by Stephen Hunt
'I thought this one was going to start creating for a moment,' said the thug, pointing to Jenny Blow's body sprawled across the chest of Samuel Lancemaster. 'Look at her brown marsh leathers. Bloody bogtrotter, acting as if she's some grand lady. Sniffing at her plate like the meat has gone off.'
'What's been added to the food doesn't have an odour,' said his friend. 'Ain't the chief cleverer than that? I think she was sniffing at the meat in the pot.'
One of their workers was bending over to get a grip on a body and the thug lashed out with his boot, catching the worker in his stomach and sending him rolling winded into a bench. 'Get about it, you dogs. Faster, less you want to join these 'uns in the butcher's store. There's plenty more fresh fodder waiting outside the walls to come in.'
Purity's eyes blinked open. They felt swollen and itchy but she couldn't reach them with her hands, couldn't even see her limbs. She was lying horizontal in total darkness inside a crate so narrow her arms lay pinned down alongside her ribs, unable to twist an inch. Claustrophobia swept in. She didn't even have the purchase to kick at the walls with her bare feet, or thump at the roof pressed tight down on her forehead.
Something snapped inside her and Purity gave herself to wild panic, thrashing and screaming in the darkness.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sandwalker had taken something like a brick out of his pack, and placed it on the floor of the tent. Glowing orange, the heating block pushed back the chill of the freezing desert night with a circulating warmth that belied the frosty atmosphere under the silk-like canvas. Along with the silence from Keyspierre, the reek of the canal haunted Molly. Had the pollutants infused Molly's clothes or was it merely the memory of the canal persisting in her nostrils, along with the vision of Jeanne disappearing in the sudden fire-flash, the siren on her barge silenced as pieces of it ricocheted off Kaliban's mighty canal works?
Molly broke the quiet. 'You've not spoken of Jeanne since we climbed out of the canal.'
'What is there to say?' remarked Keyspierre, rubbing tiredly at his stubble. 'She died to save us, so that we might reach this great sage of the Kal. She put the preservation of the Commonshare of Quatershift before her own life – as I would expect any good compatriot from my nation to do, as I would do myself.'
'You're a cold one, Keyspierre,' said the commodore. 'She was your daughter, man, your blood. Would you not have done anything for her?'
'Do not presume to tell me how to grieve for one of my own,' said Keyspierre.
'One of your own, perhaps,' said Coppertracks, the steamman – sitting furthest from the heat of the brick while he generated his own warmth from his furnace. 'But not your blood, I believe. Her iris shared about as many inheritance vectors with your eyes as it did with the scratches on my vision plate. She was not your daughter, dear mammal. Now that she is dead I think you owe her – and us – the truth.'
Duncan Connor sat bolt upright at the news. 'I kenned it. There was something not quite right about the pair of you numpties from the start.'
'You know nothing of me,' snapped Keyspierre.
'I know that you are no scientist,' said Coppertracks, the steamman's voicebox becoming uncharacteristically firm. 'Your understanding of the gunnery project at Highhorn was the superficial sort I would expect to come from a potted briefing on wave mechanics. And aboard Lord Starhome you didn't know one end of a fully functioning circuit magnetizer from another.'
'You're just an informer, aren't you?' accused Molly. 'A shiftie stooge sent to keep an eye on your scientists at the Highhorn project?'
'Is that how highly you think the Commonshare values the survival of its citizenry?' said Keyspierre, sadly. 'That it would dispatch a menial merely to spy on its scientists' fraternization with your Jackelian friends? You are wrong! I am a colonel attached to Committee Eight of the People's Commonshare of Quatershift, charged with ensuring the success of our mission to Kaliban at any cost. At any cost.'
'So then, the wolves have been let out to run free.' The commodore sucked in his breath. 'Your kind I've heard tell of before. Seven central committees operating under the rule of the first, and the eighth that doesn't officially exist at all. You're a wheatman is what you are, as bad as any of the dirty agents from the Court of the Air.'
'A typical Jackelian mangling of our tongue,' said Keyspierre. 'It's huit, you dolt.'
'A secret policeman by any name,' said the commodore. 'Ah, poor young Jeanne. I did not know you for what you were.'
'She was a loyal servant of the Commonshare. Her real name was Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, a compatriot lieutenant attached to Committee Eight.'
Commodore Black suddenly leapt at Keyspierre, landing a punch on the shiftie's chin and sending them both sprawling, the intelligent fabric of the tent trying to reflect their forms back at them as they flailed and rolled under one of the brace poles. Only Duncan Connor was strong enough to haul the u-boat man off Keyspierre, pulling the commodore away as he tried to land a boot in the Quatershiftian's face.
'Jared!' Molly shouted, shocked by her friend's sudden explosion of violence. 'What in the name of the Circle do you think you're doing?'
'Why don't you ask this wicked wheatman,' spat the commodore. 'Ask him about the Quatershiftian aristocrats who escaped with their lives to Jackals but without their children. Tell us about your secret police's schools, Keyspierre, where wheatmen stole the young from the revolution's death camps, training and honing the ones who were strong enough to survive to become fanatics to serve your cause.'
'The job of the people is to serve the people,' said Keyspierre. 'Would you rather I had left Jeanne to die in a camp? She was young enough to be re-educated. She didn't deserve to be condemned for the accident of her noble birth any more than our gutter children deserved to be left to starve outside the gates of the Sun King's palace. And I'll take no lessons on how to treat aristocrats from a Jackelian. Jeanne lived as a productive sentinel of the Commonshare; my people never kept her as a living archery target to be trotted out for a stoning every time parliament needed a distraction.'
'I can see there's aristocratic blood in your veins,' said Commodore Black, 'because you're a royal bastard right enough. She was never your daughter to take.'
'You insult me! She was a daughter of the revolution,' said Keyspierre. 'One who gave her life to keep your useless carcass walking through the desert. And after this is over-' Keyspierre patted the knife tucked under his belt '-I shall demonstrate to you how very foolish it is to strike a ranking colonel of the people's brigades. What is it you call it in the kingdom, grass before breakfast?'
'That's a mortal fancy name for a duel,' said Commodore Black. 'But if you've a plain taste for a little simple murder, I'll give you satisfaction and we'll see which of us is planted in the soil after the dark deed is done.'
'That's enough,' ordered Molly. 'You two can lock horns after we've saved Jackals and-' she looked meaningfully at Keyspierre '-Quatershift.'
Sandwalker shook his head in dismay. 'Your friends bicker like slats fighting over the finest cuts torn off one of the city-born.'
'Our people do that when our nerves fray, when we lose people we were fond of,' said Molly. 'Apologies. It is unnecessary.'
'Well,' said Sandwalker, 'then you have all come to the right land. Kaliban is the realm of the unnecessary. Lie down and I shall attempt to ease the pain in your skull.'
Molly did as she was bid and Sandwalker laid his blue-skinned fingers on her forehead, the throb inside rising then easing and pulsing back to something more bearable.
'The very desert we trek through is unnecessary,' continued Sandwalker, his fingers browsing her scalp. 'Every grain of sand, every electrical storm, every dry riverbed: all the products of our masters, a mentality that gorges itself until the cycle of life is broken with no hope of repair. The light that burns the soil, the storms that now ravage the world, the waves that lap no longer in our seabeds, they once gave my people the energy they needed to live peacefully within the cycle
of life. But the more sophisticated your civilization, the more fragile its structure, the more you rely on the cooperation and specialization of the Kal who stands beside you. Millions upon countless millions died on Kaliban when the masters and their slat legions arrived. Almost everything we knew was lost, much of the rest looted and wrecked by the Army of Shadows. No more living machines to be raised as crops. No more learning permitted to our children. Now, thousands of years later, all we are left with are paltry splinters of knowledge. An imperfect remembrance of the fact that the objectionable existence we find ourselves trapped in is a cruel, needless perdition compared with the paradise we had created for ourselves. A paradise we would have willingly shared with the masters and their slat armies if they had but asked.'
'You sound like a professor friend of mine,' said Molly. 'Back in Jackals, she's an expert on a classical fallen civilization called Camlantis. I think the Camlanteans had a little of the life you remember. At about the same time as your civilization, too, I think. They fell to our own barbarians, though, the Black-Oil Horde. We didn't need the slats to destroy our land's paradise.'
'How very sad,' said Sandwalker. 'How much better if our two peoples had met in those ancient days, rather than like this, in the ruins of the Kal civilization. What marvels might we have achieved together as friends?'
'Kyorin showed me how the Army of Shadows flies like locusts from sphere to sphere, reducing the land to a husk before moving on.'
'I once heard the great sage theorize that they are getting better at controlling the convulsions of our world as they consume it. Who knows, with enough millennia to practise, perhaps they will have learnt how to live within the cycle of life by the time they reach the very last unharvested celestial sphere that spins around the sun. They will have all our ghosts to teach them.'
'It won't come to that,' insisted Molly. 'We'll stop them, Sandwalker. Trust me. It's what my people do best, killing and fighting.'
'Carnivores,' sighed Sandwalker. 'Well, we have tried everything else over the centuries. Now it seems we shall have to trust your people to do what they do best.'
After the nomad had eased away the worst of the pain inside Molly's head, she went to sit next to Coppertracks, who – if the swirling patterns of energy inside his skull were anything to go by – had something occupying his own mind.
'A penny for your thoughts, old steamer. Are you worried about Quatershift's involvement with the expedition now that you know the truth about Keyspierre and Jeanne?'
'No I am not, Molly softbody. That Quatershift would involve someone like Keyspierre in the expedition is wholly predictable of that paranoid nation. I have a deeper concern, one concerning the rituals of Gear-gi-ju.'
'I saw you calling your ancestors' spirits earlier today,' said Molly. 'You need to be careful how much oil you shed at your age.'
'Calling, indeed, but calling without any answer at all, dear mammal. I have never experienced the like of this before – ignored for one calling, yes, but like this? Night after night, day after day of complete emptiness as I toss my cogs. It is as if the Steamo Loas have, to speak plainly, completely forsaken me here.'
'There is the distance to consider,' said Molly. 'How many million miles are we from the Steammen Free State here on Kaliban?'
'Physical distance means nothing to my ancestors,' explained Coppertracks. 'They exist outside distance in the realm of the spirits. No, there is something else to account for this void, something that I am missing. I cannot believe the people of the metal's ancestors have abandoned me in this land. So much is strange about this wasteland the Army of Shadows have created. There is something terribly wrong here, and it is staring me directly in my vision plate, yet I cannot see it.'
Molly had no answer for her friend.
If even the gods of the steammen had forsaken Molly and her friends in the dark wastelands of the Army of Shadows, what did that say about the expedition's chances of success on Kaliban, now?
Sandwalker was leading the expedition along the dunes in the welcome shade of fluted columns of basalt – giant anthills towering as high as any Middlesteel tower – when Coppertracks stopped, his tracks entangled in something. As he pulled at what was caught up in his caterpillar treads, a series of cables was revealed and a black box fell out of the side of the crumbling rock of the basalt, yanked free by the steamman's efforts.
Seeing what had happened, Sandwalker came running back. 'Don't touch the box!'
Coppertracks gingerly placed it on the sand.
'Is it a snare or the like?' Duncan asked, helping the steamman untangle the cable from his treads.
The Kal nomad shook his head. He picked up the box and examined it, then pushed it back into the face of the basalt rise. 'An old fibre communication line. Our tribes had them hidden around the desert, but the Army of Shadows discovered the cables and adjusted their machines to detect the mechanism of light transmission we had believed was secure. It was centuries ago, but we lost half the free Kal before we realized how the slats were suddenly finding our caravans and hidden bases.'
'I wonder if they were doing the same back in Jackals?' said Molly. 'Reading our crystalgrid messages before they attacked, learning about us?'
'Undoubtedly,' said Sandwalker. 'The masters do not like to leave such things to chance when they lay their plans.'
'Fate has been blessed unkind to your people for you to live like this,' said the commodore. 'Scuttling across the sands, always an eye open for the enemy, fearful even of sending a message, where every stranger of your race you meet might be hiding a fearful set of fangs to sink into your flesh.'
'It is certainly not any way of life we would wish for our young,' smiled Sandwalker. 'Stop here for a rest. Eat your food but conserve the water, we have little left.'
In the lee of a rise now, the expedition members did not need further urging. Even sitting in the shade they found the arid heat draining. They were travelling day and night, trying to keep ahead of the slats. Molly brushed the sand off her billowing white trousers and made her seat on the gravel of the rise.
Keyspierre passed the sack of food he had been given back in Iskalajinn to the nomad. Sandwalker rummaged around gratefully in the bag and removed one of the long bean-like vegetables, squeezing a green pod out of its end to chew on. 'You are very generous in your sharing. You should eat more of these yourself, Keyspierre. They contain a juice which helps your body retain water.'
'Alas, compatriot, I am an unashamed carnivore,' said Keyspierre. 'I shall stick to my tinned fare, even though Jackelian canned beef is far removed from fine steak that has been shown the flames of a fire for the requisite two minutes.'
Molly could see that the nomad found the idea of what was inside their supply cans quite disgusting, almost as strange as the idea that something as precious as tin would be used just to preserve rations.
Watching Keyspierre spoon out lumps of jellied meat, the commodore began to sing one of the oldest Jackelian drinking songs, each verse hummed out between swigs from his canteen. 'Should the shifties dare invade us; thus armed with our poles; we'll bang their bare ribs; make their lantern jaws ring. For you beef-eating, beer-eating Jackelians are sorts; who will shed their last blood for their country and king.'
Molly met his eyes and the commodore fell to silence. Keyspierre hadn't risen to the bait, but at this rate, one of them was going to run the other through before they reached the lair of the great sage.
Sandwalker led them across the shifting sands of the dunes for two more days and nights. Then they climbed an escarpment to a sandstone plateau where they were presented with dramatic views of whirling, tornado-like storms scouring the desert floor below. One of the ravines they passed contained a thin scrub of vegetation and a pool of water, but the nomad refused to allow them to go down, saying only that the tarn was a false oasis, containing creatures twisted by the Army of Shadows. Traps, always traps. Climbing through the maze of gorges and gullies was time-consuming, but the alternative
– risking the low floor of the desert with its dust devils – was too dangerous to contemplate. Those storms could rip apart even the nomad's tough tent fabric and would scour the flesh off the Jackelians' bones within minutes if they were caught in the open.
Luckily for the expedition, the height of the plateau also allowed Sandwalker to use another of the devices from his pack, a flimsy kettle-sized pyramid of transparent panels that he would religiously assemble and leave outside their tent each night. By morning a thin trickle of water had formed inside a plate in the pyramid's centre, capturing the dew of the sunrise, and he would refill their dwindling canteens as best he could.
On their fourth day crossing the plateau they spied a pair of silver machines walking across the desert floor on a nest of whipping, cantilevered metal tentacles, bodies like teardrops pockmarked by round smoking holes. The tentacles looked like magnified versions of the organic ones Molly had seen on the masters' bodies in Kyorin's memories. Molly couldn't tell exactly how large the machines were, but to be able to see them stumbling through the desert at this distance, they had to be truly massive. For once, Sandwalker didn't require that the expedition members scurry off and conceal themselves in a ravine. These were blind, stupid machines, part of the masters' network of devices to tame the atmosphere and stop Kaliban's weather from turning more vicious than it already appeared.
Every extra day burning under the Kaliban sky only stiffened Molly's resolve. If they couldn't find a way of defeating the Army of Shadows here, then this life would become the fate of the Jackelians' descendants. Living feral like rodents, crawling in-between the Army of Shadows' cities and surviving on whatever crumbs they could scavenge from their soiled world. It didn't matter that Molly was a mere shadow compared to the power she had possessed when she had piloted the Hexmachina. Nor were the petty rivalries of her world's nationalities of consequence – they had no home under this boiling Kaliban sky. Here, Molly and her friends could be only prey or predator.