Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘No wonder the lake formed here,’ said Amelia. ‘When the Camlanteans generated the floatquake to rip their city into the sky, the dyke would have been destroyed, the waters they had dammed here would have flooded over the ruins of Camlantis.’

‘I thought you said these ancients of yours were pacifists,’ said Bull. ‘Doesn’t sound too friendly to me, dimples, drowning the invaders of your land through your own suicide.’

‘They had decided to deny the riches of their high science to the Black-oil Horde,’ said Amelia. ‘I would imagine the rest of what happened here was accidental damage. Dear Circle, I wish those dolts on the High Table could see this. Incontrovertible proof that their precious “natural phenomena” back at Hundred Locks is nothing of the sort. Not only artificial, but also built by the same civilization that they have staked their fusty reputations on denying all these years. There were Camlanteans in Jackals , there had to be.’

‘I’d like to see that with those dolts of yours, too,’ said Bull. ‘Because it would mean I wouldn’t be stumbling around some jungle city at the beck and call of a bunch of walking trees.’

‘You’ve spent your last few years selling on any feral craynarbian you could snatch to the caliph’s people,’ said Amelia. ‘I would say there’s a certain amount of justice in what they’re going to do to you. From slave trader to slave, in one easy step.’

‘You think so?’ Bull spat. ‘Well, at least I’ll know that you’re going to be drooling blank-eyed about two steps behind me after they’ve stolen my body.’

Their guards picked up the pace and Amelia and Bull had to trot to keep up with the Daggish soldiers and avoid the stinging spines that would come their way if they showed any signs of slacking. They scurried past massive black shells shining like beetle-armour, twin barrels protruding from the house-sized pods. Bags at the back of the pods pulsed with green liquid, the same natural flammables that the guards carried in their sack-pipe weapons, Amelia noted that with interest. So, these were the batteries protecting the city nest that Abraham Quest had warned her about. The death of any airship that dared pass over the heart of Liongeli. Most creatures in the jungle would be terrified of normal fire, let alone the clinging, burning treacle these brutes could spit. Thunder lizards would not make the mistake of straying into Daggish territory more than once, Amelia suspected.

The streets of the Daggish nest were like no city in Jackals — not Middlesteel or Aribridge or Strathdrum. There was none of the random arbitrariness of trade or the bustle of those scampering about with the necessity of making a living. Everyone and everything that moved through this metropolis raised out of the jungle did so with single-minded purpose, whether they were working on the sides of the towers, polishing them with spittle-like resin, bearing loads on their backs in eerily coordinated columns, or waiting silently in front of water-filled troughs for the liquid they needed to stay hydrated in the harsh heat. Even ants marching in a line showed more individuality than the drones of the Daggish Empire.

Occasionally a series of hornpipes suspended from the bonelike buildings would emit a song in the clicking code that the Daggish drones appeared to use as a language and the inhabitants would stop instantly, taking on board whatever instructions the noise was imparting, standing and swaying quietly, before resuming their activity. This was the only sound; the rest was a terrible silence. None of the clamour of an honest city crowd: the hum of horseless carriages, the clatter of hansom cabs on cobbles, the hawkers’ cries and the crack of the great mills. Amelia and Bull might as well have been walking through a cathedral at morning meditations; sleek-claws that should have filled the jungle with their roars padded past without a snarl, gorillas that should have called to each other with grunts quietly propelled loaded carts. All slaves. All moving as one.

Following the silence into the centre of the city, their quickstep escort ran them to a ramp cut into the ground of a building constructed of coils of polished bone-like resin. It was the largest building Amelia had seen in the city so far, a pipe organ that had gone into a mating frenzy and expanded out in a hundred directions. Iris doors admitted the two prisoners from the u-boat — taking them into a labyrinth of tubes. No furniture or ornamentation, just succession after succession of doors with Daggish guards standing sentry by them. At one point they were led into a tube with a blue liquid bubbling along its length. Was the heart of the building flooded? But the guards took a walkway along the side, making Amelia and Bull wade shoulder high through the liquid.

Bull shook his head in disgust. ‘I’ve smelt better urinals on my boat.’

‘I guess your rebels didn’t keep flocks of sheep in the royalist fleet,’ said Amelia. ‘This is a dip. They’re delousing us.’ She slapped the surface of the thick liquid. Black dots were rising to the surface, dead mosquitoes and other insects that had settled in their shabby, sweat-drenched clothes.

Bull laughed. ‘Well, don’t that beat all. You might be right. They’re scrubbing us up before putting us on the auction block.’

‘Who are they going to sell us to?’ Amelia asked. ‘They are all the same creature, and if Ironflanks is to be believed, their only interaction with anyone outside their empire is to eat, kill or absorb.’

Dripping blue gunk on the floor they were to meet their new owner soon enough. The last door irised open onto a domed chamber, revealing a cavernous interior, dim and cool and pierced in a hundred places by shafts of light from ceiling slits. Plants grew inside, crawling over each other, shaped and crafted across millennia to perform specific functions, organic machines tended by compliant creatures — tree monkeys and tiny thunder lizards with dextrous hands — all covered with the green slime that marked them as slaves of a single will. The architect of that will sat on a raised dais at the far end of the chamber, surrounded and obscured by an arc of sentinels. These were not the river-guard caste Amelia had seen on the u-boat and in the seed ship; they were hulking beasts, trees that had metamorphosed into fanged predators the size of elephants, with twisted, bark-hard skins. As Amelia got closer to the dais she caught a brief glimpse of the master intelligence of the Daggish through the gaps in its bodyguard, the cold intellect that dwelled in thousands of stolen bodies and circulated through the sap-like blood at the heart of the dark jungle. The emperor of the Daggish.

As high as an oak tree, the ruler of this living empire should have looked taller, but age after age of renewed bark had left the torso of the intelligence as wide as the watchtower on a fortress. How many rings would she count, Amelia wondered, if she took an axe to this monster? A small army of attendants crawled over it, little marsupials with their fur matted by the control algae that patterned their skin, wiping the crevices of their master’s bark, trimming the parasitical growths that gnawed at it after an age on the earth. The emperor sent a silent command and two of its troll-sized guardians moved aside so it could gaze at Amelia and the mutinous skipper of the Sprite . On one of the ridges that circled its bulbous head there was something fixed to the bark, almost a crown. Something that looked familiar. Amelia ignored the penetrating stare of the Daggish ruler and gazed above its eyes at the coronet. Where had she seen that before? Then it came to her. The crystal-book in Middlesteel, Abraham Quest’s startling discovery. It was similar to the headdress that Pairdan, Reader-Administrator of Camlantis had been wearing in his recording. A relic from the fall of the city. But why should such trinkets matter to this hideous entity?