The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

gave the aerial hunters their three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision — along, it was rumoured, with other powers. Such as the ability to see into the future. ‘Not directly, damson. I have told you before, this eye I lost because I lacked vision.’

‘Teeth of the Circle,’ the housekeeper growled in frustration. ‘Damn your eyes then, Septimoth; the two you’ve kept, and the one you lost that makes you a useless manservant in this old heap. I’ll be off to bed and hear no more of your double talk until I make the three of us breakfast.’

Hours later, on the other side of the door, Cornelius Fortune still tossed and turned, in the power of a dream as his two servants had suspected. A nightmare that had become habit.

Cornelius was walking across a recently ploughed field — tilled by hand, now all the horses had been slaughtered for food — in the company of the village simpleton the local committee had found to tend the orchard, leading him slowly across to the tree he was seeking.

‘This is it,’ said the newly recruited farmer, casting a sad eye over the barren stumps barely rising out of the ground — all apart from one. He raised a hand that had only three fingers on it towards the solitary budding tree. ‘But look how this one grows. What a beauty. She’s the only one to thrive here.’

‘Look how she grows,’ Cornelius moaned, his hands scrabbling through the dry mud around the tree. They didn’t know how to grow anything in this land anymore. There were no irrigation channels. No water. They hadn’t even buried the seedling orchard deep enough for its roots to take hold. One boy tending farm land meant to be worked by a hundred, while his compatriots debated furiously over which illustrious revolutionaries the fields should be named after, passing regulations to bid the crops to grow faster, enacting laws to make it rain more equitably across the regions.

‘That’s how I knew where to take you, she’s the only tree to thrive out in the Glorious Orchard of the Revolution Seventy Six, Farming Community of Heroine Justine Taniayay,’ said the boy, getting the mantra just right. ‘They say I’m stupid, but I can remember them all, the names written on the sacks, the sacks that smelled so bad. That dead tree over there had a baron emptied over it. That tree next door got a woman who owned the manufactory that made rocking horses; I went on one of those once. Imagine that. I rode her wooden horses, and then I got to empty her over a tree, a tree just for her. And this tree is the one you asked for. Look how she grows.’

Cornelius let his borrowed face slip. He could hold the image of the area inspector no more, his face warping back to his natural features, the tears streaming from his eyes. The simple peasant lad just looked on, as if a melting, changing face was something he saw every day. Cornelius dug out the young sapling with expert care, brushing away the dirt, removing the tree from the ground without killing it.

‘You know about the growing and the planting and the old ways?’ asked the boy.

‘I was a farmer,’ said Cornelius, cradling the plant. ‘Once.’

‘You should stay here, then,’ said the boy, as if he was offering Cornelius the crown of the Sun King itself. ‘This is a farm.’

Cornelius stood up and touched the boy’s arm gently. ‘Thank you, but I cannot — I am not a farmer any more.’

‘There were more of us here last year,’ said the boy. ‘More of us helping with the trees and the turnips and the corn and the barley. At least ten people. I remember that — even though people keep on telling me I am wrong, there was never anyone else working with me. There was old farmer Adoulonge too, even though people say there was never a man of that name living here. What do you do now, compatriot sir?’

‘Didn’t you see my face, doesn’t it scare you? I am a monster. But now I shall prey on other monsters. What do you call such a thing, boy? A monster that eats other monsters?’

‘Furnace-breath Nick,’ smiled the boy. ‘The Sun Eater, Old Night-hand. The light priests will tell you stories about the Sun Eater, but I haven’t seen any of them in the village for a long while.’

Poor young fool. He knew about the bags that smelled bad, but he hadn’t made the connection between them and the diminishing population of his village. The human mind was such a complex instrument. Cornelius could feel his own slipping away even as he spoke, a dwindling dot of reason dimming to nothing along an impossibly long corridor.

‘The priests have gone away,’ said Cornelius, ‘along with your other friends.’ He lifted the precious sapling and shielded it inside his greatcoat. The boy stared out across the empty fields, not noticing that his visitor was stumbling west now, away from the farm. Away from Quatershift.

‘I like farming,’ the boy said to himself. ‘Better than dirty loom work, losing my fingers one by one.’

Howling like a dying fox, Cornelius glanced up at the sky as he lurched across the dead ground, the summer sun beating down. He should only look at the sky now, so clear and pure and unsullied. Filled with the sun. Waiting to be devoured. Don’t look at the mud, don’t see the ground bones lying between the furrows. White, angular bones. He lifted the sapling he had dug out high to the heavens, the young trunk left moist and supple by the fertilizer of his murdered wife’s flesh. His tree, his darling tree. She would grow again, but not in the spoiled soil of Quatershift.

He shook the young tree at the sky. ‘This is my wife, this is the child that was in her belly.’

A shadow grew in the sky, dark, bloated, born in the sun and feeding on its warmth. ‘She will live again. Your unbornchild too. They will live in the torment of those that murderedthem.’

‘I’ll give you blood,’ he screamed. ‘Is this what you want? There’s an ocean of it inside the bastards who did this — a whole jigging revolution’s worth of blood.’

See the sky.

‘Yes.’

See the sun.

‘I shall show you my face.’

Sun.

‘My true face.’

Sun Eater.

Master king of demons. With a smirking mouth concealing a furnace and the rotting heart of the devil. Licking at the splintered bones in the fields. Smacking his lips as the juice of mangled souls ran down his burning throat. Furnace-breath Nick.

The light grew brighter, blinding him, consuming the sun.

Cornelius sat bolt upright in bed, panting, the light fading away to become the shine of an oil lantern swinging in Septimoth’s hand. In his other he held a squirming lad, dangling upside down with one of his boots clutched tightly by the lashlite’s talons.

‘I’ve told you before about going out fishing along the river late at night,’ said Cornelius.

‘This fish flopped onto our island all by itself,’ said Septimoth. ‘I heard him trying to force the lock to the east wing.’

‘I wasn’t trying to break into your house, mister,’ said the boy. ‘My name’s Smike, I’ve been sent here with a message for you. What sort of bleeding nob are you anyway, employing the likes of some wild bloody lashlite to guard your place? There should be a law against it.’

‘Knowing the House of Guardians, there probably is.’ Cornelius looked at the lad; it was giving him a crink in his neck trying to talk to him upside down. He motioned to Septimoth and the lashlite flipped him around and put him back on his feet. Smike stood there shakily for a second, dripping water onto the floorboards. Cornelius waited until his silence had made the boy suitably nervous. ‘You swam across?’

‘You think there’s a boat that would risk their river authority licence by dropping the likes of me onto your pier at this time of the night?’

‘You mentioned a message,’ said Cornelius. ‘You must forgive my look of disbelief, because to the best of my knowledge, the only people who know that anyone other than a wealthy, reclusive hermit is living at this address are already inside this house’s walls. And I’m afraid that doesn’t include you.’

‘Well now, how I got to be here is a right old tale for the telling,’ explained Smike. ‘I didn’t catch a name, but the bloke who paid me was an old goat, robed like a Circlist monk. Going around pretending he was blind, but he wasn’t, he could see well enough for me and him both.’

‘A blind monk? That doesn’t sound like anyone I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘Go on …’

‘This old goat was worried about a run of Steamman grave robbing that’s been going on in Middlesteel,