by Stephen Hunt
The child-like monarch of the Free State watched the slip-thinkers and courtiers fall away as a platform raised him into the heart of his war body. A clatter of steel cage walls enveloped the King. Mu-bodies of a dozen slipthinkers swarmed over his frame, checking the pressure systems, filling the ammunition bins and oiling the joints of numerous fighting arms.
‘Bring me my arms,’ called the King. ‘Bring me my sword and shield.’
It took three knights apiece to carry the sovereign’s weapons to him, his shield made of transparent blue crystal with a rim of spiked metal that crackled with the power electric; his sword as tall as four steammen with a cluster of stubby barrels around the buckler. King Steam’s manipulator arms lifted the ancient weapons away from his retainers, and he tested the air with his blade, the fanned air blowing snow powder across the command post. Their service done, the steammen flowed away from his hull, leaving the monarch to face the mass of the enemy, metal feet juddering the ground as he turned.
Hoggstone and the Jackelian officers came running up to King Steam. ‘Your Majesty, what are you doing? Your place is here, coordinating your army.’
‘First Guardian, I was a warrior before I was a king,’ said the steamman, the spheres of his voicebox shaking in their mounts. ‘And a warrior defends his people.’
Commodore Black turned to Coppertracks as the King thumped away. ‘Sweet Circle! Aliquot Coppertracks, where is the big fellow heading off to?’
‘Where, commodore? I believe he is going to die.’
Oliver found the Whisperer collapsed in the snow, the warrior illusion replaced by the reality of malformed muscles and flesh without form. Of his gypsy sixer there was no sign.
‘Nathaniel?’ asked Oliver. Oliver had to shake the body before the feybreed started to come to.
‘Something pulled the ground from under me,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘I felt it in the earth, in the bones of the world. It smelled like the Lady of the Lights, but she was stronger, far stronger.’
‘It was not the Lady of the Lights,’ said Oliver.
This was dangerous. The Shadow Bear was making unauthor ized interventions of his own. The thing had become so desperate to finish the job he was designed for, he was tipping the balance in favour of the very forces he was intended to sterilize. He wanted the Wildcaotyl to win the day – to begin the work of birthing their own gods into a realm too small to contain them – to give him his mandate for total war.
‘I told you, she’s been replaced by something else, something fierce and wicked that wants us to fail.’
‘Whatever it is I hurt the bastard thing,’ said the Whisperer. ‘It’s not much good on detail, just like the Lady of the Lights. That is its weakness: you become the detail and it gets confused, like a slipsharp being attacked by a school of shrimp.’
‘Nathaniel,’ said Oliver. ‘If you have been unconscious, just who in the Circle’s name is doing that?’
The Whisperer looked to where Oliver was pointing. The sky was still full of the ghostly lions and ancient warrior-chieftains the fey convict had conjured across the armies’ minds, banshees whipped on the wind and riding the sky underneath the drifting aerostats.
‘Well I will be jiggered,’ hissed the Whisperer. His body rippled and transformed back into the ancient duellist from his storybook.
Oliver remounted and helped the Whisperer onto the back of his saddle when Captain Flare stumbled into sight, his guardsman’s tunic torn to pieces where the steammen knights had tried to pierce him with lance and repeater ball. There was a red weal around his neck where the torc had once been.
He looked at Oliver with a glimmer of recognition, his eyes widening when he noticed the Whisperer. In some way he saw straight through the feybreed’s illusion, his eyes as true as his demigod-like strength. ‘That is fey? Dear Circle, I have never seen a body so changed by the mist that wasn’t killed by it.’
‘You should have spent less time at the palace and visited the lower levels of Hawklam Asylum, pretty boy.’
Oliver touched his neck. ‘No more collars, captain. No more orders.’
‘You?’ said Flare, astonished. ‘There isn’t enough power in the world to remove the hex that binds.’
‘Not enough power in this one, perhaps. Yet here you stand, free – but free to do what?’
‘My son,’ said Flare. ‘I want my son.’
‘Son?’ said Oliver. ‘But you’re not married, man, the penny dreadfuls always made a big thing about what a marvellous bachelor you were!’
‘Oliver, you turnip – it’s Prince Alpheus,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘That’s his son, flapping like a flag on a standard by Tzlayloc’s side.’
‘Only a few in the Special Guard know that!’
‘I am in your guard, pretty boy. You might say I am the night watch.’
‘We’ll ride with you,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s about time Tzlayloc stepped down from the First Committee.’
‘Three fey boys to save Jackals,’ sighed Flare. ‘We’re not much.’
‘I reckon we’ll do,’ said Oliver.
Tzlayloc and King Steam closed on the battlefield, the armies of the Third Brigade and parliament breaking around their feet as the two titans clashed. The Chairman of the First Committee of Jackals was half again as tall as King Steam’s war frame now. His body had become a mass of writhing flesh, creatures with compound eyes and bones as sharp as craynarbian sword arms sprouting from his muscles, leaping off to decapitate Jackelian soldiers and feast on the corpses of the dead scattered across the snow. The two leaders fought inside a surf of two opposing mists, the monarch of the Free State supported by his weakening Loas – as insubstantial as stack steam under the assault of the Wildcaotyl – clouds of dark droning wasps which swung around the steamman, exploding then reforming like schools of black fish. Where they swarmed over the soldiers fighting in the titans’ shadows the warriors collapsed clutching their ears, the whine of the Wildcaotyl staying in their brains, intensifying and warping until their eardrums exploded, parliamentarians smashing their heads against rocks and rolling in the snow, as if the ice could cool the pain of the unholy song.
A thing with four clawed feet, hardly a body at all, erupted from Tzlayloc’s shoulder and leapt across the gap between the chairman and King Steam. The Wildcaotyl manifestation locked onto the pilot frame and tried to drive a claw into the skull of the King’s golden child-form. King Steam dodged the claw, twisting left and right as the razor bone plunged past him. One of the King’s chest-mounted pressure repeaters managed to find the right angle and depressed its barrel, hurling the clawing beast off in a storm of pellets.
Slipping the grip of one of Tzlayloc’s tentacle limbs King Steam arced his sword arm around, severing the branch of thrashing flesh. The limb fell onto the snow, crushing a Third Brigade trooper and growing millipede-like legs of bone, then rushing towards the King’s leg and wrapping itself around the steel in a circle of maddened, slathering tissue. A locust head with rotating jaws forced itself out of the stump where Tzlayloc’s tentacle had been severed, looking around and hissing at the monarch.
‘This is my time,’ jeered Tzlayloc. ‘Your reign is over. I have no need for the whir and tick of iron toys, of clockwork slaves.’
King Steam backed away from Tzlayloc, a rotating lantern viewer in front of his pilot cage showing him multiple perspectives of the Chairman of Jackals. ‘And I have no need for your stillborn vision for the world. You have become a sickness, Tzlayloc. You have made yourself a cancer on the belly of the world and to save my people, I will cut you out.’
Tzlayloc menaced the war frame with his tentacles and tilted his head back to laugh, shiny dark things like beetles spilling from his mouth as he did so. ‘I will place your soul board on top of the stack of broken components I shall build of your people, little toy. Your race’s very existence offends me – you are nothing but a conjurer’s trick of crafty mathematics slipping through ore and crystal.’
King Steam shut down
his olfactory senses as the heat and stench from Tzlayloc’s throat carried across on the wind. ‘You shall not hunt my kind again. Never!’
The Free State’s ruler pistoned to the side as Tzlayloc hurled a ball of pulp and snapping claws at him. Tzlayloc made an obscene gesture with the fronds that used to be a hand. ‘Rust has not yet addled your memory then, I see, king of the toys. After the mountains of Mechancia have been buried under the advancing glaciers, I shall enjoy watching your children cannibalizing each other for food again and scrabbling to avoid my cull.’
Warding off the chairman’s swinging arms with his shield, King Steam riddled the trunk-like flesh with a line of soft eruptions from his repeater shells. ‘Listen to me, Tzlayloc; listen to me with the softbody heart that is still buried somewhere in that monstrosity of a body you have grown. Your allies plan to freeze our realm with more than ice this time. They would breach the walls of the world and forever silence the dance of time and energy. Whatever philosophies you hold to, whatever dreams you have for Jackals, the Wildcaotyl do not plan to honour them. They will betray you! Your movement is nothing more to them than a host body to lay their eggs inside – they will consume you and make dust of your plans.’
‘LIAR!’ Tzlayloc’s body writhed as if it were on fire, every inch of his bulk pulsing and coming alive. The Chairman of Jackals lurched forward, trying to break through the royal war frame’s defences. ‘They lifted the Chimecans to supremacy for a thousand years, saved them from the coldtime. Without their succour the race of man would be extinct. How much longer will the Wildcaotyl support our flawless Commonshare where we live in perfect cooperation, a precise mirror of their selfless association? There will be no slave revolt this time, little toy, no clever machines hiding under the ice to pour poison and sedition into the minds of the people.’
King Steam said nothing, but let his sword speak for him, the four barrels around its hilt detonating and carrying cannon balls filled with chemical poison, toxins from the Hall of Architects, into Tzlayloc’s chest. Screaming creatures fell out of the craters where the balls had struck and two enraged tentacles coiled out of Tzlayloc, one seizing the King’s sword arm while the other smashed into his pilot frame and sent him reeling.
The King looked down in revulsion as the centipede-like limb wrapped around his ankle started burning its way through the leg of his war body, clouds of molten metal spitting out as the Wildcaotyl sweated an acid of appalling complexity. King Steam fired a manipulator arm like a trident, spearing the burning thing, but it was too late. His leg parted, the armour foot-tread left burning in the snow as the King’s body started to topple backwards.
In desperation the falling king pitched his shield like a discus at Tzlayloc, the energy bleed from the spikes of the rim tearing at Tzlayloc’s face as he swayed back. The shield sailed past and embedded itself in the high ground behind him, Tzlayloc exultant as he looked down at the fallen monarch. King Steam’s body-mounted weapons were emptying their ammunition drums at the swarm of Wildcaotyl flowing off Tzlayloc, but it was to no avail – the chairman howled a victory scream. Loas swirled down, forming a shield that started to crumple as the black arrows of the Wildcaotyl broke against it.
Tzlayloc’s devils halted in confusion. Behind the wounded monarch, stamping across the battlefield and making the ground tremble, came a wave of war bodies, each piloted by a child-like steamman. Following the war frames a wave of steammen knights charged to the aid of their collapsed monarch, Tzlayloc’s demon creatures leaping and crawling to meet the attack.
‘How many mu-bodies do you have, little toy?’ hissed Tzlayloc, looking down at the fallen monarch. ‘It does not matter. I shall rip them all apart and cast your melted slag into images of the Wildcaotyl for the temples of the people.’
‘You shall not triumph, Tzlayloc.’
‘Have you glimpsed the future, little toy?’ laughed Tzlayloc. ‘I shall set a new future for you and your people. For all of Jackals and the world beyond. Did the roll of the cogs in the filthy puddle of your own juices show you your death?’
‘They did,’ groaned King Steam.
Tzlayloc watched in amusement as the weakening Loas faltered around the royal war frame and glanced across at the advancing drone bodies. ‘Then I shall leave you to it. You may live just long enough to see the last of your army trodden into the mud.’
Inside the pilot cage King Steam’s golden hand fell limply off the control levers. He had to stay alive a little longer yet. There was something he had to wait for before he departed the field of battle, before he moved along the great pattern. Tzlayloc had to be kept distracted. He dare not shut down his pain receptors, in case the lack of sensation carried him away. His time here was ended, but he had to suffer the pain a little longer. Each second became an eternity of torture for the monarch.
* * *
To the rear of Tzlayloc, Marshal Arinze’s trumpeters sounded new orders. The disciplined lines of the Third Brigade closed into a defensive formation, the equalized outlaws of Grimhope that had been held in reserve at last marching down in columns to lend support. Arinze had fought the Free State both under the flag of the old regime and for the Commonshare – he knew what to expect, as did his soldiers. Canisters of harpoon-like barbs were unloaded from the ammunition train and rolled towards their artillery.
A riding officer galloped up to the marshal. ‘Gun-boxes, compatriot marshal. Advancing from the east.’
‘Ride to the battery,’ ordered Arinze. ‘Tell the artillery captains to concentrate their fire on those royal war bodies. Halt them before they get to our lines.’
After the artillery crews had resighted their cannons and fired the first ranging shots it would have taken an observant eye on a telescope to notice that the four war frames seemed surprisingly resilient to the barbs of their canister fire. Or that explosions on the downs to the east were mirroring the explosions around the giant steammen – exactly where they would be falling if they were passing unhindered through the war frames.
Captain Flare jumped onto the dying monarch’s chest, the steel plates flexing under the impact of his dense fey bones. Oliver was quick behind him, climbing up handholds in the metal. The Whisperer stayed in the lee of the broken war body, muttering with the effort of creating the living illusion of steammen war bodies, a slightly different angle of view needed for every bystander in Rivermarsh. A roar of fury behind them indicated that the mountain of flesh that was now Tzlayloc had finally discovered the trick that had been played on him.
Flare gazed across at the terrible creature. He did not see the Chairman of the First Committee, or Jacob Walwyn, or any threat to Jackals worthy of his guardsman’s oath, he did not even see the betrayer of his fey people’s hopes for freedom. He saw the monster that had strung up his son like a rabbit to be skinned and used as a lure. Flare leapt down from the wrecked war frame and met Tzlayloc’s charge – Oliver swore the ground shook as the Special Guardsman ran.
‘Oliver.’
The Whisperer was climbing up the war body, his shape flickering back and forth from bronzed warrior to his true form.
‘Oliver.’ It was not the Whisperer speaking – it was King Steam. The steamman looked in a bad way, the right side of his body crushed underneath the crumpled pilot guard, the left pierced by bone-sword strikes and scarred by acid trails.
‘Your Majesty, your knights are coming for you.’
‘The hardest part of being a monarch is knowing the time of your own death,’ said King Steam.
‘Your people can save you.’
The King had barely heard Oliver. ‘How else can a route for the new king be prepared?’
Oliver pulled at the frame but it was too badly mangled; removing it by violence would tear the steamman apart.
‘Stop trying to save me, young softbody,’ whispered King Steam. ‘Instead, save both our races. The Wildcaotyl feed on souls and the worship of their kind, on the very life of the earth. The souls are of Jackals and the Free State and th
e Wildcaotyl need the bones of the earth to drain them; when you move along the Circle you move through the bones of the earth. We are the songs of stardust, Oliver, and like all insects the Wildcaotyl are drawn to our flame. Snuff out the flame…’
Snuff out the flame!
Captain Flare was surrounded by a sea of Tzlayloc’s devils, more and more of them emerging from that deformed body. Flare smashed and crushed the creatures, so covered in blood and the insects’ perverted pulp that he looked like a crimson golem come out of the kiln. Broken Wildcaotyl littered the field, swarms of their brethren climbing the wall of corpses to hurl themselves at the Special Guardsman.
Captain Flare was just one man. Soon his fey flesh began to weaken. His rain of punches slowed as more and more of the Wildcaotyl impaled and scraped at his iron body with their claws.
Snuff out the flame.
Oliver extended his senses over the battlefield, reaching for the bones of the earth, but there was so much evil to ignore. Parliament’s forces were wavering as they clashed against the disciplined ranks of the Third Brigade, too few professional soldiers and too many amateur street fighters and Carlist rebels filling out their companies’ lists. The steammen knights were bogged down amidst the Wildcaotyl horde while ranks of metal-fleshers and First Brigade reinforcements pinned down any scattered Special Guardsmen who had not fled Rivermarsh for freedom. But underneath all the confusion the lattice of the earth’s leylines still throbbed, weak and thin after being drained and tapped by worldsingers on both sides.
Around Tzlayloc’s misshapen form the lines were distorted and diffuse, the power of the Wildcaotyl a weight on the surface of the world that she could barely support. Now Oliver saw it, the pain and horror of the battlefield being channelled through the bones of the world, the earth a sponge soaking up the blood and souls for the Wildcaotyl to sup on, each new morsel allowing more of them to uncoil through the cracks in the world. The essence of the Jackelians was being destroyed like coke thrown into a furnace, with the world the insects’ boiler, an engine to power their insane mission for calling down their unholy high gods.