From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Charlotte looked in horror as a party of the Purity Queen ’s surviving crewmen emerged disoriented from the u-boat’s wreckage. They were crawling out of an airlock in her keel; once designed to drop submariners onto the seabed from the vessel above, but now part of the upended craft’s topside. They emerged straight into the approaching darkship’s field of view, the cutting beam from its bow spine slicing out and separating the crewmen’s legs from their torsos. Maeva still had her back against the wrecked u-boat’s hull, lying on flattened kelp fronds, a bed for her and the unconscious commodore nestled between her legs.

‘Go, girl,’ Maeva urged Charlotte. ‘Swim away. You’ve no rotor-spears left and firing a shock-spear against that darkship would be like tossing seashells against a shark.’

‘My bloody sceptre is still inside the Purity Queen, I’m not going anywhere.’

‘A royalist antique won’t be any good to a corpse. There’s no glory in dying for it here.’

Damn the glory, it’s the money I want.

It was growing hard to focus on Maeva’s words, waves of pain from the nearing proximity of the enemy vessel burrowing into her skull. Charlotte wasn’t the only one feeling it. Maeva’s teeth were gritted tight behind her diving helmet’s visor.

Charlotte knelt to feel the commodore’s suit for tears. ‘How is he? Can you get him out of here?’

‘He’s sleeping and I think I’ll join him. I’m too tired to run, too tired to want to live in a world where darkships have returned. Not like you. The prophecy rests with you. You’re young enough to live through this. Go, leave us.’

Out above the kelp forest the darkship had returned to its task of cutting King Jude’s sceptre out from the wreckage of the Purity Queen. Its weapons carved the Jackelian craft into slices, pockets of trapped air streaming out as the submersible was sliced into pieces as though she were a roll of cured sausage. One of the beams boiled the sea six feet away from where the survivors were sprawled out, superheated water scalding Charlotte’s left side, her skin turning numb beneath her diving suit’s canvas. She just caught sight of the darkship angling in for another strike, condensation misting up the surface of her helmet’s visor. The next shot from the darkship would burst through the three of them, meeting as much resistance as heated cannon shot passing through rice paper. Her hands fumbled for the Eye of Fate.

Any advice?

‘You’re not alone.’ Elizica’s words formed inside her mind.

But she was. The commodore’s u-boat was cut to pieces, any seanores minded to put up a fight were either dead or heading in the opposite direction. It didn’t seem fair.

Charlotte blinked warm tears of condensation out of her eyes. I was hoping for something a little more substantial, like “duck”.

The pear-shaped darkship was manoeuvring to open up on her when a shadow whisked overhead. For a second Charlotte thought it was the second darkship, but then she realized she could still hear a faint whining noise from her speaker box, both her eardrums intact and definitely not leaking blood down her ears.

‘You’re not alone! Your friends have returned with Jethro Daunt, and like any good churchman, he has come to drive away the devils.’

Charlotte had thought the darkships strange, but this submersible was even stranger: a rapidly moving silvery stretch of steel propelled by a spinning nest of metal tentacles at her stern, the mysterious u-boat’s conning tower a low angular slash like a shark’s fin. She had no visible portholes along her hull or plate lines and rivets, but the submersible did possess a cluster of torpedo tubes circling her dome-shaped bow, and a salvo of four torpedoes hissed in anger as she angled past the ambushed darkship. As seemingly surprised by the appearance of this late addition to the conflict as Charlotte, the darkship’s lance belatedly blazed out. Dark bolts of ebony lightning ignited three of the four incoming projectiles, each lost in a flowering explosion upending Charlotte and slapping her back into the Purity Queen ’s torn length. As Charlotte collapsed forward, she saw the darkship had acted too slowly to catch the fourth torpedo, the projectile’s nose cone splitting away and shedding peels of metal, releasing a cloud of tiny warheads as though it had just given birth in the water. The fleeting school of miniature projectiles buzzed in against their quarry from a dozen directions, looping and striking the darkship as hungry and mean as a school of piranhas.

There was no immediate detonation forthcoming, and for a second Charlotte thought that the enemy’s shield had neutralised the strike; then she realized the warheads had actually burrowed deep under its inky skin. With no shockwave Charlotte could feel, the darkship jolted as it absorbed the internal detonation, a dozen violent geysers of black substance spewing out. The darkship simply fell out of the currents, drifting down towards the seabed and dissolving into inky fronds as it dropped.

Rotating like a victorious dolphin, the submarine turned elegantly above the forest and angled back over the seanore camp, before the strange interloper returned towards the broken, beached hull of the Purity Queen.

Behind Charlotte, the second darkship, already badly damaged by the rotor-spear strike she had slipped beneath its defences, turned in the ocean and vanished at speed.

‘Those who stand together are rarely beaten by evil.’ Elizica’s words slipped across her mind. ‘Evil relies on its victims acting as selfishly and supinely as it must to prosper.’

But there are always losers. Charlotte looked down at the commodore sprawled at the foot of his ravaged submarine, dozens of seanore bodies floating past mutilated, corpses held in the embrace of the currents. Did carrion care which side won or lost after they passed along the Circle, or was there just the empty void where their life had been? A gap in the lives of all those who had known and loved them?

I’m going inside the wreck to get my sceptre.

‘Be quick, girl-child. The enemy know you have fought here, they will return to this camp with equipment sensitive enough to pick up and track the trail of the sceptre’s radiations.’

There are more of those things?

‘The darkships will return with the gill-neck fleet, with everything they hold in their power, if it allows them to seize the sceptre.’

Gemma Dark prowled behind the chair at the head of the table, growing increasingly irritated at the petty sniping between the nobles sitting at the dozen seats dotted along its oblong length. Like much of the furniture in the gill-neck capital, the table was moulded from a single piece of transparent crystal, allowing her to observe the nervous twitches of the exiled royalist lords’ hands and legs as they argued back and forth. There had always been a Star Chamber in the centuries since Parliament had seized power inside the Kingdom, maintaining the increasingly slim fiction that it was the true Jackelian government, ruling in proxy for a long-deposed line of kings and queens. Had the Star Chamber always bickered and fought as fiercely as this? It was no wonder the fleet-in-exile had eventually been broken and defeated when these chinless wonders had been leading it.

‘It’s simply not on,’ pronounced Boris Jola, the present Baron of Ranfshire. ‘We are only two weeks away from beginning the raids on Jackals’ harbour towns, and now the entire Advocacy fleet is being sent away? Does that fellow Walsingham understand the first thing about war? To defeat your enemy, you must first engage him. Not go charging off, chasing after some damnable will-o’-the-wisp.’

‘He has his reasons,’ said Gemma. ‘I did not detect any reluctance to go along with Walsingham’s plans when he offered you and your crew a way out of the prison camp on the Island of Ko’marn. But perhaps you prefer picking gillwort fruit to fighting Parliament? Perhaps you prefer having the Advocacy hunt you down as pirates, rather than helping you sink Parliament’s wheel-ships?’

‘I always said it was dangerous to put our trust in Walsingham. Fellow’s a turncoat, only after his own ends. No blue blood in that fellow, no breeding, I’m sure of it.’

Angry calls to concentrate on the invasion of Jackals came back at Gemma. When Gemma had come in here, she had arrived cheered by the news that her brother’s precious submarine had been left a holed wreck on the seabed in the seanore hunting grounds. That traitorous dog Jared, that stain on their family’s name, possibly dead — well, she would only believe it when she saw his corpse — but now her good mood was slowly being sapped by the inane prattle of these titled fools. Everything they had, they owed to Gemma and her allies, to her luck. And here they were, banging the diamond surface of the council table they sat at solely through her cunning and artfulness. Talking about unilaterally moving the forces of their allies, partners who only suffered the royalist cause through Gemma’s contrivances. If ever there was a proof of absolute monarchy’s worth, these twittering blowhards were it. The Jackelian throne had waited an age for a true queen to sit on it once more, an authentic queen, not Parliament’s amputated puppet. When Gemma assumed her rightful seat, this council would be as much a thing of the past as that prattling chamber of robbing industrialists who occupied the House of Guardians. Parliament would never be swapped for this council of fools, not while she drew breath. But for now, I need them.

‘The retrieval of the last surviving crown jewel would be a powerful totem I agree,’ said the Countess of Stokesay, usually one of the more reasonable members of the Star Chamber. ‘But worthy of the complete diversion of the Advocacy war machine, surely not? I’m still waiting to hear news that Parliament had declared war against the Advocacy in retaliation for the sinking of their convoy and the blockade of the new sea route.’

More than a totem, countess. But Walsingham’s power is my power. Sometimes it was harder to remember that fact than it should be.

‘Surely we can try to convince the rulers of the Advocacy that is in our mutual interest to defeat the Kingdom first?’ The countess asked, her voice full of prudence and reason. ‘When we reign again, we can flush out the sceptre and take our pick of any of the old relics Parliament stole from our ancestors.’

‘Enough!’ Gemma jabbed a finger at the council. ‘The gill-necks’ laws only allow them to assist a legitimate regime, and we need the sceptre as a token of that.’ How easily the lies tripped off her tongue, she really had been associating with Walsingham and his friends for far too long.

‘A different interpretation of the law can be arrived at, perhaps?’ said the countess. ‘Isn’t that why the Advocacy have a council of four princes, so they may consider different points of view?’

‘My Countess Stokesay,’ snarled Gemma. ‘When I found you, you and your retainers were growing barley under assumed names in the colonies, barely better than indentured labour. And you, Lord Moray, a slaver for hire trying to scrape enough coins together to refuel your u-boat and feed your crew in a Cassarabian port. You, Baron Knighton, a jobbing privateer for the God-Emperor of Kikkosico, reduced to begging for licences of marque at a foreign court. All of you were finished without me, without the assistance I have been able to secure. I brought the cause back from the brink of extinction. Me! By my will and my luck. You were all raised, like me, by our parents with stories of what was stolen from us, from our ancestors. If you want your birthright to become anymore than fancies you whisper in turn to your children, then you will let our allies do what they must do, and in return they will bring us back everything we have lost!’

There was a silence as the impact of her words settled in. Gemma turned towards the transparent panel in the flat ruby-like stretch of wall in the tower so they wouldn’t see the tears in her eye. Most of them still had sons and daughters to pass their dwindling inheritance onto. Hers lay dead in a foreign grave, killed by her jigger of a brother, freed from prison to die for Parliament’s shilling and the greedy machination of the great Jared Black. Her brother had betrayed the cause. He had abandoned his life and his true name and his title and his family, living as a coward rather than dying as a hero. But Gemma wouldn’t. Never. It isn’t as if I’ve been left with anything else to live for, is it?

After the Star Chamber cleared of nobles, a door at the other end of the room irised open, Walsingham entering. It was easier thinking of him as Walsingham rather than one of the Mass. Deceptions were always easier to maintain when it suited you to believe in what you saw.

‘You suffer their prattle with an ease I can only admire,’ said Walsingham.

‘I am their leader; they are my people. It is my duty to listen to their concerns.’

‘Unquestioning obedience suits my temperament better, but to each their own.’

‘I brought you to this point,’ Gemma reminded him. ‘I found you and released you.’

‘An accommodation still exists between us,’ said Walsingham. ‘After all, we are so alike. Both clawing our way back from the brink, both seeking to help our people.’

‘Do you really understand me, or are they just words of reassurance you believe I need to hear?’

‘Oh, I understand you perfectly. You seek dominion over your people and your land. It is the way of all things, the most natural of all the universe’s processes. Only that which is strong survives. All else whithers and is consumed.’

‘It is not just my rightful dominions I want restored,’ demanded Gemma.

‘Quite. When we are victorious, I will give you the blessings of the Mass,’ said Walsingham. ‘That is our agreement. You will have a life as near immortal as makes no difference. Your youth will be restored.’

‘My youth be damned, sir,’ said Gemma. ‘I need my womb functioning again.’

‘I can only imagine how hard it is to lose an only child,’ smiled Walsingham, coldly. There was very little empathy in that quick flash of white teeth. ‘After all, I have so very many of them.’

‘That’s what I need to have.’

‘And have it, you shall. An eternity to fill this world with your progeny. Every nation ruled by your children. Filled by them, too. You need only keep as many others alive as you need to feed the Mass and maintain a viable breeding pool. Queen of a new world; mother to it, as well.’

‘Yes,’ said Gemma, the flush of excitement hard to keep from her voice. ‘That is how it will be. The countess was correct. We should set aside the matter of retrieving the sceptre for the moment. We’ve pushed the Advocacy and the Kingdom to the brink of war. Nudge them across the threshold and let them fight to the finish. In their ashes we will both prosper.’

Walsingham gave a facsimile of a smile. ‘Our accommodation only stretches so far. It is not for the hunting hound to tell the shooting party what to take for supper. Leave the larger picture to us. You may still keep the scraps from the table.’

Gemma took Walsingham’s own advice on unquestioning obedience, or at least the appearance of it, and said no more. Certainly not rising to the slight that to rule the Kingdom of Jackals could be considered mere table scraps. It was a dangerous thing to tie yourself to a shark. Sever the bonds of the saddle too soon and you might end up looking less like its rider and far more like its next meal. But Gemma’s luck had brought her this close to victory; she had to trust it to carry her the rest of the distance.

Charlotte looked up as Jethro Daunt entered the control room of the Court of the Air’s extraordinary u-boat. While the submersible’s exterior was windowless, the craft’s bridge was appointed with strangely translucent viewing ports. They appeared as if you could reach out and touch the ocean, feel water streaming past your fingers. These curious portholes were fringed by light from red glowing strips that illuminated the ex-parson’s face, returning some colour to his pallid features. Between tending the ruins of Boxiron’s once proud frame in the vessel’s small surgical bay, Daunt had been wandering the u-boat looking increasingly washed out. Their surgical bay was growing cramped. Boxiron lay alongside Commodore Black, the old u-boat man tended by Maeva, who wouldn’t shift from his side. With the rest of the seanore gathering their forces for war, the grand congress’s survivors having tasted the bitter fruit of their ancient prophecy firsthand, Maeva’s presence here was tantamount to abandoning her position among the Clan Raldama. Charlotte doubted the commodore would approve when — if — he regained his facilities. She could almost hear his scornful tones now. There’s no love so foolish, as old love.

Dick Tull stood up from his seat by the small chart table and Sadly turned around from the planesmen’s position at the front of the bridge, two pilots lying down on control couches as they guided and nudged the nest of control sticks and wheels at the fore of the vessel.

‘Has the steamman been stabilized?’ Sadly asked.

‘There’s little of him left to stabilize,’ sighed Daunt. ‘But I hope he will at least last until we reach the Court proper and put him in the care of your surgeons.’

‘You still haven’t paid for your passage, Mister Daunt,’ said Sadly.

An uncharacteristic flash of anger crossed the ex-parson’s face. ‘I would say that Boxiron and the commodore have both paid plenty.’

Charlotte realized she was standing ramrod straight like a sentry, clutching King Jude’s sceptre as though she held a rotor-spear outside a nomad’s seabed dwelling. She got the feeling it wasn’t going to be easy to relax here.

‘The great game is always played ruthlessly, says I. Bait’s meant to attract a nibble or two. You have my sympathy and more importantly, you currently have the surgical resources of my u-boat at the disposal of your friends. A little reciprocation if you please…’

‘Just tell him what you found out, amateur,’ said Dick. ‘It’s not as if I don’t want to know why my own people are trying to top me.’

‘That’s rather the nub of the issue,’ said Daunt. ‘They’re not your people anymore, sergeant. Walsingham and the commander of the convoy shared a curious trait with the prison camp commandant. None of the three gave off any of the tells which a Circlist priest would use to read their souls. They were blank of emotions, or rather, they were walking about as a rather hollow facsimile of the real thing.’

‘The graveyard back at the camp…’ said Sadly.

Daunt nodded. ‘Filled with the corpses of Jackelian notables. The machine Walsingham and the commodore’s sister used on me back on the island wasn’t just designed as an interrogation device, it was designed to rip memories out of my brain and implant them in something ensconced inside in a similar machine. I don’t doubt there’s now an enemy walking the streets of Middlesteel which is perceived as identical to me, a creature that carries enough of my memories to fool most of the good people of my acquaintance.’ He pointed at Dick Tull. ‘It was your story of the events at the mansion of Lord Chant that first saw my suspicions tickled. Your partner did see Lady Florence’s murder. Doubtless she had questioned some form of behaviour on the part of the thing she believed was her husband that seemed out of character. She was murdered, a facsimile of her ladyship inserted in time to make you, good sergeant, appear like a fool. Your young partner was murdered to cover the affair up, while you made the perfect scapegoat to frame for the crime and be executed as an enemy of the state.’

‘Why not just replace me with one of them?’ said Dick.

‘I rather think our enemy is limited in number. That is how you make sense of this absurd war brewing between Jackals and the Advocacy. The most powerful state beneath the waves set against the most powerful nation on the continent. Who stands to benefit? Only a third party which wishes to soften up both sides. Simple enough to arrange, I would imagine, if you have infiltrated the government and military of both sides and-’ he indicated Dick, ‘-the secret police.’

Sadly’s brow narrowed. ‘Who is the enemy then, asks I?’

‘Not who the Court believes is responsible, good agent,’ said Daunt. ‘Cast your mind back to when the camp commandant’s corpse changed and then spontaneously combusted back on the island.’ He smiled at Charlotte. ‘In his ashes I found this.’ He produced a crystal from a side pocket in his tattered waistcoat.

Charlotte reached out to confirm the Eye of Fate hung around her neck. It was still there, yet the ex-parson was holding the amulet’s identical twin between his fingers.

‘I am willing to wager, good agent, that up to now the Court of the Air had been assuming the infiltrators are Cassarabian spies? A logical deduction, given the caliph’s womb-mages are reputed to be able to warp their spies’ blood code and give them the ability to change their features. And of course, the Kingdom has been trading shells and sabre parries with the empire along the southern frontier for years now.’

‘They’re always good for a spot of mischief, are the caliph’s boys,’ admitted Sadly.

‘Quite,’ said Daunt. ‘But a Cassarabian shape-switcher wearing my face would still give away all the subtle tells of the race of man. The reason why there are infiltrators walking around like living blanks is that they haven’t assumed the shape of the victims they replaced.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘It is our perception they have stolen. A trick that Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism is also renowned for. That gem around your neck aids the mesmeric process I assume? The enemy walks around as they are, but we see only what they want us to see.’

‘It’s mine, honey,’ said Charlotte, touching her gem protectively.

‘Not exactly,’ said Daunt. ‘Rather, let us agree that you’re presently holding onto it for the spirit of the land and those who are to follow us, are you not? Please, damson, don’t bother to dissemble. No one knows better than I how uncomfortable it is to be haunted by ancient things best forgotten. The church was willing to forgive much about me, but believing in gods was one heresy more than even they were prepared to tolerate. I have caught a few glimpses of what our enemy is, but you, or rather the spirit moving you around the land like a chessboard piece, has faced this threat before. There were hints in the history texts back at Tock House. An earlier war between the gill-necks and the Jackelians long before the last ice age. The way your gem defended you when you were attacked, your fever afterwards. The manner in which the seanore were practically falling down on their knees and worshipping you when we picked you up from the clans’ gathering. You’re not who you once were, your body language betrays you. It’s as if you are two people sharing a single frame.’

Elizica’s voice echoed in Charlotte’s mind. ‘It is time. Have them place their hands on the gem at the top of the sceptre.’

What are you going to do?

‘The sceptre’s gem carries echoes of its old purpose. Do as I have told you, girl-child.’

The party did as Charlotte bid them, the sceptre’s jewel pulsing under her palm, the warmth of the others’ bodies mingling with hers. Charlotte felt a dizzying sensation, but she didn’t fall. It was as if she was becoming the sceptre, joining with what the gem on its cap had seen, the jewel’s history unravelling in reverse order before her mind’s eye.

The sceptre secure in the mausoleum beneath the speaker’s chair in Parliament’s chamber. Being polished by the Keeper of the Vault, an ancient title but little more than a janitor now in the great functions of state.

A retainer running with the sceptre wrapped up and concealed in rags, trying to sneak it across the border into Quatershift. But Parliament’s forces captured him. Hung him from a tree before they carried their prize back to the House of Guardians. Charlotte caught glimpses of royal history in the centuries before Parliament overthrew the last true king. Being carried by royals for coronations and the opening of Parliament — the Guardians little more than favoured poodles told when to bark and bite.

Centuries of cold and chill biting winds from the north. Then the sceptre was being locked away in a barrow mound, buried by a dying monarch as the Jackeni tribes dwindled, their numbers denuded at the beginning of the age of ice. Earlier, earlier, and then the gem was being installed, hidden in plain sight on the newly created sceptre of a newly minted Kingdom. Before that it had served as far more than a mere ornament. Charlotte gasped soundlessly, held in the sceptre’s spell. In the service of its true masters. Creatures that Queen Elizica had battled and known as the sea-bishops, the same hideously wizened and fanged monsters haunting Charlotte’s dreams. Charlotte could see where the nickname had come from — sea-bishops — the monsters’ distended brain cases, rising out of their skulls in offensive imitation of a bishop’s mitre. The sea-bishops had been members of the race of man once, but on another Earth, one of millions stretched out on the thread of creation, a single pearl on a necklace containing infinite variants of itself, endlessly repeated reflections in a mirror. Mankind had abused this world, drained it with their vampire hunger, becoming ever more dependent on their machines, their bodies withering away even as their brains grew and swelled until their heads became the mitre-tall monstrosities that Elizica had named them for. The sea-bishops’ minds developed to be powerful enough to amplify their will with crystal devices, compel the creatures of the world they shared to surrender their life-force to these terrible man-things evolved so far from their humanity. Cattle that would walk towards their death convinced they were approaching their own kind. Charlotte flinched as she realized that it was one of these trickster devices she wore around her neck. Every sea-bishop carried a duplicate of her amulet. A multifaceted tool: communication device, calculating machine, weapon and mesmeric camouflage apparatus combined. Eventually, nothing was left on the sea-bishops’ Earth. No food, no vegetation, no fish in the ocean, no metals left to strip-mine, no coal to burn, no sunlight capable of penetrating the dark polluted clouds that choked and swirled around their home. With their land heated to hellish temperatures, the sea-bishops retreated to the dwindling oceans, changing their bodies to live underwater in the foul acid-ridden lakes that remained and cultivated the crystal machines that sustained them. With dwindling resources, they constructed their final piece of technological art — a vast diamond cannon that could punch a tunnel through the very wall of creation itself and hurl their seed sideways into new realities on which to feed. They expended incredible amounts of power to scatter their seed this way, but the sea-bishops’ investment was repaid. Those that survived the journey and prospered would grow a huge crystal gate that could open a two-way connection between the reality they’d reached and their own dead, dark, mirror reflection of Earth. A terrible gate that could only be anchored at more than one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure of sea level. This was why the sea-bishops’ seed-cities inevitably settled on the deepest part of a host world’s ocean; trenches that scarred the world, darkness that nestled and protected their hidden work until they were ready. Balanced by coequal quantum pressure on both sides, their portal could open with minimal energy expenditure, and through that doorway would swarm the never-ending Mass of sea-bishops from the victim world’s dark twin. This was the seanores’ legend of the deep hell. Demon locusts come to feed on the native population.

The jewel in King Jude’s sceptre had captured echoes of a hundred such invasions before it arrived on Charlotte’s Earth. Billions of victims, some human, many different in a myriad subtle ways, but all the children of Earth, and all consumed in great orgies of destruction. Wars were sparked, revolutions fomented by the sea-bishops’ tricks, the host populations softened up before invasion. And only then did the demon hordes come. Children running towards people they thought were their parents just to be impaled on deadly crystal blades and their life force consumed, husks discarded. Mothers desperately trying to find their offspring only to have their children reach out and stab them through the neck. Slaughter after slaughter, race after race, nation after nation, world after world. Feeding greed without end and hunger without limit. Worlds pissed on and polluted and raped. Charlotte tried to scream and cry and turn her sight away from these hellish visions, but Elizica held her tight, Charlotte’s palm bonded to the sceptre like glue.

And the sceptre’s jewel, the jewel tormenting Charlotte with these visions, it served as a key and a map combined. A key jealously guarded by the commander of each seed-city launched towards an unknown reality. For on some of the shadowy mirror worlds, creatures of greater power than the sea-bishops lurked — other sea-bishops more technologically advanced, or human analogues raised to near god-hood by the fruits of super-science. The sea-bishops were paranoid that their world would in turn become prey to some variant of humanity more powerful than themselves. The sceptre’s gem held the secret co-ordinates of the sea-bishop’s reality and it would only to be activated by the seed-city commander if a prey-world was judged susceptible to the sea-bishop’s forces. Elizica had frustrated the sea-bishops’ original plans, uncovering the plot during their first attempt to spark a war between the Jackelian tribes and the gill-necks. She’d worked to steal their precious key. Elizica had liberated the Eye of Fate and with the help of a great mechomancer, she had altered it along with six other amulets stolen from the corpses of dead sea-bishops. Changed the gems to allow humans to change their appearance. Seven heroes had infiltrated the seed-city of the sea-bishops, led by Elizica, stealing the key-gem and preventing the enemy from opening the gateway to their hellish home. Before they had escaped, the heroes had plundered part of the seed-city’s engine works, a shield that had protected the sea-bishops from the hideous destructive forces of being flung across the barrier of reality. Machinery which could create a bubble of space-time sitting outside of existence, the only shield capable of surviving the crossing. Elizica and the two surviving members of the raiding party had buried the device in the walls of the underwater trench and activated the shield, trapping the seed-city in a trap of time, sealing the enemy inside eternity’s cold grip.

Daunt moaned opposite Charlotte and she felt Elizica siphoning his memories, the ones the ex-parson had glimpsed during his interrogation by the sea-bishops. Elizica drew them out and gave them context and meaning. Charlotte saw what the sea-bishops had seen, returning back to the world after the shield engine crystal had been dislodged by a landslide brought about by depth charges and Gemma Dark’s blundering vessel. A desperate pirate trying to escape the Kingdom’s navy. The sea-bishops had nearly fed on Gemma and her crew until they had realized that here were allies. That was the sea-bishop way. Powerful as they were, the scouts of the seed-ship were limited in number. They used trickery to sow dissent and weaken the host races of the mirror world they landed on, preparing them for an effortless conquest. The Advocacy had been targeted first, the gill-necks’ Judge Sovereign and the Bench of Four an easy mark, a moribund society constrained to follow ancient laws, unquestioning of new rulings once issued. Then, helped by Gemma Dark and her rump of royalist survivors, the Kingdom of Jackals next, the most powerful nation on the continent, key members of its government and the House of Guardians subverted, followed by the generals at House Guards and the admirals of the RAN, the fleet sea arm, the secret police, and the editors of the most important newssheets. Slowly, slowly the two sides were pushed towards mutually assured destruction. And finally, with two nations subverted, the sea-bishops tracked down the lost key to their world-crossing gate, hidden centuries before by Elizica’s descendants inside the royal sceptre of the Jackelian state. Protected by the whole apparatus of the House of Guardians and dozens of automated sentry systems. Too many people to murder and replace. But not a difficult problem to solve. Charlotte winced as she saw how easily the sea-bishops had drawn her into their web of corruption — the most infamous cat burglar in the Kingdom, always pushing her luck. Ripe to be baited into stealing the sceptre, then murdered and her corpse offered up as the thief who had stolen it. And the sceptre? Oh, undoubtedly fenced and stripped and melted by now, but look, we caught the sly, wicked woman behind the theft. No need to search for the perpetrators of the crime now. Charlotte felt herself drawn deeper into the sceptre’s gem, layer upon layer of information etched into its crystalline structure, encryption so dense it would take the great transaction-engines of the civil service thousands of years to crack it. But for the sea-bishops, only a minute, the time it would take to slot it into their seed-city’s machines and open up a bridge. Those seconds, the death sentence for every creature on Earth. The sceptre grew hotter, the warmth of Charlotte’s contact with it burning, igniting her soul. With a screech of pain she broke the connection, lurching back and seeing the spell broken for Dick, Sadly and Daunt, the men panting with their faces as pale as alabaster and stamped with horror.

We have to destroy it, smash the crystal, Charlotte told Elizica.

‘You don’t think I tried girl-child? I hawked that gem around the nations of the world, looking for alchemical sorceries strong enough to destroy it. No blades, however sharp, can cut it, no drills scratch it, no projectiles shatter it, no weights crush it, no energy disintegrate it. I spent twenty years after the exile of the sea-bishops neglecting my Kingdom and trying to destroy the key-gem. In the end, I could only hide it somewhere I trusted future generations would protect it.’

The royal sceptre of Jackals.

‘The first of the sea-bishops, the seed-city commander, the one you call Walsingham. It is said he has a way of changing the key-gem’s composition and rendering it breakable. But he would only use it if he thought we posed any kind of threat to the sea-bishop’s home. And that I fear, we do not. Even in my age, we only managed to wall the enemy away. Temporarily, as it transpired.’

Dick Tull rubbed his unshaven cheeks. ‘I know when they must have replaced Walsingham. He was operating out in the colonies, running the State Protection Board’s operations against Pericur. When Walsingham came back it was as if he was a changed man. He rose to the top of the board like a meteor, second only to the head. It was unnatural how fast it happened.’

‘Unnatural indeed, good sergeant. But in hindsight, quite understandable,’ said Daunt.

‘It’s mine,’ said Charlotte, lifting up King Jude’s sceptre. ‘The sceptre is mine and those stovepipe hat-headed jiggers are not laying one scaly claw on it.’

‘In that little matter, you’ll have the support of the Court,’ promised Sadly. ‘We’ll try to keep it out of the sea-bishops’ hands.’

‘Try?’ said Dick. ‘You better do more than sodding try. You saw what’s waiting for us if those monsters get the key-gem. They’ll finish off everyone in the world.’

‘It’s not like the old days,’ said Sadly. ‘The Court of the Air isn’t what it used to be. You’ll see.’