Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Cornelius underlined the name at the head of his list, a stolen census record selected from the pile of punch cards. ‘Not a graveyard. Our opponents have already had their pick of the plots of the dead. The oldest steamman left in the city still has a beating boiler heart … and I have a suspicion our slippery refugee friend Robur is about to switch from troubling the deceased, to kidnapping and murdering the living.’

It had been an age since Septimoth had needed to follow the mark of his own kind. But even without his third eye, he could still smell the scent of a lashlite hunt on the breeze. It was strange that he now shared more in common with Cornelius Fortune than with his own people. The cold burning desire for revenge far stronger than any call he felt to hunt skraypers in the higher atmosphere. His once proudly held position as ambassador to the court of the Sun King had always marked him as an outsider, more fluent in monkey-tongue than the whistling true speech of his own people. How much stranger would he appear to his own kith and kin now he hobbled around Dolorous Hall with his wings bent small, living only to inflict terror and pain on those who had wrought his downfall?

Riding up the thermals from a line of mills along Bunsby Green, Septimoth turned towards the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. How like those who sat in judgement upon him to pick the highest vantage point in Middlesteel for their meeting. Tucking his wings back, Septimoth plummeted like an arrow, spreading them in a fan configuration at the last second to hit the roof of the tower where their scent was emanating from. It was a showy entrance, the kind Furnace-breath Nick favoured to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy.

Standing on top of a line of smokeless chimneys were the four seers of the crimson feather, only the gurgle of the tower’s water-filled wall support system for company this high up.

Septimoth nodded to them, denying them the customary full bow where he should expose his dead, scarred third eye to the seers. After all, what could they do — blind him a second time? ‘I had not expected to receive the mark of your call again.’

‘As we do not expect to be greeted in the tongue of the flightless monkeys.’

‘You seem to understand it well enough.’

‘You have become far too closely intertwined with their ways and memes.’

‘The race of man call it “going native”, I think you will find. A peril that comes with banishment.’

‘And how have you atoned for your crimes, Septimoth? By random acts of violence against the tribe of flightless monkeys that stood-’

Septimoth pulled out his flute and waved the white instrument towards them in fury. ‘By the bones of my mother! By the bones of my people and my family and my honour, I have sworn I will not rest until the Commonshare is pulled down around the First Committee’s ears — death by death. You shall not speak of my vengeance, you are not fit to do so!’

‘Fine words, Septimoth. It is a pity you did not caution your tribe with such prudence when the flightless monkeys in Quatershift were undergoing their meme change. If you had done so, your squadron-queen, your mother, would still be alive in this realm, rather than floating in the song notes of her spine bone that you so angrily brandish towards us.’

It was as if the seers had twisted a knife in Septimoth’s gut. All the pain and misery and bile of that wound overflowed. ‘The court of the Sun King was corrupt, their people held in serfdom and bound by obsolete ritual. Those infected by the meme spoke noble words, of equality and fraternity and-’

‘You were of the ambassador caste, Septimoth; you were not in the court of the Sun King to act as a participant. All new memes are accompanied by sound and fury as they establish their infection in the presence of the population. Did not Stormlick whisper vigilance to you as you studied these monkey communityists? How could you fail to notice the ferocity of their meme, its pure loathing for competing ideas, its exclusivity ? For all its faults, the old regime was a multi-racial assembly. Whither now Quatershift’s graspers, its steammen, its craynarbians and lashlites? Those who have submitted are little better than slaves to the pink skins, and for those that fought … for your people, those fine flowery words you heard came at a terrible cost.’

Septimoth writhed on the roof in agony. ‘I shall atone for my mistakes.’

‘On your feet, ambassador,’ said the tallest of the seers. ‘We do not exile those of the true flight for poorly given advice. You know why you were banished.’

‘There were so many bodies,’ pleaded Septimoth, his figure briefly thrown into shadow by a passing aerostat, the airship’s expansion engines a muted thrum above them. ‘I was the only one left alive after the soldiers found the trail up into our mountains. My tribe was massacred, how could I eat so many?’

A long talon pointed accusingly at Septimoth. ‘Do their souls speak to you with curses on their beaks, ambassador? The souls you left to be collected by Nightstorm and her devilish servants?’

‘I tried,’ said Septimoth, his voice falling into a fluting hack-whistle as he sobbed. He remembered his fallen family’s flesh hanging from his mouth as he desperately tried to eat them all. So many hundreds of bodies strewn around his village, hanging out of eyrie slits, littering the streets with Quatershiftian lances run through them. How could a single lashlite give so many of the dead their proper honours, even without the distraction of the laughing Commonshare soldiers? Calling him a filthy cannibal, cutting off limbs from the corpses and tossing them at him. Applauding him as he tried to save the souls of as many of his people as he could by feasting on them.

‘The tribe consumes the tribe,’ quoted the tallest of the seers.

‘Nothing for the enemy, nothing left for Nightstorm to steal,’ intoned the others.

‘Nightstorm will release my tribe’s souls,’ cried Septimoth. ‘She will release them when I nourish her with the feast I shall make of my flight’s Quatershiftian murderers.’

‘Your feast of revenge shall wait,’ commanded the seer. ‘As miserable as you are, as pathetic a wretch of a hunter as I have ever seen, you carry the mark again now. The Seer of the Stalker Cave has foreseen you herself. Her will is law, even for an exiled monkey-talker like yourself.’

‘I am in her visions?’ The thought shocked Septimoth. He was unclean. Exiled and broken. How could he appear in the prophetic dreams of such as she? Supreme among the oracles.

‘We are as appalled as you that it is so. After your time with the dirt dwellers, do you still recall the high hunt?’

Septimoth remembered the soaring joy of his youth; gliding so high he was only breathing through his sealed oxygen sacks. The rip of raw, savage elation as the hunt sighted a skrayper, diving on the zeppelin-sized creature, manoeuvring past its wavering tentacle stings to drive spears into its blue flesh. ‘I do.’

‘Then you must also remember the portion of the hunting territories that you were forbidden to enter?’

‘You speak of the whispering sky.’

‘This is what has been seen within the Stalker Cave. The whispering sky is evil and its song calls many to it. It has been foretold that the whispering sky shall awaken soon and that one of the flight will stand strong against it.’

‘Me? How can this duty fall to me? I am broken wing, the walking dead uneaten.’

‘You have a part to play, as do the flightless monkeys and the people of the metal. Our seer has foretold the violation of the cogs and crystals of the living metal. You must follow the steammen’s path of pain.’

‘The grave robberies in Middlesteel?’ whispered Septimoth. ‘Is that what the holy of holies means? Did she speak of a connection with a mechomancer from Quatershift, or an old blind warrior?’