The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

a pair as I’ve ever seen.’ He slid out a machete and began to hack the corpse’s ankles away.

‘Ironflanks!’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Ironflanks, mistaking the professor’s disgust for concern about their predicament. He vaulted to their side of the wall. ‘These mammal-shells attack every other season. They get their fever up listening to their gods’ calls for sacrifices, get tired of eating their own braves out in the jungle. They’re inconveniently early this year, I must say.’

Down the shoreline, the first rafts began to thump against the line of piers, craynarbian warriors that must have been twice the size of the largest of the defenders leaping out — some with grappling claws to scale the walls, others with heavy sacks connected to vine-woven ropes. These they whirled around their heads, releasing them up towards the battlements. As each vine snapped taut, it unplugged a valve in the attached bag — two chambers of blow-barrel sap mixing and exploding against Rapalaw’s walls in a shower of clay fragments. ‘To the u-boat,’ shouted Ironflanks, tucking the bloody boots under his belt. ‘I’m going to get my steam on.’

Amelia cracked a pistol shot off, ducking as a wave of darts answered back. ‘It’s suicide. There’s too much fire coming across the Sprite’s hull.’

Bull Kammerlan pointed up towards the battlements, where squat, toad-like mortars were being pushed forward. ‘Dirtgas, dimples. Once the feral shells hold this side of the shore, our garrison will soak the whole river in dirt-gas. Unless you’ve got a mask hidden underneath that blouse of yours, you’re going to want to be breathing the wind from the commodore’s arse inside the Sprite. It’ll be a damn sight better than the air out here.’

On the exposed ground between the sailors and the Catosian fighters’ position, Ironflanks danced a jig, his twin stacks glowing white-hot as he fed power to his ancient boiler. ‘Now I’m sizzling, now I’m burning!’

Two craynarbians leapt from the prow of their canoe, Ironflanks meeting them in a fiery arc as he vaulted over the makeshift barricade protecting the expedition. Each of his four arms had produced a weapon, machetes and long knives blurring as he cut off the nearest of the warrior’s heads, blocking a bony sword-arm and smashing down on the remaining fighter’s knee joint with a cudgel. Both craynarbians were falling while the steamman sheathed two machetes, unslinging his thunder-lizard gun from his shoulder and jetting the canoe with its charge. Even in the steamman’s manipulator hands the rifle bounced, the recoil sending Ironflanks back by a couple of steps. He had loaded a tree shredder — a jungle special — half a pound of shot humming down the length of the war crew like a nest of hornets. Screaming craynarbians fell into the water, their armour shells ruptured and torn by hundreds of lead balls.

Amelia had seen steammen knights fight before — awesome, powerful, a force of nature — but this was different. Even in their battle rage King Steam’s knights retained a vestige of control; they fought like a focused storm of tonne-weight steel. But Ironflanks seemed to relish the danger as if he were a savage, bounding onto the raft with his rifle shouldered and his blades drawn, sadistically crushing falling braves under his metal feet, the craynarbians’ blood splattering his safari suit as he laughed and danced and hacked his way through the ranks of struggling attackers.

‘Now I’m burning,’ called the steamman, his voicebox on full and a whistle on his back lifting in a victory scream, superheated air spearing upwards. ‘I’m on fire.’

One of the surviving craynarbians, his breast-shell half-torn to pieces, tried to jump on top of Ironflanks’ back, clutching onto the steamman’s belt and the bloody boots he had looted. But Ironflanks twisted the craynarbian off, throwing him to the floor of the raft and burying the tip of his long knife in the creature’s forehead. ‘They’re my boots, wild shell, mine! Patent leather is no good for your claws.’

War chants sounded from the armada of rafts in the river. One of the craynarbian witch doctors, identifiable by his fur-covered antlers, was calling on the worldsong, twisting the power of the rainforest-covered land to the tribe’s own end. In front of their boats the fast-flowing waters began to froth and bubble. Shouts from up in the battlements of Rapalaw Junction urged the dispatch of more gas shells from the garrison’s arsenal.

‘That’s not good,’ said one of the Catosian fighters.

The storm of darts from the tribe’s spring-guns had momentarily abated and Bull leapt up. ‘The Sprite, boys, to the Sprite.’

‘Not with her!’ A sailor pointed at Amelia. ‘Not with the Jonah!’

‘Oh, for Circle’s sake.’ Amelia took the initiative, pushed up and began to run towards the u-boat.

Out on the river Ironflanks twirled around in an obscene mockery of the craynarbian sorcerer’s spell calling, almost perfect imitations of the jungle’s animal-song echoing from his voicebox — tree monkeys, paradise wings, redcats, hunting spiders. Across the wide, deep river birds exploded into the sky and the creatures of the canopy howled and hooted back. Spooked into action by the flare-up of life in the jungle, the submariners broke for the Sprite’s boarding gantry as a panicked mob. In contrast, the Catosian mercenaries fell back in two disciplined lines, one rank kneeling and firing, then stepping back through their comrades, smoothly reloading their carbines as the second rank poured fire back down the shoreline.

Out in the river the witch doctor’s chants were finally answered by an eruption of winged fish, a cloud of purple scales and rainbow fins bursting out of the water, fluttering off the walls of Rapalaw like bats, others of their number bouncing across the river, skimming into the sailors still fleeing after their Jonah. Poison-barbed fish heads buried into the striped shirts of the Sprite’s crewmen, tiny razored mouths gnawing at the flesh of their victims.

‘Ironflanks,’ Amelia cried, ‘back to the boat!’

She tried to drag one of the fallen sailors towards the conning tower hatch, but his face was swelling like a balloon, the skin of his bloated fingers turning rigid as his throat muscles expanded and slowly strangled him.

Veryann appeared and rolled the dying man into the river with a kick. ‘The toxin from the flying fish is fatal — there’s no cure.’

Over the top of Rapalaw Junction’s walls the thud of launching gas shells at last sounded, fingers of yellow gas trailing behind each projectile. Where they landed, clouds of noxious fumes mushroomed out, fountains of mustard tentacles curling up as far as the town’s ramparts. The redcoats looking down on them had leather masks with locust-like goggles strapped under their shako hats now, a single tube swaying from the front of each soldier like the snout of an anteater. Amelia could smell the sickly-sweet gas already, the taste of cinders and the promise of burning lungs hanging in the air. Its presence in the wind made her skin itch and she had to fight to hold down her panic. Dirt-gas was meant to be humane — first unconsciousness for an oxygen-starved brain, then a quick smothering of the target’s lungs — but she did not want to put their aerial navy’s propaganda to the test.

Plunging into the safety of the conning tower Amelia turned to watch the scene of horror through a porthole; curtains of gas drifting across the river and masking the town’s walls, sailors and Catosians running through the hail of devilbarb fish, spinning as their bodies were caught and pierced. The crackle of rifle fire echoed eerily through the mist, then out of that grim fog of death came Ironflanks, the steamman striding backwards with his four arms flickering in a dance of steel. His hunter’s hat had been mounted with the antlers from the craynarbian witch doctor, still bloody where they had been removed — with some force, Amelia imagined — from their owner’s skull. Three enraged craynarbian fighters followed from the fog, thrusting their spear-like spring-guns towards the steamman while he croaked at them in the voice of a rainforest moon-toad. Over their faces the feral shells had strapped on something that looked like a wet slug, a sack of pulsing black flesh. It was their answer to the redcoats’ dirt- gas.

Bull Kammerlan ducked through the tower’s hatch, the bloody body of one of his crewmen draped over his wide shoulders. ‘Masks! Some of them have got gas masks. They’ve been gassed outside the junction for centuries and now the damn feral shells have finally found a way to even up the odds.’

Amelia had a sneaking suspicion that Bull’s slave raids along the river might have educated the tribes in the use of gas as much as the defenders of the trading post, but she held her tongue. Pushing through the surviving sailors, Veryann appeared, replacing her carbine in its leg holster. ‘The tribe’s spring-gun darts are harmless against our hull, but if they should turn their improvised grenades against the boat …’

Amelia slid down a ladder into the pilot room. Commodore Black was hanging onto the periscope, watching war rafts emerge from the curtain of gas, heading straight towards the Sprite.

‘Make ready for diving stations,’ called the first mate. ‘Everyone inside. Rapalaw will have to fend for itself.’

‘The feral shells are mortal stirred up about something, lads.’ Black reached over to the wall and pulled out a speaking trumpet from its bracket. ‘T’ricola, I’m looking at you for some cheery news on our scrubber assembly