Читать книгу The Rise of the Iron Moon - Stephen Hunt - Страница 5
ОглавлениеPurity Drake bent down to pick up the empty brown beer bottle, recently rolled under the tall iron railings of the palace following a chance impact with one of the many pairs of shoes exiting from Guardian Fairfax atmospheric station – the gates to the underground transport system hidden just out of sight, but not so far away that the grit and soot from the vast stacks that kept the atmospherics’ tunnels under vacuum didn’t rain down on the palace grounds day and night. Endless supplies of soot that constantly needed sweeping from the flagstones in front of the palace’s faded marble façade.
But what shoes there were in the crowds outside. Polished knee boots the season’s fashion for the men; patterned red leather with shiny copper buckles and heel ribbons for the ladies. Shiny patent dress boots for the soldiers barracked in the capital, so swish under their cherry-red cavalry trousers. And big hobnailed affairs – toe-armoured for protection, cushion-heeled for comfort – for the workaday crushers patrolling the royal precinct. All serving only to remind Purity of the dirty naked feet at the other end of her grimy, stockingless legs. She wiggled her bare toes sadly, then stood up and dropped the empty bottle in her rubbish sack.
Purity’s mind drifted to the daydream – her favourite daydream. One day some young girl going to school, a rich mill-owner’s daughter, would notice a small hole in her perfect, fashionable shoes, and her mother would arch an immaculate eyebrow in disgust and pull the shoes off, leading her daughter at once to the nearest cobbler for a fresh pair. The discarded shoes would land near enough to the railing for Purity to reach out and lift, lift towards her, the beautiful pair of—
There was a loud, a meaningful cough. One of Purity’s two political police handlers had noticed she had stopped working. He nodded contemptuously towards the wire-haired brush – almost as tall as Purity after her sixteen years of the Royal Breeding House’s meagre diet. Gruel and bread, with meat served on Circleday only. She didn’t complain. Who would care to listen? Picking up the brush again, Purity quietly wiped the dirt off her drab grey shawl and went back to sweeping the flagstones. It was a mixed blessing, the duty of cleaning the palace grounds. It freed her from the captivity and tedium of the Royal Breeding House, true, and the exercise and fresh air were welcome. But this close to the main gates it would not take much for any bored passing republicans to notice the golden crown sewn onto her clothes. Republicans who would not mind that it wasn’t a stoning day and that Purity Drake wasn’t the queen. The types who would take it into their thick skulls that she made a perfect target for a bit of impromptu sport.
Purity glanced out of the railings towards the other side of the palace square. There had been a shoe shop in the line of merchants opposite at one point. Thank the Circle, that concern had shut down last year. Those bowed windows filled with tiered rows of boots and shoes stitched by the hands of a master cobbler had been so tantalizing – no cheap manufactory offcuts there.
One of the politicals shoved Purity hard in her back, breaking her reverie and nearly sending her sprawling. ‘I said, get to work, girl. Showers come back, I don’t want to be standing out here getting soaked.’
As if the pair wouldn’t stand in an alcove and watch her work from the dry. Purity didn’t voice that thought, of course. Young Pushy was handy with his fists, one of the political police’s officers who believed there weren’t many subversive tendencies against the Kingdom of Jackals’ perfect democracy that couldn’t be beaten out of a recalcitrant with an iron bar. His older partner had cruel, careful eyes and liked to sit and watch Purity with his toad-like gaze whilst smoking a large mumbleweed pipe. The violence of youth tempered with the older hand of experience. Except that Officer Toad didn’t seem too inclined to do much tempering at the best of times. Purity looked at the older officer and he merely nodded in confirmation of his younger colleague’s orders, as if Purity should know better than to try to slack off while they were on watch.
‘Hey,’ called a voice from the other side of the railings. ‘She’s half your size.’
Purity cringed. It was a real policeman – a crusher walking the palace beat outside, wearing a neat black uniform rather than her two guards’ forest green. Hadn’t the officer seen the golden crown sewn onto her dress, or had he allowed the animosity between the crushers and the political police to overcome the citizens’ usual prejudice against the nobility? Maybe he had a daughter her age, but either way, the well-meaning policeman didn’t know these two as well as she did, and he wasn’t helping her situation.
‘What did you say?’ spat Officer Pushy.
The crusher leant against the railings. ‘I said it must be a hard duty for you, pushing around a right little villain like her.’
‘Sod off, Wooden Top,’ said the Toad. ‘Find some anglers to arrest.’
Purity winced. Anglers were one of the lowest rungs of the ladder in the capital’s criminal ecosystem, using modified poles to lift women’s unmentionables and other laundry off the drying lines hanging suspended high above the narrow streets of the slum neighbourhoods. Catching anglers was a job given to cadets at Ham Yard.
Outside the railings, the policeman pushed his pillbox cap – oak-lined to take a good knock or two – back up his scalp. ‘You two are fine shoving around children, but you wouldn’t last two minutes on the beat against the flash mob down in Whineside.’
‘This ’un,’ said Pushy, ‘this ’un is a stinking royalist, and you treat them like you’d treat your hound.’
Pushy went to strike Purity in the face and she flinched, but suddenly there was a snap as reality dislocated and the political officer’s hand vanished, becoming a green-scaled fist. The courtyard was gone, replaced by a long and windy shale beach. No, not again. Another one of her visions. The madness that ran down her family line.
Purity was ducking the fist, moving fast under the weight of heavy armour, a trident in her right hand sweeping down to hook a beast off its feet, the shield in her other hand smashing into its snarling face, rendering it dead or unconscious. As always, her madness came like a dream, she was trapped as an observer in her own body. Where was she? All down the beach, warriors dressed like Purity were dancing a ballet of death. Their foe was coming out of the ocean: seven-foot tall humanoids covered in scales, dripping with seaweed, heads shaped like a bishop’s mitre. Crocodile teeth in wide, snarling grins. Her warriors were shouting insults at the sea creatures, gill-necks from one of the ocean kingdoms. Their language sounded like Jackelian, but incredibly archaic. How long ago was this?
Purity’s movements and those of the woman she was dreaming – or was it the other way around? – were fused together perfectly. One of the sea beasts raised a pipe with a series of metallic bulbs at its end, and Purity’s shield flared with blue energy, deflecting a hail of spearheads driven by compressed air. By the Circle, Purity could feel the power, the raw power of the earth throbbing beneath her feet. Drawing it into her body. This must be what being a worldsinger was like, the sorcery of the earth charging her veins. The earth of the kingdom, the holy dirt these sea beasts wished to claim as their own.
Muscled arms wrapped around Purity’s waist, crushing her bones beneath her mail armour. She shoved her trident back into the beast’s gut, reversing it to swing its triple prongs down towards the winded invader. Then she stumbled. A momentary disconnection between the past and the present, the dreamer and the dream.
‘Who am I?’
The sea beast snarled, revealing its white fangs, and spat something at her in a language full of whistles and guttural stops, a language that was made to carry underwater. Purity didn’t need a translator to know it was a curse of the deepest kind. The gill-neck reached for a razor-sharp blade strapped to its forearm and she squeezed the trigger on the trident, a stream of energy shooting from its prongs and burning a hole in the beast’s chest. The beast was still shuddering its last breath when she whirled the trident around, releasing a whip of energy across a line of the corpse’s kin wading out of the sea and trying to break through the warriors defending her beautiful white cliffs.
‘I am Elizica, Elizica of the Jackeni. Drive them back! Drive the gill-necks back into the water!’
Snap.
‘Into the water, into the water.’
The Toad was dragging her off the prone form of Officer Pushy. ‘Stop it, you mad little cow. You’ll put his brains across the floor, you will.’
Outside the railings the policeman was laughing. ‘She can take a slap and give one back.’
‘I’ll see you get a flogging for this, you little—’
Purity stopped struggling, the terrible realization of what she had done sinking in. The sudden strangeness of modern Middlesteel replaced the vision of the ancient battle at the beach. The knock of the atmospheric station’s steam engines in the distance, the shadows of the pneumatic towers lengthening as the sun emerged from behind heavy rain clouds. She’d struck a political officer, struck him down unconscious by the looks of it. What would they do to her now? How much was her rare, wild, mad royal blood worth to parliament after such a vicious assault?
‘You’ll pay for this, you—’ The Toad was bending down over his colleague, touching two fingers to the man’s neck. ‘He’s dead! Oh, jigger my soul, how am I going to explain this one to the colonel? He’s dead.’
‘But I only knocked him to the ground, how can he be bloody dead?’
The Toad drew his pistol from his holster, slipping a crystal charge into its breech. ‘You broke his nose, drove the bone right back into his head. It’s a murder trial for you now, girl, no two ways about it.’
A trial! Purity looked at Officer Pushy desperately, as if she could will the dead guard back to life with the seeming ease that she had brained him. She couldn’t even remember doing it. A death. A trial. The state always turned a blind eye to deaths inside the Royal Breeding House – but only among the royalists. One more or one less in the breeding pool was just natural wastage. But a guard, not even a redcoat, but an officer, an agent of the political police? Purity had been eleven when they took Jeffers away, the wild boy, a duke’s son who’d knifed a soldier on the ramparts as he tried to escape from the breeding house one night. They didn’t allow much reading material in the Royal Breeding House, but they had allowed the copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News that had carried the front-page cartoon of Jeffers being hanged outside Bonegate, the crowds howling their rage at the royalist murderer. Would Purity’s end be any more dignified when they dragged her to the scaffold and slipped a noose around her neck? She didn’t even have the customary coin to bribe the guards to jump on her legs and pull her feet to make it quick for her.
The Toad licked his lips nervously. The man’s position wasn’t that different from hers now. Justifying this calamity, on his damn watch, back to his masters in the state was going to be no small matter.
‘I want his boots,’ sobbed Purity.
‘What?’ the Toad levelled his pistol at Purity, unsure if he needed it. Was she the girl they pushed around at the Royal Breeding House or was she the young wolf who had just killed his colleague?
‘I’m going to bloody swing for this,’ said Purity. ‘At least let them kill me wearing his boots. I can pad them out with paper and cloth; they’ll fit me fine, you’ll see.’
‘You’re mad,’ growled the Toad. ‘Mad as a bloody biscuit. When they take you to the scaffold they’ll be putting you out of your misery.’
Toad-face needed her alive to bear the punishment for this; the man wasn’t going to shoot her now. Purity knelt to untie the dead guard’s laces, but the voice in her skull returned, the woman’s voice she had heard on the beach. Bare feet are conscious of the land. They feel the bones of Jackals, connect with the blood of the world. You will know when the time is right for shoes.
‘The blood of the world.’
‘Get away from his boots, you babbling nutter. You’re not even fit to touch him.’ The Toad grabbed a bunch of hair at the back of Purity’s head and yanked her to her feet.
She let him have the hair. Ignoring the pain, she seized his wrist and rotated the arm so he had to fall to his knees, kicking the pistol out of his other hand with her rigid toes. ‘The bones of Jackals.’
‘My bloody bones!’ the Toad screamed as his arm stretched close to breaking point.
Purity released her grip and spun around on the ball of her left foot, smashing the Toad’s face with her right sole. Bare, calloused, Purity’s foot was every bit as tough as shoe leather. Catching the falling body she rammed the Toad against the palace railing, jamming his head between two bars. It was like watching one of the crude plays the children in her dorm put on for each other back in the Royal Breeding House. Although here she was the audience and the actor both – but with every movement her actions felt more and more like her own volition, not the ancient thing whispering in her mind. She even knew why she had rammed the Toad’s head through the railing, stepping back, running at him – a human vaulting horse. A quick jump. Her hands dug into the metal between the palace railings’ sharpened ornamental spikes, hauling her weight up.
Purity saw the crusher with his pistol drawn below, the old constable stunned by the murderously quick turn of events on the other side of the palace gates. ‘Gentle as you like, girl, back onto the ground with you.’
Purity’s shared, knowing vision noted the gun’s clockwork firing mechanism, the hammer cocked back behind the crystal charge, its fluid explosive sloshing around inside the shell, the curve of her arc down at him and the insignificant chance his ball might miss at such close range.
‘Please don’t!’ The voice distracted the crusher. A vagrant, his clothes dirty and torn, his mind probably too raddled to do anything but be drawn closer to the centre of the action rather than scatter and run like all the other panicked citizens in the square were presently doing.
Drawing his club from his belt, the crusher waved the cosh at the vagrant’s face while his pistol stayed firmly pointed up towards Purity. ‘Back to the jinn house with you, you damn drunken fool, or you’ll know the why of it from me.’
‘I have not been drinking,’ insisted the vagrant. ‘Can you not see this child is pure? Is this how you honour your sages?’
‘No, this is how we do it at Ham Yard.’ The crusher swung the cosh towards the vagrant’s head and the thing inside Purity’s skull told her to leap. She did, the policeman catching the movement out of the corner of his eye and triggering the hammer on his pistol. As a storm of smoke blew out of the pistol, Purity felt as if she was frozen in amber within the air. The ball exited the barrel with a crack of broken crystal. The vagrant had raised both of his hands – not to ward off the cosh, though – a wheel of air detonated out of his outstretched fingers. Followed by another and another, the policeman slapped off his feet and falling into the railings, Purity rolling in the air with the backdraft of the strange energy force, pushed out of the path of the ball. She landed down on the square’s flagstones as nimble as a cat. This was a vagrant? If so, he was the sort who must have studied the sorcery of the worldsong at some point; he had surely mastered the magic of the leylines. Purity heard redcoats shouting from the palace grounds behind, running towards the sound of the pistol shot.
‘Come,’ called the vagrant, beckoning Purity to follow him.
No time to slide the unconscious policeman’s boots off, not that they would have fitted her. Pity, a crusher walking the beat every day would have some pair of boots.
‘Other keepers of your law are approaching, they will come after you.’
He had that right. Purity Drake on the run from the Royal Breeding House, a political officer lying dead in her wake. They were going to keep on coming after her until they had her kicking at the end of a gallows rope. She looked at her odd saviour. There was something wrong with the vagrant’s face, as if the proportions were out of balance, the hair too stiff, like feathers on a bird. The voice in her skull was undecided about him, but Purity was out of options.
‘Thank you for saving me,’ Purity wheezed as the pair of them fled into the side lanes.
‘I have done you no great favour, I fear,’ said the vagrant. He was fast on his feet for someone living on the street; Purity was having trouble keeping up. ‘You should leave my presence, there are people pursuing me far more dangerous than the keepers of your law.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Purity. ‘Hey!’ She had just realized how unnatural the vagrant she was running with actually was. ‘You’re speaking without moving your lips. Am I on the skip with a theatre act?’
He slowed down, his eyes blinking. ‘No, I am not one of your city’s stage players; I am a visitor. I have travelled down to your kingdom from the north.’
A foreigner, she should have guessed. Perhaps she could slip out of the country with him, back to his land. Jackals was never going to be safe for her again. By tomorrow, her blood code sigils would be printed on an arrest warrant hanging in every police station from Middlesteel to the border. The full horror of the future she had opened up for herself dawned on her.
‘They couldn’t see it,’ said the foreigner. They had fled deep enough into the tenements to catch their breath briefly.
She looked at him quizzically.
‘Your purity. You walk with the power of your land.’
She gazed down at her bare feet, standing in a puddle of stagnant rainwater in the rookery alley. ‘I walk with no shoes, sir, and that’s just what they call me. They call me Purity.’
‘I am called Kyorin.’
‘You’re a strange one, Kyorin, but with the way things have been going for me lately, I’m not much of a one to talk. Do all your country’s people speak by throwing their voices like a stage act?’
‘Not all of them,’ said Kyorin. ‘The ones who are coming after me would be more interested in eating me than conversing with me.’
‘Circle be damned, you say?’ Purity looked at her saviour’s oddly angled face. From the north, the far north perhaps? The polar barbarians were said to practise cannibalism, but this queer fish didn’t even have a beard, let alone a fur-shafted axe with him.
‘It is true,’ insisted Kyorin.
‘Well, Jackals is full of refugees. You’re one kind, Kyorin, and now I’m another. A royalist on the run, like old King Reuben hiding in the forest from parliament’s rebel redcoats.’
Kyorin bent down to examine Purity’s feet. ‘Your connection to the land, it is consuming for one so young. Have you yet experienced the visions of a sage?’
What was the point of lying to this vagrant, this shambling exiled witch doctor? Whatever arts of the worldsong he held to, he had the measure of her, all right. ‘I thought it was madness. Everyone in the house did.’
‘And so it is,’ smiled Kyorin. ‘But it is a glorious sort of madness. You are a conduit for the soul of your land, nourished by the leylines. It is no wonder I felt myself drawn to your presence. I can feel the power within you, it is very strong.’
‘You are a witch doctor then?’ said Purity. ‘What you did to that crusher who was going to put a bullet in me …’
‘I am not permitted to take life,’ said Kyorin. ‘It is not my people’s way. I merely disorientated your keeper of laws to prevent a worse crime being committed.’
‘Best you don’t try that line on a magistrate here,’ said Purity. ‘You’d get a boat to the colonies or the rope for helping me escape.’
In the far distance there was a whistle from a policeman’s Barnaby Blow. A pickpocket diving into the rookeries to escape justice, or were the police on their trail again? Time to be moving on. Purity looked about the narrow passage, branching out into shadowy lanes that didn’t even have old-style oil-fed lamps, let alone the new-style gas ones. Not a place to be hiding after dark. What did Purity know of Middlesteel’s geography? Depressingly little. Only what she had seen of the capital while being marched around on a handful of routes by her guards. Hiding inside the Royal Breeding House, that she could do. The other children had taken enough lumps out of her hide that there weren’t many nooks and crannies in the old fortress on the outskirts of the capital that she didn’t know like the back of her hand.
‘Do you have any money?’ asked Purity.
Kyorin took out a bag-like pocket book and jangled it. ‘I had more yesterday, but I lack the means to replicate additional Jackelian tokens of exchange now.’
‘Well, I’ve got a five-hundred-year-old act of parliament that forbids me to hold property and chattels in my name, so you’re looking pretty flush to me. My mother told me once that if I ever needed a safe place to stay, the flop houses in the east of the city don’t ask too many questions.’
Kyorin sniffed at the wind. ‘The keepers of your law are coming after us. We should leave here.’
‘That’s a handy nose.’
‘It is the hunters from my land that we must fear. Come …’
The two of them fled deeper into the heart of Middlesteel.
Harry Stave pulled out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the pinprick of blood away from his finger, the transaction engine drum on the blood machine in the doorway rattling on a set of loose bearings as his identity was successfully matched to the record on the shop’s files. The Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard, where Middlesteel’s secrets were hoarded and sold, although very few of Dred Land’s customers were aware that the shop was a station house for the Court of the Air. Its proprietor a whistler, in the parlance of the great game the various intelligence agencies of the continent’s states played against each other.
If Harry’s two companions – so traditional in their long-tailed coats and stovepipe hats, tailored in black and starched to perfection – were surprised by the appearance of the shambling, mute steamman that greeted them as the door opened, they did not show it. Harry smiled, the two crows stepping inside behind him, laconic and hardly taken aback by this obviously human-milled automaton, an expensive toy in comparison to the creatures of the metal that came down from the mountains of the Steammen Free State. A form of labour that was never going to take off, not while the race of man lounged unemployed in vast numbers across the capital’s slum districts, breeding and fighting and breeding some more.
They were good, Harry’s two crows, the Court of the Air’s finest, their presence underlying how unsettled things had become upstairs. Not even fazed when Dred Lands appeared, his silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins covering his terrible wounds; opening up the basement entrance to the duke’s hole and taking them down to the concealed rooms underneath his shop. But what was on the table now was enough to pierce even their laconic detachment.
‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it, Harry?’ said Dred Lands. ‘My informer came up trumps when she fished that floater out of the river.’
‘You’re as good as my word, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘I told the Advocate General when she gave me the nod for this job. It’ll be Dred that comes up with the goods first. And you haven’t disappointed, no you haven’t.’
‘Not really my area of expertise,’ said Dred, indicating his primitive iron drones moving about behind the steam-fogged glass of his underground orchard room. ‘But you don’t have to be a butcher to appreciate a nice piece of roast beef on Circleday.’
‘Don’t you worry about butchers,’ said Harry. ‘I brought my own.’
‘Sharp tailoring,’ said Dred, moving aside as Harry’s two crows got to work. ‘Very sharp.’
Running his hands over the wet corpse, the shorter of the two agents murmured in appreciation, pushing at the skin and the bones like a doctor trying to diagnose an inflamed chest.
‘Worth the trip down?’ asked Harry.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the shorter of the two crows. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open, revealing dozens of tools fastened to the lining with straps – bone saws, scalpels, hammers that could crack open ribs.
Harry shook his head. ‘Not here. We’ll take him back upstairs and do it properly.’
Dred nodded in thanks to Harry. As he might. Dred’s iron drones would have been scrubbing for days to remove the blood if the two crows had gone for a full dissection down in his bolthole.
‘Then I am done here.’ The crow looked at his companion. ‘Mister Shearer?’
‘Thank you, Mister Cutter.’ The second crow ran his hands along the body a couple of inches above the burnt flesh. He hummed an incantation to the worldsong, the air crackling with energy, vortexes of dancing witch-light snapping in and out of existence above the body.
‘What about his mind?’ asked Harry. ‘Can you go for a reading? His last memories?’
‘No,’ said the crow, through the gritted teeth of concentration. ‘Not even I can do that. He’s been cold for far too long. One thing I can tell you, though, his death was not an accident. There is an aura of great distress imprinted across the residue of his soul.’
Harry hadn’t been expecting anything else. ‘How far off the map are we, then?’
‘Let me show you,’ said the crow. ‘Mister Cutter …’
‘Mister Shearer?’
‘Cleaning fluid, seven strength.’
The other crow reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle, a line of sigils printed in transaction engine code the only markings on its label. Taking the bottle and carefully pouring it onto the corpse’s face, the crow rubbed the cheek gently with a cloth. As he rubbed, the pink skin changed colour, the dye running off, revealing a light powder blue underneath.
‘Bloody Circle,’ said Dred Lands, peering in for a closer look. ‘A blue man!’
‘And not from the cold of the river, eh, Mister Cutter?’
‘Certainly not, Mister Shearer. He’s been painted to fit in with the people of Jackals. All very theatrical.’
‘Not from the race of man?’ asked Harry.
‘No, nor from any of our ancestral tree’s offshoots,’ said the crow. ‘His muscles and skeletal groupings bear no relation at all to craynarbian or grasper physiology.’
‘From one of the other continents, then?’ said Harry. ‘Lots of odd creatures and races out down Thar-way. And our colonists have only explored a small part of Concorzia.’
Lifting the lips of the blue man and running a finger down the teeth, the crow indicated the stubby molars. ‘Look, flat. No edges to the teeth, no canines at all. This creature is a plant eater. I can sense more than one stomach inside his belly, maybe as many as five, all interconnected. He wouldn’t have been able to nibble so much as a ham roll for lunch without becoming violently sick from indigestion.’
‘A plant eater,’ murmured Dred Lands, looking down at the corpse. ‘I knew there was a reason why he was bleeding green blood when my informant brought him down here.’
Mister Cutter ran his hand fondly through the dead creature’s hair. ‘Yes. A plant eater. I think he would have been non-violent by nature. Peaceful.’
Harry lifted up the blackened sleeve of the corpse’s jacket. ‘Burnt up, then drowned. If it was peace he wanted, he should have buggered off out of Jackals.’
‘You know more about this than you let on when you tipped me off, don’t you?’ said the owner of the Old Mechomancery Shop.
‘Ask no questions and be told no lies.’
‘Harry, I’m the chief whistler in the capital, I need to know what’s going on here!’
‘Someone has been sniffing around, and not one of the usual suspects, either,’ explained Harry. ‘One of the Greenhall engine-room men on our payroll found something nasty turning on their drums, not a natural information daemon evolved from legacy code like they’re used to dealing with. Rummaging around the Board of the Admiralty’s drums it was, but it didn’t know we had a sentry on the Court of the Air’s own backdoor watching it breaking in. The daemon erased itself when our man tried to isolate it for examination.’
‘If they got that far into our transaction engines, then they’re sharp,’ said Dred Lands. ‘Very sharp indeed. You know how many checks a punch card goes through before it’s injected into the Greenhall engine rooms. And the Admiralty drums are the most secure in the whole civil service. Which makes it doubly unlikely that our dead friend here is an agent of the Commonshare’s Committee of Public Security.’
‘Plenty starving across the border in Quatérshift eating grass soup these days,’ snorted Harry. ‘But you’re right, this one is no shiftie agent.’
Harry didn’t mention the headaches the Order of Worldsingers were experiencing in Jackals, all those little acts of sorcery going wrong, misfiring with unexpected results. He could feel it himself, the change in the earth. Like a bird following the magnetic paths of navigation to the wrong destination. Geopathic stress was what the Court’s experts called it. The world was turning, always turning. But where were they going to end up? Maybe there would be more answers when the three of them returned to the Court of the Air and really got to work on the corpse.
‘Bundle him up.’ Harry indicated the strange body. His two crows did as they were bid.
‘But are you for the good or the worse, that’s the question?’ whispered Harry.
And more to the point, who in the Kingdom of Jackals wanted the blue man dead in the first place?
Purity returned from the vendor with a handful of apples and a couple of pears, and Kyorin nodded his approval at the girl’s selection.
‘You’ll need to eat more than fruit if we’re going to keep on walking across the city all day again. There’s an eel-seller over there and his jelly looked fresh …’
‘My digestion is not very steady where fish are involved,’ said Kyorin. ‘Let’s eat while we walk. It’s important we keep moving.’
‘If these people from your kingdom are after you, why stay in the capital? I’m getting tired of diving into the crowds every time I see a crusher. I think there’s still enough money left in your pocketbook for a couple of berths on a narrowboat up north. We could travel back to your land.’
‘I would not be welcome in my home,’ said Kyorin. ‘I am a slave and I have slipped the collar of my masters.’
‘A slave!’ exclaimed Purity, spitting out pieces of apple. ‘I thought you were a prince, a noble in exile with assassins on your trail to ensure you couldn’t return home to reclaim your throne.’
Kyorin devoured his pear, even finishing off the core and pips. ‘Nothing so grand or romantic, I fear. Of the two of us, you are the one with a royal birthright. At the very best, I could only be considered a revolutionary… to those who pursue me I am a mere piece of disobedient chattel, to be destroyed for my treasonous inclinations.’
‘More reason to be off and out of Middlesteel.’
Stopping in the shadow of a shop window, Kyorin pulled out a waxy white stick and, as he had done so many times before, rubbed his exposed skin with it. Face, neck, hands. ‘My hunters are creatures called slats, they track by scent. Luckily for me, they prefer to hunt at night— they are eyeless and see using the noise they project from their throats. There are so many people here, so many strong smells. Even without the cover of my masking stick, your capital is the safest place for me to hide.’
‘You sure you’re come down from the north, not up from the south? I’d love to go south. They say that the caliph has given sanctuary to Jackelian royalists in the past to tweak parliament’s nose.’
‘You may use my remaining tokens of exchange to book a passage to this nation by yourself,’ said Kyorin. ‘It would be best if you headed as far away from the north as you can. You should travel south, travel there and keep on going.’
‘And how long would you survive in Middlesteel alone with no coins?’ asked Purity. ‘You need me to buy things for you. I’ve seen you covering your mouth when you talk to people, so they can’t see how you speak without moving your lips. Everyone thinks you’re lying to them.’
‘Quite the opposite, young sage. I carry the seed of truth within me.’
‘Along with half a kilo of pear seeds. It’s the truth I’d like from you myself,’ said Purity. ‘What are you really doing here? You’re not just on the run from these hunters, are you?’
‘I escaped here to see if your people would be able to help overthrow the masters’ rule. My people are called the Kal, and we have been subject to occupation by the masters for so long we have almost forgotten that there was a time when we were not slaves. Our culture is suppressed; if we are even caught teaching our young to read we are executed. We hoped that the people of the Kingdom of Jackals might help free us from this yoke.’
‘We don’t do that,’ said Purity. ‘It’s the Jackelians’ oldest law, dating from long before parliament made the kings hostage. No empire, no interference with our neighbours’ concerns. We can act only in defence of the realm, never in aggression.’
‘I rather approve of that law,’ said Kyorin. ‘But I am afraid my mission to your land will soon become an irrelevancy. My masters will be at your borders shortly and from what I have seen during my travels here, your nation will not be able to withstand their might.’
‘You are mistaken, sir,’ Purity protested. ‘Jackals is the strongest nation on the continent. There is no one who has attacked us who has not lived to rue the day.’
‘I wish I was mistaken,’ sighed Kyorin. ‘But I know better, as I believe do you. Your bare feet feel the power of your land throbbing; can you not feel the sickness spreading underneath you?’
‘I—’ Purity hesitated. This runaway slave had the measure of her. That was exactly how it felt, like a wrongness in the earth, spreading inexorably slowly beneath the bones of the land; the woman’s voice in her skull, her strange madness, whispering to her of the disorder in the land.
‘What you feel is no illusion,’ explained Kyorin. ‘The beastly slats that pursue me may need flesh to dine on, but my masters need life itself. Their machines will drink the life from your land. At first your worldsingers will notice small failings of their sorceries as the leylines grow weaker, then your people will grow listless and uneasy as the connection with the soul of your home dwindles, and then, when enough of your power has been made theirs, your strength weakened, then will my masters’ slave armies appear. Legion upon legion of slats. Some of you will be made slaves in turn, some of you will be farmed for your flesh, the majority of your population will be culled down to a manageable number.’
‘That will not stand,’ insisted Purity.
‘You are a sage,’ said Kyorin. ‘You are a living conduit for your land and she is screaming her rage through your mouth. But your rage will not be enough, just as it was not enough for my people when we faced the masters’ fury.’
‘But there must be a way to fight your masters,’ said Purity.
‘Perhaps, but it is not to be found here. There is one among my people who can help, one of the last of our great sages to evade capture. He was meant to send me word of how to defeat our masters; this I was to pass on to your people. But the party travelling to me across the wastes with his secrets was betrayed and ambushed. Only one rebel survived, a desert-born nomad. He escaped to your kingdom alongside me, but I suspect my simple friend was lax with the use of his masking stick. The hunters caught up with us and murdered him.’
‘If you have a way of stopping your masters, why has this great sage of yours not used it in your own land to free your people?’
‘The same thought occurred to me,’ said Kyorin. ‘Possibly such a weapon will not work for our people. Perhaps its deployment was judged too late to be of use to us now. Activating it will almost undoubtedly involve the use of violence that is not permitted to my people. Or the whole tale may just have been a fiction by my own side to encourage me to infiltrate the expeditionary force to your kingdom in the hope that powerful allies could be found here.’
‘Allies don’t come more powerful than the Jackelian navy,’ said Purity.
Kyorin smiled. ‘It will take more than your airships to lift the oppression of the masters from the Kal, or to stop them claiming your nation as their territory.’
‘What is your kingdom called?’
Kyorin sang a long musical string of words that lasted for a minute.
‘But what do we call your land here in Jackals? Where would I find it on a map?’
‘I believe it would translate as Green Vines of the Kal: Clean Waters of the Kal.’
That wasn’t what Purity had asked, but if he didn’t want to tell her …
Kyorin started on the other pear, eating it carefully and consuming all the fruit. ‘It is not a description that has applied to my home for a long time. The masters have sucked my land dry. What used to be lakes are now dust bowls swirling with mists of stinging chemicals and our once endless forests have become salt wastes and deserts.’
‘It can’t be worse than the smogs here. Have you ever smelt a Middlesteel peculiar when the winds don’t clear away the smoke?’
‘It is far worse. The masters are very adept at dealing with the miasma and filth of their slaves’ labours. It is said that long ago they changed the pattern of their bodies to cope with the waste that they generated. Then they introduced schemes to transmute their detritus. But after a while, even their tinkering with their bodies was not enough and when my land itself had had enough of their presence, it tried to restore the balance of the ecos by sending ages of ice and heat. But the masters controlled even the land’s attempts to fight back, pumping chemicals and machines into the air to stop the ecos from cleaning their corruption from her skin. Fixing our land in a state of living death. Then the masters settled in for the long haul, feeding on the static corpse of my nation until there were no more resources left to convert, no mines left full, no soil fit for growing food, until even the animalcules flowing under the earth and the magnetic energies that pump through the land’s veins had been exhausted.’
‘I was hoping I might find sanctuary in your home,’ sighed Purity. ‘Now I’m glad we’re not going back there.’
‘I never said I wasn’t going to return home,’ said Kyorin. ‘But the time is not yet right. I need the help of a friend I have made here to return to my land. And I still hope to find allies among your people. Those with the wit and the will to survive the journey with me to meet the great sage and join our last effort against the masters. If I cannot bring the mountain to the Kingdom of Jackals, it seems I must bring the Jackelians to the mountain.’
Purity felt disorientated. There was an empty barrel by one of the market stalls and she used it as a seat. Was it Kyorin’s tale, or was it the light and the space of the capital’s streets? Even in a crowded market, the sense of freedom from the familiar corridors of the Royal Breeding House was dizzying, overwhelming at times. She knew Kyorin’s story was the truth, the part of her that throbbed with the land, the whispering voice of her madness, told her so.
‘You could stay here with me.’
Kyorin squeezed her hand in reassurance. ‘It is not my wish to return home. You don’t know how beautiful your land is, with fresh water running through the centre of your capital, sparkling and alive with the creatures of the river. Clouds that swell with falling rain you can walk in without it burning off your skin. Parks of trees and lawns you can actually stroll across, blades of grass you can feel between your fingers – all this we know only in memory. But if your kingdom is to be spared the fate of my home, I fear the journey must be made.’
There was something about his tone of voice. A warning note rose from the ancient voice whispering through her soul. ‘You’ve never met this great sage of yours, have you? You’re not even sure he’s not just a rumour, an old slave legend invented to keep a spark of hope alive.’
‘You are learning to listen to your powers,’ said Kyorin. ‘That’s good. One day soon your intuition may be all you have to keep you alive. You are correct. I am city-born; my cell in the freedom movement was attached to the maintenance of the masters’ great devices of geomancy. Only a few nomads in the salt wastes can truly count themselves free of the yoke my people wear, and it is they who carry the word of the great sage.’ He kicked the ground with a boot. ‘I fear I make a poor sage. The few powers I have are amplified massively here, thanks to the vitality of your land. Back home I could not cast even a basic shield of protection. If I could have performed such feats, my family would have been culled and I would never have been apprenticed as an engineer.’
Purity was about to ask Kyorin more about his life, but he sniffed the air and cursed in his singsong tongue. ‘The slats hunting us are drawing closer. We must pay a boatman to row us down the river again and reach a different district of your city.’
‘What about that perfume stick of yours?’
‘It is running low and the masters will have sent their most proficient pack of hunting slats after me. I fear my pursuers may now be tracking me by the scent of the masking stick itself. But even they have not yet mastered the art of following a scent across water.’
Their lives weren’t so different, Purity mused as they sprinted off towards the embankment of the River Gambleflowers. Both born as prisoners to the rulers of their land. Both slipped their chains. And both of them due to be swiftly executed if they fell back into either of their masters’ clasp. Two kingdoms to save, but they could barely even preserve their own lives.
Molly wiped the dust off the bottle of red wine – a Quatérshiftian vintage brought over from before the revolution and the execution of the Sun King – a rare treat and just the thing to cheer up Commodore Black. While the rest of Middlesteel was celebrating Smoking Prester Charles Night by building bonfires and letting off fireworks, the commodore was moping around Tock House, resolutely refusing to celebrate the foiling of the notorious rebel’s ancient attempt to blow up parliament with his underground cache of compressed-oil explosives.
‘Ah, Molly,’ the commodore had wheezed. ‘You cannot expect me to celebrate my own ancestor’s betrayal into the hands of those grasping bureaucrats and shopkeepers that rule us. Leave me alone this evening and you raise a glass to those rascals in the House of Guardians with your writer friends down on Dock Street. Don’t expect me to go out carousing with you tonight.’
‘Perhaps you could look upon it as a celebration of royalist bravery?’ Molly had slyly suggested.
‘The bravery of a mortal failed fool. Have you seen what our neighbours are building on the green outside our own gates to rub my face in it?’
She had. The ritual of Smoking Prester Charles. A bonfire platform topped by a straw figure covered in a silk gauze screen – a cheap effigy of the glass dome into which parliament’s soldiers had pushed the captured rebel five hundred years ago before burning chemically treated wood to fill the man-sized bottle with poison gases. As humane a method of public execution as any, she supposed. Centuries on, Smoking Prester Charles Night had become an excuse for a little fun in the capital, rather than the pretext parliament had needed to disinherit the losing side of the civil war of their remaining lands. Had the political police known about Prester Charles’ plot, and perhaps even encouraged it? Probably, but that wasn’t going to get in Molly’s way of a night’s much needed diversion from the worries the Hexmachina’s final fraught warning had filled her with.
She examined the faded label on her bottle. Perhaps the wine would lift the commodore’s spirits a little; he disliked the massive cellar levels and relied on Molly to ferret out the surplus bottles racked outside of their pantry. She walked up the stairs in search of the old u-boat man. There were eight storeys in Tock House, not counting the basement levels. Molly had once investigated getting a lifting room added onto the outside of the tower-like structure, but the architect she had wheedled into inspecting the building had sadly shaken his head, tapping the walls. Seven feet thick, built after the Jackelian civil war in an age of paranoia. A layer of innocent red brick concealed hard-cast concrete layered with rubber-cell shock absorption sheets. The mansion was a disguised Martello tower, a veritable fortress masquerading as a folly. Masons weren’t going to be knocking through to build additions to this place. Not without the assistance of a volley from the Jackelian Artillery Company.
Finding the commodore’s rooms empty, Molly continued up the stairs to the highest level of Tock House and sure enough, the old u-boat skipper’s complaints could be heard coming from the chamber that housed the tower’s clock mechanism and Coppertracks’ laboratory. But that was odd … None of the oil lamps in the corridor was lit …
She found Commodore Black in a room at the back, tugging on the handle of a winch with the help of three of Coppertracks’ diminutive mu-bodies. As the commodore and the drones heaved, the two halves of the dome above were creaking apart, revealing a cloudless, starry night. Molly buttoned up her tweed jacket tightly. No wonder it was so cold and dark up here, their steamman housemate was planning another series of observations on his telescope. Along with the oil lamps, the pipes that carried Tock House’s warming waters from the boiler downstairs were turned off across the top floor.
‘Ah, this is no night for your peerings and proddings about the firmament, Aliquot,’ said the commodore.
Alongside the submariner, Coppertracks’ drones raised cyclopean eyes to the heavens, extending them telescope-like to their maximum length, as if they might help the intelligence that inhabited their bodies in his endeavours of astronomy. ‘I believe our position at the top of Tavistead Hill will isolate us well enough from the firework displays this night,’ said Coppertracks.
‘The commodore might have a point, you know,’ said Molly. ‘Fireworks or no, they’re getting ready for a bonfire on the green opposite. When the smoke from that starts to fill the sky, you’re not going to be able to see much tonight.’
‘Then let us make haste,’ said Coppertracks. ‘If I were to abandon my work every time you softbodies held a celebration in the capital, I would spend more of the year playing chess against Jared here than I would in achieving anything of scientific merit.’
Commodore Black finished winching open the dome and eyed the bottle of red wine clutched in Molly’s hand. ‘Now there’s a friend on a cold night like this. Not many of those left downstairs, nor any more likely to come our way. The ingenuity of those that owned the vineyards crushed like their own grapes in the monstrous killing machines the revolution has raised in Quatérshift.’
Molly watched Coppertracks extend the tubing of his telescope to its maximum length, a clockwork-driven engine doing the heavy lifting. ‘I thought with the new observatory in the Free State at your service, you’d be using your telescope less now?’
‘So I had planned,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But last night I experienced a disturbing dream, a visitation from the Steamo Loas, urging me to seek the pattern of the stars in the toss of the Gear-gi-ju cogs.’
‘Say you did not,’ said the commodore. ‘Throwing your blessed cogs like dice and shedding oil you can ill afford at your age, murmuring like a gypsy seer.’
‘My people ignore the advice of the Steamo Loas at our peril, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Of course I performed the ritual of Gear-gi-ju at the Loas’ urging.’
Molly had an uneasy feeling about this. After her own communion with the Hexmachina a couple of days ago, a fruitless search for any sign of where her old ally in high adventure, Oliver Brooks, might be now had turned up nothing more than a trail of tall stories in the penny dreadfuls and almost-as-fictional accounts from the lurid crime pages of the capital’s news sheets. The warning from the Hexmachina seemed like a dream. At least, Molly deeply hoped it had all been a bad dream.
‘And what did the pattern of your mortal tossed cogs reveal?’ asked the commodore.
‘The Eye of Eridgius,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The ancient astronomers’ name for Ashby’s Comet.’
‘Is that all? And we are well shot of that, then. Off past the sun, you said. A fare-thee-well until the comet returns in a thousand years’ time.’
Coppertracks’ telescope swept along the sky, fixing on the position where the comet should be, the steamman’s mu-bodies setting up a table to take notes of their master’s observations. Coppertracks raised an iron finger to tap his transparent skull in perplexity. ‘This is most irregular.’
Molly moved out of the way of one of his scuttling drones. ‘What is it, old steamer?’
‘Ashby’s Comet has disappeared!’
‘Maybe that wicked flying star has finally burnt itself out?’ said the commodore.
‘That’s not how the mechanics of a comet work,’ chided Coppertracks. He returned to the telescope, placing his vision plate on the rim of the device, swivelling the assembly’s axis across different portions of the heavens. ‘It is not one of your night’s fireworks. Where have you gone to, now, you erratic little—’ Coppertracks emitted a startled fizz of static from his voicebox. ‘This cannot – this is impossible!’
Coppertracks abandoned the telescope, his diminutive drones already rolling out large tracts of paper on the table behind their master, pencils in their hands, scrawling at a frantic pace – filling the cream vellum emptiness with calculations and equations. Molly pressed her right eye to the telescope. Against the inky canvas sat a tiny crimson dot so small it might as well have been a fleck of brick dust blown off Tock House’s walls.
‘You’ve located it again, then?’ said Molly. ‘The comet looks so small now.’
‘It should be far smaller,’ said Coppertracks from the table, the fire under his skull-top pulsing with the energies of his vast intellect. ‘And more to the point, the comet should be in a totally different quadrant of the sky.’
‘Those calculations you received from King Steam’s new observatory must have been off by a margin, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Sure and it’s happened to me often enough, plotting a course underwater with only the stars and the maths on an old transaction engine to see my u-boat through the straits of the ocean. That’s a shame, but these celestial games of yours seem a complex and deep matter, everything so far away in the darkness with only a polished lens and a length of copper to peer out at them.’
‘King Steam himself assisted in my initial calculations,’ said Coppertracks, irate at the commodore’s lack of faith in his people’s infallibility.
‘He’s young metal.’
‘His body might be young, dear mammal, but his mind is the latest incarnation of a long line of ancient wisdom. King Steam does not make mistakes, and neither do I.’
The sinking feeling in Molly’s gut was getting worse. ‘It’s coming back towards us, isn’t it?’
Lifting the equation-filled paper from the hands of a mu-body, Coppertracks scanned the maths, and then nodded. ‘Yes, you are quite on the mark. Ashby’s Comet is returning. Given its present size and position, there is only one explanation that fits the mechanics of the situation. Ashby’s Comet must have used the gravity well of Kaliban to slingshot around the celestial body of the red planet, and, as you say, come back towards us.’
Molly tried to keep the panic out of her voice. ‘Returning towards us to ram into the Earth?’
‘No,’ said Coppertracks, ‘my calculations suggest the comet will not collide with us, but pass near enough by that it will be captured by the gravity of our world. I believe, dear mammal, that we are soon to have an extra moon sitting in our sky.’
‘Please, now,’ wheezed the commodore, his breath misting in the cold air of the chamber. ‘This is a huge great comet in the heavens we are speaking of, not a billiard ball knocked around across our table of velvet downstairs.’
‘I do believe you are closer to the truth than you realize,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Ashby’s Comet must have impacted with another minor celestial body after it passed us by, its trajectory nudged into the gravitational pull of Kaliban and set on a new course back towards us. A billiard table is exactly what our celestial bodies’ dance of orbits and velocities have become.’
‘Is that it, then?’ said the commodore. ‘A cruel chance meeting of vast stones in the heavens and now we are to have a new moon.’
‘How long?’ asked Molly. ‘How long before Ashby’s Comet returns to our skies?’
‘My estimation at this point would be in the order of five days.’
Five days! The Broken Circle cultists would have a field day when the comet they believed augured the end of all times returned and set up permanent residence in the heavens.
