by Stephen Hunt
‘First you must show the heart necessary to take it,’ roared Ironflanks, ‘and you will find me both more and less than a steamman now. I am a siltempter!’
Robur cut down, holding the whirling collection of steel teeth and rotating blades with both hands – shattering through Ironflanks’ shield and severing three of the steamman’s manipulator-arm fingers, oil pumping out of the severed metal.
‘Well, you bleed like a steamman,’ laughed Robur, ‘and I’ll dissect the rest of your secrets on my mechomancer’s slab.’
A pair of Catosians slipped past the savage duel – to be clear of the wild cuts of Robur’s blade and to murder the agent of the Court of the Air guarding the steamman’s rear. Damson Beeton stepped back and freed two belt daggers from the corpses of their fallen comrades, the insects feasting on their bodies snapping at her hands. Their three-pronged blades fair danced in the agent’s palms, rotating with an artist’s flourish. The Catosians came in silently and professionally, no wasted moves, from two angles simultaneously to make it harder for her to parry. Damson Beeton caught the bayonet of the first one’s carbine and kicked out at the tunnel, running along its roof fast enough to take her over the heads of her opponents. Now the two Catosians were the ones facing a wall full of slavering fury coming down the tunnel and Damson Beeton abandoned them to their fate at the jaws of the artificial insects as she rolled under the whirling blades of the hull-opener being thrown about by the shiftie. More Catosians were reloading their carbines on the other side and if they had been expecting a seventy-year-old to dive into their ranks with twin blades slicing through their thick high-altitude coats, they did not show it.
Robur’s brutal hull-opener battered down and down, the wounded steamman finally collapsing to his knees, a swarm of metal fragments from his shield showering his head. Robur kicked the broken remains of the door out of Ironflanks’ hands. ‘There we are, my sweet. Let’s see what’s inside you that enabled you to resist my plague …’
The mechomancer raised his hull-opener, ready to drive it straight down through the fur-capped skull of the kneeling steamman. Ironflanks swivelled his voicebox up, towards the rattling pipe above, emitting a screech that severed the duct’s bracket stays. The battle cry spilled a mosquito-like pair of wings onto Robur’s head – a twin of the wicked thing that had struck at Damson Beeton earlier – the creature sinking two fangs into the shiftie’s neck. Robur’s body went rigid, struck by poison and instant paralysis.
‘That was the steamman part of me,’ said Ironflanks. He rose up from his knees and head-butted the machine insect burrowing into Robur, sending it tumbling away. Ironflanks lifted Robur up and wrapped him with all four arms in a fierce bear hug, squeezing until the mechomancer’s ribs broke, a crackle of splintering bone rustling down the man’s chest. ‘And that’s the siltempter part of me.’
What was left of Robur dropped to the floor. Ironflanks picked up the two-handed hull-opener, its multiple teeth rotating to a halt now the trigger was no longer being clutched. He smashed the buckler of the weapon on his chest and let out a victory roar that filled the tunnel with the hooting of thunder lizards and the whine of sleekclaws.
The music of the Liongeli jungle had come to the ruins of Camlantis.
Abraham Quest glanced up from his console, counting the seconds down to the start of his new world. There was so little time left now. The end of poverty. The end of war. The end of famine. That the start of this age of glory meant the end of everything else, well, that was such a small and fleeting price to pay.
Veryann came down into the control chamber and was issued with a cloaking crown by the sentries on the door. She looked perfect. An amazon queen to complement his coronation as the creator of a perfect new society.
‘How goes it up there?’ asked Quest.
‘Fierce work,’ said Veryann. ‘But the free company is holding, just. Are we close to releasing the Camlantean mist now?’
Quest pointed to the thousands of green glowing coffins in the chasm below. Their people, sleeping, protected and cloaked from the mist. All that had gone before would be a bad dream. They would wake up to paradise. ‘Soon. Everything we need is with us here. You have done well, Veryann. Of all the things we had planned for – pursuit by the RAN, intervention by the Court of the Air – to think that our plans were nearly upset by a handful of lance-wielding tribesmen from Jackals’ own mountain nests. Savages, nothing but savages.’
‘History likes to repeat itself,’ said Veryann. ‘The Black-oil Horde …’
A siren sounded from the chasm below, a long string of icons in red appearing on the console in front of Quest. Critical mass had been reached in the underground mills producing the black mist. He only had to enter the ignition code that had been teased from the crystal-book discovered in Jackals. It was time for the end and the beginning of the world.
‘Yes, we have come full circle.’ Quest’s hand slid back the firing panel. ‘And now it is time to heal the world of all sickness.’
said Billy Snow.
‘Remember this!’ shouted Amelia, her palm pressed down on the dark engine, her life force being drained from her by the second. ‘Camlantis. Remember Camlantis.’
Behind Amelia the limbs of the twisted trees walling the chamber undulated towards her. Imploring her Camlantean blood to release the sewage of her kind for them to filter. Imploring her for purpose.
‘Make it even longer, Billy. Activate this engine of yours and send Camlantis back to the long night.’
Damn him. Amelia glanced desperately around the chamber. How many thousand years had Billy Snow haunted the Earth as guardian of the Camlantean civilization’s secrets only to choose now to fade into oblivion? Centuries as a living weapon. Yes, of course, a weapon. A weapon that could be transferred upon the failure of its host. She raised her acid-wrecked hand and plunged it down on one of the dark engine’s horns, impaling her swollen palm on the razor-edged thing. It was like bursting a balloon.
‘Time to move on, Billy,’ Amelia yelled through gritted teeth. ‘This thing has got the equivalent of a transaction engine turning in there, I can sense it. Combat transfer, Billy.’
Waves of pain flared through the acid-ridden ruin of a hand, slicks of her blood pouring down the spike and feeding the horn. She nearly passed out with the agony, black spots dancing around her eyes. The engine’s horns battered her with waves of gravity, gripping her with nausea, making her body part of its antennae, joining her crucified hand to the skin of the universe, drinking the energy and soul from her body, and her blood – the blood that was still fizzing with whatever was left of the ghost of Billy Snow.
Amelia had to fight to keep her remaining good hand pressed to the central panel of the dark engine, shivering until the icons flickering there started to blur and reform in front of her eyes, changing into Jackelian common script.
LOAD51. Charging spin-sinks now. Singularity leakage is no longer being contained.
‘Billy, are you safely inside that thing?’
LOAD12. Confirmed. Download to the engine-mind is completed. All degraded portions of my combat pattern are running in damage simulation. Not much time left for either of us, now.
Amelia wrenched her hand off the dark engine’s horn, trying not to scream as the lump of flesh was hauled free. ‘Is there enough power left inside your dark engine for a second expulsion of the city?’
The answer flowed across the dark engine’s central panel: REBUILD-PERS8. Confirmed, there is sufficient power, but the no-space translation will definitely not be stable this time. You must go.
‘In the name of the Circle go where, Billy? We’re scraping the stars on a couple of miles’ worth of broken floatquake land high above the Sepia Sea.’
The dark engine was shaking the walls of reality; she could feel the power of the dreadful thing, r
ewriting the equations of the universe around them, dimensions that were never meant to coexist remade and squeezed into their own world.
PERS8-REBUILD-SUCCESS. Go as far as possible, professor. If it comes to it, you must jump. If that isn’t possible, find a charged pistol and use it on yourself. The alternative – staying here after the city’s translation – will not be pleasant.
On the dark engine’s central panel the sigils had become numbers, counting down. Counting down fast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The sincere faces of Abraham Quest’s engineers – their heads weighed down by cloaking crowns – had gathered in reverent silence to watch the moment they were to inherit the Earth.
‘This will be a day you speak of for many years to come,’ cried Veryann.
‘Indeed it will,’ said Quest. He looked at the assembly, nodding at his followers in proud approval, then entered the first digits of the firing code on the black mist’s release panel. ‘The day of the death of every imperfection that has marred the race of man since its inception.’
‘Your death!’ said Veryann, plunging her dagger into the mill owner’s chest.
Quest stumbled back from the console, looking in dis belief at the dagger protruding from his breast.
Veryann’s face melted away to be replaced by the features of Cornelius Fortune. ‘I remembered to use my left hand this time.’
‘You – you—’
Cornelius removed a glass sphere from underneath the folds of his fur-lined high-altitude coat, pressing it into the bloodstained hands of the mill owner. Quest stared dumbly at the little clockwork head whirring around on top of the grenade, two hemispheres of explosive liquid separated by a thin crystal membrane. The others in the room broke the silence and the shocking unreality of the moment with a collective howl of fury, rushing towards the killer who would murder their beloved master. With his spare hand Cornelius pulled out a demon mask and slipped it over his skull, filling the chamber with the terrible laughter of Furnace-breath Nick. He flopped behind the shelter of the console as the grenade blast sent the mob of attacking engineers and Catosians flying back towards the black mist’s testing rooms.
Only Furnace-breath Nick stood up from behind the smoking ruins of the console, fire and sparks shrouding his figure as he shrugged off his airship coat. Abraham Quest was still alive – barely – and was crawling towards the balcony overlooking the sleepers’ coffins, leaving a snail’s trail of gore in his wake, when he heard the eerie whistle-song.
Furnace-breath Nick sauntered in front of him, playing a bone-white pipe. ‘I’m not as good a musician as Septimoth was, but sink me, his mother’s spine always did carry a first-rate tune.’
Good enough to have summoned the queen’s people and the seers of the crimson feather as they travelled up towards Camlantis. Good enough to have sent a flight of lashlites diving after Furnace-breath Nick’s plummeting body, catching him and depositing him back on one of the city’s spires.
Quest pulled himself to the edge of the chasm, the yellow light of thousands of gel-filled capsules illuminating the agony on his face. ‘My – children – my – people.’
‘They’ll sleep longer than a year,’ said Furnace-breath Nick, ‘and I don’t know what they’ll wake up to, but whatever they find, it isn’t going to be Camlantis.’
‘Please,’ begged Quest, ‘you can still – change things – enter the code.’
‘Oh, but I am changing things,’ laughed Furnace-breath Nick. The demon-masked figure looked back at the ignition console. It was a smouldering ruin, as wrecked as Abraham Quest’s dreams of utopia. There would be no black mist replicating across the face of the world. No resetting of the world to zero. No philosopher-kings ruling a sanitary realm of super-science. It was the mill owner’s vision of a serene, clean, society of plenty that lay burning in that fire.
Quest raised an arm, pleading. ‘Fool – you are condemning our future to – stay – this violent, impoverished hell.’
‘Yes, but isn’t that what a devil does?’
‘Please – think what – you are – doing – please, you are a man – more than a mask …’
Furnace-breath Nick raised two of his fingers in the ancient Jackelian affront – the insulting, inverted position of the lion’s teeth – then walked over to the moving stairs to the surface. He left Quest’s dying, broken form to gaze upon the last of the Camlanteans. Sleeping now, for time without end. The future was rude, crude and raw. Alive. The future was Jackelian.
The eyepiece in his Furnace-breath Nick mask automatically adjusted to the wild energies outside. In the shadow of the tomb, the ground was shaking, splintering howls echoing from the towers and spires of the forgotten land, while above him the sky was pulsing with light. These planes of radiance were not the ordered forces that had summoned Camlantis back from her exile, but instead an angry storm of nameless colours that swarmed around each other, whirlwinds of energy spiralling down, decapitating spires and walking destruction across the city, sucking whole districts into a netherworld they would never return from.
‘Oh, what larks,’ whispered his mask. ‘Camlantis is growing on me. A pity about Abraham’s bright shiny new world, but you wouldn’t have liked it, no, not our cup of caffeel at all.’
‘Shut up,’ ordered Furnace-breath Nick. ‘And enjoy the view.’
In the atmosphere above, the lashlites were swarming away from the dying zone while the ground cracked beneath them. Over the sounds of the collapsing city, the hypnotic rise and fall of expansion engines filled the air. It was the Leviathan. Some of the sailors had blown the nose dome of their airship off with improvised explosives and the tattered, torn explorer of the heavens was limping away on her remaining two engines. The airship’s hull was clear of lashlites now, but her torn caten ary curtain spilled ballonets into the air from a dozen gashes along her starboard. The Leviathan was leaking lift even as she fled, fatally shattered.
Furnace-breath Nick opened his arms in greeting and danced an absurd jig outside the tomb, vast clouds of dust from the destroyed buildings enveloping him.
Now this, this was more bloody like it.
Amelia only just managed to pull herself out of the hatch and onto the trembling pavement before the ladder-lined service tunnel crumpled into itself. A geyser of rubble exploded out of the hole. Ironflanks was nearly flung off his clunking feet, still holding the torn-off manhole cover, the smooth round shape forming and reforming in his hand, trying to close a seal it was no longer attached to.
Damson Beeton steadied the steamman and shielded her face against the sunlight of the upper city – harsh and intense after the flickering world of the maintenance levels. She closed her eyes and extended her agent’s witching perception to feel the ground. ‘I sense no release of the black mist yet.’
Amelia pointed to the distant, dark shape of the departing Leviathan. ‘Then that’s our only luck …’ The Leviathan was limping along with her forward sphere nosing down, the back of the airship still under full lift. ‘There goes our ride out of here.’
Ironflanks waved the hideously large hull-opener, trying to attract the attention of the fleeing regiments of lashlites above, but they and their captured skrayper steeds had realized the wound in the heavens was closing up. Few lashlites were staring down now at the floatquake land crumbling away beneath them. The battle was over, only escape and the selfish matter of survival concerned any still left alive here.
A spire at the end of their street stood surrounded by twirling fingers of the dimensional storm, creaking until it was ripped whole from the ground, vanishing into the hungry micro-vortex. For the second time that day Ironflanks invoked the spirits of his ancestors, as if he expected Zaka of the Cylinders to appear and convert his buckled and injured body into a vapour of stack smoke capable of surviving the final fall of Camlantis. Amelia pushed the storm-driven hair out of her eyes. Her dream was dying here, dying around her, an entire life’s work and purpose. Perhaps it was fitting her
bones should end up on whatever cold, eternal orbit Billy Snow’s dark engine was casting Camlantis into. The three survivors reeled around as the clacking sound of an armoured carriage’s tracks carried across the corner of their road. Narrowly missing one of the collapsing towers and cutting through the rising cloud of wreckage, the iron vehicle was skidding all over the boulevard, towing something ungainly behind it that was swinging to and fro in the storm’s gusts. Seeming to notice them, the carriage righted its wavering passage and crunched towards the three survivors, the stubby cannon turrets on either side of the vehicle jouncing, dark and lethal.
Damson Beeton sighed and unshouldered the carbine she had liberated from one of the Catosian corpses. There was a single charge inside her rifle, one bullet against six tonnes of iron-riveted beast. ‘Circle on a stick, you’ve got to be kidding me.’
The carriage made a sickening slapping noise as it ran over dozens of corpses, human and lashlite, that littered the boulevard. But instead of running them down, the carriage grumbled to a stop. A moment’s silence, then the door wheel on the side of the left-flank turret started to spin; the door groaned open, the large frame of the commodore squeezing through. ‘Ahoy the street. You’re a fine sight to see out here, scurrying around like rats in a terrier pit while this monstrous ancient place tries to bury us all.’
‘Ahoy yourself, you old fraud,’ said Amelia. ‘Where in the Circle’s name have you been skiving off to while we’ve been fighting for our lives against Quest and his bludgers?’
‘Giving a little fencing instruction, professor,’ said the commodore. He pointed at the rear of his armoured carriage where a glider capsule with furled wings was fixed by chains to the vehicle. ‘Before testing my mettle on the Leviathan and her ground camp to liberate this contraption. It was a rare narrow thing, too. It took all my cunning and bravery to fight and deceive my way through to the airship’s hangar, beating off lashlites who took my borrowed sailor’s shirt for the real thing and matching my cutlass with all the jack cloudies who did not.’
