by Stephen Hunt
Daunt rolled the body over; only noticing the fourteen-year old’s agony-contorted face after he had pulled his hand away from the bubbling ruin of his chest. Try as he might to suppress it, Daunt felt the wave of anger rise within him like an overwhelming tide. ‘What’s he doing here? He’s too young to be fighting.’
‘His city too, Court-man,’ snarled one of the fighters, not looking away from sighting his rifle. ‘Take him to medicos.’
‘I can’t bandage him up; I can’t move him by myself. Damn your eyes.’
The soldier pulled off his empty ammunition drum and threw it over the parapet as if it was a discus. ‘Damn theirs instead.’
‘I can’t die,’ moaned the boy, as if the fact of his mortality was more of a shock to him than his wound. ‘I can’t.’
What had this been to the child, a game? A chance to show off to his friends, to impress his elders in the city? The chance to get a piece of cannon shrapnel lodged in his gut, the random hand of fate selecting who survived and who didn’t. Daunt felt like screaming out at them to stop, begging both sides to end this butchery. But this slaughter was necessary to hold onto the Isla Furia, to keep the sea-bishops’ prize out of the invaders’ clutches for as long as possible. This is my doing, my design, and all I can do to assuage my guilt is wrap bandages around the limbless cripples I am creating here today. Maybe I should have tried to run with the sceptre? Led the sea-bishops on a merry chase across half the world. Bought time with my shoe leather, not the blood of these poor islanders.
With the militiamen fully engaged by the gill-necks crawling up the siege ladders, Daunt yelled out to Morris to help him shift the wounded boy, the Jackelian setting the timer on a stick grenade before tossing it over the parapet.
‘This is work,’ Morris panted with a savage jollity, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he came running over. ‘They’ll know they’ve been in a fight before the night falls right enough.’
Now Daunt reconciled Morris’s desertion from the army with the cues from his body earlier – his ambivalence and disgust and shame. A sudden epiphany. Morris hadn’t left the army because he had been disgusted by the carnage of war; he had left revolted by how much he had enjoyed it.
‘Lift his boots; I’ll bear his weight behind the arms. As gently as you can down to the aid station.’
‘Don’t worry, boy,’ Morris encouraged the young soldier. ‘It takes a man’s weight in lead to kill him. Bit of shrapnel like this, it’s only good for a souvenir to hang above your fireplace.’
‘Why me?’ The young soldier didn’t appear to be addressing anyone in particular, his head lolling from side to side as he was borne down the steps.
‘Because you’re here, boy, because you’re here.’
‘Don’t talk,’ Daunt advised him.
‘Those ammunition bags you were lugging, fine bullets they are,’ said Morris. ‘Been sending those arseholes out there back to the ocean all day with them. Lake’s running red with their blood when you can glimpse the waters through the bloody gas.’
The ground they were carrying the soldier along shook with the cannonade of the city’s two giant artillery pieces. Across the lawn of the aid station, bodies lay strewn outside the tents, a cacophony of moans and pleas and screams from militia fighters lying on their stretchers. If war was a mill, this was what it produced. The dead and the dying and the barely saveable; begging for water and the attentions of someone, anyone, who could take away the pain, grow them another limb, close the sight of organs that were never meant to be exposed to light.
‘Attend here!’ Daunt yelled out, lowering the boy down to an already bloody blanket, its previous occupant shrouded and piled on one of the yellow carts waiting behind the tents. ‘Surgeon, attend here!’
‘It’s no good,’ said Morris. ‘The lad’s gone.’
Daunt looked down, stunned. ‘He can’t have done. The boy was moaning, he was calling out in pain just seconds ago.’
‘That was minutes ago. You can see it in their eyes, the ones who don’t want to go on. The look always tells you more than their wounds do.’
I know that look. I used to see it in the mirror most mornings. Daunt touched the boy’s neck, feeling for a pulse. The young soldier was stone cold. It was as if he had been dead for days. ‘He didn’t want to die. This, this was my doing.’
Morris checked his rifle. ‘Some people just can’t take it. It’s a crucible up there. Some melt. Some temper. And I promise you, vicar, this ain’t your doing. It’s them arseholes over the other side of the wall, see. Fairly definite about that.’
‘He didn’t want to die.’
‘Take a rifle, vicar. Take some revenge. You’ll feel better.’
Daunt suppressed something deep and primeval that called out for him to do just that. ‘It’s not what I’m for.’
Morris shrugged. Behind him there was a bubbling vat of cauterisation gel, a soldier with a stump of an arm yelling as two orderlies either side of the man shoved the bleeding remains of his shoulder into the liquid.
‘Come on, climb back up to the wall with me. It’s not really healing you’re doing here, is it? You’re only pushing the dents out of the armour, grinding the chips out of the blades before tossing ’em back into the fray.’
‘Just hold the line, Mister Morris.’
The stocky Jackelian gave an ironic salute and loped back towards the fierce combat along the top of the battlements. Daunt had seen death before … on Jago, in his parish back home, in his trade as a consulting detective. But this destruction was on a different scale. He might as well have been the city’s commander, dispatching thousands to their end with a causal wave of a marshal’s baton. He took the boy’s cold hand in his, rubbing the fingers. ‘You have to be careful with murder like this, murder on an industrial scale. It can do things to you. Send you mad enough to start listening to the old gods, and that can land you in all sorts of trouble.’
I can’t die.
‘No energy is ever lost, young man,’ replied Daunt. ‘Only transformed. That’s how the world works.’
All along the battlements: screaming, yelling soldiers, and the thud of their rifles, the war cries from gill-necks, bayonets being thrust into gas masks and rebreathers as the battle desperately surged back and forth for control of the wall, just energy, trickling from one state to another. That was all it was. Trickle and flow, trickle and flow.
A passing surgical orderly kicked Daunt in the small of the back. ‘Get to the wall, Court man. There are more wounded who need carrying down.’
Daunt reached into his pocket and pulled out his bag of aniseed balls. ‘How about you, would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s?’
‘This is a war, Court man, a war. Get off your arse and help us.’
‘Yes. I am rather afraid this war belongs to me.’ He stood wearily up.
The orderly shoved a red crayon-like stick in Daunt’s direction. ‘Move down the line of wounded. Anyone you think can be saved, mark their forehead with a cross.’
‘Mark them all with a cross,’ said Daunt. ‘We’re pulling back. Prepare to move the aid station.’
‘Back, where?’
Daunt pointed to the volcano. ‘Inside there.’
He picked his way through the wounded littering the lawn, treading through the human debris of war, oblivious to the calls of the surgeons and their medical staff. Up on the gate’s keep, the command table holding the plans for the siege was nearly depleted of counters, only a few of the mayor’s staff left at the table and communication desk to push around the surviving units. The rest were at the battlements, firing desperately out into the wall of smoke. The mayor himself was unchanged, striding between the table and the defenders, a gas rifle cradled under his right arm.
‘Fall back,’ Daunt ordered the mayor, who was looking down at this strange foreigner with a mixture of curiosity and hostility. ‘Fall back to the volcano. There are chambers underground large enough to shelter the town’s population.’
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‘This is our city, Court man,’ boomed the politician. ‘Our forefathers—’
‘I know, I know. Lie under the ground, died defending it, you’ll bring everlasting shame on our Lady of the Light. But here’s the thing. The battle of Clawfoot Moor. Same situation. Last great siege of the civil war, and the royalists lost, because just like Nuyok, your perimeter is too wide to mount an effective defence. The Advocacy has enough numbers to swarm over your city and your towers can’t be fortified adequately to hold them off. The volcano complex on the other hand had got limited access points and you can funnel your attackers down to narrow enough streams to make your rifles count. If you stay here and fight from your towers, they’ll become nothing more than coffins for your people. The Catosian city-state of Sathens achieved the same thing I’m proposing against a polar barbarian horde using the Valley of Egon’s slopes. Fall back now, while you can still control the wall well enough that the gill-necks can’t harry your retreat. Pull back your two great guns for protective fire to cover your withdrawal.’
‘Are you a general of your people, Court man?’
‘I understand war, good mayor. Well enough to know this is the only way the people of your city will survive the invasion.’
One of the communications signallers turned around. ‘Sappers have breached the wall on the forest side, a fifty-foot section collapsed. Gill-necks are emerging from the trees and trying to storm the rubble. We are being overrun and the city reserves have all been dispatched.’
‘The Court has always protected us.’ The mayor sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.
‘We will, I vow to you we will.’
It was on Daunt’s hands now. Failure or success. A pacifist general was leading the army to victory or defeat.
The barrel of a gun pushed Dick inside a large windowless cell, the space matted with dirty straw and scattered with a dozen unkempt prisoners in a variety of clothes. Algo Monoshaft was rudely shoved in after the officer.
‘I’ve seen better looking cells,’ said Dick.
‘It’s not so much a cell,’ said the guard. ‘More of a larder.’
‘The Mass must feed,’ agreed the second guard. ‘But we’re not fussy about our prey being alive, as long as your flesh hasn’t turned rancid.’
Dick looked at the thick metal door, sturdy enough despite turning rusty from the damp. ‘How many of you things are there?’
‘Not so many here. Where we come from, you have no idea.’ The guard tossed Dick his cane. ‘You’re solely among fodder in there, though. You can use your little toy to confirm the truth of my words. You won’t need the cane when it’s your turn to be taken. You’ll be able to tell who among you is the Mass quite easily, because we’ll be the ones dining on you.’
The creature masquerading as Sadly appeared, wearing the Court agent’s form again rather than Algo’s. ‘You’ll be pleased to know, I checked your cane and left you your Court-issue suicide pill underneath the detection mechanism. I have a wager with my brothers here. They think you’ll take it after you’ve seen us feed. I say you won’t.’
‘What’s the prize?’
‘The little sustenance that’s hanging on your scrawny bones is enough of a wager. I prefer younger meat myself, but waste, not want not, as Sadly’s old ma used to say.’
‘Choke on it, you jigger.’
Their laughter echoed outside as the cell door clanged shut.
‘Not to trust anyone,’ moaned the steamman. ‘I told you. I warned you.’
‘That’s been my bloody life, sir.’ My death now too, from the look of it.
The other prisoners in the chamber seemed cowed and cowering. It took a second glance from Dick to realize he recognized one of the figures. Vice-admiral Cockburn bore little relation to the commanding figure Dick has seen on the convoy’s flagship. An atrophied figure now, sitting rocking in his own filth. There were a number of plates shoved through the feeding flap at the bottom of the armoured door – the plates piled with cubed vegetables – turnips, parsnips and other root vegetables. Dick scooped up the plate to take to the gaunt officer of the fleet sea arm. ‘Eat, man. You’re wasting away here.’
‘Eat,’ giggled the vice-admiral through a scraggly grey beard. ‘You fool. They always take the fattest first. Don’t eat. Never eat the food.’ He spilled the plate angrily in front of Dick. ‘You’ll see, when they come to choose. They feed outside the door. You can hear them. You’ll be the first. Look at you, like a pie seller with that gut. You first.’ He broke down into a fit of snorting coughs and Dick reeled back. He was disgusted by how far the navy officer had fallen. Even the prisoners back in the gill-neck’s slave camp had held onto more dignity than this. How long had the officer been held inside here?
Algo’s metal skull swivelled around the room, taking in the dozen or so prisoners, ‘You have a device to detect the presence of vampires, sergeant? Inside your cane? Use it now, there are treasonists among us, my olfactory sensors can detect the stench of the enemy, and the fact that monster told us there are none in here merely confirms it to my mind.’
‘The enemy aren’t vampires,’ said Dick, checking his cane. ‘We’ve been calling them sea-bishops, an underwater race from a bloody long distance away from the Kingdom.’
‘Names, names, I heard you, sergeant, just as I heard the vampire. Sea-bishops, the Mass. They feast on human flesh, they can alter their form, and they walk unseen among us. What else would you have me call them but vampires?’
‘Fair dos,’ said Dick. ‘But this cane isn’t going to find them.’ He pulled out the detection device, locating the tiny white pill sunk on a small velvet-lined niche underneath.
‘What do you mean? That is a device of the Court of the Air, is it not?’
‘One of the civilians I’ve been working with, Damson Shades, otherwise known as the Mistress of Mesmerism. Before I left for the capital she whispered something in my ear as I was saying my goodbyes. Your detector doesn’t work. Tell no one, until it’s too late.’
‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, sergeant, why would the Court send you here with a defunct vampire detection mechanism?’
‘Bugger me if I know. But a force that’s been around the maypole a few more times that you or me has possessed the girl. Let’s see what this cane does do, then.’ He re-inserted the tube of coiled machinery and twisted the handle as Lord Trabb had instructed him back on the Isla Furia. The eyes on the copper boar’s head started glimmering orange just as Sadly’s cane had done within Victory Arch. But unlike the fierce orange glow, the illumination of Dick’s cane’s ornamental handle spluttered and flickered weakly. That’s it then? Just broken like the girl said it was?
Algo Monoshaft seized the cane from Dick’s hands, and for a moment, Dick thought the batty old steamer was going to use the confirmation of the light to accuse him of being a sea-bishop, but the head of board seemed intent on the handle’s eyes.
‘What is it, sir?’
‘A coded message,’ said Algo. ‘From someone who knows a very ancient secret … that steammen can pulse their vision plates to communicate privately between each other, and an individual who also has access to King Steam’s royal cipher. Ah, here’s the writer’s signature. Did you meet a Lord Trabb inside the Court of the Air?’
‘That I did. Your opposite number in the Court.’
The flashing in the handle finished and the steamman unscrewed the knob, pulling away the detection apparatus. Algo tapped out the suicide pill, holding it up gently between his iron digits. ‘It is time for your vampire friend to lose his wager, sergeant. You are going to have to ingest this pill.’
Dick looked at the senile old sod as if he had gone mad.
‘It’s only fair, sergeant, as I fear I am going to have to commit suicide too.’
Whether through good timing or having to slowly navigate their way against the current of nightsoil and effluence, by the time Charlotte, the commodore and Maeva dislodged the sewer port into t
he gill-neck’s capital, the city’s defence – and their diversion – was already well under way. Charlotte’s suit carried the distant sounds of the underwater battle, amplified and tinny to her ears. She hardly noticed the clash, last out of the claustrophobic tunnel, the commodore and Maeva helping her out into a tight space between two buildings.
Lishtiken, remote and hidden from all surface dwellers’ sight, was even more imposing close up. It seized the light of its own lamps and hurled the illumination across the cityscape, dancing and reflecting from a thousand crystal surfaces, mirrored and distorted by the planes and waters. Only the constant movement of swimmers and their submersible vehicles anchored the vista as real, rather than a hall of mirrors glimpsed through the prism of a glass of water. The scale of the city and the way its illumination twisted and shimmered around Charlotte was enough to make her feel dizzy. Many of the crystal surfaces were transparent, exposing chambers inside – a few filled with liquid, others airtight, betraying the gill-necks’ origins as an amphibious offshoot of the race of man. At close quarters she could observe the organic nature of the vast steepling constructions running together like a cliff line, crystalline buildings branching out to search for the surface’s scant light. On the outskirts of the city low flashes of light bounced around Lishtiken’s margins, rotor-spears exploding and the distant magnesium flashes of shock-spears discharging bolts of wild energy. How many nomads were losing their lives out there, buying them the time to carry out her plan? When Charlotte looked closer, the flow of traffic between the buildings was bustling with a single purpose now – getting to cover. She touched the reassuring heft of the shock-spear holstered like a splint against her calf. They had decided not to enter the city with the man-high rotor-spears … waving one of the ranged weapons would have been akin to unfurling a nomad standard in the centre of Lishtiken.
