Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

But Ironflanks was no longer listening. He had spotted a brown bobbing shape being nibbled at by tiny fish in the spring. ‘Get out, professor!’ Ironflanks’ voicebox shuddered at maximum volume. He waved his four arms frantically at the sailors filling the water cart at the other end of the pool. ‘Get back from the water’s edge!’

‘Ironflanks?’

‘A tauntoraptor has given birth in this pool — that is the youngling’s faeces.’ Ironflanks unstrapped his thunder-lizard gun as he waded towards the professor kicking back to the shore. ‘When the youngling is newly born, a tauntoraptor is an-’

Something dark lashed out at the shadow of the sailors on the water, a screaming seadrinker ripped from the shore.

‘-ambush predator.’

Shouting in terror and anger the sailors fell back, raising their tridents at the bubbling water where their comrade had disappeared.

‘Don’t shoot,’ yelled Ironflanks. ‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, hold your fire. Let me kill him with my rifle.’

Ignoring the steamman’s entreaties the sailors let loose on the pool with their tridents, wild energy flickering over the surface of the water. There was a popping sound as insects exploded, then a flurry of burning fish convulsed to the surface. As they continued to empty their capacitors, a dark bony shape broke the surface, a lizard-rhinoceros with a human leg still hanging from its razor teeth. All the sailors concentrated their fire on the howling green thing and it flipped back, smoke steaming out from under its scales, mewling like the fox song that haunted Jackals’ moors. Veryann’s fighters were within range now and they finished it off in a hail of flower-headed bolts.

‘Damn fools,’ shouted Ironflanks at the u-boat crew. ‘You’ve cooked him.’

‘A fine meal for the next thunder lizard that comes along,’ laughed Bull.

Out of the jungle echoed a terrifying rumble, similar to the death song they had just heard, but amplified a hundred fold.

‘That is the next thunder lizard coming along,’ cursed Ironflanks. ‘And you’ve just boiled up her hatchling for her to smell out. Tauntoraptors hunt by scent, not sight.’

Veryann waved her fighters back from the rainforest’s tree line, the furious crashing of falling trees growing louder and louder. ‘Form two lines, independent fire.’

‘Don’t run,’ Ironflanks cried at the milling crewmen, a few of whom were already sprinting back down the trail ‘Force of fire is the only thing that will bring this beast down. Form up flanking the soldiers. We’ll see how well your seadrinker forks fare against an adult tauntoraptor.’

Amelia unholstered her Tennyson and Bounder. Her heavy pistol felt like a child’s catapult here in Liongeli. Laying his thunder-lizard gun across a fallen tree, Ironflanks took position, the massive iron barrel of the rifle fixed on the tree line. The expedition members suddenly faced the full fury of the enraged mother, smashing through trees and ferns towards the pool, as large as an elephant, with overlapping knife-edged armour and devil-like horns. Her polished bony head pushed down as she speeded up in the open, the glass-crack reports of the rifles and the hissing of the tridents lost in the howl of her rage.

There was not much in the jungle that could murder one of her hatchlings, and the tauntoraptor did not class these uniformed monkeys as a threat. That was a mistake. A wave of flower-headed bolts pin-cushioned her skull, ingenious explosive-driven steel rotating through her armour and cutting into her flesh. Charging in disbelief, the novel flare of pain running through her brain, the tauntoraptor made her weight count, piling through the line of Catosian soldiers as bodies were hurled into the air. One of the mercenaries thrashed, her torso impaled on the creature’s horns.

A tail capped with a bone mace curved around, Ironflanks leaping over the swinging wall of toughened flesh as the tauntoraptor’s weight flattened one of the sailor’s capacitor packs, a stream of blue energy forking up into the air as if his life force was being emptied into the firmament. The steamman was whistling in mimicry of a winged petrodactyl, one of the few denizens of the jungle’s sky that could trouble a tauntoraptor, and, enraged by the insults, the thunder lizard turned — just as Ironflanks had intended. He pushed his cannon-sized weapon underneath the earflap of her monstrous head and the gun boomed, the thunder lizard jerking then folding down on her four elephantine legs. With a detonation of mud the creature collapsed, her second brain — buried towards the back of her stubby neck — shredded by the steamman’s rifle.

Amelia stood shivering an inch from where the thunder lizard had been felled, her pistol empty, the drip of blood from the impaled Catosian drumming slowly down across the tips of her boots. There were howls of victory from the seadrinkers as they climbed up onto the beast’s side, machetes drawn to saw off its horns.

‘We’ll grind them down to powder,’ one of them shouted. ‘Something to keep the ladies of Rapalaw awake when we return rich!’

Veryann looked at the cavorting u-boat crew with disgust. She drew her knife and walked to where the free company fighters that had been trampled lay in the arms of their comrades.

Amelia realized what the commander was about to do and ran over. One of the soldiers grabbed the professor. ‘Do not interfere. It is our way.’

‘You can’t!’

‘Do I have my honour?’ asked one of the wounded fighters.

‘You have your honour,’ answered Veryann, plunging her dagger into the woman’s throat.

‘We can put them on the cart,’ shouted Amelia, ‘take them back to the Sprite for treatment.’

‘Catosia has no surgeons,’ said Veryann, repeating the ritual along the line of wounded. ‘You have your honour. No doctors, and no citizens living with the shame of their weakness. You have your honour. No cripples or ill to sap our bloodlines of their strength.’

Amelia struggled in the grasp of the soldier holding her back. ‘You’re a bloody barbarian.’

Veryann’s work done, she wiped the blood off her blade on the side of her britches and then sheathed the knife. She indicated Amelia’s over-sized arms. ‘We allow no perversions of the flesh save those which can be achieved through our own exertions and the blessed herb shine. No imperfections worked by womb mages, surgeons, worldsingers or the fates of battle. Our bodies must be perfect.’

‘Your bodies-’ Amelia was astonished ‘-your body may be perfect, but your soul is insane. What about your fallen? Circle’s teeth, are you just going to discard them here without burial?’

‘Toss them into the water of the pool if their sight offends you, Jackelian. They are not dead to my people; they live on in the fear-filled nightmares of their enemies and the memories of our free company, as they should. They are immortal now.’

Amelia shook her head. Between their convict u-boat crew capering around the fallen monster and the callous ice maiden in charge of the psychopaths meant to be protecting the expedition, she felt like the lone visitor to an asylum on Circle Day. Just two pennies, damson, to prod the lunatics in their cages with a stick.

A noise like a hunting horn blew in the distance, and there was an explosion from the jungle as a thousand winged creatures took to the air squawking, hissing and buzzing in panic.

Ironflanks’ head turned slowly, his telescope eyes shadowed by the rim of his hunter’s hat. ‘It cannot be!’

‘What is it, Ironflanks?’ Amelia stared towards the horizon, the cliffs of a plateau squatting in the far distance. ‘That noise came from quite a distance out, didn’t it?’