Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘She spoke of you, Septimoth, and that was enough to unsettle any who were bid to listen.’

‘She said nothing else?’

‘Only that you are to give us your bone flute to bear back to the Stalker Cave.’

‘This is my mother’s spine,’ said Septimoth. ‘I ate her corpse myself and I shall not relinquish it.’

‘What we ask is as an act of faith, Septimoth, of devotion. Your bone flute shall be returned to you when you have flown along the currents that have been revealed by the Seer of the Stalker Cave. We ask this of you, but in return we must trust our people’s fate to a dirt-grubbing exile. That is our act of faith.’

Septimoth hissed a curse and passed the instrument over to the outstretched talon awaiting it. ‘Keep my mother’s bone safe, seers of the crimson feather. That is not a request, you understand? Not a suggestion. Or you will discover how far I have fallen in my exile.’ With that, the lashlite stepped back off the hardened rubber roof and fell towards the ground before his wings spread out, and he glided up and out of the street below. On their chimneys the four seers stood, their heads nodding gently, lost in thought.

Then the tallest of the lashlites spoke. ‘Can we trust him?’

‘He is what we have. What the Stalker Cave has given us.’

‘An ill-favoured wind blows,’ complained the tallest. He sniffed at the polluted air of Middlesteel in disgust. ‘And it is not the miasma of industry created by these eager little monkeys.’

‘You forget, I have seen the future too.’

‘It was empty in your vision?’

‘As dead as a field of glaciers from the coldtime.’

One of the lashlites tutted. ‘Septimoth will not be enough to save us.’

As one, the seers rose from their perches and broke for the sky, heading back to the mountains of the north.

Amelia did something she thought she would not do again — she blinked awake and tried to sit up. A hand pushed her down, human-like fingers backed by heavy shell armour. ‘T’ricola.’

The craynarbian engineer was sitting on the edge of her bunk. ‘Rest, professor. We had to bleed you in a dozen places or your body would have burst like a rotten fruit. You’ve lost nearly a quarter of your blood.’

As the craynarbian spoke, Amelia felt the sting of the wounds, the throb beneath bandages that had been expertly lashed around her arms and legs. ‘I was reliably informed that devilbarb-fish poison is fatal.’

‘To you soft skins,’ said T’ricola, ‘not to us; their sting is painful to craynarbians, like a Jackelian adder bite — but not lethal.’ She raised her serrated sword arm. ‘I opened you with this. My sweat contains an anti-toxin that allowed you to survive. I rubbed my tears over your wounds too, close to an incision I made above your heart.’

‘Then I’m lucky to be alive,’ said Amelia. ‘And I’m sorry that I made you cry.’

‘Even back in Middlesteel, in the streets of Shell Town, it is an important ritual,’ said T’ricola. ‘But you are lucky that part of your flesh has been turned by a worldsinger, yes? The muscles in your arms resisted the poison until I got to you. A normal body would have succumbed far faster.’

‘Once a Shell Town girl, always a Shell Town girl, eh, T’ricola. I owe you my life.’

The engineer slapped the sides of the bulkhead. ‘Shell Town is just where I bunk, professor. I’m a third generation seadrinker, born on a u-boat beneath the Tharian Straits, swaddled alongside the pistons of an engine room. This is my home, not Jackals, and certainly not Liongeli.’

‘An engineer of people as well as submarines — the commodore is lucky to have found you. I hope he’s paying you well for this voyage.’

‘People are not so different from machines — spleen and bone, rather than cogs and grease.’ T’ricola pulled back the bunk niche’s curtain — they were in a far more spacious accommodation than Amelia’s cabin. At the other end of the room Commodore Black sat playing what looked like a game of chess with Veryann across a round oak table. For a moment Amelia was stunned by the size of the chamber. Then she remembered. The Sprite had once been a royalist u-boat, where the skipper was often lord of more than just the vessel.

‘And this must be the first time I have shipped with the commodore and have actually been paid a salary commensurate with my skills.’

‘You can thank the House of Quest for those guineas,’ said Amelia, ‘not that old sea dog.’

Seeing his guest was awake, Black left the mercenary commander pondering her next move and brought Amelia a cup of warm wine, T’ricola leaving to tend her engines. ‘Professor, it’s mortal good to see you back with us. I thought you might be pushing off along the Circle at one point.’

‘Did everyone else make it back alive?’ asked Amelia.

‘That they did, lass. You and Gabriel cleared our screws and we are happily pushing our way up the Shedarkshe as we speak. Ironflanks took a dent or two from the wild shells, but he fights like a fury, and kept them off your backs long enough for Bull’s boys to tickle them away from the Sprite with their tridents. We have gone further and deeper into Liongeli than any Jackelian before us. After we get back to the capital, the Dock Street pensmen will write a whole series of penny dreadfuls full of the wonders we have seen while you slept.’

‘Just how long have I been out, Jared?’

‘Two weeks, lass. Craynarbian tears are a powerful medicine. But you needed it. When I first brought you down here you were swelled up as round as an aerostat. It was a terrible thing to behold.’

Amelia gazed towards a large porthole on the other side of the chamber, small silver fish flashing past outside the armoured crystal. ‘Two weeks! Sweet Circle. I don’t remember a thing.’

‘As well you do not, Amelia. The scrapes we’ve been in. Pursued upriver by the cunning wild shells for a week, intent on paying us back for the brave scrap we gave them. Set upon by a flock of petrodactyls as we came up for air one moonless night, nearly crushed amongst a pod of mating flipbacks. That the Sprite is here for you to wake up to at all is only due to my quick thinking and the guns of Veryann and her fair fighters.’

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you are about, Jared Black,’ whispered Amelia.

‘Lass, what do you mean?’

‘The gymnasia of the Catosian League is what I am talking about, you old dog. Trial by arms and flesh is only part of what free company fighters practise — they value trial by mind and wit equally well, don’t they? Strength of arms being meaningless without strength of mind.’

The commodore looked red-faced. ‘That may be so, lass.’

‘You must prove yourself fit before you bed a Catosian, demonstrate the superiority of your blood lineage,’ mimicked Amelia. ‘How many games of chess have you lost already, Jared? You should be ashamed of yourself. You are old enough to be her grandfather.’

‘Ah, but professor, she is a fine figure of a woman, is she not? You must admit that; she has the beauty of a Jackelian princess and the poise of a sleekclaw. As fine a prize as any skipper ever sailed for.’

‘A sleekclaw has a glossy coat, Jared, but that doesn’t disguise the heart of a killer beating within its chest.’

‘You would not deny a bit of comfort to poor old Blacky, would you? I should be back in Tock House, resting my weary bones with a pot of beef gravy and a steaming loaf of bread by my side. Instead I am risking the precious hull of the Sprite for the sake of your career and the promise of the House of Quest’s meagre pension, sailing into the heart of darkness, where no Jackelian has ever set foot and lived to speak of it.’