‘My sabre, lad,’ said the commodore, exchanging a quick handshake with the ex-parson, just before he followed Charlotte along the gantry out to the Court’s submersible, Maeva and the survivors from his crew mixed in with the Court’s sailors across its sleek shining decks. ‘That’s what you can place your faith in. It’s kept us alive this long, hasn’t it?’
Only just.
‘My Lord Trabb,’ said Daunt, as the acting head of the Court was reclining back into his sedan chair. ‘I trust you have been factoring our schemes into the transaction-engines running the simulation of the Kingdom’s future.’
‘Yes of course,’ said the man.
‘What do they say about our chances of success?’
Lord Trabb sighed, a look of deep melancholy settling on his features. ‘Well, dear boy, let’s just say if you’d recently received an inheritance, now would be an excellent time to blow the lot on fine brandies, games of chance and large tips in the most expensive hotels.’ The chair lifted up into the air, its poles settling on the mechanicals’ shoulders, then bobbed back towards the u-boat pens.
Well, at least the gambling I’m doing doesn’t cost money. Just bodies and blood, you hypocritical fool. Daunt watched his friends leave, the u-boat sinking in a gush of foam and the aerosphere drifting like a black sun into the sky, growing smaller and smaller, until it was swallowed by the smoking volcano’s smoke. Daunt had a terrible premonition this was the last time he would see any of them again. Is it because they aren’t going to be around, or because I won’t? My fate is my own, created through right actions. He tried to shrug off the feeling of superstitious dread, yet still it lingered. How strange. The Court of the Air’s hidden support base, with an ancient town built beyond the submerged wreckage of an even more ancient marvel. It should have felt like a lost world. Instead, it seemed to Daunt as if the world beyond was lost, and this, here, was all that was real. The horrors that lay outside would be intruding soon, though. There was no getting away from that. Daunt just had to hold on long enough for his friends to do the impossible. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it?
He set off back to Nuyok’s walled gate, trying to whistle away the reckoning that was blowing in from the world outside, nodding to the fishermen repairing their nets in the wall’s shadow. ‘There once was a Circlist priest, who found himself facing a terrible beast. He prayed not to god, but whittled a duelling rod, and instead invited the monster in to feast.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘There’s a mortal sight for my sore old eyes,’ said the commodore, exiting the moon pool of the Court’s u- boat. ‘All my years and this is the first time I’ve seen such a thing.’
‘What did you expect?’ said Maeva. ‘The grand congress of the seanore was attacked by the ancient enemy. How did you think our people would answer such an outrage?’
Charlotte cleared the lock of the submarine in a stream of bubbles from the pair’s rebreathers. The camp they had left behind on the seabed had grown and multiplied a hundredfold, the kelp forest pierced with the clearings and banners of every clan of seanore that swam the ocean. Slanting rays of fading sunlight from the sky above dappled armoured formations of seanore shifting and switching above the underwater forest, rotor-spears glinting as they manoeuvred. Beyond the surface of the waves the sun was setting, and there were strings of burning crystals mounted on tall spears standing ready to illuminate the gathering. Was it Charlotte’s imagination, or was the water warmer here now? Had the presence of so many bodies raised the temperature of the sea water, or perhaps Charlotte was flushed by the sight of so many answering the call she had sounded? Immediately below them, the crab-shelled domes of the assembly had become a series of hills — smaller domes linked by larger structures sprawling away into the distance, clusters of nomads swimming in and out through the constructions’ portals like so many schools of fish. It was hard to believe this edifice was temporary.
‘It is the presence of the darkships that has brought so many here, girl-child,’ Elizica whispered inside her mind. ‘They remember well the dangers of the demons that lurk within the trench, within the deep of the dark. The prophecy of the shadowed sea.’
A pity those within the Advocacy have forgotten, and the Kingdom of Jackals too, for that matter.
‘Those who insulate themselves with the warm walls of civilization are apt to forget the lessons of the past. Lessons become words in books, and the books are quickly burnt for kindling when the world freezes. Ink runs when the seas shift and paper crinkles into dust when the world warms. But the songs of our forefathers are not so easily forgotten when they are sung well and passed down the generations. So many centuries have passed. Even my resonance fades, captured in the granite of our mountains and the flints of our fields and the stone circles of our tors.’ There was a sadness in the ancient queen’s voice, and a longing too, but Charlotte wasn’t sure if it was for the echo’s passing — that she would no longer able to watch over her people, or a yearning for the serenity of silence and a final passing after so many aeons of duty binding her to the land.
Charlotte touched the Eye of Fate, pressed tight against her skin under the diving suit. Sometimes she could feel the presence of its previous owners, all the gypsies who had held onto it over the centuries, passing the gem down their line. Madam Leeda hadn’t had any children to pass it onto, nor nieces and nephews. Perhaps Charlotte had been the closest thing the old woman had to such a relative. And how had Charlotte repaid Madam Leeda? With the theft of the precious stone she used to influence the outcome of her bartering with the often hostile towns and villages she passed through. If a surrogate daughter Charlotte had been, she had proved a pretty poor one of the old gypsy — no better a daughter than the farming family had been to her. Charlotte just another crop, to be uprooted and tossed out when the rent on her field was stopped. Her real mother, Lady Mary, discarding her bastard offspring, in case Charlotte’s existence embarrassed her ladyship’s new husband into a divorce. Perhaps this was how history repeated itself. In the small things as well as the large. Every one of those abandonments and misfortunes rolled up into Charlotte until all she was capable of was betrayal and disappointing those that tried to show her any kindness. What use was the Eye of Fate when it could mesmerize a person in so many ways, but it couldn’t make them give you the love you were owed?
‘We shall find a better use for the crystal, you and I,’ said Elizica, intruding into Charlotte’s maudlin gloom as she followed the commodore and Maeva swimming down towards the grand assembly.
It can bring me anything except what truly matters.
‘The Eye of Fate was created by the sea-bishops, never forget that,’ said Elizica. ‘What your heart feels is not within their understanding. All that is left of their kind is endless hunger and the desire to spread and disperse their seed across every corner of existence.’
But they used to be us — the race of man?
‘Something as close to it as to make no difference,’ said Elizica. ‘Now I fear all they are is an abject lesson on why we should always seek to live in balance with our world and never presume ourselves masters over it. The sea-bishops are the distorted reflection in a mirror we need to stare into to know what we must never become. They have become thieves of life itself. Our worst impulses given free reign and distilled over millennia into a dark, unthinking core of pure selfishness. Countless billions of sea-bishops clawing at each in cities so dense with their evil kind that bees in a hive might marvel at their fecundity. Even the walls of reality are no barrier to their dark cravings, the infinite chain of existence reduced to mere connected storehouses of fodder for them to feast on. Waiting for a doorway to open to somewhere, anywhere they might spill out for a temporary abatement of their numbers. Waiting for their scouts to signal that there is a new world fit for the feeding. Vampires in the truest sense of the world. They would suck the spark of existence out of your body and discard the marrow of your corpse as though you were a corn husk.’
Perhaps this was what Charlotte had been destined to fight after all, the magnified reflection of all the small cruelties that had been inflicted upon her.
‘Your family chose to abandon you,’ said Elizica. ‘I did not. I have selected and saved you, Charlotte Shades, kept you in my pocket like a lucky penny for this moment. All the years you were moving through the city as its most notorious thief, you were actually training for the greatest theft in history. You’re going to steal our future back from the sea-bishops, just as I once did. You will need every iota of your talent and your instincts to succeed, for the sea-bishops are the most peerless thieves of them all, and they have been stung once in the past already. I had it easy; you are going to repeat my feat when they suspect you are coming to rob them!’
