Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘The patrol may be back any second,’ said Veryann, lifting an intact flame weapon from the wall.

‘They are a long way from the boat,’ said Billy, ‘and that weapon you have taken will not work for you. It has a mechanism inside it that serves a similar purpose to a Jackelian blood-code machine — it will fire only for members of the hive.’

‘There’s a cunning thing,’ said the commodore. He kicked the deck of the seed ship. ‘A clever race would make sure this strange seahorse of a craft operated in a similar way.’

‘It does,’ said Ironflanks. ‘It will not travel the Shedarkshe for us.’ The steamman pointed to the dead navigator drone lying sprawled across the floor. ‘Only for one of those.’

‘The seed ship has a brain,’ said Billy Snow. ‘A wonderful thing, grown from a nubbin no larger than a ha’penny. Right about here .’ Billy’s witch-blade cut down, fizzing with delight as it sliced open the living decking, then transforming itself into a trident which the sonar man plunged down through the opening. The ship trembled at the strike, the trident’s fangs growing longer and penetrating deep into the nautical creature. Water churned up from the rear of the craft, bone-like hydro tubes convulsing with misery as it emptied propulsive air behind their stern, pulling against the pier’s anchorage. The craft grew still as the witch-blade extended into the boat’s brain matrix, poisoning and infiltrating the seed ship, much as the Daggish subverted other creatures into their own hive. Turnabout was fair play, it seemed.

‘The craft is ours now,’ said Billy.

‘How are you doing this?’ demanded T’ricola. ‘That witch-blade of yours is no sword that ever saw the shores of Thar.’

‘This vessel and its breed were made to serve people, once, not the other way around. It just needed to be reminded.’

‘Will your blessed seahorse carry us to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’ Commodore Black asked. ‘Will it carry us, Billy Snow, without alerting the other seed ships and Daggish to our presence?’

‘I believe it will,’ said Billy. ‘Although we should rip some vegetation from the shore first to rub over us, if we want to pass for Daggish slaves at a distance.’ He looked at Ironflanks. ‘And you will have to stay out of sight at all times. These creatures possess no means to absorb steammen within their hive — or siltempters, for that matter.’

‘It is almost as if you have been absorbed by the Daggish already, Billy softbody,’ said Ironflanks. ‘The House of Quest might have been better advised to have contracted you for your services as a guide, rather than a u-boat man.’

Billy Snow pointed to his milky unseeing eyes. ‘Who would trust a blind pathfinder, old steamer?’

‘Who indeed?’ said Veryann. ‘Does your mysterious newfound reserve of knowledge extend to whether the Sprite and her mutinous crew have already achieved the expedition’s objective and sailed back past us on the Shedarkshe?’

‘The Sprite has not sailed back down the river,’ said Billy. ‘I fear that things have not gone too well for the u-boat.’

‘My boat. My precious Sprite ,’ moaned the commodore. ‘Don’t say that she is wrecked at the end of this river of damned souls?’

‘It is not the u-boat’s condition I speak of,’ said the old sonar man. ‘It’s our crew’s. Apart from those standing in this cabin, I can sense only two other souls from the race of man unabsorbed by the Daggish. And speaking frankly, they don’t appear to be holding up too well at the moment!’

Two Catosian soldiers escorted Cornelius down a corridor along the airship’s starboard side. The exploration vessel had stopped moving now, the immense aerostat holding station at whatever position they had reached. The portholes along the gallery offered little clue to their location — save the fact that they were high. Clouds drifted far below them on the other side of the iced-up glass, the heavens were birdless, and the airship’s jack cloudies wore woollen jerseys over their striped sailors’ shirts. Little puffs of warm fresh air were injected from grilles in the ceiling every couple of minutes, followed by a wheeze like an old man as stale air was withdrawn. Unfortunately for Cornelius, Septimoth and Damson Beeton weren’t there with him to speculate on where in the heavens they had ended up — they had been left behind in the brig when the guards came for him.

At one point, Cornelius and his escort passed a small glass dome set in the hull, a sailor on a metal gangway using a gas-fired heliograph to flash messages across to one of their sister ships hanging in the firmament. The scope clacked as fresh communications landed in a wire basket from a pneumatic tube. Along from the signal station, Cornelius got the briefest glimpse of a hangar filled with engineers working in the shadow of something that looked like nothing so much as an oversized hencoop — a long queue of large iron capsules lined up inside racks, in place of eggs. Now, that was odd. An airship’s fin bombs were made of crystal to contain the acidic blow-barrel sap, two chambers separated by a thin glass membrane in mimicry of the violently explosive tree seeds. Those capsules couldn’t be fin bombs. The metal would corrode, detonating at random. What was this rogue airship fleet of Quest’s up to? The shove of the guards’ rifle butts hurried Cornelius past the open hatch. Had Robur constructed a legion of primitive steammen fighting machines to drop on Jackals, to make its people bend their knee to whatever strange Camlantean philosophy-religion his master Abraham Quest had uncovered in his crystal-books?

Cornelius was led to a portal with a pair of sentries waiting outside. The guards swung open the heavy doors — polished Jackelian oak — to reveal a stately dining room positioned underneath the airship’s bridge. There was a substantial glass nose cone at the far end with panes of glass curving across the floor between embedded girder rails, allowing guests to stare down onto the clouds when the conversation stalled. There was only one diner — Abraham Quest — but a host of staff scurried around under the watchful gaze of Catosian free company fighters lining the wall.

Cornelius indicated the sentries standing guard over their master of the air. ‘Are you expecting one of your crew to murder you?’

‘You think me paranoid?’ said Quest. ‘Well, perhaps. But the Court of the Air may still have infiltrators working undetected among my staff.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘What makes you think that?’ said Quest.

‘The fact that we are still afloat. The Court’s wolftakers are nothing if not thorough.’

Quest indicated the chair at the other end of the table. ‘Perhaps they will be kind enough to allow us to finish our supper before crashing us.’

‘A large table,’ said Cornelius, ‘for only two diners.’

‘I had to construct the Leviathan and her sister stats under the pretence that they were proving craft for a new generation of RAN warships,’ Quest apologized. ‘My airship was to be a flagship design — while this was to be the captain’s table, serving formal dinners for the crew’s officers and visiting dignitaries. The Royal Aerostatical Navy does so love its ritual and its pomp. And foreigners are so easily impressed by the swell of our canvas hulls and the glint of shells from our fin-bomb bays.’

‘The navy doesn’t have airship hangars large enough to dock a craft of this size,’ said Cornelius, watching as a seat was pulled out for him by one of the retainers.

‘Admiralty House are planning a new statodrome,’ said Quest. ‘The invasion by Quatershift and the ease with which they and their revolutionary allies seized our airship fields around Shadowclock unnerved the navy. They are planning to use Veneering’s Rock as their new base of operations.’