by Stephen Hunt
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.’
She pulled one of the poison-headed javelins free from the dirt, brushing down the mud from its shaft. Prince Doublemetal gazed up at the softbody standing over him, his vision plate pulsing in recognition at those who should have been the morning’s entertainment in the arena.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Billy Snow. ‘We are different from their kind.’
‘The difference is the free company’s code,’ said Veryann. ‘And that demands vengeance against those who fight without honour.’
‘Blood only begets blood,’ said the sonar man.
‘That it certainly does.’ Veryann knelt down before the slowly moving body. ‘And I made you a blood oath yesterday, my prince. Do you recall what I said, or were you too busy salivating oil over the crushed remains of Gabriel McCabe to listen to me?’
Prince Doublemetal tried to raise the volume on his voicebox and call for help, but only a burst of static emerged.
‘Gabriel would not have asked for this,’ said Billy Snow.
‘The prince can ask him himself,’ said Veryann, ‘in the unlikely event his putrid soul should be granted entrance to the hall of the fallen.’ She lifted the lance and leveraged it through the gap in the prince’s hull where his left leg was hanging off, sliding it up hard through his abdomen. Her shine-swollen muscles bulged as she used every last iota of her strength to drive her makeshift stake inside the body of the siltempters’ ruler. With a squawk, the crawling prince fell still, smoke pouring through the joints where his crushed legs clung uselessly to his body.
A roar echoed over the stampede, Queen Three-eyes, entering the jungle to crush the camouflaged geodesic domes of the camp, gutta-percha plates shattering as the enraged kilasaurus max slammed against them, terrified siltempters cowering inside as she scooped them out. Veryann nodded in approval at the butchery and tore the House of Quest’s fencibles’ badge from her tattered war jacket, shoving it inside the mouth slash of Prince Doublemetal’s voicebox. So that they would know who had done this. And why. Not a rogue arena animal, but the forces of the free company. Her payment for the slaughter of the strongest man in Jackals.
With the siltempters’ community being torn apart by the creatures they had once tortured for their amusement, the five officers of the Sprite vanished in the confusion, leaving the crash of falling trees and the explosions of bursting siltempters behind them.
The cool, dark rainforest swallowed them up.
There was a discernible difference between the territory that fell on the siltempter side of the border and the greenmesh, a difference that went beyond the peculiar silence of the terrain controlled by the Daggish. In their realm, the jungle grew neater, to a pattern. Still wild, but with a purpose that was lacking outside their dominion.
Commodore Black was the first to comment on it. ‘We might as well be walking through some wicked, wild green out here – like Peddler’s Piece back in the heart of Middlesteel, but laid out by a deranged groundsman.’
‘Peddler’s Piece never felt like this dark place,’ said T’ricola. ‘It makes me itch. Everything about it feels wrong – corrupt.’
‘Your instincts serve you well,’ said Ironflanks. ‘In Liongeli, craynarbians are born with the knowledge that coming close to this land means certain death.’ The lack of animal calls was setting the steamman’s nerves even more on edge than usual – no whistle-song of the birds of the canopy, no growls from hunting cats.
‘I’m glad my moulting skin has proved of some practical use,’ said T’ricola, ‘beyond my sharp new sword bone for hacking back the bush.’
Billy Snow was at the head of the party, now. Ever since they had reached the edge of the greenmesh, it was as if the sonar man had acquired a whole new set of senses, leading them across trails where the massive tree-like sentries of the Daggish had been marching only minutes before. Stopping them in silence at times – sometimes for up to an hour – waiting tensely in the Liongeli heat, moisture rolling down their skins, shell and boiler, while the u-boat man sat cross-legged, meditating on the best path to take. No one commented on this unnatural turn of events, not even Ironflanks, who had warned them it was next to impossible to penetrate the greenmesh by land without alerting the Daggish – without coming across some creature or sentient plant cluster that would pass on its warning to the others in the hive.
Billy Snow might have been denied the services of the Sprite to steal them into the waters of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo, but he was acting as his own sonar now, a living echo sounder. It was said that craynarbian witch doctors possessed the ability to dream walk into the territory of the Daggish without becoming absorbed into their living empire. But as for old Billy, where had he acquired such a talent? While Billy Snow was still in meditation, Ironflanks set his voicebox to low, whispering his suspicions that the sonar man was using a witch doctor’s skills to lead them past the nodes of self-aware jungle that would have alerted the hive to their presence. Nobody seemed willing to raise this with Billy, as if questioning his strange ability might awaken him from his dream and bring Daggish patrols crashing down around the expedition.
Only Veryann appeared to have qualms, her body language revealing the suspicions she harboured towards Billy Snow. But perhaps that was the Catosian way? Trust nothing save that which can be slit with a dagger. His abnormal flowering of abilities was not to be trusted, at least not until it could be understood.
When they reached the course of the Shedarkshe, Billy raised a finger to his mouth. He had led them within a stone’s throw of a seed ship, moored against a pier that looked as if it had flowed out of the skeleton of a hippopotamus that had expired in the water. It was a small vessel of its type – just the right size to carry a border patrol of Daggish warrior drones to the edge of the greenmesh. Or to take the five of them into the heart of enemy territory. Billy pointed to the seed ship and held up three fingers: three Daggish crew left on board.
‘If we attack, won’t these fiendish creatures be able to call for help?’ whispered the commodore.
Billy Snow shook his head. No. He did not voice it, but his meditations had a more practical purpose than merely stilling his noisy mind.
They were fast across the bone-hard pier when the first of the enemy sailors appeared from an iris hatch at the rear of the vessel. It was unarmed and clearly not expecting to blunder into five impure animals not blessed with the harmony of their hive mind. But then, why should the race of man be trespassing on Daggish territory? Creatures such as these were dragged screaming and fighting to their absorption chambers. They did not venture near the Daggish of their own inferior will.
It had barely begun to chatter an alarm when it realized it could no longer communicate with the others on the ship, Billy Snow’s witch-blade – in sabre form now – slashing through the bark-like torso of the thing, cleaving its sensory organs from its trunk and hewing the drone in half. The two drones inside the craft were quicker to realize that they were no longer in communication with the others of the cooperative – the death of their comrade outside suddenly registering on their consciousness – and filled the air with the hammering of their native tongue. Drones had a reflex fear of being out of contact with their fellows. A healthy survival instinct, to stop them from wandering away from the protection of the
hive. They knew enough to recognize that they were under assault, though, and one of the drones had the wherewithal to scurry to the wall where the patrol’s spare flame squirts were racked.
It had just pulled the sack-pipe-shaped weapon off the wall when the intruders burst into the cabin, Billy Snow tracing a fatal gash across the creature’s bark-thick chest, before pirouetting and ripping down to sever the weapon’s combustion sack. The dying Dagga tried to trigger its gun but the weapon made an empty hissing noise like an angry cat, the floor puddling with its unlit ammunition.
T’ricola charged the other Dagga, her bone-knife arm swinging in an angry arc and taking a wedge out of the drone, all the pent-up chemical anger of her body’s changes releasing itself in a sudden flurry of strikes. The Dagga stumbled back, shaken – no soldier caste fighter this, but a symbiote navigator for the living boat. Veryann finished the drone off from behind, driving her machete through its brain-bulb and letting the thing fall to the cabin floor, the chattering inside its trunk dying away as its hammer-like tonsils lost their life force.
‘The patrol may be back any second,’ said Veryann, lifting an intact flame weapon from the wall.
‘They are a long way from the boat,’ said Billy, ‘and that weapon you have taken will not work for you. It has a mechanism inside it that serves a similar purpose to a Jackelian blood-code machine – it will fire only for members of the hive.’
‘There’s a cunning thing,’ said the commodore. He kicked the deck of the seed ship. ‘A clever race would make sure this strange seahorse of a craft operated in a similar way.’
‘It does,’ said Ironflanks. ‘It will not travel the Shedarkshe for us.’ The steamman pointed to the dead navigator drone lying sprawled across the floor. ‘Only for one of those.’
‘The seed ship has a brain,’ said Billy Snow. ‘A wonderful thing, grown from a nubbin no larger than a ha’penny. Right about here.’ Billy’s witch-blade cut down, fizzing with delight as it sliced open the living decking, then transforming itself into a trident which the sonar man plunged down through the opening. The ship trembled at the strike, the trident’s fangs growing longer and penetrating deep into the nautical creature. Water churned up from the rear of the craft, bone-like hydro tubes convulsing with misery as it emptied propulsive air behind their stern, pulling against the pier’s anchorage. The craft grew still as the witch-blade extended into the boat’s brain matrix, poisoning and infiltrating the seed ship, much as the Daggish subverted other creatures into their own hive. Turnabout was fair play, it seemed.
‘The craft is ours now,’ said Billy.
‘How are you doing this?’ demanded T’ricola. ‘That witch-blade of yours is no sword that ever saw the shores of Thar.’
‘This vessel and its breed were made to serve people, once, not the other way around. It just needed to be reminded.’
‘Will your blessed seahorse carry us to Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo?’ Commodore Black asked. ‘Will it carry us, Billy Snow, without alerting the other seed ships and Daggish to our presence?’
‘I believe it will,’ said Billy. ‘Although we should rip some vegetation from the shore first to rub over us, if we want to pass for Daggish slaves at a distance.’ He looked at Ironflanks. ‘And you will have to stay out of sight at all times. These creatures possess no means to absorb steammen within their hive – or siltempters, for that matter.’
‘It is almost as if you have been absorbed by the Daggish already, Billy softbody,’ said Ironflanks. ‘The House of Quest might have been better advised to have contracted you for your services as a guide, rather than a u-boat man.’
Billy Snow pointed to his milky unseeing eyes. ‘Who would trust a blind pathfinder, old steamer?’
‘Who indeed?’ said Veryann. ‘Does your mysterious newfound reserve of knowledge extend to whether the Sprite and her mutinous crew have already achieved the expedition’s objective and sailed back past us on the Shedarkshe?’
‘The Sprite has not sailed back down the river,’ said Billy. ‘I fear that things have not gone too well for the u-boat.’
‘My boat. My precious Sprite,’ moaned the commodore. ‘Don’t say that she is wrecked at the end of this river of damned souls?’
‘It is not the u-boat’s condition I speak of,’ said the old sonar man. ‘It’s our crew’s. Apart from those standing in this cabin, I can sense only two other souls from the race of man unabsorbed by the Daggish. And speaking frankly, they don’t appear to be holding up too well at the moment!’
Two Catosian soldiers escorted Cornelius down a corridor along the airship’s starboard side. The exploration vessel had stopped moving now, the immense aerostat holding station at whatever position they had reached. The portholes along the gallery offered little clue to their location – save the fact that they were high. Clouds drifted far below them on the other side of the iced-up glass, the heavens were birdless, and the airship’s jack cloudies wore woollen jerseys over their striped sailors’ shirts. Little puffs of warm fresh air were injected from grilles in the ceiling every couple of minutes, followed by a wheeze like an old man as stale air was withdrawn. Unfortunately for Cornelius, Septimoth and Damson Beeton weren’t there with him to speculate on where in the heavens they had ended up – they had been left behind in the brig when the guards came for him.
At one point, Cornelius and his escort passed a small glass dome set in the hull, a sailor on a metal gangway using a gas-fired heliograph to flash messages across to one of their sister ships hanging in the firmament. The scope clacked as fresh communications landed in a wire basket from a pneumatic tube. Along from the signal station, Cornelius got the briefest glimpse of a hangar filled with engineers working in the shadow of something that looked like nothing so much as an oversized hencoop – a long queue of large iron capsules lined up inside racks, in place of eggs. Now, that was odd. An airship’s fin bombs were made of crystal to contain the acidic blow-barrel sap, two chambers separated by a thin glass membrane in mimicry of the violently explosive tree seeds. Those capsules couldn’t be fin bombs. The metal would corrode, detonating at random. What was this rogue airship fleet of Quest’s up to? The shove of the guards’ rifle butts hurried Cornelius past the open hatch. Had Robur constructed a legion of primitive steammen fighting machines to drop on Jackals, to make its people bend their knee to whatever strange Camlantean philosophy-religion his master Abraham Quest had uncovered in his crystal-books?
Cornelius was led to a portal with a pair of sentries waiting outside. The guards swung open the heavy doors – polished Jackelian oak – to reveal a stately dining room positioned underneath the airship’s bridge. There was a substantial glass nose cone at the far end with panes of glass curving across the floor between embedded girder rails, allowing guests to stare down onto the clouds when the conversation stalled. There was only one diner – Abraham Quest – but a host of staff scurried around under the watchful gaze of Catosian free company fighters lining the wall.
Cornelius indicated the sentries standing guard over their master of the air. ‘Are you expecting one of your crew to murder you?’
‘You think me paranoid?’ said Quest. ‘Well, perhaps. But the Court of the Air may still have infiltrators working undetected among my staff.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘What makes you think that?’ said Quest.
‘The fact that we are still afloat. The Court’s wolftakers are nothing if not thorough.’
Quest indicated the chair at the other end of the table. ‘Perhaps they will be kind enough to allow us to finish our supper before crashing us.’
‘A large table,’ said Cornelius, ‘for only two diners.’
‘I had to construct the Leviathan and her sister stats under the pretence that they were proving craft for a new generation of RAN warships,’ Quest apologized. ‘My airship was to be a flagship design – while this was to be the captain’s table, serving formal dinners for the crew’s officers and visiting dignitaries. The Royal Aerosta
tical Navy does so love its ritual and its pomp. And foreigners are so easily impressed by the swell of our canvas hulls and the glint of shells from our fin-bomb bays.’
‘The navy doesn’t have airship hangars large enough to dock a craft of this size,’ said Cornelius, watching as a seat was pulled out for him by one of the retainers.
‘Admiralty House are planning a new statodrome,’ said Quest. ‘The invasion by Quatérshift and the ease with which they and their revolutionary allies seized our airship fields around Shadowclock unnerved the navy. They are planning to use Veneering’s Rock as their new base of operations.’
‘Veneering’s Rock?’ Cornelius frowned. That was next to impossible. A mile of prime Pentshire land ripped out by the Earth’s fury and left to hang about the county, its heavy granite base keeping it locked above the downs, the land beneath dark in the shadow of the floatquake. There had been a famous cartoon forty years ago, in the Middlesteel Illustrated News. The head of the Jackelian order of worldsingers – the sorcerers whose first function was to tame the raging leylines – standing directly underneath the shadow of the sundered land, his hand cupped over his forehead searchingly; the speech bubble reading: ‘I see no problem?’
‘The Levellers don’t support the scheme, but the Purist members of parliament are pushing for it anyway. The expense will be prodigious, but for a fortress reachable only by airship, immune to the brigades of the People’s Army of the Commonshare …’
‘It’s just a bigger stick,’ said Cornelius.
‘I thought you might approve – or do you prefer something less blunt to beat the shifties with; someone like Furnace-breath Nick, perhaps?’
In front of Cornelius, a retainer lifted the silver lid on a platter of roast pork floating in cider gravy. ‘Furnace-breath Nick is feared by the revolution.’
