From the Deep of the Dark

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Shortly after the gill-necks’ rolling-pin tanks had dragged up large black spheres studded with spikes, the lines of ugly globes began launching out fizzing rockets which landed harmlessly enough, leaving each rocket pouring out smoke cover to mask the invaders’ exposed position in front of Nuyok. Unable to effectively sight on the invaders, the militia along the wall had been reduced to firing blind into the fog, emptying magazines into the billowing clouds. The battlements themselves were now shrouded inside the choking veil, and Daunt’s war had been reduced to a couple of feet’s visibility either side of him, stumbling through a hell he had been trained to deny.

Out beyond the wall the Advocacy forces had assembled gallopers — small mobile cannons that could be broken into pieces, transported by the landing boats, and then put back together to hurl small but deadly projectiles towards the city. Daunt couldn’t see them, but the effects were being felt around the city, shells tearing into the walls, others passing overhead and wrecking devastation amid the towers’ clean white porcelain spires. Particularly devastating was the enemy’s chain shot, twin cannon balls linked by thick rusty chains that rotated as they flew, deadly bolas decapitating defenders where they stood.

Nuyokians were heaving out poles designed to push back scaling ladders being lifted up against the walls, others lugging drums of acid-like oil to pour through siege drains, spraying their deadly contents out onto the assault. From the anguished screams and yells that greeted the dispersal of each drum of corrosive liquid, the gill-neck sappers and engineers were hard at work on the ground below. It was only a matter of time before the attackers managed to successfully set enough explosives to blow open a breach in Nuyok’s walls.

Daunt was moving along the battlements, thick with smoke carrying the distorted cries of the attackers and the defenders’ curses and rifle fire. Militiamen bent over the ramparts and emptied their magazines in a desperate attempt to halt the surge of numbers coming at them, heaving out at siege ladders with their y-shaped poles, others hacking at grapple cables sunk into the stone walls. Each of the gas guns contained a bayonet, spring-mounted to extend like a penknife’s blade. Many of the militia had triggered theirs, adding a foot of serrated steel to the length of their rifles, hacking out at the crystal-helmed gill-neck faces trying to struggle over the wall.

Weighed down by a medical satchel given to Daunt by a surgeon at the aid station below — one of the Court’s personnel, not a local — he crab-crawled his way toward the next cluster of men shouting for assistance, bullets whining like hornets past his helmet.

This was far removed from the Circlist church’s medical training. The priests back at Daunt’s seminary would have been horrified at the scale and severity of the injuries. A world apart from the delicate balance of pastoral care, diet, exercise, meditation exercises and identification of physical ailments that could throw out of kilter the miraculously sophisticated organism that was the race of man. Soldiers blinded by shards of stone from cannon impacts, missing arms and legs from the bombardment, punched down by rifle balls, felled by grenades and blade cuts, bones broken and spines shattered slipping from the battlements. Already the orders had gone out from the mayor’s command post that wherever they could, the injured should make their own way down the wall’s stairs to the aid posts. So hard-pressed on the battlement that no fighters could be spared to supplement the stretcher-bearers by carrying down their wounded comrades to the Spartan medical facilities. Daunt reached the militiamen yelling for a medic, half of the company jabbing out with bayonets, the remainder standing back and aiming shots over their comrades’ shoulders. At their boots was a militiaman doubled up on the rampart, surrounded by nets filled with the ammunition drums and gas propellant canisters he had been distributing among the defenders.

Daunt rolled the body over; only noticing the fourteen-year old’s agony-contorted face after he had pulled his hand away from the bubbling ruin of his chest. Try as he might to suppress it, Daunt felt the wave of anger rise within him like an overwhelming tide. ‘What’s he doing here? He’s too young to be fighting.’

‘His city too, Court-man,’ snarled one of the fighters, not looking away from sighting his rifle. ‘Take him to medicos.’

‘I can’t bandage him up; I can’t move him by myself. Damn your eyes.’

The soldier pulled off his empty ammunition drum and threw it over the parapet as if it was a discus. ‘Damn theirs instead.’

‘I can’t die,’ moaned the boy, as if the fact of his mortality was more of a shock to him than his wound. ‘I can’t.’

What had this been to the child, a game? A chance to show off to his friends, to impress his elders in the city? The chance to get a piece of cannon shrapnel lodged in his gut, the random hand of fate selecting who survived and who didn’t. Daunt felt like screaming out at them to stop, begging both sides to end this butchery. But this slaughter was necessary to hold onto the Isla Furia, to keep the sea-bishops’ prize out of the invaders’ clutches for as long as possible. This is my doing, my design, and all I can do to assuage my guilt is wrap bandages around the limbless cripples I am creating here today. Maybe I should have tried to run with the sceptre? Led the sea-bishops on a merry chase across half the world. Bought time with my shoe leather, not the blood of these poor islanders.

With the militiamen fully engaged by the gill-necks crawling up the siege ladders, Daunt yelled out to Morris to help him shift the wounded boy, the Jackelian setting the timer on a stick grenade before tossing it over the parapet.

‘This is work,’ Morris panted with a savage jollity, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he came running over. ‘They’ll know they’ve been in a fight before the night falls right enough.’

Now Daunt reconciled Morris’s desertion from the army with the cues from his body earlier — his ambivalence and disgust and shame. A sudden epiphany. Morris hadn’t left the army because he had been disgusted by the carnage of war; he had left revolted by how much he had enjoyed it.

‘Lift his boots; I’ll bear his weight behind the arms. As gently as you can down to the aid station.’

‘Don’t worry, boy,’ Morris encouraged the young soldier. ‘It takes a man’s weight in lead to kill him. Bit of shrapnel like this, it’s only good for a souvenir to hang above your fireplace.’

‘Why me?’ The young soldier didn’t appear to be addressing anyone in particular, his head lolling from side to side as he was borne down the steps.

‘Because you’re here, boy, because you’re here.’

‘Don’t talk,’ Daunt advised him.

‘Those ammunition bags you were lugging, fine bullets they are,’ said Morris. ‘Been sending those arseholes out there back to the ocean all day with them. Lake’s running red with their blood when you can glimpse the waters through the bloody gas.’

The ground they were carrying the soldier along shook with the cannonade of the city’s two giant artillery pieces. Across the lawn of the aid station, bodies lay strewn outside the tents, a cacophony of moans and pleas and screams from militia fighters lying on their stretchers. If war was a mill, this was what it produced. The dead and the dying and the barely saveable; begging for water and the attentions of someone, anyone, who could take away the pain, grow them another limb, close the sight of organs that were never meant to be exposed to light.

‘Attend here!’ Daunt yelled out, lowering the boy down to an already bloody blanket, its previous occupant shrouded and piled on one of the yellow carts waiting behind the tents. ‘Surgeon, attend here!’

‘It’s no good,’ said Morris. ‘The lad’s gone.’

Daunt looked down, stunned. ‘He can’t have done. The boy was moaning, he was calling out in pain just seconds ago.’

‘That was minutes ago. You can see it in their eyes, the ones who don’t want to go on. The look always tells you more than their wounds do.’

I know that look. I used to see it in the mirror most mornings. Daunt touched the boy’s neck, feeling for a pulse. The young soldier was stone cold. It was as if he had been dead for days. ‘He didn’t want to die. This, this was my doing.’

Morris checked his rifle. ‘Some people just can’t take it. It’s a crucible up there. Some melt. Some temper. And I promise you, vicar, this ain’t your doing. It’s them arseholes over the other side of the wall, see. Fairly definite about that.’

‘He didn’t want to die.’

‘Take a rifle, vicar. Take some revenge. You’ll feel better.’

Daunt suppressed something deep and primeval that called out for him to do just that. ‘It’s not what I’m for.’

Morris shrugged. Behind him there was a bubbling vat of cauterisation gel, a soldier with a stump of an arm yelling as two orderlies either side of the man shoved the bleeding remains of his shoulder into the liquid.

‘Come on, climb back up to the wall with me. It’s not really healing you’re doing here, is it? You’re only pushing the dents out of the armour, grinding the chips out of the blades before tossing ’em back into the fray.’

‘Just hold the line, Mister Morris.’

The stocky Jackelian gave an ironic salute and loped back towards the fierce combat along the top of the battlements. Daunt had seen death before… on Jago, in his parish back home, in his trade as a consulting detective. But this destruction was on a different scale. He might as well have been the city’s commander, dispatching thousands to their end with a causal wave of a marshal’s baton. He took the boy’s cold hand in his, rubbing the fingers. ‘You have to be careful with murder like this, murder on an industrial scale. It can do things to you. Send you mad enough to start listening to the old gods, and that can land you in all sorts of trouble.’

I can’t die.

‘No energy is ever lost, young man,’ replied Daunt. ‘Only transformed. That’s how the world works.’

All along the battlements: screaming, yelling soldiers, and the thud of their rifles, the war cries from gill-necks, bayonets being thrust into gas masks and rebreathers as the battle desperately surged back and forth for control of the wall, just energy, trickling from one state to another. That was all it was. Trickle and flow, trickle and flow.

A passing surgical orderly kicked Daunt in the small of the back. ‘Get to the wall, Court man. There are more wounded who need carrying down.’

Daunt reached into his pocket and pulled out his bag of aniseed balls. ‘How about you, would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s?’

‘This is a war, Court man, a war. Get off your arse and help us.’

‘Yes. I am rather afraid this war belongs to me.’ He stood wearily up.

The orderly shoved a red crayon-like stick in Daunt’s direction. ‘Move down the line of wounded. Anyone you think can be saved, mark their forehead with a cross.’

‘Mark them all with a cross,’ said Daunt. ‘We’re pulling back. Prepare to move the aid station.’

‘Back, where?’

Daunt pointed to the volcano. ‘Inside there.’

He picked his way through the wounded littering the lawn, treading through the human debris of war, oblivious to the calls of the surgeons and their medical staff. Up on the gate’s keep, the command table holding the plans for the siege was nearly depleted of counters, only a few of the mayor’s staff left at the table and communication desk to push around the surviving units. The rest were at the battlements, firing desperately out into the wall of smoke. The mayor himself was unchanged, striding between the table and the defenders, a gas rifle cradled under his right arm.

‘Fall back,’ Daunt ordered the mayor, who was looking down at this strange foreigner with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. ‘Fall back to the volcano. There are chambers underground large enough to shelter the town’s population.’

‘This is our city, Court man,’ boomed the politician. ‘Our forefathers-’

‘I know, I know. Lie under the ground, died defending it, you’ll bring everlasting shame on our Lady of the Light. But here’s the thing. The battle of Clawfoot Moor. Same situation. Last great siege of the civil war, and the royalists lost, because just like Nuyok, your perimeter is too wide to mount an effective defence. The Advocacy has enough numbers to swarm over your city and your towers can’t be fortified adequately to hold them off. The volcano complex on the other hand had got limited access points and you can funnel your attackers down to narrow enough streams to make your rifles count. If you stay here and fight from your towers, they’ll become nothing more than coffins for your people. The Catosian city-state of Sathens achieved the same thing I’m proposing against a polar barbarian horde using the Valley of Egon’s slopes. Fall back now, while you can still control the wall well enough that the gill-necks can’t harry your retreat. Pull back your two great guns for protective fire to cover your withdrawal.’

‘Are you a general of your people, Court man?’

‘I understand war, good mayor. Well enough to know this is the only way the people of your city will survive the invasion.’

One of the communications signallers turned around. ‘Sappers have breached the wall on the forest side, a fifty-foot section collapsed. Gill-necks are emerging from the trees and trying to storm the rubble. We are being over-run and the city reserves have all been dispatched.’

‘The Court has always protected us.’ The mayor sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

‘We will, I vow to you we will.’

It was on Daunt’s hands now. Failure or success. A pacifist general was leading the army to victory or defeat.

The barrel of a gun pushed Dick inside a large windowless cell, the space matted with dirty straw and scattered with a dozen unkempt prisoners in a variety of clothes. Algo Monoshaft was rudely shoved in after the officer.

‘I’ve seen better looking cells,’ said Dick.

‘It’s not so much a cell,’ said the guard. ‘More of a larder.’

‘The Mass must feed,’ agreed the second guard. ‘But we’re not fussy about our prey being alive, as long as your flesh hasn’t turned rancid.’

Dick looked at the thick metal door, sturdy enough despite turning rusty from the damp. ‘How many of you things are there?’

‘Not so many here. Where we come from, you have no idea.’ The guard tossed Dick his cane. ‘You’re solely among fodder in there, though. You can use your little toy to confirm the truth of my words. You won’t need the cane when it’s your turn to be taken. You’ll be able to tell who among you is the Mass quite easily, because we’ll be the ones dining on you.’

The creature masquerading as Sadly appeared, wearing the Court agent’s form again rather than Algo’s. ‘You’ll be pleased to know, I checked your cane and left you your Court-issue suicide pill underneath the detection mechanism. I have a wager with my brothers here. They think you’ll take it after you’ve seen us feed. I say you won’t.’

‘What’s the prize?’

‘The little sustenance that’s hanging on your scrawny bones is enough of a wager. I prefer younger meat myself, but waste, not want not, as Sadly’s old ma used to say.’

‘Choke on it, you jigger.’

Their laughter echoed outside as the cell door clanged shut.

‘Not to trust anyone,’ moaned the steamman. ‘I told you. I warned you.’

‘That’s been my bloody life, sir.’ My death now too, from the look of it.

The other prisoners in the chamber seemed cowed and cowering. It took a second glance from Dick to realize he recognized one of the figures. Vice-admiral Cockburn bore little relation to the commanding figure Dick has seen on the convoy’s flagship. An atrophied figure now, sitting rocking in his own filth. There were a number of plates shoved through the feeding flap at the bottom of the armoured door — the plates piled with cubed vegetables — turnips, parsnips and other root vegetables. Dick scooped up the plate to take to the gaunt officer of the fleet sea arm. ‘Eat, man. You’re wasting away here.’

‘Eat,’ giggled the vice-admiral through a scraggly grey beard. ‘You fool. They always take the fattest first. Don’t eat. Never eat the food.’ He spilled the plate angrily in front of Dick. ‘You’ll see, when they come to choose. They feed outside the door. You can hear them. You’ll be the first. Look at you, like a pie seller with that gut. You first.’ He broke down into a fit of snorting coughs and Dick reeled back. He was disgusted by how far the navy officer had fallen. Even the prisoners back in the gill-neck’s slave camp had held onto more dignity than this. How long had the officer been held inside here?

Algo’s metal skull swivelled around the room, taking in the dozen or so prisoners, ‘You have a device to detect the presence of vampires, sergeant? Inside your cane? Use it now, there are treasonists among us, my olfactory sensors can detect the stench of the enemy, and the fact that monster told us there are none in here merely confirms it to my mind.’

‘The enemy aren’t vampires,’ said Dick, checking his cane. ‘We’ve been calling them sea-bishops, an underwater race from a bloody long distance away from the Kingdom.’

‘Names, names, I heard you, sergeant, just as I heard the vampire. Sea-bishops, the Mass. They feast on human flesh, they can alter their form, and they walk unseen among us. What else would you have me call them but vampires?’

‘Fair dos,’ said Dick. ‘But this cane isn’t going to find them.’ He pulled out the detection device, locating the tiny white pill sunk on a small velvet-lined niche underneath.

‘What do you mean? That is a device of the Court of the Air, is it not?’

‘One of the civilians I’ve been working with, Damson Shades, otherwise known as the Mistress of Mesmerism. Before I left for the capital she whispered something in my ear as I was saying my goodbyes. Your detector doesn’t work. Tell no one, until it’s too late.’

‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, sergeant, why would the Court send you here with a defunct vampire detection mechanism?’

‘Bugger me if I know. But a force that’s been around the maypole a few more times that you or me has possessed the girl. Let’s see what this cane does do, then.’ He re-inserted the tube of coiled machinery and twisted the handle as Lord Trabb had instructed him back on the Isla Furia. The eyes on the copper boar’s head started glimmering orange just as Sadly’s cane had done within Victory Arch. But unlike the fierce orange glow, the illumination of Dick’s cane’s ornamental handle spluttered and flickered weakly. That’s it then? Just broken like the girl said it was?

Algo Monoshaft seized the cane from Dick’s hands, and for a moment, Dick thought the batty old steamer was going to use the confirmation of the light to accuse him of being a sea-bishop, but the head of board seemed intent on the handle’s eyes.

‘What is it, sir?’

‘A coded message,’ said Algo. ‘From someone who knows a very ancient secret… that steammen can pulse their vision plates to communicate privately between each other, and an individual who also has access to King Steam’s royal cipher. Ah, here’s the writer’s signature. Did you meet a Lord Trabb inside the Court of the Air?’

‘That I did. Your opposite number in the Court.’

The flashing in the handle finished and the steamman unscrewed the knob, pulling away the detection apparatus. Algo tapped out the suicide pill, holding it up gently between his iron digits. ‘It is time for your vampire friend to lose his wager, sergeant. You are going to have to ingest this pill.’

Dick looked at the senile old sod as if he had gone mad.

‘It’s only fair, sergeant, as I fear I am going to have to commit suicide too.’

Whether through good timing or having to slowly navigate their way against the current of nightsoil and effluence, by the time Charlotte, the commodore and Maeva dislodged the sewer port into the gill-neck’s capital, the city’s defence — and their diversion — was already well under way. Charlotte’s suit carried the distant sounds of the underwater battle, amplified and tinny to her ears. She hardly noticed the clash, last out of the claustrophobic tunnel, the commodore and Maeva helping her out into a tight space between two buildings.

Lishtiken, remote and hidden from all surface dwellers’ sight, was even more imposing close up. It seized the light of its own lamps and hurled the illumination across the cityscape, dancing and reflecting from a thousand crystal surfaces, mirrored and distorted by the planes and waters. Only the constant movement of swimmers and their submersible vehicles anchored the vista as real, rather than a hall of mirrors glimpsed through the prism of a glass of water. The scale of the city and the way its illumination twisted and shimmered around Charlotte was enough to make her feel dizzy. Many of the crystal surfaces were transparent, exposing chambers inside — a few filled with liquid, others airtight, betraying the gill-necks’ origins as an amphibious offshoot of the race of man. At close quarters she could observe the organic nature of the vast steepling constructions running together like a cliff line, crystalline buildings branching out to search for the surface’s scant light. On the outskirts of the city low flashes of light bounced around Lishtiken’s margins, rotor-spears exploding and the distant magnesium flashes of shock-spears discharging bolts of wild energy. How many nomads were losing their lives out there, buying them the time to carry out her plan? When Charlotte looked closer, the flow of traffic between the buildings was bustling with a single purpose now — getting to cover. She touched the reassuring heft of the shock-spear holstered like a splint against her calf. They had decided not to enter the city with the man-high rotor-spears… waving one of the ranged weapons would have been akin to unfurling a nomad standard in the centre of Lishtiken.

‘The Advocacy is not used to this,’ said the commodore in a coughing chortle of mischief. ‘They’ve had mastery of the mortal deeps for so long they’ve forgotten what it’s like to have their noses tweaked. I have the feeling they don’t much care for it.’

‘Lishtiken has never been attacked,’ said Maeva. ‘Not in my memory. The Temple of Judgements is over there. If we meet anyone who questions our presence, tell them we’re with your sister’s people. You can still pretend to be a royalist can’t you, Jared?’

‘I’ve spent most my life pretending not to be one; the reverse won’t be any harder.’

Charlotte slipped into her old familiar routine. Just another theft from the rich and powerful. Something she needed to do. Not to alleviate her poverty this time; an extra layer to the blanket of wealth she used to keep the desolation at bay, all her fears of being abandoned with no one willing to help her. Her commission was stealing one of the enemy’s darkships. A way to transport her into the monsters’ lair. She could hardly enjoy her life if every iota of her blood was sucked out to satisfy some horde of fish-scaled monsters, could she? The sea-bishops had immense power. They were greedy beyond avarice, and like so many back home, they had tried to use Charlotte, then discard her. Arrogant. Selfish. Calculating. They were overdue for a fall and who better to humble them than Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism?

The raiding party kept to the lower levels of the city, as Maeva led them through the shadows of the gem-like towers, a maze of pipes and gantries, exotically coloured seaweed clinging to any stretch of seabed not built over. At one point, the nomad woman led them on a diversion to skirt an access station for the transport tubes sending gill-necks to far-off sectors of the city. The way ahead was thronged with locals trying to get into the heavily overcrowded transport system; to travel home and check their families were safe from the raiders. Squadrons of armed and armoured gill-necks manoeuvred past, soldiers riding something Charlotte hadn’t seen before. Massive squid-like creatures, rubbery flesh saddled with a single rider above stabilising fins; flashes of sinuous skin and quivering tentacles as the squadron propelled past.

‘Monitors, lass,’ said the commodore, keeping low on the seabed next to Charlotte as he watched them flash down the gap between the towers. ‘Same as our Kingdom constabulary.’

‘They are stabled at the Temple of Judgements,’ said Maeva, sounding pleased. ‘Fewer of them for us to bluff our way past.’

Shaped like a crown rising majestically out of the surrounding buildings, the Temple of Judgements reached up as grand as any palace. Charlotte ran her eyes over the fortress-sized structure as she squeezed out of a narrow passage. Dozen of crystalline towers climbed out of a central wheel structure, points on its coronet circled by spirals of pearl-white bubble-buildings, each wreath set among a helix of winding arches.

‘Can you still feel the darkships inside there?’ asked the commodore. There was a tone to the old u-boat man’s voice that made Charlotte suspect he would have been relieved if she said no.

Charlotte pointed to the side of the Temple of Judgements, near the seabed where the red crystal wall sloped dotted with tunnel entrances. ‘They are inside those passages.’

‘U-boat pens,’ said Maeva. ‘They’ll be mostly empty by now. Anything with torpedo tubes will be out chasing our warriors.’

‘They won’t have sent the darkships, not yet,’ said Charlotte. That wasn’t the sea-bishop way. They might send their forces to tip the balance, but why risk their precious lives when they commanded so many expendable cattle to exhaust first? ‘I can sense at least two vessels inside.’

Elizica was worryingly silent on the matter. Yes, because I’m doing such a good job by myself.

Charlotte gazed up at the waters above the city. Was it her imagination, or were the flashes of fighting at the margins of the capital growing less frequent now? Savages against the well-defended heart of the Advocacy’s hegemony, how long had she expected the nomads’ war party to be able to mount a diversion? Charlotte singled out an entrance down which she sensed the darkships lurking and they quickly crossed the open plaza to the temple.

Inside the tunnel entrance, the water was dark and still. They only took a minute to swim along the smooth crystal surfaces. As the light inside the submersible pen began to brighten the water, Charlotte realized the sloping tunnel floor was clear of liquid before them. ‘There’s air ahead of us.’

‘Always better to do repairs on your blessed boat out of the sea when you can,’ said the commodore. ‘Welding is welding.’

‘The oxygen will be enough to keep the casually inclined away from their pens,’ said Maeva. ‘Our ride is topside?’

‘Let’s see.’

Breaking the surface of the tunnel alongside her two companions, Charlotte found herself in an oblong chamber, a crystalline ramp with multiple launch rails running across its floor. A couple of open-to-water gill-neck craft hung from gantries above, and at the back of the pen, a pair of black oily-hulled darkships skulked. Two massive malevolent stingrays — they appeared to be steaming in the air, as if their presence was enough to make the very substance of the world crawl. Arches at the rear of the chamber led deeper into the Temple of Judgement, sealed with glass doors — but of crew, engineers and temple staff there was no sign. The three of them walked cautiously up the incline, pushing the visors of their diving helmets up into their helms. Disconnecting the voice line that tethered the three of them together, they pulled out shock spears and crept up alongside the launch rails, dripping water down onto the hangar floor.

‘Why do I feel like a mouse, lass?’ whispered the commodore. ‘Creeping up on a piece of cheese dangling from a bait clasp?’

Charlotte craned her neck, looking for any signs of movement in the dock. ‘That’s the point of the assault. Any sea-bishops masquerading as Advocacy commanders inside the temple will be overwhelmed by officials pestering them for orders on how to defend the city.’

Charlotte approached the alien black mass of the ships. It was as if the substance that formed them was alive, throbbing with dark intent.

‘How many can one of these evil boats carry?’ asked the commodore.

‘Two pilots. Up to ten passengers,’ said Charlotte. At least, that’s how Elizica remembers it. ‘Enough to hold the three of us.’

The commodore appeared as though he’d been hoping for a smaller capacity — perhaps one less than his number. ‘Two craft to choose from, but we need to name them for luck. The one on the left we’ll call the Revenue Man’s Soul — for it’s a fact well known that they have none — and the one on the right should be the Witch of Jackals, for it’s her dark magic we must rely on to survive diving to thirty-six thousand feet. Which one of the terrible pair are we to seize?’

‘I’ll take a witch over the office of tax,’ said Charlotte. She approached the craft on the right and touched the crystal under her diving suit. A circular port irised open in the darkship’s hull and a ramp extruded like a lolling tongue. One foot on the ramp and Charlotte was punched backward by a weight wrapping her with a murderous constriction, then she was falling down to the dock. She managed a single surprised croak before a blaze of agony burned across every nerve she possessed. As Charlotte tumbled, she saw Maeva weaving around, her shock-spear blazing erratic bolts of energy towards the craft behind them, loosing bolts even as her body jerked and lurched, spouting blood off her diving suit in a hail of rifle balls; falling, shooting, falling, shooting. Charlotte hit the chamber’s floor as a dead weight, exhaling and gagging, the strangling netting repaying her every movement with sparking pain. Laid out across the hanger, Charlotte’s eyes twisted up, the one thing she could still move without being lashed by the cruel embrace of the capture net. A lock had opened in the craft behind them, spilling sailors with guns — Jackelians by the look of them, the ancient royalist arms of the Kingdom sitting on their Jack Tar hats.

Commodore Black stumbled towards Maeva, clutching a red weal of blood on his shoulder. Shot-drunk and trembling, he landed on his hands and knees by the nomad woman’s side. ‘Don’t move, lass.’

‘I’ve found a way to punish you after all, Jared,’ she grimaced.

‘Save your strength now,’ the commodore pleaded. ‘We’ll patch you up. Just be quiet and let me look at you again.’

‘And how do I look?’ Maeva coughed.

‘Fine, lass. Just like when we first met.’

‘You always were a honeyed-tongued pirate.’

‘Privateer, Maeva. Never a pirate.’

A grey-haired woman emerged from the darkship portal Charlotte had opened, more sailors at her side. Alighting on the dock, the woman smoothly kicked the commodore off all fours and onto his back. ‘There you are brother, lying on your fat arse. That’s the way you like to spend your wars. Before you run away, at least, leaving the rest of us to die.’

‘Mercy,’ coughed the commodore, raising an arm. ‘Parlay.’

‘One privateer to another? I think we’re a little beyond that, don’t you?’ Gemma bent down and reached through the netting binding Charlotte, a blade in her hand. Slicing open Charlotte’s diving suit, the woman reached through and ripped the amulet painfully from Charlotte’s neck. ‘No more stage tricks from you, Mistress Shades. Our mutual friend Mister Walsingham is looking forward to renewing your acquaintance. It seems you owe him a sceptre and he’s not very pleased with all the hoops you’re making him jump through to retrieve it.’

Charlotte tried to speak, but the burning agony was as bad as plunging her fist into a stoked fireplace.

‘The capacitors on the net are very sensitive,’ smiled Gemma Dark. ‘I’d keep your witticisms to yourself, thief girl, until you’re safely locked up in the feeding pens. You did want to visit my allies’ seed-city, no? It’s a long dive down. I’m here to save you the trouble of stealing a darkship. Always happy to give any friend of my brother the scenic journey.’

Maeva groaned on the floor, her fingers reaching weakly for her fallen shock-spear, but Gemma Dark’s foot swept the nomad’s weapon a couple of inches beyond her dying grasp. ‘No, I don’t think you’re coming along for the ride. You’d bleed all over my darkship’s cabin, and while our allies do so appreciate human blood, I’d rather not have to mop it up for them.’ Gemma Dark knelt down alongside Maeva. ‘Your filthy nomad vermin outside Lishtiken didn’t last very long, I’m afraid. The city wasn’t as unprepared for your arrival as it appeared. Time for you to join your friends.’ The commodore’s sister produced a pistol and shot Maeva through the heart, her body shuddering on the floor. Charlotte jounced in shock at the cold-blooded slaughter, the commodore’s moan coming out as half a sob.

‘That’s as much mercy as I have for your kind, sea-wanderer. Same as your seanore friends showed any royalist unlucky enough to be captured crossing your hunting grounds.’ She pushed the commodore away from the nomad’s corpse with her boot, clicking her fingers for the mob of sailors to come and secure him with manacles. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not getting off so easily, brother. We’ll have a proper family reunion, you and I, appropriately unhurried. The sea-bishops have a machine that allows them to drain a mind as if it’s a swamp, but where’s the sport in that? I’ll handle your interrogation the way all traitors to the cause should be treated… your fat arse, an iron bar, and your dear little sister for company.’

‘You didn’t have to kill Maeva,’ whispered the commodore. ‘You didn’t have to.’

‘Oh, I think we should start as we mean to go on, don’t you?’

Charlotte lay on the deck, the sailors deactivating the shock net only to manacle her arms and bundle her up inside the darkship. At least she was free of the vicious shocks pursuing her every roll and twitch. ‘You can’t trust the sea-bishops! Those monsters don’t have allies, they have herds. You’re not their partners. To them, you’re only their supper — delayed.’

‘Trust has always been a pliable notion, thief girl,’ said Gemma, boarding the craft and stuffing Charlotte’s amulet inside her jacket pocket. ‘And when it comes to the hunt, better a flea on the hound, than a flea on the hare, hmm?’

After the shock of the net, Charlotte could hardly stand, and the sailors rolled her into the back of the darkship’s cabin, a featureless dark tunnel leading up to the cockpit. The surface was slightly sticky and wet, as if they were being held in the belly of a beast. She turned over as she slid across the floor, landing next to Commodore Black. With her hands and the old u-boat man’s securely bound, Charlotte noticed the sailors were passing their rifles to one of their number, a young pock-faced man who then exited the darkship with a pile of rifles in his arms.

‘Is that the limit of the alliance you have struck, honey?’ Charlotte called to Gemma. ‘The sea-bishops won’t even let you in their city with ranged weapons?’

Gemma patted the sabre resting by her side. ‘Hold your filthy mouth, thief girl, lest you lose it. I still have this, and its edge is sharp enough for your wagging tongue. My allies don’t need your prattle during interrogation. They can rip your thoughts out with their queer machines.’ She turned back to the cockpit and then ignored her prisoners.

Jared Black shook his head sadly. ‘Sorry lass. This is it for our schemes. Why did Maeva choose to follow me? She always knew what follows at my heels. I’m an old fool whose life has drained away into the sea, but a young doe like you deserves better.’

Charlotte watched the controls at the front of the darkship twisting around the pilot, carnivorous black ivy wrapping itself around a victim. ‘We all deserve better, Jared.’

‘Aye, but this is all the wicked world has for us.’