by Stephen Hunt
‘We didn’t quite know whose country it was going to be when we arrived here,’ said Oliver. ‘And the Army of Shadows appears to have enough force on its side that we didn’t need half the parts for Timlar Preston’s prototype cannon falling into its hands.’
‘Old habits die hard it seems, my new friends,’ said Keyspierre, a tinge of sadness in his voice.
‘Your First Committee has agreed to the construction of the cannon deep in the kingdom,’ said Oliver. ‘Well away from the fighting.’
‘Well away for now, compatriot,’ said Jeanne. She drew a sharp-looking dagger out of her belt and made a cutting motion across her throat. ‘When you are fighting the Army of Shadows, the front line has a way of quickly shifting well beyond your control; but you will see.’
Oliver rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache developing. ‘I don’t need to see. I can feel them here. The creatures moving about, their hunger …’
‘Don’t you pay no mind to the fey lad,’ said the commodore. ‘Our friends back home are already hard at work on the cannon with your countryman, Timlar Preston. You get yourselves to the u-boat and we’ll all be on our way to see the blessed project soon enough.’
‘No, I am coming with you to retrieve the weapon’s components,’ announced Keyspierre. ‘I have been charged with the success of this project and if there are pre-milled parts for the old prototype still in existence, they will be key to the rapid construction of a working cannon.’
Oliver was about to protest, but Keyspierre cut him short. It seemed there was a hard edge to the middle-aged scientist – but then, it would have been reckless indeed to underestimate anyone who had raised themselves to the top of Quatérshift’s institute of science in the maelstrom of revolutionary politics. ‘I have spent longer than you have avoiding the Army of Shadows’ creatures, young man, searching for all the staff your parliament requested. It may feel a little less like Jackelian looting if it is I who takes away the prototype cannon’s components. Quatérshift never completed the great cannon in time for the war between our two nations. I will not lose the chance to turn such a weapon against our new common enemy.’
‘Take the lass to the dinghy, then,’ said the commodore.
‘I stay with my father,’ insisted Jeanne. ‘All are equal in the Commonshare, compatriot sailor. I am not some Jackelian maid who needs cosseting with silk dresses, expensive fragrances, or soft cushions for a coach ride.’
‘That much I can see, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But you’ll be equal in death if we come across the Army of Shadows’ beasts.’
Jeanne flashed her dagger angrily at the commodore. ‘Who do you think has been keeping my father alive as we’ve been hunting down every retired scientist and engineer in the occupied provinces?’
‘I take your point, now,’ said the commodore, flinching back from the blade. ‘And it’s sharply made.’
Jeanne looked with disdain at the commodore, Oliver, and the handful of red-coated marines left on the beach to help retrieve the prototype cannon components. ‘Just keep up with us, Jackelian. Everything north of that pinewood forest is slat territory. Our people are getting used to staying out of reach of the slats’ talons. I hope your soldiers are fast learners.’
The commodore watched Jeanne stalk away to the train of pack mules. ‘Just a quick little smuggling run, you said, lad. I should be back in the Kingdom of Jackals, helping Coppertracks, Duncan and that rascal Timlar Preston lay down the barrelling for your blessed great gun. I’m a game fellow, but I’m getting too old for these mortal dangerous jaunts you seem so damn fond of dragging me into.’
‘I bring you along because apart from me, you’re one of the few who ever survives these little adventures,’ said Oliver. ‘You’re damn unsinkable, old man.’
‘Is that what I am? When my unlucky stars put me in the way of every bullet and blade our age has to offer.’
But the age wasn’t finished with Commodore Black yet. There were sights of horror enough to haunt the group on their five-mile journey to the worked-out mine. Memories fit to torment the visitors to Quatérshift for decades to come. The smallest of these barbarities were the cold remains of fires where the slat companies had camped, littered with the blackened bones of the captured citizenry. The shifties might have been starved for years by the failure of the revolution to produce a decent harvest, but there had been meat enough on their bones to satisfy the foot soldiers of the Army of Shadows.
The largest of the outrages was the ruins of the city of Courau, briefly visible from the brow of a forested hill where the party rested, what was left of the place spilling across a wide valley next door to a lake. Its outskirts had been completely flattened by the sweep of war, an inner core of buildings standing intact but still smouldering from the small weapons fire of the slats. Out of the wreckage a new Courau was rising, an evil green luminosity lighting up the rubble as massive domes were raised in the heart of the old town. Made of hexagonal panels, the domes looked like the eyes of giant insects, ripped out and embedded deep in the race of man’s territory. Taking the commodore’s telescope, Oliver saw long lines of Quatérshift’s citizens being marched into the city along the outlying roads, their bodies – many of them were naked – painted viridescent by the tainted light of their conquerors’ eerie constructions.
‘You can’t see from here,’ Jeanne told Oliver, ‘but the slats have branded their prisoners on their foreheads. A single triangle means they are to be kept as slave labour and used to rebuild the city to the Army of Shadows’ template, a double triangle means they are to be farmed. See to the right of the domes, the low glass structures that resemble greenhouses? They are pens where our people are fed slops and fattened. If you were watching during the day, compatriot Jackelian, you would see the slats pulling out the ones they intend to consume. If you were close enough, you could hear the screams of our compatriots begging for the slats to select someone else, anyone else, someone fatter or younger or older or healthier. Fighting each other to be at the back of the pens. The food pens are where the Army of Shadows keeps the children it captures. If you waited for morning you could watch adults throwing children forward when the slats come to select the day’s cull, infants whose parents have already died and have no one left to protect them.’
‘You see now why I came with you,’ said Keyspierre, his voice like steel as he stared grimly towards the conquered city. ‘There is no price I would not pay to lift the hand of this terror from our land. If the cannon the Hero of the People Timlar Preston tried to build during the Two-Year War will turn back this invasion, then I will construct it with my own hands if I have to, one rivet at a time.’
‘Sweet Circle,’ whispered Oliver. ‘This is where their hunger leads … I felt it like a sickness in the north, but I had no idea.’
There was a tear running down Commodore Black’s fat cheek, soon lost in the scrub of his black beard. ‘Ah lad, I don’t need to be fey like you to feel their evil. This is the future we are looking at, for everyone on the continent, unless we find a way to turn them back.’
‘We must unseat them quickly, before their beachhead is established further,’ explained Keyspierre. ‘The Army of Shadows has captured six of our cities in the north, but they have only begun building like this in two of them. The conclusion we have drawn at the Institute des Luminaires is that even using our captured compatriots as slave labour, the slats do not yet possess the numbers to construct more widely. We believe that the Army of Shadows’ rate of advance isn’t currently being dictated by the obvious military superiority of their weaponry over our own, but by the paucity of their forces on the ground.’
Commodore Black laid a hand on Jeanne’s shoulder. ‘You’re not alone in this fight, lass. I never thought I’d be glad of the sight, but as we left to sail for you, Jackals’ roads were packed with regiments of redcoats marching east towards the border, our skies dark with the high fleet’s airships preparing to fly out here.’
‘And King
Steam’s knights are coming down out of the mountains to reinforce our regiments,’ reassured Oliver. ‘The forces of three nations to turn back the Army of Shadows, with Molly’s damn great cannon to carry the fight back to the devils’ homeland. To pay them back for what they’ve done to you here.’
Keyspierre seemed briefly encouraged by their words. His nation had often been on the wrong end of the cannons and bomb bays of the RAN’s indomitable airships, and the shifties had taken enough beatings from King Steam’s knights, both before and after the revolution in Quatérshift, that it seemed possible that their three combined armies could stand up to any invasion. Even against beasts like the slats. Even here, hiding in the hilly woods with a view out onto the ghastly scorched remains of one of the Commonshare’s great cities.
But any courage they might have taken from the pair’s words faded as their train of mules came in sight of the worked-out mine where the components for the original cannon had been buried. As they gazed across at the latest horror being wrought by the Army of Shadows from the protection of the tree line, a dark shape the size of a house smashed out of the pine trees to their rear, a split second away from crushing the life out of them.
Hardarms allowed himself a moment’s pride as he crested the top of the hill, one of the last before the undulating hinterland of the Steammen Free State gave way to the windswept moors of eastern Jackals.
Below lay the steammen army, without doubt the greatest the people of the metal had ever assembled. Every order of knight steamman was represented in those ranks, the order of the Steel Rose and the order of the Vanadium Lance, Hardarms’ own order of the Pathfinder Fist, banners snapping in the wind from the poles attached to their bodies. They sounded like an earthquake on the move, the orchestrated stamp of their feet almost drowned by the fighting hymns that lifted up to the sky. Close to seventy thousand voiceboxes singing in perfect unison. Every now and then, when the clouds parted, the steel and iron of the vast moving mass became a surf of glinting limbs and weapons, pressure repeaters coiled to boilers, drums rattling with balls. It was not just the orders militant on the move down below, there were a hundred legions of common steammen, militia who had answered King Steam’s call from the high mountain villages, towns and cities of the Mechancian Spine. King Steam was taking a risk, stripping the Free State of so many of their people; trusting the paper of the freshly inked tripartite pact. How things had changed. Now, it seemed they would stand or fall together, the three mightiest civilizations of the continent. The Kingdom of Jackals. Quatérshift. The Steammen Free State.
Hardarms rested the iron palms of his two manipulator arms on his hip and swung his two war arms – sharp, razor-flowered spears – to clear the kinks in his joint seals. His reverie at the sight of their host below was quickly broken by the sound of bickering slowly following him up the slope.
‘Can you not move any faster? It is not dignified for a personage of my status to be seen trailing the main body of the force in this way,’ came one of the voices.
‘Now don’t you be getting your steam up. How many damn tonnes do you think you weigh? You can thank the blessings of Steelbhalah-Waldo that the paths down the mountain actually took your damn weight without us both taking a tumble down a gorge.’
Hardarms looked around, clearing a burst of smoke from his single steel stack. Lord Starhome, a long silver shell some two hundred feet long, was being borne slowly up the slope by the articulated tractor cradles of Mandelbrot Longtreads, the hoary hauler not the slightest bit impressed by the noble graces emanating from one of the largest of the steammen army’s holy artefacts, only recently removed from the Chamber of Swords.
‘It does not matter,’ Hardarms called towards the hauler and his quarrelsome load. ‘Within a day’s march the army will turn north to rendezvous with our Jackelian allies and we three will have left them and turned south towards Halfshire.’
‘And up until that point I should be borne alongside the royal standard and the command staff,’ insisted Lord Starhome.
‘Oh, should you?’ grumbled Mandelbrot Longtreads, his skull unit rotating around on his cab to stare at the long silver shell. ‘Well then, why don’t you just fly? Why don’t you hover like a great big fat Jackelian airship above the royal standard and give my tracks a rest from hauling your noble carcass the length and breadth of the continent?’
‘I shall fly soon enough,’ retorted Lord Starhome.
‘Now!’
‘Oh, you lowly ignoramus.’ Lord Starhome’s silvery mirrorlike surface flashed crimson for a second as the artefact allowed fury to overcome his usual haughty attitude. ‘You dirty ore-hauling miner, you think to question me?’
‘Lord Starhome may not safely fly here,’ said Hardarms, detailing the shortcomings that the powerful relic would never admit to a lowly miner. ‘He moves by distortion of the weak-strong force of mass. The radioactive poisons generated by doing that within the gravity field of a celestial sphere would, I have been told, be immensely dangerous.’
‘But you are expected to pilot him?’ said Longtreads.
‘After we are safely free of the gravity-well of our home, I shall do just that.’
‘I assure you, you will not,’ said Lord Starhome. ‘I am quite capable of setting my own trajectory without your hands on my controls.’
‘I rather think that is what worries King Steam,’ said Hardarms. ‘You know what cargo you carry inside you. The looking-glass device is almost as valuable as your own shell, and I shall not allow it to fall into the hands of the Army of Shadows intact.’
The long silver capsule seemed mollified by the knight’s grudging flattery and ceased arguing with the steamman carrying him up the hill. ‘Whoever sets my course, I shall be free of this tugsome ball of dirt soon enough. I was never meant to be captured by the tiresome pull of a world’s mass.’
‘My understanding is that the people of the metal dug you out of our tiresome dirt, rebuilt you and gave you one of our own soul-boards to reactivate you,’ said Hardarms. ‘Some gratitude for repairing you after your crash would be in order. You are at least part-steamman now.’
‘Pah,’ said Lord Starhome, ‘my place is soaring free in the great darks. Once I was a ship-to-ship packet, a launch for creatures so mighty you cannot even begin to imagine their power. I have crossed between galaxies, borne on craft larger than your pathetic world, relativity sails billowing in front of a furnace of screaming matter that would make your sun seem like a glint of light on my hull.’
‘Shoot him now,’ begged the steamman transporting Lord Starhome.
‘Ah, but he is our shell,’ said Hardarms. ‘Now we must take him to his cannon.’
‘It’s hard to believe a steamman soul lives in this quarrelsome piece of quicksilver.’
‘Only to patch up the damage in his original fragmented intellect, broken by a too-hard landing,’ said Hardarms. ‘His escape from our home will be both his and our own salvation.’
Longtreads rotated his vision plate upwards to stare at their baleful new moon, a pale crimson shadow in the daylight, just visible between the fingers of cloud. ‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, while he’s about it, I wish he would burn that red abomination out of the sky.’
Hardarms’ iron hand reached down to touch the satchel that bore the package from Mechancia’s observatory. Papers and real-box images sealed with the wax emblem of King Steam himself. To be passed to Coppertracks and his soft-body friends. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he muttered.
As if the gods had answered Longtreads’ request, the pale circle of the new moon began to disappear under the rolling scuds of an advancing storm front. Shadows began to lengthen across the moorland below, a creeping crimson twilight trailing across the vast assembled orders of the steammen knights.
‘The Army of Shadows,’ growled Longtreads.
‘Stop where you are,’ ordered Hardarms. He drew a magnifying assembly out of his satchel and clipped it over his vision plate. ‘Now I ca
n see why the survivors fleeing the fall of Catosia chose such a fitting name for the enemy.’
‘But can you see their army?’ asked Longtreads, his tractor treads stalled on the slope.
‘There’s something at the other end of the moors, but the smoke from our people’s stacks is obscuring my view of it. Ah, that’s better, the wind is clearing the smoke, it’s—’
‘What? What?’
‘This is a joke, surely,’ Hardarms’ voicebox called back down the slope. ‘There are just two creatures out there. Ugly, eyeless things like the offspring of a bony black slug that has mated with a mantis; and they are manning a cannon, or perhaps it is a mortar, so stubby is the mechanism. Is this all they have to field against our forces?’
‘They insult us,’ said Longtreads. ‘A deliberate slight. May the Loas appear and curse their spawn down to the fiftieth generation.’
‘Our gun boxes are walking forward through the army’s ranks. Our bombardment will speak our answer well enough—’ Hardarms was cut short as a wail of anguish sounded from Lord Starhome’s silver shell.
‘What?’
‘I feel it,’ called Lord Starhome. ‘Oh my giddy sensors, I have not felt such a thing for a millennium.’
Longtreads’ skull rotated to directly face his heavy load. ‘I’m a simple miner, you length of noble rust, speak plainly now.’
‘A neutron-level force,’ replied Lord Starhome. ‘Like the parsec-tossed light of the neutron stars that once glinted off my belly inside the Nebula of Dreams.’
‘Is it dangerous?’ asked Hardarms.
‘It—’ the shell-shaped ship stopped for a moment. ‘Step into my shadow, steamman knight. NOW!’
Hardarms leapt back down the slope towards Longtreads and his cargo, a crackling dome of green energy forming instantly behind him and enclosing Hardarms, Longtreads and Lord Starhome under a suffocating blanket of raw power.