Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Commodore Black reached the building overlooking the arena. Its door had been staved in and was hanging off its hinges. Inside, the warmth of the previous day had been preserved within its thick walls. Ironflanks was standing in front of a plane of transparent crystal overlooking the arena floor. The steamman heaved at a wheel set on a panel, looking nothing so much as the master of a vessel, trying to turn the building about onto a new course. Commodore Black caught a glimpse of the arena below. Something like a drawbridge was dropping towards the sand and the commodore suddenly understood what the steamman was doing. Exactly how he intended to make up for his perceived sins on the great pattern.

‘Ironflanks, you idiot of a steamer, you cannot …’

‘Oh, but I can!’ Ironflanks said. ‘My waters are hot, commodore softbody, and now I’m running fit to boil.’

Beyond the screen of glass, the head of Queen Three-eyes hove into view — her single ruined pit and three good eyes focusing on the steamman behind the glass. She roared her contempt of the siltempters, that these little metal devils could chain her, starve her and think that her will could be broken by such artifice. As she howled her rage, the panicked echoes of the other thunder lizards held in the arena joined her in a nervous chorus.

‘ Metaljiggermetaljiggerwillwillwillyoufightmefightmememeinthesandsandsand ?’

‘I spent very little time in the court of the Steamman Free State,’ shouted Ironflanks, ‘but this I do know — a queen should never be humbled before a prince.’

‘Don’t be doing this,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘Have we not got enough blessed problems to be dealing with?’

Ironflanks punched the switch that released the chains on the kilasaurus max. Somewhere deeper in the building an alarm claxon sounded. Outside there was a whistling noise as the k-max wrenched her newly unlocked chains out of their stake rings so fast that they were sent flying across the arena sands, lashing into a series of benches in the wall and smashing them to splinters. Chains fell off the other lizards in the shadows of the stadium pit, steel teeth in the ground clanking open.

‘ Freemefreemefreeme ?’ Queen Three-eyes appeared astonished by the actions of her mortal enemy.

Commodore Black backed away from the viewing gallery; terrified the k-max would smash the glass and scoop them out. The steamman seemed to welcome such a fate, standing there with his four arms outstretched, as if he was beseeching Queen Three-eyes to end his aimless life.

It was a dreadful act of symmetry. Ironflanks had been cut from his life’s purpose and the wreckage of his duty in the jungles of Liongeli — and now he had done the same for the queen of the thunder lizards. Killing Ironflanks was all that Queen Three-eyes had lived for since she had lost her life-mate, and now she was being offered the life of her mate’s murderer on a plate.

‘We are both free,’ whispered Ironflanks’ voicebox. ‘We are both free, now.’

Queen Three-eyes looked across the arena at her fellow thunder lizards stampeding for the lowered ramp while it remained open, crunching underfoot the massive bleached bones of their brethren who had been captured before them, made to starve to sharpen their appetite for the games. Her sly eyes narrowed in a cold fury, the sting of oily smoke from these metal devils’ stacks a foul affront to the natural scents of the jungle. This was not the way of things. Other thunder lizards bowed before her and backed away from the claw marks on the plateaux that surrounded her territory. It was time to remind these metal intruders why she was the monarch of Liongeli.

Ironflanks followed Commodore Black back outside the arena building, the first of the thunder lizards to stampede — a tauntoraptor — thumping geysers of mud into the air as it pawed the ground and lowered its horned head towards the siltempters, the metal tribesmen thrown into confusion by the release of the arena animals.

Some of the siltempters had been trying to outflank blind Billy Snow and his deadly morphic blade and noticed the new arrivals too late — outflanked themselves. They tried to throw themselves out of the way of a charging pentaceratops, but delayed by fatal seconds, the bone-clawed hooves flattened their hulls in a pop of splitting steel and cracking crystal. Behind them more rampaging beasts followed, a petrodactyl scooping up a fleeing tribesman and lifting him high in the air before skimming the creature down towards a rocky outcrop, the brief explosion of his breeched boiler sending a shower of shrapnel across the jungle clearing.

Into this carnage strode the queen of Liongeli, her scaly skin flashing orange where the fires of broken siltempters burned in the pre-dawn light. A company of siltempters appeared with airguns, monstrously large iron barrels with ancient cables connected to the pressure of their own boilers. Heavy ammunition drums jangled on top of the guns, hundreds of lead balls queuing for gravity to drop them into barrels and speed them on their deadly duty. With a roar like splintering wood, the siltempters opened fire on the nearest thunder lizards, peppering the beasts with streams of hot lead while other creatures of the metal ran out with poison-tipped javelins, sharp injector reservoirs ready to jet concentrated shots of flying-fish toxin into the flanks of the huge, marauding creatures. A tauntoraptor swung its tail at the group of siltempters bringing it pain with their hail of tiny, stinging stones, sending three of them soaring back into the tree line with their chests crumpled and bleeding oil.

‘Time to withdraw,’ shouted Veryann, surveilling the siltempters as they emerged with increasingly heavy weaponry dug out from their jungle domes and the dark chambers of the temple. The siltempters’ defences were concentrated in a ring around their territory and the released arena creatures had bypassed all of them; but the expedition’s luck wasn’t going to last forever. The siltempters were regrouping fast.

Ironflanks, still disorientated by the twists and turns of his fate, stumbled over a dead tribesman. ‘This way, the river.’ His words were interspersed with his voicebox’s whistles and cries, the stampeding thunder lizards answering with similar calls, a few even moving out of his way — as if he was a calf of their own kind, to be treated with patience. The tree-high legs of a vulcanodon thumped past, revealing a group of trampled siltempter corpses half-buried in the mud. One of the bodies was still moving, trying to pull itself free while dragging two ruined legs, the alloy of both limbs burst and fizzing with the effort of hauling himself along.

Veryann recognized the corpulent form and the frog-like features of the face. ‘Good morning, my prince.’

She pulled one of the poison-headed javelins free from the dirt, brushing down the mud from its shaft. Prince Doublemetal gazed up at the softbody standing over him, his vision plate pulsing in recognition at those who should have been the morning’s entertainment in the arena.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Billy Snow. ‘We are different from their kind.’

‘The difference is the free company’s code,’ said Veryann. ‘And that demands vengeance against those who fight without honour.’

‘Blood only begets blood,’ said the sonar man.

‘That it certainly does.’ Veryann knelt down before the slowly moving body. ‘And I made you a blood oath yesterday, my prince. Do you recall what I said, or were you too busy salivating oil over the crushed remains of Gabriel McCabe to listen to me?’

Prince Doublemetal tried to raise the volume on his voicebox and call for help, but only a burst of static emerged.

‘Gabriel would not have asked for this,’ said Billy Snow.