fast to see at the horde of creatures trying to mount the walkway. There were few who got to observe an agent of the Court of the Air’s fighting tricks and lived to tell the tale. And unfortunately, it didn’t look like Amelia was going to be one of them.
‘Any time soon would be good, dearie,’ called the old woman.
Amelia fled along the narrow second-storey gantry — her escape feeling like betrayal even though it might be survival for the world. There was no time for farewells.
That would come soon enough, soon enough for all of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Court of the Air’s black sphere hung above the city, high enough that the army of lashlite warriors and their captured skraypers were sweeping through the heavens at a healthy distance below. The sphere was drifting over the sundered land, the Special Observer Corps with their portable scopes seeking to provide an adequate reconnaissance before feeding their findings back to the Court. The models of Jackelian society that turned on the vast drums of the Court’s transaction engines needed masses of accurate data to hold the nation true to the course laid down by the late, great Isambard Kirkhill.
‘There’s some good news,’ said the SOC surveillant from his bucket seat. ‘Our three missing airships are down there.’
Their mission commander wound his seat down from the pilot dome. ‘What’s the bad news, old stick?’
‘Well, I have to say, that would be just about everything else.’
A hatch opened and a head poked out from the heliograph operations room. ‘Analyst level back home have identified the style of architecture, but they pretty much had to go to the fiction shelf to do it.’ He passed up a stretch of tape that had been flashed across to the mission commander.
‘You’ve got to be bloody joking me,’ said the wolftaker reading the message. One Harold Stave. He looked down on the spires of Camlantis. ‘There’s a bit of classical history repeating down there, lads. But is it for the good or for the worse, that’s the question?’
And there was a more fundamental question that greater minds than his would be puzzling over, too. The three missing airships, property of the most glorious House of Guardians, made this their problem. Their location, far out over the Sepia Sea and well beyond the writ of Jackals, made it someone else’s.
Which viewpoint was going to prove stronger?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
At one end of the sewer chamber stood a row of sentient tree-trunks — something approximating faces in the bark gurning and leering at Amelia — their branch-like limbs wavering towards her in silent agony. They put her in mind of Tree-head Joe and the Daggish, bringing back memories of Bull Kammerlan’s offhand comments concerning the ruler of the greenmesh. For a rogue and a rascal with the scruples of a Gallowhill alley cat, the hole left by the u-boat privateer’s death ran deeper than it should have.
‹
‘Keep your strength,’ said Amelia.
‹
There! By the far wall. The dark engine she had seen in Billy’s memories, a large polygon of jet-black material, sucking down whatever small vestige of energy was still available through the glow tubes in the ceiling above. The device sat there, at least as tall as she was, distorting space itself. Tiny currents of matter rippled around the polygon. Looking at the abominable thing was like trying to stare through a wall of water. Twin horns curved out of the top of the dark engine, tapering to needle-sharp points. They were the horns of a demon.
Behind Amelia the line of filtration trees appeared to undulate in fear as she approached it. Had the trees somehow gleaned the dark engine’s purpose? Did they ascribe their millennia-long banishment and hibernation — their long dark night — to this terrible device?
‘What do I need to do?’
‹
She laid her good hand — her right palm — on the dark object and it seemed to suck her in with a tug like gravity; then her skin started to tickle, the tickle becoming a flare of agonizing heat. ‘You could have bloody warned me …’
‹
‘… I would have used my left hand, the acid-ridden stump of it you’ve left me.’
‹
Lights appeared on the side of the polygon. Red sigils. An information language similar to Simple, but evolved by a couple of thousand years. What the enginemen and cardsharps of Jackals would give to see this. What she would give to trade places with them.
‹
‘Then we’re jiggered,’ said Amelia.
The world was dead. She was dead.
‹
‘Just fire up the boiler on this damn thing.’ It was taking every inch of Amelia’s willpower to keep her palm pressed against the engine. ‘Throw us as far from Jackals as you can.’
‹
‘Good for your people!’ screamed Amelia. ‘If they want to book an airship berth up here they can come and vote us down. You fling Camlantis back into the bloody void.’
‹
‘Exile! Banishment!’
‹
‘BILLY!’
‹
At last, one of the creatures that had been following the Jackelians through the sewer pipes had revealed itself, deeming the time right to claim its prey in the confusion. Damson Beeton rolled to the side, throwing the winged insect to the left. It was mosquito-fast: even fighting it in witch-time it clawed at her face with cantilevered mandibles, the agent barely turning her head in time to see its rotating teeth slip past her cheek. She danced around the thing, waiting for it to try and take her throat out with its mandibles, then, as it lashed forward, she smashed its compound eye with a fist. It twisted to bring her into the field of vision of its remaining eye, just where she had been expecting it to go — she blinded the last eye with a second crack of her hand. Kicking the thrashing thing back into the swarm of insect machines won the damson a couple of seconds as its comrades devoured the wounded creature.
Ahead of her, Ironflanks was dealing with more rotating teeth, these ones belonging to Robur’s hull-opener — the Quatershiftian swinging his weapon furiously and with little care for where it landed, the whine of high-tension
