From the Deep of the Dark (48 page)

‘Trust has always been a pliable notion, thief girl,’ said Gemma, boarding the craft and stuffing Charlotte’s amulet inside her jacket pocket. ‘And when it comes to the hunt, better a flea on the hound, than a flea on the hare, hmm?’

After the shock of the net, Charlotte could hardly stand, and the sailors rolled her into the back of the darkship’s cabin, a featureless dark tunnel leading up to the cockpit. The surface was slightly sticky and wet, as if they were being held in the belly of a beast. She turned over as she slid across the floor, landing next to Commodore Black. With her hands and the old u-boat man’s securely bound, Charlotte noticed the sailors were passing their rifles to one of their number, a young pock-faced man who then exited the darkship with a pile of rifles in his arms.

‘Is that the limit of the alliance you have struck, honey?’ Charlotte called to Gemma. ‘The sea-bishops won’t even let you in their city with ranged weapons?’

Gemma patted the sabre resting by her side. ‘Hold your filthy mouth, thief girl, lest you lose it. I still have this, and its edge is sharp enough for your wagging tongue. My allies don’t need your prattle during interrogation. They can rip your thoughts out with their queer machines.’ She turned back to the cockpit and then ignored her prisoners.

Jared Black shook his head sadly. ‘Sorry lass. This is it for our schemes. Why did Maeva choose to follow me? She always knew what follows at my heels. I’m an old fool whose life has drained away into the sea, but a young doe like you deserves better.’

Charlotte watched the controls at the front of the darkship twisting around the pilot, carnivorous black ivy wrapping itself around a victim. ‘We all deserve better, Jared.’

‘Aye, but this is all the wicked world has for us.’

C
orporal Cloake pulled back the viewing slit on the feeding pen’s heavy iron door. The sea-bishop glanced inside, noting the figure stretched out across the floor. The rest of the cattle were herding fearfully to the rear of the chamber, while the nanomechnical creature that had until recently been head of the State Protection Board was shaking near the corpse as if a disease was inflicting it.

‘I have lost my bet,’ said the sea-bishop wearing Sadly’s body. He was standing behind Corporal Cloake along with the pair of guards standing sentry on the feeding pens. ‘It seems as if the Tull animal chose to suicide.’

Cloake nodded towards the guards. ‘You two, drag it to the rubbish pile.’ He opened the feeding pen door, the stench of cattle defecation flooding out, added to by the foul reek of Dick Tull’s corpse.

‘By the dark between the worlds, what a malodour,’ grunted one of the guards, hesitating before stepping through the door.

Corporal Cloake entered the pen. As he set foot inside, he stepped into a pile of decaying feed used to fatten the cattle. Cursing, Cloake brushed his foot off against the pen’s sides. What was the point of feeding these dumb things if they wouldn’t eat? Well, they still needed to consume plenty of water. He would have to remember to order the herd master to add a hunger stimulant to their liquids. Then the cattle would be as fast at the feed as the filthy rodents scattering across the floor before him.

Cloake bent down, checking the corpse’s cold, pasty skinned neck for a pulse, before feeling for a heartbeat. Nothing. The animal had been sweating before it died, its jacket drenched in its own disgusting sweat. By Tull’s side was the cane to detect the brethren of the Mass, the pommel carving’s eyes dead, power source drained and partially disassembled to reach the suicide pill. ‘Powdered root in the suicide pill, similar to those issued by the State Protection Board. The fever stopped its heart. It’s the poison you can smell on its skin.’

‘Its blood is rancid,’ said the guard, grabbing hold of a stiff leg. ‘The Mass must feed.’

‘Indeed we will, but not on this debased flesh,’ hissed Cloake. ‘How many do you need? Animals overrun this filthy city. Breeding in their slums, lying hop-addled in the gutters outside their taverns. You can’t cross the street without tripping over sustenance.’

Sadly helped the guards drag the corpse away, while in front of Corporal Cloake, the deposed head of the State Protection Board was vibrating and shuddering, adding its mad ramblings to the insane sing-song whine from the dirty cattle clustering at the rear of the pen.

‘Treasonists, treasonists, everywhere. Vampires, vampires, on the stairs.’

‘So, your mind’s finally become as broken as your body, you primitive bucket of bolts?’ Cloake drew out his pistol. He was eager to pay back this half-witted calculating device for the ignominy of far too many years having to pretend to take orders from a mere nanomechnical, of having to subjugate the superior intellect of the Mass to this ridiculous half-sentient machine-born monstrosity. ‘Don’t you have any orders for me? Speak, tell me how you are the head of the board and I must rush to do your bidding … order me to let you live!’

Dragging Dick Tull’s corpse out of the cell, the sea-bishop wearing Barnabas Sadly’s form turned and took in the vista of the Algo Monoshaft’s violently shuddering body, Corporal Cloake standing in front of it and about to pump a bullet though its useless, shaking skull.

‘Don’t!’ shouted Sadly. ‘That’s—’

Cloake ignored his brethren. ‘We can’t take an imprint of this thing’s memories. I want to see what it looks like in pieces.’

‘—how their race use their body as a—’

With stacks sealed for hours, its boiler-heart circulating and building pressure, the pressure inside Algo Monoshaft’s frame became too much for its ageing hull-plates to hold.

‘—suicide bomb!’ The steamman transformed into a grenade, shrapnel and fire scything out, instantly killing all the cattle and cutting Corporal Cloake in two, both halves of his body collapsing across the filthy pen floor. Cloake’s mesmeric field collapsed along with the shredding of his crystal. The sea-bishop’s distended head had enough life left to watch the other guard caught in the blast. Writhing across the floor, the sea-bishop’s field flickered on and off as he lost control – switching between his human and natural form – then, judging its host life lost, the evidence removal function of the crystal activated and the guard flared into ashes. Cloake reached for his own crystal, but it had been blown to pieces, his fingers only coming away with splinters. He wasn’t going to experience the sudden clean death of the crystal’s mercy.

Sadly and the remaining guard were peering around the doorway at the silent shrapnel-embedded walls of the pen, peering horrified through the smoke at the ruins of their brethren’s body.

Corporal Cloake moaned. The last thought that flickered across his dying mind was how damned hungry he was.

Crowds snaked up on the slopes of the volcano, the hangar doors of the island’s destroyed airship squadron held open while thousands of Nuyokians abandoned their city, ordinary citizens deserting their porcelain towers and hexagonal streets for the safety of the Court of the Air’s underground chambers. Daunt considered it something of an irony they would be packing in around the house-sized transaction-engines of the Court, the steam-driven thinking machines maintaining the model of Jackelian society and the supposedly safe course the Court was charting for it. There was nothing
safe
on the Isla Furia anymore. The city wall overlooking the lake was holding, but only just. Mainly thanks to the fact that the parapet on the city’s jungle side had been breached in so many places that it now made sense for the gill-neck invasion force to concentrate their forces on the breaks to the north-east. Leaking invaders into Nuyok, storming the rubble of fallen battlements. It wouldn’t take long before the Advocacy commanders realized that only token militia volunteers manned the city towers in front of them. Daunt was introducing a new thing to the city today – a terrible lesson for any pacifist to pass on. Guerrilla warfare. Hit and run. It was the only way to slow down such a vastly superior force. Give the Advocacy the impression that every hexagonal tower they faced was a fortress needing to be reduced to rubble, every savage inch bled for, while small mobile companies charged across the streets, harrying the gill-neck invaders. Hope what was left of their defences held until the populace was evacuated.

It was a risky plan, but the only one Daunt had. Every minute he slowed their advance was another minute for citizens to seek out the safety of the Court’s deep vaults. Poor devils. The Nuyokians were like refugees everywhere, all the worse for being dispossessed inside their own city, the city monitors shouting at the crowds to toss aside any possessions slowing the lines down. Wrestling carts of goods away from some and pushing them off to the side of the lawns. They took it in better humour than a similar mob of Jackelians would have – no doubt a side effect of their communal society and particular ideas about ownership.

Morris counted explosions flowering around the collapsing defences on the far side of Nuyok, then looked at the mob herding up the slopes. ‘I don’t like it. That place up there might be laid out like a fortress, but the Court was never built to house so many civilians. The gill-necks will be able to wait us out for as long as it takes for us to starve. Once the hares are inside the warren, there’s no way out that won’t be weasels all the way.’

‘I’ll settle for as long as it takes,’ said Daunt. ‘Time is what we need.’

‘Time for what?’ asked Morris, wiping the sweat off his brow. He had pushed his gas mask back up his helm. ‘You don’t really think Dick Tull and Sadly are returning to the island with a flight of Royal Aerostatical Navy squadrons in tow, do you? And I don’t particularly rate your girl and u-boat skipper’s chance of rousing the nomads of the sea up against the gill-necks, either.’

‘I fear we must have faith, Mister Morris.’

‘When a Circlist parson starts talking of having that, I know we’re in bloody trouble.’ He spat onto the ground. ‘Well, at least the poor gits will be better shielded in the gas mine’s tunnels than inside the city. Porcelain walls might keep you cool from the heat, but they’re bloody shrapnel coffins in a fight, see.’ His last few words were mangled by the detonations of the two giant cannons, their artillery relocated in front of the cable car station and landing shells within the city boundary. It was a hard thing to do, to order gunners to land shells on their own people. But the forces along the jungle-flanked wall had become so intermingled that the impact of the barrage was killing as many Advocacy soldiers as locals. Out beyond the thermal barrier surrounding the island, the invasion fleet was now bridging the killing zone unopposed. More soldiers to pour across the island, more predators to prowl the set Daunt was trapping the citizens inside.

Eventually the sea-bishops hidden among the invaders would track down and eliminate the faked signals emulating King Jude’s sceptre and then there would be only one hiding place left. The volcano. They would throw the entire gill-neck military machine against the slopes, with not a care for the natives sheltering inside. It all came down to time, if only he could buy enough time. Buy it with bodies.
What a bitter currency to fund my strategy
. A line of detonations stitched their way across the cable car concourse, the distant whoop of gill-neck mortars falling across their position.

Daunt ducked reflexively along with Morris behind the makeshift command post in the volcano’s shadow. A hailstorm of tiny stones and dirt jounced off the sandbags and ricocheted off the cable car station behind them. As the dust of the explosions cleared, Daunt saw that the columns of fleeing Nuyokians had been broken, limbless bodies scattered as though seeds from a dandelion head, wails of moaning rising around smoking craters. The rain of mortar shells on their position had left Daunt with a dusty, gritty taste on his tongue, his clothes covered with a layer of dull volcanic dust. A sudden wave of fatigue washed over him. How long since he had last eaten or slept? Everything was war; it was as if there had never been a time when he had known peace. Daunt couldn’t faint now. This was his slaughter. He would look the refugees in the eyes as they passed. He would feel their fear and taste their pain. The Circle save him, but the ex-parson’s ear was attuned to this carnage now. Daunt could tell the difference between heavy bombards and light gallopers, between the short-barrelled cannons on the rolling-pin tanks, tracks pulling them over the rubble of the walls, and the heavy howitzers that the gill-necks had assembled on the island’s shores. The pacifist had a day of practical lessons to add to his years of book learning. A day stretched into a year, subverting the lessons of the church. From how every battle could be avoided, corrupted into by what means their lost cause might be turned around.

Running across the ground of the mud-trampled parkland opposite, one of the city engineers came skidding past the sandbags. ‘The blasting barrels you requested have been assembled, Court man.’

Daunt turned to the crumpled map of the city he had procured, laid out across a porcelain bench. ‘We don’t have much time. Bring down the towers along this line—’ he tapped the map, ‘—and then this one.’

The engineer looked indignant. ‘You are asking me to destroy our city?’

‘Walls and halls are not your city,’ snarled Daunt. He pointed to the struggling lines of citizenry pouring past their position. ‘
They
are Nuyok. Bring these two districts down, collapse their under-streets into canyons and we will force the gill-necks to funnel through this central area. A mountain pass for us to defend, such as the steamman knights held in the Battle of the Gauge Heights.’ The engineer looked as if he was going to argue further, but Daunt silenced him with a jab towards the low buildings on the far side of the parkland. ‘These palaces need to come down too. The Holy Kikkosico Empire’s defence of Los Tarral showed that it’s many degrees harder to assault through rubble than through standing structures.’

‘Those are not palaces,’ the engineer sounded disgusted. ‘That is the great Library Publico of Nuyok.’