by Stephen Hunt
‘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 gr
een 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?’
