The Rise of the Iron Moon (33 page)

Sirens were rising and falling behind her as the others landed on their barges and struck the sentry machines with Sandwalker’s miniature transaction engines. Despite the heat of the sun in the purple sky, Molly was cold with sweat. All the sirens had fallen silent expect one. Something was terribly wrong at the end of the barge train.

‘Your coin, lass,’ Commodore Black was shouting. ‘Use your coin.’

Jeanne was standing up behind her barge’s dome and she raised an empty hand aloft. ‘I slipped on the sand up there, it’s gone.’

‘Leap across to my barge, lass. Come on, it’s your only chance.’

Jeanne drew her knife and lashed at the cable holding her barge to the end of the train. ‘My barge will kill us all. The people must prevail.’

‘No, Jeanne!’

But it was too late; the current of the canal carried Jeanne’s screeching barge away from them and she opened her fingers in a final farewell. Then there was a flash of light and fire and the walls of the canal rattled with debris, splashes of filthy liquid spattering Molly’s barge. Jeanne was gone. Blown to the uncaring winds.

On the next barge down, Keyspierre picked himself up and looked coldly at Molly, turning his back on her as if she was responsible for his daughter’s death. If only Molly hadn’t launched them early from the kingdom, if and if, all of the infinite
if onlys
. Molly collapsed onto her own barge, watching the particles of metal in the sludge catch the afternoon light.

Borne with the stench towards the heart of the wastes.

W
e need to find a sailboat,’ said Jenny Blow, watching Samuel Lancemaster’s broad muscles bulge with each dip of his oars into the water. Purity didn’t consider it likely that they would. They were following the River Ald west, and it appeared as if the desperate refugees who had preceded them had stolen every available boat.

‘We were lucky enough to find this old thing hidden in the reeds,’ said Purity.

‘When we get to the coast we may have more fortune in the harbour towns,’ speculated Ganby. ‘Something to carry us north towards the Army of Shadows’ terrible great beanstalk.’

Purity didn’t voice her worries, but she doubted that too. All the large craft would have been used to flee to the colonies in Concorzia; anything small enough for the five of them to manage would have been seized to flee south or out to one of the isles. While she had been busy at Highhorn, it looked as if the entire kingdom had fallen into madness. Purity had even seen boats burnt in the river, not by the Army of Shadows, but by Jackelian turning against Jackelian. At least the current was pushing them in the right direction.

‘I’ll fill some sails fast enough,’ said Jenny.

‘My rowing is not quick enough for you?’ asked Samuel. ‘Or would you prefer to give Jackaby a turn?’

‘I have my pride,’ said the black bandit. ‘I am not a living paddle to be dropped behind the transom.’

The conversation stopped, for as they rounded a corner, they discovered the course of the river blocked by a sixpenny steam ferry, its cabin covered in faded advertising hoardings that had seen better days –
Smith-Evans’ Balsamic Cough
Elixir; WW Mackinder’s of Middlesteel and her Gold Medal
Pianos
– and under the passenger bench awnings a group of men waited, rifles and pistols clutched and pointing towards Purity’s rowboat. An order to heave to was shouted out from the sixpenny steamer. Were they brigands? Whoever they were, their boat looked sound enough and the twin stacks behind the cabin were emitting wisps of steam.

‘Why do you block our way?’ Samuel shouted from the front of their boat.

‘We guard the approach to Wainsmouth,’ a man wearing a brown flat cap called back.

Purity stood up so her voice would carry across. ‘Wainsmouth still has people?’

‘More and more every day,’ shouted the man on the steamer. ‘It is the last free town, unless any of the upland cities are still left standing.’ He gazed down, obviously bemused by Samuel’s archaic cuirass and tall spear. ‘Is that all there is of you? All right, pass on, friend.’

Samuel rowed them past the passenger boat with three swift, strong strokes while Purity gazed back up at the men.

A free town, still. Perhaps with an equally free sailboat to carry them north? Their luck was turning at last.

The guard on the sixpenny ferry had been correct about more people turning up at the last free town every day. Outside Wainsmouth, the old town walls were packed with crowds queuing up in front of a line of tables for the chance to be admitted to safety inside.

Names, ages and occupations of those being admitted were recorded in ledgers, along with many other details. Few people seemed to fail whatever criteria were being applied to entry. The family in front of Purity and the Bandits of the Marsh was gushingly grateful that they were to be given sanctuary, the woman full of spite and bile over some village they had tried to enter on their way to the town whose desperate inhabitants had chased them away as thieves, waving pitchforks and birding rifles.

At one point, a couple of redcoats came trundling towards the town gate in an empty cart pulled by two grey shire horses. There was a short, disappointed exchange of shouts, then the cart was admitted back inside Wainsmouth proper. It sounded to Purity as if the cart had been out scavenging for something, but had found no luck on its search. She hoped it wasn’t for food from the farms dotted along the South Downs. The mob of refugees might turn into a besieging army if they were turned away for a lack of supplies now.

They were a motley collection keeping order among the mob outside Wainsmouth. The country constabulary in their black frockcoats, redcoats from the regiments, even some shifty-looking fleet naval arm tars. But the desperation for food and shelter meant that the crowds were kept naturally pliable by their desire to be given sanctuary. No one protested too much when they were relieved of their packs of food and whatever other provisions they had with them. The rough-shaven men taking down the bandits’ details accepted Purity’s trade as seamstress without query or question, and although she had to surrender her sack of tinned goods, Purity got her strange sword through wrapped in cloth, and Samuel Lancemaster his spear – collapsed to its knuckleduster configuration and slotted into a carry space in his chest-piece.

The people on the desk showed a little more interest in Samuel’s breastplate, asking him if he had been with the heavy cavalry to carry such a cuirass, but when the bandit demurred, the guards lost interest and waved them all through towards the town gates. Lucky that they did. A couple of nights before, Samuel had told Purity that the armour was part of his body, fused to him. Trying to take it off would be like trying to remove his ribs.

‘Here are your tokens for your first day’s meal,’ the deskman said. ‘Duties get assigned the day after. Go down to the largest warehouse on the quay. There’s benches and food inside, servings are on a rota.’

Once inside the walls Purity had a fine view of the town sloping down towards the port. The large harbour was protected by a sea fort, built down the hillside and into the water, strong round towers connected by iron walkways and pocked by concrete cannon domes. Wainsmouth’s waters looked bare of boats, only a couple of fishermen’s stubby two-mast trawlers tied up where there were moorings for hundreds. But there was one vessel in the water to fill the majority of the empty berths. It was a u-boat of the fleet sea arm, lying as long in the water as a dreadnought with a conning tower as substantial as a fortress. Her bow had been cast as a regal lion, teeth and muzzle caught in a steel snarl – each of her eyes a cluster of torpedo tubes. Purity gawped. How the commodore would have loved to be here to see this titan of the deep. Triple gun mounts on her forecastle, double water-sealed cannon turrets on the stern. Her name was embossed in cursive script on the black hull, each raised letter painted bright red. The
JNS Spartiate
. Parliament’s ensign, the cross and gate, fluttered on her flagstaff, a red field bisected with a white cross, the portcullis of the House of Guardians on the upper right-hand corner, the lion rampant in the lower left. A vessel that defied all of the kingdom’s enemies to take her.

‘A beauty, ain’t she?’ said a constable standing behind Purity. ‘They’ll never overrun Wainsmouth while we have her guns protecting the town. Now move along, get yourself fed down at the quay before you block up the way here.’

‘These are the Jackeni of our age,’ said Ganby, approvingly. ‘People who know how to honour the tradition of hospitality.’

‘I wonder if their hospitality might stretch to giving us a berth on that vessel down there?’ Jackaby Mention pondered.

‘These people need her here,’ said Jenny. ‘How many women and children in this town now shelter under her guns? I can fill the topsail of one of those fishing boats down there just as well.’

‘A pity,’ said Jackaby. ‘The watchman was right; she is a beauty as fine as any. But you are correct, they need it here. You are ever our conscience, Jenny Blow.’

‘And your bloodhound,’ said Jenny. She pointed towards the quay. ‘I can smell a stew bubbling in the pot down in the warehouse.’

‘A stew, not a roast?’ said Samuel Lancemaster, sounding almost disappointed. ‘Well, anything will be better than the jellied chunks of bully I’ve been picking out of cans since we arrived here.’

It had been raining earlier that morning and the steep cobbled streets down to the quay were slippery – Purity nearly lost her footing several times.
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
. Indeed, and how her friend Kyorin had approved of those words from Elizica. Was that good guidance, now? When the Kals were cooperating with the Army of Shadows, trying to sink their fangs in her throat. She had the blood of queens running through her veins. She had the maths-blade concealed on her back and she had the Bandits of the Marsh fighting by her side. It was time she stopped being the nation’s breeding house ragamuffin and began acting like its one true queen.

Purity thought she detected a pulse of disapproval from the spirit of Elizica of the Jackeni at her pride as she walked towards a cobbler’s halfway down the road to the bay; but then, Elizica of the Jackeni hadn’t needed shoes, or anything else in the way of clothes, for a very long time. What did she know?

Purity asked the Bandits of the Marsh to save her a seat at the warehouse. Behind the hexagonal panes of the shop’s curved bay windows were all sorts of shoes, boots and sandals ranging from the fine to the workaday. But it looked dark inside the shop, and there was a sign reading ‘closed’ behind the door’s sidelight pane. Oh well. She was about to follow the bandits down the rest of the hill when a rustling came from inside the shop and the sign twisted around to read ‘open’.

‘There we are,’ Purity announced to the air and Elizica. ‘Fate after all.’

There were oil lamps inside, but their wicks stood dry behind glass – saving fuel, but making the room dark and unwelcoming. In the gloom a boy shuffled forward with a stool for her, an apprentice with a wooden stump below the knee of his left leg. His voice had an annoying grating quality, as if he was trying to ingratiate himself.

‘The master bids you sit, damson,’ said the boy. ‘Be out soon.’

He hobbled over to the door, locked it and twisted the sign to read ‘closed’ again. Strange. Why had he done that?

‘Aren’t you going to light the shop, lad?’

‘Short of oil, that’s so, damson.’

It was then that Purity heard a knocking outside the cobbler’s shop front, someone tapping on the window panes. Had Ganby or one of the others come back to fetch her? She was about to rise to see just who it was when a wet, sickly-sweet rag was pushed down on her face, her head yanked back.

Purity struggled against the foul stench to reach her sword for a couple of seconds before blackness overtook her.

In one of the Wainsmouth warehouses, two thugs wearing the ill-fitting uniforms of county constables stepped over slumped bodies. Some were spilled across the long pine tables, others fallen off the benches onto the stone floor. The collapsed refugees were being pulled unceremonially through a door at the back like sacks of grain and dumped on the flatbed of the first of the carts waiting outside.

‘I thought this one was going to start creating for a moment,’ said the thug, pointing to Jenny Blow’s body sprawled across the chest of Samuel Lancemaster. ‘Look at her brown marsh leathers. Bloody bogtrotter, acting as if she’s some grand lady. Sniffing at her plate like the meat has gone off.’

‘What’s been added to the food doesn’t have an odour,’ said his friend. ‘Ain’t the chief cleverer than that? I think she was sniffing at the meat in the pot.’

One of their workers was bending over to get a grip on a body and the thug lashed out with his boot, catching the worker in his stomach and sending him rolling winded into a bench. ‘Get about it, you dogs. Faster, less you want to join these ’uns in the butcher’s store. There’s plenty more fresh fodder waiting outside the walls to come in.’

Purity’s eyes blinked open. They felt swollen and itchy but she couldn’t reach them with her hands, couldn’t even see her limbs. She was lying horizontal in total darkness inside a crate so narrow her arms lay pinned down alongside her ribs, unable to twist an inch. Claustrophobia swept in. She didn’t even have the purchase to kick at the walls with her bare feet, or thump at the roof pressed tight down on her forehead.

Something snapped inside her and Purity gave herself to wild panic, thrashing and screaming in the darkness.

S
andwalker had taken something like a brick out of his pack, and placed it on the floor of the tent. Glowing orange, the heating block pushed back the chill of the freezing desert night with a circulating warmth that belied the frosty atmosphere under the silk-like canvas. Along with the silence from Keyspierre, the reek of the canal haunted Molly. Had the pollutants infused Molly’s clothes or was it merely the memory of the canal persisting in her nostrils, along with the vision of Jeanne disappearing in the sudden fire-flash, the siren on her barge silenced as pieces of it ricocheted off Kaliban’s mighty canal works?

Molly broke the quiet. ‘You’ve not spoken of Jeanne since we climbed out of the canal.’

‘What is there to say?’ remarked Keyspierre, rubbing tiredly at his stubble. ‘She died to save us, so that we might reach this great sage of the Kal. She put the preservation of the Commonshare of Quatérshift before her own life – as I would expect any good compatriot from my nation to do, as I would do myself.’

‘You’re a cold one, Keyspierre,’ said the commodore. ‘She was your daughter, man, your blood. Would you not have done anything for her?’

‘Do not presume to tell me how to grieve for one of my own,’ said Keyspierre.

‘One of your own, perhaps,’ said Coppertracks, the steamman – sitting furthest from the heat of the brick while he generated his own warmth from his furnace. ‘But not your blood, I believe. Her iris shared about as many inheritance vectors with your eyes as it did with the scratches on my vision plate. She was not your daughter, dear mammal. Now that she is dead I think you owe her – and us – the truth.’

Duncan Connor sat bolt upright at the news. ‘I kenned it. There was something not quite right about the pair of you numpties from the start.’

‘You know nothing of me,’ snapped Keyspierre.

‘I know that you are no scientist,’ said Coppertracks, the steamman’s voicebox becoming uncharacteristically firm. ‘Your understanding of the gunnery project at Highhorn was the superficial sort I would expect to come from a potted briefing on wave mechanics. And aboard Lord Starhome you didn’t know one end of a fully functioning circuit magnetizer from another.’

‘You’re just an informer, aren’t you?’ accused Molly. ‘A shiftie stooge sent to keep an eye on your scientists at the Highhorn project?’

‘Is that how highly you think the Commonshare values the survival of its citizenry?’ said Keyspierre, sadly. ‘That it would dispatch a menial merely to spy on its scientists’ fraternization with your Jackelian friends? You are wrong! I am a colonel attached to Committee Eight of the People’s Commonshare of Quatérshift, charged with ensuring the success of our mission to Kaliban at any cost. At
any
cost.’

‘So then, the wolves have been let out to run free.’ The commodore sucked in his breath. ‘Your kind I’ve heard tell of before. Seven central committees operating under the rule of the first, and the eighth that doesn’t officially exist at all. You’re a wheatman is what you are, as bad as any of the dirty agents from the Court of the Air.’

‘A typical Jackelian mangling of our tongue,’ said Keyspierre. ‘It’s huit, you dolt.’

‘A secret policeman by any name,’ said the commodore. ‘Ah, poor young Jeanne. I did not know you for what you were.’

‘She was a loyal servant of the Commonshare. Her real name was Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, a compatriot lieutenant attached to Committee Eight.’

Commodore Black suddenly leapt at Keyspierre, landing a punch on the shiftie’s chin and sending them both sprawling, the intelligent fabric of the tent trying to reflect their forms back at them as they flailed and rolled under one of the brace poles. Only Duncan Connor was strong enough to haul the u-boat man off Keyspierre, pulling the commodore away as he tried to land a boot in the Quatérshiftian’s face.

‘Jared!’ Molly shouted, shocked by her friend’s sudden explosion of violence. ‘What in the name of the Circle do you think you’re doing?’

‘Why don’t you ask this wicked wheatman,’ spat the commodore. ‘Ask him about the Quatérshiftian aristocrats who escaped with their lives to Jackals but without their children. Tell us about your secret police’s schools, Keyspierre, where wheatmen stole the young from the revolution’s death camps, training and honing the ones who were strong enough to survive to become fanatics to serve your cause.’

‘The job of the people is to serve the people,’ said Keyspierre. ‘Would you rather I had left Jeanne to die in a camp? She was young enough to be re-educated. She didn’t deserve to be condemned for the accident of her noble birth any more than our gutter children deserved to be left to starve outside the gates of the Sun King’s palace. And I’ll take no lessons on how to treat aristocrats from a Jackelian. Jeanne lived as a productive sentinel of the Commonshare; my people never kept her as a living archery target to be trotted out for a stoning every time parliament needed a distraction.’

‘I can see there’s aristocratic blood in your veins,’ said Commodore Black, ‘because you’re a royal bastard right enough. She was never
your
daughter to take.’

‘You insult me! She was a daughter of the revolution,’ said Keyspierre. ‘One who gave her life to keep your useless carcass walking through the desert. And after this is over—’ Keyspierre patted the knife tucked under his belt ‘—I shall demonstrate to you how very foolish it is to strike a ranking colonel of the people’s brigades. What is it you call it in the kingdom, grass before breakfast?’

‘That’s a mortal fancy name for a duel,’ said Commodore Black. ‘But if you’ve a plain taste for a little simple murder, I’ll give you satisfaction and we’ll see which of us is planted in the soil after the dark deed is done.’

‘That’s enough,’ ordered Molly. ‘You two can lock horns after we’ve saved Jackals and—’ she looked meaningfully at Keyspierre ‘—Quatérshift.’

Sandwalker shook his head in dismay. ‘Your friends bicker like slats fighting over the finest cuts torn off one of the city-born.’

‘Our people do that when our nerves fray, when we lose people we were fond of,’ said Molly. ‘Apologies. It is unnecessary.’

‘Well,’ said Sandwalker, ‘then you have all come to the right land. Kaliban is the realm of the unnecessary. Lie down and I shall attempt to ease the pain in your skull.’

Molly did as she was bid and Sandwalker laid his blue-skinned fingers on her forehead, the throb inside rising then easing and pulsing back to something more bearable.

‘The very desert we trek through is unnecessary,’ continued Sandwalker, his fingers browsing her scalp. ‘Every grain of sand, every electrical storm, every dry riverbed: all the products of our masters, a mentality that gorges itself until the cycle of life is broken with no hope of repair. The light that burns the soil, the storms that now ravage the world, the waves that lap no longer in our seabeds, they once gave my people the energy they needed to live peacefully within the cycle of life. But the more sophisticated your civilization, the more fragile its structure, the more you rely on the cooperation and specialization of the Kal who stands beside you. Millions upon countless millions died on Kaliban when the masters and their slat legions arrived. Almost everything we knew was lost, much of the rest looted and wrecked by the Army of Shadows. No more living machines to be raised as crops. No more learning permitted to our children. Now, thousands of years later, all we are left with are paltry splinters of knowledge. An imperfect remembrance of the fact that the objectionable existence we find ourselves trapped in is a cruel, needless perdition compared with the paradise we had created for ourselves. A paradise we would have willingly shared with the masters and their slat armies if they had but asked.’

‘You sound like a professor friend of mine,’ said Molly. ‘Back in Jackals, she’s an expert on a classical fallen civilization called Camlantis. I think the Camlanteans had a little of the life you remember. At about the same time as your civilization, too, I think. They fell to our own barbarians, though, the Black-Oil Horde. We didn’t need the slats to destroy our land’s paradise.’

‘How very sad,’ said Sandwalker. ‘How much better if our two peoples had met in those ancient days, rather than like this, in the ruins of the Kal civilization. What marvels might we have achieved together as friends?’

‘Kyorin showed me how the Army of Shadows flies like locusts from sphere to sphere, reducing the land to a husk before moving on.’

‘I once heard the great sage theorize that they are getting better at controlling the convulsions of our world as they consume it. Who knows, with enough millennia to practise, perhaps they will have learnt how to live within the cycle of life by the time they reach the very last unharvested celestial sphere that spins around the sun. They will have all our ghosts to teach them.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ insisted Molly. ‘We’ll stop them, Sandwalker. Trust me. It’s what my people do best, killing and fighting.’

‘Carnivores,’ sighed Sandwalker. ‘Well, we have tried everything else over the centuries. Now it seems we shall have to trust your people to do what they do best.’

After the nomad had eased away the worst of the pain inside Molly’s head, she went to sit next to Coppertracks, who – if the swirling patterns of energy inside his skull were anything to go by – had something occupying his own mind.

‘A penny for your thoughts, old steamer. Are you worried about Quatérshift’s involvement with the expedition now that you know the truth about Keyspierre and Jeanne?’

‘No I am not, Molly softbody. That Quatérshift would involve someone like Keyspierre in the expedition is wholly predictable of that paranoid nation. I have a deeper concern, one concerning the rituals of Gear-gi-ju.’

‘I saw you calling your ancestors’ spirits earlier today,’ said Molly. ‘You need to be careful how much oil you shed at your age.’

‘Calling, indeed, but calling without any answer at all, dear mammal. I have never experienced the like of this before – ignored for one calling, yes, but like this? Night after night, day after day of complete emptiness as I toss my cogs. It is as if the Steamo Loas have, to speak plainly, completely forsaken me here.’

‘There is the distance to consider,’ said Molly. ‘How many million miles are we from the Steammen Free State here on Kaliban?’

‘Physical distance means nothing to my ancestors,’ explained Coppertracks. ‘They exist outside distance in the realm of the spirits. No, there is something else to account for this void, something that I am missing. I cannot believe the people of the metal’s ancestors have abandoned me in this land. So much is strange about this wasteland the Army of Shadows have created. There is something terribly wrong here, and it is staring me directly in my vision plate, yet I cannot see it.’

Molly had no answer for her friend.

If even the gods of the steammen had forsaken Molly and her friends in the dark wastelands of the Army of Shadows, what did that say about the expedition’s chances of success on Kaliban, now?

Sandwalker was leading the expedition along the dunes in the welcome shade of fluted columns of basalt – giant anthills towering as high as any Middlesteel tower – when Coppertracks stopped, his tracks entangled in something. As he pulled at what was caught up in his caterpillar treads, a series of cables was revealed and a black box fell out of the side of the crumbling rock of the basalt, yanked free by the steamman’s efforts.

Seeing what had happened, Sandwalker came running back. ‘Don’t touch the box!’

Coppertracks gingerly placed it on the sand.

‘Is it a snare or the like?’ Duncan asked, helping the steamman untangle the cable from his treads.

The Kal nomad shook his head. He picked up the box and examined it, then pushed it back into the face of the basalt rise. ‘An old fibre communication line. Our tribes had them hidden around the desert, but the Army of Shadows discovered the cables and adjusted their machines to detect the mechanism of light transmission we had believed was secure. It was centuries ago, but we lost half the free Kal before we realized how the slats were suddenly finding our caravans and hidden bases.’

‘I wonder if they were doing the same back in Jackals?’ said Molly. ‘Reading our crystalgrid messages before they attacked, learning about us?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Sandwalker. ‘The masters do not like to leave such things to chance when they lay their plans.’

‘Fate has been blessed unkind to your people for you to live like this,’ said the commodore. ‘Scuttling across the sands, always an eye open for the enemy, fearful even of sending a message, where every stranger of your race you meet might be hiding a fearful set of fangs to sink into your flesh.’

‘It is certainly not any way of life we would wish for our young,’ smiled Sandwalker. ‘Stop here for a rest. Eat your food but conserve the water, we have little left.’

In the lee of a rise now, the expedition members did not need further urging. Even sitting in the shade they found the arid heat draining. They were travelling day and night, trying to keep ahead of the slats. Molly brushed the sand off her billowing white trousers and made her seat on the gravel of the rise.

Keyspierre passed the sack of food he had been given back in Iskalajinn to the nomad. Sandwalker rummaged around gratefully in the bag and removed one of the long bean-like vegetables, squeezing a green pod out of its end to chew on. ‘You are very generous in your sharing. You should eat more of these yourself, Keyspierre. They contain a juice which helps your body retain water.’

‘Alas, compatriot, I am an unashamed carnivore,’ said Keyspierre. ‘I shall stick to my tinned fare, even though Jackelian canned beef is far removed from fine steak that has been shown the flames of a fire for the requisite two minutes.’

Molly could see that the nomad found the idea of what was inside their supply cans quite disgusting, almost as strange as the idea that something as precious as tin would be used just to preserve rations.

Watching Keyspierre spoon out lumps of jellied meat, the commodore began to sing one of the oldest Jackelian drinking songs, each verse hummed out between swigs from his canteen. ‘
Should the shifties dare invade us; thus armed with our poles;
we’ll bang their bare ribs; make their lantern jaws ring. For
you beef-eating, beer-eating Jackelians are sorts; who will shed
their last blood for their country and king
.’