by Stephen Hunt
‘I’ve seen her notes, too,’ said Bull, ‘and if you’re a Camlantean, then I’m the God-emperor of Kikkosico.’
One of the Daggish shot a spine into Bull’s leg and the slaver yelled, squirming about on the floor before yanking the spine out of his flesh.
‘If you had read all of my notes,’ hissed Amelia at Bull as she helped him to his feet, ‘then you would know that one of the reasons we have so little from the Camlantean age is that their tools were living things, a more advanced form of the same twisting of nature the caliph practises in Cassarabia.’ She tipped her head at the Daggish. ‘What do you think happened to all their engineering when the Camlantean gardeners that carefully tended it blasted their civilization into the heavens?’
Bull gazed at their massive jailors, the strange lines of the organic machinery. ‘I saw an abandoned village on the banks of the Shedarkshe once, plague, everyone dead and the craynarbians’ hunting hounds gone feral.’
She looked across the dais. ‘Imagine that village many thousands of years later.’
‘Damn, but the tree monkeys are running the jinn house,’ said Bull. He scratched at his unkempt hair and chased out a couple of flies that had survived the chemical dip. The Daggish emperor twitched in agony at the sight of the flies and one of the guards came running forward. Amelia thought that the creature was going to burn them to the ground, but his sack-pipe weapon discharged a jet of the delousing substance towards their heads, its foul-smelling stream madly stinging her eyes.
As she rubbed away the burning liquid, the translator creature shuddered violently in front of them. ‘Not pure – not pure. Filthy unclean thieves with their filthy crawling parasites.’
‘You’re the jigging impurity, here, Tree-head Joe!’ Bull yelled, giving the Daggish ruler the inverted ‘V’ of the Lion of Jackals with two of his fingers. ‘You’re nothing but a rotting hulk of talking wood decomposing in the heart of this rotting jungle.’
The misshapen translator creature announced his meaning to the chamber and behind Bull the troll-sized throne guards went into apoplexy at his abuse towards their ruler, smashing him to the ground and raising cudgels not much shorter than the slaver himself to finish the job of beating him to death. They only held off when Amelia leapt between them and the man they were about to murder.
‘You need him alive. You need us alive for something. All that trouble you went to separating us out on the u-boat, feeding us …’
The throne guards hesitated as the pig-like creature translated her words into the drumming language of the Daggish, reluctantly moving back as the fronds of the emperor wavered across in silent command. ‘Your place is to obey, not to criticize,’ piped the translator. ‘If you forget your position again the stain that is your existence will be scoured from the purity.’
Bull was stunned by the quickness of the assault and Amelia had to pull him back to his feet. He glowered resentfully in the direction of the Daggish emperor. ‘Touchy beggar, isn’t he?’
‘Hold your tongue,’ hissed Amelia, ‘or you’re going to get us both killed here.’
Bull spat a gob of blood from his swollen mouth onto the floor in defiance of their captors. ‘You saved my life, Guardian’s girl.’
‘That was just a temporary lapse of judgement, I assure you.’
Spined arms forced Amelia and Bull towards the side of the dome and a section of the smooth wall fell away, revealing a low chamber, sailors and marines from the Sprite lying in a field of wavering fronds, hair-thin green roots undulating snake-like into the ears, mouths and nostrils of the comatose crew. Amelia had to choke back her own vomit at the sight of Veryann’s fighters and Bull’s sailors crawling with the living filth of the greenmesh, over a hundred of them resting zombie-like under the wan emerald light while their bodies were erased of every last vestige of their humanity.
‘You should be cleansed,’ barked the translation creature, its monstrously oversized human lips dribbling with saliva. ‘You should be made uncontaminated within the purity. But there is the need, the need …’
The ring of Daggish guards and drones shoved them back in front of the dais.
‘If you’re going to fill my mind with your moss, you decaying cabbage, get on with it,’ Bull demanded. ‘Because you’re bloody boring me, and I hate being bored.’
‘You fear the purity,’ trilled the pig-like beast on behalf of its owner. ‘You value your insignificant life span, barely longer than those of the parasites you harbour.’
‘Do not all things?’ asked Amelia.
‘Then you shall do as you are bid, as you value your exclusion from the purity,’ instructed the translator. ‘You were correct in your appraisal of the purity’s temporary need for your services. You shall take your construct for navigating the lake of deep waters and undertake a sacred duty for the purity. In the event of your success, the purity shall consider your exclusion from the perfection of form you fear.’
‘The bathysphere?’ said Amelia. ‘You are talking about taking our bathysphere down to the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’
‘Jigger your archaeology. The thing I care about is the bit about our exclusion from the “perfection” of this bark-faced monarch of the jungle.’ Bull waved a fist at their captors. ‘What about my bloody crew?’
‘Your thieves are already complete within the purity,’ warbled the translator.
‘Twenty years we survived,’ sobbed Bull. ‘Twenty years after the destruction of Porto Principe – we survived Liongeli, survived being hunted by the RAN and Jackals’ men-o’-war, survived trading with those treacherous double-crossing jiggers down in Cassarabia. What did we survive for? This!’
‘They survive still,’ said the translator, ‘within the purity. They survive evolved and clean and whole.’ The hog-like creature waddled up to Amelia. ‘Observe the crown.’
On the dais one of the Daggish emperor’s ape servants pulled off its crown from the ridge of bark and held it aloft.
‘It is from the Camlantean age,’ said Amelia. ‘Ancient.’
‘There is another like it, underneath the deep waters outside our nest,’ said the translator. ‘Recover it, return it to the purity.’
Amelia frowned. But that made no sense. Why would this entity not fill hers and Bull’s skulls with the green filth that the rest of the crew had been exposed to? Why would this callous intelligence not wish to control their explorations of the lake bed, make them puppets of meat within its hive mind? If it knew what it was looking for, what use had it for the free intellect of a Jackelian academic and the treacherous impulses of Bull Kammerlan?
‘I have questions,’ said Amelia.
‘Your compliance shall serve the purity better than your inferior intellect,’ warned the translator. A wave of clicks swept the dome, the Daggish drones signalling their agreement, or perhaps their impatience with the two outsiders.
‘You shall be provided with the coordinates of the probable location of the crown. Retrieve it, salvage it for the purity as you value the brutish, brief flicker of your life span.’
Amelia exchanged glances with her companion in this predicament, the man she would least trust to watch her back now that Abraham Quest had been supplanted as the patron of their expedition and traded for an inhuman emperor with chlorophyll for emotions. Whatever the reasoning for sending them into the lake rather than risking its drones, Amelia was fairly certain the welfare of two prisoners factored fairly small into the equation, if at all. And despite the emperor’s hollow-sounding promises, Amelia was also fairly certain that their fate, once they had dredged the lake bed and located the missing crown, was not going to involve a fond farewell from the Daggish nest as she and Bull sailed off down the Shedarkshe back to Jackals.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fumes from the liquid below – a dark oil that steamed and bubbled up from the well – kept the commodore coughing and cursing his fate as the others clutched onto the bars of their cage, trying not to make the box swing on the end of i
ts precarious cable. It would not do to hit any of the other cages lowered into the pit on tethers. Not that the other occupants would mind. Whether as a warning, or simply out of pure neglect, their nearest neighbours hanging over the oily well were the carapaces of three craynarbian warriors, flesh long since rotted away through starvation. The smallest of the craynarbians had the sword arm of one of its fellows piercing its thorax, testament to how they had turned to cannibalism in their last desperate days.
‘I shall never complain about the wicked fogs of a Middlesteel peculiar again,’ said the commodore, ‘not if I have to walk through the mills of Workbarrows on a hot summer’s day without a linen mask, then swear in front of a magistrate that the air there is as sweet as the scent of the lilies along the hills of the western downs.’
‘I think the chance of you ever standing in front of a magistrate in Middlesteel are looking distinctly slim right now,’ said Gabriel McCabe, staring at the corpses in the other cages.
‘We know very little of our captors’ motives,’ Billy Snow pointed out. ‘Although I think we can presume they are not benevolently disposed towards us.’
‘Damn feral steammen,’ said T’ricola. ‘I wish Ironflanks hadn’t been taken away. He might have had a few answers for us.’
‘They are not steammen,’ said Billy Snow. ‘I can hear the difference in how they move. Steammen have an honest clunk about their walk; those things that captured us move like panthers in armour, they’re light on their feet, almost organic.’
‘It’s answer enough for me that they dragged Ironflanks away whistling in terror,’ said the commodore. ‘The old steamer recognized those monsters. He’s had prior dealings with them for sure.’
‘Our captors are the beasts that slaughtered the survivors of the airship crash we found,’ said Veryann. ‘Ironflanks intimated in the jungle that the masters of this territory are the architects of the gas wall the Sprite encountered. You do not have to smell the rot from the other cages to know that this metal tribe are a hostile and formidable force.’
The commodore clutched a handkerchief to his nose. ‘Ah, Coppertracks, my fine old friend, I should have listened to you back in Jackals. He said there were dark things in Liongeli that he would not speak of and fool that I am I ignored his mortal advice – left the comforts of Tock House and plunged into this green hell blinded by the inducements of the great Abraham Quest.’
‘He offered you what you wanted,’ said Veryann. ‘He offered all of you what you wanted. For you, Jared Black, a chance to get the Sprite back, for your officers a chance to serve on a seadrinker vessel again when no other master would take them onto their pay list.’
‘And what did he offer you?’ T’ricola asked Veryann.
‘My honour and my life,’ said Veryann. ‘For the soldiers of a free company the two are indivisible.’
‘There we are then,’ said the commodore. ‘We’ve all got what we wanted, fine and sure now. For Ironflanks his chest of silver Jackelian guineas he will never spend, for me a beautiful boat that has been stolen away by my scheming nephew, and for you, your warrior’s death at the hands of some feral steamers.’
‘I do not welcome death,’ said Veryann. ‘But I do not fear it.’
The commodore took off his jacket, his shirt covered in sweat from the heat of the pit below. ‘Noble words, lass, but it’ll break old Blacky’s heart to see your golden head dangling like a shrunken apple on the necklace of the terrible beasts that have taken us.’
There was a jolt on the cage and it began to be lifted out of the steam of the bubbling black oil, raised high on its joist. As they cleared the wall of petrol mist they saw the village of their captors stretched out below, geodesic domes in the same style as the encampments the steammen knights set up when on campaign, covered by creepers and jungle bush. It had been raining an hour before, a deluge that had left puddles in the mud, each pool broiling now with the return of the febrile heat. When the arm holding them swung across to the ground, they had a brief glimpse of a second pit next to theirs, deeper, but not filled with oil. The head of Queen Three-eyes turned towards their cage, a brief look of recognition in her eyes as she caught the scent of her fellow prisoners, followed by disappointment that her mortal enemy Ironflanks did not count among their number. She may have been free of the bubble-like substance that had trapped her, but the queen of Liongeli was as much a prisoner as the officers from the Sprite.
On the ground a small party of natives waited for them, their metal bodies filed down, sharp razors visible on any hull-part not covered by animal furs and shell armour scalped from craynarbian tribesmen. All but one of their reception committee were hulking things, steel gorillas that hissed steam from outlets along their armour while they waited. The odd tribesman out was a quarter of his companions’ size. He wore a cheetah cape and a segmented metal tail swung behind him as he capered to and fro, poking at the air with a rusty iron staff topped with an eagle sculpture. Dirty water leaked across the cage floor as the box thumped down, one of the tribe inserting his hand in the door lock – interfacing with the cage and springing their door open. The commodore looked on with interest. He knew a thing or two about locks, and the primitive appearance of their captors belied the sophistication of the cage the expedition members had been held in. These tribesmen might look like feral skull hunters, but there were few properties back in Middlesteel that had such well-protected doors.
‘What have you done with our scout?’ Veryann demanded as she stepped out. ‘Why have you separated Ironflanks from our company?’
The small steamman danced in amusement. ‘Ironflanks is an old friend and now he is an uneasy rider.’
‘Uneasy rider? Are you talking about the Steamo Loas, is Ironflanks being ridden by one of your blessed spirits?’ said the commodore, shuddering. The steamman gods had always made him nervous. Ever since one of the Loas had ridden Coppertracks and his warrior mu-bodies on the Isla Needless, driving off an attack of the rock-like creatures that bided there. The steammen gods were fickle things and numerous – you could never tell which of them might come calling when invited in during the Gear-gi-ju rituals.
The commodore’s question seemed to tickle the little metal creature, steam shrieking out of his stacks. ‘Once a Loa, once a Loa, you fat hairless monkey.’
There were no more half-answers forthcoming and the exped ition officers were led into a passage deep into the jungle covered by steel netting over arched girders – the rib bones of a mechanical whale holding out the press of the forest. Billy Snow had been right, there was something animal-like about these things. They had a strutting gait quite unlike that of the calm, meticulous steammen found back in Middlesteel. Their path through the jungle led them to a rocky hillock, a crumbling temple carved into the rock face. Whoever the original architect of the construction might have been, their artifice had been chiselled over and carved out with new statues and bas-reliefs – crudely done, but obviously remade into the form of steammen.
‘I thought your people lacked an eye for art,’ muttered the commodore.
‘Not to be confusing us with the people of the metal in your monkey land,’ said the guide. ‘We follow the true path of Lord Two-Tar.’
‘And I’m sure a fine path it is too,’ said the commodore. ‘But how about you let us leave now, rather than be bothering about a miserable small band of travellers just making their honest way through Liongeli?’
‘But you are our guests,’ giggled the little creature. ‘We have a duty to entertain you. Or is it the other way around? It is so easy to be confused.’
Inside, the temple corridors were lit – barely – by jagged green crystals wired to chemical batteries in braziers, the steam and fizz of wild energy lost as the sound of drums grew louder. The officers were jabbed forward into a wide shadowed chamber under the centre of the hill, straight into the middle of a frenzied celebration – creatures of the metal ducking and turning in front of a pit filled with red molten coals. Many of the wild
steammen had worked themselves into a manic frenzy and were detaching limbs – arms, legs, vision plates, voiceboxes – and fixing them on a spiked totem pole, then grabbing other pieces of assembly and pressing their new components into the burning coals before thrusting them into their empty sockets and continuing their dance. As a result of this insane limb-trading some of the tribesmen were loping on arm pincers or swinging legs from their shoulder sockets.
The expedition members found themselves in front of a pool containing the same black oil that had filled the prison pit. A steamman luxuriated on his back – almost corpulent in his design, a massive belly slick with oil, round lines broken by a brush of golden metal curls running down the side of his frog-like mask of a face.
Raising a goblet spilling with oil, the bathing steamman seemed to toast them. ‘So, these are the hairless monkeys that were on Queen Three-eyes’ supper menu? Mark me, they hardly look fit to be an appetizer for the thunder lizard.’
‘And don’t think we are not grateful to you for rescuing us,’ said the commodore. ‘You can have the thanks of old Blacky before we continue on our way in peace.’
‘Silence!’ The guards struck their prisoners with their needle-lined fists. ‘You do not address Prince Doublemetal without his permission.’
‘Well. Perhaps this fat ape might give Queen Three-eyes a few mouthfuls before he is made deactivate,’ mused the corpulent steamman. ‘Though in truth, I grow weary of what sport there is in seeing thunder lizards rip apart softbodies. It is all over so quickly. What do you think of that, fat little monkey, do you think that you might run fast enough to last more than a few seconds in the pit?’
‘I’m a great one for running,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve something of a royal title myself and it’s made me a mite unpopular back in Jackals, although I have found the steammen back home to be a little more forgiving in that regard than the race of man.’