Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Amelia looked at Bull sweating under the weight of his brass capacitor pack and he noticed the disdain on her face. ‘You needn’t get sniffy about these, girl. They kept the feral shells off your hide long enough for the Sprite to slip away from Rapalaw Junction.’

‘It’s wild energy.’

‘And that’s what I like about it. You’re as careful as that old grandmother Black — or should I use the commodore’s real name?’

‘Not unless you want everyone to use yours, you damn fool,’ said Amelia.

‘You know who he really is, as do I. Most of the men on the Sprite served with the royalist fleet in exile and these-’ Bull indicated the line of Catosians-‘these bloody foreigners don’t give a hoot about Jackals or anything else other than their beloved patron Abraham Quest. As for old Blacky, he won’t mind if anyone out here speaks of him as Solomon Dark. He was a duke in the fleet, and me just a lowly baron’s son. He likes to lord it up, doesn’t he, the big man on his big boat, not that our titles meant much when Jackals’ airships came calling for us.’

‘You like to live dangerously, don’t you, Kammerlan? One of your people might turn you in for the reward on your head. In fact, I might …’

‘You should turn me in, dimples,’ said Bull. ‘There’s more noble blood in my veins than in those half-breed squires’ daughters your parliament keeps locked up in their royal breeding house. Lucky for me, my census record is as fake as the commodore’s.’

Amelia shook her head. ‘If the commodore hears you mouthing off …’

‘He’s soft,’ said Bull. ‘They all were at court, all the way up to the Lord Protector in exile. Living like privateers rather than rebels. Taking the fat, easy cargoes. Sparing the crews we captured.’

‘The commodore told me why he drummed you out of the fleet,’ said Amelia.

‘Fear is a weapon. The House of Guardians understands that. I just played the game on the same terms as parliament. I put the officers and crews I captured in their own life boats, then I towed them along the margins of the Fire Sea.’

‘You covered them in seal fat first!’ said Amelia.

‘The smell of burning fat attracts ash eels — it was quicker for them than waiting for their rafts to burn and sink.’

‘You’re a merciful son of a bitch,’ said Amelia.

‘The royalists lost the civil war six hundred years ago,’ said Bull. ‘I was just carrying on the fight using Isambard Kirkhill’s rulebook. We went from being rulers to being fugitives in one easy stroke. I didn’t ask for this life, dimples, I was born to it. My noble blood made me a fugitive from before I could walk, like my mother, like my grandfather before me — an escaped slave for any topper or mug-hunter to collect, dead with my scalp removed, or alive to be tossed into parliament’s stud menagerie of royal freaks. The fleet in exile was all we had left, and Black and his soft friends at court allowed parliament to track us back to Porto Principe — let them catch us on the surface before the city could be submerged and our pen doors locked down. The RAN came for us loaded with special fire-fins that could drop through the ocean and detonate on the seabed. It wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter.’

‘The commodore saved you,’ said Amelia, ‘when he drummed you out of the fleet. You weren’t at Porto Principe when the attack began.’

‘The irony of that hasn’t escaped me,’ said Bull. ‘Now what’s left of us have abandoned the cause and we serve only ourselves. We used to make a good living out of selling the feral craynarbians on the Cassarabian slave block, but I daresay the treasure of this ancient place you’re taking us to will be worth a few shillings, eh?’

‘Nothing you could pawn back on the lanes of Middlesteel, Kammerlan. It’s knowledge we seek, the secrets of the perfect society.’

‘Is that so?’ laughed Bull. ‘Abraham Quest didn’t get to be the richest Jack in Jackals by sinking his nose in philosophy books. We already had the perfect society in Jackals, until Isambard Kirkhill stirred the passions of the mob and stole our throne for your council of shopkeepers.’

‘Watch what you say, slaver.’

‘And who I say it to, Guardian’s daughter? What did your father ever get out of Jackals’ democracy of hawkers and street merchants? A bullet through the head and-’

Amelia grabbed the submariner by the throat and shoved him against the cart, his sailors raising their tridents against her while Veryann’s mercenaries snapped their long rifles up at the crew. ‘I should crack your throat, you maggot, and finish the job the Royal Aerostatical Navy began at Porto Principe.’

‘That’s gratitude for you,’ choked Bull. He struggled frenziedly, but could not break the grip of the professor’s unnaturally large arms. ‘Next time you’re thick with craynarbian savages, I’ll let them fillet you up for their pot.’

Amelia dropped the coughing seadrinker to the ground. ‘You mention my father again and that’s not going to be nearly enough to keep you alive.’

Bull rubbed the red weal on his neck. ‘Spoken like a true parliamentarian, girl. I’ll be sure and remember that.’

Both forces let their weapons fall and the journey to the spring resumed. Their broken trail of crushed trees and vines eventually opened up into a flat clearing at the foot of a hill that held a large tarn fed by the course of a waterfall. To the left of the clearing a single line of columns jutted out of the pool and, as Amelia approached, she saw that the spring’s waters had covered over a mosaic floor, gold-flecked marble steps leading down into an artificial pool. Just like the statue back at the Sprite’s mooring on the Shedarkshe, this was from no period of history she was familiar with.

Stepping into the shallows, Amelia took out her knife and tried to prise a piece of the mosaic out, but her blade proved unequal to the task. Fascinated, she peered more closely at the mosaic images — ignoring the u-boat crew’s pump being lowered into the opposite end of the pool and the wheeze of their labours at the piston. She was peering at illustrations of the race of man; people intermingled with animals in human form. The hybrids looked like they might be the bizarre breedings of Cassarabia’s womb mages — but both the people and the hybrids were dressed in the same Jackelian-like clothes she had seen carved on the statue in the river. Wading a little deeper, Amelia tried her luck on the roofless columns rising from the water. Here too her knife could not even scratch the material, let alone claim a chip of the substance for dating.

‘You will not be able to cut it, Amelia softbody,’ called Ironflanks behind her. ‘It’s like no material known to the people of the metal, nor your kind. It has outlasted the rise of the hill and the formation of this spring.’

Amelia ran her fingers down a line of sigils imprinted on the column, their calligraphy both ethereal and precise. It put her in mind of something, but not any of the ancient languages she had seen in the university library. Simple, the language of the transaction engine men. It was a derivative of the symbols on a punch-card writer. ‘This is a machine language, Ironflanks. Look at the flow of it, the cadence. These are instructions for a transaction engine.’

Ironflanks stamped closer, lifting the rim of his hat for a better look. ‘Why, I do believe you are correct, professor of mammals. But it is no language set known to me, nor I suspect any of your mechomancers back in Jackals. King Steam carries the memory of many lost things, perhaps he-’

Amelia pulled a note pad from her pack. ‘I shall take rubbings of the symbols, Ironflanks. This is amazing — an entirely lost civilization.’