The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

At one end of the sewer chamber stood a row of sentient tree-trunks — something approximating faces in the bark gurning and leering at Amelia — their branch-like limbs wavering towards her in silent agony. They put her in mind of Tree-head Joe and the Daggish, bringing back memories of Bull Kammerlan’s offhand comments concerning the ruler of the greenmesh. For a rogue and a rascal with the scruples of a Gallowhill alley cat, the hole left by the u-boat privateer’s death ran deeper than it should have.

‹These creatures digested night soil,› said Billy Snow. His voice in her skull was growing fainter every minute now, the echoes more distant. ‹Filtering waste into different elementsthat could be transformed by our machinery into usefulsubstances.›

‘Keep your strength,’ said Amelia.

‹I need to talk. Each second that passes without an activethought from me allows your neural pathways to re-establishthemselves, eroding my presence. I am decaying at an exponentialrate now.›

There! By the far wall. The dark engine she had seen in Billy’s memories, a large polygon of jet-black material, sucking down whatever small vestige of energy was still available through the glow tubes in the ceiling above. The device sat there, at least as tall as she was, distorting space itself. Tiny currents of matter rippled around the polygon. Looking at the abominable thing was like trying to stare through a wall of water. Twin horns curved out of the top of the dark engine, tapering to needle-sharp points. They were the horns of a demon.

Behind Amelia the line of filtration trees appeared to undulate in fear as she approached it. Had the trees somehow gleaned the dark engine’s purpose? Did they ascribe their millennia-long banishment and hibernation — their long dark night — to this terrible device?

‘What do I need to do?’

‹Place your palm on the central panel on the surface ofthe engine. I am going to attempt to interface with it throughyour body.›

She laid her good hand — her right palm — on the dark object and it seemed to suck her in with a tug like gravity; then her skin started to tickle, the tickle becoming a flare of agonizing heat. ‘You could have bloody warned me …’

‹Connecting. Blood pattern recognized.›

‘… I would have used my left hand, the acid-ridden stump of it you’ve left me.’

‹Living cells better to maintain the — connection. Keep — hand — pressed. Maintain connection.›

Lights appeared on the side of the polygon. Red sigils. An information language similar to Simple, but evolved by a couple of thousand years. What the enginemen and cardsharps of Jackals would give to see this. What she would give to trade places with them.

‹The energy sink has decayed,› said Billy. ‹There isn’tenough power left for a second stable translation.›

‘Then we’re jiggered,’ said Amelia.

The world was dead. She was dead.

‹There’s not enough power for a stable translation ofCamlantis. There is enough left for a cruder manoeuvre intoa spin-state.›

‘Just fire up the boiler on this damn thing.’ It was taking every inch of Amelia’s willpower to keep her palm pressed against the engine. ‘Throw us as far from Jackals as you can.’

‹My faction’s consensus was to preserve Camlantis for thosewho were to follow us.›

‘Good for your people!’ screamed Amelia. ‘If they want to book an airship berth up here they can come and vote us down. You fling Camlantis back into the bloody void.’

‹Fling us where?›

‘Exile! Banishment!’

‹I can’t remember,› said Billy Snow. ‹I can see again. Withyour eyes. Who are you?›

‘BILLY!’

‹Who is Billy?›

At last, one of the creatures that had been following the Jackelians through the sewer pipes had revealed itself, deeming the time right to claim its prey in the confusion. Damson Beeton rolled to the side, throwing the winged insect to the left. It was mosquito-fast: even fighting it in witch-time it clawed at her face with cantilevered mandibles, the agent barely turning her head in time to see its rotating teeth slip past her cheek. She danced around the thing, waiting for it to try and take her throat out with its mandibles, then, as it lashed forward, she smashed its compound eye with a fist. It twisted to bring her into the field of vision of its remaining eye, just where she had been expecting it to go — she blinded the last eye with a second crack of her hand. Kicking the thrashing thing back into the swarm of insect machines won the damson a couple of seconds as its comrades devoured the wounded creature.

Ahead of her, Ironflanks was dealing with more rotating teeth, these ones belonging to Robur’s hull-opener — the Quatershiftian swinging his weapon furiously and with little care for where it landed, the whine of high-tension clockwork intermingling with the dull thud and slap of its blades accidentally cleaving the flesh off Catosian soldiers. The knight steamman fought to pull apart the mechomancer, using the door he had torn off its hinges as a shield.

There was a grudge to be settled here. Not just between Ironflanks and the mechomancer — one of the filthy softbodies who made a trade out of turning deceased steammen out of their graves before the rites of the Steamo Loas could be followed. Not just between Ironflanks and a Quatershiftian; the perfidious neighbours of the Steamman Free State who — come monarchy or Commonshare — were always ready to throw their armies across the border in attempts to seize the alpine meadows and high peaks they believed were theirs by right. This, this was the plague creator who had schemed to utterly empty the halls of the mountain kingdom of steammen, leaving Ironflanks’ people rusting corpses too mindless even to feed fresh coke into their boilers. Carbine balls glanced off Ironflanks’ makeshift shield, while behind him a sea of mutated maintenance-level creatures advanced on both sides, the reports of the mercenaries’ weapons echoing off the enclosed space. For the first time in an age, Ironflanks invoked the battle cry of the Steamo Loas, the steam from his stacks spearing out in the forms of his ancestors, Legba of the Valves and Sogbo-Pipes.

Behind him, Damson Beeton backed into the side tunnel, nearly slipping on all the blood. She used the enclosed space of the maintenance tube to channel and slow the charge of undercity vermin. In front of her, two Catosians slipped past Ironflanks’ shield — a corner of it being chewed off by the hull-opener — and tried to bayonet the steamman’s telescope eyes. He sent one sprawling back with an upper-cut from his heavy war arm, caving in the knee bone of the other soldier and stealing her fur-lined cap with a deft snatch of a manipulator arm as she collapsed.

‘Oh, that’s handsome.’ He settled the hat on his metal skull and pulled down the earmuffs while blocking the thrust of another bayonet.

‘I’ll take your boiler heart for my collection,’ shouted Robur, a scream of metal sounding above the melee as his hull-opener cut another hole in Ironflanks’ improvised shield. ‘Your steamman cogs and crystals will allow me to perfect the destruction of your kind.’

‘First you must show the heart necessary to take it,’ roared Ironflanks, ‘and you will find me both more and less than a steamman now. I am a siltempter!’

Robur cut down, holding the whirling collection of steel teeth and rotating blades with both hands — shattering through Ironflanks’ shield and severing three of the steamman’s manipulator-arm fingers, oil pumping out of the severed metal.

‘Well, you bleed like a steamman,’ laughed Robur, ‘and I’ll dissect the rest of your secrets on my mechomancer’s slab.’

A pair of Catosians slipped past the savage duel — to be clear of the wild cuts of Robur’s blade and to murder the agent of the Court of the Air guarding the steamman’s rear. Damson Beeton stepped back and freed two belt daggers from the corpses of their fallen comrades, the insects feasting on their bodies snapping at her hands. Their three-pronged blades fair danced in the agent’s palms, rotating with an artist’s flourish. The Catosians came in silently and professionally, no wasted moves, from two angles simultaneously to make it harder for her to parry. Damson Beeton caught the bayonet of the first one’s carbine and kicked out at the tunnel, running along its roof fast enough to take her over the heads of her opponents. Now the two Catosians were the ones facing a wall full of slavering fury coming down the tunnel and Damson Beeton abandoned them to their fate at the jaws of the artificial insects as she rolled under the whirling blades of the hull-opener being thrown about by the shiftie. More Catosians were reloading their carbines on the other side and if they had been expecting a seventy-year-old to dive into their ranks with twin blades slicing through their thick high-altitude coats, they did not show it.

Robur’s brutal hull-opener battered down and down, the wounded steamman finally collapsing to his knees, a swarm of metal fragments from his shield showering his head. Robur kicked the broken remains of the door out of Ironflanks’ hands. ‘There we are, my sweet. Let’s see what’s inside you that enabled you to resist my plague …’

The mechomancer raised his hull-opener, ready to drive it straight down through the fur-capped skull of the kneeling steamman. Ironflanks swivelled his voicebox up, towards the rattling pipe above, emitting a screech that severed the duct’s bracket stays. The battle cry spilled a mosquito-like pair of wings onto Robur’s head — a twin of the wicked thing that had struck at Damson Beeton earlier — the creature sinking two fangs into the shiftie’s neck. Robur’s body went rigid, struck by poison and instant paralysis.

‘That was the steamman part of me,’ said Ironflanks. He rose up from his knees and head-butted the machine insect burrowing into Robur, sending it tumbling away. Ironflanks lifted Robur up and wrapped him with all four arms in a fierce bear hug, squeezing until the mechomancer’s ribs broke, a crackle of splintering bone rustling down the man’s chest. ‘And that’s the siltempter part of me.’

What was left of Robur dropped to the floor. Ironflanks picked up the two-handed hull-opener, its multiple teeth rotating to a halt now the trigger was no longer being clutched. He smashed the buckler of the weapon on his chest and let out a victory roar that filled the tunnel with the hooting of thunder lizards and the whine of sleekclaws.

The music of the Liongeli jungle had come to the ruins of Camlantis.

Abraham Quest glanced up from his console, counting the seconds down to the start of his new world. There was so little time left now. The end of poverty. The end of war. The end of famine. That the start of this age of glory meant the end of everything else, well, that was such a small and fleeting price to pay.

Veryann came down into the control chamber and was issued with a cloaking crown by the sentries on the door. She looked perfect. An amazon queen to complement his coronation as the creator of a perfect new society.

‘How goes it up there?’ asked Quest.

‘Fierce work,’ said Veryann. ‘But the free company is holding, just. Are we close to releasing the Camlantean mist now?’

Quest pointed to the thousands of green glowing coffins in the chasm below. Their people, sleeping, protected and cloaked from the mist. All that had gone before would be a bad dream. They would wake up to paradise. ‘Soon. Everything we need is with us here. You have done well, Veryann. Of all the things we had planned for — pursuit by the RAN, intervention by the Court of the Air — to think that our plans were nearly upset by a handful of lance-wielding tribesmen from Jackals’ own mountain nests. Savages, nothing but savages.’

‘History likes to repeat itself,’ said Veryann. ‘The Black-oil Horde …’

A siren sounded from the chasm below, a long string of icons in red appearing on the console in front of Quest. Critical mass had been reached in the underground mills producing the black mist. He only had to enter the ignition code that had been teased from the crystal-book discovered in Jackals. It was time for the end and the beginning of the world.

‘Yes, we have come full circle.’ Quest’s hand slid back the firing panel. ‘And now it is time to heal the world of all sickness.’

‹I remember the sea,› said Billy Snow. ‹Or was it a river,with a u-boat?›

‘Remember this!’ shouted Amelia, her palm pressed down on the dark engine, her life force being drained from her by the second. ‘Camlantis. Remember Camlantis.’

Behind Amelia the limbs of the twisted trees walling the chamber undulated towards her. Imploring her Camlantean blood to release the sewage of her kind for them to filter. Imploring her for purpose.

‹Yes, Camlantis. It has been so long.›

‘Make it even longer, Billy. Activate this engine of yours and send Camlantis back to the long night.’

‹An engine. Is this thing an engine?›

Damn him. Amelia glanced desperately around the chamber. How many thousand years had Billy Snow haunted the Earth as guardian of the Camlantean civilization’s secrets only to choose now to fade into oblivion? Centuries as a living weapon. Yes, of course, a weapon. A weapon that could be transferred upon the failure of its host. She raised her acid-wrecked hand and plunged it down on one of the dark engine’s horns, impaling her swollen palm on the razor-edged thing. It was like bursting a balloon.

‘Time to move on, Billy,’ Amelia yelled through gritted teeth. ‘This thing has got the equivalent of a transaction engine turning in there, I can sense it. Combat transfer, Billy.’

Waves of pain flared through the acid-ridden ruin of a hand, slicks of her blood pouring down the spike and feeding the horn. She nearly passed out with the agony, black spots dancing around her eyes. The engine’s horns battered her with waves of gravity, gripping her with nausea, making her body part of its antennae, joining her crucified hand to the skin of the universe, drinking the energy and soul from her body, and her blood — the blood that was still fizzing with whatever was left of the ghost of Billy Snow.

Amelia had to fight to keep her remaining good hand pressed to the central panel of the dark engine, shivering until the icons flickering there started to blur and reform in front of her eyes, changing into Jackelian common script.

LOAD51. Charging spin-sinks now. Singularity leakage is no longer being contained.

‘Billy, are you safely inside that thing?’

LOAD12. Confirmed. Download to the engine-mind is completed. All degraded portions of my combat pattern are running in damage simulation. Not much time left for either of us, now.

Amelia wrenched her hand off the dark engine’s horn, trying not to scream as the lump of flesh was hauled free. ‘Is there enough power left inside your dark engine for a second expulsion of the city?’

The answer flowed across the dark engine’s central panel: REBUILD-PERS8. Confirmed, there is sufficient power, but the no-space translation will definitely not be stable this time. You must go.

‘In the name of the Circle go where, Billy? We’re scraping the stars on a couple of miles’ worth of broken floatquake land high above the Sepia Sea.’

The dark engine was shaking the walls of reality; she could feel the power of the dreadful thing, rewriting the equations of the universe around them, dimensions that were never meant to coexist remade and squeezed into their own world.

PERS8-REBUILD-SUCCESS. Go as far as possible, professor. If it comes to it, you must jump. If that isn’t possible, find a charged pistol and use it on yourself. The alternative — staying here after the city’s translation — will not be pleasant.

On the dark engine’s central panel the sigils had become numbers, counting down. Counting down fast.