From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER TWELVE

When Commodore Black came onto the bridge of the submersible, Daunt noticed it was with the support of a cane and trailed by Maeva, the old u-boat man shushing the woman and protesting her attentions, accusing her of being a ‘blessed clucking hen’.

Daunt was glad to see that the commodore had healed relatively rapidly, but the sight of him back on his feet was a painful remainder that Boxiron was nowhere close to a similar recovery. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every day at sea seemed to bring a fresh challenge in keeping the steamman clinging onto life. It wasn’t the fault of the small surgical bay — it had been equipped to deal with patients from the race of man, not a failing citizen of the Steamman Free State. The logical part of Daunt’s mind knew that a single person’s life was an insignificant matter in the balance of the great game they had been caught up in. But his friend’s dwindling reserves of energy and increasingly tenuous hold on the great pattern somehow seemed far more concrete than the prospect of the sea-bishops opening up a gateway back to their infernal home.

‘So here we are again, good captain,’ Daunt greeted the commodore. ‘Wedged between that rock and a hard place. How is-?’

‘Boxiron’s a tough old bird,’ said the commodore. ‘And this boat’s surgeon is game for a challenge. He got my creaking old bones back on their feet.’ He waved Maeva away. ‘Stop fussing, lass. There’s plenty that’s lining up to kill old Blacky, but it won’t be a spot of exercise that does for me.’ He hobbled over to the chart table and traced the headings mapped out on the table. ‘What’s this — this heading can’t be right?’

Daunt peered to where the commodore’s attention lay. The ex-parson wasn’t an expert, but to his eyes the temperature gradients of the chart seemed to be running significantly hot. They were aiming for the margins of the Fire Sea. ‘You’ve navigated us through worse than that before, surely?’

‘No, lad, I haven’t. This-’ he stabbed his finger on the centre of the bearing. ‘This is the Isla Furia. No sane sailor crosses that part of the Fire Sea.’

‘The island doesn’t appear to be located far inside the magma fields?’

‘There’s no need for it to be positioned any deeper, Jethro Daunt, for a sensible skipper to avoid it. There’s an underwater vent in the region mortal fiery enough to cook out even the best u-boat’s cooling system. The Isla Furia has a volcano that’s the devil’s own cauldron; you sail past that island and you’re liable to find molten boulders as large as houses raining down on you. And should its rocks miss your hull, the terrible place spews out choking clouds of poison gas.’

‘You’ve seen this with your own eyes?’

The commodore tapped the charts. ‘From seventy miles away, that I have. As close as I ever wanted to get. We’re almost on the Isla Furia’s doorstep, so you’ll have the sight in front of your eyes soon enough.’

That he did. Daunt saw what the commodore was afraid of through the bridge’s oddly transparent portholes. They were passing over an underwater plain of superheated water, the boils that fringed the magma fields of the Fire Sea, a basalt surface littered with the wreck of vessels, craft from dozens of nations and as many centuries. Paddle steamers and clippers, galleons and fire-breakers, u-boats and liners, debris overgrown with strange organic sculptures of fire coral.

‘This wreckage grows thicker the closer you get,’ said the commodore. ‘Those poor devils are just the surface craft whose crews were overcome with gas and holed lightly enough for them drift out a-ways before sinking on the margins of the Isla Furia.’ He turned to find Sadly, the court’s agent standing behind the two horizontal pilot positions. ‘Did you lose a grip on your marbles, lad, in that terrible prison camp you were locked up in? Have you taken a bump on your noggin while escaping? You’re heading for super-heated vents — that’s the Isla Furia on the horizon!’

‘We’re not a conventional craft,’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rated for where we’re heading.’

‘And are you rated for being hit by a squall of molten depth charges as large as carts, lad? For that’s what waiting for you on this course. I know the Fire Sea. No one has penetrated as deep as old Blacky into this foul place. Turn north-north-west twenty degrees and head for the Abbadon boils. Better choppy waters than suicidal ones.’

‘I’m feeling lucky, says I.’

Daunt reached out to steady the commodore, the u-boat man shaking with incredulous anger and his remaining fever. ‘Peace, good captain. I believe the Court of the Air prefers the sort of luck it can manufacture, rather than relying on fate’s random charity.’

‘I’ve just had my precious Purity Queen filleted by a pack of black-hearted demons and now you want me to risk my neck on this exotic tub of the Court’s? Poor old Blacky, sick and in his dotage, chased out of his home by traitors and devils set on his tail by his wicked sister, hounded across the seas… and now his unlucky stars are calling for a chance to toss boiling boulders at him? It’s a happy thing I won’t be around for much longer, Jethro Daunt. A happy thing fate won’t have these miserable bones to torment!’

Daunt said nothing and waited. Up ahead, the underwater plain was littered with the graveyard of vessels, ships laying on ships, moulded together by thick fire coral, a floor of unwise mariners and submariners forming their own geological strata. Beyond the hills of coral, a curtain of steaming water from the broken vents of the seabed shimmered. So thick with fury that nothing was visible beyond its violent turmoil. Undaunted, the Court’s vessel passed over the carpet of destroyed craft, heading right for the centre of the maelstrom.

‘Tell me, Barnabas,’ the commodore moaned, ‘Tell me the name of this strange craft of yours so I know on what boat my end is to come?’

‘The Court doesn’t name its vessels,’ said Sadly. ‘We’re travelling on U-boat 414.’

The commodore flinched. ‘No, lad, no! You talk to me of your blessed luck, then you tell me you’re challenging all the forces of the sea by daring to sail on a vessel with no name?’

Sadly just smiled ‘The Purity Queen carried a name. How long did you last against that pair of darkships?’

As Jared Black moaned, Daunt gazed at the raging wall coming up at them. In his frail state, the commodore might be better sleeping his exhaustion off next to Charlotte’s cabin, or playing cards with Dick Tull and the surviving crewmen of the Purity Queen in the hold. True to Sadly’s word, the submersible hit the wall of superheated water and passed through it with none of the creaks and complaints that would have sounded from the hull of a normal Jackelian submersible. The temperature on the bridge stayed at the same comfortable level, the gentle ticking from fans inside the air-vents continuing as untroubled as if they were cruising off the green waters of the Kingdom’s coast. Seconds after they had breached the curtain, its boiling frenzy evaporated leaving them travelling down a clear corridor of sea water. The furious underwater boils walled them in port and starboard, with spherical objects half-visible through the turbulence, a chain of iron orbs tied to the sea floor by cables. Sea mines.

‘By Lord Tridentscale’s beard, what’s this?’ the commodore cursed.

‘The Court’s luck,’ said Daunt. ‘Is that not so, good agent?’

Sadly said nothing, but he didn’t need to.

Daunt pointed outside. ‘These vents aren’t natural, they’re an artificial thermal barrier. Machines under the seabed cooking the water, with mines to sink anyone that tries to push through the shield. There must be something of considerable value on the Isla Furia to warrant all of this.’

‘I think you’ll find we will be able to protect your sceptre,’ said Sadly.

‘Bob my soul, but I hope so.’

The thermal barrier must have been protecting the island for the Court for centuries, designed by the mad, bad and dangerous to know. The graveyard of vessels stretching for miles beyond its curtain spoke volumes for its lethal efficiency. It took a minute to clear the corridor through the curtain of heat, walls sealing behind them as they passed, but whatever Daunt had been expecting on the other side, it wasn’t what he found himself facing.

Beyond the thermal barrier stretched the submerged ruins of a city. Much of it looked like blackened termite mounds, thousands of buildings towering and ruined and slagged. So ancient, that its structures had decayed into featureless underwater spires, only the occasional areas of surviving symmetry or flat surfaces to indicate that something sentient had once had a hand in these crags’ formation. But among the lofty termite mounds, hundreds of storeys high, were scattered other buildings — better preserved, signs of stone carvings and ornamentation visible on smooth surfaces, pitted by hundreds of oblong holes. Windows once, now glassless doorways for schools of fish to dart through, the surface light slanting down onto a grid of uneven, half-silted streets.

‘Bob my soul,’ said Daunt. ‘I have never seen its like.’

‘I have,’ said the commodore. ‘A far ways off from here, though. The ruins of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed. One of the world’s wonders.’

Sadly stood by the main view screen at the front of the bridge. ‘Ironically, our scientists believe the better-preserved buildings down there are actually the oldest. They were probably sprayed with a substance that resists age. The anthills were the last buildings to be built. They’re little more than dirt and dust held together by kelp now.’

Even the commodore seemed impressed. ‘Compared to those sunken behemoths, the tallest tower in Middlesteel would stand like a blessed blade of grass next to a sunflower. What manner of creature lived out there?’

‘You’ll meet their descendants on the island,’ said Sadly.

The Isla Furia’s underwater rock face loomed ahead, a jagged rise of dark volcanic stone holed by caves. The Court’s submersible headed for one of the openings, lanterns inside the tunnel activating as the craft entered, the vessel’s own bow lights switching off. She passed confidently through a smooth arrow-straight cavern, before passing out into another stretch of water, this revealed as an inland lake when U-boat 414 surfaced. Ahead of the bridge’s pilot screen a walled town was visible, concrete u-boat pens upon the shore waiting to receive their vessel. There wasn’t much to see of the town beyond its high fortifications. Whatever lay beyond the wall, it obviously wasn’t a land-locked counterpart of the ruined spires under the sea. They docked in the shadow of the volcano. It was a beast all right, the commodore had been right about that. Towering twelve thousand feet high, clouds of thick white smoke poured out of its throat. Current discharges aside, there seemed little sign of the violence and magma the old u-boat man claimed to have witnessed. In fact, as they docked, Daunt could see the Isla Furia’s slopes were covered with terraces growing crops, a series of metal pylons driven into the incline bearing cable cars up and down into the city below.

Daunt scratched his chin. ‘This is the Court’s?’

‘More or less,’ said Sadly. ‘We landed on the Isla Furia centuries ago, looking for a secluded ground base to support our operations. The islanders we found here are called the Nuyokians. Like all the tribes on the Fire Sea islands, they’d been locked inside the magma and boils of the ocean and trapped here. The natives were in a sorry state, dependent on the rain season for their crops on the slopes, blood sacrifices to hold off the steam storms. Over the centuries they’ve worked for us, intermarried with our staff. Agents that survive our calling often as not come here to retire.’

‘And now,’ said Daunt, ‘this is all that remains of the Court of the Air?’

‘What do you think we’ve been doing since the great war with the Army of Shadows, sitting on our arses and gossiping about the good old days?’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rebuilding the Court in the marshalling yards beyond the city, making ready to refloat a new aerial city. Recruiting agents, finding the wolftakers that were scattered across the continent and bringing them back into the fold.’

‘Did you ever think that the Kingdom doesn’t need you anymore?’ said the commodore. ‘All your tricks and sly ways. The conniving legacy of Isambard Kirkhill.’

The badinage hurled against his employer cut no ice with Sadly. ‘As long as there are wolves to prey on the flock, there’ll be a need for shepherds, say I.’

‘Wolftakers. Well, damn the lot of you,’ spat the commodore.

‘You might as well ask does the Kingdom need a future,’ said Sadly. ‘Do you think the sea-bishops would have got as far as they have done if the Court was still watching above Jackals, protecting the nation? Who would you rely on without us? The State Protection Board, civil servants and badly paid jobsworths like Dick Tull? Don’t make me laugh. I need to report in to my superiors. You’ll stay on board until we send for you.’

‘I trust you will get them to see reason,’ said Daunt.

‘Don’t you worry about that, Mister Daunt. I’m sure my nightmares are just the same as yours since I touched that cursed sceptre.’

‘And Boxiron, good agent?’

‘We’ll take care of him in the Court’s hospital. You just settle down and write me out a nice long list of all the names you saw in the prison camp’s graveyard. I have a feeling there’s a lot of nobles, industrialists and members of the government who are going to go missing in the next few months.’

‘Don’t underestimate the sea-bishops,’ warned Daunt.

‘Don’t underestimate the Court of the Air,’ retorted Sadly. ‘Reduced circumstances or no, this is what we do.’

Holding the Kingdom’s future in the Court’s hands. Well, that was true enough. If Daunt couldn’t protect the sceptre here, keep it out of the sea-bishops’ clutches. There wasn’t going to be a future for any of them.

When the call came to meet Sadly’s superiors in the Court of the Air, Charlotte was happy to be able to leave the submersible’s claustrophobic confines. It was strange to be out in the hot prickly sunshine again, her feet swaying uncertainly on the gangway across to the submarine pens. She used King Jude’s sceptre as a staff, feeling like some fraudulent prophet come visiting this lost tropical island sealed away on the outskirts of the Fire Sea. Between being confined to the tight confines of u-boats and floating through the underwater alien world of the seanore, the experience of solid land and an endless sky combined to make her homesick and unsteady on her feet at the same time.

Boxiron had already passed over this gangway, borne off in a stretcher that looked more like an iron coffin; Jethro Daunt had to be restrained when the locals wouldn’t let the ex-parson accompany the unfortunate steamman to his upgraded medical facilities on the island.

Nestling in the lee of the Isla Furia’s great volcano and encircled by a thick red stone wall, the town of Nuyok was hidden out of sight. Some fourteen metres high, the bulwark concealed all sight of the buildings within. The wall had only been constructed, Sadly had intimated, to protect the citizens of the town from the wildlife of the jungle covering the rest of the island. This would explain its parlous state of repair — cracked and overgrown by ivy in many places, while fishermen and trappers in wide-brimmed straw hats moved slowly and deliberately in the heat across the harbour. Flat-bottomed rafts, cork-lined against the heat and sporting rainbow-coloured sails, shifted across the lake where their submersible had surfaced. At the far end of the lake Charlotte could just see a series of docks controlling access to the Fire Sea beyond, too small for submersibles, but just the right size for the small fishing skiffs.

Complaining about the wicked heat, the commodore groaned with satisfaction as he was helped into the back of a rubber-wheeled cart, the contraption pulled by a pair of man-sized running lizards. Peeling yellow-painted boards rattled as it carried the party towards a looming pair of iron gates on rollers, a partial gap opened in the portal for them to enter. Passing inside, Charlotte had never seen a city looking so ordered. The majority of buildings facing them were five storeys tall, tiered with apartment railings, each surrounded by a stretch of neatly manicured lawns formed from evenly cropped green grass. With hexagonal walls sculpted out of white porcelain glittering in the sunlight, the buildings’ architecture mirrored the streets they were set in, road after road laid out in hexagonal grids. It wasn’t the uniformity of the hexagonal concourses that first grabbed Charlotte’s attention, however. What drew her eyes were the roads, formed out a thick clear acrylic which revealed level after level of subterranean maintenance tunnels, plumbing and pipes. The roads are transparent. Basement levels descended below the walled city as though the whole city was a scaled up model solely constructed to demonstrate the ebbs and flows of its sanitation.

With the flawless white glimmer from the porcelain buildings, the city had the feel of ancient times about the site, as though its inhabitants were living within a grid of oversized antiques. It put Charlotte in mind of a museum exhibition of priceless pottery from which she once liberated a few choice pieces. In contrast to their architecture, the Nuyokians reflected little of the sophistication of the buildings they inhabited. She could believe they had constructed the crumbling wall guarding the town, but the city itself? The people had the air of country bumpkins who had wandered into the place from some small village and finding it uninhabited had decided to stay. Well-tanned, Nuyokians tended the town’s lawns and wandered its hexagonal roads in simple long-shirts that reached down to bare knees or drawstring trousers, others wearing sleeveless cotton tunics with blanket capes and closed-shoulder capes that provided a few garish splashes of colour. They drooped out of their balconies sucking on cuds of brown leaves or occupied themselves on roof gardens in the centre of each building. As Charlotte got closer to the volcano’s slopes, she wondered at how the natives could appear so calm living in the shadow of that monstrosity vomiting out billows of white smoke into the sky. Perhaps it was from prayer? Little cupboard-sized stone temples were scattered outside the entrances of the apartments. Nuyokians busied themselves in supplication to marble statues of a female goddess, the idols kneeling with stone oil-filled lamps lit at their knees — a goddess, Sadly explained, known as the Lady of the Light. Daunt nodded in understanding, explaining that there were similar figures appearing in the mythology of other tribes of the Fire Sea islanders, gods that may have shared a common ancestry with the Nuyokians’ deity.

Approaching the foot of the volcano, Charlotte discovered the hexagonal buildings swelling in size and grandeur, as though this district served as a palace quarter for the city rulers once upon a time. Rolling through large parks and gardens, the party reached a station where a series of cable car lines reached across the slopes above them. The lines passed above hundreds of farm terraces where figures could be observed tending hillside crops of wheat, rice and corn.

Leaving their cart’s driver giving his running lizards a drink of water from a porcelain trough, Charlotte followed Daunt, the commodore and Dick Tull across the station concourse. Sadly led them past an ancient statue of a naked man bearing the skeletal sphere of the world upon his back, the whole thing sealed inside a larger sphere of the same transparent acrylic material that composed the streets.

The commodore indicated the open sliding door of a cable car for Charlotte. ‘Beauty before age, lass. And maybe you can ask that ancient phantom knocking about your noggin to put a good word in with the fire spirits of the Isla Furia to keep us from being cooked into stone casts. What a puzzle we’d make, for some future professor of history to marvel that there were people fool enough to live in the shadow of that ugly heap of magma up there.’

‘I have a feeling that the threat of the volcano has been somewhat overstated,’ said Daunt, looking meaningfully at Sadly.

‘It seems to be puffing away up there as happy as a sailor with a mumbleweed pipe,’ said the commodore. ‘I don’t need to get any closer to observe it. Not after sailing past that graveyard of ships outside.’

Charlotte received nothing from Elizica, not even a feeling of unease; but the volcano’s throat did seem to be simmering away on the summit, billows of white smoke folding over each other and being carried high into the clear blue sky beyond. There wasn’t much about the cable car she boarded to suggest it belonged to the walled town of Nuyok, its sleek lines and glossy surface reminding her of the submersible that had carried them here. A later addition, then. The Court of the Air’s handiwork. Charlotte had a good eye for such abnormalities — often all the difference between stepping on, or avoiding, a slightly out-of-place floor tile and bringing a wall of bars plunging down to trap her inside a vault.

With a low whine, the cable car lifted out of the station and began to climb up the slopes. They passed over regularly spaced terraces and an intricate network of drip irrigation channels, plenty of farm workers in simple cotton shifts moving about the crops — plain room-sized huts for them to rest in or store equipment the only signs of construction on the incline. So where were they being taken? She looked at the Isla Furia below. As they drew higher up the rise, the party could see the landscape falling behind, smaller and smaller. The city inside its walls occupied a square stretch of territory, the hypnotizing uniformity of its hexagonal streets broken in very few places — only by parks or larger buildings — also hexagonal, which had to serve non-residential functions. Everything was constructed from the same white porcelain, reflecting bright sunlight. It stood seven miles across, Nuyok’s transparent streets resembling rivers of glass this high up. Moon-shaped, the crescent of the lake surrounded the city on two sides, the volcano covering a third flank, while the distant jungle could be seen nestling against the remaining boundary. A section of their cable car network branched off and headed down the volcano, entering the distant jungle to the rear of the city. Charlotte could just discern the distant crane heads and docking pylons of an airship yard rising above the jungle, and if she stretched her ears, she imagined she could hear the distant thud of the works.

‘Are you going to sacrifice us at the top, then?’ asked Commodore Black. ‘Is that how the Court obtains its intelligence these days — blood sacrifice?’

‘The Court’s agents have made plenty of sacrifices,’ said Sadly. ‘But they’re normally paid in our blood.’

Lifting them all the way to the summit, the cable car levelled out, the pylon’s chains entering a dark tunnel on the mountainside. It only took a minute to pass through, and on the other side of the darkness they emerged into the interior crater of the volcano. Rather than the bubbling lake of lava Charlotte had been expecting to find, the interior of the crater towered with buildings and massive pipe-works, a series of gantries and girders bridging the interior space. The upper edge of its rocky rim was curved with exhaust vents pumping out smoke in mimicry of a live volcano.

‘There’s your volcano, good captain,’ said Daunt. ‘The discharge from mine works. A celgas mine if I’m not mistaken.’

‘The Court’s greatest secret,’ said Sadly. ‘The only place other than Jackals where a significant vein of the gas has been found. But then we had to lift our aerial city somehow, and the Kingdom’s got its own supply of airship gas sealed too tight for us to tap on a regular basis.’

‘But what about the wicked molten rain, lad?’ said the commodore, astonished he wasn’t facing a live volcano. ‘I’ve anchored seventy miles off this coast and watched magma coming down thick enough to leave a Jackelian ironclad more full of holes than a lump of blessed cheese?’

Sadly pointed to a crown of massive pipes encased in machinery circling the rim of the crater. ‘Your rocks are real enough, but they’re heated in furnaces here and then catapulted out under hyper-pressure. Our lava launchers have got a lot more accurate over the centuries since we landed here. For anyone that survives a bombardment from those, the island’s coastline has concealed dirt-gas flues to choke would-be trespassers.’

‘Bob my soul, but I knew there was something on the island worthy of the efforts you’ve made to discourage visitors,’ said Daunt.

‘You should consider yourself fortunate,’ said Sadly. ‘You may be the first people in history outside our ranks to see this place.’

Charlotte held onto the railing in the cabin as their cable car passed through a forest of girders, elevator belts, hoists, piping, gantries, walkways and ladders suspended across the crater’s heart. Something of such colossal value as celgas was always enough to pique her interest, but stealing bulky airship gas cylinders wasn’t a proposition worth pursuing. That was the beauty of jewels and rare paintings, their portability and resale value. It was just unfortunate the buyers of King Jude’s sceptre only wanted the piece to unleash a horde of starving demons on the world. That was one situation where having the money wouldn’t help.

Coming across the gantries marched steammen — the human-milled variety, rather than citizens of the Steamman Free State. They were a polished copper colour, hulking things seven feet tall with a single rotating transaction-engine drum turning in the middle of each chest. On their back they had twin stacks behind each shoulder blade. Their head units resembled a cuirassier’s helmet, each with three camera-like eyes giving their skulls an insectoid appearance. Some had two arms, but many had multiple limbs — four, five, six or more arms, or tools and cutting equipment serving as appendages.

Sadly noticed where Charlotte was looking. ‘We’ve always relied on automatics on the island. Locals are happy to help out with most things, but they don’t like coming inside the volcano. Old superstitions die hard.’

‘All those years in your gaff,’ said Dick Tull, the bitterness in his voice evident. ‘Me eating that slop you served and taking whatever scraps and tip-offs you tossed my way — and all that time you had all of this behind you.’

Sadly didn’t appear even slightly embarrassed by the subterfuge. ‘A lot more than this, once, Mister Tull. And again, soon. The Court’s far subtler than the sea-bishops. A nudge here, a nudge there, and softly softly catchy monkey. We’ve always operated on the principle that you receive a much easier ride in the great game if your opponent doesn’t realize there’s an opponent sitting in the chair opposite the board.’

‘So it’s true then?’ said Daunt. ‘The Court has a predictive model of society running on its transaction-engines. You really believe you can shape the world’s events to a single plan?’

‘You and your inquisition friends,’ said Sadly, only half a sneer. ‘It would be truer to say we’ve got a backup of the original model running now, says I. What with all that bother during the invasion. The accuracy of the new model will be up to snuff by the time the next Court of the Air is refloated.’

‘You detected the infiltration of the Kingdom off the back of transaction-engine analysis?’ Dick asked, not bothering to hide his surprise.

‘Punch card artists are good for a lot more than working out how much has been paid in taxes and who’s shelled out enough to become a duke this year,’ said Sadly.

The State Protection Board officer looked grey and tired. ‘I’ve got to get out of this bloody game, I really have. I used to think I understood how it operated, how things were done. Instead…’ his voice trailed off.

‘We’re on the same side, really,’ said Sadly. ‘It’s just the Court’s in for the long haul, the long view.’

‘That you are,’ said the commodore. ‘But this government rascal and the likes of poor old Blacky, we haven’t got enough years left apiece to play along, nor the energy remaining to care for the cleverness and cunning wheezes you’ve got turning on your thinking machines’ drums.’

‘I rather think your people have lost sight of the human perspective, good agent,’ said Daunt. ‘For all you’ve tried to do here, protecting the Kingdom, our future’s pivoted on the fate of young Damson Shades and the actions of myself, Boxiron, the commodore and-’

Sadly interrupted. ‘But then, the Court’s not the only one with a plan, eh?’ He looked at Charlotte. Still, Elizica passed no comment to Charlotte. ‘And there’s a thin line between assistance and meddling when it comes to the Court’s calculations.’

Daunt winked at Charlotte. ‘I wonder what side of the line we will be judged as occupying?’

‘So do I,’ sighed Sadly. ‘Like I said before, we’re not the organisation we used to be. Half our lot were listed as dead and missing after the Army of Shadows’ invasion, with the vacancies left filled by greenhorns, agents bought out of retirement and support staff.’

They docked with a large building built into the opposite side of the crater. The commodore was the second to step out of the cable car, following Charlotte. ‘The mill’s been shut down, the labourers laid off, but the clerks in the counting house are still shuffling around their blessed pieces of paper, is it?’

‘We’re in a better state than that,’ said Sadly, but something in the way he said it made Charlotte think that the old u-boat man might be closer to the mark than the agent would prefer.

Sadly led them into the building, through a nest of corridors and stairs, until the smooth rock face of the mountainous volcano replaced the metal walls of the building. Guards in close-fitting leather uniforms checked them before admitting the party any further into the complex. They carried strange-looking rifles with bulbous stocks that caught the commodore’s attention. Sadly explained that they were gas-rifles, capable of firing steel darts at enormous velocities from the rotating drums above their forestock without the need to break the rifle and insert a fresh charge after each shot. They could no doubt maintain a murderously fast rate of fire. Not quite as bulky as airship gas cylinders, Charlotte had a few acquaintances back in Middlesteel’s criminal underworld that would pay a small fortune to acquire such a weapon. But how to get it off the Isla Furia without getting caught?

There was a chlorine smell about the corridors they passed through. The scent sparked a memory of the public bathing rooms back in the capital — residue from the centuries of celgas mining operations, perhaps. Led into a large chamber, Charlotte saw they were left in front of a raised floor and a series of chairs, behind which curved one of the clear almost magically transparent view screens displaying the smoking vista of the Fire Sea beyond. Only one of the chairs was occupied, a balding man with two patches of wispy white hair clinging behind large ears, staring down on them over a pair of hexagonally framed spectacles. Charlotte had seen enough colleagues sent down in front of the middle court back home to know what this chamber was meant to signify. He cut a lonely figure up on the raised floor, a magistrate with most of his stenographers and court officials missing.

‘This,’ Sadly introduced, ‘is the acting advocate-general of the Court of the Air, Lord Edwin Trabb.’ He bowed towards the seat above. ‘And my lord advocate, these are the group who have been frustrating the schemes of the infiltrators we now know as the sea-bishops. Jethro Daunt, ex of the church, Jared Black, ex of the royalist fleet-in-exile, Dick Tull, ex of the State Protection Board, and Charlotte Shades, ex of the flash mob and the present guardian of King Jude’s sceptre.’

‘The clever, the desperate, the barely competent, and the incorrigibly criminal,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘As strange a group as I’ve had presented before me in a long time.’

‘You can’t have many visitors out here,’ said Charlotte.

‘I believe you’ve seen the hulls of those that do,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘Mounds of hasty trespassers sunk on our doorstep and overgrown with fire coral.’

‘ Acting advocate-general,’ said Daunt. ‘And whom might I inquire are you acting for?’

‘Ah yes, the clever one.’ Lord Trabb pushed his glassed back on his nose. He seemed to enjoy lecturing them. The chamber was starting to feel less like a courtroom and more like a schoolroom. ‘Well, you’ve given our elusive enemy a name and a face, albeit not quite the one we were expecting, so why not? I am acting for Lady Riddle, who was declared missing when the old Court of the Air was destroyed in the invasion. My department was the only one to survive unscathed, so it seemed natural for me to occupy the role. I would declare myself the real thing and dispense with the formalities, but milady Riddle has a disconcerting habit of disappearing and then reappearing when you least expect her.’

‘And your department, good agent?’ said Daunt.

‘Section Six,’ said Trabb. ‘The Service and Engineering Corps.’

The commodore looked unhappy at the news. ‘Ah, that’s a bad turn. We’ve come seeking a way to keep this sceptre out of our wicked foes’ clutches and instead we find grease-stained fingers guiding the tiller, not the skipper’s firm grip.’

‘Come now, I hardly think the desperate one is in a position to cherrypick his allies,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘And by your words you mark yourself out to be a fool. Who better to rebuild the Court of the Air than the very marshalling yards that maintained the old aerial city, the same academy that trained the old agents to teach the new? We have a backup model of the Kingdom’s society running here, the perfect template for the perfect democracy. That is all that matters in the end.’

‘It’ll matter a lot less than you think, lad, when the demons chasing the sceptre turn up in their darkships, wanting to open the gates to their terrible home full of hungry ravening beasts.’

‘I would council against complacency,’ said Daunt. ‘From what we’ve seen, the sea-bishops have fully infiltrated the Advocacy’s leadership. When they come for the sceptre, it will no doubt be at the head of a sizeable gill-neck force.’

‘I had no idea the Circlist church’s remit extended to military matters?’ said Lord Trabb. ‘I rather had the notion you were all pacifists. To kill another is to kill myself and all that synthetic morality cant.’ He waved Daunt’s concerns aside. ‘It is all in the model now. The sea-bishops and their schemes are fully accounted for.’

‘Popinjay!’ Elizica’s words jabbed into Charlotte’s mind. ‘Am I to trust this dusty clerk, this oily-ragged boiler repairer with protecting the sceptre? Knowing of the sea-bishops’ existence is not the same as having won hard experience of fighting them.’

‘Tell me you can protect the sceptre,’ said Charlotte. ‘That you can protect the Kingdom.’

‘My dear, it’s what the Court’s been doing for a lot longer than you’ve been around. The enemy are weak and far from home and dependent on secrecy and their little tricks of illusion to prosper. Now that we know what to look for, we’ll root them out like a gardener clubbing moles with a spade, eh?’

Charlotte began to protest, but the acting head of the Court of the Air cut her off. ‘You will have quarters made available to you in Nuyok below while our analysts follow the repercussions of your new information through our models. The course of action we need to pursue will be arrived at in good time. In the meantime, we will need to test King Jude’s sceptre and see if there is a way to destroy the key-gem, to cut the sea-bishops off from further reinforcements of their race for good. I am having testing facilities prepared and we will send for it shortly.’

Their interview, it seemed, was over, and guards led the party away from the chamber.

‘All my bloody working life,’ Dick said to Sadly. ‘I’ve been raised on tales of how all-seeing and omnipotent the Court of the Air is. Like ghosts in the machine, moving through the shadows and disappearing people before they ever posed a threat. All enemies, foreign and domestic, living in fear of the legendary wolftakers. And this is the bleeding reality? You’re no better than the State Protection Board. Run by blue-blood idiots and leaving dross like me to get the job done right. What’s that slur your people used to call the board’s officers?’

‘The glass men,’ said Sadly. ‘But this isn’t the Court of the Air, Mister Tull. This is just what’s left of it after the Court was destroyed. And it will be rebuilt and refloated again.’

Daunt frowned. ‘Is that likely to happen before the sea-bishops trace the sceptre back to the Isla Furia, good agent?’

‘No.’

‘Then I think we better make some plans of our own,’ added Charlotte. And quickly.

Daunt watched Charlotte lay King Jude’s sceptre down on the table of the roof garden while Commodore Black quickly reached for a bottle of corn whisky Sadly had produced, as if he was worried that the sceptre’s presence might contaminate his drink. ‘A precious drop of the local fire water, that’s what’s needed to lubricate my thinking. For never was there a more dangerous puzzle than how to keep this wicked key-gem out of the clutches of its demon owners.’

It didn’t seem to matter what time of the day it was, wherever you stood on the Isla Furia, you were always accompanied by the sound of the wind whistling. Sometimes it was a soft, gentle breeze. Other times a hard violent force rattling the shutters that stood ready to be lowered over the porcelain towers’ windows. But gentle or hard, the whistling was a constant companion for the people of the city. Where it buffeted the slopes of the volcano, it literally whistled, seeking out the holes in the porous rock and singing through its crevices.

Dick Tull leant back in his chair. ‘We could hoof it out to one of the other great powers — Cassarabia or Pericur, maybe. Someone without much love for the Kingdom or the Advocacy and able to protect the sceptre from both.’

‘Who’s to say their nations won’t be infiltrated, or maybe the caliph and the grand-duchess will just decide to cut a side-deal with the sea-bishops like the royalists have done?’ said Sadly. ‘Don’t trust them, says I.’

‘The sceptre is as safe here as anywhere,’ said Daunt. ‘Which is to say, not very safe at all. And the good agent has a point; at least here we can be assured that the Court of the Air’s best interests are aligned with the Kingdom’s own. On foreign shores we would have no such guarantee. There would be incalculable political variables as well as the threat of the enemy’s darkships arriving to seize the sceptre by force.’ Far too risky.

‘The sceptre is never going to be safe,’ said Charlotte. ‘Someone can always steal it. I proved that.’

‘The time of the sea-bishops exercising caution is over,’ said Daunt. ‘They know their presence here in our world stands revealed now. I believe they will act decisively to seize back the key-gem. They need to open the gate to their home before word of their nature spreads and we locals band together to cast them out, unite to destroy them prior to their numbers swelling.’

‘Just my luck. All those tales of dashing, seductive vampires in the penny-dreadfuls, and when I finally meet them, they turn out to be fish-faced monsters with a head like a bludger’s wedding tackle.’ Charlotte tapped the sceptre thoughtfully. ‘It looks like we’re going to need to split up, then. First, word of the sea-bishops’ return must be spread. Second, the sea-bishops themselves must be confronted and thrown back to hell. Lastly, the sceptre needs to be protected here.’

‘Is that you talking, lass, or that ancient phantom knocking round your noggin?’ asked the commodore, his sweaty fingers clutching the glass of alcohol. ‘Three tasks, and each of them larger than the number of brave souls we have in our band to carry them out.’

‘It’s the only way,’ insisted Charlotte. ‘I don’t want to take this on any more than you do. I didn’t ask for this. My easy life finished when that monster masquerading as Walsingham chose me as the sceptre’s thief and a convenient corpse he could turn over to the constabulary. One thing I do know, we’re not going to beat the enemy sheltering on this island, waiting for the gill-neck fleet to arrive and bottle us in here.’

Sadly nodded. ‘Warning the Kingdom will be my job, says I. I’m as like to get it officially anyway, when our analysis section decides its time to move in and clean house back home.’ He glanced at Dick. ‘Will Algo Monoshaft believe news of the sea-bishops’ invasion if we get it to him?’

‘He’s as mad as a bag of badgers, that one,’ said Dick. ‘Paranoid enough to believe his own staff were traitors. But the head might believe it, if it’s me that tells him. He was halfway to getting to the truth as it was… he knew something was rotten in the Kingdom and it was Monoshaft who told me that the Court of the Air was back in the great game. I thought he was mad at the time.’

‘As my old ma said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

‘Getting to him won’t be easy, and that’s if he’s still alive,’ said Dick. ‘They might have already topped him by now. I don’t think the sea-bishops can con us into thinking they’re steammen, otherwise the head of the board’d be dead already.’

‘No,’ said Sadly. ‘I reckon they like the shadows and pulling the strings from the backroom.’ He looked at Daunt. ‘There were lots of numbers twos and threes on your list from the graveyard, Mister Daunt, but not many number ones. The spotlight doesn’t suit the sea-bishops.’

‘As elusive as they have been,’ said Daunt, ‘I have a disturbing feeling that is going to change. How do you propose taking the fight to the sea-bishops, Charlotte? Or should we be asking Queen Elizica?’

Charlotte felt the queen’s presence swell inside her.

‘You may ask me, priest of the Circle. The only way to beat them is to enter their seed-city and steal another shield unit from their craft, use it to lock them away in a loop of time again,’ said Elizica.

‘Ah, you terrible phantom,’ begged the commodore. ‘There must be another way.’

‘I can think of only one other way of stopping them,’ said Elizica. ‘And we should not attempt it, as it’s too dangerous. Stealing one of their shield generators and trapping them in time is the best course of action. It worked before.’

‘Before, my royal bloody highness, you had seven great heroes to sneak into the seed-city, and what do we have here? An ex-parson that even the church doesn’t want, a thieving stage trickster, a couple of double-dealing spies, and poor old Blacky, tired and dying.’

‘And with myself and Boxiron, I count seven,’ said Elizica.

‘The long dead and the near-dead is it?’ whined the commodore. ‘Is that how we will make up our numbers? Let me stay here. Let poor old Blacky stay here with a few jars of corn whisky and guard the sceptre from these demons and my wicked sister and their gill-neck puppets.’

Charlotte felt the queen make her mind up almost as soon as the old u-boat man had finished speaking. ‘That is not the role I have for you. Jethro Daunt must stay on the Isla Furia to guard the sceptre. Am I right?’

‘I cannot in good conscience abandon Boxiron here, as wounded as my friend is. I will stay to assist his recovery and if it falls on me to keep the key-gem and the sceptre safe, then I shall do all that I can to ensure it stays out of the sea-bishops’ hands.’

‘Well then,’ said the commodore. ‘If Daunt is to stay here and prepare for a siege, and Dick and Sadly are to warn the Kingdom of the monsters that walk among us, just who do you expect to be sneaking into the sea-bishops’ evil city?’

‘You and I,’ said Charlotte, as the queen relinquished her voice. The plans of the spirit drifted in Charlotte’s mind as if they were her own. ‘An old thief and a young one. Who better?’

‘Ah lass, I would come gladly with you, but it can’t be done. You say the demons’ seed-city is on the bottom of the great trench that cuts the world’s seabed like a scar? No u-boat can go so deep, no bathysphere can withstand that pressure, not even the Court of the Air’s queer submersible. You’re talking about over eight tons per square inch; our hull would crumple like rice paper at six-thousand fathoms deep.’

‘You are quite right,’ said Charlotte. ‘That’s why you and I are going to need to steal the one kind of craft that can withstand that pressure, just as Elizica’s raiding party did before. We need to hijack a darkship!’

Daunt and Charlotte followed the Court’s white-coated functionary through a narrow corridor lined with pipes, leaking steam from ancient joins. It was warm inside. Daunt was glad they had a guide to lead them through the Court’s labyrinth inside the volcano; with few clues to differentiate one area from the next, even his memory would be stretched trying to trace his steps. Opening a large metal door at the end of the passage, the guide led them into a cavernous chamber. It was small wonder the volcano still appeared active outside, venting the steam from the mine works and all of this. The chamber they stood in was just the first of many interconnected recesses, the neighbouring vault holding enormous transaction-engines, the thinking machines’ heat driving the temperatures in the chamber close to the level of a sauna.

The first chamber they had been led to was filled with unfamiliar devices, and, of more immediate concern to Daunt, the horizontal form of Boxiron. His steamman friend lay stretched out in an open-lidded tank, half-floating in a pool of pink liquid while being tended to by engineers in white coats and leather aprons. One of the men in attendance was Lord Trabb, the lens of his hexagonal spectacles splattered with the soupy liquid covering Daunt’s friend.

‘You servant’s recovery is progressing well,’ said Lord Trabb, noting the two newcomers’ arrival.

‘He’s not a servant,’ said Daunt.

‘Colleague, acquaintance, friend,’ said Lord Trabb, wiping his glasses. ‘The label you choose has no bearing on the process we are using.’ He indicated the open casket. ‘We are feeding his steamman components, which have a remarkable capacity for growth and healing, while inserting new components from our own automatics into the nutrient gel to be absorbed by his structure.’

Daunt gazed down into the tank. There was a spider’s web of filaments stretched out over the gaping holes and missing limbs of Boxiron’s original body, hundreds of new components laid out like a child filling in a cardboard silhouette of a figure with crystals, boards and cogs. There were more parts ready on a cart next to the tank — armoured plates and hull pieces, as if a knight in armour’s plate had been assembled ready for the joust. But he’s still not conscious. Still not reanimated back into life. If anyone could bring him back, these people could. Some of the staff moving around the chamber were under guard, their legs and arms bound by heavy sets of chains as they shuffled between the machinery. These were the more pliant prisoners the Court of the Air had snatched out of the world. Mad geniuses and master criminals and science pirates, their talents kept under check by imprisonment inside the Court’s cells. Their capacity to create mischief forcibly redirected into the service of the state.

Daunt dipped a finger into the healing gel. It felt warm, like touching skin, the consistency of a conserve jam. On the other side of the tank, much to Daunt’s amazement, he saw Lord Trabb fish into his pocket to emerge with a familiar old friend. ‘Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops?’

‘I find their consumption conducive to the efficacy of my mental quality,’ said Lord Trabb.

‘Indeed,’ said Daunt.

‘I do hope you are not a proponent of those scurrilous libels spread by their rivals in trade.’

‘Not at all,’ said Daunt. ‘I was actually hoping to impose myself on your hospitality for the gift of one. I did have my own supply, but I’m afraid they survived the privations of the Advocacy’s labour camp as little more than a swamp-water melange.’

‘A tragedy,’ said Lord Trabb. He eased the paper bag out of his pocket and passed it to Daunt. ‘You must have these. I keep a private stock laid in from our provisioning boat to the Kingdom.’

Manners nearly made Daunt refuse, but a sweet tooth and the knowledge that the next nearest bag was lingering hundreds of miles across the sea prodded the ex-parson to override the social niceties. He took the bag, extracting a sweet.

‘You prove my theory, Mister Daunt, that all of the Kingdom’s greatest minds find succour in Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drops.’ Lord Trabb obviously counted himself among that august company, but standing here with the scale of an ant surrounded by the Court’s massive machinery, the purpose of half of which Daunt found it hard to fathom, who was he to gainsay the acting head of the Court of the Air?

Daunt offered a sweet to Damson Shades, but she wrinkled her nose in disgust and shifted her willowy body to one side so she wouldn’t have to watch him suck on his, before pushing the remainder into his pocket. Obviously the Mistress of Mesmerism didn’t seek to enter Lord Trabb’s pantheon of genius through the sweets’ consumption. Even with the clarity of consuming the aniseed drop, Daunt could do nothing for Boxiron but put his trust in the ministrations of Trabb’s engineers and his gallery of rogues.

‘Boxiron will be fine,’ Charlotte reassured Daunt. ‘There is still the spark of life within him. Elizica senses it.’

Daunt’s fingers tightened around the edge of the tank. It was out of his hands now, there was nothing he could do for Boxiron but wait and refuse to pray.

‘I see that the key-gem is still intact,’ said Charlotte, pointing to where King Jude’s sceptre was held tight in a vice-like affair, surrounded by massive needle-nosed instruments on wheels. The smell of cordite hung heavy in the air as if they had just finished firing cannons at it. ‘As I told you it would be.’

‘It is a fascinating item,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘We believe it somehow exists across multiple worlds, sharing its storage capacity with gems twinned in other realities. That no doubt accounts for its remarkable resistance to physical forces in our world.’

‘Is there no way to destroy it?’ asked Daunt.

‘Not that we have at our disposal. But there is more than one way to skin a cat, eh?’ Trabb’s hand lifted towards the next chamber and the thousands of clacking transaction-engine drums revolving inside their vast thinking machines. ‘We have successfully copied the key to open the enemy’s gate onto our transaction-engines. My staff are working on decrypting the key’s information, corrupting it, re-encrypting it and then returning it to the key-gem in a form that will not be rejected. We may not be able to destroy the gem, but these sea-bishop tallywackers will find it a lot less useful if it connects their gate to some random world in the universe rather than their home reality.’

‘How long will that take?’ asked Charlotte.

Lord Trabb pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his pinched nose. ‘Months, at the very least. The encryption used is completely alien to us; it uses a form of mathematics that was hitherto unknown in this world. But have no fear,’ he indicated the prisoners shuffling around in chains. ‘To the world’s most diabolical and depraved minds, this is a welcome distraction from their incarceration.’

Charlotte shook her head in frustration. ‘Well, as long as they’re entertained, then.’

Lord Trabb seemed puzzled by her lack of enthusiasm for their work. ‘I can assure you, it’s an astonishing achievement, being able to extract a copy of the key from the gem’s substrate. It should have been impossible to accomplish, but one of our prisoners worked out a method…’

Daunt listened with polite weariness to a tortuous explanation about quantum reflections, indeterminacy and superpositions, before watching the acting head of the Court move across to a plinth where another gem was held in a metal vice. It looked to be a twin for the Eye of Fate, but Daunt knew that still hung around Charlotte’s neck. This was the crystal Daunt had taken off the camp commandant’s corpse before they escaped into the Court’s clutches. Lord Trabb paused, lost in a world of abstract models and infinite scientific possibilities, until he remembered he was still conversing with the visitors to his island. ‘By comparison with the complexities of the key-gem, this chameleon crystal is the very model of simplicity. A multifaceted device that amplifies its owner’s powers to manipulate others’ minds, their mesmeric ability to pass unseen as a member of another race. It also interfaces with the sea-bishop’s common machinery, as well as serving as a communication, calculation and defensive tool. A veritable penknife holding a hundred blades.’

Not to mention a device for removing evidence of a sea-bishop’s presence when it dies. Daunt remembered how quickly the camp commandant’s corpse had combusted after he died.

‘Exploring the nature of the sea-bishops’ tools will not make you a better fighter against those monsters,’ said Charlotte; although Daunt detected an older voice hiding among her words.

‘On the contrary, my dear,’ said Lord Trabb, producing a small metal device the size of a shoebox. As he brought it near the sea-bishop’s chameleon crystal, a dial in the device started twitching. ‘Where you detect the energies of a chameleon crystal, you detect a sea-bishop. Along with the list of names you procured from the prison camp’s graveyard, Daunt, these detectors will serve as a functional method for winkling out the tallywackers hiding within our ranks in the Kingdom.’

The obituaries section of the newssheets back home was, Daunt suspected, about to lengthen by a couple of column inches if Lord Trabb had his way. Lots of shut casket funerals where a rash of accidents left the great and the good vaporized or incinerated beyond recognition.

‘And with such chameleon crystals,’ continued Lord Trabb, ‘we have the answer to where the gill-necks developed the knowledge to cultivate their crystalline cities and other knickknacks. Doubtless pillaged from the wreckage of the sea-bishops’ last attempt to invade our homeland. I wonder what wonders of science and engineering the Court shall divine from their technology with all of our resources?’

‘A way to hold off a big gill-neck armada would be favourite,’ said Charlotte.

Lord Trabb didn’t seem to notice Charlotte’s lack of faith in the Court, wandering off deep in conversation with his technicians.

Daunt looked at Charlotte. ‘It will take more than the beauty of a perfect equation to keep the key out of the sea-bishops’ hands. I rather fear we don’t have months. Days, perhaps, if we are lucky.’

‘You’re right,’ Charlotte sighed. ‘Elizica says she is going to call in an old marker with a friend.’

Charlotte said no more, and Daunt got the feeling that she didn’t know any more herself. She walked over to the far side of the chamber, gripping the rail that overlooked the busy engines inside the next chamber.

Daunt came up beside her. ‘I’m sorry myself and Boxiron couldn’t protect you better, Damson Shades. I did rather promise you back in Fidelia’s parish when we first met.’

He had the feeling she wasn’t used to being looked after by anyone; nor the ancient spirit haunting her, for that matter.

‘Just look after my sceptre,’ said Charlotte. ‘If I can’t melt it down for gold scrap, maybe Parliament’s posted a reward for its return.’

‘I fear no amount of money will help us now,’ said Daunt.

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Charlotte, fingering the Eye of Fate thoughtfully and staring out across the rooftops of a thousand rumbling thinking machines. ‘The money helps, it always helps.’

‘Are you still experiencing nightmares?’ asked Daunt.

Charlotte nodded. ‘It’s hard to separate all the memories sometimes. Which are mine, which are Elizica’s, which belong to the Eye of Fate’s previous owners. It’s always worse at night.’

‘I used to suffer something similar myself, I don’t envy you. The curious thing is that since we escaped from the prison camp, my own dreams seem to have been stilled. It’s as if they’re in abeyance until Boxiron returns. Damson Shades,’ said Daunt, glancing around to make sure they weren’t being overheard. ‘I need to talk with you, or more accurately, the passenger you are carrying in your mind.’ He indicated the corridor back to the surface of the volcano. ‘I have some questions about the prior invasion — a quiet state of meditation should prove conducive in winkling the answers out.’

‘Honey, I’m usually wary about men trying to get me alone.’

‘You can trust me,’ smiled Daunt. ‘After all, I used to be a parson.’

‘Yes. You did.’

Boxiron was only dimly aware of Daunt’s presence inside the large vaulted chamber, dozing in a chair next to the healing tank. The steamman’s sensory levels were set to the bare minimum, as much to protect him from the burning web of pain that was his half-grown body as any results of the damage that had been inflicted on his frame by the Advocacy soldiers. None of the Court of the Air’s scientists were in attendance now, in the middle of the night. None of them were there to see the strange luminescent shape coalescing into existence off to the side of the tank. In the presence of the ghostly child-like outline, Boxiron’s nervous system began to reawaken, a brief hot surge of pain, before easing like balm as the ethereal silhouette reached out to touch the tank’s accelerant gel. Inside Boxiron’s intact skull, a private channel opened on a very special frequency. One reserved for the creator. Reserved for King Steam.

Why have you come? Boxiron signalled. None of the people of the metal have given me succour, all have shunned me. The Loas have forsaken me, my ancestors abandoned me.

‘It is a hard law,’ said King Steam, the bronzed child-like machine’s image growing more distinct. ‘But you know why it must be. We cannot allow our race’s sentience to be copied by the fast-blooded creatures of our world. We cannot allow them to pick apart our corpses like carrion and reanimate our people as their zombie-machines. If the race of man learns how to copy our pattern, they will create a race of sentient slaves, and down that road lies perpetual warfare between the softbodies and the people of the metal. I favour the way of peace and friendship, not war.’

And I choose death, signalled Boxiron. I have tired of stumbling through life as a pale shadow of my former self, of being an outcast among the people of the metal and a brutish curiosity among the race of man. Let me honour my vows as a steamman knight; let me pass into the great pattern.

Boxiron sensed a wave of sadness from the steamman ruler washing over him.

‘It would be the right thing to do,’ said King Steam. ‘Wherever our pattern has been corrupted by outsiders, self-termination is the only honourable course of action.’

Then help me, pleaded Boxiron. Burn away this softbody gel that sustains my wounded corpse. Melt my soul-board and let me walk at last with the Loas.

King Steam’s astral projection drifted above the tank. ‘One day, Boxiron. But not today.’

Why?

‘Expedience. The cruellest of masters, and one before even I must sometimes bow my knee. I have been visited by an old acquaintance, Elizica of the Jackeni, and she has helped me travel the threads that lie before us. They were not comfortable precognitions to entertain. If you die here tonight our race dies too.’

No!

‘The enemies that walk hidden among the softbodies are as foul a race of monstrosities as creation is capable of producing and they have a deep loathing of our kind. They cannot drain our bodies for nourishment or rip memories from our encrypted minds, so terror of the steammen is their sole refuge. On all the worlds along the infinite string they have visited where they have found sentient people of the metal, they have burnt us out like a farmer pouring oil over a wasp’s nest discovered hanging inside his barn.’

This is your law, yelled Boxiron. Suffer not an abomination to exist. My pattern has been corrupted, end me!

‘My law to waive. And your sovereign to obey, by your rites of birth and your knightly vows.’

Please.

‘I created you once,’ said King Steam. ‘And now I will do something I have never done in all the history of the people of the metal. I shall create you anew.’

The astral projection cascaded into the tank and the pink gel began to change colour. Without sound it began to glitter and spark, a constellation of a million burning lights.

Exhausted, Daunt slept in his chair, which was probably just as well. Bearing witness to a resurrection was not a matter that would sit easily with a man who had once been a Circlist parson. It was always easier not to believe in gods when they didn’t come calling on you.