by Stephen Hunt
‘We might have grabbed the wrong creature,’ said Jackaby, appearing behind Purity in the clearing. ‘The blue men aren’t the slaves we believed. One of them attacked the young queen, sporting a set of fangs that makes a lie of their fruit-grazing diet, unless they have apples in their land that fight back like bears.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Ganby. ‘From chattel to soldier with one small lie uncovered. Clever, like the gill-necks when they invaded. How many stories did we hear about them which turned out to be lies they had spread to sow confusion among the tribes? But it makes getting the truth out of this one all the more imperative.’
‘You can’t torture the slat,’ said Purity. ‘It’s our prisoner, you can’t treat it like—’
‘Like it would treat us if our positions were reversed?’ said Ganby. ‘Nobody has a taste for this, but it is necessary. You should go if you find it unpleasant.’ He turned to the prisoner. ‘Now, my friend, Jenny Blow heard you giving orders to our people in our tongue, so I know you can understand what I am saying to you.’
All the Bandit of the Marsh got for his trouble was a stream of guttural chattering from the slat’s fang-encrusted mouth, the same language Purity had heard in Molly’s bedroom from Kyorin’s killer.
Samuel withdrew his burning-hot spear from the fire. ‘Let me help you remember our language, beast.’
‘No!’ Purity stepped forward, drawing her sword and holding it above the hovering slat like a divining rod.
‘You do not yet possess the skill to use your maths-blade for such a subtle task,’ said Ganby.
‘Less subtle than a burning spear?’ Purity ignored the druid’s words and felt her blade flutter above the slat, drawing in the essence of the creature, revealing it for what it was. ‘So young,’ gasped Purity.
The blade drew in information from the creature’s cells, memories imprinted at a primeval level in the thing’s brain. The slat was barely two years old – so short a life. Their kind only lived up to five years old. Everything was instinct: its drive, its hunger, its anger, its loyalty, its knowledge – weapons, fighting, obeying – all burnt into it as reflex, the slat fashioned as artfully and intentionally as the edge of a bayonet. Cast not in steel, but in flesh. A living weapon gestated inside a tank alongside thousands of its brethren. The sword probed down the slat’s body. No gender, no reproductive organs, just pea-sized hollows where the seed of such things lay suppressed and wizened. This was hardly a creature at all, just a mutilated piece of artificial flesh given a spark of life and set loose to be thrown upon the sabres and rifle fire of the Army of Shadows’ enemies.
Purity felt a terrible pity for it, mixed with contempt for the creators of such a thing – that its masters could warp the sanctity of life to such an aim.
‘Good,’ said Ganby, watching waves of light twisting out from Purity’s sword. ‘Now the mind. Where are the slats concentrated, what are their armies’ weaknesses?’
Purity ran the blade up to the slat’s eyeless skull. Had the old goat arranged the slat’s torture to goad her into using the sword like this? Just another lesson from the sly druid. Purity’s sword began to pulse, shifting its power to match the complex patterns stamped across the slat’s mind, picking at the memories that went beyond mere instinct. A dark chamber, the slat using its throat to bounce noise off thousands of its brothers, practising claw strikes against granite posts, seeing the world in reflections of sound. Darkness and light the same. Barely two days old. Feeding, fighting. But weakness? Where were their armies’ weaknesses here in Jackals? Finally she saw what she was searching for, the blade blazing with the information it had extracted, turning the possibilities and modelling them, showing Purity a potential way to victory. Could it be possible?
But just the chance of it.
There was still the matter of Kyorin and the nature of his people. Purity began to probe for answers but the slat had realized what she was doing, felt its mind being opened, and began to howl in terror. Purity felt the impulse in its skull before she realized what it was. Another reflex, buried deep, and made as fundamental as the instinct to breathe. The twin poison sacs that fed its fangs with a viper-deadly bite exploded inside its throat, poison coursing back through its veins towards the twin heart chambers thumping within its chest.
The slat’s body, still suspended in the air, flexed briefly then fell still: with its last breath it hissed slat, slat, and started reeling off a line of numbers before it fell to silence. Purity’s sword dug out the numbers’ meaning from the creature’s dying mind. The numbers were its name, allocated at birth as its wet, dripping flesh slid out of an open tube. The slats believed that repeating them at death would admit them to the warriors’ afterlife. So simple, so brutishly short-lived, but they had still developed a culture passed on in secret throat-clicks – a piece of existence discrete from the all-encompassing control of their masters.
Ganby sensed the expiration of life in the beast and let its body drop to the grass of the clearing. ‘Suicide. It killed itself rather than tell us anything.’
‘No, it wanted to live,’ said Purity, sadly. ‘Its own body turned against it.’
Samuel Lancemaster brandished his spear angrily. ‘My way would have—’
‘Ended the same way,’ said Ganby. ‘Probably a lot faster too. The slat only realized what Purity was doing to it when she touched its mind. It would have suicided as soon as you tortured its flesh.’
‘By the tail of Old Mother Corn,’ swore Jenny Blow. ‘What is that foul stench?’
Purity pointed down to the slat. ‘The same thing happened to the ones that attacked us at Tock House. Coppertracks told me their blood becomes acidic after death, melting their organs and making a post mortem impossible.’
Ganby rolled the decomposing corpse out of the clearing. ‘The Army of Shadows doesn’t want anyone to gain the knowledge of how their pets are created.’
Purity wrinkled her nose in disgust at the idea as much as the smell. Surely there wasn’t a womb mage or worldsinger on the continent who would want to create such a monstrosity as a slat, not even in Cassarabia? ‘I don’t care how the slats are created, because now I know where the Army of Shadows’ weak spot is, where the slats are massed. Where they fear attack!’
The Bandits of the Marsh looked at her, and only the crackle of the fire Jenny Blow had raised sounded inside the clearing.
‘There,’ said Purity, pointing to the iron moon, a pale red disc in the afternoon sky. ‘That’s where the Army of Shadows’ masters are. Waiting for their new cities to be built and their slat armies to crush the fight out of the last of us before they take permanent residence down here.’
‘You want us to destroy an entire moon?’ said Jackaby Mention in disbelief. ‘Had this beast been up there?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Purity. ‘I only got a brief flash of its memories of the north before it died, but I think it was a guard on their lifting room. The slats have many legions protecting their cable up to the iron moon.’
‘My feet have carried me far,’ said Jackaby. ‘But never as far as a moon. Jenny Blow’s breath cannot reach it, nor Samuel’s spear, nor even the spells of a cowardly old druid.’
‘But I have this sword, and I think it’s sharp enough to cut the stake lines that anchor the iron moon to our world,’ said Purity. ‘You wanted to know how to hurt them: breaking their cable will do that. Now the iron moon is joined to our land, their cable is incredibly taut. Cut the cable and it will whiplash back with all the force of the turning of our world, slice the masters’ fortress into pieces and spill the Army of Shadows into the night.’
‘A beanstalk,’ laughed Ganby. ‘Take an axe to the beanstalk and the giant comes tumbling down.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Molly watched in horror as the leader of the Kal’s revolution pulled Laylaydin to him and sank his newly appeared fangs into her neck, holding the woman tight as she collapsed, the skin around Laylaydin’s neck throbbing as h
e sucked the blood out of her body at a staggeringly fast rate. Molly’s spell of paralysis was punctured by the screams of the other natives in the chamber, scattering as a line of slats burst in through the main tunnel entrance, cutting apart the running Kals with bolts from their rifles. The blue-faced Kals nearest the door were dragged to the floor by leaping soldiers and torn apart. Molly was desperately trying to find the other members of her expedition amidst the confusion; she thought she saw the fleeing form of Lord Rooksby hitting the floor as a slat rifle-butt clubbed him from behind. But where were the two shifties? Then a passing bolt of fire skimmed past her eyes and she lost her vision to an explosion of fierce light and a blaze of dots. Molly stumbled, trying to rub the explosion of tears out of her eyes, flinching as a hand grabbed hers.
‘This way!’ It was the voice of Sandwalker, the nomad Kal, dragging her through the screams and the crackling sound of the slats’ discharging rifles.
‘I can’t see!’ Molly shouted, nearly tripping over something soft and fleshy on the floor.
‘Duck your head,’ warned Sandwalker, the weight of his fingers forcing her head down. ‘Keep going, the floor is flat.’ His voice was echoing – it sounded as if they had entered one of the water pipes in the cavern’s walls.
‘What was—?’
‘No talking,’ snapped Sandwalker in his mind-voice. ‘Slats hunt by sound and these tunnels carry noise far. Hold my hand, stop when I stop, go when I go.’
Molly ran with the nomad as fast as she could, trying to keep the sound of her panting low and controlled. Sometimes they climbed up what felt like small slanting passages. There was no sound of pursuit behind them that Molly could hear, but she flinched at a hissing noise. A peppery scent filled the corridor.
‘Something to destroy their sense of smell if they track us this far,’ said the nomad’s mind-voice.
After running for what seemed like hours Molly found her sight coming slowly back to her, although it was hard to tell in the dark of the sluice system; she could just see a lantern in Sandwalker’s hand, something that looked like a round flat black stone throwing out a strong beam of yellow light straight ahead. The face of Kaliban was large enough to contain thousands of miles of these tunnel systems. How did the nomad know which way to turn? She tried to search her inherited memories but the stab of pain that came back was like a knife slicing across her skull. Damn Kyorin’s memories overheating her brain, it seemed they were going to kill her slowly even if the slats and their fang-mouthed friends among the Kal didn’t finish her off sooner.
As her vision returned properly Molly started to panic, the weight of the walls crushing in on her. Her hands were trembling, her heart thumping with the feeling of being buried underneath hundreds of miles of stone.
Sandwalker stopped. ‘We can talk now. Any slats who came after us will be lost miles behind. Are you sick?’
‘I don’t like enclosed spaces,’ said Molly. She had been a stack cleaner in her poorhouse days, forced into the tight spaces of Middlesteel’s pneumatic towers; and the tunnels of this carving were far too similar to the conditions she had endured then.
The nomad laid a hand on Molly’s forehead and shut his own eyes. She could feel the weight lifting, clearing – the shuddering of claustrophobia along her body abating as the Kal pushed into her mind.
‘You will last until we get outside. This fear lives very deep within you and it would be dangerous to remove it entirely. Let me see your face.’
‘That hurts.’ Molly winced as the Kal gazed into her left eye, staring at her iris from different angles. Then the right eye.
‘Blast blindness, mild. You are lucky. If the rifle shot had been nearer it would have boiled both your eyes inside their sockets.’
‘Are you a doctor, too?’
‘No, I am a stupid, ignorant sand-born primitive with the dust of the desert still fresh on my trousers.’
Molly ignored the caustic remark. ‘With fangs or without? I was under the impression your people were plant eaters.’
‘You mean Tallyle back there? As you saw, he is not one of us anymore. Search your Kal memories for being made a gift of the hunger.’
Molly tried, but the pain was too great and she had to stop. Nothing was returned by the part of her mind that was Kyorin.
Sandwalker saw the pain she was in and shook his head as if she had failed a test. ‘Poor fool; Tallyle must have let the slats take him alive. The masters have turned him into a carnivore. He survives on blood now. The masters corrupted his body inside their machines, as a warning and a punishment and a source of ironic amusement. He now follows only his endless appetites in their service.’
Molly didn’t need to hear the disgust in his voice to know that there could be nothing worse to the gentle herbivores.
‘The Army of Shadows sees it as an improvement, no doubt,’ said Sandwalker. ‘And for the masters it is the easiest way to turn a select few of our people into eager collaborators. Nothing wasted, you see. The masters drink our souls – our very life essence. Then those of us they have given the hunger drain our blood. Finally the slats feast on the meat and bones that are left. A little something for everyone in the cruel pyramid of life they have shaped, with us crushed at the bottom as their cattle.’
Molly listened to his words in horror. And now the Army of Shadows’ masters had new acres to farm, herds that had yet to be depleted. Her entire nation, and the rest of the continent.
The Kal indicated a ladder inside a pipe positioned above their heads.
‘We’re still going upwards?’ asked Molly. ‘We’ve been travelling through these garden sluices for hours.’
‘Garden sluices?’ Sandwalker snorted. ‘The gardens on the walls outside needed only a fraction of the water that would have come through here. Don’t you know what the face of Kaliban was?’
Molly shook her head.
‘A power mill, once. The greatest on Kaliban, fed with water for fuel and harnessing the very power of the sun itself.’
‘A giant steam engine.’
‘Of a sort,’ said the nomad. ‘Our people have forgotten so much. A whole population murdered and farmed and controlled down to the few that live in the last city now.’
‘But you remember in the desert?’
‘A little more than is safe for us,’ said the Kal. ‘Which is why it suits us to be looked down on as ignorant root-grubbers by the city-born. We free Kal are usually as stingy in our sharing with our kind in the last city as they were with you. The city-born are infiltrated too easily by those who have been twisted against us by the masters’ hunger.’
‘And you really have a weapon to defeat the Army of Shadows?’
Sandwalker nodded. ‘So it is said.’
‘One that you haven’t used yourself.’
‘It is how I became a servant of the great sage. I travelled to seek him out as a boy, to beg him to give the weapon to me, so that I might use it.’
‘He didn’t give it to you?’
‘He only told me it would not help us,’ said Sandwalker.
‘You do not defeat your enemy by becoming him,’ Molly repeated the words of Kyorin’s wife. ‘But if your people are pacifists, would you have been able to use the weapon if the great sage had given it to you?’
‘I once slit the belly of one of the masters’ twisted abominations crawling through the desert towards me at night to feed on my body,’ said Sandwalker. ‘I do not think it so different. A matter of scale, perhaps.’
‘Maybe there’s hope for your people yet,’ said Molly.
‘I fear otherwise,’ said Sandwalker. ‘Else the masters’ blood would be on my hands, and your help would not be needed.’
Her hands. Molly focused her blurred vision on her fingers. She had been the guardian of Jackals, once, the last symbiote operator of the Hexmachina; had wielded the power to cast down gods. But the Army of Shadows had entombed the Hexmachina inside the heart of the world as easily as a butterfly collector pushing a prize
specimen into an empty matchbox. What weapon could the Kals possibly possess to stand against such a force? How terrible would it have to be that they had never used it? And how monstrous did they think the race of man was to actually unleash such a horror against the Army of Shadows?
After a further hour of travelling, Sandwalker stopped by a wall. The surface looked featureless enough to Molly, but Sandwalker placed his fingers on it and there was a click, followed by a section of the wall sliding into the ceiling. A dark shaft lay on the other side of the opening, squares of light activating as Molly stuck her head through, a long line of luminescence, smaller and smaller down towards a vanishing point. Craning her neck around, she saw the lights stretched away into the darkness above her, too. The shaft must extend from the very foot of the carving to its top. Molly took some convincing to step out into the air at Sandwalker’s urging, but she finally acquiesced after he used his torch to demonstrate how the flow of gravity’s polarity had been reversed inside the vent, the shaft serving as a lifting room. It was the oddest sensation, floating upwards, every sense in her body crying out that she shouldn’t be falling heavenwards, quite unlike the weightlessness she had briefly experienced inside Lord Starhome – and that had been bad enough.
Odder still was the sight that greeted her when she stepped out of the door at the top of the shaft. Not the fact that they were standing under the beating sun on the rim of the face of Kaliban’s mouth – a dark chasm, which Sandwalker told her, had once expelled water vapours as the giant power source’s sole pollution – but the shape of the creature that was waiting for them. Taller than Molly by a couple of heads, green scales shining in the light, two massive wings wrapped around it like a cloak to shade it from the heat. It was a lashlite, or something as near identical to the people of the wind that made their nests in the Kingdom of Jackals’ mountains as to make no difference.