The rise of the Iron Moon j-3

by Stephen Hunt

  Around Molly the dust haze was thickening, coalescing under the fury of the Beast's pizo-electric whipping, almost a sandstorm now. Shelter, her burning mind's Kal instincts screamed at her. No, don't dig down. To camp inside the maw of the Beast would be to invite disaster, death from the wild scourging energy. Molly flinched as there was a triple crack, a wave of bright light flaring ahead of her, geysers of sand blowing back from the Beast's assault. Then she was walking over cracking glass, the sand-flash so fresh it was still hot. Steam from the slagged sand assaulted her nostrils and a wave of nausea lurched inside her. It smelt like hog's pudding – barley and pig's offal baked inside pastry. But that was just a trick of her nose, surely, her senses distorting everything? Molly bent over and began to vomit. This was no good. How much water was she expelling out of her gut along with her last meal? The expedition was almost out of water now, and food too.

  A figure emerged out of the sand haze, like a sketch from the Middlesteel Illustrated News. A pieman opening his barrow to expose the hot charcoals at the bottom of his iron box.

  'I don't want hog's pudding,' heaved Molly as the seller indicated his fare.

  Molly screamed. It was Purity Drake's head lying inside the pie-seller's barrow, human limbs piled alongside. The slats, the slats were devouring Purity, consuming everything Molly cared about in the kingdom.

  The lines of the pieman's sketch danced and reformed into Keyspierre's face. He was shaking her. 'Compatriot!'

  'The pieman's fare,' said Molly. 'It was human meat.'

  'Your line, compatriot.'

  Molly looked down. The guide cable she was holding was smoking at the end, unconnected to the rest of the expedition. That last lightning strike must have sheared it. Sweet Circle, she was alone with Keyspierre, the others blundering ahead somewhere in the sand haze, still following on behind Sandwalker.

  Molly slipped out her knife. 'Purity was trying to warn me.'

  Keyspierre stepped out of the way as Molly lunged at him, the blade passing through the space his chest had been occupying a second ago. 'Not going to cook me, not going to chew on my ribs, you jigging shiftie scum!'

  'You've lost your mind, woman!' Keyspierre caught Molly's wrist and moved to one side, twisting her around and making the knife fall out of her hand; but she had seen what he was doing and had slipped the treacherous Quatershiftian agent's own blade out of his belt with her other hand. She slashed at him with it, cutting his arm, then tossed the knife into her right hand and went for his gut before he could register the switch. He wanted to cook her flesh, but it was going to be his organs lying spilled on the sands. Then she was tumbling through the air. The damn secret policeman had second-guessed her move, converting her movement into a – she thumped down hard on the sand, Keyspierre's weight smashing onto her back before she could get up.

  Keyspierre pushed Molly's face down into the blanket of sand, his left hand reaching around to encompass her neck, strangling her. Choking sand spilled into her mouth and she tasted salty grit as she lost consciousness. Salt. Salt to season Molly for the fire the Quatershiftian agent was going to cook her flesh over.

  ***

  Purity was dragged along the damp dripping length of the sea fort's dungeon level, the old supply cellars fastened with iron chains around the doors, faces of human produce pressed up against the bars or sprawled inside, paralysed by the criminally insane doctor's drugs. That was one thing you could say about an army of convicts, they knew how to lock down tight the unfortunates who were to be the slats' fodder.

  Purity could feel her throat swelling, the muscles burning around her neck, growing increasingly numb as the poison the chief had stuffed into her worked its bile inside her.

  'Shall we toss her in with the sailors from the Spartiate?' one of Purity's escorts asked the turnkey.

  'No, chief wants the crew kept to themselves, in case we turn up some fuel later. Chuck her in with the rest of the meat.'

  'She won't be shipping out with the Army of Shadows,' explained the guard, twisting Purity's arm further behind her back to stop her from thrashing. 'She's only got until the end of the hour. She's been "cured" right enough by him upstairs.'

  'Best we keep her fresh, then.' The turnkey beat a rifle butt against the door's bars, making the few prisoners that were on their feet retreat in fear. 'Back, you vermin. You might be dinner, but we've got dessert here, and we'll be wanting her out again in a bit.'

  Watt and Cam Quarterplate were being shoved along the corridor a few steps behind Purity.

  'When my friend opens the dungeon door, you point out your ma, just as quick as you like,' threatened the appren-tice's guard, waving a knife in front of the two cobblers. 'Otherwise you'll find out what else this is good for cutting off before you croak.'

  'But my ma's your wife, that's so,' spat Watt, who had taken some lumps on the way down the sea fort's steps himself. 'My dad gave her a little of the hey-jiggerty while you were locked inside Bonegate Gaol.'

  Watt was slammed against the wall and the guard was about to make good on his threat, but Purity was close enough to Cam Quarterplate now. She gestured in the air and her maths-blade leapt out of the steamman's vertical stack, her sword glowing white-hot from the superheated exhaust of Quarterplate's boiler heart. There was a brief burning agony as Purity seized the grip before she used its power to transmute the heat into a flash of blinding light. Watt had his eyes closed, and, as agreed, his master had flipped the cover of his vision plate down – but for the guards, that flash was the last thing they were going to see.

  Purity hardly needed the part of her that was Elizica of the Jackeni to show her the thrusts and steps of the dance – the feathery burden of the maths-blade curving and twisting and carving. When she was finished, six men lay dead at her feet. It took a second more to direct the sword's force along her own body and isolate the swelling tide of the poison making her throat muscles bloat and turn purple. Her blade passed the chemical signature of the ascomycete toxin through her mind and she twisted at its bonds, snapping the chains of the chemical as easily as if she was breaking a necklace of daises.

  Then silence apart from the cries of the seagulls flying on the other side of the fort's thick walls. Outside the dungeon door the two cobblers were staring at Purity in shock. The way she must once have looked at Oliver Brooks, the Hood-o'the-marsh, before the strange young man's existence had been joined with the land and her terrible blade.

  'That was vengeance,' said Purity, shaking.

  'That much was clear, Purity softbody,' said the steamman.

  'How did you know?' asked Watt, looking at the deadguards at his feet in horror. 'How did you know this scum wouldn't send me and old Cam back to the town for turning you in?'

  'I had a life of people like the chief telling me what to do,' said Purity, sadly, 'back in the Royal Breeding House. That's just how his kind use power, when they have it.'

  'You are the queen,' said Watt, looking at Purity's strange glowing sword. 'Sweet bloody Circle, I don't know whether I should hug you or throw a brick at you.'

  'I have the land's blade and the lion's heart,' said Purity. She slashed at the chain securing the dungeon door, sending the thick iron links splashing out in a cloud of liquid metal. 'And my Jackelians are not a people to die quietly as they are dragged to the butcher's block.'

  The few prisoners who had recovered from their paralysis fled to the damp walls inside the chamber Purity had forced open. Purity banished the darkness with her sword's fire. And there in the light were the Bandits of the Marsh. She burnt the toxin within their bodies, burnt it inside all the prisoners until they had recovered the use of their limbs, standing up sweating and groggy; or, in the case of the four Bandits of the Marsh, as furious as a swarm of wasps trapped under a cider glass and then released.

  Purity looked at her fuming bandits. 'You said back in the valley of the war gas that we didn't have time to sort out the lesser evils on the way to fight the greater one. Do you still feel the same w
ay?'

  'You are learning, I think,' coughed Ganby, rubbing life back into his numb legs. 'And not just about the mastery of conversion a maths-blade gives you.'

  'You no longer have to ask me,' said Jenny Blow, bending her knee in front of Purity. 'You can now command me.'

  'I have had my bellyful of this place,' spat Samuel Lancemaster, pressing on his cuirass and ejecting his knuckle-duster, sending the waking prisoners stumbling back crying in alarm as he extended it out to a spear twice his height. 'I have been conscious for hours, listening paralysed to the cries of sobbing children in the dark and the threats from those honourless cowards outside that dare style themselves brigands.'

  Jackaby Mention looked down at Purity's bare feet. 'Yet you still have no shoes, my queen.'

  Bare feet are conscious of the land. They feel the bones of Jackals, connect with the blood of the world. You will know when the time is right for shoes.

  'No,' said Purity. 'But I have an army here and a navy in the dungeon down the corridor waiting to be cut out of their chains.'

  And it was time to use them.

  Ganby inspected the spear. It had been a most impressive throw, straight through the chief's chest and two of his toadies, to land embedded in the metre-thick casement of the sea fort; the part of the fort's wall that hadn't been reduced to rubble by the JNS Spartiate's cannons when the u-boat's crew had been reunited with their gun mounts. It was no wonder Samuel Lancemaster had to wedge his boots against the wall to retrieve the spear. Extricating themselves from the now truly free town of Wainsmouth might be a little trickier, however.

  Ganby shook his head at the sight of the gathering crowds coming out along the harbour slope onto the walkways and surviving Martello towers of the sea fort. Even the townspeople who hadn't fought to chase the chief's men back into the surrounding hills when they realized the u-boat was on their side. Perhaps especially them, as well as all the fools who had taken the Army of Shadows' appearance as a sign of the breaking of the Circle and the end times.

  How they begged and pleaded with Purity Drake to stay and make their town her capital. Soon they would be bringing sick children to Purity and asking for the queen's touch to cure them. The gullibility of the desperate. But did Ganby have the right to look down on their superstitions? He had traded on many of the same deep needs when he had been wearing a druid's robes. Pah, so much for the Circlist heresy and their half-witted humanist religion without gods. When the kingdom's people had stopped believing in the druids' many deities they had not begun believing in nothing, they had started believing in anything.

  Purity stood on the ruined floor of what had been the chief's throne room to make her address to the mob.

  'Your town's walls may feel safe.' Purity's voice carried out beyond the cry of the seagulls. 'But they are an illusion, the illusion of safety and comfort and the familiar. The slats will come tomorrow and if we kill them still more will turn up when they realize this town is no longer a nest of collaborators.'

  'Where then?' someone called. 'Where can we go?'

  'Back to the land!' Purity called. 'You are the sons and daughters of Jackals and your land will shelter you. The regiments have failed you, the slats hold sway over our sky, and so this must be a guerrilla war from now on. The forests and mountains will shield you and you will prey on the slats before they prey on you.'

  'Stay!' the crowd begged. 'Lead us into the land.'

  Purity held her sword out. 'I am the land and the land is me. My path lies north, into the heartland of the Army of Shadows. I intend to take our u-boat and drive this blade into the chest of every slat that stands between me and the destruction of that red abomination squatting in our heavens. Those of you that have any fight left in you, those of you that have the taste for vengeance, you'll find your fill of it if you follow me into the foe's heartland.'

  A u-boatman in the crowds pointed down to the Spartiate's black hull bobbing in the harbour. 'Our old girl only has enough expansion engine gas left in her tanks to run the screws for half an hour, maybe an hour at most. You'd be lucky to reach Hundred Locks in her.'

  Purity bent down and picked up a drinking glass from the floor, placing it on a collapsed column. The oversized flagon only had a lick of red wine left in its bottom. She held her maths-blade over it and the dribble of wine began to bubble and froth, rising higher and higher until a stream of it was spilling over the edge and flooding out across the debris-strewn concrete. Ganby had to stop himself tutting aloud as people jostled in the crowd to try to get a taste of the wine, crying that this torrent was their queen of legend's own blood.

  'Her tanks can be made full,' said Purity. 'As can her cannons, and her torpedo tubes – but that means nothing unless I can fill her decks with stout Jackelians with the heart to teach the Army of Shadows what it means to invade our country. To teach them why they will never count themselves masters of this land as long as one free Jackelian remains alive to stand against them. Can I fill her?'

  The crowd yelled their approval.

  'Can I fill her?' Purity held her sword aloft and the sun turned it to fire as a shaft of light broke through the clouds to strike the roaring crowds out on the ruined sea fort.

  Ganby nodded in approval. They would need all the help they could get. The chief's force of convicts might have spared many of the u-boat's ratings from the Army of Shadows' hunger, but they certainly hadn't been planning on taking along the Spartiate's marines. Replacements for the troops that had been fed to the slats would have to come from the town's volunteers. Yes, Purity was doing well. She had asked Ganby on the journey here why Elizica of the Jackeni was no longer coming to her in waking dreams and visions. Purity only had to stare in a mirror to see the answer to that question.

  The disgraced druid walked over towards Purity as the surviving senior officer they had freed from the Spartiate – a first lieutenant of the fleet sea arm, his uniform caked in dust from the assault – emerged to talk with the queen.

  He was indicating some of the men in striped sailor's shirts in the crowd. 'They've got families in the fishing villages down the coast – wives, children. They've asked to be excused to see how they fare before they join our venture.'

  Purity looked at the collection of sailors, respectfully clutching the round hats decorated with the crest of the Spartiate in their hands. 'You want to go back for your children?'

  'What man wouldn't, damson?' said a boatswain.

  'What man wouldn't?' echoed Purity, sadly. 'Let them go. But we will sail when we sail.'

  'You know what many of them will find out there,' said Ganby as he came up to the queen.

  'They are leaving as fathers,' said Purity. 'But they will come back as avenging angels. When you have no family to worry your conscience, you have no fear.'

  'Please don't hold onto that hardness,' said Ganby. 'It is a bitter seed to plant within yourself.'

  'It was never planted by me,' said Purity. 'Those that sowed it are about to reap their harvest.'

  A cold autumn breeze came off the waters and chilled Ganby Meridian's bones. It would be colder still in the north. This girl had become their queen and now some small part of him wished that she had not. The u-boat officer and the surviving sailors were starting to make a way for Purity down to their vessel, but they needn't have bothered – Ganby watched the queen walking through the crowds, the people of Wainsmouth parting like a sea for her.

  Samuel Lancemaster came up to Ganby and planted the foot of his newly retrieved spear alongside the druid's boots. 'We're out of our time, druid, so much unfamiliar but so much the same.'

  'What did you expect?' said Ganby. 'A peaceful old man's death thousands of years ago would never have suited you or the other bandits; on a bed of straw, surrounded by grandchildren and pushed out under the stars to see the sky overhead one last time.'

  'You sound like such an end would have suited you just fine, druid. These people treat us like heroes now,' said Samuel. 'But if we save them, it won't take lo
ng for their fear of us to return and their gratitude to fade to a memory. Then we'll just be bandits hiding on the margins of the marsh waters again.'

  'There are worst things to be,' said Ganby, 'than fey.'

  'I know why you followed Elizica to sleep under the hills with us,' said Samuel. 'The druids you betrayed by fighting alongside us were not forgiving types, were they? They would have made a festival of your end, old man, for helping end their sway over the Jackeni.'

  'There are no druids in this land any longer; they are as lost to these people as the legends of the Bandits of the Marsh. But the Army of Shadows, now, they truly scare me. They are like wrathful gods in the heavens. When we fought the gill-necks they only wanted to usurp our rule over Jackals for their calflings' sakes, to make our territory their own. I understood their motives, even when I was digging spike pits on our beaches to kill them. But these dark ones, they would gnaw on the Kingdom of Jackals' bones until it is less than dust. I can feel the lifeforce of our land being drained, my sorceries fading along with it.'

  'You always did jump at your own shadow,' laughed Samuel. 'Now you have an army of them to worry about.'

  'Mock, then,' said Ganby, irritated. 'Your spear arm will be tested soon enough when we arrive at the bottom of their beanstalk.'

  'I have a bad feeling about this,' said Samuel in a fair imitation of the druid's voice before he walked off.

  Ganby held out his left hand flat in front of his face. It was trembling. He reached out with his right hand to hold it steady. There were worst things to be than a coward, too. Like dead.

  Purity saw Watt and Cam Quarterplate waiting for her on the other side of the sloping road outside their shop's bay windows. There were plenty of people in the street between them now; people loading up their possessions on carts and abandoning the town, others coming down to the harbour and the Spartiate with hunting rifles or the weapons the fleeing convicts had thrown aside. Purity crossed over to them and saw that Watt had a package under his arm.