by Stephen Hunt
‘That’s all you can ever choose,’ said Sadly. ‘Where you’re going to die.’
‘What do you care, Blacky?’ said Dick. ‘We’re all dead men walking now, same as you. Home, here on the island, or their hole at the bottom of the sea, the odds aren’t exactly in our favour are they?’
‘Ah,’ said the commodore. ‘All the adventures and terrible scrapes I’ve been in over the years. My luck’s dwindled away and left me beached here. Curse my mortal stars. All my luck’s been used up and this is my last throw of the dice.’
Dick Tull shrugged. ‘How’d you think it was going to end, you old pirate? Jared Black propped up on a swan feather pillow, surrounded by tearful grandchildren levering open the mansion’s windows so he can take one last peep at the stars in the sky above? This is how men like us go. A sabre in one and hand a pistol in the other and surrounded by all the enemies we haven’t outlived. At least you’re going out rich. My pension’s good for an evening’s gratitude at an alehouse and one cold meal a day at Sadly’s dung hole of an eatery.’
‘Let us rather focus on that life we have left before us,’ said Daunt. ‘And what we might achieve with it.’
Dick Tull didn’t look convinced. ‘Let me know how that goes for you, amateur, when the entire gill-neck fleet’s anchored off the coast. Maybe we’ll meet again on the Circle’s next turn. Maybe not. You used to be a churchman; you tell me where we’re going.’
No heaven, no hell. The Circlist mantra echoed in Daunt’s mind.
‘You owe me a drink after this, Blacky, in that escape hole of an alehouse you’re got at the bottom of your grounds,’ said Dick.
‘If I’m around to serve it, you better check it for my bladder water,’ whispered the commodore. ‘What’s the blessed world coming to when some State Protection Board man is as much a friend as an enemy?’
A sedan chair emerged from the entrance to the u-boat pens, borne with ease by two of the clanking mechanicals the Court used in its gas mines. They knelt down, lowering the chair to the ground. Silk curtains along its side were pulled back revealing Lord Trabb, the acting head of the Court swinging his legs out and dismounting uncomfortably, working the age out of his joints before approaching the group. He had two Jackelian style gentlemen’s canes in his hand, but he wasn’t using them to steady his gait. Instead, he tossed one to Dick Tull, the other out to Sadly. ‘A departing gratuity for you both.’
‘Sword cane or shotgun, sir?’ asked Sadly, examining his. Made of stout rosewood, they had copper boar’s heads as handles.
‘Neither,’ said Lord Trabb. ‘We have fitted a working prototype of our sea-bishop detection device inside each of the canes. Rotate the handle counter clockwise and push it down and the boar’s eyes will glow when you are in the presence of a sea-bishop wearing one of their mesmerism crystals. The fuel source is only rated for twenty minutes of continuous operation and once the detector is activated, it cannot be turned off, so only use the cane when you absolutely need to.’
‘No room for a shooter, then?’ said Dick. He sounded disappointed.
‘Only a suicide pill. If you pull out the detection apparatus you will find it concealed underneath. I trust you won’t be requiring it, or we shall all be royally tallywacked.’
‘Only when I absolutely need to,’ said Dick.
Charlotte stepped in and kissed Dick Tull on the cheek, whispering a quick goodbye in his ear. The State Protection Board agent looked at her with surprise, as if he didn’t quite believe his luck, then Dick and Sadly walked away towards the mountainside and the waiting aerosphere.
‘You make sure your old steamer gets better,’ Charlotte told Daunt. ‘I’m going to need Boxiron to keep my sceptre safe. I have a feeling that the Court’s engineers aren’t going to be much use in a fight.’
‘It’s not my place to put faith in what you’ve got whispering away in your head,’ said Daunt. ‘But if I did, I would ask it to keep you safe.’
‘Goodbye, Jethro Daunt, from myself and Elizica.’
‘My sabre, lad,’ said the commodore, exchanging a quick handshake with the ex-parson, just before he followed Charlotte along the gantry out to the Court’s submersible, Maeva and the survivors from his crew mixed in with the Court’s sailors across its sleek shining decks. ‘That’s what you can place your faith in. It’s kept us alive this long, hasn’t it?’
Only just.
‘My Lord Trabb,’ said Daunt, as the acting head of the Court was reclining back into his sedan chair. ‘I trust you have been factoring our schemes into the transaction-engines running the simulation of the Kingdom’s future.’
‘Yes of course,’ said the man.
‘What do they say about our chances of success?’
Lord Trabb sighed, a look of deep melancholy settling on his features. ‘Well, dear boy, let’s just say if you’d recently received an inheritance, now would be an excellent time to blow the lot on fine brandies, games of chance and large tips in the most expensive hotels.’ The chair lifted up into the air, its poles settling on the mechanicals’ shoulders, then bobbed back towards the u-boat pens.
Well, at least the gambling I’m doing doesn’t cost money. Just bodies and blood, you hypocritical fool. Daunt watched his friends leave, the u-boat sinking in a gush of foam and the aerosphere drifting like a black sun into the sky, growing smaller and smaller, until it was swallowed by the smoking volcano’s smoke. Daunt had a terrible premonition this was the last time he would see any of them again. Is it because they aren’t going to be around, or because I won’t? My fate is my own, created through right actions. He tried to shrug off the feeling of superstitious dread, yet still it lingered. How strange. The Court of the Air’s hidden support base, with an ancient town built beyond the submerged wreckage of an even more ancient marvel. It should have felt like a lost world. Instead, it seemed to Daunt as if the world beyond was lost, and this, here, was all that was real. The horrors that lay outside would be intruding soon, though. There was no getting away from that. Daunt just had to hold on long enough for his friends to do the impossible. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it?
He set off back to Nuyok’s walled gate, trying to whistle away the reckoning that was blowing in from the world outside, nodding to the fishermen repairing their nets in the wall’s shadow. ‘There once was a Circlist priest, who found himself facing a terrible beast. He prayed not to god, but whittled a duelling rod, and instead invited the monster in to feast.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘There’s a mortal sight for my sore old eyes,’ said the commodore, exiting the moon pool of the Court’s u-boat. ‘All my years and this is the first time I’ve seen such a thing.’
‘What did you expect?’ said Maeva. ‘The grand congress of the seanore was attacked by the ancient enemy. How did you think our people would answer such an outrage?’
Charlotte cleared the lock of the submarine in a stream of bubbles from the pair’s rebreathers. The camp they had left behind on the seabed had grown and multiplied a hundredfold, the kelp forest pierced with the clearings and banners of every clan of seanore that swam the ocean. Slanting rays of fading sunlight from the sky above dappled armoured formations of seanore shifting and switching above the underwater forest, rotor-spears glinting as they manoeuvred. Beyond the surface of the waves the sun was setting, and there were strings of burning crystals mounted on tall spears standing ready to illuminate the gathering. Was it Charlotte’s imagination, or was the water warmer here now? Had the presence of so many bodies raised the temperature of the sea water, or perhaps Charlotte was flushed by the sight of so many answering the call she had sounded? Immediately below them, the crab-shelled domes of the assembly had become a series of hills — smaller domes linked by larger structures sprawling away into the distance, clusters of nomads swimming in and out through the constructions’ portals like so many schools of fish. It was hard to believe this edifice was temporary.
‘It is the presence of the darkships that has broug
ht so many here, girl-child,’ Elizica whispered inside her mind. ‘They remember well the dangers of the demons that lurk within the trench, within the deep of the dark. The prophecy of the shadowed sea.’
A pity those within the Advocacy have forgotten, and the Kingdom of Jackals too, for that matter.
‘Those who insulate themselves with the warm walls of civilization are apt to forget the lessons of the past. Lessons become words in books, and the books are quickly burnt for kindling when the world freezes. Ink runs when the seas shift and paper crinkles into dust when the world warms. But the songs of our forefathers are not so easily forgotten when they are sung well and passed down the generations. So many centuries have passed. Even my resonance fades, captured in the granite of our mountains and the flints of our fields and the stone circles of our tors.’ There was a sadness in the ancient queen’s voice, and a longing too, but Charlotte wasn’t sure if it was for the echo’s passing — that she would no longer able to watch over her people, or a yearning for the serenity of silence and a final passing after so many aeons of duty binding her to the land.
Charlotte touched the Eye of Fate, pressed tight against her skin under the diving suit. Sometimes she could feel the presence of its previous owners, all the gypsies who had held onto it over the centuries, passing the gem down their line. Madam Leeda hadn’t had any children to pass it onto, nor nieces and nephews. Perhaps Charlotte had been the closest thing the old woman had to such a relative. And how had Charlotte repaid Madam Leeda? With the theft of the precious stone she used to influence the outcome of her bartering with the often hostile towns and villages she passed through. If a surrogate daughter Charlotte had been, she had proved a pretty poor one of the old gypsy — no better a daughter than the farming family had been to her. Charlotte just another crop, to be uprooted and tossed out when the rent on her field was stopped. Her real mother, Lady Mary, discarding her bastard offspring, in case Charlotte’s existence embarrassed her ladyship’s new husband into a divorce. Perhaps this was how history repeated itself. In the small things as well as the large. Every one of those abandonments and misfortunes rolled up into Charlotte until all she was capable of was betrayal and disappointing those that tried to show her any kindness. What use was the Eye of Fate when it could mesmerize a person in so many ways, but it couldn’t make them give you the love you were owed?
‘We shall find a better use for the crystal, you and I,’ said Elizica, intruding into Charlotte’s maudlin gloom as she followed the commodore and Maeva swimming down towards the grand assembly.
It can bring me anything except what truly matters.
‘The Eye of Fate was created by the sea-bishops, never forget that,’ said Elizica. ‘What your heart feels is not within their understanding. All that is left of their kind is endless hunger and the desire to spread and disperse their seed across every corner of existence.’
But they used to be us — the race of man?
‘Something as close to it as to make no difference,’ said Elizica. ‘Now I fear all they are is an abject lesson on why we should always seek to live in balance with our world and never presume ourselves masters over it. The sea-bishops are the distorted reflection in a mirror we need to stare into to know what we must never become. They have become thieves of life itself. Our worst impulses given free reign and distilled over millennia into a dark, unthinking core of pure selfishness. Countless billions of sea-bishops clawing at each in cities so dense with their evil kind that bees in a hive might marvel at their fecundity. Even the walls of reality are no barrier to their dark cravings, the infinite chain of existence reduced to mere connected storehouses of fodder for them to feast on. Waiting for a doorway to open to somewhere, anywhere they might spill out for a temporary abatement of their numbers. Waiting for their scouts to signal that there is a new world fit for the feeding. Vampires in the truest sense of the world. They would suck the spark of existence out of your body and discard the marrow of your corpse as though you were a corn husk.’
Perhaps this was what Charlotte had been destined to fight after all, the magnified reflection of all the small cruelties that had been inflicted upon her.
‘Your family chose to abandon you,’ said Elizica. ‘I did not. I have selected and saved you, Charlotte Shades, kept you in my pocket like a lucky penny for this moment. All the years you were moving through the city as its most notorious thief, you were actually training for the greatest theft in history. You’re going to steal our future back from the sea-bishops, just as I once did. You will need every iota of your talent and your instincts to succeed, for the sea-bishops are the most peerless thieves of them all, and they have been stung once in the past already. I had it easy; you are going to repeat my feat when they suspect you are coming to rob them!’
Charlotte caught echoes of the ancient queen’s life as she whispered through her mind. A young chieftain’s daughter living a life not so different from that of the seanore — albeit one on land, in the deep endless forests of what had been the Kingdom before it had a monarch. Fighting the rule of an order of druids, one already corrupted long before the sea-bishops turned up to infiltrate its ranks. A war between the gill-necks and the tribes of the Jackeni, both sides pushed towards a conflict that could have no victor save the sea-bishops. Charlotte saw glimpses of the strange people who had helped the queen in that fight — bandits from the margins of a cursed marsh. A man who could run faster than the wind, faster than time itself. Another able to cast a lance through a mountain and see it emerge from the opposite face. A woman whose voice was able to crack steel and whose breath could blast down oak trees. Heroes that made today’s people appear like pale shadows compared to such titans. What did Elizica of the Jackeni have to work with today? Not legends. Just a thieving bastard of a girl who cared merely to feather her own nest; an aging u-boat privateer on his last legs, only distinguished by being even more reluctantly involved in this madness than Charlotte.
‘The passage of time breeds legends,’ Elizica’s reply came, ‘and makes diamonds from even the crudest of coals.’
And Elizica had known tragedy too. Her father murdered by the treachery of allies who had swapped sides on the battlefield, her mother slain defending her family when the druids came to snatch the defeated chieftain’s children to sacrifice on the bloody altars of their ancient oaks. Had Elizica’s life played out any better than Charlotte’s? She had lost a family whom she had years to love deeply, while Charlotte’s had only ever been an illusion, no more real than the Eye of Fate’s mesmerism. Which of them had mourned more, which of them deserved to feel more cheated by events?
‘Everything that happened to me, tempered me, cast me into a woman fit to become the first queen of the Jackeni.’
And what have I done with my life?
‘What you needed to do. And if you succeed in this one thing, nobody who matters will ever question your worth again.’
And what if only I live long enough to see it done?
‘Then you have answered your own question, girl-child.’
There was little of the finery Charlotte had observed the first time among those assembled under the domes of the grand congress. This time, the leaders of the nomad tribes had gathered with a common purpose and their deliberations already decided. No need to impress with diamond broaches and fine seal skins and ornamental crustacean armour when there was killing to be done and a serviceable rotor-spear was all the embellishment needed to gain status over a neighbour. Word of Charlotte’s arrival had spread like wildfire when the Court’s sleek, strange craft had returned to their territory, and now the domes were packed with a throng of clan leaders and their war-parties’ lieutenants.
They weren’t waiting for Charlotte, though; rather, the echo of the ghost carried in the Eye of Fate. They didn’t see Charlotte Shades standing before them, they saw Elizica of the Jackeni.
‘There goes my scheme for a nice quiet bit of sneaking into the gill-necks’ realm,’ muttered the commodore. ‘No
t with this horde of rascals by our side.’
‘That plan never had a chance,’ said Maeva. ‘I have just talked to Poerava. She says the Advocacy closed its borders to us a day after the darkships attacked. No nomad is welcome to trade in the cities of our ‘civilised’ neighbours now. We might as well be surface dwellers for all the welcome we will receive among them.’
‘The time for subterfuge is nearly done with,’ said Charlotte. ‘The sea-bishops are gathering their forces for the final confrontation. Might of arms will serve us better now.’
‘Is it not enough that you want to drag my poor old bones with you to steal one of the demons’ wicked u-boats to carry us down into their nest of evil?’ moaned the commodore. ‘Now I must fight a pitched battle against the Advocacy first.’
‘The seanore warriors will fight the battle,’ said Charlotte.
Commodore Black did not look happy at the news. ‘Tell me that the darkship you want us to steal is close by and unguarded, lass, and its helmsmen out frolicking for human blood disguised as locals.’
Charlotte shook her head. ‘The sea-bishops scout force is few in numbers and concentrated around the nations’ existing centres of power — the capitals of the Kingdom and the Advocacy… the gill-neck city of Lishtiken is where we will find our craft.’ Elizica could sense the jiggers there, their presence a cancer gnawing away at the world, a cold weight pressing down on the skin of existence, slowly consuming and corrupting the world’s flesh. Charlotte put her hand on the commodore’s shoulder to steady the old u-boat man’s nerves. ‘The Advocacy’s forces are being prepared to assault the island. Every gill-neck soldier we can pull away from that battle is a soldier well diverted. And while the Advocacy capital at Lishtiken is being besieged, we will have our opportunity to sneak in and seize one of the darkships the sea-bishops use to shuttle between the capital and their seed-city at the bottom of the trench.’
