From the Deep of the Dark j-6

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘You’ll be joining their ranks sharpish if you’re not here when the next work party is due to leave,’ warned Dick.

  ‘I’m sure there’ll be time aplenty to discover my humanity in simple labour.’ Daunt remembered the guard towers along the walls, the rifles and focus behind them directed outwards. A set time to go out implies a schedule. But not a timetable, methinks, for our convenience.

  It wasn’t much to look at, the camp’s graveyard. Not much to mark the passing of so many lives. Hundreds of mounds crowded in with single spikes of bamboo, ranks of them crudely carved with the name of the passed and the date of their removal from the camp’s rolls. A few of the more recent graves had tiny scrolls of paper pushed into the bamboo’s hollow centre. Daunt squatted down and removed a couple, reading the messages before folding them back into place. Simple memories and farewells from friends in the camp. Standing in the far corner were the oldest graves, their bamboo markers splintered and weathered to near destruction by the passage of time. If there had been paper farewells pushed inside these, they had crumbled into dust long ago; food and nesting material for the ants crawling over the dirt.

  As Daunt had anticipated, there were noble titles carved on some of the oldest markers. Only to be expected. The royalist fleet-in-exile had been trying to survive in the gill-necks’ realm, frictions were bound to erupt between the rebels and the Advocacy. It hadn’t just been Parliament trying to call time on the glorious counter-revolution. Who were the others… adventurers and interlopers? The treasure hunters the commodore had spoken of back on the Purity Queen, driven by visions of gems as large as boulders? This was their final resting-place, then. There were no gill-necks buried here, but that didn’t surprise Daunt. With the gill-necks’ worldview, the Advocacy doubtless conducted ceremonies that saw their remains scattered into the sea. Returned to the watery universe from which they came.

  Daunt pulled himself up and moved along the line of graves, tracing the oldest dates back to the more recent burials. From the graveyard he could see the corner of the camp behind the gill-necks’ processing complex and beyond to the sea. There was no wall there. The camp ended in a steep cliff, jagged rocks — a sheer drop hundreds of feet to the ocean below. A constant lashing of waves on the rocks, neither the cliff nor the sea willing to compromise — the maelstrom below the result. Cranes on the cliff top were lowering barrels of gillwort juice towards the open hold of a gill-neck submersible freighter being tossed side to side by the wild sea. The processing centre looked to be a camp within a camp, only gill-necks permitted beyond the internal fence. Too steep to climb, too far to dive without snapping a neck. And even if you survived the trip down, Daunt had a sneaking suspicion escapees wouldn’t care for what was swimming around those waters — not if the presence of the guard towers bespoke what he suspected. But then, these cliffs weren’t the way Daunt was planning to leave — not if the more recent grave markers bore out his theory.

  He allowed a smile to soften his face as he discovered one of the graves he had been expecting, quickly followed by a second among the more recent burials. He removed one of the markers to inspect the message.

  ‘I so rather hoped I would be proved wrong this time,’ he murmured to himself.

  A crunching in the dirt made Daunt turn. Boxiron had come to stand by the ramshackle fence separating the graveyard’s rise from the rest of the camp.

  ‘What have you learned from the dead?’ Boxiron called across to the ex-parson.

  ‘That it is better to be among the living, old steamer.’

  ‘It is time. Our work party has been called and is assembling by the gate.’

  ‘Of course. One note of caution, old friend. The gill-neck soldiers escorting us out are not to stop us escaping, but rather for our protection.’

  ‘You have been speaking with the other prisoners, Jethro softbody?’

  ‘Not yet. What have they told you about our labours outside the camp?’

  ‘Tiger crabs,’ said Boxiron. ‘The waters around here are infested with the creatures. They frequently crawl up from the shoreline into the everglades to hunt. It is why no one has ever escaped from the island to tell of this cursed place.’

  ‘Land is only ever cursed if you are a gill-neck,’ said Daunt. ‘Have heart.’

  The steamman clanged the device welded to his chest in frustration. ‘I have not enough of it, my boiler bled dry by this foul limiter. How much more reduced beyond my life as a steamman knight does the great pattern intend to see me degraded? For all the gross inferiority of my human-milled monstrosity of a body, I still had raw power… I could fight in top gear! Look at me now. I am no stronger than that wretch Barnabas Sadly. If only my ancestors had not forsaken me, I would call upon the Loa to give me the strength to rip this evil contraption out of my chest plate.’

  ‘We’ll find a way yet.’

  ‘I should be able to protect you. That I cannot is beyond shameful. Is that not why our association has proved so successful? You supply the intellect and I supply the muscle.’

  ‘Not just the muscle,’ said Daunt. ‘You have the boiler heart of a champion, and I have relied on the compass of your soul as much as I have relied on anything.’

  The steamman did not seem convinced.

  ‘Listen to me, old steamer, I need you yet. We have a battle or two left before us. I glimpsed such terrible things in the interrogation machine, in the dreams and shadows of their infernal contraption. We cannot afford to lose. We cannot afford to let ourselves die in captivity here.’

  ‘What did you see, Jethro softbody?’

  ‘I believe I saw the same things that have been haunting the dreams of the Sisters Lammeter, the same things that have been tormenting Charlotte Shades.’

  ‘Vampires?’

  Daunt joylessly shook his head. ‘Not as the florid fictioneers of the penny-dreadfuls describe them. The true enemy is something else. We have to escape, old friend, we have to locate the commodore and carry the sceptre to safety.’

  Boxiron indicated the sea beyond the cliff. ‘Where will be safe? We are hunted in the Kingdom of Jackals, my people in the Steamman Free State will not help me. Where can we go in this world that will be safe?’

  ‘I think there might be a place, and the person who can help us is closer than you think.’

  ‘Is this another ploy to engage my interest?’

  ‘No ploy, old friend.’ But bob my soul, how I wish this all was just an entertainment for your distraction.

  I’ll never complain again about working for the bleeding board, Dick promised himself, swinging his machete against the clusters of leathery purple fruit hanging in beards around the tree. Every weary bite of his blade released an unpleasantly bitter smell, thin fronds attaching the fruit to the trunk seemingly as tough as steel.

  Immediately below Dick, another prisoner was sawing off low-hanging fruit while Sadly, Boxiron and the ex-parson stood in the water and caught the gillworts, piling pear-shaped fruit in their shallow-bottomed boat. Not that the craft was there for their comfort and transportation through the humid flooded world of the everglades. No, it was only with them to keep the fruit from being soaked and spoiled. Shortly after a gillwort made contact with water it flowered as it bobbed on the surface, releasing a pungent smell to attract lizard-like fish to disperse its seeds; making quick work of the fruit, not to mention trying to take chunks out of any convict pickers’ legs.

  It was an old lag, Roald Morris, who had been assigned to convert the newcomers into an effective component of the camp’s harvesting machine. Only too glad to stick to the sides of the boat and issue advice, he had at least warned them to enter the everglades only wearing their breeches. After all, their clothes would be reduced to rags soon enough and they didn’t need any extra layers to perspire like pigs out here. Only Jethro Daunt refused the advice, the eccentric ex-parson pushing their harvesting raft in his full tweeds, sweat rolling off his forehead like a waterfall. A life where the State Protection Board pa
id a man to stand outside suspected treasonists’ lodgings and watch through the long night hours seemed a world away from the fatiguing labours the Advocacy demanded of its captives.

  Morris had lasted in the camp for six years. Supposedly a pearl diver who had lost his compass during a storm and ended up deep inside gill-neck waters, Dick could tell that the man’s story sounded as flimsy to his ears as it no doubt had to the gill-necks who’d discovered Morris’s little ship bobbing in their territory. He had admitted he had once served as a corporal in the regiments back home, and his presence here on the island probably meant he had been a deserter before drifting into smuggling and developing a taste for the gill-necks’ crystals. But Morris had endured out here and had the knowledge of how to live in this hell, which made him someone worth listening to. Surviving had taken its cost, though: Morris’s skin worn as brown and wrinkled as leather from working in the sun every day of the week. He had been fat once, too. Dick could see it in the way skin hung in jowls down the man’s neck. If the sister he talked of so mournfully saw Morris now, she wouldn’t recognize him. She’d walk right past without a hint of recognition. At least he has someone who cares. Who will remember me? Who’s there to miss Dick Tull when he’s gone? Only Damson Pegler in her slum for the last week’s rent he never paid.

  Circular platforms were built into the side of a handful of the semi-submerged forest’s trees, gill-neck guards squatting languidly outside of the water with their rifles by their side. It didn’t seem right, them with their affinity for the life aquatic staying out of the water while prisoners from the race of man waded through the everglades with slop up to their waists. But then, the brackish green subtropical wetland smelled bad enough to Dick halfway up a gillwort tree, and he wasn’t even attempting to breathe the stuff.

  ‘Let yourself hang back in the harness,’ Morris called up. ‘You’ll take easier swings at the fruit. And cut down, not up, gillworts resist less that way.’

  ‘You can always send the steamman up here,’ Dick said.

  ‘You’ll all get a chance, that you will.’

  ‘It is your race that is believed to possess simian ancestry,’ said Boxiron, ‘not mine.’

  The steamman got his turn soon enough. Wading through the thick water up to his waist, Morris located a second tree with ripe fruit nearby. Boxiron was dispatched to climb up its trunk while Sadly and Daunt manoeuvred the harvesting raft halfway between the two trees, a couple of convicts sent across to catch the fruit the steamman began slicing off. Even with the strength-sapping device welded onto Boxiron’s chest, the steamman made a faster job of harvesting gillworts than Dick, pneumatic servos beating his tired old muscles, cramping from sweat and heat. After half an hour more of swinging the machete, Dick’s labours were interrupted by the sound of a small gas-driven engine. He glanced over his shoulder, sweat rolling off the tip of his itchy nose and falling towards the swampy surface below. It was On’esse. The camp commandant lounged under a shaded stretch of canvas in the middle of a shallow draft boat, a gill-neck guard at the front of the boat leaning into a tripod-mounted gun while another sat at the back, directing the small motor’s rudder and steering its passage through the everglade forest.

  ‘Work, you surface-dwelling scum,’ the commandant called from his shade. ‘We are two tonnes behind quota for my next shipment. Fall behind, and I’ll take every tenth man from this gang of slackers and peel your backs with my whip.’

  If there was any sign of irony on the part of the gill-neck commander, urging them to labour harder from the comfort of his personal launch, the old sod was hiding it well.

  A minute after his boat passed, zigzagging its way through the trees, panicked shouts began to sound from the workers in the water behind Dick, yells growing more urgent as the convicts scattered, some wading though the waters towards the guards’ platform, others heading for the harvesting rafts and the trees. Down below, Morris was shinning up the gillwort tree’s trunk, throwing a harvesting strap around the tree as he climbed.

  ‘Bloody On’esse,’ snarled Morris as he stopped under Dick’s position, five foot up from the water. ‘He knows the noise of his boat’s engine sounds like their challenge call.’

  Dick looked down at the skeletal prisoner. ‘Whose?’

  ‘ Theirs! ’ The convict pointed towards thin bone-like wands cutting though the water with the deadly intent of sharks’ fins. ‘Snorkel spiders. Get out the water, all of you!’ he yelled down at the prisoners below.

  Sodding hell. Sadly and Daunt and the two sailors below were casting around, trying to locate the cause of the commotion and work out their response. Too slow. The harvesting party behind — other sailors captured from the convoy — screamed out as bony snorkels lifted out of the everglades to reveal nests of mandibles stabbing in front of evil blanched skulls. Seconds later the human prey collapsed into the water under the leaping weight of these living thrashing machines. Now the newcomers knew what to do! Yelling in terror, prisoners desperately waded for safety, heading for the guard platforms, trees and the harvesting rafts. Underneath Dick, one of the sailors was trying to climb their tree trunk, but soaked and panicked and lacking climbing strap and hooks, he was barely able to scale a couple of inches above the waterline.

  ‘My hand!’ shouted Morris, reaching down, but the gap between him and the other prisoner was too wide. A frenzied storm of clicking mandibles lashed out, impaling the man in the spine and pulling him back screaming. Vanishing under the water, he left an outrush of bubbles and a slowly growing slick of blood as the only trace of his presence.

  The other sailor in their party had dragged himself aboard the harvesting raft and was trying to pull Daunt out of the water. Behind the ex-parson, Sadly was wading towards the raft, using his cane like a punt to speed his limping passage forward. A bone-white snorkel was arrowing in on the informant and Dick could see the inevitable outcome of their relative speeds. Sadly would be snapped up before he got to the protection of the raft. As it closed on the informant, the creature’s bony skull began to surface, thrashing mandibles extending for the man. Dick hefted the machete he had been using and hurled it with all his strength. It windmilled around, sailing down, impaling itself in the back of the snorkel spider. Not enough. The snorkel spider slowed slightly, the thrashing of its mandibles growing ever more frenzied, leaping towards Sadly as the informant reached a hand’s gap from the raft. Both the sailor and Daunt were straining back out to the surface to catch Sadly, but he turned and dived under the water. He wasn’t pulled, he went under on purpose! Landing where Sadly had just been standing, the monstrous thing disappeared, the water churning. Then its snorkel bone flashed up and down. More thrashing, and Sadly exploded out of the murky liquid, one hand on his cane as he pushed it into the dying, jolting creature in front of him. He was using his cane as a lance, manoeuvring it between the bony plates of his attacker and ramming it into the soft vulnerable flesh. Pulling out the cane as though Sadly was a duellist withdrawing a foil from a skewered opponent, he flopped around and caught the others’ hands, Daunt and the sailor hauling his soaked, bloody form into the raft.

  ‘Sharply done,’ whispered Dick in surprise. I guess there’s a survivor in everyone, if you just prod ’em hard enough.

  ‘Too much blood in the water,’ moaned Morris.

  At least the pool of blood underneath them belonged to the snorkel spiders, not their fellow prisoners. An angry rattling that sounded like the motor on the commandant’s boat filled the everglades. The commandant’s launch had turned around and was coming back to survey the damage to his operation, dozens of snorkel spiders in the water roaring counter challenges at the clattering engine.

  ‘Who has permitted this to happen?’ yelled On’esse, standing up at last, roused from his torpor under the shadow of the shade. ‘Why are you cowards not harvesting?’

  From one of the guard platforms, a gill-neck called out in the commandant’s native tongue, indicating the snorkel bones hunting across the now empty w
aters.

  On’esse dismissed the excuses with a stream of angry curses and pointed at Daunt, the sailor and Sadly on the raft. ‘You are standing on top of my harvest, you lazy fools! Spoiling today’s crop. Why are you not collecting fruit?’

  ‘There are bleeding monsters in the water!’ called the sailor.

  On’esse strode to the front of his craft. ‘Am I blind? Am I unaware of this? Why do you think it is you pulling gillworts from this swamp and not I?’ He pushed the soldier on the tripod gun to one side, swivelled the weapon towards the convict labourer and triggered the gun. There was a shock of recoil through the commandant’s launch, the Jackelian sailor struck in his chest and thrown back off the harvesting raft. Three snorkel spiders thrashed against each other as they competed to claim the corpse. ‘Only those on the highest harvesting strap may stay in the trees. Everyone else, in the water, NOW! There are only seven beasts that I can see and half of those have been fed. We may lose a few of you untrained surface dwelling scum, and then everyone will work a double shift to make up for this debacle.’ He rocked the gun towards Daunt and Sadly. ‘You two first, climb off my precious fruit and down into the swamp with you.’

  There was an almost approving rattle of mandibles from the snorkel spiders circling Sadly and Daunt’s raft.

  As Charlotte sat inside the dome, she could almost see its structure extending. Each new clan of seanore that arrived at the tribal gathering brought their own plates cut from crab shells, adding them to the interlocking structure in new and innovative ways. The communal space had been transformed from the open hall of a single clan into a rambling warren of interconnected chambers, a few even filled with air and separated by transparent permeable membranes. It was hard to imagine that Charlotte was responsible for all of this, her recitations of ancient prophecies, her victory in the arena over Vane. Except it hadn’t been her triumph, it had been the spirit of Elizica of the Jackeni’s, the ancient queen’s thoughts and memories so intermingled with Charlotte’s own now it was hard to recall there had been a time when she had just been simple Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism. Born to nobility, raised by a gypsy, and inclined to the removal of valuable objects that didn’t belong to her.