to the ground, but his sack-pipe weapon discharged a jet of the delousing substance towards their heads, its foul- smelling stream madly stinging her eyes.
As she rubbed away the burning liquid, the translator creature shuddered violently in front of them. ‘Not pure — not pure. Filthy unclean thieves with their filthy crawling parasites.’
‘You’re the jigging impurity, here, Tree-head Joe!’ Bull yelled, giving the Daggish ruler the inverted ‘V’ of the Lion of Jackals with two of his fingers. ‘You’re nothing but a rotting hulk of talking wood decomposing in the heart of this rotting jungle.’
The misshapen translator creature announced his meaning to the chamber and behind Bull the troll-sized throne guards went into apoplexy at his abuse towards their ruler, smashing him to the ground and raising cudgels not much shorter than the slaver himself to finish the job of beating him to death. They only held off when Amelia leapt between them and the man they were about to murder.
‘You need him alive. You need
The throne guards hesitated as the pig-like creature translated her words into the drumming language of the Daggish, reluctantly moving back as the fronds of the emperor wavered across in silent command. ‘Your place is to obey, not to criticize,’ piped the translator. ‘If you forget your position again the stain that is your existence will be scoured from the purity.’
Bull was stunned by the quickness of the assault and Amelia had to pull him back to his feet. He glowered resentfully in the direction of the Daggish emperor. ‘Touchy beggar, isn’t he?’
‘Hold your tongue,’ hissed Amelia, ‘or you’re going to get us both killed here.’
Bull spat a gob of blood from his swollen mouth onto the floor in defiance of their captors. ‘You saved my life, Guardian’s girl.’
‘That was just a temporary lapse of judgement, I assure you.’
Spined arms forced Amelia and Bull towards the side of the dome and a section of the smooth wall fell away, revealing a low chamber, sailors and marines from the
‘You should be cleansed,’ barked the translation creature, its monstrously oversized human lips dribbling with saliva. ‘You should be made uncontaminated within the purity. But there is the need, the need …’
The ring of Daggish guards and drones shoved them back in front of the dais.
‘If you’re going to fill my mind with your moss, you decaying cabbage, get on with it,’ Bull demanded. ‘Because you’re bloody boring me, and I hate being bored.’
‘You fear the purity,’ trilled the pig-like beast on behalf of its owner. ‘You value your insignificant life span, barely longer than those of the parasites you harbour.’
‘Do not all things?’ asked Amelia.
‘Then you shall do as you are bid, as you value your exclusion from the purity,’ instructed the translator. ‘You were correct in your appraisal of the purity’s
‘The bathysphere?’ said Amelia. ‘You are talking about taking our bathysphere down to the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’
‘Jigger your archaeology. The thing I care about is the bit about our exclusion from the “perfection” of this bark-faced monarch of the jungle.’ Bull waved a fist at their captors. ‘What about my bloody crew?’
‘Your thieves are already complete within the purity,’ warbled the translator.
‘Twenty years we survived,’ sobbed Bull. ‘Twenty years after the destruction of Porto Principe — we survived Liongeli, survived being hunted by the RAN and Jackals’ men-o’-war, survived trading with those treacherous double-crossing jiggers down in Cassarabia. What did we survive for? This!’
‘They survive still,’ said the translator, ‘within the purity. They survive evolved and clean and whole.’ The hog-like creature waddled up to Amelia. ‘Observe the crown.’
On the dais one of the Daggish emperor’s ape servants pulled off its crown from the ridge of bark and held it aloft.
‘It is from the Camlantean age,’ said Amelia. ‘Ancient.’
‘There is another like it, underneath the deep waters outside our nest,’ said the translator. ‘Recover it, return it to the purity.’
Amelia frowned. But that made no sense. Why would this entity not fill hers and Bull’s skulls with the green filth that the rest of the crew had been exposed to? Why would this callous intelligence not wish to control their explorations of the lake bed, make them puppets of meat within its hive mind? If it knew what it was looking for, what use had it for the free intellect of a Jackelian academic and the treacherous impulses of Bull Kammerlan?
‘I have questions,’ said Amelia.
‘Your compliance shall serve the purity better than your inferior intellect,’ warned the translator. A wave of clicks swept the dome, the Daggish drones signalling their agreement, or perhaps their impatience with the two outsiders.
‘You shall be provided with the coordinates of the probable location of the crown. Retrieve it, salvage it for the purity as you value the brutish, brief flicker of your life span.’
Amelia exchanged glances with her companion in this predicament, the man she would least trust to watch her back now that Abraham Quest had been supplanted as the patron of their expedition and traded for an inhuman emperor with chlorophyll for emotions. Whatever the reasoning for sending them into the lake rather than risking its drones, Amelia was fairly certain the welfare of two prisoners factored fairly small into the equation, if at all. And despite the emperor’s hollow-sounding promises, Amelia was also fairly certain that their fate, once they had dredged the lake bed and located the missing crown, was not going to involve a fond farewell from the Daggish nest as she and Bull sailed off down the Shedarkshe back to Jackals.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fumes from the liquid below — a dark oil that steamed and bubbled up from the well — kept the commodore coughing and cursing his fate as the others clutched onto the bars of their cage, trying not to make the box swing on the end of its precarious cable. It would not do to hit any of the other cages lowered into the pit on tethers. Not that the other occupants would mind. Whether as a warning, or simply out of pure neglect, their nearest neighbours hanging over the oily well were the carapaces of three craynarbian warriors, flesh long since rotted away through starvation. The smallest of the craynarbians had the sword arm of one of its fellows piercing its thorax, testament to how they had turned to cannibalism in their last desperate days.
‘I shall never complain about the wicked fogs of a Middlesteel peculiar again,’ said the commodore, ‘not if I have to walk through the mills of Workbarrows on a hot summer’s day without a linen mask, then swear in front of a magistrate that the air there is as sweet as the scent of the lilies along the hills of the western downs.’
‘I think the chance of you ever standing in front of a magistrate in Middlesteel are looking distinctly slim right now,’ said Gabriel McCabe, staring at the corpses in the other cages.
‘We know very little of our captors’ motives,’ Billy Snow pointed out. ‘Although I think we can presume they are not benevolently disposed towards us.’
‘Damn feral steammen,’ said T’ricola. ‘I wish Ironflanks hadn’t been taken away. He might have had a few answers for us.’
‘They are not steammen,’ said Billy Snow. ‘I can hear the difference in how they move. Steammen have an honest clunk about their walk; those things that captured us move like panthers in armour, they’re light on their feet, almost organic.’
‘It’s answer enough for me that they dragged Ironflanks away whistling in terror,’ said the commodore. ‘The old steamer recognized those monsters. He’s had prior dealings with them for sure.’
