From the Deep of the Dark (34 page)

Gemma took Walsingham’s own advice on unquestioning obedience, or at least the appearance of it, and said no more. Certainly not rising to the slight that to rule the Kingdom of Jackals could be considered mere table scraps. It was a dangerous thing to tie yourself to a shark. Sever the bonds of the saddle too soon and you might end up looking less like its rider and far more like its next meal. But Gemma’s luck had brought her this close to victory; she had to trust it to carry her the rest of the distance.

Charlotte looked up as Jethro Daunt entered the control room of the Court of the Air’s extraordinary u-boat. While the submersible’s exterior was windowless, the craft’s bridge was appointed with strangely translucent viewing ports. They appeared as if you could reach out and touch the ocean, feel water streaming past your fingers. These curious portholes were fringed by light from red glowing strips that illuminated the ex-parson’s face, returning some colour to his pallid features. Between tending the ruins of Boxiron’s once proud frame in the vessel’s small surgical bay, Daunt had been wandering the u-boat looking increasingly washed out. Their surgical bay was growing cramped. Boxiron lay alongside Commodore Black, the old u-boat man tended by Maeva, who wouldn’t shift from his side. With the rest of the seanore gathering their forces for war, the grand congress’s survivors having tasted the bitter fruit of their ancient prophecy firsthand, Maeva’s presence here was tantamount to abandoning her position among the Clan Raldama. Charlotte doubted the commodore would approve when – if – he regained his facilities. She could almost hear his scornful tones now.
There’s no love so foolish, as old love
.

Dick Tull stood up from his seat by the small chart table and Sadly turned around from the planesmen’s position at the front of the bridge, two pilots lying down on control couches as they guided and nudged the nest of control sticks and wheels at the fore of the vessel.

‘Has the steamman been stabilized?’ Sadly asked.

‘There’s little of him left to stabilize,’ sighed Daunt. ‘But I hope he will at least last until we reach the Court proper and put him in the care of your surgeons.’

‘You still haven’t paid for your passage, Mister Daunt,’ said Sadly.

An uncharacteristic flash of anger crossed the ex-parson’s face. ‘I would say that Boxiron and the commodore have both paid plenty.’

Charlotte realized she was standing ramrod straight like a sentry, clutching King Jude’s sceptre as though she held a rotor-spear outside a nomad’s seabed dwelling. She got the feeling it wasn’t going to be easy to relax here.

‘The great game is always played ruthlessly, says I. Bait’s meant to attract a nibble or two. You have my sympathy and more importantly, you currently have the surgical resources of my u-boat at the disposal of your friends. A little reciprocation if you please …’

‘Just tell him what you found out, amateur,’ said Dick. ‘It’s not as if I don’t want to know why my own people are trying to top me.’

‘That’s rather the nub of the issue,’ said Daunt. ‘They’re not your people anymore, sergeant. Walsingham and the commander of the convoy shared a curious trait with the prison camp commandant. None of the three gave off any of the tells which a Circlist priest would use to read their souls. They were blank of emotions, or rather, they were walking about as a rather hollow facsimile of the real thing.’

‘The graveyard back at the camp …’ said Sadly.

Daunt nodded. ‘Filled with the corpses of Jackelian notables. The machine Walsingham and the commodore’s sister used on me back on the island wasn’t just designed as an interrogation device, it was designed to rip memories out of my brain and implant them in something ensconced inside in a similar machine. I don’t doubt there’s now an enemy walking the streets of Middlesteel which is perceived as identical to me, a creature that carries enough of my memories to fool most of the good people of my acquaintance.’ He pointed at Dick Tull. ‘It was your story of the events at the mansion of Lord Chant that first saw my suspicions tickled. Your partner
did
see Lady Florence’s murder. Doubtless she had questioned some form of behaviour on the part of the thing she believed was her husband that seemed out of character. She was murdered, a facsimile of her ladyship inserted in time to make you, good sergeant, appear like a fool. Your young partner was murdered to cover the affair up, while you made the perfect scapegoat to frame for the crime and be executed as an enemy of the state.’

‘Why not just replace me with one of them?’ said Dick.

‘I rather think our enemy is limited in number. That is how you make sense of this absurd war brewing between Jackals and the Advocacy. The most powerful state beneath the waves set against the most powerful nation on the continent. Who stands to benefit? Only a third party which wishes to soften up both sides. Simple enough to arrange, I would imagine, if you have infiltrated the government and military of both sides and—’ he indicated Dick, ‘—the secret police.’

Sadly’s brow narrowed. ‘Who is the enemy then, asks I?’

‘Not who the Court believes is responsible, good agent,’ said Daunt. ‘Cast your mind back to when the camp commandant’s corpse changed and then spontaneously combusted back on the island.’ He smiled at Charlotte. ‘In his ashes I found this.’ He produced a crystal from a side pocket in his tattered waistcoat.

Charlotte reached out to confirm the Eye of Fate hung around her neck. It was still there, yet the ex-parson was holding the amulet’s identical twin between his fingers.

‘I am willing to wager, good agent, that up to now the Court of the Air had been assuming the infiltrators are Cassarabian spies? A logical deduction, given the caliph’s womb-mages are reputed to be able to warp their spies’ blood code and give them the ability to change their features. And of course, the Kingdom has been trading shells and sabre parries with the empire along the southern frontier for years now.’

‘They’re always good for a spot of mischief, are the caliph’s boys,’ admitted Sadly.

‘Quite,’ said Daunt. ‘But a Cassarabian shape-switcher wearing my face would still give away all the subtle tells of the race of man. The reason why there are infiltrators walking around like living blanks is that they
haven’t
assumed the shape of the victims they replaced.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘It is our
perception
they have stolen. A trick that Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism is also renowned for. That gem around your neck aids the mesmeric process I assume? The enemy walks around as they are, but we see only what they want us to see.’

‘It’s mine, honey,’ said Charlotte, touching her gem protectively.

‘Not exactly,’ said Daunt. ‘Rather, let us agree that you’re presently holding onto it for the spirit of the land and those who are to follow us, are you not? Please, damson, don’t bother to dissemble. No one knows better than I how uncomfortable it is to be haunted by ancient things best forgotten. The church was willing to forgive much about me, but believing in gods was one heresy more than even they were prepared to tolerate. I have caught a few glimpses of what our enemy is, but you, or rather the spirit moving you around the land like a chessboard piece, has faced this threat before. There were hints in the history texts back at Tock House. An earlier war between the gill-necks and the Jackelians long before the last ice age. The way your gem defended you when you were attacked, your fever afterwards. The manner in which the seanore were practically falling down on their knees and worshipping you when we picked you up from the clans’ gathering. You’re not who you once were, your body language betrays you. It’s as if you are two people sharing a single frame.’

Elizica’s voice echoed in Charlotte’s mind. ‘It is time. Have them place their hands on the gem at the top of the sceptre.’

What are you going to do?

‘The sceptre’s gem carries echoes of its old purpose. Do as I have told you, girl-child.’

The party did as Charlotte bid them, the sceptre’s jewel pulsing under her palm, the warmth of the others’ bodies mingling with hers. Charlotte felt a dizzying sensation, but she didn’t fall. It was as if she was becoming the sceptre, joining with what the gem on its cap had seen, the jewel’s history unravelling in reverse order before her mind’s eye.

The sceptre secure in the mausoleum beneath the speaker’s chair in Parliament’s chamber. Being polished by the Keeper of the Vault, an ancient title but little more than a janitor now in the great functions of state.

A retainer running with the sceptre wrapped up and concealed in rags, trying to sneak it across the border into Quatérshift. But Parliament’s forces captured him. Hung him from a tree before they carried their prize back to the House of Guardians. Charlotte caught glimpses of royal history in the centuries before Parliament overthrew the last true king. Being carried by royals for coronations and the opening of Parliament – the Guardians little more than favoured poodles told when to bark and bite.

Centuries of cold and chill biting winds from the north. Then the sceptre was being locked away in a barrow mound, buried by a dying monarch as the Jackeni tribes dwindled, their numbers denuded at the beginning of the age of ice. Earlier, earlier, and then the gem was being installed, hidden in plain sight on the newly created sceptre of a newly minted Kingdom. Before that it had served as far more than a mere ornament. Charlotte gasped soundlessly, held in the sceptre’s spell. In the service of its
true
masters. Creatures that Queen Elizica had battled and known as the
sea-bishops
, the same hideously wizened and fanged monsters haunting Charlotte’s dreams. Charlotte could see where the nickname had come from – sea-bishops – the monsters’ distended brain cases, rising out of their skulls in offensive imitation of a bishop’s mitre. The sea-bishops had been members of the race of man once, but on another Earth, one of millions stretched out on the thread of creation, a single pearl on a necklace containing infinite variants of itself, endlessly repeated reflections in a mirror. Mankind had abused this world, drained it with their vampire hunger, becoming ever more dependent on their machines, their bodies withering away even as their brains grew and swelled until their heads became the mitre-tall monstrosities that Elizica had named them for. The sea-bishops’ minds developed to be powerful enough to amplify their will with crystal devices, compel the creatures of the world they shared to surrender their life-force to these terrible man-things evolved so far from their humanity. Cattle that would walk towards their death convinced they were approaching their own kind. Charlotte flinched as she realized that it was one of these trickster devices she wore around her neck. Every sea-bishop carried a duplicate of her amulet. A multifaceted tool: communication device, calculating machine, weapon and mesmeric camouflage apparatus combined. Eventually, nothing was left on the sea-bishops’ Earth. No food, no vegetation, no fish in the ocean, no metals left to strip-mine, no coal to burn, no sunlight capable of penetrating the dark polluted clouds that choked and swirled around their home. With their land heated to hellish temperatures, the sea-bishops retreated to the dwindling oceans, changing their bodies to live underwater in the foul acid-ridden lakes that remained and cultivated the crystal machines that sustained them. With dwindling resources, they constructed their final piece of technological art – a vast diamond cannon that could punch a tunnel through the very wall of creation itself and hurl their seed sideways into new realities on which to feed. They expended incredible amounts of power to scatter their seed this way, but the sea-bishops’ investment was repaid. Those that survived the journey and prospered would grow a huge crystal gate that could open a two-way connection between the reality they’d reached and their own dead, dark, mirror reflection of Earth. A terrible gate that could only be anchored at more than one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure of sea level. This was why the sea-bishops’ seed-cities inevitably settled on the deepest part of a host world’s ocean; trenches that scarred the world, darkness that nestled and protected their hidden work until they were ready. Balanced by coequal quantum pressure on both sides, their portal could open with minimal energy expenditure, and through that doorway would swarm the never-ending Mass of sea-bishops from the victim world’s dark twin. This was the seanores’ legend of the deep hell. Demon locusts come to feed on the native population.

The jewel in King Jude’s sceptre had captured echoes of a hundred such invasions before it arrived on Charlotte’s Earth. Billions of victims, some human, many different in a myriad subtle ways, but all the children of Earth, and all consumed in great orgies of destruction. Wars were sparked, revolutions fomented by the sea-bishops’ tricks, the host populations softened up before invasion. And only then did the demon hordes come. Children running towards people they thought were their parents just to be impaled on deadly crystal blades and their life force consumed, husks discarded. Mothers desperately trying to find their offspring only to have their children reach out and stab them through the neck. Slaughter after slaughter, race after race, nation after nation, world after world. Feeding greed without end and hunger without limit. Worlds pissed on and polluted and raped. Charlotte tried to scream and cry and turn her sight away from these hellish visions, but Elizica held her tight, Charlotte’s palm bonded to the sceptre like glue.

And the sceptre’s jewel, the jewel tormenting Charlotte with these visions, it served as a key and a map combined. A key jealously guarded by the commander of each seed-city launched towards an unknown reality. For on some of the shadowy mirror worlds, creatures of greater power than the sea-bishops lurked – other sea-bishops more technologically advanced, or human analogues raised to near god-hood by the fruits of super-science. The sea-bishops were paranoid that their world would in turn become prey to some variant of humanity more powerful than themselves. The sceptre’s gem held the secret co-ordinates of the sea-bishop’s reality and it would only to be activated by the seed-city commander if a prey-world was judged susceptible to the sea-bishop’s forces. Elizica had frustrated the sea-bishops’ original plans, uncovering the plot during their first attempt to spark a war between the Jackelian tribes and the gill-necks. She’d worked to steal their precious key. Elizica had liberated the Eye of Fate and with the help of a great mechomancer, she had altered it along with six other amulets stolen from the corpses of dead sea-bishops. Changed the gems to allow humans to change their appearance. Seven heroes had infiltrated the seed-city of the sea-bishops, led by Elizica, stealing the key-gem and preventing the enemy from opening the gateway to their hellish home. Before they had escaped, the heroes had plundered part of the seed-city’s engine works, a shield that had protected the sea-bishops from the hideous destructive forces of being flung across the barrier of reality. Machinery which could create a bubble of space-time sitting outside of existence, the only shield capable of surviving the crossing. Elizica and the two surviving members of the raiding party had buried the device in the walls of the underwater trench and activated the shield, trapping the seed-city in a trap of time, sealing the enemy inside eternity’s cold grip.