Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The wheels of the departing coach were muffled with rags, an old coachman’s trick; not out of concern for the sleeping residents of the villages they would pass through, but to avoid giving advance notice of their approach to any highwaymen that might be out plying their trade this evening. Wherever they were heading, it wasn’t the Catgibbon’s floating jinn palace; they were making for somewhere far further out than that.

Septimoth unfastened the door on the far side of the coach and silently slipped out, vanishing into the darkness of the gardens before launching himself unseen into the air. He had a feeling that Cornelius would be driving himself back to the Skerries tonight. The wind above the downs lifted Septimoth up, buoying him effortlessly higher. He tilted his wings, feeling the glorious run of air across his feathers and scales as he glided behind the coach, a black dot below on the bare gravel road. He could hear the crack of the whip over the train of horses. The pair were driving them hard. They obviously wanted to make their journey at night under the cover of the moonless sky. Much better for avoiding awkward questions from any county constabulary, now stabled and sleeping along with the keepers of the toll cottages on the crown roads.

But a cloudy night was better for a stalking lashlite, too.

Cornelius followed Abraham Quest out of the series of ballrooms, four Catosian soldiers saluting him as they raised an old iron blast door leading into the main body of the manor house. Quest had the women dressed in the cherry tunics of a Jackelian fencible regiment, private auxiliaries ready to assist parliament in times of war. Without the padded war jackets favoured by the free companies, their shine-swollen muscles made the fencible uniforms look five sizes too small, as if someone had dressed them in children’s clothes.

‘You value your privacy,’ said Cornelius.

‘What, my girls? They’re here to preserve my life, not my privacy. They’re very effective. I haven’t had an attempted poisoning or assassination attempt for months. Toppers very rarely get as far as we are standing these days.’

‘Who would have thought it was so arduous, being the richest man in Jackals?’ said Cornelius.

‘It isn’t my money that brings the assassins. I have no heirs, and if I should have an “accident”, how long would my commercial concerns survive in their dominant position beyond my tenure? I have no illusions about the longevity of any empire built on the hope that the children may prove to be the equal of their parents. If I had offspring, I wouldn’t wish them to follow my path, even if they could. Any venture predicated on bloodlines is doomed to fade to dust eventually, including my own. It is my labours and the course of my life that has set me here — nothing more.’

‘Thank the Circle for our great democracy over monarchy, then,’ said Cornelius.

‘Yes,’ Quest smiled. ‘Thank the Circle for that. Do you have any children, Compte?’

‘I had a wife who was with child once.’

‘Had?’

‘The revolution in Quatershift.’

‘Ah,’ said Quest. ‘I’m sorry. As you said, thank the Circle for Jackals and our democracy.’

They entered the heart of the old fortress, an atrium with a view of four storeys rising above them. A railing ran around a pit ahead of them, fencing off a dizzying vista — level after level dropping down beyond the illumination of the gaslight. The architects who had remodelled the fortress as a manor house had done their best to soften the functional lines of the ammunition lifts and military gantries, but no amount of hanging plants and ivy trellises could fully conceal the building’s severe original purpose.

Quest led Cornelius past a line of food trolleys, being wheeled from the kitchens to the party via an inspection station running random tests for poison. Quest wasn’t the only powerful notable at the manor tonight and it wouldn’t do to have some Guardian or commercial lord dropping dead on his floor.

It wasn’t the food that caught Cornelius’s eye, but the woman supervising the testing team. She glanced up, saw Quest, and nodded towards him, failing to notice the staring guest by the mill owner’s side. Not that she would have recognized Cornelius, given that the last time they had met he had been concealed underneath the mask of Furnace-breath Nick. It was Robur’s supposed daughter, no longer wearing the coy bonnet of a child desperate to have her father returned to her, but dressed instead in the crimson officer’s uniform of Quest’s fencibles.

‘I’m glad to see you look after your guests,’ said Cornelius, looking at Robur’s daughter and the poison tests.

‘What kind of host would I be if I didn’t?’ said Quest. A glass-fronted lifting room was descending down an iron rail into the atrium. He pointed at the testing station. ‘I take it you don’t have to go to these lengths on your island for a decent meal?’

‘Just the risk of my housekeeper’s cooking,’ said Cornelius, ‘and she’s really rather good.’

They stepped into the lifting room and Quest inserted a key to access the private arboretum level at the top of the manor house. ‘You can see everything from here.’

Cornelius stared out at a line of deactivated catapult arms, their grips open and still, like the claws of sleeping birds of prey. In the old days they could have risen to the roof and whirled drums of flammable oil out of hidden hatches, turning what was now the topiary gardens into a molten hell for any attackers to cross. It was a good view, but no, he could not quite see everything. Wherever the flash mob’s delivery of steammen corpses had ended up was well concealed, Cornelius had no doubt of that. Quest should have no conceivable use for their grisly remains, but then he should have had no need either to surreptitiously engage Furnace-breath Nick to spirit out Quatershift’s court mechomancer from that revolution-wracked land. Quest had helped the Levellers to power in the last general election, with Ben Carl at the helm — the father of Carlism. But old Ben Carl was no shiftie committeeman; he had proved his credentials on that matter when he had led the Jackelians in repelling the invasion from Quatershift.

Cornelius looked at his host, hiding his suspicions. Was Abraham Quest dissatisfied with the progress of the Levellers in the House of Guardians? Had Quest secretly been hoping for a bloodbath, one party dictatorship and the declaration of a Jackelian Commonshare? Surely not; for all his model work villages and paternal manufactory conditions, Quest was still the man who had nearly acquired the whole nation in a single burst of his freakish intelligence. If the radicals were to set up their Gideon’s Collars in Jackals, then Cornelius’s eccentric host clearly had a place at the head of the queue of those who would be escorted into one of the wicked steam-driven killing machines.

The lifting room opened its doors to a blast of heat, a miniature jungle hidden under acres of botanic glass. The scene was more ordered than it first appeared, curved planting troughs twisting away on neatly planned paths, a riot of colours stretching out into the distance, orchids the height of shire horses, blossoms as large as the wheels of a hansom cab.

‘What do you think?’ asked Quest. ‘I can only name a fraction of these,’ said Cornelius, genuinely impressed. ‘They’re rare, I haven’t even seen them as plates in Cheggs’ Encyclopaedia of Flora .’

‘Taken from wherever my factors have travelled on the house’s business,’ said Quest. ‘Southern Concorzia, Liongeli, Thar. Not kept in a single chamber, but in many interconnecting arboreta — each with its own humidity and temperature. A little piece of home so that each species may prosper. Do you read the scientific journals? The scholars call such a miniature world an ecos , a system of life bound together.’