by Stephen Hunt
‘I am in her visions?’ The thought shocked Septimoth. He was unclean. Exiled and broken. How could he appear in the prophetic dreams of such as she? Supreme among the oracles.
‘We are as appalled as you that it is so. After your time with the dirt dwellers, do you still recall the high hunt?’
Septimoth remembered the soaring joy of his youth; gliding so high he was only breathing through his sealed oxygen sacks. The rip of raw, savage elation as the hunt sighted a skrayper, diving on the zeppelin-sized creature, manoeuvring past its wavering tentacle stings to drive spears into its blue flesh. ‘I do.’
‘Then you must also remember the portion of the hunting territories that you were forbidden to enter?’
‘You speak of the whispering sky.’
‘This is what has been seen within the Stalker Cave. The whispering sky is evil and its song calls many to it. It has been foretold that the whispering sky shall awaken soon and that one of the flight will stand strong against it.’
‘Me? How can this duty fall to me? I am broken wing, the walking dead uneaten.’
‘You have a part to play, as do the flightless monkeys and the people of the metal. Our seer has foretold the violation of the cogs and crystals of the living metal. You must follow the steammen’s path of pain.’
‘The grave robberies in Middlesteel?’ whispered Septimoth. ‘Is that what the holy of holies means? Did she speak of a connection with a mechomancer from Quatérshift, or an old blind warrior?’
‘She spoke of you, Septimoth, and that was enough to unsettle any who were bid to listen.’
‘She said nothing else?’
‘Only that you are to give us your bone flute to bear back to the Stalker Cave.’
‘This is my mother’s spine,’ said Septimoth. ‘I ate her corpse myself and I shall not relinquish it.’
‘What we ask is as an act of faith, Septimoth, of devotion. Your bone flute shall be returned to you when you have flown along the currents that have been revealed by the Seer of the Stalker Cave. We ask this of you, but in return we must trust our people’s fate to a dirt-grubbing exile. That is our act of faith.’
Septimoth hissed a curse and passed the instrument over to the outstretched talon awaiting it. ‘Keep my mother’s bone safe, seers of the crimson feather. That is not a request, you understand? Not a suggestion. Or you will discover how far I have fallen in my exile.’ With that, the lashlite stepped back off the hardened rubber roof and fell towards the ground before his wings spread out, and he glided up and out of the street below. On their chimneys the four seers stood, their heads nodding gently, lost in thought.
Then the tallest of the lashlites spoke. ‘Can we trust him?’
‘He is what we have. What the Stalker Cave has given us.’
‘An ill-favoured wind blows,’ complained the tallest. He sniffed at the polluted air of Middlesteel in disgust. ‘And it is not the miasma of industry created by these eager little monkeys.’
‘You forget, I have seen the future too.’
‘It was empty in your vision?’
‘As dead as a field of glaciers from the coldtime.’
One of the lashlites tutted. ‘Septimoth will not be enough to save us.’
As one, the seers rose from their perches and broke for the sky, heading back to the mountains of the north.
Amelia did something she thought she would not do again – she blinked awake and tried to sit up. A hand pushed her down, human-like fingers backed by heavy shell armour. ‘T’ricola.’
The craynarbian engineer was sitting on the edge of her bunk. ‘Rest, professor. We had to bleed you in a dozen places or your body would have burst like a rotten fruit. You’ve lost nearly a quarter of your blood.’
As the craynarbian spoke, Amelia felt the sting of the wounds, the throb beneath bandages that had been expertly lashed around her arms and legs. ‘I was reliably informed that devilbarb-fish poison is fatal.’
‘To you soft skins,’ said T’ricola, ‘not to us; their sting is painful to craynarbians, like a Jackelian adder bite – but not lethal.’ She raised her serrated sword arm. ‘I opened you with this. My sweat contains an anti-toxin that allowed you to survive. I rubbed my tears over your wounds too, close to an incision I made above your heart.’
‘Then I’m lucky to be alive,’ said Amelia. ‘And I’m sorry that I made you cry.’
‘Even back in Middlesteel, in the streets of Shell Town, it is an important ritual,’ said T’ricola. ‘But you are lucky that part of your flesh has been turned by a worldsinger, yes? The muscles in your arms resisted the poison until I got to you. A normal body would have succumbed far faster.’
‘Once a Shell Town girl, always a Shell Town girl, eh, T’ricola. I owe you my life.’
The engineer slapped the sides of the bulkhead. ‘Shell Town is just where I bunk, professor. I’m a third generation seadrinker, born on a u-boat beneath the Tharian Straits, swaddled alongside the pistons of an engine room. This is my home, not Jackals, and certainly not Liongeli.’
‘An engineer of people as well as submarines – the commodore is lucky to have found you. I hope he’s paying you well for this voyage.’
‘People are not so different from machines – spleen and bone, rather than cogs and grease.’ T’ricola pulled back the bunk niche’s curtain – they were in a far more spacious accommodation than Amelia’s cabin. At the other end of the room Commodore Black sat playing what looked like a game of chess with Veryann across a round oak table. For a moment Amelia was stunned by the size of the chamber. Then she remembered. The Sprite had once been a royalist u-boat, where the skipper was often lord of more than just the vessel.
‘And this must be the first time I have shipped with the commodore and have actually been paid a salary commensurate with my skills.’
‘You can thank the House of Quest for those guineas,’ said Amelia, ‘not that old sea dog.’
Seeing his guest was awake, Black left the mercenary commander pondering her next move and brought Amelia a cup of warm wine, T’ricola leaving to tend her engines. ‘Professor, it’s mortal good to see you back with us. I thought you might be pushing off along the Circle at one point.’
‘Did everyone else make it back alive?’ asked Amelia.
‘That they did, lass. You and Gabriel cleared our screws and we are happily pushing our way up the Shedarkshe as we speak. Ironflanks took a dent or two from the wild shells, but he fights like a fury, and kept them off your backs long enough for Bull’s boys to tickle them away from the Sprite with their tridents. We have gone further and deeper into Liongeli than any Jackelian before us. After we get back to the capital, the Dock Street pensmen will write a whole series of penny dreadfuls full of the wonders we have seen while you slept.’
‘Just how long have I been out, Jared?’
‘Two weeks, lass. Craynarbian tears are a powerful medicine. But you needed it. When I first brought you down here you were swelled up as round as an aerostat. It was a terrible thing to behold.’
Amelia gazed towards a large porthole on the other side of the chamber, small silver fish flashing past outside the armoured crystal. ‘Two weeks! Sweet Circle. I don’t remember a thing.’
‘As well you do not, Amelia. The scrapes we’ve been in. Pursued upriver by the cunning wild shells for a week, intent on paying us back for the brave scrap we gave them. Set upon by a flock of petrodactyls as we came up for air one moonless night, nearly crushed amongst a pod of mating flipbacks. That the Sprite is here for you to wake up to at all is only due to my quick thinking and the guns of Veryann and her fair fighters.’
‘Don’t think I don’t know what you are about, Jared Black,’ whispered Amelia.
‘Lass, what do you mean?’
‘The gymnasia of the Catosian League is what I am talking about, you old dog. Trial by arms and flesh is only part of what free company fighters practise – they value trial by mind and wit equally well, don’t they? Strength of arms being mean
ingless without strength of mind.’
The commodore looked red-faced. ‘That may be so, lass.’
‘You must prove yourself fit before you bed a Catosian, demonstrate the superiority of your blood lineage,’ mimicked Amelia. ‘How many games of chess have you lost already, Jared? You should be ashamed of yourself. You are old enough to be her grandfather.’
‘Ah, but professor, she is a fine figure of a woman, is she not? You must admit that; she has the beauty of a Jackelian princess and the poise of a sleekclaw. As fine a prize as any skipper ever sailed for.’
‘A sleekclaw has a glossy coat, Jared, but that doesn’t disguise the heart of a killer beating within its chest.’
‘You would not deny a bit of comfort to poor old Blacky, would you? I should be back in Tock House, resting my weary bones with a pot of beef gravy and a steaming loaf of bread by my side. Instead I am risking the precious hull of the Sprite for the sake of your career and the promise of the House of Quest’s meagre pension, sailing into the heart of darkness, where no Jackelian has ever set foot and lived to speak of it.’
‘Go back to your game, Jared. For your sake, I hope that Veryann is as quick with her wits as she is with that side-dagger strapped to her leg.’
‘When I was younger, lass, I would not have needed to prove myself on the chequered board of glory. Ah, I was a fast fellow back then, with a sabre arm that could see off twenty in a duel, a lucky twinkle in my eye that could melt the heart of even such as Veryann.’
‘You’ll need all your luck if you go biting the pillow with Abraham Quest’s tame cobra,’ said Amelia, her advice interrupted as the u-boat began to judder, the water outside the porthole flooding with light. ‘We’ve surfaced?’
‘So we have, professor. Ironflanks says there is a freshwater pool inland, half an hour away from our position. Our steamman guide has recovered from a little snit, after Veryann found a stash of quicksilver in his cabin and took it away from him. My darling girl’s drinking system could do with a top-up now. This wicked river is as feverish as the Fire Sea in high summer. You should take a watch above, clear your head with a breath of the fresh stuff.’
Amelia got out of her bunk and nearly bashed her head on a copper ornament, a replica of the female lance warrior that swept out of the nose of the Sprite, except that this lady of the lake was surrounded by a school of dolphins leaping around her. She went to straighten the ornament where she had knocked it, but the commodore stayed her hand.
‘Don’t be bringing my lucky dolphins down on your head, Amelia. You’ve had enough of a convalescence already.’
Amelia steadied herself on the side of the bunk, vertical for the first time in weeks, the blood rushing to her head. On the other side of the captain’s chamber, Veryann had stood up, checking the two pistols in her breast holsters. She gave Amelia an indecipherable look. Surely the mercenary did not regard her as competition for the vessel’s commander?
Out on deck, Amelia saw that the river had grown broader during her recuperation, and was now at least the width of one of Jackals’ great upland lochs. Ahead, the river forked and an obelisk rose out of the waters to the side of the junction. Amelia caught her breath and took a leather-lined telescope from one of the watch, focusing in on the figure on top of the granite carving. It was worn and dirty from the rainforest’s wet seasons, but the lines of the statue were clear enough. It was a woman clutching a book to her breast.
Ironflanks came clunking over to her, his dirty human clothes lashed with an explorer’s backpack dangling with machetes, iron cups and tent spikes. ‘One of your Camlantean friends, Amelia softbody?’
‘Not Camlantean, not even Chimecan,’ said Amelia. The dress the statue was wearing could almost have been Jackelian – she would not have looked out of place buying fruit from a stall alongside the Gambleflowers or strolling through the gardens of Goldhair Park. ‘With the amount of weathering on it, it could pre-date both those civilizations. Sweet Circle, how much history is there buried under this jungle?’
‘There are such oddities all over Liongeli,’ said the hulking steamman. ‘The statue may not be as old as you think. The jungle rots and wears away at the craft of both our peoples faster than you might imagine. If you built a home out here and then abandoned it, it would look a thousand years old after only two rain seasons. As an archaeologist, you know well the story of Isambard Kirkhill?’
Amelia nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘What I am sure your colleges have omitted is that there was a side-history played out here. Forgotten, like everything else, under the weight and decay of the jungle. Following the civil war in Jackals there were schisms in his parliament’s alliance – some of the more extreme factions attempted to set up colonies in Liongeli. Isolated communities where they could hold to their utopian ideals without interference. I often come across their bones and relics when I lead hunters out this way.’
‘A lost colony of diggers, all the way out here? I have read of such finds in Concorzia, but never this far east. Well, old steamer, here’s another heresy for the High Table to chalk up against me.’ Amelia stared at the statue: no, the clothes were just wrong; they weren’t of the civil war period. Not royalist fancy or parliamentarian plain. The carving had to be older than six hundred years. She felt it in her bones. ‘I need a flake from that statue. I can try to date its weathering when I get back to Jackals.’
If the eight universities allowed her to. Jigger them, she could set up her own college with the size of the fee Quest was paying her.
Ironflanks pointed one of his four arms towards an opening in the jungle behind the statue-topped obelisk, a doorway of crushed trees. ‘That’s the trail to the freshwater spring. Neropods drink from it too.’ He noticed the look on Amelia’s face. ‘Plant eaters, my little softbody friend. They’ll crush you if you try to bring one of their pod down, but if you ignore them they’ll leave you unmolested.’
Amelia glanced along the deck. Veryann’s mercenaries were assembling an iron raft to shuttle them to the shore, a small rotary paddle on the rear powered by a steam engine. They had swapped their carbines for long bulky rifles, each tipped by a bolt resembling the sharp petals of a steel flower. Hanging off their unnaturally drug-swollen shoulders were heavy quivers of replacement bolts.
Ironflanks saw Amelia peering at the odd-looking rifles. ‘Abraham Quest’s ingenuity runs to more than hiring my services as your guide, it seems. The commander claims their weapons are designed to break the scales of a thunder lizard, penetrate the flesh and rotate inside their organs, inflicting maximum damage.’
‘Have they ever been tested?’
‘Not by Liongeli,’ snorted Ironflanks. ‘I sense the symmetry of your transaction engines in their modelling.’
Amelia shrugged off the disdain in the steamman’s tone. ‘Are our transaction engines so different from the minds of the Steammen Free State?’
‘One third of my contempt is reserved for the slow-turning drums of your softbody calculating machines,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I reserve the remaining two parts for your people’s understanding of the jungle and its life. This place is an organism, a system. You cannot model its complexity from the bones of thunder lizards glued back together in Middlesteel Museum, you cannot understand its language by leafing through tomes of flora and fauna pulled from the shelves of your Royal Society. Even our river is alive. You could boil it nine times over and when you drank from it after the tenth time, the fevers would claim your life in a single night.’
He let out a strange hoot and from inside the canopy came a reply annoyed at being disturbed, louder and fiercer. ‘That is the language of this place.’ He patted the cannon-sized firearm hanging from his shoulder. ‘And this is my translator. If you wish to hear the jungle’s whispers, come with me to the spring. You think this statue is a curiosity to behold? You’ll love the relics inland.’
Amelia cursed the steamman under her breath. It seemed it was not just the language of this green hell he wa
s fluent in. He knew well enough which levers he needed to press inside her.
It took eight sailors from the Sprite to pull the cart – a flatbed with eight empty barrels for wheels – through the passage and towards Ironflanks’ freshwater spring. On the way back it would be slower going due to the gallons of drinking water they would be carrying. Led by Bull Kammerlan, the sailors had the burden of their tridents and capacitor packs to contend with as well. Ironflanks had argued against the unnecessary weight, claiming the wild energy would as like annoy the larger of the thunder lizards as bring them down, but the convict crewmen could not be dissuaded. Of the Catosians’ strange rifles, the steamman made no further comment. Picking her way over the trail of crushed vines and ferns, Amelia found it hard to ignore the assault of smells that accompan ied their passage. From rotting vegetation at the ground level, to plants as tall as their Catosian escorts, still dripping from a recent rain and emitting honey-like scents to attract insects for food. Liongeli was alive with a vibrancy of colour and life that was jarringly different from the bleak moors and dark oak forests of Jackals.
Amelia looked at Bull sweating under the weight of his brass capacitor pack and he noticed the disdain on her face. ‘You needn’t get sniffy about these, girl. They kept the feral shells off your hide long enough for the Sprite to slip away from Rapalaw Junction.’
‘It’s wild energy.’
‘And that’s what I like about it. You’re as careful as that old grandmother Black – or should I use the commodore’s real name?’
‘Not unless you want everyone to use yours, you damn fool,’ said Amelia.
‘You know who he really is, as do I. Most of the men on the Sprite served with the royalist fleet in exile and these—’ Bull indicated the line of Catosians—‘these bloody foreigners don’t give a hoot about Jackals or anything else other than their beloved patron Abraham Quest. As for old Blacky, he won’t mind if anyone out here speaks of him as Solomon Dark. He was a duke in the fleet, and me just a lowly baron’s son. He likes to lord it up, doesn’t he, the big man on his big boat, not that our titles meant much when Jackals’ airships came calling for us.’