with?’
Ironflanks punched the switch that released the chains on the kilasaurus max. Somewhere deeper in the building an alarm claxon sounded. Outside there was a whistling noise as the k-max wrenched her newly unlocked chains out of their stake rings so fast that they were sent flying across the arena sands, lashing into a series of benches in the wall and smashing them to splinters. Chains fell off the other lizards in the shadows of the stadium pit, steel teeth in the ground clanking open.
‘
Commodore Black backed away from the viewing gallery; terrified the k-max would smash the glass and scoop them out. The steamman seemed to welcome such a fate, standing there with his four arms outstretched, as if he was beseeching Queen Three-eyes to end his aimless life.
It was a dreadful act of symmetry. Ironflanks had been cut from his life’s purpose and the wreckage of his duty in the jungles of Liongeli — and now he had done the same for the queen of the thunder lizards. Killing Ironflanks was all that Queen Three-eyes had lived for since she had lost her life-mate, and now she was being offered the life of her mate’s murderer on a plate.
‘We are both free,’ whispered Ironflanks’ voicebox. ‘We are both free, now.’
Queen Three-eyes looked across the arena at her fellow thunder lizards stampeding for the lowered ramp while it remained open, crunching underfoot the massive bleached bones of their brethren who had been captured before them, made to starve to sharpen their appetite for the games. Her sly eyes narrowed in a cold fury, the sting of oily smoke from these metal devils’ stacks a foul affront to the natural scents of the jungle. This was not the way of things. Other thunder lizards bowed before her and backed away from the claw marks on the plateaux that surrounded her territory. It was time to remind these metal intruders why
Ironflanks followed Commodore Black back outside the arena building, the first of the thunder lizards to stampede — a tauntoraptor — thumping geysers of mud into the air as it pawed the ground and lowered its horned head towards the siltempters, the metal tribesmen thrown into confusion by the release of the arena animals.
Some of the siltempters had been trying to outflank blind Billy Snow and his deadly morphic blade and noticed the new arrivals too late — outflanked themselves. They tried to throw themselves out of the way of a charging pentaceratops, but delayed by fatal seconds, the bone-clawed hooves flattened their hulls in a pop of splitting steel and cracking crystal. Behind them more rampaging beasts followed, a petrodactyl scooping up a fleeing tribesman and lifting him high in the air before skimming the creature down towards a rocky outcrop, the brief explosion of his breeched boiler sending a shower of shrapnel across the jungle clearing.
Into this carnage strode the queen of Liongeli, her scaly skin flashing orange where the fires of broken siltempters burned in the pre-dawn light. A company of siltempters appeared with airguns, monstrously large iron barrels with ancient cables connected to the pressure of their own boilers. Heavy ammunition drums jangled on top of the guns, hundreds of lead balls queuing for gravity to drop them into barrels and speed them on their deadly duty. With a roar like splintering wood, the siltempters opened fire on the nearest thunder lizards, peppering the beasts with streams of hot lead while other creatures of the metal ran out with poison-tipped javelins, sharp injector reservoirs ready to jet concentrated shots of flying-fish toxin into the flanks of the huge, marauding creatures. A tauntoraptor swung its tail at the group of siltempters bringing it pain with their hail of tiny, stinging stones, sending three of them soaring back into the tree line with their chests crumpled and bleeding oil.
‘Time to withdraw,’ shouted Veryann, surveilling the siltempters as they emerged with increasingly heavy weaponry dug out from their jungle domes and the dark chambers of the temple. The siltempters’ defences were concentrated in a ring around their territory and the released arena creatures had bypassed all of them; but the expedition’s luck wasn’t going to last forever. The siltempters were regrouping fast.
Ironflanks, still disorientated by the twists and turns of his fate, stumbled over a dead tribesman. ‘This way, the river.’ His words were interspersed with his voicebox’s whistles and cries, the stampeding thunder lizards answering with similar calls, a few even moving out of his way — as if he was a calf of their own kind, to be treated with patience. The tree-high legs of a vulcanodon thumped past, revealing a group of trampled siltempter corpses half-buried in the mud. One of the bodies was still moving, trying to pull itself free while dragging two ruined legs, the alloy of both limbs burst and fizzing with the effort of hauling himself along.
Veryann recognized the corpulent form and the frog-like features of the face. ‘Good morning, my prince.’
She pulled one of the poison-headed javelins free from the dirt, brushing down the mud from its shaft. Prince Doublemetal gazed up at the softbody standing over him, his vision plate pulsing in recognition at those who should have been the morning’s entertainment in the arena.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Billy Snow. ‘We are different from their kind.’
‘The difference is the free company’s code,’ said Veryann. ‘And that demands vengeance against those who fight without honour.’
‘Blood only begets blood,’ said the sonar man.
‘That it certainly does.’ Veryann knelt down before the slowly moving body. ‘And I made you a blood oath yesterday, my prince. Do you recall what I said, or were you too busy salivating oil over the crushed remains of Gabriel McCabe to listen to me?’
Prince Doublemetal tried to raise the volume on his voicebox and call for help, but only a burst of static emerged.
‘Gabriel would not have asked for this,’ said Billy Snow.
‘The prince can ask him himself,’ said Veryann, ‘in the unlikely event his putrid soul should be granted entrance to the hall of the fallen.’ She lifted the lance and leveraged it through the gap in the prince’s hull where his left leg was hanging off, sliding it up hard through his abdomen. Her shine-swollen muscles bulged as she used every last iota of her strength to drive her makeshift stake inside the body of the siltempters’ ruler. With a squawk, the crawling prince fell still, smoke pouring through the joints where his crushed legs clung uselessly to his body.
A roar echoed over the stampede, Queen Three-eyes, entering the jungle to crush the camouflaged geodesic domes of the camp, gutta-percha plates shattering as the enraged kilasaurus max slammed against them, terrified siltempters cowering inside as she scooped them out. Veryann nodded in approval at the butchery and tore the House of Quest’s fencibles’ badge from her tattered war jacket, shoving it inside the mouth slash of Prince Doublemetal’s voicebox. So that they would know who had done this. And why. Not a rogue arena animal, but the forces of the free company. Her payment for the slaughter of the strongest man in Jackals.
With the siltempters’ community being torn apart by the creatures they had once tortured for their amusement, the five officers of the
The cool, dark rainforest swallowed them up.
There was a discernible difference between the territory that fell on the siltempter side of the border and the greenmesh, a difference that went beyond the peculiar silence of the terrain controlled by the Daggish. In their realm, the jungle grew neater, to a pattern. Still wild, but with a purpose that was lacking outside their dominion.
Commodore Black was the first to comment on it. ‘We might as well be walking through some wicked, wild green out here — like Peddler’s Piece back in the heart of Middlesteel, but laid out by a deranged groundsman.’
‘Peddler’s Piece never felt like this dark place,’ said T’ricola. ‘It makes me itch. Everything about it feels wrong — corrupt.’
‘Your instincts serve you well,’ said Ironflanks. ‘In Liongeli, craynarbians are born with the knowledge that coming close to this land means certain death.’ The lack of animal calls was setting the steamman’s nerves even more on edge than usual — no whistle-song of the birds of the canopy, no growls from hunting cats.
‘I’m glad my moulting skin has proved of some practical use,’ said T’ricola, ‘beyond my sharp new sword bone for hacking back the bush.’
Billy Snow was at the head of the party, now. Ever since they had reached the edge of the greenmesh, it was as if the sonar man had acquired a whole new set of senses, leading them across trails where the massive tree-like sentries of the Daggish had been marching only minutes before. Stopping them in silence at times — sometimes for up to an hour — waiting tensely in the Liongeli heat, moisture rolling down their skins, shell and boiler, while the u- boat man sat cross-legged, meditating on the best path to take. No one commented on this unnatural turn of
