The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The Sprite’s nose erupted out of the dark waters of the Shedarkshe like a whale surfacing for air, the rest of the u-boat following. As she settled on the surface of the tributary, hatches along her port side opened and started venting stale air while hatches on the starboard side sucked in clean air from outside, febrile and scented with night flowers from the thick jungle.

Amelia checked on Ironflanks, but he was still in no state to gainsay their passage down the river’s fork. Lying on the bunk, he was making strange whistling noises with his voicebox — partway between a song and some call of one of the jungle creatures. Last chance to stretch her legs topside. She exited via the nearest conning tower. Others in the exped ition had the same idea. Gabriel McCabe was sitting with his legs hanging over the Sprite’s hull, his dark fingers tapping a mumbleweed pipe on the side of the boat.

Amelia sat down next to him. ‘The crew is nervous.’

‘They have good reason to be, professor.’ The first mate pointed down the river. There was a night mist on the surface, the Sprite gently pushing against the current towards it. They might as well be sailing through the gates of the underworld denied by the Circlist faith. ‘If anyone has ever sailed further upriver than Bull’s slave raiders, they never made it back to Rapalaw Junction to boast about it.’

A line of crewmen in diving gear left the conning tower in front of them, ready to give the u-boat’s diving planes and hull a final check before they embarked on the last leg of their perilous voyage.

‘I know it’s a risk,’ said Amelia. Damn, but it had seemed so much less of a risk when she had been looking at map tables in Abraham Quest’s offices, drawing up their supply lists and making plans for the Sprite’s recovery and resurrection with Fulton’s submarine engineers. ‘But we have to believe it’s worth it.’

‘Are you following this dream for your sake, or the sake of your father?’ asked Gabriel McCabe. ‘Even if we make it to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo without being blown apart by a Daggish patrol, there are no guarantees that you will find a clue to the position of Camlantis in the heavens.’

‘Water preserves crystal-books,’ said Amelia. ‘The best records we have of the Camlantean civilization have been fished out of ancient shipwrecks.’

‘You know in your heart we will find nothing but the ruined, drowned basement levels of their city, full of nothing but the skeletons of any who were left behind for the Black-oil Horde to slaughter.’

‘They wanted their legacy to survive,’ said Amelia. ‘They knew the time would come when another civilization would transcend the dark ages, would be ready to embrace their society and its learning.’

‘Is Jackals that society, professor?’ asked the first mate.

‘We are!’ said Amelia. ‘Like Camlantis, we are a democracy. Like Camlantis, we have held the power for hundreds of years to conquer every other nation on the continent, yet we have used that power only to preserve our society and keep our people safe.’

‘The ancients did not hang children outside Bonegate for dipping pocket-books and stealing silk handkerchiefs,’ said Gabriel McCabe. ‘Nor did they dirt-gas thousands of innocents in Quatershift from the safety of a fleet of aerostats during the great war. We are not, I think, ready for their knowledge.’

‘You don’t understand; we can use their teachings to change Jackals,’ said Amelia, ‘to make things better. We can use it to end hunger and starvation, end poverty, end disease, end conflict. They had such a society, why should we deny ourselves that chance?’

Gabriel McCabe relit his pipe. ‘For myself I am happy enough to have a berth on a seadrinker, serving under an honourable skipper, rather than being beached back in Middlesteel; even sailing up the Shedarkshe is better than such a fate. But I have a feeling you will be disappointed by what we find. I do not know much about archaeology and history, professor, but I know people well enough from all my time in the confines of a u-boat. We are not big enough for your ideas.’

‘I hope you are wrong, Gabriel,’ said Amelia. ‘We will have come a long way for nothing if you are correct.’

The first mate’s pipe began to grow as he tapped his old weed out, twisting and turning on the deck like a wooden serpent. Amelia looked at it in horror. ‘Gabriel, what kind of sorcery is this?’

‘Kiss the pipe,’ said Gabriel McCabe, ‘the mumbleweed will feed you, give you strength.’

‘Get it away from me,’ said Amelia, stepping back. Leaves sprouted out of Gabriel McCabe’s face, his dark limbs twisting upwards towards the sky. ‘Your face, your face!’

‘I’m becoming a tree,’ said Gabriel McCabe. His bones cracked as they splintered. ‘The moon is too cold to go under the water again. My roots will drink from the Shedarkshe.’

Amelia stumbled into the conning tower. Two Catosian mercenaries fell out of the door, their shine-swollen muscles no longer able to be contained by their armoured jackets. Belts snapped and fabric tore, showering the deck with crystal rifle charges as the women changed into dog-things, balls of taut muscle snuffling and scratching at the hull of the u-boat. She tried to push them away but she noticed her own arms were becoming squid-like tentacles, slimy and wet and flopping off the Catosian dog women. Amelia tried to scream but her mouth was a cone of clawed teeth and all that came out was a chatter of bone.

Pulling themselves out of the river, the repair crew climbed the ladder back to the flat deck of the Sprite. Bull Kammerlan prodded one of the Catosian soldiers crawling across the decking with his trident. She mewled, her hand trying to catch some imaginary shape in front of her. Satisfied, Bull booted her unconscious with a lash of his weighted diving boots. Laughing, he reached for Amelia’s collar and hauled her into the conning tower, his divers marching in front and giving the wild crewmen of the u-boat a mild taste of their capacitors to clear the way.

Circle, but it was good to be back in the slaving business.

CHAPTER NINE

Cornelius was certainly attracting glances from the other passengers drawn up in the lane leading to the great house, but he was the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons. While everyone else sat in stylish horseless carriages, handcrafted copper boxes gleaming in the moonlight, or lounged inside the leather opulence of barouche-and-fours drawn by well-brushed horses, he rested his feet in a dusty mail coach. His fiction of a coat of arms had been fixed onto its two doors, but that was the only concession to remodelling that the ancient vehicle had received. He had even kept the original ship-style name painted on the rear, the Guardian Fleetfoot.

It hardly helped that Septimoth held the reins above, on a seat that had been intended to accommodate both a driver and a guard with a blunderbuss. Or that the footplate to their rear stood empty of retainers. The Guardian Fleetfoot was kept in a stable Cornelius rented across the river from Dolorous Hall; the ideal accompaniment for the face he was wearing this evening. Almost his own, but slightly altered — just a touch of the crazed eccentric, features that he had styled on an insane but very wealthy composer he had robbed many years ago in Middlesteel. It was what people expected of a hermit, and there was always a value in giving the audience what they expected.

At last the horseless carriage in front of him had disgorged its passengers and pulled away with a hum of high-tension clockwork. Cornelius stepped down in front of the mansion’s entrance, not waiting for Septimoth to dismount and open the door for him as was proper. ‘Off you go now,’ Cornelius called up at Septimoth. ‘Wait around the back with the others, and no flying off now, do you hear?’

‘As you say, sir,’ said Septimoth. With a crack of the whip the four horses pulled away and Cornelius brushed down his cape, then looked up at the mansion.

He was not the only one parading his eccentricity, it seemed. Whittington Manor had once been better known as Fort Whittington, an ugly, squat, thick-walled castle, constructed during the civil war and filled with parliament’s cannons staring out over the downs of the west from its commanding promontory. Abraham Quest had bought the derelict, half-abandoned place and spent a small fortune adding the facade of a graceful villa to its brutal walls. The manor house was of a distance from town that any status-conscious member of society would never have classed its grounds as part of the capital, yet still they came out here, lining up their expensive clockwork vehicles in his drive. Attracted by the flame of Quest’s genius and the vast amount of money he had accrued.

At the open door, the red-coated major-domo gave Cornelius a quizzical glance as he handed over the cream