by Stephen Hunt
Waving her pistol, the centurion fell back through an archway into an arcade of what might once have been shops. Striding out of a lifting room at the centre of the arcade came Veryann.
‘First!’
‘What is your disposition, centurion?’
‘Casualties are running at half our strength and the only aerial support left effective now is the Leviathan, but those winged jiggers have jammed her mooring lock on the spire. She’s stuck fast and running thick with lizards. Boarding parties are being repelled on every deck.’
‘And your orders?’ asked Veryann.
‘Stand and hold, First.’
Veryann reached out to steady her officer. ‘We are Catosians. That is what we do. We stand and we hold.’
‘One of the airship people told me they thought they saw you blade-to-blade with that fat u-boat skipper.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Veryann. ‘The commodore. That peacock always did like to boast about his prodigious talent at the game of tickle-my-sabre.’
‘The actuality fell short?’
‘He was proficient enough in sword-work for someone who has never drilled as free company. But I don’t think the outcome was ever in doubt.’
The centurion pointed outside the arcade, her troops taking positions around the entrance. ‘We received word from a runner a few minutes ago. Abraham Quest has asked for your presence at the tomb to command its final defence.’
‘So, it has come to that, then?’ sighed Veryann.
The officer saluted. ‘We shall hold the lashlites off to our last.’
‘Carry home victory,’ said Veryann, using the traditional Catosian farewell, ‘or carry my body home on my shield.’
The officer watched her head for the tomb. It was only after Veryann had left that the soldier realized what had been nagging at the back of her mind while they had been talking. Veryann had been clutching her left arm to her gut, as if it had been wounded. Or as if she hadn’t wanted anyone else to get a good look at it.
While the sewers of Camlantis had the advantage of having been free of night soil for many thousands of years, it appeared there were disadvantages too – the eerie hissing of something in the pipes above them following Amelia, Damson Beeton and Ironflanks as they travelled down the tunnels.
‘You buried your dark engine down here?’ said Amelia. ‘You were hoping the smell would hold off your rivals in the civil war?’
‘The same as Middlesteel,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘Nobody wants to venture down into the lower levels of the city.’
‘I sense movement in the tunnels behind us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Many small things moving.’
They broke into a run, Amelia letting Billy’s lurking presence in her mind guide her. ‘You managed to assemble your dark engine down here before.’
‘Sadly, I noticed your witch-blade locked up back on the Leviathan,’ said Ironflanks.
The hissing in the pipes above them grew louder.
‘I like primitive, ducky,’ said Damson Beeton, looking up towards whatever was scraping after them overhead, matching their speed exactly. ‘I can always use primitive.’
A plug in the floor of the tunnel ahead suddenly levered open. Two matt-black bodies emerged, glistening above spider-like feet, scorpion tails dangling with tunnel-scouring disks that had mutated into rotating razors.
Amelia heeded the advice given silently in her skull by the Camlantean and swivelled around to make for a side-tunnel, only to see a pack of pallid worms the size of tree trunks sliding out, forked tongues greedily tasting the air. The worms were hunting together with the bugs in front of them. Just like the damn Daggish hive.
‘There,’ pointed Damson Beeton. A series of footholds in the wall led up to a narrow walkway on a second level of the tunnel. Amelia scurried up, following the old lady’s ankles, Ironflanks climbing after her backwards using his two manipulator arms while his pair of war arms swung their weight into one of the massive worms rearing up after them.
They sprinted along the walkway, the mutants below marking their flight, hissing and drumming their limbs on the floor. Calling for more of their kind to come and consume the filth that had invaded their realm. Amelia found a service door and slapped her hand on the keypad, whispering a frantic meditation to the Circle that it would prove as functional as the sewer cleaners trying to scour the three of them away. There was a faint buzzing as the lock mechanism recognized her blood, but then the door smashed open from the other side, the worldsinger who had been pushing on it tumbling forward, off the walkway and into the claws of the monsters below, leaving the three of them standing nose to nose with a stunned line of Catosian soldiers and Robur.
The roar of a mighty steamman hull-opener firing into life cut short the split second of shock on both sides, leaving the three of them a fleeting panicked moment to try to close the door against the rush of soldiers.
* * *
‘There it is,’ cried one of the seers of the crimson feather, indicating the tomb below.
It had taken the lashlite flight longer than it should have to follow the broken leylines of the rendered land back to their source, so long had they lain dead after being ripped from the living grasp of mother Earth. But the Camlanteans had understood the secrets of earthflow only too well and, as expected, the terrible instrument of their final desperate solution lay at the centre of a web of them.
By the seer’s side, the war chief waved his baton down towards the building and a dozen flights of warriors hanging above him tilted their wings, diving onto the smoking rifles of the ground-hugging monkeys surrounding the tomb. As they dived, the roof of the tomb slowly began extruding a ring of white horns, a grille of dark holes opening along each of the horns’ length.
‘Too late,’ moaned the seer.
‘What are those things?’ asked the war chief.
‘That which has been foreseen in the Stalker Cave,’ said the seer. ‘The terrible chimneys of the dark wind which will scour our people from the nests of the world.’
‘I cannot hold them here forever,’ said Ironflanks, his voicebox trembling on full power.
It was a desperate contest of strength – the door wedged on one side by the knight steamman; his stacks burning red hot, as on the other side an entire company of Catosians pushed at the portal. Life metal versus the bull-women of the city-states.
Damson Beeton dropped to her knees, punching a fist through the armour of one the beetle things trying to pull itself up the wall’s handholds. Down below there was a feeding frenzy as the creatures chopped apart the corpse of the worldsinger who had tracked them down into the feral Camlantean maintenance levels.
said Billy Snow, using Amelia’s throat. He had to s
hout to be heard over the screeching din of the hull-opener coming from behind the half-closed door.
‘Go,’ called Damson Beeton. ‘Go. We shall keep them here.’
Amelia hesitated. Damson Beeton switched into witch-time, her arms and fists chopping down almost too fast to see at the horde of creatures trying to mount the walkway. There were few who got to observe an agent of the Court of the Air’s fighting tricks and lived to tell the tale. And unfortunately, it didn’t look like Amelia was going to be one of them.
‘Any time soon would be good, dearie,’ called the old woman.
Amelia fled along the narrow second-storey gantry – her escape feeling like betrayal even though it might be survival for the world. There was no time for farewells.
That would come soon enough, soon enough for all of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Court of the Air’s black sphere hung above the city, high enough that the army of lashlite warriors and their captured skraypers were sweeping through the heavens at a healthy distance below. The sphere was drifting over the sundered land, the Special Observer Corps with their portable scopes seeking to provide an adequate reconnaissance before feeding their findings back to the Court. The models of Jackelian society that turned on the vast drums of the Court’s transaction engines needed masses of accurate data to hold the nation true to the course laid down by the late, great Isambard Kirkhill.
‘There’s some good news,’ said the SOC surveillant from his bucket seat. ‘Our three missing airships are down there.’
Their mission commander wound his seat down from the pilot dome. ‘What’s the bad news, old stick?’
‘Well, I have to say, that would be just about everything else.’
A hatch opened and a head poked out from the heliograph operations room. ‘Analyst level back home have identified the style of architecture, but they pretty much had to go to the fiction shelf to do it.’ He passed up a stretch of tape that had been flashed across to the mission commander.
‘You’ve got to be bloody joking me,’ said the wolftaker reading the message. One Harold Stave. He looked down on the spires of Camlantis. ‘There’s a bit of classical history repeating down there, lads. But is it for the good or for the worse, that’s the question?’
And there was a more fundamental question that greater minds than his would be puzzling over, too. The three missing airships, property of the most glorious House of Guardians, made this their problem. Their location, far out over the Sepia Sea and well beyond the writ of Jackals, made it someone else’s.
Which viewpoint was going to prove stronger?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
At one end of the sewer chamber stood a row of sentient tree-trunks – something approximating faces in the bark gurning and leering at Amelia – their branch-like limbs wavering towards her in silent agony. They put her in mind of Tree-head Joe and the Daggish, bringing back memories of Bull Kammerlan’s offhand comments concerning the ruler of the greenmesh. For a rogue and a rascal with the scruples of a Gallowhill alley cat, the hole left by the u-boat privateer’s death ran deeper than it should have.
‘Keep your strength,’ said Amelia.
There! By the far wall. The dark engine she had seen in Billy’s memories, a large polygon of jet-black material, sucking down whatever small vestige of energy was still available through the glow tubes in the ceiling above. The device sat there, at least as tall as she was, distorting space itself. Tiny currents of matter rippled around the polygon. Looking at the abominable thing was like trying to stare through a wall of water. Twin horns curved out of the top of the dark engine, tapering to needle-sharp points. They were the horns of a demon.
Behind Amelia the line of filtration trees appeared to undulate in fear as she approached it. Had the trees somehow gleaned the dark engine’s purpose? Did they ascribe their millennia-long banishment and hibernation – their long dark night – to this terrible device?
‘What do I need to do?’
She laid her good hand – her right palm – on the dark object and it seemed to suck her in with a tug like gravity; then her skin started to tickle, the tickle becoming a flare of agonizing heat. ‘You could have bloody warned me …’
‘… I would have used my left hand, the acid-ridden stump of it you’ve left me.’
Lights appeared on the side of the polygon. Red sigils. An information language similar to Simple, but evolved by a couple of thousand years. What the enginemen and cardsharps of Jackals would give to see this. What she would give to trade places with them.
‘Then we’re jiggered,’ said Amelia.
The world was dead. She was dead.
‘Just fire up the boiler on this damn thing.’ It was taking every inch of Amelia’s willpower to keep her palm pressed against the engine. ‘Throw us as far from Jackals as you can.’
‘Good for your people!’ screamed Amelia. ‘If they want to book an airship berth up here they can come and vote us down. You fling Camlantis back into the bloody void.’
‘Exile! Banishment!’
said Billy Snow.
‘BILLY!’
At last, one of the creatures that had been following the Jackelians through the sewer pipes had revealed itself, deeming the time right to claim its prey in the confusion. Damson Beeton rolled to the side, throwing the winged insect to the left. It was mosquito-fast: even fighting it in witch-time it clawed at her face with cantilevered mandibles, the agent barely turning her head in time to see its rotating teeth slip past her cheek. She danced around the thing, waiting for it to try and take her throat out with its mandibles, then, as it lashed forward, she smashed its compound eye with a fist. It twisted to bring her into the field of vision of its remaining eye, just where she had been expecting it to go – she blinded the last eye with a second crack of her hand. Kicking the thrashing thing back into the swarm of insect machines won the damson a couple of seconds as its comrades devoured the wounded creature.
Ahead of her, Ironflanks was dealing with more rotating teeth, these ones belonging to Robur’s hull-opener – the Quatérshiftian swinging his weapon furiously and with little care for where it landed, the whine of high-tension clockwork intermingling with the dull thud and slap of its blades accidentally cleaving the flesh off Catosian soldiers. The knight steamman fought to pull apart the mechomancer, using the door he had torn off its hinges as a shield.
There was a grudge to be settled here. Not just between Ironflanks and the mechomancer – one of the filthy softbodies who made a trade out of turning deceased steammen out of their graves before the rites of the Steamo Loas could be followed.
Not just between Ironflanks and a Quatérshiftian; the perfidious neighbours of the Steamman Free State who – come monarchy or Commonshare – were always ready to throw their armies across the border in attempts to seize the alpine meadows and high peaks they believed were theirs by right. This, this was the plague creator who had schemed to utterly empty the halls of the mountain kingdom of steammen, leaving Ironflanks’ people rusting corpses too mindless even to feed fresh coke into their boilers. Carbine balls glanced off Ironflanks’ makeshift shield, while behind him a sea of mutated maintenance-level creatures advanced on both sides, the reports of the mercenaries’ weapons echoing off the enclosed space. For the first time in an age, Ironflanks invoked the battle cry of the Steamo Loas, the steam from his stacks spearing out in the forms of his ancestors, Legba of the Valves and Sogbo-Pipes.
Behind him, Damson Beeton backed into the side tunnel, nearly slipping on all the blood. She used the enclosed space of the maintenance tube to channel and slow the charge of undercity vermin. In front of her, two Catosians slipped past Ironflanks’ shield – a corner of it being chewed off by the hull-opener – and tried to bayonet the steamman’s telescope eyes. He sent one sprawling back with an upper-cut from his heavy war arm, caving in the knee bone of the other soldier and stealing her fur-lined cap with a deft snatch of a manipulator arm as she collapsed.
‘Oh, that’s handsome.’ He settled the hat on his metal skull and pulled down the earmuffs while blocking the thrust of another bayonet.
‘I’ll take your boiler heart for my collection,’ shouted Robur, a scream of metal sounding above the mêlée as his hull-opener cut another hole in Ironflanks’ improvised shield. ‘Your steamman cogs and crystals will allow me to perfect the destruction of your kind.’