The Kingdom Beyond the Waves j-2

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘You must be joking,’ spat Bull. ‘That blind codger tried to kill us back at the lake.’

  ‘I like him already,’ said Septimoth.

  ‘He’s a Camlantean,’ said Commodore Black. ‘This is his city and I need his wily arts put to good use working in my service.’

  ‘Time for a promenade around the city square, then,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘Ah, if only I had a small drink to steady my nerves,’ wheezed the commodore as he worked away inside the panel, matching the encryption routines left running inside against his self-proclaimed genius. ‘A thick ruby-red claret of the sort that used to come from Quatershift when the Sun King still held sway across the border. Or a tot of jinn, even though a war hero of my respectability should only allow himself to be seen drinking on Beer Street rather than Jinn Lane. Yes, even a rare tot of jinn would do just fine to steel my mind for a miserable second or two against the perils of this dark, dangerous affair.’

  With an almost frustrated whine, the transaction engine behind the panel finally gave up its fight with the commodore. The thick steel door of their cell slid open. ‘There it is,’ announced the commodore with satisfaction. ‘I have matched my wits against the toys of the cleverest man in Jackals, and, just as I promised you, it is Abraham Quest who has been found wanting, not Jared Black.’

  Nobody was listening. Tasting freedom, the other prisoners piled out of the cell, Septimoth’s wings unfurling to stretch and fill the space of the brig’s corridor — but, as Ironflanks broke his connection with the cell’s lock, the transaction engine behind the panel started shuddering. The drum began spinning wildly inside the lock’s mechanism, filling the cell the steamman had just vacated with a vexed screech. Billy Snow stumbled out of his own high-security cell, his head just visible bobbing at the foot of the stairs leading up to the brig’s upper level. As the commodore exited their compartment, last to leave, the heavy steel door suddenly jammed shut behind him, causing him to stumble back.

  ‘That was a blessed close thing-’ the rest of the commodore’s words were cut off as Cornelius dived at him, both of them rolling backwards as a heavy bulkhead slammed down from a slot in the ceiling, only avoiding slicing the submariner in half by a couple of inches. Commodore Black stared in horror at the bulkhead. He and the face-changing lunatic were sealed off from the others.

  Cornelius banged on the steel. ‘Septimoth, can you hear me?’

  ‘We are trapped,’ came the muffled reply. ‘Doors have come down on both sides of us.’

  Cornelius looked frantically at the commodore. ‘Can you?’

  ‘He can’t,’ announced a voice behind them. Billy Snow walked forward and traced a hand down the steel barrier, as if he was feeling the mechanisms built into the bulkhead. ‘The brig has gone into lockdown. The guards will be coming down here in strength to secure the place long before any of us can crack these open.’

  Cornelius banged on the wall in frustration. ‘Where’s Damson Beeton?’

  ‘Still in our cell. Her hex suit shocked her into unconsciousness when she tried to step over the threshold. The suit must need a counter ward to allow her to leave. Quest is damned clever, belts and braces on all his systems. Now she’s sealed back inside again.’

  ‘We can get her out. I’ll get you out, too,’ Cornelius called. ‘Septimoth, can you hear me, I’ll get you out?’

  ‘We’ll sell our freedom dearly when they come for us,’ came the tinny reply from Ironflanks. They could almost see him raising his four arms in defiance.

  Billy laid a hand on Cornelius’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, but there’s no time for this. We only have minutes left at large at most. And Camlantis is outside, waiting for us. Jared, did you manage to get through to the Court of the Air before you were detained?’

  ‘No,’ said the commodore, miserably. ‘We didn’t even succeed in leaving Quest’s terrible floating flagship.’

  ‘Then we have work to do.’ Billy pointed down the stairs to the high-security level. ‘You’ve already been through the air vents once before and deactivated the snares I can sense hidden in there …’

  ‘Is that it, then?’ muttered the commodore. ‘We’re to be crawling around Quest’s rotten airship like rats in a trap, hunted by thousands of his wicked sailors and fierce fighting women. The three of us pitted against his rogue’s navy? What sort of hope is that?’

  ‘All the hope we have,’ said Billy Snow. ‘And unfortunately, right now, all the hope the world below has too.’

  Quest stood in the shadow of the Minotaur, the airship having made the landing that was traditional when no Jackelian docking rail and hangar were available. Mooring rockets had been fired downwards into the dirt of what had once been a park — a ruin now, after cold millennia in exile from the warmth and nurture of mother Earth — sailors with drill clamps slung around their backs abseiling down lines to fix the anchorage. Heavy equipment was being winched down from the airship’s hangar, uni-tracked metal boxes with stubby cannons riveted into existence by engineers, carriages belching into life as compact steam engines were fed with bricks of coal from the House of Quest’s own mines. Their mobile fortress was partially erected on the high ground of the park’s slope, a defensible base of operations while the scouts reported in from every corner of the city: many with wondrous tales of awakening buildings and living machines, a few with reports of destruction left by the ancient floatquake, and a sad handful not at all — their glider capsules having failed to negotiate a safe landing among the spires and towers of Camlantis.

  Robur stood bent over a camp table, twin trails of mist rising from his breather unit as he examined the scouts’ reports. ‘We have found no central source of power yet for the activity we are witnessing. No main generation station.’

  ‘Nor will you, Jules,’ said Quest. ‘The power is distributed evenly, part of the fabric of every building and street in Camlantis.’

  ‘You are so sure?’

  ‘It is the way I would do it if I had the necessary level of engineering available to me,’ said Quest. ‘A single point of energy generation is vulnerable to failure, to catastrophe, to the unexpected. These were a people who built to last.’

  ‘They should have lasted,’ said Robur. ‘How different would the world be today if their society had not fallen. Quatershift and Jackals would be provinces of a peaceful federation of nations living in harmony and enjoying the fruits of a super-science so advanced we might seem as demigods. An existence that would make the wild imaginings of the authors of celestial fiction look like the art of aborigines.’

  ‘And the Circle willing, we shall have that world again,’ said Quest. ‘Or rather our children will. We just need to find it, before the meddlers from the Court of the Air turn up to see if what has been returned to the world will endanger the stillborn vision of their sainted Isambard Kirkhill.’

  ‘They will come?’

  ‘They always do. We can be certain of their pursuit — even if we were not holding a handful of the Court’s agents prisoner. Their telescopes can point across as easily as they point down.’ Quest indicated his mobile fortress and the material being unloaded. ‘But I have a few military innovations waiting for them that they won’t find deployed by the new pattern army down in Jackals.’

  Robur accepted a roll of fresh reports from one of their scouts. ‘We shall find it, yes, we shall.’

  ‘Leave the location of the tomb to our scouts,’ said Quest. ‘That’s what they have been trained and briefed for. You have other more pressing matters to attend to. The second stage of our scheme; the reason why I went to so much effort to free you from your captors in the Commonshare …’

  ‘I shall keep up my end of things. I have my equipment and test subjects already loaded onto your armoured carriages,’ said Robur, his eyelids blinking nervously. ‘They are just waiting for the tomb to be sited. With all your resources behind me, achieving my vision was only a matter of persistence and application.’

  ‘I think you overest
imate the worth of my Jackelian shillings. You could just as easily have completed your work for the Commonshare.’

  ‘I would have done so for the Sun King,’ said Robur, ‘but for the revolutionary scum that stole his throne? They were more interested in completing Timlar Preston’s designs for his supercannon and vicious toys like these-’ the mechomancer pointed to the iron carriages being assembled.

  ‘For every idea, there is a time,’ said Quest. He stared up at the spire where the Leviathan lay docked. ‘This is your time, Jules. And mine. The dream that is Camlantis is about to be reawakened and your vision shall come to fruition alongside it.’

  ‘We would need a hundred years of uninterrupted peace to even begin to understand the knowledge contained in this city.’

  ‘A hundred?’ said Quest. ‘Why ask for so little? I shall give you a thousand.’

  From the south came the unoiled squeal of a six-wheeled velocipede, its back wheels turning on a fan belt, propelling a vehicle little more than an open frame with an iron umbrella to shield its two occupants. One of which was Veryann, the Catosian officer leaping out as she drew up in front of Quest. ‘We have a situation.’

  Quest adjusted his breather unit. ‘Has the Leviathan sighted the Court’s aerospheres so soon?’

  ‘This is more a disaster of our own making,’ said Veryann. ‘The cell level on the Leviathan has gone into lockdown.’

  ‘A breakout? I thought the cursewalls my sorcerers had laid around the high security hold would contain a five-flower worldsinger?’

  ‘They would have,’ said the officer, ‘but they were facing the wrong way. The breakout came from the standard secur ity cells. I don’t have all the details yet; half the guards up there are dead, but it looks like three of our prisoners managed to get beyond the cell deck before it was sealed down tight — Cornelius Fortune, Commodore Black, and worst of all, the thing that calls itself Billy Snow. All the other prisoners were caught by the lockdown and are back in custody.’

  Robur had gone albino pale. ‘Furnace-breath Nick! Furnace-breath Nick is out to pay me back for having played him false!’

  Veryann looked with disgust at the quaking mechomancer. ‘He is merely a man in a carnival mask.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Quest. ‘Fortune and that fat fool of a submariner are of little account. It is the child of Pairdan we need to worry about — this is his city. He may well know where the tomb is, and he absolutely must not be allowed to reach it before we do.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ moaned Robur. ‘Furnace-breath Nick is walking this land with the darkness inside his heart. I have seen him. He is real, he is real. Don’t be fooled by that man-suit he wears.’

  Quest grimaced. ‘Pull yourself together, Jules. Besides, I know exactly what Furnace-breath Nick is going to do.’

  Robur looked horrified at the unholy perception of the mill owner. ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. He’s going to come here to try to kill me.’ Quest’s hand lashed out, striking Veryann’s nose, unleashing a fountain of blood and disarming her with a nerve-strike to her wrist. ‘Although, if he had ever seen Veryann train with practice swords, he would have known she was left-handed.’

  The two figures joined in a blur of limbs, the Veryann impersonator kicking out, trying to shatter Quest’s knee and bring him low enough to step forward and snap his neck, but Quest caught the boot and turned it high, pushing back to overturn his assassin. Another kick swept out to try to bring Quest to the floor, but he leapt over it, both legs frogging up to his chin. Then Quest flipped back. Behind them, Catosian soldiers from the airship ran over with their rifles drawn, but the free company fighters were hesitating, both figures too close to one another to risk a shot. Robur was quivering behind the camp table, oblivious to the fact that Furnace-breath Nick had come to kill the organ grinder, not the monkey.

  The Veryann doppelganger had a boot dagger out, moving in for a professional cut — low into the stomach and up, aiming to spill the contents of Quest’s gut with a single stroke. A flurry of blows, rapidly exchanged, Quest blocking each knife flick with the heel of his hand. The mill owner possessed the luxury of long months of training, with the money to hire the greatest sword masters and pugilists of Jackals’ duelling halls and the intellect to integrate their skills into a scientific fighting system that had been merged with the Catosian free company’s own austere regime of war. This was the first time Quest’s combat method had been matched against the dirty fighting style of the Jackelian underworld — a nameless system filtered through the rookeries, jinn houses and lean-tos of the slum areas of Middlesteel, as if it were the sewage that ran underneath the capital. A system not perfected on the polished wooden floors of duelling halls, but that survived and prospered with the blood of its practioners — mutating and evolving along with corpses left face-down in the puddles of Driselwell and Sling Street. Abraham Quest had risen from the gutter. Now the gutter had returned to strike back at him.

  Quest left a small opening in his defence and Furnace-breath Nick lunged in to push his blade into the mill owner’s heart, realizing too late that it was a trap — Quest’s hands crossing and capturing his assassin’s wrist, turning the bone at an angle the body was never meant to withstand. Quest stepped back, twisting his would-be killer’s arm to his side, keeping him pinned to the ground with a pressure-hold as his soldiers rushed up and seized the assassin. Sophistication had triumphed over savagery. As the female soldiers pulled Furnace-breath Nick away he snarled and struggled like a wild animal. The city had never witnessed such a display of animal passions, not even during the horrifying advance of the Black-oil Horde.

  ‘Keep him away from me!’ begged Robur. ‘He’s come for me.’

  ‘Every heaven must have its devils capering around the walls of paradise, it seems,’ said Quest.

  One of the Catosians raised her rifle to the assassin’s head and slid the safety catch off her gun’s clockwork hammer mechanism. Quest shook his head. ‘Not yet. There’s time enough to cast down our demons. You should have stuck to terrorizing Commonshare committeemen on the other side of the border, Cornelius Fortune. You’ve interfered in my plans once too often — but I shall permit you a small glimpse through the gates of paradise before I expel you.’ He turned to one of the airship crew. ‘Signal the Leviathan. Find out if he was telling the truth about exactly who escaped from the cells. Then find the real Veryann and have her send a company to protect Amelia Harsh’s group.’

  Robur appeared to be calming down, now that his tormentor was being bound in chains. ‘You think that the child of Pairdan will try to harm the professor?’

  ‘Amelia is the closest thing our expedition has to a true-breed Camlantean. With the stakes being what they are now, murdering her would be a logical step to help ensure we don’t breach the systems that will be protecting the tomb.’

  ‘You’re as dead as this city, Quest,’ shouted Cornelius Fortune, his face disturbingly half-melted between his natural features and those of the Catosian officer he had been impersonating. ‘We’re not meant to be here and the city will kill you, even if I don’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t place too much faith in whatever Billy Snow told you,’ said Quest. He pointed down the barren slope, towards Camlantis beyond. ‘His rebels murdered millions here to achieve their ends, but they couldn’t murder the idea of a perfect society. Once something has been imagined, it cannot simply be unimagined, it can only be hidden away.’

  ‘I’ll see you dead,’ yelled Cornelius as he was dragged away by the soldiers. ‘You and your utopia, both.’

  ‘You first, then,’ laughed Robur, finding the courage to step out from behind the table. His body had become a bag of nerves in the presence of the assassin. ‘You first, you filthy demon of darkness.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Amelia was inspecting a series of artefacts under glass, the cabinets in the centre of a hall illuminated by sun globes that had risen to hover on columns of compressed air as they entered the mu
seum. Her party were making notes and sketching each of the finds, ignoring the sound of the whining from the walls; the revived building’s systems struggling to cope with the cold of their altitude. They had not tried breaking open any more of the cabinets, not after forcing the first one had cracked its objects, turning them to dust and cold rubble with the sudden inrush of air into vacuum. Whatever method had been used for preserving these ancient artefacts, it wasn’t compatible with the Jackelians’ current brutish methods of archaeology. But how ancient were they, that was the question? The Camlanteans seemed to have reconstructed a prehistory that was as far removed from their own age as their ancient civilization was distant from modern Jackals. Artefacts ranged from the simple — a shard of pottery handsomely painted with miniature swans on a lake — to the indecipherable: a yellow egg that looked as if it was moulded in hardened gutta-percha covered in buttons with a clean panel at its centre. It was a pity that the golden rods lined with voicebox grilles next to each case had not survived the eons-long exile of Camlantis. What commentary would these rods have spoken if they had functioned? What forgotten histories could they have revealed?

  Amelia was examining a case displaying a piece of granite embedded with fossilized cogs and gears when Billy Snow struck from the shadows, a shard of broken glass in his hand in place of his confiscated witch-blade. She ducked down and reacted on instinct, using her arms to add momentum to his flying kick, tossing him over a case to land sprawled across the floor. As fast as she was, she was too slow to avoid a pass of the shard ripping open the muscles on her forearm. Her terrified team of young academics had scattered like an explosion of squawking chickens. Unlike them, Billy didn’t have a breathing mask; somehow the old man was managing to thrive on the thin, cold air, back on his feet again, his arms moving in a slow dance-like style of combat, a cobra trying to hypnotize a mouse.