The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

in the Leviathan’s brig and your dagger thrust towards my heart. Let me show you what a poor decision that was, for both you and your flying pet.’

Septimoth pulled towards his friend, seven of the airship sailors struggling to hold him in place, their wires cutting into him. ‘I always knew that you damn hairless apes would finish the job you began on my flight in the mountains of Quatershift.’

‘Sadly prescient,’ said Quest, ‘even without the use of your third eye.’

Septimoth’s gloved hand managed to get enough purchase to fumble free his bone pipe and toss it towards Cornelius. ‘My mother’s spine. Honour it. And if you have the opportunity, honour mine, old friend.’

‘I’ll get you out of this,’ shouted Cornelius. ‘I got you out of the camp in Quatershift, I can get you out of this.’

Quest scooped the bone pipe up off the floor, tucking it behind the struggling prisoner’s belt. ‘I suggest you use it to play a death dirge for the both of you.’

Septimoth gazed at Damson Beeton as he was dragged past her cell. ‘Remember, damson, nothing for the enemy. Nothing. You know what to do.’

The old woman pressed her armoured hand against the transparent surface, her tear-filled eyes just visible beneath the bulk of her hex suit. ‘No sustenance for the enemy. I remember, old bird.’

Septimoth was shoved into the cell next door to Ironflanks, and at last free of the airship sailors’ wire snares, he began tearing off his bindings, unfurling his wings and gnawing at the gloves constricting his talons. He had almost completely freed himself when the black liquid began to enter his cell, transforming into a mist in front of him, as if the vapour was trying to form itself into a shadow-copy of the winged lizard. Then the mist darted in, striking the lashlite on the bony feathers of his chest. Septimoth fell into the mist, clawing at it, trying to disperse the cloud. For a moment it was as if the glass of the viewing gallery had been painted black, obscuring their view of the combat, but when the darkness cleared, the winged beast lay on the floor, his arms flung out and his body torn with a thousand cuts. Unlike the agents of the Court and T’ricola, and in a cruel mockery of the lashlite religion, Septimoth’s mangled corpse had been abandoned on the floor rather than disintegrated by the cloud. Vapour chased around the cell in wild circles. It had tasted a soul and its flesh and it was eager for more.

‘Not quite as tidy an end as the mist gives to the race of man,’ said Quest, ‘but then, I would expect that. Sentience is the key, is it not.’

Amelia realized Quest was talking to the uninvited passenger inside her skull, but she could hardly hear the mill owner for the screams of insane rage being hurled towards him by Cornelius Fortune.

Quest walked over, muffling the prisoner’s cursing mouth with a breathing regulator, then produced a strange demonic-looking mask and slid that over the prisoner’s air supply. ‘Time for that expulsion from heaven we talked about. Take the great Furnace-breath Nick to the edge of the city and throw him over the side. And take his flying pet’s corpse back to the Leviathan for dissection; if there is something about lash-lite physiology that makes it unattractive for complete absorption by the mist, I need to know what it is.’

In front of them, Cornelius Fortune started laughing, a terrible unearthly sound. It was almost as if he had grown larger now he was wearing the mask. ‘You can’t kill me now. Nothing can. You poor deluded fool, I can’t die.’

Quest seemed amused by this. ‘I believe it is time to put that theory to the test. Goodbye, Compte de Speeler. We won’t be meeting again.’

Damson Beeton banged on the window of her cell as her erstwhile employer was dragged away to be thrown to his death and Quest wagged a finger at her. ‘Patience, damson. I already knew that the mist works on your kind. And if more of your friends from the Court of the Air come visiting Camlantis, I may yet be needing you alive, to carry them word of what will happen should they try to interfere.’

With most of the prisoners murdered a tomblike silence descended on the chamber.

‘Interfere with what?’ shouted Amelia. ‘Is this your Camlantean paradise? An exotic execution chamber floating in the sky?’

‘Ah well, at least one of you inside that pretty head understands,’ said Quest. ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the key is sentience. Your people designed very well, child of Pairdan. The Camlantean mist only seeks out that which can reason. A drover taking his geese to market would be slain in an instant by the mist, though his flock would be left behind unharmed. But then, what kind of world would it be without birdsong?’

‹Where is your sentience, Quest? Where is your ability to think?›

‘Here,’ said Quest, unfurling a roll of charts and calculations down the floor of the chamber. ‘The maths your people did so many years ago; and the numbers I found in your crystal-book have not altered a jot since I updated them with the figures for our world as she lies now.’

‹There are things that are beyond calculation.›

‘I disagree. Here are the estimated number of deaths that occur each year on our continent from war, here the number that die from starvation and malnutrition, here the numbers from sickness, here the mortality figures from poverty.’

Amelia’s hand rose of its own will to indicate the field of black that covered half the chart. ‹And those?›

‘The death of every living, thinking being outside this chamber,’ said Quest. ‘But you meant that to be rhetorical.’ His hand jabbed down on the line climbing beyond the field of black. ‘Here’s the replacement level of population generated by a society modelled on the Camlantean pattern.’

Amelia felt sick to her stomach. How do pacifists fight? Totally. The replacement population supplied from here, by people held on ice like eels on a fishmonger’s slab.

‘Break-even within three hundred years,’ said Quest. ‘Everything after is a numerical gain. No more poverty, war … misery.’

Amelia spoke with her own voice now, but she was talking for both of them. ‘You can’t build a new Camlantis on the foundations of mass murder.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ Quest yelled at her. ‘I tried to work by the rules, but you just kept on changing them.’

‹She’s right.›

‘You hypocrite,’ barked Quest. ‘You and your Camlantean rebels played by the numbers of your own calculations. A couple of million dead in this city to save how many more millions in the world outside? But preserve those lives for what kind of existence? For watching my sister cry herself to sleep every night in an alleyway because she didn’t have enough food to eat, starving while the gaslights of packed restaurants burned on the road opposite? For watching my older brother die of waterman’s sickness because the only water we had to drink was from the gutter? You saved us for this? You immortal halfwit. You could have erased the Black-oil Horde, you could have erased everything and started again with this as the seed. We could have enjoyed two thousand years of prosperity and peace, we could be living in the Camlantean age right now and have known nothing else for millennia.’

‹You can’t build paradise on a sea of blood. My people were wrong then, as you are wrong now. No one ever asked the rest of the world if they minded dying to make way for a greater Camlantean Commonwealth.›

‘I can forgive you for killing all your brothers and sisters in Camlantis. They were your kin to murder. But I can’t forgive you for all the generations of us that followed, scrabbling in the dirt and the mud of the misery you left us as your inheritance.’

‘There are other ways to change things,’ said Amelia.

‘You don’t think I haven’t bloody tried?’ Quest shouted back. ‘I could have rebuilt Jackals from the ground up on the principles of modern science and spread our democracy across the continent, used the RAN to overturn the killers sitting in the Commonshare, chased that fat fool of a caliph off into the desert. Jackals was mine. I owned everything and everyone in the land, but the old owners childishly decided they wouldn’t honour my deeds to the property.’

‹The world is changed by the one and one.›

‘Oh really, is it? Do you think my model manufactories with their sanitary plumbing, free suppers and open lending libraries actually made any difference? Or my poorhouses and academies? I funded the Levellers to power and even they were wading in parliament’s sewage, trying to pass the smallest reforms. Every one of my efforts to create the perfect society was a drop of clean water in a stagnant millpond. It’s time to drain all the filthy waters and start afresh.’

‘No,’ pleaded Amelia.