From the Deep of the Dark (53 page)

Morris reached his hand out towards Daunt, his gas rifle clutched in bloody fingers, an offering of war. ‘Take it.’

‘I can’t.’ Daunt’s voice came out like a husk, a rasp of dust and blood clearing his throat.

Morris weakly pushed his rifle out again towards Daunt. ‘I bloody love this, vicar. And I’m getting out in good order. You can revel in the fury. But the end’s always terrible. When it stops. Your rage fades. Just thousands of corpses. The cries of the lost and dying.’

Daunt crawled forward, the smoke clearing in the trench. So few standing, so few bursts of fire replying to each new shelling. The ground shaking and vibrating. If the crack widened under them, would they plunge down into hell?

‘Do you have a hell?’ Daunt yelled down the trench, his cry lost on the surviving fighters. Some crouching, others dying, survivors releasing the blades folded under their rifle barrels. Preparing for their last stand.
Or is this it?

‘I can feel it,’ moaned Morris, his words bringing Daunt out of his shock. ‘My soul leaking away back into the world, mingling with it all. Tell me I’m going to come back as better people, vicar.’

We’ll learn the lessons of this life. Return to the one sea of consciousness, diluting into the infinite until our essence is cupped back out again into the world.
Daunt took the Jackelian’s ice-cold hand. ‘We all will.’

‘I already have!’ Out of the smoke and fire along the slope he stepped. Iron feet crunching the ground. A scarlet pulse running down his vision plate as strong and steady as a heartbeat. His chest shining and bright. Boxiron.
But not Boxiron.
The creature of the metal combined with one of the Court’s human-milled marvels, sealed and connected by a power far beyond that of the race of man. As the smoke drifted sideways, Daunt saw hundreds of the Court’s miners stood lined up behind the steamman. Bunker doors were springing open across the slopes, no cannons emerging – only the massed ranks of the Court of the Air’s mining force. They emerged unconcerned into the blast waves of the Advocacy strafing, stone shards rattling off their hull plates as they formed into long columns. Then the legion charged down the Isla Furia.

‘Boxiron?’

The steamman’s head slanted down, taking in his shining polished brutal new body, as if he was seeing it for the first time. ‘Yes—’ he raised his fist and behind him a legion of miners raised theirs in a mirror reflection of the steamman, ‘—I think I am upgraded. By the will of King Steam.’

Daunt gawked.
A slipthinker.
Boxiron was now a slipthinker, able to inhabit multiple drone bodies and make their will his. The highest caste of steamman society. Unlike the empty shells back in Tock House, so many suits of armour without their controlling presence in residence. But Boxiron didn’t have an army of inactive drones. He had an army of hulking mining mechanicals, their fists spinning as drill-bits and shovels and pickaxes. Able to carve caverns out of solid rock, or chunks out of an invading army.

‘Mechanicals,’ groaned Morris. The dying adventurer’s words came out through gritted teeth. ‘Mechanicals can’t fight.’

Boxiron stepped down into the trench, the metal legion to his rear following a second later. He scooped up the gas-rifle in front of Morris. It looked like a stick in the hulking brute’s hand. ‘Perhaps, but a steamman knight knows little else. They are not your mechanicals anymore. They are mine.’ Boxiron’s proud head swept the sight of the trench, the surviving militia scrambling out of the way of the metal titans landing among them, then Boxiron took in the ruins of the city below. ‘A defensive funnel to concentrate the enemy’s formations. A variation of the Battle of the Gauge Heights.’ He looked at Daunt, the light of his vision plate skipping slightly in surprise. ‘You are in command here?’

‘I believe I was.’

Boxiron pulled back the firing bolt on the gas rifle. ‘Interesting. You would have done better to build a series of redoubts rather than a continuous trench, that would have concentrated your enfilading fire. But this is no longer a defensive action.’ The words from his voicebox were nearly overwhelmed by a fierce roar from hundreds of drill-bits spinning into action, tool arms testing the air in unison. ‘Do you mind, Jethro softbody?’

Daunt lifted his hand weakly over the top of the trench. ‘That was never what I was for.’ He tried to sit up and watch the charging waves of mining mechanicals, but it was so much easier just to prop his back up against the trench walls, holding Morris’s still, cold hand. Daunt’s head nodded, little waves of dreamless sleep, sheer exhaustion overtaking him. Sounds and screams and explosions from below punctuated each wave of blackness. Loud at first, then increasingly distant as Boxiron’s forces pushed back to the distant margins of the city. It was dark now, twilight passed into night. He was so tired, beyond what he should be.

Shaken awake by a Notifier, Daunt blinked sleep out of his eyes.

‘How do you vote?’ demanded the man. ‘Do you vote to advance towards the shore?’

Daunt lifted his hand, still holding Morris’s cold finger into the air. ‘We vote to sleep.’

‘He cannot vote. He is dead.’

‘No, I don’t think he is.’

‘Are you voting to stay here in a defensive posture?’ asked the Notifier, indicating the distant clash of fighting.

‘I know when it’s time to stop.’ Daunt shut his eyes. For the first time in ages he allowed the dreams in.

C
harlotte nearly slipped on the underwater city’s oily floor as a familiar figure emerged out of a side turning ahead of them. Gemma Dark. She had her sabre in her hand, and her appearance was answered by a hiss of steel as the commodore drew his blade.

‘I knew it,’ called the commodore’s sister. ‘They’re all at the other end of the city, sweeping the engine levels for intruders, and here you are, heading in the opposite direction. Whenever my brother is up to mischief, just head for where you’re not expecting him, and there he’ll be.’

Charlotte let go of the image of the sea-bishop with relief; the strains of keeping up the illusion dropping away like a lead weight. ‘The sea-bishops have a very low opinion of their cattle’s intelligence. I suppose it helps to loathe what you must consume.’

‘The lifeboats are back that way,’ said Gemma.

‘Oh, I don’t need a darkship,’ said Charlotte. ‘Not after you were so kind as to pilot me to where I needed to go. I don’t suppose your stock is very high with Walsingham now, or he’d be standing here beside you.’

‘We don’t have time to dally,’ hissed Elizica inside her mind. ‘When the enemy realize we’re not hiding from them in the engine levels, they’ll reach the same conclusion as this filthy collaborator.’

‘Can you keep this witch engaged for a while?’ Charlotte asked the commodore, sotto voce.

‘We shared the same fencing masters growing up,’ said the commodore. ‘But I’ve had a few hard lessons since. Let’s see what a dying man’s old bones are good for.’

Charlotte squeezed his shoulder. ‘End of this passage, second corridor on the left. Be lucky.’ She didn’t add the unspoken:
If you live long enough
.

‘There’s a first time for everything, lass.’ The commodore slashed his blade left and right, testing the air, even as Gemma Dark sprinted forward, roaring in rage.

Charlotte and Sadly slipped past against the wall as the brother and sister’s razor-edged steel sprung off each other, sparking in the gloom.

‘I think she hates him a lot more than she wants to be queen of the realm, says I,’ observed Sadly as they moved rapidly down the passage.

Charlotte glanced back at the furious duel behind them.
Almost as unwholesome as my feelings towards my mother.

‘You’re not doing what the enemy expect you to, are you?’ noted Sadly, his tone complimentary.

‘Actually, I’m going to do the sea-bishops something of a favour,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m going to give the bloody monsters exactly what they want.’

Commodore Black deflected his sister’s thrust with an angry scraping of rasping metal. ‘Our age has passed. The trail of our comet has faded into the night, lass. We’re the last of them. All that is brilliant has waned and it’s time for us to go too.’

‘Never!’ yelled Gemma, drawing back, panting. ‘It is my right to rule and I shall!’ She feinted left, then thrust to the right, the commodore only just parrying her blow in time. Jared was getting tired, his arm as heavy as if his flesh was formed from concrete. She was younger than him, and her muscles not addled with a wicked black rot eating her body away from within.

‘You wouldn’t be ruling, Gemma. You’d just be warming a hard lifeless slab of stone cut to resemble a throne. We only ever ruled with the people, not over them. When our ancestors forgot that, we lost all the rights we ever had.’

‘You lying, cowardly, useless jigger,’ Gemma sneered, the sabre raised over her head and turning in her hand. Jared would take his eyes off that hypnotic windmill of hers at his peril. ‘How dare you stand there and spout base parliamentary propaganda at me. You betrayed our family, our line, the bloody
cause
. You left me to shoulder the legacy that should have been yours. All the times you ran away and here you are, choosing to stand for
this
? After all these years, have you found something you’d die for at last?’

‘I’m already dead, lass.’

Her sabre lashed out, nearly skewering his forehead as he stepped aside. ‘On that much, we agree.’

‘I promised our father that I would look after you, Gemma.’

‘A promise broken along with the fleet-in-exile,’ spat his sister.

He stumbled back as Gemma Dark showed him how fit she still was, her blade dancing from side to side, shifting with a fierce energy. Hate could do that, so it could. All their years together. Did she still remember the first lesson their mortal fencing master had taught them? A brief one, words only, rather than the long tiring drills that followed
, high outside, low inside, thrust, parry
, administered in the cramped confines of their u-boat and the royalists’ clandestine underwater harbour?

The art of combat is the art of the unexpected.

She thrust out towards his heart even as he dropped his guard, stepping sharply forward and to the side, taking the steel in the centre of his bandaged wounds. There was a brief glimmer of shock in her eyes as the realization dawned that she had trapped her blade in her brother’s body, skewering him. Then the terrible widening of her eyes as she felt her brother’s blade sinking through her body and emerging through her spine. She tried to speak, to curse and swear, but a throttled line of blood was all that emerged as she stumbled down towards the floor of the demon city, her brother clutching her tight.

‘My vow is true. I’ve saved you, Gemma. Our family was never meant to rule over these bitter ashes.’

Gemma tried to splutter her rage at him as they fell back on the oily deck. He whispered in her ear. ‘I’m a dead man walking, lass. Dying slowly, painfully, as my blasted body eats itself from the inside courtesy of the dark rot. I’ll be seeing you soon.’

She gurgled something, a last half-satisfied exhaling of breath.

Bellowing in pain, the commodore pulled himself off her sabre and pushed himself shaking to his feet. ‘That’s my luck, Gemma. Still alive for a little bit longer.’

The words came out as strangled sobs. He withdrew his blade from his sister’s body, wiping the steel on his trousers, then stumbled down the corridor following Charlotte Shade’s parting directions.

At the end of the passage a door had been opened into a long oblong-shaped chamber, Charlotte Shades and Sadly standing over an evil-looking control panel set beneath a wide screen staring out onto the deeps of the dark. The waters at the bottom of the trench were pitch black, but there was an arc of light so bright he could hardly stand to look at it. The illumination was coming from the vast crystal portal, the gate that could connect their world to the sea-bishop’s terrible homeland.

‘What are you doing?’ moaned the commodore as he lurched into the chamber. ‘Is that not the gateway to these demons’ spoiled world, thick with their hateful legions?’

Charlotte tapped the Eye of Fate, glowing now around her neck, filling the dim chamber with a light as terrible as the one outside the city. ‘The Court of the Air took a copy of the key from the sceptre. Originally they were hoping to corrupt the key and reintroduce it to the sceptre. Instead, we copied its imprint onto the Eye of Fate.’

The commodore pointed to the glowing portal outside. ‘You’ve activated their dark portal, lass. Are you mad?’

Sadly winked at him. ‘Not just activated it, but signalled the beasts that here is a world safe for them to feed on. They’re on their way to the feast.’

Commodore Black raised his sabre at them. ‘You’re bloody mesmerized! The demons’ve nobbled the pair of you.’ As he spoke the seed-city shifted and quaked beneath his boots, the weak u-boat man’s stance on the deck nearly unbalanced.

‘There’s an armada of seed-cities hurtling towards us down their tunnel,’ said Charlotte. ‘It seems only fair to send them one back.’

Sadly grinned as he worked the controls. ‘You know what happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force, you old rascal? A ruddy big explosion, the kind you can’t even measure on the chuffing scale!’

‘I need to stay here with the Eye of Fate,’ said Charlotte. ‘To pilot the city in and seal the portal at our end just before the impact. Otherwise our world will share the force of the explosion along with the sea-bishop’s home. You two get back to the docking bay and bail out on a darkship.’

‘I’m not leaving you alone here alone, lass.’

‘Do it!’ ordered Charlotte. ‘The Isla Furia will probably have fallen by now, the Court exterminated along with Jethro. Dick Tull is likely dead too. Someone needs to make sure these bloody vampires’ last survivors don’t rule the Kingdom and the Advocacy for the new few centuries. Expose them, root them out.’

The commodore put a hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. ‘You’re as plucky as my daughter ever was, lass. Goodbye to you, and as fair a wind in your sails as I never had.’