The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Court of the Air’s black sphere hung above the city, high enough that the army of lashlite warriors and their captured skraypers were sweeping through the heavens at a healthy distance below. The sphere was drifting over the sundered land, the Special Observer Corps with their portable scopes seeking to provide an adequate reconnaissance before feeding their findings back to the Court. The models of Jackelian society that turned on the vast drums of the Court’s transaction engines needed masses of accurate data to hold the nation true to the course laid down by the late, great Isambard Kirkhill.

‘There’s some good news,’ said the SOC surveillant from his bucket seat. ‘Our three missing airships are down there.’

Their mission commander wound his seat down from the pilot dome. ‘What’s the bad news, old stick?’

‘Well, I have to say, that would be just about everything else.’

A hatch opened and a head poked out from the heliograph operations room. ‘Analyst level back home have identified the style of architecture, but they pretty much had to go to the fiction shelf to do it.’ He passed up a stretch of tape that had been flashed across to the mission commander.

‘You’ve got to be bloody joking me,’ said the wolftaker reading the message. One Harold Stave. He looked down on the spires of Camlantis. ‘There’s a bit of classical history repeating down there, lads. But is it for the good or for the worse, that’s the question?’

And there was a more fundamental question that greater minds than his would be puzzling over, too. The three missing airships, property of the most glorious House of Guardians, made this their problem. Their location, far out over the Sepia Sea and well beyond the writ of Jackals, made it someone else’s.

Which viewpoint was going to prove stronger?