Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘My steam is up,’ roared Ironflanks, charging Billy while the sonar man was busy incapacitating Amelia.

Billy’s witch-blade flexed to the diameter of a sewing pin and without turning around he stepped back, the tip of the impossibly thin sword emerging from the back of the steamman’s hull. Billy stepped forward and Ironflanks fell sideways, grasping for the side of the boat and as weak as a kitten.

‘I’ve sliced your circuit line for spatial balance,’ said Billy, making the slightest bow in the direction of the fallen steamman. ‘You should be able to reroute around the damage using your self-repair routines. But not-’ he rested the crown on the boat and converted his witch sword into something capable of smashing a near-indestructible crystal, all claws and blades, ‘-before I’ve had a chance to account for this filthy thing …’

‘My body,’ begged Ironflanks. ‘Please, I need that crown to pay for my body to be cleansed of my siltempter corruption.’

‘Not with this,’ said Billy, raising his sword to strike. He hesitated as something like a meteor hit close to them, a whistling trail of heat, followed by a spout of lake water erupting into the air — then the firmament above was filled with fiery scratches impacting all around them. As Billy moved to smash the crown into pieces, a pair of weighted bolas wrapped around his abdomen, the attached net landing on his back and shimmering with a field of sparks. It was as if a wall had collapsed on top of the sonar man. He fell to his face with a single moan.

Veryann’s legs were wedged around the bathysphere airlock, a discharged bola launcher resting against her arm. ‘That was designed to paralyse a Daggish drone, but it seems to work as well on our unusually adept sonar operator.’

Amelia tried to pull herself up, massaging life back into her leg and ignoring the pain in her sprained wrist. Had the world gone mad? Billy Snow turning on them, a rain of fire falling from the heavens? On the distant shore, the Daggish nest’s flame cannons were jouncing in their cradles, answering the volley coming down on them with streams of fire of their own. The objects Amelia had mistaken for meteors were surfacing across the lake in their hundreds, long iron capsules opening like metal flowers to give birth to boxy-looking landing craft. Periscopes, steam engine stacks and clockwork-stabilized cannons pushed out from the landing crafts’ hulls, metal lobsters extending their claws.

Veryann leapt back across to the seed ship. ‘Don’t touch Billy Snow,’ she warned the crew. ‘Leave him in the incapaci-tator net. If anyone tries to free him, I’ll kill him.’

More capsules came thumping down towards the edge of the lake, against a background of tinny explosions from the Daggish city, a pall of smoke rising above the jungle canopy of Liongeli and the twisted organic towers of the nest city. There was a second rain following now, silk chutes, detached from the engines of war they had been designed to slow, following in the invaders’ wake like a rain of blossom.

Amelia shaded her eyes against the bright afternoon sun. The invaders were pushing out of the lake and up onto the distant shore — amphibious horseless carriages moving on caterpillar tracks similar to those some of the steammen favoured. Tiny figures dismounted from the rear and moved up beside them as they trundled along.

The commodore came to Amelia’s side, helping her try to raise Ironflanks back onto his feet. ‘We’re in the middle of a shooting war now, lass.’

‘And I think I know whose …’ Amelia looked with resentment at the Catosian officer.

‘A raid,’ said Veryann, ‘not a war. With a very specific objective.’

On the centre of the lake the Daggish armada was scattering, heading for the shore to protect their city. Tree-head Joe must be in apoplexy by now — far more than a few gnats in danger of penetrating his sanctum and threatening his ancient purity.

‘You can’t beat the Daggish, Veryann,’ said Commodore Black. ‘They’re like a blessed weed. You’d have to burn down hundreds of miles of greenmesh to finish them off.’

‘We’re just giving their kind something to think about,’ said Veryann, picking up the fallen crown. ‘Into the bathysphere, if you want to live.’

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Amelia.

‘Preserving your crown’s precious knowledge. We haven’t got long. You have two choices. Enter the bathysphere and live, or stay on board the Daggish boat and die.’ She tossed the prone weight of Billy Snow over her shoulders. ‘Help the steamman to his feet. As for him-’ she pointed at the limp form of Bull Kammerlan, ‘-leave him here like he left us marooned in the jungle.’

‘I can’t be doing that,’ said the commodore. ‘There’s precious few of my blood left now, for me to be abandoning the mortal few that survive. Don’t ask me to do such a terrible thing.’

‘If he is truly of your line, you will be uncontaminating it by removing him from the breeding pool,’ said Veryann.

‘You may be right, lass, but your people follow a hard code — abandoning the runt of the litter on a mountainside is not something old Blacky can do.’

Amelia limped over and scooped Bull’s unconscious body up, trying to avoid using her burning, sprained wrist. ‘You help Ironflanks, Jared, I’ll carry your damn nephew.’

‘How can such a powerful nation be populated by such weaklings?’ Veryann shook her head in disgust. ‘You make a religion out of your softheartedness. The fact that Jackals has endured intact to this day without falling to one of your enemies is one of life’s eternal mysteries.’

T’ricola and the commodore heaved the barely functioning body of the steamman across to the bathysphere, his limbs shaking as he tried to re-establish enough control to leave the seed ship.

‘You appear to have been touched by some of our beliefs, then,’ said Amelia, nodding towards the sonar man.

Veryann lowered Billy Snow through the hatch. ‘You think saving his life is an act of compassion? I assure you it is not, professor. In his way, this old man may be just as valuable as your Camlantean crown.’

Commodore Black wheezed, half the weight of Ironflanks on his shoulder. ‘I’ve seen those fighting tricks before, when Billy’s kind come down from the sky to make a shambles of the honest rest of a poor old seafarer, long retired from adventure and danger.’

‘Snow, an agent of the Court of the Air?’ Veryann’s lips pursed into a thin smile. ‘He is no wolftaker, of that much you can be certain.’ She tossed the man’s inactive witch-blade into the bathysphere. ‘Inside quick, I’m sealing the sphere.’

The interior of the bathysphere had changed since Amelia had abandoned it for the Daggish patrol boat — a whole new suite of hidden instruments had been exposed, while an open panel to the right of the controls revealed a previously concealed rack of weapons, an empty space for the Catosian’s bolas launcher.

Amelia tapped the near-empty oxygen dial. ‘We’re not going far on three minutes’ worth of air.’

‘Further than you think,’ said Veryann.

‘We’re crammed in here like blessed sardines,’ complained the commodore.

‘We’d be one lighter without your mutinous nephew,’ said Veryann, kicking Bull’s unconscious body in anger.

Amelia glanced through the porthole. Outside, the Daggish seed ship was turning in idiot circles on one hydro-tube, the mind of the craft trying to establish itself now it had been freed from the witch-blade’s control. But it was hopeless — too much of the ship’s brain had been overwritten by Billy Snow’s strange weapon.

Veryann had their bathysphere’s small periscope trained on the distant shoreline and after a couple of minutes she nodded in satisfaction and began to work the controls again. Amelia took the scope, pressing her face against the viewing hood. The Daggish city was ablaze. Neon-yellow smoke overshadowed the haze of the attack, columns of it pouring into the sky. Amelia might have taken it for dirt-gas were it not for the fact that nozzles on their own hull seemed to be leaking the same vapour, tears of bronze dye forming on the bathysphere’s portholes.