The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER FOUR

‘When you said you were going to pick your own crew,’ said Amelia, ‘I had imagined you would take the usual route and pin up a hiring notice outside the drinking houses of Spumehead.’

Commodore Black tapped his cane on the roof of the hansom cab, and there was a clatter of hooves outside as the horse drew to a stop. ‘I want officers I have worked with, lass, and seadrinkers who have some knowledge of the rivers of Liongeli. Not the tavern sweepings of Jackals’ ports; nor Quest’s cautious house-men, for that matter.’

The cabbie jumped off his step behind the carriage and opened the door for them. Outside, the boulevards of Goldhair Park were still crowded with revellers despite — or perhaps, because of — the late hour. Women wore their finest shawls to warm themselves against the cold evening air, their escorts a sea of bobbing dark stovepipe hats.

‘I was under the impression that you had buried most of your last crew on the Isla Needless after your boat was wrecked.’

‘Don’t speak of those terrible times, Amelia,’ implored the commodore. ‘It was not the Fire Sea or the rocks around the island that did for my fine lads, it was the things on the island, along with the fever that near carried me away along the Circle’s turn.’

Amelia looked about. They were at the west end of Goldhair Park’s manicured gardens, near the gambling pits along the Tulkinghorn Road. ‘What are you up to, Jared? The days when I needed to finance an expedition by betting on cock fights are behind me now.’

‘Yes, there is you, flush with the jingle of that clever boy’s coins in your pockets,’ said the commodore. ‘But it’s a different sort of fight we have come to see tonight.’

A slight drizzle started to fall and promenading couples scattered for the trees and pavilions, parasols opening like flowers. Commodore Black took Amelia through a gate in the railing, towards the entrance of one of the brightly lit gambling pits. A grasper with a ruff of red fur poking out of his doorman’s uniform admitted them with a nod towards the commodore. Inside, a narrow corridor led them to a large chamber where three separate seat-lined pits stood crowded with guests and gamblers. Lit by cheap-burning slipsharp oil, the top of the circular hall was lined with bars and food-serving hatches.

Amelia had to shout over the rumble of the crowds. ‘I said I would help you find a crew, not a book-maker.’

One of the pits lay temporarily empty; while in the second a pair of snarling upland mountain cats circled each other, ignoring the roar of the crowd and the jabbing lances of their handlers. In the third pit a pair of men squatted, each trying to lift a heavier weight than his rival, dumbbells lined up in front of them in increasing size. Each of the muscle men was muttering a chant, trying to channel the capital’s leylines and tap into the worldsong. It was a petty use of sorcery, for if either of the competitors had any real talent, they would have been admitted to the order of worldsingers and taken the purple robes.

Amelia followed the submariner down the steps to the empty pit, squeezing past the expectant Jackelians waiting there. At the end of the row, a female craynarbian sat next to a short old man with pale, staring eyes. The craynarbian appeared to recognize Jared Black, the clan patterns on her shell armour glimmering orange in the artificial light.

‘A fine evening for it, is it not?’ said the commodore.

‘What ill tide has carried you in here?’ asked the cray-narbian woman, not bothering to hide the suspicion in her voice.

‘Cannot a poor fellow go out for an evening’s entertainment without his motives being impugned?’ said the commodore. ‘Although now you mention, I did recall hearing that the pair of you had blown in here with Gabriel.’

As the craynarbian glowered at the commodore, Amelia realized the short man next to her was blind.

‘It’s a mortal terrible thing,’ Black told Amelia, ‘the superstitious nature of submariners. You’re on a boat that gets sunk by a pod of calfing slipsharps and you’re one of the lucky ones that gets to a breather helmet and reaches the surface. Why, you’d think you’d thank your stars for your good fortune. But not a u-boat crew, no. Seadrinkers fear such people. Call them Jonahs. Shun them in case they put a hex on their screws or a curse on their air recyclers.’

‘You should know all about keeping an unlucky boat, Jared Black,’ said the blind man.

‘Not so unlucky,’ said the commodore. ‘My beautiful Sprite might have taken a few bumps, but she saw me return safe to Jackals with the treasure of the Peacock Herne in my sea chest. But I can forgive you your waspish tongue. You see, professor, Billy Snow here is one of the finest phone-men this side of the west coast. With his old ears pressed up against a sonar trumpet he can tell you if it’s a school of tuna or barracuda swimming a league beneath you, or listen to a slipsharp’s song and tell you if it be a cow or a bull.’

‘Much good did it do when the pod attacked us,’ said the craynarbian woman.

‘Ah, but then if your last u-boat’s skipper had decided to make a break for it rather than foolishly fighting it out, you would have been running away on the best-kept pair of expansion engines under the water, what with T’ricola’s four sturdy arms to keep the boat humming and her pistons turning …’

Two figures stepped out onto the sawdust of the pit and the crowd around them hollered, the commodore’s remaining words lost in the frenzy.

‘Damsons and gentlemen-’ announced the barker ‘-make your wagers now, before these two titans of pugilism engage in their noble art for your satisfaction, your delight, and, if the stars of fortune smile upon you, your profit!’

‘And there is the third member of my trio of seadrinker artists,’ said Black to Amelia.

‘It is my privilege,’ shouted the barker, ‘nay, it is my honour, to give you Gabriel McCabe, the strongest man in Jackals.’

The light of the gambling pit glimmered off the giant’s dark skin as he took an iron bar from the barker, bent it and tossed it with a clang onto the sawdust.

‘He fits inside a submarine?’ said Amelia.

‘Lass, a first mate has to be able to crack a few heads together. Keeping order is a serious matter on a boat.’

‘And facing this colossus from a legendary age, we have the most vicious fellow ever to step onto this floor … Club-handed Cratchit.’

Amelia did not fancy the chances of the commodore’s friend. The second pugilist had had his right arm twisted by the same back-street sorcerers that had given the professor her own over-sized arms. The bones of his right hand had been swollen and flowed into a massive anvil, an instrument of blunt force, muscles twisted into a corded engine of flesh. Stepping up to his reputation, Club-handed Cratchit did not wait for the barker to announce the start of the bout; he attacked Gabriel McCabe from behind as the submariner was taking the applause of the crowd. Cratchit’s bony mace rebounded off McCabe’s back, sending him sprawling into the pit’s boundary rope, then he tried to kick the legs out from under the commodore’s friend.

McCabe slipped to the floor, scissoring his legs around his opponent’s on the way down and flipping the club-handed brute into the sawdust, then he twisted around to land a kick on Cratchit’s face. They both stood up and warily circled each other. McCabe might be the strongest man in Jackals, but with his bulk, he was certainly not the fastest. Club-handed Cratchit got another strike in, his mace hand slapping McCabe’s chest as if it was ringing off the hull of the commodore’s u-boat. Cratchit went in to beat McCabe’s ribs again, but the giant caught him with both arms and lifted the ferocious fighter off the ground. Club-handed Cratchit was spun around, flailing helplessly in the air.

Then the giant saw Commodore Black seated next to his two old comrades and a strange look crossed his face. Moving his right leg back for leverage, McCabe flung his opponent towards the commodore, the crowd momentarily falling silent as Professor Harsh caught the fighter a second before he crashed into Black.

‘That’s nice work,’ said Cratchit, gazing down admiringly at Amelia’s gorilla-sized arms.

The professor flung Club-handed Cratchit back into the ring where McCabe caught the fighter and turned him over in the air, slamming him into the floor and unconsciousness.

‘Strength trumps guile and viciousness,’ called the barker, recovering from astonishment a second before the crowd, ‘with a little help from his, umm, lady friend in the audience.’

‘Oh, isn’t that dandy?’ said Amelia. ‘Now I’m the strumpet for some pit-floor blade.’

The commodore turned to Billy Snow and T’ricola. ‘Now then, mates, let’s you and I talk about hearing the hiss of an honest gas scrubber in your ears and once more feeling the bob of a deck below your feet.’

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’ Gabriel McCabe’s eyes darted between Billy Snow and T’ricola. ‘I always knew this old goat would end up impaled on a reef, but are you so intent to join him?’

‘It is a boat,’ said Billy Snow, ‘and a berth. Those two have not been in over-supply for the three of us of late.’

‘You cannot keep on taking punishment out there,’ said T’ricola. ‘Sooner or later someone like Cratchit is going to leave a fatal dent in your skull.’

‘Better we take pit money than this,’ said McCabe, looking at Amelia and the commodore. ‘There’s a reason no sane sea-drinker vessel ventures east of Rapalaw Junction, and that is it is suicide to do so.’

‘There’s never been a good enough reason to try before,’ said Amelia. ‘We’re not slave traders or big-game hunters, and we’re following the river Shedarkshe, not trying to explore the interior of Liongeli.’

‘You are sailing into the heart of Daggish territory, damson,’ said McCabe. ‘Even the RAN’s Fleet of the East does not overfly Daggish territory for fear of being brought down by their flame guns. The hive’s heart beats with the reason of sap and bark, and they have all the care for our kind that you would show towards an oak tree that needs to be felled for lumber.’

‘Our luck can be turned,’ insisted Billy Snow. ‘We can lift the sinker’s curse that’s been put on us. Black and his friends are sailing for treasure.’

Gabriel McCabe ran a hand through the stubble of his midnight scalp, still sweating after his bout with Club-handed Cratchit. ‘Jared Black came back to Jackals with the treasure of the Peacock Herne. What he did not come back with was his last crew.’

‘Ah, lad, that is low. I cared for those boys and girls like my own children,’ said the commodore. ‘It was a mortal cruel quirk of fate that led me to survive while their brave hearts perished on that terrible island.’

‘And yet it is you that sits in a fine mansion in Middlesteel,’ said McCabe, ‘while the Sprite of the Lake rots on the rocks of your last folly along with your crew’s bones.’

‘This is no whim of the commodore’s,’ said Amelia. ‘The Sprite of the Lake is in a dry dock in Spumehead and our expedition is backed by the House of Quest. We are going into Liongeli provisioned with the best equipment and fighting force his money can buy.’

That news seemed to take McCabe aback. Following the commodore was one thing. Following the cleverest money in Jackals was quite another.

‘All right,’ said McCabe. ‘Let us say the three of us agree to officer for you, I as your first mate, Billy piloting on the phones and T’ricola in the engine room. Where exactly do you propose to find the rest of a crew so foolish as to follow you? With all the settlements opening up in the colonies now, there is hardly an unemployed seadrinker left between here and New Alban. River work is dangerous at the best of times, and you are talking about navigating the perils of the Shedarkshe …’

‘I thought I would ask Bull,’ said the commodore.

‘Bull?’ McCabe roared with laughter. ‘If you convince Bull Kammerlan to ship with you, I shall follow you, Black. I shall follow you to Lord Tridentscale’s bedroom and back and play you to sleep in your cabin each night with a tune on his seahorse’s harp.’

Amelia followed the commodore as he left the gambling pit, the first mate’s laughter still thundering after them. ‘I thought we agreed to pick the rest of the hands from Quest’s merchant fleet?’

Commodore Black shook his head. ‘McCabe is right. We need deep-river experience, lass, and a crew with fighting spirit who are Liongeli-wise. Not some soft cargo-shifters for whom danger is an undercooked pie in a Shiptown jinn house.’

‘You know where you can lay your hands on that kind of training, Jared?’ asked Amelia. ‘Because if you do, Quest’s recruiters must have missed them.’

‘That is because they were trawling Spumehead’s drinking houses and the free traders’ haunts, lass, and not the cells of Bonegate Prison!’

Bonegate was quite unlike Jackals’ debtors’ prisons. In the sponging-houses, at least, desperate relatives could purchase a few basic comforts for the inmates. At Bonegate, the only comfort was the hope of transportation instead of the quick drop of the noose on one of the scaffolds outside. It was said that the guards made so much money out of selling prime viewing spots in the square on hanging days, that they even bribed juries to ensure a ready supply of victims to dance the Bonegate jig.

Quest’s money, it seemed, was good in the prison also. His powder-wigged lawyer stood by the door while Amelia and the commodore listened to the clank of prisoners’ chains in the corridor outside, the stench of urine and unwashed bodies strong even in the visitors’ chamber.

‘How much longer are they going to keep us waiting?’ asked Amelia.

‘The fellow we’re due to see is serving a water sentence,’ said the commodore. ‘He’s got to be fished out of the tanks and cracked out of his immersion helmet. They keep thousands down in the tanks, and even though each suit carries a number, it’s mortal hard to tell those crabs apart down in the basement levels.’

‘You sound like you’ve sailed close to being tanked yourself.’

‘Not these poor old bones,’ said the commodore. ‘They have never seen the inside of this cursed place, nor will they.’

Amelia held her tongue. She was one of the few people in Jackals to know the commodore’s true identity. The House of Guardians and its political police considered the once notorious rebel duke long dead, but if they ever found out he had been resurrected as Jared Black, the flotation tanks of Bonegate would be the least of the commodore’s travails.

‘This Bull Kammerlan has an entire crew in here?’ asked Amelia.

‘Such is the fate of slavers,’ said the commodore, ‘since the abolitionists had their way and the RAN has been enforcing the suppression act.’

‘Slaving’s a vile trade. You can’t trust the type of pond scum that deals in human cargoes.’

‘The caliph has it legal enough,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s only when you are caught on the wrong side of the Saltless Sea that Jackelian law applies, and although I have no love for that foul trade myself, it’s to the likes of Bull that we must turn for knowledge of your dark river, because there is no one else who sails the Shedarkshe for a profit.’

A clinking at the door signalled the arrival of Bonegate’s ‘guest’. Thanks to the chains connecting his ankles, Bull Kammerlan took small waddling steps. His rubber immersion suit still dripped, soaking the flagstones, and a bone-white nose piece dangled from his face where the breather helmet had been removed.

Two guards in black crushers’ uniforms shoved Kammerlan to sit on a stool opposite Amelia and Black, departing quickly and leaving them with only Quest’s silent lawyer for a witness.

‘Not like diving off a boat on Porto Principe?’ said the commodore.

Bull’s eyes had difficulty focusing on them after so long in the darkness of the immersion tank, but he recognized the voice. ‘Still alive, you miserable old goat? I thought the gout would have taken you by now, the rate of knots you must have been gorging yourself using the trinkets and jewels of the Peacock Herne to pay the bailiff.’

The commodore patted the paunch under his waistcoat. ‘And I’m looking blessed good on it, too, Bull.’

‘You’ve a cheek, old man, coming in here to see me. I only have to shout and tell the crushers who you really are, and they’d have you tossed in the tank alongside me and the boys, tossed in as soon as spit on you.’

‘Nothing hasty now,’ warned the commodore. ‘Or you’ll see both our necks stretched for royalists. Let us use our fine new names in this dark place.’

‘You weren’t in the royalist cause, Black,’ said Bull in a low voice, ‘you were just seated at its breakfast table, that’s all. You were too soft and the fleet-in-exile was burned in its pens by the RAN because of you and your kind’s weakness.’

‘Ah, Bull, let’s forget the old politics and our grievances with the House of Guardians, for parliament still has you and your lads in its cells, even if it is for slavery rather than piracy and sedition. And I have an offer for you and yours that might let you all see the light of day again.’

‘How are you going to do that?’ said Bull. ‘You been elected First Guardian, fat man? Is dimples here the new Chief Justice?’

Amelia leant forward. ‘Dimples is all for tossing you back in the tank for the dirty slaver scum you are, sailor-boy.’

Bull laughed. ‘Oh, I like this one. You always did have a taste for them spicy, Black. My little slavery jaunts up the Shedarkshe was just to pay the bills, girl, and I was doing them a favour. Why do you think the craynarbians carry that crab armour of theirs around on their backs? Compared with life in the jungle hell-hole of Liongeli, standing on a Cassarabian auction block has a lot to recommend it.’

The commodore pulled Amelia back before she could knock the prisoner off his stool. He looked Bull dead in the eyes. ‘Isn’t it a mortal shame the Jackelian airship that caught you on the surface with your holds packed full of pitiable craynarbian flesh did not feel the same way.’

‘Jigger Jackals,’ swore Bull, ‘and jigger you too, fat man. We did what we needed to, to survive. You’ve gone native, Black, you’ve forgotten the cause; bought off with soft bedsheets and honeyed hams, paying your taxes to parliament each year like a good fat little shopkeeper.’

Amelia turned to their clerk by the door. ‘Get his helmet and toss him back in the water, we’ve finished with him.’

‘Damn your eyes,’ shouted Bull, ‘I haven’t said I won’t help you.’

‘That’s it,’ said the commodore. ‘You remember all your crew floating alongside you in your tank, you start thinking like the skipper you once were, rather than the man you’ve become. Here’s the offer: you and your people crew for me, lad, a little jaunt up-river into Liongeli. I’ll see your water sentences are converted into nominal transportation — not to the colonies, but to the plantations up at Rapalaw Junction. I’ll hold your papers, and anyone who makes it back alive with me to Jackals will be sailing as a free citizen by the end of our trip.’

‘You have that kind of influence, now?’

‘Not I,’ said the commodore. ‘But old Blacky knows a certain shopkeeper who does.’

The fight seemed to go out of the convict. ‘So, you’re in the House of Guardians’ pocket now, then?’

‘And you are sitting in mine,’ said the commodore, patting the side of his jacket. ‘And we’ll have lots of well-armed soldiers on board, with sharp steel and shells a-plenty to keep your compass true to my course.’

‘Just in case you get any ideas about taking off with our u-boat,’ added Amelia.

Black winked at the convict. ‘You’ll like them when you see them, Bull, that you will.’

Being a good soldier of the People’s Revolutionary Second Brigade, the blue-coated trooper cracked his bayonet-tipped rifle on the floor as he recognized Compatriot Colonel Tarry. Like all trusted Carlists, the compatriot wore a red feather in his tricorn hat, not that Tarry’s loyalty to the revolution could ever be called into question. Not safely, anyway.

Tarry ran a finger along the soldier’s bayonet, testing the edge. ‘I see there is at least one guard in this camp who knows how to use a whetstone on his cutlery.’

The trooper stood to attention even straighter. ‘You do not forget what you learn in the field, compatriot colonel. A sharp bayonet is an effective bayonet.’

‘A man of action, good.’ The colonel leant in closer to the soldier; not that there was anyone else in the corridor to overhear them, but a little paranoia was a healthy reaction to the mores of Quatershift’s current society. In fact, a lot of paranoia was the healthiest reaction. ‘Prisoner seventy-six is not being productive. The camp committee have been making excuses for him for months now, but I am frankly … disappointed. Have you heard any of the camp committee here speak against the community?’

‘The prisoner is an aristocrat, compatriot colonel,’ said the trooper. ‘We mollycoddle him with coal for his fire and feed him two meals a day. To make a leech such as him productive, a more direct approach is required …’

‘Direct, yes, I like that,’ said the colonel. ‘Yes, into the Gideon’s Collar, a bolt through the neck and let his remains fertilize the people’s fields. Well, we shall see. Open up. I have much to discuss with Compatriot Robur. Let us see how well this pampered aristocrat begs for his miserable life. If you hear any screams …’

‘My hearing is much diminished by the damp of this miserable corridor, compatriot colonel.’

Inside the cell, a hand lay poised above an ink well, a steel quill quivering in the cold, hovering above a sheet of drawing-paper pinned to a draughtsman’s board that had seen better days.

‘You are Robur?’

The prisoner pulled the soiled blankets that lay wrapped around him a little tighter, as if they might protect him from the violence of the colonel. ‘I am Robur, compatriot.’

The officer picked up the cheap sheet of paper on which the prisoner had been sketching his designs. ‘And what, pray tell, do you call this?’

‘What the First Committee has instructed me to create for them, compatriot. A cannon with a firing mechanism controlled by a transaction engine. The improved accuracy will …’

‘Such toys will not assist the revolution,’ shouted the colonel. ‘The people are starving in every province! Will your damn cannon feed our cities, will it put bread on our tables?’

‘You seem well fed enough,’ said Robur, regretting the words the moment they came out of his mouth.

Colonel Tarry backhanded the prisoner, knocking him to the ground. ‘Maggot! You aristocratic, anti-revolutionary scum. You have been sabotaging our war efforts, dragging your heels, just to be fed while your compatriots starve in the world beyond your cell’s comfortable four walls. Starve because your aristocrat friends have sabotaged all our farms. Now you shall pay the price for your treachery.’

The trooper, who had been eavesdropping, opened the door, smiling, sensing an end to his cold vigil outside the cell.

‘Take him,’ ordered the colonel, leading the way. ‘I will not sully my hands by touching this uncommunityist criminal.’

The steel door at the other end of the corridor opened and a chilly gust blew down from Darksun Peak. Of all the organized communities in Quatershift to be assigned to as a guard, Darksun Fortress was undoubtedly the most miserable. Before the Sun King’s overthrow it had held only the most dangerous Carlist revolutionaries. Now that the men and women it had once held as prisoners sat on the land’s ruling committees, the mountain-dug dungeons had been refilled with the dwindling number of recalcitrants from the old regime.

Colonel Tarry pointed down to the Gideon’s Collar in the centre of the courtyard. The steam-driven killing machine was slowly rocking on its wooden stilts as its boiler hummed a lament. ‘A quick and painless death for you, Robur. Although if I had my way, you would not receive such mercy from the Commonshare. I would pass you to the king’s old torturers and let them quarter you alive after they had dragged the names of all your treacherous friends from your lips.’

Humming happily, the Second Brigade trooper slung his rifle over his shoulder so he didn’t lose his balance; the steps down to the courtyard of this bleak fortress were treacherous enough at the best of times. Usually by now, an aristocrat would be begging for his life. Promising to offer up hidden caches of gold and gems they had buried as the revolution began. But not Robur. The miserable scarecrow had no real wealth, as the trooper well knew, given the number of times his watch had tried to shake him down for a centime or two.

On the battlements below, a gaggle of soldiers quick-stepped, one of them shouting something up that was lost in the cold of the perpetual mist that shrouded the fortress.

‘Damn fools,’ swore Colonel Tarry. ‘Ignore them and bring the traitor over here.’

‘But-’

Something was wrong. The trooper peered over the battlements at the group, looking down towards the crimson, angry face of — it could not be possible — Colonel Tarry!

The closer of the two Colonel Tarrys lifted the trooper’s boots and flipped him over the battlements, his blue uniform flapping as he fell towards the courtyard below.

The gaunt figure of Robur stumbled back as Colonel Tarry’s face melted and reformed into … a mirror image of Robur’s own, right down to his sunken eyes and sallow, starved cheeks!

‘Who are you?’ Robur demanded.

‘I have many faces, many names,’ Robur’s double hissed back at him, pushing him away from the steps and the sprinting soldiers. ‘You may inquire after them later, should you live.’

‘They’ll shoot us both now, you fool.’

‘They’ve had their pound of flesh from me,’ laughed Robur’s reflection, a finger on his left hand uncurling to reveal an iron barrel that began juddering as a stream of blue marble-sized spheres fired towards the guards, shattering and layering the steps with a veil of gas.

As the real Robur was shoved towards a nearby turret, he had to admire the design of the mechanical arm. You could barely tell it was artificial, even when you knew where to look for the signs of mechomancy. Balls from the guards’ rifles began to hit the wall behind them, showering them both with shards of granite. The troopers were shooting blind through the gas. Robur turned. His insane rescuer was pulling up a pack that had been roped on the outside of the citadel’s walls, left dangling from the crenellations. Once unfastened, the pack unfurled into a bone-like structure, bundles of silk hanging underneath, waiting to fold open. Robur had seen such a thing in journals, before the revolution: but only one nation in the world had a use for them.

‘An airship’s kite-chute. You’re from Jackals! They said you would come, but I did not believe-’

‘They said I would come!’ Robur’s reflection grabbed him and slung a leather harness over his shoulders, clipping Robur to a similar yoke concealed under the fake colonel’s uniform. His face twisted in fury. ‘Who said I would come?’

‘One of the guards was bribed.’ Robur was terrified now, lest his strange rescuer abandon him here on the peaks of Darksun Fortress. ‘They said someone would come from Jackals for me. I thought it was just another of their games to break me.’

His doppelganger lifted him up and flung them both off the battlements, the silk rustling out into a triangular sail that crackled above their heads — falling — falling — then picking up into the freezing mist that whistled past the mountain. Robur was screaming, but his voice was drowned out by the wind and his liberator’s animal-like howl of victory.

‘If I drop you, Robur, you’ll bloody break. I don’t know why your fool family didn’t just hand out personalized invites to the Committee of Public Security to come and view your break-out.’

Their hair-raising flight terminated ten minutes later in a soggy meadow at the foot of one of the alpine crags, a hard landing which sent Robur rolling into a goatherd’s fence. A sixer lay tethered nearby, the horse scratching at the mud in its eagerness to be off, all six of its hooves shod in expensive, shining steel.

Stumbling to his feet, Robur turned to face his dangerous reflection. ‘Who are you?’

The figure pulled something out of the horse’s saddlebag and swivelled around, a demonic mask staring straight back at him. Furnace-breath Nick. The very devil himself.

‘Here is my true face.’

Robur liked it little better than when the demon had stolen his own. He was backed into the fence now, without even realizing he was trying to flee. ‘The Second Brigade will have their mountain trackers out of barracks and riding across the entire province by the end of the day. Every pass from here to the ocean will have a checkpoint. Unless you have an aero-stat to get us over the cursewall …’

Furnace-breath Nick advanced on the emaciated figure. ‘I do not.’

‘Then how in the sun child’s name are you going to get us out of Quatershift?’

Furnace-breath Nick’s arm twisted up. Robur heard the grinding from a clockwork mechanism beneath a torn fold of false skin on the arm. So, a trooper’s rifle ball had shattered one of the cogs during their escape. Robur knew he could fix the demon’s arm, but before he could make the offer — and see this marvel close up — there was a burst of air from an artery in Furnace-breath Nick’s artificial wrist. Robur just had time to pluck the tiny feathered dart from his chest before he plunged to the grass, his limbs tightening as if he was crafted from clockwork himself. Paralysis became unconsciousness.

‘That would be my problem,’ said Furnace-breath Nick, scooping the aristocrat’s body up from the grass.

Amelia Harsh grunted as she unclipped the refuelling pipe from the Sprite of the Lake’s hull, the smell of expansion-engine gas lingering in the air as the gutta-percha cable dangled down from Quest’s airship. This would be their final refuelling, now the moors and valleys of Jackals had given way to the endless Eastern Forest, a precursor to Liongeli’s fierce, dense jungle.

Quest’s female soldiers stepped back as the gas line was winched up inside the airship’s chequerboard hull.

‘Clear?’ Gabriel McCabe called down from one of the u-boat’s conning turrets.

Amelia flashed the first mate a thumb, then looked over at Veryann, Abraham Quest’s personal angel of death on this expedition. There was something disconcerting about the woman, and not just the fact that she and her free company of fighters insisted on wearing their Catosian war jackets at all times. Their quilted armour was cut to accommodate the unnaturally swelled muscles that came from chewing the drug shine, and twin pistol holsters stretched over each breast. Veryann was a walking knife. Calm, courteous, but with an edge that could be turned against your throat quicker than your next breath.

‘Do you have a family name, Veryann?’ Amelia asked.

‘Quest,’ said the fighter.

‘You are married-?’

She shook her head and pointed at her bare-armed soldiers as they closed the hatches to the fuel tank. ‘We are all Quest, now. It is our way. You have never travelled to the Catosian League?’

Amelia demurred. The city-states were one of the few lands as advanced in industry and modern philosophy as Jackals, their horseless carriages and mechanical servants ferried across by traders to northern ports like Shiptown. Their insular nature and pure form of democracy — or anarchy, depending on your tastes — serving up endless amusements for the satirical cartoonists of Jackals’ news sheets.

‘Our city was Sathens, a significant trading partner for the House of Quest, but its council fell in a dispute with the city of Unarta. No other city would harbour a disgraced free company, only Abraham Quest stood by us. He was hardly involved in our war at all, yet still he took us in.’

Now Amelia understood why Veryann’s people were so loyal to Quest. After losing one of the ritual wars the cities fought on the plains outside their walls, Veryann’s soldiers would have been ghosts in their own land, turned away from the gates of every civilized state in the League.

A sailor turned the handle on the dive claxon, those still on the decks turning towards the open doors on the conning turrets.

‘Living without a government sounds like a fine thing, doesn’t it?’

Amelia looked behind her. It was Billy Snow, the blind sonar man taking the last opportunity for days to catch a breath in the open air. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Catosian anarchy,’ said Billy, ‘the system that led her mercenaries to Jackals and sanctuary with Quest. Having no authority to boss you around, to give you orders. Voting on every little thing that comes up. It sounds just dandy. Until you realize there is someone to call master — the passions of the mob, or the next person you meet who is stronger or cleverer or bigger than you — or five of their friends. Then it gets ugly real fast.’

Amelia shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound so different from Jackals to me.’

‘It’s plenty different,’ said Billy. ‘Jackals has the law. Parliament’s law.’

‘My father was a Guardian,’ said Amelia. ‘At least, he was until he was disqualified from holding the post as a bankrupt — and he used to have to vote on every little thing that came around too.’

‘He was voting on passing laws, not whether Damson Dawkins next door should be exiled for rumourmongery. Laws can be bigger than people; they can be better than us. I’ll take a good law over a good man’s benevolence every time. In fact, as a rule, I’ll take a bad law over a good man’s intentions.’

‘You’ve been listening to the flow of the water on your phones for too long, old man,’ said Amelia. ‘You’re in danger of becoming a philosopher. Do you need a hand back to the hatch?’

‘Perish the thought that I should start thinking.’ Billy Snow pointed down to the river. ‘I can find my way back inside easily enough, professor; that’s my compass down there, the waters of the Shedarkshe.’

A pod of green-scaled things pushed past the Sprite, heading towards the overgrown bank.

‘You can get about just by the sounds of the jungle?’ said Amelia.

‘No,’ said Billy. ‘We’ve yet to hear the jungle, I think. Wait a week, then you’ll see.’

* * *

Even in the Sprite’s ready room, it was hard to escape from the scent of too many bodies squeezed together in their underwater tin can. Seven days under the surface of the river and the warm air had become a melange of smells. Duty on the conning turrets, when the Sprite briefly surfaced at night, had now officially become a tradable commodity among the expedition members. A brief intake of fresh air to the sound of chirruping from the night feeders in the jungle, the crew’s clothes soaked in sweat from the febrile temperature — even hotter topside than within the Sprite — then the dark hull of the u-boat would slip beneath the water again, the portholes in the conning turret blanketed with bubbling water.

‘We could make better time on the surface,’ said T’ricola. The craynarbian engineer’s sword arm was resting on the table, its serrated bone edge drumming nervously. Only the din of the engine room seemed to bring her comfort. ‘There’s less drag up there, given we’re moving against the current.’

Commodore Black looked across at Bull Kammerlan, and Bull shook his head. ‘It’s safer down here.’

‘We’re not raiding villages for slaves, now,’ said Amelia, ‘and we’re only a day out of Rapalaw Junction. There are still trading boats on the surface.’

‘There’s no greenmesh this far west, I’ll grant you,’ said Bull, ‘but civilized it isn’t. If you’d been topside in a raft with just a couple of bearers for company, you’d have seen how friendly some of them trading folk are. If I had my way, we’d sail on past Rapalaw Junction nice and silent.’

Bull seemed horrified by the very idea of the greenmesh. Jungle that cooperated, plants and animals bound together in an unholy symbiosis to form a single sentient killing machine.

Veryann spoke up, illuminated by the thin green light behind the stained glass dome of the Sprite’s nose. ‘That is not an option. There is someone waiting for us at Rapalaw Junction.’

‘Ah lass, you and your blessed secrets.’ Commodore Black watched as the flash of the u-boat’s lamps briefly exposed several river predators darting out of the way of this strange metal intruder. ‘But we must make land at Rapalaw Junction anyway for our last chance to load fresh water and victuals.’

‘East of Rapalaw belongs to the tribes. Not nice civilized shells, either.’ Bull pointed at T’ricola. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, girl? They would peel off the Sprite’s hull and spear us for their younglings’ supper as soon as look at us. And they have spies inside the trading post, keeping an eye on who is coming and going, counting how many guns we’re sailing with. You want victuals and a full belly, commodore? I’ll settle for one that’s not turning on a craynarbian spit.’

Amelia wagged a finger at the submariner. ‘Maybe if you hadn’t been dirt-gassing their villages and taking their children for slaves-’

The chamber’s hatch was thrown open, one of Bull’s sea-drinkers pitching in. ‘Fire, fire in the engine room!’

Shouts echoed through the boat’s corridors, crewmen sliding down ladders and securing compartments. After taking a flooding breach, a blaze in the confines of the underwater vessel was a seadrinker’s worst fear. Commodore Black was at the speaking trumpet, barking orders to the pilot room and the Sprite bucked as she made a crash surface. Claxons began to sound. Amelia ran with the others for the rear of the boat, pushing past coughing sailors falling out of the engine-room hatch. Seadrinkers with leather fire hoods that made them resemble insects came rushing in behind the professor, lugging fire hoses and water pumps.

The angle of the floor pulled straight with a wrench, a sure sign they were on the surface of the Shedarkshe now.

‘Close the room,’ shouted T’ricola. ‘Everyone out? Then drop the seals port and aft, vent the air and give the bitch nothing to breathe.’

Bull was sliding down a ladder behind them. He grabbed one of his men. ‘Is the fire in the gas tanks?’

‘No, the scrubber room.’

Amelia looked at the craynarbian officer. ‘We’re not going to blow?’

‘Not if the fire’s in our scrubbers, professor. But the scrubbers are a dry area; you hardly ever get a fire down there. I don’t understand how-’

‘The how of it doesn’t matter,’ said Bull. ‘Let the fire burn down without air, then we go in and douse everything. Damn our luck. It seems we’ll be running on the surface to Rapalaw Junction after all.’

‘I thought you’d want to see this,’ T’ricola said to the commodore, pointing to the burnt-out wreck of the Sprite’s expansion-gas scrubbers. She ran the fingers of one of her manipulator arms through the brown liquid bubbling out of a metal grille.

Amelia looked at the sticky residue over the commodore’s shoulder. ‘What is it?’

‘Hull-tile fixative, professor.’ The commodore tapped the cork-like substance that had been exposed under the half-melted wall. ‘But what in Tridentscale’s name was this gunk doing blocking up the tubes on my gas scrubbers?’

‘Some of it might have leaked into the machine when the Sprite was back in the pens,’ said Amelia.

T’ricola indicated a hole in the copper tube feeding the scrubbers. ‘This was holed through with a metal punch, and then the glue was deliberately poured in. I checked our stores. There’s a can of fixative missing.’

Commodore Black tapped the burnt machinery in frustration. ‘That’s a mortal clever way to sabotage a boat. Not quite enough to sink us and move us all along the Circle, but sufficient to keep us on the surface like a dead fish waiting to be spotted by the gulls.’

Amelia looked at the commodore. ‘We can’t stay submerged under the river now?’

‘We’re not one of your pocket aerostats, Amelia. We have no chimneys on the Sprite and we can’t vent our engines through the periscope. If the scrubbers have packed up, then we have to dump the exhaust manually, rather than converting it into dust bricks, and that means running with open vents up on the surface.’

T’ricola angrily kicked the puddled water left by the fire crew. ‘It’s one of Bull’s people that did this. They think if we scratch the expedition before we get to Rapalaw Junction then they all get to sail free back to Jackals with full pardons in their pockets.’

‘Then they’ll be thinking wrong,’ said Black. ‘T’ricola, tell Billy and Gabriel to be keeping an eye on the crew. Then find Veryann and send her down here.’

Amelia almost felt sorry for whoever had done the damage when the situation was explained to Veryann. The Catosian turned pale with anger as the implications of the sabotage settled in.

‘Can this be repaired?’ Veryann asked.

‘Ah, my poor boat. We may be able to jury-rig her at one of the larger workshops in Rapalaw Junction,’ said the commodore. ‘We shall see. If anyone can repair a gas scrubber in this state, it is T’ricola. She can coax melted iron and twisted steel back to life. I have seen her do it before.’

‘I shall post armed sentries,’ said Veryann. ‘Have Gabriel McCabe indicate all your vital systems to us — the things a traitor would go for next: the main pistons, our water supply, fuel, our air. We must guard them all.’

‘I’ll do that, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But be warned, there is not much on my beautiful Sprite that is not vital to our survival.’

Veryann stood looking crossly at the ruined machinery in the scrubber chamber as the commodore and Amelia turned to leave for the main engine room.

‘My poor stars,’ she heard Black groan. ‘Is it not enough that to get my own boat back I have to plunge her into the heart of treacherous Liongeli? Now I find I have a wicked cuckoo making a home in my nest.’

A cuckoo? One of Bull Kammerlan’s convicts trying to shorten their sentence? Veryann pulled out her boot knife — almost a short sword — and rammed it into the exposed tiles. If the commodore had been shown the second crystal-book back in Middlesteel, he might think differently. Someone on board was playing a very dangerous game in trying to stop Abraham Quest’s expedition. Someone who obviously knew things they had no right to know. But a u-boat sailing up the Shedarkshe was a dangerous place to keep a secret. She would make sure that whoever held it would be leaving it in the jungle … along with their decaying bones.