The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘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.’