From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER NINE

Voices were crackling so rapidly from Charlotte’s speaker box that the device was having problems interpreting the cacophony of shouts and calls; the box collapsing into an intermittent rack-rack-rack noise as it was overwhelmed by the seanores’ cries. There was no point trying to work out which of the nomads was signalling, the crowd encircling tall seabed impaled rotor-spears, seanores beating their chests as they hollered and whooped. Their spears were arranged in a field-sized semicircle along the rocky seafloor, the sketched out arena bounded by the chasm of a supposedly bottomless trench. If the proximity of the trench was meant to add an additional frisson of danger to their trial of admittance into the seanore’s ranks, then Charlotte considered the choice of venue largely superfluous. It wasn’t as if she was going to last longer than a couple of minutes against a mass of deadly muscle such as the clan’s chieftain, Vane.

‘This stands against all the blessed forms,’ the commodore protested, close enough to sound loud and clear over the jeering assembly. ‘It’s old Blacky who should be fighting you first.’

The clan leader shook his head, ‘It was you that sought admittance, silver-beard, not I that offered it. And I say your surface dwelling fancy piece shall fight me first.’ He glanced meaningfully towards Charlotte, then back at the commodore. ‘You shall know loss before I meet you in the arena.’

‘Ah, Vane. I’ve known loss since I left the clan. I lost the woman who would have been my wife and seen my own daughter perish. I’ve lost friends by the dozen and my mortal pride by the pound as I’ve scurried and run from my enemies. But this lass is not my blood, there is no need for you to involve her in our vendetta.’

‘Then you will not mind greatly when I slice her apart in front of you before tossing her carcass down into the darkness.’

‘The forms do not require that this be a death match,’ said Tera, the clan’s wise woman bobbing behind the chieftain.

‘Nor do they forbid it!’ He beckoned to Maeva and the old woman came forward bearing a case embedded with polished crab shells. Opening it, she revealed two short spears topped by jagged blades of diamond.

‘No rotor-spears in this trial,’ Vane said to Charlotte. ‘You must be close enough to look into my eyes when you come at me. To seek admittance to the clan you must understand us, know your blood and ours.’

No rotor-spears, but Charlotte had something else. She touched her diving suit below her neck, the Eye of Fate nestled reassuringly beneath the thick canvas. Will the amulet work underwater, beneath the suit? If I can throw him off for a second, paralyse him, then maybe I can live through this after all?

‘I’ve known more than a few bastards in my time,’ said Charlotte. ‘I don’t need to be close enough to you, honey, to smell your stink.’

He laughed. ‘A little spirit from you at last. I may hope for a show after all.’

They moved through a gap in the weapons and inside the semicircle of spears.

Vane traced a line in front of the rotor-spears. ‘Stay inside this space during the trial of admittance. Pass no further than fifty feet above the seabed. Flee our circle before the trial ends and we will slaughter you.’

The commodore moved in to disconnect their voice line, whispering over the private line as he did. ‘Vane will toy with you first, lass. He wants to draw the wicked game out to make me squirm and please the clan. Before he finishes you, he’ll swim behind and sever your rebreather’s air hose. Wait for that moment and jab behind. Go for his neck. His scales are weakest there, for flexibility. Until then, just play the damsel in distress.’

Play? This is one act I won’t have to study for. ‘All right.’ Charlotte was trying to fight down the rising feeling of panic, not helped by the cold currents from the trench playing across her diving suit. As cold as hell, a voice inside her whispered. Somehow, she knew that this was the reason they were fighting here. The nomads believed that the trench was the opening to the underworld.

Someone in the ring of surrounding seanore — it might have been Tera — held a crystal aloft on the end of a staff, triggering a short sunburst from the gem. Vane didn’t need any further urging; the chieftain launched himself above her head, short powerful thrusts of his legs powering him through the water. It was all Charlotte could do to spin around trying to fix his continually shifting position. If the clan leader had been minded to, he could have torn the spine of her suit open on the way past. Bastard. He’s playing with me. The roar of the crowd transmitted to her speaker box diminished to a distant surf as she raised the short glittering head of her spear against Vane — but the nomad wasn’t where she thought he would be. Where?

‘Over here,’ hissed Vane, a shadow moving off her side. ‘Has the silver-beard not trained you better than this? Can’t you even swim, surface dweller?’

She contorted around and jabbed out, but the chieftain was moving too fast, a sinuous twisting shape beating an undulating passage through the waves as though he was a merman.

‘What would you do among the seanore, what good would you be?’ he laughed. ‘I would not trust you to clean the seaweed off our nets.’

Vane darted in and stabbed her in the right thigh, a quick piercing pain burning her muscles. So fast. She yelled in anger and tried to thrust back, but he was already gone, an underwater whiplash retreating. The water around her leg was misting with blood, her blood. I don’t have that much to spare to begin with. At this rate she wasn’t going to last until Vane came at her from behind to sever her rebreather’s air pipes. Charlotte willed the Eye of Fate into life, but instead of the tug of power that usually filled her when the jewel leaked its hypnotic radiation, her head flared with an aching light. A panicked breath as she mistook this new spinning lance of pain for the ground falling away under her feet.

‘Foolish girl,’ something whispered. ‘Duelling with a lowly nomad of the depths.’ The words were coming out of Charlotte’s lips, but not at the bidding of her mind!

Not my voice! That’s ‘Elizica. I told you, girl-child, you walk in my footsteps.’

Vane slashed at Charlotte’s arm with the jagged gem-bladed shaft, but she had already turned and kicked herself away. A slight, spare movement, but the inch of distance between Charlotte and the spear might as well have been a mile. The clan leader hissed in frustration as he realized she had avoided his blow.

‘And now, my footsteps walk in you,’ whispered Elizica.

‘What are you babbling about, surface dweller?’ snarled Vane.

‘That a clan chief should be more careful who he chooses to fight.’

The gem nestled between Charlotte’s breasts weighed down as heavy as a block of lead, absorbing all of her mass, the rest of her left so light, buoyant and quicksilver fast. The jewel’s energies were not entering Vane, casting a glamour over him. They were entering Charlotte, binding her, changing her. What is this?

‘The Eye of Fate has had many owners over the ages. Even I was not the first of them, although I had a hand in refashioning the eye’s original purpose. I wore it once, my soul imprinted across its angles when I walked where you walked,’ said Elizica.

Charlotte had worn the Eye of Fate for so long, how had she failed to see? All these years, had she been using the amulet or had the jewel been using her? Preparing Charlotte until the shock of her confrontation in the pie shop reawakened the gem’s true purpose.

As Charlotte spoke a dead queen’s words, her left hand fiddled with the controls on the chest-mounted speaker box, her right turning the spear, tracing a deadly pattern through the water. Slowly, the constant roar of the crowd died away to be replaced by a different sound… a low-pitched whistling rising and falling. The modulation of the box was changing with the sinuous movement of Vane circling Charlotte, the clan leader trying to unsettle her into dizziness. You’ve changed the range and frequency of the box. I can track him!

‘That’s all sound is underwater… sonar.’

‘The sounds of your death scream!’ cried Vane, arrowing in with his spear to impale Charlotte. She bent herself into a ball, before unfolding on the charging clan leader’s flank, cutting out with her spear’s blade like a sword. Vane connected with its lethal edge along his ribs, an explosion of blood clouding above the seabed.

‘You bleed red blood, gill-neck, just the same as me. Why is that, I wonder?’

Vane moaned, clutching his side and no doubt re-evaluating his options now that Charlotte was proving to be an opponent worthy of the challenge.

‘I think it’s because your ancestors were outcasts who slunk into the sea because they were too lazy to survive on the surface. They were sitting in a bath for weeks and discovered they enjoyed it too much to ever go back to the hunt. And look at you, the mighty Vane, unable even to defeat the young fancy-piece of the man that got your father killed,’ laughed Charlotte. ‘I can taste your blood in the water, Vane, and it runs true. Your father was probably sitting on his fat arse when the tiger crabs turned up for him.’

Vane yelled in fury, closing with her. Rather than avoiding him, Charlotte stepped in, her body matching his in a supple grip of angles and joint-locks, twisting him about, stealing his momentum, thieving his considerable strength. There was a groan as Vane hit the rocky seabed, a shower of sand rising up from the slam. Charlotte had him pinned beneath her boot, the blade of her spear pushed a fraction of an inch underneath the green scales of his bare neck, ready to be hammered through his thyroid cartilage if he so much as quivered.

‘The silver-beard tricked me,’ moaned Vane. ‘You’re not what you appear to be.’

‘Which of us is, leader of the Clan Raldama?’ Her fingers fumbled with the speaker box, adjusting it back to its normal range and she called out. ‘Do I hold his life before my blade?’

Cries of confirmation returned from the seanore, uncertain at first, then louder and clearer as the magnitude of the turnaround in the arena became apparent to the clan.

‘Finish me,’ demanded Vane.

‘But I am not finished with you,’ said Charlotte. ‘I have need of you.’ She pushed her palm out. ‘I have need of you all!’

Tera had entered the arena through the space in the fence of rotor-spears, the wise woman swimming in above the pinned leader and the challenge’s victor. ‘Who are you, creature? What is your true name?’

‘Would you know me better if I carried a silver trident down from the surface? Would you know me better if I entered the ocean from a beach, two lions walking by my side? Lions that swam alongside me?’

Tera fell back, shocked.

Charlotte nodded. ‘It is good that you still sing the songs from the time before the sides of the sea froze. I am returned.’

‘What else, what else has returned?’

‘You know the prophecy of the shadowed sea.’

Tera cowered above the rocks. ‘A thief shall walk among us. A thief to fight the greater thieves, the thieves of life!’

Dick groaned as the two guards dragged his beaten body out into the light, throwing him onto the ground in front of Boxiron and Sadly. The two of them were helping him out of the dirt when the silhouette of a gill-neck loomed in front of Dick’s vision, light from the high, hot sun glinting off his metallic vest. Dick didn’t need to note the creature’s finery, his jewelled insect swatter or the entourage hanging back from him. The swagger of the gill-neck was easy to read. Another bloody officer.

‘You have missed my welcoming speech to the other surface dwellers,’ said the gill-neck officer, as if the fact of their imprisonment in the camp cells had been an act of provocation on their part. ‘I am On’esse, the camp commandant. I only ask two things of my prisoners. First, you do what any gill-neck orders you to do. Second, you work until you die. There are only two punishments for breaking these rules. One is death. The other will make you wish for it.’

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Sadly. ‘But what is this work, I ask?’

‘A pertinent question,’ said the gill-neck. He moved forward and kicked the cane out of Sadly’s hand, sending him falling to the floor; then he lashed into the informant’s stomach with his boot, Sadly rolling away in agony. ‘But I am not here to answer your questions. Anything you need to know, you diseased surface-dwelling scum, you will be told when we require it. Anything else, you can beg or steal from the other inmates here.’ He clicked his fingers and a prisoner ran forward, her tattered uniform laden down with a silver tank. She hosed the officer with a thin mist of water and his face bobbed in pleasure as he absorbed the moisture. ‘Barely tolerable, much like life here. I loathe this place as all my people do. But I am a notorious sadist and I find its discomforts counterbalanced by the opportunities to inflict suffering on your outcast hides. To serve me is life, to fail to serve me is to fail to live.’ He paused, as if inviting comment, but none of the three of them were foolish enough to rise to the bait this time.

‘Better. You seem to have come to the attention of our royalist allies. It is not good to draw attention to yourself here. I have you marked as troublemakers.’ He examined the three of them as he swaggered past. He prodded Boxiron with his jewelled insect swatter. ‘Two years.’ Then Dick. ‘Fourteen months.’ Then Sadly, still struggling up on his cane from the dirt. ‘Six months for the runt.’

‘Our sentences?’ Dick queried.

The gill-neck commandant swivelled and punched Dick in the gut, doubling him up, and then pushed him down into the dirt. ‘A slow learner and insolent with it. That is how long I expect you to last here. Your rations are not what anyone would call generous, but I do have to account for them in my supply plans somehow.’ He knelt down next to Dick and hissed in his ear low enough that only Dick could hear. ‘Do you like this as much as I do? I have more to give you than you can take, Fourteen Months.’ Without a backward glance, the camp commandant and his retinue moved off, a human prisoner on either side spraying the officer with moisture.

‘Why did you goad him?’ Boxiron asked. ‘A broken body will not help you to survive here.’

‘Shit like that I take from the State Protection Board,’ said Dick. ‘Damned if I’ll take it from a sodding gill-neck.’

‘Your soul has pride,’ said Boxiron. ‘I used to have a measure of that myself.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘I believe it leaked away from this clumsy body I’m trapped in. I used to have raw strength too, but the gill-necks have sapped even that from me. What good am I now?’

‘Alive as a cripple is better than dead, as my ma used to say,’ said Sadly.

The light behind the steamman’s vision plate pulsed with what might have been dejection. ‘You confuse existence with living.’

‘Pragmatists often do,’ said Dick. His eyes glanced around the prisoners shuffling about the camp, the clothes of most the captives hanging as tattered rags. No prison uniforms. They would rot away in the heat and the damp. The prisoners wore what they had, until they didn’t; the state of decomposition in their clothes like counting the rings on a felled tree. And this place looks to be full of sodding pragmatists.

There was a hideous wailing from deep inside the gill-necks’ processing complex.

‘Oh, Lore,’ said Sadly. ‘What was that?’

‘The sounds of torture,’ said Boxiron. ‘The sounds of Jethro softbody.’

‘What did the amateur say to you, back in the cell before they dragged him off?’ Dick asked.

‘That to the fish about to bite a hook, its bait looks a lot like supper.’

Dick listened to the piercing yells sounding again. But who is bloody eating who? If this was some sort of plan by the ex-parson, then it had gone badly wrong.

Gemma Dark watched Jethro Daunt’s twitching body strapped seated inside the machine, a dozen crystal rings circling the man and exchanging waves of ugly green energy between each hoop, lending the ex-parson’s semiconscious form the distorted appearance of being viewed through a heat haze. The screaming had stopped ten minutes ago. Daunt had lasted a little longer inside the lashing energies than most before he surrendered to the inevitable, but not much. Not as long as Gemma had anticipated. Weren’t Circlist priests meant to have minds of steel? The teachings of their much vaunted synthetic morality giving them an almost supernatural ability to stare into the souls of their parishioners. There hadn’t been many priests among the royalists in the fleet-in-exile, not when the rebels’ work was privateering and whatever it took to survive. Circlist priests. Milksops and faint hearts. They didn’t have the guts to survive in the royalists’ cruelly altered realm, a world where the rightful heirs of the Kingdom had seen their birthright stolen by thieves and murderers. Forced into a game of hit and run for weary centuries, the royalist hegemony bleeding away, until they finally devolved into a tattered ragbag collection of pirates and slavers, antique u-boats and noble titles that weren’t worth the ink on the ancient velum of their charters.

The machine the ex-parson was confined in was connected by twisting root-like crystal cables, winding organically around each other, until they linked up with a similar machine visible behind the first. For a moment, Gemma Dark was glad that the climbing waves of energy were hiding the shape of the form inside the second machine. Her luck, her famous luck. Allies at last to turn around the declining fortunes of cause that had so nearly been lost. And if this is the price, then it is a small thing indeed.

‘Do you have his memories?’ asked Walsingham from behind Gemma.

A voice answered from within the burning cage of the second machine. ‘I do.’

‘Solomon Samson Dark,’ snarled Gemma, surprising herself by the loathing engendered simply speaking the traitor’s name. Her cursed brother. ‘Also known as Jared Black. Where is the dog and does he have my sceptre?’

‘The sceptre is still in his possession, along with the girl thief, Charlotte Shades. They were on board the Jackelian submersible, the Purity Queen, until the Kingdom’s convoy was attacked. Jethro Daunt does not know their location after that point in time.’

‘I knew it,’ laughed Gemma in triumph. ‘But the sea won’t swallow you this time, my treacherous jigger of a brother. Not with the entire gill-neck navy at my disposal.’

‘His submarine has a stealth hull designed to disperse sonar waves,’ warned the shadow inside the second machine.

‘Then it is time we committed some of our ships to the hunt. Rest,’ Walsingham commanded the thing inside the device. ‘Give the ex-parson’s memories time to settle into you. Meanwhile, we shall discover if the commodore’s rudimentary submersible also has a way of disguising its mass from our sensors.’

There was a hideous screeching noise from the cage, like a fox baying, the talons of a scaled hand reaching out towards the semiconscious form of Jethro Daunt. No, you couldn’t always choose your allies.

Walsingham listened to the screeching, a frown crossing his face. ‘Speak only in Jackelian from now on. Use your new memories.’

The thing inside the device obeyed. ‘The priest-man can sense our presence. He realized that the vice-admiral on the convoy was one of the Mass.’

‘What is it that Daunt can detect?’ Walsingham snapped, looking as troubled as Gemma had ever seen him.

‘It is what he cannot. There are signs of the body, subtle cues that he could not detect when he was standing close to the vice-admiral. The Circlist church trained him in this art. Their absence gives us away.’

‘That is not a problem,’ said Walsingham. ‘Now that we know about his profession’s skill, we can focus our attention on any priests we encounter and fill in the signals they are expecting.’

The baying sounded again, louder and more insistent.

‘He is not yours to consume,’ Walsingham commanded angrily. ‘We must keep Jethro Daunt alive in the camp for a little while longer. You may need his mind and his memories again.’

‘Not for too long,’ said Gemma. ‘Not if events go as they should.’

‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst,’ said Walsingham.

They were meant to be words of reassurance, but as Gemma considered where they had probably been dredged from, her blood ran cold. The Mass must feed.

If there was ever a reassuring face to wake up to from the burning clasp of feverish unconsciousness, then Boxiron’s silvery vision plate was hard to trump. Less so, the miserly pinched expression of Dick Tull. With one arm apiece, the two of them hauled Daunt upright. ‘How do you feel, Jethro softbody?’

‘Drained, quite literally.’

‘A day,’ said Tull. ‘That’s how long we were taught by the board to hold out under interrogation. Long enough for your side to realize you’ve been taken and compromised. Any longer and you’re broken beyond use anyway, if your captors are serious about it.’

‘They were serious, but it wasn’t that kind of interrogation.’

Dick Tull lifted the ex-parson’s arm, no doubt counting his fingernails. ‘What kind was it?’

‘They have a machine that rips out your memories, that allows them to crawl inside your mind.’ Daunt glanced around. He was in one of the prison camp’s barrack buildings, sitting on a crude bunk lashed together out of bamboo poles.

Sadly was on the bunk opposite, resting his chin on the top of his cane. He had kicked one of his shoes off, his clubfoot swollen larger than the shoe leather in the close heat. ‘That sounds right effective, Mister Daunt.’

‘Surprisingly so.’ Although not quite as effective as they think.

‘What were they after?’

‘They want King Jude’s sceptre back. And the commodore’s sister would like her brother’s head on a platter for betraying the royalists, not to mention getting her son killed. They also wanted to know all about my life.’

Tull grunted. ‘Of course, you’re so interesting.’

Daunt smiled. ‘Again, surprisingly so, but they forgot one thing.’

‘What is that, amateur?’

‘There is an old adage of the church. Well, actually something of a warning. Be careful when staring into the darkness, for the darkness also stares into you. What they have forgotten is that oft times, the converse can also be true.’

‘What have you found out, you devious fastblood?’ asked Boxiron.

Daunt raised his hand. ‘Have you spoken to the other prisoners about the camp and why we’re here?’

‘We are to start work later today,’ said Boxiron. ‘The camp’s task is to harvest a purple fruit from the jungle that the Advocacy calls gillwort. The juice is used to help suppress a common sickness among the gill-necks… hyperplasia. The disease attacks their respiratory system, eventually causing death by suffocation.’

‘And let me guess, our new island home is the only place where this cure grows.’

‘Correct.’

‘The guards need us here,’ said Tull. ‘They can’t stay out of the sea for more than a couple of weeks at a time without doing their nut in.’

‘The exception being the camp commandant, On’esse,’ said Boxiron. ‘It is said that he never takes any leave.’

‘And he’s as barmy as a bucket full of badgers for it,’ said Dick. ‘His guards are terrified of him, let alone the prisoners.’

‘Sometimes the job chooses the man,’ said Daunt. ‘Or should that be evolutionary offshoot of man? No matter, I am sure the beatings will continue until morale improves. There is a graveyard inside the camp?’

Boxiron raised a heavy hand towards one of the walls. ‘A sizeable one in the Northeast corner. Dysentery, malnutrition and overwork are to be our bedfellows.’

‘I rather think rust, in your case.’ Daunt stood up. ‘I suspect there hasn’t been a churchman here for years, even a defrocked and sadly wayward one such as myself. Time to pay my respects to the departed.’

‘You’ll be joining their ranks sharpish if you’re not here when the next work party is due to leave,’ warned Dick.

‘I’m sure there’ll be time aplenty to discover my humanity in simple labour.’ Daunt remembered the guard towers along the walls, the rifles and focus behind them directed outwards. A set time to go out implies a schedule. But not a timetable, methinks, for our convenience.

It wasn’t much to look at, the camp’s graveyard. Not much to mark the passing of so many lives. Hundreds of mounds crowded in with single spikes of bamboo, ranks of them crudely carved with the name of the passed and the date of their removal from the camp’s rolls. A few of the more recent graves had tiny scrolls of paper pushed into the bamboo’s hollow centre. Daunt squatted down and removed a couple, reading the messages before folding them back into place. Simple memories and farewells from friends in the camp. Standing in the far corner were the oldest graves, their bamboo markers splintered and weathered to near destruction by the passage of time. If there had been paper farewells pushed inside these, they had crumbled into dust long ago; food and nesting material for the ants crawling over the dirt.

As Daunt had anticipated, there were noble titles carved on some of the oldest markers. Only to be expected. The royalist fleet-in-exile had been trying to survive in the gill-necks’ realm, frictions were bound to erupt between the rebels and the Advocacy. It hadn’t just been Parliament trying to call time on the glorious counter-revolution. Who were the others… adventurers and interlopers? The treasure hunters the commodore had spoken of back on the Purity Queen, driven by visions of gems as large as boulders? This was their final resting-place, then. There were no gill-necks buried here, but that didn’t surprise Daunt. With the gill-necks’ worldview, the Advocacy doubtless conducted ceremonies that saw their remains scattered into the sea. Returned to the watery universe from which they came.

Daunt pulled himself up and moved along the line of graves, tracing the oldest dates back to the more recent burials. From the graveyard he could see the corner of the camp behind the gill-necks’ processing complex and beyond to the sea. There was no wall there. The camp ended in a steep cliff, jagged rocks — a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the ocean below. A constant lashing of waves on the rocks, neither the cliff nor the sea willing to compromise — the maelstrom below the result. Cranes on the cliff top were lowering barrels of gillwort juice towards the open hold of a gill-neck submersible freighter being tossed side to side by the wild sea. The processing centre looked to be a camp within a camp, only gill-necks permitted beyond the internal fence. Too steep to climb, too far to dive without snapping a neck. And even if you survived the trip down, Daunt had a sneaking suspicion escapees wouldn’t care for what was swimming around those waters — not if the presence of the guard towers bespoke what he suspected. But then, these cliffs weren’t the way Daunt was planning to leave — not if the more recent grave markers bore out his theory.

He allowed a smile to soften his face as he discovered one of the graves he had been expecting, quickly followed by a second among the more recent burials. He removed one of the markers to inspect the message.

‘I so rather hoped I would be proved wrong this time,’ he murmured to himself.

A crunching in the dirt made Daunt turn. Boxiron had come to stand by the ramshackle fence separating the graveyard’s rise from the rest of the camp.

‘What have you learned from the dead?’ Boxiron called across to the ex-parson.

‘That it is better to be among the living, old steamer.’

‘It is time. Our work party has been called and is assembling by the gate.’

‘Of course. One note of caution, old friend. The gill-neck soldiers escorting us out are not to stop us escaping, but rather for our protection.’

‘You have been speaking with the other prisoners, Jethro softbody?’

‘Not yet. What have they told you about our labours outside the camp?’

‘Tiger crabs,’ said Boxiron. ‘The waters around here are infested with the creatures. They frequently crawl up from the shoreline into the everglades to hunt. It is why no one has ever escaped from the island to tell of this cursed place.’

‘Land is only ever cursed if you are a gill-neck,’ said Daunt. ‘Have heart.’

The steamman clanged the device welded to his chest in frustration. ‘I have not enough of it, my boiler bled dry by this foul limiter. How much more reduced beyond my life as a steamman knight does the great pattern intend to see me degraded? For all the gross inferiority of my human-milled monstrosity of a body, I still had raw power… I could fight in top gear! Look at me now. I am no stronger than that wretch Barnabas Sadly. If only my ancestors had not forsaken me, I would call upon the Loa to give me the strength to rip this evil contraption out of my chest plate.’

‘We’ll find a way yet.’

‘I should be able to protect you. That I cannot is beyond shameful. Is that not why our association has proved so successful? You supply the intellect and I supply the muscle.’

‘Not just the muscle,’ said Daunt. ‘You have the boiler heart of a champion, and I have relied on the compass of your soul as much as I have relied on anything.’

The steamman did not seem convinced.

‘Listen to me, old steamer, I need you yet. We have a battle or two left before us. I glimpsed such terrible things in the interrogation machine, in the dreams and shadows of their infernal contraption. We cannot afford to lose. We cannot afford to let ourselves die in captivity here.’

‘What did you see, Jethro softbody?’

‘I believe I saw the same things that have been haunting the dreams of the Sisters Lammeter, the same things that have been tormenting Charlotte Shades.’

‘Vampires?’

Daunt joylessly shook his head. ‘Not as the florid fictioneers of the penny-dreadfuls describe them. The true enemy is something else. We have to escape, old friend, we have to locate the commodore and carry the sceptre to safety.’

Boxiron indicated the sea beyond the cliff. ‘Where will be safe? We are hunted in the Kingdom of Jackals, my people in the Steamman Free State will not help me. Where can we go in this world that will be safe?’

‘I think there might be a place, and the person who can help us is closer than you think.’

‘Is this another ploy to engage my interest?’

‘No ploy, old friend.’ But bob my soul, how I wish this all was just an entertainment for your distraction.

I’ll never complain again about working for the bleeding board, Dick promised himself, swinging his machete against the clusters of leathery purple fruit hanging in beards around the tree. Every weary bite of his blade released an unpleasantly bitter smell, thin fronds attaching the fruit to the trunk seemingly as tough as steel.

Immediately below Dick, another prisoner was sawing off low-hanging fruit while Sadly, Boxiron and the ex-parson stood in the water and caught the gillworts, piling pear-shaped fruit in their shallow-bottomed boat. Not that the craft was there for their comfort and transportation through the humid flooded world of the everglades. No, it was only with them to keep the fruit from being soaked and spoiled. Shortly after a gillwort made contact with water it flowered as it bobbed on the surface, releasing a pungent smell to attract lizard-like fish to disperse its seeds; making quick work of the fruit, not to mention trying to take chunks out of any convict pickers’ legs.

It was an old lag, Roald Morris, who had been assigned to convert the newcomers into an effective component of the camp’s harvesting machine. Only too glad to stick to the sides of the boat and issue advice, he had at least warned them to enter the everglades only wearing their breeches. After all, their clothes would be reduced to rags soon enough and they didn’t need any extra layers to perspire like pigs out here. Only Jethro Daunt refused the advice, the eccentric ex-parson pushing their harvesting raft in his full tweeds, sweat rolling off his forehead like a waterfall. A life where the State Protection Board paid a man to stand outside suspected treasonists’ lodgings and watch through the long night hours seemed a world away from the fatiguing labours the Advocacy demanded of its captives.

Morris had lasted in the camp for six years. Supposedly a pearl diver who had lost his compass during a storm and ended up deep inside gill-neck waters, Dick could tell that the man’s story sounded as flimsy to his ears as it no doubt had to the gill-necks who’d discovered Morris’s little ship bobbing in their territory. He had admitted he had once served as a corporal in the regiments back home, and his presence here on the island probably meant he had been a deserter before drifting into smuggling and developing a taste for the gill-necks’ crystals. But Morris had endured out here and had the knowledge of how to live in this hell, which made him someone worth listening to. Surviving had taken its cost, though: Morris’s skin worn as brown and wrinkled as leather from working in the sun every day of the week. He had been fat once, too. Dick could see it in the way skin hung in jowls down the man’s neck. If the sister he talked of so mournfully saw Morris now, she wouldn’t recognize him. She’d walk right past without a hint of recognition. At least he has someone who cares. Who will remember me? Who’s there to miss Dick Tull when he’s gone? Only Damson Pegler in her slum for the last week’s rent he never paid.

Circular platforms were built into the side of a handful of the semi-submerged forest’s trees, gill-neck guards squatting languidly outside of the water with their rifles by their side. It didn’t seem right, them with their affinity for the life aquatic staying out of the water while prisoners from the race of man waded through the everglades with slop up to their waists. But then, the brackish green subtropical wetland smelled bad enough to Dick halfway up a gillwort tree, and he wasn’t even attempting to breathe the stuff.

‘Let yourself hang back in the harness,’ Morris called up. ‘You’ll take easier swings at the fruit. And cut down, not up, gillworts resist less that way.’

‘You can always send the steamman up here,’ Dick said.

‘You’ll all get a chance, that you will.’

‘It is your race that is believed to possess simian ancestry,’ said Boxiron, ‘not mine.’

The steamman got his turn soon enough. Wading through the thick water up to his waist, Morris located a second tree with ripe fruit nearby. Boxiron was dispatched to climb up its trunk while Sadly and Daunt manoeuvred the harvesting raft halfway between the two trees, a couple of convicts sent across to catch the fruit the steamman began slicing off. Even with the strength-sapping device welded onto Boxiron’s chest, the steamman made a faster job of harvesting gillworts than Dick, pneumatic servos beating his tired old muscles, cramping from sweat and heat. After half an hour more of swinging the machete, Dick’s labours were interrupted by the sound of a small gas-driven engine. He glanced over his shoulder, sweat rolling off the tip of his itchy nose and falling towards the swampy surface below. It was On’esse. The camp commandant lounged under a shaded stretch of canvas in the middle of a shallow draft boat, a gill-neck guard at the front of the boat leaning into a tripod-mounted gun while another sat at the back, directing the small motor’s rudder and steering its passage through the everglade forest.

‘Work, you surface-dwelling scum,’ the commandant called from his shade. ‘We are two tonnes behind quota for my next shipment. Fall behind, and I’ll take every tenth man from this gang of slackers and peel your backs with my whip.’

If there was any sign of irony on the part of the gill-neck commander, urging them to labour harder from the comfort of his personal launch, the old sod was hiding it well.

A minute after his boat passed, zigzagging its way through the trees, panicked shouts began to sound from the workers in the water behind Dick, yells growing more urgent as the convicts scattered, some wading though the waters towards the guards’ platform, others heading for the harvesting rafts and the trees. Down below, Morris was shinning up the gillwort tree’s trunk, throwing a harvesting strap around the tree as he climbed.

‘Bloody On’esse,’ snarled Morris as he stopped under Dick’s position, five foot up from the water. ‘He knows the noise of his boat’s engine sounds like their challenge call.’

Dick looked down at the skeletal prisoner. ‘Whose?’

‘ Theirs! ’ The convict pointed towards thin bone-like wands cutting though the water with the deadly intent of sharks’ fins. ‘Snorkel spiders. Get out the water, all of you!’ he yelled down at the prisoners below.

Sodding hell. Sadly and Daunt and the two sailors below were casting around, trying to locate the cause of the commotion and work out their response. Too slow. The harvesting party behind — other sailors captured from the convoy — screamed out as bony snorkels lifted out of the everglades to reveal nests of mandibles stabbing in front of evil blanched skulls. Seconds later the human prey collapsed into the water under the leaping weight of these living thrashing machines. Now the newcomers knew what to do! Yelling in terror, prisoners desperately waded for safety, heading for the guard platforms, trees and the harvesting rafts. Underneath Dick, one of the sailors was trying to climb their tree trunk, but soaked and panicked and lacking climbing strap and hooks, he was barely able to scale a couple of inches above the waterline.

‘My hand!’ shouted Morris, reaching down, but the gap between him and the other prisoner was too wide. A frenzied storm of clicking mandibles lashed out, impaling the man in the spine and pulling him back screaming. Vanishing under the water, he left an outrush of bubbles and a slowly growing slick of blood as the only trace of his presence.

The other sailor in their party had dragged himself aboard the harvesting raft and was trying to pull Daunt out of the water. Behind the ex-parson, Sadly was wading towards the raft, using his cane like a punt to speed his limping passage forward. A bone-white snorkel was arrowing in on the informant and Dick could see the inevitable outcome of their relative speeds. Sadly would be snapped up before he got to the protection of the raft. As it closed on the informant, the creature’s bony skull began to surface, thrashing mandibles extending for the man. Dick hefted the machete he had been using and hurled it with all his strength. It windmilled around, sailing down, impaling itself in the back of the snorkel spider. Not enough. The snorkel spider slowed slightly, the thrashing of its mandibles growing ever more frenzied, leaping towards Sadly as the informant reached a hand’s gap from the raft. Both the sailor and Daunt were straining back out to the surface to catch Sadly, but he turned and dived under the water. He wasn’t pulled, he went under on purpose! Landing where Sadly had just been standing, the monstrous thing disappeared, the water churning. Then its snorkel bone flashed up and down. More thrashing, and Sadly exploded out of the murky liquid, one hand on his cane as he pushed it into the dying, jolting creature in front of him. He was using his cane as a lance, manoeuvring it between the bony plates of his attacker and ramming it into the soft vulnerable flesh. Pulling out the cane as though Sadly was a duellist withdrawing a foil from a skewered opponent, he flopped around and caught the others’ hands, Daunt and the sailor hauling his soaked, bloody form into the raft.

‘Sharply done,’ whispered Dick in surprise. I guess there’s a survivor in everyone, if you just prod ’em hard enough.

‘Too much blood in the water,’ moaned Morris.

At least the pool of blood underneath them belonged to the snorkel spiders, not their fellow prisoners. An angry rattling that sounded like the motor on the commandant’s boat filled the everglades. The commandant’s launch had turned around and was coming back to survey the damage to his operation, dozens of snorkel spiders in the water roaring counter challenges at the clattering engine.

‘Who has permitted this to happen?’ yelled On’esse, standing up at last, roused from his torpor under the shadow of the shade. ‘Why are you cowards not harvesting?’

From one of the guard platforms, a gill-neck called out in the commandant’s native tongue, indicating the snorkel bones hunting across the now empty waters.

On’esse dismissed the excuses with a stream of angry curses and pointed at Daunt, the sailor and Sadly on the raft. ‘You are standing on top of my harvest, you lazy fools! Spoiling today’s crop. Why are you not collecting fruit?’

‘There are bleeding monsters in the water!’ called the sailor.

On’esse strode to the front of his craft. ‘Am I blind? Am I unaware of this? Why do you think it is you pulling gillworts from this swamp and not I?’ He pushed the soldier on the tripod gun to one side, swivelled the weapon towards the convict labourer and triggered the gun. There was a shock of recoil through the commandant’s launch, the Jackelian sailor struck in his chest and thrown back off the harvesting raft. Three snorkel spiders thrashed against each other as they competed to claim the corpse. ‘Only those on the highest harvesting strap may stay in the trees. Everyone else, in the water, NOW! There are only seven beasts that I can see and half of those have been fed. We may lose a few of you untrained surface dwelling scum, and then everyone will work a double shift to make up for this debacle.’ He rocked the gun towards Daunt and Sadly. ‘You two first, climb off my precious fruit and down into the swamp with you.’

There was an almost approving rattle of mandibles from the snorkel spiders circling Sadly and Daunt’s raft.

As Charlotte sat inside the dome, she could almost see its structure extending. Each new clan of seanore that arrived at the tribal gathering brought their own plates cut from crab shells, adding them to the interlocking structure in new and innovative ways. The communal space had been transformed from the open hall of a single clan into a rambling warren of interconnected chambers, a few even filled with air and separated by transparent permeable membranes. It was hard to imagine that Charlotte was responsible for all of this, her recitations of ancient prophecies, her victory in the arena over Vane. Except it hadn’t been her triumph, it had been the spirit of Elizica of the Jackeni’s, the ancient queen’s thoughts and memories so intermingled with Charlotte’s own now it was hard to recall there had been a time when she had just been simple Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism. Born to nobility, raised by a gypsy, and inclined to the removal of valuable objects that didn’t belong to her.

As the ancient monarch had grown in power, she was no longer content to seep through Charlotte’s blood and bones, whispering inside her mind. Now Elizica was appearing as a translucent blurred silhouette composed of shifting planes of light. Nobody else could see Charlotte’s ancient visitation, of course. The seanore coming into the hall walked right though the apparition, no more than a mirage.

Will you stop haunting me if I give away the Eye of Fate?

‘When you went to so much trouble to obtain it?’ said Elizica, her voice veined with mischief.

Charlotte guiltily remembered pilfering the gem from Madam Leeda. A burst of shame for stealing from the one person who had looked after her, indelibly mixed with the sadness of the first time she had used the amulet on her mother’s doorstep. That was the only time the Eye of Fate had failed her.

‘Its power is limited,’ said Elizica, speaking of the amulet. ‘You can make people believe in trivial things, you can make them see things that aren’t there. But you can no more make them love you than you can compel them to leap into a chasm and kill themselves, for that matter.’

I wasn’t thinking of hypnotising you into jumping into a chasm, Charlotte lied.

‘It would make no difference if you did,’ said Elizica. ‘We leave our mark on the world as we pass through the years: in the lives of others, the action of our lives, in the reactions of the world. The children we have and the children we don’t. I’m just an echo, Charlotte, burnt into the Eye of Fate and the bones of the land. You can’t push an echo into a chasm.’

I bloody well can if I throw the Eye of Fate over the edge.

‘You cannot, girl-child. You have been using the Eye of Fate for too long. It’s bonded to you now, as you are to it. Do you remember how sick you were during your last days in Jackals and on board the u-boat? That wasn’t a reaction to being attacked in the pie shop; it was a reaction to the crystal activating. When the Eye of Fate shielded you from Cloake’s strike, it reset to its true purpose. As your body is locked to the crystal, the changes are mirrored in your flesh.’

No!

‘You should have listened to Madam Leeda,’ said Elizica. ‘She suspected the truth. Why do you think she kept the Eye of Fate locked away in the back of her caravan and removed the gem only when she had real cause to make use of it? She knew enough to use the amulet, rather than the other way around.’

I don’t want this. Charlotte looked around the water-filled chamber. Jared Black and the old woman Maeva stood with other air-breathing nomads in one of the membrane-sealed annexes, arguing over some matter. The cavernous space of the dome filled with clan leaders and tribal wise-women, dozens of the underwater races represented. Charlotte sat on a bench of polished stone against the wall, the others like Vane and Tera keeping a respectful distance from her. Why? This was as much their fault as hers. Vane’s for letting himself be bested in the arena, Tera flapping around like fox-frightened poultry at the words of a prophecy the wise women were guardians for. What kind of fools were they? Charlotte could have stolen knowledge of the prophecy from one of them, couldn’t she? She could have used the Eye of Fate to do that easily enough. Now seanore tribes were flocking to the grand assembly. What a caper this could have been. There we go, honey. Just swim over to the Advocacy and raid their crystal fields for me. That’s all the chosen one wants from you, a nice pile of boulder-sized diamonds. What do I need them for? Oh, I’ll think of something. It wouldn’t be so wrong, would it? The money helps, it always helps.

‘Not this time,’ said Elizica, intruding on her thoughts.

If you want to do something useful, go and possess the commodore and Vane and the others. Get them to stop tiptoeing around me as if I’m the angel of death.

‘For the seanore, I’m afraid that’s more or less exactly what you are. The herald of dark tidings is always to be feared. And as for the commodore, well, the last time he heard my words was through his daughter, and she gave her life saving the Kingdom. It cannot be easy for him to feel my presence again.’

His daughter died? I thought you said you couldn’t mesmerize someone into hurting themselves?

‘Her choice,’ said Elizica, with a mixture of pride and sorrow. ‘Not my enchantment.’

Charlotte sighed and looked up. She could see the Purity Queen anchored above through one of the net-covered gaps in the dome that allowed the sea water to circulate. I’m not going to get myself killed for you. Don’t you think I will for a moment.

‘I am glad to hear it. A corpse isn’t going to be much use in helping me fulfil the prophecy of the shadowed sea.’

Charlotte glanced around the chamber. The gems that the seanore traded from the Advocacy were put to good use among the nomads, whittled by diamond drill-bits into intricate gemstone carvings of cephalopods and dolphins mounted on chains hanging around the nomads’ chests. There was nothing to match that level of artistry and craft back in Jackals, and each of the pieces would be worth a small fortune based on its uniqueness alone. This was Charlotte’s preferred class of pilferage — small, transportable and practically begging to be sliced off its chains during a chance collision in a crowd. She looked over again to where Maeva and the commodore were talking. They seem to be arguing.

‘I can channel what they are saying to you, if it will help you understand the people you fight alongside.’

All right, then. Let me hear them.

‘You should have said something before you left,’ Maeva was complaining.

The commodore shrugged. ‘I couldn’t and that’s all of it.’

‘Why not? You never seemed to have a problem with speaking honey before you disappeared. You loved to hear yourself speak. It was a problem ever getting you to stop.’

‘I couldn’t, Maeva,’ said the commodore, ‘because if I had seen you one last time, I never could have left you. I wouldn’t have had the heart for it. And then you and all your people would have died trying to protect me.’

‘You were one of our clan. That’s what we do. Then. Now.’

‘Ah, not for me, never for me. I’ve enough on my conscience. That particular hold is full.’

‘You could have taken me with you. I would have left the seanore with you.’

‘For what, a life on the run, on the surface, away from your family and friends and everything you loved in the sea? I ended up in Cassarabia with other survivors of the royalist cause. Sucking up to the caliph there in return for the guns we needed to fight on. That’s no country for you. Heat like a furnace, sands that’ll sup the sweat from you with a vampire’s thirst, nothing but enemies and plotting and sorcery as evil as any you’re ever likely to see in this world. None of the countries and intrigues that followed after were any better. Just death and treachery and a cause that was lost long before I was even born. Taking you away from the oceans would have been dragging an angel down into hell.’

Maeva frowned. ‘It’s not a choice you should have got to make alone. I’m not some weak-willed surface-dwelling maiden. I am a warrior-born, free and unbound. It was my decision to make, not yours.’

‘I’m a pirate, remember? I stole it from you. And that was my decision.’

‘I thought I had made a seanore of you. Well, damn you for a pirate. Damn you for a privateer.’

Enough. Charlotte felt guilty she had even agreed to the royal spectre’s suggestion.

The shape was beginning to fade away, the planes of light glowing translucent as they seeped into the water. ‘As you wish. We have more important matters to focus on than the life they lost together. We have more important things to worry about than the weight of your purse.’

More important things won’t put food on my plate when I get back home. Charlotte didn’t need to sound the silent if in that train of thought.

‘I grow tired. I’ve slept for so long. I will return when you have need for me.’

Come back, I need you for this now.

‘For this jabbering mass? No, I have you for that.’ Elizica’s laughter faded into the chamber. ‘So many of the underwater races here, yet so much hot air beneath the waves.’

Underneath the shell plates, interior surfaces daubed with frescos of legends and battles and creatures of the sea, Tera stepped forward and raised her arms. The wise-woman’s voice carried loud in Charlotte’s helmet speakers. ‘It is time for the grand congress of the seanore to convene.’

Many floating in the water took their seats on the simple stone benches, as did the commodore and the air-breathing nomads behind the membrane. Those of the assembly without legs angled their bodies at neutral buoyancy, tails and fins holding them at anchor, waiting with expectant faces. One of the visiting nomads had stayed on his webbed feet, half his body armoured, the other half bare muscle with a gladiator’s physique. ‘Why are we here, Tera of the Clan Raldama? Why do you waste my time and all the chiefs of the water by bringing us here to a grand congress to stand before this-’ his hand jabbed towards Charlotte, ‘-surface dweller?’

Tera grew incensed. ‘You are here, Korda of the Clan Coudama, because your wise-woman reminded you of your obligations under the songs of the shadowed sea.’

‘Where is the prophecy here? I do not see it?’ The angry clan chief indicated the Purity Queen drifting outside the tribal hall. ‘Only a crew of surface-dwellers, the gas from the outcasts’ engines fouling the great forests.’

‘The signs and currents flow true,’ said Tera. ‘Are we not arrived at a time when the people of the water are at the throats of the surface dwellers? The time of madness is close, when demons shall emerge from the scars of the world and claim us all in the confusion.’

‘Demons from the deep of the dark,’ Korda sneered. ‘The only devils I see are these surface dwellers. Is this the time of the shadowed sea? I think not. The Advocacy is habitually in dispute with trespassing surface dwellers.’ The clan chief pointed at the commodore standing behind the membrane. ‘And that one is the worst of all. A u-boat privateer notorious for his avariciousness. Do you not know him? You sheltered the silver-beard once, and here he is back again, full of tricks and lies and false words.’

Vane joined the wise-woman in facing down the rival clan chief. ‘There are more than words at work here. This girl beat me in the ceremony of admittance and then sang words from the songs of prophecy.’

‘Pah!’ Korda’s contempt filtered through Charlotte’s helmet. ‘Words can be stolen as easily as crystals. You stupid weakling, you let the commodore’s fancy-piece best you in combat and now you seek to cover up your embarrassment by placing credence in ancient lore that Jared Black has pirated from us and whispered in her ear.’

Another clan leader stood up as Vane stepped forward, boiling to challenge his guest to combat. ‘The peace of the grand congress be upon you both. Let us hear what this girl has to say. Speak, surface dweller. Were you the bearer of the lion trident in ancient times?’

Charlotte looked at them all uncertainly. Now would be time for you to speak through me. Nothing, empty silence within her, the Eye of Fate as inert as a useless piece of coal.

Korda’s sarcastic laughter filled the water. ‘For this I have dragged hundreds of the Clan Coudama’s finest warriors away from our territory, away from the hunt and the gathering. And what are we fed with here? The confidence tricks of surface dwellers.’

‘The one who gave you your prophecy has spoken through me,’ said Charlotte, ‘although by the Circle, I wish it was otherwise.’

‘On your wishes, we can at least agree,’ said Korda. ‘Speak now, then, surface-dweller. Sing the secrets songs of the prophecy. Let the grand congress echo with your wisdom.’

‘I am not a dancing monkey to caper to your whims, honey. I only know what I’ve seen and heard to bring me here,’ said Charlotte. ‘There are royalist rebels from my nation scheming with the Advocacy alongside highly placed officials inside the Kingdom, and the whole filthy conspiracy is swirling like a whirlpool around the twisted monsters appearing in my dreams.’

‘Bad dreams have carried you here? Not just you, surface dweller girl, your foolishness has called thousands of seanores to stand in this congress.’

‘I think the monsters in my dreams are the chasm-demons of your prophecy.’

‘You think — ’

The commodore’s voice interrupted the clan leader’s outburst. ‘You want proof, lad, then here it is!’ Charlotte turned. The commodore was clutching King Jude’s sceptre, unfurling the staff from a stretch of canvas where he had concealed it. ‘This is what the dark-hearts chasing us are really after.’

‘And she shall return with a staff of gold and a crystal from outside the world,’ pronounced Tera.

‘A bauble made to order by you, Jared Black,’ accused Korda.

Commodore Black pointed at the wise-woman. ‘Tera only told me of your prophecy yesterday. I knew blessed little of until then, though I recognized the description of the sceptre well enough when I heard it.’

‘Am I a fool? You’ve ordered that gaudy rod manufactured to lend credence to your schemes. I don’t know what you are here for, but I do know it will cost seanore blood spilled in the water if we listen to you. Let the squabbling surface dwelling factions and the Advocacy murder and war and plot against each other, but let it not involve us.’ He struck his way out of the waters, turning his back on Charlotte. There were murmurs of agreement echoing throughout the clan leaders’ assembly hall, many rising from the stone seats and ready to begin following the Clan Coudama out of the grand congress.

The nomads’ outrush was interrupted by a company of rotor-spear wielding sentries urgently pushing against the surge of leaving leaders. ‘They are coming!’

Vane shouted down the crowd to hear his warriors. ‘Who is coming?’

‘Darkships, we have seen darkships approaching over the forest.’

‘How many?’ asked Vane.

‘Two.’

‘You fools!’ Tera yelled across the clan leaders. ‘You wanted proof of the songs of prophecy, here it is. Did the old silver-beard manufacture the darkships, too?’

Before the words had sunk into Charlotte, there was a rush of panicked nomads speeding for the exits out onto the seabed, a flurry of hidden weapons — forbidden at the congress — emerging in nomad hands.

Elizica’s disembodied words whispered in Charlotte’s ears. ‘I think you will be glad I rested, girl-child.’

What are darkships?

‘What the prophecy was intended to warn against, girl-child. Demon chariots, the chasm’s seed.’

Charlotte didn’t need to ask what they had come for. They had come for the sceptre. And they had come for her.