by Stephen Hunt
‘I think our conversation is coming back to where we were in my orchid house, before we were so rudely interrupted,’ said Quest. ‘A single man cannot fight an idea. Only another belief can slay an idea.’
‘You sound like your toad Robur,’ said Cornelius.
‘He took very little persuading to join me,’ said Quest. ‘Anyone who has survived the hell of an organized community knows what the race of man is capable of, knows we have to change our nature if we are to prevent such atrocities repeating themselves with tedious inevitability. He is really very similar to you, in his aspirations.’
‘Robur is nothing like me. He was only kept alive because the First Committee wanted him working on the revolution’s revenge weapons. They needed his skills, much as you seem to.’
‘He’s an exceptionally clever man,’ said Quest. ‘In his own field of expertise, he makes my knowledge and advancements appear as those of a state school foundling in comparison.’
‘Why?’ Cornelius asked. ‘Why do you need the Sun King’s old court mechomancer? Is he helping you in your mad search for Camlantis?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said the mill owner. ‘When you join me, I shall tell you.’
‘Camlantis,’ Cornelius tasted the word. ‘Do you realize how insane that sounds? A lost land, a city that historians will tell you never existed at all.’
‘It existed,’ insisted Quest. ‘Listen to me, Cornelius Fortune, Furnace-breath Nick, Compte de Spééler. I have studied all that we know about history and pre-history in the hope that I could learn lessons that might stop us repeating the errors of our past in the present. Everything I have found is the same cycle of war and devastation, for as far back as time is recorded. You think the blood of the revolution in Quatérshift you nearly drowned in is exceptional? Sadly, it is the norm. Every age has its Commonshare. The invasion of Jackals five summers ago, the Two-Year War, the civil war in Jackals six hundred years before that. Go back sixteen hundred years and you’ll find the Chimecans ruling the continent from their underground holds and treating the frozen nations of the surface as nothing but food for their table. Every age, Cornelius, every age produces blood and famine and needless suffering. All save one. One brief glimmer of sanity where a group of people worked together in understanding and peace and achieved the closest thing to paradise the world has ever seen, before or since. Isn’t such a world worth the search?’
‘It won’t work,’ said Cornelius. His artificial arm was shaking with anger, the reworked mechanism unable to cope with the surge of emotions in its owner. ‘It never does. Sink me, but I do believe you are quite insane.’
‘Are you so sure in your prejudices?’ Quest shook his head sadly. ‘This is how you will defeat the great terror in Quatérshift. Not by the stalking of their committeemen and Carlists, but with a rival idea. The truth of Camlantis shall set the world free. You need to decide who you are and what your destiny is. Is it to end the horrors of revolution once and for all – or is it merely to torture those who once tortured you?’ Quest lifted the mask of Furnace-breath Nick out from under the table. ‘Are you Cornelius Fortune, or are you this? The man, or the monster?’
‘This one doesn’t deserve me,’ whispered the mask. ‘He is a butcher, not a swordsman.’
None of the retainers was prepared for their guest’s reaction. Cornelius shoved the table back, sending a soup tureen spilling over the glass of the viewing gallery.
‘My face!’ Cornelius lunged across the table, trying to claw at Quest. ‘Give me back my face!’
On a hair-trigger already, the Catosian free company soldiers rushed forward and dragged Cornelius back. He kicked down, shattering one of the guard’s knees with the heel of his boot, lunging out to try to stave in another’s windpipe with the flat of his palm. She blocked the move and her comrades piled in, raining blows down with their rifle butts as Cornelius’s fierce struggle ebbed away under their assault. They pulled him up, bruised and bloodied, and gasped as they saw his face had changed. It was now an exact simulacrum of Abraham Quest’s own.
‘The Catgibbon was right,’ said Quest. ‘You are a shape switcher. It’s astounding the consideration Cassarabia’s womb mages show when it comes to ensuring the caliph’s rivals fall to his assassins’ blades. And I understand your lineage is half-Jackelian, too. Imagine what you could do if both your parents had been blood-twisted. You were created with quite a gift, Compte de Spééler.’
‘Isn’t this what you wanted to create?’ Cornelius snarled across the table at Abraham Quest. ‘A twin of you, dreaming your dreams of an unachievable utopia. A compliant servant of the House of Quest, following behind your toad Robur to murder any vision save that which you have imagined first?’
‘It’s quite unnerving to see your own face contorted with rage, drooling spittle on someone else’s skull,’ Quest said.
Cornelius groaned with frustration as he tried to twist out of the soldiers’ grip.
‘Take me back, old friend,’ hissed the mask. ‘I’ll make you strong. Strong enough to kill them all.’
‘This is you,’ screamed Cornelius. ‘This is your face. You give me back my face and I’ll return yours.’
Quest sighed. ‘So this really is all you are, the monster over the man.’
Cornelius tried to struggle free and nearly managed to escape his captors’ grip, until he was winded by the fresh slam of rifle butts. The pain pacified him for a moment only. ‘You’re the monster, Quest. I’ve hunted enough of your kind across the border to have smelt your stench before. The smell of a new order approaching, and the blood in the fields, all the bones sticking out of the mud.’
‘Take him back to his cell with the lashlite. Don’t allow him anywhere near the Court of the Air’s agent in the brig. Damson Beeton is dangerous enough as she is, without this madman’s help.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ pleaded the mask. ‘This one is full of light and he burns so bright. I need to breathe the shadows.’
It took five of the Catosian women to pull Cornelius away, his legs flailing as their shine-enhanced muscles bulged, restraining him with all their unnatural strength. The prisoner’s counterfeit Quest-face was distorted in fury. ‘Let me go back to my tree, Quest! I want to go back to my beautiful tree, my wife, and I want my face back; so full of light, burning. You’re burning, burning—’
Then he was gone, his cries echoing fainter and fainter in the corridor outside, the two great doors cutting off his howls of anger with a heavy thump. The retainers busied themselves, cleaning up the spilled food and blood that had fallen across the observation glass. One of the staff lifted up the upset tureen. ‘Tree … what tree was he talking about?’
Quest stood up from the table, wiping the soup off his shirt, and laid a reassuring hand on the retainer’s shoulder. ‘I doubt if we will ever know – or understand if we did.’
He lifted up the mask of Furnace-breath Nick, examining it from different angles, as if the answer lay in the sigils painted on its surface. Shaking his head he put the devil’s mask down and left the chamber.
‘And he had the audacity to think me insane.’
Amelia was starting to believe the deranged ramblings of that old hag in Cassarabia and the prognostications of Rapalaw Junction’s witch doctor. If her life had a purpose, a point, a fixed resolution on the Circle, then investigating the strange pocket world they had been transported to from under the lake in the ruins of Camlantis was it. She reined herself in. When you started believing your own press in the penny dreadfuls, that was when you got sloppy … and sloppy in her trade meant a trapdoor falling onto a chute lined with steel stakes.
Amelia glanced across at Bull Kammerlan. ‘The ruler of the Daggish seemed convinced its crown is down here. Let’s see if we can find it.’
Bull glanced around. ‘Which way?’
Under the land’s artificial sun, her sense of direction wasn’t as good as it normally was – but a part of her knew where they should be heading all the same
. This was quite disconcerting. Did birds feel the same way when they quit a Jackelian winter for warmer climes, or did they just accept the knowledge of direction and the urge to travel, like they accepted the impulse to feed on an empty belly? At the edge of the forest the throbbing, waxy skin of the living machines gave way to a slope covered with structures that seemed to glisten on the hillside – an architecture that had last been seen on the surface of the world many thousands of years ago.
‘There’s a city,’ said Bull, ‘an entire city down here.’
Amelia sighed. ‘Not quite.’
From their elevation she could see the entrance to other unexplored chambers beyond the floating, simulated sun. So, what lay through those? The two of them could explore for weeks down here, although with only the sugary rain for nourishment, Amelia suspected that her body would give out on her before her thirst for exploration did.
They walked closer to the city facing them, its architecture shimmering as their perspective changed; but what an architecture – as much art, as construction – raised from tiny germs of life and grown in accordance with long-lost principles of harmony, a perfect balance of space and light. Not meant to overwhelm like the palladian extravagance of the richer quarters of Middlesteel, nor thrown together out of hard necessity like the capital’s poverty-stricken slums. This organic city possessed sweeps and curves that made the habitation of it as natural as living in a forest; brief glimpses of such places in a crystal-book could never equal the actual experience of walking through its boulevards.
Bull Kammerlan ran his hand through the wall of one of the fluted towers, the sides flickering as his fingers passed through the material. ‘A ghost town! But I can feel the surface.’
Amelia placed her own hand on a wall, the tower shivering as her fingers passed completely through it, horizontal transparency lines flickering while she walked along. She might have been running her hands through a waterfall, but she could feel the surface too: a resin – oaken wood that had been blended with the properties of a synthetic metal when it grew. Natural, but as hard as a steamman knight’s hull. ‘These ghosts remember. The projection contains the memory of what once was.’
‘Projection?’ Bull peered around them. ‘This is a magic lantern show?’
‘No,’ said Amelia wistfully. ‘The magic disappeared a long time ago. This is what is left of a dream. Unfortunately, I rather think the dream is mine.’
‘There’re no people in this projection,’ said Bull. ‘What’s the point of a city with no people?’
‘I noticed that too.’
Amelia did not say that the ghosts of this place could not bear to remember the missing, a whole civilization, as shining a zenith as the race of man had ever climbed – a million or more people who had sacrificed themselves so their legacy would not be corrupted.
She led them through the not-so-solid memories of what had once been, compensating for the tricks of perspective as the city rebuilt itself around them, taking them along boulevards that once towered majestically above the surface of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo; past river-sized aqueducts snaking under monorails; through gardens where abstract sculptures cycled from one artist’s creation to another’s – a cubist body lifting up a dancer in the air, before morphing into a knot of spheres that might have been a bird, then turning into an explosion of fused pyramids.
The ghosts were playing tricks on her. They didn’t want to harm her, that much was clear, but they were trying to conceal what was at the heart of this apparition. The core that called out to her. She had a terrible suspicion of what she would find, and the decision she would have to make there. This chamber wasn’t big enough to hold a thousandth of the glory that had been Camlantis. It was a maze resetting itself about them, trying to mask its true nature.
‘This won’t do,’ said Amelia. She felt like crying. Everything she had seen suggested in every broken fragment of the past she had risked her neck for, it was all true. The Camlanteans’ lives had been lived as art. Their skies filled not with the deadly pea-soupers of steam engines, but with delicate wisp-lines of mists from towers that converted rainwater into inestimable reserves of energy, or streets that drank their power from the endless light of the sun. All this lost, until now.
She switched direction, trusting her inner compass over the priceless glimpses she was being afforded into the long-lost culture. The ghosts of Camlantis cycled through more of their streets and scenes, faster, trying to entice them away from the small passages and back paths she was committing them to now. Amelia ignored the ghosts when they showed her an arena with controlled microclimates, the absent weather artists’ creations playing to an empty stadium, or a vast square racked with rainbow-coloured rotor-like umbrellas that could be used to lift curious travellers into the air and transport them to any part of the city with a simple command. Whatever the wonders on display, she was no longer for turning.
As if sensing her determination on this matter, the apparitions gave up and finally opened their architecture out onto another square, a tower in its centre enclosed by slow-moving spirals of radiance.
‘At last,’ said Amelia, ‘something real.’
She approached the tower and it began to descend into the ground. Ribbons of light twisted back up towards the reducing zenith of the tower, the entire city around them sinking towards the ground as if Camlantis was being submerged by a tide. With the last twist of light sucked into the tip of the tower, the fading illumination revealed a crown similar to the circlet worn by the Daggish emperor. This one had a single addition that immediately caught their attention – a crimson jewel the size of an egg sparking in the centre of the headpiece. The city about them had vanished. Only the tower remained, the column reset at the height of their shoulders.
‘I’ve never seen a ruby that large,’ hissed Bull. ‘That has to be worth the price of a kingdom.’
‘Well, why not?’ said Amelia. ‘The gem has a whole world inside it. This is what was projecting the vision of Camlantis.’
Bull looked around, only now noticing that everything about them had disappeared. They stood on a flat plateau, looking down on the machine forest below.
Bull reached out to lift the crown off the column, but Amelia slapped his hand back. ‘Traps mean treasure, but the reverse also holds true.’
Amelia inspected the column carefully, looking for weight sensors and other triggers. There was nothing she could see, but then, Camlantean society had progressed to a level of super-science mere Jackelians could only dream of. There could be a thermal trigger, a light-grid – sensors that did not even exist on this plane of reality. And what sort of traps would pacifists build to protect an ancient projector? Was this the secret the ruler of the Daggish had been trying to recover for centuries? If the gem held the memory of Camlantis within its glittering planes, might it also contain the current location of the broken city among the heavens?
‘You take the jewel, then,’ said Bull. ‘The doors here work for you, not for me.’
‘I don’t know. This crown is beyond price, we can’t just pass it over to the Daggish.’
‘Sod them, we’re going to take it for ourselves.’ Bull leered as if he had been handed the keys to the city of Middlesteel. ‘What a bloody great jewel.’
‘It’s not a ruby,’ said Amelia. She knew what it was now, bathing in its light. The jewel was illuminating her, feeding her. ‘It’s been grown from a single seed of data. Can’t you feel the energy flowing from it? It’s raw information, a nugget of absolute knowledge, compressed to a level of detail that has forged it into a universe within itself – this makes the Camlanteans’ crystal-books look like a page of text scalpel-carved onto a wax tablet.’
‘Then Abraham Quest will pay us for it,’ said Bull. ‘Even if it doesn’t provide the location of Camlantis in the heavens, he’ll pay us for it all the same. The Camlanteans are just like every other bugger that followed after them – all ego and self-importance. They couldn’t bear to leave the world witho
ut scrawling a little graffiti on the wall, so we’d know that they’d been here and what they’d achieved. You know what this is, don’t you? This is your rich shopkeeper friend’s manual for his perfect, pacifist society, and he’ll bleed money to get his hands on it. He’ll bloody well need to, too.’
Amelia stared at her comrade-in-arms with disgust. The slaver’s avarice was an affront to everything the ancient civilization that had created this miracle once stood for.
He saw her look. ‘Don’t give me that, dimples. Quest will get his jewel and you’ll have the rest of your life to study the information inside it. And all the plaudits from your bookworm friends who didn’t want you walking their college corridors.’
‘I hope they accept Jackelian coin inside the Daggish hive,’ said Amelia, ‘because that’s where we’ll be thrown if we go back to the surface with this. No wonder the hive wants the crown. Whatever blood limiters the Camlanteans placed into their engineering to stop the ancestors of the Daggish breeding feral, the clues to removing the restrictions lie inside this gem. Imagine the Daggish armed with the knowledge of a Cassarabian womb mage – no limit to the hive’s growth, able to project their drone armies hundreds of miles beyond Liongeli’s borders, absorbing Jackals, Quatérshift, the Catosian city-states and Kikkosico. Adding our strength to its own, nation by nation – everyone on the continent converted into its slaves.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ said Bull. ‘Leave the crown down here? You’ve seen how patient the Daggish are – like bulldogs with a bone. They’ll keep on trying, keep on developing new u-boats. They’ve already absorbed my crew – they know more about u-boats than they ever did before. Sooner or later they’ll bag some more explorers from the race of man and try their luck with them. Who is to say others won’t just take the jewel and hand it over to Tree-head Joe? The hive knows how our minds work, too. Grab a mother or father with their children, keep the kids as hostages, make the parents come down here to get its precious crown back for it.’
