Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

As the ancient intelligence turned to look at the wall of green machinery that lay behind the dais, a warthog-sized creature trotted forward, its lips and mouth distorted so that they were unnaturally large and shaped like the orifice of one of the race of man. Even before it opened its ulcerous mouth Amelia knew its purpose. A translator. Something that still possessed enough of a spark of the race of man’s template that it could communicate with a human-sounding throat. The fact that whatever spark of humanity rested in their old crewmates had been so extinguished by the Daggish absorption process that they could no longer serve for such a task was far more terrifying than this shambling substitute’s presence.

‘You have defiled the methods of nature,’ warbled the pig-like beast. There was no doubt now whose voice it was articulating.

Amelia looked at Bull. Were they expected to answer? ‘Methods of nature?’

‘You have entered the territory of the purity.’

‘You are the purity?’ Amelia asked.

Daggish drones behind Bull and Amelia pushed them rudely to the floor; as if they were outraged such a question could be asked.

‘Your breed only dares to violate the territory of the purity if it perceives great gain to be within reach.’ Fronds of leaves spiralling around the emperor’s arms went stiff at the thought of such an outrage. Drones came forward, bearing an open chest filled with Amelia’s expedition notes, maps and crystal-book translations pillaged from the u-boat. ‘You are thieves, invaders who have discovered the location of the source.’

The dome was filled with the chattering of the Daggish, a sudden eruption of hammering clicks giving voice to their emperor’s offence at their brazen attempt to steal into its fastness and remove objects from the lake bed.

‘You know of Camlantis?’ asked Amelia. ‘You know of the ancients who lived here?’

‘They were the source,’ translated the pig creature. ‘The purity is descended from the source. The purity is ancient, older than the chaos of that which has not been joined with the purity and made clean and given order.’

‘I’ve seen her notes, too,’ said Bull, ‘and if you’re a Camlantean, then I’m the God-emperor of Kikkosico.’

One of the Daggish shot a spine into Bull’s leg and the slaver yelled, squirming about on the floor before yanking the spine out of his flesh.

‘If you had read all of my notes,’ hissed Amelia at Bull as she helped him to his feet, ‘then you would know that one of the reasons we have so little from the Camlantean age is that their tools were living things, a more advanced form of the same twisting of nature the caliph practises in Cassarabia.’ She tipped her head at the Daggish. ‘What do you think happened to all their engineering when the Camlantean gardeners that carefully tended it blasted their civilization into the heavens?’

Bull gazed at their massive jailors, the strange lines of the organic machinery. ‘I saw an abandoned village on the banks of the Shedarkshe once, plague, everyone dead and the craynarbians’ hunting hounds gone feral.’

She looked across the dais. ‘Imagine that village many thousands of years later.’

‘Damn, but the tree monkeys are running the jinn house,’ said Bull. He scratched at his unkempt hair and chased out a couple of flies that had survived the chemical dip. The Daggish emperor twitched in agony at the sight of the flies and one of the guards came running forward. Amelia thought that the creature was going to burn them to the ground, but his sack-pipe weapon discharged a jet of the delousing substance towards their heads, its foul-smelling stream madly stinging her eyes.

As she rubbed away the burning liquid, the translator creature shuddered violently in front of them. ‘Not pure — not pure. Filthy unclean thieves with their filthy crawling parasites.’

‘You’re the jigging impurity, here, Tree-head Joe!’ Bull yelled, giving the Daggish ruler the inverted ‘V’ of the Lion of Jackals with two of his fingers. ‘You’re nothing but a rotting hulk of talking wood decomposing in the heart of this rotting jungle.’

The misshapen translator creature announced his meaning to the chamber and behind Bull the troll-sized throne guards went into apoplexy at his abuse towards their ruler, smashing him to the ground and raising cudgels not much shorter than the slaver himself to finish the job of beating him to death. They only held off when Amelia leapt between them and the man they were about to murder.

‘You need him alive. You need us alive for something. All that trouble you went to separating us out on the u-boat, feeding us …’

The throne guards hesitated as the pig-like creature translated her words into the drumming language of the Daggish, reluctantly moving back as the fronds of the emperor wavered across in silent command. ‘Your place is to obey, not to criticize,’ piped the translator. ‘If you forget your position again the stain that is your existence will be scoured from the purity.’

Bull was stunned by the quickness of the assault and Amelia had to pull him back to his feet. He glowered resentfully in the direction of the Daggish emperor. ‘Touchy beggar, isn’t he?’

‘Hold your tongue,’ hissed Amelia, ‘or you’re going to get us both killed here.’

Bull spat a gob of blood from his swollen mouth onto the floor in defiance of their captors. ‘You saved my life, Guardian’s girl.’

‘That was just a temporary lapse of judgement, I assure you.’

Spined arms forced Amelia and Bull towards the side of the dome and a section of the smooth wall fell away, revealing a low chamber, sailors and marines from the Sprite lying in a field of wavering fronds, hair-thin green roots undulating snake-like into the ears, mouths and nostrils of the comatose crew. Amelia had to choke back her own vomit at the sight of Veryann’s fighters and Bull’s sailors crawling with the living filth of the greenmesh, over a hundred of them resting zombie-like under the wan emerald light while their bodies were erased of every last vestige of their humanity.

‘You should be cleansed,’ barked the translation creature, its monstrously oversized human lips dribbling with saliva. ‘You should be made uncontaminated within the purity. But there is the need, the need …’

The ring of Daggish guards and drones shoved them back in front of the dais.

‘If you’re going to fill my mind with your moss, you decaying cabbage, get on with it,’ Bull demanded. ‘Because you’re bloody boring me, and I hate being bored.’

‘You fear the purity,’ trilled the pig-like beast on behalf of its owner. ‘You value your insignificant life span, barely longer than those of the parasites you harbour.’

‘Do not all things?’ asked Amelia.

‘Then you shall do as you are bid, as you value your exclusion from the purity,’ instructed the translator. ‘You were correct in your appraisal of the purity’s temporary need for your services. You shall take your construct for navigating the lake of deep waters and undertake a sacred duty for the purity. In the event of your success, the purity shall consider your exclusion from the perfection of form you fear.’

‘The bathysphere?’ said Amelia. ‘You are talking about taking our bathysphere down to the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’

‘Jigger your archaeology. The thing I care about is the bit about our exclusion from the “perfection” of this bark-faced monarch of the jungle.’ Bull waved a fist at their captors. ‘What about my bloody crew?’

‘Your thieves are already complete within the purity,’ warbled the translator.

‘Twenty years we survived,’ sobbed Bull. ‘Twenty years after the destruction of Porto Principe — we survived Liongeli, survived being hunted by the RAN and Jackals’ men-o’-war, survived trading with those treacherous double-crossing jiggers down in Cassarabia. What did we survive for? This!’