How can I do it? Lead these people against the Advocacy? We’ll be facing war machines, submersibles, trained armies — it will be a slaughter?
‘These are not simple fools that follow you,’ reassured Elizica. ‘They know the might of the Advocacy’s military far better than you. They have rubbed up against it for centuries. Those pledges and boasts are like the war masks that cover their faces: they use it to conceal their fear. They will follow you because they know the nature of the enemy. They will follow because they understand that if they lose, it will not just be the end of their way of life, it will be the end of all life. Their children, their wives, their husbands, their parents, their kinsmen and their hunting partners, all of them will be hunted down without mercy and their life-force ripped from them like marrow sucked from fresh whale-bone.
‘They understand perfectly that the enemy may live, or we may, but both cannot. It is a binary choice from which no sentient creature may turn its face. Do not think these people savages, do not think them fools. They have honour and they have prospered in cooperation with the balance of the sea for far longer than I have survived. To lead such warriors as these to their fate is not a tragedy; it is a privilege the like of which you will never be given again. There is no glamour being cast here and I stand revealed before them only because it is right that a warrior knows the cause they are being asked to fight and die for.’
Charlotte didn’t need Elizica’s council to know how few of the nomads would be returning from the gill-neck capital. A raid, the greatest raid the seanore had ever mounted — not against a rival clan this time — but against the best defended city of the most powerful underwater nation in existence. A theft from the ultimate race of thieves, an attempt to steal the enemy’s own magic and turn it against them.
The commodore looked out at the cheering war leaders with dismay. ‘Well, lass, the fuse has been well and truly lit. Now let us see if we can survive the force of the wicked explosion.’
Daunt stood on the parapet of the keep overlooking Nuyok’s walled gate. The citizens of the town were manning the walls and waiting for what was to come as patiently as the ex-parson. They kept no standing army in the city, but it seemed all citizens between a certain age — male or female — trained as a local defence force. The closest thing to a professional military company was the city’s armourers who came among them, emerging from entrances in the strangely transparent streets. They came bearing crates of the Court of the Air’s gas-rifles, breaking cases open and distributing guns, drums of ammunition and canisters of gas accelerant as well as sword belts among the long queues formed along the uniformly hexagonal streets. After they collected their weapons, the townspeople would pass shrines to the lady of the lamp, kneeling briefly and passing their swords over the flame, chanting prayers of the light of freedom.
The affairs of the Court of the Air and the town in the volcano’s shadow had been bound together for so long that the Nuyokians spoke in a pigeon variant of Jackelian, sometimes switching into their rapid-fire flowery-sounding local tongue, other times launching into a heavily-accented take on Jackelian. It seemed to make no difference whether there was a Court agent in their presence or not: they would meander through the three modes of speaking while conversing among themselves. In Daunt’s presence they would often forget he was Jackelian and drift between their pigeon language, Jackelian and the local tongue. Then, when they caught his look of non- comprehension, they would realize what they had done and burst into laughter, their tanned faces shaking as if the fact of his foreignness was a source of endless humour.
From his vantage point on the keep’s battlements, Daunt could see across the lake and the lightly wooded beach outside, rocky volcanic pebbles rather than sand, the boils of the Fire Sea simmering on the horizon. There was a permanent mist clinging to the top of the water where the thermal barrier circled the island, no sign of the approaching Advocacy forces through the seething fog. The enemy were advancing unseen, a vast fleet of war machines and submersible cruisers, but coming they were. Daunt didn’t need to see the ring of markers tightening like a noose around the oval of the island modelled on the command table. He could read it in the tension of the defenders. In the way their hands clenched and unclenched around the pommels of their belted short swords. In the way they would check the sights on their gas-guns, fiddle with the seals of accelerant capsules and test the connection of their weapons’ ammunition drums. Was the fear they were experiencing worse than the knot of terror tightening in Daunt’s gut? He murmured a koan in an attempt to steady his nerves, but he found it almost impossible to focus on the calm of the passage. He tried instead to think of military history, all the conflicts and sieges and battlefields he had studied, but he was uncertain what lessons could be applied here. The Advocacy were a private race, they fought below the waves in their own realm to fend off trespassers and pirates and brigands. Assaulting the Isla Furia on land, their forces infiltrated by the monstrous sea-bishops, nothing like that had been recorded in history’s annals.
Behind the wall, a workforce followed the armourers out from under the city, going into each of the porcelain towers and replacing the glass of the windows with metal sheets perforated with narrow firing strips. It seemed a smoothly disciplined exchange, as if the Isla Furia was laid siege to with such regularity that the city’s fortification was a commonplace occurrence. The city had already been overflown by darkships, the flying submarines passing with such speed that they left little explosion of sound in their wake. The sea-bishops were no doubt confused by the thousands of signals they were receiving across the island, the radiations from King Jude’s sceptre isolated, duplicated and mimicked by little devices the size of an apple that Lord Trabb’s scientists had devised. Well, the best place to hide a tree was a forest. Now the enemy would have to seize the entire island and eliminate each of the false signals one by one before they arrived at where the real sceptre was concealed.
Daunt had demurred when he was presented with one of the gas rifles and a belted sword; although he had accepted the vest of chain mail offered. He had expected it to be heavy, but the slippery ceramic-like links felt as light as paper. Slipping the entire vest over his head and poking his arms out, the chain mail might as well have been one of the local’s ponchos.
Coming up the steps from inside the city was Morris. For reasons best known to himself, the escaped convict had decided to stay on the island when the other Jackelians had left on the commodore’s u-boat. Unlike the ex- parson, Morris had a gas-gun slung over his shoulder and heavy short sword strapped around his waist.
‘Hot day for it, eh, vicar?’
‘Indeed,’ said Daunt.
‘It’ll get a might hotter when the gill-necks come calling.’
Daunt frowned. ‘It sounds as though you relish the prospect of the coming battle.’
‘I’m not much of a Circlist I’m afraid. Not much of one for turning the other cheek. Those bastards had me as a slave for the best years of my life, pulling gillwort out of their pox-ridden swamps. There’s not much inside me that’s capable of forgiving them for that.’
‘I do hope that’s not why you stayed behind — the chance for revenge against your old captors?’
Morris shrugged. ‘Not all of it. I like it here. They don’t have money in the city here, did you know that? Although it makes sense when you think about it. Most of the trouble I ever got into was because I was trying to make some fast pennies on the wrong side of right. Funny old arseholes. Everything gets voted on by each of the towers.’ He pointed to one of the soldiers on the keep wearing red chain mail. ‘He’s a Notifier. Red-chests get to run about telling people the results of their votes. Even now, they’re all having their little ballots on how the city’s going to be defended and who’s going to hold what section of the wall. Personally speaking, I got my doubts on how that’s going to hold up when the gill-necks are climbing over the ramparts and the air’s thick with shells.’
‘Yet, you’re here,’ said Daunt.
‘Well, they know about inbreeding here, don’t they? That’s one of the reasons why they welcome outsiders from the Court’s staff. I’ve got a dozen offers from different towers to stay and marry local girls. Each of the blocks has their own trade. I figure one of the towers that goes out fishing will do for me. I can sail and cast a net as well as most, and drowning worms with a rod and line was something of a pastime for me back in the Kingdom. There must be a tower of priests and shrine-keepers somewhere here. Maybe you could stay and settle down here too?’
‘I don’t think that’s for me.’ I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget about false gods without embracing this misguided people’s deity.
‘Well, the trade of thief catcher doesn’t exist here, see, what with no money to steal and everything being divided up among the people already. You need something you don’t already have, you just borrow it from the vaults under the streets and return it when you’re finished. Anyone loses their rag and murders a citizen, then they’re thrown out of the city to live in the jungle as best they can until one of the beasties does for them.’
‘Well then, there we have it. A Circlist priest must go where he is needed by the people as much as a consulting detective, even a lowly ex-communicated wretch such as me.’
