The Kingdom Beyond the Waves. Stephen Hunt

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СКАЧАТЬ out the callers. It was bad enough that every chimney sweep and hawker on the crescent called every morning trying to convince her or Cooky to purchase their wares, now she had to deal with simpletons too.

      ‘This is not the house of any Damson Robur, sir. It belongs to Lord Leicester Effingham today, exactly as it has done every day for the last twenty years.’

      ‘You are in error, damson,’ insisted her lunatic visitor. ‘I visited the lady just a few nights ago here and this house is the residence of Damson Robur.’

      ‘You have the wrong address, fellow,’ said the maid. ‘All the crescents and lanes about these parts look alike if you do not live around here.’

      ‘Then who was staying here three nights ago?’ demanded the visitor.

      ‘Exactly nobody was here, sir – the place was empty. Lord Effingham was at his country residence in Haslingshire. I have only just travelled down to Middlesteel with his cook to open up the house for the season.’ She pointed to the dark rooms behind her, furniture in the hallway hung with white linen covers to protect them from the deposit left by the capital’s smog. ‘Does this look like an occupied house to you? There’s dust all over the place; Circle knows, it’s me that has to clean it all up. Try the crescent on the other side of the park, why don’t you? The lanes all look alike, especially after a night of carousing.’

      She shut the door on the unexpected caller and went back to sit with Cooky and their nice pot of warm caffeel down in the kitchen. Within five minutes she would have been hard-pressed to describe the visitor’s nondescript face to anyone who might have asked. Which was precisely the point of that face.

      Around the corner, her visitor entered a covered arcade of small shops selling pottery and walking sticks. Cornelius Fortune emerged from the exit at the other end, walking into the crowds of a teeming market. He feigned an interest in the long silver eels being slapped down on the wooden surface of one of the stalls, checking the reflection in a shop front to ensure there had been no watch set on the house. No tail emerged from the arcade, no confused expressions trying to locate the vanished visitor. So, what mischief was to be had out of the disappearance of Jules Robur, the continent’s greatest mechomancer? Damson Robur did not exist, and now it seemed, neither did her father. There were always complex games of deception and guile being played between the paranoid members of the First Committee as they jockeyed for power and position across the border in Quatérshift. Had such a game been played with Furnace-breath Nick as one of their pawns? The thought of that ate at him like a cancer.

      ‘Lovely, ain’t they, squire?’ said the fishmonger behind the stall. ‘Special offer today, take away one of these lovelies and I’ll throw in a free tub of sweet jelly.’

      ‘The long one, there,’ said Cornelius.

      ‘I can throw in a nice piece of slipsharp heart for tuppence more. So oily you can cook it in its own juices.’

      ‘Just the eel,’ said Cornelius. ‘I rather think I have other fish to fry now.’

      Standing on the dock, Amelia moved out of the way of a chain of bearers carrying repaired components from the gas scrubbers deep into the interior of the u-boat for T’ricola to reassemble in her engine room. The sonar man Billy Snow was sitting on top of an upturned fishing boat, in a position where he could have seen everything going on in front of him – if he had only possessed the requisite sense.

      Amelia went over to him. ‘You get around Rapalaw Junction better than I do.’

      ‘There’s not much here, is there?’ said Billy. ‘But I can always follow my nose back to that soup that passes for air inside the Sprite.’

      ‘Damn it, but I hope we can fix up our boat soon.’

      ‘So eager for the greenmesh?’ said Billy. ‘I know why I’m here, professor – same as the rest of the seadrinkers. We only feel alive when you shove us in a can and push us beneath the waves. But you? Why do you care so much about some city that may or may not have been buried under Liongeli an eon ago, before a floatquake pushed it up towards the heavens?’

      ‘You want the simple answer? It is knowledge. The Camlanteans had the perfect society,’ said Amelia. ‘They lived in peace without hunger or war or evil for a thousand times longer than Jackals has endured; but we know so little about them.’

      ‘Your colleagues back at the universities doubt they even existed,’ said Billy. ‘I shall let you into a little secret. Before we left Jackals, I imposed on T’ricola to purchase the book that you wrote – The Face of the Ancients. She and Gabriel are kind enough to read me a chapter from it each evening.’

      ‘Well then, I believe I might have trebled this year’s sales of the damn thing,’ said Amelia. ‘I would have had more luck if the stationers in Middlesteel sold it as celestial fiction. That tome you are enjoying finished my career. The High Table made sure there was not an expedition or dig in Jackals that would take me with them after I had it published.’

      ‘Admitting to what you don’t know is even harder for the learned than the ignorant.’ The sonar man waved out towards the jungle. ‘They were not so perfect, I think. If they were, Middlesteel would be called Camlantis and their people would be here today, not dust and ruins under the weight of a half-sentient jungle.’

      ‘But we don’t know!’ Amelia tried to communicate the depth of her passion for the subject. ‘Circle knows, what we understand about the Chimecan Empire is sketchy enough, and they made their holds deep underground when the cold-time came – what preceded their time is shrouded in myth and legend. Where he could, my father collected every crystal-book, every piece of parchment with a legible script of Usglish, every paper and theory on the Camlanteans, and—’

      ‘—And yet still what is lost, is lost,’ said Billy Snow.

      Amelia remembered when her father was still alive – sitting at his knee, the excitement with which he talked about how Jackals’ ancient democracy was a hollow echo of the perfect utopia it could become. Somehow she could never pass on the vision as clearly as he could. ‘My theory is that the Camlantean civilization was supported by the same techniques we see perverted today by Cassarabia’s womb mages. They had found a way to live in harmony with their world, and most of their craft was lost to history for no other reason than it was living, alive. Apart from their crystal-books, most of it just rotted away after their realm fell.’

      Billy shivered. ‘Those who serve as slave wombs in Cassarabia might debate your ideals of utopia, professor. I’m a u-boat hand, not a jack cloudie, but I know our aerostat crews have mapped most of the low-lying floatquake lands. No one has ever seen something the size of Camlantis drifting about up there in the heavens – not once. If your city is as lost as that, there is a reason for it.’

      Superstition from a sailor? Well, Amelia was hardly surprised. Billy’s trade were always genuflecting to some god of the sea or river down below decks, invoking spirits and chanting in the hidden corners of the Sprite of the Lake. No wonder the Circlist church refused entry to many of the men of the sea.

      Amelia glanced curiously down the docks, towards a flurry of activity in the shadow of the trading town’s walls. It looked like a newly arrived trader was finishing setting up shop, a crowd of people from the town gathering to see the merchant. The haste that was being shown by the audience was in stark contrast to the listless pace of business she had seen conducted everywhere else in Rapalaw Junction.

      ‘That’s odd,’ noted Amelia. ‘The market is in the centre of the town, but everyone СКАЧАТЬ