Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Veneering’s Rock?’ Cornelius frowned. That was next to impossible. A mile of prime Pentshire land ripped out by the Earth’s fury and left to hang about the county, its heavy granite base keeping it locked above the downs, the land beneath dark in the shadow of the floatquake. There had been a famous cartoon forty years ago, in the Middlesteel Illustrated News . The head of the Jackelian order of worldsingers — the sorcerers whose first function was to tame the raging leylines — standing directly underneath the shadow of the sundered land, his hand cupped over his forehead searchingly; the speech bubble reading: ‘ I see no problem? ’

‘The Levellers don’t support the scheme, but the Purist members of parliament are pushing for it anyway. The expense will be prodigious, but for a fortress reachable only by airship, immune to the brigades of the People’s Army of the Commonshare …’

‘It’s just a bigger stick,’ said Cornelius.

‘I thought you might approve — or do you prefer something less blunt to beat the shifties with; someone like Furnace-breath Nick, perhaps?’

In front of Cornelius, a retainer lifted the silver lid on a platter of roast pork floating in cider gravy. ‘Furnace-breath Nick is feared by the revolution.’

‘I think our conversation is coming back to where we were in my orchid house, before we were so rudely interrupted,’ said Quest. ‘A single man cannot fight an idea. Only another belief can slay an idea.’

‘You sound like your toad Robur,’ said Cornelius.

‘He took very little persuading to join me,’ said Quest. ‘Anyone who has survived the hell of an organized community knows what the race of man is capable of, knows we have to change our nature if we are to prevent such atrocities repeating themselves with tedious inevitability. He is really very similar to you, in his aspirations.’

‘Robur is nothing like me. He was only kept alive because the First Committee wanted him working on the revolution’s revenge weapons. They needed his skills, much as you seem to.’

‘He’s an exceptionally clever man,’ said Quest. ‘In his own field of expertise, he makes my knowledge and advancements appear as those of a state school foundling in comparison.’

‘Why?’ Cornelius asked. ‘Why do you need the Sun King’s old court mechomancer? Is he helping you in your mad search for Camlantis?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the mill owner. ‘When you join me, I shall tell you.’

‘Camlantis,’ Cornelius tasted the word. ‘Do you realize how insane that sounds? A lost land, a city that historians will tell you never existed at all.’

‘It existed,’ insisted Quest. ‘Listen to me, Cornelius Fortune, Furnace-breath Nick, Compte de Speeler. I have studied all that we know about history and pre-history in the hope that I could learn lessons that might stop us repeating the errors of our past in the present. Everything I have found is the same cycle of war and devastation, for as far back as time is recorded. You think the blood of the revolution in Quatershift you nearly drowned in is exceptional? Sadly, it is the norm. Every age has its Commonshare. The invasion of Jackals five summers ago, the Two-Year War, the civil war in Jackals six hundred years before that. Go back sixteen hundred years and you’ll find the Chimecans ruling the continent from their underground holds and treating the frozen nations of the surface as nothing but food for their table. Every age, Cornelius, every age produces blood and famine and needless suffering. All save one. One brief glimmer of sanity where a group of people worked together in understanding and peace and achieved the closest thing to paradise the world has ever seen, before or since. Isn’t such a world worth the search?’

‘It won’t work,’ said Cornelius. His artificial arm was shaking with anger, the reworked mechanism unable to cope with the surge of emotions in its owner. ‘It never does. Sink me, but I do believe you are quite insane.’

‘Are you so sure in your prejudices?’ Quest shook his head sadly. ‘This is how you will defeat the great terror in Quatershift. Not by the stalking of their committeemen and Carlists, but with a rival idea. The truth of Camlantis shall set the world free. You need to decide who you are and what your destiny is. Is it to end the horrors of revolution once and for all — or is it merely to torture those who once tortured you?’ Quest lifted the mask of Furnace-breath Nick out from under the table. ‘Are you Cornelius Fortune, or are you this? The man, or the monster?’

‘ This one doesn’t deserve me ,’ whispered the mask. ‘ He isa butcher, not a swordsman .’

None of the retainers was prepared for their guest’s reaction. Cornelius shoved the table back, sending a soup tureen spilling over the glass of the viewing gallery.

‘My face!’ Cornelius lunged across the table, trying to claw at Quest. ‘Give me back my face!’

On a hair-trigger already, the Catosian free company soldiers rushed forward and dragged Cornelius back. He kicked down, shattering one of the guard’s knees with the heel of his boot, lunging out to try to stave in another’s windpipe with the flat of his palm. She blocked the move and her comrades piled in, raining blows down with their rifle butts as Cornelius’s fierce struggle ebbed away under their assault. They pulled him up, bruised and bloodied, and gasped as they saw his face had changed. It was now an exact simulacrum of Abraham Quest’s own.

‘The Catgibbon was right,’ said Quest. ‘You are a shape switcher. It’s astounding the consideration Cassarabia’s womb mages show when it comes to ensuring the caliph’s rivals fall to his assassins’ blades. And I understand your lineage is half-Jackelian, too. Imagine what you could do if both your parents had been blood-twisted. You were created with quite a gift, Compte de Speeler.’

‘Isn’t this what you wanted to create?’ Cornelius snarled across the table at Abraham Quest. ‘A twin of you, dreaming your dreams of an unachievable utopia. A compliant servant of the House of Quest, following behind your toad Robur to murder any vision save that which you have imagined first?’

‘It’s quite unnerving to see your own face contorted with rage, drooling spittle on someone else’s skull,’ Quest said.

Cornelius groaned with frustration as he tried to twist out of the soldiers’ grip.

‘Take me back, old friend,’ hissed the mask. ‘I’ll make youstrong. Strong enough to kill them all .’

‘This is you,’ screamed Cornelius. ‘This is your face. You give me back my face and I’ll return yours.’

Quest sighed. ‘So this really is all you are, the monster over the man.’

Cornelius tried to struggle free and nearly managed to escape his captors’ grip, until he was winded by the fresh slam of rifle butts. The pain pacified him for a moment only. ‘You’re the monster, Quest. I’ve hunted enough of your kind across the border to have smelt your stench before. The smell of a new order approaching, and the blood in the fields, all the bones sticking out of the mud.’

‘Take him back to his cell with the lashlite. Don’t allow him anywhere near the Court of the Air’s agent in the brig. Damson Beeton is dangerous enough as she is, without this madman’s help.’

‘ Don’t leave me,’ pleaded the mask. ‘This one is full of lightand he burns so bright. I need to breathe the shadows .’

It took five of the Catosian women to pull Cornelius away, his legs flailing as their shine-enhanced muscles bulged, restraining him with all their unnatural strength. The prisoner’s counterfeit Quest-face was distorted in fury. ‘Let me go back to my tree, Quest! I want to go back to my beautiful tree, my wife, and I want my face back; so full of light, burning. You’re burning, burning-’