The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Water bubbled over the oval hull of the bathysphere, the view of the small armada of seed ships on the surface rising behind Amelia and Bull as Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo covered over their vessel.

Amelia rested a hand on the thick armoured walls of the craft, built to withstand depths that would have crushed the Sprite. ‘Have we got the range to make a run for it?’

‘Not in this bucket, girl,’ said Bull. ‘We’re good for a poke on the lake bed, up and down. But this is intended for slow delicate work with a base vessel near by. A canoe and a couple of strong oarsmen could chase us down if we tried to scarper, let alone seed ships loaded with depth charges. Our best bet is to find Tree-head Joe’s crown and hope it makes good on its word to let us go.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Amelia. ‘That monster’s going to toss us into its conversion chamber with the rest of our crew as soon as we’ve got what it wants. We’ll be drooling moss from our lips an hour after we’ve handed over the crown.’

‘The Daggish haven’t done for us yet.’

‘No, they haven’t.’ And that bothered Amelia almost as much as the thought of actually being absorbed into the Daggish hive. Why did the Daggish controller require their humanity for its errand? If she and Bull died and they were part of the hive, did the Daggish Emperor feel their pain? Was this mission so dangerous that it could not stand to suffer its drones’ failure and death? The murderous entity was made of tougher stuff than that, she suspected.

Amelia grabbed a handhold on the wall as the bathysphere lurched. Bull made a small corrective motion on the stick.

‘I thought you could pilot this thing.’

‘I can pilot just fine, first or second stick back on the Sprite,’ said Bull, ‘but it was your Catosian friend who was trained by Quest to pilot this tub. Look at our controls: your rich shopkeeper designed this — nothing is where it should be.’

‘Veryann?’ That was strange. On a ship full of experienced submariners, why would Quest pick one of his mercenary warriors to pilot the bathysphere? ‘Quest told me the Sprite had been refitted by Robert Fulton,’ said Amelia. ‘I thought he was a legend in your line of work.’

‘Blacky’s old boat might have been patched up by him,’ said Bull, touching a line of control boxes, ‘but this exploration ball surely wasn’t. Fulton didn’t put this on the pilot’s station.’

Amelia looked at what Bull was indicating. Iron boxes, solid as their hull. ‘What is it?’

‘That I would like to know myself,’ said Bull. ‘Whatever it is, I’m locked out. I don’t even understand what’s turning our screws — this tub takes expansion-engine gas, but there’s no scrubbers running that I can see.’

‘He’s a clever man,’ said Amelia. ‘And as long as it works …’

‘Oh, he’s a sharp one,’ laughed Bull. ‘Sharp enough to buy us to sail up the Shedarkshe and do his dying for him.’

‘You planning on living for ever?’

‘Just long enough to see the head of every Guardian on a pike outside traitor’s gate and maybe your parliament turned into something useful — like a barracks for the royal cavalry.’

‘For that you’re going to need immortality,’ said Amelia.

As they sank deeper with each second, the last of the light from the surface was lost, replaced by a stygian darkness broken only by the occasional small silver fish darting out of their way. With the last of their natural visibility gone, Bull pulled a lever activating a circle of high-intensity gas lamps on the surface of their craft, checking the dial on the expansion gas reservoir to make sure they weren’t burning fuel too fast. A whine sounded and Amelia looked behind her to try to locate the source of the noise.

‘It’s the waldos,’ said Bull. ‘The arms on the back of the sphere. I’m putting the clockwork under tension while we’ve still got gas to burn.’

Amelia spotted the rubber circles surrounding two holes for her arms. ‘How do you see what the manipulator claws are doing?’

‘Just pull back the cover from the aft porthole, you’ll see well enough.’

Amelia slid the iron lid to the side and saw a strip of triple-layered crystal looking out onto the darkness. Two large clamp arms hung folded in the water outside. She pushed her arms through the holes — a tight fit for her muscled biceps — and found a metal frame inside with leather straps for her fingers to slot into.

‘Is there a dial near your thumbs inside there?’ Bull asked.

‘Got it,’ confirmed Amelia. ‘Ridged like a copper ha’penny.’

‘That’ll be your power amplification,’ said Bull. ‘Keep it dialled down when you’re poking about in the silt. If by some miracle we find Tree-head Joe’s crown, those claws will crumple it like paper on the highest power setting.’

Amelia unfolded the arms outside their submersible and practised moving them from side to side, clenching the frame to manipulate the pincer claws. Something dark floated past at the periphery of the illumination and Amelia jumped back from the glass port.

‘I saw something, Kammerlan, something big floating out there at the edge of the lights.’

Bull leant on the pilot stick and rotated the craft around sixty degrees. ‘Those two waldo arms are all the weapons we’re packing, dimples. If there’s a tussle between us and one of the Shedarkshe’s critters that’s swum into the lake, you are going to need to dish out a walloping.’

Amelia said nothing. If it came to a prolonged fight between the bathysphere and a school of underwater thunder lizards, the amplification on the arms would bleed their power fast. She returned her gaze to the lake waters. There! Something drifting at a strange angle in front of the pilot’s porthole. Bull edged the sphere forward, manually swivelling the inclination on their main gaslight to throw a circle of illumination across the shape. A bone-hard shell, bleached white.

‘A sunken seed ship,’ gasped Amelia. There were tears along its side, clean, straight rents, as if the holes had been carved open on a lathe.

‘That’s no normal seed ship,’ said Bull, guiding the bathysphere slowly about the wreck while their lamps tracked along its hull. ‘There’s no top deck, no flame cannons, no pod bulbs for its depth charge seeds.’ He pointed the main light at a silvery dome glittering like a compound eye on the wreck’s side. ‘And that isn’t anything like the patrols that used to chase my crew down. They’ve sealed the seed ship at every point, made it watertight. Tree-head Joe’s been making himself a u-boat.’

‘I knew there was something wrong!’ Amelia cursed the controlling mind of the Daggish. ‘Cutting deals with us, when all it wanted to do was cut into our skulls.’

‘Sweet Circle,’ Bull whistled, turning the craft around. ‘It’s worse than you know. Will you look out there …’

The bathysphere was drifting through a graveyard of seed ships — all different designs, some craft barely larger than their own and decayed down to barnacle-encrusted shells, others long torpedoes of modified surface craft. A dead history of Daggish nautical evolution.

‘Erosion like this,’ said Amelia. ‘Some of those wrecks have to be over seven hundred years old. How long has it been trying to find its crown?’

‘Old Tree-head Joe is desperate all right,’ said Bull. ‘Desperate enough that it’ll sully its perfection by dealing with the race of man. It must have thought that Midwinter gift-giving had come early when it netted the Sprite and her bathysphere — a Jackelian seadrinker with its very own expert on Camlantis on board. But what is worrying me is what killed the damn boats out there? Look at them — that’s not any engin eering failure. Something cut them up like mince on a butcher’s slab.’

Amelia didn’t hear Bull. Her mind was turning over the ramifications of the Daggish emperor’s obsession. ‘All this! Persisting and persevering for hundreds of years just for a crown?’

‘It probably thinks the bleeding thing is holy,’ said Bull. ‘The crown of its creators or some equally fool notion. Maybe it thinks that having the crown will allow it to talk to its god. It may be a hive, but the Daggish acts like a single organism. Tree-head Joe needs something to believe in, doesn’t it?’

‘Societies do many strange things when religion is involved, I’ll grant you,’ said Amelia. ‘But the Daggish Emperor didn’t strike me as having any deep, unfulfilled spiritual needs.’ She was trying to think like an archaeologist again. Getting inside the minds of those long lost to alien times wasn’t so different from trying to understand the Daggish. Look at what it was doing, analyse its behaviour. ‘So, what does it want?’

‘The jigger wants to kill us,’ said Bull. ‘Cover us in slime and clean our brains like a teacher wiping chalk off the blackboard.’

‘You’ve got it,’ said Amelia. ‘What does it want? It wants to expand. To grow its territory.’

‘It can’t,’ said Bull. ‘There was a lot of useless blarney about the Daggish down in Rapalaw Junction, but one thing everyone agreed on … the greenmesh never expands. It has a range, the reach at which everything inside the Daggish empire acts in unity. I saw a craynarbian once that had been grabbed back from the greenmesh by comfort auction traders — she was blank: she could breathe all right, could be fed liquids and mush, but there was nothing left inside of her. You might as well chop your finger off, toss it away, and expect it to come running back to you in gratitude. I reckon Tree-head Joe is the centre of it all, the spider in the middle of the web. Its drones have got to stay close to it to take their orders and the coward isn’t moving anywhere. You saw how spooked it got when it saw the bugs in my hair.’

‘The emperor wants the crown to expand its hive,’ said Amelia. ‘Trust me on this. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get inside the minds of cultures and kingdoms that last existed millennia ago from only the faintest of clues. I don’t know how exactly the crown will help it, but growth is what the Daggish emperor wants, it’s all that the hive wants.’ She looked out at the graveyard of broken ships. ‘And it’s been trying a long time to get it.’

Bull started lowering them beneath the field of broken vessels, checking the depth readings as they sank. ‘Tree-head Joe’s already got itself a crown; it hasn’t done the Daggish much good so far. Beyond its symbolic value, what’s so special about a king’s crown? Those trinkets were two-a-penny at the court-in-exile at Porto Principe and none of them did us any good when your parliament came a-calling with its aerostats. It’s power that counts, not the robes that you wear.’

That was true. Something about the crown was nagging at Amelia, but what? Something she had seen in the crystal-book back in Jackals. Something obvious. Her archaeologist’s sense was on fire. The rush that she got when she was close to uncovering one of history’s misplaced secrets. ‘It’s not a king’s crown. Camlantean society didn’t have a hierarchy or aristocracy. The crown is from a reader-administrator, a coordinator of knowledge. Imagine a head librarian crossed with the civil servants at Greenhall.’

‘No king, not even an elected thief like your First Guardian?’ Bull said, incredulous. ‘How did your Camlanteans decide how things got done, who was quality and who was taking the orders?’

‘The most knowledgeable person on any subject made the decisions for that area,’ said Amelia. ‘If someone came along who knew more about it, who was wiser, the incumbent would step aside. If there was a fundamental disagreement about a certain issue, everyone in the city who felt they had enough experience to make an informed judgement would vote on it.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Bull. ‘That sounds as jiggered as the anarchy the city-states have up north in Catosia. No law, mob rule, the strong blade survives …’

‘Camlantean society had no war, Kammerlan, no hunger, no poverty or crime, they possessed a level of engineering expertise that makes the kingdom of Jackals look like a tribe of feral craynarbians scratching a living along the banks of the Shedarkshe. The secret of achieving that is what we came looking for in Liongeli, not bags of silver from Quest’s counting house.’

Bull shook his head sadly at the professor’s gullibility. ‘And who recorded these accounts of a perfect society, dimples? It wouldn’t happen to be the same “coordinators of knowledge” who were looking after the shop, would it?’

‘Camlantis was mentioned in awe in every scrap of contemporary history we’ve ever uncovered from her neighbours. It wasn’t propaganda.’

‘Right.’ Bull rolled his eyes in amusement. ‘Well, the nature of the race of man sure has changed a lot over the intervening millennia, and not for the better.’ He pushed his face closer to the pilot’s porthole. ‘And out there, I reckon, is all that is left of your flawless society now.’

‘All that is left on earth,’ corrected Amelia. The professor gazed out with disappointment at the ruins their lights had revealed. But then, what was she expecting? What would Middlesteel look like if a great chunk of it was ripped and sent skyward by a floatquake? A crater with exposed basements and a few chopped up atmospheric lines, rained on by rubble as the city lifted up to the heavens. Now leave that to rot for ten thousand years under the floodwaters of a collapsed dam the height of a mountain and what would you have? Something very similar to what they were slowly drifting over. An underwater rubbish dump.

Amelia tried to cheer herself up. Some of the greatest discoveries Jackelian archaeology had ever made had been found in the dust pits of fallen civilizations. Bull grabbed an iron wheel with a wooden handle and began to rotate it fast. ‘That’s your collection nets out. Keep your eyes open at the rear port. If we come across whatever did for Tree-head Joe’s toy fleet, I’m going to bounce our buoyancy tanks, send us to the surface like a flying fish running for its life.’

‘You know what’ll happen if we surface without the crown,’ Amelia said.

‘Reckon we’re dead whichever way you look at it,’ said Bull. ‘But an hour or two more is worth having. Let’s get to work.’

Amelia extended the waldos and began to pick through the debris on the lake bed. There were shreds of things that could have been pieces of machinery, rubble with a single side carved by the hand of man. In other circumstances she would have been filling her nets with such objects, anything that could expand Jackals’ knowledge of the Camlantean civilization. Crates of antiquities that could be labelled, stored and analysed by teams of researchers at Jackals’ museums and colleges. The purpose of most of what she recovered might lay undis covered for decades, centuries even, before it could be cross-referenced and its function teased out. But she didn’t have the luxury of repeat trips. This might be her only chance to explore down here on the good graces of the Daggish emperor. The frustration welled in her, the minutes of fruitless searching, minutes turning into an hour. How much air did they have left?

Then it hit her. She was thinking like an archaeologist. The best advice she had been given for this kind of situation had come from a Chimecan tomb raider who specialized in under-city work. Follow the traps. The traps mean plunder.

‘Traps,’ said Amelia. ‘Traps mean treasure. Those broken up Daggish submersibles. How did they all get to be clustered in the same place?’

‘Currents, girl,’ said Bull. ‘It ain’t worldsinger sorcery that put them there, just the currents down here.’

‘Follow the currents.’

‘I’ve been avoiding them,’ said Bull. ‘Whatever killed those Daggish boats is as like living somewhere along the flow.’

‘That’s what I’m counting on,’ said Amelia.

‘Well, why not,’ muttered Bull, turning the bathysphere into the pull of the undercurrents. ‘Why not face the monster of the lake in its den. Least it’ll be something to see before we go.’

As they tracked against the push of water across the lake bed, Amelia noticed that the water outside appeared to be becoming lighter, the darkness of their depth lessening until the jagged outcrops of rock below started to cast shadows towards them. Bull checked the depth readings on his control panel, tapping the glass above the dial, but the hand remained hovering at eighty fathoms.

‘We’re not rising,’ said Bull. ‘This isn’t natural. Look at the light out there, we might as well be diving for pearls off the Fire Sea corals.’

‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Amelia,’ except we’re not in any tunnel. Keep going. This is what we’re looking for, I can feel it in my blood.’

After five minutes they crested a rise of rubble, their small craft’s gaslights hardly needed now. They were drifting over the centre of a basin, while down below a ring of monoliths traded waves of rainbow light between each other, wide sheets of energy undulating slowly through the water. The dark granite giants lay surrounded by a litter of sliced-apart seed-ship wreckage.

‘Jigger that,’ said Bull, ‘jigger that for a game of soldiers.’

‘Head for it,’ said Amelia. ‘Head for the centre of the stones and the light.’

‘Not in a million years,’ said Bull, pushing the pilot stick away from the basin. ‘That’s a death trap — you want to know how a fish feels when it gets sucked into a boat’s screws, you dive into that mess of light. It’s nothing we need.’

‘It is,’ said Amelia. ‘Can’t you feel it, feel the song the city is singing for us?’

‘You’ve lost it, dimples, you’ve lost your mind.’ He glanced across at Amelia and nearly fell out of the pilot seat — the professor was glowing, a faint echo of the rainbow sheets outside rippling along the surface of her torn and tattered clothes. He checked his own hands but the bizarre radiance was only covering her body, not his.

‘Turn the craft,’ said Amelia.

As if in response to her voice there was a violent lurch in the bathysphere’s direction. Bull slammed the pilot stick and pushed the pressure on the expansion engine up to the red line on his dials, but even at maximum power the craft was still getting sucked in towards the stone circle.

‘Stop it!’ Bull yelled. ‘Look at the wreckage out there. It’s a siren’s song — you’re pulling us into the butcher’s mincer.’

Amelia’s eyes were glazed with the power of the radiance. It was home. They were going home.

Bull smashed the lever to blow the lake water out of the main ballast tanks, trying to trigger an emergency surface, but the control deck was no longer responding to his directions. Something else was in control, and it sure wasn’t him. Behind Bull, the waldo arms screamed as the engine began to put its springs under intolerable tension, the dial hands under every circle of crystal on his instrument panel turning in angry loops, the craft shaking the slaver fit to rattle his teeth. They struck the plane of rainbow energy and the field flowed through the reinforced walls of the bathysphere as if they were made of glass. It was dissolving the walls of the craft — so bright, pain plunging directly into the back of his skull.

Bull yelled and tried to cover his eyes with his arms. Anything to deaden the pain. The last sound he heard was Amelia laughing like a possessed demon.

Cornelius rolled over. Something was wrong. His arm had no weight. It felt like a feather by his side. Blinking his eyes open, he watched the walls of the cell focus into view, the dark shadow by his side solidifying into Septimoth. An alien noise faded out of the range of Cornelius’s hearing, the lashlite tucking the bone-pipe of his dead mother back into his belt, halting his mediation song to the gods of the holy winds.

Cornelius tried to speak but his throat was sore and a gargle came out instead.

‘Rest yourself,’ said Septimoth. ‘You were gassed.’

Cornelius could remember nothing. ‘How?’

‘We were inside the brig of a submersible and you tried to escape, running a bypass on a transaction engine lock with your arm. Our captors detected the attempt and flooded our cell with a poisonous vapour. I held my breath as long as I could, but the gas got me eventually.’

‘My arm!’ It was coming back to Cornelius now. The flood at their hidden rooms in the old Middlesteel Museum. Being captured by the divers and taken into a small river submersible. Their housekeeper lying unconscious in the brig with them. ‘Where are we — what have they done with Damson Beeton?’

‘She was gone when I woke up,’ said Septimoth. ‘We are no longer on the submersible. There is no movement or pressure differential in the atmosphere here. We are being held on land now, I think. Yesterday the soldiers took you away and when you were returned here your arm had been tampered with.’

‘Naturally.’ A disembodied voice echoed around the cell. ‘Your artificial limb was far too dangerous for us to let you keep it as it was designed. A work of some craftsmanship, by the way. My compliments to whichever mechomancer you patronized.’

Septimoth nodded towards fluted trumpets in the four corners of the cell. For listening in and talking, both, but Cornelius didn’t need to see the face to recognize the voice.

‘Robur!’

‘Indeed. I am glad my people had a chance to find the hidden store of Furnace-breath Nick masks on your isle, otherwise I would never have known who to thank for my liberation from Quatershift.’

‘You’ve a strange way of showing your gratitude,’ said Cornelius.

‘I am grateful,’ said Robur, ‘not suicidal. Your friend’s talons are still as sharp as an eagle’s, even if I have tensioned down the strength on your false arm. I removed the weapons and lock picks and all the other gimcracks that had been packed inside it, too. Who would have thought you could fit so much inside such a confined space?’

‘What have you done with Damson Beeton?’ Cornelius demanded. ‘For your sake she had better still be alive.’

‘Hah,’ Robur’s voice snorted. ‘You keep an odd household, Cornelius Fortune.’

‘She’s just an old woman,’ said Cornelius. ‘She has no part in this. You can let her go.’

‘That “old woman” killed five of Middlesteel’s finest and most expensive toppers on your island,’ said Robur. ‘If I had to choose whose cell to be locked up in, I’d take my chances with you and your flying lizard over that old crone any day.’

A panel in the wall slid back, revealing an abacus with a hundred rails, thousands of tiny squares hanging on the copper tubes beginning to spin, forming an image. It was a Rutledge Rotator, a transaction-engine screen — still rare outside the engine rooms at Greenhall — Cornelius had briefly considered stealing one to go along with the engine he had rebuilt in Middlesteel Museum. The image on the wall of flickering squares revealed a woman held upright in a prison frame, her mouth gagged and her eyes blinded by a leather mask.

‘We’re holding your wolftaker friend hostage to ensure your cooperation. If you try and escape again, the gas we flood her cell with won’t be a somnic. It will be something far more lethal.’

Cornelius’s eyes widened. ‘A wolftaker?’

‘Did you really imagine your activities would escape the attention of the Court of the Air?’ Robur asked. ‘How typically Jackelian — a secret police so secret that even your political masters live in fear of them, the lethal shepherds of your conscience — truer guardians of Jackals’ much vaunted democracy than the politicians who wear that name in parliament. You must have looked like a wolf to the court, Cornelius — the Sun Deity knows, you looked enough like a wolf to the new rulers of Quatershift. Even at Darksun Fortress your name was legend, the prison guards lived in fear of a visit from you. But as happy as the Court was for you to be making mischief for their ancient enemy across the border, I still don’t think they trusted you; so it seems you and your winged friend got your own shepherd to ensure you didn’t start preying on the wrong flock.’

Septimoth looked over at his friend. ‘Damson Beeton was recommended to our service by Dred Lands as I recall.’

‘So she was.’ Cornelius cursed his own stupidity. And the proprietor of the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard was so perfectly connected into the heart of the Jackelian underworld, so perfectly equipped with illegal equipment and banned lore. The Court of the Air could look a long time before they found such a well-connected informer in Middlesteel — except that they obviously hadn’t needed to.

‘The watchers in the sky,’ said Septimoth. ‘My people avoid that cold place where they dwell. Perhaps it was to be expected. You always warned me that the Court could be monitoring us.’

‘You must have thought you were very clever,’ said Robur. ‘Your little palace of tricks hidden under the waters of the Gambleflowers. We use submersibles where we can to avoid their gaze ourselves, as it happens.’

‘Dear old Damson Beeton. Well, if the Court of the Air was using me to do their dirty work for them, then I was using them in exchange,’ sighed Cornelius. ‘They let Furnace-breath Nick flit back and forth across the cursewall like a wine merchant pushing bottles of brandy in a cart. But who is your “we”, mechomancer, who are you working for?’

‘So you were using them, were you, eh? A privateer, not a pirate — an admirably practical attitude. As for myself, you might say I am now working for the greater good of the race of man.’

‘Not Quatershift, then,’ said Cornelius.

‘You dare ask that!’ Robur’s voice exploded in anger. ‘After you saw the conditions they had me living in at Darksun Fortress. I could tell you things, Jackelian, the crimes I saw in that place and others like it, before. The things those monsters did to families that had fallen out with the First Committee and their revolutionary barbarians. To my friends, to their own supporters in the end …’

‘Save your breath, I have already seen the blessings of the revolution,’ said Cornelius, ‘as has Septimoth. I didn’t lose my arm in a milling accident — it was cut off as a punishment, then tossed into the fertilizer pit of an organized community not so very different from your camp.’

‘Then you know, you understand.’ It sounded like Robur was crying.

‘Yes,’ said Cornelius. ‘I know. So, mechomancer, who is it paying for the greater good of the race of man, these days?’

‘That I think you also know. Shall I confirm it for you?’

‘Abraham Quest,’ hissed Cornelius.

‘Yes, indeed. When the Catgibbon passed on word of an old friend of hers returning from the dead with an interest in missing steammen, it wasn’t too difficult to match her description to a reclusive hermit with no obvious means to show for his wealth suddenly showing up at Whittington Manor brandishing a party invite. Compte de Speeler — the Count of Thieves. That little wordplay may have cost you your life. Your methods are both hasty and unsound.’

‘My methods saved your life,’ said Cornelius.

‘That is the main reason why you and your companion are still alive,’ said Robur. ‘We are working on the same side, really. You in your small limited way. Myself in mine — but my methods are played on a grander stage. You are never going to change the Commonshare by slaughtering Carlists and the revolutionary leaders one by one. Your horror — as effective as it is — can never equal the great terror the revolution has imposed on Quatershift. What is a single angel of death dropping from the sky, one agent of vengeance, what is that compared to the constant fear of the knock at the door in the middle of the night by the Commonshare’s thugs? What is the terror invoked by the voice changer in your mask compared to the screams of your neighbours as their children are fed into a Gideon’s Collar?’

‘One death at a time is all I need,’ said Cornelius, ‘to slake my vengeance and give me a little peace at night.’

‘There we are, then,’ sighed Robur’s disembodied voice. ‘You are looking to punish those who wronged you, one grave at a time. I am looking to change society so that such evil can never be allowed to take hold again. You crudely treat the symptoms; I wish to eradicate the disease itself.’

‘There speaks a mechomancer,’ said Septimoth, his wings shivering in anger. ‘The race of man treating the sum of the world like a machine that can be fixed by tinkering with its components, by providing a different instruction set for the transaction engine.’

‘My talents will help usher in a new age,’ said Robur ‘An age where the crimes the Commonshare inflicted on my people in Quatershift will never be repeated.’

‘The Carlists were infected by the same meme,’ said Septimoth. ‘I heard identical noises from your monkey throats, even as the Commonshare practised genocide against the people of the wind when we would not turn from the old ways. I trusted your kind’s grand intentions once. I shall never do so again.’

‘You are not going to usher in a new age by robbing the decaying remains of steammen from their graves,’ Cornelius interrupted. ‘I fail to see how that is going to topple the regime in Quatershift.’

‘Of course you fail to see it, you dolt,’ said Robur. ‘And I am afraid I will be unable to enlighten you for a few days yet, as unlike you, I am anything but hasty. All will be revealed in good time.’

‘What about us?’ said Cornelius. ‘Do we have a place in your shining new society?’

‘We shall see,’ said Robur. ‘We shall see.’

The speaker in the ceiling fell silent.

‘Well, what do you make of that?’ Cornelius asked Septimoth.

‘I think, on reflection, we should have interviewed more than one candidate for the position of maid-of-all-works when we set up home in Jackals.’

‘Robur was fishing,’ said Cornelius. ‘He wanted to find out if we’re working with the Court of the Air. He’s worried how much the Court might know about his little game.’

‘Let us hope the Court knows more about his schemes than we do,’ said Septimoth, ‘for both our sakes.’

Cornelius did not reply. The last time he and Septimoth had been held captive it had been he who had come up with the plan to escape: his brains and freakish assassin’s face to break them free, Septimoth’s wings to carry them to freedom. But Robur was not a blunt instrument like an organized community inside the Commonshare. And relying on the old woman lashed to a frame in the cell next door and her deadly celestial employers to rescue them wasn’t much of a plan. If that was what they were relying on, then they truly were in trouble.

Blood-bats circled the cage at night, making passes that carried them uncomfortably close to Commodore Black. The commodore ignored the squeals of the large rodents as T’ricola massaged life back into Billy Snow’s legs, the paralysis toxin finally losing its effect. Ironflanks was with them now, and while no one wanted to speak of it, the absence of valiant Gabriel McCabe — the strongest man in Jackals no more — still hung over them like a ghost at the feast.

‘You are an unusual sonar man,’ Veryann said to Billy as she looked down on the bats sweeping through the petrol mist beneath them. ‘One who fights uncommonly well for a blind man. And a submariner.’

‘I crewed my way across the oceans to Thar when I was younger,’ said Billy. ‘They know a thing to two about blade work and empty fist fighting out there. You can even study the skill at their monasteries.’

‘Did they also smith witch-blades at their monasteries?’ Veryann asked.

‘It was considered something of an art,’ said Billy.

‘Quiet, Billy,’ said T’ricola. ‘Your throat muscles are as weak as every other part of your creaking body. You need to rest.’

‘I can rest when I’m dead,’ said the sonar man.

‘That fate will come soon enough,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Along with the wicked spectacle the mad prince of this jungle hell is planning for us.’

‘At least the end will be quick,’ said Ironflanks. ‘The five of us pitted weaponless against a kilasaurus max. It will be quick.’

The commodore laid a hand on the steamman’s shoulder. ‘For the love of the Circle, can’t you be telling the prince that you have changed your mind and that he’s a fine fellow who should be letting his new friends go on their way?’

‘You mistake him for one of my kind,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Doublemetal and his siltempters haven’t been part of the Free State for many thousands of years. They worship the foulest of Loas, Lord Two-Tar and his minions, and the Lord of Deactivation has driven all compassion from the siltempters’ boiler hearts for those whose threads are woven alongside their own in the great pattern.’

‘The prince said you escaped from this place once before,’ said T’ricola. ‘Can you not break the cell’s locks and get us out of the pit?’

‘That was an age ago,’ said Ironflanks. ‘And I had help. I was a knight steamman, ranked errant among the Order of the Pathfinder Fist. I led a party of knights here — King Steam had heard rumours that the siltempters had captured one of the last remaining Hexmachina, a wounded and nearly deactivate model. We were to find it and free it. But we had not realized how the jungle had changed the siltempters over the millennia. They had grown into monsters here. They slaughtered us, those who did not run. A few of us survived, tortured while our architecture was violated by the same prince that King Steam had once cast out of Mechancia by his own hand.’

‘But still you escaped,’ said Commodore Black.

‘It was Bronzehall who broke the codes on our lock in the temple’s torture rooms,’ said Ironflanks. ‘He was a sly one, Bronzehall. A knight of the Commando Militant with a hundred ways to demolish any construction, and a thousand more to break into it. He was one of the last of us to die when we were pursued through the jungle by the siltempters, the only steamman other than I not to be recaptured.’

‘What happened to him?’ Billy Snow asked.

‘We had almost reached Rapalaw Junction when the components the prince had violated our architecture with began to change our bodies. When Bronzehall realized how badly he had been afflicted, he could not bear the shame.’

‘A warrior’s death,’ said Veryann.

‘Yes, a warrior’s death. If we had succeeded in bringing back the Hexmachina, then perhaps King Steam would have helped us, instructed the hall of architects at Mechancia to do what they could to restore our bodies to the righteous pattern. As it was, banishment and the isolation of the unclean was to be my reward.’

‘You are still a steamman,’ implored the commodore. ‘Can you not help me break this cunning transaction-engine lock?’

‘Bronzehall could,’ said Ironflanks, ‘but not I, my softbody friend. I wish that I could, but I am as much a part of the jungle now as I am of the metal, which is why Liongeli’s dark realm speaks to me at night and fills my thoughtflow with the whispers of the canopy.’

Commodore Black stared forlornly down towards the bubbling lake of oil. ‘Then I will tease the blessed thing open myself. My genius versus the mocking black boiler hearts of the siltempters. Let us see if Prince Doublemetal is as canny as he thinks he is, the lord of the loons, filing down his rivets like a walking razor and crushing the bones of honest travellers that fall into his clutches.’

‘Let me help you,’ offered Billy Snow.

‘I know machines,’ said T’ricola. ‘I’ll take over from you when you tire.’

The commodore bent down to examine the lock, the sonar man and the chief engineer of the Sprite by his side. It was a race against time. Only a few hours remained until dawn splintered the star-filled night and ushered in their appointment with the thunder lizards in the fighting pit next door.

‘Oh, this is clever,’ said the commodore. ‘This lock is a work of art. The codes on this merciless thing are resetting themselves every few minutes — at random intervals, too, as best as I can see. You come up with a system to crack the lock and the wicked thing changes the game halfway through.’

‘What good will springing the doors do?’ said Ironflanks, pointing to the steaming oil below.

‘We can climb our cell’s tether,’ said Veryann, ‘or swing ourselves cage by cage to the edge.’

‘Let me try, let me try,’ the commodore muttered to himself, making wincing noises and grumbling as the lock matched its cunning with his. T’ricola observed his work while Billy Snow listened to the tumble of the mechanism inside, learning the clicks and clacks that preceded the apparatus resetting itself.

The commodore grew more frustrated, each small victory overturned as the lock altered its state. ‘Oh, you beast. You dark piece of work, built to play with my skill and break my hopes upon the sharp crags of your wicked construction.’ He was distracted by the distant howls from the arena next to their prison pit; a grim reminder of their fate if they failed to break the lock. ‘What are they, now? Blessed wolves howling at the moon, or thunder lizards? Can they not keep quiet? Must I crack this infernal device while listening to their song too.’

‘Their chains are fed with wild energy,’ said Ironflanks. ‘To torture the creatures and goad them into a killing fury before a contest. I saw many of my order sacrificed in such a way the last time I was held here.’

‘Are the odds not unequal enough already?’ moaned the commodore. ‘Poor old Blacky and his brave legs made slow by the years and what meagre crumbs of comfort I was able to salvage while living with my friends in Tock House. Thunder lizards do not need goading to feast on my weary bones … every mortal creature we’ve come across in Liongeli has already been clicking its jaws in fierce anticipation of the walking meal wearing the skipper of the Sprite’s uniform that they’ve found.’

Time was running out beneath their feet, an hour turning into two, then three. When the commodore’s hands were shaking and cramped, T’ricola took over and began to play the system, her bony craynarbian manipulator arms twisting and turning the mechanism with swift decisive strokes where the commodore had instead teased it like a musician playing his instrument. She was still attacking the lock when the cage heaved and began to rise out of the oil pit.

‘No!’ T’ricola cursed. ‘We’re so close. It’s still night, the sun hasn’t even broken the horizon yet.’

‘You would think that toad-faced prince would be a late riser,’ whined the commodore. ‘Soaking himself in the oil of his own people, a nice bath for his wicked steel bones before he takes it into his head to throw us into his deadly arena.’

Yet still their prison rose. Past the cages filled with rotting corpses and the bones of craynarbian tribesmen who had strayed too close to the siltempters’ territory. That was not to be their fate. They had a far more active demise than a slow starvation in the petrol mists awaiting them.

As soon as the package had been slid through the feeding hatch of their cell, the voice of one of their captors — not Robur, this time — came out of the speaking trumpet.

‘Open the box.’

Cornelius unbolted the lid of the crate. What choice did they have? A viewing slit in the cell door opened to ensure he and Septimoth were following instructions. Inside the crate there was a mess of leather straps and buckles and two large gloves, padded and oversized.

‘Put the gloves on the lashlite first. Then strap the harness around the lashlite’s wings.’

Cornelius hesitated and a female voice behind the viewing slit barked at them. ‘Do as you are instructed. A rifle ball in the head is your alternative.’

Septimoth held out his arms and Cornelius sheathed his friend’s talons inside the large gloves, then began strapping on the harness.

‘I am insulted,’ said Cornelius. ‘Am I so insignificant that you don’t have a set of manacles for me?’

‘You are just a man,’ said the voice outside the cell. ‘A one-armed freak with your artificial limb deactivated. Your large friend is quite another matter. We don’t want him attempting to fly away, or shredding us to pieces with his formidable-looking talons.’

‘They have the measure of you,’ said Septimoth, his beak twisting into an approximation of a smile as Cornelius worked the harness buckles around his body.

‘Just how tight do you want to be trussed?’

When Septimoth’s wings and talons were made safe, the cell door opened, an officer with a pistol beckoning them into a corridor where more soldiers waited with rifles. They wore the cherry uniforms of the House of Quest’s fencible regiment and their commander was Robur’s so-called ‘daughter’.

‘So, you have joined the family business after all,’ said Cornelius.

‘We could have rescued Robur ourselves,’ said the Catosian, ‘assaulted Darksun Fortress from the air. But such an action would have attracted attention. You were already operating across the border in Quatershift with a high degree of efficiency. Convincing you to rescue Robur from the Commonshare was the obvious choice.’

‘A part you played extremely well,’ said Cornelius. ‘And I do understand why you played me for a dupe. I’m sure the First Committee would have been most curious as to why one of the city-states of the Catosian League had declared war on them just for the sake of kidnapping a single prisoner.’

‘It was not the reaction in Quatershift we were concerned with,’ said the officer. Another cell door opened, a figure weighted down under the armour of a hex suit emerging into the corridor. ‘It was her people …’

‘Damson Beeton!’ Cornelius only just recognized her under the mass of the midnight-black shell, silver sigils traced across every inch of the metal. Whatever sorceries the Court of the Air had taught her, she wouldn’t be practising them in that sheathing, customized to nullify her talents. ‘Sink me, are you all right?’

Her eyes gleamed angrily from underneath her visor. ‘What, apart from being shot full of shellfish toxin, kidnapped, imprisoned, and made to stumble around sweating under enough armour to keep a steamman knight happy?’

‘Yes, apart from that.’

‘Just dandy,’ she spat.

‘Good, because I’m afraid I’m going to have to release you from my service. Moonlighting on my time is a serious offence.’

‘That’s no way to treat an elderly woman,’ said Damson Beeton. She looked at Septimoth, bound tight under the harness with his heavy gloves hanging by his side, then at Cornelius without even a set of manacles. ‘They’ve got the measure of you, then.’

‘Oh, I have it on reliable authority that we are all on the same side,’ said Cornelius.

‘Take these hex plates off me, dearie,’ said the housekeeper, ‘and I’ll show these Catosian dolly-mops whose side I am on.’

‘Enough of your prattle,’ said the Catosian commander. ‘Follow us.’

Cornelius stared at the rifle muzzles pointing at them, then at his friends; a lashlite who couldn’t fly, an old woman who could barely walk under the weight of her mobile prison and himself: a one-armed freak. Perhaps they were going to be displayed as a carnival attraction?

They were guided through long corridors and chambers carved out of the rock. In one of the chambers, stacks of supplies were being loaded into a capsule by the lock of a miniature atmospheric system and Cornelius revised his estimate of the size of the complex. If they needed an airless transport system to move victuals about, the place might go on for miles. He glanced up. Walls of rough granite towered above them, held in place by iron girders and massive mining pins.

‘Ruxley granite,’ said Cornelius. ‘We must be at Ruxley Waters. We’ve made it into your airship works after all.’

Robur’s ‘daughter’ shot him an angry glance.

‘The works’ hangers extend back into the hills,’ said Damson Beeton.

‘I would say they have been excavating a little more than a few aerostat chambers,’ said Cornelius. ‘To see this place, you’d think Quest believed that another coldtime was returning and he was digging himself an underground hold to see out the centuries of winter.’

They climbed a set of stairs that had been carved into the rock, passing dumb waiters carrying up copper cylinders marked with the celgas symbol. There looked to be far more canisters of the strictly controlled celgas than Abraham Quest should have had access to. At the top of the stairs, a window in a narrow corridor looked down on a chamber containing an engineering-frame hung with models of various airships — some based on the Jackelian aerial navy, others blue-sky designs, outlandish shapes of connected hulls with battleship-like under structures. A rotating propeller driven by a compact steam engine was simulating a powerful wind down the length of the test frame.

Damson Beeton turned her head to and fro despite the weight of her hex helmet, drinking in all the sights the airship works had to offer. Stolen celgas. Unauthorized airship designs. Military forces far beyond the company limits allowed to fencible regiments. There was enough evidence down here to see Abraham Quest and his staff take the drop outside Bonegate for the amusement of the Circleday gallows crowd a dozen times over.

The granite walls gave way to narrow wooden corridors, as if they were walking along the inside of a steamship. At one point they had to form into single file to cross a wooden gangway across a cavern, rope nets covering store rooms below, the space being loaded high with sacks and crates by a column of Quest’s workers.

Prods from the fencible soldiers’ rifles kept them moving, apart from a brief halt when a squad of retainers came striding across their path. They all looked of an age in their green uniforms. There was a flicker of inquisitiveness in their eager eyes as they passed by the motley prisoners, but they kept on marching in a disciplined formation.

‘Young,’ noted Septimoth.

‘From his academies, no doubt,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘The homes for street children and urchins that the House of Quest sponsors.’

‘They look more like soldiers than poorhouse sweepings to me,’ said Cornelius.

‘I’m sure their training is superior to that of the army’s regiments,’ said the housekeeper. ‘A better deal than parliament’s silver shilling and the taste of the lash more often than the taste of grog rations.’

‘The cadets are trained by the free company,’ said the Catosian, the pride evident in her tone. ‘At least, in matters pertaining to military instruction. They want for nothing when it comes to honing their bodies and their minds.’

‘Philosopher-kings,’ whispered Cornelius. ‘He has raised an army of philosopher-kings.’

‘I doubt that Quest found much time for tutoring them in philosophy,’ said Septimoth.

‘You are wrong,’ said the officer, watching the last of the column of cadets pass by. ‘Without a perfect mind to drive it, a perfect body is reduced to barely competent muscle. A soldier must understand what is worth dying for and what is worth living for, and the distinction between the two.’

Damson Beeton frowned. The wolftakers of the Court of the Air lived by a similar code. ‘Now that sounds worryingly familiar.’

‘You will have the opportunity to hear it again,’ said the Catosian. ‘Very shortly.’

They entered a round chamber with polished wooden decking but no natural light, recessed gas lamps hissing gently with a yellow radiance. Steps on either side led down to pits where retainers tended transaction engines and monitored illuminated dials. Dressed in aprons similar to those worn by Greenhall engine men, the staff regulated their machinery’s pressure by working wheels set along racks of copper pipes.

At the end of the chamber stood Abraham Quest and Robur, a handful of fencible officers in attendance — some obviously Catosian, others more of his academy sweepings. Quest turned, smiling, when he noticed Cornelius and the other two prisoners from Dolorous Isle. ‘A little different from the last tour I gave you, Compte de Speeler.’

‘All in all, I preferred the orchids,’ said Cornelius. ‘Even the ones that ate your mice.’

‘You three were coming close to uncovering my real game,’ said Quest. ‘So close that I thought I would spare you the trouble of breaking into my airship works and the undignified business of sneaking around my premises.’

‘Or the trouble I was taking to update the whistler network with my last report,’ said Damson Beeton.

‘You mean the Court of the Air doesn’t know about me already? You needn’t underplay your organization’s curiosity about my ambitions,’ said Quest. ‘I appreciate the interest the Court has been taking in my activities, wholly predictable as your people’s predations are.’

‘I’ve been called a lot of things in my years,’ said Damson Beeton, ‘but never predictable.’

‘Please,’ said Quest, ‘no false modesty. I am one of the few people in the world to grasp the amount of transaction-engine power it takes to model the whole of Jackelian society, to structure the quiet but deadly interventions of your wolftakers. How does the House of Quest and myself appear in the maths turning on the Court of the Air’s transaction-engine drums, I wonder?’

‘Leakage,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘Pure leakage.’

Quest’s lips tightened into a thin smile. ‘Well, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I have been putting my own theories of transaction-engine modelling to good use.’

‘Using deceased steammen components, perhaps?’ Cornelius said.

‘You’re not even warm,’ said Quest. ‘No, I used my transaction-engine rooms to model the pattern of what should be the behavioural norm for my employees. Here’s what came up as abnormal-’ Quest gestured at one of the workers in the pit and a Rutledge Rotator spun into operation on the wall. The image pixellated into a row of coffins, heavy armoured affairs gleaming black, with silver sigils sketched across them. The angle of the picture altered to show human heads visible at the other end of the metal coffins, mouths gagged with the same style of restraining mask Damson Beeton had been wearing. The old woman hissed as she recognized some of the faces.

‘Normally I admire persistence,’ said Abraham Quest. ‘You can accomplish so much with simple persistence. Give it enough time, and the wind can wear away mountains with a breeze as gentle as a whisper; but the Court of the Air’s tedious desire to infiltrate my concerns has really grown into something of an irritation for me now.’

‘You really think you can do that to the Court’s agents with impunity?’ asked Damson Beeton.

‘I’ve already had a taste of your reprisals. One of your sleeper agents managed to escape my attentions. He tried to eliminate me when he discovered I had captured your colleagues, but in one of life’s little ironies, I was pushed out of the way of his killing shot by your employer.’ Quest laughed, and looked across at Cornelius. ‘Would you save me again if the opportunity arose? It is interesting, is it not? For all the havoc you inflict across the border running around wearing a Furnace-breath Nick mask, when you had to act on pure instinct, your first reaction was to save life, not take it. I would say there’s hope for you, yet.’ Quest pointed up at the image of the restrained agents. ‘I’m sure there will be repercussions, damson. Wolves prey on sheep; wolftakers prey on the wolves, but who preys on the wolftakers? I do believe you will find the Court of the Air’s position in the ecos has just changed.’

‘You think you’re the top of the food chain now?’ said Damson Beeton. ‘Circle preserve us all, then. What do you intend to do with our agents?’

‘Your colleagues are alive,’ said Quest. ‘Albeit a little limited in capacity, currently. I didn’t want to find out their level of proficiency in the worldsinger arts the hard way, so I devised the hex boxes as a way to curtail the Court’s witchery and sorcerer’s tricks. I modelled the hexes on a transaction engine too — another first, I believe. They are very complex. I doubt whether there are many agents in the Court capable of breaking them. As to your colleagues’ fate, I am sure I can find a good use for them. As bookends, perhaps?’

A retainer in an elaborate blue uniform came up to Quest, whispering something in the mill owner’s ear. Quest looked at Robur, nodded, and the mechomancer descended into one of the instrumentation pits, both his hands reaching out to yank down a lever. As he threw the lever, the entire room started to tremble, the wall behind Quest lowering to reveal an arc of armoured glass stretching from the floor to the ceiling. There was only darkness behind the glass, but it was getting lighter, the growing illumination accompanied by a massive crunching sound beyond their room.

Septimoth covered his sensitive ears with his glove-covered talons. ‘That noise …’

‘Pneumatic pistons,’ said Quest. ‘Extremely large ones.’

With a heavy jolt their chamber was raising itself from the earth, the dark rock face outside falling away as they passed iron tubes pushing back the Ruxley granite in gushes of steam. Then they were raised clear of all obstructions, left with a view of a line of fertile green hills outside the glass. On the opposite slope, the rocky crest of a hill was flowering open to give birth to a monstrously large airship — three globes bound together in a steel frame, the under-structure of a Jackelian man-o’-war hanging embedded into her hull units. To the side of them a second hill was opening, releasing another giant aerostat into the sky, gusts of smoke from the pneumatic engines billowing out underneath the craft. With a start, Cornelius realized they were standing on the bridge of a third such vessel.

In front of the sheet glass, two ship’s wheels had risen from the floor, retainers in striped airship sailors’ shirts taking the wheels, while an elaborately uniformed man — the captain of the vessel — paced behind the elevator and rudder helmsmen. Cornelius shook his head. The skipper should be nervous. They had just declared war on Jackals. The House of Guardians maintained an absolute monopoly over their power in the skies. The RAN flew alone, as guarantor of the realm’s freedoms. No other nation had celgas. No other nation had an aerial navy — and the Jackelian state would severely punish anyone who dared to try to alter that happy equilibrium.

‘You have gone too far this time,’ said Cornelius.

‘These three vessels are high-lifters,’ said Quest. ‘You’ll find our journey has only just begun.’

‘Jackals has dealt with science pirates before,’ noted Damson Beeton. ‘Underwater raiders like Solomon Dark and aerial menaces like the Marshal of the Air. If you think these three oversized toys of yours are a match for the hundreds of airships the RAN has on her lists, you will find yourself sadly mistaken. The first city you attack, the four fleets of the navy will be mobilized to hunt you down.’

‘Do you really believe my vision is so limited?’ said Quest, sadly. ‘I helped design half the vessels serving with the Jackelian navy today — I know their weaknesses and their strengths — I could give them quite a run for their money, if that was my intent. But it is not. The Leviathan here and her two sister ships are not vessels of war, they are vessels of exploration.’

‘I glided past many Jackelian aerostats when I hunted,’ said Septimoth, ‘but I have never seen anything like these craft.’

‘No,’ said Quest, turning to the elderly wolftaker, ‘but you have, haven’t you, damson? When you’ve visited the Court of the Air. A configuration of modified aerospheres bound together in an aerial city. All the better for keeping the celgas under pressure, every square inch of extra lift we can squeeze out of our ballonets.’

‘How high are you planning to take us?’ demanded Damson Beeton.

‘A little further than the Court of the Air’s station in the sky,’ said Quest. ‘I intend to find Camlantis with my three explorers of the heavens.’

‘Cam-’ Cornelius could not believe what he was hearing. ‘You’ve lost your bloody mind. Camlantis is a penny dreadful tale — bad history that makes for good novels. You might as well fly off to find the cottage of Mother White Horse or the ancient kings of Jackals sleeping under their hill.’

‘Scholars said the same about the city of Lost Angels before its ruined towers were discovered rotting under the ocean,’ said Quest. ‘In fact, people say something very similar about you now in Quatershift, Compte de Speeler … that you are a myth, not a man: They seek him here, they seek him there,the furnace-breathed killer with the demon stare.’

‘You declared yourself an outlaw when you launched your three stats,’ said Cornelius, fighting down the urge to yell. ‘You’ve thrown away your entire commercial empire in Jackals. And you’ve done all that for the sake of a child’s tale?’

‘Easy come, easy go,’ said Quest. ‘You think I had true wealth, the man who bought Jackals, only to have his bill of sale cancelled when he presented it? I was never rich, before now. I just had piles of trinkets to spill onto my grave like some dirty great barbarian chief. What’s inside our minds, what we think, what dreams we can achieve, that’s our true wealth. With the secrets of the ancients unlocked, we shall rewrite not just our understanding of prehistory, but the face of the world itself!’

Cornelius looked at Damson Beeton and Septimoth. The lashlite seemed entranced by the scale of the high-lifters they could see turning slowly against the sky. Damson Beeton shook her head sadly, only her ancient eyes visible under the heavy visor. Abraham Quest was quite clearly insane — his wealth, his reputation, all his holdings — he had destroyed his entire life on a mere whim and the three of them were now being pulled along in the jet stream of his preposterous obsession. Prisoners, until they plunged down ice-heavy from the airless heavens, or were shot to pieces by squadrons of RAN vessels enraged by these three interlopers threatening Jackals’ carefully crafted balance of power on the continent.