Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Amelia rested a hand on the thick armoured walls of the craft, built to withstand depths that would have crushed the Sprite . ‘Have we got the range to make a run for it?’

‘Not in this bucket, girl,’ said Bull. ‘We’re good for a poke on the lake bed, up and down. But this is intended for slow delicate work with a base vessel near by. A canoe and a couple of strong oarsmen could chase us down if we tried to scarper, let alone seed ships loaded with depth charges. Our best bet is to find Tree-head Joe’s crown and hope it makes good on its word to let us go.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Amelia. ‘That monster’s going to toss us into its conversion chamber with the rest of our crew as soon as we’ve got what it wants. We’ll be drooling moss from our lips an hour after we’ve handed over the crown.’

‘The Daggish haven’t done for us yet.’

‘No, they haven’t.’ And that bothered Amelia almost as much as the thought of actually being absorbed into the Daggish hive. Why did the Daggish controller require their humanity for its errand? If she and Bull died and they were part of the hive, did the Daggish Emperor feel their pain? Was this mission so dangerous that it could not stand to suffer its drones’ failure and death? The murderous entity was made of tougher stuff than that, she suspected.

Amelia grabbed a handhold on the wall as the bathysphere lurched. Bull made a small corrective motion on the stick.

‘I thought you could pilot this thing.’

‘I can pilot just fine, first or second stick back on the Sprite ,’ said Bull, ‘but it was your Catosian friend who was trained by Quest to pilot this tub. Look at our controls: your rich shopkeeper designed this — nothing is where it should be.’

‘Veryann?’ That was strange. On a ship full of experienced submariners, why would Quest pick one of his mercenary warriors to pilot the bathysphere? ‘Quest told me the Sprite had been refitted by Robert Fulton,’ said Amelia. ‘I thought he was a legend in your line of work.’

‘Blacky’s old boat might have been patched up by him,’ said Bull, touching a line of control boxes, ‘but this exploration ball surely wasn’t. Fulton didn’t put this on the pilot’s station.’

Amelia looked at what Bull was indicating. Iron boxes, solid as their hull. ‘What is it?’

‘That I would like to know myself,’ said Bull. ‘Whatever it is, I’m locked out. I don’t even understand what’s turning our screws — this tub takes expansion-engine gas, but there’s no scrubbers running that I can see.’

‘He’s a clever man,’ said Amelia. ‘And as long as it works …’

‘Oh, he’s a sharp one,’ laughed Bull. ‘Sharp enough to buy us to sail up the Shedarkshe and do his dying for him.’

‘You planning on living for ever?’

‘Just long enough to see the head of every Guardian on a pike outside traitor’s gate and maybe your parliament turned into something useful — like a barracks for the royal cavalry.’

‘For that you’re going to need immortality,’ said Amelia.

As they sank deeper with each second, the last of the light from the surface was lost, replaced by a stygian darkness broken only by the occasional small silver fish darting out of their way. With the last of their natural visibility gone, Bull pulled a lever activating a circle of high-intensity gas lamps on the surface of their craft, checking the dial on the expansion gas reservoir to make sure they weren’t burning fuel too fast. A whine sounded and Amelia looked behind her to try to locate the source of the noise.

‘It’s the waldos,’ said Bull. ‘The arms on the back of the sphere. I’m putting the clockwork under tension while we’ve still got gas to burn.’

Amelia spotted the rubber circles surrounding two holes for her arms. ‘How do you see what the manipulator claws are doing?’

‘Just pull back the cover from the aft porthole, you’ll see well enough.’

Amelia slid the iron lid to the side and saw a strip of triple-layered crystal looking out onto the darkness. Two large clamp arms hung folded in the water outside. She pushed her arms through the holes — a tight fit for her muscled biceps — and found a metal frame inside with leather straps for her fingers to slot into.

‘Is there a dial near your thumbs inside there?’ Bull asked.

‘Got it,’ confirmed Amelia. ‘Ridged like a copper ha’penny.’

‘That’ll be your power amplification,’ said Bull. ‘Keep it dialled down when you’re poking about in the silt. If by some miracle we find Tree-head Joe’s crown, those claws will crumple it like paper on the highest power setting.’

Amelia unfolded the arms outside their submersible and practised moving them from side to side, clenching the frame to manipulate the pincer claws. Something dark floated past at the periphery of the illumination and Amelia jumped back from the glass port.

‘I saw something, Kammerlan, something big floating out there at the edge of the lights.’

Bull leant on the pilot stick and rotated the craft around sixty degrees. ‘Those two waldo arms are all the weapons we’re packing, dimples. If there’s a tussle between us and one of the Shedarkshe’s critters that’s swum into the lake, you are going to need to dish out a walloping.’

Amelia said nothing. If it came to a prolonged fight between the bathysphere and a school of underwater thunder lizards, the amplification on the arms would bleed their power fast. She returned her gaze to the lake waters. There! Something drifting at a strange angle in front of the pilot’s porthole. Bull edged the sphere forward, manually swivelling the inclination on their main gaslight to throw a circle of illumination across the shape. A bone-hard shell, bleached white.

‘A sunken seed ship,’ gasped Amelia. There were tears along its side, clean, straight rents, as if the holes had been carved open on a lathe.

‘That’s no normal seed ship,’ said Bull, guiding the bathysphere slowly about the wreck while their lamps tracked along its hull. ‘There’s no top deck, no flame cannons, no pod bulbs for its depth charge seeds.’ He pointed the main light at a silvery dome glittering like a compound eye on the wreck’s side. ‘And that isn’t anything like the patrols that used to chase my crew down. They’ve sealed the seed ship at every point, made it watertight. Tree-head Joe’s been making himself a u-boat.’

‘I knew there was something wrong!’ Amelia cursed the controlling mind of the Daggish. ‘Cutting deals with us, when all it wanted to do was cut into our skulls.’

‘Sweet Circle,’ Bull whistled, turning the craft around. ‘It’s worse than you know. Will you look out there …’

The bathysphere was drifting through a graveyard of seed ships — all different designs, some craft barely larger than their own and decayed down to barnacle-encrusted shells, others long torpedoes of modified surface craft. A dead history of Daggish nautical evolution.

‘Erosion like this,’ said Amelia. ‘Some of those wrecks have to be over seven hundred years old. How long has it been trying to find its crown?’

‘Old Tree-head Joe is desperate all right,’ said Bull. ‘Desperate enough that it’ll sully its perfection by dealing with the race of man. It must have thought that Midwinter gift-giving had come early when it netted the Sprite and her bathysphere — a Jackelian seadrinker with its very own expert on Camlantis on board. But what is worrying me is what killed the damn boats out there? Look at them — that’s not any engin eering failure. Something cut them up like mince on a butcher’s slab.’

Amelia didn’t hear Bull. Her mind was turning over the ramifications of the Daggish emperor’s obsession. ‘All this! Persisting and persevering for hundreds of years just for a crown ?’