Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Bull stumbled past a revolving plane where cavalrymen with royalist feathers in their caps galloped past a burning hamlet; huddles of refugees mixed with suspected Leveller insurgents watching their lives disappear in a furnace of heat. ‘These are visions sent to drive us insane.’

‘No, this is the great pattern that the people of the metal talk about, but alternative threads on it. The same story told by different authors, with endings just as diverse.’

‘Who would do this thing?’ asked Bull. ‘Create this hall of horrors?’

‘I think this is for humility,’ said Amelia. ‘To remind us that we always have choices and our choices have consequences. To be mindful of the harm that we might cause others.’

Bull gazed hypnotized by the plane he was watching. A royalist regime, killing and burning and punishing any dissent displayed towards the whims of a dark queen. He could not bear to look at the coat of arms worn by the secret police tossing the night’s curfew breakers into the torture rooms at Ham Yard — not the hedgehog symbol of the honest crushers of Middlesteel, but the unicorn and lion of his mother’s house. His house.

‘We ruled for the people,’ whispered Bull, ‘for them, not over them.’

The two of them pushed deeper down the corridor, trying to avoid looking at the walls now, catching only glimpses as the scenes deviated further and further from the comfortably reassuring world they knew. A Jackals filled with craynarbians, polishing their exo-skeletons while their cousins from the race of man laboured in the fields, clad only in slaves’ loincloths and shivering under the overseers’ whips. A Middlesteel empty and abandoned, the capital’s streets buried by ice and snow — the coldtime returned early to make a world of frozen emptiness. Then a land of sands blowing in hot from a furnace sun, only the tip of the solitary bell tower of Brute Julius protruding from the drifting desert to mark the fact that this world had ever been inhabited at all — a lone figure in Cassarabian sand-rider’s garb on his knees in front of the lost tower, praying to the hundred aspects of the blessed Cent. No green and pleasant realm for Jackals here, just a sea of endless dunes.

At last the corridor of cruel possibilities came to an end, opening out onto a colossal chamber. The vista reminded Amelia of the Chimecan undercity beneath Middlesteel in its scale, but the statues carved into the entrance wall behind them were far more ancient, and the valley before them was not filled with the massive fungal forests of Middlesteel-below, but an entirely different kind of woodland. Mounds of living machines! Some, bamboo fields of tentacles and throbbing anthills, others spreading out from oak-sized limbs to form an undulating canopy.

Bull’s arm rose as he found his metal rod from the bathysphere tugging itself towards a small orange sun burning in the sky above them.

‘The sun is trying to snatch my club.’

Amelia shook her head. ‘It’s no true sun. It’s a source of power, like an expansion engine or a steam boiler. There’s a field of magnetism containing it — release your club.’

Bull opened his fingers and the rod left his hand, spinning out and up towards the sun; a minute later there was a tiny splash of light as it hit the surface of the globe and was incinerated.

‘Are you possessed again, Guardian’s daughter?’

No,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s as if I know this already. It’s as if all of this is a memory.’

She turned to look at the pair of statues shielding the entrance to the corridor of visions. Carved out of white stone, they were heavily stylized, cubist arms joining together to hold up a roll of parchment above the door.

‘The twins. Knowledge standing on the left, and the wisdom to use it appropriately standing on the right.’

‘If you can “remember” a way out of here that doesn’t involve us being pursued by half the greenmesh, I would consider that mighty useful,’ said Bull.

Her mind was filling with information. As if her existence here was awakening long-dormant memories of a house she had once lived in. But this was an ancient place. She had never seen anything like it — not in the university archives, not in the crystal-books her father had saved from the bailiffs’ clutches and left to her. So how could all this seem so familiar?

‘Through that forest of machines,’ said Amelia. ‘Our way lays through there.’

‘Isn’t there another track?’ asked Bull. ‘Even a corridor showing more horrors of the might-have-been …?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s the spit of Tree-head Joe’s throne room down there-’

Was that where she had seen this before? No. Her memory wasn’t from the chambers of the Daggish hive. It came from somewhere deeper.

‘There’s a reason for that. I think the Daggish are the feral descendants of the Camlanteans’ living machines. Not much of a legacy to leave behind, are they? This is the way. Let’s follow my instincts,’ said Amelia, stepping down the slope towards the machine forest.

Bull sighed. ‘And it looks like I’m still following you.’

He cast his eyes around nervously as the two of them entered the forest. While the engineering of the Daggish had seemed bone-like and shell hard, the machine forest was smooth and organic, tentacles extruding from trunks to stroke other machines — exchanging information and function, then reshaping to whatever exotic design they were working to. Delicate transparent devices like butterflies fluttered between the various limbs of the organic machines, orange light glinting off their milky scales. There was a spray like dew raining from somewhere overhead, keeping the living engineering cool and supple. Some of it fell on Amelia’s face and she tasted it on her lips. Sweet, sugary — it contained the nourishment the growing flesh needed to renew itself. Renewing it forever, perhaps, or for as long as the manufactured sun providing it with life-giving light continued to burn in its magnetic hearth.

The two of them pushed through the forest, deeper into the dream-like realm. Amelia’s dream. She was close now, she could feel it with every iota of her being, and the determination of seeing her life’s work fulfilled drove her further into the alien land.

Billy Snow pulled the spear out of the wall of the building, the witch-blade shifting back to its sabre form, quivering in delight at having tasted the system oil of the impaled siltempter.

The first tribesman to have been roused by the arena’s whistle leapt at Ironflanks, but the scout had anticipated the move and closed in, using the momentum of the siltempter’s attack to twist him about, slamming him down into the mud. One of Ironflanks’ four arms punched in, piercing the siltempter’s hull and bursting his boiler heart.

Commodore Black scooped up the dying creature’s machete attachment, brandishing it like a crab’s claw, as if just its presence was enough to avert the charge of siltempters running towards them. ‘There!’ He pointed to a section of the jungle wall still clear of fighters. ‘Run for that, my brave boys.’

Glancing around, the commodore saw Ironflanks racing away from them, towards the arena. ‘What are you doing? This way.’

‘It is time,’ shouted Ironflanks as he sprinted towards where the thunder lizards’ keeper had died. ‘Time to make amends for my thread on the pattern.’

Commodore Black cursed the steamman. Had the Hexmachina’s expiry from this plane of existence sent Ironflanks off the deep six?

Billy Snow moved in front of T’ricola; cutting the head off the spear a siltempter was using to try to disembowel the craynarbian. They were ancient enemies, the siltempters and the craynarbians, living shell-to-hull as they did in the depths of Liongeli. The mutate steammen knew every trick of piercing craynarbian shells, breaking them open like lobsters and bringing them pain. Snow’s blade dipped low and the siltempter fell forward, all three of his tripod of legs severed below the knee joints, three spears left sticking up from the mud while the decapitated body twitched unbelieving in front of T’ricola.