by Stephen Hunt
Wildrake snarled, flipping the sabre between his hands. ‘Sharp enough to take you, Samson Dark.’
Wildrake stamped forward, sending a flurry of muddy snow spraying over the commodore’s trousers, the clatter of steel floating hollow in the silence of the twilight battlefield. Black curved his opponent’s blade away twice, diverting the agent’s thrusts with small turns. There was a dull ache in the commodore’s arm, the pain of having to hold the weight of the sabre telling now. Wildrake’s unnatural shine-stimulated muscles gave him the edge in a contest of endurance. The popinjay probably spent hours in front of a mirror holding a sword out straight, relishing the pain of the weight. Admiring himself.
‘Just how much would parliament pay for Prince Alpheus’s return?’ wheezed the commodore, swaying his sword defensively.
Wildrake grinned. ‘Trying to buy time to recover, fat man? You should have spent less time feeding your face in the pantry and more time down the muscle pits.’
‘I should have, Jamie. I should have. But maybe the old pirate in me wonders how much I could get for the boy’s head.’
Wildrake tried to cut under the commodore’s guard. Black barely managed to parry the attack. It was like being battered by a windmill. Relentless vigour without end. Only his defensive fighting style was keeping him alive.
‘Sell out one of your own? No, duke. I don’t think you’re ready for that. You are a sentimentalist, pining for an age that was buried by history long before either of us was born.’
The commodore stamped left but swung right, slipping his blade beneath Wildrake’s sabre, trapping it, then with a deft twist spinning the weapon out of the wolftaker’s hand and onto the ground. The blade impaled itself in the snow and stood there quivering.
‘I should give you the same chance you gave the fleet when you blew us out to the RAN’s airships,’ said the commodore. ‘But maybe I am a sentimentalist, Jamie.’ He stepped back and bowed slightly, pointing to the fallen sword with the tip of his sabre.
Wildrake shook his head and grinned ferociously, retrieving his blade without taking his eyes off the commodore. ‘You have to be joking! Dark, you are a piece of work and no mistake. You never would have made a wolftaker in a thousand years.’
‘You’re as cold as your friends, Jamie. The Court and the Commonshare both. You never understood; that piece of metal in your hand is only as good as the heart of the man behind it. You’ve got the moves and you’ve got the sinews, but they couldn’t give you the heart. You’re just a weapon, Jamie, a shiny sabre all bent out of shape and dirty from the hands of the bludgers and assassins who have used you.’
‘And you’re a relic, Dark. The last of the royal privateers. The last of a dead age. They should stuff you and put you in the museum back in Middlesteel next to one of the old monarchs.’
‘That they haven’t is not for want of trying. You broke my heart, Jamie, when I found out it was you that was the Court’s man on the boats, that it was you that blew on the fleet. You would have made a fine fleet-man if we could have fixed your soul — one of the best.’
Wildrake roared and thrust forward, but the submariner turned sideways and with a — snap — snap — snap — Commodore Black parried past Wildrake’s cuts using short controlled butterfly strokes that almost seemed too slight to be effective. But with each snap of metal Black pressed his sabre a little closer until — almost gently — he pushed the blade into the turncoat’s chest, sliding it right through Wildrake’s heart. ‘For old time’s sake, Jamie, for old time’s sake.’
Wildrake looked at the blade impaled into his body with incredulity. ‘I am tight — my muscles — so tight — your body — so flabby.’
Black shoved Wildrake off his sabre with his boot. ‘You’re all piss and wind, Jamie.’
Wildrake collapsed, falling on the snow, watching dis believingly as the commodore staggered back and lifted up the prone form of Prince Alpheus.
Black pointed to the smoke of the battlefield rising behind them. ‘You’re one of us, Jamie. A Jackelian with the blood of kings running through your veins. Why did you do it?’
‘I just got tired — old man. Of the dirt and the pain. The Court was too weak. The Commonshare had what is required to change things. I could have — made — our country perfect.’
‘We’re a blessed weak people, Jamie, for a perfect idea. Well now, it looks like I’ve saved the Court the trouble of hunting you down, so I think I shall take the lad as my payment and be saying my goodbyes to you.’
‘They will — find — you.’
Black winked before he limped away, hauling the prince behind him. ‘You killed Samson Dark, remember? And poor old Blacky, well, he is a hero of the war of 1596 — fought alongside the First Guardian at Rivermarsh, so he did. You killed Samson Dark and now I have returned the favour. I believe that rounds things out nicely.’
When the wolftakers found Wildrake’s body, the bloody message of accusation against Samson Dark that he had written in the snow had long since melted away into the meadow grass.
Molly was not sure how long she had been standing on the downs of Rivermarsh when she realized the melting snow was soaking her feet. Despite the fall of night it was warmer now than it had been earlier, the seasons of Jackals returning to normal. Her body felt strange, as if she was not sure where she began and the Hexmachina ended. The land seemed part of her still.
A pile of burrowed dirt in front of her was the only clue that the events of the day had not been a dream. Once more the Hexmachina had returned to her lover’s embrace. The Wildcaotyl had faded away like an echo in a well. Down the hill a few torches moved around the dark plain — scavengers looking for boots and coins to strip from the corpses, soldiers calling out for comrades, wives and children calling for fathers who had not returned, a few medical company orderlies moving between the bodies, trying to locate the increasingly weak cries of the wounded.
The stars were in the east, partially covered by smoke still rising from Middlesteel. No glow of fire though — the water must have been restored and the fires put out. For the first time in her life Molly did not know what to do. She had felt the heat of familiar souls when she had been joined with the Hexmachina — the commodore and the fey boy, Coppertracks too. They might be back at Tock House now if the folly had not been smashed apart by the Commonshare’s aerial assault. She could join them. She could do … anything. Nobody was hunting her blood now, the poor house was gone — Circle, the very records of her existence might lie in a broken tran saction engine smouldering in the ruins of Greenhall for all she knew.
But she was a Middlesteel girl at heart; she headed in the direction of the moon, across the battlefield towards the capital.
Molly wandered through the downs of Rivermarsh like a wraith. After being joined with the Hexmachina everything seemed flat and dull, denied the sight beyond sight the ancient machine possessed. It was a surreal nightmare. The wailing of a wife who had just discovered her dead husband on the ground, his face sliced by a Commonshare sabre. The multi-armed steamman she found walking through a field of deacti vate knights and mounds of dead metal-fleshers, the water from his boiler leaking out as tears for the warriors he had commanded. She pressed on him the fused soul boards of Slowstack in return for a promise her friend would be taken back to the Free State. She doubted they would inter a desecration in their hall of the dead, but perhaps the board would be scrubbed and returned to a new body, as was their way. Circle knows, there would be enough parts to be returned to the mountain kingdom over the next few weeks, caravans of deactivate. Parts enough for a new generation of steammen to replace the fallen of the last.
She was trudging up a slope when she noticed a figure in a bath chair slowly pushing itself up the hill in front of her. The ground was damp and his wheels were grinding through the slippery mud.
Molly took the handles on the chair and helped persuade it to the top of the rise. ‘You want to be careful, old fellow. The steammen have pickets out here to stop mechomancers robbi
ng their graves, they won’t care if you’re after a Commonshare sabre to sell at the market or a Free State voicebox.’
‘Thank you, compatriot, but I’m not with the crows,’ said the man. ‘I was looking for a friend of mine, an old student.’
‘Did you find him?’
‘What was left of him. He died during the battle. It helps to see the body sometimes, to remember the man.’
Molly pushed the chair around a collapsed exomount, a circle of dead Jackelians surrounding the beast, testament to the power of its pincers. ‘A lot of people died here today.’
‘Is that not the truth?’ He slowed the chair and they listened together to the cries of the dying and the wounded still out on the field. ‘What is it they say about Jackals? Every valley has a battle and every lake has a song. I wonder what they will say about this place in a hundred years?’
‘They’ll talk about the lions in the sky and the shifties dead in the snow. But you won’t have to wait a hundred years; there’ll be penny ballads on sale outside Rottonbow by the end of the week.’
‘You’re a true Jackelian,’ laughed the man. ‘You should write some of those ballads yourself and approach a printer; you would have the market to yourself if you got in early enough.’
‘You know, I think I might just do that,’ said Molly. ‘And are you going back to teaching?’
‘I have an invite,’ said the man. ‘From a Guardian called Tinfold, to run for parliament.’
Molly snorted. ‘That old whistler? He’s a radical — the Levellers haven’t held the majority for a hundred years.’
‘Do you think so? I always thought they were a bit middling. Still, I like to tilt for lost causes.’ He indicated one of the corpses Molly was pushing him past. ‘And after this I don’t think Jackals will be quite as complacent about our position in the natural order of things. Middlesteel will need rebuilding and the fleet will need rebuilding; most of the Special Guard are torcless and on the run; there’ll be calls to firebomb Quatershift to rubble that will need to be fought. Thousands of our people have been turned into metal-fleshers — they will need to be helped. I think a change might be just what we need. How about you? Are you old enough to hold the franchise?’
‘Greenhall took my blood code earlier this year,’ said Molly. ‘Maybe I’ll even vote for you, though I don’t know if I’d be doing you any favours if I did.’
‘I can still hold a debating stick.’ He slapped the side of his bath chair. ‘And I can strike low, where it hurts.’
‘To Middlesteel then?’
‘Yes,’ said Benjamin Carl. ‘Home.’
Harry pushed the dead Third Brigade officer off the chair. The rear guard had made a valiant stand at the little farmhouse north of Rivermarsh. But the vengeful survivors of parliament’s new pattern army pursing them had chewed them up.
‘Well, he wasn’t going to need it,’ said Harry, seeing Oliver’s look.
‘You had an offer for me, Harry.’
‘What makes you think that?’ asked the disreputable Stave.
‘The fact that you’re here. If I had to guess, I would say you’ve been talking to someone who knows their weapons. Or their history. Or both.’
Harry sighed. ‘Yes. It’s those two pistols, Oliver. They come with a provenance of trouble. That bloody preacher, I should have known he was up to no good.’
‘They’re part of the earth, Harry, part of the land.’
‘That’s strange, Oliver, because I was going to propose taking them up there.’ He pointed up to the ceiling.
‘With or without me?’
Harry winked. ‘Either will be acceptable.’
‘I don’t think I would make a good wolftaker, Harry.’
‘I don’t think the Court cares. That old preacher gave us the run-around, Oliver. Like no one else has ever done before. At the time I thought he was the man behind the trouble, but I was wrong. It’s not often I admit that.’
‘That’s what I mean. You’ve got a plan. You’re systemized. All that watching and peeping and planning, all those games, all those little intercessions, the small shuffles of pieces across the board, the feints and bluffs.’
‘Your father played the great game, Oliver.’
‘I am not my father.’
‘The Court doesn’t like free agents. It pollutes their ability to predict things, having chaotic elements running around down here freelancing.’
‘You’re right, Harry, these two pistols don’t have a plan or an agenda. But when you wear them you can see evil, see it like a colour, feel it like a physical force.’
‘We need the rule of law. Have you ever considered that those belt guns understand evil because they are evil? The things the preacher did when he was running around Jackals … he was operating without any boundaries. He was becoming what he hunted.’
‘You think because a king-killer wrote a charter on a piece of bloodstained note paper he stole from the palace and gave it to the Court of the Air that what you do is justice?’ said Oliver. ‘The Court recruited you from prison. Just like the Third Brigade recruited their soldiers. Does the Court want wolftakers, or does it want killers who will take orders?’
‘You can be both.’
‘Were you both, Harry, when my father came to see you?’
‘Oliver?’
‘I can feel evil, Harry. But I don’t need the guns to see the guilt you feel.’
‘What do you mean, old stick?’
In Oliver’s belt the two pistols began to glow. ‘The Chaunting Lay, your pension. How many canal boats do you own now, Harry? How easy is it to operate a flash mob of smugglers when you have all the resources of the Court of the Air to smooth over the wrinkles? It must have been easy to justify when you started, just cultivating old contacts for the whistler network, a little more like a real gang each year. That was your price for protecting the preacher, for not turning him in. He was working for you in Shadowclock, Harry, wasn’t he? It wasn’t his smuggling operation, it was yours. But when my father found out about your operation he gave you a chance. He didn’t go to the Court, he told you to shut it down.’
‘Life isn’t all black and white,’ said Harry. ‘Look at me. I just saved Jackals. I rolled up the Carlists that burrowed into the Court and Greenhall and every bloody corridor of the great and the good. How many times have I saved your life? I led the incremental companies that turned the war, for Circle’s sake. I’m a bloody hero.’
‘The hero who knew enough about aerostats to ensure that my father’s vessel took a dive into the feymist curtain.’
‘My little enterprise serves Jackals,’ said Harry. ‘It turns a crust on the side but it wouldn’t last long if it didn’t.’
Oliver placed the two pistols on the table. ‘Then maybe we are both fated to become what we hunt. The Court of the Air gave you three choices. Bring the guns, bring me and the guns, or…’
‘Don’t make me do it, Oliver.’
‘The incrementals who followed us were very good; it was almost impossible to know that they were there. But they have the weight of their own sins to carry. No level of worldsinger tricks can hide that.’
‘Even if I ordered them, Oliver, they won’t just let you walk off.’
Oliver laughed and the sound of it filled Harry Stave with fear. ‘I’m not terribly clubbable, Harry. I don’t take orders, I don’t ask permission, and with my wild blood I don’t think the Court has much interest in doing anything except keeping me in a cell.’
‘Oliver, the Court will have half a dozen surveillants watching this farmhouse, marksmen with long rifles, a couple of companies of incrementals waiting to storm the building.’
Oliver leant forward. ‘You were there for me when it counted, Harry, for Jackals. So I’m going to let you live this time. But don’t let them send you after me.’
‘You’re not listening to me, boy. Unless you surrender those two pistols to me there’s not going to be any after.’
‘I’ve got a me
ssage for the Court. If they want the pistols-’
‘Yes?’
‘-they will have to come and take them.’
Oliver’s laugh remained as he faded from view; the echoes of his cackle left lingering in the room as the black-uniformed soldiers shattered down the door.
The Whisperer pulled his attention from the surveillants in the Court at the same time as he left Harry’s mind. Damn but it was cold that high — and the peculiar watchers were hard to influence — their minds changed by all those potions they took to remain awake and vigilant.
‘The old sod was right about one thing,’ said Nathaniel. ‘They’re not going to rest until they catch you or kill you.’
Oliver shrugged and spun one of the pistols around before holstering it. ‘On the run for being fey — on the run for these. You can slip a piece of paper between the difference. How about you?’
The Whisperer had shifted back to his natural form, leaving the pretence of humanity behind. ‘I’m going to find myself a forest and a cave, Oliver. I’m going to live life as a hermit, far, far away from all the hamblins. Roger everyone. I just want the peace that comes from being alone.’
‘Is that any different from how you were held at Hawklam?’ asked Oliver.
‘I will be where I choose to be. That’s all the difference in the world — you should understand that. But Oliver, do me a favour…’
‘I owe you at least that.’
‘I saved myself first, you second, the feybreed third, and Jackals last of all. I don’t want any part of your mischief, Oliver Brooks.’
‘You will have your solitude, Nathaniel. If things get too hairy here I can always slip somewhere they can’t follow. You don’t need to worry about me.’
The Whisperer hissed in laughter. ‘Worry about you? Dear Circle, and they thought I was a menace to the realm. Goodbye Oliver. Don’t sell your life too cheaply.’
Oliver watched the Whisperer head through the trees, his shuffling footsteps through the brambles disappearing, followed only by the hoot of an owl. ‘Goodbye Whisperer. Goodbye, old friend.’
As the Whisperer left, the Lady of the Lights materialized into view by Oliver’s side. ‘I can remove the stain on your soul, Oliver, if you wish it to be so.’