by Stephen Hunt
'Living factories…' said Duncan in astonishment.
'Not so strange to someone who used to guard the southern frontier, I should say, eh, soldier? Some of the same black arts that devil of a caliph practises down in Cassarabia,' said the commodore. 'Although the cleverness of the caliph's womb mages only stretches to teasing living creatures out of his slaves' wombs. I dare say if he could teach his creations to eat rocks and sand, then shit out swords and pistols after the meal, he would be about it quick enough.'
The commodore watched Purity run over towards Oliver, now that the young man had finished explaining to Timlar what had been retrieved. Work crews moved in to draw back the narrowboats' wooden roofs and expose the cargo.
'How bad was it?' asked Duncan.
'As bad as it can be, lad.'
'How can it have come to this?' said Duncan. 'These creatures have travelled all the way from another celestial sphere, such an unimaginable distance, and for what?'
'For a supper long denied,' said the commodore. 'Aye, and we are to be their main course. Before I left, before I saw the ruins of the shifties' country, I was still in half a mind as to the truth of the matter of this Army of Shadows. I thought perhaps that Molly's imagination had laid her a little too open to the ravings of a slave's broken mind, poor Kyorin escaped from the polar barbarians of the north or the satraps of Cassarabia. But you only have to see the fate of the poor shifties to know that the perpetrators of such crimes are free of any ties to this green and pleasant place we call home.'
Duncan watched one of the last narrowboats tie up at the lumberyard docks and a party of dishevelled-looking travellers climb out; more shifties by the looks of them. There was a man at their head, silver-haired, accompanied by a beautiful young woman. Timlar Preston seemed surprised to see the senatorial newcomer and the two were soon closeted away for a private conversation.
'The fruit of our u-boat's voyage, Paul-Loup Keyspierre – some grand nabob from the shifties' Institute des Luminaires,' said the commodore, seeing the direction of Duncan's gaze. 'And the girl is his daughter, Jeanne.'
'A political, then,' said Duncan.
'No doubt a good compatriot to survive as head of their hall of science without tripping and falling in the great terror,' said the commodore. 'And at least clever enough to see which way the wind was blowing in his homeland. Rats always swim out of a burning u-boat, a long stream of them kicking away from the torpedo bays.'
'If it comes to it,' said Duncan, 'and we need to get Purity away from the hubbub, what's the port out of Spumehead looking like?'
The commodore shook his head. 'There's not a steamer ticket to the Concorzian colonies to be had for neither love nor money. The west coast is as thick with shopkeepers on the run from the storm front as there are flies circling the turd pile fallen out of your fine mare's rear. If you still remember the way to Cassarabia from your regimental days, you might be better lighting off down south.'
'If the caliph has any welcome for me, it's in his torture gardens or on the slave block,' said Duncan.
'Is that the way of it, then, the usual fondness of foreigners for our redcoats? Well, if there's three arms of the compass denied to you now, there's still east. Quatershift is as good as rolled up, but you could reach the Holy Kikkosico Empire on the other side of the slopes of the Mechancian Spine, take a caravan across the pampas. But-' he reached out to touch Duncan's sleeve, '-there's one blessed thing you must know. Running changes a man. After too many years of it, you wake up not knowing whether you're home, or just bunking down in an impostor of a place you're pretending will do for the same.'
'The Kingdom of Jackals is your home,' said Duncan.
'So it is, or should I say so it might have been, six hundred years ago, before Isambard Kirkhill's gang of shopkeepers seized the land.'
'You're not going to run, are you?'
'No,' grinned the commodore. 'I'm a sight too tired to run and a sight too old to remember a new alias. So let the slats come for old Blacky and prize my sharpened sabre out of my cold fingers if they dare.'
Duncan watched as the commodore lumbered over to the scientists he had rescued from Quatershift, before turning to haul the crates out of the narrowboat, the long boxes still dark from the dust of the mine where they had been secreted.
‹It wasn't Purity you were worried about, was it?› said the voice from inside Duncan's travel case as he dropped the first crate next to it on the back of his cart. ‹You were thinking of running with me before we're attacked by the Army of Shadows.›
'Was I?' Duncan went back for a second crate, balancing the load across his muscled shoulders.
‹It won't make any difference. Not to me.›
'Don't talk like that,' spat Duncan. 'I'd run if I thought it would keep you safe. But it won't. Those ugly kelpies from the Army of Shadows will arrive wherever we flee to soon enough, and the stronger for having consumed all the nations between us and wherever we end up. We might as well make a fight of it, here, on our home soil.'
‹Do you have a battery of rockets to kill them with?›
'No, I'm not in the Corps of Rocketeers any more,' said Duncan. 'You know that. But I might just have a bonnie cannon to do the job.'
As the cashiered soldier dropped his crate into the cart there was a massive explosion and for a second Duncan thought that one of the canal boats' cargoes had detonated – some explosive cache fused early – but the shower of leaves and loose pieces of timber was rattling off the forest canopy from above. Whatever had struck Highhorn Forest had fallen well wide of their canal path.
Duncan pushed the precious travel case under his cart in case they were being mortared, dipping his head out as Coppertracks came steaming past. 'I thought the first gunnery test was scheduled for next week, old steamer?'
'A message,' said Coppertracks. 'I received a message from one of my people seconds before the explosion. It said: "Coming in hard. Landing on my shields."'
'Hard!' Duncan blinked as a piece of blackened bark fleeted off his forehead. 'Even the dafties of Dennehy's Circus don't make landings any harder than that.'
'I believe the cannon's vital component promised to me by King Steam has arrived,' said Coppertracks. 'Though not in quite the manner that I had been led to expect.'
The steamman was the master of understatement. The task of unloading the components from the canalside forgotten, the project workers began to run towards an unexpectedly felled section of forest.
At its centre, the smoking, silver form of a shell-like capsule lay embedded in the super-heated mud. An imperious steammen voice roared out at Duncan and the others, as they stood clustered around the broken trees and boiling mud, looking at the crash site in amazement.
'Precisely which part of me being stuck in this foul gloop do you witless ground huggers think I'm enjoying? I am sure some of you possess the sentience to clutch a shovel and begin digging me out.'
Coppertracks rolled forward. 'Lord Starhome, I presume.'
Skyman First Class Hanning polished the glass face of his heliograph as he waited for fresh signals from the lamps of the lead aerostat in the Revenge's squadron. Mounted beneath the airship's chequerboard hull, lower than the gun ports, lower even than the fin-bomb bays, the h-station was a tiny domed nodule, manned by an adept in the code that allowed the Royal Aerostatical Navy fleets to move in synchronized flights.
It was a solitary calling, manning the h-lamps, but the job did have its consolations. Lamp men were always privy to the captain's orders from Admiralty House – at least when they were communicated in the field, rather than via the wax-sealed written orders handed to skippers before a stat pushed off. The quick wits needed for coding the messages – as well as their confidential nature – meant that h-operators were treated with the courtesies of a petty officer's rank, even when they hadn't passed the board exams for such: extra grog, PO's rations, and spared deck-scrubbing duties. And they got a better view of the scenery and the skies bar all but the wheelman
on the bridge, or maybe the spotters in the crow's nest.
Right now, the skyman looked out on as respectable an assemblage of both soldiery and the fleet's sleek ships as anyone sitting on his wooden seat in the RAN Revenge's h-station had ever seen. Hanning let his eyes wander to the nearest of the Revenge's sister craft. There was the RAN Diligence, his first berth as a greenhorn, running proud next to the RAN Flying Fox – the Canny Fox, or Old Canny to her crew – said to be one of the luckiest hawks in the Fleet of the South; never brought down by squall, ground fire, or any of the foes she had ever been dispatched against by the Kingdom of Jackals. Just a couple of the hundreds of airships gathered here today, their shadows a reassuring sight for the earthworms of the New Pattern Army below. And the Circle knows, they were marching in numbers that hadn't been seen since the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, when parliament's forces had smashed the rump of the royalist army so many centuries earlier. There was the Heavy Brigade, their exomounts' green scales glittering in the sunlight; the Twelfth Glenness Foot and the Sixth Sheergate Rangers, redcoat columns two abreast in full marching order; the iron land trains of the Royal Corps of Rocketeers, steam from their black stacks obscuring the racks of Congreve rockets primed and ready for battery fire; the green uniforms of the Middlesteel Rifles, walking in ragged skirmish order at the head of the infantry columns. The tactics of the New Pattern Army hadn't altered substantially since they had been perfected by First Guardian Isambard Kirkhill centuries earlier, but then why improve on perfection? Besides, the earthworms in the regiments always relied on fighting in close coordination with the Royal Aerostatical Navy, and the Jackelians' monopoly on airship gas had served their nation well when it came to defence.
Occasionally, one of the clockwork-driven horseless carriages mounted with an oversized version of Hanning's h-lamp would flicker into life below, requesting an update from the flagship or reporting the findings of the army's mounted scouts. If the musings of the command staff from House Guards were found to be mildly pertinent they would be circulated lazily among the high fleet's airships a while later. They did worry and fuss so, the braided and medal-breasted generals of the army – but then, they weren't drifting hundreds of feet out of range of the effective fire of the foreign brigades which the kingdom's armed forces were called to suppress. Where the high fleet sailed safely and omnipotently above the fog of war – often adding to it by dropping fire-fins and gas shells onto the battlefield – the poor benighted scrapings of the regiments had to face every hail of shrapnel, hot shell and ball that the enemy tossed at them.
No wonder jack cloudies were hailed as the heroes of the nation and welcomed into every jinn house and drinking establishment with offers of a song and a round freely stood, while the earthworms had to be press-ganged into the regiments, or recruited from the ranks of those facing transportation to the colonies to an alternative service under the sharp tongues – and sharper floggings – of the army's sergeants.
Hanning's musings about the good luck of his employment were interrupted by a clatter of bony feet coming down the ladder to his little glass bubble of solitude. It was Ti'ive, the young craynarbian midshipman bearing a note scribbled in the captain's hand for him to translate into lamp flicker.
'Another one for the Thunderbolt, if you please, Mister Hanning.'
Hanning checked to make sure he still had line of sight to one of their flagship's h-stations (as a flagship, the Thunderbolt had the unusual honour of possessing four h stations – fore, aft, port and starboard), then the skyman flicked into action the flint igniter on the side of his lamp's gas assembly. Hanning looked at the note he had been handed by the officer and harrumphed. The skipper was asking permission for the Revenge to break east to make contact with the missing steammen army. The steamers were a day late for the planned rendezvous, and it seemed the skipper considered it unlikely that the Free State's usually punctual army would allow themselves to fall so behind schedule.
'I doubt if we'll cut any orders independent of the fleet, sir,' opined the lamp operator. 'None of our hawks have been taken since we've started sailing convoy fashion.'
'The captain's worked with King Steam's fellows before, and he's a sight more concerned by their non-appearance at the border than our flag officers seem to be at the moment,' said the young middie.
'And has he said anything on the bridge about the six missing brigades of Quatershift's finest that were meant to be waiting on their side of the border to join up with our earthworms?'
'Jon Shiftie?' Ti'ive said, fiddling with his starched officer's uniform. 'Only that they're not fit for much beyond the fine art of retreat anyway, and that it might be better all round if the shifties took to their boot leather now, rather than folding a flank under fire and leaving good Jackelians exposed to the Army of Shadows when things start getting thick down below.'
Hanning started to blink the message out to the Thunderbolt. 'I saw Jon Shiftie fight in the Two-Year War, and I'd sooner have a few regiments of their bluecoats to add to our number than not. Even if their backbone does owe a debt to political officers with pistols ready to cut down anyone who tries to run, I reckon their boys held their lines well enough under our hawks' shells last time around.'
Skyman First Class Hanning was trying to talk over his nerves. Everyone on board the Revenge had been nervous since they had crossed the border into Quatershift. It wasn't just the sight of the dead Cursewall that had once been raised to separate the two nations, now drained of the very power of the land that once fed it. Not just the missing brigades the shiftie attaches had promised and failed to deliver to the House Guards staff. Not even the uneasy alliance with their most ancient of foes. It was the fact that they were sailing into a war of aggression for the first time, breaching a covenant that was timeless for the people of Jackals. Jackelians kept to their borders and, as stalwart as they were in their nation's defence, they had no taste for empire. The very idea of crossing into another nation and taking the fight to an enemy they hadn't even caught sight of yet felt unseemly. And it was a wrongness that had seeped through the airships and unsettled every jack cloudie serving in the four fleets.
Hanning was still clacking out the message to the flagship when Ti'ive's sharp eyes spotted the Thunderbolt making a more basic communication, the craynarbian crying out at the sight of the all-ships command – a bright red pennant running up the flagship's spine ropes, flapping in the wind. Enemy sighted.
The flagship's h-stations flashed new orders for all to see, not bothering to single out any one ship of the line, and all the other airships picked up the message for general relay until the fleet fast became a sea of winking stars. Form line. Engage.
Hanning dashed out the orders on his pad, ripped off the top sheet and passed it up to Ti'ive. He might not have been sitting in the crow's nest up top, but the skyman could see the ruby-red storm front rolling in from the north. One minute it was sweeping in above the distant hills and the next minute they were swimming in it, thick, red, as if the blood of everyone in Quatershift below had been turned into steam and blown over the high fleet.
'Have you ever seen such a thing?' asked Ti'ive.
Hanning was trying to think what to say when a lance of light and fire jetted past the Revenge's aft, so hot that he could feel the glass of the h-station's dome burn with it, a sudden wave of thermals buffeting their airship and briefly clearing away the crimson fog. And beyond the Revenge, the Flying Fox, the lucky Fox – was revealed cut in two down her middle – the whole mid-section of the stat's hull vaporized in a cloud of superheated celgas. As broken now as her luck. Both the surviving sections of the airship tumbled away, spilling burning sailors and ballonets into the mantle of tumbling debris: the melted keel catwalk, exploding engine housings, celgas netting and flailing bracing wires, all steaming white hot from the enemy's strange heat ray.
Both sailors were struck dumb, but a voice sounded from the corridor above the tunnel that led down into the h-dome. 'They're above. They're above us!
'
'What is it?' Hanning shouted up. 'Has the crow's nest sighted something? All I can see down here is-'
Seven or eight streams of energy similar to the last one jetted past, rocking the Revenge like a pigeon tossed by a tornado. Hanning fell off the operator's bench, Ti'ive sprawling about somewhere above him – his hard craynarbian shell cracking into the dome's glass.
Having lifted himself back up, dazed and bruised, Hanning blinked away the images torched on his retina to see a garden of bright red flowers – blooms of fire and smoke and blazing jack cloudies. 'Sweet Circle. How can they do this to us?'
Ti'ive tried to steady himself, as the airship and its h-dome rocked from side to side like a fairground ride. 'What's the matter with our damn airships today?'
Something caught Hanning's attention on the ground and he pulled his gaze away from the field of mushrooming destruction in the sky to look down upon the smashed ranks of the New Pattern Army in full ignoble retreat: the redcoats of the Light Infantry; the green uniforms of the Rifles; the cherry-trousered Hussars on their steeds, all retreating. Adding to the terror below was a rain of airship girders and the boiling ballast water falling from the Flying Fox. A few regiments of the infantry were trying to pull back in a disciplined line, but they were collapsing ragged against the sea of black – an undulating dark mass of the beast-soldiers of the Army of Shadows. Jackelian artillery units were attempting to set up their guns under the cover of the House Guards, each large cavalryman protected by an armoured gutta-percha cuirass, riding high and heavy on their exomounts; but the riders were encircled by a scattering of slats that had already broken through the collapsing squares of the West Pentshire Regiment. There were a few puffs from the heavy rifles carried by the House Guards before they were knocked off their mounts by streams of springing black creatures and torn apart.
The last glimpse of the ground Hanning had was the desperate uncoupling of artillery pieces from the trains of horses by their gunners before they too were swarmed over, then the unnatural cloud enveloped the Revenge and Hanning's dome was sealed once more inside a sea of dense crimson mist.