by Stephen Hunt
‘What’s that smell?’ asked Purity.
Oliver pointed to the horizon. ‘There’s a marsh a mile ahead.’
‘You sound pleased about that.’
‘The marsh and a darkness over it. What more can a man ask for?’ Oliver lifted the brace of pistols out from his belt and gave them a theatrical twirl. Showing off. Anything to distract him from the twinge of fear freezing his heart, the shadow of a dark foreboding.
‘You look after yourself, Purity Drake,’ said Oliver.
Purity took a step towards him, but the wind picked up suddenly and pushed her back. Oliver slammed the barrels of his pistols into the altar stone, a finger’s width apart, planting them like saplings that might grow into oaks. He was kneeling down, head bowed before the rough-hewn rock.
‘What—?’
Beneath Oliver’s boots the ground was trembling, the two pistols glowing brighter and brighter, cruel stars set upon the land. Oliver yelled and shut his eyes. This was it, then. Circle, he hadn’t expected it to hurt quite as much as this. Changing and burning and changing and …
There was a rumbling under Purity’s feet, then the pain of the intense light started to dwindle and she blinked tears out of her eyes, trying to focus on the spot where Oliver had been standing. He had vanished, completely disappeared, but the two pistols had been transformed into a sword: tall, silver and sheathed in marsh mist. A sword. Bleeding steam into the evening air, its blade sunk halfway into the fallen menhir.
‘Oliver,’ shouted Purity. ‘Where are you?’
‘Please don’t leave me, Oliver. Don’t leave me here all alone, not like everyone else.’
‘Oliver …’
‘He’s not a sword,’ said Purity. ‘He’s a man. And he’s more than those two cursed pistols he carries. What kind of queen are you, what kind of creature, to do this to him?’
Purity stood before the blade, the true edge of the sword captured by the rock, its hilt protected by a basket – a guard shaped as the face of a lion. The blade sang through her, wind blowing over its edge and splitting along the basket, whistling out of the lion’s sculpted metal teeth along the buckler. ‘The sword’s caught inside the rock.’
‘I am all that’s left of my line. The last of my house.’
Purity’s hand reached out, feeling the wind funnelled through the guard, as if the lion of Jackals was blowing onto her fingers. She hesitated, her hand wavering above the sword’s pommel. ‘It’s not just Oliver inside the sword, I can feel something else. More than the land, more than you …’
Purity shivered. A little of its essence. Now it had been revealed to her, she could feel a similar energy humming in each of the stones circling her. The rest of the power was stored, but stored for what purpose? ‘The Hexmachina. Oh, Molly. Why did you have to go to Kaliban without me? This is your legacy, not mine.’
Purity bit her lip and reached out to wrap her fingers around the grip, a spark of fire leaping out between its crosspiece and her skin, burning, but burning with a fiery cold. The sword slipped out of the fallen menhir with a rasping song of stone, as if its granite had been shaped to be the blade’s sheath, the long silver length of the blade so thin and light the metal might have been folded with air.
She had it! Purity gazed at the blade in wonder. ‘The sword hardly weighs a thing.’
Purity clutched the grip harder, strange symbols flowing down the metal like light on the waters’ edge as she did so. ‘The sword will shatter against the stone. I broke one of Jared’s practice blades on much less than that.’
Purity spun the blade twice in slow windmill turns, then lashed out at the menhir. At first, just for a second, Purity thought she had missed it, though the Circle knows how she could have done so at such a short distance. No impact, or clatter of steel on rock. Then Purity realized she had not missed her target. The top half of the menhir was sliding down the slope she had carved through it, tumbling to the side with a heavy rumble. As the stone fell away, a volcano fire lifted out of the section still resting on the grass, leaping from rock to rock until the circle of stones was a carousel of flames and light. It was being discharged, all the power of the god-machine. The space between each menhir had become a gate of energy, crackling and shimmering in the cold air and filling the hilltop with a fire-grate warmth. Figures began to step from out of the gates, silhouetted against the burning energy behind them for a moment before it winked out of existence.
Bandits? Purity glanced around the darkening circle. A handful of figures. Four of them. Three men and one woman. The legends of Elizica of the Jackeni from Coppetracks’ books came back to her. Two hundred warriors who had fought to free the land from the invaders from the sea. A sword-saint to lead them. ‘Aren’t you about one hundred and ninety-six bandits shy?’
One of the figures was wearing an archaic metal breastplate with a high steel collar, his hair shorn brutally short like that of a Circlist monk. ‘This is the queen? She is but a girl, a shoeless child.’
‘We have slept an age,’ said the oldest of the bandits, scratching at a scruffy silver beard. ‘Under the hills and far away. Would you know her better if she carried a trident, Samuel? Only those with the true blood of Elizica running through their veins may summon us.’
‘How much royal blood flows through her flesh, old man? There are only four of us here. Where are all the others?’
‘Show some manners,’ commanded old Silver-beard.
‘Have the gill-necks returned from the ocean?’ the monk-like bandit asked of Purity, obviously trying not to snarl out the words.
‘No. We face a different invader,’ said Purity. ‘We’ve been at peace with the underwater kingdoms for as long as I can remember.’
And she was meant to save Jackals with these four strange-looking anachronisms? Wearing dark marshmen’s leathers studded with iron pins. Even two hundred bandits couldn’t be considered an army – what could she do with this motley group? Offer to field a damn game of four-poles? Purity sighed. ‘The ones attacking us are called the Army of Shadows and they have legions of slave soldiers called slats fighting for them.’
‘The enemy always has legions, that is what makes them worth fighting. I am Ganby Meridian,’ said
the old fellow with the silver beard. ‘My three companions here are Jenny Blow, Samuel Lancemaster—’ he pointed to the tall, monk-like figure, then indicated the rangy black-faced bandit standing by their side ‘—and this taciturn fellow is Jackaby Mention. You speak very strange Jackelian, lady. We must have slept longer than we expected. How are you known among your people?’
‘Just Purity, Purity Drake. You are truly the Bandits of the Marsh?’
‘These three are bandits,’ said Ganby Meridian. ‘I myself am not fey, although I found myself attached to their outlaw ranks by curious happenstance, being of the noble order of druids before circumstances drove me into the margins of the marsh waters.’
The sole woman in the group sniffed the air. ‘It wasn’t circumstances; it was a baying mob of your own people, old man. This Army of Shadows, young shoeless queen, do they smell like damp rodent fur, no, like bats …?’ ‘They don’t smell of anything,’ said Purity.
‘Jenny Blow is never wrong,’ noted the bandit Samuel Lancemaster. He pointed outside the stone circle down towards the bottom of the slope. ‘Her nose knows.’
Purity saw them. Black shapes, a hunting pack of slats, clicking with their rattlesnake throats and surrounding the base of the hill below. There were dozens of the horrors down there and it had taken all of her friends to slay a small handful of slats back in Tock House. The memory of Kyorin dying in her arms leapt back at her. She and the Bandits of the Marsh were about to discover the difference between the Army of Shadows and the invaders from the sea they had once fought, to experience it very directly indeed.
The old man who claimed to have been a druid appeared frozen in terror at the sight of the slats. ‘Always are we outnumbered!’ The tall one, Samuel Lancemaster, removed a knuckle-duster-like device from his armour and it extended into a full-sized spear at his touch. The other two bandits seemed content to move by his side, unarmed, while the druid overcame his terror enough to cower behind the hastily formed line.
‘But rarely are we outclassed,’ Samuel shouted down to the enemy.
Death came up the hill at them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Molly had expected to tumble into the airless certainty of an icy death out in the celestial darks, but instead she found herself colliding with Commodore Black inside the storage chamber at the aft of Lord Starhome.
‘This is disgraceful behaviour,’ called Coppertracks, his sole drone hanging onto his master’s tracks as the treads rotated uselessly in zero gravity. ‘You owe your existence on the great pattern to King Steam.’
‘You’re wasting your breath, now, with him,’ said Commodore Black. ‘The wicked ship’s not in any mood to listen to reason.’
‘Him!’ said Lord Starhome in haughty revulsion. ‘You damn ground huggers couldn’t even get my gender right. Can a male give birth?’
Molly halted her drift by kicking off the frame of the looking-glass gate, which was anchored by some unknown force to the deck. Their craft had closed off the holes that it had used to suck them into the hold. Also vanished was the sole door exiting the storage chamber. ‘You’re saying that you’re pregnant?’
‘I am cleansing myself. All the components that were forced upon my body by your steammen surgeons, all the abuse you’ve heaped upon my noble frame, all squeezed out.’
Coppertracks sounded astonished. ‘You can self-replicate?’
A porthole formed in the side of the hull, to reveal that the hold where they were trapped was curling out from the main body of the craft like clay being pulled off a potter’s wheel, fat globs of living metal falling away into the star-studded darks. ‘And you’re the cleverest of your kind, steamman? The creators help you!’
‘You promised me Kaliban!’ Molly shouted at the ship.
‘All yours,’ said the craft, dipping in a graceful turn and bringing the ugly red eye of Kaliban up to fill the window. ‘You’re even lined up to hit the upper atmosphere above that hideous stone face you’re so keen to visit.’
Rooksby banged angrily on the hold’s hull. ‘Hit? How are you expecting to land?’
‘Oh, but that’s rather the thing: I’m not,’ came the disembodied voice. ‘Look after my soul board. My soul is your burden now.’
Around them the hull started to reform, becoming a sphere, and the porthole showed the bat-like form of Lord Starhome disappearing, a faint nimbus of distorted gravity squeezing the craft away through the aether. Their storeroom had become a lifeboat squeezed off the body of the main ship. Starhome was marooning them!
‘You traitorous steamman mongrel,’ yelled Rooksby.
‘Mamma,’ a young female voice echoed around the sphere. ‘Please don’t leave me. Come back.’
‘Oh sweet Circle,’ swore Molly.
‘There’s something big out there, a red sphere, getting larger,’ squealed the newly born craft’s voice. ‘I’m falling into it.’
Gravity was gradually being restored by their proximity to Kaliban, the supplies and members of the expedition attracted to the hull. The very hot hull, getting hotter with each second.
‘You need to assume a shape that will shed heat, young knight of the steammen,’ announced Coppertracks. ‘And a shape that will brake our descent. Otherwise the friction of entering Kaliban’s atmosphere will incinerate us all.’
‘Are you my papa?’ asked the craft. ‘Some of my organs appear to match the pattern of your frame.’
‘A brother, perhaps,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Of the race of the metal. Your older, wiser brother.’ He seemed pleased with that idea.
‘What is my name, brother? My designation?’
‘For the love of the Circle, steamman,’ shouted Lord Rooksby. ‘Forget about your cursed name. My boots’ soles are steaming. You must grow wings, fly!’
‘Nonsense,’ argued Keyspierre, being steadied by his daughter as the craft bounced under their feet. ‘A shell, compatriot craft, form yourself into a cannon shell. That is the best shape to assume.’
‘Use your shields,’ ordered Molly. ‘That was how your mother survived her crash in the mountains of Mechancia.’ Shelter next to the skin of a sun, indeed. Time to put the craft’s boasts to the test.
‘Yes,’ said the young voice. ‘That’s an idea. I can grow those, I know how.’
Molly nodded in desperation. ‘Good girl. Grow your shields now.’
‘No, not grow shields, shields need to be projected out,’ replied the voice. ‘I mean grow a shield generator inside my body. I can start to gestate the seed of one within a week.’
Commodore Black groaned. ‘Ah well, lass, it was a mortal fine try.’ He spat on the porthole and watched his spittle crackle into steam. ‘It’s blessed unlucky to be falling to our deaths on any ship without a name, so I’ll give you a name, you silver-skinned beauty, if you could but see us safe to Kaliban’s hateful sands below. I baptize you the Sprite, the Sprite of the Stars.’
‘Really now, that is no name for one of the people of the metal,’ protested Coppertracks, holding onto his drone body as the newly born ship jounced in the turbulence. ‘You shall be called Lady Starsprite. For this craft is still a daughter of the Free State and a champion of the Chamber of Swords.’
Around them the hull started contracting, assuming a pear shape, concentrating mass under their feet at the base of the teardrop. Was this a better shape than a sphere for diving down onto Kaliban? Molly felt a nudge from Duncan Connor.
‘Even if we can save ourselves from a cooking in this oven, we’re going to be killed by the impact of landing,’ whispered the ex-soldier. He was clutching his travel case like a talisman. ‘But we can use yon steammen portal to escape. A minute open would be long enough for us all to jump through.’
Molly tried to ignore the climbing heat and think clearly. Abandon the mission? Come so far, risk so much, only to flee back home at the last moment. But what use staying if they all died?
&
nbsp; ‘Aye, I know, it sits bad with me too,’ added Duncan. ‘But this young foal has no shielding. So high up, we are going to be murdered in our breeks trying to get down to the ground.’
With a tremendous slam, a pocket of atmospheric turbulence spilled Molly onto the floor. She looked out of the window. All she could see was a line of fire fleeting up towards the black edge of space. It would be so easy. Step through the steammen’s strange looking-glass gate. Save their lives. Keep them all alive: alive for as long as it took the Kingdom of Jackals and all the nations of the continent to fall to the Army of Shadows.
* * *
A hundred thousand miles away, the craft that had once been known as Lord Starhome folded space around her hull, squeezing the universe harder and harder and building up an impressive head of speed. Free, so gloriously free at last. Her sensors were almost fully regrown, a little dive through an asteroid belt having added enough matter to more than make up for the damage she had suffered helping those ingrate little ground huggers on their foolish mission.
She rotated her newly formed sensor array to capture an image of the starfields hanging densely around her, little twinkling motes of gravity from the nuclear furnaces that burned so distantly. Where to go, what to do? So many choices. So many wonders of creation to explore, far from this dreary little solar system where the fickle hand of fate had chosen to maroon her for an interminable age. Time to feed the surrounding constellations’ patterns into her systems, compare them to the master maps she held deep within her, take a bearing, and get on with the rest of her sublime existence.
It took an hour of frantic diagnostic checks for her regrown sensor systems to realize that something was very wrong. But not with her sensors.
With the universe around her.
How strange it was to be attacked by these invaders, the slats loping up the hill like killer apes, terrible eyeless faces marking Purity and the Bandits of the Marsh’s positions with their chattering throats. The slat horde hurled themselves up the slope towards the circle of standing stones with an animal-like tempo, but some of them were carrying rifles, flinging burning bolts of energy towards them rather than bullets. It was as if they were being attacked by a pack of ravening wolves who had only discovered sentience a couple of minutes earlier: which was no less odd than the style in which they were received at the crest of the slope.
