The Rise of the Iron Moon

by Stephen Hunt

  Harry sighed and drew out the knife he had used to kill the warder, wiping the blood off on his trousers. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

  ‘Be careful. These things are called slats and they’re fast and they take a lot of killing. Their throats are their weakest point.’

  Harry watched Oliver climb down the lifeboat’s ladder. ‘You never did say what you wanted Preston for.’

  ‘We’re going to build a cannon. One big enough to shoot us to Kaliban.’

  ‘You’re—’ Harry threw back his head and laughed. ‘Well, Timlar Preston’s your man, all right.’

  Inside the confines of the cramped lifeboat Oliver pushed Preston to one side and slipped his left foot into the sail deployment pedal. ‘Stay safe, you old thief.’

  ‘That’s what I do best, old stick. Though, from the sound of it, I rather think it’s you who’s going to need all the luck.’

  * * *

  With a clang the escape hatch shut, Harry spinning its lever tight. He slid the dead warder’s master punch card into the console and there was a clacking from the clockwork deployment mechanism as the lifeboat was lowered out of the prison sphere’s hull.

  ‘You stay safe too, boy.’ Harry pulled the firing lever, the crack of two charges blowing, and the first – and possibly the last – successful prison break in the Court of the Air’s history was over.

  A slippery clicking noise sounded from outside the warder station and Harry turned to see the flat eyeless skull-plates of the pair of ebony monsters that had tracked his scent along the corridor. Slats, damn slats!

  ‘That was fast work, lads.’ Harry showed them his blade. ‘Well done. Now, which of you two ugly slime-dripping jiggers wants some first?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Commodore Black indicated the sword rack and wiped the fat tears of sweat pouring down his forehead with the towel hanging there. Purity dropped her sabre into the wooden rail and borrowed the towel after the u-boat man had finished with it.

  ‘You’ve a classic sense of blade work about you, lass. Some might say archaic.’

  ‘Some might say unreliable,’ replied Purity. ‘This isn’t anything to do with me. Until I came here I had never picked up a sword in my life before. If any of the children in the Royal Breeding House were caught fencing with broom handles we would be birched so hard we couldn’t sit down for a week.’

  ‘They want to raise sheep to wear parliament’s tainted crown,’ said the commodore. ‘Not lions. Yet you fight as if you’ve been tutored in the arts of war all of your life.’

  ‘Something’s possessed me,’ said Purity. ‘My madness – whatever you want to call it. Every day it burrows a little deeper within me like a sickness, and it gets harder to tell where I begin and it ends.’

  ‘If madness it is, it’s a grand old sort. Your reflexes are getting steadier with each session. Cavalry sabre, fencing foil, debating stick, pistolry, cutlass. There are not many tricks of arms I have left to teach you. Nor, I dare say, any tricks of pugilism that mad strapping uplander Duncan Connor has remaining to pass on to you either. Just remember that the New Pattern Army fights dirty, and that you’ve your house’s honour to carry with you.’

  Purity looked around. The corpses of Kyorin’s murderers might have been cleared away, but Purity could still feel the slats’ lingering malevolence. ‘I wish Oliver would come back. He seems to know what I am, to recognize the thing inside me.’

  ‘Let him stay away, now,’ pleaded the commodore. ‘A day, a week, a month is good and a year would be better still. You’ve got parliament’s warrant sitting on your escaped head to think about. That lad with his wicked brace of pistols draws trouble to him like wasps to a picnic. He goes off to visit the Court of the Air and the whole place comes tumbling down like a pack of cards. I could tell you tales of that lad, Purity Drake, and all the trouble he’s got me into before now. Stumbling around the undercity and the sewers of Middlesteel, pursued by vicious killers. Marching across the fields of Rivermarsh while shiftie lancers tried to run my proud chest through with their steel and our own airships rained fin-bombs about my head. If it hadn’t been for my quick grasp of military matters directing the armies of the Kingdom of Jackals and the Steammen Free State, why, our nation would be a conquered province of Quatérshift and we’d be nodding at each other in the street with a hello compatriot, this, and a how do you do, compatriot, that. Yes, that strange lad you’re so keen to see again is fine for getting us into terrible scrapes, but it’s old Blacky that everyone has to turn to to get us out of them.’

  ‘I think whatever has been talking to me inside my head has been talking to him, too.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’d be a blessed release for us if he and Molly did come back early from the House of Guardians, for it’d mean Ben Carl had thrown them out, them and their mad plan for building a cannon to shoot Molly to the moon. I should have made an appointment an hour earlier than theirs, and used the jingle of every medal the First Guardian gave me after the battle of Rivermarsh to convince him to help keep my Molly’s precious head safe on the soil of Jackals.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ asked Purity. ‘You heard what Kyorin said.’

  ‘Ah, the poor blue-skinned traveller. Torn apart and lying bleeding on the floor of Molly’s bedroom. He was kind to you and no doubt a fine fellow for all the strange colour of his hide, but I’ve heard the dying words of a good few souls on my terrible adventures and they rarely make much sense. This wicked Army of Shadows is no doubt from one of the continents north of the polar wastes; I’ve seen stranger sights than your friend’s eyeless monsters in the underwater cities of races such as the gill-necks, and crossed swords with far more wicked creatures in the jungles of Liongeli.’

  ‘Either way,’ sighed Purity, ‘the Army of Shadows will be here soon enough. The news sheets are full of nothing but our new treaty with Quatérshift and the war.’

  ‘The sheep are lying with the wolves now, right enough. And I can think of one shiftie we’d be well rid of to start with.’ The commodore pointed towards the window of their library. ‘That twitchy devil Timlar Preston, insisting that nothing else but my finest brandies and wines will to do to comfort his genius and lubricate his plans for his damn fool cannon. If there was an agent left to seize the bugger, I would place a notice in the Illustrated’s small ads and risk my address to the Court of the Air’s rascals in the hope that Timlar Preston wouldn’t be sitting in my house come the new day.’

  ‘And in doing so you would be depriving science of one of its greatest minds,’ noted Coppertracks, rolling into the courtyard with a couple of his mu-bodies in tow. ‘The schematics I have been helping him draft bear as much relation to our current state of gunnery as a child’s catapult does to one of your redcoats’ rifles.’

  ‘Then perhaps his mad device will be good for lobbing a shell or two towards those slippery-skinned slat creatures in Catosia without me having to get close enough to unload my deck sweeper’s eight barrels into their wicked hides.’

  ‘Our cannon’s range will stretch a little further than that, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks.

  The commodore looked at the box the steamman’s drones were bearing. ‘More messages from King Steam?’

  ‘Not this time,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I spent the morning visiting our old friend at Saint Vine’s college.’ He waved at his drones and they pulled out a series of tomes, laying the books out on a garden bench in the shadow of Tock House’s courtyard. ‘The college’s library is always my first source for mining the depths of historic esoterica.’

  Purity was quick to move over to the bench. ‘You found something to help me?’

  ‘I promised that I would,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Your description of your madness, your visions, led me to a very specific period of Jackelian ancient history: the long dark ages following the fall of the Camlantean civilization. The pre-Circlean age, when the Council of Druids and the Stag Lords still ruled Jackals. The legends say that a warrior queen united
the tribes and that her royal bloodline held sway until the age of ice, blood that was later to re-emerge as the lineage of the first kings. Your ancestors!’

  Purity looked at the drawing inked on ancient vellum, an angular illustration of an armoured woman riding a chariot pulled by lions, her hair wild and spread by the wind. The face! The face was the same as that of the woman whose body she had shared on the ancient beach of shale.

  ‘Elizica!’

  ‘Elizica of the Jackeni,’ said Coppertracks. ‘There is not much beyond myth that we know of that period of history. What the glaciers of the coldtime didn’t erase, you fastbloods did when you burned your books to keep warm, and the majority of tomes that survived the age of ice were later tossed on the fire by the Circlist church for containing too many religious references for your atheist faith’s tastes. These manuscripts are copies of copies, the originals made at some personal risk by a heretic monk and buried in a cathedral meditatory.’

  ‘The woman in my dreams really existed then,’ said Purity. ‘I’m not going mad!’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The Steamo Loas are my race’s ancestors and it is considered a great blessing to be ridden by the Loas, to be touched by our gods. The steammen’s great pattern is not so different from the one sea of consciousness your Circleans put their faith in.’

  ‘What do these books say about her?’

  ‘That she was a great queen who defended Jackals from an invasion by one of the underwater races. The geographic record King Steam’s scholars have compiled indicates the Fire Sea was expanding at that time, so there may well have been mass migrations by the underwater kingdoms during Elizica’s age; the Kingdom of Jackals with its long coastlines would have been a tempting target for any fleeing refugees.’

  Purity traced a curious finger over the raised ink of the bound volume’s leather pages. It was warm to the touch, as if the monk who had illuminated the original had leaked his spirit into the illustrations. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Myth always is.’ Coppertracks opened one of the accompanying volumes – notes by a modern Jackelian academic. ‘I dare say the reality was more prosaic. She is linked to the legends of the Bandits of the Marsh, two hundred warriors who were outlaws, fey-born and sworn enemies of the Stag Lords. This volume speculates that Elizica led the Bandits of the Marsh against the underwater invaders, and then overthrew the corrupt Stag Lords who had been making treaties with the occupiers, clearing the way for your Circlist faith to replace the druids’ many gods. Monarchy and Circlism, the precursors to Jackals as we know it today – strong enough to survive even the long age of ice that was to follow.’

  ‘A long-dead queen, now,’ said Commodore Black. ‘What good will she be in this fight that is coming?’

  ‘If the Army of Shadows is composed of the slats that attacked Tock House, the help of any Loa that comes to our aid will, I suspect, be deeply welcome,’ said Coppertracks. ‘You were with me outside King Steam’s command tent when we saw the lions running through the sky.’

  ‘What we saw that day was a projection,’ protested the commodore. ‘A trick of the mind from the fey.’

  ‘You should have more faith in the power of your land, my softbody friend,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Whose lions were they, running through the sky? You know the answer – when the kingdom is threatened, it is said the first kings will return from the hills where they sleep, led by a great warrior – a sword-saint. Those lions in the sky gave heart to your army when it seemed as if all was lost. The kingdom was threatened then and it is threatened now.’ Coppertracks laid an iron hand on Purity’s shoulder. ‘And lo, our new house guest hears the whisper of an ancient queen, her life now protected by the Hood-o’the-marsh, the marsh, mind, while something terrible comes upon us from the north.’

  The commodore sadly met Purity’s gaze. ‘That is the way of it, then, lass. I would shoulder this burden of yours if I could. You already on the run from the scoundrels and dogs of parliament. Now you have to hear the whisper of some long-dead queen, too.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Purity. ‘I really don’t. All my life I’ve been treated like an outcast for the fits I suffered – but they helped me escape the Royal Breeding House and now I know them for what they are. Not a madness, but a gift. It’s as if I’ve been suffocating all my life and now I can breathe again.’ Tears welled in Purity’s eyes. ‘I think this is what happiness feels like.’

  ‘You’ve a forgiving heart,’ said the commodore. ‘And you shame an old u-boat man with it.’ He looked down at her bare feet. ‘And it pains me to see you without some fine cow leather to wrap around your toes. If you will not take one of Molly’s spares, will you at least let me buy you a new pair of shoes?’

  Purity shook her head and picked up one of the books Coppertracks had brought back from the college. ‘I need to feel the land beneath my feet. But shoes or no, I don’t think I’m a sword-saint, however quickly I may have taken to your sabre practice. Can I take these books to my room and read them up there?’

  ‘Of course you may, young softbody,’ said Coppertracks, his drones collecting the remaining volumes for her as he spoke. ‘But you must follow the house rules I explained when I showed you Tock House’s library.’

  ‘I remember – no food or drink, no book-marking by folding the pages, no breaking the spines …’

  ‘Quite correct. Books are a little like the Loas. They allow our ancestors to reach out from the past and touch our boiler-hearts with the wisdom of ages long forgotten; although with books, of course, you decide when to ride them, rather than the Loas calling upon you.’

  Commodore Black looked at Purity. ‘You’ve practised enough with sabres today, lass. But make sure you read the books in your room and not the library, now. That mad old shiftie is working in there and the further away you stay from him, the better I shall like it.’

  Purity left with Coppertracks’ drones carrying the tomes for her, their master thoughtfully rocking back and forth above his caterpillar tracks.

  ‘You are wrong about Timlar Preston,’ Coppertracks said to the commodore. ‘He is a gentle man.’

  ‘And the more dangerous for it. Many a smithy of pistols and blades can say the same… but you put the fruits of their labour in the hands of wicked men like me and the result is dead bodies on the duelling fields and fatherless children left crying after a battle.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Coppertracks, ‘fatherless children. When will you tell her?’

  ‘Tell who what?’

  ‘Please, Jared softbody. I am a steamman slipthinker. I see patterns, the little patterns that make up the great pattern. While many of my less travelled brothers back in the Steammen Free State might say that all softbodies look the same to them, I have lived long enough alongside your people not to count among their number.’

  Commodore Black seemed to slump and grow smaller at his friend’s words. ‘You’re a canny one, old steamer. There’s no denying that.’

  ‘The geometry of Purity’s facial patterns matched against yours was enough to pique my curiosity. It was an easy enough trick to use my vision plate to capture a magnified image of her eyes and compare the inheritance vectors against your own. I do not know how it has come to pass, but there’s a ninety-four per cent level of probability that Purity Drake is your daughter.’

  ‘It feels like another age,’ sighed the commodore. ‘When I was younger and still welcomed adventure. What the news sheets called the Prince Silvar affair.’

  ‘The prince was substituted for a double,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Broken out of captivity from the Royal Breeding House. But I thought that was perpetrated by agents of Quatérshift?’

  ‘So it was meant to look, that fine day,’ said the commodore, wistfully. ‘It was before the fall of Porto Principe, when the royalist court in exile still had a taste for mischief and I wore the face, name and title of Solomon Dark, Duke of Ferniethian. And it was no mean feat for me, even then. I had to join the redcoats, rise to the ran
k of sergeant and make sure I was posted to the barracks at the Royal Breeding House. I was the inside man for that blow against parliament, and Purity’s mother – ah, now, there was a lady. Alicia Drake. As proud and as beautiful and as clever as any of us born free on the islands of Porto Principe. She worked out what I was about, all right, and she was the only one of those poor broken royalist songbirds they keep cooped up in the Breeding House with the gumption to help me organize the prince’s escape.’

  ‘You should tell Purity who you are.’

  ‘How can I?’ sobbed the commodore. ‘I saw her mother fall during the prince’s escape with a ball through her head – I thought she had died. Now I find from Purity that it was a glancing blow and that when Alicia recovered, she used her wiles to portray herself as a bystander caught in the crossfire to avoid the gallows, pleading her belly for her life. I believed my darling Alicia was dead. I didn’t even know I had a daughter until Purity turned up here with her mother’s name and the House of Ferniethian’s eyes.’

  ‘She will understand,’ said Coppertracks.

  ‘How can she ever do that? A father is someone you are proud of, someone to look up to. Not a fat old fool who abandons his family to a life of hell in parliament’s dark, windy fortress of royalist brood mares. She would hate me for it. I would be a coward in her eyes. It would be more than I could stand and more than she could stand, too. Her life to date has already been ruined by my carelessness, and the mortal best I can hope for is to keep her safe now. I’ll train her with every trick and wile that’s kept me alive and out of parliament’s hands, and I’ll give my life to save hers if I have to, but you must promise me this, old steamer: you must never tell her who I am. Purity can never know.’

  ‘You owe her the truth.’

  ‘Not when the truth would hurt her more than the lie. I owe her a good life more than I owe her the wicked truth.’

  ‘How much longer do we have left?’ Coppertracks argued. ‘Darkness is upon us from the north. Nothing can be guaranteed anymore. Not if the spirit of Legba of the Valves were standing guard over Tock House, or Elizica of the Jackeni for that matter. Would you let the truth die with one of you?’