The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER SIX

‘What is going on here?’ Gabriel McCabe pushed past the ring of sailors urging on the fight; one of the seadrinkers trading blows — badly — with a Catosian soldier in the confines of the Sprite’s mid-deck. The first mate grabbed his sailor, Veryann moving in to pull off her fighter at the same time.

‘She broke my jigging nose!’ shouted the sailor, clutching a kerchief to stem the flow of blood as McCabe held him in the air.

‘He gave challenge to me,’ retorted the soldier, bridling and pushing her blonde hair back out of her face.

Commodore Black slid down a ladder and dropped to the deck, quickly followed by Amelia. ‘A blessed challenge is it? The Sprite of the Lake is too small to be fighting duels.’

The sailor pointed at Veryann’s soldier. ‘It was no challenge. I only suggested to her that when we get to Rapalaw Junction we find a nice room and get down to the hey-jiggerty.’

Veryann stepped between the sailor and her mercenary. ‘What manner of fool are you? No free company fighter will submit to mate with you until you have beaten her in combat. You must prove yourself fit before you bed a Catosian, demonstrate the superiority of your blood lineage. You issued a challenge to my fighter, duel or not.’

‘Ah,’ said the commodore, ‘I do not think any of us in Jackals do things in that way. There now, a simple misunderstanding of cultures. So let’s be putting away our knives and cudgels before I have to bring out the keys for the Sprite’s brig.’

Amelia did not like the gleam that had entered Black’s eyes as he looked at the commander of their force of mercenary marines. That gleam meant mischief on its way.

Gabriel let go of his sailor and indicated the group of Catosians who, up until a few minutes before, had been wrestling on the deck, their taut bodies gleaming from the effects of the muscle-growth stimulant favoured by the Catosian regiments — the sacred drug shine. ‘Must your people spar naked like that? Most of our crew were locked up in Bonegate before they came on board. Your soldiers are driving them crazy down here.’

‘We need to maintain our edge,’ insisted Veryann. ‘It is the fighters’ way. If your sailors have an issue with discipline, you should raise the matter with Bull Kammerlan, first mate.’

‘No disrespect intended, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s a fine thing to see such a sight, indeed it is. But if you could see your way to modifying your fighters’ code to include a few clothes when you spar, I may still have some sailors left alive when we reach Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’

‘Town ho,’ called a sailor from the hatch above. ‘It’s Rapalaw Junction.’

‘At last,’ said Amelia. ‘A chance for solid land and fresh air.’

The commodore climbed back up the ladder. ‘Let us hope that they have the facilities to fix our gas scrubbers, professor, or this expedition may be limping back home next week with nothing but empty pockets to show your rich Mister Quest. Run up the cross and gate, lads.’

A sailor came past with the Jackelian flag, a red field bisected with a white cross, the portcullis of the House of Guardians on the upper right-hand corner, the lion rampant in the lower left. Now that was out of place. She knew how Commodore Black felt about that flag, what it would cost him inside to raise parliament’s standard above his boat.

‘He’s not my Mister Quest,’ said Amelia. She gazed up at the Jackelian flag, running up to flutter in the warm river breeze. ‘Why the flag? I thought Rapalaw Junction was a free port.’

‘Free it may be,’ said Commodore Black, ‘but the only law here belongs to the garrison of redcoats attached to our ambassador’s residence, minding the trade and keeping the river open for Jackals this far out. Everything else at Rapalaw is far from free. Yes, the repairs’ll be costing us a pretty farthing, unless their traders have changed their ways since I was last in these parts.’

A beaten-up collection of narrow-draught barges and river boats lay moored to a line of piers in front of the crumbling walls of the town; occasionally a listless figure propping up a rifle appeared above its baked adobe battlements. A few hired hands lethargically pushed carts filled with buckets of fruit away from a barge, as if they had all the time in the world to move them out of the range of the green buzzing insects circling the crop. Women dangled their feet off the wooden pier, mending fishing nets that looked as if they had seen better days. Plenty of craynarbians mingled with the junction traders, larger than their brethren in Middlesteel, shell armour glossy in the sunlight, not dulled by the smog and grime of a Jackelian city.

Drawn by the sight of the large u-boat coming towards port, a small crowd of children and onlookers began building by the gate, heads shielded from the sun by wide straw hats. As the Sprite lay mooring up, a more official-looking figure bypassed the ranks of children, followed by two soldiers in kilts, their bright but tattered uniforms at odds with the simple white cottons of the town folk.

Amelia was one of the first to cross the gantry that the Sprite’s seadrinkers swung out to the pier, Commodore Black close on her heels, pulling on his blue officer’s jacket, polished epaulettes gleaming in the bright jungle light.

‘I’m with the residence,’ said the official in the bored tones of Middlesteel’s quality. He whipped at his face with a brushlike insect swatter. ‘You would be Damson Veryann?’

Amelia pointed back to the Sprite’s deck. The Catosian soldiers were taking position along the hull, holding short stocky carbines that would serve them as well in the confines of the jungle as along the passages of the u-boat. Their leader crossed the gantry; her pale skin and blonde hair serenely cool while the rest of them sweated like dogs in the febrile afternoon heat of Rapalaw’s rainforest.

The official walked up to Veryann. ‘The ambassador promised we would extend every courtesy to Abraham Quest’s expedition. Bit of a change of plans, then, what? I understood you were going to lay up north of here and we would resupply you on the quiet.’

‘The situation has changed.’

‘A little bad luck coming down here,’ explained the commodore. ‘We’ll have need of your workshops before we can put out again.’

‘Bad luck is one fruit you will always find growing on the vines of Liongeli.’ The official gave a languid wave towards the other craft in port. ‘Rapalaw Junction’s shipwright business isn’t much to look at, but such as it is, you’re welcome to use what the town has. I’m sure the town’s council will appreciate your money; just as I’m sure Abraham Quest’s counting house has enough coinage to keep even the grasping rascals that run the free port happy. Will you still be requiring the services of your guide?’

‘Guide?’ said Amelia, bemused.

Veryann stepped in. ‘We will.’

‘Bit of bad luck there, too,’ said the official. ‘Ironflanks is in the garrison stockade at the moment. A couple of my uplanders dragged him in for disturbing the peace. Smashed up a place three nights ago. Nearly broke the neck of a drinking-house owner.’

Amelia could not believe her ears. ‘That’s a steamman name, surely? A steamman smashed up a jinn house?’

‘He’s not the normal sort of chap you find coming down from the Steamman Free State,’ said the embassy man, ‘that I will grant you. I suspect the town council will be only too glad to boot him out of here this time.’

Amelia raised an eyebrow at Veryann. ‘Ironflanks … a steamman?’

‘He came highly recommended,’ said Veryann, a touch of defensiveness breaking through her icy demeanour.

‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me, there’s much to recommend him,’ said the embassy official. ‘Whenever we get a party of hunters after thunder lizards, they always want to retain Ironflanks. Brings back more safari expeditions alive than any of the other trackers here, have no doubt on that score. But he does have his funny little ways …’

‘Go on,’ said Amelia.

‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, I am afraid the old steamer is as barmy as a barn full of badgers. He is under the impression that the jungle talks to him. Rumour has it that King Steam exiled him from the Free State when he wouldn’t submit to some much needed mental adjustments.’

Amelia turned on Veryann. ‘I told Quest at the start of this that I would only command this expedition if I had my pick of its team members.’

‘Ironflanks will be a scout operating under my command,’ said Veryann. ‘We require his knowledge of the jungle. Besides, given what happened in the engine room at the hands of one of your people, I do not believe you are fit to sit in judgement on the House of Quest’s choices of staff for this expedition.’

Commodore Black stepped between the two women when he saw Amelia starting to bridle. ‘Professor, we’ll be mortal glad to have someone with a knowledge of the lay of the land when we are further upriver. Bull’s rascals know the rapids and flows of the Shedarkshe, but they never ventured further inland than the river villages they gassed for their slaves.’

‘Take me to the stockade,’ Amelia ordered. She glanced at the tartan on the two redcoats’ kilts. ‘Twelfth Kilkenny foot?’

‘The Crimson Watch,’ confirmed the official. ‘Devils with that cutlery on the end of their rifles, but you’d better watch your pocketbook when you’re in the garrison, damson, what? Now, I was never much of a one for books, but one thing has been puzzling me …’ He waved his hand towards the tall dark jungle squatting ominously on the opposite side of the river ‘Exactly what kind of science is your expedition proposing to conduct out there?’

Amelia remembered a cartoon in the Illustrated poking fun at Abraham Quest’s Circleday pastime; pottering around the grounds of his mansion, personally helping the large army of gardeners he employed. A leering caricature of Quest knee deep in the mud of his pile’s grounds, a sapling growing up before his legs in a phallic manner with the label ‘money tree’ hung around it, the speech bubble reading: ‘Forsooth, my soil-fingered helpers, see here, I have grown another large one.’

‘Orchids,’ said Amelia, ‘Abraham Quest is very fond of rare orchids.’

The official looked at the line of menacing Catosian mercenaries on the Sprite’s deck, then at Bull Kammerlan’s feral-looking sailors emerging to sniff the air — blinking at the novel freedom of being outdoors after serving years of a Bonegate water sentence, followed by long weeks cooped up inside their u-boat. ‘Ah, yes, botanists. I’m surprised I did not see it before.’

A burly uplander leafed through the keys on his chain, searching for the one that would unlock Ironflanks’ cell in the Rapalaw Junction garrison.

‘He should have calmed down by now,’ the guard explained to Amelia, Veryann and the commodore. ‘Ironflanks is a bonny enough lad when he hasn’t been snorting.’

‘Snorting?’ said Amelia.

‘Chasing the silver-stack, my lady. He’s a quicksilver user, but he’s no’ been putting any magnesium into his boiler while we’ve been holding him down here. Poor old Ironflanks is on a bit of a downer at the moment.’ He pulled open the rusting door, revealing a steamman that bore little resemblance to the members of his race Amelia was used to back in Jackals. For a start, however battered and rusting the life metal became back home, they never, never, wore clothes.

The three visitors from the submarine stood there, lost for words. Ironflanks looked up at them, poking inside his filthy, bloodstained hunter’s jacket with a stick, as if he was attempting to dislodge a leech.

‘Ah, my friends from the House of Quest, I presume? You have, I trust, brought the filthily heavy chest full of Jackelian coins that I was promised?’

‘Your fee is secure in our boat,’ said Veryann.

‘That’s good, my little softbody beauty, because I have managed to mislay the agent’s fee your people sent up. Damn careless of me, I know.’ His two telescopic eyes increased their length, focusing on her in a way that could only be described as predatory. Ironflanks jangled the chains binding his four metal arms — his architecture looking like it had been modelled on a craynarbian. ‘Then let’s be about it, my good mammals. Tick tock. If we wait any longer it’ll be night, and I doubt if you three can see in the dark, even if I can.’

‘Same time next week, then, Ironflanks?’ laughed the guard, unlocking the chains.

‘I believe I shall forgo your hospitality for a while, McGregor softbody. Now be a good fighting unit and fetch me my cloak and the other property your ruffians removed from me last night.’

‘It wasnae last night, man,’ said the soldier, ‘it was three bloody days ago.’

When the uplander returned to the cell he was struggling under the weight of a gun so large it should have been classed as an artillery piece.

‘I was under the impression your people favoured pressure repeaters powered by your own bodies,’ said Veryann.

Ironflanks shouldered the weapon and then tapped the twin stacks rising from his back. ‘My boiler is not what it used to be, dear lady. Besides, a repeater might be adequate to shoot up the bluecoats of a Quatershiftian brigade, but a thunder lizard is quite a different kettle of armoured-scale fish.’

Veryann led the steamman away, his clanking metal legs leaving impressions in the dried mud under his weight.

‘You still think we need his help out in the jungle?’ Amelia asked the commodore.

‘Lass, this is a pretty pickle and no mistake.’

Amelia bit her lip. They were sailing an antique u-boat into one of the most dangerous, uncharted regions of the world; surrounded by a crew of convicts, a fighting force of hair-trigger mercenaries that even their own country didn’t want, and carrying a saboteur determined to stop them. Now they could count among their group the maddest steamman outside of a Free State asylum. Her damn luck had to turn at some point.

Not for the first time, the undermaid wished the front door of their grand house in Westcheap had a speaking tube to filter out the callers. It was bad enough that every chimney sweep and hawker on the crescent called every morning trying to convince her or Cooky to purchase their wares, now she had to deal with simpletons too.

‘This is not the house of any Damson Robur, sir. It belongs to Lord Leicester Effingham today, exactly as it has done every day for the last twenty years.’

‘You are in error, damson,’ insisted her lunatic visitor. ‘I visited the lady just a few nights ago here and this house is the residence of Damson Robur.’

‘You have the wrong address, fellow,’ said the maid. ‘All the crescents and lanes about these parts look alike if you do not live around here.’

‘Then who was staying here three nights ago?’ demanded the visitor.

‘Exactly nobody was here, sir — the place was empty. Lord Effingham was at his country residence in Haslingshire. I have only just travelled down to Middlesteel with his cook to open up the house for the season.’ She pointed to the dark rooms behind her, furniture in the hallway hung with white linen covers to protect them from the deposit left by the capital’s smog. ‘Does this look like an occupied house to you? There’s dust all over the place; Circle knows, it’s me that has to clean it all up. Try the crescent on the other side of the park, why don’t you? The lanes all look alike, especially after a night of carousing.’

She shut the door on the unexpected caller and went back to sit with Cooky and their nice pot of warm caffeel down in the kitchen. Within five minutes she would have been hard-pressed to describe the visitor’s nondescript face to anyone who might have asked. Which was precisely the point of that face.

Around the corner, her visitor entered a covered arcade of small shops selling pottery and walking sticks. Cornelius Fortune emerged from the exit at the other end, walking into the crowds of a teeming market. He feigned an interest in the long silver eels being slapped down on the wooden surface of one of the stalls, checking the reflection in a shop front to ensure there had been no watch set on the house. No tail emerged from the arcade, no confused expressions trying to locate the vanished visitor. So, what mischief was to be had out of the disappearance of Jules Robur, the continent’s greatest mechomancer? Damson Robur did not exist, and now it seemed, neither did her father. There were always complex games of deception and guile being played between the paranoid members of the First Committee as they jockeyed for power and position across the border in Quatershift. Had such a game been played with Furnace-breath Nick as one of their pawns? The thought of that ate at him like a cancer.

‘Lovely, ain’t they, squire?’ said the fishmonger behind the stall. ‘Special offer today, take away one of these lovelies and I’ll throw in a free tub of sweet jelly.’

‘The long one, there,’ said Cornelius.

‘I can throw in a nice piece of slipsharp heart for tuppence more. So oily you can cook it in its own juices.’

‘Just the eel,’ said Cornelius. ‘I rather think I have other fish to fry now.’

Standing on the dock, Amelia moved out of the way of a chain of bearers carrying repaired components from the gas scrubbers deep into the interior of the u-boat for T’ricola to reassemble in her engine room. The sonar man Billy Snow was sitting on top of an upturned fishing boat, in a position where he could have seen everything going on in front of him — if he had only possessed the requisite sense.

Amelia went over to him. ‘You get around Rapalaw Junction better than I do.’

‘There’s not much here, is there?’ said Billy. ‘But I can always follow my nose back to that soup that passes for air inside the Sprite.’

‘Damn it, but I hope we can fix up our boat soon.’

‘So eager for the greenmesh?’ said Billy. ‘I know why I’m here, professor — same as the rest of the seadrinkers. We only feel alive when you shove us in a can and push us beneath the waves. But you? Why do you care so much about some city that may or may not have been buried under Liongeli an eon ago, before a floatquake pushed it up towards the heavens?’

‘You want the simple answer? It is knowledge. The Camlanteans had the perfect society,’ said Amelia. ‘They lived in peace without hunger or war or evil for a thousand times longer than Jackals has endured; but we know so little about them.’

‘Your colleagues back at the universities doubt they even existed,’ said Billy. ‘I shall let you into a little secret. Before we left Jackals, I imposed on T’ricola to purchase the book that you wrote — The Face of the Ancients. She and Gabriel are kind enough to read me a chapter from it each evening.’

‘Well then, I believe I might have trebled this year’s sales of the damn thing,’ said Amelia. ‘I would have had more luck if the stationers in Middlesteel sold it as celestial fiction. That tome you are enjoying finished my career. The High Table made sure there was not an expedition or dig in Jackals that would take me with them after I had it published.’

‘Admitting to what you don’t know is even harder for the learned than the ignorant.’ The sonar man waved out towards the jungle. ‘They were not so perfect, I think. If they were, Middlesteel would be called Camlantis and their people would be here today, not dust and ruins under the weight of a half-sentient jungle.’

‘But we don’t know!’ Amelia tried to communicate the depth of her passion for the subject. ‘Circle knows, what we understand about the Chimecan Empire is sketchy enough, and they made their holds deep underground when the cold-time came — what preceded their time is shrouded in myth and legend. Where he could, my father collected every crystal-book, every piece of parchment with a legible script of Usglish, every paper and theory on the Camlanteans, and-’

‘-And yet still what is lost, is lost,’ said Billy Snow.

Amelia remembered when her father was still alive — sitting at his knee, the excitement with which he talked about how Jackals’ ancient democracy was a hollow echo of the perfect utopia it could become. Somehow she could never pass on the vision as clearly as he could. ‘My theory is that the Camlantean civilization was supported by the same techniques we see perverted today by Cassarabia’s womb mages. They had found a way to live in harmony with their world, and most of their craft was lost to history for no other reason than it was living, alive. Apart from their crystal-books, most of it just rotted away after their realm fell.’

Billy shivered. ‘Those who serve as slave wombs in Cassarabia might debate your ideals of utopia, professor. I’m a u-boat hand, not a jack cloudie, but I know our aerostat crews have mapped most of the low-lying floatquake lands. No one has ever seen something the size of Camlantis drifting about up there in the heavens — not once. If your city is as lost as that, there is a reason for it.’

Superstition from a sailor? Well, Amelia was hardly surprised. Billy’s trade were always genuflecting to some god of the sea or river down below decks, invoking spirits and chanting in the hidden corners of the Sprite of the Lake. No wonder the Circlist church refused entry to many of the men of the sea.

Amelia glanced curiously down the docks, towards a flurry of activity in the shadow of the trading town’s walls. It looked like a newly arrived trader was finishing setting up shop, a crowd of people from the town gathering to see the merchant. The haste that was being shown by the audience was in stark contrast to the listless pace of business she had seen conducted everywhere else in Rapalaw Junction.

‘That’s odd,’ noted Amelia. ‘The market is in the centre of the town, but everyone is flocking out here to visit that stall?’

‘Can’t you hear the hawker’s cries?’ sighed Billy. ‘Ah, of course, they’re in bush tongue. It’s not slyfish and game meat this one’s selling. Come on, you might as well see the sight along with everyone else. Their kind aren’t allowed within the trading post to conduct business.’

Now Amelia really was curious. As she and Billy got closer she saw a folding table had been set up in the shadow of a wooden platform, a line of figures standing aimlessly on the boards, the centre of attention of the gathering crowd.

‘A slaver!’ spat Amelia, reaching down for her pistol holster.

Billy’s hand snaked out and gripped hers with an uncanny accuracy. ‘No, quite the opposite in this instance. You might consider their vocation the liberation of slaves. It’s called a comfort auction. Watch and keep quiet, whatever you see or hear. Rapalaw’s citizens get very emotional when traders in this line of work visit the post. If you try and interfere we could both be ripped to pieces.’

The trader in charge of this miniature market was looking very pleased with himself, biding his time until the crowd grew large enough for his satisfaction. A plate of meat had been brought up to the trader’s table, a flagon of beer by its side. The trader wiping his fingers on his sweat-soaked jacket looked like nothing so much as John Gloater, the cartoonists’ favourite Jackelian everyman. Living up to the image of Dock Street’s savage portly patriot, the trader gave out a belch and then waved at his craynarbian associates to push the goods forward on the platform. The figures Amelia had taken for slaves were a sickly-looking lot, gaunt, with vacant expressions frozen on their faces. Women, men, craynarbians, even a small grasper, all swaying slightly on the platform. There wasn’t much fight left in them. The trader’s assistants appeared to be there more to stop them stumbling off the edge of the platform than to prevent them from escaping. If this was an auction, it was one of zombies. But whatever their race, there was something the figures all had in common; it looked as if their skin had been scrubbed raw, the lines of their veins left exposed, an abnormal viridescent colour — a fretwork of green cables throbbing against their flesh.

Pushing to his feet, the trader waddled in front of the platform and raised his arms to still the crowd. ‘Quiet now, my lovelies. My last voyage up river has, as you can see, been a fruitful one. But not without risks. It was a fierce expedition, our passage littered with the bodies of a dozen of our best porters. And in the dark heart of the jungle, on the edge of the greenmesh, we lay our ambush; luring two patrols into the pits we dug, dug with these hands …’ He raised his soft white hands, palms out. Whoever had been doing the digging, it hadn’t been the trader; those hands hadn’t raised anything heavier than a fork for a long time.

Amelia looked at the platform with fresh eyes. Thegreenmesh. It began to dawn on her what this sale was about.

‘Now do you see?’ whispered Billy. ‘His “goods” travelled too close to the greenmesh and were absorbed by the Daggish Empire, made slaves within the unity of the hive.’

Amelia felt sick. These trade goods had once been people with families and loved ones. Now what were they? Half-dead wasps waiting at the foot of Rapalaw Junction’s walls for a bargain to be struck.

‘He’s chemically cleansed them of the hive’s control,’ said Billy. ‘What you see up there is what the extrication process leaves. Although truth to tell, everything that made them who they were was scrubbed out of them a lot more assiduously by the Daggish when they were assimilated into the hive.’

‘Do any of you lovelies who have come before me today recognize any of these splendid emancipated souls?’ asked the trader.

‘That one,’ shouted one of the crowd, pointing to the man at the end of the line. ‘He was on a safari that disappeared in the interior two years ago; come up from Middlesteel, I think.’

‘Nobody here willing to pay for him, then?’ The trader looked wistfully around the crowd, noted the silence, then scribbled a note of provenance against the names on his list. Perhaps there would be someone back in the civilized world of Jackals who would pay. Rich enough to hunt thunder lizards, there’d surely be someone with deep pockets at the other end of the river that would want their father or their husband back.

‘What about this one, then?’ said the trader, waving a chubby hand at a dark-haired man standing over six feet tall. ‘One of my porters said they thought he was the pilot on a riverboat from Rapalaw that went missing a while back. An unlucky fellow who sailed too far east and ran into a Daggish seed ship.’

From further back in the crowd came a shriek of recognition, a woman pushing forward with a girl of about twelve hanging onto her coattails. ‘Coll! Coll Ordie, don’t you recognize me? Look — ’ she lifted up her girl so he could see ‘-it’s your little Maddalena. She was only nine when you were taken.’

The ex-slave looked blankly down at the two of them from the platform, his face frozen in an emotionless rictus. Amelia saw the trader’s subtle hand signal, and one of his craynarbians gave the man a prod in the spine with a sharp stick.

‘It’s me,’ coughed the man. ‘I’ve come back.’

Amelia’s eyes narrowed, and Billy gave her hand a warning squeeze. Whatever little was left of these unlucky wretches, the emancipated slaves of the Daggish had been well tutored to say one phrase since being freed. Amelia wagered that with a poke in the back, everyone standing on the platform could repeat that utterance.

‘It warms my heart,’ announced the trader. ‘Oh, it truly does. This, damson, is what makes the dangers and perils of my endeavours worthwhile. This is what I live for. But a river pilot, someone who knows the flows and tricks of the great river Shedarkshe, I cannot let him return back to you as cheaply as I might a mere trapper of hides and furs, oh no. I have to pay for my porters and my soldiers and I have to pay for the families, like yours, left lonely where my brave crew have perished in our sallies against the fierce Daggish. So many mouths that must be fed. Shall we say sixteen guineas for your husband?’

‘Sixteen guineas?’ cried the woman. ‘I should sell my house in the post and still be left five short!’

‘Ah, damson, can there ever be a price put on the return of a father for your beautiful girl? Look at her standing there beside you, weeping. You haven’t seen him for so long, have you, my little lovely? How you must have missed him. And you, damson, as much as you love your little one, you must have grown tired of being asked by her every night, “when will daddy return, when will I see him again?” Repeating the very same thing you must have been thinking yourself as you went to bed alone each evening.’ The trader raised his arms in a magnanimous gesture. ‘But your story has touched me. I shall let him go to you for only thirteen guineas. The price of your house and the good will and merciful coins of your husband’s old friends will carry you that little extra way towards me, I am sure.’

‘It’s me,’ repeated the river pilot after another poke. ‘I’ve come back.’

Shaking and confused, the woman tried to withdraw back to the town through the press of the crowd, her daughter dragged against her will, fighting her mother every step of the way.

‘Ah well,’ laughed the merchant, winking at the men in the crowd after the woman and the girl had gone. ‘Hopefully she’ll come back with the guineas. Of course, sometimes they haven’t been going to bed so alone every night, and then they slip me a guinea or two to apprentice their old man far down river from the trading post.’

Amelia’s hand was shaking above her holster and Billy stopping it from dipping down with an iron grip. ‘Whatever you think of this, these transactions are still legal. The comfort traders operate just the right side of the Suppression of Slavery Act. Murder, however, is punished the same here as back in Jackals. More swiftly, too.’

‘I’ll pay your damn leach’s money,’ shouted Amelia, shrugging off Billy’s hand. ‘Thirteen guineas.’

‘It’s not their husband or father you’re buying back anymore,’ whispered Billy. ‘It won’t be the same for them.’

An image of the half-empty rooms of her old home came to Amelia, waiting for her aunt to turn up while the bailiffs argued with each other over which of the bruisers would get to remove the choicest pieces of furniture, lifting her father’s cheap old oil painting of an imagined Camlantis off the wall and almost coming to blows over it. ‘No, it never is.’

‘Sixteen guineas, my dear lady,’ answered the trader. ‘The special offer was only for the man’s wife, because my heart is a big soft vessel easily touched by the cruel vagaries of our world.’

Amelia pointed down the river to where the Sprite of theLake was tied up. ‘And that’s my vessel, my flabby friend. It’s big, but as you can see from the lines of its torpedo tubes, not particularly soft. The Sprite’s large enough that trading boats like yours are sometimes broken clean in two on our hull if we surface without first surveying the waters above us. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to forget the periscope check.’

‘You should have said so before, my dear lady,’ said the trader. ‘To honour a fellow swashbuckler braving the perils of the great river Shedarkshe is a pleasure, never a pain. For today only I shall extend the offer I made to the wife to you. A mere thirteen guineas, and as a token of my respect you may even keep the cotton breeches and shirt I have supplied this poor emancipated soul with.’

Amelia passed her coins across to one of the trader’s craynarbian guards. ‘Your respect is bought cheaply. Now take him into town and give him back to his family.’

‘That trader respects the Daggish well enough, I think,’ said Billy. ‘As should we, if we are to return from our devil’s errand alive. Getting close enough to the hive to tweak their nose — whether it is by stealing back those taken by the greenmesh, or by probing the ruins of Camlantis left on earth, that’s not something to be taken lightly. If things go badly for us, I have nobody at home waiting to pay a comfort trader’s price for me. I would be better off remaining part of the hive. At least the Daggish feed the slaves they absorb. There’s not many who would be queuing up to hire an old blind man scrubbed clean of his schooling in sonar.’

Amelia looked at the people left standing on the platform, empty vessels trying to remember what it was to be human. The freed slave who had once been a river pilot was being led down the platform. How much comfort had she bought that little girl and her mother? Not nearly enough, Amelia suspected. ‘If it comes to it, Billy, you shoot me rather than let me be taken alive as a slave by the Daggish.’

Suddenly Gabriel McCabe appeared, one of the Sprite’s sailors frantically shouting for him across the press of the market.

Billy Snow recognized the first mate by the weight of his footsteps alone. ‘Gabriel?’

‘Trouble in the town — one of Bull’s people.’

Amelia followed after McCabe as he pelted through Rapalaw’s gates, heading for the main square. At the centre of the town a small brawl had broken out, sailors from the Sprite fighting with craynarbians, a small patrol of uplanders trying to pull them apart.

Gabriel McCabe waded in, lifting one of the crewmen off his feet and spinning him around in the air. The craynarbian the sailor had been fighting tried to slash at McCabe, perhaps thinking the giant was one of the brawler’s friends. McCabe’s leg had a longer reach than the craynarbian’s sword arm and the first mate booted the craynarbian in his crotch shell, keeling him over. More uplanders arrived, the redcoats pushing the two sides apart with the butts of their rifles.

‘Who started this?’ boomed McCabe. ‘You know the commodore’s orders — you’ll taste the cat-o’-nine-tails for this.’

‘It was that thing.’ One of the sailors pointed at an old craynarbian, hardly an inch of his shell not covered by rainbow-bright whirls of paint, hundreds of illustrations of eyes detailed on the creature’s exo-armour. ‘Bloody witch doctor! Said the potion he sold me would see me stay perky all night in the bawdy house … instead, I’ve been pissing out green water since yesterday.’

‘It is not my fault,’ said the craynarbian sorcerer, shaking his two manipulator arms while his sword and club arms remained vertical in anger. ‘I warned this fool that the ways of magic and the worldsong work differently in our land. Leylines do not draw earthflow along predictable channels in Liongeli; the jungle drinks our power and radiates it. You use magic at your peril here.’

‘Dear Circle,’ Amelia swore in exasperation. ‘Is that all you seadrinkers think about? Someone take this idiot away to a jinn house and buy him a stiff drink.’

The redcoats from the Crimson Watch hooted with laughter and a few flashed up their kilts in the traditional upland gesture at a joke well-appreciated. As the witch doctor noticed Amelia for the first time, his eyes widened in shock, then he slowly dropped down on his knees, human lips keening like a hound through his face’s bone plate. As he did this the other craynarbians followed his lead and buried their knees in the dust of the square, bowing down before Amelia and half-howling, half-singing in nervous voices.

Bull Kammerlan appeared in the square with more sailors, some carrying cudgels and obviously ready to aid their shipmates. The convict leader took in the scene with bemusement. ‘Everyone likes a lass with big arms, eh?’

‘She is marked,’ said the witch doctor, barely able to look up at Amelia. ‘Do you not see it? She carries the mark of the south, the mark of the ancients. What can the presence of the mark mean for our people?’

‘The south?’ Amelia remembered the wild woman of the sands who had saved her from the burning desert. And the cryptic message she had given Amelia before she disappeared back home.

‘On your knees, you river dogs,’ the witch doctor shouted up at the sailors. ‘Can you not see she has the mark of the ancients?’

Some of the submariners were backing away uneasily from Amelia, the murmur of ‘Jonah’ on their terrified lips.

Bull Kammerlan rounded on his men. ‘Keep your heads, you damn fools. This old shell has been smoking some bad mumbleweed and you sorry lot start acting like the crew of a laundry house. Was it bad luck that saw us all freed from jail at Bonegate and put on the deck of a u-boat again?’

An old sailor scratched at his grizzled silver beard. ‘This is bad, oh this is bad.’

‘Hold your tongue, Roth,’ ordered Gabriel McCabe.

‘Do not show disrespect to the mark of the ancients,’ warned the witch doctor, ‘or you will invoke punishment.’

As soon as the craynarbian finished speaking a strange whining filled the air, coming from a small black dot in the cloudless sky that was gradually growing larger and larger. The whistle ended in a gurgle as an arrow as long as a spear thudded through the chest of the sailor Roth. He looked down at the projectile in disbelief, his fingers touching the carved bone arrowhead to see if it was real. His blood was flowing onto the ground from the arrowhead’s fluted holes, pierced to sing a victory song to the jungle.

‘Oh — jigger — that.’

Dark clouds of whining arrows filled the sky as the sailor fell face-first into the dirt, quite dead. On the town walls someone began ringing an alarm bell, the warning of a tribal assault echoing over the adobe and timber walls of Rapalaw Junction’s buildings.

‘Back to the Sprite,’ Bull shouted, ‘before they shut the town gates.’

‘How safe will we be there?’ said Amelia. ‘We can’t submerge yet, and the garrison may-’

‘Roger that for a laugh, dimples,’ said Bull, pulling out a pistol. ‘I’m not camping down here. This place comes under siege by the feral shells at least once a year, and the attacks usually last until the RAN diverts one of the Fleet of the East’s airships up here to rain fire-fins down on the craynarbians’ armoured noggins. You want to be stuck inside Rapalaw Junction for the next two months, chewing on rat meat and hoping our well water lasts out until the relief force arrives?’

Amelia jolted left, a long arrow banging into the ground where she had been standing. ‘I thought hunkering down here would suit you just fine, sailor boy.’

‘Not me, girl,’ said Bull. ‘The richest man in Jackals didn’t get to be that way by sending us up the Shedarkshe on a fool’s errand. He knows that old sea dog Black has a nose for treasure, and he’s paid a pretty farthing to make sure we get to it. Maybe there’ll be enough left to fill me and my boys’ pockets too, eh?’

By the docks, Quest’s private army had taken up positions around the Sprite of the Lake. Her tanks had been partially flooded, leaving just her twin turrets visible and the deck an inch out of the river.

Veryann appeared, still serene in the face of the afternoon heat and the impending attack. She might as well have been carved from ice. ‘Into the boat. We cast off within the half hour.’

Amelia unbuttoned the flap on her leather pistol holster, the heft of her old Tennyson and Bounder reassuring in her hand. ‘We’re days away from completing the repairs.’

From the jungle on the opposite side of the river, an armada of rafts was being pushed out into the Shedarkshe, each vessel filled by huge craynarbians, a blaze of war-painted shells.

‘Chief T’ricola has the scrubbers running at ten per cent of their capacity,’ said Veryann. ‘Enough to get us out of the field of battle. The remaining repairs can be made during the voyage.’

Amelia looked across at the heavily armed tribesmen shaking their spears and spring-guns, thousands of them appearing on the opposite riverbank now. If they had half an hour before the Sprite’s hull and Rapalaw Junction’s walls were swarming with craynarbian warriors, siege ladders and hostile witch doctors, she could not see it.

Damson Beeton walked down the corridor of the mansion, her lantern’s light flickering over the portraits that lined the gallery. Not that they were anything to do with the master’s family — they had come along with the house, left by the previous owner. What had not come, however, was any decent clockwork-timed lighting or heating systems to enliven the draughty corridors and rooms. Where the other islands on the Skerries were palaces of light after night fell, Dolorous Isle stood alone as an oppressive dark mass, only a single pier lamp blowing in the wind to remind the river’s pilots that there was life here.

Septimoth was approaching down the corridor from the opposite end, his wings tucked back so they did not knock over any of the table ornaments as he went. The housekeeper and the lashlite met in the middle of the corridor, outside the master’s room.

‘You heard it too?’ asked the housekeeper.

Septimoth cocked an ear to the door. ‘It is the dream, Damson Beeton. He is having the dream again.’

‘It’s not right,’ said Damson Beeton, ‘a man like him suffering like this. Can’t you impose on him to see an alienist? With his money he could go to the best practice in Middlesteel.’

Septimoth shook his head. ‘There are some things that are beyond even the powers of your surgeons of the mind and soul to heal.’

‘He has the dream once a week now. It was bad enough when they came each month.’

‘He is worried of late, I think,’ said Septimoth.

The housekeeper waved an accusing finger at the lashlite. ‘You two are as thick as thieves with your Circle-damned secrets. Don’t think I don’t see it. What is the dream, you wily old bird? Master Fortune won’t tell me … but you know, I can see that much. It has something to do with your blind eye, doesn’t it?’

Septimoth scratched the back of his neck, at the weal where his seeing eye should have been. The one that gave the aerial hunters their three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision — along, it was rumoured, with other powers. Such as the ability to see into the future. ‘Not directly, damson. I have told you before, this eye I lost because I lacked vision.’

‘Teeth of the Circle,’ the housekeeper growled in frustration. ‘Damn your eyes then, Septimoth; the two you’ve kept, and the one you lost that makes you a useless manservant in this old heap. I’ll be off to bed and hear no more of your double talk until I make the three of us breakfast.’

Hours later, on the other side of the door, Cornelius Fortune still tossed and turned, in the power of a dream as his two servants had suspected. A nightmare that had become habit.

Cornelius was walking across a recently ploughed field — tilled by hand, now all the horses had been slaughtered for food — in the company of the village simpleton the local committee had found to tend the orchard, leading him slowly across to the tree he was seeking.

‘This is it,’ said the newly recruited farmer, casting a sad eye over the barren stumps barely rising out of the ground — all apart from one. He raised a hand that had only three fingers on it towards the solitary budding tree. ‘But look how this one grows. What a beauty. She’s the only one to thrive here.’

‘Look how she grows,’ Cornelius moaned, his hands scrabbling through the dry mud around the tree. They didn’t know how to grow anything in this land anymore. There were no irrigation channels. No water. They hadn’t even buried the seedling orchard deep enough for its roots to take hold. One boy tending farm land meant to be worked by a hundred, while his compatriots debated furiously over which illustrious revolutionaries the fields should be named after, passing regulations to bid the crops to grow faster, enacting laws to make it rain more equitably across the regions.

‘That’s how I knew where to take you, she’s the only tree to thrive out in the Glorious Orchard of the Revolution Seventy Six, Farming Community of Heroine Justine Taniayay,’ said the boy, getting the mantra just right. ‘They say I’m stupid, but I can remember them all, the names written on the sacks, the sacks that smelled so bad. That dead tree over there had a baron emptied over it. That tree next door got a woman who owned the manufactory that made rocking horses; I went on one of those once. Imagine that. I rode her wooden horses, and then I got to empty her over a tree, a tree just for her. And this tree is the one you asked for. Look how she grows.’

Cornelius let his borrowed face slip. He could hold the image of the area inspector no more, his face warping back to his natural features, the tears streaming from his eyes. The simple peasant lad just looked on, as if a melting, changing face was something he saw every day. Cornelius dug out the young sapling with expert care, brushing away the dirt, removing the tree from the ground without killing it.

‘You know about the growing and the planting and the old ways?’ asked the boy.

‘I was a farmer,’ said Cornelius, cradling the plant. ‘Once.’

‘You should stay here, then,’ said the boy, as if he was offering Cornelius the crown of the Sun King itself. ‘This is a farm.’

Cornelius stood up and touched the boy’s arm gently. ‘Thank you, but I cannot — I am not a farmer any more.’

‘There were more of us here last year,’ said the boy. ‘More of us helping with the trees and the turnips and the corn and the barley. At least ten people. I remember that — even though people keep on telling me I am wrong, there was never anyone else working with me. There was old farmer Adoulonge too, even though people say there was never a man of that name living here. What do you do now, compatriot sir?’

‘Didn’t you see my face, doesn’t it scare you? I am a monster. But now I shall prey on other monsters. What do you call such a thing, boy? A monster that eats other monsters?’

‘Furnace-breath Nick,’ smiled the boy. ‘The Sun Eater, Old Night-hand. The light priests will tell you stories about the Sun Eater, but I haven’t seen any of them in the village for a long while.’

Poor young fool. He knew about the bags that smelled bad, but he hadn’t made the connection between them and the diminishing population of his village. The human mind was such a complex instrument. Cornelius could feel his own slipping away even as he spoke, a dwindling dot of reason dimming to nothing along an impossibly long corridor.

‘The priests have gone away,’ said Cornelius, ‘along with your other friends.’ He lifted the precious sapling and shielded it inside his greatcoat. The boy stared out across the empty fields, not noticing that his visitor was stumbling west now, away from the farm. Away from Quatershift.

‘I like farming,’ the boy said to himself. ‘Better than dirty loom work, losing my fingers one by one.’

Howling like a dying fox, Cornelius glanced up at the sky as he lurched across the dead ground, the summer sun beating down. He should only look at the sky now, so clear and pure and unsullied. Filled with the sun. Waiting to be devoured. Don’t look at the mud, don’t see the ground bones lying between the furrows. White, angular bones. He lifted the sapling he had dug out high to the heavens, the young trunk left moist and supple by the fertilizer of his murdered wife’s flesh. His tree, his darling tree. She would grow again, but not in the spoiled soil of Quatershift.

He shook the young tree at the sky. ‘This is my wife, this is the child that was in her belly.’

A shadow grew in the sky, dark, bloated, born in the sun and feeding on its warmth. ‘She will live again. Your unbornchild too. They will live in the torment of those that murderedthem.’

‘I’ll give you blood,’ he screamed. ‘Is this what you want? There’s an ocean of it inside the bastards who did this — a whole jigging revolution’s worth of blood.’

See the sky.

‘Yes.’

See the sun.

‘I shall show you my face.’

Sun.

‘My true face.’

Sun Eater.

Master king of demons. With a smirking mouth concealing a furnace and the rotting heart of the devil. Licking at the splintered bones in the fields. Smacking his lips as the juice of mangled souls ran down his burning throat. Furnace-breath Nick.

The light grew brighter, blinding him, consuming the sun.

Cornelius sat bolt upright in bed, panting, the light fading away to become the shine of an oil lantern swinging in Septimoth’s hand. In his other he held a squirming lad, dangling upside down with one of his boots clutched tightly by the lashlite’s talons.

‘I’ve told you before about going out fishing along the river late at night,’ said Cornelius.

‘This fish flopped onto our island all by itself,’ said Septimoth. ‘I heard him trying to force the lock to the east wing.’

‘I wasn’t trying to break into your house, mister,’ said the boy. ‘My name’s Smike, I’ve been sent here with a message for you. What sort of bleeding nob are you anyway, employing the likes of some wild bloody lashlite to guard your place? There should be a law against it.’

‘Knowing the House of Guardians, there probably is.’ Cornelius looked at the lad; it was giving him a crink in his neck trying to talk to him upside down. He motioned to Septimoth and the lashlite flipped him around and put him back on his feet. Smike stood there shakily for a second, dripping water onto the floorboards. Cornelius waited until his silence had made the boy suitably nervous. ‘You swam across?’

‘You think there’s a boat that would risk their river authority licence by dropping the likes of me onto your pier at this time of the night?’

‘You mentioned a message,’ said Cornelius. ‘You must forgive my look of disbelief, because to the best of my knowledge, the only people who know that anyone other than a wealthy, reclusive hermit is living at this address are already inside this house’s walls. And I’m afraid that doesn’t include you.’

‘Well now, how I got to be here is a right old tale for the telling,’ explained Smike. ‘I didn’t catch a name, but the bloke who paid me was an old goat, robed like a Circlist monk. Going around pretending he was blind, but he wasn’t, he could see well enough for me and him both.’

‘A blind monk? That doesn’t sound like anyone I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘Go on …’

‘This old goat was worried about a run of Steamman grave robbing that’s been going on in Middlesteel, organized by the flash mob. Not the new ones just down from the Free State, mind — but old models, the older the better. I saw a little of it going on myself, the Catgibbon’s blades doing the dirty with the shovel work.’

‘Is that all?’ asked Cornelius. ‘There’s always some mechomancer trying to get hold of body parts from the Steamman Free Steam, trying to lift up their own craft by prying out the secrets of how King Steam puts his people together. Grave robbing’s a crime for the crushers to solve, it gives the detectives from Ham Yard something to do.’

‘Now if that isn’t what advice I gave to this old bloke,’ said Smike. ‘He told me your reply would be along the lines of what you just said, too. But he paid me to tell you that one of the mechomancers who was after steammen parts was an old friend of yours from Quatershift, one who, quote, “you would have been far better off leaving behind in a Commonshare prison camp”. Does that make any sense to you, mister?’

Cornelius pushed himself off the four-poster bed. ‘When was this?’

‘About a week ago. I would have come sooner, but the crushers took me in to discuss a small matter of some pocket-books going missing in the lanes of Rottonbow. They got the wrong’un, of course.’

‘A week …’

That was hardly a day after he had gone over the curse-wall into Quatershift to get Robur out. No one knew the timing of his incursions except himself and Septimoth. ‘Did your friend say anything else?’

‘Just that you would know what to do next,’ said Smike.

‘He was wrong about that,’ said Cornelius, ‘I’m damned if I know what to do next. How much did this man give you to memorize the message?’

‘Five sovereigns,’ lied Smike.

Cornelius’s eyes twinkled in amusement. ‘Sink me, but you’re slightly more expensive than the penny post.’ He walked to a drawer and slipped five coins out, passing them to the lad. ‘That’s to forget the message, and to forget the address of my house.’

‘Address?’ said Smike, pocketing the coins. ‘We’re in the upland glens, aren’t we?’

‘Just opposite the southern frontier, I’d say,’ said Cornelius. He glanced at Septimoth. ‘Ask the damson to take our young friend to the pier and hail him a boat. Do get her to check his pockets before he departs, though.’

‘You’re a right gent,’ said Smike.

Cornelius looked out over the distant skyline resting beyond the river: the crumbling rookeries; the more modern pneumatic towers swaying slightly in the fog; the dark silhouette of an aerostat of the merchant fleet drifting across the half moon.

Septimoth returned, no doubt having been given a roasting for waking up their housekeeper at such an ungodly hour. ‘You were wrong when you said that the only people who know that we are living at this address are inside our walls.’ The lashlite pointed up towards the ceiling.

‘I have an understanding with the Court of the Air,’ said Cornelius. ‘I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me. They think it’s rather amusing, the jig we lead the First Committee over in Quatershift. It suits their purposes. But their tolerance only stretches so far. If we start lifting the flash mob’s bludgers from Middlesteel, it won’t take the capital’s pensmen long before ballads and penny dreadfuls begin to appear on the stationer’s carts with Furnace-breath Nick’s face painted on the cover. We need a safe base of operations on this side of the border to strike at the Commonshare. Life on the run will hamper our activities.’

Septimoth considered his friend’s words. With their powerful wings, his race were the only people apart from the Court of the Air’s own agents to have seen the connected aerospheres of the great aerial city, floating far beyond the reach of normal airships. The wisdom of lashlite sages’ recalled a time when the watchers in the sky had not dwelled far above the land. For the people of Jackals below, the secret organization Isambard Kirkhill had built to safeguard parliament’s victory in the civil war was a matter of conjecture, their agents, the wolftakers, a mere whisper in the jinn houses. Only by their wake could you know the Court of the Air. Missing rebels, the door left ajar on the oddly empty apartment of a crooked politician, science pirates who would simply disappear on the eve of a long-planned victory. Like the great sages of the people of the wind, the Court also attempted to peer ahead into the future. Not with any prophetic third eye, but with their mighty transaction engines, the steam from their endeavours forming a perpetual cloaking cloud around the city in the air. In that steam lay the future, it was said. Cornelius was quite right, of course. Neither of them could afford to become a rogue element in the Court’s calculations of their perfect democracy, an element that would require eliminating.

‘You already have a ballad on the stationer’s carts,’ said Septimoth. ‘You must have heard it? They seek him here, they seek him there, the furnace-breath killer with the demon stare.’

‘We hunt monsters.’

‘Are we now to hunt them closer to home, Cornelius Fortune?’

‘Take on the Catgibbon and the flash mob? Sweet bloody Circle,’ said Cornelius.

‘The monk appears dangerously well informed about our real purpose here and our activities,’ said Septimoth. ‘Even if his warning about rescuing Robur from the Commonshare finds us a little late.’

‘Quite. But rotting steammen being turned out of their graves?’ Cornelius scratched his unshaven cheeks. ‘What do we know about the people of the metal? None of them stayed long in Quatershift after the revolution, not after the Commonshare was declared. The Sun King used to treat the Steamman Free State as if it was just another of his dominions, and the Commonshare’s First Committee act little differently now. The shifties have started more wars with the steammen than they’ve ever fought with Jackals, but why would their agents want to sponsor a spate of steammen grave-robbing?’

Cornelius sighed. He might have a scant understanding of the people of the metal, but he knew someone who did: at the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard.

‘I shall ponder the matter in my eyrie,’ said Septimoth. ‘You had your dream again, didn’t you?’

Cornelius said nothing.

‘You should try and dream less,’ advised Septimoth, leaving and closing the door.

‘Yes, I should.’

Cornelius got back into bed and tried to nod off to sleep again, a near impossible task. This was all wrong. Grave robbing, the game of mirrors that had been played on him across the border in Quatershift to free Robur, a monk who knew all about his secret life as the scourge of the shifties. It was all wrong. Were the monsters coming to Middlesteel again?

Veryann’s fighters had taken up positions on the dock, sheltering from the storm of darts being launched from the wild craynarbians’ spring-guns. They returned fire in a smooth rattle; slipping crystal charges into their rifles, ejecting broken glass around the pier, burning blow-barrel hissing as it struck the planking. Above them, a short-nosed cannon had been pushed up to the fortifications of Rapalaw Junction, geysers of water erupting around the tribe’s war rafts as the trading post’s defenders tried to deny the tribesmen a firm foothold below the town’s walls.

Amelia kept her spine pressed up against a low adobe wall, the thud of darts on the other side dissuading her from doing more than snapping off the occasional shot at the lead boats with her pistol. One of the sailors broke cover and tried to run across the boarding ramp to the Sprite, two darts spearing him in his chest and hammering him down into the water. There was a thrashing in the river as something small and hungry finished off the howling submariner in a froth of bubbles.

‘Stay low,’ shouted Bull Kammerlan. He pulled the ejector rod on his carbine and a shower of broken crystal sprayed back as the clockwork mechanism forced the expended charge out. ‘We need more covering fire from the walls before we can run for the boat.’

‘Their rafts are going to be landing along the town’s front within a couple of minutes,’ said Amelia. ‘Best we were gone from here before then.’

‘Really? There’s me thinking that the boys and me would be doing a bit of fishing along here later,’ said Bull. ‘You write a paper on it, dimples; leave the killing to the men.’

A ricocheting arrow interrupted Bull’s stream of sarcasm — it glanced off Ironflanks, the steamman wandering out from the town’s closing gates as carefree as if he were taking a stroll along Goldhair Park back in Jackals. Dart heads bounced off his iron body, one piercing his wide-rimmed hunter’s hat. The steamman went up to the corpse of a fallen uplander in front of their adobe barricade and began tugging the soldier’s long leather army boots off, a task made more difficult by the amount of blood soaking the pin-cushioned uniform.

He looked down at Amelia, crouching on the other side of the wall. ‘Waste not, eh? Fine pair of boots, as fine a pair as I’ve ever seen.’ He slid out a machete and began to hack the corpse’s ankles away.

‘Ironflanks!’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Ironflanks, mistaking the professor’s disgust for concern about their predicament. He vaulted to their side of the wall. ‘These mammal-shells attack every other season. They get their fever up listening to their gods’ calls for sacrifices, get tired of eating their own braves out in the jungle. They’re inconveniently early this year, I must say.’

Down the shoreline, the first rafts began to thump against the line of piers, craynarbian warriors that must have been twice the size of the largest of the defenders leaping out — some with grappling claws to scale the walls, others with heavy sacks connected to vine-woven ropes. These they whirled around their heads, releasing them up towards the battlements. As each vine snapped taut, it unplugged a valve in the attached bag — two chambers of blow-barrel sap mixing and exploding against Rapalaw’s walls in a shower of clay fragments. ‘To the u-boat,’ shouted Ironflanks, tucking the bloody boots under his belt. ‘I’m going to get my steam on.’

Amelia cracked a pistol shot off, ducking as a wave of darts answered back. ‘It’s suicide. There’s too much fire coming across the Sprite’s hull.’

Bull Kammerlan pointed up towards the battlements, where squat, toad-like mortars were being pushed forward. ‘Dirtgas, dimples. Once the feral shells hold this side of the shore, our garrison will soak the whole river in dirt-gas. Unless you’ve got a mask hidden underneath that blouse of yours, you’re going to want to be breathing the wind from the commodore’s arse inside the Sprite. It’ll be a damn sight better than the air out here.’

On the exposed ground between the sailors and the Catosian fighters’ position, Ironflanks danced a jig, his twin stacks glowing white-hot as he fed power to his ancient boiler. ‘Now I’m sizzling, now I’m burning!’

Two craynarbians leapt from the prow of their canoe, Ironflanks meeting them in a fiery arc as he vaulted over the makeshift barricade protecting the expedition. Each of his four arms had produced a weapon, machetes and long knives blurring as he cut off the nearest of the warrior’s heads, blocking a bony sword-arm and smashing down on the remaining fighter’s knee joint with a cudgel. Both craynarbians were falling while the steamman sheathed two machetes, unslinging his thunder-lizard gun from his shoulder and jetting the canoe with its charge. Even in the steamman’s manipulator hands the rifle bounced, the recoil sending Ironflanks back by a couple of steps. He had loaded a tree shredder — a jungle special — half a pound of shot humming down the length of the war crew like a nest of hornets. Screaming craynarbians fell into the water, their armour shells ruptured and torn by hundreds of lead balls.

Amelia had seen steammen knights fight before — awesome, powerful, a force of nature — but this was different. Even in their battle rage King Steam’s knights retained a vestige of control; they fought like a focused storm of tonne-weight steel. But Ironflanks seemed to relish the danger as if he were a savage, bounding onto the raft with his rifle shouldered and his blades drawn, sadistically crushing falling braves under his metal feet, the craynarbians’ blood splattering his safari suit as he laughed and danced and hacked his way through the ranks of struggling attackers.

‘Now I’m burning,’ called the steamman, his voicebox on full and a whistle on his back lifting in a victory scream, superheated air spearing upwards. ‘I’m on fire.’

One of the surviving craynarbians, his breast-shell half-torn to pieces, tried to jump on top of Ironflanks’ back, clutching onto the steamman’s belt and the bloody boots he had looted. But Ironflanks twisted the craynarbian off, throwing him to the floor of the raft and burying the tip of his long knife in the creature’s forehead. ‘They’re my boots, wild shell, mine! Patent leather is no good for your claws.’

War chants sounded from the armada of rafts in the river. One of the craynarbian witch doctors, identifiable by his fur-covered antlers, was calling on the worldsong, twisting the power of the rainforest-covered land to the tribe’s own end. In front of their boats the fast-flowing waters began to froth and bubble. Shouts from up in the battlements of Rapalaw Junction urged the dispatch of more gas shells from the garrison’s arsenal.

‘That’s not good,’ said one of the Catosian fighters.

The storm of darts from the tribe’s spring-guns had momentarily abated and Bull leapt up. ‘The Sprite, boys, to the Sprite.’

‘Not with her!’ A sailor pointed at Amelia. ‘Not with the Jonah!’

‘Oh, for Circle’s sake.’ Amelia took the initiative, pushed up and began to run towards the u-boat.

Out on the river Ironflanks twirled around in an obscene mockery of the craynarbian sorcerer’s spell calling, almost perfect imitations of the jungle’s animal-song echoing from his voicebox — tree monkeys, paradise wings, redcats, hunting spiders. Across the wide, deep river birds exploded into the sky and the creatures of the canopy howled and hooted back. Spooked into action by the flare-up of life in the jungle, the submariners broke for the Sprite’s boarding gantry as a panicked mob. In contrast, the Catosian mercenaries fell back in two disciplined lines, one rank kneeling and firing, then stepping back through their comrades, smoothly reloading their carbines as the second rank poured fire back down the shoreline.

Out in the river the witch doctor’s chants were finally answered by an eruption of winged fish, a cloud of purple scales and rainbow fins bursting out of the water, fluttering off the walls of Rapalaw like bats, others of their number bouncing across the river, skimming into the sailors still fleeing after their Jonah. Poison-barbed fish heads buried into the striped shirts of the Sprite’s crewmen, tiny razored mouths gnawing at the flesh of their victims.

‘Ironflanks,’ Amelia cried, ‘back to the boat!’

She tried to drag one of the fallen sailors towards the conning tower hatch, but his face was swelling like a balloon, the skin of his bloated fingers turning rigid as his throat muscles expanded and slowly strangled him.

Veryann appeared and rolled the dying man into the river with a kick. ‘The toxin from the flying fish is fatal — there’s no cure.’

Over the top of Rapalaw Junction’s walls the thud of launching gas shells at last sounded, fingers of yellow gas trailing behind each projectile. Where they landed, clouds of noxious fumes mushroomed out, fountains of mustard tentacles curling up as far as the town’s ramparts. The redcoats looking down on them had leather masks with locust-like goggles strapped under their shako hats now, a single tube swaying from the front of each soldier like the snout of an anteater. Amelia could smell the sickly-sweet gas already, the taste of cinders and the promise of burning lungs hanging in the air. Its presence in the wind made her skin itch and she had to fight to hold down her panic. Dirt-gas was meant to be humane — first unconsciousness for an oxygen-starved brain, then a quick smothering of the target’s lungs — but she did not want to put their aerial navy’s propaganda to the test.

Plunging into the safety of the conning tower Amelia turned to watch the scene of horror through a porthole; curtains of gas drifting across the river and masking the town’s walls, sailors and Catosians running through the hail of devilbarb fish, spinning as their bodies were caught and pierced. The crackle of rifle fire echoed eerily through the mist, then out of that grim fog of death came Ironflanks, the steamman striding backwards with his four arms flickering in a dance of steel. His hunter’s hat had been mounted with the antlers from the craynarbian witch doctor, still bloody where they had been removed — with some force, Amelia imagined — from their owner’s skull. Three enraged craynarbian fighters followed from the fog, thrusting their spear-like spring-guns towards the steamman while he croaked at them in the voice of a rainforest moon-toad. Over their faces the feral shells had strapped on something that looked like a wet slug, a sack of pulsing black flesh. It was their answer to the redcoats’ dirt-gas.

Bull Kammerlan ducked through the tower’s hatch, the bloody body of one of his crewmen draped over his wide shoulders. ‘Masks! Some of them have got gas masks. They’ve been gassed outside the junction for centuries and now the damn feral shells have finally found a way to even up the odds.’

Amelia had a sneaking suspicion that Bull’s slave raids along the river might have educated the tribes in the use of gas as much as the defenders of the trading post, but she held her tongue. Pushing through the surviving sailors, Veryann appeared, replacing her carbine in its leg holster. ‘The tribe’s spring-gun darts are harmless against our hull, but if they should turn their improvised grenades against the boat …’

Amelia slid down a ladder into the pilot room. Commodore Black was hanging onto the periscope, watching war rafts emerge from the curtain of gas, heading straight towards the Sprite.

‘Make ready for diving stations,’ called the first mate. ‘Everyone inside. Rapalaw will have to fend for itself.’

‘The feral shells are mortal stirred up about something, lads.’ Black reached over to the wall and pulled out a speaking trumpet from its bracket. ‘T’ricola, I’m looking at you for some cheery news on our scrubber assembly now.’

Billy Snow flicked a switch on his console and the craynarbian engineer’s voice vibrated out of a voicebox above them. ‘Two minutes more, skipper, maybe five.’

‘Gabriel?’ The commodore looked across at his first mate.

‘Diving stations aye, commodore. We’re locked and sealed.’

‘Time to show our teeth,’ said the commodore.

Amelia borrowed the periscope. The war rafts were larger now, almost on top of the u-boat. ‘They’re too small to hit with torpedoes, Jared?’

‘I would not be wasting my precious glass-tipped fishes on these beasts, professor,’ said the commodore. He turned to Billy Snow, the blind sonar man’s head heavy with an iron dome and cables hanging off his skull. ‘Port lances?’

‘Can you not hear them humming for you, skipper?’

‘Those crabs up there are close enough to my lovely old lady now, Billy. Let them hear the hum too.’

Billy’s fingers punched the console in front of him. Outside the hull there was a low hiss as pneumatic tubes opened, pushing out a series of serrated spikes from the u-boat’s two conning towers, twin crowns of metal thorns emerging from the Sprite.

‘Wild power,’ said Amelia. ‘Sweet Circle, you’re carrying a capacitor on the Sprite.’

‘The power electric,’ said Billy, throwing down a switch.

She remembered the strange burned tiles she had seen exposed after their engine-room fire; it appeared they were insulation against more than just the cold of the open ocean. Amelia returned to the periscope. Beyond the u-boat, the river was lit by an undulating circle of lightning flickering from the Sprite’s two towers, the waters burning, devilbarb fish fried in mid-flight, the blow-barrel grenades of the wild craynarbians detonating as the chambers of explosive sap were joined by the force electric. Pieces of wooden raft and smoking craynarbian exo-shell rained down around the u-boat, dead river creatures floating up to the surface of the Shedarkshe before being carried downstream, towards Jackals. ‘It used to work better, the wild power,’ said Billy. ‘Something that people could control and direct. For peaceful uses too, not just war. But the world changed.’

Commodore Black took back the periscope from Amelia and gazed at the carnage across the water. Craynarbians on the far shore were already massing for a second attack, darts streaming over towards the Sprite of the Lake. ‘You’re a fine one for old legends, Billy Snow. The power electric works blessed well enough for my tastes.’

The voicebox sounded above their heads. ‘Skipper, you havethe scrubbers back again.’

‘Take us out, Gabriel,’ ordered the commodore. ‘Take us out slow and steady.’

Sailors bustled around their posts in the pilot room, but the only answer to their efforts was a hollow knocking running along the hull. It grew louder every second, the hull vibrating with a fury.

‘First mate?’

‘Something is wrong.’ McCabe ran over to the double pilot seats.

‘Kill the propellers,’ ordered the commodore, ‘shut down the screws before my girl burns out.’ He turned his periscope towards the tail of the u-boat. ‘Ah now, there’s the wicked thing.’

One of the exploding war craft had been approaching the Sprite’s stern and the force of it striking the u-boat had twisted one of their iron rudders into the path of a propeller. They were jammed and beached.

The first mate surveyed the damage through the periscope. ‘The rudder’s only slightly bent, but it’s enough to foul the rotation of the screws.’

For the first time since the trip began, Amelia started to feel the claustrophobia the seadrinkers called the black tunnel.

‘Can’t we heat it up with welding torches, bang the rudder back into shape?’

‘Do we have enough power left for a second tickle on the lances, Mister Snow?’ asked the commodore.

‘They’re spent, skipper. Pistons need to be turning to recharge them.’

‘Well then, there it is.’ Black looked at Amelia sadly, as if he was disappointing a favourite granddaughter. ‘A work crew will take too long. With our lances working we could hold the craynarbians back, give them a taste of the wild juice when they get too snappish. But without them …’

‘There is another way.’ Gabriel McCabe stood to his full height, his heavy frame nearly brushing the copper pipes along the pilot room’s ceiling. ‘If I go now, before the shells have a chance to reform their ranks, I might be able to bend the rudder back into shape.’

‘That’s suicide,’ said Billy. ‘The tribes’ braves will be swarming over our hull and Rapalaw’s walls like wasps smoked out of their nest.’

‘You heard the applause of the crowds in the gambling pits, Billy Snow, when I bent steel bars for their wagers.’

‘I had assumed that was a Circle-damned parlour trick, old friend.’

‘Does the trick work as well for two?’ Amelia’s worldsinger-twisted arms lifted up to clutch onto the rungs of the conning-tower ladder.

‘You do not have to do this,’ said McCabe.

‘To get away from this cursed corner of civilization and send us towards the foundation stones of Camlantis? Yes. Yes I do.’

‘Let her go,’ begged one of the sailors, ‘she’s a bloody Jonah. If we keep her on the boat we’ll all-’

Commodore Black swung around, landing a pile driver on the submariner’s face and the ex-convict spun onto the deck, unconscious. ‘No annoying the cargo, lads. If it weren’t for the professor, your mortal luck would have left you all swimming back in the tanks at Bonegate. You ponder on that. If I hear any more fiendish talk of a Jonah on the Sprite, I’ll walk the next of you rascals to speak such filth through the sea lock without a helmet.’

Gabriel showed Amelia how to suit up in the conning tower closest to the Sprite’s screws; their rubber suits their only protection — not from the water, but from the waves of dirt-gas still being mortared out of Rapalaw Junction towards the attacking savages. Shaped like one of the seashells children in Jackals pushed against their ears to hear Lord Tridentscale’s whispers, Amelia’s copper helmet screwed down tight into her neck plate. Her crystal visor was barely wide enough to allow her to see her air tank, before the first mate slipped the tank’s straps over her shoulders.

As Amelia finished suiting up, the handle on the sea lock spun and Ironflanks stepped into the small chamber. ‘Excellent, Amelia softbody, I see that you have made a start without me.’

‘This could be a one-way trip, old steamer,’ said Amelia.

‘I’ll return from this trip in penury unless I get you to the source of the Shedarkshe,’ said Ironflanks. ‘If we stay behind here, the second half of my fee is going to stay locked up inside Abraham Quest’s counting house.’

‘You’re quite the mercenary,’ said Amelia. ‘Most steammen of my acquaintance are happy enough with a pail of coke for their boiler and a single room to lay their head down at night.’

Ironflanks squawked a burst of what might have been laughter through his voicebox. ‘For a short period, my boiler heart shall run as well on dirt-gas as it does on air. And as for your rich countryman’s Jackelian guineas, don’t you worry, I’ll find something to squander his silver on.’ Gabriel McCabe moved his massive bulk — made even larger by the diving suit — towards the conning tower’s outer lock. ‘We will not be able to evade their spears in these suits.’

‘You two see to this submersible’s rudder,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I shall deal with your mammal-shell cousins when they come hunting for us.’

Choking green clouds muffled the sound of the water lapping against the Sprite’s hull and the echo of rifle fire from the trading post. If the hell denied by the Circlist church’s vicars existed, it might have looked something like this. Amelia’s lead-lined boots clanked against the hull as blind shots from the garrison spouted in the river. She could hear Ironflanks’ feet clanking behind her, the steamman sweeping the empty mist with the business end of his massive thunder-lizard gun.

Dead craynarbians bobbed in the water, shuddering as something still left alive in the river gnawed at their shells. She could just make out the war song of the savage craynarbians, a whistling fluting thing, followed by the crash of dart spears against their exo-armour. Amelia said a quick meditation to the Circle, imploring that the lunatic steamman escorting them did not join in the chorus; she and the first mate were exposed enough as it was in their clumsy diving suits.

Gabriel pointed ahead — there was a twinned assembly of propellers at the rear of their massive u-boat and the starboard side’s screw blades were caught against a twisted fold in the rudder. Gabriel said something, then realized his words were too muted by their helmets to be audible. He pointed to the rudder and made a hand motion indicating they should both seize it. Amelia anchored her feet against the iron frame while the first mate took the opposite side, his glove-encased hands gripping the battered steering mechanism above hers. Together they applied their muscles to the metal, Amelia pushing it while Gabriel McCabe pulled from the opposite end. Behind his visor, the first mate’s face was contorted in effort, condensation misting the crystal. Already stretched tight around her massive arms, the rubber of Amelia’s diving suit dug deep as her muscles swelled taut. If the suit ripped, the best she could hope for would be burns along the skin where the dirt-gas worked its foul business … if the tear opened a path to her lungs, then bleeding, blistered skin would be the best of it. Gabriel roared with the exertion, the yell of anger audible to Amelia even inside her helmet. She could hardly see now, floods of sweat running down into her eyes. Somewhere above the gas clouds the Liongeli sun was pouring its fury down onto Rapalaw Junction, heedless of fools in rubber suits and their desperate efforts. The rudder just appeared to be moving when a dart jounced off the metal, blue drops of ichor splattering Amelia’s visor as it broke. Poison. They filled their darts with venom milked from the flying fish!

Ironflanks stepped in to block the attack, darts glancing off the riveted metal under his hunter’s jacket as he hefted up his thunder-lizard gun. The rifle bucked in his hands like an incensed dragon as he emptied a buckshot load towards the origin of the whistling darts.

Driven by the scare of nearly being injected with jungle venom, Amelia pushed at the rudder with all her might, screaming into the rubber-scented air of her helmet. Gabriel pulled, his grasp so tight he was leaving indentations in the metal. More darts punched down, a deadly rain, bouncing off the steel deck boards and into the river. Amelia felt rather than heard the bang of the craynarbian raft impacting the side of the Sprite. She tried to concentrate on moving the rudder, on clearing the bent metal from the propeller blades, ignoring the massive wild shells leaping onto the u-boat. Ironflanks ran towards the craynarbians, yelling abuse and rotating his machetes like an iron windmill enchanted to murderous sentience — but these savages were not for scaring.

At last, amazingly, the rudder suddenly began to move — bending easily, as if it had been heated in the afternoon sun and was now butter beneath their grasp. Down the deck Ironflanks fought the craynarbian savages with a precision only a steamman could muster, two arms trading blows with a wall of thrusting spears, while another two scissored out, severing the slug-like face mask of one of the warriors. Coughing in the dirt-gas, the craynarbian stumbled back, Ironflanks crushing the squirming living gas mask underfoot then swivelling to kick the warrior overboard.

More braves leapt off the raft, bypassing the craynarbian-steamman duel and running towards Amelia and the first mate. Their job on the rudder was done, but it looked like it was going to cost them dearly. Amelia swore, cursing her bulky gloves and the pistol she’d had to leave inside the Sprite. Gabriel gave a thumbs-up towards the periscope and drew a sea knife from his belt. Standing beside the giant submariner, Amelia slipped out her own blade. Craynarbians had a lifetime to learn how to fight inside their bulky exo-shells; Amelia was a newborn in her heavy, hot suit. One of the warriors jabbed at Amelia with his spear and she clumsily turned it aside with her knife arm, then grabbed the wooden shaft with her left arm, locking it into place. The craynarbian began a tug of war for the spear, trying to batter her with his shield, a round piece of bone armour from the corpse of one of the jungle beasts. Amelia rolled forward, unbalancing the brave and coming to her feet with possession of the spear. Her oppon ent came at her with his shield up, the perfect stance for deflecting a spear thrust. But Amelia Harsh was not a shell warrior — she was a Jackelian, the daughter of a disgraced politician. Ostracized perhaps, but her father had still been a master of debating sticks — trading blows on parliament’s dais of democracy with the heavy staff of a Guardian. And how Amelia had studied at his feet! She swept the spear’s shaft down into the warrior’s knee, swivelling up, out, to whirl the brave’s shield into the air. The brave thrust at her with his sword-arm, the serrated limb clearing her neck by an inch. With the spear-staff in her hands all her father’s lessons were returning to her now, the sweet rhetoric of the debating stick, every dirty, nasty, street-fighting trick the political fighters of Middlesteel had developed on the capital’s lanes and boulevards.

Tripping the craynarbian with a blow known as the ‘chancellor’s statement’, Amelia ducked down and snapped a clout across the warrior’s armoured forehead, giving him a ‘second reading’ with all the strength in her massive arms when he tried to stumble back to his feet. Behind her, Gabriel was using his gambling-pit pugilism, swinging the unconscious carcass of one of the craynarbians into the warrior’s comrades, his body weaving left and right as they stabbed at him with their spears. More and more craynarbians were gathering behind, ready to wreak their revenge against these soft-skinned invaders of their realm. It was only going to take a minute more, with these odds. Gabriel and Amelia were surely both about to fall to a flurry of jabbing spear points.

Amelia glanced down at the water. With their wet suits she and Gabriel could leap into the river and cling onto the Sprite while the u-boat got underway — the risk of the river predators of the Shedarkshe surely better than certain death where they stood. It would mean leaving Ironflanks to fight his way back to the trading post, though. She was momentarily torn. Then she made her decision: better that the two of them survive — and there was always a chance for the steamman, however slim. Amelia was about to tackle the first mate from behind and cast them both into the river when a conning tower hatch opened. Bull Kammerlan strode out of the door, a couple of his sailors behind him, suited up with seashell-shaped air tanks — and something else, besides: they were bent under the weight of chemical batteries strapped to their backs, gutta-percha insulated cables dangling down to tridents almost twice as tall as the sailors stood.

Screaming war cries as loudly as they could with black gas-filter slugs strapped to their faces, the craynarbians charged at the submariners. Pulling up their heavy tridents, the crewmen swept arcs of crackling blue fire over the savages. Meant for driving off the tentacles of the leviathan-sized squids that were attracted to the superheated waters of the Fire Sea, the trident energy was devastating to the warriors. Expanding organs and veins blew out the thorax armour of the warriors in the front row of the charge, blood issuing out as hisses of red steam from inside their bodies. Behind them, the second wave contorted and danced in the wild cerulean flux of the power electric. Some of the boiling craynarbians near to Ironflanks flung themselves into the river, desperately trying to cool their bodies, with others who had escaped the combat following their lead, swimming out towards the veil of dirt-gas before they too were torched.

Amelia, Gabriel and Ironflanks made for the safety of the conning tower, trying not to slip on the smoking corpses that now littered their escape route. Bull Kammerlan played his trident around the river with a face as triumphant as a demon’s, laughing inside his helmet as the fleeing savages jerked then sank beneath the waters. Despite owing him her life, Amelia wanted to smash in the visor of the dark-hearted slaver’s helmet, but the instinct was suppressed as she winced at a sudden lance of pain in her arm. She stared down dumbly at the poisoned dart piercing her suit rubber, then collapsed as the air fled her lungs. Ironflanks and Gabriel caught her falling body, dragging it into the sea lock, red spots of pain swimming through Amelia’s vision. Inside the Sprite someone began cutting the suit off Amelia’s arm, her flesh expanding like a balloon. It was T’ricola, the craynarbian engineer peeling Amelia out of the diving suit with her bone-sword arm. Amelia gagged as she tried to say something, but her constricting throat smothered the words.

Bull was inside the tower, pointing the tip of his trident against her belly. ‘Let me finish her now, it’ll be a Circle-dammed kindness.’

As Amelia’s oxygen-starved brain shut down, Veryann’s words came back to her: ‘The toxin from the flying fish isfatal — no cure.’

The professor began her last convulsions.