by Stephen Hunt
‘What was in the blanket he gave you?’ asked Harry Stave.
‘I haven’t had the chance to look yet,’ said Oliver. ‘He said it was a gift. Something he didn’t get to use much anymore.’
‘He’d spend his time more profitably trying to find the miner we’re looking for,’ said Harry. ‘The old man said he knew the son – how hard can it be to track down a single grasper?’
The reverend appeared at the bottom of the stairs. ‘That depends on how hard the grasper in question is trying not to be found, Harold.’
‘Good to see your hearing isn’t going yet, old man.’
‘My sense of hospitality is wearing powerful thin though. So it’s lucky for both of us that your miner has just walked into the church. He’s waiting out the back with your steamman friend – but ’ware how you tread, this pilgrim is more than a little skittish.’
‘About time,’ said Harry.
‘Come on Harry, he’s just an old man,’ said Oliver. ‘I think he believes he’s going to move along the Circle soon.’
‘He might be right,’ said Harry. ‘One way or another.’
In the church hospice the grasper stood nervously, his boots twitching on the floor, although he became slightly calmer when he saw the reverend return.
‘This is Mabvoy,’ said the reverend. ‘His father was the combination man you described.’
‘Sit down my friend,’ said Harry. ‘We’re on the same side. The people who murdered your father have been doing their best to kill us off, too.’
‘Well pardon me if I don’t find that reassuring,’ said the grasper. ‘I only came here because with the reverend’s friends asking around town after me, it was only going to be a matter of time before word got back to them that you were looking for me. After that, I’d be as dead as my father … and so would you.’
‘Your father came to visit us in Hundred Locks,’ said Oliver.
‘You?’ The grasper looked at Oliver as if he was seeing him in the room for the first time.
‘My uncle,’ said Oliver. ‘He came to visit my Uncle Titus.’
‘Ah. Yes, he went north a couple of times – said he was telling someone about the problems at the mines. I thought it might be a Greenhall man.’
‘He didn’t want to tell the authorities here?’ asked Harry.
‘There’s them that did,’ said the grasper. ‘And them that did weren’t seen again. Nothing happens at Shadowclock without a nod from the governor. Everyone knows that. You might as well complain to the highwaymen about the mail coach being robbed. One of the traders that came here told my father that he knew someone who could sort the problems out. It cost him his life.’
‘It cost my uncle his life, too,’ said Oliver. ‘Your killers turned up at Seventy Star Hall and finished us all off. It wasn’t much of an existence, but it was mine.’
‘Sorry for your family,’ said the grasper. He sounded like he meant it.
Harry checked the window. Steamswipe was standing sentry at the wall, his vision plate tracking the workers and families walking up and down the street. Watching for people who might be loitering, repeating their route. Lord Wireburn hung on a clip on his flank, a brooding black presence waiting for murder.
‘Tell me about the problems,’ said Harry.
The grasper laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘You got all day? It started two or three years ago. There was a wave of young blood coming up through the mining combination. Radicals. Said we were getting the shaft, not the silver mine from the masters. Wanted to demand more money – all the usual things.’
‘Your father was high in the warren.’
‘He was on the combination committee,’ said the grasper. ‘They opposed the radicals at first – there was no respect for the elders being shown – that’s not the way we do things. But then the radicals bypassed the committee and went direct to the governor, demanded the reforms – and he gave in. Just like that. No withdrawal of labour, no work to rule. He just said yes, as meek as you please.’
Stave made a sound at the back of his throat. Disbelief, but it came out as half a growl.
‘I see you know how it works,’ said the grasper. ‘There’s not a penny we earn that hasn’t been sweated and fought out of the masters’ pockets. There’s not a public bath in Shadowclock that hasn’t been built on the back of an unlawful public assembly and disorder. But they just ask and the governor gives the radicals it all.’
‘That must have caused quite a stir,’ said Harry.
‘It finished the old committee,’ said the grasper. ‘After that there was no stopping the radicals. They took over the combination. Strutted around the city like the lords of the town.’
‘So how come I don’t see a sea of smiling faces coming off each shift down in the streets?’ asked Harry.
‘Oh, we still get the money,’ said the grasper. ‘But we get a lot more than that too. Miners started disappearing. Just a few at first, but the ones who vanished were the master guildsmen. Tunnellers, frame layers, engineers. The best the city had. Without them looking after things the gas mines got unsafe powerful fast.’ The grasper pulled his shirt open, showing them the burns across his leathery fur. ‘Gas flare – killed four of my team. In the old days that kind of seepage would have been detected, sealed and drained. Now, there’s barely a worker down the tunnels who knows one end of a cavity-cutter tube from another. The new committee abolished the apprenticeship system – said it encouraged inequitable caste distinctions – now there’s so many workers vanished from the city that they’re throwing pups down the pits.’
‘But that’s got to have hit your production quotas,’ said Harry. ‘The House of Guardians may not care about rock falls in the tunnels, but by the Circle, they do care about the supply of celgas.’
‘I heard the governor has been making up the shortfall by running down the reserves,’ said the grasper. ‘The governor and the combination are working together. You open your mouth to complain and if the combination hands don’t beat you along the Circle, the redcoats will pull you from your bed at night and you’ll never be seen again.’
‘Where are the miners who disappear being taken to?’ asked Oliver.
‘I bloody well know where the troublemakers go,’ said the grasper. ‘I went to one of the caverns the combination has declared out of bounds – there’s bodies down there, rotting corpses piled as high as houses. Probably my father too if I had the heart to look.’
Oliver felt sick to the stomach. People treated like the scraps from a cleared table, their bodies left to decompose underground without a Circlist burial.
Harry’s eyes narrowed. ‘Just the troublemakers?’
The grasper nodded. ‘The workers are taken away. My sister clerks on the hill and even she doesn’t know where they’re being taken. They’ve been told some story about another gas mine that’s been discovered and must be kept secret for the state, but that’s tunnel-mule manure. Everyone knows celgas is only found underneath Shadowclock.’
‘If there is another source of celgas,’ said Harry, ‘it sure as damn isn’t being worked with miners from Shadowclock, old stick. What in the name of the Circle is going on here? None of this makes any sense.’
‘Maybe there is another celgas mine, Harry,’ said Oliver. ‘Isn’t that a secret worth killing Uncle Titus for?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Harry. ‘People have killed for a lot less.’ But the wolftaker did not sound convinced; he looked at Steamswipe, still standing sentry by the window. ‘But I don’t think that King Steam is the sort to get all fierced up by a fortune in gas, not even if it had been found squarely underneath the peaks of the Mechancian Spine.
Oliver rubbed his eyes; they always seemed to be full of grit since they had come to Shadowclock. A fortune worth killing for – but Harry was right, the riches of a fresh gas strike might spark the avarice of the race of man, but it wasn’t enough to vex the Lady of the Lights or produce the grim predictions of King Steam. Jackals was in danger,
but the nature of their enemy seemed as elusive as ever.
‘Can your sister find out when the authorities intend to ship the next crew of pressed miners out of the city?’ Harry asked the grasper.
‘I don’t want anything to do with you,’ said the grasper. ‘Just one look at you three maniacs and I know you’re trouble. I’m hiding for my life here – the only thing I need to do in Shadowclock is disappear before someone disappears me.’
‘Think of your father,’ growled Oliver. ‘He cared enough about what happened to his people to do something about it.’
The grasper shivered in his chair. ‘I’m frightened.’
‘I know what that feels like,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ve been running for my life every day since I left my home in Hundred Locks. But the people who are after you are not going to forget about you. Wherever you hide, you’re going to be going to sleep every night wondering whether you’ll wake up with a knife at your throat – or not wake up at all. You don’t want to live life like that. It’s like dying every day. Think about your father at the bottom of that pile of corpses. You want to pay them back for that? Give them something else to think about … give them us.’
‘Alright,’ the grasper crumbled. ‘If she can find out when the next aerostat leaves I’ll give you the details. It may be a few days. There’s not many left here in the trade now worthy of the name brother – the mines are scraping the bottom of the barrel.’
‘We’ll be here,’ said Oliver.
* * *
‘Sharply done, Oliver,’ said Harry, after the grasper had gone.
‘He just needed some fire in his belly,’ said Oliver. ‘You could see the fear in his eyes.’
Harry looked at Oliver. There was something different about the young man he could not quite put his finger on.
‘You intend to follow the aerostat back to its home,’ said Steamswipe.
‘That I do not,’ replied Harry. ‘I intend to stow away on the bloody thing. I spent most of my life arranging for contraband to be sneaked on and off RAN vessels. If I can’t get us onto the governor’s stat I don’t deserve to be hanged as a thief.’
‘Then I believe we are as good as on board,’ said Steamswipe.
Oliver tossed and turned in the back room of the church. Since the Whisperer had stopped his nighttime visitations, Oliver’s dreams had become disjointed and jumbled. Faint, fading things that he woke up struggling even to recall. To make matters worse the whistles and hisses from the mines carried on the wind at night, making it hard to drift off. He was used to the rural stillness of Hundred Locks. Oliver could sleep through a storm blown off the dike wall, but not the clatter of miners’ boots as they trampled back from their midnight shift.
He was running through the woods behind Seventy Star Hall, killers from the police and the Court of the Air in pursuit. He could hear Pullinger shouting behind him, promising him leniency if he only turned himself in. Oliver’s head was burning, a band of pain constricting tighter and tighter. Please let me live, please let me live, the plea turned over in his mind. As he fled other dreams seemed to mingle with his desperate scrabble to escape – could you have dreams within a dream? – flashing hooves, a black horse slipping through the night with eyes burning demon-bright. Soldiers stood in his way but the horse and rider rode them down, screams as he smashed through a window, standing on top of a roof as thunder and lightning wrapped around his body like a nimbus.
Then he was back in the woods behind his home and the thunder had followed him from the other dream – and the thunder became laughter, deep and hideous, as if every tree in the forest stood possessed by devils. But the laughter was coming from his throat, from him … two redcoats emerged from the night and still laughing he broke the first soldier’s neck, then grabbed the second man’s rifle and rolled back, spinning the redcoat over his head. He turned the rifle around and bayoneted the soldier on the grass. Other soldiers came, but seeing Oliver laughing in the clearing they fled. His shadow moved around him like a cloak – like something alive, stirring to his whim.
‘Here’s my neck,’ Oliver yelled at the retreating soldiers. ‘Here is my neck. Waiting for the worldsingers’ scaffold, waiting for the caliph’s hunting cats, waiting for the Court’s justice. But who is to take it?’
He could see them, feel them. Every wicked intention, every sin, little bundles of malevolent sparks fleeing into the darkness, trying so hard to escape, but calling to be snuffed out as they fled.
Where there is evil, the trees whispered.
‘Where there is evil,’ Oliver repeated like an oath.
He is called.
‘He is called.’ The pain in his skull intensified and he dropped to the ground, clawing at his burning forehead.
Darkness is your cloak. Fear is your ally. Wickedness is your manna.
Oliver looked around the glade, the mist of pain vanishing, then he filled the forest with his terrible new laughter.
‘I ride at night.’
‘Oliver,’ Harry shook him awake.
‘I hear the noise,’ said Oliver, half dazed. It took him a moment to realize where he was; perhaps even who he was.
Outside in the street a clatter of marching echoed down the soot-stained cobbles. People from the city were spilling out into the morning to see the sight.
The reverend came into the room and peered out of the window. ‘Steammen – an army of them.’
It was true. Outside the church an army of metal creatures stomped in perfect unison, three ranks deep, their boilers pouring dirty black smoke into the air.
‘They are not of the people,’ said Steamswipe, his fierce vision plate scanning the regiment of marching things. ‘They are golem, the clumsy manufacturings of your softbody mechomancers, although I do not doubt the corpses of many of the people informed their architecture.’
Oliver looked closer and saw that Steamswipe was correct. There was none of the uniqueness, none of the life of the citizens of the Steammen Free State in their design. They were peas in a pod, a shambling army of automated undead, transaction engine drums turning in their chests, clumsy welds and rivets sealing their bodies. The fad for steammen produced by companies like Doyce and Clennam had faded decades ago, after the clumsy metal butlers had shown a tendency to pour boiling soup on dinner guests, set fire to drawing rooms and trample over family pets and children. Even the automatics from the workshops of the Catosian League could not begin to approach the simplest of King Steam’s subjects. These new creatures were primitive, but still a cut above the servants that had rolled out of Clennam’s Middlesteel mills – progress of a sort.
‘There’s something wrong with them,’ said Oliver.
‘Everything about them is wrong. They are a violation of the life metal,’ said Steamswipe. ‘A sacrilegious affront by you damn softbodies cast in mockery of our perfection.’
At the knight’s side Lord Wireburn rumbled from his holster, ‘They must be destroyed.’
‘Violation they may be,’ said Harry. ‘But I would say that Shadowclock has solved its labour shortage.’
‘No,’ said Oliver. ‘Can’t you feel it? There are souls inside those things, pieces of human flesh trapped inside the metal. Animals too in some of them. The brains, the hearts of birds and swine. It’s hideous.’
Harry stared down at the legion of golems shaking the windowsill. In the street the families of miners stood and gawked at the sight, children running behind the primitive things as if the coronation carnivals had started early. ‘A fusion of animal and steamman? Damn but I wouldn’t want some mechomancer stuffing my liver inside one of those things.’
Lord Wireburn seethed. ‘Nor would our people want your frail meat cooking over our soul boards. This is dark sorcery indeed.’
‘Keeper of the Eternal Flame,’ said Steamswipe, ‘have you heard of such a foul practice before?’
‘In ancient times such monstrosities existed,’ spat the weapon. ‘They were known as metal-fleshers. Fusions of meat and s
teamman creeping over the ice sheets to murder each other for parts, blood to drink, bones to consume. But they were self-organizing, not like these uniform things, so obviously milled by the race of man.’
Behind them the preacher sat down laughing and lit a pipe.
‘What’s so funny, old man?’ asked Harry.
‘Harold, I am only laughing so I don’t cry. Just when you get to an age when you think you’ve seen every horror, every pain we’re capable of inflicting on each other, along comes something to shock you out of your dotage. Such baleful ingenu ity. You think those things need sleep? Or rest breaks? Gas flares won’t slow them down and if there’s a cave-in, by the Circle, you can just leave them under the rubble, they’d probably rather die anyway.’
‘Shut up, old man,’ shouted Harry. ‘Get the word to the grasper. There’s going to be a shipment of miners out of Shadowclock in the next few nights. The people those things are replacing. I need to know when.’
‘Who lit a fire under your tail, Harold?’
‘It’s the end game, preacher. If the governor is using those things in the mines he has gone well beyond caring if word leaks back to the House of Guardians about the state of affairs in Shadowclock. Why do you think that would be?’
The preacher stood up. ‘Because fairly soon it won’t matter whether it does or not.’
Down below the sea of clumsy steammen-people hybrids continued to flow past the church.
‘It matters to me,’ whispered Oliver.
In the Court of the Air’s monitorarium, Surveillant Seven’s telescope clacked as it swung a degree to the left. A skrayper had momentarily floated into the surveillant’s field of vision, blocking her view. Down in the troposphere the massive balloon-like creature was being pursued by a hunt of lash-lites, a dozen of the leathery-winged lizard people riding the thin atmosphere. They were climbing for height, trying to avoid the clawed tentacles dangling underneath the skrayper. There seemed to be a lot of lashlite hunts going on at the moment. Surveillant Seven had counted at least five in the last week.
