THE KINGDOM BEYOND THE WAVES

STEPHEN HUNT

Contents

Title Page Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Series Title Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Amelia Harsh wiped the sweat from her hands across her leather trousers, then thrust her fingers up into Mombiko’s vice-tight grip. The ex-slave hauled her onto the ledge, the veins on his arms bulging as he lifted her up the final few feet to the summit. Bickering voices chased Amelia up the face of the blisteringly hot mountainside like the chattering of sand beetles.

‘You climb better than them, even with your poisoned arm,’ said Mombiko.

Amelia rubbed at the raw wound on her right shoulder – like her left, as large as that of a gorilla. Not due to the stinging scorpion that had crept into her tent two nights earlier, but the result of a worldsinger’s sorcery. Large sculpted biceps muscles that could rip a door apart or cave in the skull of a camel; a physique that was rendered near useless by that bloody insect’s barbed tail. The scorpion had to have stung her gun arm, too.

Mombiko passed the professor a blessedly cool canteen and she took a greedy swig of water before checking the progress of the Macanalie brothers. They were a minute away from the ledge, cursing each other and squabbling over the best footholds and grips to reach the summit.

‘The brothers got us through the Northern Desert,’ said Amelia. ‘There are not many uplanders who could have done that.’

‘You know where those three scum developed their knowledge of the sands, mma,’ said Mombiko, accusingly. ‘The brothers guide traders over the border in both directions – avoiding the kingdom’s revenue men to the north and the caliph’s tax collectors to the south.’

Amelia pointed to the sea of wind-scoured dunes stretched out beneath them. ‘It’s not much of a border. Besides, I know about their side-trade as well as you do, capturing escaped slaves who make it to the uplands and dragging them back for the caliph’s bounty on the slaves’ heads.’

‘They are not good men, professor.’

Amelia checked the sling of the rifle strapped to her back. ‘They were as good as we were going to get without the university’s help.’

Mombiko nodded and clipped the precious water canteen back onto his belt.

Damn the pedants on the High Table. A pocket airship could have crossed the desert in a day rather than the weeks of sun-scorched marching Amelia’s expedition had endured. But the college at Saint Vines did not want the technology of an airship falling into the caliph’s hands. And it was a fine excuse for the college authorities to drop another barrier in front of her studies, her obsession.

‘You wait here,’ Amelia said to Mombiko. ‘Help them up.’

‘If they try anything?’

She pointed to his pistol and the bandolier of crystal charges strapped over his white robes. ‘Why do you think I made sure we were climbing at the front? I wouldn’t trust a Macanalie to hold my guide rope.’

A sound like a crow screeched in the distance. Shielding her eyes, Amelia scanned the sky. Blue, cloudless. Clear of any telltale dots around the sun that would indicate the presence of the lizard-things that the caliph’s scouts flew. No match for an airship’s guns, but the unnatural creatures could fall upon the five of them easily enough; rip their spines out in a dive and carry their shredded remains back to one of Cassarabia’s military garrisons. Again, the screech. She saw a dark shape shuffling higher up the mountainside – a sand hawk – and relaxed. It was eying up one of the small salamanders on the dunes beneath them, no doubt.

Professor Harsh returned her attention to the wall on the ledge, following the trail of stone sigils worn away to near-indecipherability by Cassarabia’s sandstorms over the millennia. Mombiko’s contact had been right after all; a miracle the deserter from the caliph’s army had made it this far, had spotted the carving in the rocks below. Had possessed enough education to know what the carving might signify and the sand-craft to reach the uplands of Jackals and the safety of the clans. The path between the crags led to a wall of boulders with a circular stone slab embedded in it. A door! Shielded from the worst of the storm abrasions, the sigils on the portal had fared better than the worn iconography that had led her up here.

Amelia marvelled at the ancient calligraphy. So primitive, yet so beautiful. There were illustrations too, a swarm of brutal-looking vehicles ridden by fierce barbarians – horseless carriages, but not powered by the high-tension clockwork milled by her own nation of Jackals. Engines from a darker time.

Her revelry at the discovery was interrupted by the snarling voices behind her.

‘Is this it, then, lassie?’

Amelia looked at the three upland smugglers, practically drooling at the thought of the treasures they were imagining behind the door. ‘Roll the door back, but carefully,’ she ordered. Dipping into her backpack she pulled out five cotton masks with string ties. ‘Put these on before you go in.’

‘Are you daft, lassie?’ spat the oldest of the brothers. ‘There’s no sandstorm coming.’

‘These are not sand masks,’ Amelia said, tapping a thumb on the door. ‘You are standing outside the tomb of a powerful chieftain. He would have owned worldsingers as part of his slave-clan and would not have been above having them leave a sprinkling of curse-dust in his tomb to kill grave robbers, bandits and any of his rivals tempted to desecrate his grave.’ She slipped the mask over her mouth, the chemicals in the fabric filling her nose with a honey-sweet smell. ‘But you are free to go in without protection.’

The brothers each gave her a foul look, but pulled on the masks all the same, then got to work rolling the door back with all the vigour that only greed could generate. Mombiko drew out a gas spike and ignited the lantern. ‘I shall go first, mma.’

Amelia signalled her agreement. Mombiko had been raised in the great forests of the far south and possessed an uncanny sixth sense. Curse-dust aside, there should only be a single trap in this ancient tomb – the mausoleum’s creators were an unsubtle brutish people – but it was best to be sure.

The door rolled back. Mombiko held the gas spike in front of him, shadows dancing in the dark tunnel that lay revealed behind the stone slab. It was cool inside after the heat of the desert. Crude stone-hewn steps led downward, iron brackets in the wall where lanterns would once have hung.

‘Did you hear something?’ asked one of the brothers.

‘Put your gun down, you fool,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s just an echo. You fire your pistol in here and the ricochet of your ball will be what kills you.’

‘If there’s a treasure, there will be something to guard it,’ insisted one of the brothers. ‘A wee beastie.’

‘Nothing that could survive over two thousand years trapped down here without any food,’ said Amelia.

‘Holster your pistol,’ ordered the oldest brother, ‘the lass is right. Besides, it’s her laddie-boy that’s going in first, right?’

Followed by the cold echoes of their own steps, the five interlopers walked down the carved passage; at the bottom of the sloping cut was a foreboding stone door, a copper panel in a wall-niche by its side, the space filled with levers, nobs and handles.

‘I’ve got a casket of blow-barrel sap back with the camels,’ said one of the Macanalie brothers.

Amelia wiped the cobwebs off the copper panel. ‘You got enough to blow up all the treasure, clansman? Leave the archaeology to me.’

Amelia touched the levers, tracing the ancient script with her fingers. Like most of the Black-oil Horde’s legacy to history, their language was stolen, looted from one of the many nonnomadic nations the barbarians had over-run during their age. The script was a riddle – filled with jokes and black humour.

‘The wrong choice …’ whispered Mombiko behind her.

‘I know, I know,’ said Amelia, eyeing the impressions along the wall where the tomb builders had buried their compressed oil explosives. Surely the passage of time would have spoiled their potency? ‘Now, let’s see. In their legends the sun rises when the petrol-gods sleep, but sleeping is a play on words, so—’ she grabbed two levers, sliding one up while shoving another into a side channel and down, then clicked one of the nobs clockwise to face the symbol of the sun.

Ancient counter-weights shifted and the door drew upwards into the ceiling of the passage with a rack-rack-rack. Mombiko let out his breath.

The oldest of the smuggler brothers nodded in approval. ‘Clever lass. I knew there was a reason we brought you along.’

The professor flicked back her mane of dark hair. ‘I’m not paying you extra for your poor sense of humour, Macanalie. Let’s see what’s down here.’

They walked into the burial chamber. With its rough, jagged walls, it might almost have been mistaken for a natural cavern were it not for the statues holding up the vaulted roof – squat totem-poles of granite carved with smirking goblin faces. Mombiko’s gas spike was barely powerful enough to reveal the eight-wheeled carriage that rose on a dais in the centre of the chamber, spiral lines of gold rivets studding its armoured sides and exhaust stacks. The nearest of the smugglers gasped, scurrying over to the boat-sized machine to run his hand over the lance points protruding from the vehicle’s prow. They were silver-plated, but Amelia knew that reinforced steel would lie hidden beneath each deadly lance head.

‘It’s true, after all this time,’ said Amelia, as if she did not really believe it herself. ‘A war chief of the Black-oil Horde, perhaps even the great Diesela-Khan himself.’

‘This is a horseless carriage?’ asked one of the Macanalies. ‘I can’t see the clockwork. Where’s the clockwork?’

He was elbowed aside by his excited elder. ‘What matters that? It’s a wee fortune, man! Look at the gems on the thing – her hood here, is this beaten out of solid gold?’

‘Oil,’ said Amelia, distracted. ‘They burnt oil in their engines, they hadn’t mastered high-tension clockwork.’

‘Slipsharp oil?’ queried the smuggler. Surely there were not enough of the great beasts of the ocean swimming the world’s seas to bleed blubber to fuel such a beautiful, deadly vehicle?

‘Do you not know anything?’ said Mombiko, waving the gas spike over the massive engine at the carriage’s rear. ‘Black water from the ground. This beautiful thing would have drunk it like a horse.’

Amelia nodded. One of the many devices that stopped functioning many thousands of years ago if the ancient sagas were to be believed – overwhelmed by the power of the worldsong and the changing universe. Mombiko pointed to a silver sarcophagus in the middle of the wagon and Amelia climbed in, pulling out her knife to lever open the ancient wax-sealed coffin.

‘They must have taken the wagon to pieces outside,’ laughed the youngest brother. ‘Put it back together down here.’

‘Obviously,’ said Amelia, grunting as she pressed her knife under the coffin lid. Her shoulder burned with the effort. Damn that scorpion.

‘Oh, you’re a sly one, Professor Harsh,’ spat the eldest brother. ‘All your talk of science and the nobility of ancient history and all of the past’s lessons. All those fine-sounding lectures back in the desert. And here you are, scrabbling for jewels in some quality’s coffin. You almost had me believing you, lassie.’

She shot a glare at the smuggler, ignoring his taunts. She deserved it. Perhaps she was no better than these three gutter-scrapings of the kingdom’s border towns.

‘Her wheels weren’t built to run on sand,’ mused one of the Macanalies. He ran his hand covetously along the shining spikes of gold on the vehicle’s rim.

Amelia was nearly done, the last piece of wax seal giving way. It was a desecration really. No wonder the eight great universities had denied her tenure, kept her begging for expedition funds like a hound kept underneath the High Table. But there might be treasure inside. Her treasure.

‘There wasn’t a desert outside when our chieftain here was buried,’ said Amelia. ‘It was all steppes and grassland. This mountain once stretched all the way back to the uplands, before the glaciers came and crushed the range to dust.’

At last the lid shifted and Amelia pushed the sarcophagus open. There were weapons in there alongside the bones, bags of coins too – looted from towns the ancient nomads had sacked, no doubt, given that the Black-oil Horde either wore or drove their wealth around. But might there be something else hidden amongst their looted booty? Amelia’s hands pushed aside the diamond-encrusted ignition keys and the black-powder guns of the barbarian chief – torn between scrabbling among the find like a looter and honouring her archaeologist’s pledge. There! Among the burial spoils, the hexagonal crystal-books she had crossed a desert for.

Professor Amelia Harsh lifted them out and then she sobbed. Each crystal-book was veined with information sickness, black lines threading out as if a cancer had infected the hard purple glass. Had the barbarians of the Black-oil Horde unknowingly spoiled the ancient information blocks? Or had their final guardian cursed the books even as the nomads smashed their way into the library of the ancient civilization that had created them? They were useless. Good for nothing except bookends for a rich merchant with a taste for antiques.

The oldest of the brothers mistook her sobs for tears of joy. ‘There’s enough trinkets in that dead lord’s chest to pay for a mansion in Middlesteel.’

Amelia looked up at the ugly faces of the nomad gods on the columns. They stared back at her. Chubba-Gearshift. Tartar of the Axles. Useless deities that had not been worshipped for millennia, leering granite faces that seemed to be mocking her flesh-locked desires.

‘The crystal-books are broken,’ said Mombiko, climbing up on the wagon to spill his light down over the contents of the coffin. ‘That is too bad, mma. But with these other things here, you can finance a second expedition – there will be more chances, later …’

‘I fear you have been misinformed.’

Amelia turned to see a company of black-clad desert warriors standing by the entrance to the tomb, gauze sand masks pushed up under their hoods. The three Macanalie brothers had moved to stand next to them, out of the line of fire of the soldiers’ long spindly rifles.

‘Never trust a Macanalie,’ Amelia swore.

‘Finding this hoard was never a sure thing,’ said the eldest brother. ‘But the price on your head, lassie, now that’s filed away in the drawer of every garrison commander from here to Bladetenbul.’

‘The caliph remembers those who promise much and do not keep their word,’ said the captain of the company of soldiers. ‘But not, I fear for you, with much fondness.’

Amelia saw the small desert hawk sitting on his leather glove. Just the right size to carry a message. Damn. She had let her excitement at finding the tomb blind her to the Macanalie brothers’ treachery; they had sent for the scout patrol. She and Mombiko were royally betrayed.

‘The caliph is still cross about Zal-Rashid’s vase?’ Amelia eyed the soldiers. At least five of them. ‘I told him it was nothing but a myth.’

‘Far more equitable then, Professor Harsh, if you had given the vase to his excellency after you had dug it out of his dunes,’ said the soldier. ‘Just as you had agreed. Rather than stealing it and taking it back to Jackals with you.’

‘Oh, that. I can explain that,’ said Amelia. ‘There’s an explanation, really. What is it that your people say, the sand has many secrets?’

‘You will have much time to debate the sayings of the hundred prophets with his exulted highness,’ said the officer. ‘Much time.’

Mombiko looked at Amelia with real fear in his eyes and she bit her lip. His fate as an escaped slave of a Cassarabian nobleman would be no kinder than her own. It would be little consolation for Mombiko that he did not have a womb as Amelia did, that could be twisted into a breeding tank for Cassarabia’s dark sorcerers to nurture their pets and monstrosities inside. One of the Macanalie brothers sniggered at the thought of the fates awaiting the haughty Jackelian professor and her colleague, but when the smuggler tried to move towards the ancient vehicle, a desert warrior shoved him back with his bone-like rifle butt.

‘What’s this, laddie?’ spat the eldest of the brothers. ‘We had a deal. You get these two. We get the reward and all of this.’

‘And so you shall receive your reward,’ said the caliph’s officer. He waved at the ancient wagon. ‘But this was not part of our arrangement.’

‘You have to be joking me, laddie. Listen to me, you swindling jiggers, there’s enough down here to share out for all of us.’

The caliph’s man pointed to the leering bodies on the totem-pole columns. ‘There will be nothing left to share, effendi. These bloated infidel toads are not of the Hundred Ways, they are idols of darkness and shall be cast down.’ He gestured to one of the sand warriors. ‘Go back to the saddlebags and bring enough charges to bury this unholy place under rock for another thousand years.’

‘Are you out of your skull, laddie? There’s wealth enough here to make us all rich! We can live like kings, you could live like an emir.’

The officer laughed with contempt. ‘The caliph has lived two-score of your miserable lifetimes and if the hundred prophets be blessed, he shall live two-score more. What need does he have for the unclean gold of infidel gods when he has countless servants in every province of Cassarabia labouring to offer him their tribute for eternity?’

Amelia looked at Mombiko and understanding flashed between them. Mombiko would never again be a slave, and Amelia was jiggered if she would be used as a breeder, or allow herself to be handed over to a Cassarabian torture-sculptor to twist and mutate her bones until she was left stretched out like a human oak tree in the caliph’s scented punishment gardens.

‘He may be hundreds of years old,’ said Amelia, ‘but let me tell you a few home truths about your ruler. One, the caliph is too boring for me to listen to for a single hour, let alone a lifetime of agonized captivity. Two, he’s not even a man. He’s a woman dressed up as a male, and a damned ugly one at that. How she continues to fool all of you desert lads is beyond me.’

There was an intake of breath at her blasphemy.

‘And three – next time you try and sneak up on me, bring your own damn lamp!’

Mombiko killed the gas spike. With a hissing sputter the chamber was plunged into absolute darkness. Amelia kicked down the lever alongside the carriage’s steering wheel and the hisses from the spring-mounted spears decorating the wagon’s prow were followed by screams and shouts and sickening thuds as the steel heads found their mark. This was followed by a crack of snapping glass. One of the collapsing desert soldier’s spindly rifles splintering its charge, providing a brief gun-fire illumination of the carnage in which all the professor noticed was Mombiko sprinting before her towards the exit. Someone tried to grab Amelia and she heard the rustle of a dagger being slid from its hilt. She used her left arm to shove out towards where her assailant’s throat should be, and was rewarded by a snap and a body falling limp against her own. Amelia vaulted the corpse and found the stairs out of the tomb, nearly tripping over a speared soldier.

One of their treacherous guides was screaming for his brothers, something about trying to scrape up the gems inside the sarcophagus. Groping inside the panel-niche Amelia reversed the levers and the door started to lower itself with its rack-rack-rack rasp. She had brought herself and Mombiko a couple of minutes as the caliph’s survivors, left in the dark, tried to locate the door release wheel she had spotted back inside the burial chamber. Amelia panted, taking the stairs three treads at a time. Damn, the steps had not seemed so long nor so steep on the way down. And her rifle – a trusty Jackelian Brown Bess – was not going to be much good to her one-armed.

‘Professor!’

‘Keep going, Mombiko. Beware the ledge. The caliph’s boys might have left sentries outside.’

She pulled out a glass charge from her bandolier, cracking it against the wall so the two chambers of blow-barrel sap nearly mixed, then, still sprinting, bent down to roll the shell along the stone floor behind her. A wall of searing heat greeted Amelia as she left the tomb, the sun raised to its midday zenith. Thank the Circle, the ledge was clear of desert warriors.

Mombiko peered over the cliff. ‘There are their mounts. No soldiers that I can see.’

Amelia glanced down; sandpedes tethered together, long leathery hides and a hundred insect-like legs: the ingenuity of this heat-blasted land’s womb mages unrestrained by ethics or her own nation’s Circlist teachings. Amelia let her good arm take the strain of the downward climb, aided by gravity and the rush of blood thumping through her heart. Crumbling dust from the scramble down coated her hair, making her cough. Her gun arm was burning in agony. She had accidentally thumped it into one of the cliff’s outcrops and the scorpion-poisoned flesh felt like the caliph’s torturers were already extracting their revenge from her body. They were near the bottom of the cliff face when an explosion sounded. Someone had stepped on her half-shattered shell, mixed the explosive sap in the firing chamber.

Amelia dropped the remaining few feet onto the warm orange sands. ‘I do hope that was one of the Macanalies.’

‘Better it was one of the soldiers, professor.’ Mombiko had his knife out and advanced to where the caliph’s men had picketed their sandpedes. The creatures’ legs fluttered nervously as he approached them and reached out to slice their tethers free. Mandibles chattered, the sandpedes exchanging nervous glances, only the green human eyes in their beetle-black faces betraying their origins in some slave’s sorcery-twisted womb. Too well trained, they were failing to escape. Amelia picked up a rock with her left hand and lobbed it hard at the creatures, the mounts exploding in an eruption of bony feet as they fled the shadow of the mountains.

Cracks sounded from the top of the peak, spouts of sand spewing up where the lead balls struck close to Mombiko and Amelia. The caliph’s bullyboys had found the chamber’s door release faster than she had hoped. Sand spilled down Amelia’s boots as the two of them scrambled for their camels, the creatures whining as the soldiers’ bullets whistled past their ears. There was a grunt from Mombiko, and he clutched his side in pain with one hand, but he spurred his camel after the retreating sandpedes, waving at her to ride on. Amelia urged her camel into an uncustomarily fast pace for the heat of the day. Luckily, the ornery beasts were skittish after seeing the unnatural sandpedes and only too glad to gallop away from the mountainside’s shade.

Once the pursuit was lost behind the boundless dunes, Amelia drew to a halt, Mombiko sagging in his saddle. She pulled him off his camel and laid him down in the sand, turning aside his robes to find the wound.

‘It’s not too deep, Mombiko.’

‘Poisoned,’ hissed Mombiko. ‘The soldiers hollow out their balls and fill them with the potions of their garrison mages. Look at my camel.’

His steed was groaning, sinking to its stomach on the sands while Amelia’s camel tried to nuzzle it back to its feet. The creature had been struck on its flanks by one of the soldier’s parting shots. Mombiko pointed to a protruding wooden handle strapped under his saddlebags. ‘For the sun.’

She took it down and passed it to Mombiko. The umbrella had been her gift to him when he had started working at their university. Such a small thing in return for his prodigious talents. He could learn a new language in a week, quote verbatim from books he had read a year before. He had told her once that his seemingly unnatural memory was a common trait among many of his caste.

‘The forest way,’ said Mombiko.

Amelia nodded, tears in her eyes, understanding his request. No burial. From nature you have emerged, to nature so you shall return. The desert would blow over his unburied bones.

Mombiko reached out for Amelia’s hand and when she opened her palm there was a cut diamond pressed inside it, the image of one of the Black-oil Horde’s gods etched across the jewel’s glittering prism.

‘Sell it,’ rasped Mombiko. ‘Use the money to find the city – for both of us.’

‘Are you an archaeologist’s assistant or a crypt-robber, man?’

‘I am Mombiko Tibar-Wellking,’ said the ex-slave, raising his voice. Sweat was flooding down his face now. He was so wet he looked as if he had been pulled from the sea rather than stretched out across a sand dune. ‘I am a lance lord of the Red Forest and I shall take my leave of my enemies – a – free – man.’

Amelia held him as he shuddered, each jolt arriving a little further apart, until he had stopped moving. His spirit was blowing south, back to the vast ruby forests of his home. But her path lay north to Jackals, the republic with a king. Her green and blessed land. A home she would in all likelihood never see again now.

Amelia closed his eyes. ‘I shall be with you in a little while, Mombiko Tibar-Wellking.’ She took the water canteen from the dead camel and left her friend’s body behind, his umbrella held to his still chest for a lance.

The stars of the night sky would guide her true north, but not past the water holes that the Macanalie brothers had known about, nor past the dozens of fractious tribes that feuded across the treacherous sands. Amelia Harsh kicked her camel forward and tried to fill her mind with the dream of the lost city.

The city in the air.

One foot in front of the other, the last of her empty canteens trailing behind her boot on its leash. Too much energy required to bend down and cut the drained canteen’s strap. Dark dots wheeled in front of the furnace sun. Even the cur-birds knew she was dead, a few hours away from being a meal for the gardeners of the sands. Every time the worn leather of her boots touched the burning dunes they seemed to suck a little bit more of her life away. Amelia had been whittled down to a core of determination, a bag of dehydrated flesh lurching across the Northern Desert – no, use its Jackelian name – the Southern Desert. Towards a goal that might as well lie on the other side of the world.

Through her dry, sand-encrusted eyes Amelia glimpsed a shimmer in the distance, sheets of heat twisting and snaking over the dunes, sands bleached white by the height of the sun raised to its midday zenith. Another mirage of a waddi sent to tantalize her? No, not waters this time. The mirage was a girl of about fourteen walking out of a door, following her father into a garden. There was something familiar about the scene. The parched passages of her mind tried to recall why she should recognize the girl.

‘What did that man at the table mean, pappa, when he said that the title on the house wouldn’t be enough to secure the debts?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the girl’s father. ‘Just commerce, a matter of commerce and coins and the merely mundane.’

‘But he was talking about the sponging-house?’

‘That’s not a word to use in polite company, my sweet. I’ve visited a few of my friends in debtor’s prison,’ said the girl’s father. ‘Good people. With some of the hard days those in trade have seen this year, it’s a wonder any of my social circle have lodgings anywhere outside a debtor’s jail. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m scared, pappa, those men who came to the house yesterday …’

‘The bailiffs can’t get what doesn’t belong to you.’ The father glanced back towards the sounds of their dinner guests still drifting out of the doorway and pulled out a battered old mumbleweed pipe, lighting a pinch of leaf with the pipe’s built-in steel flint. ‘That’s why your aunt came to visit last week and left with a fair few more cases on top of her carriage than she arrived with. The antiques I’ve collected over the years and the books, of course. You always have to save the books. Enough to pay for your education to be finished.’

‘You’re not going to be sent to the sponging-house, are you?’

‘Perish the thought,’ said the girl’s father. ‘Nobody should go to such a place. We tried to amass enough support in parliament to abolish the wretched places last year, but it was no good. Too many who still want the example set, and set harsh with it. The guardians have forgotten there was a time in history when the existence of such a place would have been unthinkable, when destitution was unheard of, when the rule of reason was the only monarch people bent their knee to.’

‘You mean the lost city?’

The girl’s father puffed out a circle of mumbleweed smoke. He appeared almost contented. ‘A lost age, my sweet. An entire age of reason. Those elusive Camlanteans. Almost as tricky to find in our times as it is to locate their noble ideals among the benches of parliament today, I fear. Most people don’t believe that age even existed, but we do, don’t we, my sweet?’

‘Yes, pappa.’

‘We’ll find the ruins of that place one day.’ He pointed out to the sky. ‘Up there, that’s where we’ll find it. And when we do, we’ll bring a little piece of it down here to Jackals, you and I. A little piece of sanity to calm an insane world. You go back inside to the warmth, now. I want to spend some time by your mother’s grave.’

‘Don’t let pappa go,’ croaked Amelia at the mirage, her hands clawing at the sand. ‘Can’t you see the bulge in his jacket? Stop him from going into the garden. He’s been upstairs to his desk, the bloody gun’s in his pocket.’

The report of a pistol echoed out, the heat-thrown vision collapsing into an explosion of feathers as the cur-birds that had been inspecting her from the top of the dune fled to the sky on the back of Amelia’s unexpected howl of fury.

Amelia rubbed the crust out of her dry, swollen eyes. Not even enough moisture left in her body for tears. According to parliament’s law, debts couldn’t be passed down from one generation to the next. But dreams could.

From the fortress-wall of heat shimmer another blurred shape emerged, solidifying into something – a figure.

‘Go away,’ rasped Amelia in the direction of the mirage. ‘Leave me alone to die in peace, will you. I’ve had enough of the past.’

But the figure wasn’t going away. It was getting more defined with every step. Oh, Circle! Not a vision this time. She reached for her rifle, but the Brown Bess was no longer there. Amelia couldn’t even remember having discarded the weight of the cheap but reliable weapon. She had kept her knife though, for the stalking snakes that slid towards her at night, drawn by her body-heat. But the knife seemed so heavy now as well, a steel burden she could not pull free from her belt.

The part of Amelia’s brain that had not yet shut down recognized what she saw coming out of the heat shimmer before her. The water-filled hump on the stranger’s back was unremarkable for the desert tribes – most of whom possessed the same adaptation. Red robes flowed behind the small woman and a train of retainers followed her, each one turning and twisting in a private dance.

‘Witch of the dunes,’ grated Amelia’s throat. ‘Witch!’

‘It takes one to know one,’ cackled the figure. ‘I’m not travelling with your past, my sweet. I’m travelling with your future.’

The professor pitched forward into the embrace of the desert.

When Amelia woke up she was no longer on sand, she lay on the soft bracken of the upland foothills. Damp ground, soggy from actual rain. Jackelian rain. So, the border of Cassarabia was a couple of days behind her. The witch waited at Amelia’s side, the retainers behind her in a silent horizontal line, held in her glamour and little more than zombies if half the tales Amelia had heard were true. There were no camels nearby, no sandpedes to explain how they had possibly travelled so far. Nothing to indicate how long Amelia had been unconscious. Her journey south towards the tomb had taken nine weeks, for Circle’s sake.

‘Why?’

The witch stopped swaying, the mad mumbling of her internal dialogue briefly stilled. ‘Because you are needed, my large-armed beauty.’

Needed? The witches of the Southern Desert were mad, fey and capricious; certainly not given to helping stranded travellers.

Amelia looked at the witch. ‘Needed by whom?’

The squat, humpbacked creature dipped down and picked up a leaf with a trail of ants on its blade. ‘For want of this leaf, the ant will die; for want of the ant, the stag-beetle will die; for want of the stag-beetle, the lizard will die; for want of the lizard, the sand hawk will die; for want of the sand hawk, the hunter is blinded – and who is to say what the hunter might achieve?’

‘There are a lot of leaves blowing in Jackals,’ said Amelia. She twisted her shoulder and was hardly surprised to note that the scorpion-stung flesh had been bathed and healed.

‘Oh, my pretty,’ cackled the witch. ‘You think I have done you some kindness?’ The witch’s voice turned ugly. ‘The true kindness would have been to let the sands of Cassarabia suck the marrow from your bones. You have left the easy path behind you now.’

‘Thank you anyway,’ said Amelia. Like all her kind, the old woman was as mad as a coot and as deadly as a viper. Better not to antagonize her. ‘For the hard path forced upon me.’

A mist rose behind the witch. The weather systems of Jackals and Cassarabia collided in the hinterlands and mists were common enough. Usually.

‘Such fine manners. What a perfect daughter of Jackals you are. Thank me next time you see me, if you can.’

The witch turned her back and stalked away, her silent retainers falling into line behind her like a tail of ducklings following their mother.

Around Amelia the sounds of border grouse returned to the foothills as the humpbacked creature vanished into the mist. ‘Well, damn. Lucky me.’

Brushing the dew off her tattered clothes – too light for a chilly Jackelian morning – Amelia headed north into the uplands. Deeper into Jackals. Home.

CHAPTER TWO

The street urchin his friends called Ducker bent down to scoop up a lump of horse dung with his improvised wooden paddle. Overhall Corner was one of the busiest junctions at the heart of Middlesteel, rich pickings in the greatest city of the greatest nation on the continent. Why, with a full sack of horseshit patties drying out before the fire, you would have fuel enough to cook for a week. Cheaper than coal. And the smell? Well, for the price you paid, you quickly got used to that. But never let it be said that the dung collectors of Overhall Corner did not enjoy their job. From the other side of the boulevard William made a rude gesture, a cry of victory following quickly after the lump of horse-dirt whistling past Ducker’s cloth cap. Scooping up a handful of ammunition, Ducker dodged past the hansom cabs and cask-filled wagons, the whinnies of offended shire horses in his ears, then let his missile of revenge fly back towards his colleague in the dung trade. The dung skimmed the other urchin and narrowly missed a mumbleweed-smoke seller, the man’s tank of narcotic gas battered and rusty from the wet Middlesteel smog.

‘Bloody dung boys,’ the old vendor waved a fist at the two urchins.

‘Take a puff of your own mumbleweed and calm down,’ Ducker shouted back.

Their altercation, the best sport they had come across this morning, was interrupted by a jumpy clatter of hooves along the cobbled street. The whine of a horseless carriage had unsettled the horses, the low hum of its clockwork engine almost beyond the range of the race of man’s ears.

‘By the Circle,’ said William, ‘would you look at that beauty?’

Ducker pushed his friend out of the way for a closer peek. Was Will talking about the lady in the steering hole, or the carriage itself? Shining gold-plated steel, two wheels at the front twice the lads’ own height and four smaller wheels at the rear of the passenger box, an oval stadium-seat of soft red leather mounted on top.

‘That’s not from any Jackelian workshop,’ said William.

‘Catosia,’ said Ducker. ‘The city-states.’ Everyone knew they made the best horseless carriages. Unlike the Jackelian ones, the high-tension clockwork mechanisms of the Catosian League’s manufactories did not suffer from a tendency to explode, showering pieces of carriage across the road. The crusher directing traffic at the junction stopped the flow of cabs, carts and penny-farthings along Ollard Street, waving forward the traffic on the other side of Overhall Corner. Ducker suspected the black-coated policeman wanted to halt the vehicle and gawp at its opulence along with all the other pedestrians.

‘Not much dung out of one of them,’ said Will, enviously.

An idea occurred to Ducker. A way to turn a penny and get a closer look at the carriage at the same time. He advanced on the vehicle and tugged off his cloth cap. ‘Excuse me, sir, wipe your gas lamps, sir? They are looking a little sooty.’

The driver made to get out of the steering hole and Ducker saw beyond the short blonde curls and blue eyes for the first time, noticed her body. She was not just a beauty; she had the physique of someone who worked in the muscle pits. She was a whipper, a fighter for hire.

The sole passenger of the vehicle seemed amused. Young, handsome and as blonde as his driver, he possessed the air of authority that only came to those born to quality. One of the Lords Commercial. ‘You can sit down, Veryann. A little free trade is much to be encouraged. Clean away, young fellow.’

Whether the polishing from his cap was removing the dirt on the lamps or adding to it was unclear, but Ducker did his best and, ignoring the pained expression of the chauffeur-guard – who obviously had a different payment in mind for him – he grinned up hopefully at the commercial lord. The man flipped a coin down towards Ducker and the urchin caught it, then returned to the pavement while the wagons and hansom cabs began moving again.

‘Bleeding Circle,’ said William. ‘You’re a ballsy one.’

‘Look, a crown,’ said Ducker, turning the coin over in his fingers. ‘Not bad for a minute’s work, eh?’

‘Ain’t you seen that gent’s mug in the news sheets, Ducker? Don’t you know who you was hobnobbing with?’

Ducker looked annoyed. His friend knew he did not have his letters – the streets of Middlesteel were his education. He never even looked at the penny sheets. They only reminded him of a world that would never be his; of reading and meals and warm rooms and caring parents.

‘That was Quest, that was Abraham Quest!’

Quest? Ducker was amazed. Circle’s turn; the cleverest man in Middlesteel, it was said. Probably the richest too.

Ducker looked towards the humming carriage disappearing into the distance, a glitter of gold among the dark, sooty streets.

‘You should have asked for two crowns, you bleeding turnip,’ laughed William.

‘I expect we’ll need to fit a footman’s plate to the rear now,’ announced the driver. ‘Because when word of what you just did spreads among his friends, we’re going to be mobbed by guttersnipes at every crossing in the city.’

Abraham Quest stretched back in his seat, unconcerned. ‘Those young children are the future of Jackals, Veryann.’

‘It’s not as if you don’t already give generously enough to the Board of the Poor. And there are those children’s academies you sponsor …’

‘As to the need, so to the means.’ A quotation from the Circlist Book of Common Reflections. ‘Do you never ponder, Veryann, why one child eats off a silver platter and sleeps warm under a woollen blanket, while another goes hungry to a bed filled with twelve others equally desperate? Do you never wonder what discrepancy in fate, motivation or resolve leads to the terrible disparities in this land of ours?’

Veryann turned the carriage onto Drury Dials, steering the humming vehicle towards the House of Guardians. ‘Of all people, you should know the answer to that, Abraham Quest – you a workhouse child risen so far. The strong and the cunning and the quick thrive, the weak fail. It is the way of all nature.’

‘Ah, yes, the answer of a true soldier of the city-states.’ Quest glanced back sadly. ‘I was just like that urchin once. I truly was. It is like staring into a mirror thirty years ago. But things do not have to be this way.’

They were meeting in the Strandswitch Club, two streets down from parliament itself. The First Guardian had a delicious sense of irony. Before the Leveller party swept into power during the last election, Benjamin Carl would have been just about the last person in the kingdom to be voted into Middlesteel’s most prestigious political club. Now the club’s committee had no choice at all but to admit the man.

Guardians and civil servants from Greenhall watched Abraham Quest’s progress across the lush carpet and leather armchairs with the startled glances of those who had just found a copper ha’penny abandoned between the cobbles of the pavement. Did they see him, or did they see his wealth? He already knew the answer. Money was power and notoriety, a lens through which his humanity was distorted by any and all who saw him. All save perhaps the politician he had come to see, who had always seemed curiously unmoved by any such consideration. It was one of the reasons they got on so well.

‘First Guardian,’ announced the club butler. ‘Your guest has arrived.’

Benjamin Carl lay down his copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News and pointed to an armchair opposite the small table that concealed the frame of his wheelchair.

‘Neutral ground, Benjamin?’

‘Tongues would wag if I received you at my offices in parliament,’ said Carl.

‘More speculation on the amount of my donations to the Leveller party, perhaps?’

‘Yes, it is curious how one’s respect for the cheeky tenacity of Dock Street’s pensmen when in opposition adjusts after winning a majority.’

‘Freedom of expression is one of the great marks of our civilization,’ said Abraham, picking up the politician’s newspaper. There was a black linework cartoon on the front cover. The First Guardian facing down a gaggle of Guardians from the opposition parties in a challenge of debating sticks, a cloud of insults rising from the deliberately doll-sized mob of politicians. Benjamin Carl’s wheelchair had been transformed into a war chariot with iron spikes, his wheels crushing the more radical members of his own party. A speech bubble rose out of Carl’s grinning countenance: ‘This ride is too strong for you, m’compatriots.’

‘So it is,’ said the First Guardian, checking to make sure the club’s other patrons were out of earshot. ‘And it is a little frank speaking which I thought we might engage in this morning, Abraham.’

‘I would expect nothing less from the firebrand author of Community and the Commons.’

Carl ignored the jibe about his book – barely off the banned list for as long as his election as First Guardian. ‘The plain speaking is regarding your commercial concerns.’

‘Another donation, perhaps? I heard parliament was getting sticky again about your proposed labour reforms. I do try and set an example with the House of Quest.’

‘It is not your mill conditions which interest me – the long lines of prospective workers that queue up every time you open up a new concern speak well enough for those. It is your output I wish to discuss – more specifically, that of your airship works at Ruxley Waters.’

‘The Board of the Admiralty haven’t been complaining about the quality of the aerostats my mills turn out, have they, First Guardian?’

‘Hardly,’ replied Carl. ‘Your airwrights are the most proficient in Jackals, your airship designs the most advanced – as you well know from the size of your order-book with the navy.’ The politician jerked a finger towards the lady retainer standing discreetly by the door of the club’s dining room. ‘She is a free company fighter? From the Catosian city-states?’

‘Veryann? Yes, she is.’

‘Our nation has a long, regretful tradition of tolerating the rich and powerful keeping private armies under the fiction that they are fencibles, reserves salted away for times of war. I do not intend to be the first leader of parliament who starts tolerating private aerial navies too.’

‘It’s somewhat difficult to test new aerostat designs without celgas to float the airships we build,’ said Quest.

‘Jackals’ monopoly on celgas has kept our state safe for hundreds of years,’ replied the First Guardian. ‘Your test flights are a little too regular and the discrepancies between the gas barrels you are sent and what comes out of your airship hangars at the other end a little too wide of the mark.’

‘I shall have words with the yard’s overseers,’ said Quest.

‘Please do,’ said Carl. ‘We have our merchant marine to serve our trade and we have the Royal Aerostatical Navy to serve our defence. Your proving flights are one thing, but let me make this absolutely clear: there is no room for a third force in the air above Jackals.’

Quest chortled. ‘I am not a science pirate, Ben. I understand there are subtler ways to ensure reform for our people than standing an airship off the House of Guardians and dropping fin-bombs on the heads of your parliamentarians until you legislate for harmony among the nations and prosperity for the deserving poor.’

‘Then you understand well. Our nation is surrounded by envious tyrannies that covet our people’s wealth and would crush the freedoms that we enjoy; parliament’s backbenches are packed with Heartlanders, Purists, Roarers and Middle Circleans who would all love to see the first Leveller government for a century fail, and as for you …’

‘Mercantilism has always been a competitive business, First Guardian. The number of enemies that are out there circling me is one of the few ways I still keep score.’

A solicitous member of the club’s staff came over, offering the two men a glass of jinn. The Strandswitch Club was traditional that way: brandy still out of fashion after the attempted invasion of Jackals by its neighbour, Quatérshift, a few years earlier. Benjamin Carl took the glass and swirled the alcohol around the rim as if trying to read the future in its pink eddies.

‘We all operate within limitations, Abraham. I thought I could achieve so much in this position – but between the bureaucrats of Greenhall, the other parties and the infighting among my own Levellers, it seems I am only ever allowed to achieve one tenth of what I set out to accomplish.’

‘Now that I understand,’ said Quest. ‘After all, look what those jiggers did to me.’

‘Yet, even so, you still seem to prosper. However much they trim your sails.’

Quest filled his nostrils with the scent of the jinn. ‘Trim my sails, or confiscate them? I see things differently, Ben. To some that makes me a genius, to others a lunatic and a fool. Succeeding in my business concerns, now, that is merely a game.’

‘One you play so well,’ noted the politician. ‘So well, indeed, they changed the rules of the game just to fit around you.’

‘Time for a new game then, Ben?’

‘Let me tell you something.’ The First Guardian leant in close. ‘The establishment dislikes us both intensely, but with me, they at least know what to expect. Anyone with the wit to read Community and the Commons knows what I stand for. But with you, they have no reference points. You make yourself the richest man in Middlesteel and then you give your fortune away every year to the poor. They try and destroy you at every turn, yet it is always you that seems to end up taking over their bankrupted commercial concerns. You treat the greatest nation in the world as if it is a mere hand of cards, its sole purpose to serve as the source of your amusement. You scare them.’

‘A little mischief,’ said Quest. ‘I just need a little mischief to keep my mind fresh, to keep the black dog at bay. Everything is so flat and grey without my miserable few distractions.’

‘I understand that,’ said Ben Carl. ‘Just make sure your airwrights know you intend to restrict your game to the free market.’

‘Has someone been telling tales on me, First Guardian?’

Carl pointed up towards the ceiling. ‘An unattributed source. A note dropped down to land on my windowsill in parliament. You need to be careful, Abraham.’

Abraham Quest tapped the side of his nose. ‘I quite understand. Enough said.’

Carl watched his wealthy friend departing across the clubroom. For the industrial lord’s sake, Carl hoped Abraham Quest would be true to his word. Because if he was not, the statuesque mercenary he had watching his expensive back would not be nearly enough to protect him. Not if the Court of the Air came calling on him in judgement.

The butler returned to refill his jinn glass. His black club livery was barely enough to disguise the fact that the servant was really an agent of the political police. A g-man. Ben Carl was still not used to the fact these dogs were his hounds now, rather than part of a pursuit baying behind his own heels.

‘Do you think he will listen to you, sir?’

‘The cleverest gentleman in Middlesteel?’ sighed the First Guardian. ‘How should I know?’

‘We still do not know what he is up to at the Ruxley Waters airworks.’

‘Airships are just toys to him, like everything else,’ said Carl. ‘Toys to be made to go further, faster, higher.’

‘They are the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s toys, sir. He only gets to build them.’

‘He is a good man,’ said Carl. ‘A humane man. Half of our land’s mill workers eat better and work fewer hours because of the standards set by the model factories of the House of Quest. He has done more for the people of Jackals than I have managed to achieve with my factory acts. He is a patriot.’

The police agent refilled the politician’s glass and gave a short bow. ‘As are we all, sir, as are we all.’

Chivery did not like having the new boy foisted upon him like this. It was dangerous enough making a living as a smuggler in Jackals, rolling the dice that Greenhall’s revenue agents didn’t have the smuggler’s favourite bay outside Shiptown under observation at night, looking for u-boats like theirs cutting the line. Dangerous enough, without having some green young ’un like Tom Gashford given into his care to nursemaid. A boy who talked too much when he should have been quiet and said nothing at all when he should have been talking. But it was understandable that the skipper of the Pip Sissy wanted to pair young Tom with an experienced moonlighter like Chivery. The lad needed experience of the hidden paths the smugglers took through the forest, the clearings where casks of untaxed brandy and mumbleweed could be passed onto the moonrakers’ secretive wholesalers.

Young Tom seemed convinced that their proximity to the cursewall would lead the redcoats down upon them. Since the attempted invasion, the Frontier Foot had been reinforced all along the Jackelian border, from Hundred Locks in the north to the Steamman Free State in the south. But the tremblers that the redcoat engineers had burrowed into the ground were for detecting sappers’ tunnels deep enough to cut under the cursewall, not designed to catch a couple of smugglers out plying the coast’s oldest trade. Having the lad with him was a risk, all the same. Of all the cargoes the canny submariners of the Pip Sissy smuggled out of Quatérshift to bring into Jackals, the contents of Tom’s sack were going to prove the most lucrative this cold night. The lad kicked his heels against the frost and the darkness. He obviously wished he were bunking back in the warmth of their u-boat too.

‘If there weren’t revenue men abroad tonight, I’d burn this rubbish to warm my fingers and damn the risk of the firelight,’ said Tom, swinging the sack nervously between his hands.

The older moonraker laid his hand menacingly on his belt dagger. ‘Then you’d be a right fool, Tom. It’d be a tuppence turn of a coin whether our customer would slit your throat before the skipper tied you to the Pip Sissy’s conning tower and towed you back to Quatérshift for the crabs.’

‘Why should someone pay us good money for this rubbish, Chivery?’ The lad pulled out a handful of yellowed pamphlets from the sack and read out a few of the titles in the moonlight. ‘Directives of the First Committee. The heroes of the Faidéaux carriage works – an exhortation to labour. Equality’s Tongue: the thoughts and purity of the revolution. There ain’t anybody in Jackals that collects this revolutionary guff anymore, not since the war.’

Chivery lit the bull’s-eye lamp he carried with him, making the signal that they were ready to trade. He took advantage of the tightly focused light to unroll the penny sheet he had brought with him. The Northern Monitor: respectable opinions, honestly and directly expressed. Its front cover bore an illustration of the First Guardian, Benjamin Carl, holding a four-poles bat with the words Jackelian oak carved on it. Bounding off the wood was the head of one of the First Committee of Quatérshift, while various caricatures from parliament clapped politely on the sidelines. There was a speech bubble rising from the leader of the opposition, Hoggstone, which read ‘Your game m’lord.’

The great terror was still in full swing in Jackals’ neighbouring nation. Every month the Pip Sissy made its smuggling run, and every month their friends, contacts and colleagues in Quatérshift seemed gaunter and more malnourished. Made prematurely old by the upheavals – purge after purge – famine after famine – entire families dragged from their villages to the quick, deadly mercy of a Gideon’s Collar, the steam-driven killing machines that dominated every town square in Quatérshift. As Chivery’s news sheet indicated, even a high position within the Commonshare elite was no protection against the twitchy paranoia of the shifties’ secret police units or the whims of the street mob. Quatérshift was not a functioning republic any more – it was a dog gnawing on its own wounded, diseased flesh. The smuggler shook his head sadly. People got themselves into the strangest of pickles with their damn fool passions. If anyone in Jackals started carrying on like that, why, their neighbours would sneak them a visit one evening and give them a right good dewskitching – look on it as a favour done to them, too.

‘What’s that noise?’ Tom looked around.

A whistling from the sky, then a dark monstrous shape dropped through the canopy of trees, leathery wings folding up like an angel of hell. Yelping, the lad stumbled back and fell over a branch.

Chivery picked up the boy’s fallen bag from the grass. The lad looked on in astonishment. It was not one monster – it was two. The reptilian flying creature had dropped his passenger in the middle of the clearing and stepped back, wrapping his wings around his sides. It was a lashlite. A lashlite carrying a human-shaped figure. But was it a human? Dark high boots, black cape, a face concealed underneath a devil’s mask. Now the tales came back to the boy. The scourge of Quatérshift, vengeance taken human form. Furnace-breath Nick.

Some said Furnace-breath Nick was the ghost of a Quatérshiftian nobleman come back from hell to haunt his executioners. Others claimed that he was a member of the Carlist revolution who had been betrayed and purged by the new rulers of the land – a spirit of death hunting his old compatriots. A few maintained that Furnace-breath Nick was a dark angel of the Quatérshiftian sun god, sent to punish the newly atheist republic that shared half of Jackals’ border.

‘Do you have it?’ The devil’s voice echoed around the clearing as if it was being sucked up from hell. Something inside the figure’s mask was altering his voice, making his words hideous.

Chivery was not bothered. He had gone through this ritual many times before. ‘For the money, I have it.’

A black-gloved hand lashed out, and a purse of coins spun across to be caught by the smuggler. Chivery bounced the coins in his palm, jangling them. ‘A bargain well met.’ He tossed the sack filled with Quatérshiftian propaganda over to Furnace-breath Nick.

‘I trust there will be another delivery next month?’

‘It’s getting harder,’ said Chivery. ‘Not because of the Carlists, mind. They’re still in a right old state. The First Committee wouldn’t notice if we snuck into the Palace of Equality and painted their arses blue right now.’

‘There will be no extra money,’ Furnace-breath Nick told the smuggler.

Chivery went on, ignoring the comment. ‘It’s our own damn navy. They’ve stepped up airship patrols along the coast. It’s getting so we can’t break the surface off a Quatérshiftian cove without some RAN stat chasing us down.’

‘When the drinking houses of Hundred Locks run dry of smuggled brandy, I shall believe it’s too dangerous for you to break the blockade,’ said Furnace-breath Nick. ‘Until then … besides, like your boy says, this literature is just worthless junk.’

Terrified, the young smuggler tried to crawl back into the woods. Furnace-breath Nick had been secretly listening in to his conversation.

‘Worthless to some,’ said Chivery, clinking the bag of coins again. ‘Yet you seem to place some value on it.’

‘Oh yes,’ laughed Furnace-breath Nick – not an encouraging sound. ‘But sink me, don’t people say I am quite insane?’

With that, Furnace-breath Nick was seized by the lashlite, the beating of the creature’s wings sending the two smugglers’ tricorn hats blowing off into the trees as the devil-masked figure and the winged beast that served him vanished into the sky.

‘That was him,’ said young Tom. ‘The one in the sheets. Furnace-breath Nick.’

‘It was,’ agreed Chivery. ‘And you thought moonraking was boring, eh?’

‘But he’s the devil of Quatérshift, ain’t he, the scourge of the Commonshare? What does he want with a sack full of useless shiftie political pamphlets?’

‘Something to warm his fire during a cold evening, boy? Damned if I know. In fact, if I did know, I probably would be damned. Just, I suspect, like he must be.’

CHAPTER THREE

Quirke opened his door, the sadness in the academic’s normally sparkling eyes a fair indication of what was to follow. ‘Amelia, do come in.’

Professor Harsh followed the head of the School of Archaeology at Saint Vine’s College into his comfortable old office, the sense of foreboding in her gut mounting. The table by the window held a steaming pot of caffeel, rising vapour from the brew obscuring the quad below, where gaggles of brown-gowned students were being called to seminar by the steam-driven whistles running along the battlements of the ancient university. The brew’s presence settled it. Quirke might as well have placed an executioner’s cap on his desk.

‘Do sit down, my dear.’ The elderly fellow pulled a polished gem out of his tweed waistcoat’s pocket and placed it on his desk. It was the same jewel Mombiko had removed from the tomb in Cassarabia’s mountains.

‘I thought the university would have that under museum glass by now – or sold off by one of the Cripplecross auction houses?’ said Amelia.

‘The High Table does not know of its existence yet, Amelia.’

She looked across at Quirke, puzzled.

‘This arrived for you while you were gone.’ He passed a cream vellum envelope across to her. Taking the copper letter opener from the academic’s desk, Amelia sliced the envelope open. She unfolded the notepaper, going numb as she read the words.

‘They can’t do this to me!’

‘You don’t have tenure, Amelia. Of course they can.’

She angrily crumpled the paper into a ball with a gorilla-sized arm. ‘Saint Vines is the last college that would take me. What am I meant to do now? Accept a job as a governess teaching the snotty sons of Sun Gate quality the difference between the great civil war and last winter’s bread riots?’

‘What was the Chancellor expected to do, Amelia? You were supposed to be working at a dig along the dyke wall. Instead some uplanders discover you wandering about half-dead along the desert border. Your obsession with the city is destroying your life.’

‘The High Table are fools,’ said Amelia. ‘Fools with closed minds who are so brim-full of prejudice that they can’t see that the city is not a myth. It existed. Out in the desert I found the tomb of the man who as like destroyed it!’

Quirke shook his head and spun the globe that sat on his desk, his finger brushing the vast expanse of the Fire Sea as it rotated. ‘The academic council values orthodoxy, Amelia. A legend without solid evidence makes for very poor archaeology. You should be thankful that the Cassarabian ambassador was expelled last year, or I don’t doubt we would have Greenhall’s civil servants and magistrates crawling all over the college looking for you with a bag stuffed full of embassy grievances.’

‘Give the jewel to the Chancellor,’ said Amelia. ‘The money from it—’

‘—Will not make a difference,’ said Quirke. He pushed the gem across the table to the professor. ‘Not this time. You could have come back with an original scroll of the Circlist tenets and he still would have dismissed you. Even if by some miracle you could find evidence that the city of Camlantis really existed, that it is still intact and locked as a floatquake in the heavens, how would you reach it? The aerostats we have access to are only pocket dirigibles – do you think the RAN can be enlisted on your goose chase?’

‘Admiralty House has been known to favour requests by the High Table …’

The old academic picked up a neatly folded copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News. ‘This is what the navy are concerned with.’ He tapped a report about an airship of the merchant marine that had been savaged by a skrayper, one of the massive balloon-like creatures of the upper atmosphere that sometimes sank down to wreak havoc on Jackelian shipping. ‘You find a text in a crystal-book about how to drive skraypers off our airships and you’ll find the First Skylord willing to grant you an audience at Admiralty House quick enough. But searching the skies for Camlantis? What do you think the RAN will make of that proposal?’

‘The city is up there,’ insisted Amelia.

‘If the ruins of Camlantis were at an altitude we could reach, someone would have sighted them. Circle knows, the jack cloudies are as bad as their maritime counterparts with their superstitions and their rituals and their cant. It wouldn’t take much to add a story of a ghostly land ripped out in a floatquake to their tall tales of angels gliding around their airships and dark round stats of unknown origin whistling past their ears. And if your mystical city is resting at an altitude beyond our sight and reach, well … I am sure you can see the problem.’

‘The lashlites believe the city is up there,’ said Amelia. ‘I told you about my trip to their nests in the mountains. Their songs tell of a city that could have been Camlantis, rising past a flight of warriors out hunting a skrayper pod.’

‘The lashlites are a colourful race,’ said the academic. ‘I dare say I could find something in their aural teachings to support most of the tales of celestial fiction printed in the penny dreadfuls, if I chose to interpret their sagas in such a way.’

‘You are sounding like the dullards on the High Table.’

‘Yes,’ sighed the academic. ‘I believe I am.’ He stood up and pulled out a tome from his shelves. ‘Uriah Harthouse. Two years’ worth of lashlite shaman sagas transcribed during an expedition to the peaks around Hundred Locks fifty-five years ago. I particularly like the story where the god Stormlick engages twelve ice demons in a whistle-song contest in a wager to end the coldtime, triumphing by cunningly adding a mustard-like spice to their wine goblets when the demons weren’t looking. Try selling the Department of Geographical Studies that gem as an explanation of the glaciers’ retreat from the continent.’

‘This isn’t myth we are talking about, it is history.’

‘History is out of fashion in these corridors,’ said Quirke. ‘We have too much of it, we are drowning in it.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and lifted out a coin in a glass box, the face on the silver so faded that the impression of the woman’s head was barely discernible. ‘How old do the wild papers in those disreputable journals of yours propose Camlantis might be? Seven thousand years? Eight thousand years? I found this coin in one of the archives downstairs while I was writing a piece on the reign of King Hull. Out of idle curiosity I had Pumblechook in metallurgy use that new dating process he’s been boasting about – do you know how old this coin is according to his new method?’

‘Chimecan slave-nation period?’

Quirke lifted an eyebrow. ‘Two hundred and seventy thousand years old. How’s that for a heresy?’

Amelia nearly spilt the contents of her cup. ‘That’s impossible. Pumblechook must have made an error.’

‘You plough the fields in Jackals and you trip over history, you cast a fishing net in the Sepia Sea and you dredge up history. We have too much of it, and the High Table have had too much of yours.’

‘What are you going to do with the coin?’

‘What am I going to do?’ Quirke opened the drawer and placed the artefact back inside the felt-lined case. ‘I shall keep it as a reminder that there are things in this world older than I am. You’ll see no papers from me speculating on the origins of the coin. I’ll leave it to you in my will – you can have it along with my office, when the High Table have forgotten your name and your impudence towards them.’

‘I shall never be the sort of person they believe fit to sit in here,’ said Amelia.

‘You’ll see,’ said the academic. ‘In time, you’ll see.’

‘Fools, they’re blind, bloody fools.’

‘Some advice, Amelia,’ said Quirke, passing a cup of cafeel over to the professor. ‘As one of your father’s oldest friends. Don’t publish any more papers about the city; keep your head down and let the procession of nature take its course. The membership of the High Table will change, and in time fresh faces will arrive who have never heard of you. There is a dig along the foothills of Mechancia, some Chimecan-age ruins overrun by glaciers during the coldtime. I can get you on the expedition – you’ll just be another anonymous face helping out, a few years beyond the reach of the official journals and your enemies.’

‘Academic exile.’ Amelia set aside her cup without drinking from it.

‘I taught you better than that, my dear. A tactical withdrawal. Entropy can be an astonishingly powerful ally in these sleepy halls of ours. The long game, my dear, the long game.’

Amelia stood up. They both knew she was not going to follow his advice, and the old man had damaged his own prospects enough already by making Saint Vines her last bolt-hole within the eight universities.

‘You stood by my father after he lost everything,’ said Amelia, ‘and you have done the same for me. You are a rare old bird, Sherlock Quirke.’

He shrugged. It had never even occurred to the old academic that there was an alternative way of doing things. He was a singular touch of humanity among all the bones and dust of forgotten things.

She made to open the door and leave.

‘Amelia, did it ever occur to you that some things that are lost are meant to be that way for a reason?’

Now that was a queer thing to say. Was that the master of archaeology, or her dead father’s friend talking?

Amelia shut the door on Quirke and her old life.

Amelia could see there was something wrong with the woman in the quad the moment she left the college building – something out of place. She was the right age to be a student but her poise was wrong; like a panther waiting patiently on the lawn, carefully watching the bustle of the undergraduates. Could she be a topper sent after her by the caliph? The Circle knows, there was always a surfeit of professional assassins in Middlesteel, ready to do the capital city’s dirty work when enough coins were spilled over the bench tops of the more disreputable drinking houses.

She noticed Amelia and started to walk towards the professor, the shadows falling behind her. The visitor was approaching with the sun in her eyes. Amelia relaxed. The woman was not planning to try to sink a blade between her ribs after all.

‘Damson Harsh?’ enquired the young lady with a slight accent. Where was that accent from? It had been softened by years in Jackals.

‘Professor Harsh,’ said Amelia.

The woman pulled a folded sheet of notepaper from her jacket. ‘You are, I believe, currently in need of employment. I represent an individual who may be interested in offering you a suitable position.’

Amelia arched an eyebrow. ‘You are suspiciously well informed, damson.’

The visitor handed Amelia the piece of paper. ‘The offer is contingent on you being able to translate the text you see here.’

Amelia unfolded the sheet. It was not possible! The script on the paper was nothing this young woman should have in her possession.

‘Is this a joke?’

‘I can assure you that the offer is quite genuine, professor.’

‘Kid, where did you get this from?’

‘The translation, if you would be so kind.’

‘The last – book – of – Pairdan. Reader-Administrator of … Camlantis.’ Amelia haltingly traced her finger across the ancient script. She had nearly died in the desert wastes of the caliph to get her hands on such a treasure, yet this young pup had breezed onto the college grounds blithely oblivious to the fact that she held in her possession the title inscription of a crystal-book that had been lost to humanity some six and a half thousand years ago.

‘The crystal-book that this was taken from, does it have information blight?’

‘Turn the paper over, professor.’

Amelia looked at the other side of the sheet. An address: Snowgrave Avenue – the richest district of Sun Gate, the beating heart of commerce that kept the currents of continental trade circulating for Jackals.

‘Go there now, professor. You may see for yourself if the book is functioning or not.’

It was all Amelia could do to stop herself running.

Snowgrave Avenue lay five minutes’ walk away from Guardian Wren station on the atmospheric, the underground transportation system that served the capital and was now spilling workers out onto the avenue’s wide boulevards. This season, it seemed that the women had taken to wearing the severe uniform of the clerks – dark suits cut long to cover their dresses, and stovepipe hats. Last season it had been bonnets bearing the badges of the parliamentary parties sewn in lace. Amelia still kept an idle eye on the milliners’ window displays in Middlesteel, even if she usually set aside her attentions and the increasingly slim pickings of her salary for following her vocation. Along the avenue, the richer denizens of the counting houses and commercial concerns were stepping out of hansom cabs clattering over Snowgrave’s cobbles, while the truly wealthy – the capital’s finest quality – brushed down their waistcoats and checked their gold pocket watches from the snug comfort of private coaches. To be poor of course, meant coming in by foot, trudging from the rookeries in the shadow of the vast new pneumatic towers, water-reinforced rubber gurgling over the vendors’ cries of eels and fresh milk for sale.

Amelia gazed up at the tower that matched the address on her sheet. Seventy storeys high, but unlike its neighbours, the pneumatic building had no granite plinth outside, no brass plate announcing the names of the concerns inside. Perhaps they had yet to get around to erecting one? A lot of new towers had gone up after Quatérshift’s invasion of Jackals a few years back; half the city had been left burning after Jackals’ aerial navy had been turned against her own capital in an unspeakable act of treachery.

Inside, the atrium was polished marble, tall men in ornate frock coats waiting as if they were the sentries outside parliament. Each doorman held a bulldog on a leash, the creatures’ black noses swollen to the size of a tomato. The canines had been twisted – either by worldsinger sorcery or by the even more disrerutable hands of womb mages.

‘Damson Harsh,’ said one of the doormen. ‘Please do come in. We have been expecting you.’

Amelia looked down at the bulldog sniffing suspiciously around her ankles.

‘You have discharged a firearm recently, damson?’

‘That’s Professor Harsh, and I may have been smoked by a little blow-barrel sap last month. Who owns this tower?’

‘A man of wealth, professor,’ said the doorman, ‘and taste.’ He took out a gutta-percha punch card on a chain, walked over to the other end of the atrium, and pushed the card into a transaction engine mounted on the wall. Drums clicked and rotated on the steam-powered calculating machine. A shiny copper door drew back, revealing a lifting room larger than the lounge of Amelia’s lodgings back in Crisparkle Street.

The large doorman indicated the lifting room. ‘Please, professor.’

Amelia stepped into the room and pointed down at the bulldog. ‘Can your pup smell out the edge on a dagger too?’

‘Of course not, professor.’ He winked and indicated one of the other bulldogs. ‘That’s his job.’

Amelia looked at herself in the lifting room’s mirror. The yellow gaslight made her face look pale; she had still not recovered from the dehydration she had endured fleeing Cassarabia. There was no way around it, she looked like a mess and she could not imagine who in Jackals would possibly want to offer her a job now – Circle’s teeth, she would not offer herself a job if she had walked into her old study back at the college.

After the lifting room had silently pulled itself as high as it was going to rise, its doors slid open. Amelia found herself facing three women who could have been sisters of the lady she had met in the college grounds. Hard, beautiful faces inspecting her, weighing her up. Calculating how difficult it would be to bring her down.

‘Good morning, ladies,’ said Amelia. ‘Would you care to sniff my legs, too?’

‘There are few academics who stroll the streets of Middlesteel carrying weapons,’ said one of the guards, a scar across her cheek creasing as she talked. That strange accent again. All these whippers had lived in Jackals long enough for it to dwindle to a faint burr.

Amelia noted how one of the women opened the door for her, while the other two not-so-subtly positioned themselves behind her, just outside her field of vision. ‘Weapons? Just a sharp mind, today. Is all this really necessary?’

‘I believe so,’ said scar-face. ‘You have, after all, threatened to kill our employer.’

Amelia’s eyes narrowed when she saw who was waiting for her inside the room. Him.

‘So I have.’

‘You made the threat at your father’s funeral,’ said Abraham Quest, ‘as I recall.’

‘Just a fourteen-year-old girl speaking. I imagine you must have been reading the obituaries very closely back then,’ said Amelia. ‘How many suicides did you cause that year?’

‘None at all, professor. Suicide is caused when you place a gun to your temple and pull the trigger in a misguided attempt to cleanse the stain on your family’s honour. The pistol is not the cause, and the course of your life is not an excuse for it. If you take a walk in Goldhair Park you must expect that sometimes it will rain and sometimes it will be sunny. It is no good whining when you get wet. You cannot control the weather; all you can control is how you feel about getting soaked. If you do not wish to get wet, you should avoid taking the walk in the first place.’

‘It wasn’t a shower that bloody bankrupted my father,’ said Amelia, thrusting a finger towards Quest. ‘It was you.’

‘Everyone who places money on the Sun Gate Commercial Exchange knows their capital is at risk. That is what speculation is all about. The possibility of gains, or losses. I did nothing illegal. I merely leveraged my own wit to play the game significantly better than everyone else at the table.’

‘I understand the exchange feels rather differently,’ said Amelia. ‘Which is why you and any factor who works for you has been banned for life from setting foot in the building again.’

‘Mere petulance on their part,’ said Quest. He turned to gaze out over a commanding view of the towers and spires of Middlesteel. ‘It was not that I was a better player than the other members of the exchange that saw me disbarred, it was their cupidity – that I would not explain to them the predictive models I had set running on my transaction engines. They had not even realized it was possible to use a transaction engine in such a way and it does not matter how many engine men and cardsharps they buy in – they will never be able to reengineer my achievements. I showed them how unbearably dull they all are, and they will never forgive me for parading their ignorance in front of the nation.’

Amelia could not believe the sheer arrogance of the man. Abraham Quest, the only man in the history of Jackals to have a financial crash named after him. He had walked away from the table with all the chips and damn near shut down the whole financial gaming house in the process.

She screwed up the piece of paper that had led her here and threw it down on his expensive Cassarabian rug. ‘That’s what I think of your job offer, Quest. I’m off to join a dig along the Mechancian Spine.’

‘Don’t walk out of the door,’ said Quest. ‘At least, not until you see what I have uncovered. It appears we may disagree as to where responsibility for our personal choices rests, but believe me when I say I am truly sorry that your father lost his seat in parliament after he was declared bankrupt. I feel even sadder that he felt he had so little to live for that he took the so-called path of honour. When he was alive, I know he supported the Camlantean heresy – perhaps it is only fitting that it should be the House of Quest that helps you take a few steps closer to the lost city.’

Camlantis. ‘What do you know about the city, Quest?’

‘A few things that you won’t find in the musty journals circulating around the College of Saint Vine’s,’ said Quest. ‘Such as where the city is – or should I say, where the city was.’

‘I don’t believe—’

‘Please,’ said Quest, opening a door at the side of his office. ‘See for yourself.’

Whoever had installed the reader knew what they were about. The hexagonal crystal-book sat in a snare of cables and wires, bubbling chemical batteries supplying the power electric – the wild energy. Quest must have hired colleagues Amelia had worked with to set up his apparatus. It was a rare skill, handling crystal-books; his mechomancers could not have worked this out for themselves.

‘You have one,’ whispered Amelia. ‘You really do have a working crystal-book.’

‘Not just any book,’ said Quest. ‘This is no ledger of raw trade data or random collection of personal poetry. This book belonged to one of the greatest Camlantean philosophers, one of the ruling librarians – Pairdan. He knew the Black-oil Horde was over-running their empire’s provinces one by one. His story was inscribed on the crystal towards the end of their civilization.’

‘This is priceless,’ gasped Amelia. ‘This could change everything we know about the Camlanteans.’

‘Oh, the book had a price, professor,’ said Quest. ‘Believe me. One that made even myself think twice before paying it.’

‘Why do you care about Camlantis?’ demanded Amelia. ‘This is my life’s work – but for you? What is this? A minor distraction, in between raking in more money than the Greenhall treasury takes from the nation in a year’s taxes?’

‘It is ideas that truly interest me, professor. Concepts that fascinate me. Sadly, it must be admitted, more than people ever have. The legends say the Camlanteans had the perfect civilization. That they lived together in peace for centuries – lived in a society that had abolished hunger, poverty and violence. What lessons could we learn from their lives, what lessons?’

‘That pacifists should build bigger walls to keep their enemies out,’ said Amelia. ‘Where did you get this crystal-book, Quest?’

‘An antique dealer spotted it being used as a doorstop in a bakery in Lace Lane, sewn into a leather bag. The baker had taken it from his grandmother’s cottage when she died and had no idea of its true worth. Unfortunately for myself, the dealer had all his wits about him when it came to placing an accurate value on the crystal-book.’

Amelia ran her fingers along the crystal-book’s cold surface. ‘You can’t keep this here, Quest. Not even you. It has to be studied.’

‘And so it shall be, but not by those dullards at the High Table for whom the existence of a functioning Camlantean society is tantamount to archaeological heresy. You know what they would do with this artefact as well as I do. They would bury the book in the vaults of Middlesteel Museum and take it out once a year for a good polish.’

‘You want me to study it?’

‘More than that … watch.’ Quest walked over to the chemical drums and threw an activation lever, tiny sparks leaping from the wires coiled around the base of the book. With a green nimbus enveloping the crystal, a finger of light crept from the jewel’s surface, fanning out in front of them like mist. The light resolved into an image of a man. He was speaking, but could not be heard – script scrolling up the air to the right of him.

‘This is Pairdan you see here, professor, the last Reader-Administrator of Camlantis.’

Amelia barely heard Quest. She was following the ancient characters crawling up the air while simultaneously trying to watch Pairdan. How old was he? Thirty, perhaps? Young for such an elevated position of power. Pairdan’s head moved to one side, his crown with a single jewel at its centre glinting from the fury of the fires outside, and Amelia saw what he was looking at. Pairdan’s city was ablaze in the distance, fireballs of burning petrol-soaked straw and tar arcing across from the catapults mounted on the Black-oil Horde’s besieging war wagons. The juxtaposition between the communication crystals turning sedately in the high towers of Camlantis’s ethereal spires and the pure animal carnage of the horde was almost too much for Amelia to bear, even with the passage of so many thousands of years. It was as if it was happening now, to one of Jackals’ own cities.

‘Poor Pairdan,’ said Quest. ‘Watch the sadness in the Reader-Administrator’s eyes. He is gazing upon the end of his world, and you can tell that he knows it. The start of a dark age that lasted until the rise of the Chimecan Imperium.’

‘Quiet.’ Amelia was trying to keep up with the scrolling words. ‘I need to concentrate. He is saying something about a plan.’

Quest moved the reader’s control lever up a notch and the image froze in front of them, the bubbling of the vat filling the room with its rotten-egg stench. Amelia started to protest but Quest waved her to silence. ‘The translator I hired lacked your proficiency, professor, but I already have the gist of the story.’ Quest pointed to a high mountain in the image’s distance and the stars glittering above, frozen in aspic and lost in time. ‘This mountain is the key, Amelia. The glaciers passed it by during the coldtime. It hasn’t changed that much over the ages.’

‘You really do know where Camlantis is!’ cried Amelia.

‘Where its foundations were. As best as we can tell, Pairdan’s plan was to deny the city to the Black-oil Horde. It was no random floatquake that destroyed Camlantis, professor.’

Amelia was dumbstruck by the implications. Among the few scholars who treated the Camlantean legends with any respect, Amelia knew the speculation had always been that after the city had been sacked, and the librarian-sorcerers murdered, there had been no one left alive to drain the flows of the world’s energy and it was struck by a floatquake. The worldsingers’ first duty was to tame the leylines that could rip miles of land from the ground and send it spinning up into the cold night. The order of worldsingers mastered the power of the Earth and used it to fuel their sorcery and rituals. When civilizations fell, when order broke down, the incidence of floatquakes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes striking the land also proliferated; that was an undeniable fact.

‘Then the Camlanteans destroyed their own city.’ Amelia could hardly believe her own conclusions.

‘The barbarians weren’t fools,’ said Quest. ‘The horde did not want to burn Camlantis to the ground out of pique or envy. They wanted control of the city of marvels for their own ends. They would have strapped the librarians to their wagons as slaves. With Camlantean power at their disposal, the Wheel Lords would have swept effortlessly across every kingdom of their age. I can imagine no worse fate for a society of pacifists, can you? Turned into grovelling court wizards for a pack of murderous warlords. Watching while the horde tied the children of their conquered subjects behind their wagons, dragging them to bloody ribbons over gravel in their honour races. Abetting in the sack of cities other than their own.’

Amelia looked at the noble frozen image of the Reader-Administrator. ‘Poor man. Poor Pairdan.’

‘Think of it, professor.’ Quest walked towards a porthole-like window cut into his pneumatic tower’s rubber walls. ‘Somewhere in the heavens Camlantis is still spinning around the world. Not a sacked ruin of marble and stone, but intact, its empty streets a home for nesting eagles and the dust of Pairdan’s hopes. That is your dream too, is it not?’

Damn his eyes. Quest knew it was. ‘You said you know where the city was located, before the floatquake?’

‘And the reason why its ruined foundations have never been discovered.’ Quest led her back to a table in his office where one of his Catosian soldiers had unfurled a map. His finger hovered over a large swathe of territory, most of it coloured black for the unknown and the unexplored. ‘Liongeli.’

Amelia looked askance at the featureless, uncharted expanse. A jungle hell without end. An environment so forbidding that only distant cousins of the race of man such as the shell-armoured craynarbians could make their home there. ‘Your geographers must have made a mistake, Quest. All the ancient texts suggest that the location of Camlantis should lie far further north. My best guess is somewhere north of the Catosian League, or perhaps buried beneath the pampas of Kikkosico. It may even be underneath the wastes controlled by the polar barbarians.’

Quest shook his head. ‘Trust me, Amelia. I have established my place in the world by following my contrarian instincts. Would it surprise you to learn that yours is not the only academic heresy I have been following? In matters of continental geography, there is a hypothesis currently proscribed by the High Table that posits our entire world may have shifted its position many times in the past, with north exchanging its position with south and the whole skin of the world sliding in upheaval. Earthquakes, floatquakes, fire and brimstone. You are correct, professor, in a manner of speaking. The foundations of Camlantis are further north – it is just that further north is now further south by seven hundred miles.’

How could that be true? Was their world so flimsy? But if it was, if it was …

‘All those years scrabbling about the pampas,’ said Amelia, the enormity of Quest’s words sinking in, ‘petitioning the God-Emperor of Kikkosico for just one more set of travel papers for just one more province. We weren’t even searching for the city in the right country!’

Quest rolled out a second, more detailed map of Liongeli. A private trader’s map, no doubt very expensive to obtain. Depressingly large areas of the jungle vastness were still left unmarked on it. ‘But your instincts were correct, Amelia. The city is no myth. It is – was – here!’ He tapped the source of the River Shedarkshe, a vast lake-like crater that fed the mightiest watercourse known to Jackelian cartographers. ‘When the city was uprooted and blown into the sky by the Camlantean sorcerers it left a basin, one that was filled by rain and sink water. It’s an inland sea now, called Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’

Amelia shook her head in amazement. It was as if the Midwinter gift-giving by Mother White Horse had arrived early; a whole track of lost history opening up for her. It all made sense now. Why her digs had been so damned fruitless. The world had changed and changed again. What had once been a paradise with gentle weather systems now lay buried under a jungle.

‘You can see for yourself in some of the other crystal-book recordings. Pairdan talks to a council of his people about building up the currents of earthflow, ready to crack the land and lift their city away from the horde.’

‘Are there any clues to where the remains of Camlantis are floating now?’

Quest shook his head. ‘Sadly, no, but there are hints that the location of the city might be inscribed on other crystal-books, buried as a time-capsule for their descendents, along with blueprints of their greatest marvels. I am hopeful the ruined foundations may contain clues to Camlantis’s current location.’

‘No airship crew has ever reported sighting Camlantis,’ said Amelia. ‘It has always been my belief that our aerostats cannot yet travel high enough to spot it.’

‘That is a failing I am planning to remedy. I have my airwrights constructing a fleet of high-lifters, airships that will be capable of travelling into the thinnest atmosphere – so high we might touch the moons themselves.’

‘You’ve been reading too much celestial fiction,’ said Amelia.

‘Imagination, professor. With imagination anything is possible. You imagined a lost city where everyone else saw only myth and an absence of evidence. The first step to achieving any task is imagining that it may be possible. Without such belief you would never begin your journey and would only follow your doubts to failure.’

‘The RAN won’t authorize a goose chase of this magnitude,’ said Amelia. ‘Not even for the great Abraham Quest.’

‘What the Board of the Admiralty does not know, will not hurt them. Your task is to travel into Liongeli and find me the location of the city in the heavens. I shall provide us with the means to journey up to its airless temples and streets.’

She looked at the featureless anonymity of Liongeli on the map. The heart of darkness. Her expedition would need to travel further into the interior of the jungle than anyone had ever ventured to date.

‘Have you squirrelled away enough celgas from the navy to make an airship flight to Liongeli?’

Quest shook his head. ‘I might be able to land you at the foot of the Shedarkshe by aerostat, but not any further. The source of the river is in the heart of Daggish territory. The green-mesh. They would burn any trespassing Jackelian airship out of the sky with their flame cannons.’

Amelia sucked in her breath. She had enough craynarbian friends to have heard their tales of the terror of Liongeli. The greenmesh. A territory of animals and vegetation merged into a deadly living symbiosis of evil. The Daggish might be called an empire, considered a polity, but it was really an ancient hive, evolved out of the fierce fight for resources at the jungle’s deep interior into something alien and brooding. At best, outsiders were just rogue cells to be absorbed into its cooperative. At worst they were enemies to be slain on sight. Quest must be insane. Her expedition would need to do their work on the bed of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo, carry out sensitive underwater archaeology while trying to remain un detected by creatures that would rip them apart merely for the crime of violating their realm.

‘If the city’s foundations are on Daggish territory I don’t think it can be done,’ said Amelia. ‘There must be another way to uncover the location of Camlantis in the heavens?’

‘Whatever remains of their civilization on earth is under the waters of this lake.’ Quest paced up and down, his arms waving as he became animated. ‘The legends speak of a million people in Camlantis, close to a million citizens who sacrificed their lives so their legacy could not be perverted by the barbarian hordes of their age. Think of the absolute courage of such an act, blowing your own home into the heavens, a slow death of cold and airlessness for yourself and your friends and your family, rather than turning away from your ideals of pacifism. You could spend a lifetime futilely attending digs in Mechancia, Kikkosico, Cassarabia, hoping to find some clue in a trader’s journal or a refugee’s crystal-book as to where they sent their city.’ His finger stabbed down on Liongeli. ‘This is the mother lode. That it is now underwater close to the shores of a Daggish city in the jungle’s heart is an accident of geography we must overcome.’

‘Underwater,’ mused Amelia. Then she grinned. ‘How much money do you really want to spend on this expedition, Quest?’

‘To unlock the secrets of the ancients, to give Jackals a chance of living in the prosperity and peace of the Camlantean age? How much money do you require?’

Amelia explained her plan.

Veryann watched the professor of archaeology leave the tower. ‘She is almost as mad as you are, Abraham Quest.’

‘Mad? No. Inspired,’ said Quest. ‘Her plan is quite inspired. Did you know she studied under Hull? The very fellow who translated the Camlantean language and worked out how the crystal-books could be activated.’

‘If he were alive, I suppose you would also hire him for your expedition.’

‘Yes, I suppose I would,’ said Quest.

‘Still, for all her cleverness, her inspiration, you did not show the professor the images from the second crystal-book of the pair you purchased.’

‘The contents of the second crystal-book would disturb her,’ said Quest. ‘I prefer to keep Amelia’s faith pure, unwavering.’

‘Yes, I imagine the images would disturb her,’ said Veryann. ‘Your ideals have too high a risk attached to them. Paradise is not to be made on Earth.’

‘It was made here once.’ Quest stood in front of one of the large portholes, listening to the gurgle of water moving through his pneumatic tower. He pointed towards the sky. ‘And the secret to unlocking it all again is hidden up there.’

Smike did not know what to make of the old fellow. It was not often a blind man would venture into the rookeries of Rottonbow. What would someone wearing heavy grey robes in the manner of a Circlist monk be doing wandering one of Middlesteel’s most dangerous districts this late at night? Smike listened to the patter of the gnarled old cane, tapping along the cobbles of the lane between the ancient, tumbledown towers.

For a moment Smike considered letting the old twit keep on wandering deeper into Rottonbow, but even with his limited conscience, he could not do that. Smike skipped to catch up. The sightless visitor looked like an old man, but he was spry for his years.

‘Grandfather,’ called Smike, ‘wait. Do you know where you’re going?’

‘Why yes, I do,’ said the blind man, his face concealed by his hood and the night. ‘I am heading for Furnival’s Wark.’

Smike sucked on his mumbleweed pipe. ‘Old fellow, there’s nothing down there but the paupers’ graveyard.’

‘Yes, I believe an old friend of mine is resting there.’

‘Hang on, grandfather, do you know what hour it is?’

‘For me it is always night,’ chortled the man in the robes.

‘It’ll be the long night for you, grandfather.’ Smike tugged at the visitor’s robes. ‘You’ll get yourself in the soup so you will, tap-tapping with your cane along these avenues. There’s some right old bludgers lurking around Rottonbow. They’d think nothing of sinking a blade in your ribs and emptying your pockets.’

‘But I have so little to steal,’ said the visitor, ‘now that you have taken my money.’ The visitor’s cane darted out and spun his lifted purse back out of the folds of Smike’s tattered jacket. Like the tongue of a toad, a gnarled cold hand snaked out, catching the leather bag and concealing it under his robes again.

Smike stepped back, coughing on his mumbleweed pipe in shock. ‘You can’t blame a lad for trying, now, can you? Are you really blind, governor?’

‘Oh yes,’ the robed figure chortled. ‘The eyes are the first thing to go. The treatment preserves everything else, but not the eyes.’

Smike glanced around nervously. He had thought this blind old fool was prey. But he was mad, or something very close to it.

‘Down in the paupers’ graveyard, have they held the funeral for Sixrivets yet?’

‘The steamman?’ said Smike. ‘There’s not much of his body left in the graveyard, grandfather. After Sixrivets died, the state coroner sent his soul-board back to King Steam’s mountains like the law requires. The rest of the old steamer was so old, the king didn’t even want Sixrivets’ iron bones back to recycle.’

‘But the funeral, it has been held?’

‘Yesterday. His friends from Steamside came over and sung in their strange voices – the machine tongue. Even though Sixrivets wanted to be buried down here, rather than over in Steamside, they still came.’

‘They would come,’ said the old man. ‘Steammen never forget their own. Now, be off with you.’

Smike darted into an alley, then stopped. A thought had occurred to him. The strange old goat’s interest in Sixrivets’ corpse. He was a grave robber! Middlesteel’s mechomancers often raided the graves and corpses of the race of steammen, prying the secrets of their architecture from their rusting crystals and decaying cogs. Sixrivets had been so ancient and obsolete that the denizens of Dwerrihouse Street had thought it safe to honour the steamman’s last wish and inter him with the rest of their people down the road. But this sightless old man must be desperate, on his downers. No wonder he was wandering around at night in one of the least salubrious parts of the capital. He was about his filthy trade.

Smike stuck his head around the corner and watched the figure shuffling towards the graveyard. Smog was drifting across the cobbled streets – the miasma of industry, the currents of the capital’s factories, workshops and manufactories. The blind devil had a bleeding cheek, so he did. Sixrivets was one of their own. They said the steamman had been old enough to see the clatter of steel and puff of gun smoke as the royalist guardsmen and the new pattern army clashed on the streets of Middlesteel during the civil war, six hundred years back. Generations of Dwerrihouse Street’s children had come and gone while Sixrivets pottered about Rottonbow’s lanes. Who was this sightless goat to come and dig him out of their dirt and strip pieces off his body for souvenirs? Smike considered shouting for some of the others, but the canny old prowler might hear him and be off into the night, to return when no one was abroad. Best to watch and wait, catch him in the act, then raise the alarm.

Smike crept past the shadows of the old rookeries, his bare feet numb against the chill of the smog-cold cobbles. At the iron gates of the graveyard – two Circlist eels cast as wheels consuming their own tails – Smike heard voices whispering. He rubbed his eyes and searched for the corner plot where Sixrivets had been buried. Two shadows were there, digging. Neither of them were the old man, though. They were too big for a start. Their voices sounded familiar, too.

Smike slipped into the graveyard and used the cover of the tombs to get closer to the men. He heard the crunch of hard dirt being tossed back and a low cursing growl.

‘Can you see the body yet?’

‘It’s in here somewhere.’

‘I can see the head. The rest of it is coming. Keep at it, carefully now, don’t break anything.’

‘Break anything? Just me back, mate, just me back. This ain’t clay we’re digging through here, you know?’

Smike’s eyes widened. No wonder the voices sounded familiar. It was two of the Catgibbon’s bludgers – thugs that worked for the flash mob, and not just any gang either. The Catgibbon was the queen of the underworld in Middlesteel. They said she held the guardians and half the police of the capital in one pocket, while she kept a good share of the magistrates, doomsmen and other court functionaries in the other. Smike did not know this pair’s names, but they were a familiar sight in the daytime, knocking up pennies with not-so-subtle insinuations of what happened to shop owners who didn’t pay their ‘fire and accident’ money.

Smike was wondering where the sightless old prowler had got to, when a figure emerged from the mist behind the bludgers.

‘Good evening, gentlemen. A cold night for it.’

Startled, they whirled around, one holding his spade ready like an axe, the other dropping his sack and pulling a pistol out from his coat pocket.

‘He’s not the police.’

‘Course he isn’t a crusher; he can’t even see. Look at his cane.’

‘Away with you, blind eyes,’ said the one pointing the pistol. ‘This body is ours.’

‘That body belongs to Sixrivets, surely,’ said the old prowler. ‘And what use do you have for one of the people of the metal, now his ancient soul has passed into the great pattern?’

The spade man pulled out an evil-looking dagger. ‘Let’s do him silent, before he has half of Rottonbow up out of their beds and onto us.’

Spade man jumped across the open grave, but the old prowler had moved, moved faster than anything alive had a right to. The leaping bludger continued his motion; the top half of his body hitting a tombstone while his severed legs tumbled down across the opened grave. His colleague tried to trigger his pistol, but then it dawned on him he was holding a handle only, the other half of the weapon with the chambered crystal charge severed and falling down towards the dirt.

The old man had his legs in a fighter’s position with a silver sword turning in the air, tracing a pattern like calligraphy in the smog, before returning it gracefully to his cane sheath. Smike was about to run – this had all become a little too rich for his simple tastes – when he stepped on a branch, its snap sounding like a cannon shot even to his ears. The blind man moved his head slightly, evaluating the potential threat and choosing to ignore it, then pushed the tip of his cane in front of the frozen bludger’s face. ‘What does the Catgibbon want with ancient steamman body parts?’

Rather than answer, the terrified thug turned and sprinted across the graveyard.

‘Ah well,’ said the old man, staying put. ‘I doubt you knew much, anyway. Breaking the fingers of anyone sticking their nose into one of your rackets, that’s what your kind knows best.’ He announced to the air: ‘And why don’t you come out from behind there, now? I want to thank you for all your help.’

‘I was just keeping myself in reserve, grandfather,’ said Smike. ‘Always good to have someone watching your back. You seemed to be doing well enough against the two of them.’

‘For an old blind man, you mean?’

‘That’s a good one,’ said Smike. ‘You’re not really blind, are you? That’s just a bit of grift to get people to underestimate you. You’re good though, all that tapping you do with your cane. I couldn’t tell from watching you.’

‘I believe I gave you the answer to that question a minute ago, but I can see there’s no fooling you, young fellow.’

‘Did you know Sixrivets, grandfather? Were you protecting an old friend?’

‘Something like that.’

Smike pointed to the opened grave, the steamman’s remains keeping company with the two halves of the dead thug’s body. ‘What did the flash mob’s lads want with Sixrivets’ corpse, then?’

‘I was hoping you might know the answer to that question.’

Smike shook his head. ‘Not me, mate.’

‘Pity. Well, I have my suspicions. But they are not for sharing.’ The old man picked up the criminal’s fallen sack, climbed into the grave and began to fill it with the rusted parts of the entombed steamman. When he had finished he pulled himself out and passed the sack to Smike.

Smike looked at the sack in disgust. ‘What do you want me to do with this?’

‘I’m sure you’re not completely unacquainted with the means of concealing ill-gotten gains.’ He produced two silver sovereigns. ‘One of these is for hiding Sixrivets’ body parts some place the flash mob will not be able to lay their hands on the old steamer. Please don’t just toss the sack in the river, Sixrivets deserves better than that, and if that is what I desired, I could throw him in the Gambleflowers myself and save the cost of a sovereign.’

‘And the other coin?’

‘For carrying a message to someone who can help clear up this mess. You must tell them what you saw this night, and you must memorize what I am about to tell you.’

Smike listened intently to what the old man had to say. Those two shining coins were more than he usually managed to steal in a couple of months.

When the old man had finished relaying the message and answered most of Smike’s queries to his satisfaction, the lad concluded by asking the obvious question. ‘How do you know I won’t just pocket your two coins and do a runner?’

‘Firstly, because I will find you and remind you of a bargain badly made. Secondly, because when I return from my business I shall pass you another coin to befriend the two now warming your pocket.’

‘But you don’t even know where I live …’ said Smike.

The old goat tapped the side of his nose. ‘The musk of cheap mumbleweed? I shall find your lodgings. Even if you move. You will have to be patient for your third coin, though. I may be away some time, as my business will be taking me out of the capital for a little while.’

Smike waited until the blind old man had disappeared into the smog, the tapping of his cane against the gravestones fading to nothing, before he gathered the courage to bite into the silver sovereigns. The coins were real enough. Smike looked at the two halves of the Catgibbon’s enforcer spilled across the grave that had been opened. Time to be off, in case the crimelord’s blades came back in force.

The coins vanished back into the pickpocket’s jacket and he slung the sack over his shoulder. ‘Carry a message for me, boy. Hide Sixrivets for me, boy. What does he think I am, a bleeding postman or a bleeding undertaker?’

But conceal the body and carry the message he would. Out of fear … and for the promise of another silver sovereign.

Professor Amelia Harsh nodded politely to the steamman pushing a flattening-roller across the lawn, a little iron goblin with a single telescope-like eye. It nodded back at her. The drone was not intelligent enough to enter directly into conversation with Amelia, but it would no doubt pass on word of her arrival back to the central consciousness that controlled it.

Amelia walked along the gravel path and looked up at the tower, a large clockface dominating the upper storey of the building. Tock House showed little sign of the ravages of war now, but it had been left in quite a state after the invasion of Middlesteel. Attacked, burnt, then finally occupied and looted by the shifties. Amelia knew she was lucky that she had been out in the counties in Stainfolk when Quatérshift’s vicious Third Brigade had seized Jackals’ capital; but she had counted as friends those who had lived here – and one of them, sadly, had not been as fortunate as she had. Amelia had helped the current tenants of Tock House search for Silas Nickleby’s body in the undercity, but they had not even found enough of his corpse to bury out in the orchard.

Before Amelia got to the pair of stone lions flanking the stairs to the tower, the house’s door pulled back, revealing a flame-haired young woman waiting to greet her. Amelia stuck out her over-sized hand to meet the pale, slim palm extended towards her.

‘Professor Harsh, it has been too long. I heard about you losing your position at the college, but you weren’t at your lodgings when I called on you.’

‘I’ve been out and about, kid, you know me. So where did you hear that piece of scurrilous gossip?’

‘A mutual friend,’ said Molly Templar. ‘One who works in the engine rooms at Greenhall.’

‘That weasel Binchy? I’m surprised he’s still talking to you after what happened to him during the invasion.’

Molly shrugged and led Amelia into the comfortable hallway of Tock House. ‘Once a cardsharp, always a cardsharp. He’s got nothing better to do than set his punch cards to work on the drums of Greenhall’s engines. He’s probably keeping tabs on all of us. Do you need money, professor, to finance your work?’

‘My work always needs money, kid, but not from the likes of you.’

‘You saved my life, professor, and whatever problems I have now, thankfully money is not one of them.’

‘Yes, that much I figured,’ said Amelia. ‘I read your last novel, Molly, along with most of the rest of Jackals.’

‘Just so that you know,’ said Molly, ‘the offer is always there if you need it.’

‘Borrow money from your enemies. Never from your friends or family. That’s an old Chimecan proverb. No, I’ve come to call on the old sea dog, if he’s around?’

Molly took her along a sweeping staircase. ‘The commodore is up with Aliquot Coppertracks. He has been helping the old steamer all week on his latest obsession.’

Amelia nodded. The enthusiasms of the steamman genius that shared Tock House’s rooms with Molly and the commodore were never anything other than wholly committed. Coppertracks’ laboratory resided alongside the clock mechanism of the tower’s top floor. Sometimes it was hard to see where the cogs and parts of the clock house began and the rotating, twisting, chemical-misting mess of the steamman’s research ended. Aliquot Coppertracks rolled across the floorboards, his transparent skull ablaze with the fizz of mental energies, drones – the mu-bodies of his expanded consciousness – scurrying about their steamman master, closely followed by Commodore Black. An oil-stained leather apron had replaced the submariner’s usual waistcoat and jacket, and the bear-sized man was staggering under the weight of a crate of machinery.

‘Ah, Aliquot. This is no work for a poor old fellow like me. Another box for hulking down to the woods.’

‘Dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks, ‘the quicker we move this material to the woods the quicker we can begin work on the next stage of our project.’

The commodore saw Amelia standing with Molly and he stumbled across to them. ‘Professor Harsh. Have you come to offer us the strength of your blessed muscled arms today? Coppertracks has us all building a mad temple to his genius out in our orchard. Most of Middlesteel would be pleased to grow apples and pears in their gardens, but we must labour on some damn fool tower for him.’

‘Amelia softbody,’ implored the steamman. ‘As a fellow creature of learning you must talk some gumption into our recalcitrant friend. We are setting up a mechanism to detect vibrations across the aether. It is my contention that there are intelligences on the celestial spheres neighbouring our own world, and that they may wish to communicate with us should a suitable mechanism to commune with them be constructed.’

Amelia stepped aside as a couple of Coppertracks’ iron goblins left the clock chamber with a heft of cable. ‘Vibrations across the aether? I don’t know, Aliquot, it sounds like you have been taking Molly’s new fashion in novels a little too seriously.’

‘Good for you, lass,’ said the commodore, resting down his crate. ‘The blessed voice of reason at last. I said this scheme was fit for nothing but the plot of a celestial fiction yarn when Aliquot started spending our precious few remaining coins on it.’

Amelia picked up the crate. ‘I’ll take this down to your orchard for you, Jared. You can listen to what I have to say, then tell me if I still sound like the voice of reason to you …’

‘Liongeli,’ spluttered the commodore in the shadow of a lashed-together tower of steel and crystals. ‘Amelia, lass, it cannot be done. Nobody has ever navigated that far up the Shedarkshe before.’

‘But the river is deep enough,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s more like an inland sea along many stretches of the jungle.’

‘Deep enough your river may be.’ Black scratched nervously at his dark bushy beard. ‘But there is a mighty fine reason why no u-boat or surface ship travels further east than the trading post at Rapalaw Junction. There’s things biding in the jungle – in the river too – creatures that make the terrible beasts of the ocean I have faced look like so many pilchards on a plate.’

‘There would be money, commodore, for mounting that kind of expedition.’

The commodore tapped the makeshift tower rising in Tock House’s orchard. ‘You can pile those guineas on my grave, lass. I will be staying here and helping Coppertracks build his mad tower to send messages out to the angels. The last time I listened to you, we both ended up being chased across the pampas of Kikkosico by those devils from the god-emperor’s legions while trying to avoid the rebel army. I just need a few years to rest my mortal bones now. Good hearty food and a bottle of warm wine before I turn in for the night, that’s enough excitement for me.’

‘Just give me a day to change your mind, you old dog,’ said Amelia. ‘You owe me that much.’

‘I’ll give you your day,’ said Commodore Black. ‘But you might as well take a year, lass. Blacky’s mind is not for changing anymore, not when it comes to putting my neck on the block for more fool adventures.’

Amelia smiled and produced two elegant-looking punch cards from her jacket.

‘And what would those two be now, professor?’

‘Boarding passes for an airship running out of Maydon Statodrome,’ said Amelia. ‘We’re going for a day trip to Spumehead.’

Spumehead harbour lay crowded with the craft of commerce resting on the waters, as befitted the largest port on the west coast of Jackals. There was a familiar comfort to the sight. Commodore Black watched the clipper sails billowing as they turned to avoid cumbersome paddle steamers heading out for the colonies. Some of the larger vessels sailed in convoy, the shadow of RAN aerostats dark on the waves as the aerial navy escorted their merchants out through the pirate runs of the Adelphi Straits. Black’s keen eye spotted the white trails of underwater boats tracing past the stone Martello towers guarding the harbour fortifications. He sighed as a submarine broke the surface next to a line of tramp freighters, ugly triple-hulled affairs designed to bypass the Garurian Boils and the dangerous tracts of the Fire Sea.

The commodore looked across at Amelia, her pocket book unusually flush with banknotes to spend on two expensive airship berths to the coast. His suspicious hackles had been prickled. ‘I know a fine jinn house nearby, lass, if you have brought us here to feed and water poor old Blacky in an attempt to sign him up for your perilous enterprise. But I will warn you again, it’ll take more than a sniff of salt down by the water of the harbour to make me find my sea legs.’

‘Lunch later, Jared,’ said Amelia. ‘Whether you agree to skipper for me or not.’

‘You seem blessed confident, professor.’

She led him down through the town, along quays covered with drying fishing nets, past traders wheeling barrows of food and victuals to vend off the skiffs plying the harbour. A large building had been built into the cliff at the opposite end of the harbour and a figure in a crimson-lined velvet cloak was standing by the iron gates of its entrance, waiting for them.

‘Amelia,’ the man greeted them, ‘Commodore Black. I do not believe I have had the privilege before.’

With a start the old sea dog realized who he was looking at, that striking profile familiar from so many line-drawn cartoons in the capital’s news sheets. ‘Abraham Quest! Now I know why the professor’s pockets are suddenly fat with jingling pennies. What is this place, man, and what is your part in this fool enterprise of Amelia’s to sail into uncharted Liongeli?’

‘These are the Spumehead submarine pens,’ said Quest. ‘The House of Quest’s submarine pens, to be precise. Amelia has led me to believe that you might be familiar with them.’

‘Pah,’ said the commodore. ‘An independent skipper ties up on the surface and pays day-labour to scrape the barnacles off his hull, not your expensive grease monkeys. Are you here to offer me vast sums of money, Abraham Quest, to pay me to sail up the Shedarkshe? It’s a one-way trip, I can tell you that.’

‘Yes,’ said Quest. ‘I did rather assume that you still had enough of the treasure of the Peacock Herne left in the ledgers of the capital’s counting houses to make any financial inducements I might offer you seem of limited appeal.’

The commodore and Amelia followed Quest through the mountain-carved passages of the submarine pens, into a gas-lit chamber, the flicker of large triple-headed lamps illuminating dry docks and water pens. Rows of underwater craft were being hammered and repaired by sturdy-looking jacks in leather aprons.

‘You’ve been reading up on me,’ said the commodore. ‘But then, it must take a mortal clever mind to keep all this industry of yours ticking over.’

Quest seemed pleased at being flattered, although with his wealth, the mill owner should have been well-used to it. ‘Clever enough to notice the discrepancies on your citizenship record, commodore. But the professor here believes you are the best skipper for our expedition, and I have come to trust her judgement in such things.’

Quest took them into a side-chamber sealed off from the other pens, and pulled on a chain, lamps hissing into life along a rock-hewn wall.

‘Sweet mercy!’ Commodore Black nearly choked. ‘You have found her!’

Quest’s hand swept along the black hull of the submarine that filled the chamber, a double-turreted conning tower built low towards the rear of the long u-boat. ‘Handsome isn’t she? Now. She was not quite so pretty when I found her, though, beached and broken on the shore of the Isla Needless in the heart of the Fire Sea. I doubt there has ever been a recovery operation more difficult or more dangerous, but Amelia did so insist. I still don’t know why. She could have had her pick of the u-boats built by my own yards … modern craft.’

‘The Sprite of the Lake,’ said the commodore, wiping the tears from his cheeks. ‘Oh my beauty, my gorgeous girl. I thought you had died on the other side of the world.’

‘According to the laws of salvage, I think you will find she is currently my beauty,’ said Quest. ‘And believe me, she had died. With the money I spent on repairing and refitting this damn craft, I could have paid for new boats for half of the free traders running from Spumehead to Hundred Locks.’

‘Refitting!’ Commodore Black was outraged. ‘The Sprite of the Lake is a classic. If you have ripped her soul out, you’ll need more than Amelia’s strong arms to drag me off your wicked corpse.’

Quest waved the submariner’s protests away. ‘I only hire the best, sir. My engineer for this project was Robert Fulton – I trust you are familiar with his work?’

‘Fulton? Yes, I can see it in the lines of her hull, where the breach has been repaired. Those are Fulton lines. Old Bob himself; so, if there was ever a man to do justice to my girl …’

‘Fulton seemed to feel the same way about the vessel as yourself, commodore,’ said Quest. ‘He dated her as nearly six hundred years old. The last of the royalist war boats was his estimation, a Queen Belinda-class seadrinker. Rated for thirty knots and sixty torpedoes. Personally speaking, I would be tempted to make her next berth the maritime wing of Middlesteel Museum.’

Commodore Black pointed to a spherical bulb forward of the two conning towers. ‘What in Lord Tridentscale’s name is that carbuncle?’

‘A bathysphere. We added it along with a new docking ring.’ Quest looked over at Amelia. ‘You haven’t told him what we need the u-boat for?’

‘I just told Jared about the expedition into Liongeli,’ said Amelia. ‘It seemed a little superfluous to mention the underwater archaeology at the end of the journey.’

‘Mortal me,’ wheezed Black. ‘Amelia, you are not taking my beauty up that river of hell? Say it is not true. Has the Sprite not already gone through enough? Boiled under the waters of the Fire Sea, fired upon by the rogues of Porto Principe, hunted by the warships of the Holy Kikkosico Empire. You cannot take her into such peril again.’

‘I am afraid we can, commodore,’ said Amelia. ‘That’s why I need you to skipper her for the expedition.’

‘You can go with the sprite of the lake as her master; her owner after you return safely from Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo,’ said Quest. ‘Or I can get one of my own seadrinker skippers to take her up the Shedarkshe.’

‘Oh, you rogues,’ cried the commodore. ‘Oh, you pair of pirates. Is that to be my choice? Damned to lose my own boat, or damned to pilot her into the mouth of hell itself?’

‘You’ll understand when you see what we are trying to find,’ said Amelia. ‘The difference it could make to the people of Jackals.’

‘Jackals be damned, lass. What has Jackals done for me? Except to line up her greedy Greenhall bureaucrats with their claim on the treasure of the Peacock Herne and their hands grasping for every honest coin my intrepid ventures ever gained.’

Quest walked up to the nose of the Sprite of the Lake and tapped the dark hull under the shadow of her bowsprit, a female warrior thrusting a lance forward towards the cavern wall. ‘I think Fulton did an exceptional job, all things considered.’

Black seemed to crumple in front of them. ‘Damn your wicked cunning eyes, Quest. I’ll do it. But on one condition: I will pick my own crew.’

‘I would expect nothing less,’ said Quest. ‘Just as Amelia has free choice for her members of the expedition. There will be a complement of marines on board too, well-armed to fend off any difficulties you may encounter.’

Black nodded in acquiescence, turning his gaze to the beautiful craft. His craft. The wily mill owner did not have to say that the marines would also be there to ensure he did not just turn the Sprite around and head for the ocean.

Heads turned in the jinn house as the well-dressed lady walked in. She did not look like any of the usual drinkers in the Bernal’s Bacon, where ‘drunk for a ha’penny, dead drunk for two’ was the usual maxim.

She adjusted her bonnet and set a path towards the bar through the rowdy crowd of navvies that had been renovating the capital’s canal navigations. She looked down with distaste at the sawdust streaking her fashionable leather thigh-boots, then met the neutral gaze of the jinn-house owner.

‘Small, medium or large?’ He pulled out three sizes of glass from under the counter.

The unlikely-looking customer sniffed and opened her palm, placing a small purple flower on the counter. It was a purpletwist, the rare plant whose pollen was favoured by sorcerers. Snuff to enhance the power of the worldsong that burned through their bodies.

‘Oh, ho, I see.’ The man opened his bar counter and led her through a back room stacked with jinn barrels. He unlocked a door and indicated she should step through. ‘This way, damson.’

‘There’s nothing here, fellow,’ she protested. ‘This is your back courtyard?’

‘I don’t need to know what occurs out here, damson,’ said the jinn keeper. ‘You just wait a minute now.’

He shut the door and the woman looked around in disapproval. The clatter of a mill doing night work drifted over the yard’s tall walls, the shadows of the shambling towers of the Middlesteel rookeries hiding the broken bottles and rubbish strewn over the mud.

A fluttering noise made her turn. There was a lashlite standing on the wall like a statue, the lizard creature’s wings folded in. Behind her stood Furnace-breath Nick, his devilish mask staring accusingly at her.

‘You have been asking a lot of questions,’ he said, ‘among the refugees. Trying to find me.’

She noticed the mask was changing his voice, making it sound inhuman. ‘Many of those refugees owe their life to you. You saved them from the revolution, you brought them to Jackals from Quatérshift.’

‘There are two types of people that come to stand in this yard,’ said Furnace-breath Nick. ‘There are the Quatérshift agents with gas guns in their pockets and daggers in their boots. And then there are those who need my help.’

‘I don’t have a dagger,’ sobbed the woman. ‘You are my only remaining hope. I have spent my every last coin trying to get my father out of Quatérshift, but my resources have been stolen by traitors and squandered by tricksters.’

‘Tell me of your family.’

‘My father is Jules Robur, he was a member of the Sun King’s court.’

‘I have heard the name. He is a mechomancer?’

‘An artificer,’ said the woman. ‘The greatest in Quatérshift, perhaps the greatest in the world. When the Sun King inspected the royal guard he rode a mechanical horse – a silver steed of my father’s devising. When our armies clashed with the knights steammen on the border of the Free State it was always my father the king turned to first, to devise ways of fighting the people of the metal.’

‘Yes,’ said Furnace-breath Nick, ‘I recall now. Robur made automen of such complexity that it was said King Steam himself was curious to see his methods of manufacture.’

‘His finest creations had only one flaw,’ said the woman. ‘They were so life-like that when they realized they were created to be slaves, they went mad or shut themselves down. He had to create in the second-rate, below his talents, if he wanted his automen to last. You sound as if you are well acquainted with my land, sir?’

Furnace-breath Nick’s cloak caught in the cold wind blowing across the yard, shifting as if it were part of his body. ‘I have travelled there, damson. I have seen what has been done to it in the name of progress and the revolution.’

‘Then you know,’ cried the woman. ‘You know they have my father in an organized community. In a camp. You know what happens in those places.’

‘I know.’ Furnace-breath Nick’s altered voice hissed as if he was in pain. ‘The First Committee has thrown every aristo crat they have yet to push into a Gideon’s Collar into such places. But of all the thousands who now labour and die in the camps, why should I single out your father for rescue?’

The woman seemed surprised by the question. ‘Because he is a good man. Because I’m begging you. Because the First Committee have him there working on plans for revenge weapons to use against Jackals, and they will never release him, however many years he survives. His escape will hurt the revolution deeply.’

Furnace-breath Nick danced from foot to foot, his body twitching. The woman looked uneasily at the mad figure. How in the name of everything that was holy could she trust this creature with the task of saving the precious life of Jules Robur? He looked like one of the inmates in an asylum. Yet it was this madman who seemed able to cross the cursewall that sealed off Quatérshift from Jackals. This lunatic who moved across the revolution-wracked land like a will-o’-the-wisp, murdering Carlists and committeemen with impunity.

She opened her purse and proffered a white card, elegant copperplate script embossed on a stiff square of paper. ‘This is my residence in Westcheap. You will accept my commission?’

Furnace-breath Nick took the card and sniffed it in a slightly obscene way. ‘The property of a lady. If your father is alive, I shall find him.’

He walked along the wall, standing next to the silent, still lashlite.

‘The Carlists,’ called the woman. ‘They’ve killed the Sun King, they’ve murdered most of my family and friends, stolen my lands and property, banned the worship of my god. All this they have done to me. But why do you hate them?’

‘I don’t hate them,’ said Furnace-breath Nick. ‘But I shall destroy them.’

The lashlite seized Furnace-breath Nick under the arms and lifted him corkscrewing into the night, leaving the lady alone with her fears. Her fears and the smell of stale jinn.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘When you said you were going to pick your own crew,’ said Amelia, ‘I had imagined you would take the usual route and pin up a hiring notice outside the drinking houses of Spumehead.’

Commodore Black tapped his cane on the roof of the hansom cab, and there was a clatter of hooves outside as the horse drew to a stop. ‘I want officers I have worked with, lass, and seadrinkers who have some knowledge of the rivers of Liongeli. Not the tavern sweepings of Jackals’ ports; nor Quest’s cautious house-men, for that matter.’

The cabbie jumped off his step behind the carriage and opened the door for them. Outside, the boulevards of Goldhair Park were still crowded with revellers despite – or perhaps, because of – the late hour. Women wore their finest shawls to warm themselves against the cold evening air, their escorts a sea of bobbing dark stovepipe hats.

‘I was under the impression that you had buried most of your last crew on the Isla Needless after your boat was wrecked.’

‘Don’t speak of those terrible times, Amelia,’ implored the commodore. ‘It was not the Fire Sea or the rocks around the island that did for my fine lads, it was the things on the island, along with the fever that near carried me away along the Circle’s turn.’

Amelia looked about. They were at the west end of Goldhair Park’s manicured gardens, near the gambling pits along the Tulkinghorn Road. ‘What are you up to, Jared? The days when I needed to finance an expedition by betting on cock fights are behind me now.’

‘Yes, there is you, flush with the jingle of that clever boy’s coins in your pockets,’ said the commodore. ‘But it’s a different sort of fight we have come to see tonight.’

A slight drizzle started to fall and promenading couples scattered for the trees and pavilions, parasols opening like flowers. Commodore Black took Amelia through a gate in the railing, towards the entrance of one of the brightly lit gambling pits. A grasper with a ruff of red fur poking out of his doorman’s uniform admitted them with a nod towards the commodore. Inside, a narrow corridor led them to a large chamber where three separate seat-lined pits stood crowded with guests and gamblers. Lit by cheap-burning slipsharp oil, the top of the circular hall was lined with bars and food-serving hatches.

Amelia had to shout over the rumble of the crowds. ‘I said I would help you find a crew, not a book-maker.’

One of the pits lay temporarily empty; while in the second a pair of snarling upland mountain cats circled each other, ignoring the roar of the crowd and the jabbing lances of their handlers. In the third pit a pair of men squatted, each trying to lift a heavier weight than his rival, dumbbells lined up in front of them in increasing size. Each of the muscle men was muttering a chant, trying to channel the capital’s leylines and tap into the worldsong. It was a petty use of sorcery, for if either of the competitors had any real talent, they would have been admitted to the order of worldsingers and taken the purple robes.

Amelia followed the submariner down the steps to the empty pit, squeezing past the expectant Jackelians waiting there. At the end of the row, a female craynarbian sat next to a short old man with pale, staring eyes. The craynarbian appeared to recognize Jared Black, the clan patterns on her shell armour glimmering orange in the artificial light.

‘A fine evening for it, is it not?’ said the commodore.

‘What ill tide has carried you in here?’ asked the cray-narbian woman, not bothering to hide the suspicion in her voice.

‘Cannot a poor fellow go out for an evening’s entertainment without his motives being impugned?’ said the commodore. ‘Although now you mention, I did recall hearing that the pair of you had blown in here with Gabriel.’

As the craynarbian glowered at the commodore, Amelia realized the short man next to her was blind.

‘It’s a mortal terrible thing,’ Black told Amelia, ‘the superstitious nature of submariners. You’re on a boat that gets sunk by a pod of calfing slipsharps and you’re one of the lucky ones that gets to a breather helmet and reaches the surface. Why, you’d think you’d thank your stars for your good fortune. But not a u-boat crew, no. Seadrinkers fear such people. Call them Jonahs. Shun them in case they put a hex on their screws or a curse on their air recyclers.’

‘You should know all about keeping an unlucky boat, Jared Black,’ said the blind man.

‘Not so unlucky,’ said the commodore. ‘My beautiful Sprite might have taken a few bumps, but she saw me return safe to Jackals with the treasure of the Peacock Herne in my sea chest. But I can forgive you your waspish tongue. You see, professor, Billy Snow here is one of the finest phone-men this side of the west coast. With his old ears pressed up against a sonar trumpet he can tell you if it’s a school of tuna or barracuda swimming a league beneath you, or listen to a slipsharp’s song and tell you if it be a cow or a bull.’

‘Much good did it do when the pod attacked us,’ said the craynarbian woman.

‘Ah, but then if your last u-boat’s skipper had decided to make a break for it rather than foolishly fighting it out, you would have been running away on the best-kept pair of expansion engines under the water, what with T’ricola’s four sturdy arms to keep the boat humming and her pistons turning …’

Two figures stepped out onto the sawdust of the pit and the crowd around them hollered, the commodore’s remaining words lost in the frenzy.

‘Damsons and gentlemen—’ announced the barker ‘—make your wagers now, before these two titans of pugilism engage in their noble art for your satisfaction, your delight, and, if the stars of fortune smile upon you, your profit!’

‘And there is the third member of my trio of seadrinker artists,’ said Black to Amelia.

‘It is my privilege,’ shouted the barker, ‘nay, it is my honour, to give you Gabriel McCabe, the strongest man in Jackals.’

The light of the gambling pit glimmered off the giant’s dark skin as he took an iron bar from the barker, bent it and tossed it with a clang onto the sawdust.

‘He fits inside a submarine?’ said Amelia.

‘Lass, a first mate has to be able to crack a few heads together. Keeping order is a serious matter on a boat.’

‘And facing this colossus from a legendary age, we have the most vicious fellow ever to step onto this floor … Club-handed Cratchit.’

Amelia did not fancy the chances of the commodore’s friend. The second pugilist had had his right arm twisted by the same back-street sorcerers that had given the professor her own over-sized arms. The bones of his right hand had been swollen and flowed into a massive anvil, an instrument of blunt force, muscles twisted into a corded engine of flesh. Stepping up to his reputation, Club-handed Cratchit did not wait for the barker to announce the start of the bout; he attacked Gabriel McCabe from behind as the submariner was taking the applause of the crowd. Cratchit’s bony mace rebounded off McCabe’s back, sending him sprawling into the pit’s boundary rope, then he tried to kick the legs out from under the commodore’s friend.

McCabe slipped to the floor, scissoring his legs around his opponent’s on the way down and flipping the club-handed brute into the sawdust, then he twisted around to land a kick on Cratchit’s face. They both stood up and warily circled each other. McCabe might be the strongest man in Jackals, but with his bulk, he was certainly not the fastest. Club-handed Cratchit got another strike in, his mace hand slapping McCabe’s chest as if it was ringing off the hull of the commodore’s u-boat. Cratchit went in to beat McCabe’s ribs again, but the giant caught him with both arms and lifted the ferocious fighter off the ground. Club-handed Cratchit was spun around, flailing helplessly in the air.

Then the giant saw Commodore Black seated next to his two old comrades and a strange look crossed his face. Moving his right leg back for leverage, McCabe flung his opponent towards the commodore, the crowd momentarily falling silent as Professor Harsh caught the fighter a second before he crashed into Black.

‘That’s nice work,’ said Cratchit, gazing down admiringly at Amelia’s gorilla-sized arms.

The professor flung Club-handed Cratchit back into the ring where McCabe caught the fighter and turned him over in the air, slamming him into the floor and unconsciousness.

‘Strength trumps guile and viciousness,’ called the barker, recovering from astonishment a second before the crowd, ‘with a little help from his, umm, lady friend in the audience.’

‘Oh, isn’t that dandy?’ said Amelia. ‘Now I’m the strumpet for some pit-floor blade.’

The commodore turned to Billy Snow and T’ricola. ‘Now then, mates, let’s you and I talk about hearing the hiss of an honest gas scrubber in your ears and once more feeling the bob of a deck below your feet.’

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’ Gabriel McCabe’s eyes darted between Billy Snow and T’ricola. ‘I always knew this old goat would end up impaled on a reef, but are you so intent to join him?’

‘It is a boat,’ said Billy Snow, ‘and a berth. Those two have not been in over-supply for the three of us of late.’

‘You cannot keep on taking punishment out there,’ said T’ricola. ‘Sooner or later someone like Cratchit is going to leave a fatal dent in your skull.’

‘Better we take pit money than this,’ said McCabe, looking at Amelia and the commodore. ‘There’s a reason no sane sea-drinker vessel ventures east of Rapalaw Junction, and that is it is suicide to do so.’

‘There’s never been a good enough reason to try before,’ said Amelia. ‘We’re not slave traders or big-game hunters, and we’re following the river Shedarkshe, not trying to explore the interior of Liongeli.’

‘You are sailing into the heart of Daggish territory, damson,’ said McCabe. ‘Even the RAN’s Fleet of the East does not overfly Daggish territory for fear of being brought down by their flame guns. The hive’s heart beats with the reason of sap and bark, and they have all the care for our kind that you would show towards an oak tree that needs to be felled for lumber.’

‘Our luck can be turned,’ insisted Billy Snow. ‘We can lift the sinker’s curse that’s been put on us. Black and his friends are sailing for treasure.’

Gabriel McCabe ran a hand through the stubble of his midnight scalp, still sweating after his bout with Club-handed Cratchit. ‘Jared Black came back to Jackals with the treasure of the Peacock Herne. What he did not come back with was his last crew.’

‘Ah, lad, that is low. I cared for those boys and girls like my own children,’ said the commodore. ‘It was a mortal cruel quirk of fate that led me to survive while their brave hearts perished on that terrible island.’

‘And yet it is you that sits in a fine mansion in Middlesteel,’ said McCabe, ‘while the Sprite of the Lake rots on the rocks of your last folly along with your crew’s bones.’

‘This is no whim of the commodore’s,’ said Amelia. ‘The Sprite of the Lake is in a dry dock in Spumehead and our expedition is backed by the House of Quest. We are going into Liongeli provisioned with the best equipment and fighting force his money can buy.’

That news seemed to take McCabe aback. Following the commodore was one thing. Following the cleverest money in Jackals was quite another.

‘All right,’ said McCabe. ‘Let us say the three of us agree to officer for you, I as your first mate, Billy piloting on the phones and T’ricola in the engine room. Where exactly do you propose to find the rest of a crew so foolish as to follow you? With all the settlements opening up in the colonies now, there is hardly an unemployed seadrinker left between here and New Alban. River work is dangerous at the best of times, and you are talking about navigating the perils of the Shedarkshe …’

‘I thought I would ask Bull,’ said the commodore.

‘Bull?’ McCabe roared with laughter. ‘If you convince Bull Kammerlan to ship with you, I shall follow you, Black. I shall follow you to Lord Tridentscale’s bedroom and back and play you to sleep in your cabin each night with a tune on his seahorse’s harp.’

Amelia followed the commodore as he left the gambling pit, the first mate’s laughter still thundering after them. ‘I thought we agreed to pick the rest of the hands from Quest’s merchant fleet?’

Commodore Black shook his head. ‘McCabe is right. We need deep-river experience, lass, and a crew with fighting spirit who are Liongeli-wise. Not some soft cargo-shifters for whom danger is an undercooked pie in a Shiptown jinn house.’

‘You know where you can lay your hands on that kind of training, Jared?’ asked Amelia. ‘Because if you do, Quest’s recruiters must have missed them.’

‘That is because they were trawling Spumehead’s drinking houses and the free traders’ haunts, lass, and not the cells of Bonegate Prison!’

Bonegate was quite unlike Jackals’ debtors’ prisons. In the sponging-houses, at least, desperate relatives could purchase a few basic comforts for the inmates. At Bonegate, the only comfort was the hope of transportation instead of the quick drop of the noose on one of the scaffolds outside. It was said that the guards made so much money out of selling prime viewing spots in the square on hanging days, that they even bribed juries to ensure a ready supply of victims to dance the Bonegate jig.

Quest’s money, it seemed, was good in the prison also. His powder-wigged lawyer stood by the door while Amelia and the commodore listened to the clank of prisoners’ chains in the corridor outside, the stench of urine and unwashed bodies strong even in the visitors’ chamber.

‘How much longer are they going to keep us waiting?’ asked Amelia.

‘The fellow we’re due to see is serving a water sentence,’ said the commodore. ‘He’s got to be fished out of the tanks and cracked out of his immersion helmet. They keep thousands down in the tanks, and even though each suit carries a number, it’s mortal hard to tell those crabs apart down in the basement levels.’

‘You sound like you’ve sailed close to being tanked yourself.’

‘Not these poor old bones,’ said the commodore. ‘They have never seen the inside of this cursed place, nor will they.’

Amelia held her tongue. She was one of the few people in Jackals to know the commodore’s true identity. The House of Guardians and its political police considered the once notorious rebel duke long dead, but if they ever found out he had been resurrected as Jared Black, the flotation tanks of Bonegate would be the least of the commodore’s travails.

‘This Bull Kammerlan has an entire crew in here?’ asked Amelia.

‘Such is the fate of slavers,’ said the commodore, ‘since the abolitionists had their way and the RAN has been enforcing the suppression act.’

‘Slaving’s a vile trade. You can’t trust the type of pond scum that deals in human cargoes.’

‘The caliph has it legal enough,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s only when you are caught on the wrong side of the Saltless Sea that Jackelian law applies, and although I have no love for that foul trade myself, it’s to the likes of Bull that we must turn for knowledge of your dark river, because there is no one else who sails the Shedarkshe for a profit.’

A clinking at the door signalled the arrival of Bonegate’s ‘guest’. Thanks to the chains connecting his ankles, Bull Kammerlan took small waddling steps. His rubber immersion suit still dripped, soaking the flagstones, and a bone-white nose piece dangled from his face where the breather helmet had been removed.

Two guards in black crushers’ uniforms shoved Kammerlan to sit on a stool opposite Amelia and Black, departing quickly and leaving them with only Quest’s silent lawyer for a witness.

‘Not like diving off a boat on Porto Principe?’ said the commodore.

Bull’s eyes had difficulty focusing on them after so long in the darkness of the immersion tank, but he recognized the voice. ‘Still alive, you miserable old goat? I thought the gout would have taken you by now, the rate of knots you must have been gorging yourself using the trinkets and jewels of the Peacock Herne to pay the bailiff.’

The commodore patted the paunch under his waistcoat. ‘And I’m looking blessed good on it, too, Bull.’

‘You’ve a cheek, old man, coming in here to see me. I only have to shout and tell the crushers who you really are, and they’d have you tossed in the tank alongside me and the boys, tossed in as soon as spit on you.’

‘Nothing hasty now,’ warned the commodore. ‘Or you’ll see both our necks stretched for royalists. Let us use our fine new names in this dark place.’

‘You weren’t in the royalist cause, Black,’ said Bull in a low voice, ‘you were just seated at its breakfast table, that’s all. You were too soft and the fleet-in-exile was burned in its pens by the RAN because of you and your kind’s weakness.’

‘Ah, Bull, let’s forget the old politics and our grievances with the House of Guardians, for parliament still has you and your lads in its cells, even if it is for slavery rather than piracy and sedition. And I have an offer for you and yours that might let you all see the light of day again.’

‘How are you going to do that?’ said Bull. ‘You been elected First Guardian, fat man? Is dimples here the new Chief Justice?’

Amelia leant forward. ‘Dimples is all for tossing you back in the tank for the dirty slaver scum you are, sailor-boy.’

Bull laughed. ‘Oh, I like this one. You always did have a taste for them spicy, Black. My little slavery jaunts up the Shedarkshe was just to pay the bills, girl, and I was doing them a favour. Why do you think the craynarbians carry that crab armour of theirs around on their backs? Compared with life in the jungle hell-hole of Liongeli, standing on a Cassarabian auction block has a lot to recommend it.’

The commodore pulled Amelia back before she could knock the prisoner off his stool. He looked Bull dead in the eyes. ‘Isn’t it a mortal shame the Jackelian airship that caught you on the surface with your holds packed full of pitiable craynarbian flesh did not feel the same way.’

‘Jigger Jackals,’ swore Bull, ‘and jigger you too, fat man. We did what we needed to, to survive. You’ve gone native, Black, you’ve forgotten the cause; bought off with soft bedsheets and honeyed hams, paying your taxes to parliament each year like a good fat little shopkeeper.’

Amelia turned to their clerk by the door. ‘Get his helmet and toss him back in the water, we’ve finished with him.’

‘Damn your eyes,’ shouted Bull, ‘I haven’t said I won’t help you.’

‘That’s it,’ said the commodore. ‘You remember all your crew floating alongside you in your tank, you start thinking like the skipper you once were, rather than the man you’ve become. Here’s the offer: you and your people crew for me, lad, a little jaunt up-river into Liongeli. I’ll see your water sentences are converted into nominal transportation – not to the colonies, but to the plantations up at Rapalaw Junction. I’ll hold your papers, and anyone who makes it back alive with me to Jackals will be sailing as a free citizen by the end of our trip.’

‘You have that kind of influence, now?’

‘Not I,’ said the commodore. ‘But old Blacky knows a certain shopkeeper who does.’

The fight seemed to go out of the convict. ‘So, you’re in the House of Guardians’ pocket now, then?’

‘And you are sitting in mine,’ said the commodore, patting the side of his jacket. ‘And we’ll have lots of well-armed soldiers on board, with sharp steel and shells a-plenty to keep your compass true to my course.’

‘Just in case you get any ideas about taking off with our u-boat,’ added Amelia.

Black winked at the convict. ‘You’ll like them when you see them, Bull, that you will.’

Being a good soldier of the People’s Revolutionary Second Brigade, the blue-coated trooper cracked his bayonet-tipped rifle on the floor as he recognized Compatriot Colonel Tarry. Like all trusted Carlists, the compatriot wore a red feather in his tricorn hat, not that Tarry’s loyalty to the revolution could ever be called into question. Not safely, anyway.

Tarry ran a finger along the soldier’s bayonet, testing the edge. ‘I see there is at least one guard in this camp who knows how to use a whetstone on his cutlery.’

The trooper stood to attention even straighter. ‘You do not forget what you learn in the field, compatriot colonel. A sharp bayonet is an effective bayonet.’

‘A man of action, good.’ The colonel leant in closer to the soldier; not that there was anyone else in the corridor to overhear them, but a little paranoia was a healthy reaction to the mores of Quatérshift’s current society. In fact, a lot of paranoia was the healthiest reaction. ‘Prisoner seventy-six is not being productive. The camp committee have been making excuses for him for months now, but I am frankly … disappointed. Have you heard any of the camp committee here speak against the community?’

‘The prisoner is an aristocrat, compatriot colonel,’ said the trooper. ‘We mollycoddle him with coal for his fire and feed him two meals a day. To make a leech such as him productive, a more direct approach is required …’

‘Direct, yes, I like that,’ said the colonel. ‘Yes, into the Gideon’s Collar, a bolt through the neck and let his remains fertilize the people’s fields. Well, we shall see. Open up. I have much to discuss with Compatriot Robur. Let us see how well this pampered aristocrat begs for his miserable life. If you hear any screams …’

‘My hearing is much diminished by the damp of this miserable corridor, compatriot colonel.’

Inside the cell, a hand lay poised above an ink well, a steel quill quivering in the cold, hovering above a sheet of drawing-paper pinned to a draughtsman’s board that had seen better days.

‘You are Robur?’

The prisoner pulled the soiled blankets that lay wrapped around him a little tighter, as if they might protect him from the violence of the colonel. ‘I am Robur, compatriot.’

The officer picked up the cheap sheet of paper on which the prisoner had been sketching his designs. ‘And what, pray tell, do you call this?’

‘What the First Committee has instructed me to create for them, compatriot. A cannon with a firing mechanism controlled by a transaction engine. The improved accuracy will …’

‘Such toys will not assist the revolution,’ shouted the colonel. ‘The people are starving in every province! Will your damn cannon feed our cities, will it put bread on our tables?’

‘You seem well fed enough,’ said Robur, regretting the words the moment they came out of his mouth.

Colonel Tarry backhanded the prisoner, knocking him to the ground. ‘Maggot! You aristocratic, anti-revolutionary scum. You have been sabotaging our war efforts, dragging your heels, just to be fed while your compatriots starve in the world beyond your cell’s comfortable four walls. Starve because your aristocrat friends have sabotaged all our farms. Now you shall pay the price for your treachery.’

The trooper, who had been eavesdropping, opened the door, smiling, sensing an end to his cold vigil outside the cell.

‘Take him,’ ordered the colonel, leading the way. ‘I will not sully my hands by touching this uncommunityist criminal.’

The steel door at the other end of the corridor opened and a chilly gust blew down from Darksun Peak. Of all the organized communities in Quatérshift to be assigned to as a guard, Darksun Fortress was undoubtedly the most miserable. Before the Sun King’s overthrow it had held only the most dangerous Carlist revolutionaries. Now that the men and women it had once held as prisoners sat on the land’s ruling committees, the mountain-dug dungeons had been refilled with the dwindling number of recalcitrants from the old regime.

Colonel Tarry pointed down to the Gideon’s Collar in the centre of the courtyard. The steam-driven killing machine was slowly rocking on its wooden stilts as its boiler hummed a lament. ‘A quick and painless death for you, Robur. Although if I had my way, you would not receive such mercy from the Commonshare. I would pass you to the king’s old torturers and let them quarter you alive after they had dragged the names of all your treacherous friends from your lips.’

Humming happily, the Second Brigade trooper slung his rifle over his shoulder so he didn’t lose his balance; the steps down to the courtyard of this bleak fortress were treacherous enough at the best of times. Usually by now, an aristocrat would be begging for his life. Promising to offer up hidden caches of gold and gems they had buried as the revolution began. But not Robur. The miserable scarecrow had no real wealth, as the trooper well knew, given the number of times his watch had tried to shake him down for a centime or two.

On the battlements below, a gaggle of soldiers quick-stepped, one of them shouting something up that was lost in the cold of the perpetual mist that shrouded the fortress.

‘Damn fools,’ swore Colonel Tarry. ‘Ignore them and bring the traitor over here.’

‘But—’

Something was wrong. The trooper peered over the battlements at the group, looking down towards the crimson, angry face of – it could not be possible – Colonel Tarry!

The closer of the two Colonel Tarrys lifted the trooper’s boots and flipped him over the battlements, his blue uniform flapping as he fell towards the courtyard below.

The gaunt figure of Robur stumbled back as Colonel Tarry’s face melted and reformed into … a mirror image of Robur’s own, right down to his sunken eyes and sallow, starved cheeks!

‘Who are you?’ Robur demanded.

‘I have many faces, many names,’ Robur’s double hissed back at him, pushing him away from the steps and the sprinting soldiers. ‘You may inquire after them later, should you live.’

‘They’ll shoot us both now, you fool.’

‘They’ve had their pound of flesh from me,’ laughed Robur’s reflection, a finger on his left hand uncurling to reveal an iron barrel that began juddering as a stream of blue marble-sized spheres fired towards the guards, shattering and layering the steps with a veil of gas.

As the real Robur was shoved towards a nearby turret, he had to admire the design of the mechanical arm. You could barely tell it was artificial, even when you knew where to look for the signs of mechomancy. Balls from the guards’ rifles began to hit the wall behind them, showering them both with shards of granite. The troopers were shooting blind through the gas. Robur turned. His insane rescuer was pulling up a pack that had been roped on the outside of the citadel’s walls, left dangling from the crenellations. Once unfastened, the pack unfurled into a bone-like structure, bundles of silk hanging underneath, waiting to fold open. Robur had seen such a thing in journals, before the revolution: but only one nation in the world had a use for them.

‘An airship’s kite-chute. You’re from Jackals! They said you would come, but I did not believe—’

‘They said I would come!’ Robur’s reflection grabbed him and slung a leather harness over his shoulders, clipping Robur to a similar yoke concealed under the fake colonel’s uniform. His face twisted in fury. ‘Who said I would come?’

‘One of the guards was bribed.’ Robur was terrified now, lest his strange rescuer abandon him here on the peaks of Darksun Fortress. ‘They said someone would come from Jackals for me. I thought it was just another of their games to break me.’

His doppelgänger lifted him up and flung them both off the battlements, the silk rustling out into a triangular sail that crackled above their heads – falling – falling – then picking up into the freezing mist that whistled past the mountain. Robur was screaming, but his voice was drowned out by the wind and his liberator’s animal-like howl of victory.

‘If I drop you, Robur, you’ll bloody break. I don’t know why your fool family didn’t just hand out personalized invites to the Committee of Public Security to come and view your break-out.’

Their hair-raising flight terminated ten minutes later in a soggy meadow at the foot of one of the alpine crags, a hard landing which sent Robur rolling into a goatherd’s fence. A sixer lay tethered nearby, the horse scratching at the mud in its eagerness to be off, all six of its hooves shod in expensive, shining steel.

Stumbling to his feet, Robur turned to face his dangerous reflection. ‘Who are you?’

The figure pulled something out of the horse’s saddlebag and swivelled around, a demonic mask staring straight back at him. Furnace-breath Nick. The very devil himself.

‘Here is my true face.’

Robur liked it little better than when the demon had stolen his own. He was backed into the fence now, without even realizing he was trying to flee. ‘The Second Brigade will have their mountain trackers out of barracks and riding across the entire province by the end of the day. Every pass from here to the ocean will have a checkpoint. Unless you have an aero-stat to get us over the cursewall …’

Furnace-breath Nick advanced on the emaciated figure. ‘I do not.’

‘Then how in the sun child’s name are you going to get us out of Quatérshift?’

Furnace-breath Nick’s arm twisted up. Robur heard the grinding from a clockwork mechanism beneath a torn fold of false skin on the arm. So, a trooper’s rifle ball had shattered one of the cogs during their escape. Robur knew he could fix the demon’s arm, but before he could make the offer – and see this marvel close up – there was a burst of air from an artery in Furnace-breath Nick’s artificial wrist. Robur just had time to pluck the tiny feathered dart from his chest before he plunged to the grass, his limbs tightening as if he was crafted from clockwork himself. Paralysis became unconsciousness.

‘That would be my problem,’ said Furnace-breath Nick, scooping the aristocrat’s body up from the grass.

Amelia Harsh grunted as she unclipped the refuelling pipe from the Sprite of the Lake’s hull, the smell of expansion-engine gas lingering in the air as the gutta-percha cable dangled down from Quest’s airship. This would be their final refuelling, now the moors and valleys of Jackals had given way to the endless Eastern Forest, a precursor to Liongeli’s fierce, dense jungle.

Quest’s female soldiers stepped back as the gas line was winched up inside the airship’s chequerboard hull.

‘Clear?’ Gabriel McCabe called down from one of the u-boat’s conning turrets.

Amelia flashed the first mate a thumb, then looked over at Veryann, Abraham Quest’s personal angel of death on this expedition. There was something disconcerting about the woman, and not just the fact that she and her free company of fighters insisted on wearing their Catosian war jackets at all times. Their quilted armour was cut to accommodate the unnaturally swelled muscles that came from chewing the drug shine, and twin pistol holsters stretched over each breast. Veryann was a walking knife. Calm, courteous, but with an edge that could be turned against your throat quicker than your next breath.

‘Do you have a family name, Veryann?’ Amelia asked.

‘Quest,’ said the fighter.

‘You are married—?’

She shook her head and pointed at her bare-armed soldiers as they closed the hatches to the fuel tank. ‘We are all Quest, now. It is our way. You have never travelled to the Catosian League?’

Amelia demurred. The city-states were one of the few lands as advanced in industry and modern philosophy as Jackals, their horseless carriages and mechanical servants ferried across by traders to northern ports like Shiptown. Their insular nature and pure form of democracy – or anarchy, depending on your tastes – serving up endless amusements for the satirical cartoonists of Jackals’ news sheets.

‘Our city was Sathens, a significant trading partner for the House of Quest, but its council fell in a dispute with the city of Unarta. No other city would harbour a disgraced free company, only Abraham Quest stood by us. He was hardly involved in our war at all, yet still he took us in.’

Now Amelia understood why Veryann’s people were so loyal to Quest. After losing one of the ritual wars the cities fought on the plains outside their walls, Veryann’s soldiers would have been ghosts in their own land, turned away from the gates of every civilized state in the League.

A sailor turned the handle on the dive claxon, those still on the decks turning towards the open doors on the conning turrets.

‘Living without a government sounds like a fine thing, doesn’t it?’

Amelia looked behind her. It was Billy Snow, the blind sonar man taking the last opportunity for days to catch a breath in the open air. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Catosian anarchy,’ said Billy, ‘the system that led her mercenaries to Jackals and sanctuary with Quest. Having no authority to boss you around, to give you orders. Voting on every little thing that comes up. It sounds just dandy. Until you realize there is someone to call master – the passions of the mob, or the next person you meet who is stronger or cleverer or bigger than you – or five of their friends. Then it gets ugly real fast.’

Amelia shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound so different from Jackals to me.’

‘It’s plenty different,’ said Billy. ‘Jackals has the law. Parliament’s law.’

‘My father was a Guardian,’ said Amelia. ‘At least, he was until he was disqualified from holding the post as a bankrupt – and he used to have to vote on every little thing that came around too.’

‘He was voting on passing laws, not whether Damson Dawkins next door should be exiled for rumourmongery. Laws can be bigger than people; they can be better than us. I’ll take a good law over a good man’s benevolence every time. In fact, as a rule, I’ll take a bad law over a good man’s intentions.’

‘You’ve been listening to the flow of the water on your phones for too long, old man,’ said Amelia. ‘You’re in danger of becoming a philosopher. Do you need a hand back to the hatch?’

‘Perish the thought that I should start thinking.’ Billy Snow pointed down to the river. ‘I can find my way back inside easily enough, professor; that’s my compass down there, the waters of the Shedarkshe.’

A pod of green-scaled things pushed past the Sprite, heading towards the overgrown bank.

‘You can get about just by the sounds of the jungle?’ said Amelia.

‘No,’ said Billy. ‘We’ve yet to hear the jungle, I think. Wait a week, then you’ll see.’

* * *

Even in the Sprite’s ready room, it was hard to escape from the scent of too many bodies squeezed together in their underwater tin can. Seven days under the surface of the river and the warm air had become a melange of smells. Duty on the conning turrets, when the Sprite briefly surfaced at night, had now officially become a tradable commodity among the expedition members. A brief intake of fresh air to the sound of chirruping from the night feeders in the jungle, the crew’s clothes soaked in sweat from the febrile temperature – even hotter topside than within the Sprite – then the dark hull of the u-boat would slip beneath the water again, the portholes in the conning turret blanketed with bubbling water.

‘We could make better time on the surface,’ said T’ricola. The craynarbian engineer’s sword arm was resting on the table, its serrated bone edge drumming nervously. Only the din of the engine room seemed to bring her comfort. ‘There’s less drag up there, given we’re moving against the current.’

Commodore Black looked across at Bull Kammerlan, and Bull shook his head. ‘It’s safer down here.’

‘We’re not raiding villages for slaves, now,’ said Amelia, ‘and we’re only a day out of Rapalaw Junction. There are still trading boats on the surface.’

‘There’s no greenmesh this far west, I’ll grant you,’ said Bull, ‘but civilized it isn’t. If you’d been topside in a raft with just a couple of bearers for company, you’d have seen how friendly some of them trading folk are. If I had my way, we’d sail on past Rapalaw Junction nice and silent.’

Bull seemed horrified by the very idea of the greenmesh. Jungle that cooperated, plants and animals bound together in an unholy symbiosis to form a single sentient killing machine.

Veryann spoke up, illuminated by the thin green light behind the stained glass dome of the Sprite’s nose. ‘That is not an option. There is someone waiting for us at Rapalaw Junction.’

‘Ah lass, you and your blessed secrets.’ Commodore Black watched as the flash of the u-boat’s lamps briefly exposed several river predators darting out of the way of this strange metal intruder. ‘But we must make land at Rapalaw Junction anyway for our last chance to load fresh water and victuals.’

‘East of Rapalaw belongs to the tribes. Not nice civilized shells, either.’ Bull pointed at T’ricola. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, girl? They would peel off the Sprite’s hull and spear us for their younglings’ supper as soon as look at us. And they have spies inside the trading post, keeping an eye on who is coming and going, counting how many guns we’re sailing with. You want victuals and a full belly, commodore? I’ll settle for one that’s not turning on a craynarbian spit.’

Amelia wagged a finger at the submariner. ‘Maybe if you hadn’t been dirt-gassing their villages and taking their children for slaves—’

The chamber’s hatch was thrown open, one of Bull’s sea-drinkers pitching in. ‘Fire, fire in the engine room!’

Shouts echoed through the boat’s corridors, crewmen sliding down ladders and securing compartments. After taking a flooding breach, a blaze in the confines of the underwater vessel was a seadrinker’s worst fear. Commodore Black was at the speaking trumpet, barking orders to the pilot room and the Sprite bucked as she made a crash surface. Claxons began to sound. Amelia ran with the others for the rear of the boat, pushing past coughing sailors falling out of the engine-room hatch. Seadrinkers with leather fire hoods that made them resemble insects came rushing in behind the professor, lugging fire hoses and water pumps.

The angle of the floor pulled straight with a wrench, a sure sign they were on the surface of the Shedarkshe now.

‘Close the room,’ shouted T’ricola. ‘Everyone out? Then drop the seals port and aft, vent the air and give the bitch nothing to breathe.’

Bull was sliding down a ladder behind them. He grabbed one of his men. ‘Is the fire in the gas tanks?’

‘No, the scrubber room.’

Amelia looked at the craynarbian officer. ‘We’re not going to blow?’

‘Not if the fire’s in our scrubbers, professor. But the scrubbers are a dry area; you hardly ever get a fire down there. I don’t understand how—’

‘The how of it doesn’t matter,’ said Bull. ‘Let the fire burn down without air, then we go in and douse everything. Damn our luck. It seems we’ll be running on the surface to Rapalaw Junction after all.’

‘I thought you’d want to see this,’ T’ricola said to the commodore, pointing to the burnt-out wreck of the Sprite’s expansion-gas scrubbers. She ran the fingers of one of her manipulator arms through the brown liquid bubbling out of a metal grille.

Amelia looked at the sticky residue over the commodore’s shoulder. ‘What is it?’

‘Hull-tile fixative, professor.’ The commodore tapped the cork-like substance that had been exposed under the half-melted wall. ‘But what in Tridentscale’s name was this gunk doing blocking up the tubes on my gas scrubbers?’

‘Some of it might have leaked into the machine when the Sprite was back in the pens,’ said Amelia.

T’ricola indicated a hole in the copper tube feeding the scrubbers. ‘This was holed through with a metal punch, and then the glue was deliberately poured in. I checked our stores. There’s a can of fixative missing.’

Commodore Black tapped the burnt machinery in frustration. ‘That’s a mortal clever way to sabotage a boat. Not quite enough to sink us and move us all along the Circle, but sufficient to keep us on the surface like a dead fish waiting to be spotted by the gulls.’

Amelia looked at the commodore. ‘We can’t stay submerged under the river now?’

‘We’re not one of your pocket aerostats, Amelia. We have no chimneys on the Sprite and we can’t vent our engines through the periscope. If the scrubbers have packed up, then we have to dump the exhaust manually, rather than converting it into dust bricks, and that means running with open vents up on the surface.’

T’ricola angrily kicked the puddled water left by the fire crew. ‘It’s one of Bull’s people that did this. They think if we scratch the expedition before we get to Rapalaw Junction then they all get to sail free back to Jackals with full pardons in their pockets.’

‘Then they’ll be thinking wrong,’ said Black. ‘T’ricola, tell Billy and Gabriel to be keeping an eye on the crew. Then find Veryann and send her down here.’

Amelia almost felt sorry for whoever had done the damage when the situation was explained to Veryann. The Catosian turned pale with anger as the implications of the sabotage settled in.

‘Can this be repaired?’ Veryann asked.

‘Ah, my poor boat. We may be able to jury-rig her at one of the larger workshops in Rapalaw Junction,’ said the commodore. ‘We shall see. If anyone can repair a gas scrubber in this state, it is T’ricola. She can coax melted iron and twisted steel back to life. I have seen her do it before.’

‘I shall post armed sentries,’ said Veryann. ‘Have Gabriel McCabe indicate all your vital systems to us – the things a traitor would go for next: the main pistons, our water supply, fuel, our air. We must guard them all.’

‘I’ll do that, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But be warned, there is not much on my beautiful Sprite that is not vital to our survival.’

Veryann stood looking crossly at the ruined machinery in the scrubber chamber as the commodore and Amelia turned to leave for the main engine room.

‘My poor stars,’ she heard Black groan. ‘Is it not enough that to get my own boat back I have to plunge her into the heart of treacherous Liongeli? Now I find I have a wicked cuckoo making a home in my nest.’

A cuckoo? One of Bull Kammerlan’s convicts trying to shorten their sentence? Veryann pulled out her boot knife – almost a short sword – and rammed it into the exposed tiles. If the commodore had been shown the second crystal-book back in Middlesteel, he might think differently. Someone on board was playing a very dangerous game in trying to stop Abraham Quest’s expedition. Someone who obviously knew things they had no right to know. But a u-boat sailing up the Shedarkshe was a dangerous place to keep a secret. She would make sure that whoever held it would be leaving it in the jungle … along with their decaying bones.

CHAPTER FIVE

Damson Beeton clutched the cream card of the invitation, her cotton mittens barely keeping the chill out as the cold lifted off the Gambleflowers’ waters and washed across the island. The Islands of the Skerries sat in the middle of Middlesteel’s great river, their isolation making them an ideal home for the Jackelian quality; those rich enough not to want to bother with tall walls for their mansions, or private guards to keep the fingers of the capital’s cracksmen, anglers, rampers and myriad other trades of the criminal flash mob out of their silver.

Rich enough to pay for isolation, although, much to the damson’s disgust in this particular instance, not rich enough to want to pay for a full staff to clean Dolorous Hall. A single housekeeper and butler, and not much of a butler at that, to keep a gentleman of the master’s station in the state he deserved to be kept in. It was not proper. No it wasn’t. Not that anyone even knew where the master’s wealth came from. Family money, so the gossip ran. Twenty thousand gold guineas a year. Almost as rich as a real gentleman like Abraham Quest, or one of the bankers from the counting houses of Sun Gate. Jackals was a nation of shopkeepers and merchants, but as well as he paid her, the master of the house would not stretch to any staff larger than a few day-men and maids boated across every morning to help her dust, cook and keep the gardens. It simply was not proper.

‘Every afternoon, he is always here,’ she said to Septimoth, the silent butler waiting beside her. ‘It is not right.’

Septimoth stood there, a statue in the cold – a bony lizard-like statue with wings folded like those of a stone angel. That was another thing. Who ever heard of having a lashlite as a retainer? Graspers made fine servants. Steammen would toil for you all day long and bear life’s travails with stoic resolve. But a lashlite? They preferred their village nests in the mountains and hunts high in the airless atmosphere, tracking the balloon-like skraypers that preyed on airships. Now there was a valuable service to the nation. Hunting skraypers. As a butler, Septimoth – surly, enigmatic lashlite that he was – was frankly abominable.

‘It is his habit,’ said Septimoth. ‘We must respect his wishes, Damson Beeton.’

‘Tish and tosh,’ said the housekeeper. ‘He needs to be out and about, embracing society, not drinking alone in the cold halls of this old place.’ She waved her invitation at the lash-lite. ‘Every day I feed the fireplace with a dozen such as this, all unanswered by him. The height of rudeness. Society wishes to clutch us to its bosom, Septimoth, and we should not turn our back on society.’

‘I believe the master has finished his meditation now,’ said Septimoth.

‘Meditation is it, you say?’ said Damson Beeton. ‘That’s a fancy name for moping about, in my book.’

Septimoth kept his own counsel, and Damson Beeton tutted. How many more nights would she have to stand and ogle the other islands of the Skerries – the river awash with taxi-boat lanterns rowing the great and the good to parties and dinners, the laughter in the gardens, the blaze of chandeliers? It was obvious that the grim corridors of Dolorous Hall would be better filled with the product of her social organizing. But then, would anyone come if she got her way? Dolorous Isle was said to be unlucky. Cursed by its proximity to the old heart of Middlesteel, the part of the city drowned by the great flood of 1570, and then drowned again by design when the river was widened to stop a reoccurrence of the disaster. River boats piloted by those new to the trade still often struck the spire of Lumphill Cathedral protruding from the water, despite parliament’s red buoys bobbing in the currents nearby.

In the garden, the master stood up, leaving his apple tree behind as he shut the gate on the little enclosure. Cornelius Fortune looked tired, even to Damson Beeton’s eyes. The lash-lite and the old woman followed their employer back to the steps of the mansion.

Cornelius noticed the invitation Damson Beeton was clutching. ‘Is it tonight, damson? I had forgotten, to tell you the truth. I should sleep now, I am so tired, but if you have said yes …’

‘Sleep? Why you are a slack-a-bed, sir, you have been sleeping all through the morning and the afternoon. The least you can do now is take the air of the evening in polite company.’

Cornelius rubbed his red eyes. ‘Forgive me, Damson Beeton. It seems as if I have been up for hours.’

‘This is an event to raise finances for the poor,’ chided the housekeeper. ‘Presided over by the House of Quest. There is a function every evening for the rest of the week, so if you can’t make this night, you have no excuse for not attending the other evenings! There will be members of the House of Guardians there, perhaps even the First himself, that old rascal Benjamin Carl. There will be many great ladies looking for suitable matches and—’

Cornelius took the invitation and ran his eyes over it before handing it back. ‘I am glad to see the “poor” will be so well catered for, damson. Light a lantern to call a boat. I shall go.’

Oblivious to his sarcasm the housekeeper bustled off; mollified that she had got her way at last. As she left, she chuckled at herself. She was really very good as a housekeeper. Sometimes she could go for a couple of weeks without remembering once what she really was. But that was as it should be. ‘Damson Beeton’ had been very carefully crafted and put together. Every little quirk. Every little nuance. Now, where in the garden had she stored that damned lantern oil?

‘Your arm is still hurting you; I can see it in the way you walk,’ noted Septimoth. ‘You are taking a boat to visit the old man in the shop?’

‘You know me too well,’ said Cornelius, watching their housekeeper waddle away. He flexed his right arm, the joints hardly moving. ‘I think there’s a rifle ball still lodged in it.’

‘You take too many risks,’ said Septimoth.

Cornelius reached out and touched his friend’s leathery shoulder. ‘No, old friend, most weeks I take far too few.’

‘Do you wish me to come with you?’

‘No. I shall travel to his house like a gentleman,’ said Cornelius. ‘His neighbours will certainly talk if they see you dropping me out of the sky on his roof.’

Septimoth nodded and pulled out his most precious possession, a bone-pipe: all that was left of his mother. ‘Then I shall play for a while.’

Cornelius smiled. Damson Beeton would be pleased. He left Septimoth walking up the stairs to the hatch in the loft, the eyrie between the mansion’s smoke stacks, where he would crouch like a leathery gargoyle and fill the island grounds with his inhuman tunes. It was no wonder the river’s pilots believed this stretch of the water was haunted.

The alien melody had begun as Cornelius reached the quay, the glass door of Damson Beeton’s lantern rattling in the breeze, spilling drops of slipsharp oil down onto the wooden planks.

A long dark shape pulled out of the river, the pilot at the back lifting his oars. ‘Evening, squire.’ The pilot pointed at the other figure sitting in the front of the skiff. ‘Don’t mind if you double up, do you, squire? The islands are fair humming tonight, as busy as I’ve ever seen them. Parties all over the place.’

Cornelius nodded and stepped down into the boat, the other passenger shifting uneasily. Cornelius’s nondescript greatcoat was drawn tight and it gave little clue to its owner’s station. The coat would have suited a private on leave from the regiments as well as it would have covered the finery of a dandy visiting a wealthy relative on the Skerries.

The fact that its social ambivalence allowed its wearer to play either part was not lost on the other passenger, who erred on the side of caution and gave a greeting. ‘A cold night, sir, for such frivolity. It seems there is a ball on almost every piece of land along the river this night.’

Cornelius decided it would be easiest if he put his fellow passenger at ease. ‘I shall have to take my cousin to task, sir, for it seems he never entertains at Dolorous Hall.’

‘I did note the dark windows on your isle, but there is no shame in that. There is entirely too much frivolity in Middlesteel these days.’ He lifted a surgeon’s bag that had been hidden behind his seat. ‘And as a man of medicine, I have often noted the effects that intemperate spirits may have on the body. Jinn, I would say, is the curse of our nation.’

‘Ah, a doctor.’ And a temperance man to boot.

‘Not of the two-legged kind,’ said the passenger. ‘Although I did start out in that noble profession. No, I practise on animals now. A vet. I have noted those who are in a position to do so often care more for their pets than for members of their own family. Indeed, I have just come from the house of Hermia Durrington – perhaps you know the good lady?’

Cornelius shook his head.

‘Her raven is sick and she is quite distraught. But I have prescribed a restorative and I have every confidence that the bird will soon be returned to its …’

Cornelius listened politely for the rest of the journey as the doctor of animals went on to describe every sick canine, feline, bird and mammal owned by the capital’s quality. Even as Cornelius was about to depart, leaving him in the boat, the vet seemed barely aware that he had discovered nothing about his fellow passenger, or that the groans coming from the oarsman were not entirely the result of rowing against the current of the Gambleflowers.

‘I should give you a discount on that ride, squire,’ whispered the pilot as he stopped to let Cornelius alight along a row of dark steps cut into the river embankment.

Cornelius passed him twice the fare. ‘And I shall give you a tip for bearing the rest of the journey.’

As Cornelius watched the boat slip back into the darkness of the river, his face began to melt, his skin turning to streams of liquid flesh, folding and refashioning itself into an exact duplicate of the vet’s features.

‘Her raven is sick and she is quite distraught,’ Cornelius cackled. He pitched the voice again, lower, until it was an exact duplicate of the vet’s own tones.

Anybody who had been watching would have seen a surgeon of animals stroll away into Middlesteel, while the river taxi bore away its remaining passenger – presumably one Cornelius Fortune – into the stream of the Gambleflowers.

As was his habit, Cornelius Fortune assumed the face of the man he had come to visit. Unlike most of those who were on the receiving end of Cornelius’s visitations, Dred Lands – proprietor of the Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard – would not be shocked to meet someone wearing his own face. After all, Dred Lands hardly had much use for it himself these days.

The outside door of the shop was a cheap wooden affair with a latch that was easily lifted by a cracksman’s jimmy, but it was the hall inside where the real security began.

Two iron doors that would have honoured the front of a bank vault barred Cornelius’s way, an old but efficient blood-code machine jutting out from the wall. Cornelius pressed his thumb on the needle, a tear of his blood trickling into its nib as the transaction engine’s drums clicked and clacked in their rotary chamber. Even Cornelius could not imitate another’s essence to the level of detail required to fool one of these machines, but deception would not be needed here. Not when it was mainly his financial resources that funded the life and occupation of one of the few individuals in Middlesteel more reclusive than himself.

On the other side of the doors a steamman waited. Not one of the incredible beings of the life metal from the Steamman Free State, but a dull automaton – little more than an iron zombie – its parts scavenged from the unreliable Catosian servant machines that were available in the more exclusive markets of the capital. Lacking a voicebox as well as the wit to use it, the juddering creature limped down the corridor, through what passed for a showroom for the Old Mechomancery Shop, little more than a warehouse of pawned items awaiting repair.

The steamman’s four arms turned in a slow windmill fashion, keeping balance and urging Cornelius down a spiral staircase. You really had to know where to look to spot the duke’s hole inside the cellar; the fact that the shop was still standing was a testament to that. Six hundred years ago if Isambard Kirkhill and the parliamentarians’ new pattern army had discovered the hidden door, they would have burned the shop down to its foundation stones, along with a few of its neighbours, as a lesson. The metal servant triggered a hidden hatch and a section of the cellar floor opened up, revealing a square of orange light. They went down a line of narrow iron treads like a ship’s stairs. Below, more metal servants tended massive night orchids behind a glass wall, feeding the plants rats – no doubt cornered and trapped in the cold shop above. The rest of the chamber was fitted out like something from a Cassarabian harem or a Middlesteel bawdy house. When the royalists in the capital had hidden down here, they had hidden in style.

Lying on a scatter of large crimson velvet cushions holding a hookah filled with mumbleweed smoke was a figure that might have been mistaken for a steamman himself, but who – as he lifted himself up – revealed a largely human body, albeit one with a metal leg and a silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins that glowed in the orange gas light.

Burned, blackened lips just visible behind the mouth slash in the mask puckered in exasperation. ‘Must you always visit me looking like that?’

‘You with your mask,’ said Cornelius, ‘why should you mind?’

‘You have a cheek, talking to me about wearing masks.’ Dred Lands got up from the cushions, a hiss of compressed steam from the artificial leg leaking out as it took his weight. ‘I need to wear a mask so that people can bear to look at me.’

‘While I need to wear one so they cannot.’ Cornelius let his features re-form, his nose shortening to lose its hook while his brow reshaped and flattened out. ‘There, I am myself again.’

‘Now how can I be sure of that?’ grumbled Dred Lands. ‘For all I know, the real Cornelius Fortune could be a corpse you came across on a battlefield, or the face of your favourite teacher from your youth, now passed away.’

Cornelius tapped his arm. ‘You are familiar enough with this, I think.’

Dred sighed. ‘Enhancements? Or repairs, again?’

‘The latter.’ Cornelius picked up the book the mechomancer had been reading as his friend limped over to the side of the room, pulling back satin sheeting to reveal a luxuriously appointed workshop. Cornelius flicked through the first couple of pages. ‘The Queen in the Leather Mask, by M.W. Templar. You know this nearly made it onto parliament’s sedition list, Dred, the similarities between our own Queen Charlotte and its sympathetic portrayal of a sitting monarch …’

‘Pah,’ said Dred, ‘it is celestial fiction, nothing more. The queen escapes to the moon at the end of the novel. Besides, I thought you and your “friend” Furnace-breath Nick had a taste for sedition?’

‘For if it prosper, it be not treason,’ said Cornelius, quoting from the speech Isambard Kirkhill had made after the last true king had been captured, gagged, and had his arms surgically removed so that he might never again turn his hands against the people.

Cornelius sat down while Dred fixed a magnifying lens over his mask and began to unlock the skin-coloured gutta-percha panels from Cornelius’s artificial arm.

‘Parliament really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find Queen Charlotte,’ said the mechomancer. ‘After they discovered the Commonshare had run the majority of the royal breeding house through a Gideon’s Collar during the invasion.’

Cornelius winced, but not from the pain in his shoulder.

‘Sorry, I forgot. But the point is, the Middlesteel Illustrated is still running editorials saying there’s as much royal blood in the queen’s veins as there is in your bath water. Rumour has it that she was found in the baggage train of the retreating Quatérshiftian army – that one of the shiftie officers had taken her from the breeding house and only kept her alive because she was a pretty little thing; well, that was when she still had her arms, of course.’

‘The House of Guardians needs a symbol,’ said Cornelius.

‘Aha.’ The mechomancer removed a lead ball with a pair of tweezers, and then pulled out another from Cornelius’s arm. ‘Talking of our compatriots in Quatérshift, I presume these two rascals are cast from Commonshare lead?’

‘I may have made a flying visit there recently.’

Dred tutted. ‘Your arm is rare, Cornelius – my skill combined with Catosian high-tension clockwork. I would rather you did not throw it away. One day the First Committee is going to get wise to those tricks of yours with your damn face. Their pamphleteers will stop flattering the egos of the leading Carlists with real-box pictures of the heroes of the revolution, leaving you to impersonate committee members from Gilroy’s cartoons in the Illustrated. Their spies will stop trying to hunt down émigrés over here and start trying to steal the plans for a working blood-code machine.’

‘Can you repair my arm?’ asked Cornelius.

‘Of course I can. You know, you never did tell me how you do your face thing – did you learn the sorcery from a worldsinger? Were you caught in a feymist as a child? Did you travel south to see a womb mage? There are back-street sorcerers who can change a face just the once, but they say you feel agony for the rest of your life …’

‘I feel the pain,’ said Cornelius. ‘The difference is, I like to share it around.’

Dred pulled over a steam-powered winding machine and began to de-tension the clockwork inside the arm, still wary of another explosion, even after all these years. ‘The Commonshare will fall one day, you know. Helped along by you, or more likely because they can’t feed their own people. Or perhaps the God-Emperor in Kikkosico will tire of their insults and bypass the cursewall, land his legions on their shore and finish off Quatérshift for good. What will you do then, old friend?’

‘Retire.’

Dred Lands teased out part of the arm mechanism, laying it down on the workbench. ‘All right, don’t tell me. I’ll fix you up for your next attempt at suicide all the same.’

‘You should be more appreciative of what I do,’ said Cornelius. ‘I even rescued one of your own from Quatérshift a couple of nights back. Jules Robur, the mechomancer. He would not have lasted another year in the Commonshare’s “organized community” system.’

Dred’s hand slipped on the wire cutter he was twisting. ‘Sweet Circle, you got Jules Robur out of Quatérshift? I thought he was dead for sure. His designs, his technical architectures. He’s the greatest of us, Cornelius, the greatest! Are you sure he’s alive? Dear Circle!’

Cornelius had never seen Dred so animated. It was as if he had rescued the mechomancer’s own father from the work camp. ‘He is alive, have no worries on that account. When he woke up in Jackals, he could not stop expressing his gratitude, talking about the devices he could tinker into life now, with all of Jackelian industry and science at his disposal.’

‘Tinker, indeed! You must bring him here to me; just convince him to visit me. I shall offer all my tools to his service. Do this one thing for me, Cornelius, and I shall work for you for the rest of the year for free.’

‘You can go and see him yourself. He’s here in the capital. I left him at his daughter’s house in Westcheap.’

‘His daughter? There must be some mistake.’

‘No mistake,’ said Cornelius. ‘I saw him walk through the door of her house myself. It was his daughter who convinced me to rescue the man from Quatérshift.’

‘But it was Robur’s daughter who denounced him,’ said Dred. ‘She’s a Carlist, married to a general in the revolutionary army. She was the bloody reason he was in the camps in the first place. She blew him out to their secret police, led the crushers to the home he was hiding in. Look—’

Dred went to a bookshelf and returned with an old volume of the Journal of Philosophical Transactions, then opened it to a page with a cartoon. A man in Sun Court finery, Robur down to his hook nose, was being dragged away by soldiers of the revolutionary army as a woman watched. A speech bubble from the struggling mechomancer proclaimed: ‘Now this is a pretty penny in return for your mother’s labours.’ The woman was calling back, ‘And now your labours shall belong to the commons, you royalist dog.’ Pursed lips, staring eyes and wild hair – the daughter’s caricature bore no relation to the elegant creature who had implored him for his help in the rear yard of a jinn house.

‘It’s not the same woman.’ The anger leaked through Cornelius’s steely demeanour.

‘Keep your hair on, man,’ said Dred. ‘If she was an agent of the Commonshare, my fine arm and your strange bones would be lying dead in a ditch in Quatérshift by now. She was probably his young mistress. Would you have risked your neck so readily for a lover as a daughter? You rescued the genius of Jules Robur; believe me, that is all that matters.’

‘Finish the arm,’ ordered Cornelius. ‘I’ll take your invite to Robur’s house personally tomorrow and see how well they like playing the fool with me when Furnace-breath Nick comes to call.’

Dred muttered, but he did as he was bid.

Cornelius’s eyes narrowed. Something was wrong here, deeply wrong. Was Jackals in danger again from her ancient foe to the east? If so, the old enemy would count themselves lucky if they lived to regret it. That was the thing about invasions. In the end, it just meant the shifties were coming to him.

CHAPTER SIX

‘What is going on here?’ Gabriel McCabe pushed past the ring of sailors urging on the fight; one of the seadrinkers trading blows – badly – with a Catosian soldier in the confines of the Sprite’s mid-deck. The first mate grabbed his sailor, Veryann moving in to pull off her fighter at the same time.

‘She broke my jigging nose!’ shouted the sailor, clutching a kerchief to stem the flow of blood as McCabe held him in the air.

‘He gave challenge to me,’ retorted the soldier, bridling and pushing her blonde hair back out of her face.

Commodore Black slid down a ladder and dropped to the deck, quickly followed by Amelia. ‘A blessed challenge is it? The Sprite of the Lake is too small to be fighting duels.’

The sailor pointed at Veryann’s soldier. ‘It was no challenge. I only suggested to her that when we get to Rapalaw Junction we find a nice room and get down to the hey-jiggerty.’

Veryann stepped between the sailor and her mercenary. ‘What manner of fool are you? No free company fighter will submit to mate with you until you have beaten her in combat. You must prove yourself fit before you bed a Catosian, demonstrate the superiority of your blood lineage. You issued a challenge to my fighter, duel or not.’

‘Ah,’ said the commodore, ‘I do not think any of us in Jackals do things in that way. There now, a simple misunderstanding of cultures. So let’s be putting away our knives and cudgels before I have to bring out the keys for the Sprite’s brig.’

Amelia did not like the gleam that had entered Black’s eyes as he looked at the commander of their force of mercenary marines. That gleam meant mischief on its way.

Gabriel let go of his sailor and indicated the group of Catosians who, up until a few minutes before, had been wrestling on the deck, their taut bodies gleaming from the effects of the muscle-growth stimulant favoured by the Catosian regiments – the sacred drug shine. ‘Must your people spar naked like that? Most of our crew were locked up in Bonegate before they came on board. Your soldiers are driving them crazy down here.’

‘We need to maintain our edge,’ insisted Veryann. ‘It is the fighters’ way. If your sailors have an issue with discipline, you should raise the matter with Bull Kammerlan, first mate.’

‘No disrespect intended, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s a fine thing to see such a sight, indeed it is. But if you could see your way to modifying your fighters’ code to include a few clothes when you spar, I may still have some sailors left alive when we reach Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’

‘Town ho,’ called a sailor from the hatch above. ‘It’s Rapalaw Junction.’

‘At last,’ said Amelia. ‘A chance for solid land and fresh air.’

The commodore climbed back up the ladder. ‘Let us hope that they have the facilities to fix our gas scrubbers, professor, or this expedition may be limping back home next week with nothing but empty pockets to show your rich Mister Quest. Run up the cross and gate, lads.’

A sailor came past with the Jackelian flag, a red field bisected with a white cross, the portcullis of the House of Guardians on the upper right-hand corner, the lion rampant in the lower left. Now that was out of place. She knew how Commodore Black felt about that flag, what it would cost him inside to raise parliament’s standard above his boat.

‘He’s not my Mister Quest,’ said Amelia. She gazed up at the Jackelian flag, running up to flutter in the warm river breeze. ‘Why the flag? I thought Rapalaw Junction was a free port.’

‘Free it may be,’ said Commodore Black, ‘but the only law here belongs to the garrison of redcoats attached to our ambassador’s residence, minding the trade and keeping the river open for Jackals this far out. Everything else at Rapalaw is far from free. Yes, the repairs’ll be costing us a pretty farthing, unless their traders have changed their ways since I was last in these parts.’

A beaten-up collection of narrow-draught barges and river boats lay moored to a line of piers in front of the crumbling walls of the town; occasionally a listless figure propping up a rifle appeared above its baked adobe battlements. A few hired hands lethargically pushed carts filled with buckets of fruit away from a barge, as if they had all the time in the world to move them out of the range of the green buzzing insects circling the crop. Women dangled their feet off the wooden pier, mending fishing nets that looked as if they had seen better days. Plenty of craynarbians mingled with the junction traders, larger than their brethren in Middlesteel, shell armour glossy in the sunlight, not dulled by the smog and grime of a Jackelian city.

Drawn by the sight of the large u-boat coming towards port, a small crowd of children and onlookers began building by the gate, heads shielded from the sun by wide straw hats. As the Sprite lay mooring up, a more official-looking figure bypassed the ranks of children, followed by two soldiers in kilts, their bright but tattered uniforms at odds with the simple white cottons of the town folk.

Amelia was one of the first to cross the gantry that the Sprite’s seadrinkers swung out to the pier, Commodore Black close on her heels, pulling on his blue officer’s jacket, polished epaulettes gleaming in the bright jungle light.

‘I’m with the residence,’ said the official in the bored tones of Middlesteel’s quality. He whipped at his face with a brushlike insect swatter. ‘You would be Damson Veryann?’

Amelia pointed back to the Sprite’s deck. The Catosian soldiers were taking position along the hull, holding short stocky carbines that would serve them as well in the confines of the jungle as along the passages of the u-boat. Their leader crossed the gantry; her pale skin and blonde hair serenely cool while the rest of them sweated like dogs in the febrile afternoon heat of Rapalaw’s rainforest.

The official walked up to Veryann. ‘The ambassador promised we would extend every courtesy to Abraham Quest’s expedition. Bit of a change of plans, then, what? I understood you were going to lay up north of here and we would resupply you on the quiet.’

‘The situation has changed.’

‘A little bad luck coming down here,’ explained the commodore. ‘We’ll have need of your workshops before we can put out again.’

‘Bad luck is one fruit you will always find growing on the vines of Liongeli.’ The official gave a languid wave towards the other craft in port. ‘Rapalaw Junction’s shipwright business isn’t much to look at, but such as it is, you’re welcome to use what the town has. I’m sure the town’s council will appreciate your money; just as I’m sure Abraham Quest’s counting house has enough coinage to keep even the grasping rascals that run the free port happy. Will you still be requiring the services of your guide?’

‘Guide?’ said Amelia, bemused.

Veryann stepped in. ‘We will.’

‘Bit of bad luck there, too,’ said the official. ‘Ironflanks is in the garrison stockade at the moment. A couple of my uplanders dragged him in for disturbing the peace. Smashed up a place three nights ago. Nearly broke the neck of a drinking-house owner.’

Amelia could not believe her ears. ‘That’s a steamman name, surely? A steamman smashed up a jinn house?’

‘He’s not the normal sort of chap you find coming down from the Steamman Free State,’ said the embassy man, ‘that I will grant you. I suspect the town council will be only too glad to boot him out of here this time.’

Amelia raised an eyebrow at Veryann. ‘Ironflanks … a steamman?’

‘He came highly recommended,’ said Veryann, a touch of defensiveness breaking through her icy demeanour.

‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me, there’s much to recommend him,’ said the embassy official. ‘Whenever we get a party of hunters after thunder lizards, they always want to retain Ironflanks. Brings back more safari expeditions alive than any of the other trackers here, have no doubt on that score. But he does have his funny little ways …’

‘Go on,’ said Amelia.

‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, I am afraid the old steamer is as barmy as a barn full of badgers. He is under the impression that the jungle talks to him. Rumour has it that King Steam exiled him from the Free State when he wouldn’t submit to some much needed mental adjustments.’

Amelia turned on Veryann. ‘I told Quest at the start of this that I would only command this expedition if I had my pick of its team members.’

‘Ironflanks will be a scout operating under my command,’ said Veryann. ‘We require his knowledge of the jungle. Besides, given what happened in the engine room at the hands of one of your people, I do not believe you are fit to sit in judgement on the House of Quest’s choices of staff for this expedition.’

Commodore Black stepped between the two women when he saw Amelia starting to bridle. ‘Professor, we’ll be mortal glad to have someone with a knowledge of the lay of the land when we are further upriver. Bull’s rascals know the rapids and flows of the Shedarkshe, but they never ventured further inland than the river villages they gassed for their slaves.’

‘Take me to the stockade,’ Amelia ordered. She glanced at the tartan on the two redcoats’ kilts. ‘Twelfth Kilkenny foot?’

‘The Crimson Watch,’ confirmed the official. ‘Devils with that cutlery on the end of their rifles, but you’d better watch your pocketbook when you’re in the garrison, damson, what? Now, I was never much of a one for books, but one thing has been puzzling me …’ He waved his hand towards the tall dark jungle squatting ominously on the opposite side of the river ‘Exactly what kind of science is your expedition proposing to conduct out there?’

Amelia remembered a cartoon in the Illustrated poking fun at Abraham Quest’s Circleday pastime; pottering around the grounds of his mansion, personally helping the large army of gardeners he employed. A leering caricature of Quest knee deep in the mud of his pile’s grounds, a sapling growing up before his legs in a phallic manner with the label ‘money tree’ hung around it, the speech bubble reading: ‘Forsooth, my soil-fingered helpers, see here, I have grown another large one.’

‘Orchids,’ said Amelia, ‘Abraham Quest is very fond of rare orchids.’

The official looked at the line of menacing Catosian mercenaries on the Sprite’s deck, then at Bull Kammerlan’s feral-looking sailors emerging to sniff the air – blinking at the novel freedom of being outdoors after serving years of a Bonegate water sentence, followed by long weeks cooped up inside their u-boat. ‘Ah, yes, botanists. I’m surprised I did not see it before.’

A burly uplander leafed through the keys on his chain, searching for the one that would unlock Ironflanks’ cell in the Rapalaw Junction garrison.

‘He should have calmed down by now,’ the guard explained to Amelia, Veryann and the commodore. ‘Ironflanks is a bonny enough lad when he hasn’t been snorting.’

‘Snorting?’ said Amelia.

‘Chasing the silver-stack, my lady. He’s a quicksilver user, but he’s no’ been putting any magnesium into his boiler while we’ve been holding him down here. Poor old Ironflanks is on a bit of a downer at the moment.’ He pulled open the rusting door, revealing a steamman that bore little resemblance to the members of his race Amelia was used to back in Jackals. For a start, however battered and rusting the life metal became back home, they never, never, wore clothes.

The three visitors from the submarine stood there, lost for words. Ironflanks looked up at them, poking inside his filthy, bloodstained hunter’s jacket with a stick, as if he was attempting to dislodge a leech.

‘Ah, my friends from the House of Quest, I presume? You have, I trust, brought the filthily heavy chest full of Jackelian coins that I was promised?’

‘Your fee is secure in our boat,’ said Veryann.

‘That’s good, my little softbody beauty, because I have managed to mislay the agent’s fee your people sent up. Damn careless of me, I know.’ His two telescopic eyes increased their length, focusing on her in a way that could only be described as predatory. Ironflanks jangled the chains binding his four metal arms – his architecture looking like it had been modelled on a craynarbian. ‘Then let’s be about it, my good mammals. Tick tock. If we wait any longer it’ll be night, and I doubt if you three can see in the dark, even if I can.’

‘Same time next week, then, Ironflanks?’ laughed the guard, unlocking the chains.

‘I believe I shall forgo your hospitality for a while, McGregor softbody. Now be a good fighting unit and fetch me my cloak and the other property your ruffians removed from me last night.’

‘It wasnae last night, man,’ said the soldier, ‘it was three bloody days ago.’

When the uplander returned to the cell he was struggling under the weight of a gun so large it should have been classed as an artillery piece.

‘I was under the impression your people favoured pressure repeaters powered by your own bodies,’ said Veryann.

Ironflanks shouldered the weapon and then tapped the twin stacks rising from his back. ‘My boiler is not what it used to be, dear lady. Besides, a repeater might be adequate to shoot up the bluecoats of a Quatérshiftian brigade, but a thunder lizard is quite a different kettle of armoured-scale fish.’

Veryann led the steamman away, his clanking metal legs leaving impressions in the dried mud under his weight.

‘You still think we need his help out in the jungle?’ Amelia asked the commodore.

‘Lass, this is a pretty pickle and no mistake.’

Amelia bit her lip. They were sailing an antique u-boat into one of the most dangerous, uncharted regions of the world; surrounded by a crew of convicts, a fighting force of hair-trigger mercenaries that even their own country didn’t want, and carrying a saboteur determined to stop them. Now they could count among their group the maddest steamman outside of a Free State asylum. Her damn luck had to turn at some point.

Not for the first time, the undermaid wished the front door of their grand house in Westcheap had a speaking tube to filter out the callers. It was bad enough that every chimney sweep and hawker on the crescent called every morning trying to convince her or Cooky to purchase their wares, now she had to deal with simpletons too.

‘This is not the house of any Damson Robur, sir. It belongs to Lord Leicester Effingham today, exactly as it has done every day for the last twenty years.’

‘You are in error, damson,’ insisted her lunatic visitor. ‘I visited the lady just a few nights ago here and this house is the residence of Damson Robur.’

‘You have the wrong address, fellow,’ said the maid. ‘All the crescents and lanes about these parts look alike if you do not live around here.’

‘Then who was staying here three nights ago?’ demanded the visitor.

‘Exactly nobody was here, sir – the place was empty. Lord Effingham was at his country residence in Haslingshire. I have only just travelled down to Middlesteel with his cook to open up the house for the season.’ She pointed to the dark rooms behind her, furniture in the hallway hung with white linen covers to protect them from the deposit left by the capital’s smog. ‘Does this look like an occupied house to you? There’s dust all over the place; Circle knows, it’s me that has to clean it all up. Try the crescent on the other side of the park, why don’t you? The lanes all look alike, especially after a night of carousing.’

She shut the door on the unexpected caller and went back to sit with Cooky and their nice pot of warm caffeel down in the kitchen. Within five minutes she would have been hard-pressed to describe the visitor’s nondescript face to anyone who might have asked. Which was precisely the point of that face.

Around the corner, her visitor entered a covered arcade of small shops selling pottery and walking sticks. Cornelius Fortune emerged from the exit at the other end, walking into the crowds of a teeming market. He feigned an interest in the long silver eels being slapped down on the wooden surface of one of the stalls, checking the reflection in a shop front to ensure there had been no watch set on the house. No tail emerged from the arcade, no confused expressions trying to locate the vanished visitor. So, what mischief was to be had out of the disappearance of Jules Robur, the continent’s greatest mechomancer? Damson Robur did not exist, and now it seemed, neither did her father. There were always complex games of deception and guile being played between the paranoid members of the First Committee as they jockeyed for power and position across the border in Quatérshift. Had such a game been played with Furnace-breath Nick as one of their pawns? The thought of that ate at him like a cancer.

‘Lovely, ain’t they, squire?’ said the fishmonger behind the stall. ‘Special offer today, take away one of these lovelies and I’ll throw in a free tub of sweet jelly.’

‘The long one, there,’ said Cornelius.

‘I can throw in a nice piece of slipsharp heart for tuppence more. So oily you can cook it in its own juices.’

‘Just the eel,’ said Cornelius. ‘I rather think I have other fish to fry now.’

Standing on the dock, Amelia moved out of the way of a chain of bearers carrying repaired components from the gas scrubbers deep into the interior of the u-boat for T’ricola to reassemble in her engine room. The sonar man Billy Snow was sitting on top of an upturned fishing boat, in a position where he could have seen everything going on in front of him – if he had only possessed the requisite sense.

Amelia went over to him. ‘You get around Rapalaw Junction better than I do.’

‘There’s not much here, is there?’ said Billy. ‘But I can always follow my nose back to that soup that passes for air inside the Sprite.’

‘Damn it, but I hope we can fix up our boat soon.’

‘So eager for the greenmesh?’ said Billy. ‘I know why I’m here, professor – same as the rest of the seadrinkers. We only feel alive when you shove us in a can and push us beneath the waves. But you? Why do you care so much about some city that may or may not have been buried under Liongeli an eon ago, before a floatquake pushed it up towards the heavens?’

‘You want the simple answer? It is knowledge. The Camlanteans had the perfect society,’ said Amelia. ‘They lived in peace without hunger or war or evil for a thousand times longer than Jackals has endured; but we know so little about them.’

‘Your colleagues back at the universities doubt they even existed,’ said Billy. ‘I shall let you into a little secret. Before we left Jackals, I imposed on T’ricola to purchase the book that you wrote – The Face of the Ancients. She and Gabriel are kind enough to read me a chapter from it each evening.’

‘Well then, I believe I might have trebled this year’s sales of the damn thing,’ said Amelia. ‘I would have had more luck if the stationers in Middlesteel sold it as celestial fiction. That tome you are enjoying finished my career. The High Table made sure there was not an expedition or dig in Jackals that would take me with them after I had it published.’

‘Admitting to what you don’t know is even harder for the learned than the ignorant.’ The sonar man waved out towards the jungle. ‘They were not so perfect, I think. If they were, Middlesteel would be called Camlantis and their people would be here today, not dust and ruins under the weight of a half-sentient jungle.’

‘But we don’t know!’ Amelia tried to communicate the depth of her passion for the subject. ‘Circle knows, what we understand about the Chimecan Empire is sketchy enough, and they made their holds deep underground when the cold-time came – what preceded their time is shrouded in myth and legend. Where he could, my father collected every crystal-book, every piece of parchment with a legible script of Usglish, every paper and theory on the Camlanteans, and—’

‘—And yet still what is lost, is lost,’ said Billy Snow.

Amelia remembered when her father was still alive – sitting at his knee, the excitement with which he talked about how Jackals’ ancient democracy was a hollow echo of the perfect utopia it could become. Somehow she could never pass on the vision as clearly as he could. ‘My theory is that the Camlantean civilization was supported by the same techniques we see perverted today by Cassarabia’s womb mages. They had found a way to live in harmony with their world, and most of their craft was lost to history for no other reason than it was living, alive. Apart from their crystal-books, most of it just rotted away after their realm fell.’

Billy shivered. ‘Those who serve as slave wombs in Cassarabia might debate your ideals of utopia, professor. I’m a u-boat hand, not a jack cloudie, but I know our aerostat crews have mapped most of the low-lying floatquake lands. No one has ever seen something the size of Camlantis drifting about up there in the heavens – not once. If your city is as lost as that, there is a reason for it.’

Superstition from a sailor? Well, Amelia was hardly surprised. Billy’s trade were always genuflecting to some god of the sea or river down below decks, invoking spirits and chanting in the hidden corners of the Sprite of the Lake. No wonder the Circlist church refused entry to many of the men of the sea.

Amelia glanced curiously down the docks, towards a flurry of activity in the shadow of the trading town’s walls. It looked like a newly arrived trader was finishing setting up shop, a crowd of people from the town gathering to see the merchant. The haste that was being shown by the audience was in stark contrast to the listless pace of business she had seen conducted everywhere else in Rapalaw Junction.

‘That’s odd,’ noted Amelia. ‘The market is in the centre of the town, but everyone is flocking out here to visit that stall?’

‘Can’t you hear the hawker’s cries?’ sighed Billy. ‘Ah, of course, they’re in bush tongue. It’s not slyfish and game meat this one’s selling. Come on, you might as well see the sight along with everyone else. Their kind aren’t allowed within the trading post to conduct business.’

Now Amelia really was curious. As she and Billy got closer she saw a folding table had been set up in the shadow of a wooden platform, a line of figures standing aimlessly on the boards, the centre of attention of the gathering crowd.

‘A slaver!’ spat Amelia, reaching down for her pistol holster.

Billy’s hand snaked out and gripped hers with an uncanny accuracy. ‘No, quite the opposite in this instance. You might consider their vocation the liberation of slaves. It’s called a comfort auction. Watch and keep quiet, whatever you see or hear. Rapalaw’s citizens get very emotional when traders in this line of work visit the post. If you try and interfere we could both be ripped to pieces.’

The trader in charge of this miniature market was looking very pleased with himself, biding his time until the crowd grew large enough for his satisfaction. A plate of meat had been brought up to the trader’s table, a flagon of beer by its side. The trader wiping his fingers on his sweat-soaked jacket looked like nothing so much as John Gloater, the cartoonists’ favourite Jackelian everyman. Living up to the image of Dock Street’s savage portly patriot, the trader gave out a belch and then waved at his craynarbian associates to push the goods forward on the platform. The figures Amelia had taken for slaves were a sickly-looking lot, gaunt, with vacant expressions frozen on their faces. Women, men, craynarbians, even a small grasper, all swaying slightly on the platform. There wasn’t much fight left in them. The trader’s assistants appeared to be there more to stop them stumbling off the edge of the platform than to prevent them from escaping. If this was an auction, it was one of zombies. But whatever their race, there was something the figures all had in common; it looked as if their skin had been scrubbed raw, the lines of their veins left exposed, an abnormal viridescent colour – a fretwork of green cables throbbing against their flesh.

Pushing to his feet, the trader waddled in front of the platform and raised his arms to still the crowd. ‘Quiet now, my lovelies. My last voyage up river has, as you can see, been a fruitful one. But not without risks. It was a fierce expedition, our passage littered with the bodies of a dozen of our best porters. And in the dark heart of the jungle, on the edge of the greenmesh, we lay our ambush; luring two patrols into the pits we dug, dug with these hands …’ He raised his soft white hands, palms out. Whoever had been doing the digging, it hadn’t been the trader; those hands hadn’t raised anything heavier than a fork for a long time.

Amelia looked at the platform with fresh eyes. The greenmesh. It began to dawn on her what this sale was about.

‘Now do you see?’ whispered Billy. ‘His “goods” travelled too close to the greenmesh and were absorbed by the Daggish Empire, made slaves within the unity of the hive.’

Amelia felt sick. These trade goods had once been people with families and loved ones. Now what were they? Half-dead wasps waiting at the foot of Rapalaw Junction’s walls for a bargain to be struck.

‘He’s chemically cleansed them of the hive’s control,’ said Billy. ‘What you see up there is what the extrication process leaves. Although truth to tell, everything that made them who they were was scrubbed out of them a lot more assiduously by the Daggish when they were assimilated into the hive.’

‘Do any of you lovelies who have come before me today recognize any of these splendid emancipated souls?’ asked the trader.

‘That one,’ shouted one of the crowd, pointing to the man at the end of the line. ‘He was on a safari that disappeared in the interior two years ago; come up from Middlesteel, I think.’

‘Nobody here willing to pay for him, then?’ The trader looked wistfully around the crowd, noted the silence, then scribbled a note of provenance against the names on his list. Perhaps there would be someone back in the civilized world of Jackals who would pay. Rich enough to hunt thunder lizards, there’d surely be someone with deep pockets at the other end of the river that would want their father or their husband back.

‘What about this one, then?’ said the trader, waving a chubby hand at a dark-haired man standing over six feet tall. ‘One of my porters said they thought he was the pilot on a riverboat from Rapalaw that went missing a while back. An unlucky fellow who sailed too far east and ran into a Daggish seed ship.’

From further back in the crowd came a shriek of recognition, a woman pushing forward with a girl of about twelve hanging onto her coattails. ‘Coll! Coll Ordie, don’t you recognize me? Look —’ she lifted up her girl so he could see ‘—it’s your little Maddalena. She was only nine when you were taken.’

The ex-slave looked blankly down at the two of them from the platform, his face frozen in an emotionless rictus. Amelia saw the trader’s subtle hand signal, and one of his craynarbians gave the man a prod in the spine with a sharp stick.

‘It’s me,’ coughed the man. ‘I’ve come back.’

Amelia’s eyes narrowed, and Billy gave her hand a warning squeeze. Whatever little was left of these unlucky wretches, the emancipated slaves of the Daggish had been well tutored to say one phrase since being freed. Amelia wagered that with a poke in the back, everyone standing on the platform could repeat that utterance.

‘It warms my heart,’ announced the trader. ‘Oh, it truly does. This, damson, is what makes the dangers and perils of my endeavours worthwhile. This is what I live for. But a river pilot, someone who knows the flows and tricks of the great river Shedarkshe, I cannot let him return back to you as cheaply as I might a mere trapper of hides and furs, oh no. I have to pay for my porters and my soldiers and I have to pay for the families, like yours, left lonely where my brave crew have perished in our sallies against the fierce Daggish. So many mouths that must be fed. Shall we say sixteen guineas for your husband?’

‘Sixteen guineas?’ cried the woman. ‘I should sell my house in the post and still be left five short!’

‘Ah, damson, can there ever be a price put on the return of a father for your beautiful girl? Look at her standing there beside you, weeping. You haven’t seen him for so long, have you, my little lovely? How you must have missed him. And you, damson, as much as you love your little one, you must have grown tired of being asked by her every night, “when will daddy return, when will I see him again?” Repeating the very same thing you must have been thinking yourself as you went to bed alone each evening.’ The trader raised his arms in a magnanimous gesture. ‘But your story has touched me. I shall let him go to you for only thirteen guineas. The price of your house and the good will and merciful coins of your husband’s old friends will carry you that little extra way towards me, I am sure.’

‘It’s me,’ repeated the river pilot after another poke. ‘I’ve come back.’

Shaking and confused, the woman tried to withdraw back to the town through the press of the crowd, her daughter dragged against her will, fighting her mother every step of the way.

‘Ah well,’ laughed the merchant, winking at the men in the crowd after the woman and the girl had gone. ‘Hopefully she’ll come back with the guineas. Of course, sometimes they haven’t been going to bed so alone every night, and then they slip me a guinea or two to apprentice their old man far down river from the trading post.’

Amelia’s hand was shaking above her holster and Billy stopping it from dipping down with an iron grip. ‘Whatever you think of this, these transactions are still legal. The comfort traders operate just the right side of the Suppression of Slavery Act. Murder, however, is punished the same here as back in Jackals. More swiftly, too.’

‘I’ll pay your damn leach’s money,’ shouted Amelia, shrugging off Billy’s hand. ‘Thirteen guineas.’

‘It’s not their husband or father you’re buying back anymore,’ whispered Billy. ‘It won’t be the same for them.’

An image of the half-empty rooms of her old home came to Amelia, waiting for her aunt to turn up while the bailiffs argued with each other over which of the bruisers would get to remove the choicest pieces of furniture, lifting her father’s cheap old oil painting of an imagined Camlantis off the wall and almost coming to blows over it. ‘No, it never is.’

‘Sixteen guineas, my dear lady,’ answered the trader. ‘The special offer was only for the man’s wife, because my heart is a big soft vessel easily touched by the cruel vagaries of our world.’

Amelia pointed down the river to where the Sprite of the Lake was tied up. ‘And that’s my vessel, my flabby friend. It’s big, but as you can see from the lines of its torpedo tubes, not particularly soft. The Sprite’s large enough that trading boats like yours are sometimes broken clean in two on our hull if we surface without first surveying the waters above us. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to forget the periscope check.’

‘You should have said so before, my dear lady,’ said the trader. ‘To honour a fellow swashbuckler braving the perils of the great river Shedarkshe is a pleasure, never a pain. For today only I shall extend the offer I made to the wife to you. A mere thirteen guineas, and as a token of my respect you may even keep the cotton breeches and shirt I have supplied this poor emancipated soul with.’

Amelia passed her coins across to one of the trader’s craynarbian guards. ‘Your respect is bought cheaply. Now take him into town and give him back to his family.’

‘That trader respects the Daggish well enough, I think,’ said Billy. ‘As should we, if we are to return from our devil’s errand alive. Getting close enough to the hive to tweak their nose – whether it is by stealing back those taken by the greenmesh, or by probing the ruins of Camlantis left on earth, that’s not something to be taken lightly. If things go badly for us, I have nobody at home waiting to pay a comfort trader’s price for me. I would be better off remaining part of the hive. At least the Daggish feed the slaves they absorb. There’s not many who would be queuing up to hire an old blind man scrubbed clean of his schooling in sonar.’

Amelia looked at the people left standing on the platform, empty vessels trying to remember what it was to be human. The freed slave who had once been a river pilot was being led down the platform. How much comfort had she bought that little girl and her mother? Not nearly enough, Amelia suspected. ‘If it comes to it, Billy, you shoot me rather than let me be taken alive as a slave by the Daggish.’

Suddenly Gabriel McCabe appeared, one of the Sprite’s sailors frantically shouting for him across the press of the market.

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