Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Billy Snow’s hand reached out for the cane, receiving it in his grip with an uncanny accuracy.

‘You see truly, Snow of the race of man. You know what must be done.’

Ironflanks realized what was happening and tried to stop it, but the little siltempter’s arm pushed weakly out. ‘What must be, must be. All things have their season and my age has passed away, now, along with most of my kin. The age of gods has been replaced with a cold new age of reason and the need for god-slayers in this land is small.’

The possessed siltempter looked up at Billy Snow, his vision plate leaking white light towards the old sonar man. ‘I believe you understand what that feels like.’

‘I believe I do,’ said Billy Snow.

His blade was unsheathed almost too fast to follow, looping around once as the siltempter’s head spilled from his shoulders and slapped into the mud, severed crystal shards sparking as the body tumbled over, oil pumping out from a handful of cables quivering inside the ruin of his neck.

Veryann loosened a machete strapped to the corpse and looped the strap over her own back. ‘It won’t protect us against their kind, but it will serve well enough in the jungle.’

The commodore bent over the corpse. ‘And then there was one, again. I wish we could bury your true remains inside the body of the world, Hexmachina, where your lover the earth could blow lava to warm your strange soul and bring some comfort to you in this mortal winter of reason we have created.’

Ironflanks seemed deeply disturbed by what had happened. He stood there, swaying, as if his mind were locked in a recursive loop. This god-machine had been his life — the reason for his banishment and his life’s purpose before that. Now the Hexmachina was gone. Ironflanks was truly alone, the last of an order of steammen knights reckless enough — courageous enough — to attempt to free the holy machine from their ancient enemy.

T’ricola laid one of her four arms on the steamman’s shoulder. ‘He freed us for a reason.’

‘To find a softbody city abandoned an eternity ago?’ Ironflanks waved his arms in desperation. ‘What reason is that?’

‘Reason enough to go on,’ said Veryann. ‘Are you still my scout?’

‘I-’

‘Think about Abraham Quest’s fee,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘Enough to pay Jackals’ finest mechomancers to remove the lord of the loons’ wicked components from your body.’

‘Why not?’ said Ironflanks. ‘What else is left for me, now? Let us go. The Shedarkshe is south of here. It served me well enough once, leading me northwest and home to Rapalaw Junction. If we follow its course southeast we should reach Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo within a week.’

Veryann looked at the sonar man. ‘May I see your witch-blade, Billy Snow?’

‘It was fashioned to respond only to my touch. In your hands it would just be dead metal.’

‘I thought you would say something like that,’ said Veryann, her eyes gleaming suspiciously.

Behind them came a howl of anger — half animal, half machine-screech. It was a siltempter wearing the bleached skull of a thunder lizard as a helmet, emerging from a boxlike building overhanging the arena next to the oil lake. As the siltempter screeched, the caged thunder lizards in the arena behind him howled and shook the bars of their cages. The keeper of the lizards ran back towards his building even as Billy Snow sprinted towards him, casting out his arm. Billy’s witch-blade shifted form into a spear that hummed as it sliced through the air, striking the running siltempter in the spine and passing straight through his chest to embed itself in a wall. The lizard-keeper stumbled and grabbed hold of a wheel fixed to the wall, rotating it as he fell deactivate into the mud. Above the building, a cap on a whistle lifted, blowing a piercing screech across the darkened pre-dawn compound. Feeding time had started early in the realm of the siltempters.

Still dazed from emerging early from thoughtflow — the trance-like pseudo-sleep of the steammen — metal tribesmen began stumbling out of creeper-covered domes in the jungle in response to the din.

The commodore cast around for a direction free of awakening siltempters, but there was no clear passage that he could see. Razor-edged horrors were coming out from all directions. Roused by the noise outside, Queen Three-eyes pulled against her massive cast-iron chains down in the sand of the arena, her rage and fury roaring across the siltempter community.

Amelia was shivering when she awoke. A cold floor and the drip-drip-drip of water tapping at a puddle close to her head had replaced the warmth of the cramped bathysphere. Groaning, she turned over. She was in a large, grey room with smooth walls made out of some glossy substance she did not recognize. Behind her was the bathysphere, dripping water from its battered lake-weed-covered surface onto the floor — and the prone body of Bull Kammerlan stretched in its shadow.

How had they arrived here? There were no doorways or hatches visible in the chamber. It was as if someone had dis assembled their vessel piece by piece, then rebuilt it in this place. That was the kind of prank that first-years loved to play on their professors. Stealing the giant clocks from the college towers and rebuilding them in one of the don’s lecture rooms. But whoever had done this to them possessed no playful streak, she suspected. Amelia pulled herself up, ignoring the stiff pain of her limbs — had someone taken her to bits then put her back together, too? She lurched over to where Bull lay. She checked the pulse at his throat with her fingers — he was still warm. Still alive. The luck of a damn slaver.

Amelia looked around the chamber. No doors, no windows — the flat, gas-lightless walls were generating their own illumination somehow, with no visible source. Cupping the puddling water from the bathysphere she splashed it onto Bull’s face. He blinked and she gave him another dousing, which had the intended effect.

‘You back to normal, dimples?’ Bull coughed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were laughing like a mad woman back on the boat, dragging us towards the mincing machine that had done for Tree-head Joe’s vessels,’ said Bull. ‘I wasn’t expecting to wake up at all, let alone in here. Where is “here” by the way?’

Her head hurt. She remembered the radiance of the stone circle under the water and the longing for it. But nothing else.

‘I’ll be cast off the Circle if I know where we are,’ said Amelia. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any way to get inside here … or out again.’

Bull pulled himself up and laid his hands on the bathysphere, ducking his head under the hull to check its condition. There was a clunk as he popped the hatch, then he reappeared a minute later, brandishing a metal rod. It was a poor weapon, but it was all he could detach from the interior of their craft. ‘The hatch was locked from the inside. I had to use the diver’s emergency release to get into her — but someone got us out of the cabin, right enough.’

Amelia looked around. Something about the chamber — something she could not quite put her finger on — reminded her of the seed-ship observation room she had been locked up in by the Daggish. But the walls down here were like nothing she had seen in the nest city. And if they had been returned to the not-so-tender clutches of the Daggish emperor without his precious crown to placate him, they were more likely to have woken up with moss fronds creeping down their throats and crawling inside their eardrums, than in this chill alien place. Yes, there was definitely something about this chamber. A sense of familiarity, as if she had visited here before.

‘Here we are!’ Amelia shouted into space. ‘What are you doing with us?’