From the Deep of the Dark j-6

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘The opposite of that, sir,’ said Dick.

  ‘Sweet lies. Always lies, when the treasonists are everywhere.’

  ‘Just who do you think sent us?’ asked Sadly.

  ‘The vampires, of course,’ said Algo. ‘They have been turning all of my officers, corrupting them into the half-living, feeding on the people’s blood and spreading their sickness.’

  ‘Not quite, sir,’ said Dick. ‘But you were right about the Court of the Air, and you were right about the gill-necks working with the royalists. You were bang on about that.’

  ‘That’s it sergeant, flavour a lie with the truth. You can transmute your form into bats and vermin, that’s how you slipped past my soldiers outside. But you can’t drain my blood; I have only oil and vapour for you. That’s why I have to die. Then you’ll have one of the section heads replace me, they’re all your vampiric allies now. I can’t trust any of you.’

  Dick lifted his rifle out and as a sign of good faith placed it on a tabletop to his side. ‘I’m not here to kill you, sir. I’m here to ask for your help. We have been infiltrated all right, but not by what you think. I’ve just come back from what passes for the Court of the Air these days and I need your help to rescue them from the gill-necks. I need the RAN and the fleet sea arm to go to sea in defence of the nation and our interests or there’ll be nothing left of the Kingdom by the end of the year.’

  ‘Lying,’ spat Algo with enough venom that his voicebox shook. ‘It’s a war you want.’

  ‘Only against the real enemy.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Sadly, raising his rifle to the ceiling and loosing a chattering burst into the plasterwork before dropping the barrel towards Dick and the steamman.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dick shouted as the sound of panic and guards clattering outside the private apartments began to filter through to where they were standing.

  ‘It’s not a war, says I. No more than when a farmer brings his swine in from the field and takes a razor to their throats. What do you call that? A harvest?’

  ‘You bastard, Sadly, you’ve sold us out.’

  ‘I told you,’ warbled Algo. ‘I warned you to trust no one. There are treasonists all around us.’

  Sadly activated the sea-bishop detection mechanism on his cane and tossed it towards Dick. The eyes in the copper-boar’s head handle were filled with orange light and burning with a fierce urgency. ‘Well, someone in the room is not of this world, and you must be fairly sure you’re still a human.’

  ‘You can’t be one of them,’ said Dick, reeling in shock. ‘Daunt can sniff their kind out. The amateur pegged Vice-admiral Cockburn for a sea-bishop straight away, like a walking blank he said.’

  Sadly leered. ‘I find your nickname for our race almost as disgusting as having to bear your fetid appearance, cattle. We know our kind as the Mass. Our numbers are as infinite as our dominion is eternal. While you are as dull as you are repellent, so let me explain for you, we discovered Daunt’s ability back on the island. That was where Barnabas Sadly was taken — that was when I replaced him. To fool Jethro Daunt, all I needed to do was intensify my mesmeric field and convince the creature he was now seeing all the physical cues he expected to observe from his fellow cattle.’ The creature laughed without warmth. ‘Your crippled friend really shouldn’t have brought a cane filled with a tracking isotope into the prison camp, even an inert compound. You animals make it too easy. I let you escape and lead me straight back to the location of the key-gem, Mister Tull. Days spent on the Isla Furia, listening to your pathetic plans to defy the Mass, time well spent making sure the memories of the defences I ripped from the Court’s agent were reliable and up-to-date.’ The Sadly creature’s rifle barrel twitched as he saw Dick glancing towards the rifle he’d laid aside. ‘I wouldn’t reach for that gun, animal. It would be a shame if you were to die immediately. You have assisted the Mass so well. You deserve to see our people’s final victory, even if you don’t live quite long enough to fully regret it.’

  There were the sounds of a door breaking, the crack of approaching boots on the floor. ‘I wanted to see how much the head of the State Protection Board had uncovered of the Mass’s activities on his own. But here he is — half-senile and blinded by the superstitious myths of your primitive land — foolish machine creature. Your kind must have built his, once, animal. He’s exceeded his creators only in longevity, not in intellect.’

  ‘You can’t turn me into one of you,’ said Algo. ‘I have no veins to spread your vampiric sickness.’

  Sadly laughed and his shape began to shimmer, reforming as a facsimile of the old steamman. ‘I don’t need to bite you to become you, senile contraption. It’s your memories I am unable to steal. Too well encrypted by that rusted calculating device you call a monarch back in the Steamman Free State. But it matters not. Your kind is as few in number as mine is legion. Perhaps we shall keep some of you functioning as slaves — that was your original function, was it not? There is certainly no sustenance on you to feed the Mass.’ The sea-bishop jabbed his gun towards Dick. ‘You shouldn’t feel too bad, animal. You are livestock and we are wolves and that which preys on a creature is always quicker and faster and more intelligent than it. The best plan you could come up with is attempting to repeat the same trick your bitch-queen played on the Mass centuries ago, sealing us in a trap of time. Even if your friends weren’t going to be walking into an ambush, your witless scheme would never have borne fruit a second time. The shield technology she modified to trap us is under constant guard. What is it you animals say? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’

  The creature kept Algo’s appearance as behind him, the room was filled with armed men, Corporal Cloake and the fake Jethro Daunt among them.

  ‘Bob my soul,’ said the Daunt creature, its eyes lighting up with a passion that the original rarely showed. ‘It seems we have bagged a couple of intruders.’

  ‘This assassin broke into my apartments,’ said the sea-bishop masquerading as the head of the board. ‘One of our own officers gone rogue. Yes, there’s an execution warrant outstanding on Sergeant Tull here, and the mechanical is a poorly designed automatic engineered to impersonate me. Take them away, Jethro softbody. Consider your commission with the board fulfilled. Lock them away deep where we keep our most dangerous prisoners.’

  Dick moaned. He had failed. The sea-bishops held the Kingdom and the Advocacy in their thrall, they had the measure of the Isla Furia’s defences and that old sea-goat and Charlotte Shades were walking straight into a trap. Dick’s retirement was finally upon him, and he wouldn’t end up struggling on his scanty pension. Not in the slightest.

  Many cities were said to glitter metaphorically — to gleam with gas lamps and hotels and expensive restaurants and the moneyed classes chasing their dreams by opening their wallets. The capital of the Advocacy, however, didn’t need metaphors to sparkle. Lishtiken lay there on the underwater plain with its diamond towers and its ruby-shaped domes running along the seabed, silhouetted against the underwater mountains and shining like a thief’s dream. The Advocacy had grown a coral-like city out of crystals, the splendour of its gem buildings overlaid with knots of pearl-coloured spheres clustered together, fish spawn clinging to reeds. There was movement all across the vista — gill-necks swimming freely in every dimension between thousands of openings, larger chariot craft bearing citizens between buildings. Connecting everything as though a fine mesh, transparent tubes hung as a capsule-less version of the Kingdom’s atmospheric network — artificial currents sucking swimmers effortlessly on their way across the capital.

  But for all its obvious wealth, Charlotte wasn’t here to loot Lishtiken, and nor were the thousands of seanore warriors picking their way carefully through the sea farms on the capital’s eastern flank.

  The commodore’s voice sounded in Charlotte’s diving helmet. ‘They’re lax today, lass. All this way up to their mortal doorstep and hardly a patrol boat to make us duck on the wh
ole journey.’

  ‘Their fleet will be busy and bloodied at the Isla Furia by now,’ said Charlotte. ‘With word of the sea-bishops’ presence being spread among the nomads, the monsters must be growing desperate to get their hands on the key-gem.’ Of course, the sea-bishops’ infiltrators inside the Advocacy will be quick to write such stories off as the ramblings and propaganda of superstitious savages, and that will hold up, at least for a while.

  ‘Ah,’ the old u-boat man grumbled, ‘in my experience, when something is too good to be true, it usually is.’

  Vane came up behind them, the nomad chieftain so weighted down with rotor-spears, armour and weaponry it was a wonder he could cut through the water with the ease he did. ‘There are darkships secreted in the city?’

  ‘At least two of them,’ said Charlotte. She could feel the press of their presence like a cancer, an illness upon the world. ‘And their masters too.’ Ensuring their grip on the Advocacy’s leadership did not weaken at this pivotal point in the invaders’ fortunes.

  ‘We will give you half an hour to get inside before we begin our attack — you will find that adequate.’ He waved his arm and Maeva came forward, travelling lightly armed compared to her fellow nomads. ‘Maeva has been inside Lishtiken many times, leading our trading parties. She knows its ways best and shall guide you.’

  The commodore didn’t look pleased by the prospect. ‘You don’t have to be doing this now, Maeva.’

  ‘You would get lost two feet behind your own sleeping bubble,’ said Maeva. ‘It’s best someone who knows which way the tide flows is on hand to guide you though the city-dwellers’ defences.’

  ‘You should stay here,’ he insisted. ‘I had a mortal strange dream last night. I don’t think things will end well, and I don’t want you along to share my fate.’

  ‘I’ve as many grey hairs as you, Jared Black. I’m not planning on living forever. It is done. I will be your scout. This is my decision to make, not yours. You don’t get to do that again to me.’

  ‘You will lose many fighters in the assault,’ Charlotte warned Vane.

  Vane shrugged. ‘I was not planning on living forever, either.’

  ‘Remember, we only require a diversion,’ said Charlotte. ‘Nobody among the grand congress is expecting you to lay siege to Lishtiken and successfully seize the capital.’

  Vane shivered with the thought of it. ‘Enclosed by walls and corridors, unable to feel currents running across my skin. Hiding my face from the tides like a frightened hermit crab drawn down into its shell. What would I do with a city? Such a life would be as living entombed.’

  ‘Remind them of the old ways then, lad,’ said the commodore.

  ‘I am glad you are going, silver-beard,’ said Vane. ‘If you stayed too long with the clan I would probably have ended up killing you.’

  ‘Better an enemy should kill me than a friend,’ said the commodore. ‘Let’s give those dark-hearted demons down there first crack at my old bones.’

  ‘Half an hour!’ the war leader called after them as they left. ‘Move fast and true.’

  Urged by Maeva, the three of them connected voice lines between their suits and they travelled forward joined together as though by a long umbilical chord. ‘No open communications from here on in,’ ordered Maeva. ‘The edge of the city is patrolled by dolphins and they can detect voiceboxes at a distance far beyond any clansman’s hearing.’

  ‘It’s an exposed approach,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Not through there.’ Maeva’s gloved hand indicated the vast nets of fish pens floating tethered along the sea farms. ‘We cut a small hole through the mesh and move with the schooling fish. Too much activity inside for three uninvited guests to be spotted.’ She smiled beneath the visor of her helmet. ‘We just have to hope that no farmer tries to spear us for poachers.’

  They made the journey unimpeded, observed only by silvery clouds of darting garfish. All the farmers they spotted outside the nets were busying themselves by their feeding pipes, testing water inside the pens, dipping nets inside to check catches for diseases that could kill their livestock. Before they broke cover, Maeva sketched a rough outline of the city and asked Charlotte where she sensed the darkships’ presence. Charlotte tapped a section more or less in the centre of the underwater metropolis.

  ‘That is the heart of the Judge Sovereign’s rule,’ said Maeva. ‘The Temple of Judgements, or somewhere very close to it.’

  The commodore groaned. ‘Poor old Blacky and his unlucky stars. Why could these demons not be hiding their wicked darkships in a cavern on the outskirts of Lishtiken? They have to be in the best-defended spot in the whole nest of gill-necks.’

  Charlotte shrugged inside her diving suit. ‘Honey, the sea-bishops feed on power as much as blood. I wouldn’t expect them to be anywhere else.’ She tapped the crystal hanging around her neck, a small bulge beneath her suit’s fabric. ‘If it comes to it, I can use the Eye of Fate to convince any Advocacy soldiers we meet that I’m the Judge Sovereign himself.’

  ‘What about the sea-bishops, lass, will that little geejaw of yours work on them?’

  ‘Queen Elizica once used it to convince the enemy that she was a sea-bishop wearing a human form,’ said Charlotte. ‘I hope I can do the same. Their minds are a lot stronger than ours are — bred to be resistant to their own trickery.’ But I’ve been using the crystal for far longer than Elizica when she crept into the seed-city. Surely that must count for something?

  ‘Hope? On such a small hope swing the lives of us all. The blessed Eye of Fate is well named, so it is.’

  Maeva pointed to a stretch of Lishtiken’s waters that seemed darker than the rest of the sea. ‘That is where we must go. There is a way to bypass the city’s defences and patrols over there.’

  ‘That’s a cloud of plankton, Maeva,’ noted the commodore. ‘Is it doing what I think it’s doing?’

  ‘Maybe. Do you believe it’s feeding on the city-dwellers’ waste?’

  The commodore’s face frowned inside his rebreather. ‘Crawling along pipes full of turds. Is that what you want to inflict upon me? Is this your revenge on poor luckless Blacky for taking off all those years ago?’

  ‘It’s a start, Jared. A start only.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Shortly after the gill-necks’ rolling-pin tanks had dragged up large black spheres studded with spikes, the lines of ugly globes began launching out fizzing rockets which landed harmlessly enough, leaving each rocket pouring out smoke cover to mask the invaders’ exposed position in front of Nuyok. Unable to effectively sight on the invaders, the militia along the wall had been reduced to firing blind into the fog, emptying magazines into the billowing clouds. The battlements themselves were now shrouded inside the choking veil, and Daunt’s war had been reduced to a couple of feet’s visibility either side of him, stumbling through a hell he had been trained to deny.

  Out beyond the wall the Advocacy forces had assembled gallopers — small mobile cannons that could be broken into pieces, transported by the landing boats, and then put back together to hurl small but deadly projectiles towards the city. Daunt couldn’t see them, but the effects were being felt around the city, shells tearing into the walls, others passing overhead and wrecking devastation amid the towers’ clean white porcelain spires. Particularly devastating was the enemy’s chain shot, twin cannon balls linked by thick rusty chains that rotated as they flew, deadly bolas decapitating defenders where they stood.

  Nuyokians were heaving out poles designed to push back scaling ladders being lifted up against the walls, others lugging drums of acid-like oil to pour through siege drains, spraying their deadly contents out onto the assault. From the anguished screams and yells that greeted the dispersal of each drum of corrosive liquid, the gill-neck sappers and engineers were hard at work on the ground below. It was only a matter of time before the attackers managed to successfully set enough explosives to blow open a breach in Nuyok’s walls.

  Daunt was moving along
the battlements, thick with smoke carrying the distorted cries of the attackers and the defenders’ curses and rifle fire. Militiamen bent over the ramparts and emptied their magazines in a desperate attempt to halt the surge of numbers coming at them, heaving out at siege ladders with their y-shaped poles, others hacking at grapple cables sunk into the stone walls. Each of the gas guns contained a bayonet, spring-mounted to extend like a penknife’s blade. Many of the militia had triggered theirs, adding a foot of serrated steel to the length of their rifles, hacking out at the crystal-helmed gill-neck faces trying to struggle over the wall.

  Weighed down by a medical satchel given to Daunt by a surgeon at the aid station below — one of the Court’s personnel, not a local — he crab-crawled his way toward the next cluster of men shouting for assistance, bullets whining like hornets past his helmet.

  This was far removed from the Circlist church’s medical training. The priests back at Daunt’s seminary would have been horrified at the scale and severity of the injuries. A world apart from the delicate balance of pastoral care, diet, exercise, meditation exercises and identification of physical ailments that could throw out of kilter the miraculously sophisticated organism that was the race of man. Soldiers blinded by shards of stone from cannon impacts, missing arms and legs from the bombardment, punched down by rifle balls, felled by grenades and blade cuts, bones broken and spines shattered slipping from the battlements. Already the orders had gone out from the mayor’s command post that wherever they could, the injured should make their own way down the wall’s stairs to the aid posts. So hard-pressed on the battlement that no fighters could be spared to supplement the stretcher-bearers by carrying down their wounded comrades to the Spartan medical facilities. Daunt reached the militiamen yelling for a medic, half of the company jabbing out with bayonets, the remainder standing back and aiming shots over their comrades’ shoulders. At their boots was a militiaman doubled up on the rampart, surrounded by nets filled with the ammunition drums and gas propellant canisters he had been distributing among the defenders.