by Stephen Hunt
‘Biologicks!’ said the lieutenant. ‘The church will not suffer their presence in Jackals.’
‘Hence the plague wagon,’ said Wildrake, as if he were explaining to a child. ‘A craftsman needs the right tools, lieutenant.’
‘Colonel, those creatures have been grown inside the wombs of slaves,’ insisted the officer. ‘They are abominations.’
The Cassarabian shook his head. ‘Alikar preserve me from the backward mind of the infidel. What else would you expect us to do with wombs blessed on women by the hundred prophets, bake bread in them?’
‘Their presence in Jackals is prohibited,’ shouted the officer.
‘The state makes the law,’ said Wildrake. ‘And parliament makes the exceptions to that law. We are both servants of that state, lieutenant. Besides, where would a hunt be without its dogs?’
‘Those things are not gun hounds,’ said the lieutenant. Both the creatures were flat on the ground, growling, sensing the hostility of the officer of light foot.
‘They are at least part dog,’ said Wildrake, smiling at the things. They stared back at the agent with their wide children’s eyes. ‘Or is it sand wolf, Tariq?’
‘Colonel, I will not allow my company to follow these unholy blendings, they stand against the Circlelaw,’ spat the lieutenant.
Wildrake slapped the man on his back. ‘You know, a border fort is the last place I would have expected to find a Circlean, lieutenant, among all the shirkers and punishment company men. But I admire a fellow with principles.’
He nodded at Tariq and the Cassarabian spat a command in his desert tongue. Both biologicks sprang forward, tumbling the lieutenant to the grass. He thrashed, rolled and screamed as the man-dog joinings tore him apart.
Wildrake slid his sabre out and waved it like a wand in front of the noses of the terrified soldiers. ‘I am afraid I am not terribly conversant with church doctrine, but a little closer to home, I once read section forty-eight of the regimental code, punishment for mutiny on active service. Does anyone else here think the army would be better run along the lines of a Circlean soup kitchen?’
There were no dissenters.
Both the biologicks left the corpse alone as the Cassarabian made a guttural clicking sound, recalling the creatures.
Wildrake kicked the limp body. ‘So, what do Circlist principles taste like? Somebody’s idea of a joke, posting the fellow to a punishment company.’
One of the beasts gazed at the wolftaker and made a whining noise. It might have been words, but trapped in a canine jaw the human tongue mangled the speech into a bestial whimper. Wildrake patted the creature on the skull as if he understood. ‘You might think Tariq’s two hounds here are the unholy product of Cassarabian womb magic, and you would be right. But you need to understand that the state does not condone their use lightly. The prey we are after are two of the most dangerous killers in all of Jackals. One is a criminal who has been on the run from the crushers for over a decade, leaving a trail of dead police and soldiers in his wake. The other is a fey boy who murdered his own family before escaping the torc.’
Dark murmurs started among the ranks of the superstitious soldiers. Feybreed! The colonel did not have any purple tattoos — surely they needed a worldsinger to subdue a killer touched by the mist? Wildrake flourished his crown warrant. The lieutenant had made an excellent stick. Now it was time for the carrot.
‘As you can see, there is a very generous bounty on the heads of these two killers. Now that the lieutenant has moved along the Circle, his share of the prize money belongs to you. The warrant states dead or alive, but my two hounds here prefer dead — which means less risk for all of us. I have lost some good friends to the hands of these two jiggers, so I will also waive my share of the prize. I want these two assassins eating worms by the end of the day.’
Now the redcoats were happier; they waved their rifles — cheap Brown Jane patterns from Middlesteel’s mills — and gave him a half-hearted cheer. Most of them had probably done worse themselves in the rookeries and slums of whatever Jackelian city they had been arrested in — but they read well enough to understand the large sum of money printed on the warrant.
Wildrake passed Tariq a shirt that had come from the boy’s room in Hundred Locks. The biologicks sniffed at it and stood trembling with anticipation, the taste of human flesh fresh in their mouths. They were used to hunting slaves across the arid ground of Cassarabia and there was always a good meal at the end of a chase.
Nodding at Tariq, Wildrake brandished his sabre in the air. ‘Gentlemen, let the hunt begin.’
Chapter Twelve
Molly stared up at the tower. It was not as tall as one of Sun Gate’s counting houses — perhaps only eight storeys — but the way it rose out of the tranquillity of the private garden dominating the topiary below gave it an extra sense of scale. An illuminated clock face crowned the square tower, two massive iron hands keeping time in a stately passage against the yellow light. Something Damson Darnay had once said to Molly back in the poorhouse jumped unbidden to mind. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
‘You have rooms here?’ asked Molly.
Nickleby pointed his six-wheel horseless carriage into a coach house next door to the tower. ‘Tock House is mine, or should I say ours.’
‘You’re a pensman,’ said Molly. ‘How in the name of the Circle is this tower yours? Who are you, the part of the Quatershiftian royal family that didn’t hang around for the revolution?’
Nickleby carefully nosed the head of the horseless carriage into a steel dock, then, jumping down, he lit a boiler in the corner of the coach house — the carriage’s high tension clockwork whining as its drums were put under pressure by the steam-hissing mechanism, rewinding the engine for its next journey. ‘No noble blood in my family’s veins, Molly. Unless you consider the blood of poets and theatre players to be noble.’
Molly pointed up at the tower. ‘A good opening night paid for that, did it?’
‘I thought you were an aficionado of the pulp press, Molly? You must have missed the issues of the penny dreadfuls where my companions and myself found the wreckage of the PeacockHerne on the Isla Needless.’
‘The King’s airship, that was you?’
Nickleby gave a little bow. ‘I was covering the expedition for The Illustrated — of course, we weren’t looking for treasure; a safe passage across the Fire Sea was what the university had paid for.’
‘I thought everyone on the expedition died of a curse,’ said Molly.
‘Tropical disease,’ said Nickleby. ‘And there were enough of us left alive for parliament to invoke the crown treasure trove laws on the contents of the Peacock Herne. But even after the House of Guardians got its snout in the trough, our share of the treasure was enough to pay for a few luxuries.’ He lovingly patted the cab of the carriage.
They walked out of the coach house and into the evening air. Tending the lawn were a handful of small iron crabs, busy pulling weeds and cropping grass; Molly nearly tripped over one before she realized what it was. ‘There’s a steamman slip-thinker here?’
‘I told you I lived with a couple of companions. Come on, they should be inside. Aliquot Coppertracks is the reason we survived the Isla Needless. They can die of boiler sickness and crystal rot, but thank the Circle that tropical fever has a hard time with steammen.’
Molly tried to pick up one of the metal crabs but the drone sidled out of her reach. Slipthinkers were rare outside of the Steammen Free State; minds so powerful they could diffuse their consciousness among multiple bodies. It was rumoured that even King Steam and his royal architects did not fully understand the detail of their layout, using scavenged plans from the Camlantean age in their construction. Those that did not slide into madness provided the metal race with their greatest shamen and philosophers. She had never even seen a slipthinker, let alone met one.
Inside the tower’s hall they were greeted by a bear of a man — at first Molly thought he might be a retainer, b
ut then she spotted the silver trident on his jacket as his voice boomed out. ‘So you are back again, Silas Nickleby. And us not knowing if you were dead or trapped a thousand leagues under the earth.’
‘It takes more than a pocket aerostat jaunt down to Grimhope to throw out my stars, commodore,’ said the pensman. ‘This is Molly Templar. She will be our house-guest for a while. Molly, this is Commodore Jared Black — it was his submersible that took us on the little trip I was telling you about.’
‘Your stars indeed,’ said the commodore, running a hand thoughtfully through his rambling saltpepper beard. ‘Lucky for you, but not so lucky for my blessed boat — the poor wrecked Sprite of the Lake lying beached on the shores of that swamp at the end of the world.’
‘Sunk by age,’ whispered Nickleby to Molly. ‘It leaked most of the trip. We were lucky we didn’t end up roasting like beef on a spit underneath the Fire Sea.’
‘Ah, Molly,’ said the commodore. ‘You are welcome to the hospitality of Tock House. Small recompense has its walls proved for a glorious life lived free on the oceans. Poor old Blacky. Deprived of his beautiful craft and cheated out of the bulk of his fortune by the swindling bureaucrats of Jackals. Us stumbling around the jungle, half dead of the mortal tropical plague and the only piece of luck that’s thrown our way by the Circle is stolen by grasping counting-house men from Greenhall. Let me take you to our kitchen, girl, and I will find us some paltry fare to commiserate the rule of thieves we suffer under while we swap the sad tales of our lives.’
‘Time for that later, Jared,’ said Nickleby to the submariner. ‘I need a hand first with some boxes for Aliquot.’
Molly followed the odd pair back out to the coach house, where they began unloading crates of what looked like old newspapers from a compartment in the back of the horseless carriage. ‘You going to burn those on your fire?’
The commodore’s face was turning red with the effort of lifting out the heavy crates. ‘Burn them, lass? Burn them on the fire of Aliquot Coppertracks’ brilliance, perhaps.’
Hefting the crates back to Tock House, the two men loaded them into a dumb waiter, Nickleby pulling a cord to lift the boxes out of sight. Following the pair up a spiral staircase, Molly wished the current owners had gone to the expense of fitting Tock House with a dumb waiter for the building’s guests. But, lack of a lifting room aside, the tower had obviously had money lavished on it. The walls were lined with panels of Haslingshire oak, the floors marble and polished starstone, oil-fired chandeliers augmenting the summer light spilling in through stained-glass windows. Rainbow-bright scenes of the King having his arms cut away against a backdrop of columns of soldiers wearing roundhead-style helmets dated the building as at least six hundred years old. Built perhaps by a merchant, bishop or parliamentarian who had been on the winning side of the civil war.
Near the top of the tower they found the crates of newspaper still stacked in the cupboard-sized dumb waiter. Molly helped the pair carry the crates along the carpeted passage to its end, where a door lay slightly ajar. Black kicked the door open with one of his sailor’s boots and they lugged the boxes inside.
‘More grist for the mill, Aliquot,’ announced Nickleby.
They stood inside a hall containing the tower’s clock mechanism, the glass of the massive clockface illuminating laboratory tables covered with machinery and chemical stills, smoking glass beakers and coiled tubes filled with bubbling green liquids. The faint smell of sulphur, though, was coming from one of the steammen in the room, a squat creature sitting on two burnished orange tracks, his head a large transparent crystal dome filled with forks of ionised blue energy which seemed to rotate around the inside of his clear skull. There were other smaller steammen in the room, thin iron things the size of ten-year-old children, all identical, with bottle-shaped heads containing a single telescope-like eye. They would be some of the slipthinker’s mu-bodies, drones possessed by his intellect.
‘And blessed heavy, too,’ added the commodore. ‘The tree that gave its life for these papers must have been mortal offended by the lumberman’s axe. It’s been trying to get poor old Black’s heart to fail every step of the passage.’
‘Newspapers?’ said the tracked steamman. ‘You have brought me newspapers? Why did you not say so? Place them on the table at once.’ Its voicebox had a slight echo, making the steamman sound distracted. As soon as Nickleby and the commodore thumped the crates down, two of the small iron goblins were crawling over them, ripping out old news sheets, their telescope heads scanning the text at a breakneck pace.
Molly picked up a journal out of the box she had carried through. ‘Field and Fern?’
‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘Poor old Coppertracks is a slipthinker through and through. He needs new information to process in giant quantities or he starts to act as odd as a dancing hare in Damp-month. The paper is an anchor on his boat, the weight of it keeping that shiny mind of his from rising up out of sight like a village struck by a float quake. But I don’t begrudge him the fortune we spend on subscriptions, for without him, the pensman and me would be as dead as the rest of them on the Isla Needless. There’s more cleverness in that fizzing old noggin of his than half the transaction engines in Greenhall.’
‘A young softbody,’ said Coppertracks, noticing Molly in the confusion of the laboratory for the first time. ‘The young softbody. I know you, yes I do.’
‘I am sure I would have remembered meeting a slipthinker,’ said Molly, giving a polite little curtsey.
‘The memories of the fallen, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks, pointing to a table pushed against the crystal wall of the clockface. On the table was a steamman skull, long cables dangling from the metal like dreadlocks.
‘The controller from the atmospheric!’ said Molly.
‘One of the people of the metal was guided to Redrust’s corpse by the Steamo Loas,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The controller’s killers had rolled his body into Old Mother Gambleflowers, hoping the waters of the river would wash over their dark deed, but at least I got to his body before some eel fisherman dredged up his cadaver and tried to sell his components on to a mechomancer.’ Coppertracks pointed to the lifeless skull. ‘Whatever torturer took him apart tried to erase his silicate boards with electromagnetic force, but they did a poor job of it. I have many partial memories, including Redrust throwing the cogs for you, Molly softbody.’
‘He helped me escape to the undercity,’ said Molly.
‘A kindness which cost him his life,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Redrust was a powerful mystic, he could ride the Loas with great accuracy.’
‘Molly was worried for two of her friends, Aliquot,’ explained Nickleby. ‘Two of the people of the metal who assisted her down in Grimhope.’
‘Indeed, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have already thrown the Gear-gi-ju wheels for Slowcogs and Silver Onestack, shed my own oil for the spirits. King Steam will want to receive word of their fate along with the soul board of the controller.’
‘They were wounded when I left them,’ said Molly. ‘Seriously.’
‘It is most perplexing,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The spirits always know when one of the people of the metal has joined them. Yet the cogs I threw could not give a clear answer as to their fate. It is as if they are alive but dead at the same time. That is not something I have ever encountered before. King Steam has more powerful mystics than I at court and I hope one of them will be able to receive a truer reading.’
Molly rubbed her eyes. ‘Slowcogs, the controller, my friends at the workhouse, Onestack, everyone who has tried to help me has ended up getting hurt. They have all paid for me.’
‘These are strange days, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks, the lightning storm of his mind flaring up underneath his clear, egg-shaped skull. ‘There is confusion in the spirit world — our ancestors and the Steamo Loas do not rest easy. And there are disturbances in the world of information, the subtle suggestion of the hand of forces the like of which we have
not encountered before, now at work. You must hold to the knowledge that the controller read your part in this and judged it important enough to give his life to keep you safe.’
‘Sweet mercy of the Circle, Aliquot Coppertracks,’ said the commodore. ‘Do not speak of such wicked things. Let’s go down to the kitchen and crack open a bottle of jinn or two to whet our appetite for supper. Let’s not talk of strange currents and disturbed spirits. Surely you did not drag our poor diseased bodies out of that hellish jungle just for the three of us to go plunging ourselves into danger back home in Jackals.’
‘Molly didn’t ask to have a Guardian’s ransom placed on her head, Jared,’ said Nickleby. ‘Any more than the homes down on the docks asked to be firebombed by an aerostat; any more than the victims of the Pitt Hill Slayer asked to be picked up and murdered.’
The commodore scratched at his beard in despair. ‘If only we had my blessed boat, we could head out to sea and submerge to safety. You’d have been protected on board the Sprite of the Lake, lass, and I could have shown you the wonders of the world’s oceans on my darling boat. Steam beds off the Fire Sea, the sunken stone towers of old Lostangels, slipsharps schooling under the Straits of Quat. But her wreckage litters the beach of that cursed isle, while I rot away here in the decadent capital of ancient Jackals.’
Nickleby and the steamman seemed oblivious to the large submariner’s inexhaustible well of self-pity. Coppertracks continued his work assembling a bank of strange-looking machinery while his drones devoured the crates of reading material.
The pensman turned by the door. ‘Aliquot, I don’t think that any of the mug-hunters know yet that young Damson Templar is our guest, but in case they do …’
‘Mortal Circle,’ wheezed the commodore, stumbling after Molly and Nickleby. ‘Let us not be waking up that metal monster again. Let it rest safe in its slumber.’
‘My dear mammal.’ Coppertracks stopped his work and swivelled on one of his tracks. ‘That monster is little more than an extra arm for me to plug into my body; it is a drone, a mu-body driven by my id … to all intents and purposes it is me.’