by Stephen Hunt
‘By Lord Tridentscale’s beard, what’s this?’ the commodore cursed.
‘The Court’s luck,’ said Daunt. ‘Is that not so, good agent?’
Sadly said nothing, but he didn’t need to.
Daunt pointed outside. ‘These vents aren’t natural, they’re an artificial thermal barrier. Machines under the seabed cooking the water, with mines to sink anyone that tries to push through the shield. There must be something of considerable value on the Isla Furia to warrant all of this.’
‘I think you’ll find we will be able to protect your sceptre,’ said Sadly.
‘Bob my soul, but I hope so.’
The thermal barrier must have been protecting the island for the Court for centuries, designed by the mad, bad and dangerous to know. The graveyard of vessels stretching for miles beyond its curtain spoke volumes for its lethal efficiency. It took a minute to clear the corridor through the curtain of heat, walls sealing behind them as they passed, but whatever Daunt had been expecting on the other side, it wasn’t what he found himself facing.
Beyond the thermal barrier stretched the submerged ruins of a city. Much of it looked like blackened termite mounds, thousands of buildings towering and ruined and slagged. So ancient, that its structures had decayed into featureless underwater spires, only the occasional areas of surviving symmetry or flat surfaces to indicate that something sentient had once had a hand in these crags’ formation. But among the lofty termite mounds, hundreds of storeys high, were scattered other buildings — better preserved, signs of stone carvings and ornamentation visible on smooth surfaces, pitted by hundreds of oblong holes. Windows once, now glassless doorways for schools of fish to dart through, the surface light slanting down onto a grid of uneven, half-silted streets.
‘Bob my soul,’ said Daunt. ‘I have never seen its like.’
‘I have,’ said the commodore. ‘A far ways off from here, though. The ruins of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed. One of the world’s wonders.’
Sadly stood by the main view screen at the front of the bridge. ‘Ironically, our scientists believe the better-preserved buildings down there are actually the oldest. They were probably sprayed with a substance that resists age. The anthills were the last buildings to be built. They’re little more than dirt and dust held together by kelp now.’
Even the commodore seemed impressed. ‘Compared to those sunken behemoths, the tallest tower in Middlesteel would stand like a blessed blade of grass next to a sunflower. What manner of creature lived out there?’
‘You’ll meet their descendants on the island,’ said Sadly.
The Isla Furia’s underwater rock face loomed ahead, a jagged rise of dark volcanic stone holed by caves. The Court’s submersible headed for one of the openings, lanterns inside the tunnel activating as the craft entered, the vessel’s own bow lights switching off. She passed confidently through a smooth arrow-straight cavern, before passing out into another stretch of water, this revealed as an inland lake when U-boat 414 surfaced. Ahead of the bridge’s pilot screen a walled town was visible, concrete u-boat pens upon the shore waiting to receive their vessel. There wasn’t much to see of the town beyond its high fortifications. Whatever lay beyond the wall, it obviously wasn’t a land-locked counterpart of the ruined spires under the sea. They docked in the shadow of the volcano. It was a beast all right, the commodore had been right about that. Towering twelve thousand feet high, clouds of thick white smoke poured out of its throat. Current discharges aside, there seemed little sign of the violence and magma the old u-boat man claimed to have witnessed. In fact, as they docked, Daunt could see the Isla Furia’s slopes were covered with terraces growing crops, a series of metal pylons driven into the incline bearing cable cars up and down into the city below.
Daunt scratched his chin. ‘This is the Court’s?’
‘More or less,’ said Sadly. ‘We landed on the Isla Furia centuries ago, looking for a secluded ground base to support our operations. The islanders we found here are called the Nuyokians. Like all the tribes on the Fire Sea islands, they’d been locked inside the magma and boils of the ocean and trapped here. The natives were in a sorry state, dependent on the rain season for their crops on the slopes, blood sacrifices to hold off the steam storms. Over the centuries they’ve worked for us, intermarried with our staff. Agents that survive our calling often as not come here to retire.’
‘And now,’ said Daunt, ‘this is all that remains of the Court of the Air?’
‘What do you think we’ve been doing since the great war with the Army of Shadows, sitting on our arses and gossiping about the good old days?’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rebuilding the Court in the marshalling yards beyond the city, making ready to refloat a new aerial city. Recruiting agents, finding the wolftakers that were scattered across the continent and bringing them back into the fold.’
‘Did you ever think that the Kingdom doesn’t need you anymore?’ said the commodore. ‘All your tricks and sly ways. The conniving legacy of Isambard Kirkhill.’
The badinage hurled against his employer cut no ice with Sadly. ‘As long as there are wolves to prey on the flock, there’ll be a need for shepherds, say I.’
‘Wolftakers. Well, damn the lot of you,’ spat the commodore.
‘You might as well ask does the Kingdom need a future,’ said Sadly. ‘Do you think the sea-bishops would have got as far as they have done if the Court was still watching above Jackals, protecting the nation? Who would you rely on without us? The State Protection Board, civil servants and badly paid jobsworths like Dick Tull? Don’t make me laugh. I need to report in to my superiors. You’ll stay on board until we send for you.’
‘I trust you will get them to see reason,’ said Daunt.
‘Don’t you worry about that, Mister Daunt. I’m sure my nightmares are just the same as yours since I touched that cursed sceptre.’
‘And Boxiron, good agent?’
‘We’ll take care of him in the Court’s hospital. You just settle down and write me out a nice long list of all the names you saw in the prison camp’s graveyard. I have a feeling there’s a lot of nobles, industrialists and members of the government who are going to go missing in the next few months.’
‘Don’t underestimate the sea-bishops,’ warned Daunt.
‘Don’t underestimate the Court of the Air,’ retorted Sadly. ‘Reduced circumstances or no, this is what we do.’
Holding the Kingdom’s future in the Court’s hands. Well, that was true enough. If Daunt couldn’t protect the sceptre here, keep it out of the sea-bishops’ clutches. There wasn’t going to be a future for any of them.
When the call came to meet Sadly’s superiors in the Court of the Air, Charlotte was happy to be able to leave the submersible’s claustrophobic confines. It was strange to be out in the hot prickly sunshine again, her feet swaying uncertainly on the gangway across to the submarine pens. She used King Jude’s sceptre as a staff, feeling like some fraudulent prophet come visiting this lost tropical island sealed away on the outskirts of the Fire Sea. Between being confined to the tight confines of u-boats and floating through the underwater alien world of the seanore, the experience of solid land and an endless sky combined to make her homesick and unsteady on her feet at the same time.
Boxiron had already passed over this gangway, borne off in a stretcher that looked more like an iron coffin; Jethro Daunt had to be restrained when the locals wouldn’t let the ex-parson accompany the unfortunate steamman to his upgraded medical facilities on the island.
Nestling in the lee of the Isla Furia’s great volcano and encircled by a thick red stone wall, the town of Nuyok was hidden out of sight. Some fourteen metres high, the bulwark concealed all sight of the buildings within. The wall had only been constructed, Sadly had intimated, to protect the citizens of the town from the wildlife of the jungle covering the rest of the island. This would explain its parlous state of repair — cracked and overgrown by ivy in many places, while fishermen and trappers in wide-bri
mmed straw hats moved slowly and deliberately in the heat across the harbour. Flat-bottomed rafts, cork-lined against the heat and sporting rainbow-coloured sails, shifted across the lake where their submersible had surfaced. At the far end of the lake Charlotte could just see a series of docks controlling access to the Fire Sea beyond, too small for submersibles, but just the right size for the small fishing skiffs.
Complaining about the wicked heat, the commodore groaned with satisfaction as he was helped into the back of a rubber-wheeled cart, the contraption pulled by a pair of man-sized running lizards. Peeling yellow-painted boards rattled as it carried the party towards a looming pair of iron gates on rollers, a partial gap opened in the portal for them to enter. Passing inside, Charlotte had never seen a city looking so ordered. The majority of buildings facing them were five storeys tall, tiered with apartment railings, each surrounded by a stretch of neatly manicured lawns formed from evenly cropped green grass. With hexagonal walls sculpted out of white porcelain glittering in the sunlight, the buildings’ architecture mirrored the streets they were set in, road after road laid out in hexagonal grids. It wasn’t the uniformity of the hexagonal concourses that first grabbed Charlotte’s attention, however. What drew her eyes were the roads, formed out a thick clear acrylic which revealed level after level of subterranean maintenance tunnels, plumbing and pipes. The roads are transparent. Basement levels descended below the walled city as though the whole city was a scaled up model solely constructed to demonstrate the ebbs and flows of its sanitation.
With the flawless white glimmer from the porcelain buildings, the city had the feel of ancient times about the site, as though its inhabitants were living within a grid of oversized antiques. It put Charlotte in mind of a museum exhibition of priceless pottery from which she once liberated a few choice pieces. In contrast to their architecture, the Nuyokians reflected little of the sophistication of the buildings they inhabited. She could believe they had constructed the crumbling wall guarding the town, but the city itself? The people had the air of country bumpkins who had wandered into the place from some small village and finding it uninhabited had decided to stay. Well-tanned, Nuyokians tended the town’s lawns and wandered its hexagonal roads in simple long-shirts that reached down to bare knees or drawstring trousers, others wearing sleeveless cotton tunics with blanket capes and closed-shoulder capes that provided a few garish splashes of colour. They drooped out of their balconies sucking on cuds of brown leaves or occupied themselves on roof gardens in the centre of each building. As Charlotte got closer to the volcano’s slopes, she wondered at how the natives could appear so calm living in the shadow of that monstrosity vomiting out billows of white smoke into the sky. Perhaps it was from prayer? Little cupboard-sized stone temples were scattered outside the entrances of the apartments. Nuyokians busied themselves in supplication to marble statues of a female goddess, the idols kneeling with stone oil-filled lamps lit at their knees — a goddess, Sadly explained, known as the Lady of the Light. Daunt nodded in understanding, explaining that there were similar figures appearing in the mythology of other tribes of the Fire Sea islanders, gods that may have shared a common ancestry with the Nuyokians’ deity.
Approaching the foot of the volcano, Charlotte discovered the hexagonal buildings swelling in size and grandeur, as though this district served as a palace quarter for the city rulers once upon a time. Rolling through large parks and gardens, the party reached a station where a series of cable car lines reached across the slopes above them. The lines passed above hundreds of farm terraces where figures could be observed tending hillside crops of wheat, rice and corn.
Leaving their cart’s driver giving his running lizards a drink of water from a porcelain trough, Charlotte followed Daunt, the commodore and Dick Tull across the station concourse. Sadly led them past an ancient statue of a naked man bearing the skeletal sphere of the world upon his back, the whole thing sealed inside a larger sphere of the same transparent acrylic material that composed the streets.
The commodore indicated the open sliding door of a cable car for Charlotte. ‘Beauty before age, lass. And maybe you can ask that ancient phantom knocking about your noggin to put a good word in with the fire spirits of the Isla Furia to keep us from being cooked into stone casts. What a puzzle we’d make, for some future professor of history to marvel that there were people fool enough to live in the shadow of that ugly heap of magma up there.’
‘I have a feeling that the threat of the volcano has been somewhat overstated,’ said Daunt, looking meaningfully at Sadly.
‘It seems to be puffing away up there as happy as a sailor with a mumbleweed pipe,’ said the commodore. ‘I don’t need to get any closer to observe it. Not after sailing past that graveyard of ships outside.’
Charlotte received nothing from Elizica, not even a feeling of unease; but the volcano’s throat did seem to be simmering away on the summit, billows of white smoke folding over each other and being carried high into the clear blue sky beyond. There wasn’t much about the cable car she boarded to suggest it belonged to the walled town of Nuyok, its sleek lines and glossy surface reminding her of the submersible that had carried them here. A later addition, then. The Court of the Air’s handiwork. Charlotte had a good eye for such abnormalities — often all the difference between stepping on, or avoiding, a slightly out-of-place floor tile and bringing a wall of bars plunging down to trap her inside a vault.
With a low whine, the cable car lifted out of the station and began to climb up the slopes. They passed over regularly spaced terraces and an intricate network of drip irrigation channels, plenty of farm workers in simple cotton shifts moving about the crops — plain room-sized huts for them to rest in or store equipment the only signs of construction on the incline. So where were they being taken? She looked at the Isla Furia below. As they drew higher up the rise, the party could see the landscape falling behind, smaller and smaller. The city inside its walls occupied a square stretch of territory, the hypnotizing uniformity of its hexagonal streets broken in very few places — only by parks or larger buildings — also hexagonal, which had to serve non-residential functions. Everything was constructed from the same white porcelain, reflecting bright sunlight. It stood seven miles across, Nuyok’s transparent streets resembling rivers of glass this high up. Moon-shaped, the crescent of the lake surrounded the city on two sides, the volcano covering a third flank, while the distant jungle could be seen nestling against the remaining boundary. A section of their cable car network branched off and headed down the volcano, entering the distant jungle to the rear of the city. Charlotte could just discern the distant crane heads and docking pylons of an airship yard rising above the jungle, and if she stretched her ears, she imagined she could hear the distant thud of the works.
‘Are you going to sacrifice us at the top, then?’ asked Commodore Black. ‘Is that how the Court obtains its intelligence these days — blood sacrifice?’
‘The Court’s agents have made plenty of sacrifices,’ said Sadly. ‘But they’re normally paid in our blood.’
Lifting them all the way to the summit, the cable car levelled out, the pylon’s chains entering a dark tunnel on the mountainside. It only took a minute to pass through, and on the other side of the darkness they emerged into the interior crater of the volcano. Rather than the bubbling lake of lava Charlotte had been expecting to find, the interior of the crater towered with buildings and massive pipe-works, a series of gantries and girders bridging the interior space. The upper edge of its rocky rim was curved with exhaust vents pumping out smoke in mimicry of a live volcano.
‘There’s your volcano, good captain,’ said Daunt. ‘The discharge from mine works. A celgas mine if I’m not mistaken.’
‘The Court’s greatest secret,’ said Sadly. ‘The only place other than Jackals where a significant vein of the gas has been found. But then we had to lift our aerial city somehow, and the Kingdom’s got its own supply of airship gas sealed too tight for us to tap on a regular basi
s.’
‘But what about the wicked molten rain, lad?’ said the commodore, astonished he wasn’t facing a live volcano. ‘I’ve anchored seventy miles off this coast and watched magma coming down thick enough to leave a Jackelian ironclad more full of holes than a lump of blessed cheese?’
Sadly pointed to a crown of massive pipes encased in machinery circling the rim of the crater. ‘Your rocks are real enough, but they’re heated in furnaces here and then catapulted out under hyper-pressure. Our lava launchers have got a lot more accurate over the centuries since we landed here. For anyone that survives a bombardment from those, the island’s coastline has concealed dirt-gas flues to choke would-be trespassers.’
‘Bob my soul, but I knew there was something on the island worthy of the efforts you’ve made to discourage visitors,’ said Daunt.
‘You should consider yourself fortunate,’ said Sadly. ‘You may be the first people in history outside our ranks to see this place.’
Charlotte held onto the railing in the cabin as their cable car passed through a forest of girders, elevator belts, hoists, piping, gantries, walkways and ladders suspended across the crater’s heart. Something of such colossal value as celgas was always enough to pique her interest, but stealing bulky airship gas cylinders wasn’t a proposition worth pursuing. That was the beauty of jewels and rare paintings, their portability and resale value. It was just unfortunate the buyers of King Jude’s sceptre only wanted the piece to unleash a horde of starving demons on the world. That was one situation where having the money wouldn’t help.