approaching darkship’s field of view, the cutting beam from its bow spine slicing out and separating the crewmen’s legs from their torsos. Maeva still had her back against the wrecked u-boat’s hull, lying on flattened kelp fronds, a bed for her and the unconscious commodore nestled between her legs.
‘Go, girl,’ Maeva urged Charlotte. ‘Swim away. You’ve no rotor-spears left and firing a shock-spear against that darkship would be like tossing seashells against a shark.’
‘My bloody sceptre is still inside the Purity Queen, I’m not going anywhere.’
‘A royalist antique won’t be any good to a corpse. There’s no glory in dying for it here.’
Damn the glory, it’s the money I want.
It was growing hard to focus on Maeva’s words, waves of pain from the nearing proximity of the enemy vessel burrowing into her skull. Charlotte wasn’t the only one feeling it. Maeva’s teeth were gritted tight behind her diving helmet’s visor.
Charlotte knelt to feel the commodore’s suit for tears. ‘How is he? Can you get him out of here?’
‘He’s sleeping and I think I’ll join him. I’m too tired to run, too tired to want to live in a world where darkships have returned. Not like you. The prophecy rests with you. You’re young enough to live through this. Go, leave us.’
Out above the kelp forest the darkship had returned to its task of cutting King Jude’s sceptre out from the wreckage of the Purity Queen. Its weapons carved the Jackelian craft into slices, pockets of trapped air streaming out as the submersible was sliced into pieces as though she were a roll of cured sausage. One of the beams boiled the sea six feet away from where the survivors were sprawled out, superheated water scalding Charlotte’s left side, her skin turning numb beneath her diving suit’s canvas. She just caught sight of the darkship angling in for another strike, condensation misting up the surface of her helmet’s visor. The next shot from the darkship would burst through the three of them, meeting as much resistance as heated cannon shot passing through rice paper. Her hands fumbled for the Eye of Fate.
Any advice?
‘You’re not alone.’ Elizica’s words formed inside her mind.
But she was. The commodore’s u-boat was cut to pieces, any seanores minded to put up a fight were either dead or heading in the opposite direction. It didn’t seem fair.
Charlotte blinked warm tears of condensation out of her eyes. I was hoping for something a little more substantial, like “duck”.
The pear-shaped darkship was manoeuvring to open up on her when a shadow whisked overhead. For a second Charlotte thought it was the second darkship, but then she realized she could still hear a faint whining noise from her speaker box, both her eardrums intact and definitely not leaking blood down her ears.
‘You’re not alone! Your friends have returned with Jethro Daunt, and like any good churchman, he has come to drive away the devils.’
Charlotte had thought the darkships strange, but this submersible was even stranger: a rapidly moving silvery stretch of steel propelled by a spinning nest of metal tentacles at her stern, the mysterious u-boat’s conning tower a low angular slash like a shark’s fin. She had no visible portholes along her hull or plate lines and rivets, but the submersible did possess a cluster of torpedo tubes circling her dome-shaped bow, and a salvo of four torpedoes hissed in anger as she angled past the ambushed darkship. As seemingly surprised by the appearance of this late addition to the conflict as Charlotte, the darkship’s lance belatedly blazed out. Dark bolts of ebony lightning ignited three of the four incoming projectiles, each lost in a flowering explosion upending Charlotte and slapping her back into the Purity Queen ’s torn length. As Charlotte collapsed forward, she saw the darkship had acted too slowly to catch the fourth torpedo, the projectile’s nose cone splitting away and shedding peels of metal, releasing a cloud of tiny warheads as though it had just given birth in the water. The fleeting school of miniature projectiles buzzed in against their quarry from a dozen directions, looping and striking the darkship as hungry and mean as a school of piranhas.
There was no immediate detonation forthcoming, and for a second Charlotte thought that the enemy’s shield had neutralised the strike; then she realized the warheads had actually burrowed deep under its inky skin. With no shockwave Charlotte could feel, the darkship jolted as it absorbed the internal detonation, a dozen violent geysers of black substance spewing out. The darkship simply fell out of the currents, drifting down towards the seabed and dissolving into inky fronds as it dropped.
Rotating like a victorious dolphin, the submarine turned elegantly above the forest and angled back over the seanore camp, before the strange interloper returned towards the broken, beached hull of the Purity Queen.
Behind Charlotte, the second darkship, already badly damaged by the rotor-spear strike she had slipped beneath its defences, turned in the ocean and vanished at speed.
‘Those who stand together are rarely beaten by evil.’ Elizica’s words slipped across her mind. ‘Evil relies on its victims acting as selfishly and supinely as it must to prosper.’
But there are always losers. Charlotte looked down at the commodore sprawled at the foot of his ravaged submarine, dozens of seanore bodies floating past mutilated, corpses held in the embrace of the currents. Did carrion care which side won or lost after they passed along the Circle, or was there just the empty void where their life had been? A gap in the lives of all those who had known and loved them?
I’m going inside the wreck to get my sceptre.
‘Be quick, girl-child. The enemy know you have fought here, they will return to this camp with equipment sensitive enough to pick up and track the trail of the sceptre’s radiations.’
There are more of those things?
‘The darkships will return with the gill-neck fleet, with everything they hold in their power, if it allows them to seize the sceptre.’
Gemma Dark prowled behind the chair at the head of the table, growing increasingly irritated at the petty sniping between the nobles sitting at the dozen seats dotted along its oblong length. Like much of the furniture in the gill-neck capital, the table was moulded from a single piece of transparent crystal, allowing her to observe the nervous twitches of the exiled royalist lords’ hands and legs as they argued back and forth. There had always been a Star Chamber in the centuries since Parliament had seized power inside the Kingdom, maintaining the increasingly slim fiction that it was the true Jackelian government, ruling in proxy for a long-deposed line of kings and queens. Had the Star Chamber always bickered and fought as fiercely as this? It was no wonder the fleet-in-exile had eventually been broken and defeated when these chinless wonders had been leading it.
‘It’s simply not on,’ pronounced Boris Jola, the present Baron of Ranfshire. ‘We are only two weeks away from beginning the raids on Jackals’ harbour towns, and now the entire Advocacy fleet is being sent away? Does that fellow Walsingham understand the first thing about war? To defeat your enemy, you must first engage him. Not go charging off, chasing after some damnable will-o’-the-wisp.’
‘He has his reasons,’ said Gemma. ‘I did not detect any reluctance to go along with Walsingham’s plans when he offered you and your crew a way out of the prison camp on the Island of Ko’marn. But perhaps you prefer picking gillwort fruit to fighting Parliament? Perhaps you prefer having the Advocacy hunt you down as pirates, rather than helping you sink Parliament’s wheel-ships?’
‘I always said it was dangerous to put our trust in Walsingham. Fellow’s a turncoat, only after his own ends. No blue blood in that fellow, no breeding, I’m sure of it.’
Angry calls to concentrate on the invasion of Jackals came back at Gemma. When Gemma had come in here, she had arrived cheered by the news that her brother’s precious submarine had been left a holed wreck on the seabed in the seanore hunting grounds. That traitorous dog Jared, that stain on their family’s name, possibly dead — well, she would only believe it when she saw his corpse — but now her good mood was slowly being sapped by the inane prattle of these titled fools. Everything they had, they owed to Gemma and her allies, to her luck. And here they were, banging the diamond surface of the council table they sat at solely through her cunning and artfulness. Talking about unilaterally moving the forces of their allies, partners who only suffered the royalist cause through Gemma’s contrivances. If ever there was a proof of absolute monarchy’s worth, these twittering blowhards were it. The Jackelian throne had waited an age for a true queen to sit on it once more, an authentic queen, not Parliament’s amputated puppet. When Gemma assumed her rightful seat, this council would be as much a thing of the past as that prattling chamber of robbing industrialists who occupied the House of Guardians. Parliament would never be swapped for this council of fools, not while she drew breath. But for now, I need them.
‘The retrieval of the last surviving crown jewel would be a powerful totem I agree,’ said the Countess of Stokesay, usually one of the more reasonable members of the Star Chamber. ‘But worthy of the complete diversion
