The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

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.’