Chapter 22 - The Kraken Gate
Without its carriages, the engine made good time. Its arrival into Lannerville station caused a considerable stir. Air-train staff summoned the constabulary, who in turn enlisted the help of the local military unit.
Captain Hanta-Kildair of the North Yesper Regiment had one of his medics treat Na-Su for her injuries, while he questioned Inigo, the drivers, and I for an entire bell about what had happened. He was a briskly efficient man with a no-nonsense manner and a crisp uniform. Though he didn’t say it, a countryside posting in Lannerville was beneath him, and it was clear that he was trying to prove his worth so that he could be reassigned to where the action was as soon as possible. The captain requisitioned the air-train, giving instructions for it to be refuelled and repointed at Emberly using its turn-hanger. He also relayed a situation report via heliogram to his superiors in Emberly.
We were finally released when all our statements had been taken. Before leaving us, Captain Hanta-Kildair made it plain that he may need to visit us at Director Harman’s estate if he had any further questions. We didn’t stay to watch him board the air-train, but we heard the full-throated roar of the turbine rattling the roof and window frames of the provincial station as it pulled away.
Ellen Tremain was annoyed to have been kept in the dark while we were being questioned, but was relived to hear of our escape. She fussed over Na-Su, doing everything in her power to make the Omolit woman comfortable for the ride back to the manor house. She’d commissioned the estate’s omnibus that was usually used to fetch goods, and ferry staff to and from the town, so there was plenty of room for us and all our bags. Dusk was falling as we left Lannerville town and trundled through the country lanes towards the Harman country estate. A driver and coachman sat up-top, keeping four beautiful blue roans to a steady pace.
‘That’s not a clever tactic,’ Ellen said, when she heard about the attack on the air-train.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘It smacks of desperation.’
Inigo had fallen asleep, exhausted after his efforts, shovelling coal. Na-Su was also nodding off. I was really concerned that she needed proper medical attention, and soon.
‘Is Doctor Caldwell here?’ I asked Ellen. Caldwell had been brought in to the project early on when it became apparent that high temperature steam, high voltage batteries containing acid, pressurised pipes and insanely fast spinning dynamos weighing half a ton might present certain health risks to the staff.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He was on the same train as us. We’ll drop Na-Su off at the infirmary as soon as we reach the mansion. Caldwell was setting himself up there this morning.’
A blanket slipped off Na-Su. Ellen put it back in place and returned to the previous topic. ‘They should have known that the narrow doorways between the carriages would make them easy to defend.’
‘It didn’t feel easy at the time,’ I said, thinking of Na-Su’s injuries.
‘Sorry. You know what I mean though.’
‘Maybe it was their last chance to get at us.’
‘They certainly seem well informed as to our whereabouts.’
‘You think there’s a spy in our midst?’
‘There has to be,’ I said. ‘How else could they have known where we’d be?’
Ellen nodded thoughtfully, which was when I noticed the key she was wearing on a string around her neck. It wasn’t at all in keeping with her fastidious dress sense.
‘For the failsafe,’ she explained, realising at once what I was looking at. ‘The butler found somewhere we could secure the explosives and other materials.’ She pulled the cord over her head and handed it to me.
‘Nice work,’ I said as I hung the cord around my own neck. ‘How was your journey?’
‘I’d forgotten how much noise trains make. Our sleeper car was towards the rear, so we didn’t hear much noise from the locomotive, but I hardly slept for all the rattling and clanking!’ Ellen flicked her cascade of blond hair from her face. ‘Other than that, it was fine. James and Ankush spent most of the journey in the restaurant car.’ I noticed a tinge of disapproval in Ellen’s voice. I didn’t ask. I could imagine James enjoying a drink or two and having a laugh. He was probably glad of a distraction, what with the loss of Ty Rendish. Ankush could be talkative when the subject was right, and he certainly enjoyed his food.
The Forest of Yesper rolled by, the gloom under the canopy darkening by the turn. The trees here were festooned with bearded lichen. The smell of wet moss and decomposing vegetation permeated the carriage. Now and then I glimpsed a clearing, some piled with felled trees, a couple sheltered a workman’s cottage; crumbling timber frames packed with rough-cut stone, small leaded windows and roofed with wooden shingles. Lannerville’s declining logging industry was based on ironwood, increasingly obsolete in an age of iron and steam. The real source of income from this area though, and the source of Director Harman’s wealth, was gravitium ore. Most of what I knew came from Inigo’s research into our prospective client before we took on this contract.
Harman’s grandfather, Georgu, had been the son of a wealthy mill owner. Brilliantly gifted, but disinterested in his father’s business, he studied mineralogy and used family funds to travel extensively, even throughout Nallia, some said. Many cycles went by when the family had no news of him or his whereabouts, and on one occasion he was missing for four years. In winterxil of 717aH, his family received a coarsely written note from him which confirmed he’d fallen for the ‘Gold Fever’ that had lured so many to hardship and death in the Forest of Yesper. Two years later he negotiated his way home to Emberly through the memorable spring floods with three cartloads of broken rock. Immediately he set about converting one of the outhouses into a forge. His father, Keirun Harman, was indulgent, permitting his wayward son to conscript two of the estate’s staff to help him as he embarked on another lengthy quest, this time locally-based, to liberate the natural properties of the ore he’d stumbled on.
‘No, it isn’t gold-bearing,’ he'd explained to his bemused family. ‘It’s directional. It knows which way is down.’
Keirun Harman laughed and laughed at that until his family thought he would die of an aneurism. ‘Ha-ha! Every stone knows which way is down,’ he said, wiping the tears from his eyes.
‘You are correct, father,’ replied Georgu, ‘and yet there are situations when a stone on the end of a string would point the wrong way.’
‘How so?’
‘Airships, father. Airships need to fly in turbulent conditions and make hard turns in one direction or another. Under such conditions, their existing zhoroscopes fail.’
‘You know this to be true?’ asked his father.
Georgu issued instructions to one of his newly apprenticed smiths and steered his father into the nearby orchard for a rare moment of familial interaction. They sat on a bench under among the apple trees. Georgu wiped his brow, leaving a trail of soot across it.
‘I can demonstrate it,’ he replied, picking up a rock and tying it to a length of string. He proceeded to whirl the string around his head. ‘Where is the stone pointing now, father?’
The elder Harman had to concede that the rock was no longer pointing straight down.
‘This is the problem this ore will solve. I had the privilege of travelling aboard airships several times while I was in Nallia. I struck up a friendship with the captain of one vessel who mentioned the problem in passing. All is well when an airship banks in clear blue skies. The horizon is visible and there is no doubt as to the orientation of the craft. In heavy cloud or at night, especially during storms when caught in an updraft or downdraft, it can be very disorientating. Their existing zhoroscopes are based on a weight, mounted low in a gimbal. Gravity levels it out under gentle sailing, but when banking, for example, centripetal force pulls the weight to the outside of the turn, just like the rock on my string. Then the device records the horizon as being parallel to the floor of the gondola, even though it may be heeled over at twenty-five degrees.’
‘Yes,’ conceded Georgu’s father. ‘Only last week, the newspapers reported another airship disaster in the Bakostan mountains.’
This much Inigo had read to us from Georgu’s memoirs. They described how he had discovered the seemingly magical properties of gravitium while he’d been prospecting. A very small number of thin stones, caught in the centrifuge buckets always came to rest aligned in the up-down position, no matter how many times the contents were mixed and the drum spun again. From his experimental forge, Georgu had gone on to build a business that exported worldwide, especially to the Nallians who had no gravitium ore of their own. What appeared nowhere in any written texts, except in the scientific papers in Director Harman’s secure vault, was the new application for gravitium. Highly refined gravitium was the single constituent of the lodestone that sat at the centre of the Koulomb Gate.
Outside the carriage, the gathering gloom of night was temporarily banished by a profusion of gas lamps mounted on a lavish gatehouse. We were at the main entrance to the Lannerville Estate, built in the reign of Orwall III with a portion of the vast wealth accumulated by Georgu Harman and his son, Michael.
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