by Stephen Hunt
‘Just yourself and T’ricola,’ said the commodore.
‘I think we could trust her,’ said Ironflanks.
‘It’s not a matter of trust, old steamer, although I won’t pretend that thought hasn’t crossed my mind,’ explained the commodore. ‘Now we’re no longer about his mad goose chase, Quest has written the three of us off. But he still wants Amelia working for him. I’ve seen the way Quest makes sure there’s always at least one of his people standing around by the professor, watching her. Making sure we don’t change her mind about leaving for home.’
‘So,’ said T’ricola. ‘Billy Snow.’
‘Yes. Billy. Bad, mad Billy Snow,’ the commodore nodded. ‘He’s served with me twice before, navigated my boat through fields of mines and sat silent by my side while the God-emperor’s bully boys tried to tickle us to the surface with their depth charges. He’s shared my salted jerky and saved my life and if Quest knew anything more about seadrinkers than the cost of a cargo run across the Sepia Sea, he’d know we don’t leave our own behind.’
‘But is he our own?’ asked T’ricola, the bony hand of her manipulator arm opening and closing nervously. ‘He deep-sixed us back on the surface of the lake.’
‘After leading us safely through the greenmesh,’ pointed out Ironflanks, his voicebox set low. ‘That cut he gave me on the seed ship was the strike of a master swordsman! I could count on one hand the number of steammen knights who could duplicate such a feat. If he had meant to make me deactivate, my thread on the great pattern would surely have been severed by now. He was trying his best not to harm us, even as he fought us to destroy the Camlantean crown.’
‘There’s a blessed sight more to this affair than Quest has admitted to,’ said the commodore. He looked at T’ricola. ‘How long have you known Billy?’
‘I’ve crewed with him for years, for as long as anyone. I didn’t even know he carried a sword in that cane of his, let alone a witch-blade.’
‘I met a boy like him once,’ said the commodore. ‘A fey lad with wild blood in his veins and a talent for getting into scrapes. Billy’s older, but he always did move about like a cat on my u-boat — like no blind man I have ever seen before or since. Crewing on a seadrinker craft is a mortal clever way to travel around the world undetected, always another sailor in port to vouch for you, no ties to the land to gainsay your stories or your identity.’
‘Our merchant friend knows who Billy softbody really is,’ said Ironflanks.
‘No, I think Quest recognized what he is,’ added T’ricola.
‘Not a wolftaker, though,’ said the commodore. ‘Not an agent of the wicked Court of the Air. Not if Veryann is telling the truth, which on this matter, at least, I think she is.’
‘There are only two people with the answer,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Our erstwhile employer and Billy softbody himself. Of the two, I believe I would be inclined to trust our old sonar officer far more than the fastblood who has been paying our wages. If Abraham Quest has told a single truth about this expedition since he engaged my services, it has been by accident.’
‘Ah, but I have already asked to see my nephew in his cage on the brig,’ said the commodore. ‘Veryann just laughed at me. I doubt whether we’ll be getting visiting hours with our Billy.’
‘How then?’ asked Ironflanks.
Commodore Black tapped the metal duct beneath their feet. ‘An airship is not so different from a u-boat when she’s running at this altitude, eh T’ricola? Nothing to breathe outside, only her tanked air to keep us going. They have to breathe down in the brig as well, now, don’t they?’
‘There may be an intruder detection system running in the vents,’ said T’ricola. ‘Quest seems the cautious sort.’
The commodore scratched his beard. ‘Then we’re lucky to have the finest engineer to grace the Sprite’s decks along with us to throw a spanner in it.’
‘I am too big to crawl through such a confined space,’ said Ironflanks.
‘But you have two grand eyes,’ said the commodore, ‘like a pair of telescopes bought from Penny Street; and sound baffles so delicate I dare say you could tell me the weight of a stalking sleekclaw from her prowl. You’ll do fine standing on watch.’
‘It will be dangerous,’ said Ironflanks.
‘Your people once risked a whole company of steammen knights in Liongeli to recover one of your own. Besides, I want the mortal truth out of Billy Snow.’
‘There is an ancient saying,’ noted Ironflanks, ‘originating, I believe, from you fastbloods. The truth will set you free.’
‘No, old steamer,’ said the commodore. ‘In my experience, the truth will get you sent to the bottom of the ocean with an anchor chain wrapped around your legs to buy your silence. But it’s the truth I need, all the same.’
It was also the truth that occupied the mind of Abraham Quest, standing more or less squarely on the spot that the commodore was planning to break his way into. Billy Snow waited on the other side of the viewing port, as unconcerned by the presence of the airship’s master as by the existence of the cursewall fizzing between them.
Billy pointed to the motionless, abacus-like screen on the wall. ‘You could have used your Rutledge Rotator to talk to me.’
‘The one in your cell seems to have stopped working,’ said Quest. ‘Even though none of my mechomancers can find a fault with the equipment anywhere on the airship.’
Billy shrugged. ‘You can’t get the staff, can you?’ He raised his arms, free of their shackles. ‘They didn’t even secure me properly.’
‘Actually, normally I can get the staff,’ said Quest. ‘If you shaved your beard off, Mister Snow, and dyed your hair a shade darker, you would be the very spit of a man who tried to kill me a little over a year ago.’
‘Obviously he failed.’
‘Obviously,’ agreed Quest.
‘What happened?’
‘After the assassin died, my friends in the Department of Blood at Greenhall ran his sample through their great transaction engine halls. Not only did they find no record of his existence as a Jackelian native, but he had a previously unknown type of blood pumping through his veins.’
‘Probably foreign then,’ said Billy.
‘Not entirely dissimilar to some of our own blood types in Jackals, but unique enough to be classed as an aberration. An aberration of one.’
Billy glanced over to where Damson Beeton sat in the corner of the cell under the weight of her hex suit. She was doing a very good impression of minding her own business. ‘Aberrations happen.’
‘True enough,’ said Quest. ‘Mules are born when the race of man interbreeds with craynarbians or graspers.’
‘Craynarbians and graspers are part of the race of man,’ said Billy. ‘Just changed by the circumstances of their environment, their bodies whittled to a different pattern by the flow of life.’
‘So our learned journals would have it,’ said Quest. ‘But now it seems my would-be assassin is no longer an aberration of one, but of two. And my medical staff have been sent into an apoplexy because your blood work is not just similar to the dead rogue that tried to murder me last year, it is absolutely identical — not even the difference of twins to separate you.’
Billy shrugged. ‘Small world. What’s the chance of that happening?’
‘I have heard rumours such things may be possible in Cassarabia, womb mages turning out copies of the caliph’s favourites when their immortality drug has lost its potency on members of his clique.’
Billy inflated his cheeks like a frog. ‘I’m a little too fair-skinned to be one of the caliph’s children.’
‘You may look like one of us,’ said Quest. ‘But the workings of your body are so off the scale, you might as well be a different species — a lashlite or a steamman.’
Billy smiled and wiggled his fingers at the side of the metal straightjacket he had been jammed into. ‘I certainly feel like a member of the race of man.’
‘Would there by any point in
my bringing one of my worldsingers down here for a truth hexing?’ asked Quest.
‘It would certainly help pass the time.’
‘And there are other forms of interrogation. The sort my friend Veryann and her people specialize in.’
‘I am sure she is very accomplished,’ said Billy. ‘But those techniques only work against people who can’t deactivate their pain receptors at will. As I’m sure you know, if you took one of me alive a year ago.’
‘Why?’ said Quest. ‘Why don’t you want me to reach Camlantis?’
‘Because I think you know what is up there,’ said Billy, ‘and even if you don’t, I’d probably still try to stop you.’
‘You don’t think I’m ready?’ asked Quest.
Billy nodded. ‘You. Jackals. The continent, the whole damn race of man.’
‘We need it,’ said Quest. ‘We need your knowledge.’
‘A knife can be the tool that cuts the barley and feeds your family,’ said Billy, ‘and it can be the tool that you pull across your neighbour’s throat before you steal his fields. Trust me, Abraham Quest, none of you are ready.’
‘If you don’t want anyone to open the door, why leave a key under the mat?’ asked Quest.
‘Because you don’t burn books,’ said Billy. ‘But equally, you don’t give your books to young children to deface. You give your knowledge to them when they’re wise enough to respect the gift.’
‘And you get to decide when we’re old enough?’
‘That’s what librarians do,’ said Billy.
‘Then it’s a pity you are locked up down here,’ said Quest, ‘while we’re outside, running around the shelves.’
‘A grave pity.’
‘I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of your people,’ said Quest.
‘There were only seven of us, and as you know, we are only too mortal.’
‘A little more than that, I think,’ said Quest.
‘Our anti-aging treatment was only perfected during the last days of Camlantis and there was the civil war and the barbarian incursions to distract us.’
‘It can’t have been easy. All these years, going on and on, while everyone around you moves along the Circle sooner or later.’
‘A rock in the stream while the water passes,’ said Billy.
‘And you have been fashioned to survive. You are capable of violence.’
‘Most of pacifism is social conditioning and meditation, only a very small part of Camlantean society was based on blood engineering.’
‘Still …’ said Quest.
‘I was created to be capable of accessing a part of the brain the race of man have long suppressed — the snake part, the ancient lizard that lurks in all of us; the devil hiding in our soul that urges violence and murder and rape and hate. But unlike your kind, I get to turn it on and off at will. In a little twist of irony, we obtained the blood marker for the genetic switch from one of the greatest psychopaths or our age, the Diesela-Khan. A hair sample obtained by one of our heralds.’
‘Just a barbarian warlord,’ said Quest. ‘You really should have been able to stop him.’
‘The Camlantean tools of mass psychological manipulation had one fatal weakness: they worked a lot better when the tribes were unaware of the techniques we were using. The end came very quickly after the Diesela-Khan captured one of our expert passive-defence groups and began running counter-cultural interference through the horde’s druids. Our allies and the buffer states collapsed one by one until only we were left.’
‘How ironic,’ said Quest. ‘If I could go back in time and change things, I would. A single airship like this and a couple of companies of redcoats and I could rout the Black-oil Horde.’
‘What is gone is gone,’ said Billy. ‘All things come to an end.’
‘Including the age of darkness we’ve been suffering since the fall of Camlantis?’
‘You know the price for ending that …’
‘I do,’ admitted Quest.
‘Then you are not fit to possess it.’
Quest paced the corridor. ‘At least some of your people had a different idea. Perhaps even the majority of them. One side of a civil war is always branded the rebel side — and I’m guessing your creators were the minority that rose up. You were on the rebel side … the winning side.’
‘Nobody ever truly wins a war, Jackelian,’ said Billy. ‘There are only degrees of loss, and there was none greater than that of the Camlanteans.’
Quest smiled. ‘But you got to write the history of the winners, didn’t you? I can see traces of your hand all over that. The noble people of Camlantis — the great pacifist race that committed mass suicide so that their legacy would not be corrupted.’
‘The story is true enough. In a manner of speaking,’ said Billy.
‘A very loose manner, I think. I’ve seen your crystal-books, old man. Your own side’s and theirs.’
‘Bloody things,’ swore Billy. ‘I’ve hidden away more of them than I care to remember. Of all the books you had to find, why couldn’t it have been the poem-recordings of some self-absorbed child finishing their schooling?’
‘One last chance,’ said Quest. ‘Will you help me decode the key to enter Camlantis?’
‘No.’
Quest shrugged and looked down the corridor. It was time for him to go. ‘I’ll unlock it without you. Your people buried the key deep in encryption, but codes were meant to be cracked.’
‘You’re a clever man, I can see that.’
‘Clever enough for this task.’ Quest started to walk away. ‘Even though you’re blinded, I can see you have Pairdan’s eyes.’
‘Children were not left to chance in the old days,’ said Billy. ‘We took a little from all of our parents. Grown in bottles, the way science intended. I believe around thirty percent of my body’s pattern was inherited from Pairdan.’
‘I believe that makes you a bastard,’ noted Quest.
‘Yes,’ said Billy, ‘we share that in common. Except that you’re a self-made man.’
Quest shook his head in sadness at Billy’s decision to hold onto Camlantis’s secrets and disappeared.
‘You’re an interesting fellow,’ said Damson Beeton when she was alone again with Billy Snow. ‘There’s more to you than meets the eye.’
‘I don’t suppose the Court of the Air has any more agents left on Quest’s airship fleet?’
‘No,’ said the old woman, ‘I think he’s rolled us all up.’
‘Then we’re done for,’ said Billy. ‘We are all royally done for.’
In the transaction-engine rooms on the Leviathan, the cardsharp nervously lifted his pile of blank punch cards, dropping them into the inscription position in his typewriter-like machine before brushing the keys for luck. This last instruction set would either validate the previous day’s work and move them forward (perhaps even to the end; but don’t even dare think that), or knock them right back to the start.
‘We’re overheating,’ called a voice from above. It was one of the grease monkeys, the uplander lad hanging from the gantry lines. ‘The drums are running fit to burst.’
‘We need to hold the revolutions steady,’ said the cardsharp. ‘We’re close. I can feel it.’
‘You’ve been saying that all afternoon,’ complained the grease monkey. ‘We’re burning up in there.’
‘Vent in more cold air from outside,’ said the cardsharp. ‘Use the next grade of oil. Just keep the drums turning.’
‘We’re running on special oil right now,’ said the grease monkey. ‘The transaction engines cannot take it any more.’
It was true. There was a smell of burning beer in the chamber. The engine men cut the oil with the good stuff from Jackals’ drinking houses, swearing it got them better performance from an engine running seriously overclocked.
‘Just a little bit longer,’ muttered the cardsharp. His fingers flickered over the keyboard, translating the genius maths sent down from the master’s quarters upstairs,
symbol keys jouncing with a satisfying resistance, the tattoo of holes in the punch card getting ever more complex. Even though this wasn’t his program design, even though he was acting as a proxy to the genius of the great Abraham Quest on this project, there was still art in what he was doing. His fingers were on fire. His translation of the maths would make the difference between failure and success. The whine from the engines below acted like adrenalin, supplying the urgency, feeding him with the pressure he needed to produce his best work.
One of the chief engine men climbed out of the pit of machines to repeat the grease monkey’s concerns, but seeing the cardsharp at work he held his tongue. He was senior. He had some understanding of the art that was going on up here — unlike the young upland turnip swinging from his girdle, dripping oil onto the floor from the cans dangling from his belt.
With a final bash of the keyboard, the punch card lifted out of its cradle, held by an automatic arm. ‘There,’ spat the cardsharp. ‘Inject that into the system.’
One of his runners snatched the card and sprinted away.
‘Carefully, lad,’ called the senior engine man. ‘Gutta-percha tears if you push it in too fast. More haste, less speed.’
The cardsharp looked over the paper imprint that had been left behind on the punch-card writer. It was too late now if there were errors in the code, but he checked his work anyway. He should have had a partner logic-checking his efforts, but there were few in the House of Quest that could follow the master’s work. In the cardsharping game, it was often said the difference between the fourth and fifth best coder in the business was that the fifth best could look at the fourth’s work and not understand a line of what had been written. You flew lonely when you flew so high.
From the depths of the pit, the transaction engines changed their pitch, the thunder of the rumbling drums absorbing the new instruction set. Few laymen could tell the difference, but to everyone in this chamber it was as if a completely new hymn was being sung down below. The cardsharp tapped his desk nervously, not daring to rise. There were so many possibilities for error. All the raw data from the crown’s crystal that composed the key had been laboriously copied and transferred. What effect would too high an error rate in that data have on their attempt to crack it? Nothing good. Nothing productive, that much was certain.