The Rise of the Iron Moon (28 page)

‘Neither,’ said Purity. The conversation was making her uncomfortable, calling forth too many memories of the patriotic songs and lessons she had been forced to learn by rote in the cold school chambers of the fortress where she had grown up. ‘They are decided by the tables and logs of Greenhall, the treasury office of the Guardian Chancellor. You are automatically granted a title after you have paid a certain amount in taxes to the state; the rate varies and is voted on each year by parliament. The more money you pay, the higher your precedent in the lists.’

‘Hmm,’ groaned Ganby, the disapproving noise rumbling at the back of his throat.

‘Is it so different, Ganby Meridian, from the queen we placed on the throne of the Jackeni, or the council of druids deciding who would rule among the stag lords?’ asked Jenny Blow.

‘To become a druid took years of hard study and mastery of the worldsong. You had to prove yourself worthy of tasks as weighty as selecting a new ruler. My ostler I would trust to care for my horse, my smithy to shoe her. But to look inside the heart of the person I would call Sovereign? I am not sure I would trust such a matter to my ostler or smithy.’

Samuel smiled and tossed the leg of a table into the fire grate, sparks spitting against his silver breastplate. ‘Has Ganby mentioned he was a druid long before he joined our ranks?’

‘Yes,’ added Jenny Blow. ‘Before his crimes and knavery saw him thrown out and drawn towards the margins of the marsh’s waters as an outlaw.’

‘Pah,’ said Ganby. ‘If I ever stopped lying, I would disappoint you. These are strange new days indeed. Queens who are mutilated and kept in chains, councils of standing chosen by those who have none, and a faceless legion of monsters walking the world. Fighting those gill-necks from the kingdom below the waves seems as a blessing in comparison to this new war.’

A knot of anger tightened inside Purity. ‘My friend Oliver gave his life to free you for this war.’

‘Not just us
four
,’ said Jenny Blow, pointedly.

‘That’s enough,’ said Samuel. ‘We four answered the call and you speak to the true queen of the Jackeni, that much you must know.’ He knelt down in front of Purity. ‘My spear is your spear, as it was for Queen Elizica.’

And what a spear it was. By activating a hidden control, Samuel could collapse the weapon into a nasty weapon shaped like a knuckle-duster that could smack bricks out of a wall. When he was thinking, he would sometimes snick the spear out to its full length and then swing it back to its fist-sized shape, rattling the air with the noise of the spear’s reorientation.

‘A queen without boots,’ pointed out Jackaby Mention from his chair, wiping his lips with relish as he set about the contents of one of the tins.

Purity looked across at the brooding black bandit. ‘You wear no shoes either.’

Jackaby raised his bare toes and wiggled them. ‘I meant it as no insult. I run faster when I have none and I like to feel close to the bones of the world, the earthflow.’

Ganby drew Purity to one side. ‘They mean no harm by their words. They are touchy around normal people.’

Purity wasn’t sure if she should feel flattered or frightened that they considered her normal. ‘You mean those who aren’t fey?’

‘Quite. In our age the druids made sacrifices to keep the killing, changing clouds of the feymist at bay – children were bound and cast into the feymist curtain. Most died, but some did not.’ Ganby indicated his three companions. ‘Those that survived the changes of the warping mist were considered cursed and hunted without mercy by the land’s tribes. Where else could they hide but the great marsh? They have little love for the affairs of mortals and as loyal as they became in the end to Elizica and her lion throne, I fear they see only a little of her in you.’

‘I wish there was none of her in me,’ said Purity. She picked up the sword from the stone circle. ‘And I wish that I hadn’t been given this.’

Ganby rubbed his beard thoughtfully. ‘I remember another young woman standing before me, saying the same thing about a trident she had retrieved from a lake.’ He sighed. ‘We slept for an age to reach this strange new time, when she said she would need us again. That was not easy for us, nor for you to be the one to receive us. Let us see if we can make it worth the while for both of us  …’ He took Purity’s sword from her, carefully weighing it two hands. ‘Do you know what this blade is?’

‘Sharp,’ said Purity. ‘And the sword contains a little of the essence of my friend Oliver … and of the Hexmachina.’

‘They are facets of it,’ said Ganby. ‘You have described it a little, but they are not what the sword
is
. It is a maths-blade, a tool to manipulate the worldsong.’

‘Maths?’ said Purity. ‘You mean sums and adding up? What does that have to do with sorcery and the worldsong?’

‘Everything,’ said Ganby, his hand sweeping out to encompass the room. ‘All that you have seen, all that you will see, everything that you are, these are all mathematical constructs. The song of the world is composed of notes, the notes are composed of waves and strings, and they can be modelled and manipulated by an adroit mind. When you change the factors of an equation, you change its outcome. The worldsingers’ training allows them to tap into the flow of power within the earth and change the equations that underlie the world, by hand, spell and mind.’ He indicated the other bandits sitting around the fire and handed the blade back to her. ‘The fey carry some of that ability innately. Your sword is a tool that allows you to manipulate reality. It cuts through stone so easily because it can change the equations of existence that define how matter should interact with its surface.’

‘More than a sword,’ whispered Purity.

‘An essential truth,’ said Ganby. ‘I would never have shaped it as a sword myself. When you give someone a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. I would have made it a book, or perhaps a slide rule.’

‘What can I do with it?’

‘What can you not?’ Ganby indicated she should hold the sword out. ‘A start would be to tear a hole in the veil of the world and free our fellow Bandits of the Marsh from their sleep of ages. You managed to do it for the four of us.’

‘But there was power in the circle of standing stones,’ said Purity. ‘Helping me. I could feel it flowing through me. The power of the god machine, the Hexmachina.’

Ganby waved his hand impatiently as if this were a mere trifle. ‘Pah, there is more power in the human heart and the imagination of a child than there is in any stone circle or blade. You can use the sword. Just feel the lingering aura of our sleep and then reach to the place where the energy is connected. Tear a rent towards it using your blade.’

Purity clutched the pommel of the sword and symbols started to flow down the flat of the blade. She could feel the connection the old wizard had spoken of. Thin tentacles of else-when connecting the four bandits to the place where they had slept away the centuries. Spinning the blade, she tried to cut a portal in the air, reach the sleeping place. Instead of a rent forming, the arcs of her blade left scratches of golden light hanging in the air, shrinking and diminishing before the threads blew away like candle smoke.

‘I can’t do it,’ said Purity, frustrated, proffering the blade back to Ganby. ‘You’re the great druid, you open the gateway for your friends to come through.’

He took the sword out of her hand, gripping it properly in a fighting stance, the symbols creeping along its surface disappearing, the blade’s silver brightness darkening. It had died in his hand. ‘You see, just a cold length of metal. Something to bash away at an enemy’s helm with. I could never get Elizica’s trident to work for me either. This is not my sword.’ He passed it back to Purity. ‘It is yours.’

Purity took a few more swings to the same negligible effect. The maths-blade was becoming heavier where once it had seemed so light. ‘I can feel it, the place you came from. But I don’t have the power of the stones to channel through the blade to break across to it.’

‘Power is not channelled through the blade,’ said Ganby, sadly. ‘It is channelled through the one that wields it. And you have everything that you need to wield it, save the belief that you can. That you deserve it.’

‘But that’s the thing. I’m not sure I do. I certainly never asked for this.’

‘Yes, your ancestor was tutored as a princess of battle from the age she could first walk,’ said Ganby. ‘I am sorry to ask so much of you so quickly, Purity Drake. Time will bring you what you need.’

Purity looked out of the back room’s window, the iron moon gazing back down, a rusty squinting eye. ‘How much of that do we have left?’

‘There will be enough time and enough battle, both.’

Purity nodded. Yes. There was an entire continent full of monsters to practise her new maths-blade against.

M
olly picked herself up from the jolting deck and shouted to be heard above the roar of the re-entry flames outside. She might just have a way to stop them burning up above Kaliban! ‘Coppertracks, can you join cables with the ship?’

‘The craft is steamman enough for us to share our minds.’

‘Starsprite,’ Molly called, ‘make yourself ready.’

A silver cable extended like a tentacle from the wall. ‘My skin is hardening outside, a shield of ablative polymers forming. It feels better now. We’re finally clearing the mesosphere for the stratospheric envelope. I can see it. Do you think my mother knew this would happen? Do you think she loved me just a little?’

‘Coppertracks has a trick for you that you can’t call upon by instinct,’ said Molly, watching the ship’s cable snake towards a port opening in her steamman friend’s chest. ‘Your turn, old steamer. The sail-rider rig we cut Duncan out of at Tock House; show your young relative here the schematics for it. Starsprite, when you have the plans, peel off part of your hull to form the rig’s sail triangle.’

The fire inside the crystal dome of Coppertracks’ transparent skull began wheeling in eccentric patterns while the transfer was in progress, the steamman giving a little whistle of alarm from his stacks at just how fast the newly born craft was absorbing his wisdom. Fast then faster, then it was over. Above them, the roof of their pear-shaped capsule started to flow downwards, stopping just short of their heads, their porthole elongating and moving in front of the craft’s nose – quicksilver sails lashed by the wind-shear growing into existence outside; one sail above them, two smaller stabilizer canopies to either side. As soon as her new wings had fully formed, the young craft began to roll, arrowing down in a spin.

‘How do I control myself?’ screamed the craft.

‘Form the sail rider’s control bars and pulley system inside here, down by your nose,’ ordered Molly. She glanced at Duncan Connor. ‘This calf of a craft might not have a clue about how to make a landing, but how about one of the wild boys of Dennehy’s Circus?’

Duncan looked pensively at the control bars, guide lines and deflexor handles forming in the front of the young ship. Outside the porthole, the brilliant red arc of Kaliban’s continents and waterless seabeds curved out before them. ‘This is a wee bit higher than any sail rider ever attempted a touchdown from.’

Molly tried to ignore the rattling of the newly formed struts as Duncan climbed over the scattered supply bales to slide into the control rig. She screened out the nervous mutters of Lord Rooksby – was that a Circlist meditation he was repeating? – disregarded the cold, angry eyes of Keyspierre and his daughter. Duncan Connor had possessed skill enough to land his burning rig in Tock House’s garden, the only survivor of the Army of Shadows’ annexation of the Jackelian skies. And here they were now, tumbling down over the enemy’s old home. It was a calculated risk, but she wasn’t going to give up now. Not after coming this far.

Molly turned as a crack sounded behind her. Commodore Black was rummaging through the supplies, emptying the contents of each crate onto the floor. Then he found what he was looking for and with a grunt of satisfaction pulled out a bottle of medicinal whisky. ‘Let us say a thanks to the board of supply’s clerks back in Highhorn, for they saw fit to outfit us with the very thing to calm our nerves. Along with—’ his hand swept the debris of his scavenging ‘—this other junk.’

‘Jared, those are supplies we need,’ said Molly. ‘Compasses, pistols, tinned food, blue skin paint so that we can pass for native Kals.’

‘No, lass,’ said the commodore, unstoppering the bottle. ‘This is what we need. A toast to Duncan and his skill, swooping here and there like a blessed hunting hawk. I’ve had my fill of being treated like a wave-tossed cork by fate. Fired out of uncommonly sized cannons, living in the belly of steammen vessels crossing the celestial darks, cast away like a plummeting stone over the enemy’s stronghold.’ He took a swig from the bottle and offered it to Keyspierre but the shiftie scientist looked disgusted. ‘No? Suit yourself. Ah, it’s good. This’ll put hairs on your chest. No, it’s the solid land for me from now on. My boots firmly on the ground, even if the land is that of wicked Kaliban.’

Rooksby yelped as they started to roll again, Duncan grunting and pulling the craft back on course. His face was beaded with sweat and his lips pulled so tight he was drawing blood with the force of his concentration.

‘Your piloting is magnificent,’ announced the young Starsprite. ‘It is like having an organ for atmospheric flight inside me. I can feel what you are doing. How you’re using the side sails to brake and turn us. But we’re going to pass through a wall of turbulence at the borders of the troposphere, I can feel it flowing ahead of us.’

Molly had to stop herself from yelling as the battering outside renewed itself with fresh vigour. As if sensing the fear inside her passengers, Starsprite formed a series of pews topped with railings to hold onto across her deck. Molly clutched at one until her knuckles stood out on the back of her hands like white stones on a Spumehead beach. Then they were slipping towards smoother currents, the shaking abating.

‘Can you not increase the size of the main sail triangle?’ called Duncan from his position in the nose.

‘I do not have enough material,’ replied the craft. ‘I know the proportions of the sail are wrong but my hull is already as thin as I dare squeeze it.’

‘We’re gliding too heavy for a brake and tug landing,’ said Duncan, banking the craft. ‘I’m going to try and spiral us down, long wide figures of eight all the way to the ground. Keep your eyes open for a straight stretch of sand for our final glide in.’

Molly moved to the front and stared out of the elongated porthole. She could see the face of Kaliban, the carving no bigger than her thumbnail. Lord Starhome had been as good as his – her? – word, after all; dropping the expedition down on top of the monumental carving like a sycamore seed sinking to the ground. Shadows of canyons and mountains crisscrossed the land below – if summits were visible at this height, they must be on a scale that dwarfed the craggy ranges of the Jackelian uplands. Molly closed her eyes and waited for the jumbled headache of Kyorin’s memories to cast adrift a suitable landing zone.
There.
To the south of the carving, long undulating dunes of dust-thin sand. She could see them in her mind’s eye, blowing and shifting in front of a sierra eroded by the fierce sands into a forest of toadstool-like capstones.

Molly pointed out the stretch to Duncan. ‘Place the tail of your last loop in the shadows of the carving’s chin, there’s sand enough to skim down for a long, low landing.’

Duncan grunted in affirmation, not taking his concentration away from the porthole for a second. ‘Aye, I see it, I see it.’

Molly’s head was throbbing now. It was painful, accessing the jumble of memories that Kyorin had dumped into her. Increasingly so, each time she tried it. What, she wondered, did the pain mean?

Someone was behind her. Jeanne and her father. The young shiftie seemed fascinated by the crimson vista circling in front of the transparent material of the porthole. ‘Those lines out there. They are the same canals the steamman presented at the Royal Society.’

Who had told her? Coppertracks was humble about his achievements and Lord Rooksby had no reason to talk about his rival’s findings.

Molly nodded, warily.

‘A remarkable achievement,’ said Keyspierre, his mood improving now they had hope of a landing. ‘The Kals surely must have organized themselves as a commonshare and laboured mightily to achieve such a network.’

When it came, the final meeting with the ground was blis-teringly fast. The craft tore through the barrage of rolling dunes with whip-cracking explosions of red sand as each impact slowed Starsprite a little more. Then there was a long tearing sound as her belly caught the sand, sliding for what seemed hours before they stopped. Molly was shaking as she got to her feet. She hadn’t realized how terrified she had been during the long fall towards Kaliban and now the shock of their arrival was catching up with her. For a moment she wondered if the impact had affected her eyes – everything seemed to be turning red. But it was Starsprite. Their craft was changing the colour of her hull, the texture becoming grainy red rather than silvery smooth – camouflaging her lines – blending in with the sand in which she had settled.

‘Open the door,’ said Molly. ‘Let’s see where we are.’

‘I haven’t ordered that,’ Rooksby practically shrieked, his nerves in shreds.

Molly pointedly ignored him and jumped out of the hole rippling open in young Starsprite’s stern, landing ankle deep in the ruby sands. She felt light on her feet, springy. The pull of this world was only two thirds what she was used to back home. Then the intense wall of heat struck her. It was like walking into an oven, thick, cloying. Circle’s teeth! Molly noticed how near they had come to a canyon drop starting only ten feet away from the Starsprite’s nose. No hint of this in Kyorin’s memory of the landscape. Ten feet from a plunge to – she looked over the edge – the walls narrowed down to an impossibly deep death, as if Kaliban was an apple and someone had run a knife around its circumference in an attempt to cut it open. The floor of the ravine was filled with a stream of dark thrashing flesh. No accident of geography, then – she was looking at more of the Army of Shadows’ slave machines. Mining worms.

Molly turned away from the foul sight, allowing herself a brief snatch of exhilaration. They had actually done it. All the times Molly Templar had written of explorers landing by airship on one of the moons, finding bizarre alien lands, and now she was actually following in her literary creations’ footsteps. Molly looked around, drinking in the strange sights. No greens, no blues, everything tinted by the colour of blood, a wasteland of endless deserts. Her euphoria dwindled. How she wished one of her novels’ clever, fast-thinking heroes or heroines were here instead of her. Jack Riot or Emma Cochrane. Either of them would have been able to make a much better bid of their desperate last attempt to save the Jackelian people than her.

There was a thump behind Molly as Coppertracks and the commodore exited the craft. The steamman slipthinker’s two wide caterpillar tracks made for an effortless passage across the fine sands.

Commodore Black peered over the edge of the ravine and shook his head in repugnance. ‘Look on the canyon floor down there. Those are the black slug machines of the Army of Shadows, the same wicked things I saw infesting Quatérshift. Thousands of the foul creatures wriggling around down below like a river of terrible worms.’

‘There’s nothing left,’ said Molly, sadly. ‘They must be cutting new ravines like this all across the world, but they’ve sucked the place dry. No more minerals, no more gases and oils, no more deep-water aquifers. Kaliban really is dying.’

‘We see before us how our world will look in a couple of thousand years,’ said Coppertracks, ‘if we fail to turn back the Army of Shadows.’

‘Then we won’t fail, Aliquot,’ said the commodore. ‘For even a Cassarabian tribesman would turn their nose up at this wicked empty heat-blasted land. It’s certainly no place for any honest Jackelian.’

Duncan Connor swung out of the craft followed by the two shifties and Lord Rooksby, the latter strangely reluctant to examine the landscape for all of his protestations of the right to command their expedition.

‘How does this compare to the deserts of Cassarabia?’ Molly asked Duncan.

‘The scale of things was a wee bit more humble in the caliphate,’ noted the uplander. He was standing with his back to the canyon and staring towards the carving. The great face of Kaliban rose out of the dunes, as high as a mountain that had been levelled straight by the hand of gods.

Interesting, thought Molly. You could only see the features of the face from above, but the angular rise of a thousand flat terraces, some as tall as Middlesteel’s pneumatic towers, demonstrated that the carving was no freak of geology.

‘An idol, sir, of the natives’ gods,’ said Lord Rooksby, dismissively.

Molly shook her head. ‘Those terraces used to be hanging gardens, I think, and this desert a great forest. There hasn’t been water to run through its sluices and waterfalls for many hundreds of years.’

So strange. Seeing all this for the first time, but not for the first time. Everything carried with it the strangest sense of déjà vu and it wasn’t even hers.

‘Pah, it shows very little sophistication,’ said Lord Rooksby. ‘Compared to the noble proportions of Jackelian architecture such a barbarous carbuncle only demonstrates the superiority of the race of man.’

‘I disagree with your conclusions,’ said Keyspierre. The Quatérshiftian handed his daughter a folding telescope that he had secured from the supply crates. ‘It was clearly a high civilization, and that we stand here in the ruins of their world certainly does not bode well for our mission to uncover our invaders’ supposed weaknesses.’

‘The people must persevere,’ said Jeanne, clasping her fist to her chest. No doubt one of the many sayings parroted by the children of the revolution.

‘There is no other course,’ agreed Keyspierre.

Molly indicated the carving’s lee side, to the west. ‘That’s where the last great city of Kaliban lies. Half a day’s walk from here.’

‘Does it have a name?’ asked Duncan.

Molly’s head was throbbing more than ever with the weight of memories. ‘Iskalajinn. Not that the locals speak it with their lips, only up here.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘It is the Kal word for the end of all dreams.’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘I have no trouble speaking my mind, but I’ve never talked
with
my mind before. I’ll happily paint my face blue, but the first time I talk with my thirsty lips I’ll give the game away.’

‘Blue face or no, you’d only ever pass for a Kal in the dark of night,’ said Molly. ‘You’re far too tall and broad. You too, Duncan. There are no Kals with muscles like yours. You’ll have to keep watch on the city from outside.’