The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

organized by the flash mob. Not the new ones just down from the Free State, mind — but old models, the older the better. I saw a little of it going on myself, the Catgibbon’s blades doing the dirty with the shovel work.’

‘Is that all?’ asked Cornelius. ‘There’s always some mechomancer trying to get hold of body parts from the Steamman Free Steam, trying to lift up their own craft by prying out the secrets of how King Steam puts his people together. Grave robbing’s a crime for the crushers to solve, it gives the detectives from Ham Yard something to do.’

‘Now if that isn’t what advice I gave to this old bloke,’ said Smike. ‘He told me your reply would be along the lines of what you just said, too. But he paid me to tell you that one of the mechomancers who was after steammen parts was an old friend of yours from Quatershift, one who, quote, “you would have been far better off leaving behind in a Commonshare prison camp”. Does that make any sense to you, mister?’

Cornelius pushed himself off the four-poster bed. ‘When was this?’

‘About a week ago. I would have come sooner, but the crushers took me in to discuss a small matter of some pocket-books going missing in the lanes of Rottonbow. They got the wrong’un, of course.’

‘A week …’

That was hardly a day after he had gone over the curse-wall into Quatershift to get Robur out. No one knew the timing of his incursions except himself and Septimoth. ‘Did your friend say anything else?’

‘Just that you would know what to do next,’ said Smike.

‘He was wrong about that,’ said Cornelius, ‘I’m damned if I know what to do next. How much did this man give you to memorize the message?’

‘Five sovereigns,’ lied Smike.

Cornelius’s eyes twinkled in amusement. ‘Sink me, but you’re slightly more expensive than the penny post.’ He walked to a drawer and slipped five coins out, passing them to the lad. ‘That’s to forget the message, and to forget the address of my house.’

‘Address?’ said Smike, pocketing the coins. ‘We’re in the upland glens, aren’t we?’

‘Just opposite the southern frontier, I’d say,’ said Cornelius. He glanced at Septimoth. ‘Ask the damson to take our young friend to the pier and hail him a boat. Do get her to check his pockets before he departs, though.’

‘You’re a right gent,’ said Smike.

Cornelius looked out over the distant skyline resting beyond the river: the crumbling rookeries; the more modern pneumatic towers swaying slightly in the fog; the dark silhouette of an aerostat of the merchant fleet drifting across the half moon.

Septimoth returned, no doubt having been given a roasting for waking up their housekeeper at such an ungodly hour. ‘You were wrong when you said that the only people who know that we are living at this address are inside our walls.’ The lashlite pointed up towards the ceiling.

‘I have an understanding with the Court of the Air,’ said Cornelius. ‘I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me. They think it’s rather amusing, the jig we lead the First Committee over in Quatershift. It suits their purposes. But their tolerance only stretches so far. If we start lifting the flash mob’s bludgers from Middlesteel, it won’t take the capital’s pensmen long before ballads and penny dreadfuls begin to appear on the stationer’s carts with Furnace-breath Nick’s face painted on the cover. We need a safe base of operations on this side of the border to strike at the Commonshare. Life on the run will hamper our activities.’

Septimoth considered his friend’s words. With their powerful wings, his race were the only people apart from the Court of the Air’s own agents to have seen the connected aerospheres of the great aerial city, floating far beyond the reach of normal airships. The wisdom of lashlite sages’ recalled a time when the watchers in the sky had not dwelled far above the land. For the people of Jackals below, the secret organization Isambard Kirkhill had built to safeguard parliament’s victory in the civil war was a matter of conjecture, their agents, the wolftakers, a mere whisper in the jinn houses. Only by their wake could you know the Court of the Air. Missing rebels, the door left ajar on the oddly empty apartment of a crooked politician, science pirates who would simply disappear on the eve of a long-planned victory. Like the great sages of the people of the wind, the Court also attempted to peer ahead into the future. Not with any prophetic third eye, but with their mighty transaction engines, the steam from their endeavours forming a perpetual cloaking cloud around the city in the air. In that steam lay the future, it was said. Cornelius was quite right, of course. Neither of them could afford to become a rogue element in the Court’s calculations of their perfect democracy, an element that would require eliminating.

‘You already have a ballad on the stationer’s carts,’ said Septimoth. ‘You must have heard it? They seek him here, they seek him there, the furnace-breath killer with the demon stare.’

‘We hunt monsters.’

‘Are we now to hunt them closer to home, Cornelius Fortune?’

‘Take on the Catgibbon and the flash mob? Sweet bloody Circle,’ said Cornelius.

‘The monk appears dangerously well informed about our real purpose here and our activities,’ said Septimoth. ‘Even if his warning about rescuing Robur from the Commonshare finds us a little late.’

‘Quite. But rotting steammen being turned out of their graves?’ Cornelius scratched his unshaven cheeks. ‘What do we know about the people of the metal? None of them stayed long in Quatershift after the revolution, not after the Commonshare was declared. The Sun King used to treat the Steamman Free State as if it was just another of his dominions, and the Commonshare’s First Committee act little differently now. The shifties have started more wars with the steammen than they’ve ever fought with Jackals, but why would their agents want to sponsor a spate of steammen grave-robbing?’

Cornelius sighed. He might have a scant understanding of the people of the metal, but he knew someone who did: at the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard.

‘I shall ponder the matter in my eyrie,’ said Septimoth. ‘You had your dream again, didn’t you?’

Cornelius said nothing.

‘You should try and dream less,’ advised Septimoth, leaving and closing the door.

‘Yes, I should.’

Cornelius got back into bed and tried to nod off to sleep again, a near impossible task. This was all wrong. Grave robbing, the game of mirrors that had been played on him across the border in Quatershift to free Robur, a monk who knew all about his secret life as the scourge of the shifties. It was all wrong. Were the monsters coming to Middlesteel again?

Veryann’s fighters had taken up positions on the dock, sheltering from the storm of darts being launched from the wild craynarbians’ spring-guns. They returned fire in a smooth rattle; slipping crystal charges into their rifles, ejecting broken glass around the pier, burning blow-barrel hissing as it struck the planking. Above them, a short- nosed cannon had been pushed up to the fortifications of Rapalaw Junction, geysers of water erupting around the tribe’s war rafts as the trading post’s defenders tried to deny the tribesmen a firm foothold below the town’s walls.

Amelia kept her spine pressed up against a low adobe wall, the thud of darts on the other side dissuading her from doing more than snapping off the occasional shot at the lead boats with her pistol. One of the sailors broke cover and tried to run across the boarding ramp to the Sprite, two darts spearing him in his chest and hammering him down into the water. There was a thrashing in the river as something small and hungry finished off the howling submariner in a froth of bubbles.

‘Stay low,’ shouted Bull Kammerlan. He pulled the ejector rod on his carbine and a shower of broken crystal sprayed back as the clockwork mechanism forced the expended charge out. ‘We need more covering fire from the walls before we can run for the boat.’

‘Their rafts are going to be landing along the town’s front within a couple of minutes,’ said Amelia. ‘Best we were gone from here before then.’

‘Really? There’s me thinking that the boys and me would be doing a bit of fishing along here later,’ said Bull. ‘You write a paper on it, dimples; leave the killing to the men.’

A ricocheting arrow interrupted Bull’s stream of sarcasm — it glanced off Ironflanks, the steamman wandering out from the town’s closing gates as carefree as if he were taking a stroll along Goldhair Park back in Jackals. Dart heads bounced off his iron body, one piercing his wide-rimmed hunter’s hat. The steamman went up to the corpse of a fallen uplander in front of their adobe barricade and began tugging the soldier’s long leather army boots off, a task made more difficult by the amount of blood soaking the pin-cushioned uniform.

He looked down at Amelia, crouching on the other side of the wall. ‘Waste not, eh? Fine pair of boots, as fine