by Stephen Hunt
Shouts of mortification sounded back through the whipping snow.
‘No, I’m not going to ask you to fight your way through slat legions and hold that ground down there. But here’s the rub. I have decided that ugly bone-white beanstalk rising out of our ground offends my eye. It’s unsightly. So I’m going to take a stroll down there and chop it to pieces. Perhaps you’d like to come and see me do that?’
Her volunteers shook their rifles in the falling snow.
‘Then you’re invited for a stroll!’ shouted Purity. ‘And if we bump into any slats down there, just remember that one stout Jackelian soul is worth fifty of their slave soldiers.’
‘You have heard your queen. Not one of you is to die,’ commanded Samuel, ‘until you have sent at least fifty of those flat-faced bastards back to whatever foul underworld they worship. I shall kill twice that many myself and count them merely practice for my spear.’
Purity rose and pointed her maths-blade down towards the beanstalk. An explosion erupted from the base of the hill, the first of the Army of Shadows’ mines detecting the gravity wave sent from her blade, then there were hundreds of sprouting flowers of fury setting each other off around the perimeter, arcs of shrapnel shredding the slats that had been standing behind the safety line with their rifles shouldered. At the first sign of attack, anthill-like structures next to the underground entrances of the slats’ barracks started to spew out clouds of red gas, the cloaking mist the creatures used to blind their enemies and tip the balance in favour of their sound-sight.
Purity shook her head. Not this time – the sword blazed in her fist and the gas clouds became fierce jets venting from a hoop of red volcanoes around the beanstalk before returning to gaseous form far above the encampment.
‘I think the Army of Shadows deserves to see us come calling,’ called Purity, waving her sword. ‘For your families. For your freedom. For Jackals!’
As one they rose behind Purity, charging down the slope. Purity was not thinking about the slippery iced rocks under their feet, not thinking about the driving wind or the black chattering forms spilling out from the Army of Shadows’ underground barracks. Not thinking about how she would have to lead anyone who survived back to the Spartiate if the raid succeeded, harried every step of the way by the enemy’s legions.
Jackaby had dragged Ganby Meridian to his feet and was pushing the druid along with the rest of the kingdom’s last ragged army. Behind them the wind multiplied twenty-fold, a gale picking up broken rock from the rubble of the minefield and making a storm of flint chips over the base of the beanstalk, slats howling as their armoured skeletons were torn to pieces by the gale. The wind subsided as Jenny Blow halted for breath. Purity and her raiders were on the flat now, following fast after Jenny’s storm as though they were redcoats charging behind a rolling artillery barrage.
That was when the first of the rods started to rise from buried hatches surrounding the minefield, shining black poles each topped with a rotating globe studded with sharp crystal tips. Samuel Lancemaster shoved Purity to the snow as bolts of fire began to streak out of the spheres, leaping red sparks that cut through the ranks of the Jackelians. Rifles went spinning though the air as their owners fell clutching blackened chests and burnt off stubs of limbs. A second volley of sparks lashed out of the rising fence, splitting the falling weapons into fragments.
‘Movement!’ shouted Samuel. ‘The fence detects movement. Get to the ground and lie still!’
Purity looked around. Her force were throwing themselves down to the snow and trying not to shiver on the freezing ground. But there was Jenny Blow, still on her feet and trying to shatter the poles’ spheres with her voice. Jenny Blow had once taught the knights of the Steammen Free State how to modulate their voiceboxes and shatter organs inside a ribcage, but she would teach no more. Homing in on her from all sides, the fence whipped Jenny in a crosscut wave of spitting sparks, slicing her to pieces. The last dying notes of her throat emptied into the wind as she fell back and lay sprawled across the ground, little veins of crimson spreading across the plain’s snow. Purity had detected the minefield, but not this lurking fence of burning fire … Jenny’s death was on her hands. Fool, fool of a girl. She was a breeding-house ragamuffin, not a queen, not a leader. What use was her bravado out here?
Ganby lay across from Purity, muttering, his frantic eyes darting between the crackling poles in front of them, a forest of death raised to protect the beanstalk. ‘We’re dead, we’re dead. Death awaits us in the north.’
And Purity had led them to it.
Molly came out of unconsciousness yelling, the thunder roaring in her head as she tried to make sense of the vague shapes she could see in the dim light. She was being carried by one of the giant ants, her body lying across the foremost pair of its legs. As Molly was borne bobbing through a dark rocky tunnel, flashes of light hit her like bayonet thrusts from somewhere to her side. The nest, she was in the ants’ nest, being dragged deep into their colony. Nausea and fear swelled around her in a sea of agony, the insect’s antennae stroking her hair as she screamed and flailed in its grip.
Wakefulness came and went, the spear-clacking noise of the monstrous insect’s legs on rock drumming across her. Then she was being taken through a chamber, pale light from a distant source in the roof glinting wickedly against the ant’s compound eyes. Its legs lifted Molly forward; painfully twisting her neck she saw that it was carrying her towards a wall dotted with dark circular holes and lifting her into a tube. Oh, sweet Circle! A memory of the spider web that often seemed to be woven outside her bedroom in Tock House on cold autumn mornings came back to Molly. The spider happily spinning little white packages and sealing the flies against a leaf for its young to consume.
Molly tried to lever herself out of the tunnel, but the ant had sealed the tomb down by her feet. Shut in. Trapped. Just like when she had been a stack cleaner crawling through the tunnels of Middlesteel’s towers, the enclosed spaces pushing down on her, crushing the life out of her. She had survived that, though. Survived the short career of a poorhouse stack-cleaning girl.
Molly was feverishly kicking at the obstruction under her feet when something came crawling out of the other end of the tunnel and snapped tight onto her head.
Surrounded by the cries of the wounded and dying raiders, Purity was desperately trying to work out a way to disable the fence of murderous poles that had risen to protect the Army of Shadows’ facility. She could deflect a couple of the killing sparks with her sword, absorb a few more, but the enemy’s defence barrier encircled the beanstalk. Every time one of the Jackelians moved they were detected and cut to pieces. Just like poor Jenny Blow.
More slats were spilling out of the barracks; it wouldn’t take long for the beasts to form up behind the killing fence and pick the Jackelians off like farmers culling rabbits in a wheat field.
A slew of snow fell across Purity as a figure flashed past her, some of it falling into her open mouth and melting on her tongue. Jackaby Mention! Almost too fast to follow, save for the fact that icy erupting ground trailed the blur of his passage as the globes on top of the defence line spat their evil spark-fire at him. The blur coalesced by one of the poles, Jackaby visible for a second before he took off again, running around the ring of death.
Purity saw what Jackaby was doing. Fire flashed from each pole as he slowed, cutting into the neighbouring rod – and Jackaby was whirling around the beanstalk’s perimeter, slowing and speeding up – a brief target for the spheres on top of each black sentry machine. The deadly heads were erupting in flames as neighbours cut at each other with fire, falling like felled trees while Jackaby spun around them like a human whirlwind.
The fence was disabled now. Samuel Lancemaster rose, a titan from the field of death. ‘Forward the line! Up from the dirt, warriors of Jackals. Leave the dead behind and make their ghosts proud.’
Picking themselves up from the snow, the surviving raiders lunged past the ruined defence works. Purity wa
s running forward, the thump of the slats’ rifles sending bolts of fire sizzling through the falling snowflakes, laying down steam trails that hung in the air pointing back to the defenders’ positions. She could hear Ganby running behind her, cursing and moaning, the lee of her shadow as safe as any place in this battle. Shafts of rifle fire were slapped aside by Purity’s blade as she ran towards the web of cables anchoring the beanstalk’s earthworks to the cold northern rock of the polar wastes. The beanstalk pulsed like a muscle while lifting rooms crawled up and down it on all sides as if they were leaf flies.
Purity tried to close her ears to the beanstalk’s song in the wind, a sickening alien sound as the billion carbonized tubes that made this towering monstrosity creaked above her head, pulled by the spin of the world. But Purity’s maths-blade showed her how to change its song, right enough, cause enough stress to fracture this hideous construction’s hold on the frozen north. Just sever the web of anchor cables on one side of the beanstalk, let the planet’s spin pull the roots of the remaining anchors out and send the beanstalk whipping up to cut the iron moon into rusty shards.
Samuel Lancemaster shouted orders to the volunteers to take their defensive positions around the beanstalk. This was Purity’s moment. Her task. She came to a mooring point, the first of the beanstalk’s white anchor cables as wide as a man and sunk deep into the polar bedrock through a solidified pool of some strange dark substance.
‘Swing your blade,’ sobbed Ganby from behind her. ‘Swing it at the anchor lines and let us quit this frozen hell.’
Purity turned the sword once, willing her blade to cleave a substance so strong that it could clamp the iron moon to their world. Then she yelled and struck down with everything she had. There was a terrible screaming sound as the fibres of the anchor line split apart and the first of the holding cables lashed away to the ground. She ran to the next mooring point and swung her sword in another testing arc. There must have been at least twenty anchor lines on her side of the beanstalk. Already Purity’s arm was aching with the effort needed to drive through a million diamond-hard threads bound together more densely than anything the race of man had ever encountered. She hove at the second one, feeling the flash of energy as the maths-blade converted the strength of the carbon into something more brittle and malleable. It went tumbling away. Purity ran to the next line, ignoring the shouts of the raiders calling to each other for more ammunition or screaming as the slats broke through and tore into them with rifle bolts and the force of their talons. Ignoring the blur of Jackaby Mention, darting between the attackers, sending slats spinning away into the snowstorm, and Samuel Lancemaster’s spear whirling around like a windmill. Purity forgot even the bite of the cold as the labour of chopping away the anchor lines began to tell. How many lines had she cut now? Half? She was losing count, having to take six or seven lunges at each anchor line to sever it.
‘Make speed,’ appealed Ganby, shivering from exposure to the freezing winds. ‘We don’t have long left. Damn this place, I can’t feel my fingers.’
But Purity felt the pulse of fire spurting along the ground behind her, accompanied by the screams of the Jackelians sent flying into the air on geysers of exploding rock and snow and blood. It was a flight of the slats’ aerial spheres, the leathery crafts’ wasp-hum cutting through the storm. Turned back by the destruction of the beanstalk’s defence perimeter, the air fleet were dipping in and out of the whiteout, their cannons wreaking destruction among the defending Jackelians. Jigger the beasts! They knew the tough anchor lines would withstand the blasts of their guns, near indestructible compared to the weak, soft bodies of those who had followed her to this place. But they had reckoned without Samuel Lancemaster. He sprinted out of the shadow of the beanstalk, casting his spear forward, his first throw passing through two of the slats’ globes, smashing their pilots and the organic machinery inside. Jackaby Mention was out there too, speeding to where the spear had been cast and hurtling it back to Samuel. Allowing him to throw it again and again, as if he had an unlimited supply of deadly javelins by his side.
The attackers’ cannons couldn’t home in on Jackaby, but they realized who their true enemy was soon enough, avoiding the missiles of their own broken craft falling out of the sky, blazing at Samuel with their guns. His silver cuirass deflected the first of the bursts of fire, then buckled under the continued fusillade, sending him stumbling back. He was on his knees moaning, trying to hold in his shattered living armour with one hand, the other stretched out imploringly for the blur of Jackaby Mention to bring him his spear. The spear appeared in his hand and he used it as a crutch to get to his feet and face the two remaining craft circling him.
‘Is that it?’ Samuel yelled. ‘Is that all you have?’
Both crafts’ cannons opened up on him and he cast out the spear at the closest in a chopping motion, driving his missile all the way through the globe and out across the rotating array of blades keeping it suspended, the craft’s flight mechanism chewed to pieces as the bandit’s projectile smashed across it.
The remaining sphere drifted behind Samuel, almost cutting him in half with its stuttering cannons, creating a gale as it hovered just above the ground, slats jumping down from a hatch in the craft’s side. Samuel Lancemaster stumbled forward empty-handed and, ignoring the rifle fire of the dismounting beasts, drove a fist into the front of the globe, lifting the craft up over his head and breaking the whirling array of blades as it dug into the frozen soil behind his back. Purity swore the slat troops actually flinched and stepped back as he roared at them, tossing the broken craft away to detonate across the frozen plain. Then Samuel fell face down to lie still in the snow, burning fluids from the smashed craft leaking across his body.
Jackaby Mention coalesced into solid form in front of Purity. ‘Samuel has claimed his fifty corpses, my queen. This is the last anchor line. Sever it, sever it now!’
Purity was dizzy, swaying on her feet. She hacked wildly into the anchor line like a drunken woodsman, dozens of blows needed to break its tightly woven bonds. Purity lined up her final cut, the last cable screeching like fingernails on a blackboard as it subsumed all the stress of the anchor filaments she had already severed.
‘Quickly,’ begged Ganby. ‘There are hardly any of our people left now. The slats are overrunning us.’
‘Be quiet, druid.’ Jackaby was panting from his exertions. ‘Let our queen concentrate.’
Purity let swing at the anchor cable and chipped out perhaps a tenth of it.
‘Pick me up,’ Ganby pleaded with the only other surviving bandit. ‘You can run me out to one of the hills over there. We’re almost done here.’
Purity took another fatigued bite out of the anchor line.
Jackaby shook his head, rapping the layer of frost that had formed across his marsh leathers. ‘I can’t run any more, cramps from the cold. When we’ve cut the last line I’m going to have to walk out of here.’
Purity was so tired, she almost ignored the sense of confusion coming from her maths-blade as she raised the sword to hack again, but the information came flooding through anyway. It was the blade’s stress model. This shouldn’t be so much work; with half the anchor lines already severed; this last line should have been half-pulled apart by the drag of the world on the beanstalk. What was going on here?
Purity looked back over their snow tracks. The cables she had already severed were reaching out like snakes to their mooring points, little black threads extending from each sheared line to the stations left embedded in the rock. Tendons of a regrowing muscle.
‘Hell’s teeth,’ howled Ganby. ‘It’s repairing itself, the beanstalk can repair itself!’
‘Strike now!’ shouted Jackaby. ‘Strike, my queen, while you can.’
‘Believe in yourself,’ whimpered Ganby, making himself small on the ground as bolts of fire spun past from the dark, splashing against the beanstalk.
Purity swung the maths-blade over her head, trying to use the cold bite of the snow agains
t her bare toes to focus, concentrating on the anchor line’s alien material, altering it, allowing her sword to slice deep. She struck. The sword stopped, held tight by the anchor line – the blade was stuck. She tried to yank it out, but the anchor line’s material was flowing over it. Repairing itself. Purity’s sword was as stuck as it had been before she first drew the blade from the stone circle back in Jackals. But Purity couldn’t afford to fail. The entire nation was riding on this. The lives of all the people she had led here sacrificed for … nothing?
Ganby was still on his knees, weeping. ‘We can come back. If we just escape now. We can come back and mount another attack later, factor in the healing time of the anchors, maybe come up with a way to stop the mooring lines repairing themselves.’ Then the terrified druid was on his feet, lunging out of the shadow of the beanstalk, trying to escape.
‘Ganby!’ bellowed Jackaby Mention. ‘Come back here, you craven druid’s whore.’
Jackaby tried to grab at the fleeing bandit’s back but fell over, the cramps in his muscles toppling him moaning into the snow. As the druid was swallowed by the snowstorm there was a succession of thumps, the volley of slat rifles slapping into a soft human form.
Ganby’s smoking corpse appeared a minute later, dragged forward by a line of slats. The Kal at the front of the line looked at his soldiers picking through the slumped bodies of the last of the kingdom’s raiders, taking in Purity Drake, shedding cold tears as she lay collapsed over the anchor line, her hand still resting on the grip of the embedded maths-blade. Jackaby Mention lay semi-paralysed on the snow, gazing hatred back at the line of the Army of Shadows’ fighters.
Smirking, the Kal went over to Purity and pulled her up by the hair. Then he breathed on her icy cheeks through those monstrous fangs, meeting her eyes. ‘When, many generations hence, your ancestors are penned up, soiling themselves in their food cages, the suffering you experience for this day’s trespass will still be legendary among them.’
