by Stephen Hunt
‘The commodore told me why he drummed you out of the fleet,’ said Amelia.
‘Fear is a weapon. The House of Guardians understands that. I just played the game on the same terms as parliament. I put the officers and crews I captured in their own life boats, then I towed them along the margins of the Fire Sea.’
‘You covered them in seal fat first!’ said Amelia.
‘The smell of burning fat attracts ash eels — it was quicker for them than waiting for their rafts to burn and sink.’
‘You’re a merciful son of a bitch,’ said Amelia.
‘The royalists lost the civil war six hundred years ago,’ said Bull. ‘I was just carrying on the fight using Isambard Kirkhill’s rulebook. We went from being rulers to being fugitives in one easy stroke. I didn’t ask for this life, dimples, I was born to it. My noble blood made me a fugitive from before I could walk, like my mother, like my grandfather before me — an escaped slave for any topper or mug-hunter to collect, dead with my scalp removed, or alive to be tossed into parliament’s stud menagerie of royal freaks. The fleet in exile was all we had left, and Black and his soft friends at court allowed parliament to track us back to Porto Principe — let them catch us on the surface before the city could be submerged and our pen doors locked down. The RAN came for us loaded with special fire-fins that could drop through the ocean and detonate on the seabed. It wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter.’
‘The commodore saved you,’ said Amelia, ‘when he drummed you out of the fleet. You weren’t at Porto Principe when the attack began.’
‘The irony of that hasn’t escaped me,’ said Bull. ‘Now what’s left of us have abandoned the cause and we serve only ourselves. We used to make a good living out of selling the feral craynarbians on the Cassarabian slave block, but I daresay the treasure of this ancient place you’re taking us to will be worth a few shillings, eh?’
‘Nothing you could pawn back on the lanes of Middlesteel, Kammerlan. It’s knowledge we seek, the secrets of the perfect society.’
‘Is that so?’ laughed Bull. ‘Abraham Quest didn’t get to be the richest Jack in Jackals by sinking his nose in philosophy books. We already had the perfect society in Jackals, until Isambard Kirkhill stirred the passions of the mob and stole our throne for your council of shopkeepers.’
‘Watch what you say, slaver.’
‘And who I say it to, Guardian’s daughter? What did your father ever get out of Jackals’ democracy of hawkers and street merchants? A bullet through the head and-’
Amelia grabbed the submariner by the throat and shoved him against the cart, his sailors raising their tridents against her while Veryann’s mercenaries snapped their long rifles up at the crew. ‘I should crack your throat, you maggot, and finish the job the Royal Aerostatical Navy began at Porto Principe.’
‘That’s gratitude for you,’ choked Bull. He struggled frenziedly, but could not break the grip of the professor’s unnaturally large arms. ‘Next time you’re thick with craynarbian savages, I’ll let them fillet you up for their pot.’
Amelia dropped the coughing seadrinker to the ground. ‘You mention my father again and that’s not going to be nearly enough to keep you alive.’
Bull rubbed the red weal on his neck. ‘Spoken like a true parliamentarian, girl. I’ll be sure and remember that.’
Both forces let their weapons fall and the journey to the spring resumed. Their broken trail of crushed trees and vines eventually opened up into a flat clearing at the foot of a hill that held a large tarn fed by the course of a waterfall. To the left of the clearing a single line of columns jutted out of the pool and, as Amelia approached, she saw that the spring’s waters had covered over a mosaic floor, gold-flecked marble steps leading down into an artificial pool. Just like the statue back at the Sprite’s mooring on the Shedarkshe, this was from no period of history she was familiar with.
Stepping into the shallows, Amelia took out her knife and tried to prise a piece of the mosaic out, but her blade proved unequal to the task. Fascinated, she peered more closely at the mosaic images — ignoring the u-boat crew’s pump being lowered into the opposite end of the pool and the wheeze of their labours at the piston. She was peering at illustrations of the race of man; people intermingled with animals in human form. The hybrids looked like they might be the bizarre breedings of Cassarabia’s womb mages — but both the people and the hybrids were dressed in the same Jackelian-like clothes she had seen carved on the statue in the river. Wading a little deeper, Amelia tried her luck on the roofless columns rising from the water. Here too her knife could not even scratch the material, let alone claim a chip of the substance for dating.
‘You will not be able to cut it, Amelia softbody,’ called Ironflanks behind her. ‘It’s like no material known to the people of the metal, nor your kind. It has outlasted the rise of the hill and the formation of this spring.’
Amelia ran her fingers down a line of sigils imprinted on the column, their calligraphy both ethereal and precise. It put her in mind of something, but not any of the ancient languages she had seen in the university library. Simple, the language of the transaction engine men. It was a derivative of the symbols on a punch-card writer. ‘This is a machine language, Ironflanks. Look at the flow of it, the cadence. These are instructions for a transaction engine.’
Ironflanks stamped closer, lifting the rim of his hat for a better look. ‘Why, I do believe you are correct, professor of mammals. But it is no language set known to me, nor I suspect any of your mechomancers back in Jackals. King Steam carries the memory of many lost things, perhaps he-’
Amelia pulled a note pad from her pack. ‘I shall take rubbings of the symbols, Ironflanks. This is amazing — an entirely lost civilization.’
But Ironflanks was no longer listening. He had spotted a brown bobbing shape being nibbled at by tiny fish in the spring. ‘Get out, professor!’ Ironflanks’ voicebox shuddered at maximum volume. He waved his four arms frantically at the sailors filling the water cart at the other end of the pool. ‘Get back from the water’s edge!’
‘Ironflanks?’
‘A tauntoraptor has given birth in this pool — that is the youngling’s faeces.’ Ironflanks unstrapped his thunder-lizard gun as he waded towards the professor kicking back to the shore. ‘When the youngling is newly born, a tauntoraptor is an-’
Something dark lashed out at the shadow of the sailors on the water, a screaming seadrinker ripped from the shore.
‘-ambush predator.’
Shouting in terror and anger the sailors fell back, raising their tridents at the bubbling water where their comrade had disappeared.
‘Don’t shoot,’ yelled Ironflanks. ‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, hold your fire. Let me kill him with my rifle.’
Ignoring the steamman’s entreaties the sailors let loose on the pool with their tridents, wild energy flickering over the surface of the water. There was a popping sound as insects exploded, then a flurry of burning fish convulsed to the surface. As they continued to empty their capacitors, a dark bony shape broke the surface, a lizard-rhinoceros with a human leg still hanging from its razor teeth. All the sailors concentrated their fire on the howling green thing and it flipped back, smoke steaming out from under its scales, mewling like the fox song that haunted Jackals’ moors. Veryann’s fighters were within range now and they finished it off in a hail of flower-headed bolts.
‘Damn fools,’ shouted Ironflanks at the u-boat crew. ‘You’ve cooked him.’
‘A fine meal for the next thunder lizard that comes along,’ laughed Bull.
Out of the jungle echoed a terrifying rumble, similar to the death song they had just heard, but amplified a hundred fold.
‘That is the next thunder lizard coming along,’ cursed Ironflanks. ‘And you’ve just boiled up her hatchling for her to smell out. Tauntoraptors hunt by scent, not sight.’
Veryann waved her fighters back from the rainforest’s tree line, the furious crashing of falling t
rees growing louder and louder. ‘Form two lines, independent fire.’
‘Don’t run,’ Ironflanks cried at the milling crewmen, a few of whom were already sprinting back down the trail ‘Force of fire is the only thing that will bring this beast down. Form up flanking the soldiers. We’ll see how well your seadrinker forks fare against an adult tauntoraptor.’
Amelia unholstered her Tennyson and Bounder. Her heavy pistol felt like a child’s catapult here in Liongeli. Laying his thunder-lizard gun across a fallen tree, Ironflanks took position, the massive iron barrel of the rifle fixed on the tree line. The expedition members suddenly faced the full fury of the enraged mother, smashing through trees and ferns towards the pool, as large as an elephant, with overlapping knife-edged armour and devil-like horns. Her polished bony head pushed down as she speeded up in the open, the glass-crack reports of the rifles and the hissing of the tridents lost in the howl of her rage.
There was not much in the jungle that could murder one of her hatchlings, and the tauntoraptor did not class these uniformed monkeys as a threat. That was a mistake. A wave of flower-headed bolts pin-cushioned her skull, ingenious explosive-driven steel rotating through her armour and cutting into her flesh. Charging in disbelief, the novel flare of pain running through her brain, the tauntoraptor made her weight count, piling through the line of Catosian soldiers as bodies were hurled into the air. One of the mercenaries thrashed, her torso impaled on the creature’s horns.
A tail capped with a bone mace curved around, Ironflanks leaping over the swinging wall of toughened flesh as the tauntoraptor’s weight flattened one of the sailor’s capacitor packs, a stream of blue energy forking up into the air as if his life force was being emptied into the firmament. The steamman was whistling in mimicry of a winged petrodactyl, one of the few denizens of the jungle’s sky that could trouble a tauntoraptor, and, enraged by the insults, the thunder lizard turned — just as Ironflanks had intended. He pushed his cannon-sized weapon underneath the earflap of her monstrous head and the gun boomed, the thunder lizard jerking then folding down on her four elephantine legs. With a detonation of mud the creature collapsed, her second brain — buried towards the back of her stubby neck — shredded by the steamman’s rifle.
Amelia stood shivering an inch from where the thunder lizard had been felled, her pistol empty, the drip of blood from the impaled Catosian drumming slowly down across the tips of her boots. There were howls of victory from the seadrinkers as they climbed up onto the beast’s side, machetes drawn to saw off its horns.
‘We’ll grind them down to powder,’ one of them shouted. ‘Something to keep the ladies of Rapalaw awake when we return rich!’
Veryann looked at the cavorting u-boat crew with disgust. She drew her knife and walked to where the free company fighters that had been trampled lay in the arms of their comrades.
Amelia realized what the commander was about to do and ran over. One of the soldiers grabbed the professor. ‘Do not interfere. It is our way.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Do I have my honour?’ asked one of the wounded fighters.
‘You have your honour,’ answered Veryann, plunging her dagger into the woman’s throat.
‘We can put them on the cart,’ shouted Amelia, ‘take them back to the Sprite for treatment.’
‘Catosia has no surgeons,’ said Veryann, repeating the ritual along the line of wounded. ‘You have your honour. No doctors, and no citizens living with the shame of their weakness. You have your honour. No cripples or ill to sap our bloodlines of their strength.’
Amelia struggled in the grasp of the soldier holding her back. ‘You’re a bloody barbarian.’
Veryann’s work done, she wiped the blood off her blade on the side of her britches and then sheathed the knife. She indicated Amelia’s over-sized arms. ‘We allow no perversions of the flesh save those which can be achieved through our own exertions and the blessed herb shine. No imperfections worked by womb mages, surgeons, worldsingers or the fates of battle. Our bodies must be perfect.’
‘Your bodies-’ Amelia was astonished ‘-your body may be perfect, but your soul is insane. What about your fallen? Circle’s teeth, are you just going to discard them here without burial?’
‘Toss them into the water of the pool if their sight offends you, Jackelian. They are not dead to my people; they live on in the fear-filled nightmares of their enemies and the memories of our free company, as they should. They are immortal now.’
Amelia shook her head. Between their convict u-boat crew capering around the fallen monster and the callous ice maiden in charge of the psychopaths meant to be protecting the expedition, she felt like the lone visitor to an asylum on Circle Day. Just two pennies, damson, to prod the lunatics in their cages with a stick.
A noise like a hunting horn blew in the distance, and there was an explosion from the jungle as a thousand winged creatures took to the air squawking, hissing and buzzing in panic.
Ironflanks’ head turned slowly, his telescope eyes shadowed by the rim of his hunter’s hat. ‘It cannot be!’
‘What is it, Ironflanks?’ Amelia stared towards the horizon, the cliffs of a plateau squatting in the far distance. ‘That noise came from quite a distance out, didn’t it?’
‘She never hunts this far east, her territory is fixed,’ said Ironflanks. The hunting horn sound came again. ‘No, she knows I am here.’
‘Who are you talking about, Ironflanks?’
‘Queen Three-eyes, Amelia softbody. The Steamo Loas have cursed us this day.’
‘Another thunder lizard?’
‘The queen of them all, professor of mammals, a kilasaurus max. She knows I am here.’
On the wind the horn song seemed to be speaking.
‘Hateyouhateyouhateyouhateyoupunishpunishpunishpunishyouyou.’
‘How can that thing know you are here, Ironflanks? It’s just a big damn lizard.’
‘By that criteria, so are the lashlites,’ said the steamman. ‘She can follow a scent from a hundred miles away and well does she know the smell of my stacks.’
Amelia listened to the stream of hatred being sung over the jungle, almost words. ‘It’s talking. It knows Jackelian. Sweet Circle, how intelligent is this thing?’
‘I doubt if she has a grant of letters from the eight universities, professor, but she understands revenge well enough. The k-max mates for life, and I took Queen Three-eyes’ companion in a hunt six years back. That’s when she taught herself Jackelian
— listening to the hunting parties as they sat around their campfires at night. Anything to discover more about her enemy, more about me.’
Again, the horn.
‘Metaljiggermetaljiggermetaljiggermetaljiggercrushyoucrushyou-crushyoucrushyou.’
‘Take what water you have,’ shouted Ironflanks at the exped ition members. ‘Back to the boat. NOW!’
Amelia broke her pistol, ready to insert a fresh round. She sprinted after the steamman, slipping in another crystal charge from her belt. ‘We should form up into a battle line. Quest’s lizard killer guns worked well enough just now, and if you managed to kill this thing’s mate …’
‘A male kilasaurus max is a quarter the size of the female,’ said Ironflanks, his stacks pouring smoke into the air as they fled down the trail. ‘Those big cannons on the walls of Rapalaw Junction, they are not for the feral craynarbian tribes, you understand? Dirt-gas sinks before it climbs as high as the head of a k-max.’
‘And you killed that thing’s mate?’
‘I led the hunt,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I would not have brought the k-max down, as old and as sick as he was, I know better. Those fastblood fools who paid for my services did not live long enough to regret their decision — I was the only one to make it back to Rapalaw’s gates from that safari.’
Animals scattered under their feet and past the escaping expedition members, the trampled passage to the spring alive with terrified jungle creatures fleeing the rampaging monarch of their realm
.
Two of the u-boat men suddenly ran at Amelia. ‘Strap her to a tree — leave the Jonah here, leave her to feed the beast’s hunger. She’s called the beast to us.’
Amelia kicked one in the gut. The other fell forward as a rotating steel bolt erupted from his striped shirt. Veryann reloaded her rifle swung it towards Bull Kammerlan. ‘Our steamman scout has given you the only order you need to heed — keep running. I will cut down any of you filthy jiggers that dares to lift a hand in mutiny towards an officer.’
Her cold blue eyes bore into the sailors and whether it was due to the Catosian guns or the screams of the k-max, the crewmen fled for their miserable lives.
A dark shape grew visible in the distance above the canopy and there was a crashing avalanche of trees as the thunder lizard pushed through the press of darkest Liongeli. They were less than halfway back to the Sprite. Amelia increased her speed, the water cart lying abandoned behind them. The sacrifice of their drinking supply would not be enough. They were as good as dead.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was said even a blind man could tell when he had walked into Steamside, and Cornelius Fortune believed it. While the evening sky above the steamman enclave of Middlesteel might not have been filled with a thousand spears of hearth smoke like the quarters of their fast-blooded neighbours, the people of the metal carried their own stacks, and the smell of high-grade boiler smoke rose up to envelop Cornelius in the rooftop nest where Septimoth had landed them. It was like sitting in a drawing room where the gentlemen had all simultaneously reached for their mumbleweed pipes.
The current focus of Cornelius’s attention rested halfway across Adam Metal Square, waiting still and silent at the heart of Steamside, in the hub of a network of narrow alleys that had never once been widened in Middlesteel’s history. Lanes that had remained untouched when King Felix broadened the streets of the capital after the great plague in the year of 901, just as they remained unaltered when Isambard Kirkhill began his great programme of public works after winning the civil war for parliament. No wide new avenues in Steamside to stop the Levellers raising barricades, no new boulevards constructed to mop up the unemployed rowdies of both sides’ disbanded regiments. Steammen suffered their own plagues and were the most loyal of the capital’s constituencies — being slow to anger and measured in pondering the troves of their long memories.