From the Deep of the Dark j-6

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Then you knowingly sent that wretch Dick Tull walking into the enemy’s hands with a devil by his side. Maeva, all her seanore warriors, you let them all sacrifice themselves for this, lass.’

  ‘And all of the Court’s staff and thousands of Nuyokians back on the Isla Furia. There’s enough blood our hands for everybody. I’m sorry about what happened to Maeva, Jared, truly, but we’re all dead anyway if we don’t stop the sea-bishops. Better we have a fighting chance…’

  ‘That’s the Court’s way,’ said Sadly, almost approvingly. ‘Whatever it takes, whatever the cost.’

  The commodore rubbed his bandaged shoulder. ‘That, it may be. But it’s poor old Blacky and his friends that must do the bleeding for your dirty schemes. This is a fool’s chance. You heard what Gemma said when she had us on the darkship sinking down to this black pit of hell. The shield device you would have us steal to freeze these demons in a trap of time is under heavy guard. Will the trickery of your clever gem pass a sentry’s close inspection by an army of sea-bishops? Will you pretend to be Walsingham and have him order the demons to pass out what they have no doubt been ordered to secure with their very lives?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It might work. Misdirection is the key, remember.’

  Sadly pointed down the corridor to a side passage. ‘That’s the way to the airlock where the darkships are docked.’

  ‘How can you be telling that, Sadly?’ moaned the commodore. ‘All these dark, dripping corridors — all alike, we might as well be passing through a leviathan’s veins.’

  ‘I have a very good memory, Mister Black,’ said Sadly. ‘That’s my training and I was working very hard to memorize the way to get out of here when they hauled me down to the feeding pens.’

  ‘The city hasn’t changed much since Elizica was last here,’ said Charlotte. ‘But we’re not leaving. Our path lies that way.’

  ‘Ah, why not,’ whined the commodore. ‘I’m a dead man walking anyway. At least I’ll be going down with a sabre in my blessed hand.’

  ‘Withdraw!’ Daunt’s shouts sounded hollow through his gas mask. Never was a weapon so pointlessly deployed as this war gas, yellow blankets of blistering poison drifting over the volcano’s slopes with both sides protected by their helmets. Both factions only inconvenienced by the foul fog. How Daunt longed to rip the cloying device off, to take a breath of real air. ‘Why are they not withdrawing?’

  The Notifier standing next to Daunt stared down at the ring of trenches below, the thud of gas rifles growing frantic as the gill-necks’ massed ranks marched forward, advancing under the hazardous cover of a rolling barrage from their own artillery. The red chainmail across the woman’s chest made her appear as if she had been wading through blood all day. Perhaps she had. ‘The first trench has not had their votes tallied yet. To retreat is a serious matter, Court man.’

  Morris snorted in rude amusement on the firing step of the trench. Daunt bit his tongue. Above them was the next trench ring, higher, its tighter circumference designed to accommodate the diminished number of fighters that would be falling back from Daunt’s present position. Higher still, another trench circuit still being dug by the Court’s mining force, working as they laboured under the fierce fire. The occasional miner malfunctioning from enemy shelling would come lurching down the incline, oblivious to the battle and ploughing into the advancing gill-neck formations where it would be battered into deactivation. The survivors could only fall back, regroup and concentrate their fire, however, if they actually followed Daunt’s orders rather than constantly putting them to the ballot.

  ‘Bob my soul, but dying down there is a serious matter,’ said Daunt. ‘Falling back to a prepared position is a serious matter, keeping the townspeople alive is a serious matter.’

  ‘Freedom’s light burns within each of us. It can never be diminished,’ said the Notifier.

  Damn her foolish religious cant. Did her faith offer any succour to those dying and maimed, as their light flickered from the world? Superstition is the enemy, that’s what the seminaries taught back home. Well, the Circlist church’s teachers had never had to crouch in the dirt and be pounded by gill-neck artillery all day long. There was a sudden surge of movement as militia fighters below flooded into the narrow communication trenches, surging up towards Daunt and the next defensive ring.

  ‘Prepare the charges!’ Daunt yelled. Along the firebay one of the engineers began fiddling with the ignition wires, readying to detonate the barrels of liquid explosives in the communication passages, sealing their defences against infiltration counterattacks from below.

  ‘They have come out in support of your plan,’ said the Notifier, somewhat superfluously.

  ‘See if they can convince those gill-necked bastards down there to vote on going home,’ said Morris.

  The town’s fighters poured into the trench, taking posts in the firebays and fixing their sights on the slopes below. Their chainmail armour was covered in mud, those portions of their faces that were visible under their gasmasks streaked with soot and tears and sweat. Manoeuvring through the narrow gap of the trench, the militia’s young powder monkeys sprinted, sacks of ammunition drums and propellant jangling as they squeezed through the confined space, voices calling out for patronage in a cruel imitation of a street hawker’s cries. The day was edging towards twilight. When night fell, the gill-necks would have the advantage, their eyes born to the half-light under the waves.

  Daunt indicated the powder monkeys. ‘Their sacks are half empty.’

  ‘That’s the problem with putting out bullets like a hailstorm,’ said Morris. ‘We’re running low of ammunition.’ He patted his gas rifle. ‘Anyway, that’s what the cutlery on the end of this if for. Never thought I’d be pig-sticking on a battlefield again.’

  Daunt nodded grimly. He gazed down at the massed gill-neck ranks climbing relentlessly towards them. The heavy bunker guns along the slopes had fallen silent half an hour ago, preserving their shells for the moments when the rolling-pin tanks rumbled forward. Where previous advances had been halted, burning formations of gill-neck vehicles of war littered the blackened parkland in front of the volcano.

  ‘Fire in the hole!’ yelled the engineer as he plunged the stick down on his detonator.

  A wall of rubble and fire erupted into the sky, showering the gill-necks’ forward ranks with shrapnel and rock shards. The defenders’ abandoned trench circuit had collapsed in on itself, any dead fighters left inside incinerated along with the front of the invaders’ line. Hundred of bodies lay piled on the lower slopes, a few wounded gill-necks trying to struggle out of mounds of shattered flesh even as the next wave of Advocacy marines beat their way over their own dead and dying. Rifles discharged along the Advocacy ranks, a rippling line of smoke from their guns as bullets bounced off the lava slopes and caught some of the defenders in the head. The line that had just fired halted, clearing their rifles and pulling out a fresh charge, allowing the soldiers behind to step forward and bring their guns up towards the trench.

  One of the militiamen to Daunt’s right slumped against the revetment, his dying body shuddering as a companion pulled him off the firing step, clearing the way for another fighter to take his place on the trench board. He wasn’t a man anymore, a living being with dreams and hopes and interests and family. He had become a dead weight clogging the workings of Daunt’s killing machine.

  ‘Wait for, wait for it. Range!’

  A bass roar sounded the length of the trench, rifles jolting with the thud-thud-thud of their volleys. Each defender had the legs extended on the end of their gun barrel, sweeping the rifle left and right, invaders collapsing at the receiving end of their deadly arc of fire. Overhead, the whine of their foes’ falling shells droned louder and louder, a fountain of explosions shaking the slopes above Daunt. Rock fragments scythed the trench from the rear, Daunt feeling the impact across the back of his helmet and chain-mailed spine as if someone was trying to drive nails through his back. Further down the lin
e, larger shards had decimated the defenders, militia crawling wounded over the trench’s dead. There were gaps in their firing line. Gaps Daunt had no one left in a healthy enough state to plug. Daunt turned to the rear revetment, the smoke of the artillery barrage landing obscuring his view. The next trench ring was still being carved out of the rock by Lord Trabb’s automatics. They had nowhere left to retreat to. The locals no longer had the numbers to hold the line long enough for the mining machines to finish the job.

  Morris extended his telescope to peer down at the ruins of the town’s once palatial library. ‘Bugger. They’ve brought their howitzers up. They must have been counting our counter-battery fire. They’ve guessed our magazine is as good as empty. Nothing to throw back at them but spit and words. We’re in trouble.’

  ‘If we’re not, Mister Morris, it’ll do until the real thing comes along.’ Daunt took the telescope and peered through it. Beyond the cannons lined up behind the library’s rubble, a long column of armour advanced trundling up one of the streets, the guns spined along the length of the tanks raised as if in salute… or elevated for an attempt at storming the slopes of the Isla Furia.

  Along the rubble, the Advocacy’s gunners had finished reloading their big guns and the carriages began to slam back as they expelled thunder. More accurately ranged this time, explosions flowered fore and rear of the circuit of trenches. Daunt fell back as a shockwave snarled itself around his body and hurled him off the firing step. He grasped the bare skin of his face. His gasmask had been blown off his helmet, the smell of cordite overwhelming now. As Daunt struggled up through the dust, a rockslide from the trench walls nearly toppled him onto his back again. In front of Daunt, Morris lay stretched out, his body covered in dirt… but only some of his body. Morris’s legs were visible protruding from the landslide, too far away from his torso to still be connected to the Jackelian.

  Morris reached his hand out towards Daunt, his gas rifle clutched in bloody fingers, an offering of war. ‘Take it.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Daunt’s voice came out like a husk, a rasp of dust and blood clearing his throat.

  Morris weakly pushed his rifle out again towards Daunt. ‘I bloody love this, vicar. And I’m getting out in good order. You can revel in the fury. But the end’s always terrible. When it stops. Your rage fades. Just thousands of corpses. The cries of the lost and dying.’

  Daunt crawled forward, the smoke clearing in the trench. So few standing, so few bursts of fire replying to each new shelling. The ground shaking and vibrating. If the crack widened under them, would they plunge down into hell?

  ‘Do you have a hell?’ Daunt yelled down the trench, his cry lost on the surviving fighters. Some crouching, others dying, survivors releasing the blades folded under their rifle barrels. Preparing for their last stand. Or is this it?

  ‘I can feel it,’ moaned Morris, his words bringing Daunt out of his shock. ‘My soul leaking away back into the world, mingling with it all. Tell me I’m going to come back as better people, vicar.’

  We’ll learn the lessons of this life. Return to the one sea of consciousness, diluting into the infinite until our essence is cupped back out again into the world. Daunt took the Jackelian’s ice-cold hand. ‘We all will.’

  ‘I already have!’ Out of the smoke and fire along the slope he stepped. Iron feet crunching the ground. A scarlet pulse running down his vision plate as strong and steady as a heartbeat. His chest shining and bright. Boxiron. But not Boxiron. The creature of the metal combined with one of the Court’s human-milled marvels, sealed and connected by a power far beyond that of the race of man. As the smoke drifted sideways, Daunt saw hundreds of the Court’s miners stood lined up behind the steamman. Bunker doors were springing open across the slopes, no cannons emerging — only the massed ranks of the Court of the Air’s mining force. They emerged unconcerned into the blast waves of the Advocacy strafing, stone shards rattling off their hull plates as they formed into long columns. Then the legion charged down the Isla Furia.

  ‘Boxiron?’

  The steamman’s head slanted down, taking in his shining polished brutal new body, as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘Yes-’ he raised his fist and behind him a legion of miners raised theirs in a mirror reflection of the steamman, ‘-I think I am upgraded. By the will of King Steam.’

  Daunt gawked. A slipthinker. Boxiron was now a slipthinker, able to inhabit multiple drone bodies and make their will his. The highest caste of steamman society. Unlike the empty shells back in Tock House, so many suits of armour without their controlling presence in residence. But Boxiron didn’t have an army of inactive drones. He had an army of hulking mining mechanicals, their fists spinning as drill-bits and shovels and pickaxes. Able to carve caverns out of solid rock, or chunks out of an invading army.

  ‘Mechanicals,’ groaned Morris. The dying adventurer’s words came out through gritted teeth. ‘Mechanicals can’t fight.’

  Boxiron stepped down into the trench, the metal legion to his rear following a second later. He scooped up the gas-rifle in front of Morris. It looked like a stick in the hulking brute’s hand. ‘Perhaps, but a steamman knight knows little else. They are not your mechanicals anymore. They are mine.’ Boxiron’s proud head swept the sight of the trench, the surviving militia scrambling out of the way of the metal titans landing among them, then Boxiron took in the ruins of the city below. ‘A defensive funnel to concentrate the enemy’s formations. A variation of the Battle of the Gauge Heights.’ He looked at Daunt, the light of his vision plate skipping slightly in surprise. ‘You are in command here?’

  ‘I believe I was.’

  Boxiron pulled back the firing bolt on the gas rifle. ‘Interesting. You would have done better to build a series of redoubts rather than a continuous trench, that would have concentrated your enfilading fire. But this is no longer a defensive action.’ The words from his voicebox were nearly overwhelmed by a fierce roar from hundreds of drill-bits spinning into action, tool arms testing the air in unison. ‘Do you mind, Jethro softbody?’

  Daunt lifted his hand weakly over the top of the trench. ‘That was never what I was for.’ He tried to sit up and watch the charging waves of mining mechanicals, but it was so much easier just to prop his back up against the trench walls, holding Morris’s still, cold hand. Daunt’s head nodded, little waves of dreamless sleep, sheer exhaustion overtaking him. Sounds and screams and explosions from below punctuated each wave of blackness. Loud at first, then increasingly distant as Boxiron’s forces pushed back to the distant margins of the city. It was dark now, twilight passed into night. He was so tired, beyond what he should be.

  Shaken awake by a Notifier, Daunt blinked sleep out of his eyes.

  ‘How do you vote?’ demanded the man. ‘Do you vote to advance towards the shore?’

  Daunt lifted his hand, still holding Morris’s cold finger into the air. ‘We vote to sleep.’

  ‘He cannot vote. He is dead.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he is.’

  ‘Are you voting to stay here in a defensive posture?’ asked the Notifier, indicating the distant clash of fighting.

  ‘I know when it’s time to stop.’ Daunt shut his eyes. For the first time in ages he allowed the dreams in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Charlotte nearly slipped on the underwater city’s oily floor as a familiar figure emerged out of a side turning ahead of them. Gemma Dark. She had her sabre in her hand, and her appearance was answered by a hiss of steel as the commodore drew his blade.

  ‘I knew it,’ called the commodore’s sister. ‘They’re all at the other end of the city, sweeping the engine levels for intruders, and here you are, heading in the opposite direction. Whenever my brother is up to mischief, just head for where you’re not expecting him, and there he’ll be.’

  Charlotte let go of the image of the sea-bishop with relief; the strains of keeping up the illusion dropping away like a lead weight. ‘The sea-bishops have a very low opinion of their cattle’s intel
ligence. I suppose it helps to loathe what you must consume.’

  ‘The lifeboats are back that way,’ said Gemma.

  ‘Oh, I don’t need a darkship,’ said Charlotte. ‘Not after you were so kind as to pilot me to where I needed to go. I don’t suppose your stock is very high with Walsingham now, or he’d be standing here beside you.’

  ‘We don’t have time to dally,’ hissed Elizica inside her mind. ‘When the enemy realize we’re not hiding from them in the engine levels, they’ll reach the same conclusion as this filthy collaborator.’

  ‘Can you keep this witch engaged for a while?’ Charlotte asked the commodore, sotto voce.

  ‘We shared the same fencing masters growing up,’ said the commodore. ‘But I’ve had a few hard lessons since. Let’s see what a dying man’s old bones are good for.’

  Charlotte squeezed his shoulder. ‘End of this passage, second corridor on the left. Be lucky.’ She didn’t add the unspoken: If you live long enough.

  ‘There’s a first time for everything, lass.’ The commodore slashed his blade left and right, testing the air, even as Gemma Dark sprinted forward, roaring in rage.

  Charlotte and Sadly slipped past against the wall as the brother and sister’s razor-edged steel sprung off each other, sparking in the gloom.

  ‘I think she hates him a lot more than she wants to be queen of the realm, says I,’ observed Sadly as they moved rapidly down the passage.

  Charlotte glanced back at the furious duel behind them. Almost as unwholesome as my feelings towards my mother.

  ‘You’re not doing what the enemy expect you to, are you?’ noted Sadly, his tone complimentary.

  ‘Actually, I’m going to do the sea-bishops something of a favour,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m going to give the bloody monsters exactly what they want.’