by Stephen Hunt
Bull shook his head. ‘From where I’m standing, there are two of you on your side of the room.’
‹If I was by myself, my belief system would require me to give you the crown.›
‘But you’re not by yourself, are you?’ said Bull. ‘You always were a queer one, Billy Snow, with your strange tales and your taste for damn vegetables, but I never knew the half of it.’
The black liquid started to puddle across the floor, the very sweat of hell.
Amelia kicked the crown towards Bull. ‘I don’t want it.’
The vapour was forming around their feet. At close quarters Amelia could see it was a soot-storm of a billion dark flecks. Tiny living machines — Billy revealed their construction within Amelia’s mind — designed to take apart that which was sentient one cell at a time, to breed, to spread, to absorb, until anything more intelligent than a Jackelian rat-pit terrier was scrubbed from the face of the world.
Bull picked up the crown. ‘My family were stewards of our land once, until Quest’s kind decided it would be better run by counting-house clerks.’
The cloud was starting to rise, becoming two mocking silhouettes, as if both the prisoners’ shadows had grown detached and insane.
Bull proffered the crown to Amelia. ‘And haven’t they done well with it?’
‘I opened the tomb.’
‘Then between you and that mad old coot riding around your skull, you’ve got what you need to close it.’
Bull tossed the crown towards Amelia as the cloud formed into a lance and hissed viper-like towards his chest. ‘You be sure and tell that fat oaf of an uncle of mine how I died.’
‹One must live.›
Her hands struck out of their own will, seizing the cloaking crown and jamming it over her mane of hair.
The mist wrapped itself around the slaver, concealing him, followed by a macabre fizzing sound, like bacon on the griddle. It grew darker and denser, absorbing the new matter, swirling around in a frenzy. When the mist dispersed the slaver had vanished. A conjurer’s trick. No blood, no bones, not a trace that he had ever existed. Bull Kammerlan had died without even a cry leaving his lips. Hovering in front of Amelia, shapes formed and flowed within the inky motes. There had been someone else here. Someone the mist was required to feed on. But now there was nothing. It circled the room for a couple of minutes. Then it retreated, confused, towards the floor, reforming into a liquid that flowed repellently out of her cell. The slot sealed shut.
Bull was gone. T’ricola dead, Ironflanks left a helpless cripple, the face-shifting madman and his lashlite pet murdered. Just one left alive, Amelia and the ancient Camlantean ghost echoing around her skull.
Amelia sunk to her knees. ‘What now?’
‹Now Quest will activate the ignition process in the nanofactury buried below,› whispered the voice in her mind, showing her an image of the death mist’s huge breeding tanks. ‹And he will remake the world. After he has first slaughteredit.›
CHAPTER NINETEEN
From the safety of his tower roof, the commodore pulled out a telescope from his bag of purloined supplies and extended the brass tube, training it on the street below. It was obvious where the tomb Billy Snow had warned them about sat; you just had to follow the trail of carriages and material being moved across the city, ant-like columns of vehicles leaving the airships on the ground.
He focused on the group of figures moving to the edge of Camlantis. It was nearly dawn now, the waters of the Sepia Sea just visible beneath the gaps in the cloud, a mirror of crushed diamonds glittering far below.
‘Ah, no,’ Commodore Black cursed beneath his oxygen regulator.
It was the face-changing lunatic Cornelius Fortune, being dragged along by a guard of airship sailors. And if Fortune was no longer at liberty, then it could only mean that devil Abraham Quest was still alive. The trail of fresh vehicles shuttling out from the airships surely meant that Billy Snow must have failed in his attempt to prevent the expedition accessing the tomb too.
Two of the three escapees finished. So it was all down to him again, then? Would the world give him no blessed rest? Hadn’t it had enough of him perched on the edge of this floating mausoleum, signalling the Court of the Air to no avail? Their wicked eyes had had little trouble noticing him when brave old Blacky had worn the name of Solomon Dark and harried parliament’s shipping with his royalist freebooters. Now, the one time in his life he actually needed the Court’s people to come calling with their dark ships and their cunning weapons, they were all asleep on their watch deck.
He shook his head sadly and pressed his eye to the telescope. With a brief struggle the airship sailors unlocked the chains binding the prisoner then tossed the figure off the edge of the city — walking the air, as the jack cloudies called it when they executed a sailor sentenced to death in the sky.
Jared Black got a brief glimpse of a Furnace-breath Nick mask flapping on the madman’s head, caught behind his neck on its ties, the winds playing with the tumbling body like a cat clawing a mouse. Cornelius Fortune had freed a bone-white pipe from his belt as he tumbled down, growing smaller and smaller, and the commodore heard a faint whistling as the fierce cross winds blew a funeral ditty through the pipe for him on his fall. Smaller and smaller, then the carpet of clouds swallowed the dwindling dot.
Commodore Black tugged a flask of the airship sailors’ rum rations out of his stolen sack. Blackstrap, they called it. As thick as treacle and filthy cheap stuff, but beggars could not be choosers. He took a swig and raised a toast to the last survivor — well, the last but one — of their brief intrepid jailbreak from the Leviathan.
‘You got the best of that one, you daft daring loon, leaving poor old Blacky to face these devils alone. Always me alone, always alone to save us all, damn my stars.’
The staff in the Court of the Air’s monitorarium huddled together in an unauthorized conference on the gantry. Rarely had the handover between the day watch and the night watch in the massive spherical chamber become so heated.
‘Floatquake lands tend towards the static.’
‘But they can follow the leylines, we’ve seen that happen.’
‘There’s no sky mass of such a magnitude even recorded.’
‘It could be a fresh floatquake …’
‘Then where’s the devastation on the ground? And there are buildings on this one.’
A hornet-like buzzing came from the bell near the speaker wire and monitor ten broke away from the exchange to look over the gantry, the slowly rotating scopes and their riders below like a carnival carousel embedded within an inverted planetarium.
Monitor ten picked up his speaking trumpet and phones. ‘What is it?’
The surveillant’s voice came back tinny over the wire. ‘Skraypers and lashlites.’
‘You’ve interrupted me for a lashlite hunt? I logged a dozen flights out hunting in the clouds yesterday. We have missing airships and a new sky mass to consider.’
‘No,’ said the surveillant, waving up from the scope below. ‘The sky is full of skraypers. Full of them. And the lash-lites …’
‘The lashlites? How many in the flight, man?’
‘All of them!’
Around the monitors’ platform every bell started buzzing as the watchful eyes of the Court of the Air began calling up in panic at the inexplicable sight. The monitors scattered to their posts, runners from the higher levels of the aerostat city bursting from the sphere’s lifting rooms as the chamber signalled for backup.
Monitor ten caught a brief glimpse of the numbers on the report being tallied and torn off to be ferried away by the runners.
‘Skraypers and lashlites. Oh my.’
Amelia watched the last section of the sausage-shaped pocket airship being inflated above her. They were putting it together in the centre of one of the city’s squares. A semi-rigid, just large enough to lift its three cabins — one for Amelia at the very back of the craft, a rear observation post without even a gantry across to t
he other two cabins, one for the pilot room, and directly connected behind the crew’s bridge, a hold full of infected spastic steammen, fizzing and shaking at each other as they blundered about the storage space. The old lady from the testing rooms was being manacled to the bench alongside Amelia, the mouth slot of her hex suit just large enough to accommodate the tubes of her breathing mask.
Abraham Quest came over, his head circled by the same cloaking crown that had saved Amelia from the death mist, and stood on the steps of the rear cabin. ‘You’ve made your choice, professor. All this way to find Camlantis, only to reject it. Such a waste. I shall dream of Camlantis for you, for when I awaken, I will find it reality.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘I am afraid I do.’ Quest pointed to three sailors wearing cloaking crowns, climbing up the steps to the airship. They entered through the storage hold and locked the pilot room door on the infected idiot steammen. Unlike Amelia’s window-less observation cabin, the forward pilot room was sealed with glass. Quest’s crew would travel in relative comfort while the two prisoners shivered on the seats of their exposed berth. ‘They have orders to release you on the soil of Jackals before travelling on to the Steamman Free State. You and the old lady can enjoy the countryside for the few days it will take the Camlantean mist to propagate and hunt you down. I don’t suppose the last days in Jackals will be pleasant, but you will have the solace of knowing that whatever panicked savagery you witness will be the race of man’s last.’
‘Someone will live down below,’ spat Damson Beeton. ‘Someone will survive and come back to pay you and your murdering followers back for what you’ve done.’
Quest shook his head sadly. ‘If it comforts you to think so, damson. But no, in two days’ time the only Jackelians left alive will be the ones in our little kingdom beyond the waves. In three days the last peasant in the pampas of Kikkosico will be dying. Within two weeks there will be nobody left alive in Concorzia or Thar. By the middle of the year the last u-boat of the Spumehead trade fleet will be desperately surfacing for its final taste of air and any polar barbarians remaining alive will be falling in their snow-covered longhalls. I am sorry, damson, but Isambard Kirkhill’s bankrupt vision is about to be retired, and everything else that is left-’ his hand swept across the city, ‘-will be Camlantis. A world of sanity, peace and reason — forever more.’
‹Please,› begged Billy Snow’s spectre.
‘Too late for that,’ said Quest. ‘We’re brewing up nicely downstairs. An hour for the mist to reach critical mass, another hour to bed down the first generation of our new Camlanteans in their cloaking coffins …’
Again. ‹Please.›
‘Your revolution has run its course, child of Pairdan. Your city is about to live again.’ Quest beckoned Veryann over. ‘See that our guests are sent off on their way.’ He mounted a velocipede and was driven away towards the tomb.
Veryann secured Amelia to a seat next to the agent of the Court of the Air.
‘How does his plan sit with you?’ asked Amelia.
‘It is the plan of my liege-lord,’ said Veryann.
‘That doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement.’
‘It has a cruel logic,’ said Veryann. ‘That which is fit, prevails. That which is not, perishes. It is the way of life and the code of our free company.’
‘The code of the Catosian city-states,’ said Amelia. ‘How much of Catosia will be left after the Camlantean death mist drifts across your lands and people?’
‘We will be left,’ said Veryann. She looked out. The hull was nearly ready now, the linesmen fitting in support struts to strengthen the airship’s catenary curtain. ‘And we are no longer counted as true Catosians by our people. We were banished.’
‘Banished for losing one of the codified little tournament wars your cities hold to settle disputes,’ said Amelia. ‘Hold far out on the plains, so that the cities are not damaged and the innocents in them are not hurt by hostilities. That is your warrior’s way, isn’t it?’
‘He is our liege-lord,’ repeated Veryann. She got down from the rear cabin and pushed the collapsible steps up into the pocket airship’s floor.
The expansion engines on the side of the pilot cabin coughed into life, rotors spinning up, the airship starting to rise above Veryann’s golden hair. Amelia shook her head in sadness and looked down at the officer. ‘Enjoy Camlantis.’
‘Goodbye, professor.’
Before the pocket airship could depart, one of the sailors standing by an anchor rope twisted his mooring stake back down into the ground, kicking his colleague off balance, a second boot lashing out to smash the linesman into stillness. The renegade lifted a cutlass out of his belt. ‘Let’s save our goodbyes for later, lass.’
Amelia’s heart leapt. Commodore Black!
Veryann slipped out her Catosian sabre, her eyes glancing up at the pocket airship listing at an angle against the anchor as it tried to break free of its mooring. ‘You should have stayed hiding in the apartments of this ruin, Jared.’
‘Don’t be dying for that rich madman you call master,’ pleaded the commodore.
She warily circled the paunchy submariner. ‘I don’t intend to.’
A line of soldiers running towards the two fighters from the other side of the square suddenly scattered, shouting in alarm. The heavens above Camlantis were dark with hundreds of skraypers. Steering-cables trailed up to their lashlite masters, the organic zeppelins tamed by skin hooks. Thousands more of the winged lizards rode the currents of the upper atmosphere in intricate formations, slowly drifting chevron V’s, pointed hexagons, arrow-braided columns — the talons of Stormlick and the other fierce gods of the winds.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ said the commodore. ‘They must have heard you’re holding their fine-feathered friend Septimoth in a cage.’
‘Then they’ve come a long way for his corpse. They can have his lashlite bones back for a harp,’ spat Veryann, slashing the single line holding the pocket airship to the dirt. No longer bound to the ground, the stat rose away from the square, arrowing off low to avoid the beating wings of the lashlite battalions above them.
‘Head for Mechancia,’ Veryann yelled up towards the pilot cabin. ‘Deliver those steammen to the Free State at any cost.’
‘Tell the lashlites to bring us down!’ Amelia cried down to the commodore on the ground. ‘We’re a steamman plague ship, we’re-’ then the craft was pulling away into the sky, the rest of her words muffled by her air mask and the crosswinds blowing over the city.
Amelia was gone, the pocket airship diving between the spires to evade a passing skrayper, destined for Jackals and the Steamman Free State. Death and plague for both lands following close in their wake.
Commodore Black turned a sabre cut and pulled his cutlass back as Veryann tried to catch the edge of the sword and rotate the blade out of his hand. ‘This is a very different board for our little game of chess, lass.’
The air above them was afire as the Minotaur launched a series of aerial harpoons at the skrayper formations, but there weren’t nearly enough of the weapons in the exploration fleet to slow down the mass of creatures. One of the lead skraypers made it through the volley unscathed and brought its tentacles down across the middle sphere of the airship, ripping her hull and spilling a flock of ballonets into the air. The high-lift globes rose up like a line of air bubbles shooting for the surface of a lake.
Veryann’s form angled sideways and her blade cut ahead and forward, her right boot stamping down with each flourish. Commodore Black wheezed as he parried the attack.
Veryann struck again with renewed vigour. ‘Yes, but you’re twenty years and as many pounds ahead of me on this board.’
It was true. Her shine-swollen muscles made her a tigress, a living weapon of muscle, trained and honed for a singular purpose: war and its victory. An airship sailor reloading his rifle to their side spun around behind Veryann as a plummeting lashlite lance found its mark in
his chest.
Commodore Black mustered his strength and ignored the ache in his arms, giving her a taste of her own medicine, but she was so much faster than him, meeting each blow with a clang of steel and pushing him away every time with an intricate counter lunge.
He was soon back on the purely defensive, the vapour from his regulator soaking his forehead. ‘You’ve a sophisticated style about you, lass. As befits a Catosian maiden.’
She feinted left then cut up, severing one of the tubes from his mask, the rubber cable hissing half his precious air reserves away into the thin atmosphere. ‘Yield now, before your heart gives out.’
‘Ah, you’ve already broken that, girl.’
Their swords sparked in the centre of the ancient Camlantean square, the clashing of steel lost behind the rumble of one of Quest’s tracked carriages as it cut a corner, its stubby cannon emptying a shell towards the lashlite formations spiralling above.
‘Yield, and I can hide you away in one of our spare sleeping capsules.’
‘Your blessed new world would be a sight too tame, clean and quiet for old Blacky,’ wheezed the commodore, the mask hanging off his face. ‘A sight too quiet for a Catosian fighter, too.’
She closed in for the kill. ‘Then it’s time for a different kind of sleep, old man.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Amelia jerked against her wrist ties, but the leather loop was too firmly stretched between her hands and the chains on the wall. She tried yelling and whistling for the lashlites, but failed to attract their attention over all the carnage in the sky. Two of the Jackelian airships were still in the air — the Minotaur just barely, broadsides from her cannons being answered by diving skraypers controlled by seemingly suicidal riders. The Leviathan was still tethered to the central spire and her three interlinked globes were crawling with lashlites tearing and breaking through her hull, like ants swarming over a picnic left on the grass.
Rifle and cannon smoke drifted over the city. Flights of the winged lizards dived down, striking with unerring accuracy from their gliding formations, leaving hails of lances falling behind them, any lashlite warrior who survived the answering volley fire from the ground pulling up to rejoin the sky-borne armada. Camlantis had known centuries of peace locked to the Earth and centuries more in her cold banishment; it had never seen an explosion of violence of this magnitude. No quarter was asked for. No quarter was given. Wounded Catosian mercenaries inching bloodily across the white pavement were left still and pin-cushioned by swooping keen-eyed lashlite braves. Lashlites unlucky enough to be downed alive were mobbed by Quest’s academy soldiers and airship sailors, their wings torn by bayonets, skulls crushed in a frenzied flurry of rifle butts.