The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘We’re too far away, dearie,’ said Damson Beeton. ‘And lashlites are too proud to hunt a fleeing pocket airship. The god Stormlick fills the wings of those who hunt worthy prey, and that does not include chasing cowards who flee a fight.’

Amelia struggled vainly. ‘The people of the winds have got to stop Quest.’

‹They are too late,› said the voice in her skull. ‹The chamberyou saw in that tomb was designed to withstand all the ingenuitymy rebel grouping within the Camlantean polity couldthrow at it. The House of Quest can seal their people insideand release the death mist at their leisure after it has beenproduced in sufficient quantities to guarantee the exterminationof the world. Lashlite lances will not break their way in.’

‘There has to be a way to get inside it.’

‹There may be an alternative. But to get to it we need tobe free and back down on the streets of the city again. Whichof your hands do youvalue the most?›

‘What?’

‹Left or right?›

‘I’m right-handed.’

‹Left it is. Grit your teeth. Your screams will draw theattention of the crew.›

They did. One of the sailors put down the sounding scope he was using to guide the pocket airship between the Camlantean spires and turned around.

‘Have we been boarded?’ demanded the bosun, his peaked cap swapped for one of the soul-cloaking crowns.

‘It’s that bloody university woman,’ replied the sailor, staring out of the porthole. ‘Yelling like she’s being rogered by a pike.’

‘Go back and see what she’s about,’ ordered the bosun. ‘Unless she behaves, I’ll put her off early-’ he made a tipping motion with his hand, ‘-and give her a little wash in the sea without the bother of a landing.’

Unhooking one of the pistols from the gun rack on the wall, the sailor slipped a glass charge into the weapon’s breech, then unlocked the door to the storage cabin. Black oil washed the floor of the next compartment, thirteen imbecile steammen juddering about and spitting system fluids over the cargo hold, their voiceboxes humming in the nonsense tongue of a low-order language. Thirteen of the damn infected things. Unlucky for them and the future of the Steamman Free State both.

A tri-wheeled creature of the metal slipped up in front of the sailor, its dome of a head rotating before it pissed a stream of dark oil up at the airship sailor’s striped shirt.

‘Oh, you dirty little bugger,’ cursed the sailor.

One of the jack cloudies stuck his head through the pilot room door and laughed at the sight of his colleague. Humiliated, the fouled sailor kicked the idiot thing over with an angry lash of his boot, then squeezed around the steel box in the floor where the clockwork of the rudder guidance system was clacking away in response to the helmsman’s touch. Making enough of a noise that the sailor didn’t hear the strange whining from the steamman lying in the corner. Not that he would have recognized the sound if he had heard it. There wasn’t a mechomancer in the world — let alone an airship sailor — who would have recognized the noise of siltempter components resetting to zero in a final attempt to clear away the putrid steamman infection; for no mechomancer had ever been to the Liongeli jungle and made it back alive from the realm of Prince Doublemetal. And the annoyed skyman was many things, but he was no mechomancer.

The sailor opened the stern door of the storage hold and stepped out onto the rear gantry, calling across to the observation cabin behind. ‘Shut your cake-hole, woman. If you make one of us use the jenny line to come across to you, you’ll have cause to scream.’

But Amelia only yelled louder still as the thing that had burrowed deep into her mind continued to work its way down her bloodstream to her bound wrists, converting the salts in her left hand’s sweat glands into acid. Burning liquid bubbled from Amelia’s now blackened skin until at last the bonds snapped.

‹Rub your wrist over the damson’s hand ties now,› commanded the voice inside her skull.

She did as she was ordered and screamed as the cold metal of the agent’s manacles came into contact with her skin.

‘I’m bloody warning you for the last time,’ the sailor shouted.

‹That’s it, professor. I’m converting the chemicals in yourblood into a healing hyper-accelerant now. The pain’s mostlyin your mind.›

In the opposite cabin the sailor lifted his pistol and drew a bead on the bobbing woman opposite.

‹You should have enough acid left in your hand to rubonto the box on the belt of the damson’s hex suit. That’s themechanism to unlock her armour.›

‘Get ready to duck,’ said Damson Beeton, bending her head as far as the hex suit would permit to look across at the sailor. ‘I will tell you when.’

The sailor’s finger was closing around the trigger when Ironflanks’ four arms wrapped themselves around his chest. And compressed. It was the sailor’s turn to scream, struggling as the scout turned him about and pushed him into the gaggle of infected steammen, the imbeciles pawing his snapped ribs with metal manipulators and whistling in childish awe at his shuddering conversion into a broken bag of meat and bones. With a crack, the pistol in the dying sailor’s hand detonated into the steering box, the springs and cogs of the clockwork mechanism flailing as uselessly as the suddenly non-responsive rudder control turning in the pilot’s hands. The pocket stat pitched down; her externally-mounted expansion engines swivelling at angles that Quest’s airship works would never have envisaged, the dome of her pilot cabin shattering along with the mirrored glass of one of the Camlantean spires. Pushing forward, the pocket airship rammed herself deeper into the Camlantean structure, the rise and fall of her expansion engines fading as her propellers broke themselves trying to walk across the floor.

One of the remaining crewmen lay impaled on a shard of glass, but the bosun was still alive. He stumbled out of the wreckage into the tower, lifting up a brace of bell-barrelled pistols as he turned back towards his wrecked ship. Ironflanks appeared at the door of the cabin, an angel of vengeance covered in the oil of his kind and the blood of his softbody enemies. Ironflanks’ voicebox trembled with fury and the bosun recoiled back, his heart exploded by an arrow of sonic energy directed by the steamman like a punched nail. The commanding officer of the small craft slapped down, as dead as his airship.

Amelia slowly pulled herself out of the crumpled rear of the vessel, followed by Damson Beeton, her hex suit left abandoned in pieces on the observation cabin’s floor. Shattered glass was moving across the floor, flowing back up the wall to rebuild the broken window — regrowing itself around the foreign element that had attempted to pollute the integrity of the spire. The sound of the winds and the fighting outside was cut off as the window repaired itself.

‘Ironflanks, you are alive. But I saw you-’

‘I am reborn, Amelia softbody, but you may not like what I have become. A savage. A siltempter boiler heart driven by the wreckage of a steamman mind.’ Removing the cover from the airship’s broken expansion engine, Ironflanks balanced a pistol shell from the cabin outside the gas-mixing chamber.

Damson Beeton recognized what the scout was doing. She picked up the dead bosun’s brace of pistols and tucked them in her pinny, then pulled Amelia to the side. ‘Back we go, dear, let’s take cover.’

Inside the storage hold, the vision plate of one of the infected steammen pressed itself against the porthole.

‘Ironflanks,’ Amelia called, ‘your people are still inside there. You got better — there may be a cure!’

‘This is the cure,’ said Ironflanks, moving back as the blow-barrel gas ignited, the engine bursting apart and covering the pocket airship in flames. With the oil already inside the storage hold, the end was mercifully quick for the plague victims. Nodules appeared in the ceiling above, attempting to put out the fire, but the spire’s water supply had long since evaporated.

The thing inside Amelia’s head had become oddly silent.

‘Billy? You said there was another way to stop Quest and-’

‹I am decaying. This was only meant to be a battlefieldcopy of my essence, a combat transfer, an underhand trick tospread confusion among the foe. The synapses in yourprefrontal cortex are rewriting your mind’s pathways back totheir natural condition. You are forgetting me.›

‘You said there was a way to stop Quest releasing your mist …’