The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

place of eggs. Now, that was odd. An airship’s fin bombs were made of crystal to contain the acidic blow-barrel sap, two chambers separated by a thin glass membrane in mimicry of the violently explosive tree seeds. Those capsules couldn’t be fin bombs. The metal would corrode, detonating at random. What was this rogue airship fleet of Quest’s up to? The shove of the guards’ rifle butts hurried Cornelius past the open hatch. Had Robur constructed a legion of primitive steammen fighting machines to drop on Jackals, to make its people bend their knee to whatever strange Camlantean philosophy-religion his master Abraham Quest had uncovered in his crystal-books?

Cornelius was led to a portal with a pair of sentries waiting outside. The guards swung open the heavy doors — polished Jackelian oak — to reveal a stately dining room positioned underneath the airship’s bridge. There was a substantial glass nose cone at the far end with panes of glass curving across the floor between embedded girder rails, allowing guests to stare down onto the clouds when the conversation stalled. There was only one diner — Abraham Quest — but a host of staff scurried around under the watchful gaze of Catosian free company fighters lining the wall.

Cornelius indicated the sentries standing guard over their master of the air. ‘Are you expecting one of your crew to murder you?’

‘You think me paranoid?’ said Quest. ‘Well, perhaps. But the Court of the Air may still have infiltrators working undetected among my staff.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘What makes you think that?’ said Quest.

‘The fact that we are still afloat. The Court’s wolftakers are nothing if not thorough.’

Quest indicated the chair at the other end of the table. ‘Perhaps they will be kind enough to allow us to finish our supper before crashing us.’

‘A large table,’ said Cornelius, ‘for only two diners.’

‘I had to construct the Leviathan and her sister stats under the pretence that they were proving craft for a new generation of RAN warships,’ Quest apologized. ‘My airship was to be a flagship design — while this was to be the captain’s table, serving formal dinners for the crew’s officers and visiting dignitaries. The Royal Aerostatical Navy does so love its ritual and its pomp. And foreigners are so easily impressed by the swell of our canvas hulls and the glint of shells from our fin-bomb bays.’

‘The navy doesn’t have airship hangars large enough to dock a craft of this size,’ said Cornelius, watching as a seat was pulled out for him by one of the retainers.

‘Admiralty House are planning a new statodrome,’ said Quest. ‘The invasion by Quatershift and the ease with which they and their revolutionary allies seized our airship fields around Shadowclock unnerved the navy. They are planning to use Veneering’s Rock as their new base of operations.’

‘Veneering’s Rock?’ Cornelius frowned. That was next to impossible. A mile of prime Pentshire land ripped out by the Earth’s fury and left to hang about the county, its heavy granite base keeping it locked above the downs, the land beneath dark in the shadow of the floatquake. There had been a famous cartoon forty years ago, in the Middlesteel Illustrated News. The head of the Jackelian order of worldsingers — the sorcerers whose first function was to tame the raging leylines — standing directly underneath the shadow of the sundered land, his hand cupped over his forehead searchingly; the speech bubble reading: ‘I see no problem?’

‘The Levellers don’t support the scheme, but the Purist members of parliament are pushing for it anyway. The expense will be prodigious, but for a fortress reachable only by airship, immune to the brigades of the People’s Army of the Commonshare …’

‘It’s just a bigger stick,’ said Cornelius.

‘I thought you might approve — or do you prefer something less blunt to beat the shifties with; someone like Furnace-breath Nick, perhaps?’

In front of Cornelius, a retainer lifted the silver lid on a platter of roast pork floating in cider gravy. ‘Furnace- breath Nick is feared by the revolution.’

‘I think our conversation is coming back to where we were in my orchid house, before we were so rudely interrupted,’ said Quest. ‘A single man cannot fight an idea. Only another belief can slay an idea.’

‘You sound like your toad Robur,’ said Cornelius.

‘He took very little persuading to join me,’ said Quest. ‘Anyone who has survived the hell of an organized community knows what the race of man is capable of, knows we have to change our nature if we are to prevent such atrocities repeating themselves with tedious inevitability. He is really very similar to you, in his aspirations.’

‘Robur is nothing like me. He was only kept alive because the First Committee wanted him working on the revolution’s revenge weapons. They needed his skills, much as you seem to.’

‘He’s an exceptionally clever man,’ said Quest. ‘In his own field of expertise, he makes my knowledge and advancements appear as those of a state school foundling in comparison.’

‘Why?’ Cornelius asked. ‘Why do you need the Sun King’s old court mechomancer? Is he helping you in your mad search for Camlantis?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the mill owner. ‘When you join me, I shall tell you.’

‘Camlantis,’ Cornelius tasted the word. ‘Do you realize how insane that sounds? A lost land, a city that historians will tell you never existed at all.’

‘It existed,’ insisted Quest. ‘Listen to me, Cornelius Fortune, Furnace-breath Nick, Compte de Speeler. I have studied all that we know about history and pre-history in the hope that I could learn lessons that might stop us repeating the errors of our past in the present. Everything I have found is the same cycle of war and devastation, for as far back as time is recorded. You think the blood of the revolution in Quatershift you nearly drowned in is exceptional? Sadly, it is the norm. Every age has its Commonshare. The invasion of Jackals five summers ago, the Two-Year War, the civil war in Jackals six hundred years before that. Go back sixteen hundred years and you’ll find the Chimecans ruling the continent from their underground holds and treating the frozen nations of the surface as nothing but food for their table. Every age, Cornelius, every age produces blood and famine and needless suffering. All save one. One brief glimmer of sanity where a group of people worked together in understanding and peace and achieved the closest thing to paradise the world has ever seen, before or since. Isn’t such a world worth the search?’

‘It won’t work,’ said Cornelius. His artificial arm was shaking with anger, the reworked mechanism unable to cope with the surge of emotions in its owner. ‘It never does. Sink me, but I do believe you are quite insane.’

‘Are you so sure in your prejudices?’ Quest shook his head sadly. ‘This is how you will defeat the great terror in Quatershift. Not by the stalking of their committeemen and Carlists, but with a rival idea. The truth of Camlantis shall set the world free. You need to decide who you are and what your destiny is. Is it to end the horrors of revolution once and for all — or is it merely to torture those who once tortured you?’ Quest lifted the mask of Furnace-breath Nick out from under the table. ‘Are you Cornelius Fortune, or are you this? The man, or the monster?’

‘This one doesn’t deserve me,’ whispered the mask. ‘He isa butcher, not a swordsman.’

None of the retainers was prepared for their guest’s reaction. Cornelius shoved the table back, sending a soup tureen spilling over the glass of the viewing gallery.

‘My face!’ Cornelius lunged across the table, trying to claw at Quest. ‘Give me back my face!’

On a hair-trigger already, the Catosian free company soldiers rushed forward and dragged Cornelius back. He kicked down, shattering one of the guard’s knees with the heel of his boot, lunging out to try to stave in another’s windpipe with the flat of his palm. She blocked the move and her comrades piled in, raining blows down with their rifle butts as Cornelius’s fierce struggle ebbed away under their assault. They pulled him up, bruised and bloodied, and gasped as they saw his face had changed. It was now an exact simulacrum of Abraham Quest’s own.

‘The Catgibbon was right,’ said Quest. ‘You are a shape switcher. It’s astounding the consideration Cassarabia’s womb mages show when it comes to ensuring the caliph’s rivals fall to his assassins’ blades. And I understand your lineage is half-Jackelian, too. Imagine what you could do if both your parents had been blood-twisted. You were created with quite a gift, Compte de Speeler.’

‘Isn’t this what you wanted to create?’ Cornelius snarled across the table at Abraham Quest. ‘A twin of you, dreaming your dreams of an unachievable utopia. A compliant servant of the House of Quest, following behind your toad Robur to murder any vision save that which you have imagined first?’