The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The sincere faces of Abraham Quest’s engineers — their heads weighed down by cloaking crowns — had gathered in reverent silence to watch the moment they were to inherit the Earth.

‘This will be a day you speak of for many years to come,’ cried Veryann.

‘Indeed it will,’ said Quest. He looked at the assembly, nodding at his followers in proud approval, then entered the first digits of the firing code on the black mist’s release panel. ‘The day of the death of every imperfection that has marred the race of man since its inception.’

‘Your death!’ said Veryann, plunging her dagger into the mill owner’s chest.

Quest stumbled back from the console, looking in dis belief at the dagger protruding from his breast.

Veryann’s face melted away to be replaced by the features of Cornelius Fortune. ‘I remembered to use my left hand this time.’

‘You — you-’

Cornelius removed a glass sphere from underneath the folds of his fur-lined high-altitude coat, pressing it into the bloodstained hands of the mill owner. Quest stared dumbly at the little clockwork head whirring around on top of the grenade, two hemispheres of explosive liquid separated by a thin crystal membrane. The others in the room broke the silence and the shocking unreality of the moment with a collective howl of fury, rushing towards the killer who would murder their beloved master. With his spare hand Cornelius pulled out a demon mask and slipped it over his skull, filling the chamber with the terrible laughter of Furnace-breath Nick. He flopped behind the shelter of the console as the grenade blast sent the mob of attacking engineers and Catosians flying back towards the black mist’s testing rooms.

Only Furnace-breath Nick stood up from behind the smoking ruins of the console, fire and sparks shrouding his figure as he shrugged off his airship coat. Abraham Quest was still alive — barely — and was crawling towards the balcony overlooking the sleepers’ coffins, leaving a snail’s trail of gore in his wake, when he heard the eerie whistle-song.

Furnace-breath Nick sauntered in front of him, playing a bone-white pipe. ‘I’m not as good a musician as Septimoth was, but sink me, his mother’s spine always did carry a first-rate tune.’

Good enough to have summoned the queen’s people and the seers of the crimson feather as they travelled up towards Camlantis. Good enough to have sent a flight of lashlites diving after Furnace-breath Nick’s plummeting body, catching him and depositing him back on one of the city’s spires.

Quest pulled himself to the edge of the chasm, the yellow light of thousands of gel-filled capsules illuminating the agony on his face. ‘My — children — my — people.’

‘They’ll sleep longer than a year,’ said Furnace-breath Nick, ‘and I don’t know what they’ll wake up to, but whatever they find, it isn’t going to be Camlantis.’

‘Please,’ begged Quest, ‘you can still — change things — enter the code.’

‘Oh, but I am changing things,’ laughed Furnace-breath Nick. The demon-masked figure looked back at the ignition console. It was a smouldering ruin, as wrecked as Abraham Quest’s dreams of utopia. There would be no black mist replicating across the face of the world. No resetting of the world to zero. No philosopher-kings ruling a sanitary realm of super-science. It was the mill owner’s vision of a serene, clean, society of plenty that lay burning in that fire.

Quest raised an arm, pleading. ‘Fool — you are condemning our future to — stay — this violent, impoverished hell.’

‘Yes, but isn’t that what a devil does?’

‘Please — think what — you are — doing — please, you are a man — more than a mask …’

Furnace-breath Nick raised two of his fingers in the ancient Jackelian affront — the insulting, inverted position of the lion’s teeth — then walked over to the moving stairs to the surface. He left Quest’s dying, broken form to gaze upon the last of the Camlanteans. Sleeping now, for time without end. The future was rude, crude and raw. Alive. The future was Jackelian.

The eyepiece in his Furnace-breath Nick mask automatically adjusted to the wild energies outside. In the shadow of the tomb, the ground was shaking, splintering howls echoing from the towers and spires of the forgotten land, while above him the sky was pulsing with light. These planes of radiance were not the ordered forces that had summoned Camlantis back from her exile, but instead an angry storm of nameless colours that swarmed around each other, whirlwinds of energy spiralling down, decapitating spires and walking destruction across the city, sucking whole districts into a netherworld they would never return from.

‘Oh, what larks,’ whispered his mask. ‘Camlantis is growingon me. A pity about Abraham’s bright shiny new world, butyou wouldn’t have liked it, no, not our cup of caffeel at all.’

‘Shut up,’ ordered Furnace-breath Nick. ‘And enjoy the view.’

In the atmosphere above, the lashlites were swarming away from the dying zone while the ground cracked beneath them. Over the sounds of the collapsing city, the hypnotic rise and fall of expansion engines filled the air. It was the Leviathan. Some of the sailors had blown the nose dome of their airship off with improvised explosives and the tattered, torn explorer of the heavens was limping away on her remaining two engines. The airship’s hull was clear of lashlites now, but her torn caten ary curtain spilled ballonets into the air from a dozen gashes along her starboard. The Leviathan was leaking lift even as she fled, fatally shattered.

Furnace-breath Nick opened his arms in greeting and danced an absurd jig outside the tomb, vast clouds of dust from the destroyed buildings enveloping him.

Now this, this was more bloody like it.

Amelia only just managed to pull herself out of the hatch and onto the trembling pavement before the ladder-lined service tunnel crumpled into itself. A geyser of rubble exploded out of the hole. Ironflanks was nearly flung off his clunking feet, still holding the torn-off manhole cover, the smooth round shape forming and reforming in his hand, trying to close a seal it was no longer attached to.

Damson Beeton steadied the steamman and shielded her face against the sunlight of the upper city — harsh and intense after the flickering world of the maintenance levels. She closed her eyes and extended her agent’s witching perception to feel the ground. ‘I sense no release of the black mist yet.’

Amelia pointed to the distant, dark shape of the departing Leviathan. ‘Then that’s our only luck …’ The Leviathan was limping along with her forward sphere nosing down, the back of the airship still under full lift. ‘There goes our ride out of here.’

Ironflanks waved the hideously large hull-opener, trying to attract the attention of the fleeing regiments of lashlites above, but they and their captured skrayper steeds had realized the wound in the heavens was closing up. Few lashlites were staring down now at the floatquake land crumbling away beneath them. The battle was over, only escape and the selfish matter of survival concerned any still left alive here.

A spire at the end of their street stood surrounded by twirling fingers of the dimensional storm, creaking until it was ripped whole from the ground, vanishing into the hungry micro-vortex. For the second time that day Ironflanks invoked the spirits of his ancestors, as if he expected Zaka of the Cylinders to appear and convert his buckled and injured body into a vapour of stack smoke capable of surviving the final fall of Camlantis. Amelia pushed the storm-driven hair out of her eyes. Her dream was dying here, dying around her, an entire life’s work and purpose. Perhaps it was fitting her bones should end up on whatever cold, eternal orbit Billy Snow’s dark engine was casting Camlantis into. The three survivors reeled around as the clacking sound of an armoured carriage’s tracks carried across the corner of their road. Narrowly missing one of the collapsing towers and cutting through the rising cloud of wreckage, the iron vehicle was skidding all over the boulevard, towing something ungainly behind it that was swinging to and fro in the storm’s gusts. Seeming to notice them, the carriage righted its wavering passage and crunched towards the three survivors, the stubby cannon turrets on either side of the vehicle jouncing, dark and lethal.

Damson Beeton sighed and unshouldered the carbine she had liberated from one of the Catosian corpses. There was a single charge inside her rifle, one bullet against six tonnes of iron-riveted beast. ‘Circle on a stick, you’ve got to be kidding me.’

The carriage made a sickening slapping noise as it ran over dozens of corpses, human and lashlite, that littered the boulevard. But instead of running them down, the carriage grumbled to a stop. A moment’s silence, then the door wheel on the side of the left-flank turret started to spin; the door groaned open, the large frame of the commodore squeezing through. ‘Ahoy the street. You’re a fine sight to see out here, scurrying around like rats in a terrier pit while this monstrous ancient place tries to bury us all.’

‘Ahoy yourself, you old fraud,’ said Amelia. ‘Where in the Circle’s name have you been skiving off to while we’ve been fighting for our lives against Quest and his bludgers?’

‘Giving a little fencing instruction, professor,’ said the commodore. He pointed at the rear of his armoured carriage where a glider capsule with furled wings was fixed by chains to the vehicle. ‘Before testing my mettle on the Leviathan and her ground camp to liberate this contraption. It was a rare narrow thing, too. It took all my cunning and bravery to fight and deceive my way through to the airship’s hangar, beating off lashlites who took my borrowed sailor’s shirt for the real thing and matching my cutlass with all the jack cloudies who did not.’

Ironflanks pointed out towards the disintegrating cityscape. ‘But Jared softbody, there must be dozens of glider capsules left abandoned in Camlantis by the airships’ scouts?’

‘Ah, but this one has a special cargo worthy of a little sweat and blade work,’ said the commodore, patting the iron hull of his glider. ‘The fee that was promised to me. With a little extra thrown in from the House of Quest’s vaults, just to alleviate the financial burden and the pain of my heartbreak in losing my fine beautiful boat on Quest’s wicked errand, you understand.’

Down the boulevard another magnificent white tower collapsed like a falling tree, its foundations simply ripped out from underneath it.

‘That damn fee is unneeded ballast for the Sepia Sea,’ snarled Amelia.

‘Don’t be angry with me, lass. I needed some meagre pittance to show for this fools’ outing of ours, to help my conscience in resting easy at night,’ wheedled the commodore. ‘Ironflanks, check the sails and chutes on my little bird. You and your fighting order’s gliding tricks are about to be put to our service. I’ll navigate this iron bathtub to the edge of Camlantis and then-’

‘-The edge of Camlantis is coming to us,’ cried Damson Beeton.

They could barely hear the agent’s bellowed warning, but the sight in front of their eyes was siren enough. At the far end of the city, the dimensional storm conjured by the dark engine had coalesced into a single raw sheet of chaos, sucking ancient buildings into its maw, each section of the city sliding away in turn, accompanied by the death squeal of matter being translated across a terrible void. All four of the friends frantically abandoned the street for the cramped confines of their glider capsule, Amelia last in and struggling to close the hatch one-handed while the storm bore relentlessly down on the craft. Then came the pop of warm thick air being pumped into the cabin. Ironflanks threw himself into the pilot bucket — far too small to comfortably accommodate him — their hull shaking as fierce winds rattled the craft, bits of rubble bouncing off the viewing dome in front of them.

With an almighty crack the ground sheered away from their sight and the glider plunged down through a hail of wreckage that had, seconds before, been their street. Amelia clawed for a handhold on the rapidly rotating capsule cabin. She crashed painfully against the crystal nose-dome of the glider, Ironflanks trying to push her body away from his view of the tumbling sky. They were beneath the floatquake land now, below the sundered ground and inside a blizzard of debris. Thousands of winged warriors were swarming out from under the shadow of Camlantis. Amelia blinked in disbelief at the pair of lash-lites carrying away a figure from the race of man. Their talons were hooked into the demon-masked gentleman like a pair of owls carrying off a Jackelian field mouse, while to his side a flight of four lashlites bore away the torn remains of one of their own kind in a burial shroud. Wasn’t he the lunatic from the tomb?

Amelia’s glider capsule whistled past the figure and his lash-lite carriers — missing them by no more than a foot — and she swore old demon-face met her eyes for a second through the cockpit glass as she hurtled by, nodding to her and raising a bone-white pipe to the leering lips of his mask in salute.

It was turning out to be a queer old day.