The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘Where would they have gone?’

‘Where indeed,’ said Quest. ‘They would have concentrated, would they not? Our own experience in the streets of our capital shows that. The steammen living together in Steamside, the craynarbians congregating in Shell Town. Fleeing the victori ous Black-oil Horde in the east, I believe the Camlantean survivors fled as far west as they could travel, settling on an island.’

‘Isla Verde?’ said Amelia. ‘Or do you mean Concorzia? There’s nothing we’ve ever found there across the ocean that would suggest-’

‘Jackals was an island once,’ said Quest, ‘before she drifted back to fuse with the continental landmass. Or so say some disreputable geologists your colleagues in the colleges would be hard-pressed to give the time of day to. If they have dated the timeline correctly, it would have been right around the time that the Maitraya appeared and inspired the island’s tribes to reject the druids’ teaching.’

Amelia watched the central spire of Camlantis drifting towards them through the sweep of armoured glass, the view from the bridge interrupted only by the airship’s twin navigation wheels, manned by a sailor apiece. Quest had done it again. Twisted her worldview on its head and shaken it until there was nothing left of the old.

‘There’s a little of the Camlanteans in all of us now,’ said Quest. ‘The interbreeding that must have happened in the centuries since between the Maitraya and the tribes of Jackals. But in some, the breeding has run purer than others, the call to the old ways positively humming in their blood …’

Amelia steadied herself against a bank of navigation equipment. The blood that had acted as her passport into the strange world beneath Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo; the blood that had allowed her to claim the crown of Camlantis with its dense information jewel. The same blood that had sung the song of prophecy to a hag of the Cassarabian dunes and a witch doctor in a Liongeli trading post. Her blood.

‘We’re coming home,’ whispered Amelia, the city sliding beneath her feet.

The first scouts from their airships’ glider launch were already arriving back at the foot of the spire in the heart of Camlantis by the time the Leviathan docked underneath its rotating petals. A perilous negotiation of wildly differing standards of engineering ensued- perilous, at least, for the jack cloudies lowering themselves on lines and welding on a docking ring; leaving arcs of mist in the air from their breathing masks as they swung back and forth thousands of feet above the abandoned city. Finally, a tunnel of cantilevered metal segments was manhandled across and riveted in place, joining spire and airship, a jury-rigged bridge between the modern world of Jackals and the ancient domain of Camlantis.

When Amelia stepped across, a sack full of jottings of their best-guess maps of Camlantis over her shoulder, her way had already been crudely marked in red paint. Arrows scrawled on the clean white floors and walls reminiscent of the corridors under Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo and showing the way through the labyrinth. In this city, though, the spire’s doors and lifting rooms seemed to work for everyone, not just her. Was the lack of security a feature of the trusting nature of the Camlanteans, or the functional practicality of a large metropolis? There were no visible signs of the civil war between the two factions of the Camlantean polity. No scorch marks or damage — no evidence of conflict at all, beyond the exist ence of the dead city itself, rent intact from her old moorings in the world below. But then, how would pacifists fight? Amelia wondered. Badly, was the answer, she suspected. Totally, whispered something from deep within her. Camlantis itself was proof of how pacifists fought. A cold, calculated, carefully engineered floatquake. Millions dead within a minute, gasping for air as the land they had called home lifted beyond its reach, before the rebels’ dark engines translated the dead city somewhere even colder, somewhere still and folded away from the rest of humanity — far beyond the sight and conscience of their murderers.

The assistants assigned to her field team gasped in awe as they stepped into the lifting room running down the interior of the tower; its walls, ceiling and floor so transparent the structures might as well not have been there. Columns of light ran up the inside of the spire, rainbow bursts exchanged between floating copper spheres the size of houses. Her team chattered to each other, excited by the alien sight, voices muffled behind their air masks.

Amelia was aware she should have been more moved by the display than she was. Why did she feel so little, seeing these wonders? Wasn’t this what she had worked all her life for, her father’s legacy finally fulfilled beyond any of the dreams he and his daughter had shared when he was alive? Just the chance to be standing here. He should have been here with her to share this triumph. Then she might have been able to explain to her team that the pillars of light they stood in awe of were nothing more than raw information, capable of recharging the crystal-books of the city’s inhabitants with any fact or finding known to the long memories and ancient storage devices of the Camlanteans. Levels of data so antiquated they had to be filtered across hundreds of parsing stages before they could be interpreted by modern Camlantean minds and their information systems. She should have been able to explain that when the energy of the sunlight had faded in cold exile, the massive devices before them had frozen the data in a singularity point no larger than a fingernail, a compact string of exotic matter that must have joyously expanded when the life-giving rays of the sun struck the tower again an hour earlier.

They might have looked at Amelia as if she was mad or possessed, but the living echoes of this city were beating in time to her pulse now, and instead of being filled with elation at her dream finally being met by reality, all she could do was curse the cold and pull tighter the large, fur-lined high-altitude coat she had been issued with for exploring Camlantis. Something her father had once said to her came drifting back. Pity the person who has no dream. And pity the person whoseonly dream is realized.

Behind Amelia’s head, her father whispered, ‘Even an echo must end.’

She whirled around. ‘Pappa!’

‘Professor?’ One of her team looked at her quizzically.

‘Did you hear something, did you say something?’

‘Just the crackle of the lightning exchange over there. This is it, professor,’ said one of the explorers. ‘This is what we have come for.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s magnificent,’ said someone behind her. ‘Do you think they had a museum down in the city? The things we might learn …’

‘I believe we will find dozens of them.’

Even the street outside felt no more substantial than the phantom projections she had glimpsed at the bottom of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. The light seemed impossibly bright, painting the eerily empty boulevards and buildings with an intense, pale clarity, feeding the deserted city the power it needed to begin functioning again. In the middle of the street, a strip of road was moving forward, an adjacent strip cycling a little faster while a band beyond them pulsed faster still. Her team gauged its purpose immediately, stepping on the first strip and waving as they were carried down the road.

‘A transport system built into the road itself,’ laughed a sailor below her breather mask, clearly finding the concept amusing.

Amelia tried to raise a smile at the discovery, but found she couldn’t. Above them one of the Leviathan’s sister ships drifted, not searching for a mooring on their spire but cleared for action, her gun ports turning vigilantly — something told her the airship wasn’t on the alert for more skraypers turning up to attack the high-altitude trespassers. Then Amelia realized. Of course. She had heard enough tall tales from the commodore of the wolftakers and how they had hunted the last of the royalist fleet down at Porto Principe. Now the Court of the Air had a rival in the heavens and it would only be a matter of time before they visited the unexpected new arrivals in their sinister black aerospheres, trying to answer the questions that would be burning in their minds. No wonder Quest’s mapping of the city had been planned with the precision of an invasion. An impatient man, indeed. Surely the Court wouldn’t interfere in a scientific exploration far over the Sepia Sea? But then, there was also the matter of Quest’s airships, the first aerial rival to the Jackelian high fleet since the science pirate Newton had terrorized the skies. Would the most cabbal-istic of Jackals’ secret police forces judge Quest’s actions any more kindly than they had mad, bad Newton’s? No, they were not the forgiving type.

Amelia’s high-altitude coat was still covered in wood shavings from the crate it had been pulled out of half an hour previously. She brushed the packing off her fur, a dusting of it landing on the surface of the flawless pavement. A second after the shavings fell, a slot opened on the side of the rain gutter, discharging a flat discus on wiry legs that scurried over to the mess and consumed it, before sidling back into the darkness. Amelia felt for the lines of the slot on the pavement, but they had disappeared as decisively as the little cleaning creature. No wonder there were no mummified corpses littering the streets and buildings. The victims’ dust had been tidied away using the city’s dwindling reserves of power, even before the last age of ice had consumed the world during the coldtime.