Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘It’s the remains of a camp,’ said Gabriel.

‘Not just a camp,’ said the commodore. He pointed at a wall of unopened crates lying buried by Liongeli’s green mass. ‘I recognize those blessed things: it’s a mobile fortress. They didn’t even have enough time to bolt it together.’

Ironflanks cleared the vegetation back. White bones lay amid the debris, picked totally clean by legions of scavengers. ‘I don’t believe I am familiar with the term.’

‘That’s because your people have been fighting the brigades of Quatershift and not the red-coated devils of Jackals,’ said the commodore. ‘And count yourself lucky for it.’

‘It is a conceit of their parliament’s new pattern army,’ said Veryann. ‘A modular construction system Jackelian regiments use on campaign. A walled fort that can be raised or dismantled in a period of hours; a ridiculous toy that encourages defensive thinking and belies the very name, “mobile”, that it sports.’

Billy Snow rapped one of the boxes with his cane. ‘The wood on these crates hasn’t rotted through. They’ve been here less than a year I would say.’

T’ricola pulled out more catenary curtain sheeting from the vegetation, blackened and brittle. ‘So an airship came down here and the survivors were trying to build a camp? But celgas is not flammable, so why would the hull end up so burnt?’

‘Celgas may not be flammable,’ said Ironflanks. ‘But an airship will burn all the same if it tries to pass low over Daggish territory. Their flame cannons would scratch one from the sky for daring to pass over the nest.’

‘Perhaps the stat’s navigation and steering were wrecked?’ mused T’ricola. ‘They could have drifted over the greenmesh by accident and been brought down. The RAN fleet was pretty well scuppered when Quatershift attacked Jackals; this could have happened during the war.’

‘I saw the fleet brought down over the hills of Rivermarsh,’ said the commodore, ‘when the wicked shifties were given a drubbing in the skies true and clear by King Steam’s forces, assisted in no small part by my own genius. I don’t recall seeing any Daggish there, nor any airships making a run for it towards Liongeli.’

‘It was a big battle,’ said Veryann. ‘It was said that the shroud of cannon fire remained over the downs like a mist for a week afterwards. You can’t have seen all the action.’

‘Aye, it was thick work,’ agreed the commodore. ‘There was the rebel leader’s army of demons, the treacherous shifties and half our own people fighting against us. A hard pounding, that day, for poor old Blacky, wading through the blood of our brave boys with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other. But the steammen knights boarded the fleet when it was turned against us and cut the airships up from inside, using King Steam’s fighters as cannonballs and boarding parties both.’

‘Well, there you are,’ said Veryann. ‘No doubt this is the remains of one of those RAN vessels. Broken during the war and left to drift on the winds of fortune.’

‘And drift a rare long way it did,’ said the commodore. He looked at Veryann with a knowing glint in his eye. ‘And where were you and our expedition’s beloved benefactor during the invasion of 1596?’

‘On a paddle steamer halfway between Jackals and the colonies. We were tending to the house’s business in Concorzia.’

‘You were lucky, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Safe on a boat is where I would have liked to have been during that wicked conflict. But curse my unlucky stars, fate was not so kind to me that year.’

T’ricola bent over the trailing creepers, picking at the debris. ‘I see no Quatershiftian uniforms here.’

‘I see no uniforms left at all,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And that is what I find the most disturbing fact of all. Let us quit this place now, back to the trail.’

Ironflanks had taken only a single step back into the dense press of the jungle when the cry echoed through the trees. ‘ Smellyouyouyoumetalmetaljiggerjiggerjigger .’

‘Tell me that is not what I think it is,’ said the commodore.

‘You know the answer to that question,’ said Ironflanks.

Gabriel McCabe glanced down sadly at the pathetic pistol in his hand. ‘I thought we had lost the thunder lizard.’

‘Queen Three-eyes knows enough to be able to follow the river upstream,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And it is the scent of my stacks she is following now.’

‘We have about a quarter of an hour,’ said Billy Snow, ‘judging by the strength of her cry, before she is on top of us.’

‘Not on top of us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘On top of me . It’s my hull she is coming for, so it is my old hull that will lead her off.’

‘We won’t last a day in the Liongeli deeps without you,’ said the commodore.

Veryann took her knife out and threw it across the clearing, embedding it in the skull of a giant python that was slipping down a branch towards T’ricola. ‘Survival is a secondary concern to the success of our mission, and that has a minimal chance of succeeding without a scout to lead us to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’

‘Then we must run,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Follow me into the deepest bush and hope that it is enough to slow down Queen Three-eyes.’

They ran. Without the safety of a submersible to escape to and with the long cries of the kilasaurus max growing louder behind them. Into the dense heat of the rainforest, through walls of orchids that quivered and shot out streams of superheated pollen juice, past trees covered in running brown liquid glue where trapped animals shrieked desperately at the fleeing party, across coffee-coloured creepers that had bridged a small ravine in their search for sunlight free of the competition under the canopy. Billy Snow proved surprisingly dextrous, leaping through the twisted vines with his machete, cutting down walls of greenery and opening passages through the trees as if he had been born a feral craynarbian tracker. At times it was not clear whether T’ricola was leading him, or the blind sonar man was leading her.

Ironflanks was getting slower. He was trying to keep his stacks from venting fully, to throw Queen Three-eyes off their trail. But the effort of recycling the exhaust of his furnace was sapping his strength. If he continued at this pace, he would poison his brain with the fumes and be left with a grip on reality even more tenuous than it already was.

Ironflanks stumbled and the commodore caught him. ‘You’ve got to let it out, old steamer, or we’re going to be carrying you the rest of the way.’

Ironflanks’ voicebox trembled as he tried to find the words. ‘She will smell it.’

‘If the thunder lizard hunts by scent she will already have ours,’ said Veryann. ‘Your incapacitation will not serve us.’

The steamman stood up and his stacks whistled as a column of foul-smelling smoke lanced through the canopy above them. As the last trace of smoke left the trail, Queen Three-eyes’ voice sounded in answer, so loud that the ribcages of the u-boat officers shook in their chests.

‘I am sorry my softbody friends, I have doomed us all,’ said Ironflanks.

‘Blame my nephew rather than yourself,’ said the commodore. ‘For it’s his dark treachery that has left us marooned out here. Or blame fool old Blacky for giving him a second chance in the first place.’

‘Are you the dregs from a Jackelian jinn house?’ shouted Veryann. ‘We are not dead yet. Not while we have blood in our legs and weapons in our hands. Now run, or I’ll shoot you myself.’

Menaced by the unsteady pistol of the Catosian commander the party stumbled into life again, Gabriel McCabe taking the lead and putting all the strength of the self-proclaimed strongest man in Jackals into the swings of his machete. Gobs of green sap splashed out across them as they piled ahead, splattering their uniforms with a mess of sticky residue and then, suddenly, they were free of the press of the jungle, a clearing of grassed hills and tall emerald meadows waiting for them. Ironflanks stumbled out and looked around as if recognizing the territory. Then the howl of the kilasaurus max roared behind them. ‘ Gettingclosegettingclosetoyourendendendmetaljigger .’