by Stephen Hunt
‘There are reports circulating which cannot have escaped the attention of my honourable colleagues assembled here today, reports that have been carried back from our trading houses in the Catosian League. Reports that I can sadly confirm. Almost all of the Catosian city-states have now fallen.’
From the facing benches, the opposition leader Guardian Hoggstone came to his feet. ‘The policy of splendid detachment has served this house well for seven hundred years. The study of history is a litany of conflicts raging into war across the continent and ever shall it be so. Are we to act as policemen to the world? You will find it an ungrateful business, sir. We have no mutual assistance pact with the Catosian League. Indeed, who in the anarchy is there to sign a treaty with? Where each citizen speaks for him or herself, with not a government worthy of the name. We would go into their land as liberators and be shot at as occupiers within the week, mark me well on this matter.’
Carl continued. ‘We know of no nation to the north capable of defeating Catosia. An expeditionary force would allow us to gather information on the invaders and—’
‘And it would cause the Jackelian people to become embroiled with every foreign intrigue and border dispute on the continent,’ roared Hoggstone. ‘A little bit of splendid detachment when it suits one is similar to one’s daughter declaring she is merely a little bit pregnant for the afternoon. And I have read the developments in today’s news sheets as well as you.’ He flourished a copy of the morning’s Illustrated. ‘Quatérshift has now been invaded from the north by the polar barbarians, this Army of Shadows the refugees speak of. Would you have us come to the shifties’ aid too, send our redcoats outside of our borders to help protect the ancient enemy, compatriot?’
‘Come to order, damsons and gentlemen, please,’ yelled the speaker as the house descended into uproar.
‘Carl by name, and Carlist by nature,’ yelled a guardian from the Heartlander party.
The master whip’s lictors slapped their coshes menacingly into their palms, trying to bring the frenzied politicians into line. Uncowed, the guardians hooted their rage and threw the remains of their lunch at the enforcers of the chamber’s law. It usually paid to have a pocket stuffed with apple cores and half-eaten pies in parliament.
It was time for the First Guardian to play his trump card. ‘There is a related matter which I have the grave duty of bringing to the attention of the house. Despite my honourable colleagues supposedly partaking of the many joys of the season’s recess, you will no doubt be gratified to hear I already have a tray filled to the brim with complaints from the guardians assembled here today vigorously protesting against the grounding of the aerostat fleet of the merchant marine. The announcement that Admiralty House issued – that all airships had been grounded for maintenance checks following the crash of the RAN Amethyst due to engines clogged with the dust-ridden rain left in the wake of Ashby’s Comet – was falsified by cabinet order. By my order.’
Now the house really descended into chaos. They had been lied to, the First Guardian dared do this to them, the elected representatives of the people! A guardian from the Roarer party vaulted the opposition rail and tried to strike Carl across the head with her cane; but the lictors were all over her with their clubs, a tattoo of brutality drummed across her body until the politician slumped into unconsciousness.
‘Banned from sitting in the house for a week,’ pronounced the speaker from his perch, as the body was dragged to the infirmary by two footmen.
Carl grimaced. It would take twice as long as that for her wounds to heal. He looked at the pensmen and illustrators scribbling frantically in the gallery above. By the Circle, they would have their fun with this day. His voice rose above the bedlam. ‘My order was not issued lightly, but to avoid mass panic while parliament was being recalled. The RAN Amethyst was never grounded, it was posted missing. Along with sixteen airships of the merchant marine that disappeared in a single evening. Yesterday, as those of you who were in attendance at Goldhair Park will have noticed, dead circus performers rained down from the sky. I think it is safe to assume that they were not killed by a noxious cloud of vapours widely adrift from the Fire Sea as the penny sheets have been speculating.’
‘You are saying these events are connected?’ asked Hoggstone, the leader of the opposition’s face returning to a more normal shade now he realized how deeply his beloved Kingdom of Jackals stood threatened. Hoggstone’s Purist party members took his lead and fell quiet by his side.
‘I don’t believe in coincidences,’ said Carl. ‘The Catosian League has collapsed. The north of Quatérshift has been invaded. Our airships are being plucked from the sky without a trace like pigeons devoured by hawks. The order of worldsingers is reporting a consistent failure of its most basic sorceries. It is as if our strength, the strength of our great people, is being slowly sapped away by a fever. And who can this state of affairs suit? We have always feared a foreign nation would one day threaten the Jackelians’ sovereign rule over our proud skies. That day has now arrived, and while it may be advancing towards us from the north, I doubt if the Army of Shadows comes in the guise of any barbarian horde.’
‘But polar barbarians have been sighted on the move by my own clipper captains,’ a backbencher called out.
‘No doubt fleeing south from the same forces that are occupying Catosia,’ said Carl. ‘It may be that the Army of Shadows are from one of the continents on the other side of the polar darks. Quadgan, possibly; a crossing over the ice pack passage is still possible this late in the year. What is certain, however, is that if we meekly await our fate within our borders, we cede a vital strategic advantage to the invaders. Our duty to the people is clear! We must act to preserve the kingdom, even if that means intervening in the affairs of our neighbours.’
‘A twelve-month repeal of the Statute of Splendid Detachment,’ boomed Hoggstone, waving a fist at the members of his own party. ‘And I’ll take a debating stick to the skull of any man-jack among you that dares to vote against it.’
‘I thank the leader of the opposition for rising above narrow party interests. You should know I have already ordered the high fleet to be concentrated at Shadowclock,’ said the First Guardian. ‘While the Board of War is now mobilizing every regiment of the New Pattern Army, ready to receive our instructions.’
‘That’s the style, sir,’ said Hoggstone. ‘Taking a Jackelian merchantman by surprise on her bow is one thing; let’s see how these sneaky damn foreign devils like a dozen squadrons of RAN frigates up ’em.’
Gripped by the moment, the mass assemblage of guardians howled their approval. The vote was a foregone conclusion now. Benjamin Carl looked at their faces. Contorted by rage. Haunted by fear. Shown their own weakness, where an hour before they had still laboured under the illusion that their nation was unassailable. Thinking the unthinkable. A foreign war, not a war of defence within the Kingdom of Jackals’ acres, but a true war of aggression.
But a war against who? Who were the Army of Shadows?
Duncan Connor looked up from his bed, alerted by the smell of the commodore’s seadrinker broth, which Molly was trying hard not to spill as she opened the door to the room.
‘Your bruises are fading,’ said Molly, putting the food down to take a good look at the sail rider they had pulled from his burning rig in their garden.
Duncan touched his lumpen cheeks. ‘I think you’re just trying to make me feel better.’ He picked up that morning’s copy of the Illustrated. ‘Aye and thank you for all of this, I’ve stayed in worse hotels. Far worse, in fact.’
Molly pointed to the line drawing on the front of the newspaper. A portly Jackelian, the cartoonist’s everyman, old John Gloater, standing on an outline of the realm and shaking a blunderbuss at a giant, sly-looking polar barbarian from the Army of Shadows while a mob of miniature politicians pushed and shoved the large-bellied yeoman across the border. ‘’Pon my word,’ announced the speech bubble from the Jackelian’s mouth, ‘this splendid detachment is a right sharp busi
ness.’
‘Interesting times,’ said Molly.
‘It seems our army commanders are showing a taste for original thinking the medal-heavy numpties singularly failed to demonstrate when I was in service in the regiments.’
‘A soldier? I thought you might have been a jack cloudie,’ said Molly. ‘Your sail-rider chute …’
‘From an old friend in the navy,’ said Duncan. ‘I served in the Corps of Rocketeers, until myself and the general staff over at House Guards had a wee philosophical difference of opinion over the development of the rocket as a weapon of war. A consideration for you, if you ever fall foul of a recruiting party – never put yourself on the side against tradition, tradition always wins out in the regiments.’
‘I believe I’m a little too respectable to be press-ganged now,’ said Molly. She didn’t elaborate on how things might have gone for her a few years back, though.
‘Broth again?’
Molly laid the bowl down on the bedside next to the travel case – the one he had woken up shouting for when he first regained consciousness. Did it hold his campaign medals? Something about Duncan’s manner told Molly he would have pawned those off a long time ago. Anybody desperate enough to strap themselves to a rocket would have gone through a lot of trips to the pawnshop first. ‘The commodore swears by it.’
‘Aye well, you won’t find me complaining. As I said yesterday, I’m afraid I’m rather between trades now that the army doesn’t require my soldiering and the Circus of the Extreme has no doubt gone bankrupt.’
‘You’ve not remembered any more about your sail jump?’
‘Nothing you could make a penny sheet tale out of, I’m afraid, lassie. The force of the rocket launch concussed me during the ride up. And things happened awful fast after that. I remember seeing shapes moving in the clouds. Very big shapes. Then there was just waves of flaming pilots plummeting past me. A wall of fire above me that set my own sail rig ablaze.’
‘Aerostats?’ said Molly.
Duncan shook his head. ‘I’ve flown on enough RAN airships as regimental steerage to recognize the hull of a man-o’-war running in the clouds alongside me, and the shapes I saw didn’t look much like one of our bonnie ladies of the air. Not the underbelly of a skrayper, either. All you ever see of one of them is a half-transparent tentacle coming down from the sky to tear you apart.’
‘Well, I’ll tease a tale out of you for your board somehow,’ said Molly. ‘That is, if the Army of Shadows manages to forgo looting all the stationers in the capital that are willing to take my work.’
Molly left the sail rider to his broth.
As she shut the door to his room, Duncan tapped his travel case thoughtfully.
‘Aye, so do I,’ said Duncan. ‘All three of Tock House’s owners appear to be fine wee people. We were owed a turn of good fortune and I believe we’ll be safe enough laying away here awhile.’
‘Don’t be a daftie, I’m always going to be here to protect you,’ said Duncan. ‘This hubbub may be an opportunity. When the regiments start running short of cannon fodder and are down to bairns who don’t know one end of a dirk from another, the recruiting sergeants might not be so fussy about letting the likes of me hold a commission again.’
‘Nobody ever does,’ said Duncan. ‘Nobody ever does. But work is work.’
Molly blinked the sleep out of her eyes, the owl’s cry fading away. Woken again. She normally slept so soundly too, but then, the birds had been chattering uncommonly loudly since the news of the fall of Catosia – each dawn chorus a panicked explosion of robins and starlings. Now, even the nocturnal birds had become infected with the fear of what was coming down from the north. But this night there was something else in the air, the sense of something familiar. Something was— no, it couldn’t be? Molly swung her feet out of bed and padded over to the window, pulling the curtain back an inch. Down among the trees, was that a shadow of moonlight and clouds, or …?
‘Please don’t be alarmed.’
Molly spun around. To see … not who she had been expecting! A thin and scrawny young girl, as much a ragamuffin as Molly had been when she was a poorhouse urchin cleaning the heating stacks in the capital’s great pneumatic towers. Accompanied by a man who might have been her father in his dishevelled lack of means. Molly kept a compact purse gun in her sideboard, but these two odd intruders were between her and the expensive little Locke’s Lady Pattern.
‘How did you get past the front door? Molly hissed.
‘I spoke to your lock,’ said the man.
‘There’s seven drums turning on my front door’s transaction engine,’ said Molly. She should know, she had upgraded the cipher on the engine herself. ‘That must have been quite a conversation.’
‘For Circle’s sake, Kyorin, you’re frightening her,’ announced the ragamuffin. ‘I told you we’d be better waiting for daylight hours to come visiting.’
‘Would that we still possessed the luxury of a lost night, Purity, our time is running short,’ said Kyorin.
‘Listen to Purity’s advice next time,’ advised Molly. ‘If I scream for help there are three others inside the house.’
‘There is no need for that. I intend no harm towards you; quite the opposite, I have come to warn you.’ Kyorin drew out a copy of Molly’s novel from the pocket of his frayed jacket.
‘Oh, please! Not another one of my readers who belongs in an asylum. This is completely the wrong way to get me to write a dedication in your bloody book.’
‘I have come to warn you, to enlist your help as a person of influence with the vision to appreciate your people’s predicament. But I believe you have already been warned, you have a … talent for the soul of machines, you are – ah, now I see, you are a hybrid – your blood bubbles with sub-cellular level machinery.’
Molly stiffened. Who was this madman? ‘I really don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘There is no need for deceit. You must not think of me as an enemy,’ insisted Kyorin. ‘I can feel the imprint of your land’s sentinel machine upon you. We share an enemy, you and I, Molly Templar of the Torley Street Press. An enemy who I fear has already neutralized the sentinel machine you act as a symbiote for.’
‘Torley Street Press are only my publisher,’ said Molly, ‘and who are you to know of the Hexmachina?’
‘He’s a slave and a witch doctor,’ blurted out Purity. ‘On the run from the polar barbarians. He should have a beard, I know.’
‘Yes he should,’ said Molly, looking more closely at the ragamuffin. And the girl should have stolen a shawl from a washing line to hide the shadow mark where the golden crown of a royalist prisoner had so obviously been ripped off her cleaner’s pinny.
‘I know of your sentinel machine because my people once created similar devices. But they were not nearly enough to protect us from the masters’ fury.’
‘You’re talking about the people who have frozen the Hexmachina within the earth? I had been hoping that it was all only a bad dream. Who has the power to imprison the Hexmachina …?’
‘It is no dream. My masters’ craft is great. I can show you, if you allow me to join with your mind. I carry a forbidden memory, a seed of truth passed down from mind to mind, from generation to generation. That is why I am here, to try to stop the fate of my land being visited upon yours.’
Molly touched her neck nervously.
‘He means well,’ said Purity. ‘He does. He saved my life.’
Molly nodded towards her dirty pinny. ‘He picked the lock on the gates of the Royal Breeding House too?’
‘I will not hurt you,’ said Kyorin. ‘I sense that your brain is already evolved for a similar form of communication. Your land’s sentinel machine has used the structure of your mind to join with you before.’
For the seed of truth? Molly winced. The
truth was a mutable thing, it moved and flexed with the eye of its beholder. But she had to know, after the Hexmachina’s last garbled warning and the polar barbarians’ deadly incursion from the north. The Army of Shadows. She had to know.
‘Show me,’ whispered Molly.
‘Clear your mind,’ instructed Kyorin, reaching out with his hands. His fingers felt warm on Molly’s forehead, warmer still as the vision began to rise inside her mind. It was as if each of her eyes was showing her a different sight, the dark familiarity of her room at Tock House overlaid with something alien, at first smoke-thin, but the image growing clearer as she focused in on it.
It was a room, a large chamber made of a glowing substance Molly could not put a name to. A council was about to begin, illuminated by an emerald light falling through cathedral-sized windows that should have been covered in ocean, but were submerged no longer – waves of green sludge lapping against the lower panes instead. She could hear the noise of the surf in the vision, a repugnant polluted gargle as each thick wave sloshed against the glass.
Around the crescent table sat rubbery-skinned albino creatures, octopus-like, but with very humanoid eyes and very humanoid fingers branching out at the end of their tentacles, the pallid limbs flickering across machines built into their table. Communicating with distant functionaries while they waited for the council to start. This was a most peculiar vision. Molly could actually interact with it, push her mind towards areas of the image and gain knowledge of what she was looking at.
Molly was about to try to divine just what these strange creatures were, when a truly giant member of the species rose into the chamber through an opening in the floor.
‘The emperor’s council is in session.’
Molly concentrated on what was being said, trying to banish the image of her bedroom that underlay this strange sight. Hear the words; hear her vision’s translation of them.
‘The Department of Nourishment will open this session of the council with their report.’
