The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

feeding the horn. She nearly passed out with the agony, black spots dancing around her eyes. The engine’s horns battered her with waves of gravity, gripping her with nausea, making her body part of its antennae, joining her crucified hand to the skin of the universe, drinking the energy and soul from her body, and her blood — the blood that was still fizzing with whatever was left of the ghost of Billy Snow.

Amelia had to fight to keep her remaining good hand pressed to the central panel of the dark engine, shivering until the icons flickering there started to blur and reform in front of her eyes, changing into Jackelian common script.

LOAD51. Charging spin-sinks now. Singularity leakage is no longer being contained.

‘Billy, are you safely inside that thing?’

LOAD12. Confirmed. Download to the engine-mind is completed. All degraded portions of my combat pattern are running in damage simulation. Not much time left for either of us, now.

Amelia wrenched her hand off the dark engine’s horn, trying not to scream as the lump of flesh was hauled free. ‘Is there enough power left inside your dark engine for a second expulsion of the city?’

The answer flowed across the dark engine’s central panel: REBUILD-PERS8. Confirmed, there is sufficient power, but the no-space translation will definitely not be stable this time. You must go.

‘In the name of the Circle go where, Billy? We’re scraping the stars on a couple of miles’ worth of broken floatquake land high above the Sepia Sea.’

The dark engine was shaking the walls of reality; she could feel the power of the dreadful thing, rewriting the equations of the universe around them, dimensions that were never meant to coexist remade and squeezed into their own world.

PERS8-REBUILD-SUCCESS. Go as far as possible, professor. If it comes to it, you must jump. If that isn’t possible, find a charged pistol and use it on yourself. The alternative — staying here after the city’s translation — will not be pleasant.

On the dark engine’s central panel the sigils had become numbers, counting down. Counting down fast.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The sincere faces of Abraham Quest’s engineers — their heads weighed down by cloaking crowns — had gathered in reverent silence to watch the moment they were to inherit the Earth.

‘This will be a day you speak of for many years to come,’ cried Veryann.

‘Indeed it will,’ said Quest. He looked at the assembly, nodding at his followers in proud approval, then entered the first digits of the firing code on the black mist’s release panel. ‘The day of the death of every imperfection that has marred the race of man since its inception.’

‘Your death!’ said Veryann, plunging her dagger into the mill owner’s chest.

Quest stumbled back from the console, looking in dis belief at the dagger protruding from his breast.

Veryann’s face melted away to be replaced by the features of Cornelius Fortune. ‘I remembered to use my left hand this time.’

‘You — you-’

Cornelius removed a glass sphere from underneath the folds of his fur-lined high-altitude coat, pressing it into the bloodstained hands of the mill owner. Quest stared dumbly at the little clockwork head whirring around on top of the grenade, two hemispheres of explosive liquid separated by a thin crystal membrane. The others in the room broke the silence and the shocking unreality of the moment with a collective howl of fury, rushing towards the killer who would murder their beloved master. With his spare hand Cornelius pulled out a demon mask and slipped it over his skull, filling the chamber with the terrible laughter of Furnace-breath Nick. He flopped behind the shelter of the console as the grenade blast sent the mob of attacking engineers and Catosians flying back towards the black mist’s testing rooms.

Only Furnace-breath Nick stood up from behind the smoking ruins of the console, fire and sparks shrouding his figure as he shrugged off his airship coat. Abraham Quest was still alive — barely — and was crawling towards the balcony overlooking the sleepers’ coffins, leaving a snail’s trail of gore in his wake, when he heard the eerie whistle-song.

Furnace-breath Nick sauntered in front of him, playing a bone-white pipe. ‘I’m not as good a musician as Septimoth was, but sink me, his mother’s spine always did carry a first-rate tune.’

Good enough to have summoned the queen’s people and the seers of the crimson feather as they travelled up towards Camlantis. Good enough to have sent a flight of lashlites diving after Furnace-breath Nick’s plummeting body, catching him and depositing him back on one of the city’s spires.

Quest pulled himself to the edge of the chasm, the yellow light of thousands of gel-filled capsules illuminating the agony on his face. ‘My — children — my — people.’

‘They’ll sleep longer than a year,’ said Furnace-breath Nick, ‘and I don’t know what they’ll wake up to, but whatever they find, it isn’t going to be Camlantis.’

‘Please,’ begged Quest, ‘you can still — change things — enter the code.’

‘Oh, but I am changing things,’ laughed Furnace-breath Nick. The demon-masked figure looked back at the ignition console. It was a smouldering ruin, as wrecked as Abraham Quest’s dreams of utopia. There would be no black mist replicating across the face of the world. No resetting of the world to zero. No philosopher-kings ruling a sanitary realm of super-science. It was the mill owner’s vision of a serene, clean, society of plenty that lay burning in that fire.

Quest raised an arm, pleading. ‘Fool — you are condemning our future to — stay — this violent, impoverished hell.’

‘Yes, but isn’t that what a devil does?’

‘Please — think what — you are — doing — please, you are a man — more than a mask …’

Furnace-breath Nick raised two of his fingers in the ancient Jackelian affront — the insulting, inverted position of the lion’s teeth — then walked over to the moving stairs to the surface. He left Quest’s dying, broken form to gaze upon the last of the Camlanteans. Sleeping now, for time without end. The future was rude, crude and raw. Alive. The future was Jackelian.

The eyepiece in his Furnace-breath Nick mask automatically adjusted to the wild energies outside. In the shadow of the tomb, the ground was shaking, splintering howls echoing from the towers and spires of the forgotten land, while above him the sky was pulsing with light. These planes of radiance were not the ordered forces that had summoned Camlantis back from her exile, but instead an angry storm of nameless colours that swarmed around each other, whirlwinds of energy spiralling down, decapitating spires and walking destruction across the city, sucking whole districts into a netherworld they would never return from.

‘Oh, what larks,’ whispered his mask. ‘Camlantis is growingon me. A pity about Abraham’s bright shiny new world, butyou wouldn’t have liked it, no, not our cup of caffeel at all.’

‘Shut up,’ ordered Furnace-breath Nick. ‘And enjoy the view.’

In the atmosphere above, the lashlites were swarming away from the dying zone while the ground cracked beneath them. Over the sounds of the collapsing city, the hypnotic rise and fall of expansion engines filled the air. It was the Leviathan. Some of the sailors had blown the nose dome of their airship off with improvised explosives and the tattered, torn explorer of the heavens was limping away on her remaining two engines. The airship’s hull was clear of lashlites now, but her torn caten ary curtain spilled ballonets into the air from a dozen gashes along her starboard. The Leviathan was leaking lift even as she fled, fatally shattered.

Furnace-breath Nick opened his arms in greeting and danced an absurd jig outside the tomb, vast clouds of dust from the destroyed buildings enveloping him.

Now this, this was more bloody like it.

Amelia only just managed to pull herself out of the hatch and onto the trembling pavement before the ladder-lined service tunnel crumpled into itself. A geyser of rubble exploded out of the hole. Ironflanks was nearly flung off his clunking feet, still holding the torn-off manhole cover, the smooth round shape forming and reforming in his hand, trying to close a seal it was no longer attached to.