THE RISE OF THE IRON MOON

STEPHEN HUNT

‘Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.’

Rabindranath Tagore

Contents

Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Epilogue By Stephen Hunt Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Purity Drake tried to struggle as the long needle of the syringe sank towards her arm, but the leather straps on the restraining table were binding her down too tight.

‘Try not to move,’ ordered the civil service surgeon operating the blood machine. ‘We really do need to take a clean sample this time.’ He looked across at the official from the Royal Breeding House. ‘She can talk, can’t she?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the breeder. ‘Her family madness comes and goes, but when she’s not fitting, she’s actually quite well-spoken, for one of them.’

Talk? Surely that was a hypothetical question right now. Purity wanted to swear and scream, but the restraining table was fitted with a rubber sphere that inserted itself in the prisoner’s mouth. After all, the civil service’s surgeons didn’t want their deliberations on bloodwork and which pedigree lines to crossbreed to be interrupted by abuse. She thrashed and tried to yell as the needle sank into her arm with a flare of pain, the glass tube of the syringe slowly turning crimson. She had been feeling faint enough before, on short rations for waking up the guards with her nightmares and her cries – and her rations really hadn’t been that generous to start with.

‘We’re under a lot of pressure to give this one a clean bill of health,’ said the breeder.

The Greenhall surgeon shrugged and tapped the transaction-engine drum rotating in the steam-driven blood machine. ‘I can only give you back what the machine says. How you choose to act on that information is up to you.’

‘Come on,’ pleaded the breeder. ‘You know how thin on the ground we are for fertile females. She’s just turned sixteen, we can’t afford to let—’

The surgeon tapped the vial of blood, making sure every last drop cleared into the siphon on his machine. ‘I can see precisely how thin on the ground you are. This family’s history of lunacy would never have been allowed to breed down another generation in the old days.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers. She’s the last one of her house; we can’t afford to let an entire royalist bloodline die out. Not now.’

The surgeon absently rubbed Purity’s black hair as if she was a cat. ‘Ah yes. The invasion.’

Ah yes. The invasion. Purity’s eyes welled with tears at the memory of it; the carnage in the Jackelian capital and the charnel house that the Royal Breeding House had been turned into by the invading troops. The choice her mother had been forced to make by the foreign soldiers from Quatérshift, between Purity and her half-brother. Which of the royalist prisoners was to be allowed to survive. No choice at all, you always went with a fertile female; they were almost guaranteed to be forced to have children, to continue the family line. Purity tried to close the memory off. Her mother and brother being marched into the Gideon’s Collar, the chack-chack-chack of the Quatérshiftians’ notorious killing machine, each report a bolt through the neck.

‘Pity about her madness, then,’ sighed the surgeon. ‘She’s pretty enough, all things considered. Very unusual to see eyes this pale and blue. Green used to be the most common colour for the royalists’ eyes, you know. A little piece of trivia. I collect them.’

Behind them, the blood machine began to rattle as a tape spool printed out its results.

‘Is she fit to be taken to stud?’ asked the breeder.

Purity struggled at the terrible thought of it, trying to break her bonds. Let her still be sick, with whatever illness was stopping them from treating her like a prize mare in season, even the fever of the family madness that had gripped her so tightly.

The surgeon shook his head, confused. ‘No, it’s another partial match for her. Less distinct than last time. Very odd. I can’t even confirm her identity against her house records, let alone declare her clean for your use.’

‘Your machine isn’t working,’ spat the breeder.

‘It was working well enough for the duke’s son I had in before,’ said the surgeon. ‘And I wager it’ll be working fine enough for the children I have in tomorrow.’ He rubbed the wound on Purity’s arm with a swab, a brief sting of alcohol. ‘What’s going on in inside you, eh? Your precious royal blood. We’ll do it the hard way, then. I’ll get her sample sent over to the department and they’ll check her bloodwork for diseases and the like. We don’t want the next prince to have six fingers, now do we?’

The breeder snorted. ‘We’ll need another massacre over here before the likes of her would be used to sire a prince. The royal family are mad enough already from inbreeding without throwing this one into the mix. No, any children we squeeze out of her will only be used to diversify the royal breeding pool around the edges. Hopefully we’ll be able to screen the worst of the lunacy out of her children if we can find her a suitable stud.’

Looking out through bars across the window, the surgeon folded the test results into his pockets. They were old-fashioned at the Royal Breeding House. No cursewalls laid by sorcerers. Just thirty feet of granite, the parapet patrolled by redcoats, their rifles slung over their shoulders and their shakos oiled against the rain.

The arm holding Purity’s gag in place rose with a squeaking of metal, and the breeder unlocked her restraints. ‘Thank the nice gentleman from Greenhall, then. It can’t be pleasant for a gentleman such as he, coming all the way out here to the fortress to see the likes of you.’

Purity rubbed her arm, pulling the featureless brown house-issue shawl back over her wound. ‘Thank you, sir, for taking the time to test me.’

It was a litany, really, like the oaths to parliament they made the royalist prisoners parrot in the brainwashing that passed for a school at the breeding house. The real farewell she invoked in her mind involved the needle on the machine and the surgeon from the civil service’s stinking Department of Blood loosing his footing. Purity tried not to scowl. Keep your face neutral, a mask. That was the way you got through each day. She watched the breeder ring the bell-pull for someone from her dormitory to come and take her away.

Wiggling her cold toes on the flagstones, Purity stared enviously at the plain brown shoes on the Greenhall man’s feet. Even a man’s shoes like these would do, any shoes. Something to keep out the chill of the Royal Breeding House’s stone floors.

‘Take her back to her hall,’ the breeder ordered the young girl who turned up at the door – another royalist prisoner.

‘I missed the dinner call for the test,’ Purity complained.

‘Back to your dormitory,’ snapped the breeder.

‘We didn’t get much,’ hissed the girl who had been sent to escort Purity, closing the door to the surgeon’s office. ‘All of Dorm Seven’s going hungry thanks to you.’

‘It’s the last day of short rations,’ pointed out Purity, but she could hear the paucity of the excuse even as it escaped her lips.

The dreams, the dreams of her madness. Purity had always suffered them, but they had grown so much more intense last month, as if the flaming firmament accompanying the brief passage of Ashby’s Comet across their skies had set fire to her mind. Now the thousand-year comet had sped past for another millennia-long circuit of the heavens, but its mortal effects remained – while she could get through most nights again without visions, without waking up the guards with her puking, there was still a gnawing raw emptiness in her gut.

Still, things could be worse. After the invaders from the Kingdom of Jackals’ eastern neighbour – that most perfidious of nations, Quatérshift – had broken into the breeding house and slaughtered half of the royalists a few years back, things had nudged a little to the better. The shortage of those of noble descent meant that parliament’s stooges couldn’t go as hard on the royalist prisoners as they once had. Why, when Purity had been ten, a punishment like short rations – shorties – would have meant going hungry for a month, not a week. There was a rumour that those held prisoner at the palace were even served watered-down beer for supper now, the iron in the drink good for warding off flu and fever. Purity didn’t believe it, though. Perhaps she’d bump into one of the royal family to ask the next time the palace grounds needed sweeping. Purity had known Queen Charlotte fairly well when the monarch had been a prisoner of the Royal Breeding House, though there was always the inverse snobbery of the house to contend with. While the rest of the kingdom loathed the imprisoned royal family with a passion in proportion to their inherited rank – bottles for a baron, eggs for an earl rang the cry of the stall holders in palace square on stoning day – the blueblood prisoners of the breeding house wore their ancient titles like badges of courage. Which was bad news for Purity Drake. Her ancestors had barely qualified as knighted squires when they had found themselves on the losing side of the ancient Jackelian civil war. Add to that the fact that Purity was a mongrel – the mysterious identity of her father the result of an unplanned liaison forbidden by parliament’s breeding programme – and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration to say that there were guards patrolling the breeding house with more status than her among the royalist prisoners.

The hard shove in the small of her back as they got to Dorm Seven was a frankly unnecessary reminder of her position. Purity’s heart sank as she saw the line of dorm mates waiting for her return. Emily was at their head, the self-appointed duchess of their dorm by virtue of her rank and her bulk. She had Purity’s shoes, looted from her mother’s few possessions after the massacre. They were faded and scuffed, but everyone knew whose shoes they were. Only the strong prospered in the breeding house. The rest made do with bare feet.

‘It’s the last day we’re on shorties,’ said Emily, ‘and we don’t want you shouting the odds tonight and bringing the guards down here again. We want to eat from full plates next week.’

‘I won’t wake the guards,’ promised Purity. ‘My nightmares have nearly passed now.’

‘I was hoping the surgeon would have twigged that you’re not one of us,’ said Emily. ‘That it was all a big mistake you being in the house at all.’

‘Mongrel peasant,’ called someone at the back. ‘Half-caste guard’s daughter!’

As Emily stood aside, Purity saw that the inmates of Dorm Seven had rolled the hard hemp blankets off their bunk beds and her heart sank in wretchedness.

‘The word of your sort doesn’t mean much to us, you understand.’ Emily pointed to their bunks lined up against the damp wall. ‘Time to walk the line, peasant.’

There were too many of them to fight back, and Purity knew it would only make things worse. The governor of the breeding house knew where collective punishment led: it led to the royalist prisoners keeping order among themselves – that was rather the point of it.

‘Walk the line. Walk the line,’ the chant began.

Purity sank to her knees and began to crawl under the line of bunks. A member of Dorm Seven stood at every gap and laid into her with knotted sheets as she emerged into the open, a few seconds of lashing pain before she dragged herself under the cover of the next bunk. Purity almost made it as far as the sixteenth bunk this time before the blackness of oblivion overtook her.

Kyorin leapt down the steps, the tranquillizer dart shattering above his head on the tavern sign swinging in the alley’s draught.

Damn this foul complex of garbage-littered rookeries. Middlesteel was confusing enough a city to those born and bred to its smog-ridden lanes, let alone to a visitor and his companion. A companion who seemed to be far fitter than Kyorin, far better able to leave their pursuers behind him.

The dart’s near miss gave Kyorin a second wind. His legs pumped harder and he nearly caught up with his companion, leaping over a couple of empty barrels tossed out of a jinn house, the smell of rancid water assaulting his nostrils. Kyorin was about to wheeze something but an outburst of crude drinking songs from the tavern behind them put him off. His companion redoubled his own efforts to escape, as if realizing that if Kyorin could catch up with him, then their pursuers – who lived for the hunt and the kill – would be close behind.

Steps led down to a wider street, just behind the course of the great river Gambleflowers. His comrade cut left in front of him and Kyorin followed. They really should have split up; Kyorin could have sprinted off in the opposite direction, hoping that the pursuit would only go after one of them, but he sensed that this would be death for him. Of course, Kyorin didn’t want to die, but he also suspected that of the two of them, it was he who had the best chance of making contact with those who could help their cause. This fast-footed ally of his was desert-born, wild, simple and able – unlike Kyorin – to put up a fight worthy of the name. Neither of them knew the other, but that was the way with a rebel cell structure, compartmentalized to minimize infiltration and betrayal. That they were both in the capital city of the Kingdom of Jackals and on the run from those that hunted them was commonality of cause enough.

The sound of pounding feet down the stairs behind him made Kyorin’s eyes dance about for an escape route off the street – disgustingly well-lit by the iron gas lamps rising out of the gutter. There! A passage, the smell of river water strong on the wind.

Kyorin sprinted away down the pathway, his companion taking another turn ahead. So many scents in Middlesteel – puddles of rain, wet grass in the parks, the river’s pollution – nothing at all like the odours back home. The silence of the docks was broken by the beat of machines from a tannery on the other side of the river. Kyorin could sense the stench of death, of rotting animal skins, even from this side of the water. Curse his luck. The great sage had to have chosen him to come to this city, this Middlesteel, this capital of the strange, rain-soaked nation of Jackals. But no other rebel had been in the right place to pose as a loyal servant joining the party scouting Jackals. And now someone or something had given Kyorin away. Was it the fact that he had allowed a stowaway to join their party, the desert nomad who seemed so eager to abandon his slow, unfit ally, now that their ruse had been rumbled? Had the fool forgotten to use his masking stick to disguise his scent? Perhaps Kyorin could ask his hunters what had given them away, before the monsters devoured him.

Out in the open, the nomad raced away, disappearing into the docks – past silent cranes and bundles of pulley ropes lying on the cobbles. Kyorin was about to follow after him, when a bright light shone in his face, destroying, as was intended, his night vision.

‘Aye, aye. What’s all this, then?’

Blinking away the dots of light dancing in front of his eyes, Kyorin saw it was a policeman. A crusher, as the locals called the enforcers of their law, his black uniform illuminated by the backspill from a bull’s-eye lamp. The crusher rested a hand on his belt, heavy with a police cutlass, a leather holster and a hulking cudgel.

‘You just off a boat, then?’

Taken for a foreigner. Well, that was true enough.

‘I have to get away,’ said Kyorin, ‘There—’

‘Like your mate who bolted off?’ said the crusher. ‘Them that runs away from a warehouse past midnight normally have their pockets full of something that doesn’t belong to them, in my experience.’

It was dark enough that the policeman hadn’t noticed that Kyorin was managing to talk without moving his lips.

‘Please, you must help me—’ Kyorin’s plea was interrupted by a scream from the docks, the nomad breaking cover, a flaming comet with his clothes and body on fire. Not yet dead, Kyorin’s companion launched himself into the river, dousing the flames – but of course, the desert-born could not swim, and as he realized that he had traded a death by fire for a death by water, the wounds of his incineration overcame him. The corpse swept past them face-down on the fast-moving currents. The river took everything, in Middlesteel.

‘Bloody Nora,’ said the policeman, his hand sweeping down towards his pistol as his lamp shone along the dock front. ‘You lads been nicking oil?’

Kyorin’s companion had put up a fight, then – enough of a fight that they hadn’t taken him alive with a paralysing dart, but burnt him to the ground with a lethal-force weapon. From behind the crates a couple of dark shapes shifted just out of sight, hissing in frustration that they hadn’t been able to feed on their first victim. An eerie clicking sounded out of sight of Kyorin and the policeman, rising and falling in a rattlesnake rhythm.

‘Just how many of you are there out thieving tonight?’ asked the policeman, annoyed that one of the gangs of the flash mob had chosen his beat for their night’s pilfering. He rested his lamp on a pulley block and aimed his pistol down the dock towards the crates. ‘Out you come, you toe-rags. Step lively now.’ His spare hand unclipped a Barnaby Blow from his belt. He flicked the trigger on the bronzed canister of compressed air and a banshee whistle split the night. Other whistles sounded as nearby crushers converged on the position of an officer in need.

The hunters’ lethal-force weapon would be recharging. Kyorin only had seconds left.

‘No you don’t, my old son.’ The policeman’s pistol swung towards Kyorin and he pointed to a pair of iron manacles he had laid next to the lamp. ‘You slip those on, nice and easy, like.’

‘Run, you fool,’ Kyorin pleaded to the policeman. ‘You can’t—’

‘Hey!’ The Middlesteel constable had finally noticed that Kyorin was speaking without his lips moving. ‘How—?’

The bolt of fire leapt out from the other end of the docks, striking the crusher on his chest. The black patent leather belt that crossed his tunic shredded as the uniform became a conflagration, the silver belt buckle bearing the arms of the Middlesteel police flying past Kyorin’s face, tiny drops of molten metal splattering his brown hair.

Kyorin caught the burning police officer’s body as he fell back, just enough life left in him to help Kyorin escape – to serve and protect, as the crusher’s oath demanded. Resting his hand above the policeman’s fluttering eyes, ignoring the smell of burning flesh – so repellent to a plant-eater – Kyorin made the connection to the crusher’s forehead with his hand. Swim. How to Swim? I must know! Kyorin was flooded by images – visions that seemed to last hours rather than the solitary second that was passing: the chemical reek of the public baths along Brocroft Street, a stream in a small flint-walled village in Lightshire, fishing rods laid down in the grass while the policeman and his friends launched themselves into the water. The images grew angular and sharp, the constable’s brain shutting down as the fatal burns worked their way through the beautiful system of cooperating organs that was his body.

Letting the dead policeman drop, Kyorin sprinted towards the river and launched himself into its cold, enveloping cover as the howls of his pursuers echoed around the docks. Holding his breath, Kyorin kicked under the surface, using his newfound swimming skills, allowing the current to sweep him away as the water boiled where the hunters’ recharged weapon furiously steamed the river’s surface. But the waters were deep and wide and the sky too dark for the hunters’ killing lances of fire to find his heart this night. With the weapon drained, a hail of darts broke the surface, spiralling past Kyorin like stones dropped in the water. Their final act of desperation became a brief flash of elation for Kyorin. He had escaped! As he swam, his hand checked the carefully wrapped bulge in his pocket where the book was, brought from the stationer’s cart on Burberry Corner with a coin so realistic the shopkeeper would never realize it had been perfectly counterfeited for the expeditionary party. Back home, that book would have been a death sentence. But here in Middlesteel, well, here it might just be a chance for life.

Kyorin let the currents carry him after the corpse of his compatriot, the poor dead desert nomad, leaving hungry mouths behind on the docks; mouths that would now be considering how best to evade the call of compressed air whistles converging on their position on the docks.

The river took everything, in Middlesteel.

Warder Twelve looked at the new boy, hiding his deep reservations about the quality and judgement of the lad. Why, wondered Warder Twelve, when analysts in the great transaction-engine chambers did not live up to their potential, did the Court of the Air’s ruling council always judge that their next career move should be across to the spheres of the aerial city where the Court held its prisoners? Surely the dangerous breed that the Court of the Air removed from circulation in the Kingdom of Jackals warranted more respect than the bored attitude of this new greenhorn. A greenhorn who judged – quite rightly – that duty minding the cells was something of a demotion from modelling the plays and flows of their civilization in the great transaction-engine chambers.

‘So, these colours,’ said the boy, tapping the card slotted above the armoured cell door. ‘They indicate the potential of the prisoner to make trouble?’

‘Aye,’ said the warden, ‘and the care you need to take when interacting with the prisoner. The likelihood they might escape.’

‘Escape?’ The lad laughed. ‘There has never been an escape from the Court of the Air. Not once in five hundred years.’

Warder Twelve winced. This young buck didn’t see all the work that went into keeping things that way: the effort, the foiled escapes – many of them just mind games to keep hope alive in the prisoners, to keep their wickedness and ingenuity flowing in streams the Court could control and curtail. It was the curse of being a warder. Nobody noticed when you did your job well; nobody thanked you for decades of trouble-free internment. But let just one rascal escape, why then the rest of the aerial city would be complaining for months about how many staff it took to man the cells, how they did nothing but sit around and play cards out on the prison spheres.

‘This is a green-ten,’ said the warder, laying a hand on the cell door. ‘Green is the lowest level of threat and ten is the lowest level of prisoner intelligence.’

‘Ah,’ said the lad. ‘A politician, then.’

The warder opened a small slot in the door, a slit of one-way glass revealing a man in a faded waistcoat sitting by a desk before a sheaf of papers, reaching over to dip his metal stylus in a pot of ink. Writing memoirs that nobody would ever read – well, nobody except the Court’s alienists, as the surgeons of the mind perfected their understanding of the criminal soul.

‘Crimes against democracy. This flash fellow used to represent a district down in Middlesteel, until he started using his street gangs to intimidate voters on election day. We disappeared him after he made contact with the flash mob to arrange to have two of his opponents poisoned.’

‘He hardly seems worth the effort,’ said the boy.

‘You think so?’ The warder shook his head. Underestimating an opponent. Shocking. Hadn’t his tutors knocked any sense into him when he had first been apprenticed into the Court of the Air’s service?

The lad fingered the red lever to the left of the door, a wax seal protecting the metal switch, proving it was unbroken and had never been used. ‘Decompression throw for the cell?’

‘Yes.’ Warder Twelve pointed to a bigger lever at the end of the corridor. ‘That one up there will flush the whole level, in case there’s a mass breakout attempt. Back in the control room we can blow the entire aerosphere and disconnect all corridors into the rest of the city if it cuts up really rough across here.’

‘Have you ever had to blow a cell?’

‘On my watch?’ said the warder. ‘Once, seven years back. The science pirate Krook. He had decrypted the transaction-engine lock on his cell and was working on the last of his door bolts. He was a master of mesmerism and had hypnotized the warder walking his level. We killed Krook from upstairs. He left us no choice in the matter.’

The lad nodded. Explosive decompression, a couple of seconds choking in the slipstream of the troposphere, then unconsciousness long before the impact of a mile-high fall from the dizzying height of the Court’s levitating city removed his mischief from the face of the world. A fitting fate for an enemy of the state.

The lad looked up at the card above the next armoured door. It was purple, with the numeral one stencilled across it. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen that colour over here.’

‘A P1. So, you’ve a taste for the strong stuff?’ noted the warder. ‘Do you really want to see who’s inside this cell?’

‘I—’ he hesitated. ‘I think so.’

Warder Twelve laid his hand on the viewing slit. ‘Then gaze upon Timlar Preston!’

Timlar Preston? But this was just a man, not an ogre. Old and thin, in a cell wallpapered by white sheets, every inch thickly pencilled with formulae and diagrams. He was standing pushed up against a wall – so close you’d think he was trying to draw warmth from the riveted metal, his pencil scratching in ever smaller circles, the writing increasingly tiny now there was hardly any space on the papers left. He turned around to gaze at the viewing slit, a flash of wild eyes and wispy silver hair, then returned to his scribbling.

‘He can see us?’ asked the lad. ‘I was told that the door’s cursewalls allowed one-way viewing only?’

‘He always knows when we’re watching him,’ said Warder Twelve. ‘Don’t ask me how. There’s a touch of the fey about him, if you ask me.’

The greenhorn gazed into the cell again. Timlar Preston didn’t seem like much, certainly not the man who had nearly destroyed the Kingdom of Jackals during the Two-Year War, the Great War, the foreigner whose weapons had propelled the hell of conflict deep into the Jackelian counties. He was from Quatérshift, that much you could see, a dirty shiftie, no honest, round jowls of the Jackelian yeoman for this one; no honest fat from a diet of roast beef, beer and jinn. Thin, wiry, with a proud nose that lent him an hauteur distinctly lacking in his mad scratchings.

‘You still think you have what it takes to keep such as he away from our shores?’ asked Warder Twelve.

The lad held his tongue. Inside the cell, Timlar Preston was turning in a circle, waving his pencil. Conducting an imaginary symphony of madness.

‘You want to keep him dancing for us, rather than inventing bloody great devices of war for the shifties to use against your fellow Jackelians? Men like him aren’t controlled by this—’ the warden slapped the transaction-engine drum turning on the armoured lock. ‘They are controlled up here!’ He tapped his skull. ‘Walking the cells with a toxin club swinging from your hand won’t be your vocation in the prison spheres, any more than tapping the ivories on your key-writer was your job when you worked over in analysis. Getting into the minds of people like Timlar Preston, that’s the task for you and me. We drug his food once a week; change his pencil for one slightly fatter, slightly longer, a different shade. To keep him off balance, you see? Then we take his sketches, the ones we can understand, and change some of the formulae. Forgery section uses his handwriting to do it for us. Just enough to keep him wondering if it was he who wrote the maths or one of us. Just enough to keep him wondering if he’s going mad. And while he’s doing that, he’s not trying to break the hex we’ve got laid around his cell. He’s not thinking of creating weapons that could lay waste to our country.’

Timlar Preston’s mad dance in the centre of the cell had ended, the genius arriving at the other side of the viewing slit in three long, low strides. His shriek was relayed by the voicebox next to the cell door, the piece of paper he had been writing pushed up against the viewing slit, full of spirals, a procession of seashell-like geometries drafted with insane precision. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’

The lad looked at Warder Twelve. ‘What is he talking about?’

‘Something new,’ said Warder Twelve. ‘He’s been ranting about it for days. He’s due for the old sleepy soup and a few mind games at the end of this week. When we search his cell, we’ll probably find the notes on whatever his latest obsession is.’

‘I can hear him!’ Preston yelled. ‘Talking to me. Telling me what to do. What we need to do to survive.’

Warden Twelve flicked the sound off the voicebox and closed the viewing slit. ‘Back to the lifting room; the next level down is where we keep the prisoners with special powers– all the fey ones, the sorcerers and witches. You’re going to love them.’

They walked away, oblivious to the muffled banging on the other side of the cell door. Timlar Preston howling and throwing his papers around the cell.

Commodore Black looked over at his friend Coppertracks. It would take someone very used to steammen ways to tell that the scientist was nervous. But then, the commodore had lived with the steamman under the roof of Tock House for long enough that he could read the patterns of energy that danced under his iron friend’s transparent crystal skull like other men could read furrows in a brow or the nervous drum of fingers on a desk. And it took a lot to make one of the metal creatures nervous.

The patter of polite applause from the direction of the stage indicated that the previous presentation in front of the massed ranks of the Royal Society was going well. Well for the presenter, but not so well for Coppertracks’ chances of extracting the full financial and intellectual backing of the society if they squandered their time and resources on too many of his rivals’ proposed projects. It was a competitive business, this society of ideas, mused the commodore – as if the Kingdom of Jackals only had so much deck space for what its people thought about, and the pondering of one belief – one truth – left less room for any others to thrive.

‘You are sure you have all of my slides in the correct order?’ asked Coppertracks.

‘You know that I do,’ said the commodore. ‘Haven’t I practised enough on your blessed magic lantern back at the house? You keep your attention on the audience, I shall give your scientist friends a visual display of your genius that would put to shame the lantern operators of the theatres along Lump Street.’

‘There is really no need for you to assist me, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I could have brought one of my mu-bodies to operate the projection apparatus.’

Commodore Black nodded, but didn’t point out that having one of the steamman’s metal drones capering about the stage would only serve to remind the mainly warm-blooded races sitting in the auditorium that Coppertracks was a slipthinker – his genius so large he had to distribute his consciousness among multiple iron bodies. Back home in the Steammen Free State, they treated Coppertracks as royalty. Here in the Kingdom of Jackals, he was just a metal clever clogs who constantly reminded the members of the Royal Society how dim most of them were in comparison.

‘Now,’ said Coppertracks, rubbing nervously at his metal hull, polishing it to a high, gleaming sheen, ‘where is Molly softbody? She must have picked up that slide I changed by now.’

‘I have,’ said a voice behind them. It was Molly Templar, the third member of the trio that shared the comforts inside Tock House’s walls. Molly was sweating slightly under her long red hair – she had obviously been straining to get to the presentation in time. ‘It turned out the chemist finishing off your last slide was one of the more persistent devotees of my writing. He wouldn’t hand over the damn thing until I had signed at least two of my novels for him.’ She produced a little glass square, chemically etched with one of the steamman’s images.

Molly peered round the curtain to see how well the current presenter’s talk was going, then ducked back and lifted a copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News out of her coat pocket, passing it to Coppertracks. ‘Read the cover story. It’s a pity your presentation isn’t proposing a superior design for airship engines. The merchant marine has grounded all its flights – apparently dust from the wake of Ashby’s Comet has fouled the fleet’s motors. While they’re being checked and cleaned out on the airship fields, the cost of narrowboat berths and stagecoach tickets is rising in every county.’

Coppertracks showed the commodore the newspaper’s cover illustration, a swarthy canal boat owner with a long queue of Jackelian citizenry alongside his narrowboat and his oversized cupped hands full of coins. The speech bubble read: ‘A ride, good damsons and sirs? I think I may yet take you for a ride.’

‘Lucky then, that the three of us have no mortal plans for travelling beyond the capital,’ said the commodore. ‘Let them jack their prices up to a guinea a ticket. We can warm ourselves by the fire in Tock House and wait for winter to come while Coppertracks tinkers with his science, you pen your novels, and I take my well-earned rest from the trials and tribulations fate has sent nipping at my heels.’

One of the society administrators slipped behind the crimson curtain. ‘Aliquot Coppertracks, you are on, sir. If you don’t mind keeping your presentation to ten minutes, with five for questions, we are running a little behind at the moment.’

‘Ten minutes, lad?’ interjected the commodore. ‘If we can’t make the members of your fine society see the bright fury of Coppertracks’ brilliance in half that time, then they haven’t half the wits they were born with.’

The administrator moved aside so that the commodore and Molly could pass by to the table where their magic lantern was burning oil in front of an array of mirrors. Coppertracks rolled carefully to the lectern, staring out at the sea of faces – sombre stovepipe hats and conservative dress the order of the day among the race of man. A few thinkers of the Kingdom of Jackals’ other races were present too: steammen, graspers, a handful of lashlites – lizard-winged sages whose adherence to their aural teachings had driven them to seek wider learning when the sagas of their gods had been mastered and exhausted.

Coppertracks motioned to the commodore to project the first slide onto the white screen behind him, when a buzz of excitement arose from the audience, interrupting the start of the steamman’s presentation. Molly nudged the commodore.

Commodore Black looked around to see the source of the commotion and groaned. It was him. Making a fashionably flamboyant late entrance – no doubt perfectly timed to put Coppertracks off. Behind the lectern, the energy swirl under Coppertracks’ crystal skull had turned spiky. The steamman equivalent of a back arching as he recognized the face of his rowdy adversary. For every academic paper Coppertracks published, Lord Rooksby could be sure to make it into the journals with a contrary view. While Coppertracks shared his metal race’s methodical, steady brilliance – progress cautiously but steadily advanced over a lifetime of many centuries – Lord Rooksby was the exemplar of the race of man’s short-burn approach to science. Erratic leaps of faith and intuitive gambling that sometimes paid off, but often floundered with a heavy landing. Of course Lord Rooksby would be here at the Royal Society meeting. He couldn’t resist the opportunity for a little mischief at the expense of his steamman rival. Rooksby believed that Jackals did best when it was the hand of mankind that ruled it, and that the place of steammen, graspers, craynarbians, lashlites and the other creatures of the nation was walking two steps well behind his race’s polished calf-leather boots.

‘Don’t mind me,’ said Lord Rooksby, sweeping back his velvet-lined cloak with a flourish. The two women he had brought along sat down on either side of him and looked up adoringly at the slim, elfin-chested scientist, as if his every aristocratic word contained a new insight into the nature of the universe. ‘No, really, don’t look at me. I am fascinated to hear what we’re being asked to support this year.’

At this, his escort broke into giggles and he rested his polished boots up on the seat in front, prompting an angry glance back from its occupant.

‘Go on, man,’ whispered the commodore, willing his friend to ignore the most persistent of his scientific antagonists.

Coppertracks began. ‘I am before you, seeking your indulgence to reveal the findings of my latest research. Research that has been aided by my fellows back in the Steammen Free State.’

That drew a murmur of appreciation from the assembled scientists. If King Steam was backing Coppertracks’ endeavours, then there was as like to be something of note to be heard here this day. The people of the Steammen Free State held to their secrets fast, and getting direct aid from the monarch of the kingdom of the metal was often like pulling teeth.

‘As you may be aware,’ said Coppertracks, ‘the home of my people in the mountains of the Mechancian Spine is both cold and high, constructed at an altitude beyond that of any Jackelian city.’

‘A geography lesson,’ interrupted Lord Rooksby, his voice carrying from the back of the hall. ‘Capital stuff.’

‘A geography,’ explained Coppertracks, ‘which means the procession of the stars and bodies celestial above us can be viewed without hindrance, without the smogs and rains of Jackals. A geography most conducive to astronomical observation, which is why—’ Coppertracks paused to wave his iron hands excitedly, ‘King Steam sponsored the construction of a new observatory in my homeland, equipped with the latest astronomical apparatus, some of which I myself had the honour of designing.’

Commodore Black grinned to himself and nudged Molly back. So, the old steamer had made good use of his visit to the Free State last summer after all. Lord Rooksby was frowning in his seat. This wasn’t the way things were meant to be going at all. It was all running far too smoothly for his adversary.

‘This apparatus has allowed my people to peer deeper into the celestial void than ever before,’ said Coppertracks. ‘To observe the celestial bodies that accompany our own world’s procession around the sun at greater clarities than previously thought possible.’

That drew a few dark mutters from the crowd. Coppertracks was taking the side of the radical argument that said that the Earth orbited the sun, rather than the sun and other bodies paying due homage to their home by orbiting the Earth at the centre of all things.

‘Not decided, not decided,’ groused a few dissenters.

‘Well,’ called out Lord Rooksby. ‘It appears you’ve already got the support of your great King Steam, so what do you need the aid of mere softbodies like us for?’

‘Dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks, raising the amplification on his voicebox, ‘I am here, among other things, to share the wonders of the universe with you. For instance, many of us have speculated that the number of celestial bodies that share our world’s procession around the sun is uncommonly high at forty-six. This new apparatus will help us discover—’

‘Discover what?’ boomed Lord Rooksby. ‘Are we mere astrologers now, or noble leaders of science? Have you, sir, uncovered any new comets with which to unsettle the great unwashed masses?’

This drew a peal of laughter from the crowd. Ashby’s Comet just two months gone, had left a trail of broken-in windows and broken-up riots when various factions in the capital had sought to make mischief out of the auguries of ill fortune said to arrive with the crimson harbinger of doom.

Lord Rooksby nodded sagely, as if he exposed a great truth this day. ‘If I wish my fortune to be read in the stars, I have a gypsy caravan that calls at my house in the shires each summer. Maybe the gypsies can sharpen your wits while they sharpen my knives, old steamer!’

‘This is science,’ protested Coppertracks. ‘Science of the deepest sort. There is much our neighbouring celestial bodies have to teach us about our own home.’ He motioned to the commodore and the hulking u-boatman advanced to the next slide, an image of a fiery red circle captured bright against the darkness of the face of night.

‘Behold, Celibra, a world – I believe – of inferno temperatures. This is a celestial body fixed at a distance from the sun almost identical to that of our own world, yet in composition and temperament it seems to be radically different from the systems of life we are familiar with here on Earth, a world that is almost certainly uninhabitable.’ The next slide in the rotation clicked forward. ‘Now this is an image of our moon: observe the tinges of green we have picked up beneath the cloud cover – could it be that the lunar surface has forests as dense as any found in the jungles of Liongeli?’

‘Cheese!’ laughed Lord Rooksby. ‘Obviously it is nothing but green gas rising from the finest cheese.’

There was more laughter from the audience.

The commodore shook his head in annoyance. Coppertracks was leading the audience in too fast – ploughing ahead at ramming speed. He should have been revealing his findings at a rate of knots the scientists’ conservative bent could more readily absorb and adjust to. The crowd were not, for the main, steammen who could share new information between themselves with a joining of cables and the implicit trust that came from such networking. They were minds of slow meat that needed wheedling and convincing.

‘Let us gaze next, my colleagues in science, towards our world’s nearest neighbour in the dark, cold void: Kaliban.’

The red world came onto the screen, the light from the magic lantern catching the swirl of smoke from mumbleweed pipes as several of the assembly lit up. Coppertracks waved an iron hand at the screen. ‘Long linked in song and saga to various gods of war, instead, in reality we find a dead, dry world of crimson dunes and – perhaps – something else.’

The commodore advanced to the next slide, a high-magnification view of the celestial body.

‘The shooting stars lighting up our skies of late have not all been debris from the tail of Ashby’s Comet. I have traced some of the rocky projectiles back to what I think must be volcanic eruptions on the surface of Kaliban. And see what else I discovered during my explorations. Observe the fine splintering of lines you can see across the celestial sphere’s surface. I have analysed the geometry of these lines and come to the conclusion that they are artificial in nature.’

A hush fell over the crowd.

‘Yes, artificial. I believe these lines are a series of canals, vaster and far more sophisticated than the waterways of our own Jackals. A universal transport system that may once have rivalled the timetables of the merchant marine of the Royal Aerostatical Navy in its ability to transport cargoes and people around their world.’

‘Poppycock,’ said Lord Rooksby. ‘You see a splintering of rock fissures and detect the hand of intelligence behind it! I have never heard such arrant nonsense. It is well known that you share the roof of your home with an author of celestial fiction, one Molly Templar, whom I see has accompanied you here tonight. I believe you have spent too much time pondering her last tome of facile writings rather than upon serious scientific investigations.’

Molly made to leap up from their projecting lantern, but the commodore pulled her back.

‘I’m going to go up there and shove my last tome of facile writings down his smug, grinning—’

‘Leave him be, lass,’ whispered the commodore. ‘Or at least, let’s be leaving the long-haired popinjay until later. A fight in here is what he wants, anything to embarrass our old steamer in front of his fellow scientists.’

She saw enough reason in the commodore’s words to shrug off his hands and sit down.

‘Nonsense is it?’ retorted Coppertracks, pointing an iron hand at Lord Rooksby. ‘Then by my cogs, how do you explain this?’ Commodore Black advanced to the next slide, an amorphous grey mass whose peripheries were tinged with red.

‘Sir, I do not even know what that unsightly mess you have so kindly brought before us is.’

‘That is because you do not have access to the transaction engines of the Steammen Free State,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Some of the most advanced thinking engines of their kind in the world. When the geometries and shadow lines are resolved and cleaned using the power of our transaction engines, we see instead…’

The commodore shook his head. That was a terrible mistake, reminding the Jackelian audience that their civil service’s great engine rooms beneath Greenhall had a rival high in the mountains of Mechancia – a rival with steam-driven thinking machines that made their own transaction engines look like wind-up toys sold over the counter at Gattie and Pierce.

‘…this!’

The commodore advanced to the next slide, the image of a stone-carved face filling the screen, a scale written across it indicating that the face was three hundred miles across in width, four hundred from neck to skullcap.

Coppertracks continued over the hush of the crowd. ‘This incredible carving is clearly humanoid – the features of the race of man, or something close to it. An artefact on a scale more massive than any we have attempted here on Earth.’

‘Clearly, sir,’ shouted Lord Rooksby, ‘you have taken leave of your senses. Give me but a lump of coal from your boiler’s furnace and I will whittle you a shape as pleasing to the eye with my penknife.’ Another member of the audience lifted a piece of coke from the boiler bin of the steamman sitting next to him and tossed it towards Lord Rooksby. The aristocratic scientist seized it and raised it towards the ceiling. ‘Behold, damsons and gentlemen of the Royal Society – I give you the miraculous face of the great Pharaoh of Kaliban. Give me but a hundred years of erosion, a real-box camera and the poorly written plot of a penny dreadful, and I shall carve for you an entirely new branch of science – and for my next trick I will find you the face of the Man on the moon and send an airship to converse with the ice angels of the coldtime.’

The crowd followed Lord Rooksby’s lead and began to bray Coppertracks down in annoyance.

‘You fools,’ cried Coppertracks, pointing to the image on the screen. ‘Can you not see the evidence before your eyes? There was once life on Kaliban, life capable of constructing canal works and carving vast effigies from their mountains.’

‘Celestial fiction, sir,’ hooted Lord Rooksby, sensing that now was the time to steer events towards the projects favoured by his own lickspittles. ‘This is pure celestial fiction.’

‘Life!’ called Coppertracks, beseeching the massed ranks of the Royal Society. ‘Life that might be able to converse with us, if we would but make the effort.’

A low wailing echoed about the assembly chamber now, Coppertracks struggling to be heard over the eerie heckling. ‘My proposal is to build a colossal transmitter capable of receiving and generating vibrations across the void. We have already seen that the vicinity of our sun is blessed with an uncommonly large quantity of celestial bodies, many that would appear to be candidates for bearing life.’

The commodore dropped the next slide down in front of the assembly, but it was too late, the scientists had become a mob. A piece of coal was thrown towards the screen, an explosion of black soot impacting the image of Coppertracks’ proposed large-scale transmitter schematics.

‘Give him the shoulder,’ someone hissed.

‘Ah, no,’ wheezed the commodore behind his magic lantern. ‘Not the high shoulder. Not poor Coppertracks.’ He glanced around the room, trying to see who would do it first.

Would they?

It was too late. The mob of scientists had eagerly taken up the cry and at the other end of the hall the first boffin was already being boosted onto the shoulders of a colleague. Across the seats, the smaller, lighter members of the Royal Society were mounting the shoulders of their fellows, pointing and shaking their fists angrily at the steamman presenter. The energy under Coppertracks’ skull fizzed in disappointment and shame. In all the years of his long scientific career in Jackals he had never been given the high shoulder before. All scientists stood on the shoulders of giants when they undertook their solemn investigations, but now they were doing it to him, standing on the shoulders of those more worthy than the steamman, looking beyond his work. Coppertracks’ proposal had not even been judged valuable enough to come under the gaze of his colleagues’ scrutiny.

Commodore Black glanced furiously up towards the smirking Lord Rooksby, who was now pretending to pay attention to his two blonde dollymops rather than enjoying the moment of his adversary’s discomfort.

By Lord Tridentscale’s beard, thought the commodore, it didn’t take too much to work out who had prepared the others in the assembly to arrange this ritual howling down of his friend. Well, two could play at ambushes. The commodore’s eyes narrowed. There were a lot of dark lanes in the capital where an alley cat of Lord Rooksby’s reputation could run into a masked thug and come away from the fisticuffs with a few lumps and bruises and the silk shirt ripped off his blessed back.

Coppertracks was collecting his papers and speaking notes, gathering them up before the light hail of garbage being tossed in his direction grew into a storm. Commodore Black swept up the slides into the pocket of his greatcoat then sprinted up onto the stage with Molly and helped hustle the steamman off.

‘This is an outrage,’ spluttered Coppertracks, his voicebox a-tremble. ‘I show them hard scientific proof and they dare to throw coal at me! I should call on the Steamo Loas and ask Zaka of the Cylinders to shake the walls of this assembly down upon them.’

‘Let the spirits of your blessed ancestors rest in peace,’ said the commodore. ‘Those rascals and stuffed shirts are not worth the oil you’d need to shed to call your gods down. You’ve got all the discoveries of your people’s new observatory to take up your time, and you secured that without this crew of scoundrels’ help.’

‘Let’s get off the stage,’ said Molly, ducking a projectile, ‘Quick.’

They disappeared behind the curtain, a soggy ham roll bouncing off the back of the commodore’s naval greatcoat.

‘I simply don’t believe it,’ said Coppertracks. ‘If I had not seen the evidence of their disgraceful misbehaviour with my own vision plate … ’

Commodore Black led the two of them along a corridor and to the exit, ignoring the jeers of the crowd from the other side of the curtain. The commodore closed the door to the stage, cutting off the din of the mob. ‘Ah, your science is a fine thing indeed, but for all your years living in Jackals, your understanding of the nature of a hall full of your rivals is still a little shaky.’

The Royal Society organizer came up to them, leading the next presenter who was pushing a handcart stacked high with chemical spheres. ‘Well, that went, umm, well.’

Commodore Black smiled at the organizer, then slapped the chemist on the back of his tweed waistcoat. ‘Hear them cheering, lad? We’ve warmed them up for you good and proper. But no thanks now, we must be on our way.’

Molly didn’t look as if she was finding it as easy to put on a brave face. ‘All that time you spent putting your presentation together, old steamer, I’m so sorry.’

‘It is not beholden upon you to apologize for those louts’ behaviour,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The Jackelian Royal Society is obviously not the institution it once was.’

‘I’m going to wait here for Lord Rooksby to leave,’ growled Molly, ‘and when he stumbles out into the street with those two dollymops he had hanging off his arm, they can watch me break his fingers and—’

‘I really would not see you sink to the level of that softbody scoundrel on my account,’ interrupted Coppertracks. ‘And I believe the police still have a caution outstanding against your citizen record from your altercation with the last poor author you believed was plagiarizing your work. Please, let us retreat without creating any more gossip for the news sheets.’

Outside, the thick, marble-clad walls of the society’s headquarters muffled the noise of the harsh reception they had been given. There was a lone hansom cab waiting up the street, a single dark horse clicking its hooves in boredom. Commodore Black waved his swagger stick towards the cabbie and the driver flicked the reins to start the two-wheeled carriage rattling forward.

Coppertracks’ twin treads carried him towards the lane, every movement of his polished silver plates heavy with dejection. The commodore didn’t add to the steamman’s woes by referring to the proving tower Coppertracks had already constructed inside the orchard back at Tock House. That had already diverted enough of the coins from their finances without any degree of success being returned in the steamman’s direction.

A thin slick of rain had fallen during the presentation, the drizzle still tinged crimson even now, weeks after Ashby’s Comet had passed through the wet Jackelian skies. Also braving the day’s showers was a Broken Circle cultist labouring under the weight of a wooden placard proclaiming the final hours of the world. He was from a splinter group of the mainstream church that believed the cycle of existence could be broken, a belief that, in the commodore’s humble opinion, rather went against the central thrust of their church-without-gods. There had been many more of his ilk parading the streets as the comet passed; but they had thankfully grown scarce when, as usual, the world had not ended. What did they do, the commodore wondered, in the years between centennial celebrations, the years that were dry of comets and dark signs in the sky? Why, they bothered him and his friends, of course. As usual, the cultist seemed curiously attracted by the pull of Molly’s gravity.

‘It’s not too late,’ cried the would-be prophet, his beard tinged crimson from standing in the rain too long.

‘It is for you, lad,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Your boat sailed from port a long time ago, I think.’

The madman ignored the aging u-boat officer and reserved his spittle for Molly. It was as if he understood there was something special about her. ‘The portents, are you blind to the portents in the heavens? A rain of blood on the blessed land of Jackals, our green hills and valleys soaked with it. It is the age of the Broken Circle.’

‘The comet’s gone, old timer,’ Molly said kindly. ‘It passed us by.’

Commodore Black muttered a sailor’s curse and waved his cane – a spring-loaded swordstick concealed inside, in the event this lunatic turned violent – motioning their hansom cab to make haste.

‘Gone?’ moaned the cultist, as if the news was a revelation to him. ‘It is gone? No. It will come back to us. Make a furnace of destruction of Jackals and all who live in our land. We must meditate now for salvation. Come with me and meditate in my lodgings, lady. Come meditate with me before the world ends.’

‘I hardly think so,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Ashby’s Comet is heading towards the sun, I have been following its passage with my own telescope from the top of Tock House.’

‘The portents!’ wailed the cultist, trying to infect them with the deep despair he obviously felt. ‘The Broken Circle.’

‘I am afraid it is your logic that is broken,’ explained Coppertracks. ‘In my experience, the great pattern of existence carries a substantial weight with it. More than enough to survive a few knocks and jolts of celestial mechanics. Now be a good mammal and run along, I rather fear your proximity to us is putting off the driver of the licensed carriage we have hailed.’

Molly watched the man shamble off, his wooden placard swaying above his shoulders, and she smiled as she noticed the sudden distractions that seemed to engage everyone else walking along the street as the cultist approached them.

‘In the desert,’ noted Molly, ‘there are nomads who believe people like him are holy, connected to a deeper truth through their affliction.’

‘And in the lanes of Middlesteel there are people like me who believe he has been connecting with a pint too many and an ounce of mumbleweed smoked on the top of it,’ said the commodore. ‘Don’t you go paying any attention to his ramblings, lass.’

With the placard waver now sermonizing his beliefs further down the street, the hansom cab pulled up before them. Commodore Black opened the door and Molly stepped around a pile of manure that a previous cab’s horse had deposited on the cobbles.

It was then that the vision struck Molly’s skull, entering it like a spear. The layers of the capital peeled back to be replaced by a white, featureless vista. Of her friends from Tock House there was no sign. Breaking the dimensionless purity, the only landmark in this strange new realm was a brilliantly glowing sphere hovering above the ground. It was the size of a bathysphere, with a single silver eye sitting on its top. Molly picked herself up off her knees, her skin tingling with the familiar presence of the thing. The Hexmachina! Sometime saviour of the Kingdom of Jackals – of the entire world.

‘Operator,’ said the Hexmachina, a gentle child’s face forming across its surface. ‘You can hear my words?’

‘Yes,’ said Molly, stumbling through the white void, trying to reach the safety of the Hexmachina. Of course she could hear its words. She could wield the machine like a god-slaying sword if she could only get close enough to pilot it.

‘This realm is not real,’ warned the Hexmachina, sensing her intentions. ‘You cannot pilot me here. This is a construct, a simulation I am using to communicate with your mind.’

Molly stopped trying to navigate the featureless realm. ‘Where are you, then? Are you still riding the currents of magma under the earth?’

‘No. I am fleeing, operator,’ said the Hexmachina, the child’s face assuming a look of desperation. ‘My lover the Earth is trying to protect me, but her warmth and the life of our world is no longer enough. Her powers are being subverted and with them the powers that I can draw upon in turn. I need you …’

Already giddy in the dimensionless white space, Molly was left reeling by the unsettling implications of the Hexmachina’s plea for help. This was the machine that had once helped her defeat a slavering army of mad demon revolutionaries and their allies from the nation of Quatérshift. What could possibly overwhelm something as powerful as the Hexmachina?

‘Are the ancient enemy trying to breach the walls of the world again?’

The Hexmachina’s voice carried as an echo across the space. ‘No, Molly, this threat is not something that I was designed to defend against. My pursuers are operating firmly across our level of reality, and they know the fabric of the world as well as I do myself. This is a force manipulating the channels of earthflow, sabotaging the leylines, turning my own techniques and cunning against me. They are masters at it.’

‘But you must be close,’ pleaded Molly, ‘I can see you, hear you. Rise to the surface and I can pilot you. Together we can—’

‘No, I am far from your location. I created a channel between us within your mind, Molly, before we took our leave of each other after the last war. When you were the only operator left alive in Jackals.’

‘There are others born with the gift now, operators other than me?’

Hovering above the shiny material of the sphere, the child’s face nodded in confirmation. ‘Hundreds have passed through their age of puberty in the years that have passed, those who share the blood of your distant kin. But while the blood of those that can pilot me is carried by a new generation, they may soon not have a craft left to direct.’

The white expanse trembled, distortions washing through it like waves. Molly fell over. As she picked herself up, she saw that the facsimile of the Hexmachina was being absorbed slowly into the ground, the featureless white plain that bore their weight becoming an albino quicksand.

‘Stay back,’ shouted the Hexmachina as Molly ran towards the god-machine. ‘The purpose of this mental construct is to allow us to communicate without your position being traced. Do not touch my avatar’s skin, or my attackers will be able to mark your position.’

‘What is happening to you?’

‘I am being frozen,’ cried the Hexmachina, its female voice growing fainter. ‘Sealed within the heart of the Earth inside a tomb of modified diamond-lattice carbons. I have never seen the building blocks of matter being manipulated so adroitly, my own powers leeched, vampirized, to strengthen the bonds of my captivity.’

‘But you must be able to escape,’ pleaded Molly. ‘In the name of the Circle, you’re the Hexmachina. Who has the might to trap you?’

‘Locusts, despoilers. What are they, indeed? It is almost as if they understand the principles of my construction, but that would mean … no, no it cannot be …’

‘Please!’ Molly tried to scrabble around the featureless floor, searching for a way to stop the Hexmachina from disappearing.

‘You must stop them, Molly, my beautiful young operator,’ whispered the child’s face, rising up the side of the Hexmachina’s hull as the god-machine was submerged. ‘You alone, this time. I cannot help you in this struggle. Seek out the scheme of defence: together you may be able to save Jackals.’

‘I haven’t seen Oliver Brooks for years,’ said Molly. ‘Not since he started wearing that stupid hood and scaring the constabulary out in the shires.’

The child’s face, the Hexmachina’s body, had almost disappeared. ‘You – this – the comet, it is the—’

With a snap reality returned and Molly found herself lying in the gutter in the shadow of the hansom cab, Commodore Black splashing crimson-tinged rainwater over her face.

‘Ah, lass, I told you that you’ve been working too hard on your novels, too much time spent crouching over a writing table, knocking around the dusty corridors of Tock House with the likes of Coppertracks and myself, rather than accepting the invitations of those gentlemen callers whose cards pile up unanswered in our hall.’

Blood was running down Molly’s face, her nose leaking a stream of it. ‘The Hood-o’the-marsh, Oliver Brooks.’

‘That dark fey lad?’ The commodore helped lift Molly to her feet, passing her across to Coppertracks, the steamman already inside the carriage. ‘Let’s not talk of that wicked lad, Molly Templar. We’re well shot of him. Oliver’s good for a tale of highwaymanship in one of your penny dreadfuls, but let’s not have him hiding out in the warmth of Tock House again. No, one outlaw on the run from the cruel House of Guardians is enough sheltering under our fine roof.’

‘I fear you have struck your head, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks. ‘One of your fastblood fevers, perhaps? Shall I send for a doctor of medicine?’

Molly shook her head. The fever was in her veins, blood that still fizzed with the tiny symbiote machines of the Hexmachina. The Kingdom of Jackals was threatened once more.

But threatened by what?

Opening the curtains wide enough to see the drops of red rain rolling down the windows, the woman gripped the threadbare fabric nervously and tutted in disgust. She hated the bleeding stuff, filthy red rain that would stain your dress – the normal variety was bad enough. Rain, bringing the risk of fevers and time spent off the job. Time not earning money. And here it was again. Rain that might wake up her mark if it drummed down too hard on the roof above. She glanced back inside the bedroom. Thank the Circle, he was still snoring. Down in the lane outside a figure moved from the shadows and crossed to her side of the street, stepping over a gutter quickly filling with a torrent from the crimson downpour. There weren’t many people out late enough to witness what the two of them were about to do, which was just peachy by her. She slipped out of the bedroom and into the corridor, stepping lightly so the floorboards wouldn’t squeak.

She always murdered her victims on her second visit, the first being a sizing-up – so to speak – of the mark’s valuables. Although in this instance there almost hadn’t been a second visit from her; the Circle knows, the absence of anything of value and the dilapidated state of the apartment had given the lie to all the tales she had heard about the apartment’s owner from the tavern’s drinkers. That her mark came from a wealthy upland family, that they had purchased him a commission in the regiments down on the southern border. That he was some sort of war hero. Connor of Cassarabia, that’s what the others called him, half-jokingly, as he drank himself into oblivion. The great Duncan bloody Connor getting bladdered in the corner of their jinn house every night.

Well, all that family money had to have gone somewhere. Yes, she had nearly dismissed her scheme of murder when the bailiffs had arrived during her first visit to the hero’s home, banging on the door of the lodgings and shouting through the letterbox about the unpaid bills at the butcher’s, the tailor’s, the vintner’s. She had been witness to enough similar scenes from her own life to know that the embrace of the debtors’ prison – the dreaded sponging house – wasn’t too far off for this so-called war hero. But then she had seen the ex-soldier hide his little travel case, the hard leather shell not much of a treasure chest, but never kept too far away from him when he was at home. There had to be valuables inside the case, she could feel it with every iota of her street-sharp senses. A man with a suitcase, living alone and half-mad, he was almost begging to be robbed and murdered.

A gust of rain blew in from outside as she opened the front door. Her thug glanced up the empty stairs. ‘He asleep then?’

‘Five pints of jinn and an hour biting the pillow with me, what do you think?’

The thug pulled a garrotte out of his heavily patched coat, a thin, rusty hang of wire between two wooden handles. ‘I think you should find that suitcase you were so full of yourself about.’

‘It’s in the cupboard in his bedroom.’

‘Right,’ whispered the thug, taking his not inconsiderable bulk up the stairs. ‘After I’ve done him, I’ll take him down to the waters of the Gambleflowers and toss him in. By the time the river crabs and eels have had their meal, his own mother wouldn’t know him – or want to.’

She felt a little shiver of excitement. The murder was always exciting, that little tug of power over life and death. It was a power she lacked in almost every other area of her life. Swinging open the bedroom door, there was enough light from the oil lamp’s dwindling reservoir to see her thug moving across to the ex-soldier’s bed. She levered open the cupboard and, finding the suitcase, lifted it out and placed it on the floor. It certainly felt heavy enough. Family silver? Gold gewgaws looted from one of the battlefields down south? Enough to keep her from the company of the other working girls down in the jinn house for a good few months, hopefully.

Her man was about to slip the wire around the uplander’s neck and send him along the Circle when she opened the suitcase. And saw what was inside. And screamed.

Duncan Connor was up and out of the thug’s grasp far quicker than anyone with five pints of jinn sloshing around their body had a right to be. Her thug kept a long knife for the difficult ones, the ones who wouldn’t go quickly, but the ex-soldier’s sheet was off the bed, turned into a matador’s cloak, concealing him from her man’s blade, before becoming a whip, wrapping around the thug’s arm, yanking him off balance and into the ex-soldier’s reach. There was a crack as a kick shattered the thug’s kneecap and a louder snap as the collapsing man’s neck was twisted at an angle his spine could not survive – at least, not while still attached to his head.

Duncan Connor rose up from the floor as a breeze from the corridor outside lifted the papers pinned across the wall. The lassie was gone. She wouldn’t be surfacing at the old tavern on the street corner again, but then Middlesteel had a thousand more taverns like it scattered across its rookeries in the shadows of its pneumatic towers, and a thousand more like her, no doubt, too.

Lifting the suitcase up carefully, the lid still open, Duncan Connor placed it on top of the mattress of his bed. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that wee barney. Are you all right?’

<I think so. Who was that woman?>

‘Nobody you need to worry about.’ He turned the suitcase away from the direction of the thug’s corpse, hiding the sight of his dead would-be assassin.

<It’s nighttime, isn’t it? I should away and sleep some more.>

‘Aye, you should.’ He shut the suitcase gently and placed it back inside the cupboard, making sure to hide it properly under the threadbare blankets this time.

Duncan Connor looked at the corpse. No doubt the thug would be known to the Middlesteel constabulary, his blood code turning on the drums of their transaction engines, a Ham Yard arrest record linked to his citizen file. But if he involved the police in this hubbub, one of them would only leak the tale to the news sheets and Connor of Cassarabia’s name would be linked to yet another horror. It was hard enough finding work as it was, and he had the promise of a little job coming his way from the circus that might vanish if he was dragged along to listen to a coroner pontificate and call witnesses from the jinn house. No, the wee waters of the Gambleflowers would do for this one.

The river took everything, in Middlesteel.

Kyorin departed the perfumery shop along Penny Street leaving an assistant looking in surprise at the silver coin in her hand – not because she had seen through the counterfeit, but wondering how someone as dishevelled as Kyorin actually had the money to buy an expensive bottle of scent for his beloved in the first place. The last couple of days hadn’t been kind to Kyorin, harried and hunted across the streets and slums of Middlesteel by the monsters, staying only in cheap, anonymous dosshouses. He stopped in an alley and squeezed the scent bulb, spraying his clothes and exposed skin, even his hair. Watching the carts and carriages rattle past and praying that the stench of this perfume would be enough to mask him from his hunters for a while.

One of the residual thoughts of the policeman whose mind he had joined with floated up unbidden. <You smell like a whore’s handkerchief.>

‘Shut up,’ Kyorin muttered. ‘When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.’ He had grown uncharacteristically cantankerous with hunger and desperation.

A vagrant stumbled past, his clothes so frayed and ancient they were almost black. He stopped when he saw Kyorin slumped against the wall, muttering to himself. Taking him for one of Middlesteel’s own, obviously. Two friends together, living low on Jinn Lane.

‘Penny for an old soldier? Fought at the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, I did.’

‘What’s a soldier?’ asked Kyorin.

Laughing, the vagrant raised a bottle of cheap grain whisky to his lips and stumbled deeper into the rookeries.

The dead policeman’s residual pattern jumped out unbidden again. <Lying old rascal.>

There it was. Soldier, like a keeper of the peace – <I was a bloody crusher.> – but they acted in rituals of mass aggression between societies, formalized right down to the different colours of the tunics the opposing sides wore to mark their allegiance. <War, it’s called bloody war.> Ah, Clawfoot Moor was the final battle of the Kingdom of Jackals’ civil war between its monarchy and parliament, some six hundred years before. Kyorin’s hunters would appreciate this, although he could thank all that was holy that they were not here to do so. The vagrant’s memory was so raddled the only battle he could dredge up for his beggary was something he had been taught long ago in school.

So many voices in his mind. Too many voices. Kyorin rubbed his head frantically. ‘I just wanted to learn to swim.’

‘I can swim,’ the vagrant called out from further down the alley.

Kyorin had to focus. Two days of adrenaline-fuelled near escapes, low on sleep, nearly out of counterfeit currency to exchange for fruit from the sellers who wandered the streets of the capital with their trays. He pulled out the book from his pocket, the pages still damp from his escape down the River Gambleflowers. Velocities and Trajectories of Science by Timlar Preston. It had originally been written in Quatérshiftian, then translated into Jackelian; not that the language it was written in would have mattered to Kyorin. There was enough detail in the book that he could model the mind of the individual who had written it, feel its uniqueness. Resting his palm on the pages, he reached out.

<Timlar, can you hear me?>

Far above in the holding spheres of the Court of the Air, Kyorin sensed one of the cells of the aerial city filled with a screech of recognition, the noise muffled from the warders patrolling outside by riveted armour and pulsing curse walls. <You have been gone for so long, what happened to you?>

<I haven’t been able to contact you. It hasn’t been easy for me,> Kyorin was burning up, running a fever from too much time exposed to the near constant drizzle of the Kingdom of Jackals’ capital city. <The things I told you about have been hunting me, the masters’ servants. My scent is unique in this city and they are nipping at my heels. I can sense them getting closer, even as we speak.>

<I’m not going mad, am I? You aren’t a figment of my id, you’re real?>

<You’ll find that out soon enough,> said Kyorin. <I wish I were a figment of your imagination, Timlar, I truly do; that all I have warned you about was a fiction.>

<I thought you might be my own genius, broken free of my imprisonment up here. Coming to remind me of who I was, what I once achieved …>

<You have a little more to achieve yet, I think,> said Kyorin.

<I am very nearly finished,> said Timlar Preston.

Kyorin received an image of the Quatérshiftian prisoner brandishing his pencil like a sword, ready to sketch out the few missing pieces of the mechanics he needed for his device.

<The help you have given me, it is amazing. Concepts that I could never—>

<Merely knowing something is possible, that is often enough to begin the journey,> said Kyorin. <And you had been working along the right lines long before I contacted you.>

<I still have not find a way to stabilize the wave front, though. That is where we always failed back in Quatérshift, we always lost focus during the test firings …>

Kyorin listened and began to fill in the gaps. Thank the stars it was he who had survived the masters’ hunters, rather than his ignorant desert-born friend swept away by the river. Half an hour later Kyorin was finished, the voice of the man held captive by the Court of the Air fading as the power of Kyorin’s weakened body began to wane.

<That’s everything I need. But how will you get me out of here?> Timlar Preston’s anxiety was almost overwhelming. <No one has ever escaped from the Court of the Air.>

<I don’t know. I will find a way. I must, or we are all finished.>

<I never wanted to use my skills for war, you know,> sobbed Preston. <I nearly became a priest of the Child of Light, once, taking vows for the seminary. I was a pacifist, but the revolutionary government took my wife hostage, my three children. They said I was to dedicate my work to serving the Committee of War or we would all be banished to an organized community.>

<You deserve better than what happened to you,> said Kyorin.

<No, the devices I built were used to slaughter countless thousands of innocents during the Two-Year War,> said Preston. <Children no different from mine, who just happened to have been born inside the Kingdom of Jackals’ borders. I do deserve this. I sacrificed my principles for a mean, personal thing. And what good has it done me? My family have no doubt starved on a widow’s pension during my years as a prisoner. Even before the Court of the Air’s agents seized me, Quatérshift’s streets were full of soldiers’ wives begging in the streets for food, their children in their laps, babies’ arms as thin as shoelaces. The gratitude of our glorious revolution. I helped murder thousands of Jackelians in the Two-Year War and what has happened to my dreams, my nation, my family, as I rot away up here?>

<Your designs must be used as you once intended,> said Kyorin. <And if you once killed thousands, you can now save millions. I must go, we have been in communication with each other for too long. Your mind was not born to safely receive my thoughts over such a duration.>

Far above, Kyorin sensed the Quatérshiftian prisoner finally lying down exhausted on his bunk, left to wonder if the voice in his head was indeed his madness snapped free.

Kyorin rested the book down by his side and glanced miserably towards the strip of sky above the alley. He couldn’t see the Court of the Air from the ground, so high was the aerial city’s station. Wrapped in clouds generated by its steam-driven transaction engines as they modelled the ebb and flow of Jackelian society, in as perfect a simulation as such primitive technology allowed. ‘I’ll get you out, my new friend. I must, or we are all dead.’

The chequerboard hull of a Royal Aerostatical Navy airship went past, a brief thrum from its engine and then it was gone. For a moment, Kyorin thought its shadow had remained, but it was the shadow of the vagrant looming large above him.

‘I’ll trade you.’

‘Trade me what?’ asked Kyorin.

The vagrant pulled out a book from his own jacket pocket, in a better state than the clothes from which it had emerged. ‘Lifted this from the stationer’s stall at the Guardian Fairfax atmospheric. Finished it now.’ He pointed at Kyorin’s damp book. ‘You finished with that?’

‘Yes,’ sighed Kyorin. ‘I believe I have.’

Kyorin received the book from the vagrant and passed up his own. A sudden suspicion struck him as he saw how the vagrant was looking at the cover of his new book. ‘You can’t read, can you?’

‘No, squire. But there’s plenty on the streets around here that can, and they read them for me – Old Man Pew, Barking Billy. The words don’t make sense to my eyes, see. Got the reading sickness.’ The vagrant sipped another swig from his upland firewater. ‘This book any good?’

‘It’s a philosophical treatise on velocity science and its practical applications as related to gunnery and celestial mechanics. Royal Society Press edition as translated from the original Quatérshiftian.’

Belching, the vagrant felt the smog-damp wall of the alley for support. ‘Sweet as a nut.’

Kyorin glanced down at the cover of his new book. The Moon Pirates of Trell by Molly Templar. There was a lurid illustration on the front: three explorers in pith helmets clutching lethal-force weapons as they stepped out of a crashed high-altitude airship onto a desert-like moon. Now this was really very promising.

In the road outside the alley a hansom cab had collided with a brewer’s wagon and an argument was about to boil over into violence. The crushers would be here any minute. Time to be off before the first police arrived.

As Kyorin walked past the vagrant he quickly stooped down and laid his palm flat on the man’s forehead. The vagrant yelled at the terrible flare of burning in his skull as his brain reworked itself into a new pattern.

‘Ask Old Man Pew to teach you to read,’ said Kyorin. ‘I don’t think you’ll have problems interpreting written words any more.’

Groaning, the vagrant reached for his bottle, trying to gulp the pain away. With an obscene gargle he spat the whisky down onto the mud.

Kyorin smiled, disappearing into the labyrinth of the rookeries. ‘Unfortunately, intoxicants will no longer taste quite as appealing as they did to you before your healing.’

There was a Pentshire moon outside the farmer’s window. Round. Full. Easily enough light for the farmer to see by as the squire’s thug took his hand and raised it slowly up in front of his face.

‘Now, imagine your fingers are voters,’ said the thug. He gave the farmer’s fingers a little wiggle.

‘Pay attention!’ hissed one of the other two men pinning down the farmer’s body. ‘This is important.’

‘Nice, fat, plump little voters. Contented,’ explained the ringleader. ‘They know who to vote for. They know who owns the tenancy on their farms and crofts. But—’ his voice turned ugly ‘—now someone else comes along to stand for parliament, and look, they’re all confused.’ He wiggled the farmer’s fingers in a sad little dance.

‘Someone who’s not been paid off to throw the election for you in your rotten little borough,’ spat the farmer, spots of blood from his smashed face landing on his bedroom floor as he spoke.

‘That’s a terrible accusation to make,’ said the ringleader. ‘You see, when the voters are confused, they just need straightening out.’

The ringleader took one of the farmer’s fingers and pushed it back, the snap of bone nearly making him faint.

‘That’s a lot of work for us,’ observed one of the thugs behind him, hissing the words into his ear. ‘And the Circle knows, you’ve kept us busy enough this year already, organizing every labourer whose ear you could grab to pour your poison into their thick heads, setting up a damn tenants’ union.’

Another finger snapped and the farmer desperately tried to stop himself screaming so he didn’t wake up the others in the farmhouse, trying to keep his family out of this.

‘And you wouldn’t like parliament,’ added the second of the thugs behind him. ‘All those long airship trips down to Middlesteel, and the prices in the capital are diabolical.’

A third finger snapped and all the farmer could think of was how he was going to walk the shirehorse and the plough across his fields next week in this mangled state.

‘Don’t get me wrong, now,’ continued the ringleader, ‘but I just can’t see you sitting in the House of Guardians. They’re carriage folk, mostly, and there’s you with no carriage at all – why, I wager you wouldn’t even know which spoon to pick up from the table to use for your soup. You would just embarrass us all if you got elected.’

The ringleader made to break the farmer’s last finger, but then shook his head as if changing his mind. ‘And here’s something I bet you haven’t considered. If you’re down in Middlesteel, hobnobbing with all the quality and listening to all those boring bills being read in parliament, then who’s going to be looking after your family?’

The farmer’s heart leapt. Even they wouldn’t? A fourth thug emerged into the room with the farmer’s son struggling in his grip, one hand covering the boy’s mouth, the other clutching a pheasant-skinning knife.

‘Please!’ the farmer begged.

‘What, you thought we were joking?’ said the ringleader. ‘Thought we’d come a-visiting your home at night for a bit of sport, did you?’

‘Please!’

The shadows in the room were growing longer, thicker. Like mist. But no one noticed. The farmer was struggling desperately under the weight of the thugs holding him down, the others were too giddy with the excitement of the kill.

‘Shut up, you’ve got another two lads, you’re not even going to miss one of them.’

‘You can’t do this!’

‘I feel your pain,’ laughed the ringleader.

‘And I feel your evil,’ hissed another voice, as the thug holding the farmer’s son stumbled back into the shadows of the room. They were both enveloped and disappeared, a second before the grip holding the farmer fast seemed to slip away and he was free.

The farmer backed away as the ringleader and the remaining thug glanced hastily around at the shadows of the room, hundreds of them, swelling and moving like the surf on the sea. Solid. Black. Laughter seemed to bubble out of those shadows, but there was no happiness in it. It was a pit to hell opened in that room, the echo of a fallen soul rising out of the depths. But where was his lad, and where was the thug who had been holding him?

Twisting a knife around in his hand, the ringleader seemed to be trying to locate the sound of the terrible laughter. There was an explosion of light from one corner, blinding the farmer, then a series of wet slaps. As the dots cleared from the farmer’s eyes, he realized the only other person left in the room was the ringleader, the shadows twisting and circling around him.

‘You’ve carried your squire’s message for him this night,’ laughed a dark voice. ‘I have one for you to take back to him.’

There was a snap-snap-snap of light – like the powder flash on a camera – the shadows and the light merging to become an angular figure striking at the gang’s ringleader. The farmer turned his head to avoid the shower of splintering glass as the thug was forced to leave by the window.

The room seemed to return to normal, the intense light diminishing to a sparkle on the handle of a pistol – one of a pair – holstered on a figure wearing a jet-black riding coat, his face covered with a dark executioner’s hood.

‘My son?’ trembled the farmer, looking mesmerized at the three corpses lying on the floor of his bedroom.

‘Back in his room,’ said the figure. ‘A child’s mind is a very flexible thing. He’ll remember nothing of this night.’

‘Dear Circle,’ said the farmer, ‘what have you done, man? There’s three dead here. The squire has the county constabulary in his pocket, they’ll—’

‘The county magistrate is due a visit from me, as, I believe, is the squire.’

‘You can’t interfere with justice!’

The terrible laughter returned to the room. ‘They only know about the law; I shall explain what justice is.’

‘You’re him, aren’t you. The one they talk about.’

‘Look out of the window,’ said the hooded figure. ‘What do you see?’

The farmer stood in front of his shattered window. There was the gang’s ringleader, crawling across the glass on a broken leg, moaning, trying to reach his horse. And a dense fog was forming – seeping out of the woods, fingers of it probing along the ground like the legs of a curious spider. It was a marsh fog. The farmer looked around, but the three corpses had disappeared.

Vanished too was the Hood-o’the-marsh. Only the broken window remained as evidence that the farmer hadn’t dreamt the whole break-in.

* * *

Walking into the woods, the Hood-o’the-marsh allowed himself a smile, shouts from the squire’s mansion echoing behind him as the great house’s retainers spilled into the night, waving their blunderbusses and birding rifles. Someone was yelling to douse the lanterns, more of a hindrance than help on a nighttime pursuit. Not that it would do them any good, any more than cavalry redcoats would be able to help the bloody figure of a county magistrate in a dressing gown, stumbling towards town and the garrison. He owned the night. Not much of a recompense for losing the ability to sleep, to dream.

Which was why the silhouette of the woman waiting at the top of the hill took him by surprise. Nobody could sneak up on him. Nobody. Not since he had found… both pistols were suddenly in his hands as he advanced, treading silently towards the woman. After all these years, could it really be her?

‘Mother, is that you?’

There was no answer. He could feel nothing from her, as if she had no weight on the world. No evil. No goodness either. And there was only one person – if you could call her a person – who had ever registered on the Hood’s senses like that.

‘Mother, if—’

‘I am not the Lady of the Lights,’ said the silhouette. ‘But perhaps you should recognize me anyway, Oliver Brooks?’

He moved closer. There was just enough moonlight to see that the silhouette was wearing what looked like leather armour covered by bronze chainmail – archaic, the very picture of a warrior maiden from the cheap woodcuts of a child’s novel.

‘Enough of this.’ Oliver pointed his two pistols at her but they vanished from his hands, reappearing in her own. The light reflecting from the pistols became twin suns, blinding him. As the light dwindled he saw that the pistols had changed form, one becoming a trident, the other an oblong shield with the crude face of a lion cast on it. The lion of Jackals.

Oliver gaped. ‘They’re mine.’

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘They are mine. As are you, Hood-o’the-marsh.’

‘You are an Observer then,’ said Oliver.

‘No, I’m not one of them,’ said the woman. ‘I’m a local girl. Did you never wonder where those two pistols of yours, so carefully passed down the ages from master to master, actually came from? It is my work you are about, Oliver Brooks.’

‘Is it, indeed?’ said Oliver. ‘Then return those two pistols and I’ll be about it once more.’

‘Time enough for that,’ said the woman. ‘There are more important matters to attend to than corrupt guardians and local magistrates. Have you not felt the wrongness in our land?’

Oliver gazed down at his empty hands. She knew that he had.

‘There is an ache in my bones,’ continued the woman, ‘and I fear what it augurs.’

‘Your bones?’

‘The bones of the land, Oliver Brooks of the race of man,’ said the woman. ‘The bones of the Kingdom of Jackals.’

‘Jackals is a country, not a person,’ said Oliver. ‘It’s my country.’

‘You are half-right,’ said the woman. ‘Jackals is an idea, a dream of freedom that is dreamt by all those who live in the forests and glades of this green land. That is why you can dream no longer, Hood-o’the-marsh. Your job is to protect those who do dream, those who still believe in me.’

‘Are you certain that you’re not an Observer?’ said Oliver. ‘You surely sound like one to my thick ears.’

‘I’m not one of the grand system’s angels, I have already told you that. I’m the god of details. I’m the rustle of the wind in the oaks, the splash of a stone rolling into a loch, the mountains that stood against the glaciers and the spirit that won’t be crushed.’

‘Why are you here?’ asked Oliver.

‘Do you not remember the tales of battle your uncle told you sitting around the fire grate of Seventy Star Hall?’ said the woman. ‘Of a time when Jackals would be threatened and of what would arise once again from a circle of ancient standing stones?’

‘He told me a lot of things about the war,’ said Oliver. And so his uncle had. The mud-drenched fields of the east, Jackelian troops in trenches, wiping the smoke of battle from their gas masks’ visors. The visions they sometimes saw in the sky, the product of chemical leakage through their suits or a by-product of the earthflow particles and mage-war. Lions running through the sky. Strange angels clashing in the heavens. ‘Are the first kings really about to return from their slumber? There’s no danger of war between Jackals and the Commonshare now. Quatérshift can barely feed its own people, let alone mount another invasion.’

‘No, the threat is not from the east this time.’

‘Where, then? Cassarabia? The regiments saw off the last bandit army that came up from the desert. The caliph fears the high fleet and the wrath of the Royal Aerostatical Navy too much to make a more direct intervention.’

‘There is an old saying in the Jackelian regiments,’ said the woman. ‘It is always the bullet you don’t see that gets you.’

‘I repeat my question: are the first kings about to return?’

‘Right idea,’ said the woman. ‘Wrong gender. You are the key, Oliver. You will need to reunite with the scheme of offence to defeat that which is coming.’

‘You mean Molly Templar?’ Oliver laughed. ‘You’re a little out of touch. Molly is a famous author now, her celestial fiction the toast of the publishing houses along Dock Street. If you want someone to fill five pages in a penny dreadful with a story of derring-do, then she’s definitely your woman. But this—’ Oliver gestured around the woods ‘—running around the night, getting shot at. I don’t think so. Not anymore.’

‘Her path is still bound to yours,’ said the woman. ‘I need both of you together again, though far more than the pair of you will be required for the conflict that is bearing down upon us. Even together, the two of you are not enough to defeat that which you will face …’

‘Yes, the enemy. I was hoping you could be a little less obscure on the nature of the enemy, given how you’re definitely not an Observer, but the goddess of details and all that.’

A fog was rising around the warrior woman’s body, a marsh mist. An hour ago Oliver would have said it was one of his mists, but now he knew better. The mist belonged to the land. It was the Kingdom of Jackals’.

‘You are the key, Oliver; you will know when the time comes. Remember, you wear my favours, young man. Wear them proudly.’

With a burst of light, the familiar, comforting weight of the two pistols was back in his hands. The mist had enveloped the warrior woman, returning her essence to the soil of their land.

CHAPTER TWO

Purity Drake bent down to pick up the empty brown beer bottle, recently rolled under the tall iron railings of the palace following a chance impact with one of the many pairs of shoes exiting from Guardian Fairfax atmospheric station – the gates to the underground transport system hidden just out of sight, but not so far away that the grit and soot from the vast stacks that kept the atmospherics’ tunnels under vacuum didn’t rain down on the palace grounds day and night. Endless supplies of soot that constantly needed sweeping from the flagstones in front of the palace’s faded marble façade.

But what shoes there were in the crowds outside. Polished knee boots the season’s fashion for the men; patterned red leather with shiny copper buckles and heel ribbons for the ladies. Shiny patent dress boots for the soldiers barracked in the capital, so swish under their cherry-red cavalry trousers. And big hobnailed affairs – toe-armoured for protection, cushion-heeled for comfort – for the workaday crushers patrolling the royal precinct. All serving only to remind Purity of the dirty naked feet at the other end of her grimy, stockingless legs. She wiggled her bare toes sadly, then stood up and dropped the empty bottle in her rubbish sack.

Purity’s mind drifted to the daydream – her favourite daydream. One day some young girl going to school, a rich mill-owner’s daughter, would notice a small hole in her perfect, fashionable shoes, and her mother would arch an immaculate eyebrow in disgust and pull the shoes off, leading her daughter at once to the nearest cobbler for a fresh pair. The discarded shoes would land near enough to the railing for Purity to reach out and lift, lift towards her, the beautiful pair of—

There was a loud, a meaningful cough. One of Purity’s two political police handlers had noticed she had stopped working. He nodded contemptuously towards the wire-haired brush – almost as tall as Purity after her sixteen years of the Royal Breeding House’s meagre diet. Gruel and bread, with meat served on Circleday only. She didn’t complain. Who would care to listen? Picking up the brush again, Purity quietly wiped the dirt off her drab grey shawl and went back to sweeping the flagstones. It was a mixed blessing, the duty of cleaning the palace grounds. It freed her from the captivity and tedium of the Royal Breeding House, true, and the exercise and fresh air were welcome. But this close to the main gates it would not take much for any bored passing republicans to notice the golden crown sewn onto her clothes. Republicans who would not mind that it wasn’t a stoning day and that Purity Drake wasn’t the queen. The types who would take it into their thick skulls that she made a perfect target for a bit of impromptu sport.

Purity glanced out of the railings towards the other side of the palace square. There had been a shoe shop in the line of merchants opposite at one point. Thank the Circle, that concern had shut down last year. Those bowed windows filled with tiered rows of boots and shoes stitched by the hands of a master cobbler had been so tantalizing – no cheap manufactory offcuts there.

One of the politicals shoved Purity hard in her back, breaking her reverie and nearly sending her sprawling. ‘I said, get to work, girl. Showers come back, I don’t want to be standing out here getting soaked.’

As if the pair wouldn’t stand in an alcove and watch her work from the dry. Purity didn’t voice that thought, of course. Young Pushy was handy with his fists, one of the political police’s officers who believed there weren’t many subversive tendencies against the Kingdom of Jackals’ perfect democracy that couldn’t be beaten out of a recalcitrant with an iron bar. His older partner had cruel, careful eyes and liked to sit and watch Purity with his toad-like gaze whilst smoking a large mumbleweed pipe. The violence of youth tempered with the older hand of experience. Except that Officer Toad didn’t seem too inclined to do much tempering at the best of times. Purity looked at the older officer and he merely nodded in confirmation of his younger colleague’s orders, as if Purity should know better than to try to slack off while they were on watch.

‘Hey,’ called a voice from the other side of the railings. ‘She’s half your size.’

Purity cringed. It was a real policeman – a crusher walking the palace beat outside, wearing a neat black uniform rather than her two guards’ forest green. Hadn’t the officer seen the golden crown sewn onto her dress, or had he allowed the animosity between the crushers and the political police to overcome the citizens’ usual prejudice against the nobility? Maybe he had a daughter her age, but either way, the well-meaning policeman didn’t know these two as well as she did, and he wasn’t helping her situation.

‘What did you say?’ spat Officer Pushy.

The crusher leant against the railings. ‘I said it must be a hard duty for you, pushing around a right little villain like her.’

‘Sod off, Wooden Top,’ said the Toad. ‘Find some anglers to arrest.’

Purity winced. Anglers were one of the lowest rungs of the ladder in the capital’s criminal ecosystem, using modified poles to lift women’s unmentionables and other laundry off the drying lines hanging suspended high above the narrow streets of the slum neighbourhoods. Catching anglers was a job given to cadets at Ham Yard.

Outside the railings, the policeman pushed his pillbox cap – oak-lined to take a good knock or two – back up his scalp. ‘You two are fine shoving around children, but you wouldn’t last two minutes on the beat against the flash mob down in Whineside.’

‘This ’un,’ said Pushy, ‘this ’un is a stinking royalist, and you treat them like you’d treat your hound.’

Pushy went to strike Purity in the face and she flinched, but suddenly there was a snap as reality dislocated and the political officer’s hand vanished, becoming a green-scaled fist. The courtyard was gone, replaced by a long and windy shale beach. No, not again. Another one of her visions. The madness that ran down her family line.

Purity was ducking the fist, moving fast under the weight of heavy armour, a trident in her right hand sweeping down to hook a beast off its feet, the shield in her other hand smashing into its snarling face, rendering it dead or unconscious. As always, her madness came like a dream, she was trapped as an observer in her own body. Where was she? All down the beach, warriors dressed like Purity were dancing a ballet of death. Their foe was coming out of the ocean: seven-foot tall humanoids covered in scales, dripping with seaweed, heads shaped like a bishop’s mitre. Crocodile teeth in wide, snarling grins. Her warriors were shouting insults at the sea creatures, gill-necks from one of the ocean kingdoms. Their language sounded like Jackelian, but incredibly archaic. How long ago was this?

Purity’s movements and those of the woman she was dreaming – or was it the other way around? – were fused together perfectly. One of the sea beasts raised a pipe with a series of metallic bulbs at its end, and Purity’s shield flared with blue energy, deflecting a hail of spearheads driven by compressed air. By the Circle, Purity could feel the power, the raw power of the earth throbbing beneath her feet. Drawing it into her body. This must be what being a worldsinger was like, the sorcery of the earth charging her veins. The earth of the kingdom, the holy dirt these sea beasts wished to claim as their own.

Muscled arms wrapped around Purity’s waist, crushing her bones beneath her mail armour. She shoved her trident back into the beast’s gut, reversing it to swing its triple prongs down towards the winded invader. Then she stumbled. A momentary disconnection between the past and the present, the dreamer and the dream.

‘Who am I?’

The sea beast snarled, revealing its white fangs, and spat something at her in a language full of whistles and guttural stops, a language that was made to carry underwater. Purity didn’t need a translator to know it was a curse of the deepest kind. The gill-neck reached for a razor-sharp blade strapped to its forearm and she squeezed the trigger on the trident, a stream of energy shooting from its prongs and burning a hole in the beast’s chest. The beast was still shuddering its last breath when she whirled the trident around, releasing a whip of energy across a line of the corpse’s kin wading out of the sea and trying to break through the warriors defending her beautiful white cliffs.

‘I am Elizica, Elizica of the Jackeni. Drive them back! Drive the gill-necks back into the water!’

Snap.

‘Into the water, into the water.’

The Toad was dragging her off the prone form of Officer Pushy. ‘Stop it, you mad little cow. You’ll put his brains across the floor, you will.’

Outside the railings the policeman was laughing. ‘She can take a slap and give one back.’

‘I’ll see you get a flogging for this, you little—’

Purity stopped struggling, the terrible realization of what she had done sinking in. The sudden strangeness of modern Middlesteel replaced the vision of the ancient battle at the beach. The knock of the atmospheric station’s steam engines in the distance, the shadows of the pneumatic towers lengthening as the sun emerged from behind heavy rain clouds. She’d struck a political officer, struck him down unconscious by the looks of it. What would they do to her now? How much was her rare, wild, mad royal blood worth to parliament after such a vicious assault?

‘You’ll pay for this, you—’ The Toad was bending down over his colleague, touching two fingers to the man’s neck. ‘He’s dead! Oh, jigger my soul, how am I going to explain this one to the colonel? He’s dead.’

‘But I only knocked him to the ground, how can he be bloody dead?’

The Toad drew his pistol from his holster, slipping a crystal charge into its breech. ‘You broke his nose, drove the bone right back into his head. It’s a murder trial for you now, girl, no two ways about it.’

A trial! Purity looked at Officer Pushy desperately, as if she could will the dead guard back to life with the seeming ease that she had brained him. She couldn’t even remember doing it. A death. A trial. The state always turned a blind eye to deaths inside the Royal Breeding House – but only among the royalists. One more or one less in the breeding pool was just natural wastage. But a guard, not even a redcoat, but an officer, an agent of the political police? Purity had been eleven when they took Jeffers away, the wild boy, a duke’s son who’d knifed a soldier on the ramparts as he tried to escape from the breeding house one night. They didn’t allow much reading material in the Royal Breeding House, but they had allowed the copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News that had carried the front-page cartoon of Jeffers being hanged outside Bonegate, the crowds howling their rage at the royalist murderer. Would Purity’s end be any more dignified when they dragged her to the scaffold and slipped a noose around her neck? She didn’t even have the customary coin to bribe the guards to jump on her legs and pull her feet to make it quick for her.

The Toad licked his lips nervously. The man’s position wasn’t that different from hers now. Justifying this calamity, on his damn watch, back to his masters in the state was going to be no small matter.

‘I want his boots,’ sobbed Purity.

‘What?’ the Toad levelled his pistol at Purity, unsure if he needed it. Was she the girl they pushed around at the Royal Breeding House or was she the young wolf who had just killed his colleague?

‘I’m going to bloody swing for this,’ said Purity. ‘At least let them kill me wearing his boots. I can pad them out with paper and cloth; they’ll fit me fine, you’ll see.’

‘You’re mad,’ growled the Toad. ‘Mad as a bloody biscuit. When they take you to the scaffold they’ll be putting you out of your misery.’

Toad-face needed her alive to bear the punishment for this; the man wasn’t going to shoot her now. Purity knelt to untie the dead guard’s laces, but the voice in her skull returned, the woman’s voice she had heard on the beach. 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.

‘The blood of the world.’

‘Get away from his boots, you babbling nutter. You’re not even fit to touch him.’ The Toad grabbed a bunch of hair at the back of Purity’s head and yanked her to her feet.

She let him have the hair. Ignoring the pain, she seized his wrist and rotated the arm so he had to fall to his knees, kicking the pistol out of his other hand with her rigid toes. ‘The bones of Jackals.’

‘My bloody bones!’ the Toad screamed as his arm stretched close to breaking point.

Purity released her grip and spun around on the ball of her left foot, smashing the Toad’s face with her right sole. Bare, calloused, Purity’s foot was every bit as tough as shoe leather. Catching the falling body she rammed the Toad against the palace railing, jamming his head between two bars. It was like watching one of the crude plays the children in her dorm put on for each other back in the Royal Breeding House. Although here she was the audience and the actor both – but with every movement her actions felt more and more like her own volition, not the ancient thing whispering in her mind. She even knew why she had rammed the Toad’s head through the railing, stepping back, running at him – a human vaulting horse. A quick jump. Her hands dug into the metal between the palace railings’ sharpened ornamental spikes, hauling her weight up.

Purity saw the crusher with his pistol drawn below, the old constable stunned by the murderously quick turn of events on the other side of the palace gates. ‘Gentle as you like, girl, back onto the ground with you.’

Purity’s shared, knowing vision noted the gun’s clockwork firing mechanism, the hammer cocked back behind the crystal charge, its fluid explosive sloshing around inside the shell, the curve of her arc down at him and the insignificant chance his ball might miss at such close range.

‘Please don’t!’ The voice distracted the crusher. A vagrant, his clothes dirty and torn, his mind probably too raddled to do anything but be drawn closer to the centre of the action rather than scatter and run like all the other panicked citizens in the square were presently doing.

Drawing his club from his belt, the crusher waved the cosh at the vagrant’s face while his pistol stayed firmly pointed up towards Purity. ‘Back to the jinn house with you, you damn drunken fool, or you’ll know the why of it from me.’

‘I have not been drinking,’ insisted the vagrant. ‘Can you not see this child is pure? Is this how you honour your sages?’

‘No, this is how we do it at Ham Yard.’ The crusher swung the cosh towards the vagrant’s head and the thing inside Purity’s skull told her to leap. She did, the policeman catching the movement out of the corner of his eye and triggering the hammer on his pistol. As a storm of smoke blew out of the pistol, Purity felt as if she was frozen in amber within the air. The ball exited the barrel with a crack of broken crystal. The vagrant had raised both of his hands – not to ward off the cosh, though – a wheel of air detonated out of his outstretched fingers. Followed by another and another, the policeman slapped off his feet and falling into the railings, Purity rolling in the air with the backdraft of the strange energy force, pushed out of the path of the ball. She landed down on the square’s flagstones as nimble as a cat. This was a vagrant? If so, he was the sort who must have studied the sorcery of the worldsong at some point; he had surely mastered the magic of the leylines. Purity heard redcoats shouting from the palace grounds behind, running towards the sound of the pistol shot.

‘Come,’ called the vagrant, beckoning Purity to follow him.

No time to slide the unconscious policeman’s boots off, not that they would have fitted her. Pity, a crusher walking the beat every day would have some pair of boots.

‘Other keepers of your law are approaching, they will come after you.’

He had that right. Purity Drake on the run from the Royal Breeding House, a political officer lying dead in her wake. They were going to keep on coming after her until they had her kicking at the end of a gallows rope. She looked at her odd saviour. There was something wrong with the vagrant’s face, as if the proportions were out of balance, the hair too stiff, like feathers on a bird. The voice in her skull was undecided about him, but Purity was out of options.

‘Thank you for saving me,’ Purity wheezed as the pair of them fled into the side lanes.

‘I have done you no great favour, I fear,’ said the vagrant. He was fast on his feet for someone living on the street; Purity was having trouble keeping up. ‘You should leave my presence, there are people pursuing me far more dangerous than the keepers of your law.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Purity. ‘Hey!’ She had just realized how unnatural the vagrant she was running with actually was. ‘You’re speaking without moving your lips. Am I on the skip with a theatre act?’

He slowed down, his eyes blinking. ‘No, I am not one of your city’s stage players; I am a visitor. I have travelled down to your kingdom from the north.’

A foreigner, she should have guessed. Perhaps she could slip out of the country with him, back to his land. Jackals was never going to be safe for her again. By tomorrow, her blood code sigils would be printed on an arrest warrant hanging in every police station from Middlesteel to the border. The full horror of the future she had opened up for herself dawned on her.

‘They couldn’t see it,’ said the foreigner. They had fled deep enough into the tenements to catch their breath briefly.

She looked at him quizzically.

‘Your purity. You walk with the power of your land.’

She gazed down at her bare feet, standing in a puddle of stagnant rainwater in the rookery alley. ‘I walk with no shoes, sir, and that’s just what they call me. They call me Purity.’

‘I am called Kyorin.’

‘You’re a strange one, Kyorin, but with the way things have been going for me lately, I’m not much of a one to talk. Do all your country’s people speak by throwing their voices like a stage act?’

‘Not all of them,’ said Kyorin. ‘The ones who are coming after me would be more interested in eating me than conversing with me.’

‘Circle be damned, you say?’ Purity looked at her saviour’s oddly angled face. From the north, the far north perhaps? The polar barbarians were said to practise cannibalism, but this queer fish didn’t even have a beard, let alone a fur-shafted axe with him.

‘It is true,’ insisted Kyorin.

‘Well, Jackals is full of refugees. You’re one kind, Kyorin, and now I’m another. A royalist on the run, like old King Reuben hiding in the forest from parliament’s rebel redcoats.’

Kyorin bent down to examine Purity’s feet. ‘Your connection to the land, it is consuming for one so young. Have you yet experienced the visions of a sage?’

What was the point of lying to this vagrant, this shambling exiled witch doctor? Whatever arts of the worldsong he held to, he had the measure of her, all right. ‘I thought it was madness. Everyone in the house did.’

‘And so it is,’ smiled Kyorin. ‘But it is a glorious sort of madness. You are a conduit for the soul of your land, nourished by the leylines. It is no wonder I felt myself drawn to your presence. I can feel the power within you, it is very strong.’

‘You are a witch doctor then?’ said Purity. ‘What you did to that crusher who was going to put a bullet in me …’

‘I am not permitted to take life,’ said Kyorin. ‘It is not my people’s way. I merely disorientated your keeper of laws to prevent a worse crime being committed.’

‘Best you don’t try that line on a magistrate here,’ said Purity. ‘You’d get a boat to the colonies or the rope for helping me escape.’

In the far distance there was a whistle from a policeman’s Barnaby Blow. A pickpocket diving into the rookeries to escape justice, or were the police on their trail again? Time to be moving on. Purity looked about the narrow passage, branching out into shadowy lanes that didn’t even have old-style oil-fed lamps, let alone the new-style gas ones. Not a place to be hiding after dark. What did Purity know of Middlesteel’s geography? Depressingly little. Only what she had seen of the capital while being marched around on a handful of routes by her guards. Hiding inside the Royal Breeding House, that she could do. The other children had taken enough lumps out of her hide that there weren’t many nooks and crannies in the old fortress on the outskirts of the capital that she didn’t know like the back of her hand.

‘Do you have any money?’ asked Purity.

Kyorin took out a bag-like pocket book and jangled it. ‘I had more yesterday, but I lack the means to replicate additional Jackelian tokens of exchange now.’

‘Well, I’ve got a five-hundred-year-old act of parliament that forbids me to hold property and chattels in my name, so you’re looking pretty flush to me. My mother told me once that if I ever needed a safe place to stay, the flop houses in the east of the city don’t ask too many questions.’

Kyorin sniffed at the wind. ‘The keepers of your law are coming after us. We should leave here.’

‘That’s a handy nose.’

‘It is the hunters from my land that we must fear. Come …’

The two of them fled deeper into the heart of Middlesteel.

Harry Stave pulled out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the pinprick of blood away from his finger, the transaction engine drum on the blood machine in the doorway rattling on a set of loose bearings as his identity was successfully matched to the record on the shop’s files. The Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard, where Middlesteel’s secrets were hoarded and sold, although very few of Dred Land’s customers were aware that the shop was a station house for the Court of the Air. Its proprietor a whistler, in the parlance of the great game the various intelligence agencies of the continent’s states played against each other.

If Harry’s two companions – so traditional in their long-tailed coats and stovepipe hats, tailored in black and starched to perfection – were surprised by the appearance of the shambling, mute steamman that greeted them as the door opened, they did not show it. Harry smiled, the two crows stepping inside behind him, laconic and hardly taken aback by this obviously human-milled automaton, an expensive toy in comparison to the creatures of the metal that came down from the mountains of the Steammen Free State. A form of labour that was never going to take off, not while the race of man lounged unemployed in vast numbers across the capital’s slum districts, breeding and fighting and breeding some more.

They were good, Harry’s two crows, the Court of the Air’s finest, their presence underlying how unsettled things had become upstairs. Not even fazed when Dred Lands appeared, his silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins covering his terrible wounds; opening up the basement entrance to the duke’s hole and taking them down to the concealed rooms underneath his shop. But what was on the table now was enough to pierce even their laconic detachment.

‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it, Harry?’ said Dred Lands. ‘My informer came up trumps when she fished that floater out of the river.’

‘You’re as good as my word, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘I told the Advocate General when she gave me the nod for this job. It’ll be Dred that comes up with the goods first. And you haven’t disappointed, no you haven’t.’

‘Not really my area of expertise,’ said Dred, indicating his primitive iron drones moving about behind the steam-fogged glass of his underground orchard room. ‘But you don’t have to be a butcher to appreciate a nice piece of roast beef on Circleday.’

‘Don’t you worry about butchers,’ said Harry. ‘I brought my own.’

‘Sharp tailoring,’ said Dred, moving aside as Harry’s two crows got to work. ‘Very sharp.’

Running his hands over the wet corpse, the shorter of the two agents murmured in appreciation, pushing at the skin and the bones like a doctor trying to diagnose an inflamed chest.

‘Worth the trip down?’ asked Harry.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the shorter of the two crows. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open, revealing dozens of tools fastened to the lining with straps – bone saws, scalpels, hammers that could crack open ribs.

Harry shook his head. ‘Not here. We’ll take him back upstairs and do it properly.’

Dred nodded in thanks to Harry. As he might. Dred’s iron drones would have been scrubbing for days to remove the blood if the two crows had gone for a full dissection down in his bolthole.

‘Then I am done here.’ The crow looked at his companion. ‘Mister Shearer?’

‘Thank you, Mister Cutter.’ The second crow ran his hands along the body a couple of inches above the burnt flesh. He hummed an incantation to the worldsong, the air crackling with energy, vortexes of dancing witch-light snapping in and out of existence above the body.

‘What about his mind?’ asked Harry. ‘Can you go for a reading? His last memories?’

‘No,’ said the crow, through the gritted teeth of concentration. ‘Not even I can do that. He’s been cold for far too long. One thing I can tell you, though, his death was not an accident. There is an aura of great distress imprinted across the residue of his soul.’

Harry hadn’t been expecting anything else. ‘How far off the map are we, then?’

‘Let me show you,’ said the crow. ‘Mister Cutter …’

‘Mister Shearer?’

‘Cleaning fluid, seven strength.’

The other crow reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle, a line of sigils printed in transaction engine code the only markings on its label. Taking the bottle and carefully pouring it onto the corpse’s face, the crow rubbed the cheek gently with a cloth. As he rubbed, the pink skin changed colour, the dye running off, revealing a light powder blue underneath.

‘Bloody Circle,’ said Dred Lands, peering in for a closer look. ‘A blue man!’

‘And not from the cold of the river, eh, Mister Cutter?’

‘Certainly not, Mister Shearer. He’s been painted to fit in with the people of Jackals. All very theatrical.’

‘Not from the race of man?’ asked Harry.

‘No, nor from any of our ancestral tree’s offshoots,’ said the crow. ‘His muscles and skeletal groupings bear no relation at all to craynarbian or grasper physiology.’

‘From one of the other continents, then?’ said Harry. ‘Lots of odd creatures and races out down Thar-way. And our colonists have only explored a small part of Concorzia.’

Lifting the lips of the blue man and running a finger down the teeth, the crow indicated the stubby molars. ‘Look, flat. No edges to the teeth, no canines at all. This creature is a plant eater. I can sense more than one stomach inside his belly, maybe as many as five, all interconnected. He wouldn’t have been able to nibble so much as a ham roll for lunch without becoming violently sick from indigestion.’

‘A plant eater,’ murmured Dred Lands, looking down at the corpse. ‘I knew there was a reason why he was bleeding green blood when my informant brought him down here.’

Mister Cutter ran his hand fondly through the dead creature’s hair. ‘Yes. A plant eater. I think he would have been non-violent by nature. Peaceful.’

Harry lifted up the blackened sleeve of the corpse’s jacket. ‘Burnt up, then drowned. If it was peace he wanted, he should have buggered off out of Jackals.’

‘You know more about this than you let on when you tipped me off, don’t you?’ said the owner of the Old Mechomancery Shop.

‘Ask no questions and be told no lies.’

‘Harry, I’m the chief whistler in the capital, I need to know what’s going on here!’

‘Someone has been sniffing around, and not one of the usual suspects, either,’ explained Harry. ‘One of the Greenhall engine-room men on our payroll found something nasty turning on their drums, not a natural information daemon evolved from legacy code like they’re used to dealing with. Rummaging around the Board of the Admiralty’s drums it was, but it didn’t know we had a sentry on the Court of the Air’s own backdoor watching it breaking in. The daemon erased itself when our man tried to isolate it for examination.’

‘If they got that far into our transaction engines, then they’re sharp,’ said Dred Lands. ‘Very sharp indeed. You know how many checks a punch card goes through before it’s injected into the Greenhall engine rooms. And the Admiralty drums are the most secure in the whole civil service. Which makes it doubly unlikely that our dead friend here is an agent of the Commonshare’s Committee of Public Security.’

‘Plenty starving across the border in Quatérshift eating grass soup these days,’ snorted Harry. ‘But you’re right, this one is no shiftie agent.’

Harry didn’t mention the headaches the Order of Worldsingers were experiencing in Jackals, all those little acts of sorcery going wrong, misfiring with unexpected results. He could feel it himself, the change in the earth. Like a bird following the magnetic paths of navigation to the wrong destination. Geopathic stress was what the Court’s experts called it. The world was turning, always turning. But where were they going to end up? Maybe there would be more answers when the three of them returned to the Court of the Air and really got to work on the corpse.

‘Bundle him up.’ Harry indicated the strange body. His two crows did as they were bid.

‘But are you for the good or the worse, that’s the question?’ whispered Harry.

And more to the point, who in the Kingdom of Jackals wanted the blue man dead in the first place?

Purity returned from the vendor with a handful of apples and a couple of pears, and Kyorin nodded his approval at the girl’s selection.

‘You’ll need to eat more than fruit if we’re going to keep on walking across the city all day again. There’s an eel-seller over there and his jelly looked fresh …’

‘My digestion is not very steady where fish are involved,’ said Kyorin. ‘Let’s eat while we walk. It’s important we keep moving.’

‘If these people from your kingdom are after you, why stay in the capital? I’m getting tired of diving into the crowds every time I see a crusher. I think there’s still enough money left in your pocketbook for a couple of berths on a narrowboat up north. We could travel back to your land.’

‘I would not be welcome in my home,’ said Kyorin. ‘I am a slave and I have slipped the collar of my masters.’

‘A slave!’ exclaimed Purity, spitting out pieces of apple. ‘I thought you were a prince, a noble in exile with assassins on your trail to ensure you couldn’t return home to reclaim your throne.’

Kyorin devoured his pear, even finishing off the core and pips. ‘Nothing so grand or romantic, I fear. Of the two of us, you are the one with a royal birthright. At the very best, I could only be considered a revolutionary… to those who pursue me I am a mere piece of disobedient chattel, to be destroyed for my treasonous inclinations.’

‘More reason to be off and out of Middlesteel.’

Stopping in the shadow of a shop window, Kyorin pulled out a waxy white stick and, as he had done so many times before, rubbed his exposed skin with it. Face, neck, hands. ‘My hunters are creatures called slats, they track by scent. Luckily for me, they prefer to hunt at night— they are eyeless and see using the noise they project from their throats. There are so many people here, so many strong smells. Even without the cover of my masking stick, your capital is the safest place for me to hide.’

‘You sure you’re come down from the north, not up from the south? I’d love to go south. They say that the caliph has given sanctuary to Jackelian royalists in the past to tweak parliament’s nose.’

‘You may use my remaining tokens of exchange to book a passage to this nation by yourself,’ said Kyorin. ‘It would be best if you headed as far away from the north as you can. You should travel south, travel there and keep on going.’

‘And how long would you survive in Middlesteel alone with no coins?’ asked Purity. ‘You need me to buy things for you. I’ve seen you covering your mouth when you talk to people, so they can’t see how you speak without moving your lips. Everyone thinks you’re lying to them.’

‘Quite the opposite, young sage. I carry the seed of truth within me.’

‘Along with half a kilo of pear seeds. It’s the truth I’d like from you myself,’ said Purity. ‘What are you really doing here? You’re not just on the run from these hunters, are you?’

‘I escaped here to see if your people would be able to help overthrow the masters’ rule. My people are called the Kal, and we have been subject to occupation by the masters for so long we have almost forgotten that there was a time when we were not slaves. Our culture is suppressed; if we are even caught teaching our young to read we are executed. We hoped that the people of the Kingdom of Jackals might help free us from this yoke.’

‘We don’t do that,’ said Purity. ‘It’s the Jackelians’ oldest law, dating from long before parliament made the kings hostage. No empire, no interference with our neighbours’ concerns. We can act only in defence of the realm, never in aggression.’

‘I rather approve of that law,’ said Kyorin. ‘But I am afraid my mission to your land will soon become an irrelevancy. My masters will be at your borders shortly and from what I have seen during my travels here, your nation will not be able to withstand their might.’

‘You are mistaken, sir,’ Purity protested. ‘Jackals is the strongest nation on the continent. There is no one who has attacked us who has not lived to rue the day.’

‘I wish I was mistaken,’ sighed Kyorin. ‘But I know better, as I believe do you. Your bare feet feel the power of your land throbbing; can you not feel the sickness spreading underneath you?’

‘I—’ Purity hesitated. This runaway slave had the measure of her. That was exactly how it felt, like a wrongness in the earth, spreading inexorably slowly beneath the bones of the land; the woman’s voice in her skull, her strange madness, whispering to her of the disorder in the land.

‘What you feel is no illusion,’ explained Kyorin. ‘The beastly slats that pursue me may need flesh to dine on, but my masters need life itself. Their machines will drink the life from your land. At first your worldsingers will notice small failings of their sorceries as the leylines grow weaker, then your people will grow listless and uneasy as the connection with the soul of your home dwindles, and then, when enough of your power has been made theirs, your strength weakened, then will my masters’ slave armies appear. Legion upon legion of slats. Some of you will be made slaves in turn, some of you will be farmed for your flesh, the majority of your population will be culled down to a manageable number.’

‘That will not stand,’ insisted Purity.

‘You are a sage,’ said Kyorin. ‘You are a living conduit for your land and she is screaming her rage through your mouth. But your rage will not be enough, just as it was not enough for my people when we faced the masters’ fury.’

‘But there must be a way to fight your masters,’ said Purity.

‘Perhaps, but it is not to be found here. There is one among my people who can help, one of the last of our great sages to evade capture. He was meant to send me word of how to defeat our masters; this I was to pass on to your people. But the party travelling to me across the wastes with his secrets was betrayed and ambushed. Only one rebel survived, a desert-born nomad. He escaped to your kingdom alongside me, but I suspect my simple friend was lax with the use of his masking stick. The hunters caught up with us and murdered him.’

‘If you have a way of stopping your masters, why has this great sage of yours not used it in your own land to free your people?’

‘The same thought occurred to me,’ said Kyorin. ‘Possibly such a weapon will not work for our people. Perhaps its deployment was judged too late to be of use to us now. Activating it will almost undoubtedly involve the use of violence that is not permitted to my people. Or the whole tale may just have been a fiction by my own side to encourage me to infiltrate the expeditionary force to your kingdom in the hope that powerful allies could be found here.’

‘Allies don’t come more powerful than the Jackelian navy,’ said Purity.

Kyorin smiled. ‘It will take more than your airships to lift the oppression of the masters from the Kal, or to stop them claiming your nation as their territory.’

‘What is your kingdom called?’

Kyorin sang a long musical string of words that lasted for a minute.

‘But what do we call your land here in Jackals? Where would I find it on a map?’

‘I believe it would translate as Green Vines of the Kal: Clean Waters of the Kal.’

That wasn’t what Purity had asked, but if he didn’t want to tell her …

Kyorin started on the other pear, eating it carefully and consuming all the fruit. ‘It is not a description that has applied to my home for a long time. The masters have sucked my land dry. What used to be lakes are now dust bowls swirling with mists of stinging chemicals and our once endless forests have become salt wastes and deserts.’

‘It can’t be worse than the smogs here. Have you ever smelt a Middlesteel peculiar when the winds don’t clear away the smoke?’

‘It is far worse. The masters are very adept at dealing with the miasma and filth of their slaves’ labours. It is said that long ago they changed the pattern of their bodies to cope with the waste that they generated. Then they introduced schemes to transmute their detritus. But after a while, even their tinkering with their bodies was not enough and when my land itself had had enough of their presence, it tried to restore the balance of the ecos by sending ages of ice and heat. But the masters controlled even the land’s attempts to fight back, pumping chemicals and machines into the air to stop the ecos from cleaning their corruption from her skin. Fixing our land in a state of living death. Then the masters settled in for the long haul, feeding on the static corpse of my nation until there were no more resources left to convert, no mines left full, no soil fit for growing food, until even the animalcules flowing under the earth and the magnetic energies that pump through the land’s veins had been exhausted.’

‘I was hoping I might find sanctuary in your home,’ sighed Purity. ‘Now I’m glad we’re not going back there.’

‘I never said I wasn’t going to return home,’ said Kyorin. ‘But the time is not yet right. I need the help of a friend I have made here to return to my land. And I still hope to find allies among your people. Those with the wit and the will to survive the journey with me to meet the great sage and join our last effort against the masters. If I cannot bring the mountain to the Kingdom of Jackals, it seems I must bring the Jackelians to the mountain.’

Purity felt disorientated. There was an empty barrel by one of the market stalls and she used it as a seat. Was it Kyorin’s tale, or was it the light and the space of the capital’s streets? Even in a crowded market, the sense of freedom from the familiar corridors of the Royal Breeding House was dizzying, overwhelming at times. She knew Kyorin’s story was the truth, the part of her that throbbed with the land, the whispering voice of her madness, told her so.

‘You could stay here with me.’

Kyorin squeezed her hand in reassurance. ‘It is not my wish to return home. You don’t know how beautiful your land is, with fresh water running through the centre of your capital, sparkling and alive with the creatures of the river. Clouds that swell with falling rain you can walk in without it burning off your skin. Parks of trees and lawns you can actually stroll across, blades of grass you can feel between your fingers – all this we know only in memory. But if your kingdom is to be spared the fate of my home, I fear the journey must be made.’

There was something about his tone of voice. A warning note rose from the ancient voice whispering through her soul. ‘You’ve never met this great sage of yours, have you? You’re not even sure he’s not just a rumour, an old slave legend invented to keep a spark of hope alive.’

‘You are learning to listen to your powers,’ said Kyorin. ‘That’s good. One day soon your intuition may be all you have to keep you alive. You are correct. I am city-born; my cell in the freedom movement was attached to the maintenance of the masters’ great devices of geomancy. Only a few nomads in the salt wastes can truly count themselves free of the yoke my people wear, and it is they who carry the word of the great sage.’ He kicked the ground with a boot. ‘I fear I make a poor sage. The few powers I have are amplified massively here, thanks to the vitality of your land. Back home I could not cast even a basic shield of protection. If I could have performed such feats, my family would have been culled and I would never have been apprenticed as an engineer.’

Purity was about to ask Kyorin more about his life, but he sniffed the air and cursed in his singsong tongue. ‘The slats hunting us are drawing closer. We must pay a boatman to row us down the river again and reach a different district of your city.’

‘What about that perfume stick of yours?’

‘It is running low and the masters will have sent their most proficient pack of hunting slats after me. I fear my pursuers may now be tracking me by the scent of the masking stick itself. But even they have not yet mastered the art of following a scent across water.’

Their lives weren’t so different, Purity mused as they sprinted off towards the embankment of the River Gambleflowers. Both born as prisoners to the rulers of their land. Both slipped their chains. And both of them due to be swiftly executed if they fell back into either of their masters’ clasp. Two kingdoms to save, but they could barely even preserve their own lives.

Molly wiped the dust off the bottle of red wine – a Quatérshiftian vintage brought over from before the revolution and the execution of the Sun King – a rare treat and just the thing to cheer up Commodore Black. While the rest of Middlesteel was celebrating Smoking Prester Charles Night by building bonfires and letting off fireworks, the commodore was moping around Tock House, resolutely refusing to celebrate the foiling of the notorious rebel’s ancient attempt to blow up parliament with his underground cache of compressed-oil explosives.

‘Ah, Molly,’ the commodore had wheezed. ‘You cannot expect me to celebrate my own ancestor’s betrayal into the hands of those grasping bureaucrats and shopkeepers that rule us. Leave me alone this evening and you raise a glass to those rascals in the House of Guardians with your writer friends down on Dock Street. Don’t expect me to go out carousing with you tonight.’

‘Perhaps you could look upon it as a celebration of royalist bravery?’ Molly had slyly suggested.

‘The bravery of a mortal failed fool. Have you seen what our neighbours are building on the green outside our own gates to rub my face in it?’

She had. The ritual of Smoking Prester Charles. A bonfire platform topped by a straw figure covered in a silk gauze screen – a cheap effigy of the glass dome into which parliament’s soldiers had pushed the captured rebel five hundred years ago before burning chemically treated wood to fill the man-sized bottle with poison gases. As humane a method of public execution as any, she supposed. Centuries on, Smoking Prester Charles Night had become an excuse for a little fun in the capital, rather than the pretext parliament had needed to disinherit the losing side of the civil war of their remaining lands. Had the political police known about Prester Charles’ plot, and perhaps even encouraged it? Probably, but that wasn’t going to get in Molly’s way of a night’s much needed diversion from the worries the Hexmachina’s final fraught warning had filled her with.

She examined the faded label on her bottle. Perhaps the wine would lift the commodore’s spirits a little; he disliked the massive cellar levels and relied on Molly to ferret out the surplus bottles racked outside of their pantry. She walked up the stairs in search of the old u-boat man. There were eight storeys in Tock House, not counting the basement levels. Molly had once investigated getting a lifting room added onto the outside of the tower-like structure, but the architect she had wheedled into inspecting the building had sadly shaken his head, tapping the walls. Seven feet thick, built after the Jackelian civil war in an age of paranoia. A layer of innocent red brick concealed hard-cast concrete layered with rubber-cell shock absorption sheets. The mansion was a disguised Martello tower, a veritable fortress masquerading as a folly. Masons weren’t going to be knocking through to build additions to this place. Not without the assistance of a volley from the Jackelian Artillery Company.

Finding the commodore’s rooms empty, Molly continued up the stairs to the highest level of Tock House and sure enough, the old u-boat skipper’s complaints could be heard coming from the chamber that housed the tower’s clock mechanism and Coppertracks’ laboratory. But that was odd … None of the oil lamps in the corridor was lit …

She found Commodore Black in a room at the back, tugging on the handle of a winch with the help of three of Coppertracks’ diminutive mu-bodies. As the commodore and the drones heaved, the two halves of the dome above were creaking apart, revealing a cloudless, starry night. Molly buttoned up her tweed jacket tightly. No wonder it was so cold and dark up here, their steamman housemate was planning another series of observations on his telescope. Along with the oil lamps, the pipes that carried Tock House’s warming waters from the boiler downstairs were turned off across the top floor.

‘Ah, this is no night for your peerings and proddings about the firmament, Aliquot,’ said the commodore.

Alongside the submariner, Coppertracks’ drones raised cyclopean eyes to the heavens, extending them telescope-like to their maximum length, as if they might help the intelligence that inhabited their bodies in his endeavours of astronomy. ‘I believe our position at the top of Tavistead Hill will isolate us well enough from the firework displays this night,’ said Coppertracks.

‘The commodore might have a point, you know,’ said Molly. ‘Fireworks or no, they’re getting ready for a bonfire on the green opposite. When the smoke from that starts to fill the sky, you’re not going to be able to see much tonight.’

‘Then let us make haste,’ said Coppertracks. ‘If I were to abandon my work every time you softbodies held a celebration in the capital, I would spend more of the year playing chess against Jared here than I would in achieving anything of scientific merit.’

Commodore Black finished winching open the dome and eyed the bottle of red wine clutched in Molly’s hand. ‘Now there’s a friend on a cold night like this. Not many of those left downstairs, nor any more likely to come our way. The ingenuity of those that owned the vineyards crushed like their own grapes in the monstrous killing machines the revolution has raised in Quatérshift.’

Molly watched Coppertracks extend the tubing of his telescope to its maximum length, a clockwork-driven engine doing the heavy lifting. ‘I thought with the new observatory in the Free State at your service, you’d be using your telescope less now?’

‘So I had planned,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But last night I experienced a disturbing dream, a visitation from the Steamo Loas, urging me to seek the pattern of the stars in the toss of the Gear-gi-ju cogs.’

‘Say you did not,’ said the commodore. ‘Throwing your blessed cogs like dice and shedding oil you can ill afford at your age, murmuring like a gypsy seer.’

‘My people ignore the advice of the Steamo Loas at our peril, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Of course I performed the ritual of Gear-gi-ju at the Loas’ urging.’

Molly had an uneasy feeling about this. After her own communion with the Hexmachina a couple of days ago, a fruitless search for any sign of where her old ally in high adventure, Oliver Brooks, might be now had turned up nothing more than a trail of tall stories in the penny dreadfuls and almost-as-fictional accounts from the lurid crime pages of the capital’s news sheets. The warning from the Hexmachina seemed like a dream. At least, Molly deeply hoped it had all been a bad dream.

‘And what did the pattern of your mortal tossed cogs reveal?’ asked the commodore.

‘The Eye of Eridgius,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The ancient astronomers’ name for Ashby’s Comet.’

‘Is that all? And we are well shot of that, then. Off past the sun, you said. A fare-thee-well until the comet returns in a thousand years’ time.’

Coppertracks’ telescope swept along the sky, fixing on the position where the comet should be, the steamman’s mu-bodies setting up a table to take notes of their master’s observations. Coppertracks raised an iron finger to tap his transparent skull in perplexity. ‘This is most irregular.’

Molly moved out of the way of one of his scuttling drones. ‘What is it, old steamer?’

‘Ashby’s Comet has disappeared!’

‘Maybe that wicked flying star has finally burnt itself out?’ said the commodore.

‘That’s not how the mechanics of a comet work,’ chided Coppertracks. He returned to the telescope, placing his vision plate on the rim of the device, swivelling the assembly’s axis across different portions of the heavens. ‘It is not one of your night’s fireworks. Where have you gone to, now, you erratic little—’ Coppertracks emitted a startled fizz of static from his voicebox. ‘This cannot – this is impossible!’

Coppertracks abandoned the telescope, his diminutive drones already rolling out large tracts of paper on the table behind their master, pencils in their hands, scrawling at a frantic pace – filling the cream vellum emptiness with calculations and equations. Molly pressed her right eye to the telescope. Against the inky canvas sat a tiny crimson dot so small it might as well have been a fleck of brick dust blown off Tock House’s walls.

‘You’ve located it again, then?’ said Molly. ‘The comet looks so small now.’

‘It should be far smaller,’ said Coppertracks from the table, the fire under his skull-top pulsing with the energies of his vast intellect. ‘And more to the point, the comet should be in a totally different quadrant of the sky.’

‘Those calculations you received from King Steam’s new observatory must have been off by a margin, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Sure and it’s happened to me often enough, plotting a course underwater with only the stars and the maths on an old transaction engine to see my u-boat through the straits of the ocean. That’s a shame, but these celestial games of yours seem a complex and deep matter, everything so far away in the darkness with only a polished lens and a length of copper to peer out at them.’

‘King Steam himself assisted in my initial calculations,’ said Coppertracks, irate at the commodore’s lack of faith in his people’s infallibility.

‘He’s young metal.’

‘His body might be young, dear mammal, but his mind is the latest incarnation of a long line of ancient wisdom. King Steam does not make mistakes, and neither do I.’

The sinking feeling in Molly’s gut was getting worse. ‘It’s coming back towards us, isn’t it?’

Lifting the equation-filled paper from the hands of a mu-body, Coppertracks scanned the maths, and then nodded. ‘Yes, you are quite on the mark. Ashby’s Comet is returning. Given its present size and position, there is only one explanation that fits the mechanics of the situation. Ashby’s Comet must have used the gravity well of Kaliban to slingshot around the celestial body of the red planet, and, as you say, come back towards us.’

Molly tried to keep the panic out of her voice. ‘Returning towards us to ram into the Earth?’

‘No,’ said Coppertracks, ‘my calculations suggest the comet will not collide with us, but pass near enough by that it will be captured by the gravity of our world. I believe, dear mammal, that we are soon to have an extra moon sitting in our sky.’

‘Please, now,’ wheezed the commodore, his breath misting in the cold air of the chamber. ‘This is a huge great comet in the heavens we are speaking of, not a billiard ball knocked around across our table of velvet downstairs.’

‘I do believe you are closer to the truth than you realize,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Ashby’s Comet must have impacted with another minor celestial body after it passed us by, its trajectory nudged into the gravitational pull of Kaliban and set on a new course back towards us. A billiard table is exactly what our celestial bodies’ dance of orbits and velocities have become.’

‘Is that it, then?’ said the commodore. ‘A cruel chance meeting of vast stones in the heavens and now we are to have a new moon.’

‘How long?’ asked Molly. ‘How long before Ashby’s Comet returns to our skies?’

‘My estimation at this point would be in the order of five days.’

Five days! The Broken Circle cultists would have a field day when the comet they believed augured the end of all times returned and set up permanent residence in the heavens.

CHAPTER THREE

The force commander looked out across the plains of Catosia: green fields irrigated by aqueducts that ran out from the city behind her like spokes on a wheel. All except the sparring fields, of course, which were dust, rock, trenches and cover. No olive groves or rows of corn there. That was where the civilized cities of the Catosian League settled their differences using free companies such as hers. Professional fighters and citizen soldiers with a taste for it who would flourish their drug-swollen muscles – so large in some cases that their war jackets could barely contain their flesh – before commencing the ritual of battle. Fighting in front of the judges from the nearest city both sides could agree as neutral in whatever dispute had sparked the fight. That was the way the civilized people of Catosia made war. Unlike, of course, the other nations of the continent. The fat, complacent Jackelians, who relied on their cowardly monopoly of airships and fin bombs to preserve their freedoms, or Kikkosico to the southeast, with the god-emperor’s shiny legions trampling across the pampas.

Which made it all the more painful to the force commander that her sparring fields lay empty. No judges in purple togas. No audience behind the observer wall, cheering their citystate’s women into battle from the relative safety of angled viewing slits. Instead, the city-state of Sathens’ towering walls were reconfiguring for a full siege; the pneumatic pumps hissing as her battlements raised themselves to full combat height. Seven-inch thick steel plating gliding up and into position, clanking as the walls moved forward to create buffer cavities that began to fill with sand-like compounds piped up from the underground silos ringing the city. The streets of the city were being reshaped in the opposite direction, tall towers sliding down into underground holds, doors and windows disappearing behind blast plates as the lower rise buildings rotated to present a blank face to their thoroughfares.

Inside the Catosian city, a state of change had infected the population too. After the people of Sathens had taken in the survivors from the city of Unarta, the normally turbulent currents of their city’s anarchy had converged into a single focused stream of purpose. Survival. Survival against the terrible horde their neighbour’s survivors had nicknamed the Army of Shadows. Every voter of Sathens had filed past the crystal head of the goddess their city state had been named for, filed past long into the night, dropping in their pebbles. White for war. Black for peace. When the sun rose over the central square, the crystal goddess had stood proudly as a mass of shimmering white in the sunrise. Not a mere sparring war against civilized neighbours, where the citizens would go unhurt and the city’s infrastructure would be spared. Total war. Absolute war. The sort of war barbarian nations such as the Kingdom of Jackals and Quatérshift still foolishly practised against each other. The sort of war that nobody had been unwise enough to wage against any city-state of the Catosian League in a long, long time. Leave your sword at home or your corpse in Catosia was the adage that was often directed towards foreigners.

Jackelians might look down on the Catosian League because they treated war with the codification of a duel, but that was only between the city-states. For foreign barbarians, the Catosians practised a different sort of war altogether. Even the men would fight, those who weren’t guarding the children in the city vaults. Ever since the population had voted, the drinking water of Sathens had run crimson with the holiest and rarest of their drugs, the Blood of Forman Thawnight. Some of their men had refused to drink it – the philosopher scientists, so ethereal and haughty in their starched white robes. Their contribution to the war effort would be in tending to the automatics, they had argued, in converting the cogs and artful clockwork mechanisms of their mechanical servants to a war footing. But their wives had known better. They had dragged their menfolk to the drinking basins and plunged their faces under the water until they could breathe no longer and were forced to sup the drug-filled waters. And where the men had no wives, the warrior maidens of the free company had broken down doors and performed the same rites on the trembling virgin lads.

Now the Catosian law that all men must walk clean-shaven save in time of war was showing its worth. Within days of drinking the Blood of Forman Thawnight, the men of the city had sprouted beards that would have made a polar barbarian proud. Sathens’ nights had been filled with the sound of its men screeching their newfound rage at the stars. The mornings found adrenaline-twitching husbands begging their wives to pass on the skills of the women’s mandatory daily war practice.

The force commander extended her brass telescope to its maximum length and was about to raise it to her eyes when one of the philosopher scientists barged forward and offered her a heavy double-tubed binocular set. ‘Use these. Gas compression lens. Triple the range of that old piece of brass.’

‘You have been busy,’ said the force commander, approvingly.

‘A toy!’ shouted one of the scientist’s fellows. Then he proudly pointed to his ranks of automatics shining like steammen knights in front of the city’s walls, jangling with maces, spears, and ammunition bins. ‘Does he expect you to toss his binoculars towards the enemy’s helmets and brain them? I took four of my own servants and built them into a cannon, a cannon that walks! What is that piece of optics compared to my genius?’

The two males looked as if they were about to start wrestling over the matter, but a company leader stepped forward and as she drew her sword, both men hurriedly stepped back into the ranks.

‘The enemy had better come soon,’ whispered the force commander’s aide. ‘Trying to keep any semblance of discipline among these damned males …’ ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

‘The city of Unarta was not expecting an attack,’ said the aide. ‘There is no element of surprise here. Our city is reordered for war, as are our people. Even my little husband will fight today.’

‘What else can we expect from filthy barbarians?’ said the force commander. ‘A declaration spear shoved into the sparring field and five days of feasting with the opposition free company first? Well, we shall have the measure of these foreign dogs soon enough.’

There was a rifle shot below as one of the free company officers punished a fighter trying to break the order of the line. Another male overcome with the berserker fury of his drugs a little too early.

‘Save it for the enemy,’ muttered the force commander.

Yes, the enemy. Unarta’s survivors had been hysterical. Men, of course. No warrior woman would willingly abandon her city. Carry me to victory or carry me home on my shield. The end had come shockingly fast, but there was one thing Unarta’s survivors agreed on. The cloud. The hideous crimson cloud gathering overhead and a darkness like night falling during the high heat of the day. Something terrible was coming out of the north. But what was the Army of Shadows? The far north was just a wide wilderness, worthless ice plains and glaciers left over from the age of the coldtime. It had been centuries since any lord of the north had emerged capable of uniting the polar barbarians’ feuding tribes.

A flaming cloud was rolling forward, shadows lengthening across their olive groves. The force commander rolled a wheel on the side of her binoculars, a hiss escaping from the instrument as its amplification was pushed beyond its safety parameters. At last, she saw the enemy; saw what the hundreds of thousands of corpses now rotting at Unarta had seen before they died.

The Army of Shadows was like nothing any Catosian city-state had ever faced before. The force commander experienced a feeling she had never known before. Fear.

She slammed her rifle against her shield and the drumming was taken up across the thousands formed up in front of the wall and the thousands more manning the ramparts. Anything to smother the feeling of dread rising in her stomach. Did her fighters realize they were now drumming their own march into the gates of hell?

CHAPTER FOUR

Molly saw Commodore Black opening the door to Tock House just as she was struggling up the main staircase with a wooden crate full of periodicals, news sheets and journals. The old u-boatman rushed over to pick the box out of his friend’s arms. With his bulk and strength he lifted it up easily before she caught him remembering to put on a show, pretending to puff and struggle.

‘Have you been laying in reading material for Coppertracks, lass? The old steamer is off in the woods again, tinkering with his tower – his genius is occupied enough for now, I think. No need for these.’

‘These news sheets aren’t for his distraction, Jared,’ replied Molly. ‘I need to track down Oliver Brooks. Coppertracks can find patterns in the information, things too subtle for me to notice. Somewhere in here is the clue to where I can find Oliver.’

‘Good luck to you, then, for our old steamer isn’t noticing much these days except his tower and his dreams of conversing with the man in the moon.’

Molly looked towards the house’s orchard. The tip of the lashed-together tower was just visible over the trees. ‘He wants to prove the Royal Society wrong.’

‘He wants revenge,’ said Commodore Black. ‘That’s what his boiler heart desires now, and that’s not an emotion that sits well with a blessed steamman.’

And that was equally true of another creature of the metal Molly was well acquainted with. She thought of the Hexmachina’s final plea to her before it was frozen in the centre of the earth. It seemed so much like a dream now, she was half-doubting her own memory of the vision. Perhaps she had been working too hard of late?

Molly left the commodore and walked over towards the orchard. She had always loved the peace of the apple and pear trees, left to run slightly wild in their grounds. In the summer months, Molly would take an old collapsible card table from the cellar of the house and set it up in a glade alongside the ruins of an overgrown gazebo. There she would lay her writing paper and pencil down on the green felt top, watching the butterflies flit over the lilacs while she imagined tales of terror to stir the hearts – and pocketbooks – of the penny dreadful readers. Now, of course, she had the presence of Coppertracks’ tower of science for company, a small Porterbrook-model portable steam engine chugging away beside the ever-lengthening pyramid of lashed together girders, crystals and cables.

Molly could tell that Coppertracks was agitated, his mu-bodies falling over themselves to keep the tower running smoothly as his attention darted between his drones and the task at hand. One of the drones held a cluster of cylinders to its cyclopean eye, taking a reading from the sun, while Coppertracks seemed more interested in a large sheet of calculations resting on her card table, still out from her morning writing session. As Molly got closer, she saw there was also a map of the stars open before him – she even recognized a few of the constellations.

‘What’s the matter, old steamer?’ Molly called.

‘The matter? Why, everything is the matter, Molly softbody. Reality is not as it should be.’ Coppertracks’ caterpillar tracks ground at the grass in frustration. ‘I have been checking the declination of my tower’s transmissions to our closest neighbour in the heavens, Kaliban, and I have been missing the red planet by at least two degrees.’

Molly stared up at the dish at the top of the tower, a polished silver shield like a giant’s porridge bowl turned on its side. ‘Maybe the rain last night knocked your dish out of kilter? It sounded like it was becoming quite a squall from my bedroom.’

‘That is what I had assumed too, but my mu-bodies have checked and rechecked the tower and my apparatus has not shifted by an inch. It is transmitting at exactly the same angle as it has always been, yet now my signals are passing by Kaliban and falling away into the void.’

‘Then if your tower hasn’t moved, the logical conclusion to draw would be that it is either the Earth or Kaliban that has shifted.’

‘Precisely, but as we both know, that is impossible. Celestial bodies do not jiggle around their orbits like fidgeting young children swapping desks in a classroom.’

‘Very odd,’ said Molly. A puzzle fit for one of her celestial fiction novels, certainly.

‘It gets worse,’ said Coppertracks. He indicated the constellation of the Windmill on his astronomy charts. ‘I have been checking the position of the stars from my observations the other night against the official charts and something is terribly wrong. While some of our stars are precisely where they should be, others have changed station, a couple of stars have vanished entirely, and I have even found a new star appeared as if from nowhere.’

‘Surely not? You always told me—’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Coppertracks ‘and I still hold to my people’s belief that the stars are celestial bodies similar to our own sun, but viewed from the vantage point of an incredible distance. Huge cosmic kilns many times larger than our own world, able to circulate heat with an efficiency that makes my own boiler heart look like a toy.’ Coppertracks tapped his charts. ‘But measuring against the astronomical record, the face of night above us has been transformed in a manner that should be impossible. Conventional science can offer no explanation for this. We might as well subscribe to the teachings of the old Quatérshiftian religion and assume that Furnace-breath Nick is flying through the sky on his demon steed, snuffing out the candles of the Child of Light and firing up his own wax lights in their stead.’

Now Molly saw why Coppertracks was close to despair. Entire stars disappearing, while their neighbours twisted across the firmament to settle in new positions. It made even the problem of a new moon appearing in the sky appear like a mere distraction in the cosmic ordering of things. What if their sun should just disappear? It would be as if the boiler were turned off at Tock House in the dead of winter. No heat, no light. An eternal winter of such ferocity would make the coldtime look like a picnic in Goldhair Park on a balmy summer afternoon. The world would die, as would every creature that swam, walked, flew or crawled across its surface.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ asked Molly. ‘Does King Steam know about this?’

‘I am certain he does,’ said Coppertracks, distractedly. ‘With our new array tracking Ashby’s Comet, King Steam’s astronomers would have to possess defective vision plates not to have noticed this.’

Coppertracks’ mu-bodies began shinning up the tower, recalibrating the transmission dish and showering Molly with flecks of paint and dust from the girders as they scrambled about on high.

‘You’re continuing with your work on the tower?’ Molly was flabbergasted.

‘Dear mammal, the forward momentum of science must not be swayed off-course by an as-yet-undiagnosed disorder in celestial mechanics. I must press on with my transmissions.’

Above their heads, the dish was ratcheted around to a new setting.

‘Even if you find someone on one of the other celestial spheres with a level of engineering as advanced as ours and willing to converse with you, what in the name of the Circle would you say to them now?’

Coppertracks stopped for a second, as if this thought – of all the thousands he was capable of processing in parallel in his impressive mind – had only just occurred to him. ‘Say? In this instance, I believe I would say hello.’

Pulling the lid off two drum-like chemical batteries, Coppertracks’ drones observed the mixture bubbling inside and pronounced themselves satisfied. It was always dangerous, using wild energy, the power electric, but nothing else would do for throwing a pulse across the heavens. Luckily for the inhabitants of Tock House, scanning the heavens for a reply didn’t require a discharge, or their orchard would soon resemble Lady Amazement’s Lightning Gardens down at Makeworth Park. As distant as Molly’s neighbours were behind the ground’s high walls, Tock House had already seen a number of petitions circulating in the village as a result of Coppertracks’ unorthodox scientific interests.

A spectral moaning along the iron girders warned Molly that the pulse of exotic waves Coppertracks intended to direct towards Kaliban was about to be released. She moved back beyond her card table as emerald energy lit the girders, sparks raining down over the ruined gazebo. With a bacon-like sizzle the dish vibrated at the top of the tower, a couple of holding pins blowing out, followed by a dying whine as the apparatus powered down. Coppertracks’ mu-bodies were back over the tower instantly, like ants on a picnic basket, checking it for signs of damage and resetting it to its receiving configuration.

‘Excellent,’ said Coppertracks, checking the signal readings on a bank of dials at the foot of the tower. ‘A clean send with very little leakage this time. Tight and focused. Each time we do this, it gets easier to calibrate the tower for an optimal transmission.’

Molly took a step back – the line of crystals running up the far side of the tower was starting to vibrate, the grass under her feet trembling with the force of it. Dials twitched violently across the board on Coppertracks’ instrument bank. ‘I think that might have been a pulse too far, old steamer. Should we start running and take cover now?’

Coppertracks’ stacks whistled in excitement as he momentarily lost control of his boiler function. ‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders, that is no feedback loop! It’s a signal. Molly softbody, someone is answering my communication!’

His mu-bodies rushed to the tower from wherever they were standing in the glade in a fury of coordinated action, the steamman desperate that this message should not be lost. For all his practice in sending transmissions over the past year, he was a virgin at the art of receiving anything other than the occasional internal test.

‘This is odd,’ said Coppertracks, checking his equipment bank.

To Molly the whole thing felt odd. She was actually present at the receipt of the first communication from another celestial body within their solar system. Who would believe that she hadn’t just invented the whole tale for publicity? ‘What is it?’

‘This can’t be a reply to my communication, it’s the same message repeating on a loop, over and over.’

‘A loop?’ said Molly. ‘Who would want to put a message on a loop?’

‘The logical inference would be someone who needs assistance, possibly someone who has long been deactivate and unable to switch their transmission off.’

‘How long do you think it will take you to translate it?’

‘No time at all,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The message is in binary mathematics and transmitted using something similar to crystalgrid code, dashes and dots that any station operator in the capital could understand. It carries a table key at the front based on the periodic table with the translation of their language.’

Molly hardly dared to ask the next question. ‘And it says …?’

‘They are coming,’ said Coppertracks. ‘That is all it says. Over and over again. They are coming.’

The steamman and Molly stared up at the Kingdom of Jackals’ grey cloudy sky, Molly imagining that she could see Kaliban as it appeared in the images from King Steam’s observatory. Plains of red sand and barren mountains. Vast dead valleys. A world that now conclusively harboured enough life to send them a message. Possibly their last.

A tear welled in Molly’s eye. ‘Hello.’

Molly saw Commodore Black fiddling with the rusty lock to the roof of Tock House, but Coppertracks was nowhere to be seen in his laboratory.

‘Where’s the old steamer gone now?’

‘Have you checked the orchard, lass?’ asked the commodore.

Molly looked at her crates of periodicals, news sheets and journals, hardly touched, despite her protestations to Coppertracks about the Hexmachina’s warning. Did the steamman still believe her vision of the ancient god-machine was a result of stress and fever? ‘That was the first place I checked, but he wasn’t there.’

‘Then perhaps he has finally had a bellyful of that message of his, repeating over and over again like a parrot trapped in a cage.’

It was a mystery, right enough, yet as much as the steamman analysed the message for hidden patterns or deeper clues, there appeared to be no other information forthcoming from the signal. Molly sighed. ‘I dare say he’s gone to the crystalgrid station to transmit word to King Steam of his lack of progress.’

‘There’ll be no progress in this mortal matter,’ said the commodore. ‘His tower of science has found nothing but a message in a bottle, cast off by some poor wretch. The Circle knows how long that signal has been rattling around up there. I found as many when I was master and commander of my beautiful u-boat. Bottles lying on the seabed, their paper washed of blessed meaning by the waters and the ages and the changes in language. Half of them from bored sailors tossing away sheets of their diaries in empty rum bottles for a jape.’

‘Coppertracks is certain the message originates from Kaliban.’

The commodore shrugged. ‘Well, we’re never going to know.’

Molly rattled one of the crates, frustrated at the lack of progress. ‘Then what good are these newspapers to me? I can’t use them to help me find Oliver Brooks. Meanwhile stars are disappearing, a comet is heading back towards us to take up residence as a new moon, and I’m not even sure if the warning I got from the Hexmachina wasn’t just the result of a slip on the curb and a bump on my head.’

‘The first of those questions I can answer for you.’ The commodore waved a page torn from a news sheet in front of her. An advertisement.

For your delectation, a circus of the extreme – the famous troupe of Dennehy’s Divers – will be launching from Goldhair Park. Cannons, rocketry and sail riders, in a dumbfounding display of daring unrivalled in the realm. Discover why Jackelia still rules supreme over our dignified skies.

Molly read the small print. ‘That’s today. You’ll never get to the park in time. The streets will be packed.’

‘Aye, as will the park. But I have no intention of paying tuppence for a chance to be jostled, have my pocket picked, and get hot rocket ash falling in my eyes if the wind changes course.’ He pulled open the door to the stairs to their roof. ‘Not when I have a fine view of proceedings from afar for free.’

Free, the commodore’s favourite price. Molly followed him up the small winding stairs to the house’s battlements. The top door opened with a squeak, and Molly emerged from between the two smoke stacks of their furnace room to stand by Tock House’s balustrade.

‘I have heard of these mad boys of Dennehy’s Circus and I have always wanted to see them.’

Molly looked out. Below Tavistead Hill, the gardens and trees of Goldhair Park could just be seen as a splash of green far beyond in the centre of the capital. Sail riders were a mad breed at the best of times, taking to the air with their silk sails and kite frames. Any jack cloudie in the Royal Aerostatical Navy would tell you jumping from a wrecked airship was not something you did lightly. If the sail folded, failed to open or you landed badly, you were dead. Then add to that risk by being shot out from a cannon or having yourself strapped to an oversized firework to reach the giddying heights they sailed down from – well, that was plain madness. No wonder Goldhair Park was packing them in; Middlesteel’s crowds were thronging the park to see men and women die in front of their eyes. The only reason Dennehy’s Circus didn’t put on more performances in a year was it took that long to gather enough performers suitably desperate and down on their luck to mount such a spectacle.

A signal rocket rose to explode in a cloud of yellow smoke, a dim cry of encouragement from the distant crowd barely perceptible out on the brow of Tavistead Hill. Molly and the commodore could hear the next sound, though; the faint boom of cantilevered cannons accompanied by the sight of the human cannonballs moving almost too fast to track. But the show wasn’t over yet. Coordinated plumes of rocket smoke carrying a second wave of sail riders followed shortly after the cannon fire. Slowly to Molly’s eyes – but no doubt at an incredible velocity to the sail riders concerned – multicoloured spears of rocket smoke passed from view into the clouds above the capital.

‘We’ll see them come down on their sails soon enough,’ said the commodore. ‘And it’s a sight that wasn’t always so blessed welcome to me. Have I told you of how the Quatérshiftian men-o’-war used to winch sail riders behind their frigates, higher than any crow’s nest, searching for the trails and periscopes of my privateer’s u-boats?’

‘Many times,’ said Molly. She stretched on her toes for a better look. What kind of formations and high-altitude stunts would the sail riders put on for the crowds below? Commodore Black took a brass telescope from his coat pocket and pulled it open.

But the next sound Molly heard wasn’t the soft susurration of the distant crowd as sail riders emerged from the clouds; it was the scraping of Coppertracks’ treads as the steamman came up the stairs to the tower roof.

‘I have news,’ announced the steamman, his voicebox trembling with excitement. ‘The observatory in Mechancia has communicated its findings back to me.’

‘News about the disturbance in the heavens?’ said Molly. ‘How do your people explain new stars appearing while others are snuffed off your charts?’

‘King Steam’s scholars have devised a theory,’ said Coppertracks. ‘To formulate it, they consulted copies of pre-Camlantean texts so ancient there are none among you fast bloods who still have the knowledge of their translation. The theory suggests there is a cloud drifting through the celestial void, composed of a dark substance that is the antithesis of the very fabric of our universe. King Steam’s scholars believe that if this cloud has been clearing in some places while thickening in others it would lead to the effect we have been observing: some stars vanishing while new ones appear to be born in the sky.’

Molly realized she had been holding her breath and let the air escape from her lungs. The sun and its life-giving warmth was safe, and perhaps her vision of the Hexmachina just a trick of a tired and overtaxed mind. Yes, that was it. What had she been thinking of? Molly laughed out loud. She had ridden the god-machine, joined with it once to cast down the dark gods trying to scuttle back into their world. Felt its incredible power. Of course nothing could seal up the Hexmachina like a ship inside a bottle.

Her relief was interrupted by a distant buzz of excitement from Goldhair Park. The sail riders were returning to the capital – but not in a coordinated display of multicoloured silks. Dozens of blackened bodies were plummeting from the sky, smudged smoke trails spiralling behind them.

‘Their sails haven’t opened,’ shouted Molly. ‘None of their sails have worked.’

The commodore put aside his telescope to take in the terrible scene with his own eyes. ‘Ah, those poor brave lads and lasses. They’re finished.’

The crowd’s distant noise grew louder. Molly could imagine the astonishment among the ticket holders in Goldhair Park turning to screams as the corpses of the circus entertainers impacted among the watchers, at speeds fatal for the sail riders as well as any below they slammed into.

Coppertracks rocked on his treads, the energy in his transparent skull calculating the odds of so many sails failing to open at once. ‘There is only one explanation: the cannon charges must have been overfilled by the circus, the riders killed by the velocity of their launch, fired too high into the firmament to breathe without a mask.’

‘Then riddle me this, old steamer.’ The commodore pointed to the second wave of sail riders – the rocket-launched entertainers – now returning through the clouds. Unlike the human cannonballs, their sails had successfully deployed, but their silks were burning up between their plywood frames. ‘Did they fly too close to the sun?’

The second wave of performers was spiralling down, their silks an inferno. Even at their distance from the display, the three friends on the top of Tock House could see this was enough to finally panic the crowd into a complete stampede, a ripple that became a violent surge as the sightseers abandoned their once fought-over places for the relative safety of the streets outside the park.

‘I simply do not understand,’ said Coppertracks. ‘I have never seen the like before. There are geysers of volcanic debris from the Fire Sea that erupt into the sky and could burn sail riders like this, but the flues of the Fire Sea lie many hundreds of miles north of us.’

Flaming masses were striking the capital now, some of the smoke trails lost among the pneumatic towers of Sun Gate. All ability to control their landing had vanished – a rain of dead circus men and women striking Middlesteel’s streets. Finally, the sky was filled with the gentle fall of a thousand smouldering silk threads as the entertainers vanished out of sight. All save one, a tri-sail rider hanging limp as his mainsail was tugged by a side-draught while the glider’s tail-sails crackled into nothingness; a side-draught that was dragging the contraption high above the streets of the capital and towards Tavistead Hill. Towards Tock House!

The dot grew larger and larger in the sky. Embers from the disappearing tail-sail finally ignited one of the mainsails and the rider frame began losing height rapidly, falling out of the wind’s clasp above the capital. Down below, Coppertracks’ mu-bodies were running out from the house, crunching the gravel of the path, swinging buckets of sand unhooked from the fire point of their boiler room. If the sail rider managed to avoid being impaled on the tip of the steamman’s tower of science, then he was going to come down hard in their orchard. The three owners of Tock House were fast after Coppertracks’ drones, joining the little iron goblins converging on the likely landing point.

Down to a single sail now, the flaming craft swung across the clearing where Coppertracks’ celestial signalling apparatus stood spearing up towards the clouds. Then the rig blew into the line of pear trees, wrapping itself around the canopy of branches, burning silk billowing into dozens of pieces across the tree line. Where sheets of flaming material blew across the grass, the friends quickly extinguished them. Splintering, the main frame of the sail-rider rig folded in two, the limp mass of the rider swaying to a sudden halt, left hanging upside down from a tangled snarl of harness belts and sail pulleys.

Commodore Black pulled out a knife and shimmied up the tree to cut the pilot loose, Molly and Coppertracks waiting underneath to catch the body in the canvas rain cover they had pulled off the glade’s small Porterbrook steam engine.

‘The sail rider’s a lad and he’s taken some burns,’ shouted the commodore.

‘Is he alive?’ Molly called up.

‘He can count his lucky stars, but I believe the fellow is.’ The commodore was sawing his way through the nest of ropes. ‘His lucky stars and the fact that for all its bright rainbow colours, this sail frame is an old RAN chute. I can smell the retardant chemicals from his blessed burning silk, like bad eggs. Treated to exit a cannonshot-riddled airship when needs demand.’

With a final slice and a warning shout, the commodore cut the pilot free to flop down into their canvas. Molly pulled off a black leather glove from the pilot’s hand and felt the wrist for a pulse. Yes, he was still alive, but in what shape was anyone’s guess. ‘Send for the doctor and make sure she turns up half-sober.’

‘One of my mu-bodies is already on its way into the village,’ said Coppertracks.

Molly rolled the pilot over. What she had first taken for part of the sail frame caught up on his back clearly wasn’t. ‘Look, a travel case! Why in the name of the Circle would you sail-jump with the weight of a travel case tied to your back?’ She tried to open the case but it was locked. Damned heavy too.

Commodore Black landed down on the grass next to the pilot. ‘A queer thing to do, but it saved his life. The weight of that case would have kept him at a lower altitude than the rest of his circus friends. Whatever ignited the others’ sails only singed his poor head a little.’

Molly glanced up towards the firmament. Only the flat grey clouds of Middlesteel hung over the capital, but this carnage was no accident. The mystery of the disappearing stars might have been solved, but something else was deeply awry up in the heavens. The Jackelians were used to being masters of the sky. Their airships ruled the vaults of the firmament without peer or equal; a monopoly of aerial destruction that had long preserved their ancient kingdom from her many enemies.

But it appeared it was a monopoly no longer.

CHAPTER FIVE

It took a lot to recall the Jackelian parliament from its summer recess. The honourable members of the House of Guardians didn’t collect much of a stipend from the state for their troubles, but at least they could usually rely on the long days of hunting, shooting and fishing on their estates. Estates that the members of the present Leveller government often lacked, so the grumbles went, hence their eagerness to recall parliament at the drop of a hat. The guardians’ resentment at the interruption of their amusements was slowly bubbling over while the speaker of the house’s lictors assembled the bones of King Reuben, his ancient skeleton dangling from a seven-foot staff of heavy Jackelian oak.

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