Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Incredible,’ said Cornelius. ‘Even the Botanic Gardens have nothing as sophisticated as this.’

‘Interesting that you should say that.’ Quest walked across to a silver tank. ‘It was my first visit to the Botanic Gardens in Middlesteel that gave me the insight I needed to create my original fortune. The interconnectedness of all things, how the economy of Jackals resembled the complex systems we see in life, in the ecos, each market with its own predators and prey, an intricate ever-evolving environment supporting them. If a foreign garden can be transported and captured under a palace of glass, I thought, why not a simulacrum of the markets of Jackals held on the drums of a transaction engine?’

‘The whole world in your hand,’ said Cornelius. ‘And now your trading house is the top predator in the savage land of commerce.’

‘Ah, but I only ever held a shadow of the economy in my transaction engines,’ said Quest. ‘As for real predators, let me show you …’ He banged the side of a glass tank and lifted its lid. Inside, hundreds of mice flowed desperately away from his hand, climbing over each other in living mounds, each of them trying not to be the creature he would select. His hand dipped down and a frantic white mouse was removed by its tail. Quest took the rodent and tossed it over a gated enclosure. On the other side, a bed of orchids lashed out with whip-like fronds, shield-sized petals turning in search of their prey. The mouse scurried between the wavering tongues, slipping back until one plant seized the small creature and tossed it into the air, straight into the digestion sack around its roots. The squeaking died away as the mouse sunk below the poisonous gluey liquid, hundreds of tiny barbs impaling its body, preventing its struggles from tearing the sack wall.

‘Now there’s something you don’t see in the Botanic Gardens,’ said Cornelius.

‘Not for lack of demand, if the seats sold at our cock fighting pits are anything to judge by,’ said Quest. ‘We all love a spectacle, do we not? For me, however, this is a salutary reminder of the intricacy of our own ecos. Almost everything that exists is either the meal or it is the diner, often both at the same time. It is these complexities that engage my interest these days, far more, I can sadly say, than people.’

‘Your reputation as a humanitarian suggests otherwise,’ said Cornelius.

‘I cannot abide the cruelties of our people, the poverty and the misery we tolerate in our world,’ said Quest, ‘but alas, that is not the same thing as an endless store of empathy for those who suffer. I am not that good a person, and such a store would have to be deep indeed to cope with our world. I cannot abide our miseries because they are unnecessary , they are symptomatic of a total failure of imagination and intelligence on the part of those who shoulder the burden of leading Jackals. A different ecos could produce a different outcome, could ensure no one else would have to grow up seeing the things I did. How many times have you stepped over a body lying in the street at night wrapped up in rags, shivering and hungry and cold? How many times have you looked the other way when the street children run up to your carriage in the lanes of Middlesteel, their skeletal hands stretched out begging for a few pennies to buy them enough jinn to blot out the emptiness of their lives? How many news sheets have you turned a page on when you got to yet another story of wars, massacres and famines? How many times, Compte, how many times can you bear to see that, before you do something?’

‘I don’t get out that much,’ said Cornelius, ‘and I had my fill of utopias in Quatershift. I found utopia wanting.’

‘Something about you told me that you would be a philosopher,’ said Quest. ‘Quatershift is broken because their Commonshare runs contrary to human nature. It expects people to be noble, to put others before themselves — all for the community, nothing for the self — and it is then psychotically disappointed when its citizens fail to live up to that impossible ideal. We are selfish monkeys capering around in clothes and you cannot take a corrupt autocracy, murder its wolves and expect the sheep to run everything without other predators emerging to seize control of the flock. Certainly not when the fools in their First Committee think that issuing a piece of parchment in triplicate stating that the people are to be fed is the same as actually feeding them.’

‘Are we still talking about Quatershift?’ asked Cornelius.

‘Of course,’ smiled Quest.

‘If you can’t change the state …’

Quest shrugged. ‘Then you must change the people, or at least, what the people believe in.’

Smashing glass above them interrupted the mill owner’s musings. A dark figure dropped down through the hole in the ceiling and kicked off a line of steam pipes, setting the valves hissing as heated water spread across the mosaic floor. An assassin swinging down on a drop cord with a gun in his hand! Cornelius shoved Quest out of the way and ducked, the pistol shot missing both of them. The intruder arced through the spot where Cornelius had been standing, Quest recovering his balance and seizing the attacker, the two of them swinging up towards the conservatory roof.

Cornelius was rolling over, bringing his artificial arm up to shoot a string of gas globes at the attacker — then he saw the gas mask on the assassin’s face, protecting him from the house’s defences as well as Cornelius’s arm. But their host was proving surprisingly resilient for a mere merchant. Quest had seized a girder with one arm and converted the assassin’s momentum with all the skill of a trapeze artist, bringing the pair of them into a support strut, letting the intruder take the brunt of the impact. Both of them began tumbling down towards the ground, the intruder falling with the dead weight of a sack of cannon balls, Quest turning gracefully in the air, angling his body for a bent-knee landing.

They crashed into the display of carnivorous plants, a lashing frenzy of spines and razor fronds, the assassin trying to disengage from the man-eaters long enough to spring to safety, Abraham Quest pin-wheeling through the attacking vegetation as a raucous clamour sounded across the roof. Bells! The manor house’s bells were ringing — the old fortress’s towers had sentries, then, and they weren’t asleep on the job. A rush of Catosian guards emerged out of a doorway behind Cornelius, soldiers armed with crossbows. Cornelius lowered his weaponized arm as the heads on the crossbows detonated, steel nets weighted with copper spheres wrapping themselves around the intruder as he tried to dodge away. A shower of sparks danced around the attacker’s chest, timers on the spheres in the netting jolting their victim with bursts of wild energy — the power electric.

More soldiers poured into the arboretum, armed with long poles tipped with pincers, their hands safe inside insulated gloves to protect them from the wild force being expended around the intruder. They were taking no chances. Soon a ring of cherry-uniformed guards had the assassin pinned to the floor with their immobilizing poles, the assassin still struggling forlornly between each burst of energy. Cornelius stood almost forgotten on the sidelines, none of the soldiers noticing the fingertip barrels of his artificial arm sealing shut.

Quest brushed away the spined leaves that had embedded themselves along his velvet jacket’s arm. He hadn’t even worked up a sweat. ‘That was fast work. Well done, ladies. You have upheld the honour of the free company as capably as always.’

‘You said downstairs you hadn’t had an attempted poisoning or assassination attempt for months,’ said Cornelius.

‘Yes, foolish me, tempting fate. I was long overdue,’ Quest noted.