by Stephen Hunt
Robur walked over to them, tapping his trousers with a clipboard heavy with schematics. ‘You would understand such contradictions better if you had survived a decade in an organized community in the Commonshare, professor. The hand that preaches greater love for your neighbours and the forsaking of all personal gain, that hand is all too ready to turn into the fist that beats your family into submission.’
Robur’s presence made Amelia uneasy. There was something about this man, a manic energy that manifested itself like a halo of light around him. It was as if Robur was capable of doing anything, flipping instantly between moods. He might suddenly sprint away, break down crying, or fly into a fit of violence. All it would take would be a gentle push. He was clearly a broken man, his soul torn to pieces in Quatershift, hanging together by the thinnest of threads. Amelia had a terrible suspicion that thread might be her own dream of utopia. What in the Circle’s name did that say about her dream, her obsession? As it was, Robur’s attention was presently directed towards keeping Quest’s latest creation functional.
Amelia noticed a faint spark in the sky outside answering the throb of light from the machine on the bridge. Each pulse from the mechanism mirrored by a heartbeat in the thin, cold atmosphere outside.
‘It works!’ cried Robur. ‘After all this time …’
‘We both toiled on this,’ said Quest. ‘We knew that we would succeed.’
Robur watched the flickering light outside, hypnotized. ‘Without the transmetric valves of your devising this would not have been possible.’
‘I merely refined the concept on my transaction engines. The basics were published in a Royal Society paper a year or two ago,’ said Quest. ‘Increase the power. We need to match the transmission frequency precisely, or knowing the key from the crown will prove useless.’
Robur waved his clipboard at the engineers and they adjusted the wheels and levers around the pyramid-shaped contraption. The foreign mechomancer started to mumble something, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
‘Is that a prayer?’ asked Amelia.
‘I prayed to the Sun God morning, noon and night once,’ said Robur. ‘For my family to be spared. For my friends to survive. For food for them to eat. To taste the air again as a free man. But my prayers were never answered. Now I am like you Jackelians; I have made a religion out of believing in nothing. So in answer to your question, no, I am not praying. I am repeating the sequencing key for the valves.’
‘We don’t believe in nothing,’ said Amelia. ‘We believe in each other.’
‘I think I would find it easier to believe in the Sun God again.’ Robur rushed forward as a hiss of steam erupted from one of the pipes servicing his device, closing the connection while his engineers wrestled a backup duct into operation. Outside, the light was becoming more intense — almost too bright to stare at. Robur stumbled back. He was soaked in steam from the leak and his forehead was covered in sweat. ‘I have seen no evidence of the Sun God or the Child of Light in the world. But I have seen Lord Darksun in the hearts and faces of my countrymen. I have seen Furnace-breath Nick striding across the land!’
Amelia was torn between watching the spectacle outside and the scarecrow figure of Robur, shaking like a mumbleweed addict too long without a drag on his pipe. Robur snatched up Amelia’s hand and pressed it hard, a look of fanaticism crossing his face. ‘We’ll cast them out, the demons lurking in our souls. There! There are our tools to remake the world …’
Beyond the airship, the light was shifting, becoming planes of dancing energy. She had seen that light before at the bottom of the basin of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. The light had taken them somewhere else, then: might it also be able to transport something back into the heavens above their Earth?
‘Signal the other ships,’ Quest shouted at the airmaster of the Leviathan. ‘Have them move back. I don’t want their crews needlessly lost if we are wrong about this.’
A wall of light pulled away from them, moving at incredible speed, every mile it fell back revealing an incredible sight: a sight Amelia had dreamed of, a sight she had never thought she would see outside the grainy images of a crystal-book. Tears rolled down Amelia’s cheeks. ‘You weren’t wrong.’
Cheers erupted from the crew, echoes of their ovation rising up in the corridors outside. Faces throughout the giant airship and her sister craft pressed up against freezing cold portholes, for down beneath them hung Camlantis, floating in the air. Proud, beautiful Camlantis, her spindly towers and wide boulevards empty of life, her parks full of fossilized trees, starved of water and light in the folded-away pocket of a sideways universe where she had been banished for so many millennia. The people who had made her had turned to dust, but the organic lines of their city might as well have been preserved in amber. Only the underside of Camlantis showed the devastation that had struck the city, trailing girders hanging out of the sundered rock, severed atmospheric tunnels leading to twin shafts at the bottom of a lake in Liongeli a thousand miles away. There had never been a floatquake so large. Gravity reversed across a single landmass that stretched for miles. If this floating monster collapsed into the Sepia Sea now, the resulting tsunami would sink half the Jackelian downlands.
Quest walked over to Amelia, taking her hand. ‘Are you all right, professor? You look faint.’
‘I can’t believe we’ve done it.’
‘Your dream,’ said Quest, ‘and mine. We’ve always known the city was there.’
‘Look at the size of it. We can’t keep this a secret. Every paddle steamer making a course for Concorzia will be landing in colonial harbours with stories of a new floatquake land hanging in the heavens.’
‘I think we’ll have the run of the place for a while yet,’ said Quest. ‘Time enough to explore the ruins.’
It was true. They were beyond the reach of the RAN, beyond the reach of almost everything except the obsession that had driven them both here, that and … something else that counted itself master of these empty skies.
‘Skrayper!’ cried one of the sailors, her head covered with bulky earphones. ‘Word from the aft watch on the Minotaur. Skrayper sighted at four o’clock.’
‘I have it,’ confirmed one of the crew, letting go of his arm-mounted telescope. ‘Two miles away and heading straight for us.’
The airmaster pulled his cap down tight. ‘This high up, it was only a matter of time. Damn my eyes, but I warned you, Mister Quest, those monsters are fiercely territorial.’
Amelia took the abandoned telescope and twisted it down to where the watchman had been pointing it. There. An elongated tube of transparent flesh as large as one of their own colossal airship flotilla, organic gas twinkling inside its body like a thousand star motes in the painfully clear sunlight. Jellyfish-like tentacles dangled from its belly, deceptively thin at this distance. Amelia had read enough tales of skrayper attacks on Jackals’ aerial shipping in the penny dreadfuls to know that those arms were covered in wiry toxin-filled hairs that could lash apart the catenary curtain of an airship. Normally the sunlight feeders only came low enough to maul aerostats when the creatures were wounded or dying. But then, Quest’s exploration squadron was operating at no normal altitude.
‘Sound action stations,’ ordered Quest. The undulating scream of a siren broke across the bridge, the sound of air-boots stamping past in the corridor outside. One of Quest’s young academy boys — almost too small for his green uniform — came running past, handing a breather mask to Amelia. She copied the other sailors and pulled the strap over her head, letting the leather cup dangle under her chin, the flask-sized oxygen canister tied to lie across her chest. A token, only. If they were holed at this height, the decompression would take care of her long before she needed tanked air to breathe.
‘The Minotaur will have field of fire first, sir,’ the airmaster informed Quest.
‘Signal her, then. Make ready on the harpoons and prepare our own too, in case the Minotaur’s aim proves unsteady.’
‘Harpoons?�
�� questioned Amelia. ‘We’re no slipsharper out of Spumehead hunting for blubber and oil.’
‘High altitude flight has its perils,’ said Quest, ‘and we have not come unprepared. This far above the ground I was anticipating at least one attack a day until the skraypers recognize this is our territory and learn to respect our limits.’
‘And how are you going to teach them that?’
Quest pointed to their sister airship manoeuvring beyond the bridge’s viewing platform. The Minotaur shuddered as she released two rockets from her belly battery, twin lances pulling away on spouts of fire and heading straight for the glistening shape closing in on the flotilla. Both rockets impaled the skrayper and exploded inside its transparent body, the shimmering sun-feeding gas turning a dull green in the detonation’s aftershock. The infection of colour spread throughout the creature’s bulk quickly, like dye in water, then the whale of the sky began to slowly rotate, the diaphanous wing-like fins on its flank crumpling and folding up in agony. The skrayper’s trajectory changed, arrowing down towards the carpet of cloud cover far below.
‘Basic chemistry,’ said Quest. ‘Altering the composition of the gas that keeps a skrayper aloft and allows it to feed. Now, every time the poor creature tries to draw sustenance from the sunlight, the energy is transformed into a level of voltage that is higher than its body can tolerate. It’s burning itself out with every new breath it takes.’
Amelia looked on, not sure whether to feel relief at the end of one of the legendary krakens of the heavens, or pity for such a cruel end. ‘You thought of that?’
‘Admiralty House has been offering a prize for a weapon capable of driving skraypers off our airships for three centuries,’ said Quest. ‘One of the members of the Royal Society bet me that I couldn’t claim it.’
A bet. He had developed a method of securing Jackelian aerial shipping for a mere wager. Amelia shuddered. Sometimes it was the small things that served as a reminder that this was the man who had tried to buy the nation just because he could; who had nearly bankrupted the Jackelian economy and destroyed her life before they had even met. He belonged here in the clouds thinking his wild thoughts, too large for the nations of the ground below to contain. But it was Quest’s storm-basin of a mind that had led them here, where no one else could tread. He had found the foundations of Camlantis where no one before would have dreamed looking — at the bottom of a rotting jungle. It was he who had set her on the path to the key to unlock the ethereal ruins of this city, as surely as his pilots had plotted a course in their flotilla of high-lifters — riding at altitudes that nobody would have previously believed feasible.
Quest nodded to a sailor on the helioscope platform and he began to flash a message to the other airships in their small fleet. In front of them, the Minotaur switched course, drifting above the city’s towers and seeding it with glider capsules, triangle wings folding out of the iron craft, white silk chute tails popping out to brake their descent. Amelia could hear a bass rattle in the heart of the Leviathan and guessed that they were also emptying their rails in the hangar below.
‘We’re here to explore the city,’ Amelia said. ‘Not occupy it.’
‘You archaeologists do the same thing at your dig sites,’ replied Quest. ‘You lay out a grid and explore each sector in turn.’
‘We use trowels and brushes. Not Catosian free company fighters and your poorhouse academy cadets.’
‘They have orders not to break anything,’ said Quest. ‘I’m an impatient man and they will be our scouts. We already know the rough shape of the city from the outline of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo and with the landmarks contained in your crown and our two crystal-books, we should be able to orient ourselves very quickly after we land.’
The Leviathan was heading across the metropolis towards the centre of Camlantis where a massive spire-stalk stood, towering high above the surrounding city, a furl of flower-like petals starting to rotate around the building’s apex.
‘Sweet Circle.’ Amelia watched a series of golden lights patterning up the huge tower.
‘The crystal-books were true,’ said Robur. ‘The buildings do feed on the light of the sun. Just like a skrayper.’
‘The city has been in hibernation,’ said Quest, ‘awaiting the return of its people.’
‘We’re not its people,’ said Amelia, ‘we’re just pilgrims come a-visiting.’
Quest shrugged. ‘Well, actually …’
Amelia looked restlessly at the merchant lord. ‘What is it, Quest? You’ve been holding out on me again?’
‘I told you when we first met that yours was not the only academic heresy I have been funding the investigation of. What do you know of the Maitraya?’
‘Theology has never been my strong suit,’ said Amelia, ‘but isn’t that a technique from the book of Circlelaw, an enlightened state of being you enter into after weeks of deep meditation?’
‘That’s how it is interpreted now by our church,’ said Quest. ‘But if you follow the scripts back to their ancient roots, it was said to mean an enlightened being. Not a state of being, but a very wise teacher. As an archaeologist you must have come across broken totems of the old Jackelian gods out in the counties, fragments from the age before the gods were cast down and the druids chased off?’
‘Not my field, but of course I have. I’ve dug up temple artefacts from Badger-haired Joseph, the White Fox of Pine Hall, Old Mother Corn, Diana Moon-Walker, the Oak Goddess, Stoat-gloves Samuel — I could go on, the druids had deities for every season and lake and mountain in Jackals.’
‘All the better for extracting tithes and tribute from their tribes. Two related questions for you, then,’ said Quest. ‘How do you cast down your gods and how do you destroy a civili zation?’
Amelia saw where Quest was going, saw a glimpse of how his ingenious mind worked. Making connections between unrelated disciplines. Joining the dots to draw a picture whose existence no one else had even guessed at, let alone seen. Asking questions so outlandish that he would have been laughed out of every lecture hall in the great universities.
‘You can’t-’
‘You can’t destroy a civilization,’ said Quest. ‘Not truly, not without a trace. There were Camlantean embassies in other nations, Camlantean traders travelling abroad, there were the distant wheat plains and plantations worked by the Camlanteans’ great machines of agriculture, Camlantean refugees fleeing from the fighting and the Black-oil Horde.’
‘Camlantis was removed from the world,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s here, beneath our deck.’
‘The city, yes. And its libraries and its accumulated knowledge, the majority of its people too,’ said Quest. ‘The dust of the bones of millions of people blowing in the wind beneath our feet right now, exiled from the Earth for millennia. But there would have been at least a scattering of Camlanteans left alive down below to remember the glory their people had once held to.’
Amelia asked the question. It was almost rhetorical now, but she needed to hear Quest say the words. ‘Where would they have gone?’
‘Where indeed,’ said Quest. ‘They would have concentrated, would they not? Our own experience in the streets of our capital shows that. The steammen living together in Steamside, the craynarbians congregating in Shell Town. Fleeing the victori ous Black-oil Horde in the east, I believe the Camlantean survivors fled as far west as they could travel, settling on an island.’
‘Isla Verde?’ said Amelia. ‘Or do you mean Concorzia? There’s nothing we’ve ever found there across the ocean that would suggest-’
‘Jackals was an island once,’ said Quest, ‘before she drifted back to fuse with the continental landmass. Or so say some disreputable geologists your colleagues in the colleges would be hard-pressed to give the time of day to. If they have dated the timeline correctly, it would have been right around the time that the Maitraya appeared and inspired the island’s tribes to reject the druids’ teaching.’
Amelia watched the central spire of Camlantis drifti
ng towards them through the sweep of armoured glass, the view from the bridge interrupted only by the airship’s twin navigation wheels, manned by a sailor apiece. Quest had done it again. Twisted her worldview on its head and shaken it until there was nothing left of the old.
‘There’s a little of the Camlanteans in all of us now,’ said Quest. ‘The interbreeding that must have happened in the centuries since between the Maitraya and the tribes of Jackals. But in some, the breeding has run purer than others, the call to the old ways positively humming in their blood …’
Amelia steadied herself against a bank of navigation equipment. The blood that had acted as her passport into the strange world beneath Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo; the blood that had allowed her to claim the crown of Camlantis with its dense information jewel. The same blood that had sung the song of prophecy to a hag of the Cassarabian dunes and a witch doctor in a Liongeli trading post. Her blood.
‘We’re coming home,’ whispered Amelia, the city sliding beneath her feet.
The first scouts from their airships’ glider launch were already arriving back at the foot of the spire in the heart of Camlantis by the time the Leviathan docked underneath its rotating petals. A perilous negotiation of wildly differing standards of engineering ensued- perilous, at least, for the jack cloudies lowering themselves on lines and welding on a docking ring; leaving arcs of mist in the air from their breathing masks as they swung back and forth thousands of feet above the abandoned city. Finally, a tunnel of cantilevered metal segments was manhandled across and riveted in place, joining spire and airship, a jury-rigged bridge between the modern world of Jackals and the ancient domain of Camlantis.
When Amelia stepped across, a sack full of jottings of their best-guess maps of Camlantis over her shoulder, her way had already been crudely marked in red paint. Arrows scrawled on the clean white floors and walls reminiscent of the corridors under Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo and showing the way through the labyrinth. In this city, though, the spire’s doors and lifting rooms seemed to work for everyone, not just her. Was the lack of security a feature of the trusting nature of the Camlanteans, or the functional practicality of a large metropolis? There were no visible signs of the civil war between the two factions of the Camlantean polity. No scorch marks or damage — no evidence of conflict at all, beyond the exist ence of the dead city itself, rent intact from her old moorings in the world below. But then, how would pacifists fight? Amelia wondered. Badly, was the answer, she suspected. Totally, whispered something from deep within her. Camlantis itself was proof of how pacifists fought. A cold, calculated, carefully engineered floatquake. Millions dead within a minute, gasping for air as the land they had called home lifted beyond its reach, before the rebels’ dark engines translated the dead city somewhere even colder, somewhere still and folded away from the rest of humanity — far beyond the sight and conscience of their murderers.