by Stephen Hunt
‘You never liked the church,’ said Amelia. ‘You said you only went along because your constituents packed the building each Circleday.’
‘I never particularly liked the people in the pews,’ corrected her father. ‘A habit I am sad to say I passed down to you, living more for your books than for those who might have shared your life with you. The church’s beliefs I did not have a problem with. I was always rather fond of the fourth koan: “When you hurt another creature you hurt yourself.” It always seemed we never paid enough attention to that one.’
‘I never dream of you. Some mornings I can wake up and I can’t even remember what you looked like. Please stay with me,’ Amelia implored.
‘In a way I will and in a way I will not,’ said her father. ‘Even an echo must end. You are afraid to wake for fear of the trials that await you, but you should not be. You must free your mind and burn your beliefs.’
‘But Camlantis,’ said Amelia. ‘I’m trapped, so damned useless here. Camlantis is so very close now and the dream …’
‘… Is closer than you know,’ said her father. ‘All flesh is a prison and your desires are its bars. Dreams, desires, the burdens of the flesh, they all seem so distant to me now. Just remember that the dream you chase is not the dream you find.’
‘What will I find, father? What will I find in the land where Camlantis once lay?’
‘A hole filled with a lake. Life always gives you what you need, but never what you want. I think you might find the truth.’
‘My truth or yours?’ Amelia asked.
‘Now that’s my girl talking,’ said her father. ‘The one who knows that nothing can be achieved sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.’ He walked out of the library, his shape becoming fainter with each step. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, before I go?’
‘Do you ever see mamma?’
‘You know, I find her every damned where I look,’ said her father, his voice as much an echo now as the pattern of his soul. ‘In the rustle of the trees and the song of decaying carbon, in the sway of a newborn colt and the froth on a jar of beer. But mostly I find her in you.’
He was gone.
‘Well, that’s reassuring, given that she bloody died in childbirth.’
Her next dream slipped into her mind, but she was not to remember it.
Amelia was starting to think the Daggish had forgotten about her. Left her in the u-boat’s storage room to starve, although that might have been a blessing, given the food they had been bringing her once a day up until then. Long green bricks that resembled compressed, dried peas, but tasted more like zinc, full of crunchy pip-like things. Even washed down with cold water it tasted no better. No doubt designed to be perfectly balanced to meet the bodily functions of the Daggish army of organic slaves, it only underlined their alien nature.
She used a paste made from the food to count a line of days across her metal walls, each long smear another wasted day in captivity. The motion of the Sprite had ceased a couple of days ago — she had marked that day with a cross. If they were waiting in an attempt to wear down her nerves, it was working. Each hour all she could think about was the living death that was existence for those absorbed by the green-mesh. The pitiable freed slaves of the Daggish being sold off in the comfort auction back at the trading post. And they, supposedly, were the lucky ones, recaptured by their own people. What would it be like to have all individuality and personality subsumed to the dictates of the super-organism that dwelled in the heart of the jungle? Were the slaves aware of what they once were? Was there a small seed of humanity watching out through Daggish eyes after you were made part of the hive? A feverish dream you could never wake from.
Finally the Daggish came for Amelia, dragging the bloody body of Bull Kammerlan, his stolen captain’s uniform — inexpertly re-tailored from a fit for the commodore’s frame — now ripped and pierced by his captors’ spines. Amelia had just enough time to take in the scene when the guards reached for her and pulled her out into the corridor.
Bull coughed and shook his head in sadness when he saw the identity of his fellow prisoner. ‘You think I’ve taken a kicking, you should see the other guy.’
‘Where’s the rest of your crew, Kammerlan?’
The silent guards showed no sign of recognizing that their prisoners were communicating, let alone objecting to it.
‘Beats me, girl. They had me locked up on my own. At one point they threw in one of the Catosians — a centurion, a real hellcat. That lasted an hour, until they grew tired of us both trying to kill each other. Then they took her away and I’ve been on my own ever since.’
More Daggish appeared, carrying weapons that resembled a Jackelian uplander’s sack-pipes, except that the uplanders’ musical instruments did not squirt fire that stuck like treacle to the flesh. The new guards marched in front of Bull and Amelia.
‘Rank,’ said Amelia. ‘They’ve separated us by rank. You were the u-boat skipper when they took the Sprite. I’m the expedition head — the centurion was the senior officer of marines after Veryann. Ironflanks said the Daggish had different castes, like insects.’
‘All I’ve seen are these cactus-skinned bruisers and a few animals dripping in that filthy green moss,’ said Bull. He turned to the Daggish soldiers. ‘Where’re my people, you bark-faced bastards? What have you done with my crew?’
The guards showed no response to his words.
‘They can’t talk,’ said Amelia. ‘Only that clicking noise.’
‘I’ve heard enough of that to last me a lifetime. Like crickets in the meadow, chattering at each other during the night. What a bloody waste. I could have been rich. Quest would have coughed up half the silver in his counting house for what we could have salvaged from the lake bed.’
Amelia didn’t point out that Kammerlan’s dreams of riches were as far away as her chances of discovering where Camlantis drifted in the heavens. With a clang, one of the forward hatches was flung open and Amelia found herself blinking in the bright sunlight. As her eyes adjusted, she saw they were moored on the shores of what looked like a sea. No, not a sea. She could just make out the green-covered mountains rising above the opposite shore. Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. Behind her squatted the Daggish nest city, flute-shaped towers given life and allowed to breed to the plans of a madman, sweeps and angles that no architect from Jackals was capable of mimicking, and everything overgrown — or perhaps intermingled — with lush emerald vegetation.
But it was not the bizarre city that caught Amelia’s eye; it was the range of mountains behind the jungle and the ruins that lay between two of the peaks she was gawping at. ‘Do you see that? No wonder …’
Bull followed her gaze but saw nothing of note. ‘What is it?’
‘Look, between the two peaks of the mountains. Those are the remains of a wall. Haven’t you seen something similar to that before?’
‘It’s manmade?’ Bull said in wonder. ‘Nobody can build a wall that large.’
‘That’s what people say about the dyke wall at Hundred Locks back in Jackals. A freak of geology, smoothed by ancient storms to resemble an artefact of the race of the man. Look at its design, it’s the same!’
‘There’s no water to hold back here,’ said Bull.
‘Not now, but thousands of years ago, before the skin of the earth had turned, there would have been water. The Camlanteans were mariners, explorers. Their country wouldn’t have been landlocked under this green hell.’
The Daggish escort pushed them across a boarding ramp and onto a pier that might have been formed from the hardened secretions of a giant snail.
‘Well, this cursed place is under new management now,’ said Bull.
‘No wonder the lake formed here,’ said Amelia. ‘When the Camlanteans generated the floatquake to rip their city into the sky, the dyke would have been destroyed, the waters they had dammed here would have flooded over the ruins of Camlantis.’
‘I thought you said these ancients of yours were
pacifists,’ said Bull. ‘Doesn’t sound too friendly to me, dimples, drowning the invaders of your land through your own suicide.’
‘They had decided to deny the riches of their high science to the Black-oil Horde,’ said Amelia. ‘I would imagine the rest of what happened here was accidental damage. Dear Circle, I wish those dolts on the High Table could see this. Incontrovertible proof that their precious “natural phenomena” back at Hundred Locks is nothing of the sort. Not only artificial, but also built by the same civilization that they have staked their fusty reputations on denying all these years. There were Camlanteans in Jackals, there had to be.’
‘I’d like to see that with those dolts of yours, too,’ said Bull. ‘Because it would mean I wouldn’t be stumbling around some jungle city at the beck and call of a bunch of walking trees.’
‘You’ve spent your last few years selling on any feral craynarbian you could snatch to the caliph’s people,’ said Amelia. ‘I would say there’s a certain amount of justice in what they’re going to do to you. From slave trader to slave, in one easy step.’
‘You think so?’ Bull spat. ‘Well, at least I’ll know that you’re going to be drooling blank-eyed about two steps behind me after they’ve stolen my body.’
Their guards picked up the pace and Amelia and Bull had to trot to keep up with the Daggish soldiers and avoid the stinging spines that would come their way if they showed any signs of slacking. They scurried past massive black shells shining like beetle-armour, twin barrels protruding from the house-sized pods. Bags at the back of the pods pulsed with green liquid, the same natural flammables that the guards carried in their sack-pipe weapons, Amelia noted that with interest. So, these were the batteries protecting the city nest that Abraham Quest had warned her about. The death of any airship that dared pass over the heart of Liongeli. Most creatures in the jungle would be terrified of normal fire, let alone the clinging, burning treacle these brutes could spit. Thunder lizards would not make the mistake of straying into Daggish territory more than once, Amelia suspected.
The streets of the Daggish nest were like no city in Jackals — not Middlesteel or Aribridge or Strathdrum. There was none of the random arbitrariness of trade or the bustle of those scampering about with the necessity of making a living. Everyone and everything that moved through this metropolis raised out of the jungle did so with single-minded purpose, whether they were working on the sides of the towers, polishing them with spittle-like resin, bearing loads on their backs in eerily coordinated columns, or waiting silently in front of water-filled troughs for the liquid they needed to stay hydrated in the harsh heat. Even ants marching in a line showed more individuality than the drones of the Daggish Empire.
Occasionally a series of hornpipes suspended from the bonelike buildings would emit a song in the clicking code that the Daggish drones appeared to use as a language and the inhabitants would stop instantly, taking on board whatever instructions the noise was imparting, standing and swaying quietly, before resuming their activity. This was the only sound; the rest was a terrible silence. None of the clamour of an honest city crowd: the hum of horseless carriages, the clatter of hansom cabs on cobbles, the hawkers’ cries and the crack of the great mills. Amelia and Bull might as well have been walking through a cathedral at morning meditations; sleek-claws that should have filled the jungle with their roars padded past without a snarl, gorillas that should have called to each other with grunts quietly propelled loaded carts. All slaves. All moving as one.
Following the silence into the centre of the city, their quickstep escort ran them to a ramp cut into the ground of a building constructed of coils of polished bone-like resin. It was the largest building Amelia had seen in the city so far, a pipe organ that had gone into a mating frenzy and expanded out in a hundred directions. Iris doors admitted the two prisoners from the u-boat — taking them into a labyrinth of tubes. No furniture or ornamentation, just succession after succession of doors with Daggish guards standing sentry by them. At one point they were led into a tube with a blue liquid bubbling along its length. Was the heart of the building flooded? But the guards took a walkway along the side, making Amelia and Bull wade shoulder high through the liquid.
Bull shook his head in disgust. ‘I’ve smelt better urinals on my boat.’
‘I guess your rebels didn’t keep flocks of sheep in the royalist fleet,’ said Amelia. ‘This is a dip. They’re delousing us.’ She slapped the surface of the thick liquid. Black dots were rising to the surface, dead mosquitoes and other insects that had settled in their shabby, sweat-drenched clothes.
Bull laughed. ‘Well, don’t that beat all. You might be right. They’re scrubbing us up before putting us on the auction block.’
‘Who are they going to sell us to?’ Amelia asked. ‘They are all the same creature, and if Ironflanks is to be believed, their only interaction with anyone outside their empire is to eat, kill or absorb.’
Dripping blue gunk on the floor they were to meet their new owner soon enough. The last door irised open onto a domed chamber, revealing a cavernous interior, dim and cool and pierced in a hundred places by shafts of light from ceiling slits. Plants grew inside, crawling over each other, shaped and crafted across millennia to perform specific functions, organic machines tended by compliant creatures — tree monkeys and tiny thunder lizards with dextrous hands — all covered with the green slime that marked them as slaves of a single will. The architect of that will sat on a raised dais at the far end of the chamber, surrounded and obscured by an arc of sentinels. These were not the river-guard caste Amelia had seen on the u-boat and in the seed ship; they were hulking beasts, trees that had metamorphosed into fanged predators the size of elephants, with twisted, bark-hard skins. As Amelia got closer to the dais she caught a brief glimpse of the master intelligence of the Daggish through the gaps in its bodyguard, the cold intellect that dwelled in thousands of stolen bodies and circulated through the sap-like blood at the heart of the dark jungle. The emperor of the Daggish.
As high as an oak tree, the ruler of this living empire should have looked taller, but age after age of renewed bark had left the torso of the intelligence as wide as the watchtower on a fortress. How many rings would she count, Amelia wondered, if she took an axe to this monster? A small army of attendants crawled over it, little marsupials with their fur matted by the control algae that patterned their skin, wiping the crevices of their master’s bark, trimming the parasitical growths that gnawed at it after an age on the earth. The emperor sent a silent command and two of its troll-sized guardians moved aside so it could gaze at Amelia and the mutinous skipper of the Sprite. On one of the ridges that circled its bulbous head there was something fixed to the bark, almost a crown. Something that looked familiar. Amelia ignored the penetrating stare of the Daggish ruler and gazed above its eyes at the coronet. Where had she seen that before? Then it came to her. The crystal-book in Middlesteel, Abraham Quest’s startling discovery. It was similar to the headdress that Pairdan, Reader-Administrator of Camlantis had been wearing in his recording. A relic from the fall of the city. But why should such trinkets matter to this hideous entity?
As the ancient intelligence turned to look at the wall of green machinery that lay behind the dais, a warthog-sized creature trotted forward, its lips and mouth distorted so that they were unnaturally large and shaped like the orifice of one of the race of man. Even before it opened its ulcerous mouth Amelia knew its purpose. A translator. Something that still possessed enough of a spark of the race of man’s template that it could communicate with a human-sounding throat. The fact that whatever spark of humanity rested in their old crewmates had been so extinguished by the Daggish absorption process that they could no longer serve for such a task was far more terrifying than this shambling substitute’s presence.
‘You have defiled the methods of nature,’ warbled the pig-like beast. There was no doubt now whose voice it was articulating.
Amelia looked at Bull. Were they expected to answer
? ‘Methods of nature?’
‘You have entered the territory of the purity.’
‘You are the purity?’ Amelia asked.
Daggish drones behind Bull and Amelia pushed them rudely to the floor; as if they were outraged such a question could be asked.
‘Your breed only dares to violate the territory of the purity if it perceives great gain to be within reach.’ Fronds of leaves spiralling around the emperor’s arms went stiff at the thought of such an outrage. Drones came forward, bearing an open chest filled with Amelia’s expedition notes, maps and crystal-book translations pillaged from the u-boat. ‘You are thieves, invaders who have discovered the location of the source.’
The dome was filled with the chattering of the Daggish, a sudden eruption of hammering clicks giving voice to their emperor’s offence at their brazen attempt to steal into its fastness and remove objects from the lake bed.
‘You know of Camlantis?’ asked Amelia. ‘You know of the ancients who lived here?’
‘They were the source,’ translated the pig creature. ‘The purity is descended from the source. The purity is ancient, older than the chaos of that which has not been joined with the purity and made clean and given order.’
‘I’ve seen her notes, too,’ said Bull, ‘and if you’re a Camlantean, then I’m the God-emperor of Kikkosico.’
One of the Daggish shot a spine into Bull’s leg and the slaver yelled, squirming about on the floor before yanking the spine out of his flesh.
‘If you had read all of my notes,’ hissed Amelia at Bull as she helped him to his feet, ‘then you would know that one of the reasons we have so little from the Camlantean age is that their tools were living things, a more advanced form of the same twisting of nature the caliph practises in Cassarabia.’ She tipped her head at the Daggish. ‘What do you think happened to all their engineering when the Camlantean gardeners that carefully tended it blasted their civilization into the heavens?’