The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER TEN

Amelia could tell her arms were shackled even as she was waking up. She could barely remember where she was through the waves of nausea; but the line of trussed-up Catosian free company soldiers lying comatose in the low-roofed chamber brought it all back to her. The Sprite of theLake. And it wasn’t just the mercenaries bundled down here — there was Billy Snow, his grizzled old head lying sprawled unconscious on one of the Catosians, while at the far end she could just see Gabriel McCabe and an armoured set of foot claws that had to belong to T’ricola.

‘Breathe deep, lass,’ said a voice. ‘You took a bad lungful of the vapours out on the deck.’

‘Commodore? Jared, are you here?’ Amelia tried to peer down the dimly lit chamber, but then she realized the voice was coming from behind her.

‘Where else would I be, professor? Captain of my own boat and now master of nothing more than this old storage hold.’ The commodore wriggled into the corner of her vision, his legs tied and arms bound like Amelia’s. ‘What do you remember?’ ‘I was outside on the deck and reality was breaking down. People were changing into things, becoming monsters, even parts of the boat were coming alive.’

‘It was no more than your mind breaking down, lass. We sailed into a wall of river mist — but it turned out to be something more potent, a defensive wall of gas laid out to snare anyone foolish enough to come visiting.’

‘A Daggish weapon?’ said Amelia. ‘But that makes no sense. They have living creatures in their cooperative, animals that would be affected by the gas. And where are the sailors, where are Bull’s people?’

‘Who do you think led us into the trap? Ah, they played me for a fool, so they did. Us on the surface venting the stale air out of our corridors. Bull and his cronies in suits, scraping off barnacles below our hull, knowing they would have all the time in the world to seize the boat when we ran into that wicked wall of vapours. Snug in their wet suits while the rest of us were out of our gourds.’

‘Whose wall of vapours, Jared? Whose, if not the Daggish empire’s?’

‘Bull was in here gloating an hour ago, but he did not say, although I have a terrible idea who it may belong to. Something that would not be affected by any amount of madness-inducing vapours. Our mutual friend Coppertracks used to hint at an evil that dwelled in Liongeli, when he dared, when he was off his guard … something so fearful he would never say much more.’

‘That gas didn’t come out of one of your old steamer’s ghost stories,’ said Amelia. Circle, her head was throbbing now. ‘It was real enough.’

Like most steammen, Coppertracks had never been given to exaggeration. A thought occurred to her. ‘Where’s Ironflanks?’ ‘Off flying with the tree monkeys,’ laughed a voice.

It was Bull Kammerlan, three of his sailors behind him, now armed with the Catosians’ carbines.

‘We’ve kept him on the sauce, as much Quicksilver as he can snort into his boiler, bless him.’

‘You filthy jigger,’ spat Amelia. ‘You were the traitor! Poisoning the old steamer and wrecking the Sprite.’

‘Me?’ Bull smiled. ‘Well, I spiked your scout, there’s no denying that. We could hardly have Ironflanks warning you that the channel we were taking had a nasty surprise halfway up it, could we? But am I your traitor? No. I’m not that. It wasn’t me behind the games on the Sprite. I’d not want to damage the old girl, would I, dimples? She’s my boat now, and the old gang are back in business, I should say.’

‘Don’t do this, Bull,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘You have a pardon waiting for you. You and the lads can be free, as legal as the powder on a magistrate’s wig back in Jackals.’

‘Free!’ Bull roared. ‘Free! Free to pay taxes on my beer to the rabble that turned our families off our land and stole everything we owned? Free to bend my knee to their law and kiss their populist arses once a five-year at the ballot? You’ve forgotten what we once were, old man, hiding your real name and pretending that the cause is dead.’

‘It is dead, Bull — you, me, a few others scattered to the winds, we’re all that’s left of the royalist fleet now. We need to survive, you and I — why do you think it was old Blacky that sprung you out of Bonegate?’

‘I intend to do more than survive,’ said Bull, ‘I intend to live! If Quest was going to pay you for a few antiques scraped off the bottom of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo, then he’ll pay us too, I fancy. What with his money and the coins we’ll raise from selling these killer Catosian princesses on the block down Cassarabia way, I reckon we’ll have enough loot to kick off the cause again in a grand old style. Guns and boats and a whole ocean’s worth of Jackelian shipping to plunder. They’ll curse my name in the House of Guardians for a thousand years after I have made them bleed, after I cut off their precious trade and shake the pennies from their dirty, thieving pockets.’

‘Bull, I’m begging you …’

‘And don’t think I don’t like the sound of you doing it.’ The u-boat man turned to his sailors. ‘Just remove the people I talked about, boys. You’ll get your chance to “survive” now, commodore, that’s the least I owe you for giving me the Sprite and setting us back on the water and back in the game.’

The guards pulled up Amelia and the commodore. At the opposite end of the chamber they picked up the unconscious forms of the other expedition officers — Billy Snow, Gabriel McCabe, Veryann, T’ricola — carrying their limp forms out like sacks of coal.

‘What are you going to do to us?’ Amelia demanded.

‘You ever fight a snake, dimples? Best way to stop it quick is to cut off the head, leave the rest of it wriggling on the dirt. Especially you, commodore. I know there are secret passages on this boat, pieces of equipment hidden away in chambers with private activation codes — secrets handed down from generation to generation by the captains. I leave you tied up in my brig, I’m as like to wake up to find my cabin flooded and the pilot room locked on me. No, I think we’ll be sailing with our own officers in charge of things from now on.’

Hauled at gunpoint to the deck, Amelia saw that one of the shore boats had been taken out, Ironflanks’ passed-out form already inside it, twitching in the bright, clear sunlight. Sailors carried the unconscious bodies of the other officers down the ladder, tossing them next to the steamman.

‘Marooning us, are you?’ the commodore said.

‘More of a chance than you gave me when I was exiled from the fleet,’ replied Bull. ‘There’s pistols in the boat, water and victuals. We’ll toss some charges on the shore upriver for your guns. There’s a couple of holes in the shore boat, but if you’re quick at rowing, it’ll stay afloat long enough to get you out of the river and into the rainforest.’

‘Nobody has ever come this far up the southeast fork on foot and survived,’ said Amelia.

‘Not true,’ said Bull, pointing at the drugged steamman. ‘He has. Of course, he didn’t return to Rapalaw Junction with anyone else!’

That drew a laugh from the ring of grinning sailors.

‘Besides, what do you care?’ He shoved Amelia back. ‘You’re staying here. I just brought you topside so you could say goodbye to this old dog …’

‘No, Bull!’ shouted the commodore, but he was kicked to the deck then pushed down the ladder towards the other officers.

‘I don’t know too much about fishing antiquities off lake beds,’ said Bull, ‘so you’re going to help make me rich, dimples. And if we don’t get that far and have to turn back, well, I’m sure there’s someone in Cassarabia who likes to buy them in large for their harem.’

There was a ripple of unease through the crew. One of the stripe-shirted sailors stepped forward. ‘She’s got the hex on her, this one. Leave her, Bull. Leave her here with Blacky and his friends.’

Bull’s hand wavered over his pistol holster. ‘We’ve just got rid of one skipper — any of you think you can do the same to me?’

‘We’re not challenging you, captain,’ said the sailor, ‘but she’s trouble, this one. I can feel it. You’ve seen what happens around her. She draws death to her like wasps to sweet cider. If we carry her along with us, this’ll become a voyage of damned souls.’

Bull turned to his men. ‘How damned are we, then? Freed from the tanks at Bonegate, treading the decks of our own war boat again? A full cargo of flaxen-haired moxies trussed up in our holds — treasure before us, and the fool that drummed us out of the royal fleet quaking on his fat feet at the thought of being stranded out in the jungle. If that’s bad luck, I’ll take a barrelful of it any day. And unless any of you jacks became experts in ancient civilizations while you were treading water back in Middlesteel, we still need the Guardian girl’s knowledge to make us wealthy.’

They seemed mollified and Bull cut the line holding the shore boat. It began to drift back as the Sprite’s engines pulled the u-boat away against the current.

‘You’d break your mother’s heart if she was alive to see this,’ called the commodore as the flow of the Shedarkshe seized the small craft and carried it away.

‘She hated you as much as I did, even before you court-martialled me,’ laughed Bull. ‘Say hello to the sleekclaws and tree spiders for me, uncle.’

‘A seadrinker’s curse on you and for paying back my mercy like this,’ shouted the commodore. ‘But not on your head, Amelia. When Bull’s dogs are struggling in the water, cursing the day they stole the Sprite, the river dolphins will come for you and carry you to safety.’

‘Not unless they’ve developed a taste for this Liongeli soup,’ roared Bull. ‘You take care, uncle, try not to poison the pot of the first tribe of craynarbians you come across with your fraud’s swagger and your landsman’s belly. I’ll take care of your boat and your women for you while you’re off exploring.’

‘Jared, I’m sorry!’ Amelia turned aghast to the new master of the Sprite. ‘He’s your own family and you’re doing this to him?’

‘It was only our bloodline that kept the fleet-in-exile going,’ said Bull. ‘Leastways, it was until his dim-witted courtier’s ways brought your RAN aerostats calling over the free isles.’

‘You’re not going to make it without him and the other officers.’

‘You think?’ Bull gave a final mocking wave to the drifting shore craft. ‘Well, we’ll be doing a lot better than your friends will when they wake up and find out where we’ve marooned them.’

Rifle muzzles shoved Amelia back as she tried to grab Bull. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Blacky can ask your friend Ironflanks. He knows,’ said Bull, amused. ‘That wall of gas is about to become the least of their problems. Your fate has taken a turn for the worse too, girl. Take her below and keep her out of my sight.’

Ironflanks was the last of them to emerge from the effects of his sedation and the uneasiest with it, all four of his arms shaking as the effect of days of quicksilver abuse wore off.

‘We’re not on the u-boat any longer, then?’ noted the steamman, his metal body smoking with condensation as the sun sliced through the canopy, burning off the morning dew from his hull.

‘You tell us,’ said Gabriel McCabe. ‘You’re the expert on this damned jungle.’

‘Your bender has seen us marooned,’ explained the commodore. ‘While you were out of your metal skull, Bull and his gang of pirates ran us up a channel and into a wall of gas that had us barking at the moon as if we belonged in an asylum.’

‘A wall of gas?’ Ironflanks hissed what might have been a sigh out of his voicebox. ‘Then I know where we are, and it isn’t anywhere we want to be. What supplies do we have?’

Veryann pointed to the two pistols, a belt of charges and a pile of water canteens behind them.

‘The pistols are enough to annoy most of what we will encounter in Liongeli,’ said Ironflanks. ‘No boiler-grade coke for me?’

The commodore shook his head.

‘Excellent,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I do so love the taste of wet leaves burning inside my body.’

‘Where are we?’ asked Veryann. ‘I thought we had entered Daggish territory?’

‘We are near their border, at the edge of the nest’s patrol area. But there are some things that even the greenmesh does not want to absorb into its hive.’

Ironflanks stared past the commodore’s bulk to where Billy Snow was holding T’ricola, the craynarbian engineer shaking worse than he was. ‘She has acclimatization sickness?’

‘My armour is expanding,’ said T’ricola, ‘I’m moulting all over.’

‘You are nearly at your full jungle height,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Direct exposure to Liongeli is accelerating your body’s natural cycles.’

‘I detest this place,’ moaned T’ricola.

‘Then it is fitting you survive it,’ said Ironflanks.

‘You know the route back to Rapalaw Junction from here?’ asked T’ricola.

‘We are not going back,’ said Veryann. ‘My company is on the Sprite and my mission is at the source of this river.’

‘Your mission is over,’ said Gabriel McCabe. ‘Your people are slaves that haven’t been sold yet, and even if we caught up with the Sprite, the six of us are not going to be able to storm the boat and take her back.’

‘Gabriel is right,’ said the commodore. ‘I would walk to the end of the Shedarkshe if I thought I would get my precious Sprite back and free our friends, but Bull’s rascals would raise lances and fry us like eels in a frying pan if they saw us clambering over her hull. Our best hope is to make it back to the Junction and send word to Quest. With his resources we can lay an ambush downriver, wait for the Sprite to return and net her on Jackelian territory.’

‘You may be correct,’ said Ironflanks. ‘But you are missing one thing, my softbody friends. I am not going back to Rapalaw Junction. I am taking myself and any of you that want to accompany me to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. Quest will not pay me for a missing u-boat and a failed expedition.’

‘It was difficult enough sneaking up the river in the safety of my lovely boat. What chance do the six of us have on foot, against an empire? What will you be doing with Abraham Quest’s blessed coins?’ demanded the commodore. ‘Melting them down to make yourself a set of gold-plated arms?’

‘If you only knew,’ said Ironflanks. ‘You are welcome to try to return to Rapalaw Junction by yourself. Follow the river northwest, walking along the west bank — avoid any and all villages you come across. In fact, avoid anything that is bigger than you.’

‘Quest’s money cannot be that important to you,’ said Gabriel McCabe.

‘As I said, you have no idea,’ replied Ironflanks.

Veryann picked up one of the water canteens and looked meaningfully at the group.

‘We should go with them,’ said Billy. ‘See our mission through. Let’s face it, the chances are we’re going to die either way, and I’d rather have it said that I passed along the Circle running towards danger than running away from it.’

‘Is that it, then?’ said the commodore. ‘I am to finish as a pile of bleached bones hidden in the jungle, used as a nest for snakes while my friends back home in Tock House raise a glass to poor old missing Blacky each Midwinter, his genius as lost to the world as the temples of ancient Camlantis.’

‘The free companies have a saying,’ said Veryann. ‘You are not dead until you have taken a hundred with you.’

‘Ah, lass, I’ll follow you to the heart of the dark territory of the Daggish. For you and my blessed Sprite I’ll go. But I’ve killed a hundred or more in duels when I was young and had a temper as red as the blood that runs through my veins. So don’t be surprised if poor old Blacky gets carried off by a petrodactyl or trampled by a tauntoraptor; I’ve got my hundred lined up in the halls of the dead waiting for me to fall into their dreadful clutches.’

Billy Snow got up, leaning on his old cane which the Sprite’s new masters had contemptuously tossed into the raft before casting them off. ‘Sometimes I’m glad I can’t see what we’re getting ourselves into.’

They set off and the jungle closed around them. Something like a snake crawled out of the bush, its metal carapace scraping along the floor, turning a single jewel-sized eye towards the trail left by the departing officers from the u-boat. Normally the gas would have been enough to finish the intruders off. How foolish of these creatures to forsake the safety of their craft for the embrace of deepest Liongeli.

Switching its sight to heat vision, the metal scout slithered silently after them.

Cornelius pushed open the door to the banqueting room of Dolorous Hall, largely empty except for the rows of mirrored suits of armour, Damson Beeton’s reflection distorted in the breastplates as she busied about, sorting the day’s delivery of victuals from Gattie and Pierce. She noticed Cornelius’s entry into the room. ‘Don’t even bother turning up for breakfast, you and that old bird both.’

‘I was out late last night,’ explained Cornelius. ‘The final evening of the House of Quest’s big function. I thought you would be pleased I had accepted one of the society invites at last.’

‘If you accepted a few more, perhaps you would develop your manners enough to come down in time to see the now-cold fare I cooked for you when the sun was coming up.’

‘Thank you, but I am not hungry. Have you seen Septimoth this morning?’

‘Pah.’ Damson Beeton dismissed his inquiry with a cursory wave. ‘No. And I have to sort through these boxes. They’ve either forgotten to send the salt, or that crooked delivery boy has cheated us out of it. Next time he rows this way, I’ll give him what for. How can you cook without salt?’

‘How indeed?’ Realizing he wasn’t going to get any sense out of the housekeeper, Cornelius beat a retreat to the lifting room and rode the chamber up to the aerie. Septimoth was waiting inside, resting his back with both wings unfolded against a y-shaped wooden frame that had been built in facsimile of the lashlites’ simple pine furniture.

‘If you were my coachman, I would release you from my service,’ said Cornelius.

‘If I were your coachman I would ask for danger money,’ said Septimoth.

‘Where did you get to yesterday evening?’

‘Our friends in the flash mob were at Quest’s residence,’ said Septimoth, lifting himself from the frame and pulling his massive leathery wings in. ‘They left with a cargo of eviscerated steammen.’

‘That would explain why I didn’t find anything at the mansion,’ said Cornelius. ‘You followed the thugs from the flash mob?’

‘I did,’ said Septimoth, ‘until my wings ached from it. They switched horses at staging posts twice and rode across two counties. They finished their journey at the airship works at Ruxley Waters, and waiting for them was the same mouse I scooped up for you by the cursewall in Quatershift.’

‘Robur!’ Cornelius swore under his breath. ‘So, Quest’s money is paying for the grave robbing. It was our handsomely moneyed friend who set Furnace-breath Nick up to grab Robur from the Commonshare, too. I came across Robur’s so-called daughter at Quest’s house, nicely fitted out in the cherry uniform of one of his fencibles.’

‘The woman in the jinn house?’

‘The same,’ said Cornelius. ‘Good for more than making fools out of us, too; they earn their keep, those ladies of his. An assassin paid an uninvited visit to Quest’s reception last night, broke a skylight and came sailing down a cord like a spider. I thought the topper was after me for a moment, but he’d come for Quest — who’s been suspiciously well trained in the art of combat, by the way. His Catosian fighters were on the assassin like a hunt falling on a fox. Fast enough that I wager they were expecting trouble. So then, what mischief do you think that Quest and Robur are up to at the airship works?’

‘I know only two people guaranteed to have the answers to that. We should snatch the merchant,’ said Septimoth. ‘If he is an agent of the Commonshare I shall enjoy myself finding ways to make him talk.’

‘Quest is too well protected,’ said Cornelius. ‘I saw some of his set-up at Whittington Manor. He has an army salted away up there, with blood machines at sentry points inside. I can change my face and body within limits, but I can’t mimic flesh at a fundamental enough level to fool a blood machine.’

‘Whatever his plans, there is a sure way to stop them. If we can’t get close enough to seize Quest, we can get close enough to kill him,’ said Septimoth. ‘I can drop you past his close-quarter protection — he travels in the open, he has commercial concerns to run, he can’t stay inside that fortress of his forever.’

‘It may yet come to that,’ said Cornelius. ‘But this isn’t the same as taking our vengeance against a Commonshare leader, this is one of our own we are talking about. If I put a bullet in Quest’s skull, we’ll have the Ham Yard crushers and the army after us, possibly the Court of the Air’s wolftakers too, no more sanctuary inside Jackals for the pair of us. We cannot bring down the Commonshare on the run, hiding in barns and travelling on false papers.’

‘You forget our blood oath, Cornelius Fortune. If this merchant is abetting the Commonshare’s designs, I shall tear his heart out myself.’

‘If Quest was in the pocket of the First Committee, he wouldn’t have needed to trick us into freeing Robur. The mechomancer could have been quietly smuggled out to Quest, dropped off on the coast by a shiftie submersible.’

‘And yet the seers of the crimson feather have been prodded out of the cave of the oracle to seek out a disgraced outcast such as I. This is not happening merely because a Jackelian trader thought his commercial concerns would profit by having a Quatershiftian tinker broken out of the camps and employed on his staff.’

‘Robur,’ said Cornelius. ‘This mystery started with that damn mechomancer and he is the key that will unlock the puzzle.’

Septimoth flashed his talons. ‘Then it is time to pay Ruxley Waters a visit.’

‘Not me,’ said Cornelius, pulling out the mask of Furnace-breath Nick and slipping it down over his skull. ‘But me!’

The dark laughter faded inside Dolorous Hall’s banqueting room as Damson Beeton’s remote viewing spell dwindled away to nothing. In the old days, the people of Jackals would have burnt her as a witch for such tricks. She chuckled and resumed sorting the day’s delivery of food. It was about time those two lackwits started making some progress on this affair.

Damson Beeton suspected their instinct was a good one, though. Robur was the key, and if he was secreted away at the airship works at Ruxley Waters, then that was a revelation she could use. The thing that worried her most was the assassin Cornelius had spoken of. The description of the methods used in the assassination attempt sounded worryingly familiar, but not so worrying as the fact the assassination had failed in the first place. That spoke of desperation, foolhardiness from quarters that should have been coldly calculated in their choreography of such a murder.

Her mind was awhirl with the possibilities, until she found the missing bag of salt under the cabbage and swore. Now she would have to apologize to the damn delivery boy tomorrow morning.

The two sailors dragging Amelia into the commodore’s old quarters were careful to keep their carbines at the ready as they pushed her in front of the large hardwood navigation table. Bull Kammerlan looked up, prodding aside a pile of papers in irritation — not charts but mission documents, carefully compiled by the House of Quest’s researchers and added to during the voyage by Amelia.

‘Have you developed a taste for archaeology?’ asked Amelia.

‘Have you developed a taste for quarters other than a hold filled with resentful Catosians?’ Bull retorted. ‘I brought you along to make sense of this rubbish, to do the job Quest paid you to do.’

‘I may be on Quest’s pay book, but I wasn’t mounting this expedition for him,’ said Amelia.

‘Leave off with the nobility of science speech, dimples,’ retorted Bull. ‘You’re a looter of tombs, a history thief with letters after your name that were paid for by your rich family. I know the way Abraham Quest’s mind works better than you do, and a man like him isn’t doing all this to fill the bowls of the poor with milk and honey.’ Bull leafed through the papers in exasperation ‘There were wonders in that ancient time, things we can only dream of now. That’s the knowledge your rich shopkeeper friend is after. Artificers’ tricks to swell his pockets.’

‘Quest is already the richest man in Jackals,’ said Amelia. ‘He doesn’t need more money.’

Bull shook his head sadly. ‘He doesn’t need it to pay his pantry bill, girl, but he needs it all right. Needs it like an itch — because it’s how his kind keeps count.’

‘Even if we make it to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo, even if we unearth the location of the city in the heavens from those ruins on the lake bed, what makes you think he’ll pay you for it?’

‘Oh, he’ll pay all right, Guardian’s daughter. I wager he won’t even ask what happened to poor old Blacky, or you, or his army of golden-haired killers. He’ll just ask if we have the location of Camlantis for him. Then he’ll whistle up the lads from his counting house with as many bags of Jackelian guineas as I have a care to ask for.’

‘What if he won’t pay?’

Bull smiled. ‘Then it won’t just be your companions down in the hold that I sell on the trading block in Cassarabia. What do you reckon the caliph will pay for the location of Camlantis?’

Amelia recoiled in disgust. ‘You’d betray Jackals.’

‘My Jackals stopped existing six hundred years ago. I’d sell the location of Camlantis to the First Committee in Quatershift if they had enough gold in their vaults left to buy a loaf of bread.’

‘And what will you do with your newfound wealth? Rebuild Porto Principe? Pay for the daughters of the new regime to lay down with you in your underwater kingdom?’

‘I’ve never needed to pay for it, girl,’ said Bull, ‘and it might shock you to know that not everyone finds arms as large as a side of beef appealing.’

Amelia walked to the bunk and patted the blankets, then rested her hand on the dolphin-encircled ornament there. It would need to be easy to find, for a skipper surprised in his sleep by a mutinous rabble, but not so easy as to be obvious. ‘Of course you don’t need to pay for it. Not with a hold full of Catosians who’re going to end up on the slave market anyway.’

Bull started to laugh a retort, but Amelia found the cover and the switch hidden underneath, the slaver’s words turning to a yelp as a hidden capacitor fed the copper-veined marble floor with its charge, a sheet of blue energy scything across the chamber, tossing the two guards into the wall as Bull’s chair was hurled back with the force of his convulsing muscles.

Amelia’s boots stood on the square of thick woollen carpet surrounding the bunk alcove — more than just insulation against the cold seas the Sprite had passed through, as the three unconscious figures sprawled across the commodore’s luxurious quarters attested to. ‘You were right, Jared, the river dolphins did come to my rescue.’

Amelia scooped up one of the carbines and unclipped the belt of charges for the gun. Her mind raced with the possibilities. One woman against more than ninety of Bull’s crew. She could try to even the odds by releasing the Catosian fighters, but their hold was the most heavily guarded pos ition in the Sprite, she had already seen that. Bull’s people were rightly paranoid that the fighters would chew their way out of their manacles and throttle the crew in their sleep. Revenge was a matter of principle for a betrayed city-state free company. She could take Bull Kammerlan hostage — put a gun to his head and demand the Catosians’ release. But perhaps not. The slavers would as like allow Bull to swing, then gleefully knife each other for the vacant position of skipper.

If only Commodore Black were here, he’d have a way to even the odds. A second secret pilot room able to override the first, a hidden tank of gas just as vile as the ambush mist Bull had ridden them into — but the other secrets of the Sprite were as lost to Amelia as her friends marooned out in the jungle.

Amelia made up her mind. The bathysphere attached to the Sprite’s hull. If they lost that as well as her knowledge of Camlantis, the expedition was as good as over — unless the slavers fancied blundering around the ruins on the lake bed in their diving suits, trying to distinguish ancient crystal-books from two-thousand-year-old rubble. She would scupper their chances and use the bathysphere as an escape capsule at the same time.

As Amelia stepped out of the commodore’s quarters, the corridor’s lights changed from the standard yellow to a muted crimson hue. Was this to do with her escape? There were no claxons, though. Unless the sudden surge of capacitor juice had thrown an alarm somewhere, drained the boat’s power, nobody outside of the thugs lying shocked in the skipper’s quarters should know she had activated Black’s secret switch.

Amelia crept through the corridors, as silent as the rest of the boat. The Sprite had stopped moving now, her engines stilled. Pulling herself up the cold steel of a ladder, Amelia climbed two decks, heading for the rear conning tower. At one point she passed the Sprite’s engineering bay and risked a glance through its slightly ajar hatch. The bay’s lathes and workbenches were at a halt, maintenance work quieted while the crewmen inside nervously held onto the ceiling pipes. It was as if by stunning Bull Kammerlan she had cut the marionette cords on the rest of his gang of slavers; they were just waiting there in the stale tinned air for their leader to awake kraken-like from his slumbers.

Her luck did not hold. Amelia dipped into the passage leading to the bathysphere and a sailor at the other end saw her, then did a double take as he realized she should be locked up below in the hold with the Catosians. He grabbed for a holster on his belt and Amelia let him have the round in her carbine, the sailor bouncing from the wall and collapsing in front of her — she had hit him square in the chest: he was dead before the crack of the stubby rifle had finished echoing down the boat. There goes caution, Amelia sighed. She teased another charge from her ammunition belt even as she ejected the broken crystal from the first onto the deck. Slid the new shell into her carbine.

Amelia found the entrance to the bathysphere barred to her — a simple rotating combination lock. With no hope of guessing the sequence she placed the muzzle of the carbine an inch from the metal and turned her head as the blast from the short rifle jounced off the hatch. Hot metal lanced her hand. The lock was mangled, but it still held. She beat the butt of the carbine on the hatch, exposing the locking mechanism. Curse the Sprite for being so well built by its long-dead royalist engineers. Desperation grew in Amelia as she heard stirrings from the lower decks. She smashed the rifle as hard as she could against the lock, shattering the wooden butt with the impact. On Amelia’s last blow the Sprite shook violently as if a fire squid had scooped up the u-boat from the river to rattle it around, a muffled detonation that knocked Amelia off her feet, and landed her across the dead sailor. Then all was still again, an unnatural silence tinted only by the eerie crimson light.

A head popped up through the floor hatch — it was cooky, the grizzled old chef still wearing his oil-spattered apron. He looked down the corridor, took in the dead sailor and the carbine still in Amelia’s grip, then pulled himself up, running terrified to the bathysphere hatch, practically sobbing when he saw the ruin that was all that was left of the locking system. Amelia got to her feet, covering him with the carbine, but he was so horrified that he showed no sign of even being aware of the weapon.

‘Did you not see the red light?’

Amelia glanced up at the illumination strips. ‘The red light?’

‘Silent bloody running,’ moaned the crewman. ‘There’s a pair of seed ships above us and your gunshots have blown us to them. They’ve depth-charged our engines, we’re dead in the water.’ He started pulling distraughtly at the door, but it was beyond use. There would be no escape that way. A hissing sound came from inside the rear conning tower.

Old cooky gave up, slumping to the deck in despair. ‘Jonah. Jonah. We never should have kept you here.’

She glanced down the corridor. There were screams and shouts coming up from the lower decks as the crew realized what was happening, all thoughts of silent running abandoned as they began to panic. Amelia turned around. Cooky was reaching for the holster of the sailor she had killed. ‘Don’t do it, cooky. I’ll shoot you if I have to, I swear I will …’

He continued to fumble with the flap and slid the pistol out. ‘Save the last shell for yourself.’

Amelia sighted her carbine before she realized what cooky was doing. The pistol barrel slid into his mouth and he exchanged a luckless look with the professor before he pressed the trigger and whipped into the wall of the corridor, the explosion taking off the rear of his head. Amelia felt like being sick. She had made Billy Snow promise she wouldn’t end up like those poor soul-scrubbed zombies swaying empty on the block of Rapalaw Junction’s comfort auction; but Billy Snow wasn’t here. Whatever death in the jungle was awaiting the officers of the expedition who had been marooned, it was looking like they had got the best of the bargain. She pointed the carbine at her own heart and willed herself to squeeze the trigger. Just a small squeeze, that was all that was needed. Tighter, tighter. As she tried to find the resolve to do it, a weight seemed to press down on the weapon, lowering the barrel away from her body.

‘I took that way, and I was very wrong to do so.’

‘Father!’ Amelia called into the empty corridor, but there were only the dead bodies of the sailor and cooky to hear her. She was going mad, justifying her gutlessness with echoes from the past.

Above Amelia the hissing grew louder. The mindless drones of the Daggish Empire were cutting their way into the u-boat.

They needed fresh flesh for the hive.

It was sweltering work, hacking through the green deeps of Liongeli, avoiding the trails favoured by the land’s lumbering predators. Ironflanks led the way, his four arms cutting back the vegetation. The others quickly realized that his habit of whistling in mimicry of the jungle’s creatures was born out of his stacks overheating — better to release pressure in a way that sounded natural, rather than announcing his presence with a full piercing lift of his boiler’s whistle.

‘Can we not rest?’ wheezed the commodore. ‘We’ve been an age breaking our way through these infernal green halls.’

‘An age?’ said Ironflanks. ‘We have hardly started our journey, Jared softbody.’

‘There was a call from the rear of the line. Billy had found something, his fingers tearing a scrap of canvas from a bush by his side. ‘This is not a creeper.’

T’ricola took the cloth from the blind sonar man and sniffed it through the three olfactory holes in her head armour. ‘It’s burnt and it looks like — no, it cannot be …’

The others gathered around to examine it.

‘It’s a piece of catenary curtain,’ said T’ricola. ‘Burnt off from an airship hull.’

‘The RAN do not fly missions this deep into the interior,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Rapalaw Junction counts itself lucky if Jackals’ aerostats answer the garrison’s siege alarm.’

‘Yet here it is,’ said T’ricola.

Commodore Black pushed his head between the trees behind them. ‘There is more through here, and a terrible sight it is to behold, too.’

Bearing the officers’ pistols, Gabriel McCabe and Veryann pressed through the bush, emerging into a clearing where the jungle was growing back over hacked-down trees and felled ferns. The others came through after them.

‘It’s the remains of a camp,’ said Gabriel.

‘Not just a camp,’ said the commodore. He pointed at a wall of unopened crates lying buried by Liongeli’s green mass. ‘I recognize those blessed things: it’s a mobile fortress. They didn’t even have enough time to bolt it together.’

Ironflanks cleared the vegetation back. White bones lay amid the debris, picked totally clean by legions of scavengers. ‘I don’t believe I am familiar with the term.’

‘That’s because your people have been fighting the brigades of Quatershift and not the red-coated devils of Jackals,’ said the commodore. ‘And count yourself lucky for it.’

‘It is a conceit of their parliament’s new pattern army,’ said Veryann. ‘A modular construction system Jackelian regiments use on campaign. A walled fort that can be raised or dismantled in a period of hours; a ridiculous toy that encourages defensive thinking and belies the very name, “mobile”, that it sports.’

Billy Snow rapped one of the boxes with his cane. ‘The wood on these crates hasn’t rotted through. They’ve been here less than a year I would say.’

T’ricola pulled out more catenary curtain sheeting from the vegetation, blackened and brittle. ‘So an airship came down here and the survivors were trying to build a camp? But celgas is not flammable, so why would the hull end up so burnt?’

‘Celgas may not be flammable,’ said Ironflanks. ‘But an airship will burn all the same if it tries to pass low over Daggish territory. Their flame cannons would scratch one from the sky for daring to pass over the nest.’

‘Perhaps the stat’s navigation and steering were wrecked?’ mused T’ricola. ‘They could have drifted over the greenmesh by accident and been brought down. The RAN fleet was pretty well scuppered when Quatershift attacked Jackals; this could have happened during the war.’

‘I saw the fleet brought down over the hills of Rivermarsh,’ said the commodore, ‘when the wicked shifties were given a drubbing in the skies true and clear by King Steam’s forces, assisted in no small part by my own genius. I don’t recall seeing any Daggish there, nor any airships making a run for it towards Liongeli.’

‘It was a big battle,’ said Veryann. ‘It was said that the shroud of cannon fire remained over the downs like a mist for a week afterwards. You can’t have seen all the action.’

‘Aye, it was thick work,’ agreed the commodore. ‘There was the rebel leader’s army of demons, the treacherous shifties and half our own people fighting against us. A hard pounding, that day, for poor old Blacky, wading through the blood of our brave boys with a sabre in one hand and a pistol in the other. But the steammen knights boarded the fleet when it was turned against us and cut the airships up from inside, using King Steam’s fighters as cannonballs and boarding parties both.’

‘Well, there you are,’ said Veryann. ‘No doubt this is the remains of one of those RAN vessels. Broken during the war and left to drift on the winds of fortune.’

‘And drift a rare long way it did,’ said the commodore. He looked at Veryann with a knowing glint in his eye. ‘And where were you and our expedition’s beloved benefactor during the invasion of 1596?’

‘On a paddle steamer halfway between Jackals and the colonies. We were tending to the house’s business in Concorzia.’

‘You were lucky, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Safe on a boat is where I would have liked to have been during that wicked conflict. But curse my unlucky stars, fate was not so kind to me that year.’

T’ricola bent over the trailing creepers, picking at the debris. ‘I see no Quatershiftian uniforms here.’

‘I see no uniforms left at all,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And that is what I find the most disturbing fact of all. Let us quit this place now, back to the trail.’

Ironflanks had taken only a single step back into the dense press of the jungle when the cry echoed through the trees. ‘Smellyouyouyoumetalmetaljiggerjiggerjigger.’

‘Tell me that is not what I think it is,’ said the commodore.

‘You know the answer to that question,’ said Ironflanks.

Gabriel McCabe glanced down sadly at the pathetic pistol in his hand. ‘I thought we had lost the thunder lizard.’

‘Queen Three-eyes knows enough to be able to follow the river upstream,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And it is the scent of my stacks she is following now.’

‘We have about a quarter of an hour,’ said Billy Snow, ‘judging by the strength of her cry, before she is on top of us.’

‘Not on top of us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘On top of me. It’s my hull she is coming for, so it is my old hull that will lead her off.’

‘We won’t last a day in the Liongeli deeps without you,’ said the commodore.

Veryann took her knife out and threw it across the clearing, embedding it in the skull of a giant python that was slipping down a branch towards T’ricola. ‘Survival is a secondary concern to the success of our mission, and that has a minimal chance of succeeding without a scout to lead us to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’

‘Then we must run,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Follow me into the deepest bush and hope that it is enough to slow down Queen Three-eyes.’

They ran. Without the safety of a submersible to escape to and with the long cries of the kilasaurus max growing louder behind them. Into the dense heat of the rainforest, through walls of orchids that quivered and shot out streams of superheated pollen juice, past trees covered in running brown liquid glue where trapped animals shrieked desperately at the fleeing party, across coffee-coloured creepers that had bridged a small ravine in their search for sunlight free of the competition under the canopy. Billy Snow proved surprisingly dextrous, leaping through the twisted vines with his machete, cutting down walls of greenery and opening passages through the trees as if he had been born a feral craynarbian tracker. At times it was not clear whether T’ricola was leading him, or the blind sonar man was leading her.

Ironflanks was getting slower. He was trying to keep his stacks from venting fully, to throw Queen Three-eyes off their trail. But the effort of recycling the exhaust of his furnace was sapping his strength. If he continued at this pace, he would poison his brain with the fumes and be left with a grip on reality even more tenuous than it already was.

Ironflanks stumbled and the commodore caught him. ‘You’ve got to let it out, old steamer, or we’re going to be carrying you the rest of the way.’

Ironflanks’ voicebox trembled as he tried to find the words. ‘She will smell it.’

‘If the thunder lizard hunts by scent she will already have ours,’ said Veryann. ‘Your incapacitation will not serve us.’

The steamman stood up and his stacks whistled as a column of foul-smelling smoke lanced through the canopy above them. As the last trace of smoke left the trail, Queen Three-eyes’ voice sounded in answer, so loud that the ribcages of the u-boat officers shook in their chests.

‘I am sorry my softbody friends, I have doomed us all,’ said Ironflanks.

‘Blame my nephew rather than yourself,’ said the commodore. ‘For it’s his dark treachery that has left us marooned out here. Or blame fool old Blacky for giving him a second chance in the first place.’

‘Are you the dregs from a Jackelian jinn house?’ shouted Veryann. ‘We are not dead yet. Not while we have blood in our legs and weapons in our hands. Now run, or I’ll shoot you myself.’

Menaced by the unsteady pistol of the Catosian commander the party stumbled into life again, Gabriel McCabe taking the lead and putting all the strength of the self-proclaimed strongest man in Jackals into the swings of his machete. Gobs of green sap splashed out across them as they piled ahead, splattering their uniforms with a mess of sticky residue and then, suddenly, they were free of the press of the jungle, a clearing of grassed hills and tall emerald meadows waiting for them. Ironflanks stumbled out and looked around as if recognizing the territory. Then the howl of the kilasaurus max roared behind them. ‘Gettingclosegettingclosetoyourendendendmetaljigger.’

‘Head for the forest on the other side,’ called Veryann, checking the charge in her pistol. ‘We can get off a few shots when the thunder lizard comes into the open. Aim for the creature’s eyes.’

Knee-deep in grass, they were plunging down one of the hillocks when the trees at the ridge of the hill flowered open, spouting white jets of liquid into the air. For a second the commodore thought that they had triggered some devilish man-eating hardwood into feeding, but the white fountain solidified into a net, scooping up the expedition members and sweeping them off their feet. They were hanging between the trees like a hammock, bound to the sticky material and swaying seven feet off the ground. Just the right height for an offering to Queen Three-eyes. T’ricola thrashed, trying to turn her sword arm on the material, but the harder she struggled, the more the netting seemed to tighten around them.

Crashing through the jungle, the kilasaurus max splintered through the last of the towering trees. She emerged in the clearing; her undersized lizard’s head darting about before settling on the direction of the hills, her nostrils flaring and snorting like those of a stallion. Sensing the ensnared presence of Ironflanks, the thunder lizard dipped down then stretched to her full height and roared at a volume that shook the netting the expedition members lay pinned against. Billy Snow dropped his machete from his left arm to his partially free right hand and tried to saw their cords of bondage but the material turned slippery, oozing a soap-like liquid that made his blade slip. ‘What is this stuff?’ he growled.

Veryann attempted to lower her pistol arm enough to get a shot off against the thunder lizard, but the gun discharged wide, the bullet disappearing over the horizon.

‘This is a rare old mess and no mistake,’ said the commodore.

The webbing of their snare trembled as Queen Three-eyes advanced towards them, roaring gusts of fetid hate from the second mouth in her chest. Reaching the foot of the hillock, Queen Three-eyes’ snout snaked around as she detected a movement in the corner of her field of vision. A line of boulders at the bottom of the hill was swivelling towards her, tracking each thumping footstep. She backed away, sensing the oddness of this place — a clearing so purpose-made for animals to graze across, yet so bereft of local life. Where tiny prey that should be running instead lay paralysed. Where rocks came alive. Too late. Slits opened in the boulders, iron spider’s legs sprouting out, the suddenly mobile rocks spraying Queen Three-eyes with an orange liquid that solidified on contact with the air and sheathed the thunder lizard in a rubber bubble. She pushed against the foul glutinous substance but only succeeded in unbalancing herself, falling over and rolling back down the slope. Now the mightiest creature in the jungle lay as helpless as a toy figurine embedded inside the glass of a child’s marble. The legs in the rocks retracted and the monarch of Liongeli was left thrashing futilely inside the orange enclosure.

‘What is this, Ironflanks?’ demanded the commodore. ‘This is no Daggish trap. Those blessed rocks are machines.’

There was no intelligible reply. Something inside the steamman had snapped and he spouted a static screech of raw machine code, in the same inhuman voice as his people used to sing hymns to the Steamo Loas in their mountain fastness. ‘Look,’ called Veryann, ‘look behind us.’

On the other side of the clearing a line of dark shapes was emerging from the twilight shadow of the rainforest. Metal bodies with the edges of their arms, wheels, legs and tracks filed down to razor sharpness, their rivets extruded into spikes. Iron hands clutching spears frilled with the shrunken heads of thunder lizards, craynarbians and the race of man. One of the figures crouched like a monkey and pointed at the full net containing the Sprite’s officers. The arm indicating the catch was slipped through the bloodied sleeve of an airship captain’s uniform: the fate of the shattered aerostat’s crew had become clear.

‘Steammen,’ said the commodore. ‘By my stars, they’re steammen.’

‘No,’ said Ironflanks, recovering his higher functions, ‘they’re not.’

It was the first time any of them had heard a citizen of the Steammen Free State sob.