by Stephen Hunt
‘Cam-’ Cornelius could not believe what he was hearing. ‘You’ve lost your bloody mind. Camlantis is a penny dreadful tale — bad history that makes for good novels. You might as well fly off to find the cottage of Mother White Horse or the ancient kings of Jackals sleeping under their hill.’
‘Scholars said the same about the city of Lost Angels before its ruined towers were discovered rotting under the ocean,’ said Quest. ‘In fact, people say something very similar about you now in Quatershift, Compte de Speeler … that you are a myth, not a man: They seek him here, they seek him there,the furnace-breathed killer with the demon stare.’
‘You declared yourself an outlaw when you launched your three stats,’ said Cornelius, fighting down the urge to yell. ‘You’ve thrown away your entire commercial empire in Jackals. And you’ve done all that for the sake of a child’s tale?’
‘Easy come, easy go,’ said Quest. ‘You think I had true wealth, the man who bought Jackals, only to have his bill of sale cancelled when he presented it? I was never rich, before now. I just had piles of trinkets to spill onto my grave like some dirty great barbarian chief. What’s inside our minds, what we think, what dreams we can achieve, that’s our true wealth. With the secrets of the ancients unlocked, we shall rewrite not just our understanding of prehistory, but the face of the world itself!’
Cornelius looked at Damson Beeton and Septimoth. The lashlite seemed entranced by the scale of the high-lifters they could see turning slowly against the sky. Damson Beeton shook her head sadly, only her ancient eyes visible under the heavy visor. Abraham Quest was quite clearly insane — his wealth, his reputation, all his holdings — he had destroyed his entire life on a mere whim and the three of them were now being pulled along in the jet stream of his preposterous obsession. Prisoners, until they plunged down ice-heavy from the airless heavens, or were shot to pieces by squadrons of RAN vessels enraged by these three interlopers threatening Jackals’ carefully crafted balance of power on the continent.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Commodore Black clutched tightly onto the cage’s bars as they swung out of the petrol mists and over the edge of the pit. That was odd; the normal reception committee of iron apes did not seem to be waiting for them. Instead it was the small siltempter with a prehensile tail and a cheetah cloak working the winch mechanism below, alone.
‘It’s that capering fool,’ said the commodore. ‘Maybe his job is to give us breakfast and fatten us up before we are fed to the thunder lizards.’ His stomach grumbled at the thought. They hadn’t been fed in days ‘A nice slice of jungle boar with plenty of crackling on the side for me to crunch through, and a little blessed cold wine to wash it down with.’
‘They feed their boilers with tar-soaked charcoal,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I doubt if any of the siltempters have much experience with the murdered meat you softbodies consume.’
‘They can pick fruit from their trees, can’t they?’ whined the commodore. ‘Just a little energy, to help us run around their infernal fighting pit. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’
‘I can feel something,’ said Billy Snow. ‘A presence. Can you not sense it, too?’
‘The hunger is playing tricks on your mind,’ said the commodore.
But it was not in his mind.
‘Something is not as it should be,’ said Veryann. ‘Look at the siltempter.’
Their cage lodged on the mud in front of the small metal creature — his dark hull faintly illuminated, not with the glow of the fireflies that flitted above the burning oil in the prison pit, but with a light that was pure white, whiter than anything had a right to be.
‘Keep your voices down,’ said the siltempter. ‘Most of the tribe are deep in thoughtflow. Only the perimeter pickets are awake.’
He extended his iron fingers and white light flowed from the tips of his pincers, suffusing the transaction lock with its glow. As the light entered the lock, the tiny transaction-engine drums inside the construct started rotating at a blinding speed, steam rising from the metal as they spun so fast they began to melt. There was a dull thud as the cage door opened, the remains of the lock engine dripping molten tears onto the mud, coalescing into a cooling steel puddle.
‘Ayeeee,’ Ironflanks bowed — half in reverence, half in fear. ‘You are no siltempter, you are ridden. Which Loa …?’
‘Quiet, Ironflanks of the Pathfinder Fist,’ instructed the siltempter. ‘I am not from the halls of your ancestors — no Loa, I.’
‘I have been party to a steamman possession before,’ said the commodore, ‘on the Isla Needless, when I was on the trail of the treasure of the Peacock Hearne, and you will beg my pardon, sir, if I point out that you appear to be no siltempter now.’
‘He is inhabited by the spirit of the wreckage they have imprisoned in the temple,’ said Billy Snow. ‘You are the Hexmachina.’
‘I see that I am recognized,’ said the possessed siltempter. ‘Well met, Snow of the race of man.’
‘You live!’ Ironflanks hissed in surprise through his voicebox. ‘I thought you fully deactivate.’
‘You have the measure of me, then, for I am spent,’ said the Hexmachina, ‘close to death. Once I could cross the walls of the world and beard the darkest of gods in their dens. Now I only have enough life force to watch from my cage and perform parlour tricks on weak minds such as this vessel I ride.’
‘Why?’ begged Ironflanks. ‘Why come for us now? You never appeared before, you never came for us when a whole order of steammen knights perished to free you from the siltempters.’
‘There was not enough of me left to free,’ said the possessed siltempter, ‘and you had the means to escape among your own number. I do not expend my last reserves of energy for the sake of a party of innocent travellers, Ironflanks of the Pathfinder Fist. My centuries imprisoned here have seen countless slaughtered who did not deserve their fate. There is more to your mission than your personal survival. I see a disturbance in the great pattern surfacing on the paths of probability and your threads are bound tightly to it. Much rests on your survival. More than your mere existence — and more than mine.’
‘I must rescue you,’ said Ironflanks. ‘I still carry the charge from King Steam for your release.’
‘Your mission is over,’ said the Hexmachina. ‘I am fading now. Follow your own path on the great pattern.’
The diminutive siltempter stumbled to his knees, a single arm reaching for something he had tucked under his cheetah cloak. He pulled out Billy Snow’s cane sword, with its hidden witch-blade. ‘I am dying, now; my hold on this vessel weakens. This form cannot be allowed to raise the alarm.’
Billy Snow’s hand reached out for the cane, receiving it in his grip with an uncanny accuracy.
‘You see truly, Snow of the race of man. You know what must be done.’
Ironflanks realized what was happening and tried to stop it, but the little siltempter’s arm pushed weakly out. ‘What must be, must be. All things have their season and my age has passed away, now, along with most of my kin. The age of gods has been replaced with a cold new age of reason and the need for god-slayers in this land is small.’
The possessed siltempter looked up at Billy Snow, his vision plate leaking white light towards the old sonar man. ‘I believe you understand what that feels like.’
‘I believe I do,’ said Billy Snow.
His blade was unsheathed almost too fast to follow, looping around once as the siltempter’s head spilled from his shoulders and slapped into the mud, severed crystal shards sparking as the body tumbled over, oil pumping out from a handful of cables quivering inside the ruin of his neck.
Veryann loosened a machete strapped to the corpse and looped the strap over her own back. ‘It won’t protect us against their kind, but it will serve well enough in the jungle.’
The commodore bent over the corpse. ‘And then there was one, again. I wish we could bury your true remains inside the body of the world, Hexmachina, where your lover the ea
rth could blow lava to warm your strange soul and bring some comfort to you in this mortal winter of reason we have created.’
Ironflanks seemed deeply disturbed by what had happened. He stood there, swaying, as if his mind were locked in a recursive loop. This god-machine had been his life — the reason for his banishment and his life’s purpose before that. Now the Hexmachina was gone. Ironflanks was truly alone, the last of an order of steammen knights reckless enough — courageous enough — to attempt to free the holy machine from their ancient enemy.
T’ricola laid one of her four arms on the steamman’s shoulder. ‘He freed us for a reason.’
‘To find a softbody city abandoned an eternity ago?’ Ironflanks waved his arms in desperation. ‘What reason is that?’
‘Reason enough to go on,’ said Veryann. ‘Are you still my scout?’
‘I-’
‘Think about Abraham Quest’s fee,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘Enough to pay Jackals’ finest mechomancers to remove the lord of the loons’ wicked components from your body.’
‘Why not?’ said Ironflanks. ‘What else is left for me, now? Let us go. The Shedarkshe is south of here. It served me well enough once, leading me northwest and home to Rapalaw Junction. If we follow its course southeast we should reach Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo within a week.’
Veryann looked at the sonar man. ‘May I see your witch-blade, Billy Snow?’
‘It was fashioned to respond only to my touch. In your hands it would just be dead metal.’
‘I thought you would say something like that,’ said Veryann, her eyes gleaming suspiciously.
Behind them came a howl of anger — half animal, half machine-screech. It was a siltempter wearing the bleached skull of a thunder lizard as a helmet, emerging from a boxlike building overhanging the arena next to the oil lake. As the siltempter screeched, the caged thunder lizards in the arena behind him howled and shook the bars of their cages. The keeper of the lizards ran back towards his building even as Billy Snow sprinted towards him, casting out his arm. Billy’s witch-blade shifted form into a spear that hummed as it sliced through the air, striking the running siltempter in the spine and passing straight through his chest to embed itself in a wall. The lizard-keeper stumbled and grabbed hold of a wheel fixed to the wall, rotating it as he fell deactivate into the mud. Above the building, a cap on a whistle lifted, blowing a piercing screech across the darkened pre-dawn compound. Feeding time had started early in the realm of the siltempters.
Still dazed from emerging early from thoughtflow — the trance-like pseudo-sleep of the steammen — metal tribesmen began stumbling out of creeper-covered domes in the jungle in response to the din.
The commodore cast around for a direction free of awakening siltempters, but there was no clear passage that he could see. Razor-edged horrors were coming out from all directions. Roused by the noise outside, Queen Three-eyes pulled against her massive cast-iron chains down in the sand of the arena, her rage and fury roaring across the siltempter community.
Amelia was shivering when she awoke. A cold floor and the drip-drip-drip of water tapping at a puddle close to her head had replaced the warmth of the cramped bathysphere. Groaning, she turned over. She was in a large, grey room with smooth walls made out of some glossy substance she did not recognize. Behind her was the bathysphere, dripping water from its battered lake-weed-covered surface onto the floor — and the prone body of Bull Kammerlan stretched in its shadow.
How had they arrived here? There were no doorways or hatches visible in the chamber. It was as if someone had dis assembled their vessel piece by piece, then rebuilt it in this place. That was the kind of prank that first-years loved to play on their professors. Stealing the giant clocks from the college towers and rebuilding them in one of the don’s lecture rooms. But whoever had done this to them possessed no playful streak, she suspected. Amelia pulled herself up, ignoring the stiff pain of her limbs — had someone taken her to bits then put her back together, too? She lurched over to where Bull lay. She checked the pulse at his throat with her fingers — he was still warm. Still alive. The luck of a damn slaver.
Amelia looked around the chamber. No doors, no windows — the flat, gas-lightless walls were generating their own illumination somehow, with no visible source. Cupping the puddling water from the bathysphere she splashed it onto Bull’s face. He blinked and she gave him another dousing, which had the intended effect.
‘You back to normal, dimples?’ Bull coughed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You were laughing like a mad woman back on the boat, dragging us towards the mincing machine that had done for Tree-head Joe’s vessels,’ said Bull. ‘I wasn’t expecting to wake up at all, let alone in here. Where is “here” by the way?’
Her head hurt. She remembered the radiance of the stone circle under the water and the longing for it. But nothing else.
‘I’ll be cast off the Circle if I know where we are,’ said Amelia. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any way to get inside here … or out again.’
Bull pulled himself up and laid his hands on the bathysphere, ducking his head under the hull to check its condition. There was a clunk as he popped the hatch, then he reappeared a minute later, brandishing a metal rod. It was a poor weapon, but it was all he could detach from the interior of their craft. ‘The hatch was locked from the inside. I had to use the diver’s emergency release to get into her — but someone got us out of the cabin, right enough.’
Amelia looked around. Something about the chamber — something she could not quite put her finger on — reminded her of the seed-ship observation room she had been locked up in by the Daggish. But the walls down here were like nothing she had seen in the nest city. And if they had been returned to the not-so-tender clutches of the Daggish emperor without his precious crown to placate him, they were more likely to have woken up with moss fronds creeping down their throats and crawling inside their eardrums, than in this chill alien place. Yes, there was definitely something about this chamber. A sense of familiarity, as if she had visited here before.
‘Here we are!’ Amelia shouted into space. ‘What are you doing with us?’
There was no reply. Bull snorted. ‘Nobody visiting the zoo today, then?’
Amelia checked the collection nets behind the bathysphere. They had been emptied of all the debris she had collected from the bottom of the lake, but there were still fronds of wet lake weed wrapped around the wire mesh. Giving up on the boat, Amelia prowled the boundary of the chamber, feeling the walls for any sign of a hatch, an exit. When she approached the final side of the chamber, a section of the wall dis appeared, simply dissolved as if it had never existed, the newly formed entrance revealing a corridor receding into absolute darkness. Jumping back in alarm, Amelia watched the wall become solid again as she moved away. Bull came running over, laying both of his hands on the section of the wall that had vanished. It was rock hard. Nothing happened as he thumped it. Amelia stepped forward and the wall vanished again, the corridor illuminating this time, as if it was encouraging her to enter.
‘It likes you, girl,’ said Bull.
Amelia glanced around the chamber holding the bathysphere. ‘There’s nothing for us here.’
‘Well, I’m not staying around here on my lonesome,’ said Bull, stepping closer to her, as if he was fearful that the wall might close up and leave him trapped behind.
‘I thought you believed I was a Jonah?’ said Amelia.
‘Stuck in Circle-knows where, with half the Daggish fleet waiting for us at the other end, what would make you think that?’ Bull said. ‘Besides, I’m a practical man. Something created this — and it sure wasn’t Tree-head Joe or the spirit of Lord Tridentscale. What was it you said about traps?’
‘They mean treasure.’
‘That’s the part I like,’ said Bull. ‘You can tell me more about that.’
‘They also mean death concealed in a hundred different cunning ways,’ said Amelia, annoyed by his flippan
t tone. ‘I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years — none of them have lasted the course.’
‘Yeah, I can tell,’ said Bull. ‘But you haven’t worked with a superior pedigree like mine before. I survived life in the fleet-in-exile, I survived working the river along Liongeli and the holding tanks of Bonegate. All this-’ he gestured down the corridor ‘-is just meat on the bone to a man like me.’
‘You’re poured from the same pot as Jared Black,’ said Amelia. ‘I can see that much from your boasting.’
‘He’s a useless old man who gave up on what he believed in,’ said Bull. ‘That’s not something I would ever do.’
Amelia indicated they should go into the corridor, the slaver first. ‘The commodore cut his cloth to fit the times. I would take that as a sign of intelligence.’
A couple of seconds after they had passed through, the wall solidified behind them. She resisted the temptation to walk back and see if it would open as willingly for her again as it had when she had been inside the chamber.
Halfway down the corridor, and the air around them seemed to be getting warmer — a tepid wind playing down the passageway. Amelia stopped, suspicious now, and checked the floor and the walls. They were as featureless as the chamber holding the bathysphere.
‘What is it?’ said Bull.
‘It’s getting hotter.’
‘You expecting us to be chased down the corridor by a wall of fire?’
‘At the very least.’ She traced her hand across the wall, not quite enamel, not quite glass. ‘No dust down here, no leaks of water, no dirt. Just like our chamber. This could have been cleaned a couple of minutes ago.’
‘The walls here are a different colour,’ said Bull, tapping the side of the passageway. ‘It feels different to the touch too.’
The sides of the passage changed even more as they progressed down the corridor — from the strange smooth grey material to something that resembled green glass. Amelia was walking with her finger running down the cool surface when the glass turned completely transparent. Bull whirled around. Dazzling light flooded the corridor, multiple oblong-shaped sheets of green glass rotating on the other side of the now translucent wall. As they watched, the revolving oblong planes began to be filled with scenes, images and sounds of the world beyond — grey rain-filled clouds scudding over the pneumatic towers of Middlesteel, a drover leading a flock of geese down a small country lane. There was no order to the images, some familiar, others scenes from nations so exotic that Amelia could only guess at their identity.
