The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Billy,’ hissed the commodore. ‘Billy Snow, are you in there?’

A face appeared on the other side of the viewing slot, its features distorted by the shimmer of the cursewall. ‘What are you doing here, Jared Black? Our next cell check is due in ten minutes.’

‘I know,’ whispered the commodore. ‘I’ve been watching your wicked Catosian maiden come and go from the other side of the ventilation grille, my old frame squeezed between her jail’s walls like the meat in a sausage roll.’

T’ricola crept past, taking position at the bottom of the armoured hold’s stairs, her ears and the fine hairs on the back of her armoured skull quivering for any sound of the guard’s return.

Billy shook his head. ‘If they catch you down here …’

‘Ah, Billy, we’ve risked a lot to reach you. Creeping like tiny little rats through these infernal shafts, nearly chopped into pieces by rotating fans, squeezing through spaces so small you wouldn’t send in a vent girl to risk her neck to clean them, some so iced up we needed chisels to break through, others wired with snares and wicked devices of Quest’s invention. But none of them were of any concern for old Blacky and your brave crewmates.’

An elderly female voice sounded behind Billy. ‘Who is it?’

‘A fool,’ answered the sonar man, ‘come to get himself killed on my account.’

‘Ah, they’ve given you a lady friend to keep you company,’ winked the commodore. ‘They are not as bad as they seem, then. As for us, we don’t leave our own behind, or we’re no better than Quest and his gang of renegade mill hands.’

‘You need to go,’ insisted Billy. ‘Your skill with locks is no match for this hold. It makes our old cage back in the siltempters’ jungle kingdom look like the lock on a toy music box.’

‘Don’t say that, Billy. My genius has never been bested yet, and as clever as Quest is, he knows more about countinghouse ledgers than he does of tumblers and cursewalls.’

‘Maybe,’ said Billy. ‘But we’re certainly not going to be sprung from here before the next cell check is due.’

‘Take a little heart,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ll crack this yet.’

‘There are greater things at stake. My fate is settled, but there may yet be hope for the race of man. You need to return to Jackals and come back with help.’

‘Who is to fly as high as this monstrous fleet of Quest’s?’ whispered the commodore. ‘The RAN has no airships that can pursue a flotilla at this altitude.’

‘I’m not talking about running to Admiralty House,’ said Billy. He pointed at the woman sharing his cell. ‘Her people. I know you have had dealings with their profession before, black aerospheres that can climb as high as these airships of Quest’s.’

‘A blessed wolftaker is she?’ The commodore stepped back in alarm. ‘Don’t ask me to make contact with the Court of the Air, old friend. They’ll have my poor suffering bones in a cell half the size of this one and a hundred times more secure within an hour of muttering my first “good day”.’

Billy sighed. ‘I know all about your royal blood, Jared — or should I say, Duke Solomon Dark. But this is more important. My companion here can give you pass phrases, pass phrases that will overrule any desire the Court may have to toss an aging royalist into their cells. Listen to me. I have a story to tell you. The true story of ancient Camlantis, reduced to five minutes of telling with a spare minute for you to squeeze back into your air vent.’

The commodore listened and the terrible truth dawned on him. He was going to have to contact the wicked dogs of the Court of the Air after all. There was simply too much at stake. Nothing else would do.

Amelia looked up. The assistant from Quest’s team had brought back another ream of translated papers. This must be what it was like to be appointed to the High Table, an army of scribes and undergraduates following every twitch of your efforts — doing the donkey work, copying and translating and cross-referencing and looking up facts in dusty volumes it would have taken her days to get permission to view back home. She thanked the boy and noticed he had brought in something else on his coattails — Commodore Black.

‘Jared.’ She glanced at the carriage clock on the corner of her workbench. ‘Is that really the time?’

‘Time for us to be going, lass. We’re nearly out of Jackals’ acres and over the Sepia Sea.’

‘So many days have passed already?’ She had become so engaged in her work that she would have been hard-pressed to say whether it was currently day or night outside the airship.

Another of Quest’s people was admitted by her Catosian sentry, a bunch of cables clutched in the boy’s hand as if he had brought flowers for the professor’s desk. ‘The fault in the crystal-book reader has been located and fixed. It was-’

Amelia waved him away. ‘Thank you. I’ll be down to the reader room in half an hour.’

‘You could still come with us,’ said the commodore. ‘You could be back on the grand, solid soil of Jackals within the hour.’

There was a sense of urgency seeping through the commodore’s words that seemed out of place. Amelia half noticed it, but wrote it off to her tired imagination playing tricks on her. How long had she been working now? Snatching sleep at her desk in hourlong stretches. So much to do, so much to achieve and read and soak into her brain. If only the worldsingers could work their sorcery on her mind as they had on her arms.

‘My place is here now, Jared. The real expedition is only just beginning.’

‘I’ve left my beautiful boat behind,’ said the commodore. ‘Don’t be making me leave you behind too.’

‘I’ll see you again, you old sea dog. Under very altered circumstances. Parliament will pardon Quest when they see what we discover up in Camlantis. Do you think the Guardians will want the secrets of the Camlantean civilization landing on one of the city-states of the Catosian League? Catosia’s more advanced than Jackals in many fields of science already. The House will write off Quest’s theft of their proving vessels as the erratic prank of a childish genius and offer him a title for his troubles, you wait and see. It was you who once told me that success has many fathers …’

‘… And failure is an orphan,’ echoed the commodore. ‘My own blessed words coming back to haunt me. All the same, lass, you should be coming with us.’

‘I could say the same to you,’ said Amelia. ‘You travelled with me all the way up the Shedarkshe to peek at the mere ruins of the Camlantean basin — now we’re a day or two away from the greatest archaeological discovery of our age, the sundered city itself. Don’t you want to see that?’

‘I travelled with you for the sake of my boat, lass, and now she’s at the bottom of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. And I came to keep you safe, too, but I won’t travel any further. You’ll make me an outlaw twice over and old Blacky needs his few remaining comforts, not a new life on the run. There’s only so many times a worldsinger can re-mould my face before I forget who I am and why I’m blessed running.’

‘Then this is goodbye,’ said Amelia.

‘So it is then. I’ll pass your good wishes onto T’ricola and Ironflanks.’

‘You be careful, Jared. Ironflanks may claim some experience pushing around a sail rider, but there’s a big difference between jumping off a cliff on the Mechancian Spine with a chute of silk above you and piloting down a hot glider capsule.’

Amelia noticed Commodore Black peering over at her assistants; as if he would prefer they were not present at their parting. Odd, Jared had never come over as reserved before. She had seen the submariner skipper walk into a hardcore parliamentarian jinn house and sing long-forgotten royalist songs just to get a rise and think nothing of it.

‘Mad old Ironflanks used to be in the Pathfinder Fist,’ said the commodore, trying harder than he should have to raise a smile. ‘You could drop him out of the airship’s fin-bomb bays and he’d just bounce on his landing.’

‘And T’ricola has her hard skeleton shell to protect her,’ said Amelia. ‘But all you’ll have to cushion your landing is the weight of Quest’s silver coins, so you glide down safe all the same.’

Veryann watched the last of the commodore’s crates of money being loaded into the glider capsule, the silk-lined wings being furled to her side by the sailors. The Catosian soldier wouldn’t be staying in the hangar when the three survivors of the expedition launched — the lack of air at this altitude would asphyxiate anyone without an air mask within a minute. Veryann crossed the hangar, pulling her high-altitude coat tighter to ward off the cold in this unheated section of the vessel.

‘You need to launch now,’ one of the hangar crew was advising the commodore, T’riocla and Ironflanks. ‘We’re approaching the edge of western Jackals. You’ll be floating in Spumehead harbour and praying for a fishing boat to see your lights before you sink if you leave it much longer.’

Commodore Black was staring at Ironflanks climbing inside the capsule to finish off their pre-flight checks, T’ricola following to inspect the engineering. The old u-boat officer turned back to the airship crewman. ‘I can see your iron pigeon is no seadrinker vessel. We’ll head for the western downs right enough and leave the pleasures of the sea until we’re back on solid ground.’

‘No more adventures for you, then?’ asked Veryann.

‘If I had wanted to sail the heavens on one of these aerial battleships I would have taken the RAN’s silver shilling, lass, and become a jack cloudie. You’d be as wise to join me.’

‘The free company owe Abraham Quest a blood debt.’

‘Then I hope you and your fighters have enough blood left to pay it.’

‘We never did finish that last game of chess we started,’ said Veryann. ‘Drawing pieces in the dirt of the cage floor back in Prince Doublemetal’s realm. There’s a real board or two on the Leviathan. Who knows, I might even let you win — and that’s not an offer I make often.’

‘You’ve a sharp mind, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘and the vigour of youth besides, but I would have beaten you in the end.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Because you are a touch too predictable. You follow your warrior’s code, but when you make that the heart of you, you give up something in return.’

‘I think you have a code,’ said Veryann, ‘even though you pretend that you do not.’

‘No, lass. There’s no code for me, anymore. I just let myself be pushed around by the cruel tides of fate and survive as best I can.’

Something was nagging at the Catosian officer. Was it the haste with which the expedition survivors were trying to load the money into their glider capsule? Or was it the stiffness in the commodore’s manner — an unease that should have been well sweetened by a glider stuffed full of Jackelian guineas; enough money to outfit a flotilla of new u-boats and more besides. The commodore should have been dancing a jig at the thought of leaving the danger of their high-altitude exploration of the firmament behind.

Veryann followed her instincts. ‘Stay a while longer, Jared. You should see your nephew before you go. He may be a filthy oath-breaker, but you should at least say goodbye to him before you leave. It may be your last chance for a very long time. Quest will have him thrown back in Bonegate to finish the rest of his sentence when we return.’

The commodore picked up the last remaining chest of coins, wheezing under its weight. ‘Now, if only you had been so reasonable the other day when I asked. As it is, we are running out of the green and pleasant land of Jackals to make a soft landing on. If I say my fare-thee-wells to Bull, poor Ironflanks will be paddling us back to the coast on his back and my treasure will be waiting on the seabed for a fisherman’s nets to claim it.’

Veryann nodded as if in sympathy. Quest might not understand the deep loyalty of the crew of a seadrinker boat, but she did. They were not so different from the bonds of a Catosian free company. ‘There is that. But we’re still holding onto the child of Pairdan in the cells. You can get both your farewells over at once.’

‘Two farewells would take longer than one.’

Veryann signalled her sentries forward from the hangar lock. ‘Maybe you should say goodbye to them anyway.’ A line of soldiers raised their rifles up towards the expedition members. ‘While you consider telling me just how it is you know Billy Snow’s real name.’

‘Uncle silver-beard,’ said Bull, glancing up as Commodore Black, Ironflanks and T’ricola were pushed into his cell. ‘Misery loves company, eh? The food’s better than the slop that came down the feeding tubes in the tanks at Bonegate, but the conversation here isn’t up to much.’

‘You are this braggart’s kinsman?’ said Septimoth, ruffling his wings in annoyance. ‘This cell isn’t half as big as it needs to be to contain two from the same family.’

Commodore Black looked over at the frenzied figure squatting behind the flying lizard, scrawling an intricate line of writing on the cell floor with the smeared remains of their last meal, coughing and shuddering as if in the grip of a fit. ‘You’ve got that right, my lashlite friend.’

Turbulence shook the deck of the Leviathan’s bridge, which was more crowded than Amelia had ever seen it. Not only were the command crew of the airship in attendance, but there were engineers preparing the mountains of equipment that Quest promised would prove the mechanism to unlock Camlantis — some of the components strangely familiar to Amelia: shades of the tower Coppertracks had been building at Tock House to communicate across the void. Helping supervise the work was the strange Quatershiftian exile — Robur — whom Quest had assured Amelia possessed a genius to match the mill owner’s own.

A gust caught the airship and even with the stat’s bulk she tipped to the side, Amelia’s hand snaking out to grip a guide rail. The Leviathan’s crew showed steadier air legs, the sailors in their green-striped shirts barely moving with each shift of the bridge’s wooden decking. Not one of them had lost the cap off their head yet, unlike the engineers, sliding and cursing as they made their final adjustments to the transmission mechanism. The question was, the transmission mechanism to what? Outside the sweeping arc of armoured glass that was visible past the steersmen’s two wheels, the sky seemed preternaturally clear. Amelia’s own airship voyages — previously confined to Jackals’ merchant marine and her university’s pocket aerostat — had never ventured even a tenth as high as their present altitude. But even with Amelia’s limited experience, she doubted that the airstream this high up should be so vicious in an empty, cloudless sky.

‘There’s nothing here,’ she opined to Quest as his airmaster rolled up the sky charts and passed them over to one of his jack cloudies, folding the compass back into the map table. ‘What good is your key now? There’s no lock for you to fit it into.’

‘It’s not that sort of key,’ said Quest.

‘Oh, is that so? Then why here?’ asked Amelia. ‘We’re so high up I can barely see the Sepia Sea underneath us any more.’

‘This is where we need to be, Amelia. I have had months to scrutinize the contents of the other crystal-book of the pair my antique dealer turned up for me back in Middlesteel. The second book contains the plan for the sundering of Camlantis — exactly where the rock formations would need to be split by the force of the leylines. How much earthflow energy would need to be concentrated to reverse the gravity of the rock layer under Camlantis, the trajectory, the height the city was to be set adrift at. If you know that, then you know where in the sky to search for the lost city.’

‘There’s nothing here now.’

‘That’s what the key inside the crown you brought back is for,’ said Quest. ‘The city is here, just folded away, caught between the cracks in the walls of the universe.’ He indicated the glowing crystals protruding from his machinery. ‘Stand back and watch.’

‘There’s one thing that puzzles me,’ continued Amelia. ‘As best as I can tell, the losing side in the Camlantean civil war seemed to be in the majority. Most of the Camlanteans favoured a direct solution to the Black-oil Horde when it seemed like their civilization would finally fall.’

Quest folded his arms behind his back. ‘Actually fighting the barbarians to preserve their civilization. Yes, from what I have seen, I would certainly say that was the case. The Camlanteans were desperate in their closing days.’

‘Yet, it was the few that still clung to the tenets of pacifism who attacked Camlantis, denying the city to the horde and murdering their enemies in the civil war. Doesn’t that strike you as more than a little perverse? Surely it should have been the faction that favoured violent action that should have been willing to attack their pacifist rivals with the tools of aggression, not the other way around?’

The mound of machines on the bridge began to throb, an uncomfortable sound, just drifting in and out of the range of hearing.

Robur walked over to them, tapping his trousers with a clipboard heavy with schematics. ‘You would understand such contradictions better if you had survived a decade in an organized community in the Commonshare, professor. The hand that preaches greater love for your neighbours and the forsaking of all personal gain, that hand is all too ready to turn into the fist that beats your family into submission.’

Robur’s presence made Amelia uneasy. There was something about this man, a manic energy that manifested itself like a halo of light around him. It was as if Robur was capable of doing anything, flipping instantly between moods. He might suddenly sprint away, break down crying, or fly into a fit of violence. All it would take would be a gentle push. He was clearly a broken man, his soul torn to pieces in Quatershift, hanging together by the thinnest of threads. Amelia had a terrible suspicion that thread might be her own dream of utopia. What in the Circle’s name did that say about her dream, her obsession? As it was, Robur’s attention was presently directed towards keeping Quest’s latest creation functional.

Amelia noticed a faint spark in the sky outside answering the throb of light from the machine on the bridge. Each pulse from the mechanism mirrored by a heartbeat in the thin, cold atmosphere outside.

‘It works!’ cried Robur. ‘After all this time …’

‘We both toiled on this,’ said Quest. ‘We knew that we would succeed.’

Robur watched the flickering light outside, hypnotized. ‘Without the transmetric valves of your devising this would not have been possible.’

‘I merely refined the concept on my transaction engines. The basics were published in a Royal Society paper a year or two ago,’ said Quest. ‘Increase the power. We need to match the transmission frequency precisely, or knowing the key from the crown will prove useless.’

Robur waved his clipboard at the engineers and they adjusted the wheels and levers around the pyramid-shaped contraption. The foreign mechomancer started to mumble something, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

‘Is that a prayer?’ asked Amelia.

‘I prayed to the Sun God morning, noon and night once,’ said Robur. ‘For my family to be spared. For my friends to survive. For food for them to eat. To taste the air again as a free man. But my prayers were never answered. Now I am like you Jackelians; I have made a religion out of believing in nothing. So in answer to your question, no, I am not praying. I am repeating the sequencing key for the valves.’

‘We don’t believe in nothing,’ said Amelia. ‘We believe in each other.’

‘I think I would find it easier to believe in the Sun God again.’ Robur rushed forward as a hiss of steam erupted from one of the pipes servicing his device, closing the connection while his engineers wrestled a backup duct into operation. Outside, the light was becoming more intense — almost too bright to stare at. Robur stumbled back. He was soaked in steam from the leak and his forehead was covered in sweat. ‘I have seen no evidence of the Sun God or the Child of Light in the world. But I have seen Lord Darksun in the hearts and faces of my countrymen. I have seen Furnace-breath Nick striding across the land!’

Amelia was torn between watching the spectacle outside and the scarecrow figure of Robur, shaking like a mumbleweed addict too long without a drag on his pipe. Robur snatched up Amelia’s hand and pressed it hard, a look of fanaticism crossing his face. ‘We’ll cast them out, the demons lurking in our souls. There! There are our tools to remake the world …’

Beyond the airship, the light was shifting, becoming planes of dancing energy. She had seen that light before at the bottom of the basin of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. The light had taken them somewhere else, then: might it also be able to transport something back into the heavens above their Earth?

‘Signal the other ships,’ Quest shouted at the airmaster of the Leviathan. ‘Have them move back. I don’t want their crews needlessly lost if we are wrong about this.’

A wall of light pulled away from them, moving at incredible speed, every mile it fell back revealing an incredible sight: a sight Amelia had dreamed of, a sight she had never thought she would see outside the grainy images of a crystal-book. Tears rolled down Amelia’s cheeks. ‘You weren’t wrong.’

Cheers erupted from the crew, echoes of their ovation rising up in the corridors outside. Faces throughout the giant airship and her sister craft pressed up against freezing cold portholes, for down beneath them hung Camlantis, floating in the air. Proud, beautiful Camlantis, her spindly towers and wide boulevards empty of life, her parks full of fossilized trees, starved of water and light in the folded-away pocket of a sideways universe where she had been banished for so many millennia. The people who had made her had turned to dust, but the organic lines of their city might as well have been preserved in amber. Only the underside of Camlantis showed the devastation that had struck the city, trailing girders hanging out of the sundered rock, severed atmospheric tunnels leading to twin shafts at the bottom of a lake in Liongeli a thousand miles away. There had never been a floatquake so large. Gravity reversed across a single landmass that stretched for miles. If this floating monster collapsed into the Sepia Sea now, the resulting tsunami would sink half the Jackelian downlands.

Quest walked over to Amelia, taking her hand. ‘Are you all right, professor? You look faint.’

‘I can’t believe we’ve done it.’

‘Your dream,’ said Quest, ‘and mine. We’ve always known the city was there.’

‘Look at the size of it. We can’t keep this a secret. Every paddle steamer making a course for Concorzia will be landing in colonial harbours with stories of a new floatquake land hanging in the heavens.’

‘I think we’ll have the run of the place for a while yet,’ said Quest. ‘Time enough to explore the ruins.’

It was true. They were beyond the reach of the RAN, beyond the reach of almost everything except the obsession that had driven them both here, that and … something else that counted itself master of these empty skies.

‘Skrayper!’ cried one of the sailors, her head covered with bulky earphones. ‘Word from the aft watch on the Minotaur. Skrayper sighted at four o’clock.’

‘I have it,’ confirmed one of the crew, letting go of his arm-mounted telescope. ‘Two miles away and heading straight for us.’

The airmaster pulled his cap down tight. ‘This high up, it was only a matter of time. Damn my eyes, but I warned you, Mister Quest, those monsters are fiercely territorial.’

Amelia took the abandoned telescope and twisted it down to where the watchman had been pointing it. There. An elongated tube of transparent flesh as large as one of their own colossal airship flotilla, organic gas twinkling inside its body like a thousand star motes in the painfully clear sunlight. Jellyfish-like tentacles dangled from its belly, deceptively thin at this distance. Amelia had read enough tales of skrayper attacks on Jackals’ aerial shipping in the penny dreadfuls to know that those arms were covered in wiry toxin-filled hairs that could lash apart the catenary curtain of an airship. Normally the sunlight feeders only came low enough to maul aerostats when the creatures were wounded or dying. But then, Quest’s exploration squadron was operating at no normal altitude.

‘Sound action stations,’ ordered Quest. The undulating scream of a siren broke across the bridge, the sound of air-boots stamping past in the corridor outside. One of Quest’s young academy boys — almost too small for his green uniform — came running past, handing a breather mask to Amelia. She copied the other sailors and pulled the strap over her head, letting the leather cup dangle under her chin, the flask-sized oxygen canister tied to lie across her chest. A token, only. If they were holed at this height, the decompression would take care of her long before she needed tanked air to breathe.

‘The Minotaur will have field of fire first, sir,’ the airmaster informed Quest.

‘Signal her, then. Make ready on the harpoons and prepare our own too, in case the Minotaur’s aim proves unsteady.’

‘Harpoons?’ questioned Amelia. ‘We’re no slipsharper out of Spumehead hunting for blubber and oil.’

‘High altitude flight has its perils,’ said Quest, ‘and we have not come unprepared. This far above the ground I was anticipating at least one attack a day until the skraypers recognize this is our territory and learn to respect our limits.’

‘And how are you going to teach them that?’

Quest pointed to their sister airship manoeuvring beyond the bridge’s viewing platform. The Minotaur shuddered as she released two rockets from her belly battery, twin lances pulling away on spouts of fire and heading straight for the glistening shape closing in on the flotilla. Both rockets impaled the skrayper and exploded inside its transparent body, the shimmering sun-feeding gas turning a dull green in the detonation’s aftershock. The infection of colour spread throughout the creature’s bulk quickly, like dye in water, then the whale of the sky began to slowly rotate, the diaphanous wing-like fins on its flank crumpling and folding up in agony. The skrayper’s trajectory changed, arrowing down towards the carpet of cloud cover far below.

‘Basic chemistry,’ said Quest. ‘Altering the composition of the gas that keeps a skrayper aloft and allows it to feed. Now, every time the poor creature tries to draw sustenance from the sunlight, the energy is transformed into a level of voltage that is higher than its body can tolerate. It’s burning itself out with every new breath it takes.’

Amelia looked on, not sure whether to feel relief at the end of one of the legendary krakens of the heavens, or pity for such a cruel end. ‘You thought of that?’

‘Admiralty House has been offering a prize for a weapon capable of driving skraypers off our airships for three centuries,’ said Quest. ‘One of the members of the Royal Society bet me that I couldn’t claim it.’

A bet. He had developed a method of securing Jackelian aerial shipping for a mere wager. Amelia shuddered. Sometimes it was the small things that served as a reminder that this was the man who had tried to buy the nation just because he could; who had nearly bankrupted the Jackelian economy and destroyed her life before they had even met. He belonged here in the clouds thinking his wild thoughts, too large for the nations of the ground below to contain. But it was Quest’s storm-basin of a mind that had led them here, where no one else could tread. He had found the foundations of Camlantis where no one before would have dreamed looking — at the bottom of a rotting jungle. It was he who had set her on the path to the key to unlock the ethereal ruins of this city, as surely as his pilots had plotted a course in their flotilla of high-lifters — riding at altitudes that nobody would have previously believed feasible.

Quest nodded to a sailor on the helioscope platform and he began to flash a message to the other airships in their small fleet. In front of them, the Minotaur switched course, drifting above the city’s towers and seeding it with glider capsules, triangle wings folding out of the iron craft, white silk chute tails popping out to brake their descent. Amelia could hear a bass rattle in the heart of the Leviathan and guessed that they were also emptying their rails in the hangar below.

‘We’re here to explore the city,’ Amelia said. ‘Not occupy it.’

‘You archaeologists do the same thing at your dig sites,’ replied Quest. ‘You lay out a grid and explore each sector in turn.’

‘We use trowels and brushes. Not Catosian free company fighters and your poorhouse academy cadets.’

‘They have orders not to break anything,’ said Quest. ‘I’m an impatient man and they will be our scouts. We already know the rough shape of the city from the outline of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo and with the landmarks contained in your crown and our two crystal-books, we should be able to orient ourselves very quickly after we land.’

The Leviathan was heading across the metropolis towards the centre of Camlantis where a massive spire-stalk stood, towering high above the surrounding city, a furl of flower-like petals starting to rotate around the building’s apex.

‘Sweet Circle.’ Amelia watched a series of golden lights patterning up the huge tower.

‘The crystal-books were true,’ said Robur. ‘The buildings do feed on the light of the sun. Just like a skrayper.’

‘The city has been in hibernation,’ said Quest, ‘awaiting the return of its people.’

‘We’re not its people,’ said Amelia, ‘we’re just pilgrims come a-visiting.’

Quest shrugged. ‘Well, actually …’

Amelia looked restlessly at the merchant lord. ‘What is it, Quest? You’ve been holding out on me again?’

‘I told you when we first met that yours was not the only academic heresy I have been funding the investigation of. What do you know of the Maitraya?’

‘Theology has never been my strong suit,’ said Amelia, ‘but isn’t that a technique from the book of Circlelaw, an enlightened state of being you enter into after weeks of deep meditation?’

‘That’s how it is interpreted now by our church,’ said Quest. ‘But if you follow the scripts back to their ancient roots, it was said to mean an enlightened being. Not a state of being, but a very wise teacher. As an archaeologist you must have come across broken totems of the old Jackelian gods out in the counties, fragments from the age before the gods were cast down and the druids chased off?’

‘Not my field, but of course I have. I’ve dug up temple artefacts from Badger-haired Joseph, the White Fox of Pine Hall, Old Mother Corn, Diana Moon-Walker, the Oak Goddess, Stoat-gloves Samuel — I could go on, the druids had deities for every season and lake and mountain in Jackals.’

‘All the better for extracting tithes and tribute from their tribes. Two related questions for you, then,’ said Quest. ‘How do you cast down your gods and how do you destroy a civili zation?’

Amelia saw where Quest was going, saw a glimpse of how his ingenious mind worked. Making connections between unrelated disciplines. Joining the dots to draw a picture whose existence no one else had even guessed at, let alone seen. Asking questions so outlandish that he would have been laughed out of every lecture hall in the great universities.

‘You can’t-’

‘You can’t destroy a civilization,’ said Quest. ‘Not truly, not without a trace. There were Camlantean embassies in other nations, Camlantean traders travelling abroad, there were the distant wheat plains and plantations worked by the Camlanteans’ great machines of agriculture, Camlantean refugees fleeing from the fighting and the Black-oil Horde.’

‘Camlantis was removed from the world,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s here, beneath our deck.’

‘The city, yes. And its libraries and its accumulated knowledge, the majority of its people too,’ said Quest. ‘The dust of the bones of millions of people blowing in the wind beneath our feet right now, exiled from the Earth for millennia. But there would have been at least a scattering of Camlanteans left alive down below to remember the glory their people had once held to.’

Amelia asked the question. It was almost rhetorical now, but she needed to hear Quest say the words. ‘Where would they have gone?’

‘Where indeed,’ said Quest. ‘They would have concentrated, would they not? Our own experience in the streets of our capital shows that. The steammen living together in Steamside, the craynarbians congregating in Shell Town. Fleeing the victori ous Black-oil Horde in the east, I believe the Camlantean survivors fled as far west as they could travel, settling on an island.’

‘Isla Verde?’ said Amelia. ‘Or do you mean Concorzia? There’s nothing we’ve ever found there across the ocean that would suggest-’

‘Jackals was an island once,’ said Quest, ‘before she drifted back to fuse with the continental landmass. Or so say some disreputable geologists your colleagues in the colleges would be hard-pressed to give the time of day to. If they have dated the timeline correctly, it would have been right around the time that the Maitraya appeared and inspired the island’s tribes to reject the druids’ teaching.’

Amelia watched the central spire of Camlantis drifting towards them through the sweep of armoured glass, the view from the bridge interrupted only by the airship’s twin navigation wheels, manned by a sailor apiece. Quest had done it again. Twisted her worldview on its head and shaken it until there was nothing left of the old.

‘There’s a little of the Camlanteans in all of us now,’ said Quest. ‘The interbreeding that must have happened in the centuries since between the Maitraya and the tribes of Jackals. But in some, the breeding has run purer than others, the call to the old ways positively humming in their blood …’

Amelia steadied herself against a bank of navigation equipment. The blood that had acted as her passport into the strange world beneath Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo; the blood that had allowed her to claim the crown of Camlantis with its dense information jewel. The same blood that had sung the song of prophecy to a hag of the Cassarabian dunes and a witch doctor in a Liongeli trading post. Her blood.

‘We’re coming home,’ whispered Amelia, the city sliding beneath her feet.

The first scouts from their airships’ glider launch were already arriving back at the foot of the spire in the heart of Camlantis by the time the Leviathan docked underneath its rotating petals. A perilous negotiation of wildly differing standards of engineering ensued- perilous, at least, for the jack cloudies lowering themselves on lines and welding on a docking ring; leaving arcs of mist in the air from their breathing masks as they swung back and forth thousands of feet above the abandoned city. Finally, a tunnel of cantilevered metal segments was manhandled across and riveted in place, joining spire and airship, a jury-rigged bridge between the modern world of Jackals and the ancient domain of Camlantis.

When Amelia stepped across, a sack full of jottings of their best-guess maps of Camlantis over her shoulder, her way had already been crudely marked in red paint. Arrows scrawled on the clean white floors and walls reminiscent of the corridors under Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo and showing the way through the labyrinth. In this city, though, the spire’s doors and lifting rooms seemed to work for everyone, not just her. Was the lack of security a feature of the trusting nature of the Camlanteans, or the functional practicality of a large metropolis? There were no visible signs of the civil war between the two factions of the Camlantean polity. No scorch marks or damage — no evidence of conflict at all, beyond the exist ence of the dead city itself, rent intact from her old moorings in the world below. But then, how would pacifists fight? Amelia wondered. Badly, was the answer, she suspected. Totally, whispered something from deep within her. Camlantis itself was proof of how pacifists fought. A cold, calculated, carefully engineered floatquake. Millions dead within a minute, gasping for air as the land they had called home lifted beyond its reach, before the rebels’ dark engines translated the dead city somewhere even colder, somewhere still and folded away from the rest of humanity — far beyond the sight and conscience of their murderers.

The assistants assigned to her field team gasped in awe as they stepped into the lifting room running down the interior of the tower; its walls, ceiling and floor so transparent the structures might as well not have been there. Columns of light ran up the inside of the spire, rainbow bursts exchanged between floating copper spheres the size of houses. Her team chattered to each other, excited by the alien sight, voices muffled behind their air masks.

Amelia was aware she should have been more moved by the display than she was. Why did she feel so little, seeing these wonders? Wasn’t this what she had worked all her life for, her father’s legacy finally fulfilled beyond any of the dreams he and his daughter had shared when he was alive? Just the chance to be standing here. He should have been here with her to share this triumph. Then she might have been able to explain to her team that the pillars of light they stood in awe of were nothing more than raw information, capable of recharging the crystal-books of the city’s inhabitants with any fact or finding known to the long memories and ancient storage devices of the Camlanteans. Levels of data so antiquated they had to be filtered across hundreds of parsing stages before they could be interpreted by modern Camlantean minds and their information systems. She should have been able to explain that when the energy of the sunlight had faded in cold exile, the massive devices before them had frozen the data in a singularity point no larger than a fingernail, a compact string of exotic matter that must have joyously expanded when the life-giving rays of the sun struck the tower again an hour earlier.

They might have looked at Amelia as if she was mad or possessed, but the living echoes of this city were beating in time to her pulse now, and instead of being filled with elation at her dream finally being met by reality, all she could do was curse the cold and pull tighter the large, fur-lined high-altitude coat she had been issued with for exploring Camlantis. Something her father had once said to her came drifting back. Pity the person who has no dream. And pity the person whoseonly dream is realized.

Behind Amelia’s head, her father whispered, ‘Even an echo must end.’

She whirled around. ‘Pappa!’

‘Professor?’ One of her team looked at her quizzically.

‘Did you hear something, did you say something?’

‘Just the crackle of the lightning exchange over there. This is it, professor,’ said one of the explorers. ‘This is what we have come for.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s magnificent,’ said someone behind her. ‘Do you think they had a museum down in the city? The things we might learn …’

‘I believe we will find dozens of them.’

Even the street outside felt no more substantial than the phantom projections she had glimpsed at the bottom of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. The light seemed impossibly bright, painting the eerily empty boulevards and buildings with an intense, pale clarity, feeding the deserted city the power it needed to begin functioning again. In the middle of the street, a strip of road was moving forward, an adjacent strip cycling a little faster while a band beyond them pulsed faster still. Her team gauged its purpose immediately, stepping on the first strip and waving as they were carried down the road.

‘A transport system built into the road itself,’ laughed a sailor below her breather mask, clearly finding the concept amusing.

Amelia tried to raise a smile at the discovery, but found she couldn’t. Above them one of the Leviathan’s sister ships drifted, not searching for a mooring on their spire but cleared for action, her gun ports turning vigilantly — something told her the airship wasn’t on the alert for more skraypers turning up to attack the high-altitude trespassers. Then Amelia realized. Of course. She had heard enough tall tales from the commodore of the wolftakers and how they had hunted the last of the royalist fleet down at Porto Principe. Now the Court of the Air had a rival in the heavens and it would only be a matter of time before they visited the unexpected new arrivals in their sinister black aerospheres, trying to answer the questions that would be burning in their minds. No wonder Quest’s mapping of the city had been planned with the precision of an invasion. An impatient man, indeed. Surely the Court wouldn’t interfere in a scientific exploration far over the Sepia Sea? But then, there was also the matter of Quest’s airships, the first aerial rival to the Jackelian high fleet since the science pirate Newton had terrorized the skies. Would the most cabbal-istic of Jackals’ secret police forces judge Quest’s actions any more kindly than they had mad, bad Newton’s? No, they were not the forgiving type.

Amelia’s high-altitude coat was still covered in wood shavings from the crate it had been pulled out of half an hour previously. She brushed the packing off her fur, a dusting of it landing on the surface of the flawless pavement. A second after the shavings fell, a slot opened on the side of the rain gutter, discharging a flat discus on wiry legs that scurried over to the mess and consumed it, before sidling back into the darkness. Amelia felt for the lines of the slot on the pavement, but they had disappeared as decisively as the little cleaning creature. No wonder there were no mummified corpses littering the streets and buildings. The victims’ dust had been tidied away using the city’s dwindling reserves of power, even before the last age of ice had consumed the world during the coldtime. There was something terribly sad about that. This city was alive, but its people were not — and a city without people to occupy it had so very little point.

Walking past an oval booth Amelia triggered a still functioning sensor, a female head and shoulders shimmering into view in front of the stall. ‘Kalour Iso? Kalour Isotta?’

They had no verbal record of the Camlantean tongue, but Amelia had mapped the written script of the crystal-books against what she had imagined would be the correct phonetic matches; debated the possibilities with other collectors and Camlanteaphiles in their amateur journals.

Information today. Information now.

Was it a request or an offer? A series of spinning shapes materialized by the side of the face as Amelia stepped closer, and she instinctively reached out to touch one. As she did so, a list of symbols appeared, each shape revealing its own list of sub-options. These she understood: the same script that had been pieced together by the universities in Jackals. Plays. Festivals. Education. Dialogues of council. Dialogues of consensus mind. And at the head of the list a phrase she had never seen before — Update of hostile action. Even in ancient Camlantis, war reporting had taken front page, it seemed. Amelia activated the symbol and the woman’s face began speaking at a speed she could barely keep up with, only a sprinkling of the words in her commentary comprehensible. But the images that flashed up spoke clearly enough.

Continued advance. A sea of petrol-belching chariots viewed from above, a dust storm in the wake of a thousand spiked wheels grinding the ground, the picture device zooming in to show figures in leather and fur cavorting on the roofs of their vehicles, waving axes at the source of the images and making rude gestures towards their prisoners — scarcely alive — chained to the prows of their land craft.

Continued atrocities. A massive Camlantean farm machine lying smashed in a field of burning crops, flayed bodies dangling from the crumpled organic hull of the harvester, barely an inch of skin left on the ruined mess that had once been living human beings.

Neighbour-friend’s collapse. A sacked city shadowed by a pall of smoke, zooming in to show a column of refugees trudging away, carts piled high with possessions while tired-looking soldiers in odd-looking angular armour used spindly rifles emptied of charges as crutches and walking sticks, grimly shepherding the survivors away from the poisoned wells and broken walls of what had once been their home.

Amelia watched hypnotized as the scenes flickered in front of her, misery after misery, massacre after massacre, until suddenly the report was over and the face announced: ‘Timo-Felcidaed Iso’ and incongruously moved across to a vista of children in yellow robes solemnly processing down one of Camlantis’s boulevards, tossing petals from baskets while older children danced on a series of carnival floats pulled by catlike creatures. Amelia gawped. Festivals held today. Was this some sort of crude propaganda? Their world was collapsing around them, but they still had the time and inclination to hold flower festivals as the barbarian horde closed in on the gates of their city?

It didn’t make sense. These people had either been indulging in the most gigantic act of sticking their heads in the sand the world had ever seen, or they were simply expecting their lives to go on as normal. Neither option seemed likely, not in the slightest.

There was something desperately wrong here, and Amelia didn’t need the pulse of whatever percentage of Camlantean blood flowed through her veins to realize that all the history she knew no longer added up.

‘Quiet, now,’ muttered the commodore. ‘This is a delicate matter.’

‘It is an outrage,’ said Ironflanks as the commodore’s left hand held open his chest panel while the plump fingers of the submariner’s right hand probed inside the steamman’s body. ‘A blasphemy against my race.’

The commodore peered inside the dark recesses of Ironflanks’ opened chest. ‘You said yourself you have siltempter components, and don’t those rascals swap parts of their bodies like the urchins along Pipchin Street trade marbles?’

‘There is still part of me that is a steamman knight,’ protested Ironflanks. ‘The Pathfinder Fist do not submit to such indignities.’

‘Ah, well that part of you had best stay very still while I see if I can do this.’ The commodore glanced irritably across the cell towards where Cornelius Fortune sat, rocking and moaning. ‘Be a good fellow now, I need to concentrate. How long is he going to stay like that, calling like a blessed crow that has lost its mate? He’ll bring the guards in on us with that hullabaloo.’

‘There were times in the organized community in Quatershift when he would stay in such a state for weeks,’ said Septimoth. ‘That’s why the community committee ordered his arm to be cut off. They thought he was shirking his duties in the camp and the threat of amputation would be enough to make him stop faking illness. As with so much else, they were wrong about that, of course.’

‘I know a way to shut him up,’ said Bull Kammerlan, bunching his hand menacingly into a fist.

Septimoth flicked a talon towards Bull. ‘If you lay a finger on him, I promise you it will be your last act, little monkey.’

‘You can’t fly away from me in here, lashlite,’ spat Bull, ‘and-’

‘Belay that talk,’ ordered the commodore. ‘We’ve got enough problems with an airship full of Quest’s soldiers and jack cloudies to contend with. My nephew makes a rough point, old bird, but he does have one. If we’re to get out of this cell, we’re all going to need to be pulling on the anchor rope at the same time. Your friend isn’t going to get very far like that.’

‘There is another way,’ said Septimoth, looking at Cornelius hunched and whimpering in the corner. ‘But it loses its potency if it is used too often, and the one suffering can go mad — visited by the gods of the wind in their dreams.’

‘If ever there was a time for your medicine, this would be it,’ said the commodore. ‘And as for madness …’ he nodded towards the shivering form of their cellmate.

Septimoth sighed in agreement, pulling out his bone flute and raising it to his beak. He sat himself opposite Cornelius and began to play a low, haunting melody, so gentle that it barely registered on the ears at all. Everyone in the cell had to stretch their hearing to focus on the melody, losing themselves inside the tune as they spread their senses to catch it.

Bull began to make a disparaging remark, but T’ricola hushed him with a whisper. ‘I’ve seen a lashlite play a half-crazed exo-beast to sleep with one of their pipes. Keep quiet for once.’

‘This is no ordinary song,’ said Ironflanks in awe. ‘There are Loas being called. I can feel the power of it echoing within my boiler-heart.’

Around their feet a gentle wind began to circulate, warm to the skin, blowing at their trousers, flowing with the cadence of the unearthly tune leaving Septimoth’s flute. It rustled the feathers along the lashlite’s folded wings and swirled around Cornelius, his keening growing lower as the swish of air surged stronger. Wrapping itself around Cornelius like a cloak, the air seemed to solidify, pulling at his clothes and levitating him an inch off the ground. He stopped moaning and with a sudden inrush of air the wind filled his mouth with its power, disappearing inside the man. Cornelius’s chest expanded as his lungs bulged with the unexpected blessing of the lashlite gods of the wind and he slumped back to the floor, gasping as if having just survived drowning.

Septimoth lowered the bone flute, leaving his alien tune still whispering in the minds of the other prisoners even though his pipe had fallen silent. ‘How do you fare?’

Cornelius blinked and looked around the cell at the faces staring at him. ‘We are still on Quest’s airship?’

‘If the guards’ chatter is to be believed, we have landed on Camlantis,’ said Septimoth. ‘But you are correct. Our position as prisoners here is unaltered. They dragged you out to see Abraham Quest …’

‘Yes, I remember that. He wanted me to save the world.’

‘There’s a coincidence,’ remarked the commodore. ‘For I was going to ask you the very same thing. You with your strange rubber face, you’re just the fellow to do it.’

Cornelius pulled himself to his feet. ‘The world doesn’t need saving: it needs punishing. And this isn’t my face. Quest still has it.’

The commodore resumed his probing within Ironflanks’ innards. ‘Well, let’s be saving ourselves first. We can debate about what to do with our mortal freedom after we are well out of here. Now, there’s the fellow …’ he removed a skein of crystalline cable, a thin wafer of dark silicate etched with delicate golden metal attached to the other end. ‘If only my darling Molly were here by my side, her with her fierce quick affinity for the life metal. She would be able to do this far faster than a weak old fool who has allowed himself to be tricked into this terrible adventure. Betrayed by his greed for Quest’s pennies and his deep, pure love for the Sprite of theLake.’

Cornelius noticed the wall behind where the commodore was fiddling: the panel to the transaction engine lock had been levered off. ‘You can break the lock on the door?’

‘I forced the panel open. He’s been trying to crack the combination for most of the day,’ said Bull. ‘And we’re still here.’

‘You’ve got not a whit of appreciation for the art behind this, nephew of mine,’ complained the commodore. ‘If you had, you wouldn’t have been languishing in the tanks at Bonegate Prison waiting like an idiot for your sentimental old uncle to come and rescue you from parliament’s bully boys. You could have swum up to the surface and tickled their clumsy gates open for yourself. This lock is no humble standalone affair, the transaction engine sitting behind that panel is a slave to the great monsters Quest has steaming away in the heart of his flagship. It draws on all the power and quickness of his main transaction-engine chamber. Fuelled by their potency, this abominable lock is almost a living thing, its mathematics able to roll and change to counter every drop of cunning I can squeeze out of my poor, tired mind.’

‘Then we’re finished,’ said Cornelius.

‘Not yet,’ said the commodore. ‘When you can’t win at the game, it’s time to play a new one. Ironflanks, step closer to the lock. T’ricola, I’ll ask you to hold the cable straight while I work, hold it as still and as gently as if it were a ruptured gas line back on your engineering deck. You may blow me a little tune if you like, Septimoth. A tune for luck and to steady my old fingers while I try to avoid setting off the hundred alarms and tripwires Quest has paid to be installed behind that panel.’

‘The music of the race of man is too simple,’ said Septimoth. ‘Your notes possess no power and having forsaken your ancient gods, you Jackelians no longer play in worship of them, as is proper.’

‘That’s a pity, then. A nice shanty, that’s what I could do with. Are you sure you don’t know My U-boat, She’s No Sinker? No matter, no matter.’ Sweat trickled down the commodore’s forehead as he worked the wafer from Ironflanks’ body deep inside the transaction engine, then spent half an hour fiddling and cursing Quest’s mechanism and all the cunning of the merchant lord’s transaction-engine chamber. At last he nodded and reached inside Ironflanks’ chest, changing the configuration of a cluster of crystals and completing his travails.

‘You should have been born a steamman,’ said Ironflanks, in reluctant admiration of the commodore’s work. ‘Have you done what I think?’

‘If you think your short term memory board is now running as a facsimile of the main transaction-engine system for the entire brig, then you are thinking right,’ said the commodore. ‘Just don’t move and dislodge the cable, is all I am asking. While Quest’s transaction-engine chamber is talking to you, believing you are the lock, I shall be having my own conversation with the little engine inside here. Let us see how clever this lock is now it’s all on its own, with only a single drum turning inside it to outwit the great Jared Black. If I do this right, I can spring our cell door and Billy Snow’s at the same time.’

‘You must be joking,’ spat Bull. ‘That blind codger tried to kill us back at the lake.’

‘I like him already,’ said Septimoth.

‘He’s a Camlantean,’ said Commodore Black. ‘This is his city and I need his wily arts put to good use working in my service.’

‘Time for a promenade around the city square, then,’ said Cornelius.

‘Ah, if only I had a small drink to steady my nerves,’ wheezed the commodore as he worked away inside the panel, matching the encryption routines left running inside against his self-proclaimed genius. ‘A thick ruby-red claret of the sort that used to come from Quatershift when the Sun King still held sway across the border. Or a tot of jinn, even though a war hero of my respectability should only allow himself to be seen drinking on Beer Street rather than Jinn Lane. Yes, even a rare tot of jinn would do just fine to steel my mind for a miserable second or two against the perils of this dark, dangerous affair.’

With an almost frustrated whine, the transaction engine behind the panel finally gave up its fight with the commodore. The thick steel door of their cell slid open. ‘There it is,’ announced the commodore with satisfaction. ‘I have matched my wits against the toys of the cleverest man in Jackals, and, just as I promised you, it is Abraham Quest who has been found wanting, not Jared Black.’

Nobody was listening. Tasting freedom, the other prisoners piled out of the cell, Septimoth’s wings unfurling to stretch and fill the space of the brig’s corridor — but, as Ironflanks broke his connection with the cell’s lock, the transaction engine behind the panel started shuddering. The drum began spinning wildly inside the lock’s mechanism, filling the cell the steamman had just vacated with a vexed screech. Billy Snow stumbled out of his own high-security cell, his head just visible bobbing at the foot of the stairs leading up to the brig’s upper level. As the commodore exited their compartment, last to leave, the heavy steel door suddenly jammed shut behind him, causing him to stumble back.

‘That was a blessed close thing-’ the rest of the commodore’s words were cut off as Cornelius dived at him, both of them rolling backwards as a heavy bulkhead slammed down from a slot in the ceiling, only avoiding slicing the submariner in half by a couple of inches. Commodore Black stared in horror at the bulkhead. He and the face-changing lunatic were sealed off from the others.

Cornelius banged on the steel. ‘Septimoth, can you hear me?’

‘We are trapped,’ came the muffled reply. ‘Doors have come down on both sides of us.’

Cornelius looked frantically at the commodore. ‘Can you?’

‘He can’t,’ announced a voice behind them. Billy Snow walked forward and traced a hand down the steel barrier, as if he was feeling the mechanisms built into the bulkhead. ‘The brig has gone into lockdown. The guards will be coming down here in strength to secure the place long before any of us can crack these open.’

Cornelius banged on the wall in frustration. ‘Where’s Damson Beeton?’

‘Still in our cell. Her hex suit shocked her into unconsciousness when she tried to step over the threshold. The suit must need a counter ward to allow her to leave. Quest is damned clever, belts and braces on all his systems. Now she’s sealed back inside again.’

‘We can get her out. I’ll get you out, too,’ Cornelius called. ‘Septimoth, can you hear me, I’ll get you out?’

‘We’ll sell our freedom dearly when they come for us,’ came the tinny reply from Ironflanks. They could almost see him raising his four arms in defiance.

Billy laid a hand on Cornelius’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, but there’s no time for this. We only have minutes left at large at most. And Camlantis is outside, waiting for us. Jared, did you manage to get through to the Court of the Air before you were detained?’

‘No,’ said the commodore, miserably. ‘We didn’t even succeed in leaving Quest’s terrible floating flagship.’

‘Then we have work to do.’ Billy pointed down the stairs to the high-security level. ‘You’ve already been through the air vents once before and deactivated the snares I can sense hidden in there …’

‘Is that it, then?’ muttered the commodore. ‘We’re to be crawling around Quest’s rotten airship like rats in a trap, hunted by thousands of his wicked sailors and fierce fighting women. The three of us pitted against his rogue’s navy? What sort of hope is that?’

‘All the hope we have,’ said Billy Snow. ‘And unfortunately, right now, all the hope the world below has too.’

Quest stood in the shadow of the Minotaur, the airship having made the landing that was traditional when no Jackelian docking rail and hangar were available. Mooring rockets had been fired downwards into the dirt of what had once been a park — a ruin now, after cold millennia in exile from the warmth and nurture of mother Earth — sailors with drill clamps slung around their backs abseiling down lines to fix the anchorage. Heavy equipment was being winched down from the airship’s hangar, uni-tracked metal boxes with stubby cannons riveted into existence by engineers, carriages belching into life as compact steam engines were fed with bricks of coal from the House of Quest’s own mines. Their mobile fortress was partially erected on the high ground of the park’s slope, a defensible base of operations while the scouts reported in from every corner of the city: many with wondrous tales of awakening buildings and living machines, a few with reports of destruction left by the ancient floatquake, and a sad handful not at all — their glider capsules having failed to negotiate a safe landing among the spires and towers of Camlantis.

Robur stood bent over a camp table, twin trails of mist rising from his breather unit as he examined the scouts’ reports. ‘We have found no central source of power yet for the activity we are witnessing. No main generation station.’

‘Nor will you, Jules,’ said Quest. ‘The power is distributed evenly, part of the fabric of every building and street in Camlantis.’

‘You are so sure?’

‘It is the way I would do it if I had the necessary level of engineering available to me,’ said Quest. ‘A single point of energy generation is vulnerable to failure, to catastrophe, to the unexpected. These were a people who built to last.’

‘They should have lasted,’ said Robur. ‘How different would the world be today if their society had not fallen. Quatershift and Jackals would be provinces of a peaceful federation of nations living in harmony and enjoying the fruits of a super-science so advanced we might seem as demigods. An existence that would make the wild imaginings of the authors of celestial fiction look like the art of aborigines.’

‘And the Circle willing, we shall have that world again,’ said Quest. ‘Or rather our children will. We just need to find it, before the meddlers from the Court of the Air turn up to see if what has been returned to the world will endanger the stillborn vision of their sainted Isambard Kirkhill.’

‘They will come?’

‘They always do. We can be certain of their pursuit — even if we were not holding a handful of the Court’s agents prisoner. Their telescopes can point across as easily as they point down.’ Quest indicated his mobile fortress and the material being unloaded. ‘But I have a few military innovations waiting for them that they won’t find deployed by the new pattern army down in Jackals.’

Robur accepted a roll of fresh reports from one of their scouts. ‘We shall find it, yes, we shall.’

‘Leave the location of the tomb to our scouts,’ said Quest. ‘That’s what they have been trained and briefed for. You have other more pressing matters to attend to. The second stage of our scheme; the reason why I went to so much effort to free you from your captors in the Commonshare …’

‘I shall keep up my end of things. I have my equipment and test subjects already loaded onto your armoured carriages,’ said Robur, his eyelids blinking nervously. ‘They are just waiting for the tomb to be sited. With all your resources behind me, achieving my vision was only a matter of persistence and application.’

‘I think you overestimate the worth of my Jackelian shillings. You could just as easily have completed your work for the Commonshare.’

‘I would have done so for the Sun King,’ said Robur, ‘but for the revolutionary scum that stole his throne? They were more interested in completing Timlar Preston’s designs for his supercannon and vicious toys like these-’ the mechomancer pointed to the iron carriages being assembled.

‘For every idea, there is a time,’ said Quest. He stared up at the spire where the Leviathan lay docked. ‘This is your time, Jules. And mine. The dream that is Camlantis is about to be reawakened and your vision shall come to fruition alongside it.’

‘We would need a hundred years of uninterrupted peace to even begin to understand the knowledge contained in this city.’

‘A hundred?’ said Quest. ‘Why ask for so little? I shall give you a thousand.’

From the south came the unoiled squeal of a six-wheeled velocipede, its back wheels turning on a fan belt, propelling a vehicle little more than an open frame with an iron umbrella to shield its two occupants. One of which was Veryann, the Catosian officer leaping out as she drew up in front of Quest. ‘We have a situation.’

Quest adjusted his breather unit. ‘Has the Leviathan sighted the Court’s aerospheres so soon?’

‘This is more a disaster of our own making,’ said Veryann. ‘The cell level on the Leviathan has gone into lockdown.’

‘A breakout? I thought the cursewalls my sorcerers had laid around the high security hold would contain a five-flower worldsinger?’

‘They would have,’ said the officer, ‘but they were facing the wrong way. The breakout came from the standard secur ity cells. I don’t have all the details yet; half the guards up there are dead, but it looks like three of our prisoners managed to get beyond the cell deck before it was sealed down tight — Cornelius Fortune, Commodore Black, and worst of all, the thing that calls itself Billy Snow. All the other prisoners were caught by the lockdown and are back in custody.’

Robur had gone albino pale. ‘Furnace-breath Nick! Furnace-breath Nick is out to pay me back for having played him false!’

Veryann looked with disgust at the quaking mechomancer. ‘He is merely a man in a carnival mask.’

‘I agree,’ said Quest. ‘Fortune and that fat fool of a submariner are of little account. It is the child of Pairdan we need to worry about — this is his city. He may well know where the tomb is, and he absolutely must not be allowed to reach it before we do.’

‘You don’t understand,’ moaned Robur. ‘Furnace-breath Nick is walking this land with the darkness inside his heart. I have seen him. He is real, he is real. Don’t be fooled by that man-suit he wears.’

Quest grimaced. ‘Pull yourself together, Jules. Besides, I know exactly what Furnace-breath Nick is going to do.’

Robur looked horrified at the unholy perception of the mill owner. ‘You do?’

‘Yes. He’s going to come here to try to kill me.’ Quest’s hand lashed out, striking Veryann’s nose, unleashing a fountain of blood and disarming her with a nerve-strike to her wrist. ‘Although, if he had ever seen Veryann train with practice swords, he would have known she was left-handed.’

The two figures joined in a blur of limbs, the Veryann impersonator kicking out, trying to shatter Quest’s knee and bring him low enough to step forward and snap his neck, but Quest caught the boot and turned it high, pushing back to overturn his assassin. Another kick swept out to try to bring Quest to the floor, but he leapt over it, both legs frogging up to his chin. Then Quest flipped back. Behind them, Catosian soldiers from the airship ran over with their rifles drawn, but the free company fighters were hesitating, both figures too close to one another to risk a shot. Robur was quivering behind the camp table, oblivious to the fact that Furnace-breath Nick had come to kill the organ grinder, not the monkey.

The Veryann doppelganger had a boot dagger out, moving in for a professional cut — low into the stomach and up, aiming to spill the contents of Quest’s gut with a single stroke. A flurry of blows, rapidly exchanged, Quest blocking each knife flick with the heel of his hand. The mill owner possessed the luxury of long months of training, with the money to hire the greatest sword masters and pugilists of Jackals’ duelling halls and the intellect to integrate their skills into a scientific fighting system that had been merged with the Catosian free company’s own austere regime of war. This was the first time Quest’s combat method had been matched against the dirty fighting style of the Jackelian underworld — a nameless system filtered through the rookeries, jinn houses and lean-tos of the slum areas of Middlesteel, as if it were the sewage that ran underneath the capital. A system not perfected on the polished wooden floors of duelling halls, but that survived and prospered with the blood of its practioners — mutating and evolving along with corpses left face-down in the puddles of Driselwell and Sling Street. Abraham Quest had risen from the gutter. Now the gutter had returned to strike back at him.

Quest left a small opening in his defence and Furnace-breath Nick lunged in to push his blade into the mill owner’s heart, realizing too late that it was a trap — Quest’s hands crossing and capturing his assassin’s wrist, turning the bone at an angle the body was never meant to withstand. Quest stepped back, twisting his would-be killer’s arm to his side, keeping him pinned to the ground with a pressure-hold as his soldiers rushed up and seized the assassin. Sophistication had triumphed over savagery. As the female soldiers pulled Furnace-breath Nick away he snarled and struggled like a wild animal. The city had never witnessed such a display of animal passions, not even during the horrifying advance of the Black-oil Horde.

‘Keep him away from me!’ begged Robur. ‘He’s come for me.’

‘Every heaven must have its devils capering around the walls of paradise, it seems,’ said Quest.

One of the Catosians raised her rifle to the assassin’s head and slid the safety catch off her gun’s clockwork hammer mechanism. Quest shook his head. ‘Not yet. There’s time enough to cast down our demons. You should have stuck to terrorizing Commonshare committeemen on the other side of the border, Cornelius Fortune. You’ve interfered in my plans once too often — but I shall permit you a small glimpse through the gates of paradise before I expel you.’ He turned to one of the airship crew. ‘Signal the Leviathan. Find out if he was telling the truth about exactly who escaped from the cells. Then find the real Veryann and have her send a company to protect Amelia Harsh’s group.’

Robur appeared to be calming down, now that his tormentor was being bound in chains. ‘You think that the child of Pairdan will try to harm the professor?’

‘Amelia is the closest thing our expedition has to a true-breed Camlantean. With the stakes being what they are now, murdering her would be a logical step to help ensure we don’t breach the systems that will be protecting the tomb.’

‘You’re as dead as this city, Quest,’ shouted Cornelius Fortune, his face disturbingly half-melted between his natural features and those of the Catosian officer he had been impersonating. ‘We’re not meant to be here and the city will kill you, even if I don’t.’

‘I wouldn’t place too much faith in whatever Billy Snow told you,’ said Quest. He pointed down the barren slope, towards Camlantis beyond. ‘His rebels murdered millions here to achieve their ends, but they couldn’t murder the idea of a perfect society. Once something has been imagined, it cannot simply be unimagined, it can only be hidden away.’

‘I’ll see you dead,’ yelled Cornelius as he was dragged away by the soldiers. ‘You and your utopia, both.’

‘You first, then,’ laughed Robur, finding the courage to step out from behind the table. His body had become a bag of nerves in the presence of the assassin. ‘You first, you filthy demon of darkness.’