Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Follow the currents.’

‘I’ve been avoiding them,’ said Bull. ‘Whatever killed those Daggish boats is as like living somewhere along the flow.’

‘That’s what I’m counting on,’ said Amelia.

‘Well, why not,’ muttered Bull, turning the bathysphere into the pull of the undercurrents. ‘Why not face the monster of the lake in its den. Least it’ll be something to see before we go.’

As they tracked against the push of water across the lake bed, Amelia noticed that the water outside appeared to be becoming lighter, the darkness of their depth lessening until the jagged outcrops of rock below started to cast shadows towards them. Bull checked the depth readings on his control panel, tapping the glass above the dial, but the hand remained hovering at eighty fathoms.

‘We’re not rising,’ said Bull. ‘This isn’t natural. Look at the light out there, we might as well be diving for pearls off the Fire Sea corals.’

‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Amelia,’ except we’re not in any tunnel. Keep going. This is what we’re looking for, I can feel it in my blood.’

After five minutes they crested a rise of rubble, their small craft’s gaslights hardly needed now. They were drifting over the centre of a basin, while down below a ring of monoliths traded waves of rainbow light between each other, wide sheets of energy undulating slowly through the water. The dark granite giants lay surrounded by a litter of sliced-apart seed-ship wreckage.

‘Jigger that,’ said Bull, ‘jigger that for a game of soldiers.’

‘Head for it,’ said Amelia. ‘Head for the centre of the stones and the light.’

‘Not in a million years,’ said Bull, pushing the pilot stick away from the basin. ‘That’s a death trap — you want to know how a fish feels when it gets sucked into a boat’s screws, you dive into that mess of light. It’s nothing we need.’

‘It is,’ said Amelia. ‘Can’t you feel it, feel the song the city is singing for us?’

‘You’ve lost it, dimples, you’ve lost your mind.’ He glanced across at Amelia and nearly fell out of the pilot seat — the professor was glowing, a faint echo of the rainbow sheets outside rippling along the surface of her torn and tattered clothes. He checked his own hands but the bizarre radiance was only covering her body, not his.

‘Turn the craft,’ said Amelia.

As if in response to her voice there was a violent lurch in the bathysphere’s direction. Bull slammed the pilot stick and pushed the pressure on the expansion engine up to the red line on his dials, but even at maximum power the craft was still getting sucked in towards the stone circle.

‘Stop it!’ Bull yelled. ‘Look at the wreckage out there. It’s a siren’s song — you’re pulling us into the butcher’s mincer.’

Amelia’s eyes were glazed with the power of the radiance. It was home. They were going home.

Bull smashed the lever to blow the lake water out of the main ballast tanks, trying to trigger an emergency surface, but the control deck was no longer responding to his directions. Something else was in control, and it sure wasn’t him. Behind Bull, the waldo arms screamed as the engine began to put its springs under intolerable tension, the dial hands under every circle of crystal on his instrument panel turning in angry loops, the craft shaking the slaver fit to rattle his teeth. They struck the plane of rainbow energy and the field flowed through the reinforced walls of the bathysphere as if they were made of glass. It was dissolving the walls of the craft — so bright, pain plunging directly into the back of his skull.

Bull yelled and tried to cover his eyes with his arms. Anything to deaden the pain. The last sound he heard was Amelia laughing like a possessed demon.

Cornelius rolled over. Something was wrong. His arm had no weight. It felt like a feather by his side. Blinking his eyes open, he watched the walls of the cell focus into view, the dark shadow by his side solidifying into Septimoth. An alien noise faded out of the range of Cornelius’s hearing, the lashlite tucking the bone-pipe of his dead mother back into his belt, halting his mediation song to the gods of the holy winds.

Cornelius tried to speak but his throat was sore and a gargle came out instead.

‘Rest yourself,’ said Septimoth. ‘You were gassed.’

Cornelius could remember nothing. ‘How?’

‘We were inside the brig of a submersible and you tried to escape, running a bypass on a transaction engine lock with your arm. Our captors detected the attempt and flooded our cell with a poisonous vapour. I held my breath as long as I could, but the gas got me eventually.’

‘My arm!’ It was coming back to Cornelius now. The flood at their hidden rooms in the old Middlesteel Museum. Being captured by the divers and taken into a small river submersible. Their housekeeper lying unconscious in the brig with them. ‘Where are we — what have they done with Damson Beeton?’

‘She was gone when I woke up,’ said Septimoth. ‘We are no longer on the submersible. There is no movement or pressure differential in the atmosphere here. We are being held on land now, I think. Yesterday the soldiers took you away and when you were returned here your arm had been tampered with.’

‘Naturally.’ A disembodied voice echoed around the cell. ‘Your artificial limb was far too dangerous for us to let you keep it as it was designed. A work of some craftsmanship, by the way. My compliments to whichever mechomancer you patronized.’

Septimoth nodded towards fluted trumpets in the four corners of the cell. For listening in and talking, both, but Cornelius didn’t need to see the face to recognize the voice.

‘Robur!’

‘Indeed. I am glad my people had a chance to find the hidden store of Furnace-breath Nick masks on your isle, otherwise I would never have known who to thank for my liberation from Quatershift.’

‘You’ve a strange way of showing your gratitude,’ said Cornelius.

‘I am grateful,’ said Robur, ‘not suicidal. Your friend’s talons are still as sharp as an eagle’s, even if I have tensioned down the strength on your false arm. I removed the weapons and lock picks and all the other gimcracks that had been packed inside it, too. Who would have thought you could fit so much inside such a confined space?’

‘What have you done with Damson Beeton?’ Cornelius demanded. ‘For your sake she had better still be alive.’

‘Hah,’ Robur’s voice snorted. ‘You keep an odd household, Cornelius Fortune.’

‘She’s just an old woman,’ said Cornelius. ‘She has no part in this. You can let her go.’

‘That “old woman” killed five of Middlesteel’s finest and most expensive toppers on your island,’ said Robur. ‘If I had to choose whose cell to be locked up in, I’d take my chances with you and your flying lizard over that old crone any day.’

A panel in the wall slid back, revealing an abacus with a hundred rails, thousands of tiny squares hanging on the copper tubes beginning to spin, forming an image. It was a Rutledge Rotator, a transaction-engine screen — still rare outside the engine rooms at Greenhall — Cornelius had briefly considered stealing one to go along with the engine he had rebuilt in Middlesteel Museum. The image on the wall of flickering squares revealed a woman held upright in a prison frame, her mouth gagged and her eyes blinded by a leather mask.

‘We’re holding your wolftaker friend hostage to ensure your cooperation. If you try and escape again, the gas we flood her cell with won’t be a somnic. It will be something far more lethal.’

Cornelius’s eyes widened. ‘A wolftaker?’

‘Did you really imagine your activities would escape the attention of the Court of the Air?’ Robur asked. ‘How typically Jackelian — a secret police so secret that even your political masters live in fear of them, the lethal shepherds of your conscience — truer guardians of Jackals’ much vaunted democracy than the politicians who wear that name in parliament. You must have looked like a wolf to the court, Cornelius — the Sun Deity knows, you looked enough like a wolf to the new rulers of Quatershift. Even at Darksun Fortress your name was legend, the prison guards lived in fear of a visit from you. But as happy as the Court was for you to be making mischief for their ancient enemy across the border, I still don’t think they trusted you; so it seems you and your winged friend got your own shepherd to ensure you didn’t start preying on the wrong flock.’