The Rise of the Iron Moon (30 page)

Purity made to go down the valley path, but Jenny Blow laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘No, that is no mist, it smells unnatural – a false odour to it.’

‘What does your nose suggest?’ asked Samuel Lancemaster, resting against his spear as if it were a lamppost.

‘War gas,’ replied Jenny Blow. ‘A barbarian’s weapon. Does the Army of Shadows possess such filth?’

Purity shook her head. ‘I don’t know – I didn’t see the slats use gas when they attacked us at the Highhorn camp. But our redcoats do and the Royal Aerostatical Navy have gas shells in their fin-bomb racks.’

‘There may have been a battle below,’ said Ganby.

‘I could run through the valley,’ suggested Jackaby Mention. ‘Fast enough that I wouldn’t have to breathe it. Find out what lies below.’

‘No,’ said Purity. ‘If that’s dirt-gas it will burn your skin off – and the Circle knows what the Army of Shadows is capable of producing.’

‘Then I shall clear it away,’ said Jenny Blow, taking a deep breath, her chest expanding to an unnaturally large size.

‘Allow me,’ said Purity, drawing out her maths-blade. ‘You’ll be gusting that back onto the Jackelian highway.’ And she needed the practice.

Ganby nodded in approval and Purity held out the sword, pointing it towards the valley. She could feel the composition of the gas through the sword, heavy and complex, a name rising into her mind from the blade that meant nothing to her –
dichlorodiethyl sulphide
. But she could see the chain of bonds stretching out inside the cloud, ladders and ladders of particles, all connected. She felt the throb in her hand and visualized the bonds realigning, millions upon millions of them, reforming and changing their shape, becoming harmless celgas – the rare substance that floated the hulls of the RAN’s airships. Within seconds the newly transformed lighter-than-air cloud was rising, clearing the valley below and revealing a terrible sight.

‘I am glad to see that our practice sessions are bearing fruit,’ said Ganby.

Purity wasn’t. She would have been better off leaving the valley shrouded. Bodies littered the road snaking through the valley, grey dots scattered across the way. Horses. People. Overturned carriages.

‘A gas assault,’ said Samuel Lancemaster in disgust. ‘There is no honour in war fought by such methods.’

It was no better at close quarters, the figures below twisted into hideous shapes, white foam hanging out of their bloated lips. Everywhere there was a terrible garlic reek. These people were refugees by the look of them, carts and wheelbarrows piled with precious possessions. Not much to look at really – mantelpiece clocks, a few prize gardening tools, bundles of clothes and – then Purity saw
her
. She stopped in shock. It was Emily from the Royal Breeding House, lying on the flatbed of an overturned cart, her eyes crying tears of dried blood and staring up sightlessly towards the cold autumnal sky. Purity bent over to look across at the other bodies. There were Flora and Edith from Dorm Five, the two young duchesses stretched out across the grass. More familiar faces sprawled along the side of the road.

‘There are bodies in uniform up here!’ called Jackaby Mention. ‘Are these your soldiers?’

‘Second Mounted Rifles,’ said Purity, looking at the corpses. ‘They were often assigned duty at the fortress.’ She had nearly said home, but the Royal Breeding House hadn’t been that, even when she had still been a prisoner of its halls. How many times had she wished a terrible death down on Emily’s head for all of her torments? Egging the other royalist prisoners on to single Purity out for her madness and fits. But this … Parliament must have been evacuating the house’s stock south, not wanting a repeat of the invasion by Quatérshift, when the shifties and their revolutionary allies in the kingdom had run half the old order through their steam-driven killing machines. Her mother. Her brother. It looked like the premium on the old royalist bloodlines was about to rise even higher. If the House of Guardians were left a land to reconvene over.

‘There is something wrong here,’ said Ganby.

‘You always say that, old man,’ said Jenny. ‘Any excuse to run away.’

Ganby pointed to two bodies locked together. One was a redcoat of the Second Mounted Rifles, his face covered by a neckerchief to protect against the fumes before he had been overcome. His bayonet had been stuck through the chest of another soldier wearing a Jackelian uniform, but not from a regiment whose insignia Purity recognized. Save for the bayonet thrust, this soldier would have lived: his face was covered by a gas mask with brass goggles concealing his features.

‘These travellers were attacked by their own soldiers,’ said Ganby.

‘There’s no food,’ noted Samuel Lancemaster. ‘Any supplies these people carried have been looted. They were ambushed down here.’

Sweet Circle, had it really become so bad in the world outside Highhorn while Purity and her friends were constructing parliament’s secret cannon? Soldiers fighting each other for supplies? Raiding refugees for their few paltry belongings. Where were the raiders’ officers, had there been a mutiny in the ranks?

‘Yes,’ said Purity, ‘it was our own troops. The slats would never have left good food on the bone like this.’

Jenny Blow tapped her nose and pointed to the left. Jackaby Mention became a blur, running up the side of the valley and disappearing into the woods. After a minute he returned, the smear of his form coalescing in front of them, wiping a frosting of ice from his dark aquiline nose. ‘There was a camp up there, the remains of a fire pit still smouldering and a great many empty shell casings in the tree line.’

‘They’ve gone,’ said Samuel Lancemaster, thumping his spear angrily in the mud.

‘We must focus on the Army of Shadows,’ said Ganby. ‘We have no time to track these killers. There will always be people easily driven to brigandage by brutal circumstances and a poor harvest. We did not wake to follow a queen again for the likes of them.’

‘I would have a harvest of their skulls if I ever come across such cowards,’ said Samuel. A shaft of sunlight glinted off his silver cuirass, becoming a sunburst.

Ganby saw how Purity was staring at the bodies of the dead breeding house inmates. ‘Did you know them?’

‘No. I thought I might know them, but in the end I never did,’ said Purity. ‘They were Jackelians, just Jackelians. Like me.’

The plan to capture a slat alive for interrogation sounded a lot more achievable when it was being discussed around a campfire with the Bandits of the Marsh. Now Purity was actually facing the prospect of having to entice one into chasing her, the sense of the plan was melting away in the harsh light of day.

Perhaps it was the shock of seeing Jackelians collaborating with the slats, whip-wielding overseers from the race of man lording it over the slaves. Broken Circle cultists who had finally achieved their exalted position at the feasting tables of the end times. That they had transferred their worship of the iron moon to veneration of the invaders who had come down from it was bad enough; but that the collaborators felt so little sympathy for the lines of slaves labouring under their whips – slaves who had been their neighbours and friends a little while ago – that was unforgivable. The Broken Circle cultists had the smug, self-satisfied look of gamblers who had backed the right bird in a cockfight, and the fact that the loser was left bleeding in the pit mattered not a jot to them. It was the same look she remembered from the staff at the Royal Breeding House, a look that Purity knew well enough to loathe.

The Kingdom of Jackals was being transformed into a nation-wide version of the Royal Breeding House – its occupants not raised as royalist songbirds, but kept as fattening farm animals and beasts of burden. A little piece of Purity had, ever so briefly, felt a touch of gladness that the Jackelian citizenry was finally getting a taste of the existence she and her ancestors had been sentenced to; but that unworthy feeling had been squashed when she’d seen the look of misery on the slaves’ faces.

The Army of Shadows’ vassals were chained to each other at the ankle with slippery grey cables that resembled snakes; the poor devils branded and struggling under the weight of hexagonal panels. Bringing the components back from the swathes of destruction being worked by the invaders’ living factories to the ruins of Crosshampton where the slaves were erecting a new emerald-domed city.

Purity moved the leaves on a bush to get a better look at the slaves.

‘How is it that I am to play the part of the bait?’ Purity whispered to Jackaby Mention, ‘when it is you who can run so fast?’

‘I only have two speeds. I can walk or I can run,’ said Jackaby. ‘And when I run, the wind itself envies my heels.’

Purity stared out towards the slat they had singled out for capture, the beast standing guard over the line of Jackelians struggling past it. ‘Precisely.’

‘They would be made wary by both my age and my speed if it was I who had to give the hound a taste of the hare. Chasing a young female is something that should come naturally to them.’

‘The overseers, perhaps,’ said Purity. ‘I’m not so sure about the slats.’

‘We shall see,’ said Jackaby.

Purity glanced back into the woods. She couldn’t see Ganby, Samuel Lancemaster or Jenny Blow, but she hoped they were still hiding back there, waiting to incapacitate the slat. Purity rested her blade against a tree and turned round to say something to Jackaby, but he had already disappeared to warn the others that it was time.

Slipping past a thicket, Purity wandered out into the trail of flattened trees, took a couple of purposefully blundering steps into the open, and pretended to see the slat soldier guarding the chain gang for the first time. She followed her discovery up with what she hoped was a convincing scream. The slat’s flat oblong head spun around with a hiss, the sound of her scream all it needed to home in on her presence.

Purity turned and pushed back through the thicket, ignoring the yells of the collaborators and warning shouts from the line of slaves. Grabbing at her sword, Purity ran as fast as she could. She could hear the crashing of the undergrowth behind her as the slat followed. She could feel the hunger inside its mind, such a craving to tear and feast on her flesh. More yells came from the human overseers further behind. They had decided to join the pursuit too, but they weren’t a quarter as nimble as the slat, its claws ripping apart the undergrowth like a living machete.

At last, as agreed, there was a peculiar roaring sound: Jenny Blow’s deadly voice stripping the bark off the trees like the rattle of a hundred woodpeckers at once. On the explosion of sound, Purity opened her bag of ground-down pepper grains and scattered them behind her, thwarting the slat’s only other tracking sense. It hardly mattered, the deafening reports were blinding the beast and it crashed through the undergrowth to one side of Purity, its talons slashing angrily at the bush as if it was trying to silence the noise by slicing at the forest. It was concentrating on the source of this deafening irritation and Purity slid underneath a fallen trunk, gripping her sword securely in case the slat changed its mind. How long to wait before heading after the slat? She was about to step out when she heard someone else moving through the undergrowth. Peering out from behind the tree trunk she caught a glimpse of blue skin slipping through the trees. It was one of Kyorin’s people, following the slat’s trail. A male Kal. Had he used the diversion to slip his chains of bondage and come to try to save her? He was wearing a white robe wrapped around his body, his belt empty of tools.

‘Over here,’ whispered Purity.

The Kal looked around, his slim body slipping through the trees and raising a hand in greeting.

‘Can you understand me?’ asked Purity.

‘Yes,’ said the Kal, his mind-speech reaching across to her and his lips broadening into a smile.

‘I was a friend of Kyorin, when he was alive,’ said Purity. ‘Did you know him?’

‘I did,’ said the Kal, advancing through the trees. ‘We trained together. You say
when
he was alive. You saw him die?’

‘A pack of slats killed him,’ said Purity. ‘They hunted him down. I tried to save him from the monsters but I couldn’t.’

‘Of course you couldn’t,’ said the Kal, moving in front of Purity. ‘A slat warrior is bred only to slay and you are just a girl.’ The Kal’s smile opened wider and two massive fangs sprouted down from his upper jaw. ‘A very juicy young girl, bloated with salty fresh blood.’

He leapt at her neck, trying to sink his fangs into Purity’s flesh. She reacted on instinct – hers or Elizica’s – and punched the Kal’s stomach deep with her sword’s buckler, winding the blue man and sending him stumbling back.

‘You’ll taste all the better, for that insolence, my sweet,’ laughed the Kal, taken aback by Purity’s attack but quickly recovering his composure. ‘I’m going to drain every bit of your blood and leave your body a husk before I toss your marrow to my slats to feed on.’

‘Taste this instead!’ Purity waved the tip of the maths-blade threateningly in front of the Kal’s chest.

He was looking for an opening and swaying like a cobra for another attack when there was a blur and a buffeting, the Kal carried back almost too fast to follow and slammed into a tree. There was a sickening thump as the Kal’s body joined with the tree trunk and the blur materialized to a stop in front of her. Jackaby Mention crackling with frost. The Kal was dead. Nothing could have survived being slammed into an oak tree at that velocity.

Jackaby kicked the corpse, making sure the creature was slain. ‘I thought you said that the blue skins were slaves taken by the Army of Shadows? That they were our allies?’

Purity stared at the corpse, horrified. So she had. How could she have been so wrong about Kyorin and his people?

I
skalajinn before sunrise was a city made dark by the shadow of the colossal face, slag-glass houses dimly lit by green globes that hung off joists drilled into their rough crystalline walls. These ancient lanterns drank in the sun’s rays during the furnace-like days and trickled it back out as a faint glow for as long as their energy stores lasted. Molly and her companions had waited a day already in one of the Kal safe houses, and this was the second they were spending in Iskalajinn.

Molly, Lord Rooksby and the two shifties were being led through the narrow streets in silence by their guide Laylaydin, along winding passages that ascended between the terraced houses as they climbed higher and higher, up the side of the great face of Kaliban. Had it been the Army of Shadows’ idea to concentrate the last of the dying world’s resources here, in the shadow of the wreck of the Kals’ once great civilization? A reminder that the Kals’ age had come, gone and been eclipsed by their all-powerful conquerors.

Molly was desperately aware that they would have to send word to her three friends hiding outside the city before too long. Before one of them attempted something rash and came looking for her. Molly didn’t have another day to spend in this city, waiting for a guide to the great sage to be procured, ignoring the tedious complaints of Rooksby and the pair of Quatérshiftians. Molly’s head throbbed harder and harder, it seemed, each hour. So many things that seemed familiar, firing off tiny flashes of agony as she tried to avoid recalling why they’d meant something to the runaway slave.

It hadn’t helped that there had been nothing to do in their last safe house but watch the Kals who shared their slag-glass hideaway tending the bean-like things growing on terraces in the central courtyard, fed by a trickle of the water collected from the well each day. The Kals would take almost religious care in trimming the vines and bearing away their visitors’ stool pots to empty as manure on the rock basins. A complex array of shutters allowed just the right amount of sun to slant through and warm the beans.

Molly was about to press Laylaydin as to why they were being moved between safe houses when the Kal woman stopped them and pointed down to a street on a lower terrace. A company of slats was moving along in two lines, the beasts at the head riding high in saddles on something that looked like a cross between an eagle and a giraffe, an impossibly long neck surmounted by a wickedly sharp beak. There weren’t many Kals out in the bitterly cold hours of the early morning yet, but those that were threw themselves to their knees, not daring to look up at the convoy. Not daring to gaze upon the windowless silver-blue metallic capsule being borne through the streets by seventy naked Kals, keeping the capsule aloft at shoulder height on long ceramic poles.

‘It is one of the masters,’ whispered Laylaydin, indicating the glow of the hulking domes at the end of the city. ‘They hardly ever venture out of their city, now.’

Molly thought of the tentacled, octopus-like monstrosities she had seen in Kyorin’s vision, plotting the invasion of her home. She shuddered. Was the master bobbing around in the comfort of the last of the world’s water inside that capsule?

‘You don’t think the masters suspect we’re inside Iskalajinn?’

‘No,’ said Laylaydin. ‘That procession is heading out on the road to the travel fields. There are still a few deep-cast mines and facilities scattered across our land with resources not yet stripped.’

Travel fields. Molly looked at the sky, but there was no sign of the leathery globes that the Army of Shadows used instead of airships, ugly windowless spheres suspended under rapidly spinning metal blades.

‘If they knew we were here, compatriot Templar,’ said Keyspierre, ‘we would be dead.’

‘Or worse,’ said Laylaydin. ‘Yet you almost sound approving of their efficiency.’

Keyspierre shrugged. ‘Efficiency is always to be admired, wherever it is found.’

Laylaydin snorted. ‘Between them, the masters and their slat pets have gnawed the last of the meat from our land’s bones. That is efficiency of a kind. But I pity it and I shall save my admiration for more worthy endeavours.’

‘Well said, damson,’ Lord Rooksby agreed. ‘They are our enemy, Keyspierre, and it is the bones of our people back home they’re busy devouring.’

‘Quite,’ said Keyspierre, looking knowingly at his daughter as they kept to the shadows of the empty street. ‘And I have seen nothing since we arrived in this heat-blasted land fit to help us shake their seeming supremacy.’

‘Kyorin thought otherwise,’ said Molly.

‘An escaped slave,’ laughed Keyspierre. ‘Who lacked even the means to return home save for the ingenuity of the Commonshare and our cannon.’

‘Be quiet!’ snapped Laylaydin. ‘You don’t know what you speak of.’ Seeing that those she was leading were taken aback by the shattering of her usual serenity, she added, ‘Kyorin was my life mate, an illegal union made outside of the masters’ breeding laws. The slats took our children, and now he is gone from me too.’

Molly was nearly lost for words. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘In the normal course of things his last memories would have been shared with me,’ said Laylaydin. ‘For all of the masters’ breeding strictures, they still have not managed to entirely eliminate our higher powers from the blood line.’

Molly bit her lip. No wonder she had detected a resentful edge to the way Laylaydin dealt with her. ‘Kyorin died well in my land.’

‘There are no good deaths,’ said Laylaydin, ‘only bad ones, only the release of our pain. My people’s time here is nearly done.’

Laylaydin ushered them into the igloo-like entrance of one of the highest houses nestling against the great carving. Rooms had been blown like bubbles inside the slag-glass building, floors softened by the brightly patterned carpets Molly had seen female Kals weaving using threads stripped off their bean plants. At the end of the house one of the carpets hanging tapestry fashion across the wall was pulled back to reveal a tunnel. A passage burrowing into the great face of Kaliban. The rough-hewn excavation ran only a short way through the structure before joining a series of conduits that had perhaps, once, channelled water to the hanging gardens outside. A trail of fluorescent arrows was marked on the walls of the sluice system and the group followed the long-dry passages to the edge of a precipice. Steps led down to a vast chamber lit by hanging lamps, ancient pumping machines and water filtering equipment lying derelict around its edges. Circular drain holes marked the walls of the chamber at head height, hundreds of dark pipes staring back at them. The floor of this cavern hidden inside the Face of Kaliban was dotted with Kals, some eating fruit at long tables formed by stone slabs, others reading, or sitting cross-legged in circles, humming and meditating.

‘This is the heart of the resistance,’ announced Laylaydin. ‘Many of those here are criminals with slat destruction orders hanging over them. Some are deserters who refused to assist the slats with the invasion of your land. Others are merely sympathizers drawn to our aims.’

‘This?’ said Keyspierre, looking around the nearly silent empty space in derision. ‘This is your revolution? Surely this is a joke – where are your sabres, your weapon smiths, your bomb makers? Where is the training in arms being conducted? The lessons in assassination?’

‘We resist in our own way, not in yours.’

Keyspierre looked indignant. ‘Please do not lecture me on the ways of revolution, compatriot. Before the tyranny of the Sun King was swept away by the forces of our glorious commonshare, I survived two years on the run from the king’s secret police as a Carlist subversive. This, compatriot, is not how you cut off the oppressor’s hand.’

‘Nor do you defeat your masters by becoming them,’ retorted Laylaydin. ‘Our land was very different from yours before the occupation and the coming of the masters. We had few meat eaters in the geographic record of our world. The pattern of our ecos was based on a vast network of elaborate cooperating systems that straddled the land. We had no word for violence, none for murder or crime.’

‘The perfect commonshare,’ said Jeanne in reverence.

‘And its end the perfect tragedy,’ said Keyspierre. ‘But you have since been taught the concept of cruelty well enough from the Army of Shadows. We travelled here to find allies, not sheep willing to step meekly up to the farmer’s knife.’

‘You came because of the rumours that the great sage has a way of defeating the masters,’ said Laylaydin. ‘But first we would know that you are fit to receive it.’ Laylaydin indicated the largest of the circles of sitting natives to Molly. ‘Your friends’ weak minds could not survive our sharing, but your mind is different, Molly Templar.’

‘I have machines in my blood,’ said Molly, sitting down in a place that had been made for her. ‘I was an operator of the Hexmachina, the last of my land’s god-machines.’

‘It is said that our own veins once bubbled with such machine-life,’ said Laylaydin. ‘But the masters feared our longevity, quick minds and the other abilities our machines gave us, and burnt all traces of the life metal from our bodies. We are mere shadows of our ancestors now, cripples bred into cattle to sate the appetites of the masters’ slat armies.’

‘But you can still share memories with each other.’

‘Yes, but we end up nailed to the cross when we are caught doing this,’ said Laylaydin.

‘Or worse,’ added Molly.

The skin of the Kal next to her had been darkened to near indigo by the sun and he still wore his dusty desert robes bound tight. ‘You speak lightly of such things.’

‘As lightly as a nomad walks across the dunes.’

‘Perceptive, too,’ said the Kal. ‘Well met. Yes, I am your guide. My name is Sandwalker. I have come out of the salt flats and would suffer the fate of all free Kals if I was discovered inside the last city.’

‘Your accent is different from Laylaydin’s.’

The Kal wiped his hand on his white pantaloon-like trousers before taking Molly’s. ‘I only shared the learning of your tongue this morning. Your words still come hard for me. I will grow fluent as I practise more.’

Molly started. Since this morning! She had already received an inkling of what it was like to be part of a network of living minds from Kyorin, but here was the example made flesh. What miracles had the Kal civilization accomplished during its heyday? How far had they fallen to end up here, mere farm animals and slaves?

Laylaydin sat down in the group, and with the circle of hands complete, Molly felt the pain she associated with Kyorin’s memories abating, subsiding to such an extent that it was only now that she realized the dead slave’s gift to her had become a constant dull throb within her. Memories began flashing past. Drawn out of her like grubs pulled from an apple with a set of tweezers. Kyorin on a dock in Middlesteel, leaping into a river with slat hunters firing darts at him, running sodden through the cold streets, communicating with Timlar Preston inside the cells of the Court of the Air, being helped by Purity Drake. On the run together with the young royalist. Then the images accelerated faster still, Molly’s own recollections this time. Flashes of the Hexmachina, the war she had once fought against the demon revolutionaries so many years ago, the cannon construction at Highhorn and her three friends waiting for her in the ruins outside Iskalajinn.

Molly caught only brief glimpses of the minds of the others sitting in the circle as they probed her memories. Why were the Kals being so careful not to show her their own histories and pasts?

‘Enough,’ said Laylaydin, releasing the hands of the two Kals sitting to either side of her. ‘Oh, my Kyorin, all that way for this.’

‘What is it?’ said Molly. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me. Why weren’t you sharing your thoughts with me? What have you got to hide?’

‘To put it simply, your mind is already full,’ said Laylaydin. ‘Kyorin gambled that your symbiote machinery would be able to handle the weight of all his memories driven into you so fast, but I fear your mind is not as sophisticated or evolved as ours. Have you been experiencing headaches?’

‘I—’ Molly considered lying, but what would be the point? ‘I have.’

‘The machines inside your body are concentrating around your brain, trying to cope with the weight of his knowledge. But they are burning up under the strain. Your mind is cooking inside your skull, Molly Templar, caught in a vicious circle. The more machines die in your blood the fewer there are to carry the load and the faster those remaining burn up. I am so sorry, but my life-mate filled you with his soul and the vessel of your body is too weak to be able to carry it.’

‘Take the memories out of me,’ Molly struggled to keep her voice calm. ‘Your damn husband put them in, you can take them out of me.’

‘We eased your pain as much as were able when we were joined, but such cleansing is merely a balm on your wounds. We are unable to clear you of the remains of Kyorin’s soul.’

‘We are unable,’ said Sandwalker. ‘But there is one who can help you. The great sage is not like us; he is what our people once were before the occupation. He could unentangle the pathways of the mind of even someone as strange as you who have travelled so far to stand by our cause.’

Rooksby and the two shifties were staring at Molly with horror, as if her condition might be contagious. She had to bite back an insult. ‘We were going to see the great sage anyway. Now we have two reasons to go.’

‘You must stay here, compatriot,’ insisted Keyspierre. ‘Let our Kal compatriots care for you while we travel to seek the weapon and your cure. Are we to travel through the desert bearing you on a stretcher? Your presence will only hinder the prospects of the expedition succeeding.’

‘Not a chance,’ snapped Molly. ‘I’m going with you.’

There was a rise of excited voices at the far side of the chamber.

‘Tallyle! You’re alive,’ said Laylaydin, spotting the Kal who was walking down the steps to the chamber. ‘We heard that all of the engineers working at Processing Ten were fed to the slats when the station was decommissioned.’