Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘What foolishness is this?’ protested Cornelius. ‘I have money. You must have the wrong man.’

A vice-like grip laid itself on his shoulder. ‘I am sure the floor master will be glad to discuss that with you, sir. Right away.’

They led him to a door padded with rich red leather. ‘This way, sir.’

He found himself in a small lifting room, little more than a dumb waiter for the cooks and floor staff. Yellow gas started spraying up out of a grille on the floor as they closed the door on him, vapours warm to the skin and cloyingly choking to the lungs. Cornelius stumbled back, smashing into a wall of mirrored glass. The lifting room was neither sinking nor rising. He tried to lever open the door, but the foul cloud swilling around the chamber was sapping his strength. If this was their way of reclaiming money out of their clients’ pockets, the flash mob might find debtors’ prison a more effective approach. Whatever happened to breaking a couple of fingers first?

Fresh air poured in suddenly as the doors were drawn back, someone catching him as he lurched out. His arms were pinned behind him and a pile driver of a fist sucked the last remaining breath out of his gut. A warning, then. Traditionalists after all. Pocket manacles were clamped around his wrists and the thugs dragged him along the corridor like an empty crate of jinn bottles. The stinging gas’s residue made Cornelius’s eyes stream, a swirl of locusts swarming across his vision as one of the whipper’s boots slammed down onto his left leg.

He could barely see when they shoved him down into a chair, but he recognized the voice of the soft-spoken mechomancer he had spied scavenging inside Bunzal Coalmelter’s corpse. The mumbler sounded no louder in person than he had through the hull of the floating jinn palace.

‘Intolerable. How can I get on with the job I must do with all these distractions?’

‘Just set it up,’ growled a whipper.

Cornelius’s borrowed forehead was scraped, a sharp-pointed tiara pulled down hard over his hair. Circle’s teeth, it was a crown of thorns they were fitting him for. A circlet made up of small, imperfectly cut shards from the mother stones that allowed Jackals’ crystalgrid network to function. But these crystals did not need senders to operate them, and the only communication they could relay was limited to a single message. Pain. Raw pain. A victim in a crown could be tortured for weeks leaving no physical evidence, until their brain started to fracture into multiple selves, in a vain attempt to protect the mind. It was said that while one person would go into a room wearing a crown of thorns, a dozen would come out.

‘I’ll pay you,’ said Cornelius. ‘I have the money.’

‘You’ll pay, jigger,’ said a thug, securing Cornelius’s feet to the chair. ‘We’ll make sure of that.’

‘Get the floor master,’ said Cornelius. ‘This is pointless. I’ve already told you that I’ll pay you. How are you going to clear my debts if you put me inside an asylum with this contraption?’

A stinging slap across his face served as his initial answer. ‘You can shut your gob. We don’t want your wallet. We already have that. We want to know who you are.’

‘Who I am? You know that!’

Another slap. Far stronger this time.

Mumbling-boy was still assembling the crown of thorns, but they probably would have slapped Cornelius anyway. You couldn’t beat a little physical degradation thrown into the mix. Six months as a prisoner in a Commonshare organized community had taught him that, sharing a cell with that bloody insufferable wolftaker, Harry Stave. At least most of the people with the education to assemble a crown of thorns within Quatershift had ended up being pushed inside one of the shifties’ steam-driven killing machines at the start of the revolution.

‘Who are you really , jigger? Under that false face of yours, who are you?’

The crown started to vibrate on his scalp, tearing into his skin, close to full activation. They knew! But how? Somehow, his game had been rumbled by the flash mob.

From somewhere far away, he heard his mask laughing, dangling from Septimoth’s belt as the lashlite headed home; the telling, mocking retribution of Furnace-breath Nick. ‘ Justa man. You’re just a man after all .’

Cornelius’s punishment beating had just turned into something immeasurably worse.

Each step Amelia took closer to the Sprite of the Lake seemed to increase the weight of her boots, until it seemed that she was sprinting towards the u-boat with lead weights on her feet. Out of the jungle canopy, the insult-howls of the k-max chased after the fleeing expedition members. Was it something in the thunder lizard’s screech that was slowing down her escape — a natural paralysis mechanism?

‘ Noescapenoescapenoescapeforyoumetaljggermetaljiggermetaljigger .’

Each time the k-max howled, more creatures flushed out of the jungle, bursting past at speeds that only served to remind Amelia how far they still were from the safety of the Sprite . This sluggishness had to be something in her mind. She had fled equally dangerous threats in her rascal’s career — packs of hunting pecks in the capital’s undercity, the Caliph’s scent-seekers in Bladetenbul, Count Vauxtion’s well mannered but deadly attentions in the alleys of Middlesteel, the bandit army of Kal Ferdo out on the Kikkosico pampas. She had not come this close to the lost city after a professional lifetime of heartbreak, rejections and ridicule, to end up inside the gut of a six-storey lizard with a grudge against their half-insane steamman guide.

As Amelia sidestepped a panicked toad she saw something at the other end of the trail, two silhouettes against the afternoon sun, running towards them down the passage trampled through the jungle. Sweet Circle. She imagined all the disasters that could have befallen their boat while they were out in search of fresh drinking water. She knew from the size of the silhouette that it had to be Gabriel McCabe running out to meet them, yes, accompanied by one of Veryann’s Catosian soldiers.

‘Professor,’ shouted Gabriel, sprinting towards them, ‘we are betrayed.’

‘We’ve got problems of our own,’ panted Amelia. ‘A big hungry problem the size of the Bells of Brute Julius coming down in our direction. Betrayal we don’t need.’

‘The thunder lizard is the betrayal,’ said Gabriel. He held aloft a broken vial of dripping green liquid.

‘Where did you get that?’ demanded Ironflanks.

‘It was placed smashed by the entrance to the trail. One of Bull’s men found it while out collecting fruit. He knew what this filth would do …’

Amelia took the broken vial, smelling it.

‘It’s the gland milk from a kilasaurus max,’ said Ironflanks, slowing down his pace. ‘Parties out of Rapalaw Junction use it to lure the larger thunder lizards away from a safari area, so they have the hunt to themselves.’

Amelia cursed under her breath. And it looked like it worked well enough in the opposite direction too, if you were fool enough to use it. Or a traitor who wanted to bang the dinner gong for a thunder lizard.

The Catosian soldier unslung a signal rocket from her back and Gabriel motioned that she should set the small clockwork fuse turning on its mixing chamber. Veryann dashed up to them, the last of the water party’s stragglers running past.

‘You have mortars set up?’ Veryann asked the soldier.

With a crack of glass the firing head on the rocket released blow-barrel sap from both chambers and the missile swept towards the sky above them, exploding out into a magnesium star shower.

‘Yes, First.’

From the direction of the river a series of explosions answered, a sound like fresh logs popping on a fire grate. Round shells burst in the air above the retreating expedition members, streamers of smoke spiralling out before being smeared across the roof of the jungle.