Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘She never hunts this far east, her territory is fixed,’ said Ironflanks. The hunting horn sound came again. ‘No, she knows I am here.’

‘Who are you talking about, Ironflanks?’

‘Queen Three-eyes, Amelia softbody. The Steamo Loas have cursed us this day.’

‘Another thunder lizard?’

‘The queen of them all, professor of mammals, a kilasaurus max. She knows I am here.’

On the wind the horn song seemed to be speaking.

‘ Hateyouhateyouhateyouhateyoupunishpunishpunishpunishyouyou .’

‘How can that thing know you are here, Ironflanks? It’s just a big damn lizard.’

‘By that criteria, so are the lashlites,’ said the steamman. ‘She can follow a scent from a hundred miles away and well does she know the smell of my stacks.’

Amelia listened to the stream of hatred being sung over the jungle, almost words. ‘It’s talking. It knows Jackelian. Sweet Circle, how intelligent is this thing?’

‘I doubt if she has a grant of letters from the eight universities, professor, but she understands revenge well enough. The k-max mates for life, and I took Queen Three-eyes’ companion in a hunt six years back. That’s when she taught herself Jackelian

— listening to the hunting parties as they sat around their campfires at night. Anything to discover more about her enemy, more about me .’

Again, the horn.

‘ Metaljiggermetaljiggermetaljiggermetaljiggercrushyoucrushyou-crushyoucrushyou .’

‘Take what water you have,’ shouted Ironflanks at the exped ition members. ‘Back to the boat. NOW!’

Amelia broke her pistol, ready to insert a fresh round. She sprinted after the steamman, slipping in another crystal charge from her belt. ‘We should form up into a battle line. Quest’s lizard killer guns worked well enough just now, and if you managed to kill this thing’s mate …’

‘A male kilasaurus max is a quarter the size of the female,’ said Ironflanks, his stacks pouring smoke into the air as they fled down the trail. ‘Those big cannons on the walls of Rapalaw Junction, they are not for the feral craynarbian tribes, you understand? Dirt-gas sinks before it climbs as high as the head of a k-max.’

‘And you killed that thing’s mate?’

‘I led the hunt,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I would not have brought the k-max down, as old and as sick as he was, I know better. Those fastblood fools who paid for my services did not live long enough to regret their decision — I was the only one to make it back to Rapalaw’s gates from that safari.’

Animals scattered under their feet and past the escaping expedition members, the trampled passage to the spring alive with terrified jungle creatures fleeing the rampaging monarch of their realm.

Two of the u-boat men suddenly ran at Amelia. ‘Strap her to a tree — leave the Jonah here, leave her to feed the beast’s hunger. She’s called the beast to us.’

Amelia kicked one in the gut. The other fell forward as a rotating steel bolt erupted from his striped shirt. Veryann reloaded her rifle swung it towards Bull Kammerlan. ‘Our steamman scout has given you the only order you need to heed — keep running. I will cut down any of you filthy jiggers that dares to lift a hand in mutiny towards an officer.’

Her cold blue eyes bore into the sailors and whether it was due to the Catosian guns or the screams of the k-max, the crewmen fled for their miserable lives.

A dark shape grew visible in the distance above the canopy and there was a crashing avalanche of trees as the thunder lizard pushed through the press of darkest Liongeli. They were less than halfway back to the Sprite . Amelia increased her speed, the water cart lying abandoned behind them. The sacrifice of their drinking supply would not be enough. They were as good as dead.

It was said even a blind man could tell when he had walked into Steamside, and Cornelius Fortune believed it. While the evening sky above the steamman enclave of Middlesteel might not have been filled with a thousand spears of hearth smoke like the quarters of their fast-blooded neighbours, the people of the metal carried their own stacks, and the smell of high-grade boiler smoke rose up to envelop Cornelius in the rooftop nest where Septimoth had landed them. It was like sitting in a drawing room where the gentlemen had all simultaneously reached for their mumbleweed pipes.

The current focus of Cornelius’s attention rested halfway across Adam Metal Square, waiting still and silent at the heart of Steamside, in the hub of a network of narrow alleys that had never once been widened in Middlesteel’s history. Lanes that had remained untouched when King Felix broadened the streets of the capital after the great plague in the year of 901, just as they remained unaltered when Isambard Kirkhill began his great programme of public works after winning the civil war for parliament. No wide new avenues in Steamside to stop the Levellers raising barricades, no new boulevards constructed to mop up the unemployed rowdies of both sides’ disbanded regiments. Steammen suffered their own plagues and were the most loyal of the capital’s constituencies — being slow to anger and measured in pondering the troves of their long memories.

It was the owner of the longest of those memories that Cornelius had come to observe. In any other area of the city, Cornelius’s surveillance would have been easy. He could have walked round the square, dipping in and out, returning each time with a fresh face borrowed from the locals. But imitating a steamman was beyond even his powers morphic.

‘It is growing quieter,’ observed Septimoth. ‘Night will soon be upon us.’

Cornelius nodded. It was still relatively busy down below. Steamside had a high population density, the people of the metal able to approximate sleep standing up a dozen to a garret.

‘And this steamman will just stay there, in the square?’ asked Septimoth.

‘So Dred Lands would have it,’ replied Cornelius. ‘Dred assured me that Bunzal Coalmelter has been standing down there in that same spot for over a hundred years.’

Septimoth’s hunting eyes focused in on the old steamman below. Weeds had grown up around his legs and a chest assembly that had once been painted a brilliant red had been reduced to a few crumbling flecks of dye by the capital’s rain and smog. Even with the lashlite’s incredible powers of magnification, he could only just discern the flicker of a single point of yellow light behind the creature’s vision plate, pulsing with the faintness of a mouse’s heartbeat. Lands had told Cornelius that the locals had tried to polish and clean Bunzal Coalmelter in the old days, but he had cursed his fellow steammen for fools and refused to dispense his wisdom until they had left him alone. Now Coalmelter was more statue than steamman, an iron sage rusting away into a monument in the middle of Steamside.

‘You watched him all last night,’ said Septimoth. ‘You should let me take this night’s duty. Return to Dolorous Hall for some rest.’

‘ You don’t need rest ,’ whispered his mask. ‘ Not when you are wearing me. The sun is losing its power and I am gainingmine .’

‘I don’t need your power,’ spat Cornelius.

Septimoth looked curiously at his friend.

‘I mean to say we shall both stay here,’ said Cornelius. ‘They will come for him tonight. I am sure of it.’

Septimoth knew better than to underestimate his human companion’s sense for such things. Sometimes it was as if he possessed a third eye himself. There was a touch of the lash-lite about Cornelius Fortune — perhaps there was more to their friendship than just a life debt owed?

‘I could fly down there and ask Coalmelter if he thinks his kidnap is likely,’ said Septimoth. ‘There seems to be no shortage of people who seek his counsel.’