians, his breast-shell half-torn to pieces, tried to jump on top of Ironflanks’ back, clutching onto the steamman’s belt and the bloody boots he had looted. But Ironflanks twisted the craynarbian off, throwing him to the floor of the raft and burying the tip of his long knife in the creature’s forehead. ‘They’re my boots, wild shell, mine! Patent leather is no good for your claws.’