by Stephen Hunt
EPILOGUE
Five million years ago
The four Kal bearers carrying Fayris Fastmind’s stretcher-style chair placed him carefully down on the cliff. Not so close to the edge that he might fall off, but near enough that the great sage could see the siege works raised around the last city.
‘You should be more careful,’ advised the sage’s chief bearer, opening a sunshade for his ancient mentor. The thump of slat rifles, dimmed by distance, and the cries of lashlites floated in the furnace-like air above the giant face of Kaliban. All the faint clatter of their siege. ‘We could move back a little.’ He pointed towards the tent that the others in the nomad caravan had set up behind them, its memory silk already a crimson rock-like haze as it matched the pattern of the mountain.
‘We are far enough away from the siege works, I think,’ said the great sage.
His people were nervous. The nomads didn’t want to lose even one among the few that still understood the old science. Every tribe held fiercely tight to its sages, although they were little more than court sorcerers now.
The great sage’s chief bearer pointed down the cliff face they were perched above. One of the giant weather machines the Kals had tampered with was shuffling across the plains on its nest of steel tentacles, coming towards the cliff face, ready to rip out more rocks to hurl towards the masters’ domes. ‘The machines sometimes cause landslides when they pull rocks out of the mountain.’
‘I will take the risk. I’m as old as these mountains,’ said the great sage. ‘And I like the view.’
Yes, the view. Fayris Fastmind lifted up his set of binoculars and focused on the plain below. He could see trains of lizards pulling canal barges across the dunes towards catapults, the barges converted into fused bombs after their self-destruct sensors had been disabled and the craft pulled out of the canal’s sludge. But that wasn’t what he was looking for. There! There was the man, riding up and down the trenches, shouting encouragement towards the Kals below and the lashlites above.
Connor of Cassarabia, still mounted on the thorax saddle of his tamed queen ant, a god of war thundering up and down the lines, the proud insect steed rearing and flashing its mandibles.
Who would have thought such things possible? That a queen ant could be broken. Or that a lion could lead a flock of sheep to inherit the world?
A baby’s cry came from the direction of the tent, the young female swaddled in white robes and being wet-nursed by the chief bearer’s wife.
‘We could show him the child now.’
The great sage shook his head. ‘Wait for the fall of the city to show him the girl. It will come soon enough.’
After all, it was the least the sages could do. Reactivating a few cells scraped off Duncan Connor’s bag of bones had been the easy part. Adapting a stolen slat birthing tank to accommodate the pattern of the race of man as it would be in the distant future, that had stretched the ingenuity and the depleted resources of all of the hidden sages.
Down below, Duncan Connor’s upland battle cry roared across the plain.
Connor of Kaliban.
Some time later
The farm boy brushed the snow settling on his woollen breeches off across the rubble of what had once been the base of the Army of Shadows’ beanstalk, then pointed to the sword embedded in the hillside. Left rooted just as it might have been if a flailing anchor cable had thrown it against the stone with all the force of a moon being pulled away.
Grunting, the shaman of the tribe of polar barbarians followed the farm boy. So, the sword was there after all, although the shaman didn’t believe for a moment that the young farmer hadn’t touched the blade before coming to tell the tribe’s elders. Such a sword begged for men to come and attempt to pull it out of the side of the hill. And of course, the farm boy had failed in his striving to free the blade.
The shaman inspected the ground and the hillside and the sword and the figure sprawled beside it. It was a man, dressed in the same clothes as the southern traders who sometimes ventured to the polar realm in their steam-driven iron boats. What were their people called again? Jackelians, that was it. This one was a Jackelian, no doubt about it. ‘This one is a herald who has stayed to sing of the victory of the gods over the blood drinkers and their black-bone trolls.’
‘He’s alive? I thought—’
‘You are a young fool, there is life here.’ The shaman touched the man’s neck then ran his hand over the hard frozen soil. ‘Just as there is life under here, also. Go back to the caves, fetch my case of herbs and tell the people to hide no more. Tell the ungrateful non-believers they have a great stone circle to raise in the shadow of a sword as thanks to the gods they foolishly thought had forsaken them.’
The shaman shook his head as the farm boy ran off. His people had believed too little and suffered as a consequence. He laid a finger on the man’s neck again. The pulse was still there. The shaman shivered – but not from the cold – and unclipped his dragon brooch, laying his cloak over the herald to warm the man up. There was a dark power inside this stranger, he could feel it. Shadows seemed to move around the rocks of this place, shadows given life. Standing up, the shaman stared into the clear night sky, empty of the monsters’ red chariot now. A woman’s sibilant voice seemed to whisper through the gently blowing snow. Hood. Hood-o’the-marsh.
Pulling out a glass tube of golden filings, the shaman scattered the most precious of commodities, star metal, around the ruins of the beanstalk so it would not grow up to the heavens again, blessing the most sacred of grounds.
‘There are no marshes here, goddess.’
It seemed fitting to hold their private ceremony on Nagcross Bridge, Molly and Coppertracks anonymous again after the parade through the capital’s newly renamed Highhorn Square. After all, with so few surviving workers and scientists from the cannon project the parade’s focus had been on the sailors and officers of the JNS Spartiate, the fleet sea arm much the fashion among the public again, after centuries spent hero-worshipping the Royal Aerostatical Navy and its jack cloudies.
Molly stopped to look out across the River Gambleflowers, standing in a break between the shops that rose up on either side of the bridge. ‘At least the commodore had managed to keep his mouth shut about Keyspierre during the ceremony.’
‘Peace with Quatérshift, dear mammal, is well worth the price of a small lie,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Who would have thought we would see peace in our time? I read in the Illustrated yesterday that parliament is going to repeal the Corn Law and allow grain shipments east again. Mark my words, there will be statues of Keyspierre being chipped out across the border before the end of the month.’
‘And a statue to Lord Rooksby here in Jackals,’ said Molly. ‘Although the House of Guardians is still arguing about who should go on top of the second plinth in Highhorn Square.’
Indeed, Molly had seen the cartoon in the newspaper the steamman had bought. A statueless towering column with a gaggle of parliamentarians trying to push each other off the top, their trousers half-pulled down, a speech bubble rising from a crew of u-boat sailors below trying to dodge the faeces falling out of the politicians’ overlarge buttocks, saying, ‘Gads, you jolly tars, now it is each other they attempt to give the shaft.’
‘If I had a vote in parliament I would cast it in favour of a statue of you,’ said Coppertracks.
‘Then let us both be glad that you’ve never stood for election as a guardian,’ smiled Molly.
Coppertracks’ transparent dome of a skull flared with energy. ‘I am quite sincere, Molly softbody. You risked your life on the iron moon to save my people from the Army of Shadows.’
‘I think I risked it to save your people from my people.’
‘The Army of Shadows were not you,’ insisted Coppertracks. ‘It is not the composition of our form that defines us, it is our actions on the great pattern. My heart pulses with steam, your heart beats with blood, yet when your people had to choose, you – even that rascal Lord Rooksby �
� chose to act with the humanity your race wears as its title.’
Molly nodded. Yes, let poor dead Lord Rooksby have his place up on the plinth, as a scientist and the official leader of the expedition, rather than the twisted avian monster he had been transformed into. He had earned it, in the end.
‘Then what are we, old steamer?’
Coppertracks changed his treads’ configuration to raise him up and stared out across the capital’s fast-flowing river. ‘Molly softbody, you are my friend.’ The steamman reached down into a satchel, bringing out the porcelain canister containing the ashes from the handful of Lord Rooksby’s feathers Molly had seized. ‘And speaking of friends, shall we wait for Jared before we scatter these in the river?’
Molly shook her head. Commodore Black wouldn’t be coming onto the bridge any time soon. ‘The hero of Highhorn is in one of those taverns down on the embankment drinking it up with the Spartiate’s crew. One of the officers mentioned he had a brother in the State Office of Shipwrights who might be able to put a decommissioned u-boat Jared’s way for the right price.’
‘By the beard of Zaka of the Cylinders,’ said the startled steamman. ‘Please tell me you are making a jest?’
‘Would that I were,’ said Molly.
‘He is too old to go jaunting about the world in a u-boat,’ said Coppertracks, passing the jar of ashes for Molly to scatter. ‘As am I for such foolishness.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Now that your tower’s been taken down, a gentle voyage of scientific discovery might be just the thing.’
‘The last time I followed Jared softbody on a seadrinker vessel, the only discovery I made was how much treasure and death lay hiding on the Isla Needless. I shall talk him out of this folly after we are finished here. My arguments coupled with the attractions of a warm house and a full pantry will win the day, I am sure, with winter coming.’
Molly shrugged. Good luck to that. Opening the jar, she tipped the ashes from Lord Rooksby’s feathers away, a shroud of dark dust falling into the wind and drifting above the surface of the river’s green waters.
Molly bowed her head and said a quiet meditation to the Circle for Rooksby’s soul to be cupped out of the one sea of consciousness and refilled into a happier life. ‘To all the friends we have lost.’
Below, Lord Rooksby’s ashes joined the water and were borne away by the frothing course of the Gambleflowers. The river took everything, in Middlesteel.
By Stephen Hunt
The Court of the Air
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
The Rise of the Iron Moon
Copyright
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Published by HarperVoyager
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Copyright © Stephen Hunt 2009
Stephen Hunt asserts the moral right to
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A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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