The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

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.’