Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘It probably thinks the bleeding thing is holy,’ said Bull. ‘The crown of its creators or some equally fool notion. Maybe it thinks that having the crown will allow it to talk to its god. It may be a hive, but the Daggish acts like a single organism. Tree-head Joe needs something to believe in, doesn’t it?’

‘Societies do many strange things when religion is involved, I’ll grant you,’ said Amelia. ‘But the Daggish Emperor didn’t strike me as having any deep, unfulfilled spiritual needs.’ She was trying to think like an archaeologist again. Getting inside the minds of those long lost to alien times wasn’t so different from trying to understand the Daggish. Look at what it was doing, analyse its behaviour. ‘So, what does it want?’

‘The jigger wants to kill us,’ said Bull. ‘Cover us in slime and clean our brains like a teacher wiping chalk off the blackboard.’

‘You’ve got it,’ said Amelia. ‘What does it want? It wants to expand. To grow its territory.’

‘It can’t,’ said Bull. ‘There was a lot of useless blarney about the Daggish down in Rapalaw Junction, but one thing everyone agreed on … the greenmesh never expands. It has a range, the reach at which everything inside the Daggish empire acts in unity. I saw a craynarbian once that had been grabbed back from the greenmesh by comfort auction traders — she was blank: she could breathe all right, could be fed liquids and mush, but there was nothing left inside of her. You might as well chop your finger off, toss it away, and expect it to come running back to you in gratitude. I reckon Tree-head Joe is the centre of it all, the spider in the middle of the web. Its drones have got to stay close to it to take their orders and the coward isn’t moving anywhere. You saw how spooked it got when it saw the bugs in my hair.’

‘The emperor wants the crown to expand its hive,’ said Amelia. ‘Trust me on this. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get inside the minds of cultures and kingdoms that last existed millennia ago from only the faintest of clues. I don’t know how exactly the crown will help it, but growth is what the Daggish emperor wants, it’s all that the hive wants.’ She looked out at the graveyard of broken ships. ‘And it’s been trying a long time to get it.’

Bull started lowering them beneath the field of broken vessels, checking the depth readings as they sank. ‘Tree-head Joe’s already got itself a crown; it hasn’t done the Daggish much good so far. Beyond its symbolic value, what’s so special about a king’s crown? Those trinkets were two-a-penny at the court-in-exile at Porto Principe and none of them did us any good when your parliament came a-calling with its aerostats. It’s power that counts, not the robes that you wear.’

That was true. Something about the crown was nagging at Amelia, but what? Something she had seen in the crystal-book back in Jackals. Something obvious. Her archaeologist’s sense was on fire. The rush that she got when she was close to uncovering one of history’s misplaced secrets. ‘It’s not a king’s crown. Camlantean society didn’t have a hierarchy or aristocracy. The crown is from a reader-administrator, a coordinator of knowledge. Imagine a head librarian crossed with the civil servants at Greenhall.’

‘No king, not even an elected thief like your First Guardian?’ Bull said, incredulous. ‘How did your Camlanteans decide how things got done, who was quality and who was taking the orders?’

‘The most knowledgeable person on any subject made the decisions for that area,’ said Amelia. ‘If someone came along who knew more about it, who was wiser, the incumbent would step aside. If there was a fundamental disagreement about a certain issue, everyone in the city who felt they had enough experience to make an informed judgement would vote on it.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Bull. ‘That sounds as jiggered as the anarchy the city-states have up north in Catosia. No law, mob rule, the strong blade survives …’

‘Camlantean society had no war, Kammerlan, no hunger, no poverty or crime, they possessed a level of engineering expertise that makes the kingdom of Jackals look like a tribe of feral craynarbians scratching a living along the banks of the Shedarkshe. The secret of achieving that is what we came looking for in Liongeli, not bags of silver from Quest’s counting house.’

Bull shook his head sadly at the professor’s gullibility. ‘And who recorded these accounts of a perfect society, dimples? It wouldn’t happen to be the same “coordinators of knowledge” who were looking after the shop, would it?’

‘Camlantis was mentioned in awe in every scrap of contemporary history we’ve ever uncovered from her neighbours. It wasn’t propaganda.’

‘Right.’ Bull rolled his eyes in amusement. ‘Well, the nature of the race of man sure has changed a lot over the intervening millennia, and not for the better.’ He pushed his face closer to the pilot’s porthole. ‘And out there, I reckon, is all that is left of your flawless society now.’

‘All that is left on earth,’ corrected Amelia. The professor gazed out with disappointment at the ruins their lights had revealed. But then, what was she expecting? What would Middlesteel look like if a great chunk of it was ripped and sent skyward by a floatquake? A crater with exposed basements and a few chopped up atmospheric lines, rained on by rubble as the city lifted up to the heavens. Now leave that to rot for ten thousand years under the floodwaters of a collapsed dam the height of a mountain and what would you have? Something very similar to what they were slowly drifting over. An underwater rubbish dump.

Amelia tried to cheer herself up. Some of the greatest discoveries Jackelian archaeology had ever made had been found in the dust pits of fallen civilizations. Bull grabbed an iron wheel with a wooden handle and began to rotate it fast. ‘That’s your collection nets out. Keep your eyes open at the rear port. If we come across whatever did for Tree-head Joe’s toy fleet, I’m going to bounce our buoyancy tanks, send us to the surface like a flying fish running for its life.’

‘You know what’ll happen if we surface without the crown,’ Amelia said.

‘Reckon we’re dead whichever way you look at it,’ said Bull. ‘But an hour or two more is worth having. Let’s get to work.’

Amelia extended the waldos and began to pick through the debris on the lake bed. There were shreds of things that could have been pieces of machinery, rubble with a single side carved by the hand of man. In other circumstances she would have been filling her nets with such objects, anything that could expand Jackals’ knowledge of the Camlantean civilization. Crates of antiquities that could be labelled, stored and analysed by teams of researchers at Jackals’ museums and colleges. The purpose of most of what she recovered might lay undis covered for decades, centuries even, before it could be cross-referenced and its function teased out. But she didn’t have the luxury of repeat trips. This might be her only chance to explore down here on the good graces of the Daggish emperor. The frustration welled in her, the minutes of fruitless searching, minutes turning into an hour. How much air did they have left?

Then it hit her. She was thinking like an archaeologist. The best advice she had been given for this kind of situation had come from a Chimecan tomb raider who specialized in under-city work. Follow the traps. The traps mean plunder .

‘Traps,’ said Amelia. ‘Traps mean treasure. Those broken up Daggish submersibles. How did they all get to be clustered in the same place?’

‘Currents, girl,’ said Bull. ‘It ain’t worldsinger sorcery that put them there, just the currents down here.’