by Stephen Hunt
‘Steammen,’ said the commodore. ‘By my stars, they’re steammen.’
‘No,’ said Ironflanks, recovering his higher functions, ‘they’re not.’
It was the first time any of them had heard a citizen of the Steammen Free State sob.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Damson Beeton waddled down the front garden of Dolorous Hall, whistling and happy to be up with the larks. Red fingers of sunrise fringed the skyline behind the capital’s pneumatic towers, most of the city’s mills silent, not yet throwing the dark miasma of commerce into the air. The barge from Gattie and Pierce was pulling towards the isle’s landing, using its single sail to keep down the cost of gas for the boat’s expansion engine.
So much easier to get a start on the day’s tasks this early in the morning. Cornelius and Septimoth were both pretending to be asleep, when in reality they were on the riverbed level of the isle, rattling around the old museum, planning their next move in the great game they had been sucked into within Jackals. All in all, Damson Beeton preferred it when they were causing their mischief across the border in Quatérshift. She had more time to herself, then. Not to mention lighter duties and the run of the place when empty.
‘Morning, damson,’ called the delivery boy at the prow. ‘Two boxes for you today, right? And a quart of milk in the jug.’
‘Fresh, I hope, young man,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Where’s Master Jerry Cruncher today?’
‘Called in sick,’ said the delivery boy. The barge bumped gently into the landing and the boy started tying up.
She looked at the man on the rudder and the two bargemen tackling the sail. ‘Not night-fog chest again, poor lad?’
‘Beer-night head is more like it, I reckon,’ laughed the delivery boy, stepping onto the isle with two crates balanced under his arms.
‘Empty boxes are over there,’ said Damson Beeton. As the boy looked towards the end of the pier, the housekeeper reached out and snapped the lad’s nose bone back through his brain case. Instant death. ‘The correct counter phrase was “that night-fog is the devil,” young man.’
The three assassins abandoned their pretence as the crew of the delivery barge. They were reaching for secreted weapons, fingers wrapping around pistol butts and marlinspikes, when Damson Beeton stepped across the gap with a grace that belied her near seventy years. Targeting the fastest of the bargemen she kicked the pistol he had managed to draw out into the river, then cart-wheeled past, placing a needle kick just above his heart on the way towards his two friends. Just as he was wondering why his heart was no longer beating, the old woman’s hand chopped out, breaking the heavy marlinspike in his other hand in two, converting her motion to embed a foot in one of the remaining two killers’ guts. The last one standing punched out towards where her throat should have been. He was quick. And trained. A style that marked him as a topper, one of the elite cadres of assassins that floated around the capital’s orbit.
She seized the two halves of the marlinspike as they fell and slammed them against his eardrums, then swivelled as his winded companion launched himself at her side. Oh, they were good. A normal man would have been left rolling on the floor of the boat, clutching his sides as the internal bleeding left him incapacitated. This one just came back for more. Luckily, she had more to give. She used his own momentum to break his spine against the sail, then gave mister no-hearing a little something to take his mind off the pain in his ears, seemingly brushing his knee with the tip of her boot. It was enough to collapse him down towards the barge’s seat, where she pulled the hidden garrotte wire out of the sleeve of his river-man’s jacket and twisted it around his neck, tightening it until he turned purple.
‘Who do you work for, dearie?’
He gargled something unintelligible and she placed a boot on the seat of his trousers for extra purchase. ‘Come on now, young man. You know enough to turn off the pain centre to your ears. Give me my answer.’
‘Here’s your answer,’ said a voice behind her, as the dart buried itself in her back.
Damson Beeton just had time to turn to see the squat conning tower of the small river submersible rising on the other side of the pier, behind the figures in diving rubbers. One of the divers pulled off her mask, giving the unconscious housekeeper a prod with her boot.
‘She was expecting someone else.’
‘Obviously,’ said the second diver, replying in fluent Catosian.
‘You didn’t say anything about this,’ moaned the sole survivor in the barge, untangling the strangle cord from his neck. ‘She was fighting in witch-time. She could have killed us all.’
‘Yours is a risky profession,’ was all that the diver on the pier had to say. Then to her comrade, ‘Check her empty crates for hidden signals. She was expecting a courier exchange.’
‘You are aware of what she is?’ asked the other diver. Behind them, their submarine was discharging a row of soldiers in heavy padded uniforms onto the isle.
‘Yes, but ours is also a risky profession.’
A lone man stepped out onto the pier, flanked by female soldiers. The only sign of his identity were the scars on his forehead where the purple flower tattoos of a worldsinger had been badly removed. The dive commander looked at the ex-worldsinger with distaste. Anyone willing to sell out his allegiance to his own people was not to be trusted. A necessary evil.
‘How many left?’ she asked.
‘Just two that I can sense,’ said the turncoat sorcerer. ‘A lashlite and a man. The man’s body is not normal. I have felt nothing like him before.’
‘Interesting. It appears like the Catgibbon was telling the truth about him, then. You are sure there are only two more?’ She looked up at Dolorous Hall. ‘In a place this size?’
‘That is what I sense. But they’re not up in the house. They’re below the water: the island extends out onto the riverbed.’
‘Clever,’ said the diver. ‘They obviously value their privacy, but I wonder how good the seals on their construction are?’
‘We need them alive,’ said the other raider.
‘If their maid of all works here is anything to go by, I think we shall settle for alive and wet.’
Cornelius was looking at the county map for Ruxley Waters when Septimoth’s head swivelled. His hunter’s sense had detected the first crack of the glass above them, but Cornelius did not need to be a lashlite to hear what followed. A wall of water burst through the shattering glass, landing on their stolen transaction engine then smashing over statues of royalty long dead and curiosities milled hundreds of years before. The old Middlesteel Museum was rejoining the other submerged buildings beneath the Gambleflowers as a breeding room for river crabs and eels. The two of them scrambled for the corridor leading to the isle’s concealed lifting room, trying to keep on their feet as waves of water fountained past their legs, rising higher with each second.
‘The crystal can’t have cracked,’ shouted Cornelius, evading a man-sized vase flowing past with the force of a battering ram. ‘I designed it with sandwich layers to withstand five times the weight above us.’
‘Your calculations seem to be a little at fault,’ said Septimoth. One of the glass skylights in a side hall gave way and a second wave rode in with tidal force, sending both of them sprawling towards the rear of the museum. Behind them another wave of the Gambleflowers loosed its way across the museum. Buffeted in the crosscurrents, Septimoth spun away to slam into a wall, the press of water dislodging a display of swords on top of him, large cutlass-style affairs with clockwork driven rotating teeth raining down. Cornelius could tell his friend was unconscious by the way his wings unfolded limply out, a leathery stingray spiralling around on top of the water pouring in. Cornelius ejected the gutta-percha breathing tube from his artificial arm, biting down on the mouthpiece, then swam out towards the lashlite, each second pushing him higher towards the ceiling of the hall. Would the lifting room work with this amount of water in its mechanism, even if he could reach it now? He doubted it.<
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Cornelius grabbed his friend and pulled him close. Septimoth was oddly buoyant. Of course! The lashlite’s nostrils had closed, the two air humps on his back filled and sealed. In unconsciousness his body had triggered his high flight reflex, a useful gift of nature when hunting skraypers in the airless upper atmosphere – higher even than RAN aerostats could climb. If Cornelius could swim them both to the surface they wouldn’t drown. With only a foot of air left in the flooding chamber, Cornelius dragged them both down. It was devilish hard work with his lashlite friend inflated like a puffer fish, and Cornelius had to use the wall to pull them towards the shattered skylight. Kicking out the remaining shards of crystal so they were not eviscerated escaping the museum hall, Cornelius launched them out, using Septimoth as a buoy to lift them towards the surface. There was just enough light this deep underneath the Gambleflowers to see the remains of the flooded quarter of Middlesteel, slimy black buildings that had once been shops and homes, fish swimming out of broken windows while river crabs scuttled across gaping doorways. Cornelius tried to hold Septimoth back as they rose to the surface. He was uncertain about lashlite physiology, but he had heard enough tales in the submarine sailors’ taverns along the waterway to be wary of the bends should they ascend too fast.
Something was wrong, he could feel it. Then they appeared. Two figures swimming out from behind the spire of a Circlist chapel, the spear guns in their hands the same golden colour as their dolphin skull-moulded helmets. Now Cornelius had sighted them, he didn’t even need to look behind him to confirm the presence of the others rising up from concealed positions around the roof of the submerged museum. The warning shot of a spear powering closely past his chest was largely unnecessary. He and his winged friend were surrounded, and even if he could make a break for it without being pin-cushioned with spearheads, he would not abandon Septimoth. One of the underwater ambushers pointed to the two of them and then gestured to the dark hull of a small river submersible sinking down behind the spire.
Cornelius lacked the free air to sigh. He let himself be led to the submarine. A prisoner.
Most of the Daggish that had captured Amelia looked like walking cacti. Except that cacti did not have a single cyclopslike eye slit and their hard bark-like skin was not covered in a fuzz of foul-smelling green moss. But it was not these walking plant-animal hybrids that disturbed Amelia – not their rotting-plant smell, nor the dagger-sharp spines that they liberally applied at the first sign of disobedience among their prisoners; not even their disconcerting habit of suddenly stopping still and emitting chattering clicks at each other as if their minds were infected by crickets. It was the things they had with them that unsettled Amelia. Shambling sleekclaws that were allowed enough of their original minds to lope off as scouts, their beautiful coats veined green and putrid. Moss-covered gorillas that would stare with inhuman intelligence at the Sprite’s crew, before lumbering off with their backs bent by baskets filled with ripped-out instrumentation from the u-boat. While the Sprite of the Lake was being towed by two long seed ships into the heart of the Daggish realm, the crew were kept split up, locked in random rooms in the submersible, giant plant-soldiers standing sentry outside.
Once during the trip, Amelia had been removed from the old supply room where she was confined alone and taken across to the nearest of the seed ships. They had shoved her in a room with a table-like globule extruded from the floor, covered with the logs, maps and crystal-book copies she had taken on the expedition. One of the room’s walls had a strange sheen and she knew the Daggish were watching her from the other side, even though she could not see them. Theirs was an intelligence so different from the race of man’s that she could not begin to imagine what they expected her to do. How had they guessed her position in the expedition? Did they presume that as one of the few females in their hands she must be some kind of matriarch? None of these creatures appeared either able or inclined to communicate with her in any tongue she understood. Perhaps they had taken one of the crewmen and absorbed him into their slime-drenched cooperative, stripping his thoughts as casually as she peeled the bananas Ironflanks used to bring back from the jungle? Terrifyingly, that was the most likely option. Amelia flipped open the notebooks and studied them for signs of damage. The copied crystal-books seemed intact, but without reader machinery they were only good for bookends.
After half an hour of fiddling with the material that had been left out, the hidden watchers seemed satisfied and two Daggish guards opened a bone-like iris into the room and silently carried her away, careless of how easily their spines cut her dirty uniform. Off the ugly living craft – as much a part of their cooperative as the twisted animal servants and intelligent plants – and back into the reassuringly man-made corridors of the Sprite, all plates, pipes and rivets after the pulsing, throbbing curves of the seed ship. As Amelia was being taken back to her makeshift cell, she crossed paths with a group of sailors being moved by a larger escort. When the crewmen saw Amelia they began to hurl abuse at her, ignoring the spined Daggish arms smashing them back, chains rattling as they were knocked down, screaming like banshees at her.
‘Jonah!’
‘Bitch!’
‘Killed us all!’
Then she was shoved into the solitude of the storeroom. Isolation she was glad of, now she had been reminded she was not the only passenger on the ghost ship the Sprite had become. With the cries of hate still echoing in her mind, she remembered a conversation she had had with her father many years ago, when she had asked why so many of Jackals’ neighbours seemed ready to invade, held back only by the ingenious floating navy of the RAN – their famous wall of cloth. In answer, he had not explained about the politics of envy, or that outside the checks and balances of Isambard Kirkhill’s perfect democracy, the point of power was simply the accumulation of more power. He had not explained that the Jackelians’ insular, contented nature was mistaken for decadence and weakness by kings, caliphs and warlords. He had not explained how ridiculous the rituals of the House of Guardians, the games of four-poles on the village green, or the shopkeepers pottering around their rose beds, trowels in hand, looked from the shores of rulers used to being able to stretch dissenters on racks. Rulers who would mangle the bodies of opposing voices in the scented torture gardens of the south, or shove them into the steam-driven killing rooms of the east. All these things he had expected her to have already learnt. His answer was far simpler. ‘Amelia, they don’t like us and we don’t care.’
She sat down and laid her back against the bulkhead, the tears streaming down her face. Was it the failure of the expedition; the memory of the father that had meant so much to her; the loathing of the crew for the Jonah that had brought certain death down on their heads; the loss of her friends, cast away to die in the jungle – probably dead now? Had chasing her dream wrought all this? Perhaps the superstitious sailors were correct. She was a Jonah. Her personal life had been cursed, her professional life ruined. She was akin to a leper in academia, a joke told at luncheons in the university refectories. Whatever happened to Professor Harsh? Why don’t you know, dear fellow? Rumour has it she slipped into Liongeli on some mad expedition and died there, rambling through the jungle when her food and water ran out. Never heard from again.
Amelia buried her head in her hands. She should have listened to the advice of that insane witch in the dunes back in Cassarabia. The true kindness would have been to let the sands of Cassarabia suck the marrow from your bones. But wasn’t it better to die trying to follow a dream, rather than experience the death of a million cuts she would have endured back in Middlesteel? Slowly suffocated by the cant and ritual of academia, the way things had always been. The received wisdom. She drifted into sleep and the worries, fears and regrets swirled around her, keeping her tossing on the hard metal floor.
Amelia was back in Jackals, in the grand old house along Mouse Place that had been sold off after her father’s suicide. But the great financial crash hadn’t happened yet. Had she imagined her fa
mily’s fall? She was reading in the library when her father entered. She felt an enormous wave of gratitude to see him, such happiness. But he hadn’t died yet, so why should she feel such joy?
‘Amelia,’ he said. ‘What have you done to your arms? They look like they belong on a butcher, not a professor with letters after her name.’
‘I needed to be strong, father.’ Should she tell him about the dig in the foothills of Kikkosico, where she had nearly died at the hands of the bandits; when she vowed she would never let herself be captured like that again? No, it would just worry him. ‘I can lift a horse with these. It wasn’t womb magic that changed them, I went to a worldsinger here in Jackals, used the power of the earth.’
‘It’s a thin difference,’ said her father, the disapproval evident in his voice. ‘We should move along the Circle as we were born to it. We are not Catosians to fill ourselves with the herb of shine, or Cassarabians to curse our children’s line with the mutations of womb magic.’
‘It’s something I had to do,’ said Amelia.
‘So it seems.’
‘For the dream,’ said Amelia. ‘To find Camlantis.’
‘I rather think this is the dream,’ said her father, indicating the house at Mouse Place.
‘Please be real,’ begged Amelia.
‘I cannot.’
‘Are you a ghost now? You told me they exist.’
‘Not all of us moves along the Circle,’ said her father. ‘Some of our pattern is left imprinted on the one sea of consciousness, the universal soul, before we are drawn back into the realm of the many and the fragmented.’