by Stephen Hunt
A day after they had left the plateau behind, Molly began to suffer additional physical side effects from carrying the weight of Kyorin's memories. As well as the headaches, she was struck by bouts of muscle cramps, nausea and drowsiness. She was slowing them down, now, and in a territory they needed to pass through fast. They were traversing an area of sand mists, grains that had been beaten as light as flour by the sun and the storms, and which now blew as a fine silicate across the Aard Ailkalmer Issah. Even the name of the territory being pronounced by Sandwalker was painful to Molly, the alien Kal syllables echoing like a battering ram inside her skull.
By the third day Molly started to suffer waking hallucinations, seeing faces briefly in the shadows and dust hazes, hideous leering goblin-like devils that might have belonged to the dark gods from before the Circlist enlightenment. She would flinch in alarm and swear at them before they snapped back to being mere shadows of rocks.
Sandwalker insisted Molly suck on strips of blue salt and chew the bitter pods from the vegetables in his supplies to help alleviate the symptoms – her heated brain made increasingly susceptible to sunstroke. But Molly could tell from the way the nomad looked at her now that he was seriously worried about her condition. It seemed as if Keyspierre's prediction that her affliction would become a burden to the expedition was proving correct after all. The pain inside Molly's mind swelled and ebbed. Increasingly when the pain was on the rise, she would become confused, her mind experiencing things that had once happened to Kyorin as if they were happening to her now, or seeing things that made no sense at all. Once, she even thought she had come across Duncan hiding behind a basalt column and talking to his precious battered travel case as if he was expecting an answer. She was going mad, slowly. Then not so slowly at all.
Molly caught Keyspierre looking at her as they trudged along the dunes, his eyes deceitful and narrow under the turban that protected his face from the blowing dust.
'Stop looking at me!' Molly shouted.
'Compatriot?'
'I know what you are planning to do.'
Duncan Connor was ahead of Molly, holding a guide rope to stop them becoming separated in the endless floating sand haze. 'Are you all right, lassie?'
'He's planning to kill me!'
Duncan looked back at Keyspierre. 'What are you about, man?'
Molly threw herself towards the uplander. 'Keyspierre's planning to slip a cushion over my face and smother me in the tent tonight so I don't slow us down, or he'll cut my rope and leave me to wander alone out here. Anything, Duncan, anything to ensure we get to reach the great sage. All for the people, they must prevail. The people.'
'Molly,' said the ex-soldier, feeling her forehead. 'You're burning up, lassie.'
'Don't let him kill me! Duncan, please, I saved your life from a blazing sail-rider rig back in Middlesteel, now's your chance to repay me by saving mine.'
'There are a good few in this blasted land that deserve to die, compatriot,' said Keyspierre, coming towards her, 'but I do not count you among their number.'
Molly took a step back and fell over something buried in the sand. 'Liar, you dirty shiftie liar. You'll kill us all to make sure you reach the great sage!'
Sandwalker appeared out of the haze. Unslinging his canteen and helping Molly to her feet, he was about to offer her a sip from his water, but then he spotted what she had tripped over and stopped, his eyes widening in shock. Jutting out was a long fused tube of sand that had been petrified into glass. 'This is fresh.'
Duncan Connor knelt down and examined the glass. 'It's not the spoor of one of the kelpies that live out here, is it?'
'A beast,' said Sandwalker. 'But not a living creature. This is the sand flash left from a lightning strike on the dunes. There is a permanent pizo-electrical storm we call the Beast, but it normally rotates eight hundred miles north of here. The masters' systems are truly failing if the storm has moved so far south.'
Molly tried to break out of line and flee into the haze, but Commodore Black caught her and pulled her back. 'No, lass, that's not our way.'
'Keyspierre wants us to die,' insisted Molly. 'He knew the storm was here. You have seen what his people are capable of, Jared. He wants the great sage's weapon just for Quatershift, not for us. We all have to die.'
'I'll not lighten that secret policeman's reputation,' said Commodore Black, 'but this is your fever speaking, lass. Your imagination is swinging wild on the yardarm with your sickness.'
Why couldn't the commodore see what Keyspierre was doing, was planning to do to them all? He was so dangerous.
'We don't have time for Molly to rest,' said Sandwalker. 'We must be skirting the fringes of the stormfront or we would already be dead. We have to clear the basin and the storm area before we are-'
His words were cut off by a tremendous burst of light in the sand haze, an ozone stench and a sound like a cannon being given the fuse right next to their ears. Coppertracks' sole remaining mu-body was blown apart by the lightning strike, cut in two, sent spinning into the dunes.
A wave of aftershock from the discharge rippled through the sand haze, making the skin along Molly's hand twitch as if someone were pinching it.
They had met the Beast and they were balancing inside its maw.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
With a scraping sound, the lid of Purity's crate was wrenched off, blinding her with the sudden flood of light. Pulling her aching body out of the crate, Purity saw she was in a room lit by a solitary gaslight on a circular table. And there! There was the one-legged jigger who had attacked her, accompanied by a steamman, an old four-armed affair wearing a leather apron over his iron chest, hung with hammers, pins, scissors and other tools of the cobbler's trade.
'What-?'
'Quieten down,' said the apprentice boy. 'We had to hide you. There were men looking for you who thought they had seen you come into the shop.'
Purity rubbed at her swollen eyes, the skin of her face red and peeling where the apprentice had drugged her with his rag.
'Leather cleaner,' noted the apprentice. 'As good as a teeth-puller's gas if you're not wearing a cobbler's mask.'
'Or don't have a boiler heart not much subject to the vagaries of atmospheric composition,' said the steamman. 'My name is Cam Quarterplate and this young softbody is my apprentice, Watt.'
'What in the name of the Circle are you doing?' Purity shouted. 'Those men at the front of the shop were my friends.'
'The men who came looking for you weren't the ones you went walking down the hill with, that's so,' said Watt. 'They were the chief's men, damson.'
'Chief?' said Purity. 'What chief? Are you two foot-shodders completely mad?'
'That's what the softbody who now runs the town calls himself,' said Quarterplate, his twin stacks nervously quivering out a trail of smoke, his voicebox set low to a whisper. 'They came out of Middlesteel, a horde of them. Convicts, we think. From Bonegate or one of the other large prisons. Wainsmouth belongs to them now.'
Watt nodded sadly. 'And everyone inside the walls is as good as their slave. Rumours I heard in town say their chief used to be a leech-monger, a doctor who was waiting the rope in Bonegate for poisoning rich patients after the carriage folk had changed their wills to favour him.'
'But there are soldiers outside the gates,' said Purity, shocked, 'and that vast u-boat sitting in your harbour…' 'There are men dressed in uniform outside the gate. Our garrison cleared out months ago with the rest of the army to march east to the war in Quatershift,' said Watt. 'And the chief's brutes took the Spartiate's crew just like they've taken all you refugees. The Spartiate sailed into harbour looking for fuel. Except we haven't got any, of course. If we did, the chief and his men would have seized the u-boat and sailed off to Concorzia like all the bloody guardians did when the capital and parliament fell to the Army of Shadows.'
'This is no free town,' said Cam Quarterplate, the outrage seeping through his voicebox. 'The only freedom we have here is to be made deactivate if
we go against the chief. That duplicitous fastblood has made a deal with the slat creatures.'
'Don't you see, damson?' protested Watt. 'We don't have the victuals to feed a tenth of the people who have come to camp outside Wainsmouth's gates. You refugees come here with supplies, the chief's men steal them off you, and then you leave as food. Food and slave labour for the slats. There are not enough of the bloody monsters in Jackals for the Army of Shadows to hunt down everyone yet, but when people on the road hear of our free town and the free feeds down in Wainsmouth's warehouses, they all make their way here readily enough. The slats are licking the bugs off the flypaper in Wainsmouth.'
'Will one of you two please tell me what happened to my friends?'
Watt cast his eyes ashamedly to the floor. 'They've been drugged, damson. Not everyone survives the dose of what they slip in the warehouse food, but them that does is paralysed for about a week. Your friends will be chained up in the sea fort's dungeons. No RAN airships come calling here now, but the Army of Shadows does. Every week, in those ugly hovering aerostats they rattle through the sky in, with nets underneath to carry away all their slaves and meat.'
'It is true,' agreed the steamman.
'But they don't know you're here, damson,' continued Watt. 'They've already searched our shop for you, when you were nailed inside the crate. You're not on the worker count, you won't be missed here. If we can get you out of Wainsmouth… you have to find the people coming here, tell them what will happen to them – spread the truth about the last free town!'
'They'll know I'm here, all right,' said Purity. 'When I free my friends.'
'Don't be stupid, damson,' begged Watt. 'The chief's men are animals. When they stormed the town they made our defenders strip, then they covered our fencibles and the county police in oil and burnt them down in the square like it was bloody Smoking Prester Charles Night, made everyone in the town watch it, too, so we'd know what we'd get if we went against them again. If they catch you, you'll end up just like the people we find floating in the harbour after they've been tossed from the sea fort.'
'Oh, those poor fastbloods,' said Quarterplate, the iron fingers on his four hands flickering in dismay. 'The sounds that drift across from the sea fort at night. It's enough to make one deactivate one's sound baffles. Those poor, poor people.'
'My people,' said Purity.
Watt and Quarterplate ducked as Purity extended her arm and her sword burst out of its sheepskin wrap and flew across the room to wallop into her hand. The cobbler's backroom suddenly did not seem so dark, the light of the maths-blade scouring away the shadows.
'My people!' she yelled.
The man sitting on the old mayoral chair of Wainsmouth had more of the manner of a king than a mayor, even if he had completely failed to dress for the part. He reclined against the cushioned chair-back sporting a tattered officer's uniform looted from the regiments, covered by a sheepskin waistcoat, while a dark stovepipe hat warmed his bald white scalp. At his feet a woman was chained to the floor.
Two thugs dressed as redcoats dragged Purity Drake's bruised and bleeding body closer so he could get a better look at the prisoner.
'I'm flattered,' said the chief, sizing up Purity. 'Most of the occupants of this miserable little town are trying to scale the walls to get out every night. But you, my fancy, you actually have the temerity to try to scale my fort's walls to face me.'
'What do you want done with her?' asked one of his thugs.
'I don't suppose you can converse on any learned subject with distinction – music, contemporary theatre, any literature other than penny dreadfuls? No? Circle forbid I should actually find any source of diversion here.'
Purity spat a gob of blood onto the floor from her swollen mouth. 'Did that amuse you? Let's talk about you dying, you hairless slug.'
'Not on my rug, you filthy young ruffian,' sighed the chief, averting his eyes in disgust. Two of the bruisers in his court of convicts ran forward, vying to be the one to clean away the mess. 'You know, your voice puts me in mind of a singer at the capital's pleasure gardens, Fanny Thornhill – I never cared much for her arias. A little too strident for my taste.'
One of the chief's men came into the chamber ill-dressed as a county constable, pushing Cam Quarterplate and his apprentice Watt in front of him.
'You should not have done this wicked thing, Watt,' quivered the steamman.
'I assure you,' said the chief, 'he should have done.' He pointed down at Watt. 'May I presume, my fancy, that this is the part of our sad play's script where you beg me for money or a position in my little fighting force of felons?'
'I just want my ma back,' said Watt. 'You've got her here in your cells.'
'Good grief,' said the chief, lifting his stovepipe hat to rub at a rash on his bald pate. 'The tastes of some of my brutes. I do hope she's fairer in complexion than you.'
Purity struggled in the grip of the guards, trying to lunge at Watt. But they were too strong, and Purity had taken quite a beating when they captured her scaling the sea fort's walls. 'You jigging little foot-shodder, you said you would help me!'
'You, you're as mad as a bag full of weasels,' laughed Watt. 'Waving some rusty old sabre about and raving on about how you're the true ruler of the kingdom. You were going to get yourself killed anyway, now at least I can use you to help get my family back.'
'I believe I'm currently occupying the position of the last ruler of Jackals,' said the chief. 'Monarch of the ruins and rubble and rats and all else that is crude and base. That is all that is true here, now the veil has at long last dropped away from civilization's unsightly face. But I'm afraid there's only room for one chief. Bring that foolish little thing towards me.'
The thugs forced Purity forwards and down to her knees while the chief rummaged in a black surgeon's bag by the side of his makeshift throne. 'Kill or cure, it's an old quandary. Now, here I have the very thing I gave my third wife. A connoisseur's choice.' He grabbed Purity by the cheek and stuffed something inside her mouth, then closed her nostrils until she choked and swallowed it.
He held his hands out regally, one of the thugs running over to clean them with a hot towel. 'That's a very rare fungus called Shadowjack's Kiss. When it is dried and crumbled, a few grains of it mixed with mercury can cure the sweating sickness.' He waved Purity away from his presence. 'Bed her down in the cells. She'll begin to suffocate in an hour when her throat is too distended to admit air into her lungs. Make sure one of you dogs calls me to the cells to observe the girl's symptoms well before she goes purple. She'll only have five minutes of really first-rate choking for me to see before her end.'
Purity tried to say something, but she was still coughing and gagging from the slimy, foul-tasting toadstool. Her tongue was heating up as if someone had rested a hot poker on it.
The chief indicated Watt. 'I also have a prescription for our little one-legged cobbler. Take him down to the cells with the girl, find the little snitch's mother and make him watch while you cut her throat, then you may cut the young rascal's for his troubles.'
The chief's thugs dragged Purity away with the two cobblers, the young apprentice struggling and screaming in anger at his betrayal while the court of convicts laughed, jeered and poked at them on the way out.
'Well,' said the chief, as his three prisoners vanished. 'You can't do right by doing wrong, can you?'
'And the old steamer…?' asked a guard.
'He's saved us the trouble of rounding him up with the others,' said the chief. 'The blue-skin who arrived with the slats brought fresh instructions. All steammen inside the walls to be held ready in chains for transport by the time the next quota is due.'
His lieutenant looked surprised. 'They can't bloody eat them too, can they?'
'I rather think they are displaying the instincts of a mechomancer in this matter,' said the chief, drawing an imaginary scalpel blade through the air. 'I'm sure they'll tease a few of King Steam's secrets out of the people of the metal before the last of
them has been dissected.'
The chief nudged the woman chained by his feet and she brushed back her elaborate coiffure and picked up the book she had been reading aloud, Purges, Physics, Clysters and other Allied Sciences.
'Read on from page two twenty, my fancy, cutting for stones.'
One of the henchmen coughed nervously.
'Speak,' commanded the chief.
'We're a little shy on our quota this week. We could always pass the cobbler's lad to the slats…'
'Oh really, is that all?' The chief waved his underling's concern away and indicated to the woman that she should continue reading. 'I have faith that there will be more people banging at the town's gates by tomorrow. The fecundity of the filthy poor, breeding, always breeding. If there is one thing there is always an abundance of in this doleful life, it's the sight of the great unwashed masses befouling your doorstep. Trust me on that.'
Trust him. After all, he had once been one of Middlesteel's most distinguished doctors.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Abolt of electricity flashed down the dunes and erupted behind the expedition, showering Molly in sand, making the red haze they were running through sputter with dispersing energy like crackling popping on a roasting pig.
The sand had never seemed so untraversable as Molly desperately tried to keep up with Commodore Black and Coppertracks over the slow, sucking dunes. Anything but fall back alongside Keyspierre. If Molly slipped out of sight of the others for a moment the shiftie would try to murder her, she could see just how he would arrange it. So easy. Trip her and push her face into the sand, strangle her and leave her corpse to be claimed by the shifting sands or fried to ashes by the lightning storm. Just another victim of the Beast, like Coppertracks' decapitated drone.
Poor Molly Templar, so unfortunate, dying on the expedition she had been the catalyst for. An adventure too far for the foolish author and her friends, overreaching her talents, overestimating her resources and fortitude. Just a sad little workhouse girl made good whose luck had finally run out. But would there be anyone left in Jackals to mourn her? No! Keep hold of the line; don't lose sight of the others.