Veryann looked at the cavorting u-boat crew with disgust. She drew her knife and walked to where the free company fighters that had been trampled lay in the arms of their comrades.
Amelia realized what the commander was about to do and ran over. One of the soldiers grabbed the professor. ‘Do not interfere. It is our way.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Do I have my honour?’ asked one of the wounded fighters.
‘You have your honour,’ answered Veryann, plunging her dagger into the woman’s throat.
‘We can put them on the cart,’ shouted Amelia, ‘take them back to the
‘Catosia has no surgeons,’ said Veryann, repeating the ritual along the line of wounded. ‘You have your honour. No doctors, and no citizens living with the shame of their weakness. You have your honour. No cripples or ill to sap our bloodlines of their strength.’
Amelia struggled in the grasp of the soldier holding her back. ‘You’re a bloody barbarian.’
Veryann’s work done, she wiped the blood off her blade on the side of her britches and then sheathed the knife. She indicated Amelia’s over-sized arms. ‘We allow no perversions of the flesh save those which can be achieved through our own exertions and the blessed herb shine. No imperfections worked by womb mages, surgeons, worldsingers or the fates of battle. Our bodies must be perfect.’
‘Your bodies-’ Amelia was astonished ‘-your body may be perfect, but your soul is insane. What about your fallen? Circle’s teeth, are you just going to discard them here without burial?’
‘Toss them into the water of the pool if their sight offends you, Jackelian. They are not dead to my people; they live on in the fear-filled nightmares of their enemies and the memories of our free company, as they should. They are immortal now.’
Amelia shook her head. Between their convict u-boat crew capering around the fallen monster and the callous ice maiden in charge of the psychopaths meant to be protecting the expedition, she felt like the lone visitor to an asylum on Circle Day. Just two pennies, damson, to prod the lunatics in their cages with a stick.
A noise like a hunting horn blew in the distance, and there was an explosion from the jungle as a thousand winged creatures took to the air squawking, hissing and buzzing in panic.
Ironflanks’ head turned slowly, his telescope eyes shadowed by the rim of his hunter’s hat. ‘It cannot be!’
‘What is it, Ironflanks?’ Amelia stared towards the horizon, the cliffs of a plateau squatting in the far distance. ‘That noise came from quite a distance out, didn’t it?’
‘She never hunts this far east, her territory is fixed,’ said Ironflanks. The hunting horn sound came again. ‘No, she knows I am here.’
‘Who are you talking about, Ironflanks?’
‘Queen Three-eyes, Amelia softbody. The Steamo Loas have cursed us this day.’
‘Another thunder lizard?’
‘The queen of them all, professor of mammals, a kilasaurus max. She knows I am here.’
On the wind the horn song seemed to be speaking.
‘
‘How can that thing know you are here, Ironflanks? It’s just a big damn lizard.’
‘By that criteria, so are the lashlites,’ said the steamman. ‘She can follow a scent from a hundred miles away and well does she know the smell of my stacks.’
Amelia listened to the stream of hatred being sung over the jungle, almost words. ‘It’s talking. It knows Jackelian. Sweet Circle, how intelligent is this thing?’
‘I doubt if she has a grant of letters from the eight universities, professor, but she understands revenge well enough. The k-max mates for life, and I took Queen Three-eyes’ companion in a hunt six years back. That’s when she taught herself Jackelian
— listening to the hunting parties as they sat around their campfires at night. Anything to discover more about her enemy, more about
Again, the horn.
‘
‘Take what water you have,’ shouted Ironflanks at the exped ition members. ‘Back to the boat. NOW!’
Amelia broke her pistol, ready to insert a fresh round. She sprinted after the steamman, slipping in another crystal charge from her belt. ‘We should form up into a battle line. Quest’s lizard killer guns worked well enough just now, and if you managed to kill this thing’s mate …’
‘A male kilasaurus max is a quarter the size of the female,’ said Ironflanks, his stacks pouring smoke into the air as they fled down the trail. ‘Those big cannons on the walls of Rapalaw Junction, they are not for the feral craynarbian tribes, you understand? Dirt-gas sinks before it climbs as high as the head of a k-max.’
‘And you killed that thing’s mate?’
‘I led the hunt,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I would not have brought the k-max down, as old and as sick as he was, I know better. Those fastblood fools who paid for my services did not live long enough to regret their decision — I was the only one to make it back to Rapalaw’s gates from that safari.’
Animals scattered under their feet and past the escaping expedition members, the trampled passage to the spring alive with terrified jungle creatures fleeing the rampaging monarch of their realm.
Two of the u-boat men suddenly ran at Amelia. ‘Strap her to a tree — leave the Jonah here, leave her to feed the beast’s hunger. She’s called the beast to us.’
Amelia kicked one in the gut. The other fell forward as a rotating steel bolt erupted from his striped shirt. Veryann reloaded her rifle swung it towards Bull Kammerlan. ‘Our steamman scout has given you the only order you need to heed — keep running. I will cut down any of you filthy jiggers that dares to lift a hand in mutiny towards an officer.’
Her cold blue eyes bore into the sailors and whether it was due to the Catosian guns or the screams of the k-max, the crewmen fled for their miserable lives.
A dark shape grew visible in the distance above the canopy and there was a crashing avalanche of trees as the thunder lizard pushed through the press of darkest Liongeli. They were less than halfway back to the
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was said even a blind man could tell when he had walked into Steamside, and Cornelius Fortune believed it. While the evening sky above the steamman enclave of Middlesteel might not have been filled with a thousand spears of hearth smoke like the quarters of their fast-blooded neighbours, the people of the metal carried their own stacks, and the smell of high-grade boiler smoke rose up to envelop Cornelius in the rooftop nest where Septimoth had landed them. It was like sitting in a drawing room where the gentlemen had all simultaneously reached for their mumbleweed pipes.
The current focus of Cornelius’s attention rested halfway across Adam Metal Square, waiting still and silent at the heart of Steamside, in the hub of a network of narrow alleys that had never once been widened in Middlesteel’s history. Lanes that had remained untouched when King Felix broadened the streets of the capital after the great plague in the year of 901, just as they remained unaltered when Isambard Kirkhill began his great programme of public works after winning the civil war for parliament. No wide new avenues in Steamside to stop the Levellers raising barricades, no new boulevards constructed to mop up the unemployed rowdies of both sides’ disbanded regiments. Steammen suffered their own plagues and were the most loyal of the capital’s constituencies — being slow to anger and measured in pondering the troves of their long memories.
It was the owner of the longest of those memories that Cornelius had come to observe. In any other area of the city, Cornelius’s surveillance would have been easy. He could have walked round the square, dipping in and out, returning each time with a fresh face borrowed from the locals. But imitating a steamman was beyond even his
