by Stephen Hunt
‘There’s the town square at Coldkirk,’ said Bull. ‘I stayed there for a winter, when I was on the run from the crushers in Jackals.’
‘And Cassarabia, too,’ said Amelia. ‘The royal water gardens at Bladetenbul. They’re like the imagery from a crystal-book.’ She pressed her hand against the barrier. Not even a smear was left on the surface. ‘But with this wall, I think it’s the glass that holds the recording.’
Bull pointed at the scenes of Jackelian life floating on the sheared planes beyond. ‘That’s no ancient record from a crystal-book. That’s happening now.’
As they moved further down the corridor the scenes began to transform. Subtle changes at first — streets from Jackelian cities, but with their fashions slightly off kilter — women wearing Quatershiftian bonnets and soldiers on leave strutting about in brigade blue rather than the wine-red coats of the new pattern army. Further still, and the clothes changed to an austere parliamentarian cut, the kind of fashion favoured hundreds of years earlier — but updated in a sinister military style. The streets of Middlesteel grew darker, less colourful. The buildings taller and more imposing, but all individuality of dress vanishing from the citizenry — a sea of grey and black, as if everyone in the capital was serving in the army.
‘What is this?’ hissed Bull. ‘This isn’t Jackals.’
Amelia’s head had begun to throb again. ‘It is. Look at the streets, the buildings. It’s the capital.’
In the vision floating in front of them, a massive roaring sounded from the crowds lining the boulevard, the silhouettes of a fleet of airships thrumming across the sky. Their hulls were not painted in the chequerboard colours of the RAN, but were instead pitch black, apart from a single circle filled with a blood-red gate — the gate of parliament, solitary, without the lion that flew on the true flag of Jackals. Along the boulevard marched the Special Guard — black cloaks instead of red, their muscled arms wearing armbands bearing the same crimson gate that adorned the aerostats. Their sweeping march, so precise and strong, was made menacing in this vision. Stamping the road, shaking the street. Between their ranks were carts loaded with cages full of prisoners — starved, broken wretches still wearing the rags of other nations — Cassarabian gowns, Catosian togas, Kikkosicoan ponchos. The crowd bayed their hate, soldiers accompanying the carts striking through the bars with their whips when the mob had roared loud enough to be rewarded with blood.
A Cassarabian woman hidden under black robes shielded her daughter, the whip cracking across her back. ‘Whip the child,’ someone yelled from the pavement. The call was taken up by the mob until one of the Special Guardsmen yanked the mother back to expose her ten-year-old girl to their fury.
‘No,’ Amelia moaned, ‘that’s not us, that’s not Jackals.’ Her words were lost in the fury of the vision, a sea of standards bobbing in front of her tear-stained eyes, each bearing an eagle clinging to the sharpened teeth of parliament’s gate.
‘What is this cursed place?’ said Bull.
Words came to Amelia in answer, but it was as if they were drawn deep from something ancient lurking within her. ‘These are the corridors of else-when, that which might have been, the resonance of the parallel path.’
Bull stumbled past a revolving plane where cavalrymen with royalist feathers in their caps galloped past a burning hamlet; huddles of refugees mixed with suspected Leveller insurgents watching their lives disappear in a furnace of heat. ‘These are visions sent to drive us insane.’
‘No, this is the great pattern that the people of the metal talk about, but alternative threads on it. The same story told by different authors, with endings just as diverse.’
‘Who would do this thing?’ asked Bull. ‘Create this hall of horrors?’
‘I think this is for humility,’ said Amelia. ‘To remind us that we always have choices and our choices have consequences. To be mindful of the harm that we might cause others.’
Bull gazed hypnotized by the plane he was watching. A royalist regime, killing and burning and punishing any dissent displayed towards the whims of a dark queen. He could not bear to look at the coat of arms worn by the secret police tossing the night’s curfew breakers into the torture rooms at Ham Yard — not the hedgehog symbol of the honest crushers of Middlesteel, but the unicorn and lion of his mother’s house. His house.
‘We ruled for the people,’ whispered Bull, ‘for them, not over them.’
The two of them pushed deeper down the corridor, trying to avoid looking at the walls now, catching only glimpses as the scenes deviated further and further from the comfortably reassuring world they knew. A Jackals filled with craynarbians, polishing their exo-skeletons while their cousins from the race of man laboured in the fields, clad only in slaves’ loincloths and shivering under the overseers’ whips. A Middlesteel empty and abandoned, the capital’s streets buried by ice and snow — the coldtime returned early to make a world of frozen emptiness. Then a land of sands blowing in hot from a furnace sun, only the tip of the solitary bell tower of Brute Julius protruding from the drifting desert to mark the fact that this world had ever been inhabited at all — a lone figure in Cassarabian sand-rider’s garb on his knees in front of the lost tower, praying to the hundred aspects of the blessed Cent. No green and pleasant realm for Jackals here, just a sea of endless dunes.
At last the corridor of cruel possibilities came to an end, opening out onto a colossal chamber. The vista reminded Amelia of the Chimecan undercity beneath Middlesteel in its scale, but the statues carved into the entrance wall behind them were far more ancient, and the valley before them was not filled with the massive fungal forests of Middlesteel-below, but an entirely different kind of woodland. Mounds of living machines! Some, bamboo fields of tentacles and throbbing anthills, others spreading out from oak-sized limbs to form an undulating canopy.
Bull’s arm rose as he found his metal rod from the bathysphere tugging itself towards a small orange sun burning in the sky above them.
‘The sun is trying to snatch my club.’
Amelia shook her head. ‘It’s no true sun. It’s a source of power, like an expansion engine or a steam boiler. There’s a field of magnetism containing it — release your club.’
Bull opened his fingers and the rod left his hand, spinning out and up towards the sun; a minute later there was a tiny splash of light as it hit the surface of the globe and was incinerated.
‘Are you possessed again, Guardian’s daughter?’
No,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s as if I know this already. It’s as if all of this is a memory.’
She turned to look at the pair of statues shielding the entrance to the corridor of visions. Carved out of white stone, they were heavily stylized, cubist arms joining together to hold up a roll of parchment above the door.
‘The twins. Knowledge standing on the left, and the wisdom to use it appropriately standing on the right.’
‘If you can “remember” a way out of here that doesn’t involve us being pursued by half the greenmesh, I would consider that mighty useful,’ said Bull.
Her mind was filling with information. As if her existence here was awakening long-dormant memories of a house she had once lived in. But this was an ancient place. She had never seen anything like it — not in the university archives, not in the crystal-books her father had saved from the bailiffs’ clutches and left to her. So how could all this seem so familiar?
‘Through that forest of machines,’ said Amelia. ‘Our way lays through there.’
‘Isn’t there another track?’ asked Bull. ‘Even a corridor showing more horrors of the might-have-been …?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s the spit of Tree-head Joe’s throne room down there-’
Was that where she had seen this before? No. Her memory wasn’t from the chambers of the Daggish hive. It came from somewhere deeper.
‘There’s a reason for that. I think the Daggish are the feral descendants of the Camlanteans’ living machines. Not much
of a legacy to leave behind, are they? This is the way. Let’s follow my instincts,’ said Amelia, stepping down the slope towards the machine forest.
Bull sighed. ‘And it looks like I’m still following you.’
He cast his eyes around nervously as the two of them entered the forest. While the engineering of the Daggish had seemed bone-like and shell hard, the machine forest was smooth and organic, tentacles extruding from trunks to stroke other machines — exchanging information and function, then reshaping to whatever exotic design they were working to. Delicate transparent devices like butterflies fluttered between the various limbs of the organic machines, orange light glinting off their milky scales. There was a spray like dew raining from somewhere overhead, keeping the living engineering cool and supple. Some of it fell on Amelia’s face and she tasted it on her lips. Sweet, sugary — it contained the nourishment the growing flesh needed to renew itself. Renewing it forever, perhaps, or for as long as the manufactured sun providing it with life-giving light continued to burn in its magnetic hearth.
The two of them pushed through the forest, deeper into the dream-like realm. Amelia’s dream. She was close now, she could feel it with every iota of her being, and the determination of seeing her life’s work fulfilled drove her further into the alien land.
Billy Snow pulled the spear out of the wall of the building, the witch-blade shifting back to its sabre form, quivering in delight at having tasted the system oil of the impaled siltempter.
The first tribesman to have been roused by the arena’s whistle leapt at Ironflanks, but the scout had anticipated the move and closed in, using the momentum of the siltempter’s attack to twist him about, slamming him down into the mud. One of Ironflanks’ four arms punched in, piercing the siltempter’s hull and bursting his boiler heart.
Commodore Black scooped up the dying creature’s machete attachment, brandishing it like a crab’s claw, as if just its presence was enough to avert the charge of siltempters running towards them. ‘There!’ He pointed to a section of the jungle wall still clear of fighters. ‘Run for that, my brave boys.’
Glancing around, the commodore saw Ironflanks racing away from them, towards the arena. ‘What are you doing? This way.’
‘It is time,’ shouted Ironflanks as he sprinted towards where the thunder lizards’ keeper had died. ‘Time to make amends for my thread on the pattern.’
Commodore Black cursed the steamman. Had the Hexmachina’s expiry from this plane of existence sent Ironflanks off the deep six?
Billy Snow moved in front of T’ricola; cutting the head off the spear a siltempter was using to try to disembowel the craynarbian. They were ancient enemies, the siltempters and the craynarbians, living shell-to-hull as they did in the depths of Liongeli. The mutate steammen knew every trick of piercing craynarbian shells, breaking them open like lobsters and bringing them pain. Snow’s blade dipped low and the siltempter fell forward, all three of his tripod of legs severed below the knee joints, three spears left sticking up from the mud while the decapitated body twitched unbelieving in front of T’ricola.
Commodore Black reached the building overlooking the arena. Its door had been staved in and was hanging off its hinges. Inside, the warmth of the previous day had been preserved within its thick walls. Ironflanks was standing in front of a plane of transparent crystal overlooking the arena floor. The steamman heaved at a wheel set on a panel, looking nothing so much as the master of a vessel, trying to turn the building about onto a new course. Commodore Black caught a glimpse of the arena below. Something like a drawbridge was dropping towards the sand and the commodore suddenly understood what the steamman was doing. Exactly how he intended to make up for his perceived sins on the great pattern.
‘Ironflanks, you idiot of a steamer, you cannot …’
‘Oh, but I can!’ Ironflanks said. ‘My waters are hot, commodore softbody, and now I’m running fit to boil.’
Beyond the screen of glass, the head of Queen Three-eyes hove into view — her single ruined pit and three good eyes focusing on the steamman behind the glass. She roared her contempt of the siltempters, that these little metal devils could chain her, starve her and think that her will could be broken by such artifice. As she howled her rage, the panicked echoes of the other thunder lizards held in the arena joined her in a nervous chorus.
‘Metaljiggermetaljiggerwillwillwillyoufightmefightmememeinthesandsandsand?’
‘I spent very little time in the court of the Steamman Free State,’ shouted Ironflanks, ‘but this I do know — a queen should never be humbled before a prince.’
‘Don’t be doing this,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘Have we not got enough blessed problems to be dealing with?’
Ironflanks punched the switch that released the chains on the kilasaurus max. Somewhere deeper in the building an alarm claxon sounded. Outside there was a whistling noise as the k-max wrenched her newly unlocked chains out of their stake rings so fast that they were sent flying across the arena sands, lashing into a series of benches in the wall and smashing them to splinters. Chains fell off the other lizards in the shadows of the stadium pit, steel teeth in the ground clanking open.
‘Freemefreemefreeme?’ Queen Three-eyes appeared astonished by the actions of her mortal enemy.
Commodore Black backed away from the viewing gallery; terrified the k-max would smash the glass and scoop them out. The steamman seemed to welcome such a fate, standing there with his four arms outstretched, as if he was beseeching Queen Three-eyes to end his aimless life.
It was a dreadful act of symmetry. Ironflanks had been cut from his life’s purpose and the wreckage of his duty in the jungles of Liongeli — and now he had done the same for the queen of the thunder lizards. Killing Ironflanks was all that Queen Three-eyes had lived for since she had lost her life-mate, and now she was being offered the life of her mate’s murderer on a plate.
‘We are both free,’ whispered Ironflanks’ voicebox. ‘We are both free, now.’
Queen Three-eyes looked across the arena at her fellow thunder lizards stampeding for the lowered ramp while it remained open, crunching underfoot the massive bleached bones of their brethren who had been captured before them, made to starve to sharpen their appetite for the games. Her sly eyes narrowed in a cold fury, the sting of oily smoke from these metal devils’ stacks a foul affront to the natural scents of the jungle. This was not the way of things. Other thunder lizards bowed before her and backed away from the claw marks on the plateaux that surrounded her territory. It was time to remind these metal intruders why she was the monarch of Liongeli.
Ironflanks followed Commodore Black back outside the arena building, the first of the thunder lizards to stampede — a tauntoraptor — thumping geysers of mud into the air as it pawed the ground and lowered its horned head towards the siltempters, the metal tribesmen thrown into confusion by the release of the arena animals.
Some of the siltempters had been trying to outflank blind Billy Snow and his deadly morphic blade and noticed the new arrivals too late — outflanked themselves. They tried to throw themselves out of the way of a charging pentaceratops, but delayed by fatal seconds, the bone-clawed hooves flattened their hulls in a pop of splitting steel and cracking crystal. Behind them more rampaging beasts followed, a petrodactyl scooping up a fleeing tribesman and lifting him high in the air before skimming the creature down towards a rocky outcrop, the brief explosion of his breeched boiler sending a shower of shrapnel across the jungle clearing.
Into this carnage strode the queen of Liongeli, her scaly skin flashing orange where the fires of broken siltempters burned in the pre-dawn light. A company of siltempters appeared with airguns, monstrously large iron barrels with ancient cables connected to the pressure of their own boilers. Heavy ammunition drums jangled on top of the guns, hundreds of lead balls queuing for gravity to drop them into barrels and speed them on their deadly duty. With a roar like splintering wood, the siltempters opened fire on the nearest thunder lizards, peppering
the beasts with streams of hot lead while other creatures of the metal ran out with poison-tipped javelins, sharp injector reservoirs ready to jet concentrated shots of flying-fish toxin into the flanks of the huge, marauding creatures. A tauntoraptor swung its tail at the group of siltempters bringing it pain with their hail of tiny, stinging stones, sending three of them soaring back into the tree line with their chests crumpled and bleeding oil.
‘Time to withdraw,’ shouted Veryann, surveilling the siltempters as they emerged with increasingly heavy weaponry dug out from their jungle domes and the dark chambers of the temple. The siltempters’ defences were concentrated in a ring around their territory and the released arena creatures had bypassed all of them; but the expedition’s luck wasn’t going to last forever. The siltempters were regrouping fast.
Ironflanks, still disorientated by the twists and turns of his fate, stumbled over a dead tribesman. ‘This way, the river.’ His words were interspersed with his voicebox’s whistles and cries, the stampeding thunder lizards answering with similar calls, a few even moving out of his way — as if he was a calf of their own kind, to be treated with patience. The tree-high legs of a vulcanodon thumped past, revealing a group of trampled siltempter corpses half-buried in the mud. One of the bodies was still moving, trying to pull itself free while dragging two ruined legs, the alloy of both limbs burst and fizzing with the effort of hauling himself along.
Veryann recognized the corpulent form and the frog-like features of the face. ‘Good morning, my prince.’
