by Stephen Hunt
The last syllable of the steamman’s words was lost in the howl that echoed off the walls of the passage.
‘That is a softbody throat,’ said Slowstack.
‘Not merely the race of man,’ said Molly. ‘Those things are ridden by dirty Loas.’
She extended her senses, felt the rush of the Hexmachina’s voyage through the magma. The Hexmachina was at least an hour away from their position.
They started speeding away from the noise, but Molly was reluctant to flee, checking the path with her hands, looking for something.
‘Molly softbody?’
‘They are too near, Slowstack. They’ll run us down in minutes.’
‘I have no weapon capable of harming the Wildcaotyl,’ said the steamman. ‘Even a pair of minor entities. Are you joined yet with the Hexmachina?’
Molly shook her head. ‘We should save our strength, stand here and face them down.’
‘You can smell another pack of wild pecks?’
‘The only thing worth hunting down here is us, old steamer.’ She pulled him towards her. ‘By my side, Slowstack. Don’t try and throw yourself in front of me. No heroic sacrifices.’
Down the passage the two convicts rounded the corner, rolling in two spheres of black light suspended above the ground, their hands crackling with an incinerating fire. They sighted their prey and accelerated towards Molly and Slowstack with a howl which was a roar of triumph channelled through burning human throats.
‘This is chaos,’ shouted Oliver.
Third Brigade soldiers were falling back at the other end of the street in a disciplined line, one rank firing, while the troops who had retreated a couple of steps behind them reloaded from their bandoliers. On Nagcross Bridge equalized revolutionaries were being picked up by their iron legs by rebels and tossed into the Gambleflowers, political fighters running along the shops on the bridge and brandishing their debating sticks.
Commodore Black had one of the dead shifties’ carbines and he shot it with the accuracy of a long rifle, Third Brigade troops dropping with each charge he broke. ‘Use the cover, lad. Your fey skull will stop a bullet the same as any other.’
One of Benjamin Carl’s officers ran up to them, his only mark of rank a red band of cloth bound around his arm. ‘They’ve started putting pickets on the sewer gates, we can’t get our people behind them.’
‘The other bridges?’ asked Oliver.
‘Even better defended than this one.’
Nagcross Bridge had to fall. Oliver looked at the ranks of soldiers at the other end of the bridge. They were sheltering behind an interlocking wooden rampart — one of the mobile barricades they erected to seal off troublesome districts back in the Quatershiftian cities. As he watched a column of soldiers came into view marching in quickstep, reinforcing the position to the north of the bridge.
‘Different uniforms,’ said the commodore. ‘Look, caps, not shakos. The marshal has swallowed his pride and is bringing in another brigade to help crush the city.’
On their side of the lines an old steamman came into sight, supported by a couple of young political fighters from the party of the Levellers.
‘Guardian Tinfold,’ said the Carlist officer.
Tinfold made a weary whistle as steam escaped out from beneath his metal plates. ‘I told Hoggstone our forces were not prepared for an all-out assault. I counselled for a guerrilla campaign.’
Oliver pointed to the Quatershiftian soldiers blocking the north end of the bridge. ‘Time is their ally, old steamer, not ours. If we don’t free Middlesteel before the cursewall is lowered you’ll have your guerrilla war — generation after generation of fighting from caves in the uplands.’
‘Fastbloods are so hasty,’ sighed the politician. ‘Well then, we must save Jackals from the folly of our alacrity. Our people in the city are cut off now; we must open a passage to the pocket or suffer encirclement and defeat. Nagcross Bridge must fall.’
At the shiftie end of the bridge fresh ammunition boxes had been brought up and the troops felt emboldened enough to start a volley of fire that started cutting down the rioting street fighters. Debating sticks smashed aside doors as the ragtag army took cover.
A couple of fast-bowlers with glass grenades tried running out onto the bridge and pitching the explosives towards the north end, but the range was too far even for the two four-poles fanatics, the explosions showering flames at the foot of the barricade as the Third Brigade cut down the two players. From the rebels a traditional flutter of applause sounded as they honoured the dead men’s fatal innings.
Oliver turned as a clatter of hooves reverberated behind them, half expecting to face a charge of exomounts. But instead of heavy cavalry, Oliver saw a line of horses with a collection of riders as motley as the city fighters’ own forces. There were huntsmen from the villages wearing red tunics that could almost pass for redcoat uniforms, the black greatcoats of mail coachmen, the blue uniforms of the county constabulary, and, by far the greater number, hundreds of roamers — wild gypsies in a flurry of colours, their fire witches riding without saddles and naked, war paint swirled around lithe muscles. At their head was a riding officer of the House Horse Guards, parliament’s oldest cavalry regiment.
‘Jack Dibnah,’ shouted the riding officer, adjusting his roundhead-style helmet. ‘Mad Jack to m’friends. Late of the House’s own. Been out hunting any shifties foolish enough to stick their heads into the royal county of Stainfolk. Heard there were some of the buggers in Middlesteel needing stringing up too.’
He pointed at the hundreds of horses behind him, sixers mostly, whippet-thin and panting from the thrill of the ride. ‘Dibnah’s irregulars. Not much for parade turns but handy enough with a sabre or a lance.’
One of the fire witches kicked her horse up to the front of the column. ‘Enough of your prattle, we were promised the blood of the beng that drove us from the plains of Natsia.’
Mad Jack winked at Oliver and the commodore. ‘Not much for the niceties of command either, but they’re spirited fillies, eh?’ He looked over at the steamman politician. ‘You with that lot camped out east?’
‘I am the honourable member for Workbarrows, young softbody,’ said Guardian Tinfold. ‘Which lot are you referring to?’
‘Good Circle, man, there’s a whole army of your people camped east of the Gambleflowers.’
‘King Steam has honoured the ancient treaty,’ said Tinfold.
Bullets whistled past Mad Jack’s helmet, but he just swatted at the air, as if horseflies drawn to the sweat of his sixer were bothering him.
‘We need the steammen here,’ said the Carlist officer. ‘Why aren’t they marching to our relief?’
‘King Steam is bound by the treaty,’ whistled Tinfold. ‘No army from the Free State will cross the Gambleflowers unless it is invited to do so by the House of Guardians.
‘Is King Steam mortal insane?’ said Commodore Black. ‘The Third Brigade is murdering us down here. If we can’t break through soon their gallopers will be hauled up and they’ll be giving us the whiff of their cannon.’
‘I must go to them,’ said Tinfold. ‘They must accept my command as a Guardian to traverse the river.’ He turned to Mad Jack. ‘Will your horse carry me?’
‘On the flat of a cart maybe, old steamer. Don’t you see how you’re spooking her?’
Oliver indicated the fast flowing waters of the Gambleflowers. ‘That will carry you fast enough.’
‘Would you have us drift the Guardian down the Gambleflowers like a barrel?’ asked the commodore. ‘The refugees floated away on every skiff that could hold out the mortal river.’
‘Not quite everything.’
Commodore Black looked with horror to where Oliver was pointing, at a boat converted into a tavern moored to the banks of the river. ‘A jinn house, lad? You’d risk our fate to an old tub that hasn’t been cast off the banks of Middlesteel for a decade or more?’
‘With an experienced skipper at the wheel, commodore.’
‘No, lad. Don’t ask that of me. Haven’t I been put in harm’s way enough? My fine house filled with wicked shifties, my friends and companions slaughtered underground with half the armies of the Commonshare trying to see us off the same way. Those troops on the bridge would fill the tub full of holes as soon as they saw us making off with her.’
‘Let’s see if we can’t throw their aim for you,’ said Oliver. He looked up at the cavalry. ‘I heard that horses won’t jump a line with bayonets.’
The gypsy witch looked at him with contempt. ‘These are not salahori horses, little gadje.’
‘Have you never been blooded, dear boy?’ said Mad Jack. ‘Jump a hedge, jump some shifties with a little cutlery on the end of their rifles. All the same to me.’
Oliver leapt onto the back of the gypsy’s mare and flourished his witch-blade. ‘Good luck commodore, you’ve just been promoted to what’s left of the Jackelian navy.’
‘Ah, lad, when you get to that asylum of yours, have them warm up a cell for you. You’ll put poor old Blacky in his grave yet.’
‘How does a man who does not know horses ride bareback?’ demanded the gypsy woman.
‘My memory comes and goes.’
Mad Jack spun his horse around and pointed his sabre down the bridge. ‘All those who would ride as free men, all those who would ride for Jackals — then ride with me now!’
Their trot became a canter became a gallop, the thunder of their hooves and the screams of the gypsies filling the long run of the bridge. At the other end of the bridge the glass-crack of charges sounded as the order to fire at will rippled down the enemy line. Horses fell, the easiest target to hit and as fatal to their rider as if the bullets had found their hearts, lost beneath the storm of the charge.
Oliver risked a quick glance away from the rapidly approaching barricade and the frantically reloading Third Brigade men. Commodore Black was scurrying down to the moored jinn palace, a handful of Ben Carl’s loyalists carrying Tinfold down the steps behind him.
Streamers of fire twisted around the gypsy witch’s painted arms in front of Oliver. ‘Kris, kris, kris,’ she yelled. They were no longer a charge of cavalry — they were thunder taken mortal form and hurtling towards the Quatershiftian line, the din of their hooves and cries painful to hear.
In front of them the bayonet-tipped rifles of the Quatershiftian line rose like the spines on a hedgehog.
‘The wall,’ shouted Molly to her steamman friend as the two possessed convicts flew towards them. ‘Use your voice on the wall.’
Slowstack swivelled to face the stone passage and his voicebox shook as he used the fighting frequency of the knights steammen, a spider web of cracks forming along the wall under the violence of his voice.
Dark energy rolled down the passage, the inhuman banshee howls of the Wildcaotyl channelled through corporeal throats. On the wall the cracks spread, slow at first, then rippling out as the pressure of the magma-drain behind the wall widened the fissure, the earth’s fury forcing its way out. Shards of the green stone favoured by the Chimecans blew off, followed by a geyser of molten rock.
Molly caught sight of the two convicts pushing back at the magma with their black light as they tried to retreat. Then her view was cut off as the slab of stone in the ceiling smashed down an inch in front of their position. She felt the rumble of the second door sealing the breach out of sight. Magma caught under the edge of the door began to cool, hissing by their feet.
‘Molly softbody, that was reckless. What if the trigger on the fire door had malfunctioned?’
‘Then at least we would have had the pleasure of the company of those two jiggers as we moved along the Circle.’ She pointed at one of the crystal growths on the stone floor. ‘That fire sensor is broken, I can feel it. It just looks wrong. But the one on the other side looked good.’
Slowstack let out a whistle — part relief, part frustration. ‘Let us see if your senses can lead us towards the Hexmachina.’
‘You have a good voice, Slowstack. You should have been a steamman knight.’
Slowstack ignored the teasing. The passages they travelled changed from rough-hewn stone to more intricate paths — false pillars and Doric columns supporting the ceilings, as if the craftsmen of the fallen empire had been drafted in to expend one last burst of vigour at their deepest levels. What did not change was the energy-sapping heat, the rubble of shattered crystal machines that would have regulated the temperature littering their path. Occasionally they came across a cooling crystal still working, glowing like a sun and humming and vibrating from the strain of trying to keep the oven-like temperatures in check.
The two friends passed across a drawbridge that lay suspended over a bubbling channel of magma into a chamber with dark oily walls stretching up high into the darkness. Molly peered at the statues of the Wildcaotyl gods lining the cavern, carved out of a black diamond material, dark stone that seemed to swallow the light of the wall crystals still flickering in their mounts.
‘She’s close, Slowstack. My body is trembling with the power of her.’
‘This is as deep as the cities of Chimeca extend,’ said the steamman. ‘There are passages that could take us further out underneath the seabed, but none deeper. This is the limit of their territory, the depth of their wound upon the body of the earth.’
At the far end of the vault were piles of bones, not food for a whitegnaw this time, but legionnaires of the old empire. They lay in ordered rows in front of four massive doors — gates large enough to have accommodated the bulk of a Jackelian aerostat. Among the dust and shards of bone lay black plates of armour sewn together with a cable mesh, odd rifles, a mixture of stone and crystal that looked like something a child might cobble together as a toy.
‘They were guarding this entrance, Molly softbody, to the very end. They died from starvation still standing here rather than abandon their post.’
Molly shivered as she stepped through the dust that had once been the hearts of such men; capable of holding their position even as their comrades dropped dying from thirst and hunger around them. Fanatics. Picking a path through the ancient remains she laid a palm on one of the doors, metal and peculiarly cold in the febrile air.
Her blood moved to its own secret tides and she gasped as her body wrenched to one side of its own volition. Molly tried to say something to Slowstack but her voice came out as a gargling hymn of machine noise, a golden light warming her palm, spreading out along the surface of the door and glowing so bright Molly had to shut her eyes. The burning radiance seemed to seep through her eyelids, so painful she cried out. Then it was gone, leaving a headache dancing in her forehead. Molly opened her eyes. The doors had vanished as if they had never existed and the two of them were standing at the rim of a polished crater filled with a coral-growth of black complexity. Threads of glass, millions of them, grown into shapes that pulsed and moved with their own simulacrum of life.
‘A machine,’ said Slowstack in awe. ‘But not of the metal.’
Molly realized it was cold in the room. After days of furnace-like heat, dreaming of the cool autumns of Middlesteel, she was actually shivering.
‘No, old steamer. Not of the metal. Those threads are crystallised blood, drawn from the bodies of the Chimecan lords’ own children. The ultimate sacrifice that their gods called upon them to make.’
Molly’s body fizzed with revulsion at this sly abomination, her proximity to it triggering her relationship with the Hexmachina. Her blood was changing, the structures of her body rebuilding themselves into something new. She was the daughter of Vindex and the philosopher slave had seen this thing, she knew that. He had stood exactly where she stood now and felt the same emotions, passions that had pushed him into leading the revolt of the slave nations.
‘Molly softbody, what is the function of this artefact?’
‘Nothing yet,’ said Molly. She felt the echo of the words in her head before she said them. The Hexmachina was so close now. ‘It is only half
built. But had its construction been finalized, then it would have been a pipe, a pipe to play a tune for the Wildcaotyl, to crack the substance of the great pattern and allow the Wildcaotyl to call down their own gods. Meta-gods! Beings far beyond the frail substance of our universe.’
‘By Steelbhalah-Waldo’s beard,’ hissed Slowstack, ‘there are hymns among the people that are never sung. Names that are never said for fear of what power they might allow into the world. For the Wildcaotyl to do such a thing! The Circle would be closed, the great pattern dissolved. We believed that all the Wildcaotyl desired was to encase the earth in ice again, to return the Chimecan Empire to its ancient glory and control our life force as food for their table.’
Molly shook her head. ‘Poor mad Tzlayloc. He thought he was preparing the way for a perfect order, but the order was never his. It is to be his Wildcaotyl masters’, a perfect cold eternity of complete method … no chaos, no warmth, no gravity or movement or change. Everything subservient to the meta-gods’ inert dominion and the will of the Wildcaotyl. We would all be equal in a way — equal in our non-existence, equal in our living death within a circle of time without end. That is the future my ancestor glimpsed. Why he dared rebel against the Chimecan Empire.’
‘Molly softbody, you are changing,’ said Slowstack, his voicebox disturbed.
He tracked back; the same golden nimbus that had disintegrated the door was now lifting off Molly’s skin in waves, an aurora borealis that made the Wildcaotyl’s instrument of ultimate destruction glitter like a million crimson stars in a dark firmament. Slowstack’s own hull lit up with the glow, the golden energy making his body feel as hale as Slowcogs once had, before Onestack had fused their bodies together in a desecration.
Molly groaned and leant on the railing around the crater’s rim, collapsing to her knees with the strain of her body’s changes.
As the glow faded Slowstack’s vision plate cleared and he saw the dark figure standing three feet behind Molly, black fire leaking from his eyes, the sound of his malevolent laughter an echo from the pits of a nightmare.