From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘There’s a mortal sight for my sore old eyes,’ said the commodore, exiting the moon pool of the Court’s u-boat. ‘All my years and this is the first time I’ve seen such a thing.’

‘What did you expect?’ said Maeva. ‘The grand congress of the seanore was attacked by the ancient enemy. How did you think our people would answer such an outrage?’

Charlotte cleared the lock of the submarine in a stream of bubbles from the pair’s rebreathers. The camp they had left behind on the seabed had grown and multiplied a hundredfold, the kelp forest pierced with the clearings and banners of every clan of seanore that swam the ocean. Slanting rays of fading sunlight from the sky above dappled armoured formations of seanore shifting and switching above the underwater forest, rotor-spears glinting as they manoeuvred. Beyond the surface of the waves the sun was setting, and there were strings of burning crystals mounted on tall spears standing ready to illuminate the gathering. Was it Charlotte’s imagination, or was the water warmer here now? Had the presence of so many bodies raised the temperature of the sea water, or perhaps Charlotte was flushed by the sight of so many answering the call she had sounded? Immediately below them, the crab-shelled domes of the assembly had become a series of hills — smaller domes linked by larger structures sprawling away into the distance, clusters of nomads swimming in and out through the constructions’ portals like so many schools of fish. It was hard to believe this edifice was temporary.

‘It is the presence of the darkships that has brought so many here, girl-child,’ Elizica whispered inside her mind. ‘They remember well the dangers of the demons that lurk within the trench, within the deep of the dark. The prophecy of the shadowed sea.’

A pity those within the Advocacy have forgotten, and the Kingdom of Jackals too, for that matter.

‘Those who insulate themselves with the warm walls of civilization are apt to forget the lessons of the past. Lessons become words in books, and the books are quickly burnt for kindling when the world freezes. Ink runs when the seas shift and paper crinkles into dust when the world warms. But the songs of our forefathers are not so easily forgotten when they are sung well and passed down the generations. So many centuries have passed. Even my resonance fades, captured in the granite of our mountains and the flints of our fields and the stone circles of our tors.’ There was a sadness in the ancient queen’s voice, and a longing too, but Charlotte wasn’t sure if it was for the echo’s passing — that she would no longer able to watch over her people, or a yearning for the serenity of silence and a final passing after so many aeons of duty binding her to the land.

Charlotte touched the Eye of Fate, pressed tight against her skin under the diving suit. Sometimes she could feel the presence of its previous owners, all the gypsies who had held onto it over the centuries, passing the gem down their line. Madam Leeda hadn’t had any children to pass it onto, nor nieces and nephews. Perhaps Charlotte had been the closest thing the old woman had to such a relative. And how had Charlotte repaid Madam Leeda? With the theft of the precious stone she used to influence the outcome of her bartering with the often hostile towns and villages she passed through. If a surrogate daughter Charlotte had been, she had proved a pretty poor one of the old gypsy — no better a daughter than the farming family had been to her. Charlotte just another crop, to be uprooted and tossed out when the rent on her field was stopped. Her real mother, Lady Mary, discarding her bastard offspring, in case Charlotte’s existence embarrassed her ladyship’s new husband into a divorce. Perhaps this was how history repeated itself. In the small things as well as the large. Every one of those abandonments and misfortunes rolled up into Charlotte until all she was capable of was betrayal and disappointing those that tried to show her any kindness. What use was the Eye of Fate when it could mesmerize a person in so many ways, but it couldn’t make them give you the love you were owed?

‘We shall find a better use for the crystal, you and I,’ said Elizica, intruding into Charlotte’s maudlin gloom as she followed the commodore and Maeva swimming down towards the grand assembly.

It can bring me anything except what truly matters.

‘The Eye of Fate was created by the sea-bishops, never forget that,’ said Elizica. ‘What your heart feels is not within their understanding. All that is left of their kind is endless hunger and the desire to spread and disperse their seed across every corner of existence.’

But they used to be us — the race of man?

‘Something as close to it as to make no difference,’ said Elizica. ‘Now I fear all they are is an abject lesson on why we should always seek to live in balance with our world and never presume ourselves masters over it. The sea-bishops are the distorted reflection in a mirror we need to stare into to know what we must never become. They have become thieves of life itself. Our worst impulses given free reign and distilled over millennia into a dark, unthinking core of pure selfishness. Countless billions of sea-bishops clawing at each in cities so dense with their evil kind that bees in a hive might marvel at their fecundity. Even the walls of reality are no barrier to their dark cravings, the infinite chain of existence reduced to mere connected storehouses of fodder for them to feast on. Waiting for a doorway to open to somewhere, anywhere they might spill out for a temporary abatement of their numbers. Waiting for their scouts to signal that there is a new world fit for the feeding. Vampires in the truest sense of the world. They would suck the spark of existence out of your body and discard the marrow of your corpse as though you were a corn husk.’

Perhaps this was what Charlotte had been destined to fight after all, the magnified reflection of all the small cruelties that had been inflicted upon her.

‘Your family chose to abandon you,’ said Elizica. ‘I did not. I have selected and saved you, Charlotte Shades, kept you in my pocket like a lucky penny for this moment. All the years you were moving through the city as its most notorious thief, you were actually training for the greatest theft in history. You’re going to steal our future back from the sea-bishops, just as I once did. You will need every iota of your talent and your instincts to succeed, for the sea-bishops are the most peerless thieves of them all, and they have been stung once in the past already. I had it easy; you are going to repeat my feat when they suspect you are coming to rob them!’

Charlotte caught echoes of the ancient queen’s life as she whispered through her mind. A young chieftain’s daughter living a life not so different from that of the seanore — albeit one on land, in the deep endless forests of what had been the Kingdom before it had a monarch. Fighting the rule of an order of druids, one already corrupted long before the sea-bishops turned up to infiltrate its ranks. A war between the gill-necks and the tribes of the Jackeni, both sides pushed towards a conflict that could have no victor save the sea-bishops. Charlotte saw glimpses of the strange people who had helped the queen in that fight — bandits from the margins of a cursed marsh. A man who could run faster than the wind, faster than time itself. Another able to cast a lance through a mountain and see it emerge from the opposite face. A woman whose voice was able to crack steel and whose breath could blast down oak trees. Heroes that made today’s people appear like pale shadows compared to such titans. What did Elizica of the Jackeni have to work with today? Not legends. Just a thieving bastard of a girl who cared merely to feather her own nest; an aging u-boat privateer on his last legs, only distinguished by being even more reluctantly involved in this madness than Charlotte.

‘The passage of time breeds legends,’ Elizica’s reply came, ‘and makes diamonds from even the crudest of coals.’

And Elizica had known tragedy too. Her father murdered by the treachery of allies who had swapped sides on the battlefield, her mother slain defending her family when the druids came to snatch the defeated chieftain’s children to sacrifice on the bloody altars of their ancient oaks. Had Elizica’s life played out any better than Charlotte’s? She had lost a family whom she had years to love deeply, while Charlotte’s had only ever been an illusion, no more real than the Eye of Fate’s mesmerism. Which of them had mourned more, which of them deserved to feel more cheated by events?

‘Everything that happened to me, tempered me, cast me into a woman fit to become the first queen of the Jackeni.’

And what have I done with my life?

‘What you needed to do. And if you succeed in this one thing, nobody who matters will ever question your worth again.’

And what if only I live long enough to see it done?

‘Then you have answered your own question, girl-child.’

There was little of the finery Charlotte had observed the first time among those assembled under the domes of the grand congress. This time, the leaders of the nomad tribes had gathered with a common purpose and their deliberations already decided. No need to impress with diamond broaches and fine seal skins and ornamental crustacean armour when there was killing to be done and a serviceable rotor-spear was all the embellishment needed to gain status over a neighbour. Word of Charlotte’s arrival had spread like wildfire when the Court’s sleek, strange craft had returned to their territory, and now the domes were packed with a throng of clan leaders and their war-parties’ lieutenants.

They weren’t waiting for Charlotte, though; rather, the echo of the ghost carried in the Eye of Fate. They didn’t see Charlotte Shades standing before them, they saw Elizica of the Jackeni.

‘There goes my scheme for a nice quiet bit of sneaking into the gill-necks’ realm,’ muttered the commodore. ‘Not with this horde of rascals by our side.’

‘That plan never had a chance,’ said Maeva. ‘I have just talked to Poerava. She says the Advocacy closed its borders to us a day after the darkships attacked. No nomad is welcome to trade in the cities of our ‘civilised’ neighbours now. We might as well be surface dwellers for all the welcome we will receive among them.’

‘The time for subterfuge is nearly done with,’ said Charlotte. ‘The sea-bishops are gathering their forces for the final confrontation. Might of arms will serve us better now.’

‘Is it not enough that you want to drag my poor old bones with you to steal one of the demons’ wicked u-boats to carry us down into their nest of evil?’ moaned the commodore. ‘Now I must fight a pitched battle against the Advocacy first.’

‘The seanore warriors will fight the battle,’ said Charlotte.

Commodore Black did not look happy at the news. ‘Tell me that the darkship you want us to steal is close by and unguarded, lass, and its helmsmen out frolicking for human blood disguised as locals.’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘The sea-bishops scout force is few in numbers and concentrated around the nations’ existing centres of power — the capitals of the Kingdom and the Advocacy… the gill-neck city of Lishtiken is where we will find our craft.’ Elizica could sense the jiggers there, their presence a cancer gnawing away at the world, a cold weight pressing down on the skin of existence, slowly consuming and corrupting the world’s flesh. Charlotte put her hand on the commodore’s shoulder to steady the old u-boat man’s nerves. ‘The Advocacy’s forces are being prepared to assault the island. Every gill-neck soldier we can pull away from that battle is a soldier well diverted. And while the Advocacy capital at Lishtiken is being besieged, we will have our opportunity to sneak in and seize one of the darkships the sea-bishops use to shuttle between the capital and their seed-city at the bottom of the trench.’

‘It is time,’ urged Elizica. ‘Address the seanore, address them as their war leader!’

A shelf of stone served as a stage, netting strung up behind hung with trophies slipped through by clan leaders. Charlotte strode forward, unpinning one of the rotor-spears. As she turned around, she felt the fire of the Eye of Fate spreading across her chest. Her form was changing; or rather the onlookers’ perception of it was altering. The Eye of Fate cast its spell, the ultimate piece of showmanship from the Mistress of Mesmerism. Rather than her willowy frame, they saw before them a figure of legend. A trident sharp enough to pierce armoured steel, a round shield with the moulded head of a lion and a helm with a built-in rebreather mask. This was different from any of the illusions she had cast before using the gem. They had been paltry things, accompanying sleight of hand; convincing a single person that they were at home eating a meal that didn’t exist, rather than on a stage. Now Charlotte was inside the light and haze of the trickery, she could see herself as they saw her. A myth breathed into life, the phantom forms of two savage lions slowly pacing around her.

Charlotte raised her rotor-spear as Elizica raised her trident. ‘Hear me, braves of the seanore. Once there was no difference between you and those that call themselves the Advocacy. Both lived in the sea of life and flowed with the current and the schooling fish. But there is a difference now. You have passed on the old songs. You have remembered the terrors of the deep of the dark, the night that clings to the scar cutting the world. The Advocacy has not. They have lost their connection to the waters of life, swaddled in glittering artificial walls and protected by the tick and tock of their machinery; they have made superstitions of the old songs and fools and witches of those that keep their faith with them. And now we have come to where we have come. Darkships cut the waters once more, and within the comforting warmth of their walls, the Advocacy has not felt the trench’s chill.’

Among the assembly the nomad war leaders were jabbing their own bodies with the sharp edges of their shock-spears, working themselves up into a berserker fury, swaying and moaning to her words. There was more than one sort of mesmerism and her words held a power all of their own.

Charlotte continued. ‘Within the clatter of their machinery, the Advocacy is deaf to the songs that could have warned them. Their people have paid the price for such folly. The Judge Sovereign and the Bench of Four are not their own people anymore, darkness lives within them, the stealers of shapes and eaters of souls swimming with their bodies and seeing with their eyes and lying with their tongues. The ancient enemy has begun to spread the same sickness among the surface dwellers of the Kingdom of Jackals. Soon, the surface-dwellers’ airships and wheel-ships and u-boats will move completely subservient to the enemy’s bidding too. Then the sea-bishops will plunge the world into war, so that there will be only bloated corpses and weeping widows to stand against them when they unlock the gates to hell and unleash their legions upon us.’

One of the war leaders leapt forward. ‘My rotor-spear is thirsty for the blood of these demons; will they bleed if I cut them?’

‘They bleed well enough,’ said Charlotte. ‘The sea-bishops rely on confusion and cunning and the cleverness of their machines. They rely on a force of numbers that would be enough to turn the sea black with their legions. But those numbers are still denied them, so now is the time to strike.’

‘I will slay a hundred of them and count it a disgrace to slay so few!’ yelled a seanore.

‘My rotor-spear will pass through the guts of five at a time and return to my hand pleading for another throw!’

‘We advance on Lishtiken!’ yelled Charlotte.

The assembly dissolved into a mob as pledges of blood and carnage erupted across their ranks. Charlotte looked at the sea of eager faces, a forest of rotor-spears jabbing up towards the carapace panelled dome above. How can I do it? Lead these people against the Advocacy? We’ll be facing war machines, submersibles, trained armies — it will be a slaughter?

‘These are not simple fools that follow you,’ reassured Elizica. ‘They know the might of the Advocacy’s military far better than you. They have rubbed up against it for centuries. Those pledges and boasts are like the war masks that cover their faces: they use it to conceal their fear. They will follow you because they know the nature of the enemy. They will follow because they understand that if they lose, it will not just be the end of their way of life, it will be the end of all life. Their children, their wives, their husbands, their parents, their kinsmen and their hunting partners, all of them will be hunted down without mercy and their life-force ripped from them like marrow sucked from fresh whale-bone.

‘They understand perfectly that the enemy may live, or we may, but both cannot. It is a binary choice from which no sentient creature may turn its face. Do not think these people savages, do not think them fools. They have honour and they have prospered in cooperation with the balance of the sea for far longer than I have survived. To lead such warriors as these to their fate is not a tragedy; it is a privilege the like of which you will never be given again. There is no glamour being cast here and I stand revealed before them only because it is right that a warrior knows the cause they are being asked to fight and die for.’

Charlotte didn’t need Elizica’s council to know how few of the nomads would be returning from the gill-neck capital. A raid, the greatest raid the seanore had ever mounted — not against a rival clan this time — but against the best defended city of the most powerful underwater nation in existence. A theft from the ultimate race of thieves, an attempt to steal the enemy’s own magic and turn it against them.

The commodore looked out at the cheering war leaders with dismay. ‘Well, lass, the fuse has been well and truly lit. Now let us see if we can survive the force of the wicked explosion.’

Daunt stood on the parapet of the keep overlooking Nuyok’s walled gate. The citizens of the town were manning the walls and waiting for what was to come as patiently as the ex-parson. They kept no standing army in the city, but it seemed all citizens between a certain age — male or female — trained as a local defence force. The closest thing to a professional military company was the city’s armourers who came among them, emerging from entrances in the strangely transparent streets. They came bearing crates of the Court of the Air’s gas-rifles, breaking cases open and distributing guns, drums of ammunition and canisters of gas accelerant as well as sword belts among the long queues formed along the uniformly hexagonal streets. After they collected their weapons, the townspeople would pass shrines to the lady of the lamp, kneeling briefly and passing their swords over the flame, chanting prayers of the light of freedom.

The affairs of the Court of the Air and the town in the volcano’s shadow had been bound together for so long that the Nuyokians spoke in a pigeon variant of Jackelian, sometimes switching into their rapid-fire flowery-sounding local tongue, other times launching into a heavily-accented take on Jackelian. It seemed to make no difference whether there was a Court agent in their presence or not: they would meander through the three modes of speaking while conversing among themselves. In Daunt’s presence they would often forget he was Jackelian and drift between their pigeon language, Jackelian and the local tongue. Then, when they caught his look of non-comprehension, they would realize what they had done and burst into laughter, their tanned faces shaking as if the fact of his foreignness was a source of endless humour.

From his vantage point on the keep’s battlements, Daunt could see across the lake and the lightly wooded beach outside, rocky volcanic pebbles rather than sand, the boils of the Fire Sea simmering on the horizon. There was a permanent mist clinging to the top of the water where the thermal barrier circled the island, no sign of the approaching Advocacy forces through the seething fog. The enemy were advancing unseen, a vast fleet of war machines and submersible cruisers, but coming they were. Daunt didn’t need to see the ring of markers tightening like a noose around the oval of the island modelled on the command table. He could read it in the tension of the defenders. In the way their hands clenched and unclenched around the pommels of their belted short swords. In the way they would check the sights on their gas-guns, fiddle with the seals of accelerant capsules and test the connection of their weapons’ ammunition drums. Was the fear they were experiencing worse than the knot of terror tightening in Daunt’s gut? He murmured a koan in an attempt to steady his nerves, but he found it almost impossible to focus on the calm of the passage. He tried instead to think of military history, all the conflicts and sieges and battlefields he had studied, but he was uncertain what lessons could be applied here. The Advocacy were a private race, they fought below the waves in their own realm to fend off trespassers and pirates and brigands. Assaulting the Isla Furia on land, their forces infiltrated by the monstrous sea-bishops, nothing like that had been recorded in history’s annals.

Behind the wall, a workforce followed the armourers out from under the city, going into each of the porcelain towers and replacing the glass of the windows with metal sheets perforated with narrow firing strips. It seemed a smoothly disciplined exchange, as if the Isla Furia was laid siege to with such regularity that the city’s fortification was a commonplace occurrence. The city had already been overflown by darkships, the flying submarines passing with such speed that they left little explosion of sound in their wake. The sea-bishops were no doubt confused by the thousands of signals they were receiving across the island, the radiations from King Jude’s sceptre isolated, duplicated and mimicked by little devices the size of an apple that Lord Trabb’s scientists had devised. Well, the best place to hide a tree was a forest. Now the enemy would have to seize the entire island and eliminate each of the false signals one by one before they arrived at where the real sceptre was concealed.

Daunt had demurred when he was presented with one of the gas rifles and a belted sword; although he had accepted the vest of chain mail offered. He had expected it to be heavy, but the slippery ceramic-like links felt as light as paper. Slipping the entire vest over his head and poking his arms out, the chain mail might as well have been one of the local’s ponchos.

Coming up the steps from inside the city was Morris. For reasons best known to himself, the escaped convict had decided to stay on the island when the other Jackelians had left on the commodore’s u-boat. Unlike the ex-parson, Morris had a gas-gun slung over his shoulder and heavy short sword strapped around his waist.

‘Hot day for it, eh, vicar?’

‘Indeed,’ said Daunt.

‘It’ll get a might hotter when the gill-necks come calling.’

Daunt frowned. ‘It sounds as though you relish the prospect of the coming battle.’

‘I’m not much of a Circlist I’m afraid. Not much of one for turning the other cheek. Those bastards had me as a slave for the best years of my life, pulling gillwort out of their pox-ridden swamps. There’s not much inside me that’s capable of forgiving them for that.’

‘I do hope that’s not why you stayed behind — the chance for revenge against your old captors?’

Morris shrugged. ‘Not all of it. I like it here. They don’t have money in the city here, did you know that? Although it makes sense when you think about it. Most of the trouble I ever got into was because I was trying to make some fast pennies on the wrong side of right. Funny old arseholes. Everything gets voted on by each of the towers.’ He pointed to one of the soldiers on the keep wearing red chain mail. ‘He’s a Notifier. Red-chests get to run about telling people the results of their votes. Even now, they’re all having their little ballots on how the city’s going to be defended and who’s going to hold what section of the wall. Personally speaking, I got my doubts on how that’s going to hold up when the gill-necks are climbing over the ramparts and the air’s thick with shells.’

‘Yet, you’re here,’ said Daunt.

‘Well, they know about inbreeding here, don’t they? That’s one of the reasons why they welcome outsiders from the Court’s staff. I’ve got a dozen offers from different towers to stay and marry local girls. Each of the blocks has their own trade. I figure one of the towers that goes out fishing will do for me. I can sail and cast a net as well as most, and drowning worms with a rod and line was something of a pastime for me back in the Kingdom. There must be a tower of priests and shrine-keepers somewhere here. Maybe you could stay and settle down here too?’

‘I don’t think that’s for me.’ I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget about false gods without embracing this misguided people’s deity.

‘Well, the trade of thief catcher doesn’t exist here, see, what with no money to steal and everything being divided up among the people already. You need something you don’t already have, you just borrow it from the vaults under the streets and return it when you’re finished. Anyone loses their rag and murders a citizen, then they’re thrown out of the city to live in the jungle as best they can until one of the beasties does for them.’

‘Well then, there we have it. A Circlist priest must go where he is needed by the people as much as a consulting detective, even a lowly ex-communicated wretch such as me.’

‘Won’t have much need for a pacifist on these ramparts either when the blood gets flowing.’

‘You might be surprised,’ said Daunt.

It was the tragedy of Daunt’s old calling. The science of synthetic morality had detailed volumes dedicated to the history of warfare, for if you didn’t understand such a terrible force, how could you ever hope to stop it? All the factors and facets that went into causing conflicts, from political tensions to resource scarcity to familial jealousies among ruling elites. All distilled down to equations and formulae that could be manipulated and altered towards peace by the church, nudging a faction here, prodding its opposing party there. Daunt could see the branches of probabilities and possibilities narrowing to a single, inevitable conclusion. Either the race of man would survive or the sea-bishops would. This time, peace would only come with one race’s complete victory over the other.

Morris left for a minute and came back holding a helmet identical to the one he was wearing, a long helm with a nosepiece made of the same light ceramic-like substance as the chain mail.

‘Not for me,’ said Daunt. ‘I will feel too much like a soldier if I wear it.’

‘You’ll look like a corpse if you don’t,’ said Morris, indicating the back. There was a small rubber eyepiece and mask with a ceramic air tank on the helm’s neck cover that could slide up a central rail and down in front of the face. ‘There are dirt-gas vents all around the shore-line. The wind blows the wrong way and you’re going to be choking on your own guts when the gill-necks arrive. And that’s if the Advocacy doesn’t use war gas first.’

Daunt reluctantly took the helm and fitted it over his head. At least it reflected the heat of the high sun above. I wonder what my old parishioners would say if they could see their parson now?

‘There’s the mayor of the city, Rafael Ligera,’ said Morris, nodding towards a local.

Accompanied by a phalanx of the red-armoured runners, the mayor was advancing on a command platform in the centre of the keep, markers being nudged around the table by staff with wooden sweepers. The tall politician strode into their midst, broad shoulders carrying his chain mail across a ramrod straight back. But it wasn’t the mayor’s orders that would dictate the opening actions of the siege; those would be dispatched by the Court of the Air up in the crater of the ancient volcano. Dispatched along with the Court’s u-boats now patrolling the thermal wall protecting the island, dispatched with aerospheres manoeuvring in the sky above the city. Deadly-looking weapon assemblies hung connected to the bottom of the globular airships, rocket racks and dishes of varying sizes with lethal-looking needles emerging from their parabolas. Behind the command table, citizen-soldiers wearing bulbous leather helmets with built-in speakers and voice trumpets sat at a bank of communication consoles, receiving the observations from the Court’s eyes and ears in the sea and sky, relaying them to the staff adjusting the position of markers on the table. Pieces for the gill-neck fleet approaching and the disposition of the town’s defenders, others for the Court’s small fleet of submersibles and squadrons of darting airships. It was as though Daunt was watching a game of chess being played out. Easy to be dispassionate about the siege now, before the first exchange of fire had been traded. Before too long this will feel all too real.

As if the defenders had been waiting for the mayor’s arrival before commencing hostilities, the volcano crater exploded in facsimile of an eruption, rocks sent spewing outwards. The roar echoing from the mount was deafening down on the city ramparts — the Circle preserve anyone inside the Court of the Air’s hidden base… or a good pair of ear plugs. Daunt marvelled at the scale of the Court’s ingenuity. He had never seen a real volcanic eruption before, but then, neither had many of the skeletons in the graveyard of vessels rusting on the bottom of the ocean on the Isla Furia’s limits. None of the mariners who had sailed too close to the island had been likely to quibble about the effects as tonnes of superheated boulders began raining down around their decks.

Spouts of water fountained up beyond the thermal barrier; seemingly random patterns, but no doubt closely targeted on the advancing position of the Advocacy’s underwater armada. Rocks came out faster than the eye could follow, burning specks leaving ghosts of their trajectory against Daunt’s retina. Extra smoke was being vented from the Court’s gas mining operation and transaction-engine chamber, and the ground around the base of the mountain trembled with the fury of the magma launchers’ volleys.

For five minutes the fusillade roared out unopposed. Then, beyond the thermal barrier, the sea began to bubble and fume as Advocacy war craft surfaced. Daunt examined the surfacing fleet through the lens of a telescope borrowed from the command table. They were obviously submersibles, but unlike the Kingdom’s u-boat force, the craft had none of the form necessary to preserve a little slice of surface dwelling life beneath the waves. The gill-neck craft were closer to vast ironclad warships travelling beneath the depths. Superstructures the size of citadels with cannons and turrets and decks open to the sea; mortars and bombards mounted in swivelling domes while crews of gill-neck gunners let the water sluice off their decks, carrying with it seaweed and schools of fish that had been swimming moments before across the fleet’s control towers. The designs of the vessels were a curious mix of the brutally functional lines of warships combined with ornamental carvings and intricate hull sculptures. Hull plates camouflaged with the patterning of tropical fish and canon mountings wrapped with cast metal octopus tentacles. If beauties these were, it was a savage beauty.

At least a hundred of the underwater war vessels surfaced within Daunt’s line of vision, and their guns didn’t stay silent for long. The crash of cannons swelled into a near continuous rumble of thunder — answered with plumes of explosions from the volcano slopes and treeline, the Isla Furia’s beaches shattered in a salvo of fire and shrapnel. The towering rise of the volcano shielded the Nuyokians from the worst of the invaders’ barrage, warm liquid from the lake raining down as shells landed in the waters beyond the town.

The sea thrashed beyond the thermal barrier, water frothing and bubbling as the gill-necks expended underwater projectiles and torpedoes by the tonne trying to destroy the devices creating the heat field. Daunt was no engineer, but even he knew they weren’t going to break it that easily.

Given targets unshielded by the sea, the volcano’s spitting fury had swelled to a crescendo, rocks spinning out towards the surfaced fleet, passages traced with fiery spirals, contrails of dark volcanic dust marking their wake. The projectiles disappeared, tiny motes in the sky, followed by explosions flowering across the fleet. The volcano’s hidden launchers were firing with a rapidity that no natural eruption could match. The Court had abandoned their base’s camouflage as a natural phenomenon, launching projectiles so fast that their launch pipes were echoing with hollow reverberations, a stuttering expulsion of rocky mass. To the sailors and marines on the Advocacy fleet, the missiles must resemble gull motes swelling to the size of houses, a brief prayer to the mother of the ocean that they would land somewhere else, then their fierce impact, tossing the massive war machines in the sea. The impact on the gill-neck armada was apparent now, the rain of high velocity rocks striking the enemy hulls, flying vessel fragments and explosions of debris audible from within the town’s walls. A tinny booming as if the invaders were beating drums on their approach.

From back inside the city came a jarring screech. Daunt turned to see a pair of gigantic cannons being pulled down the translucent streets, a caterwauling rising from their steel wheels, eight on either side of their recoil carriages. Articulated barrels stretched over ninety feet, with each of the red-tipped shells following in a long ammunition train standing taller than Daunt. These two giant artillery pieces were clearly of the city rather than the Court, the barrels raised on hydraulic struts with carriages constructed to be anchored on steel turntables waiting either side of the gates. Shrine keepers walked backwards in front of the rumbling monstrosities, swinging globes of scented oil and tossing holy liquid and blessings over the advancing gunnery. The antique artillery pieces were every bit a match for the ornamentation crafted into the Advocacy war cruisers halted outside the thermal barrier. Both barrels gleamed evilly as dragonhead jaws, angelic-winged women coiled around each piece, while their wheels turned as gargoyles with grinning, leering metal teeth as spokes.

Morris cursed and one of the Nuyokian soldiers on the line clapped Morris’s back between the shoulder blades. ‘Is Santo Ruidoso and Santa Bocainfierno, yes? They speak for the city today.’

‘It’s not those two howitzers that worry me, it’s the automatics you got manning them.’ He pointed to the chains being used to haul the pair, each the weight of anchor chains and borne by thirty to forty metal forms lugging the tonnage forward. It was more of the same automatics the Court set to work in their volcano’s gas mine, the hulking machine-men — as large as they were — clearly straining against the mass of the town’s artillery.

‘Who better to pull those two brutes?’ said Daunt.

‘The cardinal rule of soldiering,’ said Morris. ‘You never bring automatics within a mile of real battle. They haven’t got the brains for it, see.’

Daunt frowned. ‘I believe you’ll find the steamman knights would beg to differ on that point.’

‘I’m not talking about King Steam’s lads,’ said Morris. ‘I’m talking about the kind of automatic that clank fresh out of a Kingdom mill with the badge of one of our industrial lords stamped across its shiny bum-cheeks. You can train their kind to simple tasks with enough repetition, but stick them in a fighting regiment and as strong and as armoured as they be, you’ll end up with as many casualties on your own side as the enemy’s.’ He pointed to the creations setting up the cannon. ‘Rely on them as loaders and they’ll be fine for a few shots, until one of ’em has a funny turn. Before you know it, a shell will be slotted in nose facing down-ways rather than up-ways, followed by an explosion that’ll tear the gates off the town walls. Every few years you get some green-arsed colonel that sets up a battalion of automatics, promising a revolution in warfare. They’re usually cashiered out after the steamers have bayoneted a few too many of our own side’s redcoats, that’s if the officer’s pretty head hasn’t been sabred off by one of his automatics.’

The Nuyokians had obviously reached the same conclusion as Morris. As soon as the two cannons were nestling behind the walls, their barrels raised over the battlement like metal giraffe necks, the automatics lined up and marched back down the streets towards the volcano. Human artillery crews swarmed over to crew the weapons. Daunt looked up at the volcanic slopes of the Isla Furia. Somewhere up there, Boxiron was recovering in the Court’s healing tank. Still oblivious to the world and the turn of events that had brought the forces of an entire nation hammering on the walls the steamman and Daunt had taken refuge behind.

It didn’t take long for the city’s two cannons to add their fury to the fusillade from the Court’s volcano launchers, the length of the barrels recoiling back along their pneumatic segments, shortening as the great guns rocked on their carriages. They sucked in the air after each ear-splitting shot, dozens of the gunnery crew mounting the ramparts’ steps with hand pumped water hoses and spraying down water that sizzled and turned to steam along the length of the pieces. Nuyok’s long-guns sounded more like instruments of war than the mock eruption from the volcano, but the flowers of destruction that blossomed among the distant fleet was distinctly less impressive than the savage impact of the Court’s hidden launchers. Still, the artillery crews cheered wildly, while all along the ramparts the armed citizenry joined in, hollering and waving their rifles in the air.

Hovering above the volcano’s slopes, the squadron of aerospheres turned as if tracking something. The reverberation of a darkship clapped above their ears in the sky while the weapon assemblies beneath the Court’s airships traded electrical lightning between their dishes, a web of burning energy traced in the air above the city. The darkship passed through the lattice, a second later shattering into an explosion of waxy fronds, leaving the air above the lake filled with smoking, drifting strips of an oily dark substance. Boxiron created a similar effect when he held his monthly bonfire of all the newssheets and periodicals which Daunt subscribed to.

There was a second clap, another darkship operating in the air, this one flying underneath the web of deadly energies cast by the Court’s globular airships. At first Daunt thought the darkship had been affected by its proximity to the energy web, its mantaray shape diving into the lake’s waters. But it regained a semblance of control and skimmed out towards the distant harbour gate, bouncing like a tossed stone and clearing the inlet before ricocheting off the sea and back into the sky. In its wake, Daunt saw the evidence of the curious cargo it had deposited before fleeing. A slick of pollution bubbling to the lake’s surface, followed by a bobbing school of egg-shaped objects, each constructed of the same inky substance as the darkship.

‘That thing’s laid some spawn,’ said Morris.

‘Bob my soul, but I believe you are right,’ noted Daunt.

The slick crawled up towards the shore of the basin, forming an unctuous crescent in the corner of the lake. The eggs appeared to be rolling towards land. As they touched down on solid ground, they each sprouted six pincering legs and the rise of the volcano turned dark at the foot of the shore. The Isla Furia’s queer invaders were moving up through the beard of tropical woodland and into the crevices of the mountain. Swooping downwards, the Court’s squadron of aerospheres came in to investigate, their weapon assemblies rotating as they dived, preparing to lash this peculiar black army of fist-sized marching spheres with the energies stored in the airships’ capacitors. A hideous screeching sounded from the little eggs as the airships plunged to fifty feet above the shoreline.

Where have I heard that infernal sound before? Then it came to Daunt. Inside the crystal machine of the sea-bishops when they were attempting to plunder his memories. It was a hideous murdered baby noise, far worse than fox baying. With a sudden flurry of explosions, the eggs that were still bobbing in the inky pool on the lake rocketed upward, breaching the fuselage of the Court’s squadron of aerial vessels. The aerospheres began to twist and judder, a flight of birds that had ingested a swarm of wasps and were now dancing with the pain of stings in their gullet. Then the spherical hulls of the Court’s airships started to buckle and warp, the weapon dishes underneath discharging at random before each of the craft detonated. Showers of burning metals and hull plates glanced off the lake, hissing and burning, floating briefly before sinking.

‘There goes the bloody RAN,’ said Morris in mocking reference to the Kingdom’s force of airships.

Moans and wails mixed with angry curses along the wall. Daunt could sense the change in the population’s temperament. It wasn’t surprising. The Court of the Air had arrived from far beyond the unbreachable Fire Sea, benefactors who had helped end the Nuyokians’ isolation, their periodic famines and dependence on erratic rainy seasons for their crops. The Court had squatted in the volcano’s remains for centuries like fire gods, protecting the islanders in return for their humble labours. And here their benefactors were, being lain low by the invaders. Daunt looked up from the flaming devastation spread across the lake’s surface. He had been distracted long enough for the scuttling eggs to have formed into narrow black fingers crawling up the slopes, advancing towards the throat of the volcano. Oblivious to the creeping threat below, the volcano’s guns were still raining a furious toll of destruction down on the armada halted beyond the thermal barrier.

The Court continued its shaking volley in mimicry of an eruption, right up until the top of the volcano was seething black with the fist-sized invaders, then the spider-legged eggs started leaping over the edge, the rolling barrage of superheated rocks violently halted by clouds of exploding trespassers. Daunt could imagine the eggs rolling down the vent of the crater, twisting the launchers into ragged lines of punctured metal with their explosive fury. Others leaping into the nest of gantries and stations and blowing apart walkways and murdering the Court’s personnel by the dozen with each detonation. Surely Boxiron would still be safe, deep inside the rocky chamber alongside the fruits of the Court’s super science and their great transaction-engines? The sea-bishops wouldn’t want to waste the time digging their precious sceptre out of a mountain’s worth of rock fall, would they? Daunt could hear the rolling firecracker detonations echoing inside the vent, the louder explosions of the Court’s launchers silenced, overwhelmed by this ugly black tide flowing up the slopes, filling the crater’s space with fury. As the last of the swarm disappeared over the edge a sudden silence settled over the island. No barrage from the fleet, no shelling from the Court’s launchers, no small-arms fire from the wall. The distant cheeping and whistling from the jungle beyond Nuyok’s walls, monkeys and birds, filled the quiet. The chirruping was added to by shouts along the wall, defenders pointing to the boiling ocean beyond their shoreline. Daunt raised his telescope for a better look.

Outside the thermal barrier the same class of metal war machines the gill-necks used to entangle the Jackelian convoy’s flagship had surfaced. Starfish! They were spinning around, launching ordinance up and over the thermal barrier. Daunt wasn’t sure what they were throwing across the barrier protecting the island from the ocean, but he was certain it meant no good for their chances of keeping the city in human hands. Daunt passed the telescope across to Morris and the old Jackelian adventurer swore under his breath.

‘Do you recognize what they are tossing over the barrier?

‘Our fleet sea arm call them rolling-pins, on account of what the buggers look like,’ said Morris. ‘Landing boats, good for crossing the seabed and advancing up a shore. A big steel tube with caterpillar tracks on either end, spiked with guns and lances. I wouldn’t want to be one of the Court’s soldiers dug in on the beach — they’ll do a roll and crush job on their positions down there.’

‘I trust the city’s walls will hold the machines at bay?’

Morris shrugged. ‘They’re not much good as a ram against walls this thick and high, but they won’t need to be. Each rolling pin will be carrying thirty to fifty gill-necks, depending how tight they’ve packed their marines in. There’ll be sappers with explosive charges, snipers, grenadiers, and portable artillery pieces and assault troops pounding on our walls within the hour.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘We’ve lost our big guns up there as well as our Jack Cloudies. There’ll be too many rolling-pins coming in for the few u-boats the island’s got patrolling inside the barrier to pick even a fraction of the armour off.’

‘What would you say a realistic estimation of our chances are?’

Morris patted his gas-rifle. ‘With these fancy shooting irons, we’ve got seven or eight times the gill-necks’ rate of fire, but-’ he indicated the citizenry lined up along the battlements, ‘-you’re talking about one of the world’s great powers lining up against us out there. The Nuyokians are a game bunch, but they’re not professional soldiers, they’re farmers and shopkeepers with guns and a couple of weeks’ militia training every year. Even with the Court’s soldiers as our backbone, we’re outnumbered a thousand to one. So what are our chances, vicar? I would say our bun’s been well and truly baked. It’s not if we fall, it’s when.’

Daunt felt his soul shrivel at the ex-soldier’s estimation of their odds. We have to buy Charlotte and the commodore the time to reach the seed-city.

Morris pulled back the safety bolt of his rifle. ‘On the plus side, I’m going to get my choice of Advocacy heads to put bullets into. One for every day the arseholes had me as their slave, see. You might want to be getting off the wall sharpish.’

‘A priest’s training includes physical healing, as well as tending to our parishioners’ souls and mental wellbeing.’

Morris pointed down to the aid station tents set up close to the wall, rows of stretchers and tables bearing bone saws and tubs of boiling tar to quickly seal wounds, all lined up incongruously across the neat lawns of the nearest row of hexagonal buildings. ‘There’ll be work for you soon enough, then.’

His words were cut short by the wailing of sirens coming from inside the town, no obvious sign of the source, but the noise seemed to shake through the transparent streets from every point.

One of the nearby locals tapped his nose and indicated his gas mask. ‘Air, for face.’

Morris pulled down the gas mask on the back of his helmet and Daunt followed suit.

‘There she goes.’ Morris’s voice sounded muffled beneath the ceramic air drum and rubber visor, great clouds of yellow-tinged gas seeping down from midway up the volcano’s slopes, rolling across the shore and making a fog across the sea. Whatever damage had been inflicted inside the crater, the Court’s facilities were intact enough to release their final defensive barrier. As a cornered squid releases a mist of ink, so the volcano was putting out the shroud of poisonous death that accompanied a genuine eruption. Flags lifted up along the wall to monitor the direction the wind was blowing. Luckily for the city, the breeze seemed to be carrying the poison gas along the shoreline and out to sea. Unfortunately for the islanders, Daunt mused, the Advocacy fleet wasn’t a convoy of merchantmen chancing their luck against the Isla Furia’s ferocious reputation. The landing force would no doubt be wearing water breathers, and the poison gas would be of nuisance value only. It did have the effect of concealing the Court’s defences along the shoreline, though. When the initial sounds of battle began to drift across the lake, the sights of the fighting were completely enveloped by high waves of rolling poison. Along the beach, different strands of coloured smoke began to mix with the yellow war gas, trenches laying down smoke cover, other forces signalling with smoke canisters. The two massive cannons behind the city walls responded to the coded signals, pounding out volley after volley, the results of their work hidden from view, but audible from the distant whoop of detonations. It was a surreal sight, the mist and clouds veined as though a rainbow, all sounds of conflict distorted by it. The distant fighting continued for over an hour and there seemed no let up in the gas — as if the volcano — having its fire silenced, was pouring all its fury into this boundless toxic veil.

Signalling the collapse of the shore’s defensive line, the lake’s ocean lock burst open in a massive explosion, pieces of concrete blown across the lake, a deadly shower of wreckage sweeping across the battlements. A second after the detonation, the screams of pain and terror from the defenders who had taken the shockwave reached Daunt. Some townspeople had been flung off the wall, others maimed and ripped apart. Behind the city’s wall, one of the clean gleaming white porcelain towers stood with its top two storeys shaved off by the scythe of rubble.

‘This is how it begins,’ whispered Daunt. Then he shook himself. It was almost as if he had been possessed by the old gods again when he had spoken.

‘Reckon you’re not wrong,’ said Morris, resting his rifle on the battlements. There were two little metal legs underneath the barrel, and he had opened them up to rest the gun against the stone, swivelling the stock experimentally. ‘You been through anything like this before?’

‘Jago,’ said the ex-parson. ‘I was on Jago when it was invaded.’

‘Then you know what to expect.’

‘I presume you’ve tasted similar when you were in the regiments?’

‘Once.’

‘So you showed the good wit to get out,’ said Daunt. ‘Sickened by the senselessness of it all?’

‘That wasn’t why I deserted,’ said Morris. The convict’s body language closed up. ‘Eyes front. They’re coming. Can you smell them? Can you taste them? Bloody gill-necks.’

Out towards the sea the wind had changed direction, war gas drifting across the lake, providing the advancing Advocacy forces with a haze screen of cover. The Court’s own deadly cloud was working against them now. Daunt saw a couple of runners outside the battlements, sprinting down the ground between the wall and near shore of the lake, pegging small triangular pennants into the dirt. The effective killing range of our rifles, so our defenders don’t expend ammunition needlessly. There wasn’t much cover in the stretch of land between the lake and the city — wooden jetties for fishing boats, a few shacks for storing nets, eeling skiffs lying beached in the reeds. Apart from the runners desperately marking out the ground, the rest of Nuyok were sheltering behind their town’s thick, tall walls.

Daunt quickly tipped up his gas mask and wiped the salty sweat off his forehead before it could sting his eyes again. Even the wind on the island was hot, playing against his skin as if it had been blown off the coals of a Jackelian tavern’s fireplace. Matters were about to get devilishly hotter. Out on the border of the lake, a rhythmic clanking filled the air as hundreds of rolling-pin tanks began to rise up out of the lime-coloured waters, tracks at either end of the metal vehicles dragging them off the lake bed and up onto the surface. Almost before the landing craft had cleared the surface, the guns studding their armour spewed out a hail of fire. They were moving up in a coordinated assault formation — some halting for hatches at their rear to fall down and disgorge marines, others coming to a standstill in the shadows of the battlements, dozens of weapons bristling up on their maximum elevation and peppering the battlements with shot and shell. These soldiers had come for the long haul, bulbous crystal helmets filled with water connected by hoses to their version of rebreather packs, bodies weighted down with pouches and entrenchment equipment. Protected by the initial landing force, more rolling-pin armour emerged out of the lake waters. Some were dragging spherical cargo containers, others mounted with trench digging prows and siege machinery. The appearance of this assault was met by a hail of fire from the Nuyokians, the roar of their rifles firing a thousand baby rattles shaking in anger. It resounded across the lake like no gunfire Daunt had ever heard before. Not the wood-like splinter of explosive charges being ignited and discarded manually, but a hollow thwacking as the firing bolts in the side of rifles jolted back and forth with the discharge of super-compressed gas. The defenders’ furious response was accompanied by a clockwork clack of ammunition drums rotating on top of the rifles as the city’s militiamen emptied their magazines down onto the ground in front of their home. A fierce drumming echoed from the rolling-pin tanks as rifle balls glanced off their armour. Where the gill-neck marines were out in the open, unloading their siege and entrenching tools from the landing craft, soldiers’ corpses spilled into the dirt and crumpled back into the lake’s reeds.

Behind Daunt, the two long guns of the city were still discharging every few minutes, tossing shells at the stalled battle fleet of the Advocacy as fast as the city gunners could reload shells into the breeches. Daunt ducked as a spray of shots whistled past his head. Morris was keeping down, swivelling his gas gun on its leg mounts and aiming careful bursts at the invaders below, laughing as if the vista of carnage below was a theatre production laid on purely for his amusement. At the receiving end of each spray of bullets, Advocacy soldiers collapsed to the ground with shattered breathing helmets, their crab-shell armour torn and holed. Elements of the landing force were trying to storm the slopes of the volcano, no doubt trying to find elevated positions from where they could shell and snipe at the city below. Fortunately for the Nuyokians, the close-defence mechanisms of the Court of the Air were coming into play. Fake rock fronts were drawing back all across the mountain side, cannons, mortars and banks of rapid-fire rifles emerging into the light of day from camouflaged bunkers, cutting down each wave of Advocacy marines as they attempted to scale the rise.

Stretcher-bearers ran crouched along the length of the battlements, rolling collapsed bodies onto stretchers and manhandling them down the steps towards the surgeons’ tents on the lawns of the nearest towers.

All around Daunt the defenders were intent on murder, focused on killing enough gill-necks for the Advocacy to abandon its beachhead. This is your war, Jethro Daunt, and welcome to it. He bent down and went off to see how many of the wounded he could save.