by Stephen Hunt
Molly led the four of them into the shadow of one of the emptied cacti and bade them wait cross-legged. It was ten minutes before one of the water-keepers left his plant to come over to them.
‘Are you sand-born?’ he asked using mind-speech. ‘If the slats hear that nomads are travelling close to here and begging for water they will—’
‘We are travellers,’ said Molly. ‘From afar.’
The water-keeper stepped back, gasping as he saw Molly’s lips opening and closing to form the words.
‘What did you say to him?’ Rooksby demanded, watching the shocked water-keeper hustle back to his cactus and beckon his apprentices closer.
‘You’ll know soon enough.’
‘What have you done, now, you foolish woman?’ hissed Rooksby. ‘Is it not enough you had to drag us here without the soldiery to finish off the Army of Shadows …’
‘We’ll find out soon enough if Kyorin still has friends here among the oasis regulators,’ said Molly.
‘This is not how such things are done,’ said Keyspierre.
‘I bow to a Quatérshiftian’s greater knowledge of how informers and the secret police work,’ said Molly. ‘But as I’m the only one here who can communicate in their language, we’ll do this my way.’
Molly’s way proved adequate, for when one of the water-keeper’s assistants returned, it was with a female Kal, her face uncovered by the enveloping white headscarves the rest of them were wearing. She knelt before Molly and pressed the skin of Molly’s forehead with her thumb. Molly felt a gentle tickle inside her skull, then the headache of Kyorin’s memories rising. Molly winced in agony as the female Kal withdrew her thumb and rubbed it with her forefinger. There was a smudge of blue dye where the sweat of Molly’s forehead had made the theatrical face paint moist.
‘Clever,’ said the woman. ‘But do not bring your blue faces too close to any slats. They have very good nasal receptors and your scent is, I suspect, different enough from ours.’
‘We are friends of the slave engineer Kyorin,’ said Molly. Her head throbbed with pain. There was something about this female that was causing Kyorin’s memories to thunder inside Molly.
‘That much is clear. Why else would the residue of his soul burn hard inside you?’ said the woman. ‘And you use old speech. Keep your lips closed when we get inside the city. I shall do such communicating as may be required.’ She looked at Rooksby and the two shifties and repeated her words in Jackelian.
‘You understand us!’ said Keyspierre.
The woman sighed, leading them away from the oasis and towards the city. ‘It’s quite unnerving seeing someone with blue skin speaking like a slat, all fangs and tongue and teeth. Yes, I understand Jackelian, Quatérshiftian and about a dozen more of your languages. One of my family received training for a position on the expeditionary force.’
‘You are our compatriots, then,’ said Jeanne. ‘You are fighting the Army of Shadows.’
‘We resist their aims,’ said the Kal, bitterly. ‘While also serving duty as their slaves and food source. I am not sure if the former outbalances the latter. It would have been better if one of the plagues that followed the loss of our medical technology had wiped us out entirely, then the masters would have starved to death before they ever reached your home.’
‘Does your cell’s revolutionary tradecraft allow us to know your name, compatriot?’ asked Keyspierre.
‘Why not? If I am caught with you we are all dead anyway,’ said the Kal. ‘My name is Laylaydin.’
‘Are you taking us to meet the great sage?’ said Molly. ‘Kyorin said the sage has a way of defeating the Army of Shadows.’
Laylaydin shrugged. ‘So it is said. But he does not live in the city. The nomads in the deeps of the desert wastes hide him. He would not survive for long here in Iskalajinn with the slats’ nose for uncovering saboteurs and detecting resistance to their occupation. You shall be taken to a place of safety until we can send for one of the sand-born to take you to the great sage.’
Molly stopped as she noticed that the palm-like trees that had so far lined their path had given way to glass-slag crucifixes, the emaciated dead bodies of Kals hanging upside down from each cross.
‘They were part of the resistance?’ whispered Molly.
Laylaydin shook her head. ‘No, look, their bodies do not bear the torture marks of interrogation. These are petty criminals. The ones on the left were caught teaching the young to read, while the ones hanging opposite were exposed indulging in a ritual sharing of ancestral memories using mind-to-mind contact. Technically neither crime carries the death sentence – that would be too wasteful of the Army of Shadows’ dwindling food stocks – but you have to survive more than five days on the cross to be cut down. It is so hot now that it is very hard to survive five days.’
Rooksby looked as if he was about to gag at the sight. ‘Damn you for sheep. How can you let the Army of Shadows treat you like this? You Kals might almost be part of the race of man, save for your cyan-coloured skin. Why do you not fight them?’
Laylaydin looked pityingly at the Lord Commercial, exposing her wrists from underneath her robes. There were two great ugly weals of flesh where the nails had been driven through them. ‘I lasted the five days up there for birth crimes.’
Birth crimes. Molly rubbed her temple at the pain of the memory rising inside her. ‘Your children …’
‘They were fed to the slats as sweetmeats after they were found to have passed the threshold for powers of the mind. The masters require their cattle to breed true. My blood code carries a recessive pattern of how our race once existed, which is why they sterilized me when they cut me off the cross – so I could not have any more children quick of mind with the potential to be raised as sages. Our streets are ahead, please, you must walk in silence now.’
Molly and the others needed little encouragement to do so.
Travelling north along the cobbled country road with the woods on either side for cover, Purity was unnerved by how empty the landscape seemed to be. Where they passed through a village, the houses were abandoned, possessions tossed about in the yards, gates unlatched and banging in the breeze. It couldn’t have been more than a week or two since the Army of Shadows invaded, but already nature was reclaiming the gardens. Weeds rising from in between paving stones, once manicured lawns overgrown, brown leaves lying curled and uncollected.
Occasionally they came across the corpse of a horse by the side of the road, the saddle removed and its rider fled. Ridden to death in an attempt to escape the advancing slats? The gates by the toll cottage were unmanned, the little wooden boxes where pennies were dropped for the upkeep of the roads rattling full and uncollected. The road that Purity and the four Bandits of the Marsh were currently following rose up a hill before twisting down into a long valley, its floor covered in a yellow-green mist.
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, drawin
g 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.