The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER SEVEN

Damson Beeton came into the servants’ pantry with a beef and potato pie balanced on a pewter plate. Septimoth was accustomed enough to the race of man’s eating conventions that he felt a pang of hunger at the sight of the steaming hot pie. Briefly he regretted how acclimatized he had become to Jackelian ways. No true flight brother would have been stimulated unless they had first seen their supper soaring in the currents of the sky, or scampering along the ground from a hundred foot-high glide. Lashlite brains were wired to detect movement and feed only after the chase. It was a measure of the depth of his fall from grace that his gut could now be urged into action by boiled roots and the motionless bovine carcass the housekeeper had squashed under her cooked pastry.

‘Have you seen him, Septimoth, have you seen the master? It’s well past time for supper.’

‘He is about the house,’ said Septimoth.

‘Is that so, butler? About our corridors, is he? About our empty dusty rooms? How easy it seems to be for him to dis appear into the vastness of this cold, dark place. This place which he seems unwilling to pay to adequately heat, staff, or adorn with the niceties of society.’

‘He will return when he is ready, damson.’

‘Of that I have no doubt.’ The old lady carved off a quarter of the pie for Septimoth, pushing a chunk of warm bread onto his plate. Then she separated out a generous portion for Cornelius Fortune and tucked it into the warm oven, keeping the slimmest portion for her own supper. ‘Point him in the direction of the oven when he appears, old bird. I have no doubt you will still be about when he chooses to show himself.’

‘It shall be as you say,’ noted Septimoth.

Before she turned in for the night, Damson Beeton produced a crimson feather. ‘Have you been moulting. Septimoth?’

Septimoth stared intently at the semi-scaled feather. ‘Where did you find that?’

‘With a handful of others like it, you old pigeon. In the shrubbery in front of the house.’

Septimoth’s tucked-back wings seemed to shiver with anticipation. ‘In the garden?’

‘Just so.’ She placed the feather on the table. ‘If the master will hire nothing but day labour to tend the garden, is it too much to ask you to drop your feathers in your own tower, or better yet, in the compost heap behind the lake?’

Septimoth watched the housekeeper waddle off to the warmth of her quarters at the far end of the house. He picked up the crimson feather from the table. This was something he had not seen for a long time, not since Quatershift. Nor was it something he had expected to see in Jackals for the remainder of his lifetime. He was tempted to ignore the call. He was an outcast, so let him act like one. But it was too powerful a totem to resist.

Falling upon his slab of pie, he devoured it in a display of rapaciousness that would have turned Damson Beeton’s stomach and earned him an admonishment had she still been in the room. Then he removed the portion that had been set aside for Cornelius Fortune and took it towards the lifting room in the corridor outside. There were only three storeys to Dolorous Hall, but the mansion’s current owner had paid for an eyrie tower to be built for Septimoth, the round stone construction lancing out of the roof like a black finger. Septimoth corrected himself; at least, there were only three storeys that were visible. Once the lifting-room doors had closed, Septimoth pulled out an ivory handle from the copper wall panel, twisting a second handle counter-clockwise. Rather than rising up to his quarters, the room started to descend, falling through the bedrock of the island with the hiss of counter weights rising in the opposite direction and the clack of the turning clockwork cable feeder.

After three minutes the lifting-room doors opened onto a long corridor, rough-hewn rock walls dotted with flickering oil-fed lanterns mounted below the lead pipe that fed them. Before the capital’s river had been artificially widened to prevent flooding, the islands of the Skerries had been hills, prosperous enclaves looking across the nearby Gambleflowers and the city below. Septimoth emerged in a large hall, briefly glancing up at the fish and the dark course of the river flowing over the atrium skylight of the old Middlesteel Museum. It had not taken much to seal the abandoned building underwater and pump it free of water. Even Jackals’ most secret of police forces, the Court of the Air, were unable to peer beneath the Gambleflowers with their sorcerous watchers.

It was amazing how much of the old museum’s stock the curators had abandoned in the basement chambers, before moving to their acreages of new marble over in the west of the capital. Unfashionable royalist statues and artefacts mostly — a cavalier on horseback, waving a carbine at a rearing goreback; the massive lion-headed iron expansion engine that had taken the royal airship Scramblewolf across the ocean to discover Concorzia and the other colonies. Now the abandoned museum had only one patron and a couple of regular visitors. Cornelius Fortune was in the museum’s main hall at the centre of the building, sitting in the shadow of a large transaction engine that should by rights have been delivered to the endless engine rooms of Greenhall, but had instead been diverted to their island — piece by stolen piece. Septimoth placed the plate of supper next to the boxes of purloined punch cards that his friend had acquired from the civil service.

It never surprised Septimoth how easily such things came into Cornelius’s possession. Before Quatershift, before the mask, his friend had been Jackals’ greatest thief. The thief with a thousand faces, with an identity so fluid he had flowed across the capital, taking what pleased him, making any mischief that entertained him. The Nightshifter. Many years ago. Before the curse of love.

‘Your supper, sir.’

‘You play the butler poorly, old friend. I’ll take it in a little while.’ Cornelius pointed at the pile of glossy gutta-percha punch cards, each one proudly embossed with Ham Yard’s coat of arms in one corner. ‘There’s a pattern to the grave robbing. It’s always steammen being turned out of their coffins and it’s always the oldest corpses being taken. Where there’s a young cadaver, the body is left untouched.’

‘Young is a relative concept when applied to the people of the metal,’ said Septimoth. ‘Steammen outlive our flesh by many spans of both our races’ lifetimes.’

Cornelius showed his friend the list he had compiled. ‘None of the officers at Ham Yard know what to make of this.’

‘Are you sure these crimes are linked to Robur?’

‘Even if I hadn’t been tipped off by that young urchin from Rottonbow … I can feel it, Septimoth. In my bones. He is behind it. You carried Robur’s body over the cursewall, what do you think?’

‘I have no talent for pre-vision now,’ said Septimoth. He placed the crimson feather down on the table next to the plate. ‘But there are others who have.’

Cornelius raised the feather between his fingers. ‘Your people? I thought you carried the death mark, old friend? You’ve been exiled. They’ll kill you if you fly into one of their nests, rip you to pieces.’

‘I will not need to travel to one of our villages. They will come for me.’

‘Let them bloody wait,’ said Cornelius. ‘Let them fly in circles around Middlesteel until their wings turn blue with cold and ache with tiredness. What do you owe them?’

Septimoth pulled out his bone pipe, turning the flute sadly in his long talon-like fingers — all that remained of his mother, the squadron-queen, his whole tribe. ‘You know what debt I owe my people. Did we not escape from Quatershift together, after you broke the door to my cage?’

‘Sweet Circle,’ Cornelius swore at his friend’s stubbornness. ‘You are dead to them, Septimoth. Your people’s rulers can go jigger themselves, the way they have treated you.’

‘The spirits of the wind still whisper to me,’ said Septimoth, ‘I can hear my gods again. Stormlick has not yet abandoned me. I must answer the mark of the crimson feather.’

‘If you must,’ said Cornelius. ‘But if your people want you to go off on some mystical sky quest hunting for skraypers to bring down, you tell them you are otherwise engaged. We have work to do. I have compiled a list of locations where our grave-robbing friends are likely to strike next.’

‘I shall be back in good time,’ said Septimoth. ‘There will be hours enough for me to ride the fog above Middlesteel’s graveyards for you.’

Cornelius underlined the name at the head of his list, a stolen census record selected from the pile of punch cards. ‘Not a graveyard. Our opponents have already had their pick of the plots of the dead. The oldest steamman left in the city still has a beating boiler heart … and I have a suspicion our slippery refugee friend Robur is about to switch from troubling the deceased, to kidnapping and murdering the living.’

It had been an age since Septimoth had needed to follow the mark of his own kind. But even without his third eye, he could still smell the scent of a lashlite hunt on the breeze. It was strange that he now shared more in common with Cornelius Fortune than with his own people. The cold burning desire for revenge far stronger than any call he felt to hunt skraypers in the higher atmosphere. His once proudly held position as ambassador to the court of the Sun King had always marked him as an outsider, more fluent in monkey-tongue than the whistling true speech of his own people. How much stranger would he appear to his own kith and kin now he hobbled around Dolorous Hall with his wings bent small, living only to inflict terror and pain on those who had wrought his downfall?

Riding up the thermals from a line of mills along Bunsby Green, Septimoth turned towards the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. How like those who sat in judgement upon him to pick the highest vantage point in Middlesteel for their meeting. Tucking his wings back, Septimoth plummeted like an arrow, spreading them in a fan configuration at the last second to hit the roof of the tower where their scent was emanating from. It was a showy entrance, the kind Furnace-breath Nick favoured to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy.

Standing on top of a line of smokeless chimneys were the four seers of the crimson feather, only the gurgle of the tower’s water-filled wall support system for company this high up.

Septimoth nodded to them, denying them the customary full bow where he should expose his dead, scarred third eye to the seers. After all, what could they do — blind him a second time? ‘I had not expected to receive the mark of your call again.’

‘As we do not expect to be greeted in the tongue of the flightless monkeys.’

‘You seem to understand it well enough.’

‘You have become far too closely intertwined with their ways and memes.’

‘The race of man call it “going native”, I think you will find. A peril that comes with banishment.’

‘And how have you atoned for your crimes, Septimoth? By random acts of violence against the tribe of flightless monkeys that stood-’

Septimoth pulled out his flute and waved the white instrument towards them in fury. ‘By the bones of my mother! By the bones of my people and my family and my honour, I have sworn I will not rest until the Commonshare is pulled down around the First Committee’s ears — death by death. You shall not speak of my vengeance, you are not fit to do so!’

‘Fine words, Septimoth. It is a pity you did not caution your tribe with such prudence when the flightless monkeys in Quatershift were undergoing their meme change. If you had done so, your squadron-queen, your mother, would still be alive in this realm, rather than floating in the song notes of her spine bone that you so angrily brandish towards us.’

It was as if the seers had twisted a knife in Septimoth’s gut. All the pain and misery and bile of that wound overflowed. ‘The court of the Sun King was corrupt, their people held in serfdom and bound by obsolete ritual. Those infected by the meme spoke noble words, of equality and fraternity and-’

‘You were of the ambassador caste, Septimoth; you were not in the court of the Sun King to act as a participant. All new memes are accompanied by sound and fury as they establish their infection in the presence of the population. Did not Stormlick whisper vigilance to you as you studied these monkey communityists? How could you fail to notice the ferocity of their meme, its pure loathing for competing ideas, its exclusivity? For all its faults, the old regime was a multi-racial assembly. Whither now Quatershift’s graspers, its steammen, its craynarbians and lashlites? Those who have submitted are little better than slaves to the pink skins, and for those that fought … for your people, those fine flowery words you heard came at a terrible cost.’

Septimoth writhed on the roof in agony. ‘I shall atone for my mistakes.’

‘On your feet, ambassador,’ said the tallest of the seers. ‘We do not exile those of the true flight for poorly given advice. You know why you were banished.’

‘There were so many bodies,’ pleaded Septimoth, his figure briefly thrown into shadow by a passing aerostat, the airship’s expansion engines a muted thrum above them. ‘I was the only one left alive after the soldiers found the trail up into our mountains. My tribe was massacred, how could I eat so many?’

A long talon pointed accusingly at Septimoth. ‘Do their souls speak to you with curses on their beaks, ambassador? The souls you left to be collected by Nightstorm and her devilish servants?’

‘I tried,’ said Septimoth, his voice falling into a fluting hack-whistle as he sobbed. He remembered his fallen family’s flesh hanging from his mouth as he desperately tried to eat them all. So many hundreds of bodies strewn around his village, hanging out of eyrie slits, littering the streets with Quatershiftian lances run through them. How could a single lashlite give so many of the dead their proper honours, even without the distraction of the laughing Commonshare soldiers? Calling him a filthy cannibal, cutting off limbs from the corpses and tossing them at him. Applauding him as he tried to save the souls of as many of his people as he could by feasting on them.

‘The tribe consumes the tribe,’ quoted the tallest of the seers.

‘Nothing for the enemy, nothing left for Nightstorm to steal,’ intoned the others.

‘Nightstorm will release my tribe’s souls,’ cried Septimoth. ‘She will release them when I nourish her with the feast I shall make of my flight’s Quatershiftian murderers.’

‘Your feast of revenge shall wait,’ commanded the seer. ‘As miserable as you are, as pathetic a wretch of a hunter as I have ever seen, you carry the mark again now. The Seer of the Stalker Cave has foreseen you herself. Her will is law, even for an exiled monkey-talker like yourself.’

‘I am in her visions?’ The thought shocked Septimoth. He was unclean. Exiled and broken. How could he appear in the prophetic dreams of such as she? Supreme among the oracles.

‘We are as appalled as you that it is so. After your time with the dirt dwellers, do you still recall the high hunt?’

Septimoth remembered the soaring joy of his youth; gliding so high he was only breathing through his sealed oxygen sacks. The rip of raw, savage elation as the hunt sighted a skrayper, diving on the zeppelin-sized creature, manoeuvring past its wavering tentacle stings to drive spears into its blue flesh. ‘I do.’

‘Then you must also remember the portion of the hunting territories that you were forbidden to enter?’

‘You speak of the whispering sky.’

‘This is what has been seen within the Stalker Cave. The whispering sky is evil and its song calls many to it. It has been foretold that the whispering sky shall awaken soon and that one of the flight will stand strong against it.’

‘Me? How can this duty fall to me? I am broken wing, the walking dead uneaten.’

‘You have a part to play, as do the flightless monkeys and the people of the metal. Our seer has foretold the violation of the cogs and crystals of the living metal. You must follow the steammen’s path of pain.’

‘The grave robberies in Middlesteel?’ whispered Septimoth. ‘Is that what the holy of holies means? Did she speak of a connection with a mechomancer from Quatershift, or an old blind warrior?’

‘She spoke of you, Septimoth, and that was enough to unsettle any who were bid to listen.’

‘She said nothing else?’

‘Only that you are to give us your bone flute to bear back to the Stalker Cave.’

‘This is my mother’s spine,’ said Septimoth. ‘I ate her corpse myself and I shall not relinquish it.’

‘What we ask is as an act of faith, Septimoth, of devotion. Your bone flute shall be returned to you when you have flown along the currents that have been revealed by the Seer of the Stalker Cave. We ask this of you, but in return we must trust our people’s fate to a dirt-grubbing exile. That is our act of faith.’

Septimoth hissed a curse and passed the instrument over to the outstretched talon awaiting it. ‘Keep my mother’s bone safe, seers of the crimson feather. That is not a request, you understand? Not a suggestion. Or you will discover how far I have fallen in my exile.’ With that, the lashlite stepped back off the hardened rubber roof and fell towards the ground before his wings spread out, and he glided up and out of the street below. On their chimneys the four seers stood, their heads nodding gently, lost in thought.

Then the tallest of the lashlites spoke. ‘Can we trust him?’

‘He is what we have. What the Stalker Cave has given us.’

‘An ill-favoured wind blows,’ complained the tallest. He sniffed at the polluted air of Middlesteel in disgust. ‘And it is not the miasma of industry created by these eager little monkeys.’

‘You forget, I have seen the future too.’

‘It was empty in your vision?’

‘As dead as a field of glaciers from the coldtime.’

One of the lashlites tutted. ‘Septimoth will not be enough to save us.’

As one, the seers rose from their perches and broke for the sky, heading back to the mountains of the north.

Amelia did something she thought she would not do again — she blinked awake and tried to sit up. A hand pushed her down, human-like fingers backed by heavy shell armour. ‘T’ricola.’

The craynarbian engineer was sitting on the edge of her bunk. ‘Rest, professor. We had to bleed you in a dozen places or your body would have burst like a rotten fruit. You’ve lost nearly a quarter of your blood.’

As the craynarbian spoke, Amelia felt the sting of the wounds, the throb beneath bandages that had been expertly lashed around her arms and legs. ‘I was reliably informed that devilbarb-fish poison is fatal.’

‘To you soft skins,’ said T’ricola, ‘not to us; their sting is painful to craynarbians, like a Jackelian adder bite — but not lethal.’ She raised her serrated sword arm. ‘I opened you with this. My sweat contains an anti-toxin that allowed you to survive. I rubbed my tears over your wounds too, close to an incision I made above your heart.’

‘Then I’m lucky to be alive,’ said Amelia. ‘And I’m sorry that I made you cry.’

‘Even back in Middlesteel, in the streets of Shell Town, it is an important ritual,’ said T’ricola. ‘But you are lucky that part of your flesh has been turned by a worldsinger, yes? The muscles in your arms resisted the poison until I got to you. A normal body would have succumbed far faster.’

‘Once a Shell Town girl, always a Shell Town girl, eh, T’ricola. I owe you my life.’

The engineer slapped the sides of the bulkhead. ‘Shell Town is just where I bunk, professor. I’m a third generation seadrinker, born on a u-boat beneath the Tharian Straits, swaddled alongside the pistons of an engine room. This is my home, not Jackals, and certainly not Liongeli.’

‘An engineer of people as well as submarines — the commodore is lucky to have found you. I hope he’s paying you well for this voyage.’

‘People are not so different from machines — spleen and bone, rather than cogs and grease.’ T’ricola pulled back the bunk niche’s curtain — they were in a far more spacious accommodation than Amelia’s cabin. At the other end of the room Commodore Black sat playing what looked like a game of chess with Veryann across a round oak table. For a moment Amelia was stunned by the size of the chamber. Then she remembered. The Sprite had once been a royalist u-boat, where the skipper was often lord of more than just the vessel.

‘And this must be the first time I have shipped with the commodore and have actually been paid a salary commensurate with my skills.’

‘You can thank the House of Quest for those guineas,’ said Amelia, ‘not that old sea dog.’

Seeing his guest was awake, Black left the mercenary commander pondering her next move and brought Amelia a cup of warm wine, T’ricola leaving to tend her engines. ‘Professor, it’s mortal good to see you back with us. I thought you might be pushing off along the Circle at one point.’

‘Did everyone else make it back alive?’ asked Amelia.

‘That they did, lass. You and Gabriel cleared our screws and we are happily pushing our way up the Shedarkshe as we speak. Ironflanks took a dent or two from the wild shells, but he fights like a fury, and kept them off your backs long enough for Bull’s boys to tickle them away from the Sprite with their tridents. We have gone further and deeper into Liongeli than any Jackelian before us. After we get back to the capital, the Dock Street pensmen will write a whole series of penny dreadfuls full of the wonders we have seen while you slept.’

‘Just how long have I been out, Jared?’

‘Two weeks, lass. Craynarbian tears are a powerful medicine. But you needed it. When I first brought you down here you were swelled up as round as an aerostat. It was a terrible thing to behold.’

Amelia gazed towards a large porthole on the other side of the chamber, small silver fish flashing past outside the armoured crystal. ‘Two weeks! Sweet Circle. I don’t remember a thing.’

‘As well you do not, Amelia. The scrapes we’ve been in. Pursued upriver by the cunning wild shells for a week, intent on paying us back for the brave scrap we gave them. Set upon by a flock of petrodactyls as we came up for air one moonless night, nearly crushed amongst a pod of mating flipbacks. That the Sprite is here for you to wake up to at all is only due to my quick thinking and the guns of Veryann and her fair fighters.’

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you are about, Jared Black,’ whispered Amelia.

‘Lass, what do you mean?’

‘The gymnasia of the Catosian League is what I am talking about, you old dog. Trial by arms and flesh is only part of what free company fighters practise — they value trial by mind and wit equally well, don’t they? Strength of arms being meaningless without strength of mind.’

The commodore looked red-faced. ‘That may be so, lass.’

‘You must prove yourself fit before you bed a Catosian, demonstrate the superiority of your blood lineage,’ mimicked Amelia. ‘How many games of chess have you lost already, Jared? You should be ashamed of yourself. You are old enough to be her grandfather.’

‘Ah, but professor, she is a fine figure of a woman, is she not? You must admit that; she has the beauty of a Jackelian princess and the poise of a sleekclaw. As fine a prize as any skipper ever sailed for.’

‘A sleekclaw has a glossy coat, Jared, but that doesn’t disguise the heart of a killer beating within its chest.’

‘You would not deny a bit of comfort to poor old Blacky, would you? I should be back in Tock House, resting my weary bones with a pot of beef gravy and a steaming loaf of bread by my side. Instead I am risking the precious hull of the Sprite for the sake of your career and the promise of the House of Quest’s meagre pension, sailing into the heart of darkness, where no Jackelian has ever set foot and lived to speak of it.’

‘Go back to your game, Jared. For your sake, I hope that Veryann is as quick with her wits as she is with that side-dagger strapped to her leg.’

‘When I was younger, lass, I would not have needed to prove myself on the chequered board of glory. Ah, I was a fast fellow back then, with a sabre arm that could see off twenty in a duel, a lucky twinkle in my eye that could melt the heart of even such as Veryann.’

‘You’ll need all your luck if you go biting the pillow with Abraham Quest’s tame cobra,’ said Amelia, her advice interrupted as the u-boat began to judder, the water outside the porthole flooding with light. ‘We’ve surfaced?’

‘So we have, professor. Ironflanks says there is a freshwater pool inland, half an hour away from our position. Our steamman guide has recovered from a little snit, after Veryann found a stash of quicksilver in his cabin and took it away from him. My darling girl’s drinking system could do with a top-up now. This wicked river is as feverish as the Fire Sea in high summer. You should take a watch above, clear your head with a breath of the fresh stuff.’

Amelia got out of her bunk and nearly bashed her head on a copper ornament, a replica of the female lance warrior that swept out of the nose of the Sprite, except that this lady of the lake was surrounded by a school of dolphins leaping around her. She went to straighten the ornament where she had knocked it, but the commodore stayed her hand.

‘Don’t be bringing my lucky dolphins down on your head, Amelia. You’ve had enough of a convalescence already.’

Amelia steadied herself on the side of the bunk, vertical for the first time in weeks, the blood rushing to her head. On the other side of the captain’s chamber, Veryann had stood up, checking the two pistols in her breast holsters. She gave Amelia an indecipherable look. Surely the mercenary did not regard her as competition for the vessel’s commander?

Out on deck, Amelia saw that the river had grown broader during her recuperation, and was now at least the width of one of Jackals’ great upland lochs. Ahead, the river forked and an obelisk rose out of the waters to the side of the junction. Amelia caught her breath and took a leather-lined telescope from one of the watch, focusing in on the figure on top of the granite carving. It was worn and dirty from the rainforest’s wet seasons, but the lines of the statue were clear enough. It was a woman clutching a book to her breast.

Ironflanks came clunking over to her, his dirty human clothes lashed with an explorer’s backpack dangling with machetes, iron cups and tent spikes. ‘One of your Camlantean friends, Amelia softbody?’

‘Not Camlantean, not even Chimecan,’ said Amelia. The dress the statue was wearing could almost have been Jackelian — she would not have looked out of place buying fruit from a stall alongside the Gambleflowers or strolling through the gardens of Goldhair Park. ‘With the amount of weathering on it, it could pre-date both those civilizations. Sweet Circle, how much history is there buried under this jungle?’

‘There are such oddities all over Liongeli,’ said the hulking steamman. ‘The statue may not be as old as you think. The jungle rots and wears away at the craft of both our peoples faster than you might imagine. If you built a home out here and then abandoned it, it would look a thousand years old after only two rain seasons. As an archaeologist, you know well the story of Isambard Kirkhill?’

Amelia nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘What I am sure your colleges have omitted is that there was a side-history played out here. Forgotten, like everything else, under the weight and decay of the jungle. Following the civil war in Jackals there were schisms in his parliament’s alliance — some of the more extreme factions attempted to set up colonies in Liongeli. Isolated communities where they could hold to their utopian ideals without interference. I often come across their bones and relics when I lead hunters out this way.’

‘A lost colony of diggers, all the way out here? I have read of such finds in Concorzia, but never this far east. Well, old steamer, here’s another heresy for the High Table to chalk up against me.’ Amelia stared at the statue: no, the clothes were just wrong; they weren’t of the civil war period. Not royalist fancy or parliamentarian plain. The carving had to be older than six hundred years. She felt it in her bones. ‘I need a flake from that statue. I can try to date its weathering when I get back to Jackals.’

If the eight universities allowed her to. Jigger them, she could set up her own college with the size of the fee Quest was paying her.

Ironflanks pointed one of his four arms towards an opening in the jungle behind the statue-topped obelisk, a doorway of crushed trees. ‘That’s the trail to the freshwater spring. Neropods drink from it too.’ He noticed the look on Amelia’s face. ‘Plant eaters, my little softbody friend. They’ll crush you if you try to bring one of their pod down, but if you ignore them they’ll leave you unmolested.’

Amelia glanced along the deck. Veryann’s mercenaries were assembling an iron raft to shuttle them to the shore, a small rotary paddle on the rear powered by a steam engine. They had swapped their carbines for long bulky rifles, each tipped by a bolt resembling the sharp petals of a steel flower. Hanging off their unnaturally drug-swollen shoulders were heavy quivers of replacement bolts.

Ironflanks saw Amelia peering at the odd-looking rifles. ‘Abraham Quest’s ingenuity runs to more than hiring my services as your guide, it seems. The commander claims their weapons are designed to break the scales of a thunder lizard, penetrate the flesh and rotate inside their organs, inflicting maximum damage.’

‘Have they ever been tested?’

‘Not by Liongeli,’ snorted Ironflanks. ‘I sense the symmetry of your transaction engines in their modelling.’

Amelia shrugged off the disdain in the steamman’s tone. ‘Are our transaction engines so different from the minds of the Steammen Free State?’

‘One third of my contempt is reserved for the slow-turning drums of your softbody calculating machines,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I reserve the remaining two parts for your people’s understanding of the jungle and its life. This place is an organism, a system. You cannot model its complexity from the bones of thunder lizards glued back together in Middlesteel Museum, you cannot understand its language by leafing through tomes of flora and fauna pulled from the shelves of your Royal Society. Even our river is alive. You could boil it nine times over and when you drank from it after the tenth time, the fevers would claim your life in a single night.’

He let out a strange hoot and from inside the canopy came a reply annoyed at being disturbed, louder and fiercer. ‘That is the language of this place.’ He patted the cannon-sized firearm hanging from his shoulder. ‘And this is my translator. If you wish to hear the jungle’s whispers, come with me to the spring. You think this statue is a curiosity to behold? You’ll love the relics inland.’

Amelia cursed the steamman under her breath. It seemed it was not just the language of this green hell he was fluent in. He knew well enough which levers he needed to press inside her.

It took eight sailors from the Sprite to pull the cart — a flatbed with eight empty barrels for wheels — through the passage and towards Ironflanks’ freshwater spring. On the way back it would be slower going due to the gallons of drinking water they would be carrying. Led by Bull Kammerlan, the sailors had the burden of their tridents and capacitor packs to contend with as well. Ironflanks had argued against the unnecessary weight, claiming the wild energy would as like annoy the larger of the thunder lizards as bring them down, but the convict crewmen could not be dissuaded. Of the Catosians’ strange rifles, the steamman made no further comment. Picking her way over the trail of crushed vines and ferns, Amelia found it hard to ignore the assault of smells that accompan ied their passage. From rotting vegetation at the ground level, to plants as tall as their Catosian escorts, still dripping from a recent rain and emitting honey-like scents to attract insects for food. Liongeli was alive with a vibrancy of colour and life that was jarringly different from the bleak moors and dark oak forests of Jackals.

Amelia looked at Bull sweating under the weight of his brass capacitor pack and he noticed the disdain on her face. ‘You needn’t get sniffy about these, girl. They kept the feral shells off your hide long enough for the Sprite to slip away from Rapalaw Junction.’

‘It’s wild energy.’

‘And that’s what I like about it. You’re as careful as that old grandmother Black — or should I use the commodore’s real name?’

‘Not unless you want everyone to use yours, you damn fool,’ said Amelia.

‘You know who he really is, as do I. Most of the men on the Sprite served with the royalist fleet in exile and these-’ Bull indicated the line of Catosians-‘these bloody foreigners don’t give a hoot about Jackals or anything else other than their beloved patron Abraham Quest. As for old Blacky, he won’t mind if anyone out here speaks of him as Solomon Dark. He was a duke in the fleet, and me just a lowly baron’s son. He likes to lord it up, doesn’t he, the big man on his big boat, not that our titles meant much when Jackals’ airships came calling for us.’

‘You like to live dangerously, don’t you, Kammerlan? One of your people might turn you in for the reward on your head. In fact, I might …’

‘You should turn me in, dimples,’ said Bull. ‘There’s more noble blood in my veins than in those half-breed squires’ daughters your parliament keeps locked up in their royal breeding house. Lucky for me, my census record is as fake as the commodore’s.’

Amelia shook her head. ‘If the commodore hears you mouthing off …’

‘He’s soft,’ said Bull. ‘They all were at court, all the way up to the Lord Protector in exile. Living like privateers rather than rebels. Taking the fat, easy cargoes. Sparing the crews we captured.’

‘The commodore told me why he drummed you out of the fleet,’ said Amelia.

‘Fear is a weapon. The House of Guardians understands that. I just played the game on the same terms as parliament. I put the officers and crews I captured in their own life boats, then I towed them along the margins of the Fire Sea.’

‘You covered them in seal fat first!’ said Amelia.

‘The smell of burning fat attracts ash eels — it was quicker for them than waiting for their rafts to burn and sink.’

‘You’re a merciful son of a bitch,’ said Amelia.

‘The royalists lost the civil war six hundred years ago,’ said Bull. ‘I was just carrying on the fight using Isambard Kirkhill’s rulebook. We went from being rulers to being fugitives in one easy stroke. I didn’t ask for this life, dimples, I was born to it. My noble blood made me a fugitive from before I could walk, like my mother, like my grandfather before me — an escaped slave for any topper or mug-hunter to collect, dead with my scalp removed, or alive to be tossed into parliament’s stud menagerie of royal freaks. The fleet in exile was all we had left, and Black and his soft friends at court allowed parliament to track us back to Porto Principe — let them catch us on the surface before the city could be submerged and our pen doors locked down. The RAN came for us loaded with special fire-fins that could drop through the ocean and detonate on the seabed. It wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter.’

‘The commodore saved you,’ said Amelia, ‘when he drummed you out of the fleet. You weren’t at Porto Principe when the attack began.’

‘The irony of that hasn’t escaped me,’ said Bull. ‘Now what’s left of us have abandoned the cause and we serve only ourselves. We used to make a good living out of selling the feral craynarbians on the Cassarabian slave block, but I daresay the treasure of this ancient place you’re taking us to will be worth a few shillings, eh?’

‘Nothing you could pawn back on the lanes of Middlesteel, Kammerlan. It’s knowledge we seek, the secrets of the perfect society.’

‘Is that so?’ laughed Bull. ‘Abraham Quest didn’t get to be the richest Jack in Jackals by sinking his nose in philosophy books. We already had the perfect society in Jackals, until Isambard Kirkhill stirred the passions of the mob and stole our throne for your council of shopkeepers.’

‘Watch what you say, slaver.’

‘And who I say it to, Guardian’s daughter? What did your father ever get out of Jackals’ democracy of hawkers and street merchants? A bullet through the head and-’

Amelia grabbed the submariner by the throat and shoved him against the cart, his sailors raising their tridents against her while Veryann’s mercenaries snapped their long rifles up at the crew. ‘I should crack your throat, you maggot, and finish the job the Royal Aerostatical Navy began at Porto Principe.’

‘That’s gratitude for you,’ choked Bull. He struggled frenziedly, but could not break the grip of the professor’s unnaturally large arms. ‘Next time you’re thick with craynarbian savages, I’ll let them fillet you up for their pot.’

Amelia dropped the coughing seadrinker to the ground. ‘You mention my father again and that’s not going to be nearly enough to keep you alive.’

Bull rubbed the red weal on his neck. ‘Spoken like a true parliamentarian, girl. I’ll be sure and remember that.’

Both forces let their weapons fall and the journey to the spring resumed. Their broken trail of crushed trees and vines eventually opened up into a flat clearing at the foot of a hill that held a large tarn fed by the course of a waterfall. To the left of the clearing a single line of columns jutted out of the pool and, as Amelia approached, she saw that the spring’s waters had covered over a mosaic floor, gold-flecked marble steps leading down into an artificial pool. Just like the statue back at the Sprite’s mooring on the Shedarkshe, this was from no period of history she was familiar with.

Stepping into the shallows, Amelia took out her knife and tried to prise a piece of the mosaic out, but her blade proved unequal to the task. Fascinated, she peered more closely at the mosaic images — ignoring the u-boat crew’s pump being lowered into the opposite end of the pool and the wheeze of their labours at the piston. She was peering at illustrations of the race of man; people intermingled with animals in human form. The hybrids looked like they might be the bizarre breedings of Cassarabia’s womb mages — but both the people and the hybrids were dressed in the same Jackelian-like clothes she had seen carved on the statue in the river. Wading a little deeper, Amelia tried her luck on the roofless columns rising from the water. Here too her knife could not even scratch the material, let alone claim a chip of the substance for dating.

‘You will not be able to cut it, Amelia softbody,’ called Ironflanks behind her. ‘It’s like no material known to the people of the metal, nor your kind. It has outlasted the rise of the hill and the formation of this spring.’

Amelia ran her fingers down a line of sigils imprinted on the column, their calligraphy both ethereal and precise. It put her in mind of something, but not any of the ancient languages she had seen in the university library. Simple, the language of the transaction engine men. It was a derivative of the symbols on a punch-card writer. ‘This is a machine language, Ironflanks. Look at the flow of it, the cadence. These are instructions for a transaction engine.’

Ironflanks stamped closer, lifting the rim of his hat for a better look. ‘Why, I do believe you are correct, professor of mammals. But it is no language set known to me, nor I suspect any of your mechomancers back in Jackals. King Steam carries the memory of many lost things, perhaps he-’

Amelia pulled a note pad from her pack. ‘I shall take rubbings of the symbols, Ironflanks. This is amazing — an entirely lost civilization.’

But Ironflanks was no longer listening. He had spotted a brown bobbing shape being nibbled at by tiny fish in the spring. ‘Get out, professor!’ Ironflanks’ voicebox shuddered at maximum volume. He waved his four arms frantically at the sailors filling the water cart at the other end of the pool. ‘Get back from the water’s edge!’

‘Ironflanks?’

‘A tauntoraptor has given birth in this pool — that is the youngling’s faeces.’ Ironflanks unstrapped his thunder-lizard gun as he waded towards the professor kicking back to the shore. ‘When the youngling is newly born, a tauntoraptor is an-’

Something dark lashed out at the shadow of the sailors on the water, a screaming seadrinker ripped from the shore.

‘-ambush predator.’

Shouting in terror and anger the sailors fell back, raising their tridents at the bubbling water where their comrade had disappeared.

‘Don’t shoot,’ yelled Ironflanks. ‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, hold your fire. Let me kill him with my rifle.’

Ignoring the steamman’s entreaties the sailors let loose on the pool with their tridents, wild energy flickering over the surface of the water. There was a popping sound as insects exploded, then a flurry of burning fish convulsed to the surface. As they continued to empty their capacitors, a dark bony shape broke the surface, a lizard-rhinoceros with a human leg still hanging from its razor teeth. All the sailors concentrated their fire on the howling green thing and it flipped back, smoke steaming out from under its scales, mewling like the fox song that haunted Jackals’ moors. Veryann’s fighters were within range now and they finished it off in a hail of flower-headed bolts.

‘Damn fools,’ shouted Ironflanks at the u-boat crew. ‘You’ve cooked him.’

‘A fine meal for the next thunder lizard that comes along,’ laughed Bull.

Out of the jungle echoed a terrifying rumble, similar to the death song they had just heard, but amplified a hundred fold.

‘That is the next thunder lizard coming along,’ cursed Ironflanks. ‘And you’ve just boiled up her hatchling for her to smell out. Tauntoraptors hunt by scent, not sight.’

Veryann waved her fighters back from the rainforest’s tree line, the furious crashing of falling trees growing louder and louder. ‘Form two lines, independent fire.’

‘Don’t run,’ Ironflanks cried at the milling crewmen, a few of whom were already sprinting back down the trail ‘Force of fire is the only thing that will bring this beast down. Form up flanking the soldiers. We’ll see how well your seadrinker forks fare against an adult tauntoraptor.’

Amelia unholstered her Tennyson and Bounder. Her heavy pistol felt like a child’s catapult here in Liongeli. Laying his thunder-lizard gun across a fallen tree, Ironflanks took position, the massive iron barrel of the rifle fixed on the tree line. The expedition members suddenly faced the full fury of the enraged mother, smashing through trees and ferns towards the pool, as large as an elephant, with overlapping knife-edged armour and devil-like horns. Her polished bony head pushed down as she speeded up in the open, the glass-crack reports of the rifles and the hissing of the tridents lost in the howl of her rage.

There was not much in the jungle that could murder one of her hatchlings, and the tauntoraptor did not class these uniformed monkeys as a threat. That was a mistake. A wave of flower-headed bolts pin-cushioned her skull, ingenious explosive-driven steel rotating through her armour and cutting into her flesh. Charging in disbelief, the novel flare of pain running through her brain, the tauntoraptor made her weight count, piling through the line of Catosian soldiers as bodies were hurled into the air. One of the mercenaries thrashed, her torso impaled on the creature’s horns.

A tail capped with a bone mace curved around, Ironflanks leaping over the swinging wall of toughened flesh as the tauntoraptor’s weight flattened one of the sailor’s capacitor packs, a stream of blue energy forking up into the air as if his life force was being emptied into the firmament. The steamman was whistling in mimicry of a winged petrodactyl, one of the few denizens of the jungle’s sky that could trouble a tauntoraptor, and, enraged by the insults, the thunder lizard turned — just as Ironflanks had intended. He pushed his cannon-sized weapon underneath the earflap of her monstrous head and the gun boomed, the thunder lizard jerking then folding down on her four elephantine legs. With a detonation of mud the creature collapsed, her second brain — buried towards the back of her stubby neck — shredded by the steamman’s rifle.

Amelia stood shivering an inch from where the thunder lizard had been felled, her pistol empty, the drip of blood from the impaled Catosian drumming slowly down across the tips of her boots. There were howls of victory from the seadrinkers as they climbed up onto the beast’s side, machetes drawn to saw off its horns.

‘We’ll grind them down to powder,’ one of them shouted. ‘Something to keep the ladies of Rapalaw awake when we return rich!’

Veryann looked at the cavorting u-boat crew with disgust. She drew her knife and walked to where the free company fighters that had been trampled lay in the arms of their comrades.

Amelia realized what the commander was about to do and ran over. One of the soldiers grabbed the professor. ‘Do not interfere. It is our way.’

‘You can’t!’

‘Do I have my honour?’ asked one of the wounded fighters.

‘You have your honour,’ answered Veryann, plunging her dagger into the woman’s throat.

‘We can put them on the cart,’ shouted Amelia, ‘take them back to the Sprite for treatment.’

‘Catosia has no surgeons,’ said Veryann, repeating the ritual along the line of wounded. ‘You have your honour. No doctors, and no citizens living with the shame of their weakness. You have your honour. No cripples or ill to sap our bloodlines of their strength.’

Amelia struggled in the grasp of the soldier holding her back. ‘You’re a bloody barbarian.’

Veryann’s work done, she wiped the blood off her blade on the side of her britches and then sheathed the knife. She indicated Amelia’s over-sized arms. ‘We allow no perversions of the flesh save those which can be achieved through our own exertions and the blessed herb shine. No imperfections worked by womb mages, surgeons, worldsingers or the fates of battle. Our bodies must be perfect.’

‘Your bodies-’ Amelia was astonished ‘-your body may be perfect, but your soul is insane. What about your fallen? Circle’s teeth, are you just going to discard them here without burial?’

‘Toss them into the water of the pool if their sight offends you, Jackelian. They are not dead to my people; they live on in the fear-filled nightmares of their enemies and the memories of our free company, as they should. They are immortal now.’

Amelia shook her head. Between their convict u-boat crew capering around the fallen monster and the callous ice maiden in charge of the psychopaths meant to be protecting the expedition, she felt like the lone visitor to an asylum on Circle Day. Just two pennies, damson, to prod the lunatics in their cages with a stick.

A noise like a hunting horn blew in the distance, and there was an explosion from the jungle as a thousand winged creatures took to the air squawking, hissing and buzzing in panic.

Ironflanks’ head turned slowly, his telescope eyes shadowed by the rim of his hunter’s hat. ‘It cannot be!’

‘What is it, Ironflanks?’ Amelia stared towards the horizon, the cliffs of a plateau squatting in the far distance. ‘That noise came from quite a distance out, didn’t it?’

‘She never hunts this far east, her territory is fixed,’ said Ironflanks. The hunting horn sound came again. ‘No, she knows I am here.’

‘Who are you talking about, Ironflanks?’

‘Queen Three-eyes, Amelia softbody. The Steamo Loas have cursed us this day.’

‘Another thunder lizard?’

‘The queen of them all, professor of mammals, a kilasaurus max. She knows I am here.’

On the wind the horn song seemed to be speaking.

‘Hateyouhateyouhateyouhateyoupunishpunishpunishpunishyouyou.’

‘How can that thing know you are here, Ironflanks? It’s just a big damn lizard.’

‘By that criteria, so are the lashlites,’ said the steamman. ‘She can follow a scent from a hundred miles away and well does she know the smell of my stacks.’

Amelia listened to the stream of hatred being sung over the jungle, almost words. ‘It’s talking. It knows Jackelian. Sweet Circle, how intelligent is this thing?’

‘I doubt if she has a grant of letters from the eight universities, professor, but she understands revenge well enough. The k-max mates for life, and I took Queen Three-eyes’ companion in a hunt six years back. That’s when she taught herself Jackelian

— listening to the hunting parties as they sat around their campfires at night. Anything to discover more about her enemy, more about me.’

Again, the horn.

‘Metaljiggermetaljiggermetaljiggermetaljiggercrushyoucrushyou-crushyoucrushyou.’

‘Take what water you have,’ shouted Ironflanks at the exped ition members. ‘Back to the boat. NOW!’

Amelia broke her pistol, ready to insert a fresh round. She sprinted after the steamman, slipping in another crystal charge from her belt. ‘We should form up into a battle line. Quest’s lizard killer guns worked well enough just now, and if you managed to kill this thing’s mate …’

‘A male kilasaurus max is a quarter the size of the female,’ said Ironflanks, his stacks pouring smoke into the air as they fled down the trail. ‘Those big cannons on the walls of Rapalaw Junction, they are not for the feral craynarbian tribes, you understand? Dirt-gas sinks before it climbs as high as the head of a k-max.’

‘And you killed that thing’s mate?’

‘I led the hunt,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I would not have brought the k-max down, as old and as sick as he was, I know better. Those fastblood fools who paid for my services did not live long enough to regret their decision — I was the only one to make it back to Rapalaw’s gates from that safari.’

Animals scattered under their feet and past the escaping expedition members, the trampled passage to the spring alive with terrified jungle creatures fleeing the rampaging monarch of their realm.

Two of the u-boat men suddenly ran at Amelia. ‘Strap her to a tree — leave the Jonah here, leave her to feed the beast’s hunger. She’s called the beast to us.’

Amelia kicked one in the gut. The other fell forward as a rotating steel bolt erupted from his striped shirt. Veryann reloaded her rifle swung it towards Bull Kammerlan. ‘Our steamman scout has given you the only order you need to heed — keep running. I will cut down any of you filthy jiggers that dares to lift a hand in mutiny towards an officer.’

Her cold blue eyes bore into the sailors and whether it was due to the Catosian guns or the screams of the k-max, the crewmen fled for their miserable lives.

A dark shape grew visible in the distance above the canopy and there was a crashing avalanche of trees as the thunder lizard pushed through the press of darkest Liongeli. They were less than halfway back to the Sprite. Amelia increased her speed, the water cart lying abandoned behind them. The sacrifice of their drinking supply would not be enough. They were as good as dead.