The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‹An oblique way,› Billy used her voice for the benefit of the others. ‹The dark engine my faction concealed inside Camlantis to banish the city into the no-space realm after we blew her into the sky may still have enough power left inside its energy sinks to repeat the exercise. If so, we can send the city away again, trap Quest and our disassembler weapon in a place where his terrible solution — my people’s solution — will wither in absolute isolation.›

‘May still have enough power?’

‹We must go, my time left with you here is short.›

Amelia fingered the skin on her burning left hand. Part ruined, the remains of it felt like a lump of numb meat. She sprinted away, followed by Ironflanks and the elderly agent of the Court of the Air.

Quest watched the disciplined lines of his academy cadets filing down into the chasm, suspension capsules hissing open to swallow each young man and woman in turn, then filling with the strange yellow gel that would allow them to sleep for years, their bodies nourished, and — more importantly — their souls cloaked from the ravages of the cleansing mist. Young, malleable minds that had known nothing but loyalty to the House of Quest. Rescued from the cruel streets of the capital and the other industrial towns, then fed, clothed, taught, nurtured, honed into the best they could be. Philosopher kings. The first generation of Camlanteans to seed an empty world.

Briefly, Quest felt a twinge of grief that there hadn’t been someone like him to save his own siblings from their early deaths in the crowded, dirty tenements of Middlesteel. He sighed. He always felt so normal, so average. But the rational part of his mind realized that a person such as himself was born only once in a thousand generations. Well, the universe had borne him into her grace as a watchmaker, so it was beholden on him to fix the broken clock that was their world. Honour the vow that he made over the dirt of his brother and sisters’ paupers’ graves after the last of them had moved along the Circle for their new lives, leaving him all alone.

‘No more poverty,’ he whispered. ‘No more needless suffering.’

His engineers busied themselves about the chamber, cloaking crowns fixed around their scalps, the sounds of battle filtering down the moving stairs along with the crates of supplies still being portered inside the tomb. There were enough Catosian fighters and airship crew to hold off the lashlites for the final half hour he needed. Then the dirty lizards’ lifeless corpses would be raining out of the sky as the black mist climbed to embrace their aerial regiments.

Nobody would miss them in his brave new world.

Robur stood up, the melted components of the steammen still white hot in the ruins of the pocket airship. The soldiers of the Catosian company escorting the mechomancer stood silently behind him, wisely holding their tongues and their judgment on this debacle.

He hadn’t needed the sailors’ garbled reports of a murderous steamman running about at large in the streets with a couple of murderous women by its side to tell him of his mission’s failure — the ruptured heart of the airship bosun spoke volumes for which of his thirteen test subjects had shrugged off his virus. Was Ironflanks’ survival due to some esoteric technique of the knights steammen, like their ability to fight with sound? Abraham Quest was not a forgiving man and word of this disaster was sure to filter back to him, imperilling Robur’s seat in the perfect new world they had planned together.

Robur looked up at the commander who stood at least a head higher than the top of his own thinning skull. ‘You have a tracker capable of following them?’

She saluted. ‘There is a worldsinger cowering in the Leviathan, a soul-sniffer. He can follow the trail of their essence like a bloodhound if we motivate him properly.’

‘Send for him.’

He was not stymied yet. This was a setback, not a complete failure. What had been imagined by the mighty mind of the great Robur could not simply be unimagined, and there were plenty more steammen he could kidnap and infect with the work of his genius. He just needed to perfect the technique. Yes, the dissection of a certain steamman scout running around outside would be the first step to a far more potent form of his virus of the metal.

Robur beckoned for his mechomancer’s tools, watching while his assistants placed his oak cases in front of him. Behind Robur, the Catosian commander looked on with professional interest as he removed a series of blades and rotating teeth belts, attaching them to a hilt with a high-tension clockwork drive. The Catosian city-states had so little experience fighting the people of the Steamman Free State. But he would show these unnaturally muscled beauties how it was done.

‘What is that?’ asked the officer, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.

‘A hull-opener,’ said Robur. ‘A steamman hull-opener.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Three of the House of Quest’s armoured vehicles steamed backwards, their single tracks bouncing over the boulevards, the short stubby cannons on their prows at maximum elevation, tossing shells upwards. Reversing through the stream of fleeing sailors, they were followed by the tentacles of a skrayper, gel-swollen trunks of flesh lined with spines swaying and slaying as they went. But even the reins inserted above the skrayper’s sensitive ridge of optical cells could not urge the monster to squeeze any lower between the spires, so its lashlite handlers had to be content with trailing its twitching tentacles along the pavement, whipping across lines of Catosians as the soldiers emptied their rifles. A few of them were left flailing, impaled on the wiry flesh as if they were so many insects on Dr Billickin’s patent flypaper.

One of the tentacles curled out, guided by the heat-sensing flesh inside the limb and, wrapping itself around the hot barrel of a vehicle’s cannon, battered two tanks off the road before raising the vehicle — treads spinning useless in the air — into its monstrous maw filled with whale-like teeth. The skrayper fed on sunlight, but it had to get its trace minerals from somewhere. A cannon gunner attempted to climb out of a side hatch but only succeeded in falling into the gullet early, passing straight through the teeth and into the jelly-like absorption gel. The armoured carriage followed him, rotating slowly through the stomach liquids as the last of its energy expended itself through the track. A shiver ran down the skin of the skrayper. Oh, this was good. Far richer in irons than the massive schools of helium globules that drifted through the stratosphere. After this day of feeding it would be able to drift lazily through the heavens for months, just filling itself with the glorious white light.

At the end of the boulevard the Minotaur crashed through the buildings of Camlantis, one of its three massive aerospheres severed and making its own last flight into the heavens, the remaining two hull units blanketed by the bodies of as many skraypers as could latch onto the airship, squeezing the life out of this strange new entrant into their realm. It took every iota of the lashlite riders’ talents to keep the creatures focused on ripping apart the Minotaur and not flailing their tentacles at each other. This was not breeding season and without the pain the lashlites were able to cause with their riding wires, the sky would have been filled with a mass of furious, sparring skraypers.

On the ground, a line of Catosian soldiers ran towards the collapsing airship only to be driven back by the ferocity of the lashlite assault. Fifty flights of aerial warriors were circling overhead, each squadron of the flight taking a turn to peel off from the formation and fill the air above the downed aerostat with a storm of lances — whistling down to strike the hundreds of crewmen trying to climb out of the torn walls of their airship.

‘Withdraw!’ barked a Catosian centurion, recognizing the grim reality of their situation. ‘Find a spire and mark your targets from the tower windows.’

A bugler took up her command and sounded the retreat, poignant echoes of it bouncing off the shining skyline of Camlantis. They kept their line, each woman in lockstep as they fell back, sliding glass charges into their rifles and maintaining a volley of fire up at the diving lizards, closing ranks where lances thudded through their number. The enemy seemed almost fanatical about retrieving the corpses of their lifeless warriors; but unlike the lashlites, the free company fighters had no compulsions about abandoning the bloody carcasses of their fallen behind them.

Waving her pistol, the centurion fell back through an archway into an arcade of what might once have been shops. Striding out of a lifting room at the centre of the arcade came Veryann.

‘First!’