The Kingdom Beyond the Waves j-2

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Amelia. ‘That monster’s going to toss us into its conversion chamber with the rest of our crew as soon as we’ve got what it wants. We’ll be drooling moss from our lips an hour after we’ve handed over the crown.’

  ‘The Daggish haven’t done for us yet.’

  ‘No, they haven’t.’ And that bothered Amelia almost as much as the thought of actually being absorbed into the Daggish hive. Why did the Daggish controller require their humanity for its errand? If she and Bull died and they were part of the hive, did the Daggish Emperor feel their pain? Was this mission so dangerous that it could not stand to suffer its drones’ failure and death? The murderous entity was made of tougher stuff than that, she suspected.

  Amelia grabbed a handhold on the wall as the bathysphere lurched. Bull made a small corrective motion on the stick.

  ‘I thought you could pilot this thing.’

  ‘I can pilot just fine, first or second stick back on the Sprite,’ said Bull, ‘but it was your Catosian friend who was trained by Quest to pilot this tub. Look at our controls: your rich shopkeeper designed this — nothing is where it should be.’

  ‘Veryann?’ That was strange. On a ship full of experienced submariners, why would Quest pick one of his mercenary warriors to pilot the bathysphere? ‘Quest told me the Sprite had been refitted by Robert Fulton,’ said Amelia. ‘I thought he was a legend in your line of work.’

  ‘Blacky’s old boat might have been patched up by him,’ said Bull, touching a line of control boxes, ‘but this exploration ball surely wasn’t. Fulton didn’t put this on the pilot’s station.’

  Amelia looked at what Bull was indicating. Iron boxes, solid as their hull. ‘What is it?’

  ‘That I would like to know myself,’ said Bull. ‘Whatever it is, I’m locked out. I don’t even understand what’s turning our screws — this tub takes expansion-engine gas, but there’s no scrubbers running that I can see.’

  ‘He’s a clever man,’ said Amelia. ‘And as long as it works …’

  ‘Oh, he’s a sharp one,’ laughed Bull. ‘Sharp enough to buy us to sail up the Shedarkshe and do his dying for him.’

  ‘You planning on living for ever?’

  ‘Just long enough to see the head of every Guardian on a pike outside traitor’s gate and maybe your parliament turned into something useful — like a barracks for the royal cavalry.’

  ‘For that you’re going to need immortality,’ said Amelia.

  As they sank deeper with each second, the last of the light from the surface was lost, replaced by a stygian darkness broken only by the occasional small silver fish darting out of their way. With the last of their natural visibility gone, Bull pulled a lever activating a circle of high-intensity gas lamps on the surface of their craft, checking the dial on the expansion gas reservoir to make sure they weren’t burning fuel too fast. A whine sounded and Amelia looked behind her to try to locate the source of the noise.

  ‘It’s the waldos,’ said Bull. ‘The arms on the back of the sphere. I’m putting the clockwork under tension while we’ve still got gas to burn.’

  Amelia spotted the rubber circles surrounding two holes for her arms. ‘How do you see what the manipulator claws are doing?’

  ‘Just pull back the cover from the aft porthole, you’ll see well enough.’

  Amelia slid the iron lid to the side and saw a strip of triple-layered crystal looking out onto the darkness. Two large clamp arms hung folded in the water outside. She pushed her arms through the holes — a tight fit for her muscled biceps — and found a metal frame inside with leather straps for her fingers to slot into.

  ‘Is there a dial near your thumbs inside there?’ Bull asked.

  ‘Got it,’ confirmed Amelia. ‘Ridged like a copper ha’penny.’

  ‘That’ll be your power amplification,’ said Bull. ‘Keep it dialled down when you’re poking about in the silt. If by some miracle we find Tree-head Joe’s crown, those claws will crumple it like paper on the highest power setting.’

  Amelia unfolded the arms outside their submersible and practised moving them from side to side, clenching the frame to manipulate the pincer claws. Something dark floated past at the periphery of the illumination and Amelia jumped back from the glass port.

  ‘I saw something, Kammerlan, something big floating out there at the edge of the lights.’

  Bull leant on the pilot stick and rotated the craft around sixty degrees. ‘Those two waldo arms are all the weapons we’re packing, dimples. If there’s a tussle between us and one of the Shedarkshe’s critters that’s swum into the lake, you are going to need to dish out a walloping.’

  Amelia said nothing. If it came to a prolonged fight between the bathysphere and a school of underwater thunder lizards, the amplification on the arms would bleed their power fast. She returned her gaze to the lake waters. There! Something drifting at a strange angle in front of the pilot’s porthole. Bull edged the sphere forward, manually swivelling the inclination on their main gaslight to throw a circle of illumination across the shape. A bone-hard shell, bleached white.

  ‘A sunken seed ship,’ gasped Amelia. There were tears along its side, clean, straight rents, as if the holes had been carved open on a lathe.

  ‘That’s no normal seed ship,’ said Bull, guiding the bathysphere slowly about the wreck while their lamps tracked along its hull. ‘There’s no top deck, no flame cannons, no pod bulbs for its depth charge seeds.’ He pointed the main light at a silvery dome glittering like a compound eye on the wreck’s side. ‘And that isn’t anything like the patrols that used to chase my crew down. They’ve sealed the seed ship at every point, made it watertight. Tree-head Joe’s been making himself a u-boat.’

  ‘I knew there was something wrong!’ Amelia cursed the controlling mind of the Daggish. ‘Cutting deals with us, when all it wanted to do was cut into our skulls.’

  ‘Sweet Circle,’ Bull whistled, turning the craft around. ‘It’s worse than you know. Will you look out there …’

  The bathysphere was drifting through a graveyard of seed ships — all different designs, some craft barely larger than their own and decayed down to barnacle-encrusted shells, others long torpedoes of modified surface craft. A dead history of Daggish nautical evolution.

  ‘Erosion like this,’ said Amelia. ‘Some of those wrecks have to be over seven hundred years old. How long has it been trying to find its crown?’

  ‘Old Tree-head Joe is desperate all right,’ said Bull. ‘Desperate enough that it’ll sully its perfection by dealing with the race of man. It must have thought that Midwinter gift-giving had come early when it netted the Sprite and her bathysphere — a Jackelian seadrinker with its very own expert on Camlantis on board. But what is worrying me is what killed the damn boats out there? Look at them — that’s not any engin eering failure. Something cut them up like mince on a butcher’s slab.’

  Amelia didn’t hear Bull. Her mind was turning over the ramifications of the Daggish emperor’s obsession. ‘All this! Persisting and persevering for hundreds of years just for a crown?’

  ‘It probably thinks the bleeding thing is holy,’ said Bull. ‘The crown of its creators or some equally fool notion. Maybe it thinks that having the crown will allow it to talk to its god. It may be a hive, but the Daggish acts like a single organism. Tree-head Joe needs something to believe in, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Societies do many strange things when religion is involved, I’ll grant you,’ said Amelia. ‘But the Daggish Emperor didn’t strike me as having any deep, unfulfilled spiritual needs.’ She was trying to think like an archaeologist again. Getting inside the minds of those long lost to alien times wasn’t so different from trying to understand the Daggish. Look at what it was doing, analyse its behaviour. ‘So, what does it want?’

  ‘The jigger wants to kill us,’ said Bull. ‘Cover us in slime and clean our brains like a teacher wiping chalk off the blackboard.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ said Amelia
. ‘What does it want? It wants to expand. To grow its territory.’

  ‘It can’t,’ said Bull. ‘There was a lot of useless blarney about the Daggish down in Rapalaw Junction, but one thing everyone agreed on … the greenmesh never expands. It has a range, the reach at which everything inside the Daggish empire acts in unity. I saw a craynarbian once that had been grabbed back from the greenmesh by comfort auction traders — she was blank: she could breathe all right, could be fed liquids and mush, but there was nothing left inside of her. You might as well chop your finger off, toss it away, and expect it to come running back to you in gratitude. I reckon Tree-head Joe is the centre of it all, the spider in the middle of the web. Its drones have got to stay close to it to take their orders and the coward isn’t moving anywhere. You saw how spooked it got when it saw the bugs in my hair.’

  ‘The emperor wants the crown to expand its hive,’ said Amelia. ‘Trust me on this. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get inside the minds of cultures and kingdoms that last existed millennia ago from only the faintest of clues. I don’t know how exactly the crown will help it, but growth is what the Daggish emperor wants, it’s all that the hive wants.’ She looked out at the graveyard of broken ships. ‘And it’s been trying a long time to get it.’

  Bull started lowering them beneath the field of broken vessels, checking the depth readings as they sank. ‘Tree-head Joe’s already got itself a crown; it hasn’t done the Daggish much good so far. Beyond its symbolic value, what’s so special about a king’s crown? Those trinkets were two-a-penny at the court-in-exile at Porto Principe and none of them did us any good when your parliament came a-calling with its aerostats. It’s power that counts, not the robes that you wear.’

  That was true. Something about the crown was nagging at Amelia, but what? Something she had seen in the crystal-book back in Jackals. Something obvious. Her archaeologist’s sense was on fire. The rush that she got when she was close to uncovering one of history’s misplaced secrets. ‘It’s not a king’s crown. Camlantean society didn’t have a hierarchy or aristocracy. The crown is from a reader-administrator, a coordinator of knowledge. Imagine a head librarian crossed with the civil servants at Greenhall.’

  ‘No king, not even an elected thief like your First Guardian?’ Bull said, incredulous. ‘How did your Camlanteans decide how things got done, who was quality and who was taking the orders?’

  ‘The most knowledgeable person on any subject made the decisions for that area,’ said Amelia. ‘If someone came along who knew more about it, who was wiser, the incumbent would step aside. If there was a fundamental disagreement about a certain issue, everyone in the city who felt they had enough experience to make an informed judgement would vote on it.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Bull. ‘That sounds as jiggered as the anarchy the city-states have up north in Catosia. No law, mob rule, the strong blade survives …’

  ‘Camlantean society had no war, Kammerlan, no hunger, no poverty or crime, they possessed a level of engineering expertise that makes the kingdom of Jackals look like a tribe of feral craynarbians scratching a living along the banks of the Shedarkshe. The secret of achieving that is what we came looking for in Liongeli, not bags of silver from Quest’s counting house.’

  Bull shook his head sadly at the professor’s gullibility. ‘And who recorded these accounts of a perfect society, dimples? It wouldn’t happen to be the same “coordinators of knowledge” who were looking after the shop, would it?’

  ‘Camlantis was mentioned in awe in every scrap of contemporary history we’ve ever uncovered from her neighbours. It wasn’t propaganda.’

  ‘Right.’ Bull rolled his eyes in amusement. ‘Well, the nature of the race of man sure has changed a lot over the intervening millennia, and not for the better.’ He pushed his face closer to the pilot’s porthole. ‘And out there, I reckon, is all that is left of your flawless society now.’

  ‘All that is left on earth,’ corrected Amelia. The professor gazed out with disappointment at the ruins their lights had revealed. But then, what was she expecting? What would Middlesteel look like if a great chunk of it was ripped and sent skyward by a floatquake? A crater with exposed basements and a few chopped up atmospheric lines, rained on by rubble as the city lifted up to the heavens. Now leave that to rot for ten thousand years under the floodwaters of a collapsed dam the height of a mountain and what would you have? Something very similar to what they were slowly drifting over. An underwater rubbish dump.

  Amelia tried to cheer herself up. Some of the greatest discoveries Jackelian archaeology had ever made had been found in the dust pits of fallen civilizations. Bull grabbed an iron wheel with a wooden handle and began to rotate it fast. ‘That’s your collection nets out. Keep your eyes open at the rear port. If we come across whatever did for Tree-head Joe’s toy fleet, I’m going to bounce our buoyancy tanks, send us to the surface like a flying fish running for its life.’

  ‘You know what’ll happen if we surface without the crown,’ Amelia said.

  ‘Reckon we’re dead whichever way you look at it,’ said Bull. ‘But an hour or two more is worth having. Let’s get to work.’

  Amelia extended the waldos and began to pick through the debris on the lake bed. There were shreds of things that could have been pieces of machinery, rubble with a single side carved by the hand of man. In other circumstances she would have been filling her nets with such objects, anything that could expand Jackals’ knowledge of the Camlantean civilization. Crates of antiquities that could be labelled, stored and analysed by teams of researchers at Jackals’ museums and colleges. The purpose of most of what she recovered might lay undis covered for decades, centuries even, before it could be cross-referenced and its function teased out. But she didn’t have the luxury of repeat trips. This might be her only chance to explore down here on the good graces of the Daggish emperor. The frustration welled in her, the minutes of fruitless searching, minutes turning into an hour. How much air did they have left?

  Then it hit her. She was thinking like an archaeologist. The best advice she had been given for this kind of situation had come from a Chimecan tomb raider who specialized in under-city work. Follow the traps. The traps mean plunder.

  ‘Traps,’ said Amelia. ‘Traps mean treasure. Those broken up Daggish submersibles. How did they all get to be clustered in the same place?’

  ‘Currents, girl,’ said Bull. ‘It ain’t worldsinger sorcery that put them there, just the currents down here.’

  ‘Follow the currents.’

  ‘I’ve been avoiding them,’ said Bull. ‘Whatever killed those Daggish boats is as like living somewhere along the flow.’

  ‘That’s what I’m counting on,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Well, why not,’ muttered Bull, turning the bathysphere into the pull of the undercurrents. ‘Why not face the monster of the lake in its den. Least it’ll be something to see before we go.’

  As they tracked against the push of water across the lake bed, Amelia noticed that the water outside appeared to be becoming lighter, the darkness of their depth lessening until the jagged outcrops of rock below started to cast shadows towards them. Bull checked the depth readings on his control panel, tapping the glass above the dial, but the hand remained hovering at eighty fathoms.

  ‘We’re not rising,’ said Bull. ‘This isn’t natural. Look at the light out there, we might as well be diving for pearls off the Fire Sea corals.’

  ‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Amelia,’ except we’re not in any tunnel. Keep going. This is what we’re looking for, I can feel it in my blood.’

  After five minutes they crested a rise of rubble, their small craft’s gaslights hardly needed now. They were drifting over the centre of a basin, while down below a ring of monoliths traded waves of rainbow light between each other, wide sheets of energy undulating slowly through the water. The dark granite giants lay surrounded by a litter of sliced-apart seed-ship wreckage.

  ‘Jigger that,’ said Bull, �
��jigger that for a game of soldiers.’

  ‘Head for it,’ said Amelia. ‘Head for the centre of the stones and the light.’

  ‘Not in a million years,’ said Bull, pushing the pilot stick away from the basin. ‘That’s a death trap — you want to know how a fish feels when it gets sucked into a boat’s screws, you dive into that mess of light. It’s nothing we need.’

  ‘It is,’ said Amelia. ‘Can’t you feel it, feel the song the city is singing for us?’

  ‘You’ve lost it, dimples, you’ve lost your mind.’ He glanced across at Amelia and nearly fell out of the pilot seat — the professor was glowing, a faint echo of the rainbow sheets outside rippling along the surface of her torn and tattered clothes. He checked his own hands but the bizarre radiance was only covering her body, not his.

  ‘Turn the craft,’ said Amelia.

  As if in response to her voice there was a violent lurch in the bathysphere’s direction. Bull slammed the pilot stick and pushed the pressure on the expansion engine up to the red line on his dials, but even at maximum power the craft was still getting sucked in towards the stone circle.

  ‘Stop it!’ Bull yelled. ‘Look at the wreckage out there. It’s a siren’s song — you’re pulling us into the butcher’s mincer.’

  Amelia’s eyes were glazed with the power of the radiance. It was home. They were going home.

  Bull smashed the lever to blow the lake water out of the main ballast tanks, trying to trigger an emergency surface, but the control deck was no longer responding to his directions. Something else was in control, and it sure wasn’t him. Behind Bull, the waldo arms screamed as the engine began to put its springs under intolerable tension, the dial hands under every circle of crystal on his instrument panel turning in angry loops, the craft shaking the slaver fit to rattle his teeth. They struck the plane of rainbow energy and the field flowed through the reinforced walls of the bathysphere as if they were made of glass. It was dissolving the walls of the craft — so bright, pain plunging directly into the back of his skull.