The Rise of the Iron Moon

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘You’ve been working with the Army of Shadows since the city,’ said Molly in disgust, the truth dawning on her. ‘They caught you back there, didn’t they? You and Jeanne both.’

  ‘I warned you all once that I was here to make sure the Commonshare was preserved at any cost,’ said Keyspierre. ‘I found no allies in this land capable of resisting the Army of Shadows’ legions. Only a dying race of pacifists that wasn’t strong enough to cast off the enemy’s yoke at the very height of its powers, let alone now. Sometimes, little author, the only way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend.’

  Commodore Black was trying to rise to his feet. ‘Kill you, you mortal shiftie piece of—’ He was shoved back down.

  ‘Make them your friends, man?’ roared Duncan Connor. ‘The commodore was right about you all along. You numpty! Your nation will be made into nothing but a stable of wee slaves and pets.’

  Keyspierre went red in the face and grabbed Duncan’s travel case, smashing it open across the floor. ‘I will take no lessons in strategy from a bloated u-boat tar or an asylum inmate!’

  Bones scattered across the floor and the nearest slats seized a couple of femurs and started gnawing at them. Connor of Cassarabia screamed abuse and tried to flail past the circle of slats surrounding him, but they beat him to the ground too. The last word on his lips was a girl’s name: Hannah.

  Carnivore Tallyle went over and dragged Duncan’s unconscious body to where the great sage was quivering, unseated. Tallyle took the dead nomad’s pack and removed the queen ant’s pheromone tube, tossing it to his slats. ‘Cut the clothes from the sage and this human, spray their skin with the contents of that tube, then toss them outside, naked and with no supplies or water.’ Tallyle looked down on the terrified sage, whose ancient body looked shrunken and shrivelled without his floating carriage. ‘I liked the false ants, that was uncommonly clever of you, Fayris Fastmind. I had to execute a couple of my slats just to get the others to come near your fake colony. Your ant machines are all destroyed, though. You and your bone-collecting friend can go outside and meet some of the real ones now.’

  Molly’s stomach heaved as the great sage was dragged out whimpering behind Duncan Connor’s dazed form; the smell of what was left of Sandwalker’s corpse filling the room.

  Tallyle jabbed a finger towards Molly, the commodore and Coppertracks and barked orders at his slat soldiers. ‘Take the three Jackelians back to the last city. Then seal this dusty useless place off from the world.’

  As the slats pushed Molly past Tallyle, the corrupted Kal leant in and seized her by the face. ‘You’re the future, are you? The future tastes good.’

  * * *

  Molly was losing the ability to understand the Kal tongue, she realized, now that Kyorin’s memories had been erased from her mind. She was forgetting their complex singsong cadences. She became aware of this as the corridor the slats were pushing her along turned into a tight tunnel curving past a series of riveted metal doors. Coppertracks was pushed alone into the first cell, the steamman complaining that the space was too small for him as soon as he saw it. A scowling Commodore Black got the second cell, shouting obscenities at the slat soldiers as they threw him inside. Then Molly was forced into the third compartment. A strange alien voice sounded from a grille in the room’s ceiling. What was it saying? But it was no good. Kyorin’s burden had passed, taking its blessings with it. As had Molly’s mission. She had failed. Failed her friends, failed poor, dead Sandwalker. Failed the Hexmachina and failed all of the Kingdom of Jackals. The poorhouse girl sunk to her natural level, a cell – not for stealing a handkerchief or dipping a wallet. But for conspiring in the murder of her entire world.

  Molly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the first of the transparent pipes pushed out of the wall and began filling her cell with a thick yellow liquid. Soon she was wading though the thick gloop, then it was up to her chest. Was this the traditional method of execution on Kaliban? Drowning in a cell little bigger than a cupboard? You would think Keyspierre could have tipped his new allies off about a nice clinical Gideon’s Collar, a quick bolt through the neck from one of his nation’s execution machines.

  Molly was panicking and smashing on the transparent crystal panel set in the door, but nobody was coming. Finally the liquid flowed into the last inch of air remaining under the cell’s ceiling and she was enveloped. She was drowning.

  * * *

  Duncan Connor turned over in the sand, the raging sun filling the sky and burning his naked body. There was Fayris Fastmind curled up on one of the dunes behind him, the great sage’s pale wrinkled body free of robes too. Duncan stifled a gag as he smelled his hand. A right good reek. As if someone had pissed on him after they had beat him to insensibility.

  Duncan could just make out the slope of the mountain in the distance, billowing columns of smoke coming from the hidden entrance they had used to enter the great sage’s domain. Not so great now, unable to walk and moaning from the aches of age without the medical machinery in his chair to help coddle his ancient, creaking body. So much for the great sage’s fake ant colony, too. Sealed shut on them, no doubt blasted away by the explosives of the Army of Shadows.

 

  Thank the Circle! Hannah lay scattered across the dunes behind him, along with, he discovered, a tauntingly empty water canteen.

  ‘Did the slats gnaw on you, lassie?’

  Hannah cried.

  ‘You’re a good lassie. You did the right thing, you saved my life. Brave wee thing, I’m proud of you. Now we can both get out of here.’

  He broke the empty canteen’s strap and used it as a harness to tie Hannah to his chest. Then he limped across to where the great sage lay.

  ‘Leave me,’ begged the ancient Kal, his mind-voice as faint as a whisper.

  ‘Don’t be a daftie, man.’ Duncan bent down to scoop up the great sage’s body, as light as a feather.

  ‘We have been sprayed,’ said the great sage. ‘Sprayed with the pheromone of an ant queen. Leave me here and you might have a chance. They’ll come for me first if I’m not moving.’

  ‘Aye, I heard much the same story from Sandwalker when we were trying to reach you,’ said Duncan. ‘But those ants aren’t so hard. I killed one when it tried to fly away with my daughter. Back in Cassarabia, the womb mages grew real kelpies inside the wombs of their slaves. You’ve never had a shufty at a sandpede or a Cassarabian flying lizard, have you? They’re real monsters.’

  ‘Who were you talking to over there, do you have a communications device inside your body?’

  ‘It’s called my mouth, man. Do you not have eyes to see? Hannah is coming with us too and I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk about my lassie. You’ve been in the sun too long, great sage. But I’ll carry you out of here just the same.’

  Clicking mandibles interrupted the great sage’s bemused reply, a forest of fluttering antennae rising from behind the dune followed by the giant form of an enraged queen ant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Molly’s journey, nauseous-inducing and timeless in the grasp of the yellow gel, ended much as it had started, with a muffled shuddering, the oblong of light behind the cell door flickering with the violence of the craft’s braking. Molly had realized what was going on soon after the gel had filled her nostrils and lungs – a brief sensation of drowning before she registered that the liquid she was suspended in actually allowed her to breathe. After all, this design wasn’t so different from Timlar Preston’s original plans for a shell to cross the celestial darks. But instead of Quatérshiftian explorers wearing diving suits, insulated from the shock of launch and flight in water-filled chambers, the slats had obviously crossed to Molly’s home cosseted in this strange umbilical fluid.

  After holes opened in the fl
oor and drained all the gel away, Molly waited, still sopping wet from the sticky protective fluid, shivering and trying to clear the gloop from her hair. She thought she heard the commodore complaining in the corridor outside, then silence as he was removed. Still they didn’t come for Molly, but after an hour had passed, two slats unlocked her cell door.

  One babbled at Molly in what she thought was the Kal language, and then the second beast stepped forward, towering over her. ‘Speak new slave tongue. Come.’

  It was disconcerting, no eyes to focus on, fangs sliding up and down as the slat spoke. Molly realized how much of communication came just from looking into another person’s eyes.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Food not speak,’ hissed the slat, clicking in annoyance. It jabbed her with its rifle barrel, a flared metal pipe with a shaped crystal set inside it. ‘Food obey.’

  ‘Food obeys,’ sighed Molly.

  No sign of her two friends outside. Circle, she hoped they were still alive. The tight corridor of the shell-ship opened up into a vast hangar, walls of rusting red metal rising above lines of capsules, hundreds of shells, some tended by slats with a few blue-skinned Kals overseeing the maintenance. The iron moon! They had sent her to the iron moon. And alongside the capsules they used to cross the darks was Starsprite; the half-steamman craft locked in a vice-like girdle while slats were crawling over her hull. Oh sweet Circle, they had found her ship. Found the looking-glass gate she would have used to jump across to the realm of the steammen. Molly tried to wave to Starsprite, but the slats pushed her brutally past. Failed. The expedition to Kaliban had failed in every way it could have done. She was on the iron moon and she didn’t have the great sage’s weapon. For the sake of a device the size of a marble she had lost the power to bring down the whole rotten edifice of the Army of Shadows.

  As she was marched through the iron moon, Molly saw that its chambers and passages were a bizarre mixture of the advanced and the primitive. She was shoved into a cart pulled by six lizard-like things, the beasts dragging her through the iron corridors of the artificial satellite, past deep halls where legions of slats swung swords at rock posts or trained with their talons. Eventually, Molly reached a more advanced transportation station, a polished black carriage hovering above a rail outside a tunnel mouth. Then the railcar was accelerating her through the iron moon, some tunnels as black and sightless as the Middlesteel atmospheric, others transparent and showing chambers filled with strange glowing machines that swung around each other like the pieces of an orrery.

  At one point Molly’s tube ran along the outside of the iron moon and the awe-inspiring vista of her world filled the velvet night below. The bone-white cable of the beanstalk Molly had seen in the steammen’s observatory pictures stretched all the way down to the surface, like the proboscis of a mosquito impaling its host.

  Once back inside the alien satellite, the railcar slowed to a stop alongside a watercourse, a garden waiting on the other side of an ornately carved wooden bridge. It was a surreal juxtaposition: a sculpted green paradise sitting in an ugly rusting chamber. At the far end of the garden, a curving wall of glass displayed the view she had been ogling outside, the gem of her world seen from on high. Precious, fragile. Home. The slats pushed Molly though the garden, butterflies landing on her arm and fluttering away as the gurgle of a nearby fountain startled them.

  At the other end of the garden a figure was sitting on a stool in front of a canvas, where the view of the world below was captured almost perfectly. Was this a Kal? The figure turned. He looked like a Jackelian, save that he had to be eight feet tall, a man-mountain rising up from the stool; golden locks curling atop an achingly handsome pink face, his hair bound by a circlet crown bearing a golden helix just above his forehead. Both slats knelt in front of the giant and he spoke to Molly in mind-speech, even though his words were Jackelian. Jackelian? Was he a Kal or not?

  ‘So, this is what a slayer of gods looks like?’

  ‘And my,’ said Molly, ‘haven’t you been eating a lot of beans.’

  The giant roared with laughter and wiped his brush on a piece of wet cotton by the easel. ‘You think me a Kal? No, little animal, I am what the Kals call a master, the master of all masters in fact.’

  A master? Molly looked in shock at the ridiculously striking figure. But this was a man, albeit a giant of a man … ‘I’ve seen the Army of Shadows’ masters. They look like squids with great big tentacle limbs.’

  ‘Then you have seen how the masters looked in ancient days, when we were adapted for life in the ocean. Form is a fleeting thing, little pet. We cut our flesh to suit our times. You see before you our original form, one that predates even our aquatic existence. I am magnificent, am I not?’

  A trick, they were trying to trick her. But why?

  ‘No,’ insisted Molly. ‘I saw the masters’ council of war, I saw them planning the invasion of my home. The Army of Shadows’ masters are octopus-shaped monsters.’

  ‘Council of war?’ said the giant, bemused. ‘Ah, those mischievous Kal. Who would have thought that our own sheep would one day try to savage us? I shall be quite glad to leave their kind behind. With the appropriate breeding programme in place your people will make far better slaves.’

  ‘This is a ruse,’ said Molly.

  ‘To what end, little animal? If the Kal showed you us in our aquatic form, the memory they shared was ancient indeed. And the only invasion they had to show you was not that of your world, it was of their own, the fall of Kaliban.’

  ‘I saw the Army of Shadows’ ships leaving Kaliban to attack us!’

  ‘The Kals’ memories are as broken as the machine abominations they were once melded with, or perhaps they have not told you and your little band of explorers the truth, for fear you would not prove as pliable as the so-called great sage obviously hoped you would. You have it the wrong way around. The ships you saw weren’t leaving Kaliban to attack your world, they were leaving your world to attack Kaliban.’

  To attack Kaliban? What was this mad giant talking about? He was clearly an oversized slave gone mad. ‘I’d do it now if I could,’ said Molly, ‘blow your iron moon to pieces. The great sage wouldn’t need to trick me into doing it.’

  ‘I believe you would,’ smiled the giant. ‘But then in your own primitive way you are as much an abomination as the great sage, a symbiote for that revolting little machine spider we sealed inside the world. The Hexmachina. Very cunning, machines that mimic a blood disease pumping inside your veins. Of course, those that share your heritage can’t be allowed to breed on.’

  ‘If you’re not just a Kal wearing human skin paint, how are you able to communicate using mind-speech?’

  The giant tapped the canvas he had been painting. ‘A true artist is never afraid to borrow from others, little animal. We took the ability for mind-speech along with memory sharing from the Kals’ own blood code. To the victor, the spoils. You stand in the realm of the masters and I am their emperor, Gabraphrim.’

  Molly shook her head. What lies had the great sage told her to bring her to this strange green garden high above the Earth? Had any of what he had said been true?

  ‘Well,’ said the giant emperor. ‘We’re going to cut you apart to see the truth of what makes you tick. You may as well enjoy a little of the same courtesy before your infected blood is flowing around our test tubes.’

  The emperor clicked his fingers and the two slats shoved Molly after him as he walked to the far side of the chamber, the walls folding back and forming a corridor for him to stride along. Molly followed and they entered another iron chamber, this one filled with figures just as large as the emperor, giant men and women of prodigious beauty. Carpets and pillows covered the cold iron outlines of the room where slats and Kals worked alongside their masters. And there was a single member of the race of man there too: Keyspierre! The treacherous jigger. Molly had shouted the words before she realized she was crying them aloud. The emperor seemed amused by her outburs
t.

  ‘I will be hailed as the saviour of all of Quatérshift when I return,’ called Keyspierre to Molly, indicating a cage resting under an iron pillar. ‘And see what your people’s defiance has earnt Jackals …’

  Molly was hardly able to make out the occupant within the cage, which was surrounded by blue-faced Kal women, prodding at it and hissing laughter through their carnivores’ fangs. It was Lord Rooksby! The Lord Commercial was stripped naked and looking emaciated. His throat was bound with a metal collar, and he had two feathery wings rising out of his back. Circle’s teeth. They had twisted Rooksby’s flesh! Made him into a bird-like chimera.

  ‘You have served me well, Keyspierre,’ said the emperor. ‘But you have yet to pass the final test. To make a reliable governor of your nation you must first be given the gift of the hunger. As for my fine-feathered songbird here, make it sing, little Kals. Make it tweet its foolishness for us. Let us hear its song of how the race of man and the Kingdom of Jackals is destined for mastery of all your pathetic, flat horizons.’

  Rooksby hardly needed the cruel urging of the corrupted Kal women. His man-beak twitched and he broke into a cracked song, whistling and capering behind the bars while they poked at him.

  The emperor grabbed Molly’s face and squeezed it painfully, making her meet his burning red eyes. ‘Don’t you understand why your kind are perfect as slaves, little animal? Five million years ago we discarded your world with only a few exiles, criminals and dissenters remaining behind. Left it as a farmer leaves a field fallow, for the ecos to recover. You people, with your stunted pathetic little lives over in less than a century, are the crippled mongrel descendants of the criminals who wouldn’t accept the changes necessary to live under the oceans, who stayed behind on our old home. Those who lacked the courage to conquer Kaliban after our oceans boiled away.’

  Molly pulled away from the emperor’s grip. ‘No!’

  ‘The ecos always recovers,’ said the emperor. ‘Given enough time. Life begets life. The bacteria at the world’s core breed and multiply, the leylines begin to pulse again. Life rallies and grows and spreads across the surface once more.’