by Stephen Hunt
Amelia struggled desperately in the grip of her escort. ‘T’ricola, Ironflanks, what are you doing here? You should be safely back in Jackals!’
‘And your colleagues would be,’ said Quest, ‘if they hadn’t so foolishly decided to betray my trust. That’s something I have learnt from my Catosians, the value of total loyalty. There’s something comforting in their binary philosophy, don’t you think? You, them. Friend, enemy. Loyal, traitor.’ He turned to one of his engineers, pointing to the cell filled with hex-suited coffins. ‘Let’s start with that one.’ He tapped on the transparent partition holding Damson Beeton. ‘I told you I would find something useful to do with your friends from the Court of the Air, damson. They made very poor bookends.’
Quest’s staff moved about the controls on the Camlantean machinery. A slot appeared at the bottom of the agents’ cell, a black liquid starting to puddle out. The fluid fingered across the floor, moving under the coffins, then it began to bubble and froth, a dark mist forming above the floor. It spiralled upwards, higher, rearing above the heads of the trapped agents whose shouts were muffled by the viewing wall. The vapour swayed from face to face, having difficulty choosing with so many trapped in the room.
‘The craynarbian woman next,’ said Quest.
On his order, a similar puddle formed in the corner of T’ricola’s cell, the u-boat engineer backing into a corner at the sight of the liquid. The fluid moved as if it were alive, licking across the floor with slow, curious intent.
‘Now the steamman.’
Ironflanks dipped down to try to block the small slot forming, but to no effect; the inky substance began entering his cell too. The steamman’s voicebox trembled. ‘You soft-body lunatic, what is this foul oil?’
In all three rooms the liquid had started to froth and boil now, angry, furious, becoming a vapour. Quest nodded in approval. ‘This is the final instalment of my payment to you, scout. For taking my coin and repaying me with treachery.’
As he spoke, the mist fell down upon the occupants of the holding cells, the captured agents of the Court of the Air twisting in their hex suits as the mist devoured them. T’ricola banged madly against the glass, her exo-shell boiling in the haze, her body burning away – her flesh transforming, becoming mist, adding to the vapour’s volume.
Amelia kicked fiercely at her guards, but they punched her down, then forced her face towards her friends’ death throes, making her watch the lesson. In the first two cells there was nothing left, every drop of living matter absorbed by the ebony vapour; but in the third, Ironflanks stood untouched, the black gas curling around his metal feet, as flaccid and as harmless as a marsh mist.
Quest looked at Amelia, heaving a sigh at the sight of the intact steamman. ‘Of course, you knew that was going to happen.’
‘I—’ Amelia was struck dumb in horror, but the unwelcome passenger in her mind answered for her.
‘Not quite true,’ said Quest. ‘I am sure King Steam was wandering the nations of the world, a lost lonely soul, when your city was alive, much as you yourself must have done for so many centuries.’ The mill owner turned to Cornelius Fortune. ‘Well, we have confirmed that the Camlantean mist does not function on steammen, just as we know it certainly does work on those who have mastered the worldsinger arts as well as offshoots of the race of man, like the craynarbians. But what do you think about something rarer and altogether more alien, something like a lashlite?’
Pushed into the chamber by a mob of airship sailors, a lashlite arrived, forced along by long metal poles capped with wire loops, the proud lizard’s wings bound by straightjacket-like belts.
‘No,’ cried Cornelius, his face freezing on his true features as he realized what was about to be done. ‘Septimoth. NO!’
Damson Beeton banged on the glass of her cell, smashing the chest piece of her hex suit against the partition; but the glass was made of something as near indestructible as made no difference.
‘Toss him inside the empty cell,’ ordered Quest. He looked over at Cornelius Fortune. ‘I offered you a place in my service, once, Compte de Spééler. Unless I’m mistaken, your reply appeared to be a trail of my people left dead in the Leviathan’s brig and your dagger thrust towards my heart. Let me show you what a poor decision that was, for both you and your flying pet.’
Septimoth pulled towards his friend, seven of the airship sailors struggling to hold him in place, their wires cutting into him. ‘I always knew that you damn hairless apes would finish the job you began on my flight in the mountains of Quatérshift.’
‘Sadly prescient,’ said Quest, ‘even without the use of your third eye.’
Septimoth’s gloved hand managed to get enough purchase to fumble free his bone pipe and toss it towards Cornelius. ‘My mother’s spine. Honour it. And if you have the opportunity, honour mine, old friend.’
‘I’ll get you out of this,’ shouted Cornelius. ‘I got you out of the camp in Quatérshift, I can get you out of this.’
Quest scooped the bone pipe up off the floor, tucking it behind the struggling prisoner’s belt. ‘I suggest you use it to play a death dirge for the both of you.’
Septimoth gazed at Damson Beeton as he was dragged past her cell. ‘Remember, damson, nothing for the enemy. Nothing. You know what to do.’
The old woman pressed her armoured hand against the transparent surface, her tear-filled eyes just visible beneath the bulk of her hex suit. ‘No sustenance for the enemy. I remember, old bird.’
Septimoth was shoved into the cell next door to Ironflanks, and at last free of the airship sailors’ wire snares, he began tearing off his bindings, unfurling his wings and gnawing at the gloves constricting his talons. He had almost completely freed himself when the black liquid began to enter his cell, transforming into a mist in front of him, as if the vapour was trying to form itself into a shadow-copy of the winged lizard. Then the mist darted in, striking the lashlite on the bony feathers of his chest. Septimoth fell into the mist, clawing at it, trying to disperse the cloud. For a moment it was as if the glass of the viewing gallery had been painted black, obscuring their view of the combat, but when the darkness cleared, the winged beast lay on the floor, his arms flung out and his body torn with a thousand cuts. Unlike the agents of the Court and T’ricola, and in a cruel mockery of the lashlite religion, Septimoth’s mangled corpse had been abandoned on the floor rather than disintegrated by the cloud. Vapour chased around the cell in wild circles. It had tasted a soul and its flesh and it was eager for more.
‘Not quite as tidy an end as the mist gives to the race of man,’ said Quest, ‘but then, I would expect that. Sentience is the key, is it not.’
Amelia realized Quest was talking to the uninvited passenger inside her skull, but she could hardly hear the mill owner for the screams of insane rage being hurled towards him by Cornelius Fortune.
Quest walked over, muffling the prisoner’s cursing mouth with a breathing regulator, then produced a strange demonic-looking mask and slid that over the prisoner’s air supply. ‘Time for that expulsion from heaven we talked about. Take the great Furnace-breath Nick to the edge of the city and throw him over the side. And take his flying pet’s corpse back to the Leviathan for dissection; if there is something about lash-lite physiology that makes it unattractive for complete absorption by the mist, I need to know what it is.’
In front of them, Cornelius Fortune started laughing, a terrible unearthly sound. It was almost as if he had grown larger now he was wearing the mask. ‘You can’t kill me now. Nothing can. You poor deluded fool, I can’t die.’
Quest seemed amused by this. ‘I believe it is time to put that theory to the test. Goodbye, Compte de Spééler. We won’t be meeting again.’
Damson Beeton banged on the window of her cell as her erstwhile employer was dragged away to be thrown to his death and Quest wagged a finger at her. ‘Patience, damson. I already knew that the mist works on your kind. And if more of your friend
s from the Court of the Air come visiting Camlantis, I may yet be needing you alive, to carry them word of what will happen should they try to interfere.’
With most of the prisoners murdered a tomblike silence descended on the chamber.
‘Interfere with what?’ shouted Amelia. ‘Is this your Camlantean paradise? An exotic execution chamber floating in the sky?’
‘Ah well, at least one of you inside that pretty head understands,’ said Quest. ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the key is sentience. Your people designed very well, child of Pairdan. The Camlantean mist only seeks out that which can reason. A drover taking his geese to market would be slain in an instant by the mist, though his flock would be left behind unharmed. But then, what kind of world would it be without birdsong?’
‘Here,’ said Quest, unfurling a roll of charts and calculations down the floor of the chamber. ‘The maths your people did so many years ago; and the numbers I found in your crystal-book have not altered a jot since I updated them with the figures for our world as she lies now.’
‘I disagree. Here are the estimated number of deaths that occur each year on our continent from war, here the number that die from starvation and malnutrition, here the numbers from sickness, here the mortality figures from poverty.’
Amelia’s hand rose of its own will to indicate the field of black that covered half the chart.
‘The death of every living, thinking being outside this chamber,’ said Quest. ‘But you meant that to be rhetorical.’ His hand jabbed down on the line climbing beyond the field of black. ‘Here’s the replacement level of population generated by a society modelled on the Camlantean pattern.’
Amelia felt sick to her stomach. How do pacifists fight? Totally. The replacement population supplied from here, by people held on ice like eels on a fishmonger’s slab.
‘Break-even within three hundred years,’ said Quest. ‘Everything after is a numerical gain. No more poverty, war … misery.’
Amelia spoke with her own voice now, but she was talking for both of them. ‘You can’t build a new Camlantis on the foundations of mass murder.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ Quest yelled at her. ‘I tried to work by the rules, but you just kept on changing them.’
‘You hypocrite,’ barked Quest. ‘You and your Camlantean rebels played by the numbers of your own calculations. A couple of million dead in this city to save how many more millions in the world outside? But preserve those lives for what kind of existence? For watching my sister cry herself to sleep every night in an alleyway because she didn’t have enough food to eat, starving while the gaslights of packed restaurants burned on the road opposite? For watching my older brother die of waterman’s sickness because the only water we had to drink was from the gutter? You saved us for this? You immortal halfwit. You could have erased the Black-oil Horde, you could have erased everything and started again with this as the seed. We could have enjoyed two thousand years of prosperity and peace, we could be living in the Camlantean age right now and have known nothing else for millennia.’
‘I can forgive you for killing all your brothers and sisters in Camlantis. They were your kin to murder. But I can’t forgive you for all the generations of us that followed, scrabbling in the dirt and the mud of the misery you left us as your inheritance.’
‘There are other ways to change things,’ said Amelia.
‘You don’t think I haven’t bloody tried?’ Quest shouted back. ‘I could have rebuilt Jackals from the ground up on the principles of modern science and spread our democracy across the continent, used the RAN to overturn the killers sitting in the Commonshare, chased that fat fool of a caliph off into the desert. Jackals was mine. I owned everything and everyone in the land, but the old owners childishly decided they wouldn’t honour my deeds to the property.’
‘Oh really, is it? Do you think my model manufactories with their sanitary plumbing, free suppers and open lending libraries actually made any difference? Or my poorhouses and academies? I funded the Levellers to power and even they were wading in parliament’s sewage, trying to pass the smallest reforms. Every one of my efforts to create the perfect society was a drop of clean water in a stagnant millpond. It’s time to drain all the filthy waters and start afresh.’
‘No,’ pleaded Amelia.
Quest looked over at Jules Robur and pointed at Ironflanks. ‘But we’re not clearing our acreages to allow the steammen to inherit the Earth. We will survive inside this chamber. The coffins below are built to shield those who sleep inside their confines, while my people moving around the tomb will be protected from the mist by their crowns. A year inside the tomb will be long enough to allow the mist of Camlantis to exterminate the nations of the surface, but I have no intention of waking up to find a second horde – this time one composed of angry steammen – ready to storm my paradise.’
Robur murmured into a speaking trumpet. ‘Introduce test subject twelve.’
A door opened in Ironflanks’ cell, a tracked steamman crunching across the threshold. Amelia could see that there was something wrong with the new addition, the steamman’s arms jerking in spastic movements, his head juddering while his vision plate danced with a peculiar pattern rather than pulsing with the calm, steady light of the life metal. Ironflanks sensed the wrongness too, backing away into the corner of his cell, but the newcomer tracked towards the scout, an iron hand rising up as if in greeting. A modem screech began to issue from the new arrival’s voicebox. Amelia was no expert on the machine language of the steammen, but she had heard enough of their hymns to the Steamo Loas to recognize that this was not one of them.
Ironflanks stumbled back, trying to cover his sound baffles and drown out the siren song but, he could not. Swaying, Ironflanks began to lose control of his body, his four arms shaking, his metal legs jerking in the same obscene, involuntary dance as the other steamman. The scout tried to say something, but his mind was no longer capable of teasing his thoughts into vocalizations through his voicebox. He turned pleadingly towards the window where Amelia was watching and his turn became an uncontrolled dervish spin. Where was Ironflanks’ softbody friend? He tried to focus on her, on the figures outside the room, but there were only random shapes floating through his vision. Ironflanks’ telescope eyes began to flex out, his head lolling to the side as he stumbled around the room.
‘Ironflanks,’ cried Amelia. ‘Ironflanks.’
The two steammen started to circle each other inside the cell in an idiot’s waltz, poking each other with their manipulator arms.
‘You are wasting your breath, professor. Your scout now lacks the higher mental functions necessary to understand you,’ sneered Robur. ‘My ingenious little steamman disease is spread at the sonic level – it doesn’t even require a joining of cables between steammen to spread. A few infected specimens pushed up the stairs to Mechancia and within a week, the mountains of the Steamman Free State will be inhabited by nothing but oil-drooling imbeciles.’
‘You jigger!’ Amelia struggled in the grip of the guards. ‘You filthy shiftie jigger.’
Robur just smiled at her threats. ‘The Sun King had grown tired of the steammen knights defeating his regiments. He desired something to distract the people of the metal from the length of their border with Quatérshift. Then the revolution got in the way of our project. Ironically, it was a lot easier to complete my work on the disease in a multiracial society such as Jackals, with its ready supply of steammen components and bodies.’
Quest addressed the passenger lurking inside Amelia�
��s mind. ‘It was the steammen grave robberies that first made you suspicious, wasn’t it?’
‘But it was ancient parts that I needed,’ said Robur. ‘Ancient components have their encryption patterns broken, their unravelled designs circulating as common currency among mechomancers. King Steam makes sure he advances each new generation of his people, always trying to frustrate the work of my noble trade. I needed to dig very deep into their filthy race’s nucleus to design such a potent steamman plague.’
‘Turnaround is fair play,’ added Quest. ‘I have seen enough of my cardsharps infected with transaction-engine sickness to realize that my colleague’s unfinished project had considerable merit.’
‘You’re the sickness, Quest,’ spat Amelia. ‘You and your pet shiftie.’
‘We are not monsters,’ protested Robur. ‘Do you not understand that I and my Jackelian friend have imagined countless times the terror the innocents below will feel as the Camlantean death mist seeps through their lodgings and starts to pull them to pieces? I see little else these days, but their myriad, murdered faces as I drift to sleep. But the body of the race of man is riddled with cancer and we must cut it out if we are to survive. You would understand better if you had seen what we did to each other in the organized communities of my nation. Such things cannot be allowed to continue. We must change.’
‘I’ll stop you!’ bellowed Amelia. ‘You’re not going to do this.’
‘Then you have made your choice,’ sighed Quest. ‘There is no room in our new world for division and opposition, professor. You of all people should know that if Camlantean society is to be reborn it will require harmony on the part of its citizens. But there is still one thing left to test …’ He took off his Camlantean crown and gave it to one of his airship sailors. ‘Put the crown and Professor Harsh in one of the cells, then throw him—’ he pointed at Bull Kammerlan,’—in after her. I am fairly confident the Camlanteans’ crowns still function after all these centuries, but I think a demonstration of their operation would be prudent first.’
