by Stephen Hunt
‘Over here,’ hissed Vane, a shadow moving off her side. ‘Has the silver-beard not trained you better than this? Can’t you even swim, surface dweller?’
She contorted around and jabbed out, but the chieftain was moving too fast, a sinuous twisting shape beating an undulating passage through the waves as though he was a merman.
‘What would you do among the seanore, what good would you be?’ he laughed. ‘I would not trust you to clean the seaweed off our nets.’
Vane darted in and stabbed her in the right thigh, a quick piercing pain burning her muscles. So fast. She yelled in anger and tried to thrust back, but he was already gone, an underwater whiplash retreating. The water around her leg was misting with blood, her blood. I don’t have that much to spare to begin with. At this rate she wasn’t going to last until Vane came at her from behind to sever her rebreather’s air pipes. Charlotte willed the Eye of Fate into life, but instead of the tug of power that usually filled her when the jewel leaked its hypnotic radiation, her head flared with an aching light. A panicked breath as she mistook this new spinning lance of pain for the ground falling away under her feet.
‘Foolish girl,’ something whispered. ‘Duelling with a lowly nomad of the depths.’ The words were coming out of Charlotte’s lips, but not at the bidding of her mind!
Not my voice! That’s—
‘Elizica. I told you, girl-child, you walk in my footsteps.’
Vane slashed at Charlotte’s arm with the jagged gem-bladed shaft, but she had already turned and kicked herself away. A slight, spare movement, but the inch of distance between Charlotte and the spear might as well have been a mile. The clan leader hissed in frustration as he realized she had avoided his blow.
‘And now, my footsteps walk in you,’ whispered Elizica.
‘What are you babbling about, surface dweller?’ snarled Vane.
‘That a clan chief should be more careful who he chooses to fight.’
The gem nestled between Charlotte’s breasts weighed down as heavy as a block of lead, absorbing all of her mass, the rest of her left so light, buoyant and quicksilver fast. The jewel’s energies were not entering Vane, casting a glamour over him. They were entering Charlotte, binding her, changing her. What is this?
‘The Eye of Fate has had many owners over the ages. Even I was not the first of them, although I had a hand in refashioning the eye’s original purpose. I wore it once, my soul imprinted across its angles when I walked where you walked,’ said Elizica.
Charlotte had worn the Eye of Fate for so long, how had she failed to see? All these years, had she been using the amulet or had the jewel been using her? Preparing Charlotte until the shock of her confrontation in the pie shop reawakened the gem’s true purpose.
As Charlotte spoke a dead queen’s words, her left hand fiddled with the controls on the chest-mounted speaker box, her right turning the spear, tracing a deadly pattern through the water. Slowly, the constant roar of the crowd died away to be replaced by a different sound … a low-pitched whistling rising and falling. The modulation of the box was changing with the sinuous movement of Vane circling Charlotte, the clan leader trying to unsettle her into dizziness. You’ve changed the range and frequency of the box. I can track him!
‘That’s all sound is underwater … sonar.’
‘The sounds of your death scream!’ cried Vane, arrowing in with his spear to impale Charlotte. She bent herself into a ball, before unfolding on the charging clan leader’s flank, cutting out with her spear’s blade like a sword. Vane connected with its lethal edge along his ribs, an explosion of blood clouding above the seabed.
‘You bleed red blood, gill-neck, just the same as me. Why is that, I wonder?’
Vane moaned, clutching his side and no doubt re-evaluating his options now that Charlotte was proving to be an opponent worthy of the challenge.
‘I think it’s because your ancestors were outcasts who slunk into the sea because they were too lazy to survive on the surface. They were sitting in a bath for weeks and discovered they enjoyed it too much to ever go back to the hunt. And look at you, the mighty Vane, unable even to defeat the young fancy-piece of the man that got your father killed,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘I can taste your blood in the water, Vane, and it runs true. Your father was probably sitting on his fat arse when the tiger crabs turned up for him.’
Vane yelled in fury, closing with her. Rather than avoiding him, Charlotte stepped in, her body matching his in a supple grip of angles and joint-locks, twisting him about, stealing his momentum, thieving his considerable strength. There was a groan as Vane hit the rocky seabed, a shower of sand rising up from the slam. Charlotte had him pinned beneath her boot, the blade of her spear pushed a fraction of an inch underneath the green scales of his bare neck, ready to be hammered through his thyroid cartilage if he so much as quivered.
‘The silver-beard tricked me,’ moaned Vane. ‘You’re not what you appear to be.’
‘Which of us is, leader of the Clan Raldama?’ Her fingers fumbled with the speaker box, adjusting it back to its normal range and she called out. ‘Do I hold his life before my blade?’
Cries of confirmation returned from the seanore, uncertain at first, then louder and clearer as the magnitude of the turnaround in the arena became apparent to the clan.
‘Finish me,’ demanded Vane.
‘But I am not finished with you,’ said Charlotte. ‘I have need of you.’ She pushed her palm out. ‘I have need of you all!’
Tera had entered the arena through the space in the fence of rotor-spears, the wise woman swimming in above the pinned leader and the challenge’s victor. ‘Who are you, creature? What is your true name?’
‘Would you know me better if I carried a silver trident down from the surface? Would you know me better if I entered the ocean from a beach, two lions walking by my side? Lions that swam alongside me?’
Tera fell back, shocked.
Charlotte nodded. ‘It is good that you still sing the songs from the time before the sides of the sea froze. I am returned.’
‘What else, what else has returned?’
‘You know the prophecy of the shadowed sea.’
Tera cowered above the rocks. ‘A thief shall walk among us. A thief to fight the greater thieves, the thieves of life!’
Dick groaned as the two guards dragged his beaten body out into the light, throwing him onto the ground in front of Boxiron and Sadly. The two of them were helping him out of the dirt when the silhouette of a gill-neck loomed in front of Dick’s vision, light from the high, hot sun glinting off his metallic vest. Dick didn’t need to note the creature’s finery, his jewelled insect swatter or the entourage hanging back from him. The swagger of the gill-neck was easy to read. Another bloody officer.
‘You have missed my welcoming speech to the other surface dwellers,’ said the gill-neck officer, as if the fact of their imprisonment in the camp cells had been an act of provocation on their part. ‘I am On’esse, the camp commandant. I only ask two things of my prisoners. First, you do what any gill-neck orders you to do. Second, you work until you die. There are only two punishments for breaking these rules. One is death. The other will make you wish for it.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Sadly. ‘But what is this work, I ask?’
‘A pertinent question,’ said the gill-neck. He moved forward and kicked the cane out of Sadly’s hand, sending him falling to the floor; then he lashed into the informant’s stomach with his boot, Sadly rolling away in agony. ‘But I am not here to answer your questions. Anything you need to know, you diseased surface-dwelling scum, you will be told when we require it. Anything else, you can beg or steal from the other inmates here.’ He clicked his fingers and a prisoner ran forward, her tattered uniform laden down with a silver tank. She hosed the officer with a thin mist of water and his face bobbed in pleasure as he absorbed the moisture. ‘Barely tolerable, much like life here. I loathe this place as all my people do. But I am a notorious sadist and I
find its discomforts counterbalanced by the opportunities to inflict suffering on your outcast hides. To serve me is life, to fail to serve me is to fail to live.’ He paused, as if inviting comment, but none of the three of them were foolish enough to rise to the bait this time.
‘Better. You seem to have come to the attention of our royalist allies. It is not good to draw attention to yourself here. I have you marked as troublemakers.’ He examined the three of them as he swaggered past. He prodded Boxiron with his jewelled insect swatter. ‘Two years.’ Then Dick. ‘Fourteen months.’ Then Sadly, still struggling up on his cane from the dirt. ‘Six months for the runt.’
‘Our sentences?’ Dick queried.
The gill-neck commandant swivelled and punched Dick in the gut, doubling him up, and then pushed him down into the dirt. ‘A slow learner and insolent with it. That is how long I expect you to last here. Your rations are not what anyone would call generous, but I do have to account for them in my supply plans somehow.’ He knelt down next to Dick and hissed in his ear low enough that only Dick could hear. ‘Do you like this as much as I do? I have more to give you than you can take, Fourteen Months.’ Without a backward glance, the camp commandant and his retinue moved off, a human prisoner on either side spraying the officer with moisture.
‘Why did you goad him?’ Boxiron asked. ‘A broken body will not help you to survive here.’
‘Shit like that I take from the State Protection Board,’ said Dick. ‘Damned if I’ll take it from a sodding gill-neck.’
‘Your soul has pride,’ said Boxiron. ‘I used to have a measure of that myself.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘I believe it leaked away from this clumsy body I’m trapped in. I used to have raw strength too, but the gill-necks have sapped even that from me. What good am I now?’
‘Alive as a cripple is better than dead, as my ma used to say,’ said Sadly.
The light behind the steamman’s vision plate pulsed with what might have been dejection. ‘You confuse existence with living.’
‘Pragmatists often do,’ said Dick. His eyes glanced around the prisoners shuffling about the camp, the clothes of most the captives hanging as tattered rags. No prison uniforms. They would rot away in the heat and the damp. The prisoners wore what they had, until they didn’t; the state of decomposition in their clothes like counting the rings on a felled tree. And this place looks to be full of sodding pragmatists.
There was a hideous wailing from deep inside the gill-necks’ processing complex.
‘Oh, Lore,’ said Sadly. ‘What was that?’
‘The sounds of torture,’ said Boxiron. ‘The sounds of Jethro softbody.’
‘What did the amateur say to you, back in the cell before they dragged him off?’ Dick asked.
‘That to the fish about to bite a hook, its bait looks a lot like supper.’
Dick listened to the piercing yells sounding again. But who is bloody eating who? If this was some sort of plan by the ex-parson, then it had gone badly wrong.
Gemma Dark watched Jethro Daunt’s twitching body strapped seated inside the machine, a dozen crystal rings circling the man and exchanging waves of ugly green energy between each hoop, lending the ex-parson’s semiconscious form the distorted appearance of being viewed through a heat haze. The screaming had stopped ten minutes ago. Daunt had lasted a little longer inside the lashing energies than most before he surrendered to the inevitable, but not much. Not as long as Gemma had anticipated. Weren’t Circlist priests meant to have minds of steel? The teachings of their much vaunted synthetic morality giving them an almost supernatural ability to stare into the souls of their parishioners. There hadn’t been many priests among the royalists in the fleetin-exile, not when the rebels’ work was privateering and whatever it took to survive. Circlist priests. Milksops and faint hearts. They didn’t have the guts to survive in the royalists’ cruelly altered realm, a world where the rightful heirs of the Kingdom had seen their birthright stolen by thieves and murderers. Forced into a game of hit and run for weary centuries, the royalist hegemony bleeding away, until they finally devolved into a tattered ragbag collection of pirates and slavers, antique u-boats and noble titles that weren’t worth the ink on the ancient velum of their charters.
The machine the ex-parson was confined in was connected by twisting root-like crystal cables, winding organically around each other, until they linked up with a similar machine visible behind the first. For a moment, Gemma Dark was glad that the climbing waves of energy were hiding the shape of the form inside the second machine. Her luck, her famous luck. Allies at last to turn around the declining fortunes of cause that had so nearly been lost. And if this is the price, then it is a small thing indeed.
‘Do you have his memories?’ asked Walsingham from behind Gemma.
A voice answered from within the burning cage of the second machine. ‘I do.’
‘Solomon Samson Dark,’ snarled Gemma, surprising herself by the loathing engendered simply speaking the traitor’s name. Her cursed brother. ‘Also known as Jared Black. Where is the dog and does he have my sceptre?’
‘The sceptre is still in his possession, along with the girl thief, Charlotte Shades. They were on board the Jackelian submersible, the Purity Queen, until the Kingdom’s convoy was attacked. Jethro Daunt does not know their location after that point in time.’
‘I knew it,’ laughed Gemma in triumph. ‘But the sea won’t swallow you this time, my treacherous jigger of a brother. Not with the entire gill-neck navy at my disposal.’
‘His submarine has a stealth hull designed to disperse sonar waves,’ warned the shadow inside the second machine.
‘Then it is time we committed some of our ships to the hunt. Rest,’ Walsingham commanded the thing inside the device. ‘Give the ex-parson’s memories time to settle into you. Meanwhile, we shall discover if the commodore’s rudimentary submersible also has a way of disguising its mass from our sensors.’
There was a hideous screeching noise from the cage, like a fox baying, the talons of a scaled hand reaching out towards the semiconscious form of Jethro Daunt. No, you couldn’t always choose your allies.
Walsingham listened to the screeching, a frown crossing his face. ‘Speak only in Jackelian from now on. Use your new memories.’
The thing inside the device obeyed. ‘The priest-man can sense our presence. He realized that the vice-admiral on the convoy was one of the Mass.’
‘What is it that Daunt can detect?’ Walsingham snapped, looking as troubled as Gemma had ever seen him.
‘It is what he cannot. There are signs of the body, subtle cues that he could not detect when he was standing close to the vice-admiral. The Circlist church trained him in this art. Their absence gives us away.’
‘That is not a problem,’ said Walsingham. ‘Now that we know about his profession’s skill, we can focus our attention on any priests we encounter and fill in the signals they are expecting.’
The baying sounded again, louder and more insistent.
‘He is not yours to consume,’ Walsingham commanded angrily. ‘We must keep Jethro Daunt alive in the camp for a little while longer. You may need his mind and his memories again.’
‘Not for too long,’ said Gemma. ‘Not if events go as they should.’
‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst,’ said Walsingham.
They were meant to be words of reassurance, but as Gemma considered where they had probably been dredged from, her blood ran cold. The Mass must feed.
If there was ever a reassuring face to wake up to from the burning clasp of feverish unconsciousness, then Boxiron’s silvery vision plate was hard to trump. Less so, the miserly pinched expression of Dick Tull. With one arm apiece, the two of them hauled Daunt upright. ‘How do you feel, Jethro softbody?’
‘Drained, quite literally.’
‘A day,’ said Tull. ‘That’s how long we were taught by the board to hold out under interrogation. Long enough for your side to realize
you’ve been taken and compromised. Any longer and you’re broken beyond use anyway, if your captors are serious about it.’
‘They were serious, but it wasn’t that kind of interrogation.’
Dick Tull lifted the ex-parson’s arm, no doubt counting his fingernails. ‘What kind was it?’
‘They have a machine that rips out your memories, that allows them to crawl inside your mind.’ Daunt glanced around. He was in one of the prison camp’s barrack buildings, sitting on a crude bunk lashed together out of bamboo poles.
Sadly was on the bunk opposite, resting his chin on the top of his cane. He had kicked one of his shoes off, his clubfoot swollen larger than the shoe leather in the close heat. ‘That sounds right effective, Mister Daunt.’
‘Surprisingly so.’ Although not quite as effective as they think.
‘What were they after?’
‘They want King Jude’s sceptre back. And the commodore’s sister would like her brother’s head on a platter for betraying the royalists, not to mention getting her son killed. They also wanted to know all about my life.’
Tull grunted. ‘Of course, you’re so interesting.’
Daunt smiled. ‘Again, surprisingly so, but they forgot one thing.’
‘What is that, amateur?’
‘There is an old adage of the church. Well, actually something of a warning. Be careful when staring into the darkness, for the darkness also stares into you. What they have forgotten is that oft times, the converse can also be true.’
‘What have you found out, you devious fastblood?’ asked Boxiron.
Daunt raised his hand. ‘Have you spoken to the other prisoners about the camp and why we’re here?’
‘We are to start work later today,’ said Boxiron. ‘The camp’s task is to harvest a purple fruit from the jungle that the Advocacy calls gillwort. The juice is used to help suppress a common sickness among the gill-necks … hyperplasia. The disease attacks their respiratory system, eventually causing death by suffocation.’