The Rise of the Iron Moon (36 page)

‘Her tanks can be made full,’ said Purity. ‘As can her cannons, and her torpedo tubes – but that means nothing unless I can fill her decks with stout Jackelians with the heart to teach the Army of Shadows what it means to invade our country. To teach them why they will never count themselves masters of this land as long as one free Jackelian remains alive to stand against them. Can I fill her?’

The crowd yelled their approval.

‘Can I fill her?’ Purity held her sword aloft and the sun turned it to fire as a shaft of light broke through the clouds to strike the roaring crowds out on the ruined sea fort.

Ganby nodded in approval. They would need all the help they could get. The chief’s force of convicts might have spared many of the u-boat’s ratings from the Army of Shadows’ hunger, but they certainly hadn’t been planning on taking along the
Spartiate
’s marines. Replacements for the troops that had been fed to the slats would have to come from the town’s volunteers. Yes, Purity was doing well. She had asked Ganby on the journey here why Elizica of the Jackeni was no longer coming to her in waking dreams and visions. Purity only had to stare in a mirror to see the answer to that question.

The disgraced druid walked over towards Purity as the surviving senior officer they had freed from the
Spartiate
– a first lieutenant of the fleet sea arm, his uniform caked in dust from the assault – emerged to talk with the queen.

He was indicating some of the men in striped sailor’s shirts in the crowd. ‘They’ve got families in the fishing villages down the coast – wives, children. They’ve asked to be excused to see how they fare before they join our venture.’

Purity looked at the collection of sailors, respectfully clutching the round hats decorated with the crest of the
Spartiate
in their hands. ‘You want to go back for your children?’

‘What man wouldn’t, damson?’ said a boatswain.

‘What man wouldn’t?’ echoed Purity, sadly. ‘Let them go. But we will sail when we sail.’

‘You know what many of them will find out there,’ said Ganby as he came up to the queen.

‘They are leaving as fathers,’ said Purity. ‘But they will come back as avenging angels. When you have no family to worry your conscience, you have no fear.’

‘Please don’t hold onto that hardness,’ said Ganby. ‘It is a bitter seed to plant within yourself.’

‘It was never planted by me,’ said Purity. ‘Those that sowed it are about to reap their harvest.’

A cold autumn breeze came off the waters and chilled Ganby Meridian’s bones. It would be colder still in the north. This girl had become their queen and now some small part of him wished that she had not. The u-boat officer and the surviving sailors were starting to make a way for Purity down to their vessel, but they needn’t have bothered – Ganby watched the queen walking through the crowds, the people of Wainsmouth parting like a sea for her.

Samuel Lancemaster came up to Ganby and planted the foot of his newly retrieved spear alongside the druid’s boots. ‘We’re out of our time, druid, so much unfamiliar but so much the same.’

‘What did you expect?’ said Ganby. ‘A peaceful old man’s death thousands of years ago would never have suited you or the other bandits; on a bed of straw, surrounded by grandchildren and pushed out under the stars to see the sky overhead one last time.’

‘You sound like such an end would have suited you just fine, druid. These people treat us like heroes now,’ said Samuel. ‘But if we save them, it won’t take long for their fear of us to return and their gratitude to fade to a memory. Then we’ll just be bandits hiding on the margins of the marsh waters again.’

‘There are worst things to be,’ said Ganby, ‘than fey.’

‘I know why you followed Elizica to sleep under the hills with us,’ said Samuel. ‘The druids you betrayed by fighting alongside us were not forgiving types, were they? They would have made a festival of your end, old man, for helping end their sway over the Jackeni.’

‘There are no druids in this land any longer; they are as lost to these people as the legends of the Bandits of the Marsh. But the Army of Shadows, now, they truly scare me. They are like wrathful gods in the heavens. When we fought the gill-necks they only wanted to usurp our rule over Jackals for their calflings’ sakes, to make our territory their own. I understood their motives, even when I was digging spike pits on our beaches to kill them. But these dark ones, they would gnaw on the Kingdom of Jackals’ bones until it is less than dust. I can feel the lifeforce of our land being drained, my sorceries fading along with it.’

‘You always did jump at your own shadow,’ laughed Samuel. ‘Now you have an army of them to worry about.’

‘Mock, then,’ said Ganby, irritated. ‘Your spear arm will be tested soon enough when we arrive at the bottom of their beanstalk.’

‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ said Samuel in a fair imitation of the druid’s voice before he walked off.

Ganby held out his left hand flat in front of his face. It was trembling. He reached out with his right hand to hold it steady. There were worst things to be than a coward, too. Like dead.

Purity saw Watt and Cam Quarterplate waiting for her on the other side of the sloping road outside their shop’s bay windows. There were plenty of people in the street between them now; people loading up their possessions on carts and abandoning the town, others coming down to the harbour and the
Spartiate
with hunting rifles or the weapons the fleeing convicts had thrown aside. Purity crossed over to them and saw that Watt had a package under his arm.

‘Are you coming to the north with me?’

‘Not I, damson,’ said Watt, slapping his wooden leg with a hand. ‘How do you think I lost this? Mangled by a shell-loading cable when I was thirteen on a seadrinker not much different from that old girl down there. My days as a u-boat boy are over, that’s so.’

‘And you fastbloods will still need sturdy boots,’ said the steamman, ‘out in the forests and the hills.’

‘More than ever,’ said Purity. ‘To stay ahead of the slats.’

Watt held out the parcel he was holding. ‘It ain’t right for a queen to go around without covering up her toes.’

Purity put her hand on the wax paper then smiled. ‘Lay them aside for me. It’ll give me something to look forward to when I come back.’

Clutching the parcel with mixed feelings, Watt watched Purity walk away. She had been lucky that she had left a good footprint or two back in the dust of the shoe shop’s floor. The shoes he had made for her would have fitted perfectly if she had tried them on. Perhaps they would have reminded her of him, too, when she glanced down at them every so often. Oh well. Purity Drake looked like a queen and talked like a queen, but Watt was a parliamentarian at heart, and he was voting with the one good foot that his service in the fleet sea arm had left him with.

‘Good luck,’ the apprentice whispered.

‘I rather think, observed Cam Quarterplate, ‘that you were growing quite fond of her.’

Watt looked down briefly, embarrassed, and clomped his wooden leg down on the cobbles. ‘You know what I like about working for you, Cam? You never made fun of me for this, not even when all the customers were having their little jokes about young Master One-Boot working down at the cobbler’s. Not even then.’

Cam Quarterplate’s skull unit rotated towards the sky. ‘The great pattern needs many different threads in its weave. Look up there. The birds are heading south, young softbody.’

‘Too bloody right, old steamer.’

Watt hurried back into the shop to pack the rest of his tools up.

The slats were coming back to Wainsmouth. You didn’t need to travel all the way to the icy north to find the Army of Shadows.

C
ommodore Black rubbed the grit out of his face. ‘There! Is that what my poor mortal eyes think it is?’

It was. Coming out of the sand haze was a figure with a body slumped over its shoulders, briefly silhouetted against the last pizo-electric crackle of the raging beast of a storm.

‘My ancestors’ cogs be blessed,’ said Coppertracks, his vision plate magnifying the distant image. ‘They made it out of the storm! It is Molly and Keyspierre softbody.’

Even Sandwalker’s normally stony face momentarily cracked into a smile. The group stopped and turned to look behind them in amazement, as if the pair might be a mirage cast by the heat of the day pounding down on them from above. They unslung their backpacks into a pile on the sand as they gawped at the miraculous sight.

‘But I fear she doesn’t look well,’ added the steamman.

‘The storm has slowed us down,’ said Sandwalker. He pointed to a distant peak piercing the empty sky. ‘We must make better time towards the mountains or Molly will surely die on the way.’

‘What have you done to her?’ shouted the commodore as Keyspierre stumbled to a stop in front of the expedition. ‘She’s as bruised as a barrel of lemons hauled through a storm tossing.’

The secret policeman unshouldered Molly and lay her body down on the dunes. Sandwalker was immediately at her side with a canteen; trying to give her the derisory dribble of water that remained to them.

Keyspierre squared up to the commodore, throwing the strip of severed guide rope at the u-boat man’s feet. ‘Thank you, compatriot, for rescuing the little author.’

Commodore Black lunged at the shiftie, but Duncan caught him.

‘He’s brought her back out of the storm, man, all the way through the lightning. The bampot didn’t have to do that.’

‘He was as likely using her blessed body as a shield to take any bolts that were coming his way.’

‘I was obliged to render Compatriot Templar unconscious,’ said Keyspierre. ‘Her sickness has left her unhinged. She woke up screaming that I had eaten her hands, then tried to throttle me with the very fingers that were supposed to be inside my stomach.’

‘Why did you do it?’ asked Duncan. ‘You could have just left the lassie to the storm, claimed that she was separated from you.’

‘If you ask me that then you have no code,’ said Keyspierre, ‘and even less idea of what the Commonshare stands for. We are all equal and all equally worthy of saving. No officer of Committee Eight would leave a compatriot behind.’

‘I will carry her,’ said Coppertracks as Sandwalker finished administering the last of their water. ‘This heat has less influence on my organs and my treads can roll as well over the dunes with Molly softbody’s weight across me as with my own.’

Commodore Black laid his hand on Molly’s forehead. Her only response was a small moan. ‘Ah, poor lass and poor us. We’ve fought so hard and come so far and this is the end of us, out here. Molly burning up under the weight of Kyorin’s soul. Your blessed paradise made a hell, Sandwalker, a small taste of the fate of our beautiful green Jackals. My genius has been tested before, but never by a land so fearfully arid and an enemy so cruel as the Army of Shadows.’ The commodore slipped his bottle of medicinal whisky from his pack. ‘But I still have this, even if our water canteens are as dry as a seadrinker hull sailing too close to the magma of the Fire Sea. A rare taste of home so we can remember the kingdom’s lochs and hills before we all leave our parched corpses stretched out here.’

Duncan lunged for the bottle, but the commodore was too quick, moving it to the side and pushing away the ex-rocketman’s hand. Duncan was furious. ‘Are you mad, Jared, wanting a dram of that stuff? With no water you can’t drink whisky out here in the heat of the day.’

‘I may not be an old hand of the southern frontier like you, but I know what drinking whisky in the desert does to a man,’ said the commodore. ‘But here it is, I’m dry, and as great an adventurer as I am, even my brave frame can’t be murdered twice. I’ll keel over from this wicked sun long before I keel over from the stomach cramps.’

Taking a greedy swig from the canteen, the commodore wiped the drips from the side of his mouth and offered the bottle to Duncan and Keyspierre.

‘I’m still going to kill you when this is over,’ said the secret policeman, taking the whisky, drawing a quick measure and then passing it across to Duncan Connor.

‘What sort of filthy wheatman would you be if you did not?’ said the commodore.

Duncan took a nip, made a face and spat the foul-tasting stuff out onto the sand. ‘Sweet Circle, man, I’ve drunk raw jinn distilled by tribesmen that tasted better than that. How much alcohol is in this wee bottle?’

‘Alcohol!’ Sandwalker snatched the bottle, sniffing at it in horror before corking it shut. ‘Fools! You’ve actually brought a solution of alcohol out onto the plains?’ The nomad drew his arm back to hurl the bottle as far as he could, the commodore about to leap on him to save it, when they saw it. ‘You’ll attract …’

The thin branches of what looked like a tree were rising up over the dune in front of them, quivering in the air. A horrendous buzzing filled the empty wasteland and the thin branches became the spread of twin antennae on a giant ant, its chitin a mottled orange, the same shade as the sand, hovering under twin buzz-saw wings, two leathery globes swelling out on either side of its thorax.

Sandwalker tossed the bottle as far and as hard he could, and like a gun hound fetching a falling pheasant, the flying ant curved through the air and snatched the tumbling green glass with one of its six jointed legs. Then the monstrosity flipped around and came straight for the members of the expedition. Everyone scattered, Coppertracks ducking as he reversed backwards at full speed clutching Molly’s prone form, the huge insect’s rotating forewings nearly clipping the steamman’s transparent dome skull in passing.

It went right through the space where the expedition had been standing, scooping up all their piled packs – the potpourri of food scents too strong for the insect to ignore.

‘Our blessed supplies!’ Commodore Black shouted, running up to the crest of the dune after the creature. ‘My bully beef!’

On the opposite side of the dune was a rough circle of ground a lighter colour than the surrounding sands. Fat orange larvae were coming out to feed as the giant ant opened the expedition’s belongings with its scimitar-sharp mouthparts, its antennae flickering in a dance as it scented and sorted the chemical traces coming from each pack. Commodore Black didn’t need to notice the similarity between the flying ant and the slats’ hovering globe ships to know that here was another of the mutations scattered across Kaliban by the terrible Army of Shadows. Where was his blessed gun?

‘Leave our food there,’ ordered Sandwalker as he sprinted up the dune, pushing the commodore’s pistol down towards the sand. ‘That flying ant is only a male drone left to tend the nest’s young. The female soldiers and workers will be out foraging with their queen – there will be dozens of them, more than enough to hunt us down as prey.’

A grand course of action. One ruined by Duncan Connor sprinting up the slope behind them, roaring as if he had just lost his mind, a pistol in one hand and a straight Jackelian cavalry sabre in the other. ‘It’s got her, it’s got her!’

For a moment Commodore Black thought that his friend was talking about Molly, but a quick glance back down the dune showed that she was still resting in Coppertracks’ iron arms. ‘She’s safe, lad!’

Connor of Cassarabia was over the crest of the hill and dashing down in frenzied kicks of sand towards the ant. It was then that Commodore Black saw it. The flying insect had ripped open Duncan’s travel case, scattering bleached white bones across the bronze sand, one of them a skull so small it had to be that of a human child.

The head of the insect darted up as it saw Duncan racing towards the nest and the larvae in its charge. Raising its abdomen and dipping its antennae in warning like a charging bull, the insect took off towards Duncan, but the ex-rocketman triggered the charge in his pistol, blowing out the ant’s right compound eye in a shower of ichor. Off balance now, the ant continued to fly towards Duncan, the Jackelian launching himself into the air and landing on top of the creature’s thorax underneath the twin rotating wings. Now the flying ant was furious. This was prey – prey fighting back! It clumped down onto the dune and angled its wings to blow a sandstorm back across its body, always enough to dislodge any parasite foolish enough to try to pierce its chitin.

In the midst of the gale Duncan yelled an upland battle cry and slammed his sabre down through the join between the head and thorax of his furious mount, decapitating the ant in one swing. As the massive insect’s wings stopped rotating, Duncan was off, smoothly rolling away from the beast’s back and running towards his broken case and the bones lying across the sands, slashing at the fat orange larvae as they reared up and tried to lunge at his legs.

Commodore Black and Sandwalker were quickly at Duncan’s side, leaving the others on the crest to gaze down bewildered at the carnage and the giant slain ant, watching Duncan stuffing the bones into his travel case and trying to lock the lid back on it.

Duncan was mumbling at the sand, barely registering their presence. ‘I’m sorry, lassie, I’m sorry they did that to you.’

‘Are you suffering from heat exhaustion, Duncan Connor?’ asked Sandwalker. ‘You could have died. Do you know how dangerous these colonies are?’

‘Don’t look at her, man,’ begged Duncan. ‘She hates people glowering at her now.’

‘Who, lad?’ asked Commodore Black.

‘My wee daughter, Hannah.’

‘These are just blessed bones.’

‘She’s different now, that’s all. Hannah hates people having a shufty at her. Nobody else understands, only her father does, only me, always me.’

‘We have to go,’ urged the nomad, bending down to gather what supplies had survived the larvae’s feeding frenzy. ‘The drone’s mates will return and we must be far away when they do.’

‘It wasn’t my regiment’s fault,’ said Duncan, standing up and clutching the broken case to his chest, ‘when we fired on the raiders with our gas rockets. We didn’t realize the raiding party had already stolen people from the upland villages for slaves. Everyone was wearing sand robes. We thought they were coming out of the desert, not going back towards Cassarabia, not going
back
.’

Commodore Black gently laid a hand on the ex-soldier’s shoulder. ‘She’s just bones, lad, she’s dead.’

Duncan shook his head. ‘No, it was my wife who died, not Hannah. No one understands that Hannah’s just a little different. My wee girl, my bonnie wee girl.’

But Commodore Black understood now. Why the New Pattern Army hadn’t taken Connor of Cassarabia back into the fold even when the enlisting parties were desperately sweeping every lane in the kingdom’s towns for fresh recruits to face the Army of Shadows. How many years had Duncan been travelling with his daughter’s corpse rotting in a suitcase? Part of him must know, deep down. The part that had been taking coin for suicide callings like the circus of the extreme.

‘We have to protect Hannah,’ insisted Duncan. ‘Protect her from the Army of Shadows. Those black-hearted kelpies will take her for a slave, make her suffer the same as Sandwalker’s people.’

Commodore Black looked at the ex-soldier. ‘We’ll save her, Duncan, we’ll save all our darling girls back in the Kingdom of Jackals and stick our boot hard up the Army of Shadows’ arse while we’re about it.’

Sandwalker retrieved a thin black tube from his torn pack. He rotated its head to reveal a tiny spray hole. ‘We must pass through the territory of the ant colonies to reach the mountains. This will help us survive.’

‘What is it, lad?’ asked the commodore.

‘A synthesized version of the pheromone a queen ant uses to attract her workers and soldiers to her. If we are pursued, one of us must sacrifice themselves for the group. Once the pheromone is applied to a robe, the colony will chase only the one who has been sprayed. If this was my tribe’s caravan, it would be traditional for the oldest and the sickest to be appointed as the lure.’

Commodore Black glanced nervously at the massive bladelike pincers of the dead ant’s mouthparts. If it came to it, who would be selected in such a mortal awful lottery?

Which one of them would have die to save them all?

Molly woke up to burning pain slicing through her head, haunted by the shadows of things she wasn’t quite sure were phantoms, or Kyorin’s memories, or events that were actually happening to her now. She was being carried. Yes, the expedition to reach the great sage. To find the weapon. And to cure her, before her mind fried under the endless heat of the Kaliban sun and the weight of the strange memories.

She was being borne in someone’s arms; her head so weak she couldn’t even turn to catch sight of who it was. But she could see the great rise of a mountain in front of them. So tall, as were the ants. Two giant ants! Coming towards her, as big as shire horses, pincers snicking together hungrily. Molly tried to yell but her throat was too dry. She was placed on the ground and left there. The monstrous pair of ants were still coming forward, six legs apiece, sharp orange legs like lances jabbing at the ground. The head of the nearest ant dipped down, its antennae brushing against Molly’s forehead, marking her scent. This treachery was Keyspierre’s work, it had to be! The dirty shiftie secret policeman was sacrificing her as an offering to these monsters. Abandoning her as food to save his skin.

Now Molly’s paper-dry throat summoned enough saliva to scream.