his mechomancers could not have worked this out for themselves.
‘You have one,’ whispered Amelia. ‘You really do have a working crystal-book.’
‘Not just any book,’ said Quest. ‘This is no ledger of raw trade data or random collection of personal poetry. This book belonged to one of the greatest Camlantean philosophers, one of the ruling librarians – Pairdan. He knew the Black-oil Horde was over-running their empire’s provinces one by one. His story was inscribed on the crystal towards the end of their civilization.’
‘This is priceless,’ gasped Amelia. ‘This could change everything we know about the Camlanteans.’
‘Oh, the book had a price, professor,’ said Quest. ‘Believe me. One that made even myself think twice before paying it.’
‘Why do you care about Camlantis?’ demanded Amelia. ‘This is my life’s work – but for you? What is this? A minor distraction, in between raking in more money than the Greenhall treasury takes from the nation in a year’s taxes?’
‘It is ideas that truly interest me, professor. Concepts that fascinate me. Sadly, it must be admitted, more than people ever have. The legends say the Camlanteans had the perfect civilization. That they lived together in peace for centuries – lived in a society that had abolished hunger, poverty and violence. What lessons could we learn from their lives, what lessons?’
‘That pacifists should build bigger walls to keep their enemies out,’ said Amelia. ‘Where did you get this crystal-book, Quest?’
‘An antique dealer spotted it being used as a doorstop in a bakery in Lace Lane, sewn into a leather bag. The baker had taken it from his grandmother’s cottage when she died and had no idea of its true worth. Unfortunately for myself, the dealer had all his wits about him when it came to placing an accurate value on the crystal-book.’
Amelia ran her fingers along the crystal-book’s cold surface. ‘You can’t keep this here, Quest. Not even you. It has to be studied.’
‘And so it shall be, but not by those dullards at the High Table for whom the existence of a functioning Camlantean society is tantamount to archaeological heresy. You know what they would do with this artefact as well as I do. They would bury the book in the vaults of Middlesteel Museum and take it out once a year for a good polish.’
‘You want me to study it?’
‘More than that … watch.’ Quest walked over to the chemical drums and threw an activation lever, tiny sparks leaping from the wires coiled around the base of the book. With a green nimbus enveloping the crystal, a finger of light crept from the jewel’s surface, fanning out in front of them like mist. The light resolved into an image of a man. He was speaking, but could not be heard – script scrolling up the air to the right of him.
‘This is Pairdan you see here, professor, the last Reader-Administrator of Camlantis.’
Amelia barely heard Quest. She was following the ancient characters crawling up the air while simultaneously trying to watch Pairdan. How old was he? Thirty, perhaps? Young for such an elevated position of power. Pairdan’s head moved to one side, his crown with a single jewel at its centre glinting from the fury of the fires outside, and Amelia saw what he was looking at. Pairdan’s city was ablaze in the distance, fireballs of burning petrol-soaked straw and tar arcing across from the catapults mounted on the Black-oil Horde’s besieging war wagons. The juxtaposition between the communication crystals turning sedately in the high towers of Camlantis’s ethereal spires and the pure animal carnage of the horde was almost too much for Amelia to bear, even with the passage of so many thousands of years. It was as if it was happening now, to one of Jackals’ own cities.
‘Poor Pairdan,’ said Quest. ‘Watch the sadness in the Reader-Administrator’s eyes. He is gazing upon the end of his world, and you can tell that he knows it. The start of a dark age that lasted until the rise of the Chimecan Imperium.’
‘Quiet.’ Amelia was trying to keep up with the scrolling words. ‘I need to concentrate. He is saying something about a plan.’
Quest moved the reader’s control lever up a notch and the image froze in front of them, the bubbling of the vat filling the room with its rotten-egg stench. Amelia started to protest but Quest waved her to silence. ‘The translator I hired lacked your proficiency, professor, but I already have the gist of the story.’ Quest pointed to a high mountain in the image’s distance and the stars glittering above, frozen in aspic and lost in time. ‘This mountain is the key, Amelia. The glaciers passed it by during the coldtime. It hasn’t changed that much over the ages.’
‘You really do know where Camlantis is!’ cried Amelia.
‘Where its foundations were. As best as we can tell, Pairdan’s plan was to deny the city to the Black-oil Horde. It was no random floatquake that destroyed Camlantis, professor.’
Amelia was dumbstruck by the implications. Among the few scholars who treated the Camlantean legends with any respect, Amelia knew the speculation had always been that after the city had been sacked, and the librarian-sorcerers murdered, there had been no one left alive to drain the flows of the world’s energy and it was struck by a floatquake. The worldsingers’ first duty was to tame the leylines that could rip miles of land from the ground and send it spinning up into the cold night. The order of worldsingers mastered the power of the Earth and used it to fuel their sorcery and rituals. When civilizations fell, when order broke down, the incidence of floatquakes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes striking the land also proliferated; that was an undeniable fact.
‘Then the Camlanteans destroyed their own city.’ Amelia could hardly believe her own conclusions.
‘The barbarians weren’t fools,’ said Quest. ‘The horde did not want to burn Camlantis to the ground out of pique or envy. They wanted control of the city of marvels for their own ends. They would have strapped the librarians to their wagons as slaves. With Camlantean power at their disposal, the Wheel Lords would have swept effortlessly across every kingdom of their age. I can imagine no worse fate for a society of pacifists, can you? Turned into grovelling court wizards for a pack of murderous warlords. Watching while the horde tied the children of their conquered subjects behind their wagons, dragging them to bloody ribbons over gravel in their honour races. Abetting in the sack of cities other than their own.’
Amelia looked at the noble frozen image of the Reader-Administrator. ‘Poor man. Poor Pairdan.’
‘Think of it, professor.’ Quest walked towards a porthole-like window cut into his pneumatic tower’s rubber walls. ‘Somewhere in the heavens Camlantis is still spinning around the world. Not a sacked ruin of marble and stone, but intact, its empty streets a home for nesting eagles and the dust of Pairdan’s hopes. That is your dream too, is it not?’
Damn his eyes. Quest knew it was. ‘You said you know where the city was located, before the floatquake?’
‘And the reason why its ruined foundations have never been discovered.’ Quest led her back to a table in his office where one of his Catosian soldiers had unfurled a map. His finger hovered over a large swathe of territory, most of it coloured black for the unknown and the unexplored. ‘Liongeli.’
Amelia looked askance at the featureless, uncharted expanse. A jungle hell without end. An environment so forbidding that only distant cousins of the race of man such as the shell-armoured craynarbians could make their home there. ‘Your geographers must have made a mistake, Quest. All the ancient texts suggest that the location of Camlantis should lie far further north. My best guess is somewhere north of the Catosian League, or perhaps buried beneath the pampas of Kikkosico. It may even be underneath the wastes controlled by the polar barbarians.’
Quest shook his head. ‘Trust me, Amelia. I have established my place in the world by following my contrarian instincts. Would it surprise you to learn that yours is not the only academic heresy I have been following? In matters of continental geography, there is a hypothesis currently proscribed by the High Table that posits our entire world may have shifted its position many times in the past,