by Stephen Hunt
‘Over here,’ whispered Purity.
The Kal looked around, his slim body slipping through the trees and raising a hand in greeting.
‘Can you understand me?’ asked Purity.
‘Yes,’ said the Kal, his mind-speech reaching across to her and his lips broadening into a smile.
‘I was a friend of Kyorin, when he was alive,’ said Purity. ‘Did you know him?’
‘I did,’ said the Kal, advancing through the trees. ‘We trained together. You say when he was alive. You saw him die?’
‘A pack of slats killed him,’ said Purity. ‘They hunted him down. I tried to save him from the monsters but I couldn’t.’
‘Of course you couldn’t,’ said the Kal, moving in front of Purity. ‘A slat warrior is bred only to slay and you are just a girl.’ The Kal’s smile opened wider and two massive fangs sprouted down from his upper jaw. ‘A very juicy young girl, bloated with salty fresh blood.’
He leapt at her neck, trying to sink his fangs into Purity’s flesh. She reacted on instinct – hers or Elizica’s – and punched the Kal’s stomach deep with her sword’s buckler, winding the blue man and sending him stumbling back.
‘You’ll taste all the better, for that insolence, my sweet,’ laughed the Kal, taken aback by Purity’s attack but quickly recovering his composure. ‘I’m going to drain every bit of your blood and leave your body a husk before I toss your marrow to my slats to feed on.’
‘Taste this instead!’ Purity waved the tip of the maths-blade threateningly in front of the Kal’s chest.
He was looking for an opening and swaying like a cobra for another attack when there was a blur and a buffeting, the Kal carried back almost too fast to follow and slammed into a tree. There was a sickening thump as the Kal’s body joined with the tree trunk and the blur materialized to a stop in front of her. Jackaby Mention crackling with frost. The Kal was dead. Nothing could have survived being slammed into an oak tree at that velocity.
Jackaby kicked the corpse, making sure the creature was slain. ‘I thought you said that the blue skins were slaves taken by the Army of Shadows? That they were our allies?’
Purity stared at the corpse, horrified. So she had. How could she have been so wrong about Kyorin and his people?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Iskalajinn before sunrise was a city made dark by the shadow of the colossal face, slag-glass houses dimly lit by green globes that hung off joists drilled into their rough crystalline walls. These ancient lanterns drank in the sun’s rays during the furnace-like days and trickled it back out as a faint glow for as long as their energy stores lasted. Molly and her companions had waited a day already in one of the Kal safe houses, and this was the second they were spending in Iskalajinn.
Molly, Lord Rooksby and the two shifties were being led through the narrow streets in silence by their guide Laylaydin, along winding passages that ascended between the terraced houses as they climbed higher and higher, up the side of the great face of Kaliban. Had it been the Army of Shadows’ idea to concentrate the last of the dying world’s resources here, in the shadow of the wreck of the Kals’ once great civilization? A reminder that the Kals’ age had come, gone and been eclipsed by their all-powerful conquerors.
Molly was desperately aware that they would have to send word to her three friends hiding outside the city before too long. Before one of them attempted something rash and came looking for her. Molly didn’t have another day to spend in this city, waiting for a guide to the great sage to be procured, ignoring the tedious complaints of Rooksby and the pair of Quatérshiftians. Molly’s head throbbed harder and harder, it seemed, each hour. So many things that seemed familiar, firing off tiny flashes of agony as she tried to avoid recalling why they’d meant something to the runaway slave.
It hadn’t helped that there had been nothing to do in their last safe house but watch the Kals who shared their slag-glass hideaway tending the bean-like things growing on terraces in the central courtyard, fed by a trickle of the water collected from the well each day. The Kals would take almost religious care in trimming the vines and bearing away their visitors’ stool pots to empty as manure on the rock basins. A complex array of shutters allowed just the right amount of sun to slant through and warm the beans.
Molly was about to press Laylaydin as to why they were being moved between safe houses when the Kal woman stopped them and pointed down to a street on a lower terrace. A company of slats was moving along in two lines, the beasts at the head riding high in saddles on something that looked like a cross between an eagle and a giraffe, an impossibly long neck surmounted by a wickedly sharp beak. There weren’t many Kals out in the bitterly cold hours of the early morning yet, but those that were threw themselves to their knees, not daring to look up at the convoy. Not daring to gaze upon the windowless silver-blue metallic capsule being borne through the streets by seventy naked Kals, keeping the capsule aloft at shoulder height on long ceramic poles.
‘It is one of the masters,’ whispered Laylaydin, indicating the glow of the hulking domes at the end of the city. ‘They hardly ever venture out of their city, now.’
Molly thought of the tentacled, octopus-like monstrosities she had seen in Kyorin’s vision, plotting the invasion of her home. She shuddered. Was the master bobbing around in the comfort of the last of the world’s water inside that capsule?
‘You don’t think the masters suspect we’re inside Iskalajinn?’
‘No,’ said Laylaydin. ‘That procession is heading out on the road to the travel fields. There are still a few deep-cast mines and facilities scattered across our land with resources not yet stripped.’
Travel fields. Molly looked at the sky, but there was no sign of the leathery globes that the Army of Shadows used instead of airships, ugly windowless spheres suspended under rapidly spinning metal blades.
‘If they knew we were here, compatriot Templar,’ said Keyspierre, ‘we would be dead.’
‘Or worse,’ said Laylaydin. ‘Yet you almost sound approving of their efficiency.’
Keyspierre shrugged. ‘Efficiency is always to be admired, wherever it is found.’
Laylaydin snorted. ‘Between them, the masters and their slat pets have gnawed the last of the meat from our land’s bones. That is efficiency of a kind. But I pity it and I shall save my admiration for more worthy endeavours.’
‘Well said, damson,’ Lord Rooksby agreed. ‘They are our enemy, Keyspierre, and it is the bones of our people back home they’re busy devouring.’
‘Quite,’ said Keyspierre, looking knowingly at his daughter as they kept to the shadows of the empty street. ‘And I have seen nothing since we arrived in this heat-blasted land fit to help us shake their seeming supremacy.’
‘Kyorin thought otherwise,’ said Molly.
‘An escaped slave,’ laughed Keyspierre. ‘Who lacked even the means to return home save for the ingenuity of the Commonshare and our cannon.’
‘Be quiet!’ snapped Laylaydin. ‘You don’t know what you speak of.’ Seeing that those she was leading were taken aback by the shattering of her usual serenity, she added, ‘Kyorin was my life mate, an illegal union made outside of the masters’ breeding laws. The slats took our children, and now he is gone from me too.’
Molly was nearly lost for words. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘In the normal course of things his last memories would have been shared with me,’ said Laylaydin. ‘For all of the masters’ breeding strictures, they still have not managed to entirely eliminate our higher powers from the blood line.’
Molly bit her lip. No wonder she had detected a resentful edge to the way Laylaydin dealt with her. ‘Kyorin died well in my land.’
‘There are no good deaths,’ said Laylaydin, ‘only bad ones, only the release of our pain. My people’s time here is nearly done.’
Laylaydin ushered them into the igloo-like entrance of one of the highest houses nestling against the great carving. Rooms had been blown like bubbles inside the
slag-glass building, floors softened by the brightly patterned carpets Molly had seen female Kals weaving using threads stripped off their bean plants. At the end of the house one of the carpets hanging tapestry fashion across the wall was pulled back to reveal a tunnel. A passage burrowing into the great face of Kaliban. The rough-hewn excavation ran only a short way through the structure before joining a series of conduits that had perhaps, once, channelled water to the hanging gardens outside. A trail of fluorescent arrows was marked on the walls of the sluice system and the group followed the long-dry passages to the edge of a precipice. Steps led down to a vast chamber lit by hanging lamps, ancient pumping machines and water filtering equipment lying derelict around its edges. Circular drain holes marked the walls of the chamber at head height, hundreds of dark pipes staring back at them. The floor of this cavern hidden inside the Face of Kaliban was dotted with Kals, some eating fruit at long tables formed by stone slabs, others reading, or sitting cross-legged in circles, humming and meditating.
‘This is the heart of the resistance,’ announced Laylaydin. ‘Many of those here are criminals with slat destruction orders hanging over them. Some are deserters who refused to assist the slats with the invasion of your land. Others are merely sympathizers drawn to our aims.’
‘This?’ said Keyspierre, looking around the nearly silent empty space in derision. ‘This is your revolution? Surely this is a joke – where are your sabres, your weapon smiths, your bomb makers? Where is the training in arms being conducted? The lessons in assassination?’
‘We resist in our own way, not in yours.’
Keyspierre looked indignant. ‘Please do not lecture me on the ways of revolution, compatriot. Before the tyranny of the Sun King was swept away by the forces of our glorious commonshare, I survived two years on the run from the king’s secret police as a Carlist subversive. This, compatriot, is not how you cut off the oppressor’s hand.’
‘Nor do you defeat your masters by becoming them,’ retorted Laylaydin. ‘Our land was very different from yours before the occupation and the coming of the masters. We had few meat eaters in the geographic record of our world. The pattern of our ecos was based on a vast network of elaborate cooperating systems that straddled the land. We had no word for violence, none for murder or crime.’
‘The perfect commonshare,’ said Jeanne in reverence.
‘And its end the perfect tragedy,’ said Keyspierre. ‘But you have since been taught the concept of cruelty well enough from the Army of Shadows. We travelled here to find allies, not sheep willing to step meekly up to the farmer’s knife.’
‘You came because of the rumours that the great sage has a way of defeating the masters,’ said Laylaydin. ‘But first we would know that you are fit to receive it.’ Laylaydin indicated the largest of the circles of sitting natives to Molly. ‘Your friends’ weak minds could not survive our sharing, but your mind is different, Molly Templar.’
‘I have machines in my blood,’ said Molly, sitting down in a place that had been made for her. ‘I was an operator of the Hexmachina, the last of my land’s god-machines.’
‘It is said that our own veins once bubbled with such machine-life,’ said Laylaydin. ‘But the masters feared our longevity, quick minds and the other abilities our machines gave us, and burnt all traces of the life metal from our bodies. We are mere shadows of our ancestors now, cripples bred into cattle to sate the appetites of the masters’ slat armies.’
‘But you can still share memories with each other.’
‘Yes, but we end up nailed to the cross when we are caught doing this,’ said Laylaydin.
‘Or worse,’ added Molly.
The skin of the Kal next to her had been darkened to near indigo by the sun and he still wore his dusty desert robes bound tight. ‘You speak lightly of such things.’
‘As lightly as a nomad walks across the dunes.’
‘Perceptive, too,’ said the Kal. ‘Well met. Yes, I am your guide. My name is Sandwalker. I have come out of the salt flats and would suffer the fate of all free Kals if I was discovered inside the last city.’
‘Your accent is different from Laylaydin’s.’
The Kal wiped his hand on his white pantaloon-like trousers before taking Molly’s. ‘I only shared the learning of your tongue this morning. Your words still come hard for me. I will grow fluent as I practise more.’
Molly started. Since this morning! She had already received an inkling of what it was like to be part of a network of living minds from Kyorin, but here was the example made flesh. What miracles had the Kal civilization accomplished during its heyday? How far had they fallen to end up here, mere farm animals and slaves?
Laylaydin sat down in the group, and with the circle of hands complete, Molly felt the pain she associated with Kyorin’s memories abating, subsiding to such an extent that it was only now that she realized the dead slave’s gift to her had become a constant dull throb within her. Memories began flashing past. Drawn out of her like grubs pulled from an apple with a set of tweezers. Kyorin on a dock in Middlesteel, leaping into a river with slat hunters firing darts at him, running sodden through the cold streets, communicating with Timlar Preston inside the cells of the Court of the Air, being helped by Purity Drake. On the run together with the young royalist. Then the images accelerated faster still, Molly’s own recollections this time. Flashes of the Hexmachina, the war she had once fought against the demon revolutionaries so many years ago, the cannon construction at Highhorn and her three friends waiting for her in the ruins outside Iskalajinn.
Molly caught only brief glimpses of the minds of the others sitting in the circle as they probed her memories. Why were the Kals being so careful not to show her their own histories and pasts?
‘Enough,’ said Laylaydin, releasing the hands of the two Kals sitting to either side of her. ‘Oh, my Kyorin, all that way for this.’
‘What is it?’ said Molly. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me. Why weren’t you sharing your thoughts with me? What have you got to hide?’
‘To put it simply, your mind is already full,’ said Laylaydin. ‘Kyorin gambled that your symbiote machinery would be able to handle the weight of all his memories driven into you so fast, but I fear your mind is not as sophisticated or evolved as ours. Have you been experiencing headaches?’
‘I—’ Molly considered lying, but what would be the point? ‘I have.’
‘The machines inside your body are concentrating around your brain, trying to cope with the weight of his knowledge. But they are burning up under the strain. Your mind is cooking inside your skull, Molly Templar, caught in a vicious circle. The more machines die in your blood the fewer there are to carry the load and the faster those remaining burn up. I am so sorry, but my life-mate filled you with his soul and the vessel of your body is too weak to be able to carry it.’
‘Take the memories out of me,’ Molly struggled to keep her voice calm. ‘Your damn husband put them in, you can take them out of me.’
‘We eased your pain as much as were able when we were joined, but such cleansing is merely a balm on your wounds. We are unable to clear you of the remains of Kyorin’s soul.’
‘We are unable,’ said Sandwalker. ‘But there is one who can help you. The great sage is not like us; he is what our people once were before the occupation. He could unentangle the pathways of the mind of even someone as strange as you who have travelled so far to stand by our cause.’
Rooksby and the two shifties were staring at Molly with horror, as if her condition might be contagious. She had to bite back an insult. ‘We were going to see the great sage anyway. Now we have two reasons to go.’
‘You must stay here, compatriot,’ insisted Keyspierre. ‘Let our Kal compatriots care for you while we travel to seek the weapon and your cure. Are we to travel through the desert bearing you on a stretcher? Your presence will only hinder the prospects of the expedition succeeding.’
‘Not a chance,’ snapped Molly. ‘I’m going wi
th you.’
There was a rise of excited voices at the far side of the chamber.
‘Tallyle! You’re alive,’ said Laylaydin, spotting the Kal who was walking down the steps to the chamber. ‘We heard that all of the engineers working at Processing Ten were fed to the slats when the station was decommissioned.’
‘Not all of us,’ said the Kal, shaking hands with the other natives eagerly pressing in around him.
‘This is our leader,’ said Laylaydin, proudly. ‘The infiltration of the Jackelian scouting force was his plan.’
‘And the allies we hoped for have arrived just in time,’ said the Kal.
‘In time for what?’ asked Molly.
‘Why, to feed my hunger,’ replied the Kal, a pair of deadly pearl-white fangs sprouting from his jaw, his tongue whipping out obscenely to lick at his lips.
Purity came to the clearing where the Bandits of the Marsh were holding the captured slat just in time. Hanging in the air like a conjuring trick while Ganby stood by muttering a spell, the captured slat was watching Samuel Lancemaster heat the edge of his spear inside a fire. A blaze that Jenny Blow was encouraging to iron-foundry heat with her breath.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Purity.
‘We have our prisoner,’ said Samuel. ‘Now we are going to begin our interrogation.’
Purity looked at the spear tip glowing orange in the fire. ‘You can’t do that.’
Ganby reached out to tap the hard black chest of the slat. ‘This bone armour doesn’t stretch all the way around its body. These slat creatures are like craynarbians, the joints of the legs, arms and neck have soft areas to allow their limbs to bend.’
