The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Commodore Black clutched tightly onto the cage’s bars as they swung out of the petrol mists and over the edge of the pit. That was odd; the normal reception committee of iron apes did not seem to be waiting for them. Instead it was the small siltempter with a prehensile tail and a cheetah cloak working the winch mechanism below, alone.

‘It’s that capering fool,’ said the commodore. ‘Maybe his job is to give us breakfast and fatten us up before we are fed to the thunder lizards.’ His stomach grumbled at the thought. They hadn’t been fed in days ‘A nice slice of jungle boar with plenty of crackling on the side for me to crunch through, and a little blessed cold wine to wash it down with.’

‘They feed their boilers with tar-soaked charcoal,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I doubt if any of the siltempters have much experience with the murdered meat you softbodies consume.’

‘They can pick fruit from their trees, can’t they?’ whined the commodore. ‘Just a little energy, to help us run around their infernal fighting pit. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

‘I can feel something,’ said Billy Snow. ‘A presence. Can you not sense it, too?’

‘The hunger is playing tricks on your mind,’ said the commodore.

But it was not in his mind.

‘Something is not as it should be,’ said Veryann. ‘Look at the siltempter.’

Their cage lodged on the mud in front of the small metal creature — his dark hull faintly illuminated, not with the glow of the fireflies that flitted above the burning oil in the prison pit, but with a light that was pure white, whiter than anything had a right to be.

‘Keep your voices down,’ said the siltempter. ‘Most of the tribe are deep in thoughtflow. Only the perimeter pickets are awake.’

He extended his iron fingers and white light flowed from the tips of his pincers, suffusing the transaction lock with its glow. As the light entered the lock, the tiny transaction-engine drums inside the construct started rotating at a blinding speed, steam rising from the metal as they spun so fast they began to melt. There was a dull thud as the cage door opened, the remains of the lock engine dripping molten tears onto the mud, coalescing into a cooling steel puddle.

‘Ayeeee,’ Ironflanks bowed — half in reverence, half in fear. ‘You are no siltempter, you are ridden. Which Loa …?’

‘Quiet, Ironflanks of the Pathfinder Fist,’ instructed the siltempter. ‘I am not from the halls of your ancestors — no Loa, I.’

‘I have been party to a steamman possession before,’ said the commodore, ‘on the Isla Needless, when I was on the trail of the treasure of the Peacock Hearne, and you will beg my pardon, sir, if I point out that you appear to be no siltempter now.’

‘He is inhabited by the spirit of the wreckage they have imprisoned in the temple,’ said Billy Snow. ‘You are the Hexmachina.’

‘I see that I am recognized,’ said the possessed siltempter. ‘Well met, Snow of the race of man.’

‘You live!’ Ironflanks hissed in surprise through his voicebox. ‘I thought you fully deactivate.’

‘You have the measure of me, then, for I am spent,’ said the Hexmachina, ‘close to death. Once I could cross the walls of the world and beard the darkest of gods in their dens. Now I only have enough life force to watch from my cage and perform parlour tricks on weak minds such as this vessel I ride.’

‘Why?’ begged Ironflanks. ‘Why come for us now? You never appeared before, you never came for us when a whole order of steammen knights perished to free you from the siltempters.’

‘There was not enough of me left to free,’ said the possessed siltempter, ‘and you had the means to escape among your own number. I do not expend my last reserves of energy for the sake of a party of innocent travellers, Ironflanks of the Pathfinder Fist. My centuries imprisoned here have seen countless slaughtered who did not deserve their fate. There is more to your mission than your personal survival. I see a disturbance in the great pattern surfacing on the paths of probability and your threads are bound tightly to it. Much rests on your survival. More than your mere existence — and more than mine.’

‘I must rescue you,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I still carry the charge from King Steam for your release.’

‘Your mission is over,’ said the Hexmachina. ‘I am fading now. Follow your own path on the great pattern.’

The diminutive siltempter stumbled to his knees, a single arm reaching for something he had tucked under his cheetah cloak. He pulled out Billy Snow’s cane sword, with its hidden witch-blade. ‘I am dying, now; my hold on this vessel weakens. This form cannot be allowed to raise the alarm.’

Billy Snow’s hand reached out for the cane, receiving it in his grip with an uncanny accuracy.

‘You see truly, Snow of the race of man. You know what must be done.’

Ironflanks realized what was happening and tried to stop it, but the little siltempter’s arm pushed weakly out. ‘What must be, must be. All things have their season and my age has passed away, now, along with most of my kin. The age of gods has been replaced with a cold new age of reason and the need for god-slayers in this land is small.’

The possessed siltempter looked up at Billy Snow, his vision plate leaking white light towards the old sonar man. ‘I believe you understand what that feels like.’

‘I believe I do,’ said Billy Snow.

His blade was unsheathed almost too fast to follow, looping around once as the siltempter’s head spilled from his shoulders and slapped into the mud, severed crystal shards sparking as the body tumbled over, oil pumping out from a handful of cables quivering inside the ruin of his neck.

Veryann loosened a machete strapped to the corpse and looped the strap over her own back. ‘It won’t protect us against their kind, but it will serve well enough in the jungle.’

The commodore bent over the corpse. ‘And then there was one, again. I wish we could bury your true remains inside the body of the world, Hexmachina, where your lover the earth could blow lava to warm your strange soul and bring some comfort to you in this mortal winter of reason we have created.’

Ironflanks seemed deeply disturbed by what had happened. He stood there, swaying, as if his mind were locked in a recursive loop. This god-machine had been his life — the reason for his banishment and his life’s purpose before that. Now the Hexmachina was gone. Ironflanks was truly alone, the last of an order of steammen knights reckless enough — courageous enough — to attempt to free the holy machine from their ancient enemy.

T’ricola laid one of her four arms on the steamman’s shoulder. ‘He freed us for a reason.’

‘To find a softbody city abandoned an eternity ago?’ Ironflanks waved his arms in desperation. ‘What reason is that?’

‘Reason enough to go on,’ said Veryann. ‘Are you still my scout?’

‘I-’

‘Think about Abraham Quest’s fee,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘Enough to pay Jackals’ finest mechomancers to remove the lord of the loons’ wicked components from your body.’

‘Why not?’ said Ironflanks. ‘What else is left for me, now? Let us go. The Shedarkshe is south of here. It served me well enough once, leading me northwest and home to Rapalaw Junction. If we follow its course southeast we should reach Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo within a week.’

Veryann looked at the sonar man. ‘May I see your witch-blade, Billy Snow?’

‘It was fashioned to respond only to my touch. In your hands it would just be dead metal.’

‘I thought you would say something like that,’ said Veryann, her eyes gleaming suspiciously.

Behind them came a howl of anger — half animal, half machine-screech. It was a siltempter wearing the bleached skull of a thunder lizard as a helmet, emerging from a boxlike building overhanging the arena next to the oil lake. As the siltempter screeched, the caged thunder lizards in the arena behind him howled and shook the bars of their cages. The keeper of the lizards ran back towards his building even as Billy Snow sprinted towards him, casting out his arm. Billy’s witch-blade shifted form into a spear that hummed as it sliced through the air, striking the running siltempter in the spine and passing straight through his chest to embed itself in a wall. The lizard-keeper stumbled and grabbed hold of a wheel fixed to the wall, rotating it as he fell deactivate into the mud. Above the building, a cap on a whistle lifted, blowing a piercing screech across the darkened pre-dawn compound. Feeding time had started early in the realm of the siltempters.

Still dazed from emerging early from thoughtflow — the trance-like pseudo-sleep of the steammen — metal tribesmen began stumbling out of creeper-covered domes in the jungle in response to the din.

The commodore cast around for a direction free of awakening siltempters, but there was no clear passage that he could see. Razor-edged horrors were coming out from all directions. Roused by the noise outside, Queen Three-eyes pulled against her massive cast-iron chains down in the sand of the arena, her rage and fury roaring across the siltempter community.

Amelia was shivering when she awoke. A cold floor and the drip-drip-drip of water tapping at a puddle close to her head had replaced the warmth of the cramped bathysphere. Groaning, she turned over. She was in a large, grey room with smooth walls made out of some glossy substance she did not recognize. Behind her was the bathysphere, dripping water from its battered lake-weed-covered surface onto the floor — and the prone body of Bull Kammerlan stretched in its shadow.

How had they arrived here? There were no doorways or hatches visible in the chamber. It was as if someone had dis assembled their vessel piece by piece, then rebuilt it in this place. That was the kind of prank that first-years loved to play on their professors. Stealing the giant clocks from the college towers and rebuilding them in one of the don’s lecture rooms. But whoever had done this to them possessed no playful streak, she suspected. Amelia pulled herself up, ignoring the stiff pain of her limbs — had someone taken her to bits then put her back together, too? She lurched over to where Bull lay. She checked the pulse at his throat with her fingers — he was still warm. Still alive. The luck of a damn slaver.

Amelia looked around the chamber. No doors, no windows — the flat, gas-lightless walls were generating their own illumination somehow, with no visible source. Cupping the puddling water from the bathysphere she splashed it onto Bull’s face. He blinked and she gave him another dousing, which had the intended effect.

‘You back to normal, dimples?’ Bull coughed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were laughing like a mad woman back on the boat, dragging us towards the mincing machine that had done for Tree-head Joe’s vessels,’ said Bull. ‘I wasn’t expecting to wake up at all, let alone in here. Where is “here” by the way?’

Her head hurt. She remembered the radiance of the stone circle under the water and the longing for it. But nothing else.

‘I’ll be cast off the Circle if I know where we are,’ said Amelia. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any way to get inside here … or out again.’

Bull pulled himself up and laid his hands on the bathysphere, ducking his head under the hull to check its condition. There was a clunk as he popped the hatch, then he reappeared a minute later, brandishing a metal rod. It was a poor weapon, but it was all he could detach from the interior of their craft. ‘The hatch was locked from the inside. I had to use the diver’s emergency release to get into her — but someone got us out of the cabin, right enough.’

Amelia looked around. Something about the chamber — something she could not quite put her finger on — reminded her of the seed-ship observation room she had been locked up in by the Daggish. But the walls down here were like nothing she had seen in the nest city. And if they had been returned to the not-so-tender clutches of the Daggish emperor without his precious crown to placate him, they were more likely to have woken up with moss fronds creeping down their throats and crawling inside their eardrums, than in this chill alien place. Yes, there was definitely something about this chamber. A sense of familiarity, as if she had visited here before.

‘Here we are!’ Amelia shouted into space. ‘What are you doing with us?’

There was no reply. Bull snorted. ‘Nobody visiting the zoo today, then?’

Amelia checked the collection nets behind the bathysphere. They had been emptied of all the debris she had collected from the bottom of the lake, but there were still fronds of wet lake weed wrapped around the wire mesh. Giving up on the boat, Amelia prowled the boundary of the chamber, feeling the walls for any sign of a hatch, an exit. When she approached the final side of the chamber, a section of the wall dis appeared, simply dissolved as if it had never existed, the newly formed entrance revealing a corridor receding into absolute darkness. Jumping back in alarm, Amelia watched the wall become solid again as she moved away. Bull came running over, laying both of his hands on the section of the wall that had vanished. It was rock hard. Nothing happened as he thumped it. Amelia stepped forward and the wall vanished again, the corridor illuminating this time, as if it was encouraging her to enter.

‘It likes you, girl,’ said Bull.

Amelia glanced around the chamber holding the bathysphere. ‘There’s nothing for us here.’

‘Well, I’m not staying around here on my lonesome,’ said Bull, stepping closer to her, as if he was fearful that the wall might close up and leave him trapped behind.

‘I thought you believed I was a Jonah?’ said Amelia.

‘Stuck in Circle-knows where, with half the Daggish fleet waiting for us at the other end, what would make you think that?’ Bull said. ‘Besides, I’m a practical man. Something created this — and it sure wasn’t Tree-head Joe or the spirit of Lord Tridentscale. What was it you said about traps?’

‘They mean treasure.’

‘That’s the part I like,’ said Bull. ‘You can tell me more about that.’

‘They also mean death concealed in a hundred different cunning ways,’ said Amelia, annoyed by his flippant tone. ‘I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years — none of them have lasted the course.’

‘Yeah, I can tell,’ said Bull. ‘But you haven’t worked with a superior pedigree like mine before. I survived life in the fleet-in-exile, I survived working the river along Liongeli and the holding tanks of Bonegate. All this-’ he gestured down the corridor ‘-is just meat on the bone to a man like me.’

‘You’re poured from the same pot as Jared Black,’ said Amelia. ‘I can see that much from your boasting.’

‘He’s a useless old man who gave up on what he believed in,’ said Bull. ‘That’s not something I would ever do.’

Amelia indicated they should go into the corridor, the slaver first. ‘The commodore cut his cloth to fit the times. I would take that as a sign of intelligence.’

A couple of seconds after they had passed through, the wall solidified behind them. She resisted the temptation to walk back and see if it would open as willingly for her again as it had when she had been inside the chamber.

Halfway down the corridor, and the air around them seemed to be getting warmer — a tepid wind playing down the passageway. Amelia stopped, suspicious now, and checked the floor and the walls. They were as featureless as the chamber holding the bathysphere.

‘What is it?’ said Bull.

‘It’s getting hotter.’

‘You expecting us to be chased down the corridor by a wall of fire?’

‘At the very least.’ She traced her hand across the wall, not quite enamel, not quite glass. ‘No dust down here, no leaks of water, no dirt. Just like our chamber. This could have been cleaned a couple of minutes ago.’

‘The walls here are a different colour,’ said Bull, tapping the side of the passageway. ‘It feels different to the touch too.’

The sides of the passage changed even more as they progressed down the corridor — from the strange smooth grey material to something that resembled green glass. Amelia was walking with her finger running down the cool surface when the glass turned completely transparent. Bull whirled around. Dazzling light flooded the corridor, multiple oblong-shaped sheets of green glass rotating on the other side of the now translucent wall. As they watched, the revolving oblong planes began to be filled with scenes, images and sounds of the world beyond — grey rain-filled clouds scudding over the pneumatic towers of Middlesteel, a drover leading a flock of geese down a small country lane. There was no order to the images, some familiar, others scenes from nations so exotic that Amelia could only guess at their identity.

‘There’s the town square at Coldkirk,’ said Bull. ‘I stayed there for a winter, when I was on the run from the crushers in Jackals.’

‘And Cassarabia, too,’ said Amelia. ‘The royal water gardens at Bladetenbul. They’re like the imagery from a crystal-book.’ She pressed her hand against the barrier. Not even a smear was left on the surface. ‘But with this wall, I think it’s the glass that holds the recording.’

Bull pointed at the scenes of Jackelian life floating on the sheared planes beyond. ‘That’s no ancient record from a crystal-book. That’s happening now.’

As they moved further down the corridor the scenes began to transform. Subtle changes at first — streets from Jackelian cities, but with their fashions slightly off kilter — women wearing Quatershiftian bonnets and soldiers on leave strutting about in brigade blue rather than the wine-red coats of the new pattern army. Further still, and the clothes changed to an austere parliamentarian cut, the kind of fashion favoured hundreds of years earlier — but updated in a sinister military style. The streets of Middlesteel grew darker, less colourful. The buildings taller and more imposing, but all individuality of dress vanishing from the citizenry — a sea of grey and black, as if everyone in the capital was serving in the army.

‘What is this?’ hissed Bull. ‘This isn’t Jackals.’

Amelia’s head had begun to throb again. ‘It is. Look at the streets, the buildings. It’s the capital.’

In the vision floating in front of them, a massive roaring sounded from the crowds lining the boulevard, the silhouettes of a fleet of airships thrumming across the sky. Their hulls were not painted in the chequerboard colours of the RAN, but were instead pitch black, apart from a single circle filled with a blood-red gate — the gate of parliament, solitary, without the lion that flew on the true flag of Jackals. Along the boulevard marched the Special Guard — black cloaks instead of red, their muscled arms wearing armbands bearing the same crimson gate that adorned the aerostats. Their sweeping march, so precise and strong, was made menacing in this vision. Stamping the road, shaking the street. Between their ranks were carts loaded with cages full of prisoners — starved, broken wretches still wearing the rags of other nations — Cassarabian gowns, Catosian togas, Kikkosicoan ponchos. The crowd bayed their hate, soldiers accompanying the carts striking through the bars with their whips when the mob had roared loud enough to be rewarded with blood.

A Cassarabian woman hidden under black robes shielded her daughter, the whip cracking across her back. ‘Whip the child,’ someone yelled from the pavement. The call was taken up by the mob until one of the Special Guardsmen yanked the mother back to expose her ten-year-old girl to their fury.

‘No,’ Amelia moaned, ‘that’s not us, that’s not Jackals.’ Her words were lost in the fury of the vision, a sea of standards bobbing in front of her tear-stained eyes, each bearing an eagle clinging to the sharpened teeth of parliament’s gate.

‘What is this cursed place?’ said Bull.

Words came to Amelia in answer, but it was as if they were drawn deep from something ancient lurking within her. ‘These are the corridors of else-when, that which might have been, the resonance of the parallel path.’

Bull stumbled past a revolving plane where cavalrymen with royalist feathers in their caps galloped past a burning hamlet; huddles of refugees mixed with suspected Leveller insurgents watching their lives disappear in a furnace of heat. ‘These are visions sent to drive us insane.’

‘No, this is the great pattern that the people of the metal talk about, but alternative threads on it. The same story told by different authors, with endings just as diverse.’

‘Who would do this thing?’ asked Bull. ‘Create this hall of horrors?’

‘I think this is for humility,’ said Amelia. ‘To remind us that we always have choices and our choices have consequences. To be mindful of the harm that we might cause others.’

Bull gazed hypnotized by the plane he was watching. A royalist regime, killing and burning and punishing any dissent displayed towards the whims of a dark queen. He could not bear to look at the coat of arms worn by the secret police tossing the night’s curfew breakers into the torture rooms at Ham Yard — not the hedgehog symbol of the honest crushers of Middlesteel, but the unicorn and lion of his mother’s house. His house.

‘We ruled for the people,’ whispered Bull, ‘for them, not over them.’

The two of them pushed deeper down the corridor, trying to avoid looking at the walls now, catching only glimpses as the scenes deviated further and further from the comfortably reassuring world they knew. A Jackals filled with craynarbians, polishing their exo-skeletons while their cousins from the race of man laboured in the fields, clad only in slaves’ loincloths and shivering under the overseers’ whips. A Middlesteel empty and abandoned, the capital’s streets buried by ice and snow — the coldtime returned early to make a world of frozen emptiness. Then a land of sands blowing in hot from a furnace sun, only the tip of the solitary bell tower of Brute Julius protruding from the drifting desert to mark the fact that this world had ever been inhabited at all — a lone figure in Cassarabian sand-rider’s garb on his knees in front of the lost tower, praying to the hundred aspects of the blessed Cent. No green and pleasant realm for Jackals here, just a sea of endless dunes.

At last the corridor of cruel possibilities came to an end, opening out onto a colossal chamber. The vista reminded Amelia of the Chimecan undercity beneath Middlesteel in its scale, but the statues carved into the entrance wall behind them were far more ancient, and the valley before them was not filled with the massive fungal forests of Middlesteel-below, but an entirely different kind of woodland. Mounds of living machines! Some, bamboo fields of tentacles and throbbing anthills, others spreading out from oak-sized limbs to form an undulating canopy.

Bull’s arm rose as he found his metal rod from the bathysphere tugging itself towards a small orange sun burning in the sky above them.

‘The sun is trying to snatch my club.’

Amelia shook her head. ‘It’s no true sun. It’s a source of power, like an expansion engine or a steam boiler. There’s a field of magnetism containing it — release your club.’

Bull opened his fingers and the rod left his hand, spinning out and up towards the sun; a minute later there was a tiny splash of light as it hit the surface of the globe and was incinerated.

‘Are you possessed again, Guardian’s daughter?’

No,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s as if I know this already. It’s as if all of this is a memory.’

She turned to look at the pair of statues shielding the entrance to the corridor of visions. Carved out of white stone, they were heavily stylized, cubist arms joining together to hold up a roll of parchment above the door.

‘The twins. Knowledge standing on the left, and the wisdom to use it appropriately standing on the right.’

‘If you can “remember” a way out of here that doesn’t involve us being pursued by half the greenmesh, I would consider that mighty useful,’ said Bull.

Her mind was filling with information. As if her existence here was awakening long-dormant memories of a house she had once lived in. But this was an ancient place. She had never seen anything like it — not in the university archives, not in the crystal-books her father had saved from the bailiffs’ clutches and left to her. So how could all this seem so familiar?

‘Through that forest of machines,’ said Amelia. ‘Our way lays through there.’

‘Isn’t there another track?’ asked Bull. ‘Even a corridor showing more horrors of the might-have-been …?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s the spit of Tree-head Joe’s throne room down there-’

Was that where she had seen this before? No. Her memory wasn’t from the chambers of the Daggish hive. It came from somewhere deeper.

‘There’s a reason for that. I think the Daggish are the feral descendants of the Camlanteans’ living machines. Not much of a legacy to leave behind, are they? This is the way. Let’s follow my instincts,’ said Amelia, stepping down the slope towards the machine forest.

Bull sighed. ‘And it looks like I’m still following you.’

He cast his eyes around nervously as the two of them entered the forest. While the engineering of the Daggish had seemed bone-like and shell hard, the machine forest was smooth and organic, tentacles extruding from trunks to stroke other machines — exchanging information and function, then reshaping to whatever exotic design they were working to. Delicate transparent devices like butterflies fluttered between the various limbs of the organic machines, orange light glinting off their milky scales. There was a spray like dew raining from somewhere overhead, keeping the living engineering cool and supple. Some of it fell on Amelia’s face and she tasted it on her lips. Sweet, sugary — it contained the nourishment the growing flesh needed to renew itself. Renewing it forever, perhaps, or for as long as the manufactured sun providing it with life-giving light continued to burn in its magnetic hearth.

The two of them pushed through the forest, deeper into the dream-like realm. Amelia’s dream. She was close now, she could feel it with every iota of her being, and the determination of seeing her life’s work fulfilled drove her further into the alien land.

Billy Snow pulled the spear out of the wall of the building, the witch-blade shifting back to its sabre form, quivering in delight at having tasted the system oil of the impaled siltempter.

The first tribesman to have been roused by the arena’s whistle leapt at Ironflanks, but the scout had anticipated the move and closed in, using the momentum of the siltempter’s attack to twist him about, slamming him down into the mud. One of Ironflanks’ four arms punched in, piercing the siltempter’s hull and bursting his boiler heart.

Commodore Black scooped up the dying creature’s machete attachment, brandishing it like a crab’s claw, as if just its presence was enough to avert the charge of siltempters running towards them. ‘There!’ He pointed to a section of the jungle wall still clear of fighters. ‘Run for that, my brave boys.’

Glancing around, the commodore saw Ironflanks racing away from them, towards the arena. ‘What are you doing? This way.’

‘It is time,’ shouted Ironflanks as he sprinted towards where the thunder lizards’ keeper had died. ‘Time to make amends for my thread on the pattern.’

Commodore Black cursed the steamman. Had the Hexmachina’s expiry from this plane of existence sent Ironflanks off the deep six?

Billy Snow moved in front of T’ricola; cutting the head off the spear a siltempter was using to try to disembowel the craynarbian. They were ancient enemies, the siltempters and the craynarbians, living shell-to-hull as they did in the depths of Liongeli. The mutate steammen knew every trick of piercing craynarbian shells, breaking them open like lobsters and bringing them pain. Snow’s blade dipped low and the siltempter fell forward, all three of his tripod of legs severed below the knee joints, three spears left sticking up from the mud while the decapitated body twitched unbelieving in front of T’ricola.

Commodore Black reached the building overlooking the arena. Its door had been staved in and was hanging off its hinges. Inside, the warmth of the previous day had been preserved within its thick walls. Ironflanks was standing in front of a plane of transparent crystal overlooking the arena floor. The steamman heaved at a wheel set on a panel, looking nothing so much as the master of a vessel, trying to turn the building about onto a new course. Commodore Black caught a glimpse of the arena below. Something like a drawbridge was dropping towards the sand and the commodore suddenly understood what the steamman was doing. Exactly how he intended to make up for his perceived sins on the great pattern.

‘Ironflanks, you idiot of a steamer, you cannot …’

‘Oh, but I can!’ Ironflanks said. ‘My waters are hot, commodore softbody, and now I’m running fit to boil.’

Beyond the screen of glass, the head of Queen Three-eyes hove into view — her single ruined pit and three good eyes focusing on the steamman behind the glass. She roared her contempt of the siltempters, that these little metal devils could chain her, starve her and think that her will could be broken by such artifice. As she howled her rage, the panicked echoes of the other thunder lizards held in the arena joined her in a nervous chorus.

‘Metaljiggermetaljiggerwillwillwillyoufightmefightmememeinthesandsandsand?’

‘I spent very little time in the court of the Steamman Free State,’ shouted Ironflanks, ‘but this I do know — a queen should never be humbled before a prince.’

‘Don’t be doing this,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘Have we not got enough blessed problems to be dealing with?’

Ironflanks punched the switch that released the chains on the kilasaurus max. Somewhere deeper in the building an alarm claxon sounded. Outside there was a whistling noise as the k-max wrenched her newly unlocked chains out of their stake rings so fast that they were sent flying across the arena sands, lashing into a series of benches in the wall and smashing them to splinters. Chains fell off the other lizards in the shadows of the stadium pit, steel teeth in the ground clanking open.

‘Freemefreemefreeme?’ Queen Three-eyes appeared astonished by the actions of her mortal enemy.

Commodore Black backed away from the viewing gallery; terrified the k-max would smash the glass and scoop them out. The steamman seemed to welcome such a fate, standing there with his four arms outstretched, as if he was beseeching Queen Three-eyes to end his aimless life.

It was a dreadful act of symmetry. Ironflanks had been cut from his life’s purpose and the wreckage of his duty in the jungles of Liongeli — and now he had done the same for the queen of the thunder lizards. Killing Ironflanks was all that Queen Three-eyes had lived for since she had lost her life-mate, and now she was being offered the life of her mate’s murderer on a plate.

‘We are both free,’ whispered Ironflanks’ voicebox. ‘We are both free, now.’

Queen Three-eyes looked across the arena at her fellow thunder lizards stampeding for the lowered ramp while it remained open, crunching underfoot the massive bleached bones of their brethren who had been captured before them, made to starve to sharpen their appetite for the games. Her sly eyes narrowed in a cold fury, the sting of oily smoke from these metal devils’ stacks a foul affront to the natural scents of the jungle. This was not the way of things. Other thunder lizards bowed before her and backed away from the claw marks on the plateaux that surrounded her territory. It was time to remind these metal intruders why she was the monarch of Liongeli.

Ironflanks followed Commodore Black back outside the arena building, the first of the thunder lizards to stampede — a tauntoraptor — thumping geysers of mud into the air as it pawed the ground and lowered its horned head towards the siltempters, the metal tribesmen thrown into confusion by the release of the arena animals.

Some of the siltempters had been trying to outflank blind Billy Snow and his deadly morphic blade and noticed the new arrivals too late — outflanked themselves. They tried to throw themselves out of the way of a charging pentaceratops, but delayed by fatal seconds, the bone-clawed hooves flattened their hulls in a pop of splitting steel and cracking crystal. Behind them more rampaging beasts followed, a petrodactyl scooping up a fleeing tribesman and lifting him high in the air before skimming the creature down towards a rocky outcrop, the brief explosion of his breeched boiler sending a shower of shrapnel across the jungle clearing.

Into this carnage strode the queen of Liongeli, her scaly skin flashing orange where the fires of broken siltempters burned in the pre-dawn light. A company of siltempters appeared with airguns, monstrously large iron barrels with ancient cables connected to the pressure of their own boilers. Heavy ammunition drums jangled on top of the guns, hundreds of lead balls queuing for gravity to drop them into barrels and speed them on their deadly duty. With a roar like splintering wood, the siltempters opened fire on the nearest thunder lizards, peppering the beasts with streams of hot lead while other creatures of the metal ran out with poison-tipped javelins, sharp injector reservoirs ready to jet concentrated shots of flying-fish toxin into the flanks of the huge, marauding creatures. A tauntoraptor swung its tail at the group of siltempters bringing it pain with their hail of tiny, stinging stones, sending three of them soaring back into the tree line with their chests crumpled and bleeding oil.

‘Time to withdraw,’ shouted Veryann, surveilling the siltempters as they emerged with increasingly heavy weaponry dug out from their jungle domes and the dark chambers of the temple. The siltempters’ defences were concentrated in a ring around their territory and the released arena creatures had bypassed all of them; but the expedition’s luck wasn’t going to last forever. The siltempters were regrouping fast.

Ironflanks, still disorientated by the twists and turns of his fate, stumbled over a dead tribesman. ‘This way, the river.’ His words were interspersed with his voicebox’s whistles and cries, the stampeding thunder lizards answering with similar calls, a few even moving out of his way — as if he was a calf of their own kind, to be treated with patience. The tree-high legs of a vulcanodon thumped past, revealing a group of trampled siltempter corpses half-buried in the mud. One of the bodies was still moving, trying to pull itself free while dragging two ruined legs, the alloy of both limbs burst and fizzing with the effort of hauling himself along.

Veryann recognized the corpulent form and the frog-like features of the face. ‘Good morning, my prince.’

She pulled one of the poison-headed javelins free from the dirt, brushing down the mud from its shaft. Prince Doublemetal gazed up at the softbody standing over him, his vision plate pulsing in recognition at those who should have been the morning’s entertainment in the arena.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Billy Snow. ‘We are different from their kind.’

‘The difference is the free company’s code,’ said Veryann. ‘And that demands vengeance against those who fight without honour.’

‘Blood only begets blood,’ said the sonar man.

‘That it certainly does.’ Veryann knelt down before the slowly moving body. ‘And I made you a blood oath yesterday, my prince. Do you recall what I said, or were you too busy salivating oil over the crushed remains of Gabriel McCabe to listen to me?’

Prince Doublemetal tried to raise the volume on his voicebox and call for help, but only a burst of static emerged.

‘Gabriel would not have asked for this,’ said Billy Snow.

‘The prince can ask him himself,’ said Veryann, ‘in the unlikely event his putrid soul should be granted entrance to the hall of the fallen.’ She lifted the lance and leveraged it through the gap in the prince’s hull where his left leg was hanging off, sliding it up hard through his abdomen. Her shine-swollen muscles bulged as she used every last iota of her strength to drive her makeshift stake inside the body of the siltempters’ ruler. With a squawk, the crawling prince fell still, smoke pouring through the joints where his crushed legs clung uselessly to his body.

A roar echoed over the stampede, Queen Three-eyes, entering the jungle to crush the camouflaged geodesic domes of the camp, gutta-percha plates shattering as the enraged kilasaurus max slammed against them, terrified siltempters cowering inside as she scooped them out. Veryann nodded in approval at the butchery and tore the House of Quest’s fencibles’ badge from her tattered war jacket, shoving it inside the mouth slash of Prince Doublemetal’s voicebox. So that they would know who had done this. And why. Not a rogue arena animal, but the forces of the free company. Her payment for the slaughter of the strongest man in Jackals.

With the siltempters’ community being torn apart by the creatures they had once tortured for their amusement, the five officers of the Sprite vanished in the confusion, leaving the crash of falling trees and the explosions of bursting siltempters behind them.

The cool, dark rainforest swallowed them up.

There was a discernible difference between the territory that fell on the siltempter side of the border and the greenmesh, a difference that went beyond the peculiar silence of the terrain controlled by the Daggish. In their realm, the jungle grew neater, to a pattern. Still wild, but with a purpose that was lacking outside their dominion.

Commodore Black was the first to comment on it. ‘We might as well be walking through some wicked, wild green out here — like Peddler’s Piece back in the heart of Middlesteel, but laid out by a deranged groundsman.’

‘Peddler’s Piece never felt like this dark place,’ said T’ricola. ‘It makes me itch. Everything about it feels wrong — corrupt.’

‘Your instincts serve you well,’ said Ironflanks. ‘In Liongeli, craynarbians are born with the knowledge that coming close to this land means certain death.’ The lack of animal calls was setting the steamman’s nerves even more on edge than usual — no whistle-song of the birds of the canopy, no growls from hunting cats.

‘I’m glad my moulting skin has proved of some practical use,’ said T’ricola, ‘beyond my sharp new sword bone for hacking back the bush.’

Billy Snow was at the head of the party, now. Ever since they had reached the edge of the greenmesh, it was as if the sonar man had acquired a whole new set of senses, leading them across trails where the massive tree-like sentries of the Daggish had been marching only minutes before. Stopping them in silence at times — sometimes for up to an hour — waiting tensely in the Liongeli heat, moisture rolling down their skins, shell and boiler, while the u-boat man sat cross-legged, meditating on the best path to take. No one commented on this unnatural turn of events, not even Ironflanks, who had warned them it was next to impossible to penetrate the greenmesh by land without alerting the Daggish — without coming across some creature or sentient plant cluster that would pass on its warning to the others in the hive.

Billy Snow might have been denied the services of the Sprite to steal them into the waters of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo, but he was acting as his own sonar now, a living echo sounder. It was said that craynarbian witch doctors possessed the ability to dream walk into the territory of the Daggish without becoming absorbed into their living empire. But as for old Billy, where had he acquired such a talent? While Billy Snow was still in meditation, Ironflanks set his voicebox to low, whispering his suspicions that the sonar man was using a witch doctor’s skills to lead them past the nodes of self-aware jungle that would have alerted the hive to their presence. Nobody seemed willing to raise this with Billy, as if questioning his strange ability might awaken him from his dream and bring Daggish patrols crashing down around the expedition.

Only Veryann appeared to have qualms, her body language revealing the suspicions she harboured towards Billy Snow. But perhaps that was the Catosian way? Trust nothing save that which can be slit with a dagger. His abnormal flowering of abilities was not to be trusted, at least not until it could be understood.

When they reached the course of the Shedarkshe, Billy raised a finger to his mouth. He had led them within a stone’s throw of a seed ship, moored against a pier that looked as if it had flowed out of the skeleton of a hippopotamus that had expired in the water. It was a small vessel of its type — just the right size to carry a border patrol of Daggish warrior drones to the edge of the greenmesh. Or to take the five of them into the heart of enemy territory. Billy pointed to the seed ship and held up three fingers: three Daggish crew left on board.

‘If we attack, won’t these fiendish creatures be able to call for help?’ whispered the commodore.

Billy Snow shook his head. No. He did not voice it, but his meditations had a more practical purpose than merely stilling his noisy mind.

They were fast across the bone-hard pier when the first of the enemy sailors appeared from an iris hatch at the rear of the vessel. It was unarmed and clearly not expecting to blunder into five impure animals not blessed with the harmony of their hive mind. But then, why should the race of man be trespassing on Daggish territory? Creatures such as these were dragged screaming and fighting to their absorption chambers. They did not venture near the Daggish of their own inferior will.

It had barely begun to chatter an alarm when it realized it could no longer communicate with the others on the ship, Billy Snow’s witch-blade — in sabre form now — slashing through the bark-like torso of the thing, cleaving its sensory organs from its trunk and hewing the drone in half. The two drones inside the craft were quicker to realize that they were no longer in communication with the others of the cooperative — the death of their comrade outside suddenly registering on their consciousness — and filled the air with the hammering of their native tongue. Drones had a reflex fear of being out of contact with their fellows. A healthy survival instinct, to stop them from wandering away from the protection of the hive. They knew enough to recognize that they were under assault, though, and one of the drones had the wherewithal to scurry to the wall where the patrol’s spare flame squirts were racked.

It had just pulled the sack-pipe-shaped weapon off the wall when the intruders burst into the cabin, Billy Snow tracing a fatal gash across the creature’s bark-thick chest, before pirouetting and ripping down to sever the weapon’s combustion sack. The dying Dagga tried to trigger its gun but the weapon made an empty hissing noise like an angry cat, the floor puddling with its unlit ammunition.

T’ricola charged the other Dagga, her bone-knife arm swinging in an angry arc and taking a wedge out of the drone, all the pent-up chemical anger of her body’s changes releasing itself in a sudden flurry of strikes. The Dagga stumbled back, shaken — no soldier caste fighter this, but a symbiote navigator for the living boat. Veryann finished the drone off from behind, driving her machete through its brain-bulb and letting the thing fall to the cabin floor, the chattering inside its trunk dying away as its hammer-like tonsils lost their life force.

‘The patrol may be back any second,’ said Veryann, lifting an intact flame weapon from the wall.

‘They are a long way from the boat,’ said Billy, ‘and that weapon you have taken will not work for you. It has a mechanism inside it that serves a similar purpose to a Jackelian blood-code machine — it will fire only for members of the hive.’

‘There’s a cunning thing,’ said the commodore. He kicked the deck of the seed ship. ‘A clever race would make sure this strange seahorse of a craft operated in a similar way.’

‘It does,’ said Ironflanks. ‘It will not travel the Shedarkshe for us.’ The steamman pointed to the dead navigator drone lying sprawled across the floor. ‘Only for one of those.’

‘The seed ship has a brain,’ said Billy Snow. ‘A wonderful thing, grown from a nubbin no larger than a ha’penny. Right about here.’ Billy’s witch-blade cut down, fizzing with delight as it sliced open the living decking, then transforming itself into a trident which the sonar man plunged down through the opening. The ship trembled at the strike, the trident’s fangs growing longer and penetrating deep into the nautical creature. Water churned up from the rear of the craft, bone-like hydro tubes convulsing with misery as it emptied propulsive air behind their stern, pulling against the pier’s anchorage. The craft grew still as the witch-blade extended into the boat’s brain matrix, poisoning and infiltrating the seed ship, much as the Daggish subverted other creatures into their own hive. Turnabout was fair play, it seemed.

‘The craft is ours now,’ said Billy.

‘How are you doing this?’ demanded T’ricola. ‘That witch-blade of yours is no sword that ever saw the shores of Thar.’

‘This vessel and its breed were made to serve people, once, not the other way around. It just needed to be reminded.’

‘Will your blessed seahorse carry us to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’ Commodore Black asked. ‘Will it carry us, Billy Snow, without alerting the other seed ships and Daggish to our presence?’

‘I believe it will,’ said Billy. ‘Although we should rip some vegetation from the shore first to rub over us, if we want to pass for Daggish slaves at a distance.’ He looked at Ironflanks. ‘And you will have to stay out of sight at all times. These creatures possess no means to absorb steammen within their hive — or siltempters, for that matter.’

‘It is almost as if you have been absorbed by the Daggish already, Billy softbody,’ said Ironflanks. ‘The House of Quest might have been better advised to have contracted you for your services as a guide, rather than a u-boat man.’

Billy Snow pointed to his milky unseeing eyes. ‘Who would trust a blind pathfinder, old steamer?’

‘Who indeed?’ said Veryann. ‘Does your mysterious newfound reserve of knowledge extend to whether the Sprite and her mutinous crew have already achieved the expedition’s objective and sailed back past us on the Shedarkshe?’

‘The Sprite has not sailed back down the river,’ said Billy. ‘I fear that things have not gone too well for the u-boat.’

‘My boat. My precious Sprite,’ moaned the commodore. ‘Don’t say that she is wrecked at the end of this river of damned souls?’

‘It is not the u-boat’s condition I speak of,’ said the old sonar man. ‘It’s our crew’s. Apart from those standing in this cabin, I can sense only two other souls from the race of man unabsorbed by the Daggish. And speaking frankly, they don’t appear to be holding up too well at the moment!’

Two Catosian soldiers escorted Cornelius down a corridor along the airship’s starboard side. The exploration vessel had stopped moving now, the immense aerostat holding station at whatever position they had reached. The portholes along the gallery offered little clue to their location — save the fact that they were high. Clouds drifted far below them on the other side of the iced-up glass, the heavens were birdless, and the airship’s jack cloudies wore woollen jerseys over their striped sailors’ shirts. Little puffs of warm fresh air were injected from grilles in the ceiling every couple of minutes, followed by a wheeze like an old man as stale air was withdrawn. Unfortunately for Cornelius, Septimoth and Damson Beeton weren’t there with him to speculate on where in the heavens they had ended up — they had been left behind in the brig when the guards came for him.

At one point, Cornelius and his escort passed a small glass dome set in the hull, a sailor on a metal gangway using a gas-fired heliograph to flash messages across to one of their sister ships hanging in the firmament. The scope clacked as fresh communications landed in a wire basket from a pneumatic tube. Along from the signal station, Cornelius got the briefest glimpse of a hangar filled with engineers working in the shadow of something that looked like nothing so much as an oversized hencoop — a long queue of large iron capsules lined up inside racks, in place of eggs. Now, that was odd. An airship’s fin bombs were made of crystal to contain the acidic blow-barrel sap, two chambers separated by a thin glass membrane in mimicry of the violently explosive tree seeds. Those capsules couldn’t be fin bombs. The metal would corrode, detonating at random. What was this rogue airship fleet of Quest’s up to? The shove of the guards’ rifle butts hurried Cornelius past the open hatch. Had Robur constructed a legion of primitive steammen fighting machines to drop on Jackals, to make its people bend their knee to whatever strange Camlantean philosophy-religion his master Abraham Quest had uncovered in his crystal-books?

Cornelius was led to a portal with a pair of sentries waiting outside. The guards swung open the heavy doors — polished Jackelian oak — to reveal a stately dining room positioned underneath the airship’s bridge. There was a substantial glass nose cone at the far end with panes of glass curving across the floor between embedded girder rails, allowing guests to stare down onto the clouds when the conversation stalled. There was only one diner — Abraham Quest — but a host of staff scurried around under the watchful gaze of Catosian free company fighters lining the wall.

Cornelius indicated the sentries standing guard over their master of the air. ‘Are you expecting one of your crew to murder you?’

‘You think me paranoid?’ said Quest. ‘Well, perhaps. But the Court of the Air may still have infiltrators working undetected among my staff.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘What makes you think that?’ said Quest.

‘The fact that we are still afloat. The Court’s wolftakers are nothing if not thorough.’

Quest indicated the chair at the other end of the table. ‘Perhaps they will be kind enough to allow us to finish our supper before crashing us.’

‘A large table,’ said Cornelius, ‘for only two diners.’

‘I had to construct the Leviathan and her sister stats under the pretence that they were proving craft for a new generation of RAN warships,’ Quest apologized. ‘My airship was to be a flagship design — while this was to be the captain’s table, serving formal dinners for the crew’s officers and visiting dignitaries. The Royal Aerostatical Navy does so love its ritual and its pomp. And foreigners are so easily impressed by the swell of our canvas hulls and the glint of shells from our fin-bomb bays.’

‘The navy doesn’t have airship hangars large enough to dock a craft of this size,’ said Cornelius, watching as a seat was pulled out for him by one of the retainers.

‘Admiralty House are planning a new statodrome,’ said Quest. ‘The invasion by Quatershift and the ease with which they and their revolutionary allies seized our airship fields around Shadowclock unnerved the navy. They are planning to use Veneering’s Rock as their new base of operations.’

‘Veneering’s Rock?’ Cornelius frowned. That was next to impossible. A mile of prime Pentshire land ripped out by the Earth’s fury and left to hang about the county, its heavy granite base keeping it locked above the downs, the land beneath dark in the shadow of the floatquake. There had been a famous cartoon forty years ago, in the Middlesteel Illustrated News. The head of the Jackelian order of worldsingers — the sorcerers whose first function was to tame the raging leylines — standing directly underneath the shadow of the sundered land, his hand cupped over his forehead searchingly; the speech bubble reading: ‘I see no problem?’

‘The Levellers don’t support the scheme, but the Purist members of parliament are pushing for it anyway. The expense will be prodigious, but for a fortress reachable only by airship, immune to the brigades of the People’s Army of the Commonshare …’

‘It’s just a bigger stick,’ said Cornelius.

‘I thought you might approve — or do you prefer something less blunt to beat the shifties with; someone like Furnace-breath Nick, perhaps?’

In front of Cornelius, a retainer lifted the silver lid on a platter of roast pork floating in cider gravy. ‘Furnace-breath Nick is feared by the revolution.’

‘I think our conversation is coming back to where we were in my orchid house, before we were so rudely interrupted,’ said Quest. ‘A single man cannot fight an idea. Only another belief can slay an idea.’

‘You sound like your toad Robur,’ said Cornelius.

‘He took very little persuading to join me,’ said Quest. ‘Anyone who has survived the hell of an organized community knows what the race of man is capable of, knows we have to change our nature if we are to prevent such atrocities repeating themselves with tedious inevitability. He is really very similar to you, in his aspirations.’

‘Robur is nothing like me. He was only kept alive because the First Committee wanted him working on the revolution’s revenge weapons. They needed his skills, much as you seem to.’

‘He’s an exceptionally clever man,’ said Quest. ‘In his own field of expertise, he makes my knowledge and advancements appear as those of a state school foundling in comparison.’

‘Why?’ Cornelius asked. ‘Why do you need the Sun King’s old court mechomancer? Is he helping you in your mad search for Camlantis?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the mill owner. ‘When you join me, I shall tell you.’

‘Camlantis,’ Cornelius tasted the word. ‘Do you realize how insane that sounds? A lost land, a city that historians will tell you never existed at all.’

‘It existed,’ insisted Quest. ‘Listen to me, Cornelius Fortune, Furnace-breath Nick, Compte de Speeler. I have studied all that we know about history and pre-history in the hope that I could learn lessons that might stop us repeating the errors of our past in the present. Everything I have found is the same cycle of war and devastation, for as far back as time is recorded. You think the blood of the revolution in Quatershift you nearly drowned in is exceptional? Sadly, it is the norm. Every age has its Commonshare. The invasion of Jackals five summers ago, the Two-Year War, the civil war in Jackals six hundred years before that. Go back sixteen hundred years and you’ll find the Chimecans ruling the continent from their underground holds and treating the frozen nations of the surface as nothing but food for their table. Every age, Cornelius, every age produces blood and famine and needless suffering. All save one. One brief glimmer of sanity where a group of people worked together in understanding and peace and achieved the closest thing to paradise the world has ever seen, before or since. Isn’t such a world worth the search?’

‘It won’t work,’ said Cornelius. His artificial arm was shaking with anger, the reworked mechanism unable to cope with the surge of emotions in its owner. ‘It never does. Sink me, but I do believe you are quite insane.’

‘Are you so sure in your prejudices?’ Quest shook his head sadly. ‘This is how you will defeat the great terror in Quatershift. Not by the stalking of their committeemen and Carlists, but with a rival idea. The truth of Camlantis shall set the world free. You need to decide who you are and what your destiny is. Is it to end the horrors of revolution once and for all — or is it merely to torture those who once tortured you?’ Quest lifted the mask of Furnace-breath Nick out from under the table. ‘Are you Cornelius Fortune, or are you this? The man, or the monster?’

‘This one doesn’t deserve me,’ whispered the mask. ‘He isa butcher, not a swordsman.’

None of the retainers was prepared for their guest’s reaction. Cornelius shoved the table back, sending a soup tureen spilling over the glass of the viewing gallery.

‘My face!’ Cornelius lunged across the table, trying to claw at Quest. ‘Give me back my face!’

On a hair-trigger already, the Catosian free company soldiers rushed forward and dragged Cornelius back. He kicked down, shattering one of the guard’s knees with the heel of his boot, lunging out to try to stave in another’s windpipe with the flat of his palm. She blocked the move and her comrades piled in, raining blows down with their rifle butts as Cornelius’s fierce struggle ebbed away under their assault. They pulled him up, bruised and bloodied, and gasped as they saw his face had changed. It was now an exact simulacrum of Abraham Quest’s own.

‘The Catgibbon was right,’ said Quest. ‘You are a shape switcher. It’s astounding the consideration Cassarabia’s womb mages show when it comes to ensuring the caliph’s rivals fall to his assassins’ blades. And I understand your lineage is half-Jackelian, too. Imagine what you could do if both your parents had been blood-twisted. You were created with quite a gift, Compte de Speeler.’

‘Isn’t this what you wanted to create?’ Cornelius snarled across the table at Abraham Quest. ‘A twin of you, dreaming your dreams of an unachievable utopia. A compliant servant of the House of Quest, following behind your toad Robur to murder any vision save that which you have imagined first?’

‘It’s quite unnerving to see your own face contorted with rage, drooling spittle on someone else’s skull,’ Quest said.

Cornelius groaned with frustration as he tried to twist out of the soldiers’ grip.

‘Take me back, old friend,’ hissed the mask. ‘I’ll make youstrong. Strong enough to kill them all.’

‘This is you,’ screamed Cornelius. ‘This is your face. You give me back my face and I’ll return yours.’

Quest sighed. ‘So this really is all you are, the monster over the man.’

Cornelius tried to struggle free and nearly managed to escape his captors’ grip, until he was winded by the fresh slam of rifle butts. The pain pacified him for a moment only. ‘You’re the monster, Quest. I’ve hunted enough of your kind across the border to have smelt your stench before. The smell of a new order approaching, and the blood in the fields, all the bones sticking out of the mud.’

‘Take him back to his cell with the lashlite. Don’t allow him anywhere near the Court of the Air’s agent in the brig. Damson Beeton is dangerous enough as she is, without this madman’s help.’

‘Don’t leave me,’ pleaded the mask. ‘This one is full of lightand he burns so bright. I need to breathe the shadows.’

It took five of the Catosian women to pull Cornelius away, his legs flailing as their shine-enhanced muscles bulged, restraining him with all their unnatural strength. The prisoner’s counterfeit Quest-face was distorted in fury. ‘Let me go back to my tree, Quest! I want to go back to my beautiful tree, my wife, and I want my face back; so full of light, burning. You’re burning, burning-’

Then he was gone, his cries echoing fainter and fainter in the corridor outside, the two great doors cutting off his howls of anger with a heavy thump. The retainers busied themselves, cleaning up the spilled food and blood that had fallen across the observation glass. One of the staff lifted up the upset tureen. ‘Tree … what tree was he talking about?’

Quest stood up from the table, wiping the soup off his shirt, and laid a reassuring hand on the retainer’s shoulder. ‘I doubt if we will ever know — or understand if we did.’

He lifted up the mask of Furnace-breath Nick, examining it from different angles, as if the answer lay in the sigils painted on its surface. Shaking his head he put the devil’s mask down and left the chamber.

‘And he had the audacity to think me insane.’

Amelia was starting to believe the deranged ramblings of that old hag in Cassarabia and the prognostications of Rapalaw Junction’s witch doctor. If her life had a purpose, a point, a fixed resolution on the Circle, then investigating the strange pocket world they had been transported to from under the lake in the ruins of Camlantis was it. She reined herself in. When you started believing your own press in the penny dreadfuls, that was when you got sloppy … and sloppy in her trade meant a trapdoor falling onto a chute lined with steel stakes.

Amelia glanced across at Bull Kammerlan. ‘The ruler of the Daggish seemed convinced its crown is down here. Let’s see if we can find it.’

Bull glanced around. ‘Which way?’

Under the land’s artificial sun, her sense of direction wasn’t as good as it normally was — but a part of her knew where they should be heading all the same. This was quite disconcerting. Did birds feel the same way when they quit a Jackelian winter for warmer climes, or did they just accept the knowledge of direction and the urge to travel, like they accepted the impulse to feed on an empty belly? At the edge of the forest the throbbing, waxy skin of the living machines gave way to a slope covered with structures that seemed to glisten on the hillside — an architecture that had last been seen on the surface of the world many thousands of years ago.

‘There’s a city,’ said Bull, ‘an entire city down here.’

Amelia sighed. ‘Not quite.’

From their elevation she could see the entrance to other unexplored chambers beyond the floating, simulated sun. So, what lay through those? The two of them could explore for weeks down here, although with only the sugary rain for nourishment, Amelia suspected that her body would give out on her before her thirst for exploration did.

They walked closer to the city facing them, its architecture shimmering as their perspective changed; but what an architecture — as much art, as construction — raised from tiny germs of life and grown in accordance with long-lost principles of harmony, a perfect balance of space and light. Not meant to overwhelm like the palladian extravagance of the richer quarters of Middlesteel, nor thrown together out of hard necessity like the capital’s poverty-stricken slums. This organic city possessed sweeps and curves that made the habitation of it as natural as living in a forest; brief glimpses of such places in a crystal-book could never equal the actual experience of walking through its boulevards.

Bull Kammerlan ran his hand through the wall of one of the fluted towers, the sides flickering as his fingers passed through the material. ‘A ghost town! But I can feel the surface.’

Amelia placed her own hand on a wall, the tower shivering as her fingers passed completely through it, horizontal transparency lines flickering while she walked along. She might have been running her hands through a waterfall, but she could feel the surface too: a resin — oaken wood that had been blended with the properties of a synthetic metal when it grew. Natural, but as hard as a steamman knight’s hull. ‘These ghosts remember. The projection contains the memory of what once was.’

‘Projection?’ Bull peered around them. ‘This is a magic lantern show?’

‘No,’ said Amelia wistfully. ‘The magic disappeared a long time ago. This is what is left of a dream. Unfortunately, I rather think the dream is mine.’

‘There’re no people in this projection,’ said Bull. ‘What’s the point of a city with no people?’

‘I noticed that too.’

Amelia did not say that the ghosts of this place could not bear to remember the missing, a whole civilization, as shining a zenith as the race of man had ever climbed — a million or more people who had sacrificed themselves so their legacy would not be corrupted.

She led them through the not-so-solid memories of what had once been, compensating for the tricks of perspective as the city rebuilt itself around them, taking them along boulevards that once towered majestically above the surface of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo; past river-sized aqueducts snaking under monorails; through gardens where abstract sculptures cycled from one artist’s creation to another’s — a cubist body lifting up a dancer in the air, before morphing into a knot of spheres that might have been a bird, then turning into an explosion of fused pyramids.

The ghosts were playing tricks on her. They didn’t want to harm her, that much was clear, but they were trying to conceal what was at the heart of this apparition. The core that called out to her. She had a terrible suspicion of what she would find, and the decision she would have to make there. This chamber wasn’t big enough to hold a thousandth of the glory that had been Camlantis. It was a maze resetting itself about them, trying to mask its true nature.

‘This won’t do,’ said Amelia. She felt like crying. Everything she had seen suggested in every broken fragment of the past she had risked her neck for, it was all true. The Camlanteans’ lives had been lived as art. Their skies filled not with the deadly pea-soupers of steam engines, but with delicate wisp-lines of mists from towers that converted rainwater into inestimable reserves of energy, or streets that drank their power from the endless light of the sun. All this lost, until now.

She switched direction, trusting her inner compass over the priceless glimpses she was being afforded into the long-lost culture. The ghosts of Camlantis cycled through more of their streets and scenes, faster, trying to entice them away from the small passages and back paths she was committing them to now. Amelia ignored the ghosts when they showed her an arena with controlled microclimates, the absent weather artists’ creations playing to an empty stadium, or a vast square racked with rainbow-coloured rotor-like umbrellas that could be used to lift curious travellers into the air and transport them to any part of the city with a simple command. Whatever the wonders on display, she was no longer for turning.

As if sensing her determination on this matter, the apparitions gave up and finally opened their architecture out onto another square, a tower in its centre enclosed by slow-moving spirals of radiance.

‘At last,’ said Amelia, ‘something real.’

She approached the tower and it began to descend into the ground. Ribbons of light twisted back up towards the reducing zenith of the tower, the entire city around them sinking towards the ground as if Camlantis was being submerged by a tide. With the last twist of light sucked into the tip of the tower, the fading illumination revealed a crown similar to the circlet worn by the Daggish emperor. This one had a single addition that immediately caught their attention — a crimson jewel the size of an egg sparking in the centre of the headpiece. The city about them had vanished. Only the tower remained, the column reset at the height of their shoulders.

‘I’ve never seen a ruby that large,’ hissed Bull. ‘That has to be worth the price of a kingdom.’

‘Well, why not?’ said Amelia. ‘The gem has a whole world inside it. This is what was projecting the vision of Camlantis.’

Bull looked around, only now noticing that everything about them had disappeared. They stood on a flat plateau, looking down on the machine forest below.

Bull reached out to lift the crown off the column, but Amelia slapped his hand back. ‘Traps mean treasure, but the reverse also holds true.’

Amelia inspected the column carefully, looking for weight sensors and other triggers. There was nothing she could see, but then, Camlantean society had progressed to a level of super-science mere Jackelians could only dream of. There could be a thermal trigger, a light-grid — sensors that did not even exist on this plane of reality. And what sort of traps would pacifists build to protect an ancient projector? Was this the secret the ruler of the Daggish had been trying to recover for centuries? If the gem held the memory of Camlantis within its glittering planes, might it also contain the current location of the broken city among the heavens?

‘You take the jewel, then,’ said Bull. ‘The doors here work for you, not for me.’

‘I don’t know. This crown is beyond price, we can’t just pass it over to the Daggish.’

‘Sod them, we’re going to take it for ourselves.’ Bull leered as if he had been handed the keys to the city of Middlesteel. ‘What a bloody great jewel.’

‘It’s not a ruby,’ said Amelia. She knew what it was now, bathing in its light. The jewel was illuminating her, feeding her. ‘It’s been grown from a single seed of data. Can’t you feel the energy flowing from it? It’s raw information, a nugget of absolute knowledge, compressed to a level of detail that has forged it into a universe within itself — this makes the Camlanteans’ crystal-books look like a page of text scalpel-carved onto a wax tablet.’

‘Then Abraham Quest will pay us for it,’ said Bull. ‘Even if it doesn’t provide the location of Camlantis in the heavens, he’ll pay us for it all the same. The Camlanteans are just like every other bugger that followed after them — all ego and self-importance. They couldn’t bear to leave the world without scrawling a little graffiti on the wall, so we’d know that they’d been here and what they’d achieved. You know what this is, don’t you? This is your rich shopkeeper friend’s manual for his perfect, pacifist society, and he’ll bleed money to get his hands on it. He’ll bloody well need to, too.’

Amelia stared at her comrade-in-arms with disgust. The slaver’s avarice was an affront to everything the ancient civilization that had created this miracle once stood for.

He saw her look. ‘Don’t give me that, dimples. Quest will get his jewel and you’ll have the rest of your life to study the information inside it. And all the plaudits from your bookworm friends who didn’t want you walking their college corridors.’

‘I hope they accept Jackelian coin inside the Daggish hive,’ said Amelia, ‘because that’s where we’ll be thrown if we go back to the surface with this. No wonder the hive wants the crown. Whatever blood limiters the Camlanteans placed into their engineering to stop the ancestors of the Daggish breeding feral, the clues to removing the restrictions lie inside this gem. Imagine the Daggish armed with the knowledge of a Cassarabian womb mage — no limit to the hive’s growth, able to project their drone armies hundreds of miles beyond Liongeli’s borders, absorbing Jackals, Quatershift, the Catosian city-states and Kikkosico. Adding our strength to its own, nation by nation — everyone on the continent converted into its slaves.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ said Bull. ‘Leave the crown down here? You’ve seen how patient the Daggish are — like bulldogs with a bone. They’ll keep on trying, keep on developing new u-boats. They’ve already absorbed my crew — they know more about u-boats than they ever did before. Sooner or later they’ll bag some more explorers from the race of man and try their luck with them. Who is to say others won’t just take the jewel and hand it over to Tree-head Joe? The hive knows how our minds work, too. Grab a mother or father with their children, keep the kids as hostages, make the parents come down here to get its precious crown back for it.’

‘You’re just saying that because it suits your greed,’ said Amelia.

‘Maybe, but you know it’s true. All that’s keeping that crown from the Daggish is a crater filled with water. Sooner or later, the hive is getting in here. We have to take the crown and make a run for Jackals. We can take it now, or Tree-head Joe’s boys will take it later.’

‘You said we couldn’t outrun their seed ships in our bathysphere.’

‘I didn’t have the crown then,’ said Bull. ‘We’ll sneak past them. I know a few tricks about silent running those walking trees and their moss-covered slaves have yet to learn.’

Her hand reached out for the jewel, hesitating just above the crown. If they failed in their escape attempt, she was condemning everything and everyone she cared for in Jackals to a living death. But then there were the seed ships, the graveyard of Daggish u-boats lying dead in the currents of the lake. Kammerlan was right. Leaving the gem where it was wouldn’t deny it to the hive, just postpone the inevitable day when the Daggish broke in down here and took the knowledge they needed. The knowledge for infin ite expansion.

‘You think you can do it, Guardian’s daughter?’ said Bull. ‘Then walk away. Let’s go.’ His hand clenched into a fist. ‘Let’s leave a hundred thousand crystal-books crushed into an object no bigger than my hand. Everything your life has been devoted to. Let’s just leave the gem down here, dreaming its dreams of old Camlantis town, and go back to the bathysphere empty handed. We’ll make a run for home all the same. And if we make it back to Jackals, well, you can return to digging out Wheat Tribe pottery from the plains of Concorzia, while old Bully-boy will take a berth on a Spumehead trader working the oceans for your shopkeeper friends: then we’ll both be happy.’

Amelia tried to block out the slaver’s voice. This had to be done for the right reasons; there was too much riding on the outcome for the decision to be made any other way. Jigger it. Her hand flashed out and she removed the crown from the plinth. Action over inaction every time.

‘Let me hold it for a moment,’ said Bull.

‘Don’t push your luck. Or mine. That was-’ she noticed the tide of light rushing up the empty hill.

‘-easy.’

The wave washed over the two of them, and, as it overtook them, their hill above the machine forest was rewritten with the flat, featureless walls of the chamber they had started out in. Only the dried-up pools of water around the bathysphere indicated that any time had passed at all. Amelia checked her hand — still clutching the crown with its near weightless egg-sized jewel of knowledge. Were the Jackelians ready for the wisdom it contained? Did the fact she had been allowed to take it at all mean she had been tested and the Jackelians judged ready to receive the precious knowledge of the Camlantean civilization? That had to be the purpose of the crown, this place, the ancients’ legacy preserved for those who would walk the world after them.

There was no sign of the doorway down to the corridors of else-when. Amelia resisted the urge to walk over to the wall to see if she would be granted admittance a second time. Everything she needed from the wrecked basement world of Camlantis was in this crown.

‘Make the bathysphere ready,’ said Amelia.

Bull looked at the walls. ‘There’s no way back out to the lake.’

‘Yes there is, we just can’t see it, is all.’

Bull unlocked the craft and tossed out any loose objects that could be dislodged and make a noise falling, prepping for silent running, then emerged to adjust the screws at the back of the craft. ‘We’ll be running light, as gentle as a lady’s fan at a playhouse. Just enough thrust to push us out into the currents of the Shedarkshe.’

‘How capable is a seed ship’s sonar?’

‘Not so good,’ said Bull, ‘from what I’ve seen. Down here, we’ll probably be deep enough to avoid them, but on the river — well, at least we’ll be running with the flow of the Shedarkshe at our back.’

The enormity of the risk they were taking was beginning to sink in. Bull was following the fires of his avarice, but what in the Circle’s name was she following? Was this her dead father’s dream, her dream?

‘The Daggish aren’t so sharp underwater,’ said Bull, thinking the professor was about to change her mind about departing with the crown. ‘They can’t absorb fish or river lizards into the hive, only creatures of the land and the air. That’s why they rely on seed ships on the Shedarkshe’s surface rather than a navy of sliporaptors. Maybe that green muck of theirs don’t work so well down here, or perhaps Tree-head Joe’s commands don’t get passed on as clear in the deeps. We’ve got a chance.’

Amelia bit her lip and ducked under the bathysphere to enter the submersible. The crown of the Camlanteans rested on her lap, so light as not to be noticeable. That was the best she could hope for, then, that the drones of the Daggish Empire hadn’t learnt to swim properly. On such a premise did the fate of their continent rest. Kammerlan had only just begun spinning up the expansion engine when the burning light overtook them, dwindling away to be replaced by the cool, dark waters of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.