Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘I’m becoming a tree,’ said Gabriel McCabe. His bones cracked as they splintered. ‘The moon is too cold to go under the water again. My roots will drink from the Shedarkshe.’

Amelia stumbled into the conning tower. Two Catosian mercenaries fell out of the door, their shine-swollen muscles no longer able to be contained by their armoured jackets. Belts snapped and fabric tore, showering the deck with crystal rifle charges as the women changed into dog-things, balls of taut muscle snuffling and scratching at the hull of the u-boat. She tried to push them away but she noticed her own arms were becoming squid-like tentacles, slimy and wet and flopping off the Catosian dog women. Amelia tried to scream but her mouth was a cone of clawed teeth and all that came out was a chatter of bone.

Pulling themselves out of the river, the repair crew climbed the ladder back to the flat deck of the Sprite . Bull Kammerlan prodded one of the Catosian soldiers crawling across the decking with his trident. She mewled, her hand trying to catch some imaginary shape in front of her. Satisfied, Bull booted her unconscious with a lash of his weighted diving boots. Laughing, he reached for Amelia’s collar and hauled her into the conning tower, his divers marching in front and giving the wild crewmen of the u-boat a mild taste of their capacitors to clear the way.

Circle, but it was good to be back in the slaving business.

Cornelius was certainly attracting glances from the other passengers drawn up in the lane leading to the great house, but he was the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons. While everyone else sat in stylish horseless carriages, handcrafted copper boxes gleaming in the moonlight, or lounged inside the leather opulence of barouche-and-fours drawn by well-brushed horses, he rested his feet in a dusty mail coach. His fiction of a coat of arms had been fixed onto its two doors, but that was the only concession to remodelling that the ancient vehicle had received. He had even kept the original ship-style name painted on the rear, the Guardian Fleetfoot .

It hardly helped that Septimoth held the reins above, on a seat that had been intended to accommodate both a driver and a guard with a blunderbuss. Or that the footplate to their rear stood empty of retainers. The Guardian Fleetfoot was kept in a stable Cornelius rented across the river from Dolorous Hall; the ideal accompaniment for the face he was wearing this evening. Almost his own, but slightly altered — just a touch of the crazed eccentric, features that he had styled on an insane but very wealthy composer he had robbed many years ago in Middlesteel. It was what people expected of a hermit, and there was always a value in giving the audience what they expected.

At last the horseless carriage in front of him had disgorged its passengers and pulled away with a hum of high-tension clockwork. Cornelius stepped down in front of the mansion’s entrance, not waiting for Septimoth to dismount and open the door for him as was proper. ‘Off you go now,’ Cornelius called up at Septimoth. ‘Wait around the back with the others, and no flying off now, do you hear?’

‘As you say, sir,’ said Septimoth. With a crack of the whip the four horses pulled away and Cornelius brushed down his cape, then looked up at the mansion.

He was not the only one parading his eccentricity, it seemed. Whittington Manor had once been better known as Fort Whittington, an ugly, squat, thick-walled castle, constructed during the civil war and filled with parliament’s cannons staring out over the downs of the west from its commanding promontory. Abraham Quest had bought the derelict, half-abandoned place and spent a small fortune adding the facade of a graceful villa to its brutal walls. The manor house was of a distance from town that any status-conscious member of society would never have classed its grounds as part of the capital, yet still they came out here, lining up their expensive clockwork vehicles in his drive. Attracted by the flame of Quest’s genius and the vast amount of money he had accrued.

At the open door, the red-coated major-domo gave Cornelius a quizzical glance as he handed over the cream invitation. It was the major-domo’s job to recognize all of the capital’s quality by sight and greet them personally like long lost relatives. How could it be that there was someone standing here with an invitation he had never seen before? Then he read the beautiful calligraphy of the name. Cornelius Fortune! His eyes opened in understanding and the major-domo looked at Cornelius as if he had just discovered a mythical creature on his doorstep. ‘Mister Fortune! A rare pleasure, sir. I do not believe we have ever had the honour of your attendance at Whittington before. Allow us to take your cloak for you …’

Cornelius shrugged his hand away. ‘I get cold, man. Do you want me to pass away of the fever in your corridors?’

‘That would never do, sir. Please, come inside. You will find warmth and a special buffet cooked by our own chef, a man who once attended to the culinary needs of the Sun King personally.’

‘Very good, very good.’ Cornelius stumbled inside, ignoring the solicitations of the other staff and the tremor of interest that ran through the crowd as his name was announced. So, this was Whittington Manor? He should have brought Damson Beeton, she would have appreciated it. A peculiar resting place for the stripped-down components of antiquated steammen turned out of their graves and kidnapped by the flash mob. But this was the location that the mechomancer on the RubyBelle had given as the destination of their dirty graveyard trade.

Cornelius walked through a series of ballrooms until he came to the buffet tables, as many staff waiting to serve behind them as there were platters in front. ‘This is all foreign muck. Don’t you have any eels, or a nice lamb pie? Nothing spicy, mind, my plumbing is delicate.’

So, it appeared, were the sensibilities of the other guests. They seemed to vanish as the uncouth newcomer moved along the table, piling his plate with boiled potatoes, scraping off the buttery cream sauce and shovelling it onto a spare plate.

‘The meat on the river crab is very good,’ a voice announced. ‘If you can get under its shell to catch it.’

Abraham Quest. Word of Cornelius’s presence had been discreetly passed to the master of the manor and his curiosity had no doubt been piqued — as well as his ego flattered — that it was at one of his functions that the hermit of Dolorous Isle had finally surfaced.

‘It’s a tough shell to get past,’ said Cornelius.

Quest picked up one of the long, tongue-like silver forks from the table, a single edge serrated and as sharp as a scalpel. ‘But not impossible. As long as you have the right leverage. Do I have the honour of addressing the Compte de Speeler?’

‘That’s not a title I use anymore. I prefer plain Mister Fortune.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Quest. ‘My experts in heraldry tell me that your title never actually existed, outside of the pages of a three-hundred-year-old adventure novel written by an obscure Quatershiftian author.’

‘I believe the writer used my family’s title in her book,’ said Cornelius. ‘There were so many small titles and noble grants in Quatershift … and then the revolution came.’

‘Yes, the revolution, and so much of the ancient regime’s history and documentation went up in the smoke of the Carlist book burnings,’ said Quest. ‘Interestingly enough, the word speeler has a different meaning in Jackals. In the argot of our criminal underclass it means a thief or a cheat.’

‘Really? I have never heard that before. Speeler is a small mountain village in the north of Quatershift, quite close to the border with Kikkosico.’