Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘This is what there is,’ said the great seer, though the words were surely passed in turn to her by the whisper of the winds and the grace of the gods. ‘I have spoken.’ The great seer furled her wings, her attendant stilling the fires in the lake beneath with the throw of a golden blanket, its threads woven from the rare star metal. The four seers of the crimson feather followed the attendant back towards the light of the first cave.

Alone once more in the darkness, the great seer let the emptiness of the future fill her soul. ‘Oh, aweless throne, oh, all the cleverness and hopes of man.’ A tear left the great seer’s eye unseen, falling towards the lake below. ‘Oh, Camlantis.’

As the four seers of the crimson feather gained sight of their eyrie’s entrance the winged creatures broke into a sprint, leaving a short interval between each runner and the seer that followed. On the opposite cliff, the heads of a class of young flightlings looked up from their ledge, the shaman teaching them their tone poems irritated at being interrupted. Each seer fell from the peak, arrowing down until their wings extended to full width with a deafening crack. There were gasps from the children as the golden spears glinted in the sunlight. Their people’s most ancient songs were always those that were taught first, but perhaps only the shaman teaching them truly understood what they were witnessing.

From the ledges of the nests above and below came whistles of alarm, more and more of the flight coming out of their cliffside dwellings to see what the commotion was.

Catching an updraught, the four seers of the crimson feather spiralled up above the line of mountains and broke formation. To the north. To the east. To the south. To the west.

To war.

Bull thrust the bathysphere hard to starboard as the seed ship’s spine weapon flashed past leaving a trail of highly compressed air bubbles in its wake. The Daggish ruler had obviously grown suspicious during their prisoners’ absence in the Camlantean underworld. Two of its latest submersible seed ships had been waiting in ambush for them when they exited the gate of light on the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.

‘I thought they wanted the crown back in one piece,’ said Bull.

‘Whatever’s in those spine heads, it won’t damage the crown,’ said Amelia, clutching onto her seat, ‘you can be sure of that.’

‘Poison, then,’ speculated Bull. ‘Dirt-gas, or their version of it.’ He dropped the bathysphere, using the manoeuvrability of their vessel to push down towards the ruins. ‘I don’t want to find out the hard way.’

More shots came past, well wide, disappearing into the crater beneath.

‘Kill the lights.’ Bull’s hands closed the illumination reservoir to the gas spots. ‘Let’s see how good their sonar is.’

‘Better than ours.’ Amelia peered out of the rear porthole. ‘We don’t have any!’

Beyond the glass she could see luminescent strips along the side of the submersible following them, a blood marker from whatever underwater creature the Daggish had used to create its seed ship design. Their craft were slow to turn due to their size, but that bulk meant they were carrying a lot more air than their small bathysphere. The two expedition survivors were down to half an hour’s charge; even if they escaped into the Shedarkshe, the chase downriver was going to be over before it started.

‘They’re piloting those two boats like they’ve broken into the grog rations,’ sneered Bull. ‘It’s small wonder their vessels have been ending up in the graveyard down here. They’ve got a dead hand on the stick.’

‘Head for the river,’ called Amelia, as a spine head from the second pursuer flashed past, ‘or there’ll be two corpses in this boat.’

Schools of tiny fish scattered as their bathysphere powered through the water, chased by the whale-like outlines of the Daggish submersibles turning after them with an organic grace, like fish themselves.

‘We’re nearly there,’ said Bull. ‘We’re in the river currents now and-’

He yelled in alarm. A wall of anti-u-boat netting had been laid ahead, stretched across the wide entrance to the river. Bull turned the sphere, the expansion engines whining as loudly as Amelia had ever heard them. Missing the metal gauze by less than a foot, they turned away from the rigid mesh, running along the crater wall with the pull of the current buffeting them.

‘Dead hand on the stick!’ Amelia cursed the slaver. ‘They weren’t trying to catch us, just corral us in here.’

‘I didn’t see those nets on the way in,’ said Bull. ‘What’s that jigger Tree-head Joe done that for? You’d think that he didn’t trust us.’

‘You were brigged on the way in, you lackwit.’ Amelia looked through the rear porthole. The two Daggish craft were turning after them — they had only been slowing to avoid being caught in the nets. ‘And they’ve absorbed enough feral craynarbians into the hive to know the tales of a u-boat making slaving calls along the river villages.’

Bull laughed, twisting the bathysphere around to face their pursuers.

‘What are you doing?’

Bull slammed the pilot stick forward. ‘Attacking!’

Amelia ran for the exo-claws at the back, pushing her arms into the control gloves. She’d had plenty of practice sifting through the debris on the lake bed. She dialled them up to maximum strength, the clockwork amplification feeding the claws with so much energy that they shook every couple of seconds as if they were possessed with palsy. Good enough. Taken aback by the attack of this minnow, the modified seed ships tried to pull to port, but they had slowed too much to avoid colliding with the anti-sub netting. The bathysphere’s shadow passed over the nearest of the craft and Amelia lashed down with both her claws at the illuminated compound eye-shaped conning dome on the hull. Bull’s words came back to her. You are going to need to dish out a walloping with themwaldos . She had a brief glimpse of shattering panels, the pressure of the water imploding the dome, drowning Daggish drones, then the submersible’s light flickering and dying.

The second seed ship had turned enough to bring her aft tubes to bear, two spine heads powering forward faster than they had any right to, a trail of bubbles in their wake. Bull dived their craft down, but the second of the spines glanced off the bathysphere’s screws, smashing open the engine assembly. Pressurized expansion engine gas hissed out into the waters of the lake, spinning them around. Bull twisted the pilot stick and slammed his fist into the control panel but nothing he could do was making any difference to their gyrations.

‘I’m going to blow the tanks,’ shouted Bull. ‘Grab hold of something and make for a hard rise.’

Amelia cursed the slaver. He should have held his nerve and left her to tear open the anti-submarine netting with their waldos. Now their fallback plan was to break surface and swim for it. To a shore where every organism they blundered into for a hundred miles would be controlled by the hive. As their ballast tanks emptied at high velocity, they found a new direction, corkscrewing upwards, erupting out of the lake in a spout of water before smashing back down to the surface. They had stopped their demented pirouette now, the bathysphere’s engine fuel bleeding out into the air. Amelia caught a glimpse of the armada of seed ships on the surface waiting for them, her view blocked by the remaining Daggish submersible breaking the surface beside the bathysphere. Bull spun the wheel on the top hatch lock, pulling himself out, Amelia close behind, still clutching her precious crown. An iris door on the Daggish u-boat’s conning dome was cycling open. It was searing outside, a wall of bright heat after their confinement in the cool, deep waters of the lake.