‘We shall see.’ Gemma pulled out Charlotte’s amulet and swung it tauntingly inches from her face. ‘What are you without this trinket? Only a petty housebreaker, and probably not a very competent one without my allies’ tricks to bend weak-willed minds to your thievery. Walsingham tells me that you’re the illegitimate daughter of an industrial lord, that filthy parliament of shopkeepers, tradesmen with their dirty stolen titles. What a fancy pair of doves flapping in my snare. A shopkeeper’s bastard, working with a traitor to the cause… a lapdog and informer for the State Protection Board.’ Behind Gemma, the cliff-face through the darkship’s port had stopped rising past, her darkship turning to reveal the trench floor. Further than any human should have been able to reach, the deep of the dark. It was still, currentless and cold, but not entirely without movement. Charlotte could see the sea-bishops’ seed-city ahead, a vast ebony disk blocking the floor of the trench. Above it, moving sedately with the vast pressure, were darkships, as well as figures wearing diving suits that looked like collections of joined spheres. They were putting the finishing touches on a massive curved arch, jagged, crystalline, an architecture of pure evil. Large enough to pass the seed-city squatting before it through the vault, and with good reason. When the gate was activated, Charlotte’s world would be joined to its dangerous mirror image across the well of infinite possibilities. How many seed-cities would pass through that gate then, how many countless sea-bishops, arriving to feast until every living creature in her world was extinct?
‘Nothing should be able to prosper this deep down,’ said the commodore.
‘Walsingham’s people like to toil far away from the gaze of their enemies,’ said Gemma. ‘And as I have had it explained to me, my allies need the incredible forces of the pressure down here to anchor the energies released when unlocking the portal to their home.’
‘How can you talk like that about helping them?’ asked Charlotte, stunned by the royalist’s disregard for the implications of her words.
‘Why don’t you ask my brother?’ laughed Gemma. ‘We were both born with a price on our head, weren’t we, Jared? The children of rebels with long-lost titles and nothing else except a world full of enemies and assassins and turncoats ranged against us. You want to know why I’ll choose those treacherous reflections of humanity as allies over my own race? Just the chance of getting my hands on my brother would be worth all that I have done in their name and all that I yet will. I would crawl across every cold inch of hell merely for the chance to tweak this jigger’s beard.’
Charlotte found it hard to believe anyone could hate the way this woman could. Beyond reason, Gemma was clinging to it like a life raft. She was hollowed out with hate. ‘Once you open that gate, there will be no closing it. The sea-bishops will come here in numbers beyond legion to feed on us.’
‘Quite so,’ said Gemma. ‘Fortunately there are so many nations around who are entirely superfluous to my coming reign. Those shiftie bastards, those king-murdering regicides on the First Committee in Quatershift, for instance. I think a world without them would be for the better, don’t you? And the Steamman Free State? Where were they when Jackelian shopkeepers were hunting my ancestors, foxes to the hounds, across the moors? An internal matter, can’t intervene. Let’s see how the steammen like a taste of neutrality from their neighbours for a change. The caliph down in Cassarabia, drip-feeding the cause crumbs of support from his table only when it suited his glorious highness? Well, he likes crafting monsters out of slave flesh, he can meet my monsters and we shall see who comes out best from the arrangement. The Mass must feed, that’s what my little darlings are always saying. Let them!’
Charlotte stared up in shock at the commodore’s sister. ‘You’ve lost your mind.’
‘Just running to the bitter, that is all. Ashes are what the world has given me. I’m only riding my luck and making the best of it.’
‘You can’t trust them!’
‘Am I an idiot, thief girl?’ snarled Gemma. ‘I trust them as much as I trust my dear brother here. But I have worked with the Mass for long enough to understand them far better than you ever will. They are cowards. They are a hundred times as far ahead of us in engineering and technology as we are above the most primitive tribe of polar barbarians, and yet the Mass will never fight until they have overwhelming numbers on their side. Even then, they prefer to sidle up behind you masquerading as your grandmother to slip one of their blood-draining daggers in your spine. They live in fear. Fear that one day they will connect to a reflection of their world carrying a race as far beyond them as they are beyond us. A race that will follow them back to their barren piss-ridden world and burn them out for the plague they have become.’ She bent in close to Charlotte and winked. ‘Every day I’ve lived I’ve faced and fought against impossible odds. The sea-bishops don’t know it yet, but they’ve found the world they’ve been dreading all these millennia. It is ours, and I shall be its sole ruler.’
‘They’re not quite the cravens you take them for,’ said Charlotte. ‘You know what happens when sea-bishops reach a world with a species judged too hostile to be conquered? They detonate their seed-city and all on board die rather than risk capture and having their home traced. Self-sacrifice, all for the Mass. They are experts at judging the odds.’ She pointed to the seed-city, its black expanse approaching closer to the darkship with every second. ‘Does that look like a race of creatures uncertain about their chances of victory against us?’
‘Suicide is usually the way cowards leave the world,’ said Gemma. She turned to her royalist sailors inside the darkship. ‘Never give up the cause. Never surrender. To live is to fight and to fight is to live!’
The u-boat crew raised their fists and punched the air, shouting back her words like a war cry, making a holy mantra of the cry. Gemma turned around and slammed her boot into the commodore, doubling him up in agony. ‘Look at you, brother. Always fighting when you should be running and running when you should be fighting.’
The commodore groaned and raised a hand weakly towards the approaching seed-city. ‘We’re like those demons lurking out there in the night, Gemma, the fleet-in-exile, the royalist cause. We should have died out an age ago, surrendered to history and the blessed march of progress.’
‘If that’s the limit of your defeatist cant, maybe you could have had the courtesy to move along the Circle before you went and got my only son bloody killed,’ snarled Gemma.
‘Bull died like a man,’ said the commodore, ‘facing down true enemies of the Kingdom.’
‘Another lie. You paroled him out of prison just to get him murdered on one of your dupe’s adventures, your pockets lined with an industrial lord’s gold to do it. Well, brother, you and your fancy piece here can share Bull’s glory. But not before you’ve seen my allies have their fun.’
‘I’m sorry about Bull; that much is true.’
‘Sorry! You’ve never had a child die. You don’t have the right to be sorry.’
‘You’re wrong about that too, Gemma.’
‘Been sowing your wild oats out there have you?’ sneered the commodore’s sister. ‘Yes, your noble bastards are probably scattered in every port from Spumehead to Thar. But don’t expect me to mourn one less of your seed, brother. Your half of the family tree is about to come to an abrupt end, while mine is only just beginning.’
‘Ah, sister,’ wheezed the commodore, ‘you’re sixty now if you’re a year. There are no more children for your old body.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. The Mass are going to alter my flesh to make me like them. I will live forever, my youth restored, my womb fertile again. By the time I am finished, this world will be filled with nothing but my descendants. You and everyone else in the world are nothing but my meal ticket to power, quite literally. So let me tell you how things sit. Your pathetically desperate plan to alert the State Protection Board to the sea-bishops’ presence has failed. The siege at the Isla Furia is about to end the only way it could, and you two fools are going to live just as long as it takes for that gate out there to be opened.’ She smiled coldly at them before she turned to watch the seed-city swallowing their craft. ‘After all, it is true. The Mass must feed.’
When the door on the seed-city’s dimly illuminated cell opened it was more like a mouth widening. The manacles were unlocked on Charlotte and the commodore before royalist sailors shoved the two of them inside. The surface of the cell was wet and slippery and a silhouette rose up out of the shadowy prisoners huddling on the floor towards the cell’s rear. As he drew closer, Charlotte recognized the man. ‘Sadly!’
Barnabas Sadly rubbed at raw red eyes, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. ‘They’ve caught you too?’
‘That they have, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘My sister and the sea-bishops both.’
‘Sea-bishops?’ said Sadly. ‘Is that what you’re calling those things?’ He saw the look of confusion on the commodore’s face and continued. ‘Those monsters have the spit of me walking around. My face, a parcel of memories they ripped out of my mind inside the gill-neck prison camp. But I, it certainly ain’t. It’s one of the wobble-headed beasts. I’ve been here ever since they stole my shape and shipped me out of the prison camp, trying to avoid looking chuffing fat enough to make a good mouthful for these monsters.’
