by Stephen Hunt
The assistants assigned to her field team gasped in awe as they stepped into the lifting room running down the interior of the tower; its walls, ceiling and floor so transparent the structures might as well not have been there. Columns of light ran up the inside of the spire, rainbow bursts exchanged between floating copper spheres the size of houses. Her team chattered to each other, excited by the alien sight, voices muffled behind their air masks.
Amelia was aware she should have been more moved by the display than she was. Why did she feel so little, seeing these wonders? Wasn’t this what she had worked all her life for, her father’s legacy finally fulfilled beyond any of the dreams he and his daughter had shared when he was alive? Just the chance to be standing here. He should have been here with her to share this triumph. Then she might have been able to explain to her team that the pillars of light they stood in awe of were nothing more than raw information, capable of recharging the crystal-books of the city’s inhabitants with any fact or finding known to the long memories and ancient storage devices of the Camlanteans. Levels of data so antiquated they had to be filtered across hundreds of parsing stages before they could be interpreted by modern Camlantean minds and their information systems. She should have been able to explain that when the energy of the sunlight had faded in cold exile, the massive devices before them had frozen the data in a singularity point no larger than a fingernail, a compact string of exotic matter that must have joyously expanded when the life-giving rays of the sun struck the tower again an hour earlier.
They might have looked at Amelia as if she was mad or possessed, but the living echoes of this city were beating in time to her pulse now, and instead of being filled with elation at her dream finally being met by reality, all she could do was curse the cold and pull tighter the large, fur-lined high-altitude coat she had been issued with for exploring Camlantis. Something her father had once said to her came drifting back. Pity the person who has no dream. And pity the person whoseonly dream is realized.
Behind Amelia’s head, her father whispered, ‘Even an echo must end.’
She whirled around. ‘Pappa!’
‘Professor?’ One of her team looked at her quizzically.
‘Did you hear something, did you say something?’
‘Just the crackle of the lightning exchange over there. This is it, professor,’ said one of the explorers. ‘This is what we have come for.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s magnificent,’ said someone behind her. ‘Do you think they had a museum down in the city? The things we might learn …’
‘I believe we will find dozens of them.’
Even the street outside felt no more substantial than the phantom projections she had glimpsed at the bottom of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo. The light seemed impossibly bright, painting the eerily empty boulevards and buildings with an intense, pale clarity, feeding the deserted city the power it needed to begin functioning again. In the middle of the street, a strip of road was moving forward, an adjacent strip cycling a little faster while a band beyond them pulsed faster still. Her team gauged its purpose immediately, stepping on the first strip and waving as they were carried down the road.
‘A transport system built into the road itself,’ laughed a sailor below her breather mask, clearly finding the concept amusing.
Amelia tried to raise a smile at the discovery, but found she couldn’t. Above them one of the Leviathan’s sister ships drifted, not searching for a mooring on their spire but cleared for action, her gun ports turning vigilantly — something told her the airship wasn’t on the alert for more skraypers turning up to attack the high-altitude trespassers. Then Amelia realized. Of course. She had heard enough tall tales from the commodore of the wolftakers and how they had hunted the last of the royalist fleet down at Porto Principe. Now the Court of the Air had a rival in the heavens and it would only be a matter of time before they visited the unexpected new arrivals in their sinister black aerospheres, trying to answer the questions that would be burning in their minds. No wonder Quest’s mapping of the city had been planned with the precision of an invasion. An impatient man, indeed. Surely the Court wouldn’t interfere in a scientific exploration far over the Sepia Sea? But then, there was also the matter of Quest’s airships, the first aerial rival to the Jackelian high fleet since the science pirate Newton had terrorized the skies. Would the most cabbal-istic of Jackals’ secret police forces judge Quest’s actions any more kindly than they had mad, bad Newton’s? No, they were not the forgiving type.
Amelia’s high-altitude coat was still covered in wood shavings from the crate it had been pulled out of half an hour previously. She brushed the packing off her fur, a dusting of it landing on the surface of the flawless pavement. A second after the shavings fell, a slot opened on the side of the rain gutter, discharging a flat discus on wiry legs that scurried over to the mess and consumed it, before sidling back into the darkness. Amelia felt for the lines of the slot on the pavement, but they had disappeared as decisively as the little cleaning creature. No wonder there were no mummified corpses littering the streets and buildings. The victims’ dust had been tidied away using the city’s dwindling reserves of power, even before the last age of ice had consumed the world during the coldtime. There was something terribly sad about that. This city was alive, but its people were not — and a city without people to occupy it had so very little point.
Walking past an oval booth Amelia triggered a still functioning sensor, a female head and shoulders shimmering into view in front of the stall. ‘Kalour Iso? Kalour Isotta?’
They had no verbal record of the Camlantean tongue, but Amelia had mapped the written script of the crystal-books against what she had imagined would be the correct phonetic matches; debated the possibilities with other collectors and Camlanteaphiles in their amateur journals.
Information today. Information now.
Was it a request or an offer? A series of spinning shapes materialized by the side of the face as Amelia stepped closer, and she instinctively reached out to touch one. As she did so, a list of symbols appeared, each shape revealing its own list of sub-options. These she understood: the same script that had been pieced together by the universities in Jackals. Plays. Festivals. Education. Dialogues of council. Dialogues of consensus mind. And at the head of the list a phrase she had never seen before — Update of hostile action. Even in ancient Camlantis, war reporting had taken front page, it seemed. Amelia activated the symbol and the woman’s face began speaking at a speed she could barely keep up with, only a sprinkling of the words in her commentary comprehensible. But the images that flashed up spoke clearly enough.
Continued advance. A sea of petrol-belching chariots viewed from above, a dust storm in the wake of a thousand spiked wheels grinding the ground, the picture device zooming in to show figures in leather and fur cavorting on the roofs of their vehicles, waving axes at the source of the images and making rude gestures towards their prisoners — scarcely alive — chained to the prows of their land craft.
Continued atrocities. A massive Camlantean farm machine lying smashed in a field of burning crops, flayed bodies dangling from the crumpled organic hull of the harvester, barely an inch of skin left on the ruined mess that had once been living human beings.
Neighbour-friend’s collapse. A sacked city shadowed by a pall of smoke, zooming in to show a column of refugees trudging away, carts piled high with possessions while tired-looking soldiers in odd-looking angular armour used spindly rifles emptied of charges as crutches and walking sticks, grimly shepherding the survivors away from the poisoned wells and broken walls of what had once been their home.
Amelia watched hypnotized as the scenes flickered in front of her, misery after misery, massacre after massacre, until suddenly the report was over and the face announced: ‘Timo-Felcidaed Iso’ and incongruously moved across to a vista of children in yellow robes solemnly processing down one of Camlantis’s boulevards, tossing petals from baskets while older children danced
on a series of carnival floats pulled by catlike creatures. Amelia gawped. Festivals held today. Was this some sort of crude propaganda? Their world was collapsing around them, but they still had the time and inclination to hold flower festivals as the barbarian horde closed in on the gates of their city?
It didn’t make sense. These people had either been indulging in the most gigantic act of sticking their heads in the sand the world had ever seen, or they were simply expecting their lives to go on as normal. Neither option seemed likely, not in the slightest.
There was something desperately wrong here, and Amelia didn’t need the pulse of whatever percentage of Camlantean blood flowed through her veins to realize that all the history she knew no longer added up.
‘Quiet, now,’ muttered the commodore. ‘This is a delicate matter.’
‘It is an outrage,’ said Ironflanks as the commodore’s left hand held open his chest panel while the plump fingers of the submariner’s right hand probed inside the steamman’s body. ‘A blasphemy against my race.’
The commodore peered inside the dark recesses of Ironflanks’ opened chest. ‘You said yourself you have siltempter components, and don’t those rascals swap parts of their bodies like the urchins along Pipchin Street trade marbles?’
‘There is still part of me that is a steamman knight,’ protested Ironflanks. ‘The Pathfinder Fist do not submit to such indignities.’
‘Ah, well that part of you had best stay very still while I see if I can do this.’ The commodore glanced irritably across the cell towards where Cornelius Fortune sat, rocking and moaning. ‘Be a good fellow now, I need to concentrate. How long is he going to stay like that, calling like a blessed crow that has lost its mate? He’ll bring the guards in on us with that hullabaloo.’
‘There were times in the organized community in Quatershift when he would stay in such a state for weeks,’ said Septimoth. ‘That’s why the community committee ordered his arm to be cut off. They thought he was shirking his duties in the camp and the threat of amputation would be enough to make him stop faking illness. As with so much else, they were wrong about that, of course.’
‘I know a way to shut him up,’ said Bull Kammerlan, bunching his hand menacingly into a fist.
Septimoth flicked a talon towards Bull. ‘If you lay a finger on him, I promise you it will be your last act, little monkey.’
‘You can’t fly away from me in here, lashlite,’ spat Bull, ‘and-’
‘Belay that talk,’ ordered the commodore. ‘We’ve got enough problems with an airship full of Quest’s soldiers and jack cloudies to contend with. My nephew makes a rough point, old bird, but he does have one. If we’re to get out of this cell, we’re all going to need to be pulling on the anchor rope at the same time. Your friend isn’t going to get very far like that.’
‘There is another way,’ said Septimoth, looking at Cornelius hunched and whimpering in the corner. ‘But it loses its potency if it is used too often, and the one suffering can go mad — visited by the gods of the wind in their dreams.’
‘If ever there was a time for your medicine, this would be it,’ said the commodore. ‘And as for madness …’ he nodded towards the shivering form of their cellmate.
Septimoth sighed in agreement, pulling out his bone flute and raising it to his beak. He sat himself opposite Cornelius and began to play a low, haunting melody, so gentle that it barely registered on the ears at all. Everyone in the cell had to stretch their hearing to focus on the melody, losing themselves inside the tune as they spread their senses to catch it.
Bull began to make a disparaging remark, but T’ricola hushed him with a whisper. ‘I’ve seen a lashlite play a half-crazed exo-beast to sleep with one of their pipes. Keep quiet for once.’
‘This is no ordinary song,’ said Ironflanks in awe. ‘There are Loas being called. I can feel the power of it echoing within my boiler-heart.’
Around their feet a gentle wind began to circulate, warm to the skin, blowing at their trousers, flowing with the cadence of the unearthly tune leaving Septimoth’s flute. It rustled the feathers along the lashlite’s folded wings and swirled around Cornelius, his keening growing lower as the swish of air surged stronger. Wrapping itself around Cornelius like a cloak, the air seemed to solidify, pulling at his clothes and levitating him an inch off the ground. He stopped moaning and with a sudden inrush of air the wind filled his mouth with its power, disappearing inside the man. Cornelius’s chest expanded as his lungs bulged with the unexpected blessing of the lashlite gods of the wind and he slumped back to the floor, gasping as if having just survived drowning.
Septimoth lowered the bone flute, leaving his alien tune still whispering in the minds of the other prisoners even though his pipe had fallen silent. ‘How do you fare?’
Cornelius blinked and looked around the cell at the faces staring at him. ‘We are still on Quest’s airship?’
‘If the guards’ chatter is to be believed, we have landed on Camlantis,’ said Septimoth. ‘But you are correct. Our position as prisoners here is unaltered. They dragged you out to see Abraham Quest …’
‘Yes, I remember that. He wanted me to save the world.’
‘There’s a coincidence,’ remarked the commodore. ‘For I was going to ask you the very same thing. You with your strange rubber face, you’re just the fellow to do it.’
Cornelius pulled himself to his feet. ‘The world doesn’t need saving: it needs punishing. And this isn’t my face. Quest still has it.’
The commodore resumed his probing within Ironflanks’ innards. ‘Well, let’s be saving ourselves first. We can debate about what to do with our mortal freedom after we are well out of here. Now, there’s the fellow …’ he removed a skein of crystalline cable, a thin wafer of dark silicate etched with delicate golden metal attached to the other end. ‘If only my darling Molly were here by my side, her with her fierce quick affinity for the life metal. She would be able to do this far faster than a weak old fool who has allowed himself to be tricked into this terrible adventure. Betrayed by his greed for Quest’s pennies and his deep, pure love for the Sprite of theLake.’
Cornelius noticed the wall behind where the commodore was fiddling: the panel to the transaction engine lock had been levered off. ‘You can break the lock on the door?’
‘I forced the panel open. He’s been trying to crack the combination for most of the day,’ said Bull. ‘And we’re still here.’
‘You’ve got not a whit of appreciation for the art behind this, nephew of mine,’ complained the commodore. ‘If you had, you wouldn’t have been languishing in the tanks at Bonegate Prison waiting like an idiot for your sentimental old uncle to come and rescue you from parliament’s bully boys. You could have swum up to the surface and tickled their clumsy gates open for yourself. This lock is no humble standalone affair, the transaction engine sitting behind that panel is a slave to the great monsters Quest has steaming away in the heart of his flagship. It draws on all the power and quickness of his main transaction-engine chamber. Fuelled by their potency, this abominable lock is almost a living thing, its mathematics able to roll and change to counter every drop of cunning I can squeeze out of my poor, tired mind.’
‘Then we’re finished,’ said Cornelius.
‘Not yet,’ said the commodore. ‘When you can’t win at the game, it’s time to play a new one. Ironflanks, step closer to the lock. T’ricola, I’ll ask you to hold the cable straight while I work, hold it as still and as gently as if it were a ruptured gas line back on your engineering deck. You may blow me a little tune if you like, Septimoth. A tune for luck and to steady my old fingers while I try to avoid setting off the hundred alarms and tripwires Quest has paid to be installed behind that panel.’
‘The music of the race of man is too simple,’ said Septimoth. ‘Your notes possess no power and having forsaken your ancient gods, you Jackelians no longer play in worship of them, as is proper.’
‘That’s a pity, then. A nice shanty, that’s w
hat I could do with. Are you sure you don’t know My U-boat, She’s No Sinker? No matter, no matter.’ Sweat trickled down the commodore’s forehead as he worked the wafer from Ironflanks’ body deep inside the transaction engine, then spent half an hour fiddling and cursing Quest’s mechanism and all the cunning of the merchant lord’s transaction-engine chamber. At last he nodded and reached inside Ironflanks’ chest, changing the configuration of a cluster of crystals and completing his travails.
‘You should have been born a steamman,’ said Ironflanks, in reluctant admiration of the commodore’s work. ‘Have you done what I think?’
‘If you think your short term memory board is now running as a facsimile of the main transaction-engine system for the entire brig, then you are thinking right,’ said the commodore. ‘Just don’t move and dislodge the cable, is all I am asking. While Quest’s transaction-engine chamber is talking to you, believing you are the lock, I shall be having my own conversation with the little engine inside here. Let us see how clever this lock is now it’s all on its own, with only a single drum turning inside it to outwit the great Jared Black. If I do this right, I can spring our cell door and Billy Snow’s at the same time.’
