The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The redcoat of the Second Parliamentary Foot knelt down on the hill and laid out his rifle on the grass — a cheap Brown Bess milled in a Middlesteel manufactory and topped by a whetstone-sharp bayonet — before resting his tired back against the wreckage of the airship. He reached inside his pocket for his pipe and extracted a small wax paper-wrapped parcel of mumbleweed from his coat. Striking a light that could be seen at night while on sentry duty was normally a flogging offence, but their sergeant was of the same opinion as the rest of the company: standing guard on the wreckage of an aerostat to deter looters was not proper work for the men and women of the Second. Not when there were shifties to guard against in the east and desert raiders moving about again in the south, all of whom would benefit from the proud sharp cutlery slotted on the end of the Second’s rifles.

There had been a bit of excitement earlier in the day when the engineers from the cannon works had arrived on the isolated downs and found one of Quest’s armoured carriages nearly intact in the debris. But that was as exciting as this duty was going to get — without the warmth of a proper barracks fire to shield against the cold Jackelian autumn nights, or the distractions of a town’s drinking houses nearby. He sighed contentedly as the first puff of mumbleweed warmed his chest and hardly noticed the hand that reached out from behind him and massaged his neck, felling him onto the wet grass instantly.

A figure stepped out of the ruined airship; his blind eyes turning across the moonlit downlands to see if any of the other sentries had noticed their comrade was sleeping. A second man dressed in monk-like robes emerged from between the steel ribs of the Leviathan’s ruins, nearly identical in every way to the first intruder, except that his back was weighed down by a sack stuffed full of crystal-books, not to mention a rather buckled crown with an information gem glittering in its centre. With the right tools, the plunder would crack and be exposed to information blight, ending up as useless curios on the mantelpiece of a Jackelian cottage.

The first intruder pointed towards the distant south and his twin nodded, jerking his thumb towards the east and his own journey. Theirs was a lonely calling. Meetings between their kind were rare. With so few of them left now, having even two in the same location was an appalling risk.

‘Where are you travelling to next?’

‘Back to the wild north. I’m presently serving as a shaman for a tribe of polar barbarians.’

‘Ah, you live an enviously simple life. I came over by clipper from Thar as a trader, but I suppose I shall have to stay by the coast in Jackals now and make sure that nothing too dangerous is recovered from the old days. It’s been a long time since I needed to be a fisherman. The knowing of it will come back, and I won’t be sorry if I never have to pick up a merchant’s ledger again. I’ll confer with you in a hundred years or so.’

His compatriot leant on his cane, listening peacefully to the break of the sea on the rocks on the opposite slope of the downs. It was a beautiful sound. The kind of sound you could lose yourself in. The crash of eternity on cold coves, a reminder that the land was here before them and would be so long after they, as nearly immortal as they were, had gone. But no time to dawdle. They were close to the port towns here; there was always the danger that someone in this county might mistakenly identify either, or both of them, as Billy Snow.

The first one rubbed his scarred blind eyes, so empty of one sight and full of another, and answered. ‘The next century, then, brother.’

By the time the Second Foot’s sergeant found his careless corporal asleep on sentry duty, the two children of Pairdan were long gone.

There was a frothing in the warm waters as the pearl diver cleared the surface. She blinked the itching salt water from her eyes then swam back to her boat. Her sister sat on one of the hulls of the catamaran, cleaning the bronze diving helmet that belonged to the strange foreigner who had paid the two of them for a week of their time. The foreigner wasn’t used to the heat off the shallow Catosian coastline, sweating like a pig at the slightest exertion; wearing clothes that seemed too thick and hot, just like all the stupid Jackelians that visited their land.

‘It is where you said it would be,’ the pearl diver called. She did not ask what the glider craft — obviously fallen from one of the bloated aerial vessels that the city-states had forbidden to overfly their lands — was doing sunk in Catosian waters. She and her sister were being rewarded for this work to such a degree that their discretion was taken as granted.

‘Of course it’s down there, lass,’ said the Jackelian. He glanced across at the other Catosian. ‘Now help me squeeze into my sea-skin and I’ll show you how an old u-boat hand dives for his pearls.’

The woman passed him the antique helmet, crowned with a brass moulding of an octopus, watching her sister climb up onto the deck.

Still dripping, the diver looked with disapproval at the lumbering Jackelian sea gear. Was that really the best their clumsy mills could manage? None of the elegance or mini aturization that her own people were capable of crafting. ‘Coral has already started growing over the wreck of the glider. Opening the hatch down below will be difficult.’

‘Ah, the coral loves the warmth. Your proximity to the Fire Sea keeps everything growing and a-bubbling at a fair old rate of knots.’

The Jackelian picked up a towel and wiped the sweat off his brow. Was that a tear she caught sight of rolling down his fat cheek? She saw the stranger had noticed she’d become aware of whatever unvoiced sentimental musings were swimming around his mind.

‘You put old Blacky in mind of someone, is all.’

The pearl diver did not ask. And he did not tell. It was not the time for the tale of a woman who had saved her nation and all its inhabitants by falling on a rusty cutlass, letting in a thrust that she could have so easily parried. There should have been a blessed great statue raised to her in every city square in Catosia, but they did not raise monuments to warriors who had betrayed their sworn liege-lord — even by so subtle a degree as throwing a duel.

Checking the foreigner’s neck seal after he had shouldered the helmet, the pearl diver raised a thumb to her sister. ‘What is inside that wreck down there, old fellow?’

‘Ah, a paltry few pennies,’ smiled the Jackelian from inside his helmet, ‘to help keep a poor seadrinker in his dotage. That’s not too much to ask, is it? A modest pension to provide a full pantry and a little jinn to warm my lonely nights?’

As usual after an ambush, the siltempters stood in a crude circle, pushing and shoving each other above the corpses of the dead craynarbians while Lowbolts rifled through the cart of pelts and furs, searching for the choicest, rarest pieces to incorporate into his monarch’s cloak now he had declared himself the Grand Duke of Liongeli.

Lowbolts’ stacks steamed in the excitement of the raid on the craynarbian trading party, and he waved his hulking war-arms at any of the other steamman-like creatures that strayed too close to his plunder. He was the strongest, the most brutal. This was his right.

From somewhere deep within the canopy came a cry from a voicebox that shook the creepers and caused an explosion of fear among every jungle dweller within earshot. It wasn’t a sound Lowbolts had heard for many weeks now, not since he had stripped the last siltempter reckless enough to call a challenge against him down to the fool’s components, the new ruler giving the loser’s parts out as gifts to his courtiers at a feast.

‘Who dares?’

Swinging into the clearing on a vine, the impudent stranger dropped just outside of the line of slain craynarbians, his powerful legs landing him with the dexterity of an ape.

‘I dare,’ said the newcomer. ‘I have heard that you have declared yourself Grand Duke of the siltempters, Lowbolts, and there is only room in this land of ours for a single Lord of Liongeli.’

Lowbolts released a spear of steam from his stacks in angry derision. ‘Lord! I see no lord. I see dead metal walking. Have you actually sought me out to call the right to challenge, you four-armed freak?’

‘We have.’

Lowbolts swivelled his head unit to look for encouragement among his followers, who clutched their airguns and hooted monkey-like noises of support back at him. ‘We? I see only a lone, foolish mongrel, defective after too many seasons of rain without resealing.’

‘We!’ said Ironflanks, unshouldering the largest jigging hull-opener any siltempter had ever seen — had even imagined possible — casting aside its thunder lizard-skin scabbard and triggering the blades into a fearful, whining rotation.

Amelia gazed out of the window down into the quad. Still the same manicured lawn, the students in their black gowns, following the sound of the steam whistles to their seminars. Nothing had changed here, nothing except herself, herself and the absence of a Catosian woman on the lawn with an intriguing clue for a disgraced academic to decipher. Maybe history really did repeat itself. Cycle after cycle. Age after age.

‘Professor.’

Amelia turned to see Sherlock Quirke pouring her a nice warm cup of caffeel. ‘I’m sorry, professor, my mind was wandering. You were saying …’

‘You can see the position of the High Table, the potential embarrassment.’

Amelia smiled. ‘Oh, yes.’

The Sepia Sea was bobbing with the rubble and bric-a-brac of an entire civilization that had never officially entered the history texts — whatever wreckage hadn’t been sucked into eternity by Billy Snow’s dark engine. Yes. She could certainly see the potential for embarrassment.

‘Why, I got this myself from one of the undergraduates back from Hundred Locks. Sixpence from a fishing stall on the docks above the great shield wall.’ He lifted the white Camlantean cup and poured some milk into it, then turned it over to spill the liquid onto his desk. He showed her the inside of the cup, left perfectly clean, not a stain or a trickle of milk remaining. ‘Frictionless surface, do you see? The Circle knows how their people did that.’

‘What, you mean a caffeel cup that doesn’t officially exist?’ said Amelia. ‘Or the frictionless surface?’

Quirke politely ignored her teasing. ‘I am certain there will be a revision authorized soon. A significant but discreetly handled revision of the texts. And should the blushes of the High Table be spared in the penny sheets and the journals, I feel certain that resources to document and archive all this new material will not be stinting; especially not for the person who found Camlantis in the first place.’

Amelia stood up. ‘Thank you for the drink, professor. You can tell the High Table three things. First, I’ll think about their offer. Second, I don’t come cheap — engagement in the world of private capital has opened my eyes to that old adage about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, and third …’

Quirke opened the door for his colleague. ‘Third, professor?’

‘Tell them that I didn’t find Camlantis. Tell them that you can never find it. You can only build it.’

Lord Meldrew patted his waistcoat. As if he were feeling the tweed to see how much room there was left in his stomach for the meat he was being helped to at the table. Damson Beeton nodded approvingly at her hired evening staff serving on the other side of the table, the spread sparkling with candlelight, their finest silver laden with food.

‘But Dolorous Isle has had a tenant for many years, damson,’ continued the elderly lord, looking at the guests newly arrived by boat and being ushered into the hall by crimson-coated retainers. ‘And this is the first soiree he has thrown for his neighbours since he moved in?’

‘We found ourselves with a surfeit of food in the pantry that needed getting through before it went off, my lord.’

Lord Meldrew chortled. ‘Oh that’s a good one, that’s sharp indeed, damson.’

‘More roast potatoes with your meat, my lord? I spiced them up with a little concoction of my own devising.’

‘Capital,’ said the ruddy-faced nobleman. ‘I don’t suppose I could entice you into my service, damson? It’s only the next island across. You could teach my old cooky a thing or two about how to relish the humble spud over at m’pile.’

‘I fear not, Lord M,’ said the housekeeper. ‘The truth is, I’m secretly watching the crook that owns this place for a covert department of the Jackelian state.’

‘Really!’ Lord Meldrew’s face glowed like a steamman’s stack as he rolled with laughter. ‘Oh, capital. That’s rich; but then your employer looks like a queer one, a fellow who appreciates a good ribbing now and then. That was him playing a flute in the orchard and ignoring all his guests as we walked up to the house, wasn’t it?’

‘The very same, sir. I’ll chase him into the mansion later on.’

‘And I shall chase some more of your roast down m’gullet while we wait upon his presence. Charcoaled and chewy, just the way I like it. It’s quite gamey, actually.’

Damson Beeton carved another slice of Septimoth off the table’s spit. ‘Yes, he was a tough old bird, sir.’

Nothing for the enemy. Nothing.