by Stephen Hunt
Elizica’s voice echoed in Charlotte’s mind. ‘It is time. Have them place their hands on the gem at the top of the sceptre.’
What are you going to do?
‘The sceptre’s gem carries echoes of its old purpose. Do as I have told you, girl-child.’
The party did as Charlotte bid them, the sceptre’s jewel pulsing under her palm, the warmth of the others’ bodies mingling with hers. Charlotte felt a dizzying sensation, but she didn’t fall. It was as if she was becoming the sceptre, joining with what the gem on its cap had seen, the jewel’s history unravelling in reverse order before her mind’s eye.
The sceptre secure in the mausoleum beneath the speaker’s chair in Parliament’s chamber. Being polished by the Keeper of the Vault, an ancient title but little more than a janitor now in the great functions of state.
A retainer running with the sceptre wrapped up and concealed in rags, trying to sneak it across the border into Quatérshift. But Parliament’s forces captured him. Hung him from a tree before they carried their prize back to the House of Guardians. Charlotte caught glimpses of royal history in the centuries before Parliament overthrew the last true king. Being carried by royals for coronations and the opening of Parliament – the Guardians little more than favoured poodles told when to bark and bite.
Centuries of cold and chill biting winds from the north. Then the sceptre was being locked away in a barrow mound, buried by a dying monarch as the Jackeni tribes dwindled, their numbers denuded at the beginning of the age of ice. Earlier, earlier, and then the gem was being installed, hidden in plain sight on the newly created sceptre of a newly minted Kingdom. Before that it had served as far more than a mere ornament. Charlotte gasped soundlessly, held in the sceptre’s spell. In the service of its true masters. Creatures that Queen Elizica had battled and known as the sea-bishops, the same hideously wizened and fanged monsters haunting Charlotte’s dreams. Charlotte could see where the nickname had come from – sea-bishops – the monsters’ distended brain cases, rising out of their skulls in offensive imitation of a bishop’s mitre. The sea-bishops had been members of the race of man once, but on another Earth, one of millions stretched out on the thread of creation, a single pearl on a necklace containing infinite variants of itself, endlessly repeated reflections in a mirror. Mankind had abused this world, drained it with their vampire hunger, becoming ever more dependent on their machines, their bodies withering away even as their brains grew and swelled until their heads became the mitre-tall monstrosities that Elizica had named them for. The sea-bishops’ minds developed to be powerful enough to amplify their will with crystal devices, compel the creatures of the world they shared to surrender their life-force to these terrible man-things evolved so far from their humanity. Cattle that would walk towards their death convinced they were approaching their own kind. Charlotte flinched as she realized that it was one of these trickster devices she wore around her neck. Every sea-bishop carried a duplicate of her amulet. A multifaceted tool: communication device, calculating machine, weapon and mesmeric camouflage apparatus combined. Eventually, nothing was left on the sea-bishops’ Earth. No food, no vegetation, no fish in the ocean, no metals left to strip-mine, no coal to burn, no sunlight capable of penetrating the dark polluted clouds that choked and swirled around their home. With their land heated to hellish temperatures, the sea-bishops retreated to the dwindling oceans, changing their bodies to live underwater in the foul acid-ridden lakes that remained and cultivated the crystal machines that sustained them. With dwindling resources, they constructed their final piece of technological art – a vast diamond cannon that could punch a tunnel through the very wall of creation itself and hurl their seed sideways into new realities on which to feed. They expended incredible amounts of power to scatter their seed this way, but the sea-bishops’ investment was repaid. Those that survived the journey and prospered would grow a huge crystal gate that could open a two-way connection between the reality they’d reached and their own dead, dark, mirror reflection of Earth. A terrible gate that could only be anchored at more than one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure of sea level. This was why the sea-bishops’ seed-cities inevitably settled on the deepest part of a host world’s ocean; trenches that scarred the world, darkness that nestled and protected their hidden work until they were ready. Balanced by coequal quantum pressure on both sides, their portal could open with minimal energy expenditure, and through that doorway would swarm the never-ending Mass of sea-bishops from the victim world’s dark twin. This was the seanores’ legend of the deep hell. Demon locusts come to feed on the native population.
The jewel in King Jude’s sceptre had captured echoes of a hundred such invasions before it arrived on Charlotte’s Earth. Billions of victims, some human, many different in a myriad subtle ways, but all the children of Earth, and all consumed in great orgies of destruction. Wars were sparked, revolutions fomented by the sea-bishops’ tricks, the host populations softened up before invasion. And only then did the demon hordes come. Children running towards people they thought were their parents just to be impaled on deadly crystal blades and their life force consumed, husks discarded. Mothers desperately trying to find their offspring only to have their children reach out and stab them through the neck. Slaughter after slaughter, race after race, nation after nation, world after world. Feeding greed without end and hunger without limit. Worlds pissed on and polluted and raped. Charlotte tried to scream and cry and turn her sight away from these hellish visions, but Elizica held her tight, Charlotte’s palm bonded to the sceptre like glue.
And the sceptre’s jewel, the jewel tormenting Charlotte with these visions, it served as a key and a map combined. A key jealously guarded by the commander of each seed-city launched towards an unknown reality. For on some of the shadowy mirror worlds, creatures of greater power than the sea-bishops lurked – other sea-bishops more technologically advanced, or human analogues raised to near god-hood by the fruits of super-science. The sea-bishops were paranoid that their world would in turn become prey to some variant of humanity more powerful than themselves. The sceptre’s gem held the secret coordinates of the sea-bishop’s reality and it would only to be activated by the seed-city commander if a prey-world was judged susceptible to the sea-bishop’s forces. Elizica had frustrated the sea-bishops’ original plans, uncovering the plot during their first attempt to spark a war between the Jackelian tribes and the gill-necks. She’d worked to steal their precious key. Elizica had liberated the Eye of Fate and with the help of a great mechomancer, she had altered it along with six other amulets stolen from the corpses of dead sea-bishops. Changed the gems to allow humans to change their appearance. Seven heroes had infiltrated the seed-city of the sea-bishops, led by Elizica, stealing the key-gem and preventing the enemy from opening the gateway to their hellish home. Before they had escaped, the heroes had plundered part of the seed-city’s engine works, a shield that had protected the sea-bishops from the hideous destructive forces of being flung across the barrier of reality. Machinery which could create a bubble of space-time sitting outside of existence, the only shield capable of surviving the crossing. Elizica and the two surviving members of the raiding party had buried the device in the walls of the underwater trench and activated the shield, trapping the seed-city in a trap of time, sealing the enemy inside eternity’s cold grip.
Daunt moaned opposite Charlotte and she felt Elizica siphoning his memories, the ones the ex-parson had glimpsed during his interrogation by the sea-bishops. Elizica drew them out and gave them context and meaning. Charlotte saw what the sea-bishops had seen, returning back to the world after the shield engine crystal had been dislodged by a landslide brought about by depth charges and Gemma Dark’s blundering vessel. A desperate pirate trying to escape the Kingdom’s navy. The sea-bishops had nearly fed on Gemma and her crew until they had realized that here were allies. That was the sea-bishop way. Powerful as they were, the scouts of the seed-ship were limited in number. They used trickery to sow
dissent and weaken the host races of the mirror world they landed on, preparing them for an effortless conquest. The Advocacy had been targeted first, the gill-necks’ Judge Sovereign and the Bench of Four an easy mark, a moribund society constrained to follow ancient laws, unquestioning of new rulings once issued. Then, helped by Gemma Dark and her rump of royalist survivors, the Kingdom of Jackals next, the most powerful nation on the continent, key members of its government and the House of Guardians subverted, followed by the generals at House Guards and the admirals of the RAN, the fleet sea arm, the secret police, and the editors of the most important newssheets. Slowly, slowly the two sides were pushed towards mutually assured destruction. And finally, with two nations subverted, the sea-bishops tracked down the lost key to their world-crossing gate, hidden centuries before by Elizica’s descendants inside the royal sceptre of the Jackelian state. Protected by the whole apparatus of the House of Guardians and dozens of automated sentry systems. Too many people to murder and replace. But not a difficult problem to solve. Charlotte winced as she saw how easily the sea-bishops had drawn her into their web of corruption – the most infamous cat burglar in the Kingdom, always pushing her luck. Ripe to be baited into stealing the sceptre, then murdered and her corpse offered up as the thief who had stolen it. And the sceptre? Oh, undoubtedly fenced and stripped and melted by now, but look, we caught the sly, wicked woman behind the theft. No need to search for the perpetrators of the crime now. Charlotte felt herself drawn deeper into the sceptre’s gem, layer upon layer of information etched into its crystalline structure, encryption so dense it would take the great transaction-engines of the civil service thousands of years to crack it. But for the sea-bishops, only a minute, the time it would take to slot it into their seed-city’s machines and open up a bridge. Those seconds, the death sentence for every creature on Earth. The sceptre grew hotter, the warmth of Charlotte’s contact with it burning, igniting her soul. With a screech of pain she broke the connection, lurching back and seeing the spell broken for Dick, Sadly and Daunt, the men panting with their faces as pale as alabaster and stamped with horror.
We have to destroy it, smash the crystal, Charlotte told Elizica.
‘You don’t think I tried girl-child? I hawked that gem around the nations of the world, looking for alchemical sorceries strong enough to destroy it. No blades, however sharp, can cut it, no drills scratch it, no projectiles shatter it, no weights crush it, no energy disintegrate it. I spent twenty years after the exile of the sea-bishops neglecting my Kingdom and trying to destroy the key-gem. In the end, I could only hide it somewhere I trusted future generations would protect it.’
The royal sceptre of Jackals.
‘The first of the sea-bishops, the seed-city commander, the one you call Walsingham. It is said he has a way of changing the key-gem’s composition and rendering it breakable. But he would only use it if he thought we posed any kind of threat to the sea-bishop’s home. And that I fear, we do not. Even in my age, we only managed to wall the enemy away. Temporarily, as it transpired.’
Dick Tull rubbed his unshaven cheeks. ‘I know when they must have replaced Walsingham. He was operating out in the colonies, running the State Protection Board’s operations against Pericur. When Walsingham came back it was as if he was a changed man. He rose to the top of the board like a meteor, second only to the head. It was unnatural how fast it happened.’
‘Unnatural indeed, good sergeant. But in hindsight, quite understandable,’ said Daunt.
‘It’s mine,’ said Charlotte, lifting up King Jude’s sceptre. ‘The sceptre is mine and those stovepipe hat-headed jiggers are not laying one scaly claw on it.’
‘In that little matter, you’ll have the support of the Court,’ promised Sadly. ‘We’ll try to keep it out of the sea-bishops’ hands.’
‘Try?’ said Dick. ‘You better do more than sodding try. You saw what’s waiting for us if those monsters get the key-gem. They’ll finish off everyone in the world.’
‘It’s not like the old days,’ said Sadly. ‘The Court of the Air isn’t what it used to be. You’ll see.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Commodore Black came onto the bridge of the submersible, Daunt noticed it was with the support of a cane and trailed by Maeva, the old u-boat man shushing the woman and protesting her attentions, accusing her of being a ‘blessed clucking hen’.
Daunt was glad to see that the commodore had healed relatively rapidly, but the sight of him back on his feet was a painful remainder that Boxiron was nowhere close to a similar recovery. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every day at sea seemed to bring a fresh challenge in keeping the steamman clinging onto life. It wasn’t the fault of the small surgical bay – it had been equipped to deal with patients from the race of man, not a failing citizen of the Steamman Free State. The logical part of Daunt’s mind knew that a single person’s life was an insignificant matter in the balance of the great game they had been caught up in. But his friend’s dwindling reserves of energy and increasingly tenuous hold on the great pattern somehow seemed far more concrete than the prospect of the sea-bishops opening up a gateway back to their infernal home.
‘So here we are again, good captain,’ Daunt greeted the commodore. ‘Wedged between that rock and a hard place. How is—?’
‘Boxiron’s a tough old bird,’ said the commodore. ‘And this boat’s surgeon is game for a challenge. He got my creaking old bones back on their feet.’ He waved Maeva away. ‘Stop fussing, lass. There’s plenty that’s lining up to kill old Blacky, but it won’t be a spot of exercise that does for me.’ He hobbled over to the chart table and traced the headings mapped out on the table. ‘What’s this – this heading can’t be right?’
Daunt peered to where the commodore’s attention lay. The ex-parson wasn’t an expert, but to his eyes the temperature gradients of the chart seemed to be running significantly hot. They were aiming for the margins of the Fire Sea. ‘You’ve navigated us through worse than that before, surely?’
‘No, lad, I haven’t. This—’ he stabbed his finger on the centre of the bearing. ‘This is the Isla Furia. No sane sailor crosses that part of the Fire Sea.’
‘The island doesn’t appear to be located far inside the magma fields?’
‘There’s no need for it to be positioned any deeper, Jethro Daunt, for a sensible skipper to avoid it. There’s an underwater vent in the region mortal fiery enough to cook out even the best u-boat’s cooling system. The Isla Furia has a volcano that’s the devil’s own cauldron; you sail past that island and you’re liable to find molten boulders as large as houses raining down on you. And should its rocks miss your hull, the terrible place spews out choking clouds of poison gas.’
‘You’ve seen this with your own eyes?’
The commodore tapped the charts. ‘From seventy miles away, that I have. As close as I ever wanted to get. We’re almost on the Isla Furia’s doorstep, so you’ll have the sight in front of your eyes soon enough.’
That he did. Daunt saw what the commodore was afraid of through the bridge’s oddly transparent portholes. They were passing over an underwater plain of superheated water, the boils that fringed the magma fields of the Fire Sea, a basalt surface littered with the wreck of vessels, craft from dozens of nations and as many centuries. Paddle steamers and clippers, galleons and firebreakers, u-boats and liners, debris overgrown with strange organic sculptures of fire coral.
‘This wreckage grows thicker the closer you get,’ said the commodore. ‘Those poor devils are just the surface craft whose crews were overcome with gas and holed lightly enough for them drift out a-ways before sinking on the margins of the Isla Furia.’ He turned to find Sadly, the court’s agent standing behind the two horizontal pilot positions. ‘Did you lose a grip on your marbles, lad, in that terrible prison camp you were locked up in? Have you taken a bump on your noggin while escaping? You’re heading for superheated vents – that’s the Isla Furia on the horizon!’
‘We’re not a conventional cra
ft,’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rated for where we’re heading.’
‘And are you rated for being hit by a squall of molten depth charges as large as carts, lad? For that’s what waiting for you on this course. I know the Fire Sea. No one has penetrated as deep as old Blacky into this foul place. Turn north-north-west twenty degrees and head for the Abbadon boils. Better choppy waters than suicidal ones.’
‘I’m feeling lucky, says I.’
Daunt reached out to steady the commodore, the u-boat man shaking with incredulous anger and his remaining fever. ‘Peace, good captain. I believe the Court of the Air prefers the sort of luck it can manufacture, rather than relying on fate’s random charity.’
‘I’ve just had my precious Purity Queen filleted by a pack of black-hearted demons and now you want me to risk my neck on this exotic tub of the Court’s? Poor old Blacky, sick and in his dotage, chased out of his home by traitors and devils set on his tail by his wicked sister, hounded across the seas … and now his unlucky stars are calling for a chance to toss boiling boulders at him? It’s a happy thing I won’t be around for much longer, Jethro Daunt. A happy thing fate won’t have these miserable bones to torment!’
Daunt said nothing and waited. Up ahead, the underwater plain was littered with the graveyard of vessels, ships laying on ships, moulded together by thick fire coral, a floor of unwise mariners and submariners forming their own geological strata. Beyond the hills of coral, a curtain of steaming water from the broken vents of the seabed shimmered. So thick with fury that nothing was visible beyond its violent turmoil. Undaunted, the Court’s vessel passed over the carpet of destroyed craft, heading right for the centre of the maelstrom.
‘Tell me, Barnabas,’ the commodore moaned, ‘Tell me the name of this strange craft of yours so I know on what boat my end is to come?’
