The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Three of the House of Quest’s armoured vehicles steamed backwards, their single tracks bouncing over the boulevards, the short stubby cannons on their prows at maximum elevation, tossing shells upwards. Reversing through the stream of fleeing sailors, they were followed by the tentacles of a skrayper, gel-swollen trunks of flesh lined with spines swaying and slaying as they went. But even the reins inserted above the skrayper’s sensitive ridge of optical cells could not urge the monster to squeeze any lower between the spires, so its lashlite handlers had to be content with trailing its twitching tentacles along the pavement, whipping across lines of Catosians as the soldiers emptied their rifles. A few of them were left flailing, impaled on the wiry flesh as if they were so many insects on Dr Billickin’s patent flypaper.

One of the tentacles curled out, guided by the heat-sensing flesh inside the limb and, wrapping itself around the hot barrel of a vehicle’s cannon, battered two tanks off the road before raising the vehicle — treads spinning useless in the air — into its monstrous maw filled with whale-like teeth. The skrayper fed on sunlight, but it had to get its trace minerals from somewhere. A cannon gunner attempted to climb out of a side hatch but only succeeded in falling into the gullet early, passing straight through the teeth and into the jelly-like absorption gel. The armoured carriage followed him, rotating slowly through the stomach liquids as the last of its energy expended itself through the track. A shiver ran down the skin of the skrayper. Oh, this was good. Far richer in irons than the massive schools of helium globules that drifted through the stratosphere. After this day of feeding it would be able to drift lazily through the heavens for months, just filling itself with the glorious white light.

At the end of the boulevard the Minotaur crashed through the buildings of Camlantis, one of its three massive aerospheres severed and making its own last flight into the heavens, the remaining two hull units blanketed by the bodies of as many skraypers as could latch onto the airship, squeezing the life out of this strange new entrant into their realm. It took every iota of the lashlite riders’ talents to keep the creatures focused on ripping apart the Minotaur and not flailing their tentacles at each other. This was not breeding season and without the pain the lashlites were able to cause with their riding wires, the sky would have been filled with a mass of furious, sparring skraypers.

On the ground, a line of Catosian soldiers ran towards the collapsing airship only to be driven back by the ferocity of the lashlite assault. Fifty flights of aerial warriors were circling overhead, each squadron of the flight taking a turn to peel off from the formation and fill the air above the downed aerostat with a storm of lances — whistling down to strike the hundreds of crewmen trying to climb out of the torn walls of their airship.

‘Withdraw!’ barked a Catosian centurion, recognizing the grim reality of their situation. ‘Find a spire and mark your targets from the tower windows.’

A bugler took up her command and sounded the retreat, poignant echoes of it bouncing off the shining skyline of Camlantis. They kept their line, each woman in lockstep as they fell back, sliding glass charges into their rifles and maintaining a volley of fire up at the diving lizards, closing ranks where lances thudded through their number. The enemy seemed almost fanatical about retrieving the corpses of their lifeless warriors; but unlike the lashlites, the free company fighters had no compulsions about abandoning the bloody carcasses of their fallen behind them.

Waving her pistol, the centurion fell back through an archway into an arcade of what might once have been shops. Striding out of a lifting room at the centre of the arcade came Veryann.

‘First!’

‘What is your disposition, centurion?’

‘Casualties are running at half our strength and the only aerial support left effective now is the Leviathan, but those winged jiggers have jammed her mooring lock on the spire. She’s stuck fast and running thick with lizards. Boarding parties are being repelled on every deck.’

‘And your orders?’ asked Veryann.

‘Stand and hold, First.’

Veryann reached out to steady her officer. ‘We are Catosians. That is what we do. We stand and we hold.’

‘One of the airship people told me they thought they saw you blade-to-blade with that fat u-boat skipper.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Veryann. ‘The commodore. That peacock always did like to boast about his prodigious talent at the game of tickle-my-sabre.’

‘The actuality fell short?’

‘He was proficient enough in sword-work for someone who has never drilled as free company. But I don’t think the outcome was ever in doubt.’

The centurion pointed outside the arcade, her troops taking positions around the entrance. ‘We received word from a runner a few minutes ago. Abraham Quest has asked for your presence at the tomb to command its final defence.’

‘So, it has come to that, then?’ sighed Veryann.

The officer saluted. ‘We shall hold the lashlites off to our last.’

‘Carry home victory,’ said Veryann, using the traditional Catosian farewell, ‘or carry my body home on my shield.’

The officer watched her head for the tomb. It was only after Veryann had left that the soldier realized what had been nagging at the back of her mind while they had been talking. Veryann had been clutching her left arm to her gut, as if it had been wounded. Or as if she hadn’t wanted anyone else to get a good look at it.

While the sewers of Camlantis had the advantage of having been free of night soil for many thousands of years, it appeared there were disadvantages too — the eerie hissing of something in the pipes above them following Amelia, Damson Beeton and Ironflanks as they travelled down the tunnels.

‘You buried your dark engine down here?’ said Amelia. ‘You were hoping the smell would hold off your rivals in the civil war?’

‹More than a bad smell, professor,› answered Billy Snow using Amelia’s voice. ‹There were difficulties with the integrity of the systems down here, even in my time. It was never a problem when the people of Camlantis were alive. When the recycling and sewer devices bred corrupt and began running contrary to their instructions, they would be replaced by a superior generation who would eliminate the old until they too needed upgrading. But there has been nobody to control the sanitation equipment for a very long time. The ages move to a different tock and tick in the no-space realm where Camlantis was banished, but even so, the systems in the sewers have been feral for many centuries.›

‘The same as Middlesteel,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘Nobody wants to venture down into the lower levels of the city.’

‹Yes, but not all of the Camlantean undercity was ripped into the sky by our floatquake,› said Billy. ‹You see around you the distant ancestors of the Daggish and they are coming out of hibernation. Trickle-down power from the towers above is awakening their systems. We must hurry.›

‘I sense movement in the tunnels behind us,’ said Ironflanks. ‘Many small things moving.’

They broke into a run, Amelia letting Billy’s lurking presence in her mind guide her. ‘You managed to assemble your dark engine down here before.’

‹Quite a few of my bodies died doing it, and the children of Pairdan were heavily armed with specialist weaponry to disrupt and subvert the systems of the sewer creatures.›

‘Sadly, I noticed your witch-blade locked up back on the Leviathan,’ said Ironflanks.

‹My earlier copies were armed with a little more than that,› Billy told the steamman. ‹The witch-blade is a primitive weapon in comparison, intended to survive the ages in a low-maintenance environment.›

The hissing in the pipes above them grew louder.

‘I like primitive, ducky,’ said Damson Beeton, looking up towards whatever was scraping after them overhead, matching their speed exactly. ‘I can always use primitive.’

A plug in the floor of the tunnel ahead suddenly levered open. Two matt-black bodies emerged, glistening above spider-like feet, scorpion tails dangling with tunnel-scouring disks that had mutated into rotating razors.

Amelia heeded the advice given silently in her skull by the Camlantean and swivelled around to make for a side-tunnel, only to see a pack of pallid worms the size of tree trunks sliding out, forked tongues greedily tasting the air. The worms were hunting together with the bugs in front of them. Just like the damn Daggish hive.

‘There,’ pointed Damson Beeton. A series of footholds in the wall led up to a narrow walkway on a second level of the tunnel. Amelia scurried up, following the old lady’s ankles, Ironflanks climbing after her backwards using his two manipulator arms while his pair of war arms swung their weight into one of the massive worms rearing up after them.

They sprinted along the walkway, the mutants below marking their flight, hissing and drumming their limbs on the floor. Calling for more of their kind to come and consume the filth that had invaded their realm. Amelia found a service door and slapped her hand on the keypad, whispering a frantic meditation to the Circle that it would prove as functional as the sewer cleaners trying to scour the three of them away. There was a faint buzzing as the lock mechanism recognized her blood, but then the door smashed open from the other side, the worldsinger who had been pushing on it tumbling forward, off the walkway and into the claws of the monsters below, leaving the three of them standing nose to nose with a stunned line of Catosian soldiers and Robur.

The roar of a mighty steamman hull-opener firing into life cut short the split second of shock on both sides, leaving the three of them a fleeting panicked moment to try to close the door against the rush of soldiers.

* * *

‘There it is,’ cried one of the seers of the crimson feather, indicating the tomb below.

It had taken the lashlite flight longer than it should have to follow the broken leylines of the rendered land back to their source, so long had they lain dead after being ripped from the living grasp of mother Earth. But the Camlanteans had understood the secrets of earthflow only too well and, as expected, the terrible instrument of their final desperate solution lay at the centre of a web of them.

By the seer’s side, the war chief waved his baton down towards the building and a dozen flights of warriors hanging above him tilted their wings, diving onto the smoking rifles of the ground-hugging monkeys surrounding the tomb. As they dived, the roof of the tomb slowly began extruding a ring of white horns, a grille of dark holes opening along each of the horns’ length.

‘Too late,’ moaned the seer.

‘What are those things?’ asked the war chief.

‘That which has been foreseen in the Stalker Cave,’ said the seer. ‘The terrible chimneys of the dark wind which will scour our people from the nests of the world.’

‘I cannot hold them here forever,’ said Ironflanks, his voicebox trembling on full power.

It was a desperate contest of strength — the door wedged on one side by the knight steamman; his stacks burning red hot, as on the other side an entire company of Catosians pushed at the portal. Life metal versus the bull-women of the city-states.

Damson Beeton dropped to her knees, punching a fist through the armour of one the beetle things trying to pull itself up the wall’s handholds. Down below there was a feeding frenzy as the creatures chopped apart the corpse of the worldsinger who had tracked them down into the feral Camlantean maintenance levels.

‹I am fading,› said Billy Snow, using Amelia’s throat. He had to shout to be heard over the screeching din of the hull-opener coming from behind the half-closed door. ‹There is very little of my pattern left now. I am trying to preserve the knowledge of the dark engine’s location and the security protocols necessary to activate the engine’s ignition sequence.›

‘Go,’ called Damson Beeton. ‘Go. We shall keep them here.’

Amelia hesitated. Damson Beeton switched into witch-time, her arms and fists chopping down almost too fast to see at the horde of creatures trying to mount the walkway. There were few who got to observe an agent of the Court of the Air’s fighting tricks and lived to tell the tale. And unfortunately, it didn’t look like Amelia was going to be one of them.

‘Any time soon would be good, dearie,’ called the old woman.

Amelia fled along the narrow second-storey gantry — her escape feeling like betrayal even though it might be survival for the world. There was no time for farewells.

That would come soon enough, soon enough for all of them.