Damson Beeton steadied the steamman and shielded her face against the sunlight of the upper city — harsh and intense after the flickering world of the maintenance levels. She closed her eyes and extended her agent’s witching perception to feel the ground. ‘I sense no release of the black mist yet.’
Amelia pointed to the distant, dark shape of the departing
Ironflanks waved the hideously large hull-opener, trying to attract the attention of the fleeing regiments of lashlites above, but they and their captured skrayper steeds had realized the wound in the heavens was closing up. Few lashlites were staring down now at the floatquake land crumbling away beneath them. The battle was over, only escape and the selfish matter of survival concerned any still left alive here.
A spire at the end of their street stood surrounded by twirling fingers of the dimensional storm, creaking until it was ripped whole from the ground, vanishing into the hungry micro-vortex. For the second time that day Ironflanks invoked the spirits of his ancestors, as if he expected Zaka of the Cylinders to appear and convert his buckled and injured body into a vapour of stack smoke capable of surviving the final fall of Camlantis. Amelia pushed the storm-driven hair out of her eyes. Her dream was dying here, dying around her, an entire life’s work and purpose. Perhaps it was fitting her bones should end up on whatever cold, eternal orbit Billy Snow’s dark engine was casting Camlantis into. The three survivors reeled around as the clacking sound of an armoured carriage’s tracks carried across the corner of their road. Narrowly missing one of the collapsing towers and cutting through the rising cloud of wreckage, the iron vehicle was skidding all over the boulevard, towing something ungainly behind it that was swinging to and fro in the storm’s gusts. Seeming to notice them, the carriage righted its wavering passage and crunched towards the three survivors, the stubby cannon turrets on either side of the vehicle jouncing, dark and lethal.
Damson Beeton sighed and unshouldered the carbine she had liberated from one of the Catosian corpses. There was a single charge inside her rifle, one bullet against six tonnes of iron-riveted beast. ‘Circle on a stick, you’ve got to be kidding me.’
The carriage made a sickening slapping noise as it ran over dozens of corpses, human and lashlite, that littered the boulevard. But instead of running them down, the carriage grumbled to a stop. A moment’s silence, then the door wheel on the side of the left-flank turret started to spin; the door groaned open, the large frame of the commodore squeezing through. ‘Ahoy the street. You’re a fine sight to see out here, scurrying around like rats in a terrier pit while this monstrous ancient place tries to bury us all.’
‘Ahoy yourself, you old fraud,’ said Amelia. ‘Where in the Circle’s name have you been skiving off to while we’ve been fighting for our lives against Quest and his bludgers?’
‘Giving a little fencing instruction, professor,’ said the commodore. He pointed at the rear of his armoured carriage where a glider capsule with furled wings was fixed by chains to the vehicle. ‘Before testing my mettle on the
Ironflanks pointed out towards the disintegrating cityscape. ‘But Jared softbody, there must be dozens of glider capsules left abandoned in Camlantis by the airships’ scouts?’
‘Ah, but this one has a special cargo worthy of a little sweat and blade work,’ said the commodore, patting the iron hull of his glider. ‘The fee that was promised to me. With a little extra thrown in from the House of Quest’s vaults, just to alleviate the financial burden and the pain of my heartbreak in losing my fine beautiful boat on Quest’s wicked errand, you understand.’
Down the boulevard another magnificent white tower collapsed like a falling tree, its foundations simply ripped out from underneath it.
‘That damn fee is unneeded ballast for the Sepia Sea,’ snarled Amelia.
‘Don’t be angry with me, lass. I needed some meagre pittance to show for this fools’ outing of ours, to help my conscience in resting easy at night,’ wheedled the commodore. ‘Ironflanks, check the sails and chutes on my little bird. You and your fighting order’s gliding tricks are about to be put to our service. I’ll navigate this iron bathtub to the edge of Camlantis and then-’
‘-The edge of Camlantis is coming to us,’ cried Damson Beeton.
They could barely hear the agent’s bellowed warning, but the sight in front of their eyes was siren enough. At the far end of the city, the dimensional storm conjured by the dark engine had coalesced into a single raw sheet of chaos, sucking ancient buildings into its maw, each section of the city sliding away in turn, accompanied by the death squeal of matter being translated across a terrible void. All four of the friends frantically abandoned the street for the cramped confines of their glider capsule, Amelia last in and struggling to close the hatch one-handed while the storm bore relentlessly down on the craft. Then came the pop of warm thick air being pumped into the cabin. Ironflanks threw himself into the pilot bucket — far too small to comfortably accommodate him — their hull shaking as fierce winds rattled the craft, bits of rubble bouncing off the viewing dome in front of them.
With an almighty crack the ground sheered away from their sight and the glider plunged down through a hail of wreckage that had, seconds before, been their street. Amelia clawed for a handhold on the rapidly rotating capsule cabin. She crashed painfully against the crystal nose-dome of the glider, Ironflanks trying to push her body away from his view of the tumbling sky. They were beneath the floatquake land now, below the sundered ground and inside a blizzard of debris. Thousands of winged warriors were swarming out from under the shadow of Camlantis. Amelia blinked in disbelief at the pair of lash-lites carrying away a figure from the race of man. Their talons were hooked into the demon-masked gentleman like a pair of owls carrying off a Jackelian field mouse, while to his side a flight of four lashlites bore away the torn remains of one of their own kind in a burial shroud. Wasn’t he the lunatic from the tomb?
Amelia’s glider capsule whistled past the figure and his lash-lite carriers — missing them by no more than a foot — and she swore old demon-face met her eyes for a second through the cockpit glass as she hurtled by, nodding to her and raising a bone-white pipe to the leering lips of his mask in salute.
It was turning out to be a queer old day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The redcoat of the Second Parliamentary Foot knelt down on the hill and laid out his rifle on the grass — a cheap Brown Bess milled in a Middlesteel manufactory and topped by a whetstone-sharp bayonet — before resting his tired back against the wreckage of the airship. He reached inside his pocket for his pipe and extracted a small wax paper-wrapped parcel of mumbleweed from his coat. Striking a light that could be seen at night while on sentry duty was normally a flogging offence, but their sergeant was of the same opinion as the rest of the company: standing guard on the wreckage of an aerostat to deter looters was not proper work for the men and women of the Second. Not when there were shifties to guard against in the east and desert raiders moving about again in the south, all of whom would benefit from the proud sharp cutlery slotted on the end of the Second’s rifles.
There had been a bit of excitement earlier in the day when the engineers from the cannon works had arrived on the isolated downs and found one of Quest’s armoured carriages nearly intact in the debris. But that was as exciting as this duty was going to get — without the warmth of a proper barracks fire to shield against the cold Jackelian autumn nights, or the distractions of a town’s drinking houses nearby. He sighed contentedly as the first puff of mumbleweed warmed his chest and hardly noticed the hand that reached out from behind him and massaged his neck, felling him onto the wet grass instantly.
A figure stepped out of the ruined airship; his blind eyes turning across the moonlit downlands to see if any of the other sentries had noticed their comrade was sleeping. A second man dressed in monk-like robes emerged from between the steel ribs of the
The first intruder pointed towards the distant south and his twin nodded, jerking his thumb towards the east
