by Stephen Hunt
This was the future of warfare Daunt was inventing here. Of all the prizes to claim, this was a terrible accolade Daunt had never imagined possessing. If the ex-parson had any consolation, it was only that nobody would survive on the island to enter his name in the history books for originating this slaughter. Not the Nuyokians, not the gill-necks. The invaders didn’t want to be here, fighting in this alien realm. Whatever lies the sea-bishops among the Advocacy’s leadership had concocted to set their invasion force against the Isla Furia, the invaders had no passion for it – fighting the surface-dwellers outside the womb of the sea, dying in the beating heat across such strange, unfamiliar streets. No desire to die here. Only a grim murderous determination now to repay the casualties inflicted upon them. A butcher’s bill unlike any battle in history. Slaughter on an industrial scale. The Jackelians had mills for everything, now one of their numbers had established a manufactory for murder. All hail the pacifist commander – inventor of the scientific method, warfare as science.
‘Gaze upon the future, Mister Morris. I am the master of it,’ said Daunt. How am I better than the sea-bishops? They have their dupes lined up for the slaughter and I have mine. And here in this peculiar city of the past and city of the future, our proxies are dismembering each other to decide which race will endure.
‘Nothing modern about this vicar. We’ve been at it long before you lifted the marshal’s baton.’ Morris glanced back up at the volcano’s slope, noticing the guns had fallen silent in their camouflaged bunkers. ‘We’re not going to fall back under barrage?’
Daunt pointed to the massing forces in the ruins of the once palatial library opposite. ‘There’s more of the enemy now than Lord Trabb has shells left in the stronghold’s magazine.’
‘So we’re only to fire when we see the whites of their eyes. Not that you can see their peepers with those fish tanks they’ve got on their heads.’ Morris spotted something out of place on the farm terraces above them. Figures moving among the spouts of fire being thrown up by the Advocacy artillery. ‘What’s that? Tell me some arseholes aren’t still ploughing and watering the paddy fields up there?’
‘I’ve made arrangements with Lord Trabb,’ said Daunt. ‘Something more gainful for his labour force of mechanicals to be doing than tunnelling fresh mining shafts.’
Morris shielded his face against the high sun with a hand. ‘They’re digging a network of fire steps up there!’
‘Trenches,’ said Daunt. ‘Trenches are what they’re digging.’
Yes, Daunt had formulated an equation for his new style of warfare. And the Advocacy was about to discover that as hideous as their losses had been to date, they could get a lot worse.
Dick Tull shivered as he woke up, his teeth chattering and his fingers trembling against the frost-covered pile of rotting vegetation. Circle’s teeth, it was night cold outside. At least the hill of decaying turnips, corn heads and blackened potatoes serving as his bed were frozen solid enough for his body to be laid across the top of the mound, rather than drowned underneath a rotting slush.
There were dozens of other bodies thrown across the mound, the mummified sacks left by the sea-bishops’ feeding, and Dick had to work hard not to retch at the sight as he pulled himself up. He recognized the tall buildings surrounding him, the grand crystal canopies glinting in the moonlight. This was the State Protection Board wing of the civil service complex at Greenhall. So, they had dragged his corpse out of the cells without feeding on his poisoned flesh. And all I had to do was stop my heart for an hour to get here. Dick smelt the tang of his jacket, rank even to him. Garlic powder the contents of his cane’s suicide pill, along with the Court of the Air’s cardiac drug. Garlic. He tried not to chuckle through the cold burning agony of his throat. It was strange how many myths had their basis in reality.
There was a clanking from inside the bottom storey of the building, the light of a furnace burning inside. Best to be out of here before the sea-bishops on the janitorial staff showed up and tried to feed him into a fire.
Dick patted his jacket pocket. Still there. It wouldn’t do for Algo Monoshaft’s sacrifice to be for nothing.
Gemma Dark’s men opened the cell door and pushed her coughing brother, manacled anew, out into the corridor. Gemma glanced behind her. The dregs of Parliament’s cowardly Fleet Sea Arm were cowering along the back of the soiled chamber, along with Jared’s fancy piece, still standing tall, defiant to the end.
‘You won’t be so cocky, thief girl, not after Walsingham has run you through his mind ripper. You’ll only be provisions for his people’s larder after that.’
The dirty little whore flashed Gemma her fingers in an inverted ‘V’. That obscene gesture of defiance, the lion’s teeth, never went out of fashion back in the Kingdom. Gemma snorted in amusement and sealed the cell door.
Commodore Black tried to say something but broke into a fit of coughing, unable to cover his mouth with the weight of his chained hands.
‘Don’t worry brother. She’s got an hour or two before my allies come for her. Your troubles, however, are a lot more immediate.’
‘Come on now, Gemma, you won’t do any harm to me. We’re family, aren’t we?’
‘Blood’s thicker than water? Let’s spill some of it and see.’
‘At least let the blessed girl go free, then. What harm has that poor lass done to you?’
‘The Mistress of Mesmerism means something to you, brother, and that means something to me.’ Gemma turned to her escort. ‘Stay here. After Walsingham has ripped what he needs from the thief girl’s mind, make sure she’s pushed to the front for the first hungry pack that turns up with an appetite.’
The commodore groaned and Gemma laughed, shoving him down the corridor. She had a more old fashioned arrangement lined up for her brother’s interrogation. ‘I think that counts as a kindness, don’t you? She’ll probably be sucked dry by the time you get back to the feeding pen. You won’t have to watch my allies exercise their shockingly crude table manners on the silly little thief girl. Just a sack of skin and bone discarded in the corner for you to remember all the good times you had together.’
Her brother was sobbing, but Gemma felt no pity for the traitorous dog. His crocodile tears were oil to the flames of her rage. How dare he care for her, a Middlesteel guttersnipe, when he had cared so little for the thousands of his people he’d abandoned to their deaths at Parliament’s hands? Fleeing when the fleetin-exile had been burnt in its u-boat pens, betrayed by renegades among their own ranks. Getting her darling Bull killed after he’d been captured, selling out to the enemy’s secret police when push came to shove, just to preserve his own cowardly hide. All that Gemma had done, all that she had seen – it all should have been her brother’s fate. Instead he had tossed it over to her. A final bitter legacy as cruel as the one her parents had heaped onto their offspring. The children of exiles, hunted and pursued to the ends of the globe. Rebels by birth and blood. Well, the world had made her a privateer, every new breath a victory, and now they would drink from the bitter chalice they had mixed. Let the world choke on it. She would rule over its survivors. Gemma would be their saviour, wringing gratitude out of the people like blood from a soiled rag discarded from a surgeon’s table. But there was still her brother to deal with. Too weak to rule, too headstrong to be ruled.
‘Don’t torture me, Gemma. For old time’s sake, just put a bullet in my head. Don’t let me linger in this wicked nest of demons.’
Gemma didn’t deign to reply. They headed through the dark, unpopulated lower levels of the seed-city. Water dripping from its black, bony organic hull. This was where her allies made their royalist puppets live and work. Indicative of how they viewed their relationship. Tossing Gemma meagre scraps from their table. She got to the room she had readied, pushing the commodore inside. At her command, the floor of the middle of the chamber rose, forming the shape of a chair. She pushed the commodore savagely down into it, and at her direction, it wrapped tentacles of black coil
s around her brother’s chest and arms, sealing him in its grasp as securely as if she had whittled both chair and sibling out of obsidian. A curving table shaped into existence just in front of them, rising out of the floor’s oily substance.
‘In an hour the Star Chamber will arrive here to try you. There are a few old faces you’ll recognize, Jared. Crew that served with the fleetin-exile. They’re not up to much, to be honest. All the good ones stayed and fought and died at Porto Principe.’ She walked to the edge of the chamber and returned with a long length of black metal. ‘You recall what used to be done to traitors to the cause, brother? We saw it done ourselves often enough in front of whichever captains were in harbour at the time.’
‘Why do you think I left, lass? We’d become no better than murdering pirates.’
Gemma leant forward with the pipe and casually winded him in the pit of his gut with the end of it. ‘Pirates steal what is not theirs. Any shipping that fell to the fleetin-exile’s u-boats was already ours!’ Gemma didn’t give him time to reply, but lashed down against his kneecap, hearing the crack of it shattering with as much satisfaction as she was capable of. ‘Stealing from thieves who had stripped us of everything we possessed, executing all the prisoners we took. That wasn’t piracy. That was pure justice.’
The commodore moaned something and she shut the filthy turncoat up with a quick slap of the bar across his mouth, blood and teeth flying over her boots. ‘How did my boy look when he died? Something like you, or do I need the rest of our hour together to work towards that?’
‘Shoot me,’ mumbled the commodore, the words lisping and mangled through what was left of the lower part of his face. ‘I’ll tell you anything.’
‘Of course you will,’ said Gemma. ‘But that’s not really the point of this, is it? You’ve never known anything worth knowing. Only how to run and lie and betray.’ She jerked up his scalp and looked him straight in his pathetic, puffy face. ‘And that’s not enough, this time. You’ll get your bullet after your trial, after my coronation. Unless I decide to bring back disembowelling for treason as my first act as sovereign.’
The door opened behind her and Walsingham entered. She slapped the bar across her brother’s ribs, laughing as they shifted and snapped, then turned to face the creature.
‘What are you doing?’ Walsingham demanded.
‘Exactly what we agreed,’ said Gemma, raising her bloody length of metal. ‘I don’t need his mind ripped to administer royal law.’
‘You are beating an empty chair,’ said Walsingham.
Gemma looked confused towards her brother’s beaten body lolling in the clutches of the seat. ‘What are you talking about? I’m working to keep my brother breathing; just alive enough for his trial, just alive enough for him to see my victory.’
Walsingham strode forward in fury and slapped Gemma, knocking her to the floor. ‘You foolish animal, what have you done here?’ He pulled out the pendant hanging around his neck and shouted at it. ‘Send a fully armed cohort to secure the feeding pens. Send another to the engine rooms. Order all guards on duty to admit no one. There are escaped animals on board who have possession of one of our chameleon crystals. No shield generation equipment is to be removed under pain of execution!’
‘My brother,’ moaned Gemma pointing at the bleeding figure slumped in the seat.
‘Is not there! You have been mesmerized, animal.’ He kicked Gemma in rage. ‘You are talking to thin air and attacking an empty chair.’ He knelt, his human form vanishing to be replaced by the dark leathery-faced features of a sea-bishop, fangs glistening at Gemma. ‘If the savages on this world succeed in locking us away in eternity’s cold grasp again, I can promise you and your royalist herd, it will feel so much longer than forever for you!’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dick Tull had acquired a heavy blanket from the doorman of the Embassy of the Steamman Free State, though the Circle knows where from. It was not as if the sentient metal creature had much use for it.
He felt like a beggar as he was ushered shivering in front of the ambassador. The transparent dome-skull of his Excellency Grinder Longbody sparked with unrestrained curiosity as Dick was ushered into the ambassador’s office.
‘Your possession of the embassy’s pass code would have gained you an audience by itself,’ announced the steamman official, ‘without the ridiculous notion of a Jackelian citizen wanting to claim political asylum with us.’
Dick coughed, still trembling. ‘Belt and braces, your Excellency.’ He reached inside his pocket and removed a slim oblong of semiconductor substrate inlaid with a fine filigree of glowing lines.
‘And by the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, what would that be?’
‘A soul board,’ said Dick.
‘I know that, you impertinent softbody,’ snapped the ambassador. ‘Are you a common gravedigger, violating our corpses in the hope of a reward? Which of our people’s cadavers did you violate to steal that soul board?’
‘It was freely given while its owner was alive,’ said Dick. ‘And it contains more than the soul of Algo Monoshaft. It contains a suggested modification for your brains, courtesy of the Court of the Air.’
‘Algo Monoshaft, the head of the State Protection Board?’ crackled the ambassador’s voicebox. ‘If he gave you this, then he is dead! He could not live for longer than an hour without it.’
‘Indeed he didn’t. He blew himself up, turned himself into a suicide bomb.’
‘But such an extreme end can only be granted with the permission of our maker, King Steam – it is almost unheard of?’
‘Your king’s spirit visited Algo Monoshaft in the cell of our enemies. Royal sanction was secured. Algo’s sacrifice was necessary to guarantee the survival of both your people and mine.’
‘How am I to believe these outrageous claims, softbody?’
‘Algo said you could verify my words by lifting the seal on this thing’s circuits and reading his final memories.’
‘What possible modification to our hallowed architecture would be important enough for Monoshaft to pass into the Hall of Ancestors for?’
‘Let’s just say you’ll be able to see more clearly,’ coughed Dick. Clearly enough to see the monsters walking among us. ‘And after you do, the head of the State Protection Board has petitioned King Steam for every steamman living inside the Kingdom to go out into the streets on a bit of a hunt. You see,’ said Dick, leaning in close, ‘and this is the nub of the thing. There are treasonists everywhere.’
Charlotte, Sadly and the commodore moved down the darkship’s corridor as fast as they dared. To anyone who caught sight of the three of them, hopefully all they would notice was a sea-bishop, the commodore in a purloined royalist sailor’s uniform and their prisoner – Sadly – being taken to an interrogation room to have his mind probed. Hopefully, that is, as long as Charlotte’s control over the Eye of Fate stayed strong.
It didn’t come easy to Charlotte. She was using the amulet constantly now, as a sea-bishop would. It was intensely painful keeping up the appearance of a sea-bishop, pushing the mesmeric field out. Her head was aching from it, throbbing with the mother of all headaches. Charlotte’s usual acts of mesmerism were restricted to ten-minute turns of a stage, and more often than not, one-to-one acts of suggestion. She had a new-found respect for the sea-bishops’ abilities. To be able to walk undetected among the race of man’s teeming masses unnoticed for months at a time without letting the illusion slip. No wonder they needed skull cases as tall as a stovepipe hat to hold such powerful brains.
‘Don’t worry, girl-child,’ said Elizica, her smooth voice slipping through Charlotte’s mind as though a memory. ‘This is what the Eye of Fate was meant for. Not relieving noble-born dupes of their wallets, not tricking local dignitaries into stabling gypsy caravans on their land.’
Charlotte rubbed the smarting skin under her breasts, scratching the remains of the artificial skin she’d torn to reveal the real Eye of Fate’s hiding place. The Court of t
he Air was expert at creating such nooks for their agents.
I would like to see Gemma Dark’s face when she realizes that the crystal she ripped from my neck belongs to a dead prison camp commandant.
‘I would not,’ whispered Elizica. ‘This cursed vessel’s halls are filled with enemies. Once Gemma Dark understands you mesmerized her and compelled her sentries to open the door and surrender their weapons and uniforms, your ability to mimic a sea-bishop’s form will count for little.
The commodore shuffled along, a hand on the pommel of his purloined sabre to stop its length tripping his legs. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful for saving my old bones from what my sister had in store for me, but … answers, lass. You promised you would tell me the truth back in the cell, a promise cut short by Gemma’s arrival. How did you know to be wearing another crystal and have the Eye of Fate hidden away under the Court’s cunning prosthetics?’
‘You have the canny eye of Jethro Daunt to thank for that,’ said Charlotte. ‘He spotted that Sadly had been replaced by a sea-bishop when he was escaping from the Advocacy prison camp.’
Sadly looked confused. ‘But the sea-bishops realized Daunt could smell their kind out, they taunted me for days with how cleverly they had replaced me. They thought their infiltrator could supply Daunt with all the missing signs that gave them away?’
‘Oh, but they did,’ said Charlotte. ‘He was quite impressed how fast the sea-bishops learned to fool a priest’s senses. Your doppelganger planted Daunt’s mind with every cue and tell a churchman needs to read a person like a book. It was a perfect impersonation.’
‘Then how did …?’
Charlotte brushed Sadly’s bad leg with her fingers as he limped forward. ‘Your doppelganger’s footprints on the beach as he was limping out towards the Court’s rescue submarine. A pair of boots walking normally left them, without the irregularity of the limp Daunt was observing.’
