The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was said even a blind man could tell when he had walked into Steamside, and Cornelius Fortune believed it. While the evening sky above the steamman enclave of Middlesteel might not have been filled with a thousand spears of hearth smoke like the quarters of their fast-blooded neighbours, the people of the metal carried their own stacks, and the smell of high-grade boiler smoke rose up to envelop Cornelius in the rooftop nest where Septimoth had landed them. It was like sitting in a drawing room where the gentlemen had all simultaneously reached for their mumbleweed pipes.

The current focus of Cornelius’s attention rested halfway across Adam Metal Square, waiting still and silent at the heart of Steamside, in the hub of a network of narrow alleys that had never once been widened in Middlesteel’s history. Lanes that had remained untouched when King Felix broadened the streets of the capital after the great plague in the year of 901, just as they remained unaltered when Isambard Kirkhill began his great programme of public works after winning the civil war for parliament. No wide new avenues in Steamside to stop the Levellers raising barricades, no new boulevards constructed to mop up the unemployed rowdies of both sides’ disbanded regiments. Steammen suffered their own plagues and were the most loyal of the capital’s constituencies — being slow to anger and measured in pondering the troves of their long memories.

It was the owner of the longest of those memories that Cornelius had come to observe. In any other area of the city, Cornelius’s surveillance would have been easy. He could have walked round the square, dipping in and out, returning each time with a fresh face borrowed from the locals. But imitating a steamman was beyond even his powers morphic.

‘It is growing quieter,’ observed Septimoth. ‘Night will soon be upon us.’

Cornelius nodded. It was still relatively busy down below. Steamside had a high population density, the people of the metal able to approximate sleep standing up a dozen to a garret.

‘And this steamman will just stay there, in the square?’ asked Septimoth.

‘So Dred Lands would have it,’ replied Cornelius. ‘Dred assured me that Bunzal Coalmelter has been standing down there in that same spot for over a hundred years.’

Septimoth’s hunting eyes focused in on the old steamman below. Weeds had grown up around his legs and a chest assembly that had once been painted a brilliant red had been reduced to a few crumbling flecks of dye by the capital’s rain and smog. Even with the lashlite’s incredible powers of magnification, he could only just discern the flicker of a single point of yellow light behind the creature’s vision plate, pulsing with the faintness of a mouse’s heartbeat. Lands had told Cornelius that the locals had tried to polish and clean Bunzal Coalmelter in the old days, but he had cursed his fellow steammen for fools and refused to dispense his wisdom until they had left him alone. Now Coalmelter was more statue than steamman, an iron sage rusting away into a monument in the middle of Steamside.

‘You watched him all last night,’ said Septimoth. ‘You should let me take this night’s duty. Return to Dolorous Hall for some rest.’

‘You don’t need rest,’ whispered his mask. ‘Not when you are wearing me. The sun is losing its power and I am gainingmine.’

‘I don’t need your power,’ spat Cornelius.

Septimoth looked curiously at his friend.

‘I mean to say we shall both stay here,’ said Cornelius. ‘They will come for him tonight. I am sure of it.’

Septimoth knew better than to underestimate his human companion’s sense for such things. Sometimes it was as if he possessed a third eye himself. There was a touch of the lash-lite about Cornelius Fortune — perhaps there was more to their friendship than just a life debt owed?

‘I could fly down there and ask Coalmelter if he thinks his kidnap is likely,’ said Septimoth. ‘There seems to be no shortage of people who seek his counsel.’

‘Much good may his words do them,’ said Cornelius. And it was true. Many of the visitors — steammen, graspers, craynarbians, the race of man — who had come to the square during the day, went away with disappointed looks on their faces. For every piece of advice Bunzal Coalmelter uttered, there were as many insults thrown at his petitioners — ‘workit out yourself, jigger’ — ‘you are too fat’ — or sometimes he turned to the obscure and the indecipherable — ‘the finger thatpoints at the moon is not the moon.’

Whether the ossifying creature of the metal possessed real wisdom was a moot point, Cornelius knew that Coalmelter possessed cogs and crystals as old as any to be found in a steamman grave — and that should be enough to attract a different sort of seeker of knowledge this night. He was sure of it. Or rather, the part of him that was Furnace-breath Nick was sure of it, which was good enough for the hermit of Dolorous Hall.

‘Remember, we let them take the steamman when they come,’ said Cornelius. ‘It is the organ grinder we seek, not his monkeys.’

‘An apt choice of words,’ said Septimoth, ‘given that rascal hatchling Smike said the hand of the Catgibbon is involved in this.’

‘I doubt the flash mob’s interest extends much beyond the guineas they receive for the thugs they have been supplying. Robur is behind the missing steammen corpses, of that much I am certain. Let us see if Middlesteel’s gutter scum can lead us to him.’

Down below, the evening crowd had dwindled to a single group of steammen playing a game of chess on a table outside the temple of Legba of the Valves. That was when Cornelius saw it. A coal cart pulled by two giant craynarbians, a pair of vendors walking ahead of the creaking transport — a small rat-like coalman with fingerless gloves trailed by a bullet-headed colleague almost as large as the craynarbians.

‘What do you think, Septimoth?’

The lashlite’s eyes focused on the sword arms of the two craynarbians, the bony appendages swinging casually as they hauled the weight of the coal cart. ‘Chipped and worn — I doubt through honest labours. Those sword arms have been sharpened against a grinder in a muscle pit.’

‘Who will buy my high-grade boiler coke?’ called out the small coalman. ‘Smokes up as fine as mist, Pentshire mined and graded. Who will buy my lovely coke?’ Approaching the group of chess-playing steammen, the coalman dug out a pail of coke and proffered it to the table. ‘A free sample, good sirs. Once you’ve tried Pentshire fine grade, you’ll never want anything else.’

Iron hands reached out for the free samples, then clicked open furnace chutes to imbibe the fuel. As the steammen started juddering and fitting where they sat, rat-face’s bulky companion pulled out an anti-steamman grapple from under the cart and put a bolt straight through Bunzal Coalmelter’s boiler heart.

‘Quicksilver,’ said Cornelius. ‘They’ve laced the coke with magnesium.’

‘And they obviously do not require the old steamman alive,’ said Septimoth.

So stiff with age was Coalmelter, that even impaled, he did not sink to his iron knees. He remained swaying there, the grapple point showing through the back of his spine shell, crystals fizzing as black oil leaked out from ruptured pipes and onto the moss growing around his feet units. Working calmly but rapidly, the two craynarbians pulled back a false bottom on the cart, hauling the dying steamman out from the square and hiding him under the planks. Then the killers covered over the coal cart with their black produce, all four of them wheeling the corpse away. The murderous abduction was completed in a matter of seconds.

Cornelius snarled. It sat badly with him letting the flash mob do this, but it would have been difficult for the two of them to react fast enough to have saved the steamman, even forewarned, even if they had been there solely to act as Coalmelter’s guardian angels.

‘There are a hundred crimes as bad as this each night in Middlesteel,’ said Septimoth, noticing his companion’s hackles rising. ‘The weeds of your society. Thefts and petty murders. We are not mere vigilantes. We serve our people’s memories, we serve the song of the dead.’

‘All the same, some weeds demand to be cleared away,’ said Cornelius. ‘Take me up, Septimoth. We follow them.’

Outside the temple of Legba of the Valves, only the hallucinating steammen were on hand as witnesses to a lashlite launching himself into the sky with a human passenger. Septimoth carried the man as his people had carried their prey for thousands of years. Only the two of them and the lash-lite gods of the wind knew that the true prey was yet to be claimed.

‘There is the location,’ called Septimoth, the wind and rustle of the silk wings supporting Cornelius masking the man’s reply.

The towers of Middlesteel drifted beneath, layered with smog. This high up, Cornelius was reliant on his friend’s sharp eyes, which were nearly as powerful in the dark as in daylight. Septimoth dipped down, extending the harness tether, Cornelius’s kite wings gliding behind the lashlite as if the man was a pet monkey with the gift of flight. Closer to the truth in this aerial realm than Cornelius liked to admit.

Looming out of the darkness of the Gambleflowers was the largest jinn palace Cornelius had ever seen afloat on the river — a tiered illuminated wedding cake bobbing in the tidal flow. So, the Catgibbon still retained her fondness for a river view.

‘You have seen them go inside?’ Cornelius called forward.

‘They took the coal cart into a warehouse first, switched the cover of coke for a few hogsheads of jinn,’ shouted Septimoth. ‘All four of them went into the boat by its lower boarding ramp. The steamman’s corpse is still in the cart, judging by the effort it took the four of them to pull a few barrels of drink.’

‘Cut my line,’ cried Cornelius, slipping his Furnace-breath Nick mask off and tossing it up to his friend. Stealth would serve him better than force this night. ‘I’ll go aboard and see if our old friend Robur has made himself a home by the river.’

‘Take me,’ pleaded the mask. ‘I can still be of use to you.You are stronger as Furnace-breath Nick than as a mere man.’

‘I am a man,’ shouted Cornelius.

‘I do realize that,’ Septimoth called back. ‘You are far too heavy to be any lamb I have scooped up from a farmer’s field. I should circle, you may yet need my assistance.’

‘With a full moon tonight? Too dangerous. Lashlites don’t frequent drinking houses and if they see you up here, they may take you for a spotter for Ham Yard, or worse, a scout for a gang of rival bludgers.’

Septimoth swished his devil’s tail in annoyance. ‘You are too reckless.’

‘I have stolen into the fastness of Darksun Fortress under the Commonshare’s very nose, old bird. I am sure I can safely penetrate a gang of Middlesteel cut purses. Go home to Dolorous Hall and tell Damson Beeton I will be returning shortly.’

Septimoth whistled his disapproval and then released the towline for Cornelius to glide down towards the roofs of the docks. Cornelius used his flight silks proficiently well for a wingless monkey.

Watching from the shadows of a tannery, Cornelius waited for a suitably sized reveller to leave the jinn house, then he slipped behind the man and gassed him before he could reach the line of waiting hansom cabs. He dragged his victim behind a warehouse and removed his cloak, jacket and cane, before binding and gagging the unconscious dupe. Cornelius’s features flowed like melting wax into a facsimile of his victim’s face as he donned the stolen clothes. Cornelius chafed at the high collar of his victim’s tunic — it was lined with a ring of metal, sewn into the cloth to protect its owner’s neck from the garrotte gangs that robbed worthies in the less salubrious parts of town. He tested the handle of the cane and sprung the sword concealed inside. Courtland Town steel — this fellow was not short of a penny or two.

Cornelius’s destination was moored far enough away from the affluent heart of the capital that the visitors to the jinn house were in no danger of being spotted by anyone other than their fellow revellers. He noted that the jinn house’s iron hull had once belonged to a fire-breaker. A decommissioned colony boat, no longer fit to skirt the Fire Sea, not now that her decks were fitted out with additional pagoda levels, flammable oakwood rising by the light of a constellation of paper lanterns. Her new silver nameplate had been riveted proudly above the entrance. The Ruby Belle.

On the boarding ramp the two whippers nodded at the face Cornelius was wearing, passing no comment that one of their regulars had changed his mind and decided to try his luck again. The ship’s interior bore out the impression of wealth that Cornelius had derived from its patrons’ dress. No ha’penny tumble this for dockers, riverboat crews and rookery dwellers. Her cramped colonist hold had been cut out, replaced with a set of stairs leading down to a floor of lush red carpet covered by gaming tables, mirror-backed bars and marble-surfaced drinking stalls. Another line of stairs swept up to the pagodas. The transparent silk shifts worn by the two women waiting by the flight of steps, as well as the oiled chests of the guards standing behind them, left little doubt as to the entertainments that were on offer above.

‘Canes to be checked at the door, sir,’ said one of the jinn palace hands, making it clear that they expected all their patrons’ canes to have a razor-sharp utility beyond fashion. Cornelius moved aside for a press of braying quality, rich ladies with their stud retainers close at hand. ‘Of course.’

‘Back for another crack at the whist tables, sir?’

Cornelius handed over his cape and cane. ‘Yes. I believe my luck may be about to change.’

He took a step up onto a brass dais and received a numbered wooden coin from the cloakroom assistant, noting that the room behind her was racked with purse pistols, shoulder holsters, garter guns and sword sticks. The patrons might be slumming it in this end of town, but they were careful with it, preserving their dignity — and their life — while about their sport.

‘Would you care for a masque, sir?’ asked the cloakroom assistant, indicating a range of velvet-lined masques hanging to the side. ‘To preserve your anonymity?’

Cornelius shook his head. ‘I left mine at home today, I don’t believe I would care for another.’

‘As you will, sir.’

Down below, the gambling tables were frequented by a mix of merrymakers — some concealed by masques, others openly revelling in the wickedness of the house and probably hoping they would be recognized. Plying the tables, spinning the wheels of chance and turning cards, Cornelius moved across the connected series of chambers, mapping the layout of the Ruby Belle and locating the corridors and doors used by her staff. Taking a long glass of sweet wine, he slipped out onto the promenade, bypassing laughing clusters of patrons engrossed in their own amusements. He found the blind spot he was looking for and put down his glass. Pushing on his artificial arm with a finger, he drew out a metal cord, looping it around the railing, then lowered himself down the hull of the boat on her river side. His boots pushed him out in looping arcs, quietly swinging him down the outside of the jinn house. This should be about where the boarding ramp lay on the port side of the craft.

From his thumb he extruded a rubber circle that rolled out into a dome, a thin copper wire trailing back into his arm. He hated using this, the mechomancy so obviously imperfectly reverse-engineered from a steamman’s architecture. He willed the device into action and it began to amplify the vibrations of sound in the hull, crystals in his arm flaring up as they fed the information along his nerves, a fire like heartburn withering his guts. But along with the fire came words — a male voice growling about his attentions being rejected by a croupier. Using the large rivets as footholds, Cornelius moved along the hull, flakes of paint and iron rubbing against him as he eavesdropped on the conversations and peeped in through portholes — safe enough with the darkness of night and the lapping waters of the river Gambleflowers behind him.

Midway across the hull he found them. The two flash mob enforcers that had bundled Bunzal Coalmelter into their false-bottomed cart. They had changed out of their coke vendors’ rags, and were inspecting the ruin of the steamman’s cracked chest casing as parts were being gingerly teased out into a pool of dark puddling oil. Damn. It was not Robur working on the grave robbers’ dark business — instead, some gangly beanstalk of a man was poking around the steamman’s body.

‘Careful now,’ said rat-face. ‘The parts have to be preserved, removed without cracking the crystals.’

‘For that I need to concentrate,’ said the mechomancer performing the forbidden autopsy. The man spoke annoyingly quietly, his words barely carrying through to Cornelius’s vibration amplifier.

‘There’s good coin in this for you,’ said rat-face. ‘You do this job right. The client needs the parts shipped out tomorrow, cleaned and each organ labelled.’ The larger of the two bruisers cracked his knuckles. ‘You do it badly, and it’ll be your parts that’ll need work. This is the last of the steamers on our list. You won’t get a second chance now.’

‘This is delicate work,’ whispered the mechomancer. ‘Leave I to it.’

They laughed together at the sport of needling the quiet hireling, then left, shutting the door to the room. Cornelius was about to trigger the retraction wheel on his grappling line when he realized that the mechomancer was mumbling to himself. The Circle bless a mumbler. He dialled up his listening device to maximum to catch the hissed mutters, ignoring the lancing pain.

‘Turds, turds, the way they treat I. But they have no brains, no wit.’ He stuck his lips out like a fish that was about to start whistling, scratched at his head as fiercely as if he had nits, then delved back into Bunzal Coalmelter’s guts. ‘Not clever. The client wants it tomorrow. They want it tomorrow, get to stuff their face at Whittington Manor, see all the quality. All the pretties. Should be I that goes. It is I that is working for him, not the stupids. The way they treat I …’

Whittington Manor. Cornelius had heard that name recently, or had he read about it in the Middlesteel Illustrated News? Was that where Robur was holed up, playing him for a fool and possibly planning his mischief for Quatershift’s First Committee? He willed the retraction wheel into action and, with a low hiss, he was hauled back up to the Ruby Belle’s promenade.

Picking up the fluted wine glass, Cornelius moved across the gaming floor, his mind revolving with the possibility of finally tracking down the slippery refugee from the Sun King’s broken court; so focused on his quarry that he only noticed the two whippers when they stepped out in front of him — both a head taller than Cornelius.

‘Excuse me, sir, the floor master would like a word with you about the settlement of your debts.’

‘My debts?’ Another two whippers emerged out of the crowd around the tables, taking position behind him. Four was not such a big number, but an ordinary patron killing them would spook the flash mob. Robur might be moved somewhere else as a precaution. Damn his unlucky stars, of all the customers he could have chosen to mimic, he had to have selected a welcher. Let them have their say, then. He should be able to buy them off for at least a night with the wad of money thickening his borrowed wallet. A night was all that he required.

‘What foolishness is this?’ protested Cornelius. ‘I have money. You must have the wrong man.’

A vice-like grip laid itself on his shoulder. ‘I am sure the floor master will be glad to discuss that with you, sir. Right away.’

They led him to a door padded with rich red leather. ‘This way, sir.’

He found himself in a small lifting room, little more than a dumb waiter for the cooks and floor staff. Yellow gas started spraying up out of a grille on the floor as they closed the door on him, vapours warm to the skin and cloyingly choking to the lungs. Cornelius stumbled back, smashing into a wall of mirrored glass. The lifting room was neither sinking nor rising. He tried to lever open the door, but the foul cloud swilling around the chamber was sapping his strength. If this was their way of reclaiming money out of their clients’ pockets, the flash mob might find debtors’ prison a more effective approach. Whatever happened to breaking a couple of fingers first?

Fresh air poured in suddenly as the doors were drawn back, someone catching him as he lurched out. His arms were pinned behind him and a pile driver of a fist sucked the last remaining breath out of his gut. A warning, then. Traditionalists after all. Pocket manacles were clamped around his wrists and the thugs dragged him along the corridor like an empty crate of jinn bottles. The stinging gas’s residue made Cornelius’s eyes stream, a swirl of locusts swarming across his vision as one of the whipper’s boots slammed down onto his left leg.

He could barely see when they shoved him down into a chair, but he recognized the voice of the soft-spoken mechomancer he had spied scavenging inside Bunzal Coalmelter’s corpse. The mumbler sounded no louder in person than he had through the hull of the floating jinn palace.

‘Intolerable. How can I get on with the job I must do with all these distractions?’

‘Just set it up,’ growled a whipper.

Cornelius’s borrowed forehead was scraped, a sharp-pointed tiara pulled down hard over his hair. Circle’s teeth, it was a crown of thorns they were fitting him for. A circlet made up of small, imperfectly cut shards from the mother stones that allowed Jackals’ crystalgrid network to function. But these crystals did not need senders to operate them, and the only communication they could relay was limited to a single message. Pain. Raw pain. A victim in a crown could be tortured for weeks leaving no physical evidence, until their brain started to fracture into multiple selves, in a vain attempt to protect the mind. It was said that while one person would go into a room wearing a crown of thorns, a dozen would come out.

‘I’ll pay you,’ said Cornelius. ‘I have the money.’

‘You’ll pay, jigger,’ said a thug, securing Cornelius’s feet to the chair. ‘We’ll make sure of that.’

‘Get the floor master,’ said Cornelius. ‘This is pointless. I’ve already told you that I’ll pay you. How are you going to clear my debts if you put me inside an asylum with this contraption?’

A stinging slap across his face served as his initial answer. ‘You can shut your gob. We don’t want your wallet. We already have that. We want to know who you are.’

‘Who I am? You know that!’

Another slap. Far stronger this time.

Mumbling-boy was still assembling the crown of thorns, but they probably would have slapped Cornelius anyway. You couldn’t beat a little physical degradation thrown into the mix. Six months as a prisoner in a Commonshare organized community had taught him that, sharing a cell with that bloody insufferable wolftaker, Harry Stave. At least most of the people with the education to assemble a crown of thorns within Quatershift had ended up being pushed inside one of the shifties’ steam-driven killing machines at the start of the revolution.

‘Who are you really, jigger? Under that false face of yours, who are you?’

The crown started to vibrate on his scalp, tearing into his skin, close to full activation. They knew! But how? Somehow, his game had been rumbled by the flash mob.

From somewhere far away, he heard his mask laughing, dangling from Septimoth’s belt as the lashlite headed home; the telling, mocking retribution of Furnace-breath Nick. ‘Justa man. You’re just a man after all.’

Cornelius’s punishment beating had just turned into something immeasurably worse.

Each step Amelia took closer to the Sprite of the Lake seemed to increase the weight of her boots, until it seemed that she was sprinting towards the u-boat with lead weights on her feet. Out of the jungle canopy, the insult-howls of the k-max chased after the fleeing expedition members. Was it something in the thunder lizard’s screech that was slowing down her escape — a natural paralysis mechanism?

‘Noescapenoescapenoescapeforyoumetaljggermetaljiggermetaljigger.’

Each time the k-max howled, more creatures flushed out of the jungle, bursting past at speeds that only served to remind Amelia how far they still were from the safety of the Sprite. This sluggishness had to be something in her mind. She had fled equally dangerous threats in her rascal’s career — packs of hunting pecks in the capital’s undercity, the Caliph’s scent-seekers in Bladetenbul, Count Vauxtion’s well mannered but deadly attentions in the alleys of Middlesteel, the bandit army of Kal Ferdo out on the Kikkosico pampas. She had not come this close to the lost city after a professional lifetime of heartbreak, rejections and ridicule, to end up inside the gut of a six-storey lizard with a grudge against their half-insane steamman guide.

As Amelia sidestepped a panicked toad she saw something at the other end of the trail, two silhouettes against the afternoon sun, running towards them down the passage trampled through the jungle. Sweet Circle. She imagined all the disasters that could have befallen their boat while they were out in search of fresh drinking water. She knew from the size of the silhouette that it had to be Gabriel McCabe running out to meet them, yes, accompanied by one of Veryann’s Catosian soldiers.

‘Professor,’ shouted Gabriel, sprinting towards them, ‘we are betrayed.’

‘We’ve got problems of our own,’ panted Amelia. ‘A big hungry problem the size of the Bells of Brute Julius coming down in our direction. Betrayal we don’t need.’

‘The thunder lizard is the betrayal,’ said Gabriel. He held aloft a broken vial of dripping green liquid.

‘Where did you get that?’ demanded Ironflanks.

‘It was placed smashed by the entrance to the trail. One of Bull’s men found it while out collecting fruit. He knew what this filth would do …’

Amelia took the broken vial, smelling it.

‘It’s the gland milk from a kilasaurus max,’ said Ironflanks, slowing down his pace. ‘Parties out of Rapalaw Junction use it to lure the larger thunder lizards away from a safari area, so they have the hunt to themselves.’

Amelia cursed under her breath. And it looked like it worked well enough in the opposite direction too, if you were fool enough to use it. Or a traitor who wanted to bang the dinner gong for a thunder lizard.

The Catosian soldier unslung a signal rocket from her back and Gabriel motioned that she should set the small clockwork fuse turning on its mixing chamber. Veryann dashed up to them, the last of the water party’s stragglers running past.

‘You have mortars set up?’ Veryann asked the soldier.

With a crack of glass the firing head on the rocket released blow-barrel sap from both chambers and the missile swept towards the sky above them, exploding out into a magnesium star shower.

‘Yes, First.’

From the direction of the river a series of explosions answered, a sound like fresh logs popping on a fire grate. Round shells burst in the air above the retreating expedition members, streamers of smoke spiralling out before being smeared across the roof of the jungle.

Veryann nodded in satisfaction at her subordinate’s efficiency. ‘Let us see if this creature can find us as well inside a wall of smoke cover.’

‘Circle bless the Catosian military,’ said Amelia, resuming her pelt down the trail. And Circle curse the traitor in their ranks. First the sabotage of their u-boat’s gas scrubbers and now this. Someone badly wanted to stop them reaching their destination. But anyone who knew anything about Camlantis must know that their civilization had reached the peak of moral evolution. Who in their right mind would seek to deny the ancients’ secrets to the flawed, feuding nations that had succeeded Camlantis in the millennia since? That left ignorance as the motive. Which one of them wanted to stop the expedition finding Camlantis so badly they were prepared to murder half the crew to do it? Surely one of Bull’s crew wasn’t so afraid of ending up a slave of the Daggish that they were willing to sacrifice half their own shipmates’ lives to force the Sprite to turn about? They wouldn’t earn a pardon that way.

From the direction of the river, the mortars lined up on the u-boat continued to pour a rolling barrage of covering smoke behind them, matching the pace of their sprint with an uncanny accuracy. The howls of the k-max behind them became a confused mess of snarls lost in the acrid smoke as the welcoming sight of the long dark hull of the Sprite hove into view, sitting just ahead, fixed in the river current. Commodore Black waved from the nearest of the two conning towers. Helping the Catosians, the u-boat crew were desperately breaking down the mortars, tossing footplates and barrel piping down into their open hatches. The Sprite was close enough to the jungle that the barge they had used to reach the shore was more useful as a boarding ramp now. A roar echoed through the smoke. Uncomfortably close.

Commodore Black helped Amelia up the last few rungs of the hull ladder. ‘You were meant to be bringing drinking water back with you, professor, not that rare fierce pet of yours.’

‘You know how it is,’ said Amelia, ‘a girl sees it in a shop window along Penny Street and she has to have it.’

The commodore looked over at the shore; the remaining u-boat crew were scrambling across to the Sprite in an undisciplined rabble while Veryann’s mercenary company were falling back in formation, flower-headed bolt rifles at the ready. ‘Well, I’ll not be feeding the wicked thing for you. Veryann, board your people on the Sprite — I’ll be pushing my bishop across our board by myself if you try and lock horns with a k-max.’

Amelia turned to see Ironflanks clanking down the hull. ‘Can your friend out there wade into the water, old steamer?’

‘A kilasaurus will not cross the Shedarkshe,’ said Ironflanks, clutching his thunder-lizard gun and peering at the smoke-shrouded jungle. ‘They have no taste for swimming.’

The last of the mortars was disassembled and the Catosians on board when a head appeared through the thinning fog, a freakishly small razor-lined snout twitching to find Ironflanks, a massive green-scaled body as large as a Middlesteel tower following behind, a tongue snicking out of a second mouth in her chest. This second maw sported a circular buzz-saw rim of teeth opening and shutting in an eager gnashing. Three good eyes and one scarred hole settled on the Sprite and the thunder lizard roared her rage, a sound so raw that it made Amelia’s rib cage vibrate under its fury.

‘Down ship,’ yelled the commodore into the conning tower. ‘Take us out, full speed forward.’

So frenzied were they to put the steel hull of the ancient u-boat between themselves and the thunder lizard, the remaining members of the expedition threw themselves down any hatch left open. Queen Three-eyes saw the steamman disappearing into one of the conning towers and her snout lashed around, aiming for the hatch where Ironflanks had vanished. ‘METALJIGGERMETALJIGGERRIPANDKILLANDRIPANDKILL.’

Amelia was barely through the conning tower door, followed by the foetid heat wave of the monster’s breath, when the submarine started sinking, water bubbling up past the turret’s portholes. Reaching the pilot room, Amelia saw Commodore Black had got there first, hanging onto the periscope’s arms, twisting the scope around towards the bank. ‘Sweet mercy, Ironflanks, it’s coming into the river after us.’

‘She can’t swim,’ said Ironflanks, borrowing the periscope. ‘Her forearms are meant for hooking down prey, not paddling.’

Unfortunately for the expedition, no one had told the thunder lizard, carefully keeping her balance as she manoeuvred into the Shedarkshe’s currents.

‘Full forward. Down inclination two degrees.’ The commodore turned to his first mate. ‘Flood tube one. Put a fish in the water, Mister McCabe.’

‘You expect me to hit that thing, skipper?’

‘Timed fuse, one hundred yards detonation. Ironflanks is right about one thing; that’s no slipsharp coming after us. Unbalance the beast, give the wicked creature something to think about other than smashing the Sprite to pieces.’

Gabriel nodded. ‘Aft tube, guns. Timed fish with a hundred-yard screw, number two head to load.’

‘Aft tube, aye. Flooding now.’

Amelia watched the gunnery station sailors plotting in a firing solution and flooding the tubes as their loaders reported in. She could almost feel the shadow of the kilasaurus on the boat as their expansion engines vibrated along the hull plating, dragging them fast against the Shedarkshe’s current.

Blind Billy adjusted the controls on the side of his large silver phones. ‘The beast is wading after us.’

‘Clear tube one,’ ordered the commodore.

A clang and a hiss and a torpedo squeezed past the Sprite’s screws, trailing backwards from the submarine.

‘Fish in the water,’ said guns.

‘She’s running smooth,’ reported Billy. ‘And she’s running straight and true. The thunder lizard has seen the trail and is trying to move …’

The torpedo’s explosion was a dull echo on the Sprite’s hull. The commodore clung onto the periscope. Wading through the water after them and already up to her chest mouth, Queen Three-eyes lost her footing in the treacherous flow as the fountaining water from the blast unbalanced her, and spun her away downstream.

Her howl of fury swirled after the Sprite as the tips of the double conning towers disappeared up river. ‘Comingbackcomingbackcomingbackforyoumetaljiggermetaljigger.’

‘So you were right after all,’ said the commodore to Ironflanks. ‘The wicked thing isn’t made for the water. But let’s put a few leagues between ourselves and the beast all the same.’

‘Will it come after us?’ asked Amelia.

Ironflanks pushed the rim of his safari hat up. ‘I am uncertain. We will be in Daggish territory within a week. Normally she would not be foolish enough to trespass on their lands.’

An uneasy silence fell over the pilot room. The expedition was moving into the heart of darkness with a traitor on board, a turncoat willing to dangle their shipmates out as bait for creatures like the k-max. The Sprite had felt safe once, a refuge from the jungle outside. Now the u-boat was in a vice. A vice being tightened by an unknown hand.

The Sprite’s refectory was long and narrow. Its two huge tables were made of Jackelian oak that had been polished so much by generations of galley boys using leftover cooking oil that you could slide a plate along them, like skating pebbles across a pond.

Amelia entered the galley and glanced around. She had long since stopped being sensitive to the smell of unwashed crewmen now their water was being reserved for drinking rations and the u-boat’s overstretched cooling system. One of the Catosians who had spurned the submariners’ advice and tried bathing in the river still had a rash to show for it. There were smaller predators in the river than devilbarb fish and crocodiles, and only a craynarbian would want to take a bath in the Shedarkshe. Amelia squeezed past Bull’s off-duty sailors and sat next to T’ricola and Billy Snow.

‘You’ve heard the commodore’s running orders, now we are getting close to where Daggish seed ships patrol?’ Amelia asked.

‘Many times,’ said Billy, taking a sip of yellow liquid juiced from fruit Ironflanks had discovered during his last rainforest sortie. ‘I don’t need to be told how dangerous these waters are. I can still hear the voice of that poor devil from the comfort auction back at the trading post, parroting his lines at his wife and daughter.’

‘It’s one way to survive in Liongeli,’ said T’ricola. ‘Join the Daggish, become part of the jungle, cooperate rather than compete.’ She rubbed at her armoured forehead in discomfort.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Amelia.

‘Headaches,’ said T’ricola, ‘I’m not sick. It’s the jungle. My body knows Liongeli is out there. I’m changing. I must have grown two inches since we started this damn journey. None of those scrotes that Bull’s assigned me for engine room duty wants to say two words to me now; they think I’ll slice them with my sword arm if they even spill oil on the decking.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Amelia.

‘Don’t worry,’ said T’ricola. ‘It’ll be a while longer before I strap a pair of antlers to my head and start worshipping thunder lizards down in the engine room.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about — your body is working with nature,’ said Billy. ‘The same as if you were carrying a child.’

‘Don’t wish that on me,’ said T’ricola. ‘Out here I’d give birth to a dozen or more young shells rather than a couple of offspring.’

Billy reached out for a refill for his mug, Amelia pushing the jug across towards his fingers. ‘Were you born blind, Billy?’

‘No,’ he smiled. ‘In my younger days I could see just fine. But I caught the waterman’s sickness off the Gambleflowers when I was a lad.’

‘I thought that was fatal?’

‘Usually it is. If you are lucky enough to survive, this is the price.’ He waved a hand in front of his blind eyes. ‘But my ears? I can hear the wind turn the pages of a book and tell you what page number it’s blown open on. There was only one trade really open to me. My family were eelers, selling river crab and water serpent to the submarines that travelled up to Middlesteel docks; they had enough seadrinker friends to make sure I got a job as the phones-man on a boat.’

At the galley hatch, old cooky banged his spoon against the pan to indicate their stew was ready. The off-shift crew mobbed the hatch while Billy Snow stood up and collected a plate of boiled potatoes and green salad leaves, manoeuvring back around the benches as easily as any of the fully sighted crew. Cooky slopped out the mutton, laughing at the sonar man’s slim fare.

Amelia looked over at T’ricola. ‘Is Billy not feeling hungry?’

‘Same reason he doesn’t drink blackstrap or rum rations,’ said T’ricola. ‘Billy has his funny ways. I think it might be religious.’

Amelia shrugged. There were extreme Circlist sects that did not eat meat, but most Jackelians had a hearty taste for a good steaming plate of red meat and roast potatoes drowning in gravy. Out in the shires, the doctors were known to prescribe red wine and hot roast beef to sickening children.

‘My ways are not that funny,’ said Billy, sitting down again.

Sweet Circle, he must have heard the two of them talking halfway across the room.

‘Despite what Bull’s pirates think to the contrary. It never sat well with me, that the price of my existence should be the end of something else’s.’

‘And the juice in your mug rather than a tot of rum?’ asked Amelia.

‘I like a ration of rum as much as the next man, professor, but when you’re running shy of a sense, you take trouble not to dull your remaining ones,’ said Billy. ‘Besides, you’re a fine one to be speculating about my funny ways. Most academics would be happy enough blowing the dust off journals back in Jackals, not dreaming of some ancient paradise that may or may not be lost beneath this green hell we are sailing through.’

There was a weight of things Amelia wanted to reply to that, but she had long since grown weary of trying to haul them out of her past — all the long evening conversations about Camlantis with her father, huddled under a blanket by a snug fire grate while hail tapped against their window — trying to find a way to reawaken that dream, that memory in her present. It was so hard, made her so cursed exhausted, attempting to explain the dream, attempting to justify it. Amelia speared a lump of stewed mutton in her bowl. ‘I guess you’ll just have to think of the lost city as my plate of salad at the spit-roast, Billy.’

Damson Beeton pursued Septimoth down the corridor. ‘What do you mean, the master’s delayed? His supper is waiting for him as dry as a Cassarabian sand garden inside my oven.’

‘His business is keeping him in Middlesteel this evening,’ said Septimoth.

‘Oh it is, is it, you old bird? Appointment with his tailor overrunning? You two will be the death of me.’

‘I am sure we will not, damson.’

‘So you say.’ Damson Beeton produced a bone pipe from beneath the folds of her pinny. ‘If so, then why did I nearly trip over this and crack my skull outside?’

‘My flute!’ Septimoth’s folded wings nearly expanded into their glide position. The seers of the crimson feather had made their decision, and returned his bone flute as a sign. Things must be worse than he had imagined, then, for them to turn to him for help.

‘Your ma’s old spine. Left on the top step of the main hall. I was going into the herb garden and nearly came a cropper tripping over this.’

Septimoth took the flute back and tucked the instrument into his belt. ‘Thank you, damson, I had mislaid it.’

‘Your poor mother,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘I thought her bones were meant to be holy and precious to you. If this is the way you treat them, then you can do me the favour of letting my spine rest in the grave when I move along the Circle, thank you very much. No. No lute for you stripped out of my poor weary back, you careless old bird.’

Septimoth bowed in acknowledgement and made to leave; he was grateful, too, that he wouldn’t have to be called on to perform his people’s death rites on the human housekeeper. Her corpse would be as tough as vulture meat, no doubt.

‘Hang on there,’ cried the housekeeper. ‘You haven’t told me where the master is, or what time I’m to be expecting him back?’

‘Do not worry, I’m sure he will return presently.’

The housekeeper tutted as Septimoth walked away. ‘Where is he, Septimoth? Has he accepted one of the invites to society I’ve been so carefully piling up?’

‘I’m sure he’s enjoying himself,’ Septimoth called back.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ whispered the mumbler as Cornelius writhed in the chair. ‘It’s a clever device, the crown of thorns. Not many working parts to go wrong. No.’

Cornelius had to wait for the rogue mechomancer to turn off the crown before he could reply. The trick of surviving a crown was to grit your teeth — so you didn’t bite your tongue off and bleed to death. If these thugs had been professionals, then they might have known that and given him the courtesy of a mouth guard to bite on. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘You can drop the act,’ said one of the thugs. ‘The, oh sir,let’s just settle the debt and be out of here bit. Which worldsinger changed your ugly features?’

‘I don’t-’

The thug grabbed Cornelius’s face and viciously squeezed it. ‘The plate in the floor you stood on by the cloakroom is connected to a transaction engine. Faces are easy to mimic with worldsinger sorcery — but weight? Your weight’s changed by two pounds, you idiot.’

Cornelius silently swore to himself. They weren’t the gang of simple bludgers he had taken them for. Smarter than the revolutionaries across the border in Quatershift, certainly. He had badly underestimated the sophistication of the flash mob.

‘You must be new in town,’ said the thug, ‘if you think you can come onto the Ruby Belle and count cards at our tables. You think that our boss likes to be swindled? You think she goes to bed with a big smile on her face knowing that scrotes like you have been dipping your hand in her pockets?’

His companion waved a sheaf of illustrations and real-box pictures in front of Cornelius; face after face of known card counters and cheats. ‘So here’s what you’re going to do, new boy. You’re going to give us the name of the back-street sorcerer that did your mug for you, then you’re going to tell us the system you were planning to use to swindle the house, and finally, you’re going off to meet the eels in the Gambleflowers.’

‘You three are good,’ said Cornelius. ‘They should have you upstairs as the entertainment.’

One of them backhanded Cornelius. ‘You’re the amusement, jigger. Tell us what we need to know and we’ll make your death a little easier.’

‘You’re not thinking big enough,’ said Cornelius. ‘I’m not here to count cards; I’m here working for a rival crew. And the rest of what I’ve got to say is for the Catgibbon’s ears only.’

That stopped them short.

‘I could tell you, but the Catgibbon is as like to kill you, when she finds out that you know what I have got to say.’

‘Get her,’ ordered the thug; then he turned to Cornelius. ‘If you’re playing us false …’

‘I know. Little pieces; eels; feeding.’

He smelt her before he saw her, the faint scent of honey, a scent designed by womb mages to drive men wild. The Catgibbon. An ugly name for such an alluring creature; but none of her other names would have done. Not for a high lord of the flash mob.

‘Hello, Jasmine,’ said Cornelius.

The creature that had entered the room looked at him with anger on her face, brushing back the light dusting of fur that covered the golden skin on the nape of her neck. ‘You had better have something good for me.’

‘Will a greeting do?’ said Cornelius, his face melting back to an approximation of his natural features. Damson Beeton might not have recognized him now, but there was more than a touch of Cornelius Fortune in the old face he was wearing.

‘You look good, for someone who’s been dead for nearly thirty years.’ The Catgibbon turned to the others in the room. ‘Get out.’

The tone of her voice indicated that she was not inviting debate. The whippers and the crooked mechomancer hustled out.

‘You look good, too,’ said Cornelius. He inclined his head to indicate the boat. ‘And you seem to have done well for yourself. You took over Dirty Porterbrook’s crew after he died, I presume.’

‘And a few others besides,’ said the Catgibbon.

‘You always were the brains behind the operation, Jasmine. Everyone always used to look at you and stop with your body. They never bothered to wonder what was inside that head of yours.’

‘Brains enough that I never believed that body we found in the rookeries of Whineside was yours. I always knew you would disappear one day without a word. Just change your face and vanish into the crowd. It must be a constant temptation with your talent.’

‘We are what we were born to be.’

‘Yes, quite. Neither of us would have risen so far or so fast in Cassarabia, would we? Too many people who would recognize what we are.’

‘My father was Jackelian,’ said Cornelius.

‘Of course he was. But how happy would the caliph’s womb mages be if they knew that one of their tailor-made assassin bitches had escaped to Jackals and started breeding wild with the locals? I can still smell the half of you that’s your mother in your blood.’

‘Well, you smell as sweet as ever to me,’ said Cornelius. ‘Even if I am immune to the wiles of your sweat.’

‘Where did you go, farm boy?’

‘I tried my luck in Quatershift, before the troubles began.’

‘The court of the Sun King? Rich pickings, for the capital’s greatest thief.’

‘Actually,’ said Cornelius, ‘I tried going straight.’

The Catgibbon laughed at the idea. ‘That I would have liked to have seen. But now you’re back in Middlesteel. I can’t blame you. What have the shifties got left that’s worth stealing now? They can’t even put food on the table, let alone set it with silver plate to eat off. You’re not really working for a rival crew, are you?’

‘No,’ admitted Cornelius.

‘No. You barely tolerated working under Dirty Porterbrook’s patronage. But even you and your pliable assassin’s face couldn’t have afforded to have both Ham Yard and the flash mob hunting you down; which rather begs the question …’

‘What I’m really doing here? You’ve grabbed a friend of mine. A steamman friend. I was hoping to find him.’

The Catgibbon looked puzzled, then her delicate golden-furred face split into a most unladylike laugh. ‘Is that it? Is that all? No wonder I haven’t been reading news sheet tales of paintings and jewels mysteriously going missing from the residences of the quality. Sweet Circle, that’s a turn up for the books, you really have gone straight. What happened to you, Cornelius, what happened to the reign of crime of the Nightshifter?’

‘Allow that a year held in a Commonshare organized community changes a man’s perspective.’

The Catgibbon stroked his face, a cruel look settling on her face. ‘Poor you.’

‘Why is my friend lying in pieces on a table in your jinn house?’

‘Nothing personal, farm boy. He’s just a job, one that is paying handsomely at that.’

‘Grave robbing? You used to only take on jobs that amused you. The years have changed you.’

‘We’re no longer those two young greenhorns that arrived in Middlesteel without a guinea to our names,’ said the Catgibbon. ‘And the Nightshifter I remember wouldn’t have cared three turds for some senile old steamer that’s been nothing but a pigeon rest for most of the century.’

Damn it. She was too canny to spill the beans on the steamman’s fate, even with Cornelius tied up and at her mercy in the jinn palace.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll let me go then, for old time’s sake?’

She grinned at him, but not fondly. ‘I would love to, but you know how it works. If I let you go, everyone’s going to be talking about how the Catgibbon caught a card counter and went soft on him. Then the smaller crews will stop sending me my percentage and start sending me toppers with daggers down their trousers and strangle-cords sewn into their cuffs.’

‘I thought you might say something like that.’

She fingered the crown of thorns on his head. ‘I’m going to do exactly what you did to me. I’m going to walk out on you. Without a word. Without looking back. Then I’m going to let my crew turn your mind into a beef broth with our crown of thorns. You always liked wearing all those different faces — by the time my boys have finished with you, you’ll have a fresh new personality to go along with each of them.’

‘It irritates you, doesn’t it,’ said Cornelius, ‘that I’m as immune to the wiles of your body’s perfume as your old owners back in Cassarabia.’

‘You’re nothing but a halfbreed desert assassin,’ said the Catgibbon, ‘and if you wanted to keep on bloody living, you should have stayed back in Quatershift.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘It’s odd that you should say that, because part of me did stay behind in their death camp. I’d say round about the two extra pounds you spotted on your ingenious set of scales. Let me show you …’

He sent the flex command to his arm and the limb went rigid, snapping the cords binding him to the chair. She was diving for the door even as her whippers outside were piling back inside. But Cornelius wasn’t planning on leaving by the grand entrance. One of the double nozzles that had emerged from his artificial wrist sprayed the porthole with a circle of blow-barrel sap and he ducked as a squirt of ignition chamber liquid left his arm. The explosion scythed out above Cornelius, knocking the Catgibbon’s thugs back into the corridor while he flopped sideways out of the torn hull, the cold waters of the Gambleflowers slapping into his face as the Catgibbon’s scream of rage chased him down.

Lead balls bubbled past him, the pistol shots’ velocity broken by the black river waters. He swum downwards, watching the crown of thorns carried away towards the darkness of the river bottom, chased to the deeps by the flash mob’s volley. A gutta-percha tube snaked out of his arm and Cornelius took a greedy gulp of air as his feet beat him down deeper into the grasp of old mother Gambleflowers. The tidal flow quickly sucked him out west, the jinn house nowhere to be seen when he finally broke the surface. He must have been carried a mile downriver at least. Cornelius’s life would be far more dangerous now that the head of the flash mob knew he was alive and living in Middlesteel. But there was nothing to connect his old life to his solitary existence on Dolorous Isle. Nothing to connect a ghost-like thief that had made fools out of Ham Yard with the demon of vengeance stalking Quatershift.

The man had won without the mask.

‘You were lucky tonight,’ the words drifted down the river from Dolorous Isle.

‘I let myself be captured to find out more about their plans.’

‘Keep telling yourself that,’ whispered the mask.

Hotter each day, the Sprite of the Lake followed the Shedarkshe southeast. The hull of the u-boat seemed to sweat tears of coolant, the creak and crack of the heat exchangers the expedition’s constant companion. Nerves were on edge now — fights and squabbles a daily affair — as they charted waters that had never been inked on any explorer’s map. The commodore marked their progress with a compass and cartographer’s nib, the blank expanse on the neatly lined roll of paper a reminder of how deep into the unknown they were sailing.

‘No sign of any seed ships yet,’ said Commodore Black. ‘We’ll be running into their borderlands soon. I hope our blessed steamman knows what he is about.’

Amelia stood behind the two pilot seats and gritted her teeth. If the mercurial Ironflanks didn’t know where they were going then the whole expedition was in trouble.

‘The Daggish are out there,’ said Bull Kammerlan. ‘If they’re not patrolling this far west, it’s a measure of their strength, not weakness.’

‘I thought it was only Ironflanks who had ventured this far out?’ said Amelia. ‘What do you know about it?’

Bull grinned. ‘The craynarbians around the fringes of the greenmesh worship the Daggish. When you think the gods protect you, you tend to get careless. Easy pickings.’

‘You really are disgusting,’ said Amelia. ‘How many thousands of lives did your slavers ruin in Liongeli?’

‘The way I see it, girl, we were giving them a step up. You’ve only seen a taste of what it takes to survive out in the jungle. Life on a Cassarabian slave block looks pretty sweet after you’ve survived out in this hell for a few years.’

‘That must be why you had to gas their village,’ said Amelia, ‘rather than selling the tribes a passage downriver.’

‘You may be sniffy now, dimples, but it’s my crew’s knowledge of the Shedarkshe that’s kept your skull connected to your neck so far, rather than shrunk down to the size of an apple on some war chief’s necklace.’

‘That’s enough, Bull,’ said the commodore. ‘Your river lore’s got you and your rascals out of a water sentence back in Bonegate, so be thankful for that.’

‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Bull. ‘The water is where we both belong, one way or another, eh?’

‘Old time’s sake only goes so far,’ warned the commodore.

‘Yes, I do seem to remember you saying that at my court martial.’

‘Channel is splitting up ahead, skipper,’ called Billy from his station. ‘Three courses.’

‘Stop, full,’ ordered the commodore. He pulled a speaking tube out of the wall and dialled Ironflanks’ quarters on the panel. ‘Up to the bridge with you, old steamer. You never said anything about a choice of tributaries in the river.’

Commodore Black looked puzzled. There was no answer from the speaking tube.

‘I’ll find him,’ said Amelia, swinging out of the pilot room.

Find him she did, lying in a pool of dark oil that had vomited out between the seal joins around his boiler, the smell of magnesium in the air as his legs jerked and twitched in the delusion of his quicksilver dreams. His trip did not look like a good one. For a moment she didn’t know whether she should feel pity or revulsion for the creature of the metal. She called the master of arms on the room’s speaker tube and Veryann turned up with two of her fighters fast behind her.

‘By the blood of Forman Thawnight,’ swore Veryann, seeing the half-comatose steamman lying on the floor. ‘I thought we had confiscated his stash of quicksilver.’

‘He must have had some more hidden away,’ said Amelia. She ran her finger along the tell-tale trail of white-veined coal dust that lay on a folding table in the corner of the cabin. A terrible thought occurred to her. ‘The quicksilver you confiscated from Ironflanks after he boarded, what did you do with it?’

‘Master of arms gallery,’ said Veryann, ‘locked inside one of the rifle lockers. The armoury is guarded by my people, day and night both.’

‘Let’s go.’

Veryann led Amelia past a sentry and through the u-boat’s narrow training range. A second sentry stood guard over the ship’s small arms store, but despite the Catosian’s vigilance, Amelia’s heart sank when she saw the empty locker that was opened for her.

‘This is not possible,’ said Veryann. ‘The sentries are rotated. There is no shift when this room is not locked and guarded.’

‘Maybe a ghost stole it,’ said Amelia. Damn the traitor’s eyes. The turncoat in their midst had done it again, wrecking their chances as surely as they had burnt out the gas scrubbers. ‘Oh, Ironflanks, why did you have to pick now to be weak?’

‘I should have flushed the narcotic overboard,’ said Veryann. ‘But I thought it might come in useful as an inducement if our steamman scout started becoming uncooperative.’

Amelia checked the grille on the air vent in the ceiling. It was loose. If someone knew the Sprite’s layout well enough … ‘Yes, you should have flushed that filth down the head.’

‘The steamman may not have known there was quicksilver in his coke supply,’ said Veryann. ‘The traitor might have poisoned his coal bins.’

Amelia shook her head. ‘No, Ironflanks knew what he was doing. I don’t know what he’s trying to escape from, but whatever it is, he didn’t need to be fooled into taking quicksilver. Just leaving it on his table would have been enough.’

Veryann looked at her two soldiers. ‘Lie the steamman in his bunk. His dream-state could last for days.’

‘Put a double guard on Ironflanks’ room,’ said Amelia. ‘Nobody to be left alone with him. Two at all times.’

‘Does that include you, professor?’

‘Me, Commodore Black, every jack in this crew.’

‘I didn’t bring nearly enough free company fighters for this expedition,’ said Veryann. ‘There’s not a cabin or hull plate in this underwater antique we’re not guarding now.’

‘And there was me thinking Quest was being a touch paranoid when he put marines on board,’ said Amelia.

‘The cleverest man in Jackals?’ said Veryann. ‘No, I think he was being just cautious enough. There’s a saying in the city-states: just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’renot out to get you.’

Amelia looked over at poor Ironflanks, his voicebox murmuring in some low-level language that sounded like static over the Sprite’s speakers. ‘Damn it, you fool of an old steamer.’

His quicksilver-induced nightmare continued. Theirs was just beginning.

Commodore Black dripped sweat on the pilot room’s map table. The only thing the cartographers knew for sure about the river Shedarkshe was that it continued southeast and eventually ended up at the sea-sized lake that lapped against the shores of the Daggish capital city. ‘Well, Bull, you’re our river man, what do you know about these channels?’

‘The channel on the right doesn’t go as far as the river’s source. The one in the middle is said to be the shortest route and its waters are the widest, but it’s going to be hairy with seed-ship patrols sooner rather than later. The one on the far left steers nor’-east and is reputed to be the long way round, narrow waters at points, but it eventually rejoins the main trunk of the Shedarkshe. It’s out of the way, but that’s where I’d put my money.’

‘It isn’t your money,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s Quest’s.’

‘His money but my blessed boat,’ said the commodore.

‘And I’d like to survive this fool’s voyage with my hide intact enough to spend the bonus that Quest promised us,’ said Bull.

‘We should wait for Ironflanks to recover,’ said Amelia. ‘He knows the greenmesh better than any of us.’

‘Right now he doesn’t know his metal arse from his tin elbow, girl,’ said Bull. ‘You want to lay down here for a few days, you might as well run up a signal buoy with an invite to the first seed ship that sails out this far. We need to wait for night, surface, clean our air, then its deep sailing all the way until we’ve got the lights of the Daggish nest glinting in our periscope.’

‘Better a moving target, right now,’ said Commodore Black. He had made his decision. ‘Mister McCabe, Mister Snow, rig stations for narrow waters. Ahead slow. If that lunatic steamer has his wits about him when we tank for air, we’ll ask his opinion on our course. Right now, left channel it is. Long and easy sounds mighty fine if we are to be dealing with these mortal terrible jungle lords.’

Amelia said nothing. She could sense the danger lurking for them down this tapered offshoot of the Shedarkshe. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something desperately wrong about the commodore’s long and easy channel. And whatever it was, they were sailing straight for it.

Commodore Black pushed the periscope back into the ceiling. ‘Cloudy and moonless, a good night to sit on the surface for a while. Take us up, Mister McCabe. Tank for air. Let’s clean my beautiful girl’s lungs out before we put our necks on the block for these wicked Daggish.’

The Sprite’s nose erupted out of the dark waters of the Shedarkshe like a whale surfacing for air, the rest of the u-boat following. As she settled on the surface of the tributary, hatches along her port side opened and started venting stale air while hatches on the starboard side sucked in clean air from outside, febrile and scented with night flowers from the thick jungle.

Amelia checked on Ironflanks, but he was still in no state to gainsay their passage down the river’s fork. Lying on the bunk, he was making strange whistling noises with his voicebox — partway between a song and some call of one of the jungle creatures. Last chance to stretch her legs topside. She exited via the nearest conning tower. Others in the exped ition had the same idea. Gabriel McCabe was sitting with his legs hanging over the Sprite’s hull, his dark fingers tapping a mumbleweed pipe on the side of the boat.

Amelia sat down next to him. ‘The crew is nervous.’

‘They have good reason to be, professor.’ The first mate pointed down the river. There was a night mist on the surface, the Sprite gently pushing against the current towards it. They might as well be sailing through the gates of the underworld denied by the Circlist faith. ‘If anyone has ever sailed further upriver than Bull’s slave raiders, they never made it back to Rapalaw Junction to boast about it.’

A line of crewmen in diving gear left the conning tower in front of them, ready to give the u-boat’s diving planes and hull a final check before they embarked on the last leg of their perilous voyage.

‘I know it’s a risk,’ said Amelia. Damn, but it had seemed so much less of a risk when she had been looking at map tables in Abraham Quest’s offices, drawing up their supply lists and making plans for the Sprite’s recovery and resurrection with Fulton’s submarine engineers. ‘But we have to believe it’s worth it.’

‘Are you following this dream for your sake, or the sake of your father?’ asked Gabriel McCabe. ‘Even if we make it to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo without being blown apart by a Daggish patrol, there are no guarantees that you will find a clue to the position of Camlantis in the heavens.’

‘Water preserves crystal-books,’ said Amelia. ‘The best records we have of the Camlantean civilization have been fished out of ancient shipwrecks.’

‘You know in your heart we will find nothing but the ruined, drowned basement levels of their city, full of nothing but the skeletons of any who were left behind for the Black-oil Horde to slaughter.’

‘They wanted their legacy to survive,’ said Amelia. ‘They knew the time would come when another civilization would transcend the dark ages, would be ready to embrace their society and its learning.’

‘Is Jackals that society, professor?’ asked the first mate.

‘We are!’ said Amelia. ‘Like Camlantis, we are a democracy. Like Camlantis, we have held the power for hundreds of years to conquer every other nation on the continent, yet we have used that power only to preserve our society and keep our people safe.’

‘The ancients did not hang children outside Bonegate for dipping pocket-books and stealing silk handkerchiefs,’ said Gabriel McCabe. ‘Nor did they dirt-gas thousands of innocents in Quatershift from the safety of a fleet of aerostats during the great war. We are not, I think, ready for their knowledge.’

‘You don’t understand; we can use their teachings to change Jackals,’ said Amelia, ‘to make things better. We can use it to end hunger and starvation, end poverty, end disease, end conflict. They had such a society, why should we deny ourselves that chance?’

Gabriel McCabe relit his pipe. ‘For myself I am happy enough to have a berth on a seadrinker, serving under an honourable skipper, rather than being beached back in Middlesteel; even sailing up the Shedarkshe is better than such a fate. But I have a feeling you will be disappointed by what we find. I do not know much about archaeology and history, professor, but I know people well enough from all my time in the confines of a u-boat. We are not big enough for your ideas.’

‘I hope you are wrong, Gabriel,’ said Amelia. ‘We will have come a long way for nothing if you are correct.’

The first mate’s pipe began to grow as he tapped his old weed out, twisting and turning on the deck like a wooden serpent. Amelia looked at it in horror. ‘Gabriel, what kind of sorcery is this?’

‘Kiss the pipe,’ said Gabriel McCabe, ‘the mumbleweed will feed you, give you strength.’

‘Get it away from me,’ said Amelia, stepping back. Leaves sprouted out of Gabriel McCabe’s face, his dark limbs twisting upwards towards the sky. ‘Your face, your face!’

‘I’m becoming a tree,’ said Gabriel McCabe. His bones cracked as they splintered. ‘The moon is too cold to go under the water again. My roots will drink from the Shedarkshe.’

Amelia stumbled into the conning tower. Two Catosian mercenaries fell out of the door, their shine-swollen muscles no longer able to be contained by their armoured jackets. Belts snapped and fabric tore, showering the deck with crystal rifle charges as the women changed into dog-things, balls of taut muscle snuffling and scratching at the hull of the u-boat. She tried to push them away but she noticed her own arms were becoming squid-like tentacles, slimy and wet and flopping off the Catosian dog women. Amelia tried to scream but her mouth was a cone of clawed teeth and all that came out was a chatter of bone.

Pulling themselves out of the river, the repair crew climbed the ladder back to the flat deck of the Sprite. Bull Kammerlan prodded one of the Catosian soldiers crawling across the decking with his trident. She mewled, her hand trying to catch some imaginary shape in front of her. Satisfied, Bull booted her unconscious with a lash of his weighted diving boots. Laughing, he reached for Amelia’s collar and hauled her into the conning tower, his divers marching in front and giving the wild crewmen of the u-boat a mild taste of their capacitors to clear the way.

Circle, but it was good to be back in the slaving business.