by Stephen Hunt
‘You think you can do it, Guardian’s daughter?’ said Bull. ‘Then walk away. Let’s go.’ His hand clenched into a fist. ‘Let’s leave a hundred thousand crystal-books crushed into an object no bigger than my hand. Everything your life has been devoted to. Let’s just leave the gem down here, dreaming its dreams of old Camlantis town, and go back to the bathysphere empty handed. We’ll make a run for home all the same. And if we make it back to Jackals, well, you can return to digging out Wheat Tribe pottery from the plains of Concorzia, while old Bully-boy will take a berth on a Spumehead trader working the oceans for your shopkeeper friends: then we’ll both be happy.’
Amelia tried to block out the slaver’s voice. This had to be done for the right reasons; there was too much riding on the outcome for the decision to be made any other way. Jigger it. Her hand flashed out and she removed the crown from the plinth. Action over inaction every time.
‘Let me hold it for a moment,’ said Bull.
‘Don’t push your luck. Or mine. That was-’ she noticed the tide of light rushing up the empty hill.
‘-easy.’
The wave washed over the two of them, and, as it overtook them, their hill above the machine forest was rewritten with the flat, featureless walls of the chamber they had started out in. Only the dried-up pools of water around the bathysphere indicated that any time had passed at all. Amelia checked her hand — still clutching the crown with its near weightless egg-sized jewel of knowledge. Were the Jackelians ready for the wisdom it contained? Did the fact she had been allowed to take it at all mean she had been tested and the Jackelians judged ready to receive the precious knowledge of the Camlantean civilization? That had to be the purpose of the crown, this place, the ancients’ legacy preserved for those who would walk the world after them.
There was no sign of the doorway down to the corridors of else-when. Amelia resisted the urge to walk over to the wall to see if she would be granted admittance a second time. Everything she needed from the wrecked basement world of Camlantis was in this crown.
‘Make the bathysphere ready,’ said Amelia.
Bull looked at the walls. ‘There’s no way back out to the lake.’
‘Yes there is, we just can’t see it, is all.’
Bull unlocked the craft and tossed out any loose objects that could be dislodged and make a noise falling, prepping for silent running, then emerged to adjust the screws at the back of the craft. ‘We’ll be running light, as gentle as a lady’s fan at a playhouse. Just enough thrust to push us out into the currents of the Shedarkshe.’
‘How capable is a seed ship’s sonar?’
‘Not so good,’ said Bull, ‘from what I’ve seen. Down here, we’ll probably be deep enough to avoid them, but on the river — well, at least we’ll be running with the flow of the Shedarkshe at our back.’
The enormity of the risk they were taking was beginning to sink in. Bull was following the fires of his avarice, but what in the Circle’s name was she following? Was this her dead father’s dream, her dream?
‘The Daggish aren’t so sharp underwater,’ said Bull, thinking the professor was about to change her mind about departing with the crown. ‘They can’t absorb fish or river lizards into the hive, only creatures of the land and the air. That’s why they rely on seed ships on the Shedarkshe’s surface rather than a navy of sliporaptors. Maybe that green muck of theirs don’t work so well down here, or perhaps Tree-head Joe’s commands don’t get passed on as clear in the deeps. We’ve got a chance.’
Amelia bit her lip and ducked under the bathysphere to enter the submersible. The crown of the Camlanteans rested on her lap, so light as not to be noticeable. That was the best she could hope for, then, that the drones of the Daggish Empire hadn’t learnt to swim properly. On such a premise did the fate of their continent rest. Kammerlan had only just begun spinning up the expansion engine when the burning light overtook them, dwindling away to be replaced by the cool, dark waters of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was unusual for the Stalker Cave to be filled with such a low noise — a keening more appropriate to the funeral feast of one of the lashlite flight escaping the beaks of those who waited motionless. It was even more unusual for one of the great seer’s attendants to slip out of the inner cave without taking time to wash away the sins of the future-revealed in the pool that lay to the side of the holy of holies.
The four seers of the crimson feather looked up as one, uncrossing their legs and standing, the tallest lighting the small brazier of slipsharp oil that lay in the corner. His beak opened to blow out the match, fixing the attendant with his lizard’s eyes. ‘The great seer has seen true?’
‘I fear so.’ The attendant raised his hand to cover the nape of his neck and his true eye. A superstitious gesture, lest his seeing orb pollute the vision of those with greater sight than he himself possessed.
‘And in her seeing, what stands revealed?’
The attendant hesitated, still too dumbstruck by what he had been ordered to do.
Reaching out, the seer of the crimson feather shook the other lashlite. ‘I do not have the luxury of three days to undergo the cleansing rituals and ablutions to pass through to the Stalker Cave. You must tell us what has been said, now.’
‘You are bid to enter the great seer’s chamber,’ said the attendant. ‘Without the cleansing rituals. To enter immediately.’
Their beaks hung open in astonishment. Abandon the rituals they had been raised to honour? Just walk into the great seer’s chamber? Such a thing had never been sung of, not once in the memory of any of the people of the wind’s poems. They would risk polluting her sight forever.
The attendant fell nervously to his knees in supplication and indicated the passage they were to take. The four members of the crimson feather reluctantly did as they were instructed. They were the great seer’s disciples, what other choice did they have? The attendant fell in behind them, taking a torch from the wall to illuminate the darkness. Each time they passed one of the pools of meditation they faltered, resisting the instinct to fulfil their ancient rituals. To wash the dust of the cliffs from their feathers. To still their noisy minds. The air grew warmer the deeper they walked into the mountain, until at last a breeze like a sigh blew over their clawed feet, and the four members of the crimson feather and the attendant found themselves in the blackest of caverns. A darkness that was splintered by the attendant’s torchlight glittering off mineral veins as he strode forward, a thousand quartz stars twinkling in the vast space. The four disciples waited by the entrance, feeling soiled for having forsaken the cleansing pools. Advancing, the attendant dipped his torch into a lake of oil and it erupted into flames, the light running up the cavern wall and, high above, revealing the great seer’s wings stretched out from her perch in the rocks, moaning as the heat banished the rheumatism in her ancient hollow bones.
‘Advance, children of the crimson feather,’ she whistled.
They formed a line in front of the cavern’s lake, their wings furled and wrapped around them to ward off the heat of the fire.
‘Septimoth has fallen!’ said the great seer, her voice reflected by the walls.
The four seers of the crimson feather quivered in shock at her words.
‘Why did it have to be a miserable exile that was chosen?’ moaned one of the seers, recovering his composure enough to speak. ‘Why not a warrior of the flight? Why not a champion?’
‘Septimoth still lives,’ explained the great seer. ‘But he dwells in the shadows of the bright realm, as does his companion from the race of man. Soon there is to be desolation, desolation everywhere — for the waters of the lake of the past have finally been parted. Our future is to be decided in the kingdom beyond the waves.’
Sensing her four disciples’ trepidation, the great seer added, ‘There is still hope. The future is disturbed. There are many paths narrowing to a beggarly pair. One path is the end of our people, the terrible chimneys of the dark wind,
the end of everything. The other … the other might yet be bought with our blood and our bravery.’
‘And what else is there, Mother-Future of the Stalker Cave?’
She flexed a weary talon in the direction of the attendant below. Her servant walked to the side of the chamber, across an undecorated rock floor worn smooth by the clawed footsteps of hundreds of his predecessors. He knelt by a wooden chest and undid its latch, laying four long, cloth-wrapped objects onto the floor — rolling out the fabric to reveal spears. Long shafts of golden metal, cast by a smelting process long forgotten, their heads so sharply edged it was said they could be cast at a boulder and pass completely through without a scratch.
Still kneeling, the attendant solemnly passed one across to each of the four seers of the crimson feather as they advanced to receive their gifts. ‘For the mountains of the north and the wind to warm your wings. For the mountains of the east and the wind to speed you across barren ground. For the mountains of the south and the wind to lift you across the dunes. For the mountains of the west and the wind to carry you across the sea.’
They stood there a moment, clutching their spears, overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were expected to do. There were songs of times such as these. When the spears made from the fallen star were distributed to the seers; but they were ancient songs, so old the verses had been made liturgy by their repetition. To be told that they were now living in such times … that they were living in legend …
One of the seers raised his spear and the other three followed suit, joining their tips in the centre of the great seer’s cavern. There was silence, broken only by the sound of the oil burning in the lake.
‘This is what there is,’ said the great seer, though the words were surely passed in turn to her by the whisper of the winds and the grace of the gods. ‘I have spoken.’ The great seer furled her wings, her attendant stilling the fires in the lake beneath with the throw of a golden blanket, its threads woven from the rare star metal. The four seers of the crimson feather followed the attendant back towards the light of the first cave.
Alone once more in the darkness, the great seer let the emptiness of the future fill her soul. ‘Oh, aweless throne, oh, all the cleverness and hopes of man.’ A tear left the great seer’s eye unseen, falling towards the lake below. ‘Oh, Camlantis.’
As the four seers of the crimson feather gained sight of their eyrie’s entrance the winged creatures broke into a sprint, leaving a short interval between each runner and the seer that followed. On the opposite cliff, the heads of a class of young flightlings looked up from their ledge, the shaman teaching them their tone poems irritated at being interrupted. Each seer fell from the peak, arrowing down until their wings extended to full width with a deafening crack. There were gasps from the children as the golden spears glinted in the sunlight. Their people’s most ancient songs were always those that were taught first, but perhaps only the shaman teaching them truly understood what they were witnessing.
From the ledges of the nests above and below came whistles of alarm, more and more of the flight coming out of their cliffside dwellings to see what the commotion was.
Catching an updraught, the four seers of the crimson feather spiralled up above the line of mountains and broke formation. To the north. To the east. To the south. To the west.
To war.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bull thrust the bathysphere hard to starboard as the seed ship’s spine weapon flashed past leaving a trail of highly compressed air bubbles in its wake. The Daggish ruler had obviously grown suspicious during their prisoners’ absence in the Camlantean underworld. Two of its latest submersible seed ships had been waiting in ambush for them when they exited the gate of light on the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.
‘I thought they wanted the crown back in one piece,’ said Bull.
‘Whatever’s in those spine heads, it won’t damage the crown,’ said Amelia, clutching onto her seat, ‘you can be sure of that.’
‘Poison, then,’ speculated Bull. ‘Dirt-gas, or their version of it.’ He dropped the bathysphere, using the manoeuvrability of their vessel to push down towards the ruins. ‘I don’t want to find out the hard way.’
More shots came past, well wide, disappearing into the crater beneath.
‘Kill the lights.’ Bull’s hands closed the illumination reservoir to the gas spots. ‘Let’s see how good their sonar is.’
‘Better than ours.’ Amelia peered out of the rear porthole. ‘We don’t have any!’
Beyond the glass she could see luminescent strips along the side of the submersible following them, a blood marker from whatever underwater creature the Daggish had used to create its seed ship design. Their craft were slow to turn due to their size, but that bulk meant they were carrying a lot more air than their small bathysphere. The two expedition survivors were down to half an hour’s charge; even if they escaped into the Shedarkshe, the chase downriver was going to be over before it started.
‘They’re piloting those two boats like they’ve broken into the grog rations,’ sneered Bull. ‘It’s small wonder their vessels have been ending up in the graveyard down here. They’ve got a dead hand on the stick.’
‘Head for the river,’ called Amelia, as a spine head from the second pursuer flashed past, ‘or there’ll be two corpses in this boat.’
Schools of tiny fish scattered as their bathysphere powered through the water, chased by the whale-like outlines of the Daggish submersibles turning after them with an organic grace, like fish themselves.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said Bull. ‘We’re in the river currents now and-’
He yelled in alarm. A wall of anti-u-boat netting had been laid ahead, stretched across the wide entrance to the river. Bull turned the sphere, the expansion engines whining as loudly as Amelia had ever heard them. Missing the metal gauze by less than a foot, they turned away from the rigid mesh, running along the crater wall with the pull of the current buffeting them.
‘Dead hand on the stick!’ Amelia cursed the slaver. ‘They weren’t trying to catch us, just corral us in here.’
‘I didn’t see those nets on the way in,’ said Bull. ‘What’s that jigger Tree-head Joe done that for? You’d think that he didn’t trust us.’
‘You were brigged on the way in, you lackwit.’ Amelia looked through the rear porthole. The two Daggish craft were turning after them — they had only been slowing to avoid being caught in the nets. ‘And they’ve absorbed enough feral craynarbians into the hive to know the tales of a u-boat making slaving calls along the river villages.’
Bull laughed, twisting the bathysphere around to face their pursuers.
‘What are you doing?’
Bull slammed the pilot stick forward. ‘Attacking!’
Amelia ran for the exo-claws at the back, pushing her arms into the control gloves. She’d had plenty of practice sifting through the debris on the lake bed. She dialled them up to maximum strength, the clockwork amplification feeding the claws with so much energy that they shook every couple of seconds as if they were possessed with palsy. Good enough. Taken aback by the attack of this minnow, the modified seed ships tried to pull to port, but they had slowed too much to avoid colliding with the anti-sub netting. The bathysphere’s shadow passed over the nearest of the craft and Amelia lashed down with both her claws at the illuminated compound eye-shaped conning dome on the hull. Bull’s words came back to her. You are going to need to dish out a walloping with themwaldos. She had a brief glimpse of shattering panels, the pressure of the water imploding the dome, drowning Daggish drones, then the submersible’s light flickering and dying.
The second seed ship had turned enough to bring her aft tubes to bear, two spine heads powering forward faster than they had any right to, a trail of bubbles in their wake. Bull dived their craft down, but the second of the spines glanced off the bathysphere’s screws, smashing open the engine assembly. Pressurized expansion engine gas hissed out into the waters of the lake, spin
ning them around. Bull twisted the pilot stick and slammed his fist into the control panel but nothing he could do was making any difference to their gyrations.
‘I’m going to blow the tanks,’ shouted Bull. ‘Grab hold of something and make for a hard rise.’
Amelia cursed the slaver. He should have held his nerve and left her to tear open the anti-submarine netting with their waldos. Now their fallback plan was to break surface and swim for it. To a shore where every organism they blundered into for a hundred miles would be controlled by the hive. As their ballast tanks emptied at high velocity, they found a new direction, corkscrewing upwards, erupting out of the lake in a spout of water before smashing back down to the surface. They had stopped their demented pirouette now, the bathysphere’s engine fuel bleeding out into the air. Amelia caught a glimpse of the armada of seed ships on the surface waiting for them, her view blocked by the remaining Daggish submersible breaking the surface beside the bathysphere. Bull spun the wheel on the top hatch lock, pulling himself out, Amelia close behind, still clutching her precious crown. An iris door on the Daggish u-boat’s conning dome was cycling open. It was searing outside, a wall of bright heat after their confinement in the cool, deep waters of the lake.
‘Soldiers coming,’ Bull called.
‘That’s the least of our problems,’ Amelia replied, steadying herself on one of the sphere’s gas lamps as the wake of a passing seed ship struck them. She stretched out to dive for the water, but the heat blast from the seed ship’s forward guns knocked her back. Not directed at them, but towards the Daggish submersible, a visor on the boat’s flame cannon twisting up as a stream of flame licked down the u-boat’s hull. Incinerated drones were flung back towards the open iris, the submersible bucking in agony at the scorch marks blistering down its hull. Curving around the submersible, the patrol craft bore down on them. Amelia gripped tighter as the wash from the seed ship tidal-waved towards them.