From the Deep of the Dark

by Stephen Hunt

  Commodore Black did not look happy at the news. ‘Tell me that the darkship you want us to steal is close by and unguarded, lass, and its helmsmen out frolicking for human blood disguised as locals.’

  Charlotte shook her head. ‘The sea-bishops scout force is few in numbers and concentrated around the nations’ existing centres of power – the capitals of the Kingdom and the Advocacy… the gill-neck city of Lishtiken is where we will find our craft.’ Elizica could sense the jiggers there, their presence a cancer gnawing away at the world, a cold weight pressing down on the skin of existence, slowly consuming and corrupting the world’s flesh. Charlotte put her hand on the commodore’s shoulder to steady the old u-boat man’s nerves. ‘The Advocacy’s forces are being prepared to assault the island. Every gill-neck soldier we can pull away from that battle is a soldier well diverted. And while the Advocacy capital at Lishtiken is being besieged, we will have our opportunity to sneak in and seize one of the darkships the sea-bishops use to shuttle between the capital and their seed-city at the bottom of the trench.’

  ‘It is time,’ urged Elizica. ‘Address the seanore, address them as their war leader!’

  A shelf of stone served as a stage, netting strung up behind hung with trophies slipped through by clan leaders. Charlotte strode forward, unpinning one of the rotor-spears. As she turned around, she felt the fire of the Eye of Fate spreading across her chest. Her form was changing; or rather the onlookers’ perception of it was altering. The Eye of Fate cast its spell, the ultimate piece of showmanship from the Mistress of Mesmerism. Rather than her willowy frame, they saw before them a figure of legend. A trident sharp enough to pierce armoured steel, a round shield with the moulded head of a lion and a helm with a built-in rebreather mask. This was different from any of the illusions she had cast before using the gem. They had been paltry things, accompanying sleight of hand; convincing a single person that they were at home eating a meal that didn’t exist, rather than on a stage. Now Charlotte was inside the light and haze of the trickery, she could see herself as they saw her. A myth breathed into life, the phantom forms of two savage lions slowly pacing around her.

  Charlotte raised her rotor-spear as Elizica raised her trident. ‘Hear me, braves of the seanore. Once there was no difference between you and those that call themselves the Advocacy. Both lived in the sea of life and flowed with the current and the schooling fish. But there is a difference now. You have passed on the old songs. You have remembered the terrors of the deep of the dark, the night that clings to the scar cutting the world. The Advocacy has not. They have lost their connection to the waters of life, swaddled in glittering artificial walls and protected by the tick and tock of their machinery; they have made superstitions of the old songs and fools and witches of those that keep their faith with them. And now we have come to where we have come. Darkships cut the waters once more, and within the comforting warmth of their walls, the Advocacy has not felt the trench’s chill.’

  Among the assembly the nomad war leaders were jabbing their own bodies with the sharp edges of their shock-spears, working themselves up into a berserker fury, swaying and moaning to her words. There was more than one sort of mesmerism and her words held a power all of their own.

  Charlotte continued. ‘Within the clatter of their machinery, the Advocacy is deaf to the songs that could have warned them. Their people have paid the price for such folly. The Judge Sovereign and the Bench of Four are not their own people anymore, darkness lives within them, the stealers of shapes and eaters of souls swimming with their bodies and seeing with their eyes and lying with their tongues. The ancient enemy has begun to spread the same sickness among the surface dwellers of the Kingdom of Jackals. Soon, the surface-dwellers’ airships and wheelships and u-boats will move completely subservient to the enemy’s bidding too. Then the sea-bishops will plunge the world into war, so that there will be only bloated corpses and weeping widows to stand against them when they unlock the gates to hell and unleash their legions upon us.’

  One of the war leaders leapt forward. ‘My rotor-spear is thirsty for the blood of these demons; will they bleed if I cut them?’

  ‘They bleed well enough,’ said Charlotte. ‘The sea-bishops rely on confusion and cunning and the cleverness of their machines. They rely on a force of numbers that would be enough to turn the sea black with their legions. But those numbers are still denied them, so now is the time to strike.’

  ‘I will slay a hundred of them and count it a disgrace to slay so few!’ yelled a seanore.

  ‘My rotor-spear will pass through the guts of five at a time and return to my hand pleading for another throw!’

  ‘We advance on Lishtiken!’ yelled Charlotte.

  The assembly dissolved into a mob as pledges of blood and carnage erupted across their ranks. Charlotte looked at the sea of eager faces, a forest of rotor-spears jabbing up towards the carapace panelled dome above. How can I do it? Lead these people against the Advocacy? We’ll be facing war machines, submersibles, trained armies – it will be a slaughter?

  ‘These are not simple fools that follow you,’ reassured Elizica. ‘They know the might of the Advocacy’s military far better than you. They have rubbed up against it for centuries. Those pledges and boasts are like the war masks that cover their faces: they use it to conceal their fear. They will follow you because they know the nature of the enemy. They will follow because they understand that if they lose, it will not just be the end of their way of life, it will be the end of all life. Their children, their wives, their husbands, their parents, their kinsmen and their hunting partners, all of them will be hunted down without mercy and their life-force ripped from them like marrow sucked from fresh whalebone.

  ‘They understand perfectly that the enemy may live, or we may, but both cannot. It is a binary choice from which no sentient creature may turn its face. Do not think these people savages, do not think them fools. They have honour and they have prospered in cooperation with the balance of the sea for far longer than I have survived. To lead such warriors as these to their fate is not a tragedy; it is a privilege the like of which you will never be given again. There is no glamour being cast here and I stand revealed before them only because it is right that a warrior knows the cause they are being asked to fight and die for.’

  Charlotte didn’t need Elizica’s council to know how few of the nomads would be returning from the gill-neck capital. A raid, the greatest raid the seanore had ever mounted – not against a rival clan this time – but against the best defended city of the most powerful underwater nation in existence. A theft from the ultimate race of thieves, an attempt to steal the enemy’s own magic and turn it against them.

  The commodore looked out at the cheering war leaders with dismay. ‘Well, lass, the fuse has been well and truly lit. Now let us see if we can survive the force of the wicked explosion.’

  Daunt stood on the parapet of the keep overlooking Nuyok’s walled gate. The citizens of the town were manning the walls and waiting for what was to come as patiently as the ex-parson. They kept no standing army in the city, but it seemed all citizens between a certain age – male or female – trained as a local defence force. The closest thing to a professional military company was the city’s armourers who came among them, emerging from entrances in the strangely transparent streets. They came bearing crates of the Court of the Air’s gas-rifles, breaking cases open and distributing guns, drums of ammunition and canisters of gas accelerant as well as sword belts among the long queues formed along the uniformly hexagonal streets. After they collected their weapons, the townspeople would pass shrines to the lady of the lamp, kneeling briefly and passing their swords over the flame, chanting prayers of the light of freedom.

  The affairs of the Court of the Air and the town in the volcano’s shadow had been bound together for so long that the Nuyokians spoke in a pigeon variant of Jackelian, sometimes switching into their rapid-fire flowery-sounding local tongue, other times launching into a heavily-accented take
on Jackelian. It seemed to make no difference whether there was a Court agent in their presence or not: they would meander through the three modes of speaking while conversing among themselves. In Daunt’s presence they would often forget he was Jackelian and drift between their pigeon language, Jackelian and the local tongue. Then, when they caught his look of non-comprehension, they would realize what they had done and burst into laughter, their tanned faces shaking as if the fact of his foreignness was a source of endless humour.

  From his vantage point on the keep’s battlements, Daunt could see across the lake and the lightly wooded beach outside, rocky volcanic pebbles rather than sand, the boils of the Fire Sea simmering on the horizon. There was a permanent mist clinging to the top of the water where the thermal barrier circled the island, no sign of the approaching Advocacy forces through the seething fog. The enemy were advancing unseen, a vast fleet of war machines and submersible cruisers, but coming they were. Daunt didn’t need to see the ring of markers tightening like a noose around the oval of the island modelled on the command table. He could read it in the tension of the defenders. In the way their hands clenched and unclenched around the pommels of their belted short swords. In the way they would check the sights on their gas-guns, fiddle with the seals of accelerant capsules and test the connection of their weapons’ ammunition drums. Was the fear they were experiencing worse than the knot of terror tightening in Daunt’s gut? He murmured a koan in an attempt to steady his nerves, but he found it almost impossible to focus on the calm of the passage. He tried instead to think of military history, all the conflicts and sieges and battlefields he had studied, but he was uncertain what lessons could be applied here. The Advocacy were a private race, they fought below the waves in their own realm to fend off trespassers and pirates and brigands. Assaulting the Isla Furia on land, their forces infiltrated by the monstrous sea-bishops, nothing like that had been recorded in history’s annals.

  Behind the wall, a workforce followed the armourers out from under the city, going into each of the porcelain towers and replacing the glass of the windows with metal sheets perforated with narrow firing strips. It seemed a smoothly disciplined exchange, as if the Isla Furia was laid siege to with such regularity that the city’s fortification was a commonplace occurrence. The city had already been overflown by darkships, the flying submarines passing with such speed that they left little explosion of sound in their wake. The sea-bishops were no doubt confused by the thousands of signals they were receiving across the island, the radiations from King Jude’s sceptre isolated, duplicated and mimicked by little devices the size of an apple that Lord Trabb’s scientists had devised. Well, the best place to hide a tree was a forest. Now the enemy would have to seize the entire island and eliminate each of the false signals one by one before they arrived at where the real sceptre was concealed.

  Daunt had demurred when he was presented with one of the gas rifles and a belted sword; although he had accepted the vest of chain mail offered. He had expected it to be heavy, but the slippery ceramic-like links felt as light as paper. Slipping the entire vest over his head and poking his arms out, the chain mail might as well have been one of the local’s ponchos.

  Coming up the steps from inside the city was Morris. For reasons best known to himself, the escaped convict had decided to stay on the island when the other Jackelians had left on the commodore’s u-boat. Unlike the ex-parson, Morris had a gas-gun slung over his shoulder and heavy short sword strapped around his waist.

  ‘Hot day for it, eh, vicar?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Daunt.

  ‘It’ll get a might hotter when the gill-necks come calling.’

  Daunt frowned. ‘It sounds as though you relish the prospect of the coming battle.’

  ‘I’m not much of a Circlist I’m afraid. Not much of one for turning the other cheek. Those bastards had me as a slave for the best years of my life, pulling gillwort out of their pox-ridden swamps. There’s not much inside me that’s capable of forgiving them for that.’

  ‘I do hope that’s not why you stayed behind – the chance for revenge against your old captors?’

  Morris shrugged. ‘Not all of it. I like it here. They don’t have money in the city here, did you know that? Although it makes sense when you think about it. Most of the trouble I ever got into was because I was trying to make some fast pennies on the wrong side of right. Funny old arseholes. Everything gets voted on by each of the towers.’ He pointed to one of the soldiers on the keep wearing red chain mail. ‘He’s a Notifier. Red-chests get to run about telling people the results of their votes. Even now, they’re all having their little ballots on how the city’s going to be defended and who’s going to hold what section of the wall. Personally speaking, I got my doubts on how that’s going to hold up when the gill-necks are climbing over the ramparts and the air’s thick with shells.’

  ‘Yet, you’re here,’ said Daunt.

  ‘Well, they know about inbreeding here, don’t they? That’s one of the reasons why they welcome outsiders from the Court’s staff. I’ve got a dozen offers from different towers to stay and marry local girls. Each of the blocks has their own trade. I figure one of the towers that goes out fishing will do for me. I can sail and cast a net as well as most, and drowning worms with a rod and line was something of a pastime for me back in the Kingdom. There must be a tower of priests and shrine-keepers somewhere here. Maybe you could stay and settle down here too?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s for me.’ I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget about false gods without embracing this misguided people’s deity.

  ‘Well, the trade of thief catcher doesn’t exist here, see, what with no money to steal and everything being divided up among the people already. You need something you don’t already have, you just borrow it from the vaults under the streets and return it when you’re finished. Anyone loses their rag and murders a citizen, then they’re thrown out of the city to live in the jungle as best they can until one of the beasties does for them.’

  ‘Well then, there we have it. A Circlist priest must go where he is needed by the people as much as a consulting detective, even a lowly ex-communicated wretch such as me.’

  ‘Won’t have much need for a pacifist on these ramparts either when the blood gets flowing.’

  ‘You might be surprised,’ said Daunt.

  It was the tragedy of Daunt’s old calling. The science of synthetic morality had detailed volumes dedicated to the history of warfare, for if you didn’t understand such a terrible force, how could you ever hope to stop it? All the factors and facets that went into causing conflicts, from political tensions to resource scarcity to familial jealousies among ruling elites. All distilled down to equations and formulae that could be manipulated and altered towards peace by the church, nudging a faction here, prodding its opposing party there. Daunt could see the branches of probabilities and possibilities narrowing to a single, inevitable conclusion. Either the race of man would survive or the sea-bishops would. This time, peace would only come with one race’s complete victory over the other.

  Morris left for a minute and came back holding a helmet identical to the one he was wearing, a long helm with a nosepiece made of the same light ceramic-like substance as the chain mail.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Daunt. ‘I will feel too much like a soldier if I wear it.’

  ‘You’ll look like a corpse if you don’t,’ said Morris, indicating the back. There was a small rubber eyepiece and mask with a ceramic air tank on the helm’s neck cover that could slide up a central rail and down in front of the face. ‘There are dirt-gas vents all around the shoreline. The wind blows the wrong way and you’re going to be choking on your own guts when the gill-necks arrive. And that’s if the Advocacy doesn’t use war gas first.’

  Daunt reluctantly took the helm and fitted it over his head. At least it reflected the heat of the high sun above. I wonder what my old parishioners would say if they could see their parson now?

  ‘There’
s the mayor of the city, Rafael Ligera,’ said Morris, nodding towards a local.

  Accompanied by a phalanx of the red-armoured runners, the mayor was advancing on a command platform in the centre of the keep, markers being nudged around the table by staff with wooden sweepers. The tall politician strode into their midst, broad shoulders carrying his chain mail across a ramrod straight back. But it wasn’t the mayor’s orders that would dictate the opening actions of the siege; those would be dispatched by the Court of the Air up in the crater of the ancient volcano. Dispatched along with the Court’s u-boats now patrolling the thermal wall protecting the island, dispatched with aerospheres manoeuvring in the sky above the city. Deadly-looking weapon assemblies hung connected to the bottom of the globular airships, rocket racks and dishes of varying sizes with lethal-looking needles emerging from their parabolas. Behind the command table, citizen-soldiers wearing bulbous leather helmets with built-in speakers and voice trumpets sat at a bank of communication consoles, receiving the observations from the Court’s eyes and ears in the sea and sky, relaying them to the staff adjusting the position of markers on the table. Pieces for the gill-neck fleet approaching and the disposition of the town’s defenders, others for the Court’s small fleet of submersibles and squadrons of darting airships. It was as though Daunt was watching a game of chess being played out. Easy to be dispassionate about the siege now, before the first exchange of fire had been traded. Before too long this will feel all too real.

  As if the defenders had been waiting for the mayor’s arrival before commencing hostilities, the volcano crater exploded in facsimile of an eruption, rocks sent spewing outwards. The roar echoing from the mount was deafening down on the city ramparts – the Circle preserve anyone inside the Court of the Air’s hidden base … or a good pair of ear plugs. Daunt marvelled at the scale of the Court’s ingenuity. He had never seen a real volcanic eruption before, but then, neither had many of the skeletons in the graveyard of vessels rusting on the bottom of the ocean on the Isla Furia’s limits. None of the mariners who had sailed too close to the island had been likely to quibble about the effects as tonnes of superheated boulders began raining down around their decks.