From the Deep of the Dark by Stephen Hunt Page A

the kitchen’s centre, enough chairs to seat twelve heads at a single sitting.
    ‘Your cook has the night off?’ Daunt said to the commodore’s back as the large man drained a pot of steaming vegetables.
    Without turning, the commodore pointed to one of the goblin-sized metal figures standing inert against the wall. ‘The month off, lad. Coppertracks’ drones will be as still as statues until he returns from the colonies.’
    ‘I fear I would never let Boxiron cook for me. His idea of a fine meal is a tenth of a coal box shovelled into his furnace injector.’
    ‘Ah, but Coppertracks is a rare genius,’ said the commodore. ‘Clever enough to have read Damson Beaton’s
Household Economies and Recipes for Sustenance
and passed it onto his little metal puppets here. Did you find any of the revelations you were looking for upstairs?’
    ‘Along with a measure of frustration, good captain. I have a little of the meaning of what the sisters have been saying, but meaning without context.’
    ‘A map without bearings,’ said the commodore opening the range and removing a tray of covered clay pots. ‘Blessed hard to plot a course against that.’
    ‘Much of what I have uncovered seems to concern a monarch who was said to have unified the tribes into the first Kingdom of Jackals before the age of ice swept the continent.’
    At Daunt’s words, the commodore seemed to stumble, almost spilling the pot’s contents. ‘That would be Queen Elizica of the Jackeni.’
    ‘Indeed,’ said Daunt. ‘It is as if the Sisters Lammeter are possessed by her spirit, relaying her words from beyond the grave.’
    ‘Elizica’s whispers have been heard in our world before, lad. She took it in her wicked mind to speak through my daughter, once. Nothing good comes from possession by the spirit of the land. Elizica’s like an albatross fleeing the storm front. If it’s her mutterings that your poor lassies are babbling about, you had best close the storm shutters and start stacking sacks full of flood sand outside your door.’
    ‘I don’t believe in unquiet spirits,’ said Daunt. ‘And the only gods with us in the world are the ones we create in our mind.’
    ‘Save your Circlist cant for the archbishop,’ said the commodore. ‘I know what I’m talking about, right enough. She’s the voice of the bones of the land. Jackals itself. The Kingdom soaked with the souls and blood of a thousand generations of our ancestors before us.’
    Daunt shrugged. ‘A voice that talks in riddles … of a war within a war. And riddles that point back to an ancient conflict between the tribes and the underwater people. A time when gill-necks waded up our beaches and attempted to conquer the mainland.’
    ‘I know a little of the legends of that time,’ said the commodore. ‘Though I wish I didn’t.’
    ‘The professor wrote a book on it,’ said Daunt. ‘
The Fall of the Stag-lords
. She hypothesized that the magma fields of the Fire Sea were expanding during that age, driving the peoples of the underwater nations onto our shores. During the confusion of that period, the hold of the druids over the land was weakened, the invaders repelled and the tribes unified under the first queen.’
    The commodore looked as though this was news he did not want to hear. ‘Let it stay in the professor’s history texts, lad. Wicked times, let them stay lost and forgotten, that is where they belong!’
    ‘The tongues that the sisters Lammeter are speaking in would have it otherwise,’ said Daunt lifting up his notes and translations. ‘The meaning is obtuse, but they seem to suggest that those times are repeating, that the war we now face with the Advocacy is merely the turning of the circle. They warn of ancient prophecy.’
    The commodore moaned and abandoned his range. He collapsed at one of the table’s chairs. ‘Damn her, damn her wicked tricks.’
    ‘The professor?’
    ‘Elizica, lad, the bloody ancient queen. Is there so little royal blood