The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

‘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.’