The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Damson Beeton waddled down the front garden of Dolorous Hall, whistling and happy to be up with the larks. Red fingers of sunrise fringed the skyline behind the capital’s pneumatic towers, most of the city’s mills silent, not yet throwing the dark miasma of commerce into the air. The barge from Gattie and Pierce was pulling towards the isle’s landing, using its single sail to keep down the cost of gas for the boat’s expansion engine.

So much easier to get a start on the day’s tasks this early in the morning. Cornelius and Septimoth were both pretending to be asleep, when in reality they were on the riverbed level of the isle, rattling around the old museum, planning their next move in the great game they had been sucked into within Jackals. All in all, Damson Beeton preferred it when they were causing their mischief across the border in Quatershift. She had more time to herself, then. Not to mention lighter duties and the run of the place when empty.

‘Morning, damson,’ called the delivery boy at the prow. ‘Two boxes for you today, right? And a quart of milk in the jug.’

‘Fresh, I hope, young man,’ said the housekeeper. ‘Where’s Master Jerry Cruncher today?’

‘Called in sick,’ said the delivery boy. The barge bumped gently into the landing and the boy started tying up.

She looked at the man on the rudder and the two bargemen tackling the sail. ‘Not night-fog chest again, poor lad?’

‘Beer-night head is more like it, I reckon,’ laughed the delivery boy, stepping onto the isle with two crates balanced under his arms.

‘Empty boxes are over there,’ said Damson Beeton. As the boy looked towards the end of the pier, the housekeeper reached out and snapped the lad’s nose bone back through his brain case. Instant death. ‘The correct counter phrase was “that night-fog is the devil,” young man.’

The three assassins abandoned their pretence as the crew of the delivery barge. They were reaching for secreted weapons, fingers wrapping around pistol butts and marlinspikes, when Damson Beeton stepped across the gap with a grace that belied her near seventy years. Targeting the fastest of the bargemen she kicked the pistol he had managed to draw out into the river, then cart-wheeled past, placing a needle kick just above his heart on the way towards his two friends. Just as he was wondering why his heart was no longer beating, the old woman’s hand chopped out, breaking the heavy marlinspike in his other hand in two, converting her motion to embed a foot in one of the remaining two killers’ guts. The last one standing punched out towards where her throat should have been. He was quick. And trained. A style that marked him as a topper, one of the elite cadres of assassins that floated around the capital’s orbit.

She seized the two halves of the marlinspike as they fell and slammed them against his eardrums, then swivelled as his winded companion launched himself at her side. Oh, they were good. A normal man would have been left rolling on the floor of the boat, clutching his sides as the internal bleeding left him incapacitated. This one just came back for more. Luckily, she had more to give. She used his own momentum to break his spine against the sail, then gave mister no-hearing a little something to take his mind off the pain in his ears, seemingly brushing his knee with the tip of her boot. It was enough to collapse him down towards the barge’s seat, where she pulled the hidden garrotte wire out of the sleeve of his river-man’s jacket and twisted it around his neck, tightening it until he turned purple.

‘Who do you work for, dearie?’

He gargled something unintelligible and she placed a boot on the seat of his trousers for extra purchase. ‘Come on now, young man. You know enough to turn off the pain centre to your ears. Give me my answer.’

‘Here’s your answer,’ said a voice behind her, as the dart buried itself in her back.

Damson Beeton just had time to turn to see the squat conning tower of the small river submersible rising on the other side of the pier, behind the figures in diving rubbers. One of the divers pulled off her mask, giving the unconscious housekeeper a prod with her boot.

‘She was expecting someone else.’

‘Obviously,’ said the second diver, replying in fluent Catosian.

‘You didn’t say anything about this,’ moaned the sole survivor in the barge, untangling the strangle cord from his neck. ‘She was fighting in witch-time. She could have killed us all.’

‘Yours is a risky profession,’ was all that the diver on the pier had to say. Then to her comrade, ‘Check her empty crates for hidden signals. She was expecting a courier exchange.’

‘You are aware of what she is?’ asked the other diver. Behind them, their submarine was discharging a row of soldiers in heavy padded uniforms onto the isle.

‘Yes, but ours is also a risky profession.’

A lone man stepped out onto the pier, flanked by female soldiers. The only sign of his identity were the scars on his forehead where the purple flower tattoos of a worldsinger had been badly removed. The dive commander looked at the ex-worldsinger with distaste. Anyone willing to sell out his allegiance to his own people was not to be trusted. A necessary evil.

‘How many left?’ she asked.

‘Just two that I can sense,’ said the turncoat sorcerer. ‘A lashlite and a man. The man’s body is not normal. I have felt nothing like him before.’

‘Interesting. It appears like the Catgibbon was telling the truth about him, then. You are sure there are only two more?’ She looked up at Dolorous Hall. ‘In a place this size?’

‘That is what I sense. But they’re not up in the house. They’re below the water: the island extends out onto the riverbed.’

‘Clever,’ said the diver. ‘They obviously value their privacy, but I wonder how good the seals on their construction are?’

‘We need them alive,’ said the other raider.

‘If their maid of all works here is anything to go by, I think we shall settle for alive and wet.’

Cornelius was looking at the county map for Ruxley Waters when Septimoth’s head swivelled. His hunter’s sense had detected the first crack of the glass above them, but Cornelius did not need to be a lashlite to hear what followed. A wall of water burst through the shattering glass, landing on their stolen transaction engine then smashing over statues of royalty long dead and curiosities milled hundreds of years before. The old Middlesteel Museum was rejoining the other submerged buildings beneath the Gambleflowers as a breeding room for river crabs and eels. The two of them scrambled for the corridor leading to the isle’s concealed lifting room, trying to keep on their feet as waves of water fountained past their legs, rising higher with each second.

‘The crystal can’t have cracked,’ shouted Cornelius, evading a man-sized vase flowing past with the force of a battering ram. ‘I designed it with sandwich layers to withstand five times the weight above us.’

‘Your calculations seem to be a little at fault,’ said Septimoth. One of the glass skylights in a side hall gave way and a second wave rode in with tidal force, sending both of them sprawling towards the rear of the museum. Behind them another wave of the Gambleflowers loosed its way across the museum. Buffeted in the crosscurrents, Septimoth spun away to slam into a wall, the press of water dislodging a display of swords on top of him, large cutlass-style affairs with clockwork driven rotating teeth raining down. Cornelius could tell his friend was unconscious by the way his wings unfolded limply out, a leathery stingray spiralling around on top of the water pouring in. Cornelius ejected the gutta-percha breathing tube from his artificial arm, biting down on the mouthpiece, then swam out towards the lashlite, each second pushing him higher towards the ceiling of the hall. Would the lifting room work with this amount of water in its mechanism, even if he could reach it now? He doubted it.

Cornelius grabbed his friend and pulled him close. Septimoth was oddly buoyant. Of course! The lashlite’s nostrils had closed, the two air humps on his back filled and sealed. In unconsciousness his body had triggered his high flight reflex, a useful gift of nature when hunting skraypers in the airless upper atmosphere — higher even than RAN aerostats could climb. If Cornelius could swim them both to the surface they wouldn’t drown. With only a foot of air left in the flooding chamber, Cornelius dragged them both down. It was devilish hard work with his lashlite friend inflated like a puffer fish, and Cornelius had to use the wall to pull them towards the shattered skylight. Kicking out the remaining shards of crystal so they were not eviscerated escaping the museum hall, Cornelius launched them out, using Septimoth as a buoy to lift them towards the surface. There was just enough light this deep underneath the Gambleflowers to see the remains of the flooded quarter of Middlesteel, slimy black buildings that had once been shops and homes, fish swimming out of broken windows while river crabs scuttled across gaping doorways. Cornelius tried to hold Septimoth back as they rose to the surface. He was uncertain about lashlite physiology, but he had heard enough tales in the submarine sailors’ taverns along the waterway to be wary of the bends should they ascend too fast.

Something was wrong, he could feel it. Then they appeared. Two figures swimming out from behind the spire of a Circlist chapel, the spear guns in their hands the same golden colour as their dolphin skull-moulded helmets. Now Cornelius had sighted them, he didn’t even need to look behind him to confirm the presence of the others rising up from concealed positions around the roof of the submerged museum. The warning shot of a spear powering closely past his chest was largely unnecessary. He and his winged friend were surrounded, and even if he could make a break for it without being pin-cushioned with spearheads, he would not abandon Septimoth. One of the underwater ambushers pointed to the two of them and then gestured to the dark hull of a small river submersible sinking down behind the spire.

Cornelius lacked the free air to sigh. He let himself be led to the submarine. A prisoner.

Most of the Daggish that had captured Amelia looked like walking cacti. Except that cacti did not have a single cyclopslike eye slit and their hard bark-like skin was not covered in a fuzz of foul-smelling green moss. But it was not these walking plant-animal hybrids that disturbed Amelia — not their rotting-plant smell, nor the dagger-sharp spines that they liberally applied at the first sign of disobedience among their prisoners; not even their disconcerting habit of suddenly stopping still and emitting chattering clicks at each other as if their minds were infected by crickets. It was the things they had with them that unsettled Amelia. Shambling sleekclaws that were allowed enough of their original minds to lope off as scouts, their beautiful coats veined green and putrid. Moss-covered gorillas that would stare with inhuman intelligence at the Sprite’s crew, before lumbering off with their backs bent by baskets filled with ripped-out instrumentation from the u-boat. While the Sprite of the Lake was being towed by two long seed ships into the heart of the Daggish realm, the crew were kept split up, locked in random rooms in the submersible, giant plant-soldiers standing sentry outside.

Once during the trip, Amelia had been removed from the old supply room where she was confined alone and taken across to the nearest of the seed ships. They had shoved her in a room with a table-like globule extruded from the floor, covered with the logs, maps and crystal-book copies she had taken on the expedition. One of the room’s walls had a strange sheen and she knew the Daggish were watching her from the other side, even though she could not see them. Theirs was an intelligence so different from the race of man’s that she could not begin to imagine what they expected her to do. How had they guessed her position in the expedition? Did they presume that as one of the few females in their hands she must be some kind of matriarch? None of these creatures appeared either able or inclined to communicate with her in any tongue she understood. Perhaps they had taken one of the crewmen and absorbed him into their slime-drenched cooperative, stripping his thoughts as casually as she peeled the bananas Ironflanks used to bring back from the jungle? Terrifyingly, that was the most likely option. Amelia flipped open the notebooks and studied them for signs of damage. The copied crystal-books seemed intact, but without reader machinery they were only good for bookends.

After half an hour of fiddling with the material that had been left out, the hidden watchers seemed satisfied and two Daggish guards opened a bone-like iris into the room and silently carried her away, careless of how easily their spines cut her dirty uniform. Off the ugly living craft — as much a part of their cooperative as the twisted animal servants and intelligent plants — and back into the reassuringly man-made corridors of the Sprite, all plates, pipes and rivets after the pulsing, throbbing curves of the seed ship. As Amelia was being taken back to her makeshift cell, she crossed paths with a group of sailors being moved by a larger escort. When the crewmen saw Amelia they began to hurl abuse at her, ignoring the spined Daggish arms smashing them back, chains rattling as they were knocked down, screaming like banshees at her.

‘Jonah!’

‘Bitch!’

‘Killed us all!’

Then she was shoved into the solitude of the storeroom. Isolation she was glad of, now she had been reminded she was not the only passenger on the ghost ship the Sprite had become. With the cries of hate still echoing in her mind, she remembered a conversation she had had with her father many years ago, when she had asked why so many of Jackals’ neighbours seemed ready to invade, held back only by the ingenious floating navy of the RAN — their famous wall of cloth. In answer, he had not explained about the politics of envy, or that outside the checks and balances of Isambard Kirkhill’s perfect democracy, the point of power was simply the accumulation of more power. He had not explained that the Jackelians’ insular, contented nature was mistaken for decadence and weakness by kings, caliphs and warlords. He had not explained how ridiculous the rituals of the House of Guardians, the games of four-poles on the village green, or the shopkeepers pottering around their rose beds, trowels in hand, looked from the shores of rulers used to being able to stretch dissenters on racks. Rulers who would mangle the bodies of opposing voices in the scented torture gardens of the south, or shove them into the steam-driven killing rooms of the east. All these things he had expected her to have already learnt. His answer was far simpler. ‘Amelia, they don’tlike us and we don’t care.’

She sat down and laid her back against the bulkhead, the tears streaming down her face. Was it the failure of the expedition; the memory of the father that had meant so much to her; the loathing of the crew for the Jonah that had brought certain death down on their heads; the loss of her friends, cast away to die in the jungle — probably dead now? Had chasing her dream wrought all this? Perhaps the superstitious sailors were correct. She was a Jonah. Her personal life had been cursed, her professional life ruined. She was akin to a leper in academia, a joke told at luncheons in the university refectories. Whatever happened to Professor Harsh? Why don’t you know, dear fellow? Rumour has it she slipped into Liongeli on some mad expedition and died there, rambling through the jungle when her food and water ran out. Never heard from again.

Amelia buried her head in her hands. She should have listened to the advice of that insane witch in the dunes back in Cassarabia. The true kindness would have been to let the sands of Cassarabia suck the marrow from your bones. But wasn’t it better to die trying to follow a dream, rather than experience the death of a million cuts she would have endured back in Middlesteel? Slowly suffocated by the cant and ritual of academia, the way things had always been. The received wisdom. She drifted into sleep and the worries, fears and regrets swirled around her, keeping her tossing on the hard metal floor.

Amelia was back in Jackals, in the grand old house along Mouse Place that had been sold off after her father’s suicide. But the great financial crash hadn’t happened yet. Had she imagined her family’s fall? She was reading in the library when her father entered. She felt an enormous wave of gratitude to see him, such happiness. But he hadn’t died yet, so why should she feel such joy?

‘Amelia,’ he said. ‘What have you done to your arms? They look like they belong on a butcher, not a professor with letters after her name.’

‘I needed to be strong, father.’ Should she tell him about the dig in the foothills of Kikkosico, where she had nearly died at the hands of the bandits; when she vowed she would never let herself be captured like that again? No, it would just worry him. ‘I can lift a horse with these. It wasn’t womb magic that changed them, I went to a worldsinger here in Jackals, used the power of the earth.’

‘It’s a thin difference,’ said her father, the disapproval evident in his voice. ‘We should move along the Circle as we were born to it. We are not Catosians to fill ourselves with the herb of shine, or Cassarabians to curse our children’s line with the mutations of womb magic.’

‘It’s something I had to do,’ said Amelia.

‘So it seems.’

‘For the dream,’ said Amelia. ‘To find Camlantis.’

‘I rather think this is the dream,’ said her father, indicating the house at Mouse Place.

‘Please be real,’ begged Amelia.

‘I cannot.’

‘Are you a ghost now? You told me they exist.’

‘Not all of us moves along the Circle,’ said her father. ‘Some of our pattern is left imprinted on the one sea of consciousness, the universal soul, before we are drawn back into the realm of the many and the fragmented.’

‘Then you are a ghost. You’re dead,’ sobbed Amelia. If this was a dream, why were there colours? You couldn’t have colours in a dream, everyone knew that. The shelves seemed brown, polished Jackelian oak, and the books …

‘No,’ said her father, ‘not dead. You know better than that. I just swapped one pair of clothes for another.’ He reached out to touch her hair. ‘I live in here, in the bees on the flowers and the gnats over the meadow and in a thousand babies born since. When a cup of water is poured into the stream, then refilled, is the cup filled with the same water or with different water?’

‘The water is movement,’ said Amelia. ‘The stream is flow. It is change.’

Her father smiled. ‘I am glad to see the time you spent listening to our Circlist vicar in her pulpit was not entirely in vain.’

‘You never liked the church,’ said Amelia. ‘You said you only went along because your constituents packed the building each Circleday.’

‘I never particularly liked the people in the pews,’ corrected her father. ‘A habit I am sad to say I passed down to you, living more for your books than for those who might have shared your life with you. The church’s beliefs I did not have a problem with. I was always rather fond of the fourth koan: “When you hurt another creature you hurt yourself.” It always seemed we never paid enough attention to that one.’

‘I never dream of you. Some mornings I can wake up and I can’t even remember what you looked like. Please stay with me,’ Amelia implored.

‘In a way I will and in a way I will not,’ said her father. ‘Even an echo must end. You are afraid to wake for fear of the trials that await you, but you should not be. You must free your mind and burn your beliefs.’

‘But Camlantis,’ said Amelia. ‘I’m trapped, so damned useless here. Camlantis is so very close now and the dream …’

‘… Is closer than you know,’ said her father. ‘All flesh is a prison and your desires are its bars. Dreams, desires, the burdens of the flesh, they all seem so distant to me now. Just remember that the dream you chase is not the dream you find.’

‘What will I find, father? What will I find in the land where Camlantis once lay?’

‘A hole filled with a lake. Life always gives you what you need, but never what you want. I think you might find the truth.’

‘My truth or yours?’ Amelia asked.

‘Now that’s my girl talking,’ said her father. ‘The one who knows that nothing can be achieved sitting around feeling sorry for yourself.’ He walked out of the library, his shape becoming fainter with each step. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, before I go?’

‘Do you ever see mamma?’

‘You know, I find her every damned where I look,’ said her father, his voice as much an echo now as the pattern of his soul. ‘In the rustle of the trees and the song of decaying carbon, in the sway of a newborn colt and the froth on a jar of beer. But mostly I find her in you.’

He was gone.

‘Well, that’s reassuring, given that she bloody died in childbirth.’

Her next dream slipped into her mind, but she was not to remember it.

Amelia was starting to think the Daggish had forgotten about her. Left her in the u-boat’s storage room to starve, although that might have been a blessing, given the food they had been bringing her once a day up until then. Long green bricks that resembled compressed, dried peas, but tasted more like zinc, full of crunchy pip-like things. Even washed down with cold water it tasted no better. No doubt designed to be perfectly balanced to meet the bodily functions of the Daggish army of organic slaves, it only underlined their alien nature.

She used a paste made from the food to count a line of days across her metal walls, each long smear another wasted day in captivity. The motion of the Sprite had ceased a couple of days ago — she had marked that day with a cross. If they were waiting in an attempt to wear down her nerves, it was working. Each hour all she could think about was the living death that was existence for those absorbed by the green-mesh. The pitiable freed slaves of the Daggish being sold off in the comfort auction back at the trading post. And they, supposedly, were the lucky ones, recaptured by their own people. What would it be like to have all individuality and personality subsumed to the dictates of the super-organism that dwelled in the heart of the jungle? Were the slaves aware of what they once were? Was there a small seed of humanity watching out through Daggish eyes after you were made part of the hive? A feverish dream you could never wake from.

Finally the Daggish came for Amelia, dragging the bloody body of Bull Kammerlan, his stolen captain’s uniform — inexpertly re-tailored from a fit for the commodore’s frame — now ripped and pierced by his captors’ spines. Amelia had just enough time to take in the scene when the guards reached for her and pulled her out into the corridor.

Bull coughed and shook his head in sadness when he saw the identity of his fellow prisoner. ‘You think I’ve taken a kicking, you should see the other guy.’

‘Where’s the rest of your crew, Kammerlan?’

The silent guards showed no sign of recognizing that their prisoners were communicating, let alone objecting to it.

‘Beats me, girl. They had me locked up on my own. At one point they threw in one of the Catosians — a centurion, a real hellcat. That lasted an hour, until they grew tired of us both trying to kill each other. Then they took her away and I’ve been on my own ever since.’

More Daggish appeared, carrying weapons that resembled a Jackelian uplander’s sack-pipes, except that the uplanders’ musical instruments did not squirt fire that stuck like treacle to the flesh. The new guards marched in front of Bull and Amelia.

‘Rank,’ said Amelia. ‘They’ve separated us by rank. You were the u-boat skipper when they took the Sprite. I’m the expedition head — the centurion was the senior officer of marines after Veryann. Ironflanks said the Daggish had different castes, like insects.’

‘All I’ve seen are these cactus-skinned bruisers and a few animals dripping in that filthy green moss,’ said Bull. He turned to the Daggish soldiers. ‘Where’re my people, you bark-faced bastards? What have you done with my crew?’

The guards showed no response to his words.

‘They can’t talk,’ said Amelia. ‘Only that clicking noise.’

‘I’ve heard enough of that to last me a lifetime. Like crickets in the meadow, chattering at each other during the night. What a bloody waste. I could have been rich. Quest would have coughed up half the silver in his counting house for what we could have salvaged from the lake bed.’

Amelia didn’t point out that Kammerlan’s dreams of riches were as far away as her chances of discovering where Camlantis drifted in the heavens. With a clang, one of the forward hatches was flung open and Amelia found herself blinking in the bright sunlight. As her eyes adjusted, she saw they were moored on the shores of what looked like a sea. No, not a sea. She could just make out the green-covered mountains rising above the opposite shore. Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. Behind her squatted the Daggish nest city, flute-shaped towers given life and allowed to breed to the plans of a madman, sweeps and angles that no architect from Jackals was capable of mimicking, and everything overgrown — or perhaps intermingled — with lush emerald vegetation.

But it was not the bizarre city that caught Amelia’s eye; it was the range of mountains behind the jungle and the ruins that lay between two of the peaks she was gawping at. ‘Do you see that? No wonder …’

Bull followed her gaze but saw nothing of note. ‘What is it?’

‘Look, between the two peaks of the mountains. Those are the remains of a wall. Haven’t you seen something similar to that before?’

‘It’s manmade?’ Bull said in wonder. ‘Nobody can build a wall that large.’

‘That’s what people say about the dyke wall at Hundred Locks back in Jackals. A freak of geology, smoothed by ancient storms to resemble an artefact of the race of the man. Look at its design, it’s the same!’

‘There’s no water to hold back here,’ said Bull.

‘Not now, but thousands of years ago, before the skin of the earth had turned, there would have been water. The Camlanteans were mariners, explorers. Their country wouldn’t have been landlocked under this green hell.’

The Daggish escort pushed them across a boarding ramp and onto a pier that might have been formed from the hardened secretions of a giant snail.

‘Well, this cursed place is under new management now,’ said Bull.

‘No wonder the lake formed here,’ said Amelia. ‘When the Camlanteans generated the floatquake to rip their city into the sky, the dyke would have been destroyed, the waters they had dammed here would have flooded over the ruins of Camlantis.’

‘I thought you said these ancients of yours were pacifists,’ said Bull. ‘Doesn’t sound too friendly to me, dimples, drowning the invaders of your land through your own suicide.’

‘They had decided to deny the riches of their high science to the Black-oil Horde,’ said Amelia. ‘I would imagine the rest of what happened here was accidental damage. Dear Circle, I wish those dolts on the High Table could see this. Incontrovertible proof that their precious “natural phenomena” back at Hundred Locks is nothing of the sort. Not only artificial, but also built by the same civilization that they have staked their fusty reputations on denying all these years. There were Camlanteans in Jackals, there had to be.’

‘I’d like to see that with those dolts of yours, too,’ said Bull. ‘Because it would mean I wouldn’t be stumbling around some jungle city at the beck and call of a bunch of walking trees.’

‘You’ve spent your last few years selling on any feral craynarbian you could snatch to the caliph’s people,’ said Amelia. ‘I would say there’s a certain amount of justice in what they’re going to do to you. From slave trader to slave, in one easy step.’

‘You think so?’ Bull spat. ‘Well, at least I’ll know that you’re going to be drooling blank-eyed about two steps behind me after they’ve stolen my body.’

Their guards picked up the pace and Amelia and Bull had to trot to keep up with the Daggish soldiers and avoid the stinging spines that would come their way if they showed any signs of slacking. They scurried past massive black shells shining like beetle-armour, twin barrels protruding from the house-sized pods. Bags at the back of the pods pulsed with green liquid, the same natural flammables that the guards carried in their sack-pipe weapons, Amelia noted that with interest. So, these were the batteries protecting the city nest that Abraham Quest had warned her about. The death of any airship that dared pass over the heart of Liongeli. Most creatures in the jungle would be terrified of normal fire, let alone the clinging, burning treacle these brutes could spit. Thunder lizards would not make the mistake of straying into Daggish territory more than once, Amelia suspected.

The streets of the Daggish nest were like no city in Jackals — not Middlesteel or Aribridge or Strathdrum. There was none of the random arbitrariness of trade or the bustle of those scampering about with the necessity of making a living. Everyone and everything that moved through this metropolis raised out of the jungle did so with single-minded purpose, whether they were working on the sides of the towers, polishing them with spittle-like resin, bearing loads on their backs in eerily coordinated columns, or waiting silently in front of water-filled troughs for the liquid they needed to stay hydrated in the harsh heat. Even ants marching in a line showed more individuality than the drones of the Daggish Empire.

Occasionally a series of hornpipes suspended from the bonelike buildings would emit a song in the clicking code that the Daggish drones appeared to use as a language and the inhabitants would stop instantly, taking on board whatever instructions the noise was imparting, standing and swaying quietly, before resuming their activity. This was the only sound; the rest was a terrible silence. None of the clamour of an honest city crowd: the hum of horseless carriages, the clatter of hansom cabs on cobbles, the hawkers’ cries and the crack of the great mills. Amelia and Bull might as well have been walking through a cathedral at morning meditations; sleek-claws that should have filled the jungle with their roars padded past without a snarl, gorillas that should have called to each other with grunts quietly propelled loaded carts. All slaves. All moving as one.

Following the silence into the centre of the city, their quickstep escort ran them to a ramp cut into the ground of a building constructed of coils of polished bone-like resin. It was the largest building Amelia had seen in the city so far, a pipe organ that had gone into a mating frenzy and expanded out in a hundred directions. Iris doors admitted the two prisoners from the u-boat — taking them into a labyrinth of tubes. No furniture or ornamentation, just succession after succession of doors with Daggish guards standing sentry by them. At one point they were led into a tube with a blue liquid bubbling along its length. Was the heart of the building flooded? But the guards took a walkway along the side, making Amelia and Bull wade shoulder high through the liquid.

Bull shook his head in disgust. ‘I’ve smelt better urinals on my boat.’

‘I guess your rebels didn’t keep flocks of sheep in the royalist fleet,’ said Amelia. ‘This is a dip. They’re delousing us.’ She slapped the surface of the thick liquid. Black dots were rising to the surface, dead mosquitoes and other insects that had settled in their shabby, sweat-drenched clothes.

Bull laughed. ‘Well, don’t that beat all. You might be right. They’re scrubbing us up before putting us on the auction block.’

‘Who are they going to sell us to?’ Amelia asked. ‘They are all the same creature, and if Ironflanks is to be believed, their only interaction with anyone outside their empire is to eat, kill or absorb.’

Dripping blue gunk on the floor they were to meet their new owner soon enough. The last door irised open onto a domed chamber, revealing a cavernous interior, dim and cool and pierced in a hundred places by shafts of light from ceiling slits. Plants grew inside, crawling over each other, shaped and crafted across millennia to perform specific functions, organic machines tended by compliant creatures — tree monkeys and tiny thunder lizards with dextrous hands — all covered with the green slime that marked them as slaves of a single will. The architect of that will sat on a raised dais at the far end of the chamber, surrounded and obscured by an arc of sentinels. These were not the river-guard caste Amelia had seen on the u-boat and in the seed ship; they were hulking beasts, trees that had metamorphosed into fanged predators the size of elephants, with twisted, bark-hard skins. As Amelia got closer to the dais she caught a brief glimpse of the master intelligence of the Daggish through the gaps in its bodyguard, the cold intellect that dwelled in thousands of stolen bodies and circulated through the sap-like blood at the heart of the dark jungle. The emperor of the Daggish.

As high as an oak tree, the ruler of this living empire should have looked taller, but age after age of renewed bark had left the torso of the intelligence as wide as the watchtower on a fortress. How many rings would she count, Amelia wondered, if she took an axe to this monster? A small army of attendants crawled over it, little marsupials with their fur matted by the control algae that patterned their skin, wiping the crevices of their master’s bark, trimming the parasitical growths that gnawed at it after an age on the earth. The emperor sent a silent command and two of its troll-sized guardians moved aside so it could gaze at Amelia and the mutinous skipper of the Sprite. On one of the ridges that circled its bulbous head there was something fixed to the bark, almost a crown. Something that looked familiar. Amelia ignored the penetrating stare of the Daggish ruler and gazed above its eyes at the coronet. Where had she seen that before? Then it came to her. The crystal-book in Middlesteel, Abraham Quest’s startling discovery. It was similar to the headdress that Pairdan, Reader-Administrator of Camlantis had been wearing in his recording. A relic from the fall of the city. But why should such trinkets matter to this hideous entity?

As the ancient intelligence turned to look at the wall of green machinery that lay behind the dais, a warthog-sized creature trotted forward, its lips and mouth distorted so that they were unnaturally large and shaped like the orifice of one of the race of man. Even before it opened its ulcerous mouth Amelia knew its purpose. A translator. Something that still possessed enough of a spark of the race of man’s template that it could communicate with a human-sounding throat. The fact that whatever spark of humanity rested in their old crewmates had been so extinguished by the Daggish absorption process that they could no longer serve for such a task was far more terrifying than this shambling substitute’s presence.

‘You have defiled the methods of nature,’ warbled the pig-like beast. There was no doubt now whose voice it was articulating.

Amelia looked at Bull. Were they expected to answer? ‘Methods of nature?’

‘You have entered the territory of the purity.’

‘You are the purity?’ Amelia asked.

Daggish drones behind Bull and Amelia pushed them rudely to the floor; as if they were outraged such a question could be asked.

‘Your breed only dares to violate the territory of the purity if it perceives great gain to be within reach.’ Fronds of leaves spiralling around the emperor’s arms went stiff at the thought of such an outrage. Drones came forward, bearing an open chest filled with Amelia’s expedition notes, maps and crystal-book translations pillaged from the u-boat. ‘You are thieves, invaders who have discovered the location of the source.’

The dome was filled with the chattering of the Daggish, a sudden eruption of hammering clicks giving voice to their emperor’s offence at their brazen attempt to steal into its fastness and remove objects from the lake bed.

‘You know of Camlantis?’ asked Amelia. ‘You know of the ancients who lived here?’

‘They were the source,’ translated the pig creature. ‘The purity is descended from the source. The purity is ancient, older than the chaos of that which has not been joined with the purity and made clean and given order.’

‘I’ve seen her notes, too,’ said Bull, ‘and if you’re a Camlantean, then I’m the God-emperor of Kikkosico.’

One of the Daggish shot a spine into Bull’s leg and the slaver yelled, squirming about on the floor before yanking the spine out of his flesh.

‘If you had read all of my notes,’ hissed Amelia at Bull as she helped him to his feet, ‘then you would know that one of the reasons we have so little from the Camlantean age is that their tools were living things, a more advanced form of the same twisting of nature the caliph practises in Cassarabia.’ She tipped her head at the Daggish. ‘What do you think happened to all their engineering when the Camlantean gardeners that carefully tended it blasted their civilization into the heavens?’

Bull gazed at their massive jailors, the strange lines of the organic machinery. ‘I saw an abandoned village on the banks of the Shedarkshe once, plague, everyone dead and the craynarbians’ hunting hounds gone feral.’

She looked across the dais. ‘Imagine that village many thousands of years later.’

‘Damn, but the tree monkeys are running the jinn house,’ said Bull. He scratched at his unkempt hair and chased out a couple of flies that had survived the chemical dip. The Daggish emperor twitched in agony at the sight of the flies and one of the guards came running forward. Amelia thought that the creature was going to burn them to the ground, but his sack-pipe weapon discharged a jet of the delousing substance towards their heads, its foul-smelling stream madly stinging her eyes.

As she rubbed away the burning liquid, the translator creature shuddered violently in front of them. ‘Not pure — not pure. Filthy unclean thieves with their filthy crawling parasites.’

‘You’re the jigging impurity, here, Tree-head Joe!’ Bull yelled, giving the Daggish ruler the inverted ‘V’ of the Lion of Jackals with two of his fingers. ‘You’re nothing but a rotting hulk of talking wood decomposing in the heart of this rotting jungle.’

The misshapen translator creature announced his meaning to the chamber and behind Bull the troll-sized throne guards went into apoplexy at his abuse towards their ruler, smashing him to the ground and raising cudgels not much shorter than the slaver himself to finish the job of beating him to death. They only held off when Amelia leapt between them and the man they were about to murder.

‘You need him alive. You need us alive for something. All that trouble you went to separating us out on the u-boat, feeding us …’

The throne guards hesitated as the pig-like creature translated her words into the drumming language of the Daggish, reluctantly moving back as the fronds of the emperor wavered across in silent command. ‘Your place is to obey, not to criticize,’ piped the translator. ‘If you forget your position again the stain that is your existence will be scoured from the purity.’

Bull was stunned by the quickness of the assault and Amelia had to pull him back to his feet. He glowered resentfully in the direction of the Daggish emperor. ‘Touchy beggar, isn’t he?’

‘Hold your tongue,’ hissed Amelia, ‘or you’re going to get us both killed here.’

Bull spat a gob of blood from his swollen mouth onto the floor in defiance of their captors. ‘You saved my life, Guardian’s girl.’

‘That was just a temporary lapse of judgement, I assure you.’

Spined arms forced Amelia and Bull towards the side of the dome and a section of the smooth wall fell away, revealing a low chamber, sailors and marines from the Sprite lying in a field of wavering fronds, hair-thin green roots undulating snake-like into the ears, mouths and nostrils of the comatose crew. Amelia had to choke back her own vomit at the sight of Veryann’s fighters and Bull’s sailors crawling with the living filth of the greenmesh, over a hundred of them resting zombie-like under the wan emerald light while their bodies were erased of every last vestige of their humanity.

‘You should be cleansed,’ barked the translation creature, its monstrously oversized human lips dribbling with saliva. ‘You should be made uncontaminated within the purity. But there is the need, the need …’

The ring of Daggish guards and drones shoved them back in front of the dais.

‘If you’re going to fill my mind with your moss, you decaying cabbage, get on with it,’ Bull demanded. ‘Because you’re bloody boring me, and I hate being bored.’

‘You fear the purity,’ trilled the pig-like beast on behalf of its owner. ‘You value your insignificant life span, barely longer than those of the parasites you harbour.’

‘Do not all things?’ asked Amelia.

‘Then you shall do as you are bid, as you value your exclusion from the purity,’ instructed the translator. ‘You were correct in your appraisal of the purity’s temporary need for your services. You shall take your construct for navigating the lake of deep waters and undertake a sacred duty for the purity. In the event of your success, the purity shall consider your exclusion from the perfection of form you fear.’

‘The bathysphere?’ said Amelia. ‘You are talking about taking our bathysphere down to the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’

‘Jigger your archaeology. The thing I care about is the bit about our exclusion from the “perfection” of this bark-faced monarch of the jungle.’ Bull waved a fist at their captors. ‘What about my bloody crew?’

‘Your thieves are already complete within the purity,’ warbled the translator.

‘Twenty years we survived,’ sobbed Bull. ‘Twenty years after the destruction of Porto Principe — we survived Liongeli, survived being hunted by the RAN and Jackals’ men-o’-war, survived trading with those treacherous double-crossing jiggers down in Cassarabia. What did we survive for? This!’

‘They survive still,’ said the translator, ‘within the purity. They survive evolved and clean and whole.’ The hog-like creature waddled up to Amelia. ‘Observe the crown.’

On the dais one of the Daggish emperor’s ape servants pulled off its crown from the ridge of bark and held it aloft.

‘It is from the Camlantean age,’ said Amelia. ‘Ancient.’

‘There is another like it, underneath the deep waters outside our nest,’ said the translator. ‘Recover it, return it to the purity.’

Amelia frowned. But that made no sense. Why would this entity not fill hers and Bull’s skulls with the green filth that the rest of the crew had been exposed to? Why would this callous intelligence not wish to control their explorations of the lake bed, make them puppets of meat within its hive mind? If it knew what it was looking for, what use had it for the free intellect of a Jackelian academic and the treacherous impulses of Bull Kammerlan?

‘I have questions,’ said Amelia.

‘Your compliance shall serve the purity better than your inferior intellect,’ warned the translator. A wave of clicks swept the dome, the Daggish drones signalling their agreement, or perhaps their impatience with the two outsiders.

‘You shall be provided with the coordinates of the probable location of the crown. Retrieve it, salvage it for the purity as you value the brutish, brief flicker of your life span.’

Amelia exchanged glances with her companion in this predicament, the man she would least trust to watch her back now that Abraham Quest had been supplanted as the patron of their expedition and traded for an inhuman emperor with chlorophyll for emotions. Whatever the reasoning for sending them into the lake rather than risking its drones, Amelia was fairly certain the welfare of two prisoners factored fairly small into the equation, if at all. And despite the emperor’s hollow-sounding promises, Amelia was also fairly certain that their fate, once they had dredged the lake bed and located the missing crown, was not going to involve a fond farewell from the Daggish nest as she and Bull sailed off down the Shedarkshe back to Jackals.