The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Amelia was inspecting a series of artefacts under glass, the cabinets in the centre of a hall illuminated by sun globes that had risen to hover on columns of compressed air as they entered the museum. Her party were making notes and sketching each of the finds, ignoring the sound of the whining from the walls; the revived building’s systems struggling to cope with the cold of their altitude. They had not tried breaking open any more of the cabinets, not after forcing the first one had cracked its objects, turning them to dust and cold rubble with the sudden inrush of air into vacuum. Whatever method had been used for preserving these ancient artefacts, it wasn’t compatible with the Jackelians’ current brutish methods of archaeology. But how ancient were they, that was the question? The Camlanteans seemed to have reconstructed a prehistory that was as far removed from their own age as their ancient civilization was distant from modern Jackals. Artefacts ranged from the simple — a shard of pottery handsomely painted with miniature swans on a lake — to the indecipherable: a yellow egg that looked as if it was moulded in hardened gutta-percha covered in buttons with a clean panel at its centre. It was a pity that the golden rods lined with voicebox grilles next to each case had not survived the eons-long exile of Camlantis. What commentary would these rods have spoken if they had functioned? What forgotten histories could they have revealed?

Amelia was examining a case displaying a piece of granite embedded with fossilized cogs and gears when Billy Snow struck from the shadows, a shard of broken glass in his hand in place of his confiscated witch-blade. She ducked down and reacted on instinct, using her arms to add momentum to his flying kick, tossing him over a case to land sprawled across the floor. As fast as she was, she was too slow to avoid a pass of the shard ripping open the muscles on her forearm. Her terrified team of young academics had scattered like an explosion of squawking chickens. Unlike them, Billy didn’t have a breathing mask; somehow the old man was managing to thrive on the thin, cold air, back on his feet again, his arms moving in a slow dance-like style of combat, a cobra trying to hypnotize a mouse.

Behind her, she heard the barks of more new arrivals to the museum. Orders to clear the way. The first of the Catosians’ shots exploded into Billy’s chest, barely slowing him down as he ran towards Amelia. He was running against the force of a storm, the crack of glass shells behind Amelia building to a crescendo. She could hear the soldiers shouting and yelling at each other, shocked at how little effect their rifle volley was having on the escaped prisoner. Still Billy Snow came, shuddering and jerking against the hail of fire. It was as if he was trying to prove the old maxim of the Jackelian redcoat regiments: the false boast that it took a man’s weight in lead to kill him. Amelia crouched, mesmerized, as the blood-covered shell that was Billy Snow finally collapsed in front of her.

‘Why Billy, why?’

‘Get back from him,’ shouted Veryann. ‘He may be feigning.’

Feigning, her right foot. The old sonar man had taken a man’s load of lead and there wasn’t enough of him left to crawl another inch.

‘Why, Billy?’ Amelia repeated.

‘Because — you can — never — find — Camlantis,’ coughed Billy. ‘You have — to — build — it.’

She ignored the warnings and bellows of the Catosians and knelt down to hold him. His hand reached up weakly, taking Amelia’s arm, kissing the skin where he had wounded her. Then the old man rested his head back and moved no more.

‘You damn fool,’ swore Veryann, poking Billy’s corpse with her boot, keeping a pistol trained between the blind eyes on his grizzled skull. ‘He came to kill you.’

‘He was one of them, wasn’t he? One of the people of Camlantis.’

‘He was a weapon, professor,’ said Veryann. ‘As much a sword as that living witch-blade of his. And I would hazard a guess that he and his rebels caused more deaths in this city than every battle-match fought by every free company in the Catosian League combined.’

Cold air from outside spilled into the hall as the museum’s glass doors opened. ‘We’ve found it!’ shouted an airship sailor. ‘Come quick, we’ve found it!’

‘What’s he talking about?’ demanded Amelia.

‘The reason Billy Snow wanted you dead. A challenge worthy of your talents at last,’ said Veryann. ‘Come. It is time we finished this.’

In the cold of the monitorarium, surveillant twenty-four pressed the pedal by her foot to rotate her seat away from her great cannon of a telescope, turning towards the monitor on the gantry. As if a personal appeal face-to-face would have more effect than the angry exchange of words they had just had over her speaking tube.

‘I’m telling you, there’s a new landmass above the Sepia Sea, well outside the location of any mapped or known floatquake atoll.’

‘And I’m telling you that I have logged it for the day watch to follow up,’ came the monitor’s answer over her phones. ‘We have sweep orders for three missing airships and half the counties of the uplands still left to examine.’

The surveillant swore under her breath. As if the missing airships would be heading south for Cassarabia. What need did Abraham Quest have for the caliph’s gold, when he had just thrown away a mountain of his own money by absconding with the property of the navy?

‘Orders are orders,’ said the monitor. ‘Leave the creative thinking to our analysts. Report and view, view and report. Save your amateur geography for someone who doesn’t need to have a sheaf of sweep reports filled in by daybreak.’

Surveillant twenty-four reluctantly placed her face back into her rubber viewing hood, the transaction engine clicking and filtering the view, turning down to the mountains and lochs of the south — searching for incongruities that might indicate camouflage nets large enough to cover an airship.

Which was a pity, because if she had increased the magnifi cation where her scope had previously been angled, she might have seen the lonely figure sitting on top of a Camlantean spire with a stolen helioscope, cursing every one of his unlucky stars and counting down how many hours of air remained in his mortal tank as he flashed his urgent message out.

A message loaded with pass phrases that would immediately have been recognized by any agent of the Court of the Air.

Amelia looked at the train of armoured vehicles drawn up outside the building, belching boiler smoke, trailing their own tanks of air to help feed their furnaces. It was more than the vehicles’ pollution of the city that offended Amelia’s sight; the single-storey building in front of her looked wrong too. It had been constructed along different lines to the rest of the city. Not open, but closed. No windows. No doors. A tomb, it reminded her of a tomb. And where normally her curiosity would cry for such as this to be levered open to disgorge its ancient secrets, her only instinct here was to run away, as far and as fast as possible.

‘What is this place?’ Amelia looked at Veryann and Quest.

‘This is your heritage,’ said Veryann.

Quest nodded. ‘The resting place of the Camlanteans’ greatest secrets.’

‘Isn’t there enough information for you in the city’s main spire?’ asked Amelia. ‘If we can find the mechanism for extracting it down to our crystal-books, the whole of Jackelian academia will be teaching nothing but ancient Camlantean for the next few centuries in their efforts to translate this place’s treasures.’

Quest tapped the walls of the tomb. ‘And this is where they stored the greatest of their learning. Mined to ensure it could never fall into the hands of the Black-oil Horde.’

‘Mined?’ Amelia looked at the brooding presence of the low-slung construct. ‘Are you mad? If the tomb is wired into their system of power and it is detonated, we could lose the entire damn city.’

Quest pressed on. ‘We’ve come so far, risked so much.’

‘You’re risking the lives of the expedition, the whole bloody city!’

‘Not with your blood,’ said Quest. ‘The dream of this place is in my soul, but it’s part of your inheritance, your very flesh. One last secret to unlock, Amelia. If you can’t succeed in getting in with the blessing of whatever sentinels the Camlanteans have left looking after the city, you have my word we won’t try to force our way in. We’ll content ourselves with the parts of the city that were left off the latch.’

Taking off her thick wool gloves, Amelia placed her palm on the wall, the tomb’s surface so cold it was almost an ache. She could feel the hidden lines of a portal, just awaiting the command to open. The building was as alive as the rest of the city, more so perhaps, deep wells of power buried within to keep this last store safe, no matter what carnage the Black-oil Horde committed. Warmth flowed out from her hand, her arms vibrating, as numb as if they had gone to sleep.

With the hiss of a murderous serpent, the security door rolled back, an outrush of warm air carried from the interior. The glow of the streets and surrounding spires disappeared, boulevard by boulevard, the tomb sucking up energy from the surrounding area, draining power into itself with a deep breath. There was a moment’s confusion as the expedition members activated their gas spikes, lighting the scene.

Amelia entered through the portal, two beams of light flickering down the length of her body, dying away as they reached her boots. ‘Keep back. I don’t think this is safe for you yet.’

Quest’s airship sailors and expedition members needed little urging.

A raised podium — a white circle — pulsed with light inside, beckoning her closer.

Quest watched from just outside the tomb. ‘Is that similar to the transportation devices you said you came across in Liongeli?’

‘No,’ said Amelia. ‘I think it is a keyhole. Unfortunately, I think I am the key.’

She made to step onto the circle, nearly there, when she doubled up in pain.

‹Don’t do it!›

‘What is it?’ cried Quest, seeing Amelia collapse in pain.

‘My mind, he’s inside my mind.’

‹Don’t do it.›

The cut on her arm. The last kiss. The blood bubbling up from his mouth.

‘Who’s inside your mind?’ demanded Quest.

‘Billy Snow!’

Her voice spoke, but not with her words. ‹Pairdan, Jackelian, I am Pairdan.›

‘Get out of me!’ Amelia yelled.

‹First, you leave this place.›

Amelia tried to step onto the circle in front of her, but her legs were frozen, contradictory orders raging across her body. The tomb growled in anger. It had sensed something wrong. Billy Snow was no part of its creators’ scheme. The civil war, the Circle-damned Camlantean civil war. Power was building up. Preparing to be released in a single murderous burst if this was an intrusion attempt by the enemy.

‘You’ll kill us all,’ cried Amelia.

‹Yes.›

She made one last effort, kicking and thrashing like a mad woman towards the circular platform. Her brain was burning, the headache to end all headaches. As she reached the platform the light pierced her, lifting her off her feet and rotating her around — giving her a crazy view of the other expedition members spinning outside the portal. She was washed with a sensation like water, cold water flowing across her every cell. Testing. Probing. The building made its judgment. Compatible. She fell to the floor, paralysed, whether by Billy Snow’s possession or as a result of being drained of every iota of energy by the tomb she was uncertain.

Behind her a second portal hissed open, a moving walkway down in the depths below beginning to run. Darkness was overwhelming her, the room starting to fade.

Quest knelt down beside her, talking to her, but not talking to her. ‘You realize, I trust, that it was the blood copy of you that tried to kill me last year that helped make all this possible, child of Pairdan?’

‹Damn you.› Amelia’s lips were moving, but not by her command.

‘We could hardly have combed the great engine rooms at Greenhall for a compatible blood-marker like Amelia’s unless we had a little Camlantean blood to begin with, could we?’

Then, came the blackness.

Amelia woke up, unsure of where she was, uncertain even who she was. She tried to move but her arms were manacled behind her back, the wound on her forearm burning with the restricted flow of her blood. Camlantis. She was still in Camlantis.

‘My arms — why are my arms tied?’

One of her assistants came around the corner, followed by two Catosian soldiers, their high-altitude jackets shrugged off in the warmth of the tomb. ‘My apologies, professor. Abraham Quest said you were possessed.’

Now she remembered. ‘I can’t feel anything inside me now. Untie me, kid.’

Veryann appeared behind her soldier. ‘I don’t think so. I warned you back in the museum not to touch Billy Snow. Now you have been betrayed by your Jackelian compassion.’

‘I’m fine! Take these damn manacles off me.’

Veryann shook her head. ‘Ingenious, don’t you think? Wounded. Dying. But you can still infect your enemy. Turn your enemy’s weapons against their own side using one of their bodies.’

‘Right now, I find it difficult to appreciate his cunning.’

Veryann pulled Amelia to her feet. ‘Then perhaps, instead, you can appreciate how little I presently trust your intentions.’

Amelia was shoved out into a corridor, its roof held up by glass columns. There were dark shapes swimming inside the columns, darting about a crimson liquid. Like heated wax in oil, the clouds changed shape, reaching out to touch the glass, then recoiling, the surface burning them. Their movement was slow, sinuous, almost sensual. Where had she seen such things before?

‘What are they?’

‘Prototypes,’ said Veryann.

‘For what?’

In answer the Catosian waved a hand in front of a triangle etched onto the wall and the enclosure vanished, revealing a hall filled with machines — the organic systems of the Camlanteans interspersed with the crude machinery of Jackelian engineering, leaking oil and steam across the clean surfaces. Quest’s retainers swarmed over their equipment, Robur at hand, along with someone else she recognized: Bull Kammerlan. The slaver was spitting invectives at the soldiers manhandling him. Next to him was another figure, also chained. The other prisoner’s features were hideous, melting and reforming between different faces — one of which she briefly recognized as Commodore Black’s. He was a shape switcher! What was this madhouse?

‘Quest,’ called Amelia. ‘You lying son of a bitch, there’s no crystal-books down here, no information store.’

The mill owner turned from his work and walked towards her, his arms open in supplication. ‘Professor, up at last. No storage for facts, perhaps, but storage of a different nature.’ He pointed to the face-changer. ‘Plenty of room for my friends, down here, as well. This is Cornelius Fortune. He pushed me out of the way of a bullet once, a reaction he must be regretting now.’ Hearing the mockery, Fortune tried to struggle free of his chains but he was too well secured. ‘Walk with me, Amelia, you are entitled to see all the wonders of the tomb you have opened up for us.’

Quest led Amelia — still followed by her escort — to a gantry rail and motioned for her to peer over. A chasm vanished into the darkness of the rock below, the space surrounded by level after level of crystal coffins honeycombed into the sides of the pit.

She looked up. ‘What is this place? There must be millions of coffins down there. We can’t be on Camlantis anymore, that pit is far deeper than the bedrock under the city in the air.’

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Quest. ‘The Camlanteans could do things with the fabric of our world; stretch it like the garters of a jinn-house serving girl. No, we’re still in the tomb you opened — it’s just bigger on the inside than the outside. I was hoping the passenger inside your mind might be able to tell us some more about the forces involved in achieving such a feat.’

‘I’m fine now, I told your soldiers.’

‹Warn her,› said her voice. Amelia groaned. The spectre of Billy Snow was still inside her, squatting within her mind like an unwanted toad in a garden.

‘That’s better,’ said Quest. ‘No need to be shy, Billy Snow, or may I address you as a child of Pairdan?’

Amelia cursed her forehead — the throbbing had started all over again. ‹Let her see your paradise.›

‘There are as many coffins down in that pit as there were once citizens in the city,’ said Quest. He indicated a storage area behind them, shelved with hundreds of crowns — the same style of crown that she had seen worn by the Daggish Emperor, the same style as the crown under Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. Except that these coronets didn’t contain an egg-like crystal-book: instead they were mounted with a circle of tiny gems joined by copper wires.

‘Enough crowns to make you King of Jackals, if you had a throne to go along with it,’ said Amelia. ‘What are you planning, you devious jigger? You knew that this place was down here …’

Quest picked a crown off the rack and slipped it over his mane of golden hair. ‘Can you tell the difference?’

‘It makes your ego look even bigger than it normally is.’

Quest smiled. ‘Perhaps, but when I wear this, it also hides my soul. The fire of my id is cloaked as if I did not exist, as if I was never born. Which is precisely what it was designed to do. The coffins down there perform much the same function, with the added benefit you can sleep in them and they will feed you and keep you alive. You could sleep for centuries down here, protected, hidden away from the world.’

Amelia shook her manacles in frustration. ‘You want to hide from the airships parliament will send after you? There are cheaper ways to buy them off than mounting an expedition like this.’

‘Now don’t be facetious. You and the uninvited passenger inside your head have woken up just in time for our tests, Amelia. After all these years, we need to make sure the Camlanteans’ measures to save the world are still fit for purpose.’

‹You’re not saving the world, you’re stoking the furnaces of hell, you fool.›

‘The majority of your people didn’t think so, old man. There was no coffin for you and your blood-father’s followers down there, was there? You are Pairdan’s child all right, for all the artificial nature of your nativity. You and your rebels preferred entropy and the victory of the Black-oil Horde.’

‹We preferred history and the natural course of things.›

‘Then you’ve had your wish,’ said Quest. ‘For too many thousands of years you’ve had your own way. But I choose to shape our destiny, shape it to an improved pattern.’

He waved to one of his engineers and the wall at the end of the chamber became transparent, revealing a series of rooms, each separated from the others like cages in an underground zoo. In the first of the rooms was an old lady Amelia did not recognize until the uninvited passenger in her mind supplied her name. ‹Damson Beeton. An agent of the Court of the Air.›

A series of metal boxes lay in an adjacent cell — hex suit-like coffins, only the prisoners’ heads visible. More agents of the Court; the unfortunates who had been given the job of infiltrating the House of Quest. Inside the next cell, T’ricola paced about. Then there was an empty room, followed by a cell holding Ironflanks.

Amelia struggled desperately in the grip of her escort. ‘T’ricola, Ironflanks, what are you doing here? You should be safely back in Jackals!’

‘And your colleagues would be,’ said Quest, ‘if they hadn’t so foolishly decided to betray my trust. That’s something I have learnt from my Catosians, the value of total loyalty. There’s something comforting in their binary philosophy, don’t you think? You, them. Friend, enemy. Loyal, traitor.’ He turned to one of his engineers, pointing to the cell filled with hex-suited coffins. ‘Let’s start with that one.’ He tapped on the transparent partition holding Damson Beeton. ‘I told you I would find something useful to do with your friends from the Court of the Air, damson. They made very poor bookends.’

Quest’s staff moved about the controls on the Camlantean machinery. A slot appeared at the bottom of the agents’ cell, a black liquid starting to puddle out. The fluid fingered across the floor, moving under the coffins, then it began to bubble and froth, a dark mist forming above the floor. It spiralled upwards, higher, rearing above the heads of the trapped agents whose shouts were muffled by the viewing wall. The vapour swayed from face to face, having difficulty choosing with so many trapped in the room.

‘The craynarbian woman next,’ said Quest.

On his order, a similar puddle formed in the corner of T’ricola’s cell, the u-boat engineer backing into a corner at the sight of the liquid. The fluid moved as if it were alive, licking across the floor with slow, curious intent.

‘Now the steamman.’

Ironflanks dipped down to try to block the small slot forming, but to no effect; the inky substance began entering his cell too. The steamman’s voicebox trembled. ‘You soft-body lunatic, what is this foul oil?’

In all three rooms the liquid had started to froth and boil now, angry, furious, becoming a vapour. Quest nodded in approval. ‘This is the final instalment of my payment to you, scout. For taking my coin and repaying me with treachery.’

As he spoke, the mist fell down upon the occupants of the holding cells, the captured agents of the Court of the Air twisting in their hex suits as the mist devoured them. T’ricola banged madly against the glass, her exo-shell boiling in the haze, her body burning away — her flesh transforming, becoming mist, adding to the vapour’s volume.

Amelia kicked fiercely at her guards, but they punched her down, then forced her face towards her friends’ death throes, making her watch the lesson. In the first two cells there was nothing left, every drop of living matter absorbed by the ebony vapour; but in the third, Ironflanks stood untouched, the black gas curling around his metal feet, as flaccid and as harmless as a marsh mist.

Quest looked at Amelia, heaving a sigh at the sight of the intact steamman. ‘Of course, you knew that was going to happen.’

‘I-’ Amelia was struck dumb in horror, but the unwelcome passenger in her mind answered for her. ‹The steamman’s race came after our time.›

‘Not quite true,’ said Quest. ‘I am sure King Steam was wandering the nations of the world, a lost lonely soul, when your city was alive, much as you yourself must have done for so many centuries.’ The mill owner turned to Cornelius Fortune. ‘Well, we have confirmed that the Camlantean mist does not function on steammen, just as we know it certainly does work on those who have mastered the worldsinger arts as well as offshoots of the race of man, like the craynarbians. But what do you think about something rarer and altogether more alien, something like a lashlite?’

Pushed into the chamber by a mob of airship sailors, a lashlite arrived, forced along by long metal poles capped with wire loops, the proud lizard’s wings bound by straightjacket-like belts.

‘No,’ cried Cornelius, his face freezing on his true features as he realized what was about to be done. ‘Septimoth. NO!’

Damson Beeton banged on the glass of her cell, smashing the chest piece of her hex suit against the partition; but the glass was made of something as near indestructible as made no difference.

‘Toss him inside the empty cell,’ ordered Quest. He looked over at Cornelius Fortune. ‘I offered you a place in my service, once, Compte de Speeler. Unless I’m mistaken, your reply appeared to be a trail of my people left dead in the Leviathan’s brig and your dagger thrust towards my heart. Let me show you what a poor decision that was, for both you and your flying pet.’

Septimoth pulled towards his friend, seven of the airship sailors struggling to hold him in place, their wires cutting into him. ‘I always knew that you damn hairless apes would finish the job you began on my flight in the mountains of Quatershift.’

‘Sadly prescient,’ said Quest, ‘even without the use of your third eye.’

Septimoth’s gloved hand managed to get enough purchase to fumble free his bone pipe and toss it towards Cornelius. ‘My mother’s spine. Honour it. And if you have the opportunity, honour mine, old friend.’

‘I’ll get you out of this,’ shouted Cornelius. ‘I got you out of the camp in Quatershift, I can get you out of this.’

Quest scooped the bone pipe up off the floor, tucking it behind the struggling prisoner’s belt. ‘I suggest you use it to play a death dirge for the both of you.’

Septimoth gazed at Damson Beeton as he was dragged past her cell. ‘Remember, damson, nothing for the enemy. Nothing. You know what to do.’

The old woman pressed her armoured hand against the transparent surface, her tear-filled eyes just visible beneath the bulk of her hex suit. ‘No sustenance for the enemy. I remember, old bird.’

Septimoth was shoved into the cell next door to Ironflanks, and at last free of the airship sailors’ wire snares, he began tearing off his bindings, unfurling his wings and gnawing at the gloves constricting his talons. He had almost completely freed himself when the black liquid began to enter his cell, transforming into a mist in front of him, as if the vapour was trying to form itself into a shadow-copy of the winged lizard. Then the mist darted in, striking the lashlite on the bony feathers of his chest. Septimoth fell into the mist, clawing at it, trying to disperse the cloud. For a moment it was as if the glass of the viewing gallery had been painted black, obscuring their view of the combat, but when the darkness cleared, the winged beast lay on the floor, his arms flung out and his body torn with a thousand cuts. Unlike the agents of the Court and T’ricola, and in a cruel mockery of the lashlite religion, Septimoth’s mangled corpse had been abandoned on the floor rather than disintegrated by the cloud. Vapour chased around the cell in wild circles. It had tasted a soul and its flesh and it was eager for more.

‘Not quite as tidy an end as the mist gives to the race of man,’ said Quest, ‘but then, I would expect that. Sentience is the key, is it not.’

Amelia realized Quest was talking to the uninvited passenger inside her skull, but she could hardly hear the mill owner for the screams of insane rage being hurled towards him by Cornelius Fortune.

Quest walked over, muffling the prisoner’s cursing mouth with a breathing regulator, then produced a strange demonic-looking mask and slid that over the prisoner’s air supply. ‘Time for that expulsion from heaven we talked about. Take the great Furnace-breath Nick to the edge of the city and throw him over the side. And take his flying pet’s corpse back to the Leviathan for dissection; if there is something about lash-lite physiology that makes it unattractive for complete absorption by the mist, I need to know what it is.’

In front of them, Cornelius Fortune started laughing, a terrible unearthly sound. It was almost as if he had grown larger now he was wearing the mask. ‘You can’t kill me now. Nothing can. You poor deluded fool, I can’t die.’

Quest seemed amused by this. ‘I believe it is time to put that theory to the test. Goodbye, Compte de Speeler. We won’t be meeting again.’

Damson Beeton banged on the window of her cell as her erstwhile employer was dragged away to be thrown to his death and Quest wagged a finger at her. ‘Patience, damson. I already knew that the mist works on your kind. And if more of your friends from the Court of the Air come visiting Camlantis, I may yet be needing you alive, to carry them word of what will happen should they try to interfere.’

With most of the prisoners murdered a tomblike silence descended on the chamber.

‘Interfere with what?’ shouted Amelia. ‘Is this your Camlantean paradise? An exotic execution chamber floating in the sky?’

‘Ah well, at least one of you inside that pretty head understands,’ said Quest. ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the key is sentience. Your people designed very well, child of Pairdan. The Camlantean mist only seeks out that which can reason. A drover taking his geese to market would be slain in an instant by the mist, though his flock would be left behind unharmed. But then, what kind of world would it be without birdsong?’

‹Where is your sentience, Quest? Where is your ability to think?›

‘Here,’ said Quest, unfurling a roll of charts and calculations down the floor of the chamber. ‘The maths your people did so many years ago; and the numbers I found in your crystal-book have not altered a jot since I updated them with the figures for our world as she lies now.’

‹There are things that are beyond calculation.›

‘I disagree. Here are the estimated number of deaths that occur each year on our continent from war, here the number that die from starvation and malnutrition, here the numbers from sickness, here the mortality figures from poverty.’

Amelia’s hand rose of its own will to indicate the field of black that covered half the chart. ‹And those?›

‘The death of every living, thinking being outside this chamber,’ said Quest. ‘But you meant that to be rhetorical.’ His hand jabbed down on the line climbing beyond the field of black. ‘Here’s the replacement level of population generated by a society modelled on the Camlantean pattern.’

Amelia felt sick to her stomach. How do pacifists fight? Totally. The replacement population supplied from here, by people held on ice like eels on a fishmonger’s slab.

‘Break-even within three hundred years,’ said Quest. ‘Everything after is a numerical gain. No more poverty, war … misery.’

Amelia spoke with her own voice now, but she was talking for both of them. ‘You can’t build a new Camlantis on the foundations of mass murder.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ Quest yelled at her. ‘I tried to work by the rules, but you just kept on changing them.’

‹She’s right.›

‘You hypocrite,’ barked Quest. ‘You and your Camlantean rebels played by the numbers of your own calculations. A couple of million dead in this city to save how many more millions in the world outside? But preserve those lives for what kind of existence? For watching my sister cry herself to sleep every night in an alleyway because she didn’t have enough food to eat, starving while the gaslights of packed restaurants burned on the road opposite? For watching my older brother die of waterman’s sickness because the only water we had to drink was from the gutter? You saved us for this? You immortal halfwit. You could have erased the Black-oil Horde, you could have erased everything and started again with this as the seed. We could have enjoyed two thousand years of prosperity and peace, we could be living in the Camlantean age right now and have known nothing else for millennia.’

‹You can’t build paradise on a sea of blood. My people were wrong then, as you are wrong now. No one ever asked the rest of the world if they minded dying to make way for a greater Camlantean Commonwealth.›

‘I can forgive you for killing all your brothers and sisters in Camlantis. They were your kin to murder. But I can’t forgive you for all the generations of us that followed, scrabbling in the dirt and the mud of the misery you left us as your inheritance.’

‘There are other ways to change things,’ said Amelia.

‘You don’t think I haven’t bloody tried?’ Quest shouted back. ‘I could have rebuilt Jackals from the ground up on the principles of modern science and spread our democracy across the continent, used the RAN to overturn the killers sitting in the Commonshare, chased that fat fool of a caliph off into the desert. Jackals was mine. I owned everything and everyone in the land, but the old owners childishly decided they wouldn’t honour my deeds to the property.’

‹The world is changed by the one and one.›

‘Oh really, is it? Do you think my model manufactories with their sanitary plumbing, free suppers and open lending libraries actually made any difference? Or my poorhouses and academies? I funded the Levellers to power and even they were wading in parliament’s sewage, trying to pass the smallest reforms. Every one of my efforts to create the perfect society was a drop of clean water in a stagnant millpond. It’s time to drain all the filthy waters and start afresh.’

‘No,’ pleaded Amelia.

Quest looked over at Jules Robur and pointed at Ironflanks. ‘But we’re not clearing our acreages to allow the steammen to inherit the Earth. We will survive inside this chamber. The coffins below are built to shield those who sleep inside their confines, while my people moving around the tomb will be protected from the mist by their crowns. A year inside the tomb will be long enough to allow the mist of Camlantis to exterminate the nations of the surface, but I have no intention of waking up to find a second horde — this time one composed of angry steammen — ready to storm my paradise.’

Robur murmured into a speaking trumpet. ‘Introduce test subject twelve.’

A door opened in Ironflanks’ cell, a tracked steamman crunching across the threshold. Amelia could see that there was something wrong with the new addition, the steamman’s arms jerking in spastic movements, his head juddering while his vision plate danced with a peculiar pattern rather than pulsing with the calm, steady light of the life metal. Ironflanks sensed the wrongness too, backing away into the corner of his cell, but the newcomer tracked towards the scout, an iron hand rising up as if in greeting. A modem screech began to issue from the new arrival’s voicebox. Amelia was no expert on the machine language of the steammen, but she had heard enough of their hymns to the Steamo Loas to recognize that this was not one of them.

Ironflanks stumbled back, trying to cover his sound baffles and drown out the siren song but, he could not. Swaying, Ironflanks began to lose control of his body, his four arms shaking, his metal legs jerking in the same obscene, involuntary dance as the other steamman. The scout tried to say something, but his mind was no longer capable of teasing his thoughts into vocalizations through his voicebox. He turned pleadingly towards the window where Amelia was watching and his turn became an uncontrolled dervish spin. Where was Ironflanks’ softbody friend? He tried to focus on her, on the figures outside the room, but there were only random shapes floating through his vision. Ironflanks’ telescope eyes began to flex out, his head lolling to the side as he stumbled around the room.

‘Ironflanks,’ cried Amelia. ‘Ironflanks.’

The two steammen started to circle each other inside the cell in an idiot’s waltz, poking each other with their manipulator arms.

‘You are wasting your breath, professor. Your scout now lacks the higher mental functions necessary to understand you,’ sneered Robur. ‘My ingenious little steamman disease is spread at the sonic level — it doesn’t even require a joining of cables between steammen to spread. A few infected specimens pushed up the stairs to Mechancia and within a week, the mountains of the Steamman Free State will be inhabited by nothing but oil-drooling imbeciles.’

‘You jigger!’ Amelia struggled in the grip of the guards. ‘You filthy shiftie jigger.’

Robur just smiled at her threats. ‘The Sun King had grown tired of the steammen knights defeating his regiments. He desired something to distract the people of the metal from the length of their border with Quatershift. Then the revolution got in the way of our project. Ironically, it was a lot easier to complete my work on the disease in a multiracial society such as Jackals, with its ready supply of steammen components and bodies.’

Quest addressed the passenger lurking inside Amelia’s mind. ‘It was the steammen grave robberies that first made you suspicious, wasn’t it?’

‹You shouldn’t have stolen such ancient parts.›

‘But it was ancient parts that I needed,’ said Robur. ‘Ancient components have their encryption patterns broken, their unravelled designs circulating as common currency among mechomancers. King Steam makes sure he advances each new generation of his people, always trying to frustrate the work of my noble trade. I needed to dig very deep into their filthy race’s nucleus to design such a potent steamman plague.’

‘Turnaround is fair play,’ added Quest. ‘I have seen enough of my cardsharps infected with transaction-engine sickness to realize that my colleague’s unfinished project had considerable merit.’

‘You’re the sickness, Quest,’ spat Amelia. ‘You and your pet shiftie.’

‘We are not monsters,’ protested Robur. ‘Do you not understand that I and my Jackelian friend have imagined countless times the terror the innocents below will feel as the Camlantean death mist seeps through their lodgings and starts to pull them to pieces? I see little else these days, but their myriad, murdered faces as I drift to sleep. But the body of the race of man is riddled with cancer and we must cut it out if we are to survive. You would understand better if you had seen what we did to each other in the organized communities of my nation. Such things cannot be allowed to continue. We must change.’

‘I’ll stop you!’ bellowed Amelia. ‘You’re not going to do this.’

‘Then you have made your choice,’ sighed Quest. ‘There is no room in our new world for division and opposition, professor. You of all people should know that if Camlantean society is to be reborn it will require harmony on the part of its citizens. But there is still one thing left to test …’ He took off his Camlantean crown and gave it to one of his airship sailors. ‘Put the crown and Professor Harsh in one of the cells, then throw him-’ he pointed at Bull Kammerlan,’-in after her. I am fairly confident the Camlanteans’ crowns still function after all these centuries, but I think a demonstration of their operation would be prudent first.’

‘You’re nothing but a pathetic little shopkeeper,’ Bull yelled and struggled as they dragged him after Amelia. ‘You’re not fit to run a sewer works, let alone a new world.’

‘You don’t approve of my calculations either?’ said Quest. ‘Let me give you a new sum, then, something that even a lowlife royalist like you should be able to understand. One crown and two souls that need cloaking. You do the maths.’

Amelia was shoved, struggling, into the cell, Bull Kammerlan thrown onto the floor beside her and the room sealed.

‘One crown, dimples,’ said Bull, ‘and two of us. That sum isn’t going to change.’

‘I opened this tomb for him,’ groaned Amelia. ‘I’ve murdered everyone in Jackals with my obsession for Camlantis. You take the damn crown and survive.’

A slot in the wall began to open where it joined the floor.

Bull shook his head. ‘From where I’m standing, there are two of you on your side of the room.’

‹If I was by myself, my belief system would require me to give you the crown.›

‘But you’re not by yourself, are you?’ said Bull. ‘You always were a queer one, Billy Snow, with your strange tales and your taste for damn vegetables, but I never knew the half of it.’

The black liquid started to puddle across the floor, the very sweat of hell.

Amelia kicked the crown towards Bull. ‘I don’t want it.’

The vapour was forming around their feet. At close quarters Amelia could see it was a soot-storm of a billion dark flecks. Tiny living machines — Billy revealed their construction within Amelia’s mind — designed to take apart that which was sentient one cell at a time, to breed, to spread, to absorb, until anything more intelligent than a Jackelian rat-pit terrier was scrubbed from the face of the world.

Bull picked up the crown. ‘My family were stewards of our land once, until Quest’s kind decided it would be better run by counting-house clerks.’

The cloud was starting to rise, becoming two mocking silhouettes, as if both the prisoners’ shadows had grown detached and insane.

Bull proffered the crown to Amelia. ‘And haven’t they done well with it?’

‘I opened the tomb.’

‘Then between you and that mad old coot riding around your skull, you’ve got what you need to close it.’

Bull tossed the crown towards Amelia as the cloud formed into a lance and hissed viper-like towards his chest. ‘You be sure and tell that fat oaf of an uncle of mine how I died.’

‹One must live.›

Her hands struck out of their own will, seizing the cloaking crown and jamming it over her mane of hair.

The mist wrapped itself around the slaver, concealing him, followed by a macabre fizzing sound, like bacon on the griddle. It grew darker and denser, absorbing the new matter, swirling around in a frenzy. When the mist dispersed the slaver had vanished. A conjurer’s trick. No blood, no bones, not a trace that he had ever existed. Bull Kammerlan had died without even a cry leaving his lips. Hovering in front of Amelia, shapes formed and flowed within the inky motes. There had been someone else here. Someone the mist was required to feed on. But now there was nothing. It circled the room for a couple of minutes. Then it retreated, confused, towards the floor, reforming into a liquid that flowed repellently out of her cell. The slot sealed shut.

Bull was gone. T’ricola dead, Ironflanks left a helpless cripple, the face-shifting madman and his lashlite pet murdered. Just one left alive, Amelia and the ancient Camlantean ghost echoing around her skull.

Amelia sunk to her knees. ‘What now?’

‹Now Quest will activate the ignition process in the nanofactury buried below,› whispered the voice in her mind, showing her an image of the death mist’s huge breeding tanks. ‹And he will remake the world. After he has first slaughteredit.›