Quest looked over at Jules Robur and pointed at Ironflanks. ‘But we’re not clearing our acreages to allow the steammen to inherit the Earth. We will survive inside this chamber. The coffins below are built to shield those who sleep inside their confines, while my people moving around the tomb will be protected from the mist by their crowns. A year inside the tomb will be long enough to allow the mist of Camlantis to exterminate the nations of the surface, but I have no intention of waking up to find a second horde — this time one composed of angry steammen — ready to storm my paradise.’
Robur murmured into a speaking trumpet. ‘Introduce test subject twelve.’
A door opened in Ironflanks’ cell, a tracked steamman crunching across the threshold. Amelia could see that there was something wrong with the new addition, the steamman’s arms jerking in spastic movements, his head juddering while his vision plate danced with a peculiar pattern rather than pulsing with the calm, steady light of the life metal. Ironflanks sensed the wrongness too, backing away into the corner of his cell, but the newcomer tracked towards the scout, an iron hand rising up as if in greeting. A modem screech began to issue from the new arrival’s voicebox. Amelia was no expert on the machine language of the steammen, but she had heard enough of their hymns to the Steamo Loas to recognize that this was not one of them.
Ironflanks stumbled back, trying to cover his sound baffles and drown out the siren song but, he could not. Swaying, Ironflanks began to lose control of his body, his four arms shaking, his metal legs jerking in the same obscene, involuntary dance as the other steamman. The scout tried to say something, but his mind was no longer capable of teasing his thoughts into vocalizations through his voicebox. He turned pleadingly towards the window where Amelia was watching and his turn became an uncontrolled dervish spin. Where was Ironflanks’ softbody friend? He tried to focus on her, on the figures outside the room, but there were only random shapes floating through his vision. Ironflanks’ telescope eyes began to flex out, his head lolling to the side as he stumbled around the room.
‘Ironflanks,’ cried Amelia. ‘
The two steammen started to circle each other inside the cell in an idiot’s waltz, poking each other with their manipulator arms.
‘You are wasting your breath, professor. Your scout now lacks the higher mental functions necessary to understand you,’ sneered Robur. ‘My ingenious little steamman disease is spread at the sonic level — it doesn’t even require a joining of cables between steammen to spread. A few infected specimens pushed up the stairs to Mechancia and within a week, the mountains of the Steamman Free State will be inhabited by nothing but oil- drooling imbeciles.’
‘You jigger!’ Amelia struggled in the grip of the guards. ‘You filthy shiftie jigger.’
Robur just smiled at her threats. ‘The Sun King had grown tired of the steammen knights defeating his regiments. He desired something to distract the people of the metal from the length of their border with Quatershift. Then the revolution got in the way of our project. Ironically, it was a lot easier to complete my work on the disease in a multiracial society such as Jackals, with its ready supply of steammen components and bodies.’
Quest addressed the passenger lurking inside Amelia’s mind. ‘It was the steammen grave robberies that first made you suspicious, wasn’t it?’
‹You shouldn’t have stolen such ancient parts.›
‘But it was ancient parts that I needed,’ said Robur. ‘Ancient components have their encryption patterns broken, their unravelled designs circulating as common currency among mechomancers. King Steam makes sure he advances each new generation of his people, always trying to frustrate the work of my noble trade. I needed to dig very deep into their filthy race’s nucleus to design such a potent steamman plague.’
‘Turnaround is fair play,’ added Quest. ‘I have seen enough of my cardsharps infected with transaction-engine sickness to realize that my colleague’s unfinished project had considerable merit.’
‘You’re the sickness, Quest,’ spat Amelia. ‘You and your pet shiftie.’
‘We are not monsters,’ protested Robur. ‘Do you not understand that I and my Jackelian friend have imagined countless times the terror the innocents below will feel as the Camlantean death mist seeps through their lodgings and starts to pull them to pieces? I see little else these days, but their myriad, murdered faces as I drift to sleep. But the body of the race of man is riddled with cancer and we must cut it out if we are to survive. You would understand better if you had seen what we did to each other in the organized communities of my nation. Such things cannot be allowed to continue. We must change.’
‘I’ll stop you!’ bellowed Amelia. ‘You’re not going to do this.’
‘Then you have made your choice,’ sighed Quest. ‘There is no room in our new world for division and opposition, professor. You of all people should know that if Camlantean society is to be reborn it will require harmony on the part of its citizens. But there is still one thing left to test …’ He took off his Camlantean crown and gave it to one of his airship sailors. ‘Put the crown and Professor Harsh in one of the cells, then throw him-’ he pointed at Bull Kammerlan,’-in after her. I am fairly confident the Camlanteans’ crowns still function after all these centuries, but I think a demonstration of their operation would be prudent first.’
‘You’re nothing but a pathetic little shopkeeper,’ Bull yelled and struggled as they dragged him after Amelia. ‘You’re not fit to run a sewer works, let alone a new world.’
‘You don’t approve of my calculations either?’ said Quest. ‘Let me give you a new sum, then, something that even a lowlife royalist like you should be able to understand. One crown and two souls that need cloaking. You do the maths.’
Amelia was shoved, struggling, into the cell, Bull Kammerlan thrown onto the floor beside her and the room sealed.
‘One crown, dimples,’ said Bull, ‘and two of us. That sum isn’t going to change.’
‘I opened this tomb for him,’ groaned Amelia. ‘I’ve murdered everyone in Jackals with my obsession for Camlantis. You take the damn crown and survive.’
A slot in the wall began to open where it joined the floor.
Bull shook his head. ‘From where I’m standing, there are two of you on your side of the room.’
‹If I was by myself, my belief system would require me to give you the crown.›
‘But you’re not by yourself, are you?’ said Bull. ‘You always were a queer one, Billy Snow, with your strange tales and your taste for damn vegetables, but I never knew the half of it.’
The black liquid started to puddle across the floor, the very sweat of hell.
Amelia kicked the crown towards Bull. ‘I don’t want it.’
The vapour was forming around their feet. At close quarters Amelia could see it was a soot-storm of a billion dark flecks. Tiny living machines — Billy revealed their construction within Amelia’s mind — designed to take apart that which was sentient one cell at a time, to breed, to spread, to absorb, until anything more intelligent than a Jackelian rat-pit terrier was scrubbed from the face of the world.
Bull picked up the crown. ‘My family were stewards of our land once, until Quest’s kind decided it would be better run by counting-house clerks.’
The cloud was starting to rise, becoming two mocking silhouettes, as if both the prisoners’ shadows had grown detached and insane.
Bull proffered the crown to Amelia. ‘And haven’t they done well with it?’
‘I opened the tomb.’
‘Then between you and that mad old coot riding around your skull, you’ve got what you need to close it.’
Bull tossed the crown towards Amelia as the cloud formed into a lance and hissed viper-like towards his chest. ‘You be sure and tell that fat oaf of an uncle of mine how I died.’
‹
Her hands struck out of their own will, seizing the cloaking crown and jamming it over her mane of hair.
The mist wrapped itself around the slaver, concealing him, followed by a macabre fizzing sound, like bacon on the griddle. It grew darker and denser, absorbing the new matter, swirling around in a frenzy. When the mist dispersed the slaver had vanished. A conjurer’s trick. No blood, no bones, not a trace that he had ever existed. Bull Kammerlan had died without even a cry leaving his lips. Hovering in front of Amelia, shapes formed and flowed within the inky motes. There had been someone else here. Someone the mist was required to feed on. But now there was nothing. It circled the room for a couple of minutes. Then it retreated, confused, towards the floor, reforming into a liquid that flowed repellently out of her cell. The slot sealed shut.
Bull was gone. T’ricola dead, Ironflanks left a helpless cripple, the face-shifting madman and his lashlite pet
