murdered. Just one left alive, Amelia and the ancient Camlantean ghost echoing around her skull.
Amelia sunk to her knees. ‘What now?’
‹
CHAPTER NINETEEN
From the safety of his tower roof, the commodore pulled out a telescope from his bag of purloined supplies and extended the brass tube, training it on the street below. It was obvious where the tomb Billy Snow had warned them about sat; you just had to follow the trail of carriages and material being moved across the city, ant-like columns of vehicles leaving the airships on the ground.
He focused on the group of figures moving to the edge of Camlantis. It was nearly dawn now, the waters of the Sepia Sea just visible beneath the gaps in the cloud, a mirror of crushed diamonds glittering far below.
‘Ah, no,’ Commodore Black cursed beneath his oxygen regulator.
It was the face-changing lunatic Cornelius Fortune, being dragged along by a guard of airship sailors. And if Fortune was no longer at liberty, then it could only mean that devil Abraham Quest was still alive. The trail of fresh vehicles shuttling out from the airships surely meant that Billy Snow must have failed in his attempt to prevent the expedition accessing the tomb too.
Two of the three escapees finished. So it was all down to him again, then? Would the world give him no blessed rest? Hadn’t it had enough of him perched on the edge of this floating mausoleum, signalling the Court of the Air to no avail? Their wicked eyes had had little trouble noticing him when brave old Blacky had worn the name of Solomon Dark and harried parliament’s shipping with his royalist freebooters. Now, the one time in his life he actually needed the Court’s people to come calling with their dark ships and their cunning weapons, they were all asleep on their watch deck.
He shook his head sadly and pressed his eye to the telescope. With a brief struggle the airship sailors unlocked the chains binding the prisoner then tossed the figure off the edge of the city —
Jared Black got a brief glimpse of a Furnace-breath Nick mask flapping on the madman’s head, caught behind his neck on its ties, the winds playing with the tumbling body like a cat clawing a mouse. Cornelius Fortune had freed a bone-white pipe from his belt as he tumbled down, growing smaller and smaller, and the commodore heard a faint whistling as the fierce cross winds blew a funeral ditty through the pipe for him on his fall. Smaller and smaller, then the carpet of clouds swallowed the dwindling dot.
Commodore Black tugged a flask of the airship sailors’ rum rations out of his stolen sack. Blackstrap, they called it. As thick as treacle and filthy cheap stuff, but beggars could not be choosers. He took a swig and raised a toast to the last survivor — well, the last but one — of their brief intrepid jailbreak from the
‘You got the best of that one, you daft daring loon, leaving poor old Blacky to face these devils alone. Always me alone, always alone to save us all, damn my stars.’
The staff in the Court of the Air’s monitorarium huddled together in an unauthorized conference on the gantry. Rarely had the handover between the day watch and the night watch in the massive spherical chamber become so heated.
‘Floatquake lands tend towards the static.’
‘But they can follow the leylines, we’ve seen that happen.’
‘There’s no sky mass of such a magnitude even recorded.’
‘It could be a fresh floatquake …’
‘Then where’s the devastation on the ground? And there are buildings on this one.’
A hornet-like buzzing came from the bell near the speaker wire and monitor ten broke away from the exchange to look over the gantry, the slowly rotating scopes and their riders below like a carnival carousel embedded within an inverted planetarium.
Monitor ten picked up his speaking trumpet and phones. ‘What is it?’
The surveillant’s voice came back tinny over the wire. ‘Skraypers and lashlites.’
‘You’ve interrupted me for a lashlite hunt? I logged a dozen flights out hunting in the clouds yesterday. We have missing airships and a new sky mass to consider.’
‘No,’ said the surveillant, waving up from the scope below. ‘The sky is full of skraypers.
‘The lashlites? How many in the flight, man?’
‘All of them!’
Around the monitors’ platform every bell started buzzing as the watchful eyes of the Court of the Air began calling up in panic at the inexplicable sight. The monitors scattered to their posts, runners from the higher levels of the aerostat city bursting from the sphere’s lifting rooms as the chamber signalled for backup.
Monitor ten caught a brief glimpse of the numbers on the report being tallied and torn off to be ferried away by the runners.
‘Skraypers and lashlites. Oh my.’
Amelia watched the last section of the sausage-shaped pocket airship being inflated above her. They were putting it together in the centre of one of the city’s squares. A semi-rigid, just large enough to lift its three cabins — one for Amelia at the very back of the craft, a rear observation post without even a gantry across to the other two cabins, one for the pilot room, and directly connected behind the crew’s bridge, a hold full of infected spastic steammen, fizzing and shaking at each other as they blundered about the storage space. The old lady from the testing rooms was being manacled to the bench alongside Amelia, the mouth slot of her hex suit just large enough to accommodate the tubes of her breathing mask.
Abraham Quest came over, his head circled by the same cloaking crown that had saved Amelia from the death mist, and stood on the steps of the rear cabin. ‘You’ve made your choice, professor. All this way to find Camlantis, only to reject it. Such a waste. I shall dream of Camlantis for you, for when I awaken, I will find it reality.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘I am afraid I do.’ Quest pointed to three sailors wearing cloaking crowns, climbing up the steps to the airship. They entered through the storage hold and locked the pilot room door on the infected idiot steammen. Unlike Amelia’s window-less observation cabin, the forward pilot room was sealed with glass. Quest’s crew would travel in relative comfort while the two prisoners shivered on the seats of their exposed berth. ‘They have orders to release you on the soil of Jackals before travelling on to the Steamman Free State. You and the old lady can enjoy the countryside for the few days it will take the Camlantean mist to propagate and hunt you down. I don’t suppose the last days in Jackals will be pleasant, but you will have the solace of knowing that whatever panicked savagery you witness will be the race of man’s last.’
‘Someone will live down below,’ spat Damson Beeton. ‘Someone will survive and come back to pay you and your murdering followers back for what you’ve done.’
Quest shook his head sadly. ‘If it comforts you to think so, damson. But no, in two days’ time the only Jackelians left alive will be the ones in our little kingdom beyond the waves. In three days the last peasant in the pampas of Kikkosico will be dying. Within two weeks there will be nobody left alive in Concorzia or Thar. By the middle of the year the last u-boat of the Spumehead trade fleet will be desperately surfacing for its final taste of air and any polar barbarians remaining alive will be falling in their snow-covered longhalls. I am sorry, damson, but Isambard Kirkhill’s bankrupt vision is about to be retired, and everything else that is left-’ his hand swept across the city, ‘-will be Camlantis. A world of sanity, peace and reason — forever more.’
‹Please,› begged Billy Snow’s spectre.
‘Too late for that,’ said Quest. ‘We’re brewing up nicely downstairs. An hour for the mist to reach critical mass, another hour to bed down the first generation of our new Camlanteans in their cloaking coffins …’
