by Stephen Hunt
Screaming war cries as loudly as they could with black gas-filter slugs strapped to their faces, the craynarbians charged at the submariners. Pulling up their heavy tridents, the crewmen swept arcs of crackling blue fire over the savages. Meant for driving off the tentacles of the leviathan-sized squids that were attracted to the superheated waters of the Fire Sea, the trident energy was devastating to the warriors. Expanding organs and veins blew out the thorax armour of the warriors in the front row of the charge, blood issuing out as hisses of red steam from inside their bodies. Behind them, the second wave contorted and danced in the wild cerulean flux of the power electric. Some of the boiling craynarbians near to Ironflanks flung themselves into the river, desperately trying to cool their bodies, with others who had escaped the combat following their lead, swimming out towards the veil of dirt-gas before they too were torched.
Amelia, Gabriel and Ironflanks made for the safety of the conning tower, trying not to slip on the smoking corpses that now littered their escape route. Bull Kammerlan played his trident around the river with a face as triumphant as a demon’s, laughing inside his helmet as the fleeing savages jerked then sank beneath the waters. Despite owing him her life, Amelia wanted to smash in the visor of the dark-hearted slaver’s helmet, but the instinct was suppressed as she winced at a sudden lance of pain in her arm. She stared down dumbly at the poisoned dart piercing her suit rubber, then collapsed as the air fled her lungs. Ironflanks and Gabriel caught her falling body, dragging it into the sea lock, red spots of pain swimming through Amelia’s vision. Inside the Sprite someone began cutting the suit off Amelia’s arm, her flesh expanding like a balloon. It was T’ricola, the craynarbian engineer peeling Amelia out of the diving suit with her bone-sword arm. Amelia gagged as she tried to say something, but her constricting throat smothered the words.
Bull was inside the tower, pointing the tip of his trident against her belly. ‘Let me finish her now, it’ll be a Circle-dammed kindness.’
As Amelia’s oxygen-starved brain shut down, Veryann’s words came back to her: ‘The toxin from the flying fish isfatal — no cure.’
The professor began her last convulsions.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Damson Beeton came into the servants’ pantry with a beef and potato pie balanced on a pewter plate. Septimoth was accustomed enough to the race of man’s eating conventions that he felt a pang of hunger at the sight of the steaming hot pie. Briefly he regretted how acclimatized he had become to Jackelian ways. No true flight brother would have been stimulated unless they had first seen their supper soaring in the currents of the sky, or scampering along the ground from a hundred foot-high glide. Lashlite brains were wired to detect movement and feed only after the chase. It was a measure of the depth of his fall from grace that his gut could now be urged into action by boiled roots and the motionless bovine carcass the housekeeper had squashed under her cooked pastry.
‘Have you seen him, Septimoth, have you seen the master? It’s well past time for supper.’
‘He is about the house,’ said Septimoth.
‘Is that so, butler? About our corridors, is he? About our empty dusty rooms? How easy it seems to be for him to dis appear into the vastness of this cold, dark place. This place which he seems unwilling to pay to adequately heat, staff, or adorn with the niceties of society.’
‘He will return when he is ready, damson.’
‘Of that I have no doubt.’ The old lady carved off a quarter of the pie for Septimoth, pushing a chunk of warm bread onto his plate. Then she separated out a generous portion for Cornelius Fortune and tucked it into the warm oven, keeping the slimmest portion for her own supper. ‘Point him in the direction of the oven when he appears, old bird. I have no doubt you will still be about when he chooses to show himself.’
‘It shall be as you say,’ noted Septimoth.
Before she turned in for the night, Damson Beeton produced a crimson feather. ‘Have you been moulting. Septimoth?’
Septimoth stared intently at the semi-scaled feather. ‘Where did you find that?’
‘With a handful of others like it, you old pigeon. In the shrubbery in front of the house.’
Septimoth’s tucked-back wings seemed to shiver with anticipation. ‘In the garden?’
‘Just so.’ She placed the feather on the table. ‘If the master will hire nothing but day labour to tend the garden, is it too much to ask you to drop your feathers in your own tower, or better yet, in the compost heap behind the lake?’
Septimoth watched the housekeeper waddle off to the warmth of her quarters at the far end of the house. He picked up the crimson feather from the table. This was something he had not seen for a long time, not since Quatershift. Nor was it something he had expected to see in Jackals for the remainder of his lifetime. He was tempted to ignore the call. He was an outcast, so let him act like one. But it was too powerful a totem to resist.
Falling upon his slab of pie, he devoured it in a display of rapaciousness that would have turned Damson Beeton’s stomach and earned him an admonishment had she still been in the room. Then he removed the portion that had been set aside for Cornelius Fortune and took it towards the lifting room in the corridor outside. There were only three storeys to Dolorous Hall, but the mansion’s current owner had paid for an eyrie tower to be built for Septimoth, the round stone construction lancing out of the roof like a black finger. Septimoth corrected himself; at least, there were only three storeys that were visible. Once the lifting-room doors had closed, Septimoth pulled out an ivory handle from the copper wall panel, twisting a second handle counter-clockwise. Rather than rising up to his quarters, the room started to descend, falling through the bedrock of the island with the hiss of counter weights rising in the opposite direction and the clack of the turning clockwork cable feeder.
After three minutes the lifting-room doors opened onto a long corridor, rough-hewn rock walls dotted with flickering oil-fed lanterns mounted below the lead pipe that fed them. Before the capital’s river had been artificially widened to prevent flooding, the islands of the Skerries had been hills, prosperous enclaves looking across the nearby Gambleflowers and the city below. Septimoth emerged in a large hall, briefly glancing up at the fish and the dark course of the river flowing over the atrium skylight of the old Middlesteel Museum. It had not taken much to seal the abandoned building underwater and pump it free of water. Even Jackals’ most secret of police forces, the Court of the Air, were unable to peer beneath the Gambleflowers with their sorcerous watchers.
It was amazing how much of the old museum’s stock the curators had abandoned in the basement chambers, before moving to their acreages of new marble over in the west of the capital. Unfashionable royalist statues and artefacts mostly — a cavalier on horseback, waving a carbine at a rearing goreback; the massive lion-headed iron expansion engine that had taken the royal airship Scramblewolf across the ocean to discover Concorzia and the other colonies. Now the abandoned museum had only one patron and a couple of regular visitors. Cornelius Fortune was in the museum’s main hall at the centre of the building, sitting in the shadow of a large transaction engine that should by rights have been delivered to the endless engine rooms of Greenhall, but had instead been diverted to their island — piece by stolen piece. Septimoth placed the plate of supper next to the boxes of purloined punch cards that his friend had acquired from the civil service.
It never surprised Septimoth how easily such things came into Cornelius’s possession. Before Quatershift, before the mask, his friend had been Jackals’ greatest thief. The thief with a thousand faces, with an identity so fluid he had flowed across the capital, taking what pleased him, making any mischief that entertained him. The Nightshifter. Many years ago. Before the curse of love.
‘Your supper, sir.’
‘You play the butler poorly, old friend. I’ll take it in a little while.’ Cornelius pointed at the pile of glossy gutta-percha punch cards, each one proudly embossed with Ham Yard’s coat of arms in
one corner. ‘There’s a pattern to the grave robbing. It’s always steammen being turned out of their coffins and it’s always the oldest corpses being taken. Where there’s a young cadaver, the body is left untouched.’
‘Young is a relative concept when applied to the people of the metal,’ said Septimoth. ‘Steammen outlive our flesh by many spans of both our races’ lifetimes.’
Cornelius showed his friend the list he had compiled. ‘None of the officers at Ham Yard know what to make of this.’
‘Are you sure these crimes are linked to Robur?’
‘Even if I hadn’t been tipped off by that young urchin from Rottonbow … I can feel it, Septimoth. In my bones. He is behind it. You carried Robur’s body over the cursewall, what do you think?’
‘I have no talent for pre-vision now,’ said Septimoth. He placed the crimson feather down on the table next to the plate. ‘But there are others who have.’
Cornelius raised the feather between his fingers. ‘Your people? I thought you carried the death mark, old friend? You’ve been exiled. They’ll kill you if you fly into one of their nests, rip you to pieces.’
‘I will not need to travel to one of our villages. They will come for me.’
‘Let them bloody wait,’ said Cornelius. ‘Let them fly in circles around Middlesteel until their wings turn blue with cold and ache with tiredness. What do you owe them?’
Septimoth pulled out his bone pipe, turning the flute sadly in his long talon-like fingers — all that remained of his mother, the squadron-queen, his whole tribe. ‘You know what debt I owe my people. Did we not escape from Quatershift together, after you broke the door to my cage?’
‘Sweet Circle,’ Cornelius swore at his friend’s stubbornness. ‘You are dead to them, Septimoth. Your people’s rulers can go jigger themselves, the way they have treated you.’
‘The spirits of the wind still whisper to me,’ said Septimoth, ‘I can hear my gods again. Stormlick has not yet abandoned me. I must answer the mark of the crimson feather.’
‘If you must,’ said Cornelius. ‘But if your people want you to go off on some mystical sky quest hunting for skraypers to bring down, you tell them you are otherwise engaged. We have work to do. I have compiled a list of locations where our grave-robbing friends are likely to strike next.’
‘I shall be back in good time,’ said Septimoth. ‘There will be hours enough for me to ride the fog above Middlesteel’s graveyards for you.’
Cornelius underlined the name at the head of his list, a stolen census record selected from the pile of punch cards. ‘Not a graveyard. Our opponents have already had their pick of the plots of the dead. The oldest steamman left in the city still has a beating boiler heart … and I have a suspicion our slippery refugee friend Robur is about to switch from troubling the deceased, to kidnapping and murdering the living.’
It had been an age since Septimoth had needed to follow the mark of his own kind. But even without his third eye, he could still smell the scent of a lashlite hunt on the breeze. It was strange that he now shared more in common with Cornelius Fortune than with his own people. The cold burning desire for revenge far stronger than any call he felt to hunt skraypers in the higher atmosphere. His once proudly held position as ambassador to the court of the Sun King had always marked him as an outsider, more fluent in monkey-tongue than the whistling true speech of his own people. How much stranger would he appear to his own kith and kin now he hobbled around Dolorous Hall with his wings bent small, living only to inflict terror and pain on those who had wrought his downfall?
Riding up the thermals from a line of mills along Bunsby Green, Septimoth turned towards the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. How like those who sat in judgement upon him to pick the highest vantage point in Middlesteel for their meeting. Tucking his wings back, Septimoth plummeted like an arrow, spreading them in a fan configuration at the last second to hit the roof of the tower where their scent was emanating from. It was a showy entrance, the kind Furnace-breath Nick favoured to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy.
Standing on top of a line of smokeless chimneys were the four seers of the crimson feather, only the gurgle of the tower’s water-filled wall support system for company this high up.
Septimoth nodded to them, denying them the customary full bow where he should expose his dead, scarred third eye to the seers. After all, what could they do — blind him a second time? ‘I had not expected to receive the mark of your call again.’
‘As we do not expect to be greeted in the tongue of the flightless monkeys.’
‘You seem to understand it well enough.’
‘You have become far too closely intertwined with their ways and memes.’
‘The race of man call it “going native”, I think you will find. A peril that comes with banishment.’
‘And how have you atoned for your crimes, Septimoth? By random acts of violence against the tribe of flightless monkeys that stood-’
Septimoth pulled out his flute and waved the white instrument towards them in fury. ‘By the bones of my mother! By the bones of my people and my family and my honour, I have sworn I will not rest until the Commonshare is pulled down around the First Committee’s ears — death by death. You shall not speak of my vengeance, you are not fit to do so!’
‘Fine words, Septimoth. It is a pity you did not caution your tribe with such prudence when the flightless monkeys in Quatershift were undergoing their meme change. If you had done so, your squadron-queen, your mother, would still be alive in this realm, rather than floating in the song notes of her spine bone that you so angrily brandish towards us.’
It was as if the seers had twisted a knife in Septimoth’s gut. All the pain and misery and bile of that wound overflowed. ‘The court of the Sun King was corrupt, their people held in serfdom and bound by obsolete ritual. Those infected by the meme spoke noble words, of equality and fraternity and-’
‘You were of the ambassador caste, Septimoth; you were not in the court of the Sun King to act as a participant. All new memes are accompanied by sound and fury as they establish their infection in the presence of the population. Did not Stormlick whisper vigilance to you as you studied these monkey communityists? How could you fail to notice the ferocity of their meme, its pure loathing for competing ideas, its exclusivity? For all its faults, the old regime was a multi-racial assembly. Whither now Quatershift’s graspers, its steammen, its craynarbians and lashlites? Those who have submitted are little better than slaves to the pink skins, and for those that fought … for your people, those fine flowery words you heard came at a terrible cost.’
Septimoth writhed on the roof in agony. ‘I shall atone for my mistakes.’
‘On your feet, ambassador,’ said the tallest of the seers. ‘We do not exile those of the true flight for poorly given advice. You know why you were banished.’
‘There were so many bodies,’ pleaded Septimoth, his figure briefly thrown into shadow by a passing aerostat, the airship’s expansion engines a muted thrum above them. ‘I was the only one left alive after the soldiers found the trail up into our mountains. My tribe was massacred, how could I eat so many?’
A long talon pointed accusingly at Septimoth. ‘Do their souls speak to you with curses on their beaks, ambassador? The souls you left to be collected by Nightstorm and her devilish servants?’
‘I tried,’ said Septimoth, his voice falling into a fluting hack-whistle as he sobbed. He remembered his fallen family’s flesh hanging from his mouth as he desperately tried to eat them all. So many hundreds of bodies strewn around his village, hanging out of eyrie slits, littering the streets with Quatershiftian lances run through them. How could a single lashlite give so many of the dead their proper honours, even without the distraction of the laughing Commonshare soldiers? Calling him a filthy cannibal, cutting off limbs from the corpses and tossing them at him. Applauding him as he tried to save the souls of as many of his people as he could by feasting on them.
‘The tribe co
nsumes the tribe,’ quoted the tallest of the seers.
‘Nothing for the enemy, nothing left for Nightstorm to steal,’ intoned the others.
‘Nightstorm will release my tribe’s souls,’ cried Septimoth. ‘She will release them when I nourish her with the feast I shall make of my flight’s Quatershiftian murderers.’
‘Your feast of revenge shall wait,’ commanded the seer. ‘As miserable as you are, as pathetic a wretch of a hunter as I have ever seen, you carry the mark again now. The Seer of the Stalker Cave has foreseen you herself. Her will is law, even for an exiled monkey-talker like yourself.’
‘I am in her visions?’ The thought shocked Septimoth. He was unclean. Exiled and broken. How could he appear in the prophetic dreams of such as she? Supreme among the oracles.
‘We are as appalled as you that it is so. After your time with the dirt dwellers, do you still recall the high hunt?’
Septimoth remembered the soaring joy of his youth; gliding so high he was only breathing through his sealed oxygen sacks. The rip of raw, savage elation as the hunt sighted a skrayper, diving on the zeppelin-sized creature, manoeuvring past its wavering tentacle stings to drive spears into its blue flesh. ‘I do.’
