Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘And there was me thinking Quest was being a touch paranoid when he put marines on board,’ said Amelia.

‘The cleverest man in Jackals?’ said Veryann. ‘No, I think he was being just cautious enough. There’s a saying in the city-states: just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’renot out to get you .’

Amelia looked over at poor Ironflanks, his voicebox murmuring in some low-level language that sounded like static over the Sprite’s speakers. ‘Damn it, you fool of an old steamer.’

His quicksilver-induced nightmare continued. Theirs was just beginning.

Commodore Black dripped sweat on the pilot room’s map table. The only thing the cartographers knew for sure about the river Shedarkshe was that it continued southeast and eventually ended up at the sea-sized lake that lapped against the shores of the Daggish capital city. ‘Well, Bull, you’re our river man, what do you know about these channels?’

‘The channel on the right doesn’t go as far as the river’s source. The one in the middle is said to be the shortest route and its waters are the widest, but it’s going to be hairy with seed-ship patrols sooner rather than later. The one on the far left steers nor’-east and is reputed to be the long way round, narrow waters at points, but it eventually rejoins the main trunk of the Shedarkshe. It’s out of the way, but that’s where I’d put my money.’

‘It isn’t your money,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s Quest’s.’

‘His money but my blessed boat,’ said the commodore.

‘And I’d like to survive this fool’s voyage with my hide intact enough to spend the bonus that Quest promised us,’ said Bull.

‘We should wait for Ironflanks to recover,’ said Amelia. ‘He knows the greenmesh better than any of us.’

‘Right now he doesn’t know his metal arse from his tin elbow, girl,’ said Bull. ‘You want to lay down here for a few days, you might as well run up a signal buoy with an invite to the first seed ship that sails out this far. We need to wait for night, surface, clean our air, then its deep sailing all the way until we’ve got the lights of the Daggish nest glinting in our periscope.’

‘Better a moving target, right now,’ said Commodore Black. He had made his decision. ‘Mister McCabe, Mister Snow, rig stations for narrow waters. Ahead slow. If that lunatic steamer has his wits about him when we tank for air, we’ll ask his opinion on our course. Right now, left channel it is. Long and easy sounds mighty fine if we are to be dealing with these mortal terrible jungle lords.’

Amelia said nothing. She could sense the danger lurking for them down this tapered offshoot of the Shedarkshe. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something desperately wrong about the commodore’s long and easy channel. And whatever it was, they were sailing straight for it.

Commodore Black pushed the periscope back into the ceiling. ‘Cloudy and moonless, a good night to sit on the surface for a while. Take us up, Mister McCabe. Tank for air. Let’s clean my beautiful girl’s lungs out before we put our necks on the block for these wicked Daggish.’

The Sprite’s nose erupted out of the dark waters of the Shedarkshe like a whale surfacing for air, the rest of the u-boat following. As she settled on the surface of the tributary, hatches along her port side opened and started venting stale air while hatches on the starboard side sucked in clean air from outside, febrile and scented with night flowers from the thick jungle.

Amelia checked on Ironflanks, but he was still in no state to gainsay their passage down the river’s fork. Lying on the bunk, he was making strange whistling noises with his voicebox — partway between a song and some call of one of the jungle creatures. Last chance to stretch her legs topside. She exited via the nearest conning tower. Others in the exped ition had the same idea. Gabriel McCabe was sitting with his legs hanging over the Sprite’s hull, his dark fingers tapping a mumbleweed pipe on the side of the boat.

Amelia sat down next to him. ‘The crew is nervous.’

‘They have good reason to be, professor.’ The first mate pointed down the river. There was a night mist on the surface, the Sprite gently pushing against the current towards it. They might as well be sailing through the gates of the underworld denied by the Circlist faith. ‘If anyone has ever sailed further upriver than Bull’s slave raiders, they never made it back to Rapalaw Junction to boast about it.’

A line of crewmen in diving gear left the conning tower in front of them, ready to give the u-boat’s diving planes and hull a final check before they embarked on the last leg of their perilous voyage.

‘I know it’s a risk,’ said Amelia. Damn, but it had seemed so much less of a risk when she had been looking at map tables in Abraham Quest’s offices, drawing up their supply lists and making plans for the Sprite’s recovery and resurrection with Fulton’s submarine engineers. ‘But we have to believe it’s worth it.’

‘Are you following this dream for your sake, or the sake of your father?’ asked Gabriel McCabe. ‘Even if we make it to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo without being blown apart by a Daggish patrol, there are no guarantees that you will find a clue to the position of Camlantis in the heavens.’

‘Water preserves crystal-books,’ said Amelia. ‘The best records we have of the Camlantean civilization have been fished out of ancient shipwrecks.’

‘You know in your heart we will find nothing but the ruined, drowned basement levels of their city, full of nothing but the skeletons of any who were left behind for the Black-oil Horde to slaughter.’

‘They wanted their legacy to survive,’ said Amelia. ‘They knew the time would come when another civilization would transcend the dark ages, would be ready to embrace their society and its learning.’

‘Is Jackals that society, professor?’ asked the first mate.

‘We are!’ said Amelia. ‘Like Camlantis, we are a democracy. Like Camlantis, we have held the power for hundreds of years to conquer every other nation on the continent, yet we have used that power only to preserve our society and keep our people safe.’

‘The ancients did not hang children outside Bonegate for dipping pocket-books and stealing silk handkerchiefs,’ said Gabriel McCabe. ‘Nor did they dirt-gas thousands of innocents in Quatershift from the safety of a fleet of aerostats during the great war. We are not, I think, ready for their knowledge.’

‘You don’t understand; we can use their teachings to change Jackals,’ said Amelia, ‘to make things better. We can use it to end hunger and starvation, end poverty, end disease, end conflict. They had such a society, why should we deny ourselves that chance?’

Gabriel McCabe relit his pipe. ‘For myself I am happy enough to have a berth on a seadrinker, serving under an honourable skipper, rather than being beached back in Middlesteel; even sailing up the Shedarkshe is better than such a fate. But I have a feeling you will be disappointed by what we find. I do not know much about archaeology and history, professor, but I know people well enough from all my time in the confines of a u-boat. We are not big enough for your ideas.’

‘I hope you are wrong, Gabriel,’ said Amelia. ‘We will have come a long way for nothing if you are correct.’

The first mate’s pipe began to grow as he tapped his old weed out, twisting and turning on the deck like a wooden serpent. Amelia looked at it in horror. ‘Gabriel, what kind of sorcery is this?’

‘Kiss the pipe,’ said Gabriel McCabe, ‘the mumbleweed will feed you, give you strength.’

‘Get it away from me,’ said Amelia, stepping back. Leaves sprouted out of Gabriel McCabe’s face, his dark limbs twisting upwards towards the sky. ‘Your face, your face!’