by Stephen Hunt
Molly felt a wave of gratitude towards the brave ramshackle steammen who had suffered so much on her account. ‘Circle’s turn, thank you…’
‘…Silver Slowstack. Both of us have been stripped of our true names now, but this is our chosen common designation.’
‘Slowstack, where can we go? Jackals is being invaded, the undercity has fallen to the same evil. There’s nowhere safe for us to run to. When they sense I am still alive they will come after me again.’
‘She is approaching, Molly softbody. Warmed by the oceans of lava no longer, she climbs towards us and we must venture down to convene with her. The Hexmachina, Molly. She needs an operator. She needs you!’
Outside the palace the sounds of fighting had grown sporadic. There were still fires burning across the city, but most of them were the result of the surprise attack the previous night – crystalgrid stations taken offline, grenades tossed through the windows of police stations, the barracks of the Sixth Foot and the Guardian Horse Guards stormed.
It was a novel experience for Prince Alpheus to stand on the balcony and watch the city without having to endure a shower of rotten fruit and stones from the street. In the square below rows of people knelt facing the palace, a strange keening sound humming in their throats. It had started snowing last night and flurries of white flakes were still falling on the people in the square. Middlesteel was used to fogs from the mills and the dirty miasma of industry, but snow in the heart of summer?
Bonefire came out onto the balcony and looked over Captain Flare’s shoulder at the crowds. ‘What’s a man to do to get some sleep around here? Who the hell are they – that’s a Circlist mantra, isn’t it?’
‘They’ve been chanting for nearly an hour,’ said Prince Alpheus. ‘The first ones arrived from the morning congregations before the shifties started shutting down the churches. They were crying for help, begging at the gates for the Special Guard to come out of their barracks.’
Bonefire pointed to the cart of purple-robed bodies piled by the gate. It was amazing that there were still worldsingers in Jackals who thought that the suicide torcs on the guards’ necks actually worked. ‘Let them go to the order and beg for help. See if their hamblin magicians can beat off the shifties without the guards’ assistance.’
‘They’re not chanting for you,’ said the prince to Bonefire. ‘They’re chanting for me.’
‘You!’ Bonefire laughed.
‘The old legend,’ said Captain Flare. ‘The sleeping kings. When Jackals is threatened the first kings will waken from underneath the hills of Elmorgan.’
Bonefire started laughing so hard tears rolled down his face. ‘The pup? The pup is going to save them? Oh that’s good.’ He stretched his arm out and fired a volley of blue pain-fire towards the chanting crowd. ‘Chant louder, you filthy hamblin jiggers. I can’t hear you.’
Flare slapped his arm down. ‘That’s enough, Bonefire.’
‘What do you care? Let them dance a little before we leave this bloody prison.’
At one end of the square a line of equalized soldiers appeared, metal shoulders covered in snow. Marching forward they surrounded the chanting Jackelians in a corner of the square, beating to death with a flurry of iron fists any that tried to flee past their lines. Carts loaded with large wooden boxes were pulled into the centre of the square, blue-uniformed Commonshare troops unloading them into the space that had been cleared.
A shiftie officer stood on one of the wagons, a Commonshare worldsinger by his side, amplifying his voice as it filled the square. ‘By order of the First Committee of the Commonshare of Jackals, any gathering of three individuals or more not licensed by prior arrangement with the First Committee shall be classified as counter-revolutionary activity. Secondly, by order of the First Committee of the Commonshare of Jackals, the Circlist philosophy has been classified as an uncommunityist activity and is henceforth banned. The punishment for violation of either of these two rulings of the people is excommunication from the commonality and fellowship of the state.’
People trapped behind the line of equalized troops cried out in fear and anger until the more vocal complainants were beaten down with sabres and rifle butts. Most of them had read enough in the Middlesteel penny sheets about the early days of the revolution across the border in Quatérshift to recognize the euphemism used by the Carlists when they shoved members of the old regime through a Gideon’s Collar. Excommunication from the commonality and fellowship of the state.
Bonefire watched the erection of the massive meat-processing machine in the centre of the square in fascination. ‘They’ll let us go down and watch, you think?’
‘Those are Jackelians,’ said Prince Alpheus. ‘They are our people.’
‘We are your people now, pup. They are hamblins. I can go down and get them to throw a few jinn bottles up at you if you need reminding.’
‘Come on, Alpheus,’ said Flare. ‘We need to check the stores for when we travel south.’
‘Let the pup stay,’ called the Special Guardsman as they left. ‘I used to watch them give jiggers the rope outside Bonegate when I was a lad. It never did me any harm.’
Outside, the Commonshare’s military engineers raised the frame of the Gideon’s Collar with the ease that comes only from practice.
Damson Davenport peered out of the door’s peephole at the Quatérshiftian soldiers. They banged harder. She opened the door and they cuffed it aside before she could take it off its chain, breaking the lock and seizing her while a line of soldiers ran into the rookery’s hall.
‘We’re not quality on this street, young man,’ said Damson Davenport. ‘I work in the jinn house over on Sling Street, not the palace of bleeding Greenhall.’
‘Quiet, old woman,’ said the soldier, pulling her out towards a gypsy-sized caravan drawn by a train of four horses, a mobile blood machine pouring steam into the sky. The rumours were true, then. In the street the Jackelians were being herded into one of two groups guarded by metal-fleshers. Her neighbour Mister Kenwigs had told her that those metal things used to belong to the race of man once, but that did not seem likely.
They took a sample of her blood and then made her wait for the results. What were they testing for? The wagon was not large enough to contain the records of everyone in Middlesteel. It had to be the new required-citizen register – guardians and silks and famous Jackelians. Nobody on this street would be on that list. If only they did not find the girl. Shouts sounded from inside the rookery and Damson Davenport’s worst fears were realized. Poor Cru’brin. Everyone in the crumbling tenement had known the young craynarbian from when she was an infant. It did not take long for them to drag her out, still wearing the tattered red uniform of the Sixth Foot. Better she had been slaughtered with the rest of her company or had disappeared into Shell Town. Hiding with her mother had been madness.
A tall officer appeared by the wagon. The craynarbian’s captor jumped up and hastily saluted him. ‘Marshal Arinze.’
The marshal ignored them and walked up to the struggling deserter, followed by another soldier, his blue uniform cropped at the side to display his muscled arms. There was a boy who loved himself, tutted Damson Davenport. Too many days down the muscle pits with a mirror in his back pocket.
‘Harbouring enemy troops,’ said Marshal Arinze. He called to the soldiers pulling the weeping people into the street. ‘Compatriot sergeant, burn this building down. There shall be no relief given to the enemies of the people.’
Swearing at the marshal, young Cru’brin tried to break free of the leather straps binding her sword arm. The troops struggled to hold her.
‘Compatriot marshal, if I may…’
‘Compatriot Colonel Wildrake?’
‘Let me show these counter-revolutionary criminals the power of the Commonshare, the superiority of our forces.’
Arinze rubbed the colonel’s arm with a worried look on his face. ‘You do not need to continually prove your loyalty to the revolution, compatriot colonel. You h
ave advanced our cause in Jackals more than any brother save Tzlayloc himself.’
‘Look at her, compatriot marshal, her scrawny shell. What kind of muscles can she have under that armour? My lats are falling towards the corpulent without a test worthy of the name.’
Arinze sighed. ‘Hold the burning, sergeant. You, compatriot private of the Sixth Foot. You shall have a chance to prove the worth of this decadent city of yours. You see before you a gladiator of the Third Brigade. If you can beat him in a match I will spare your entire street from punishment.’
A space was cleared for the craynarbian deserter and Colonel Wildrake, the marshal momentarily distracted as his soldiers dragged a man with a red beard up towards the commanding officer’s entourage.
‘You’ve got the wrong man!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve done nothing. I just row a boat on the estuary. I ferry people up and down the Gambleflowers, that’s all.’
‘Compatriot Meagles,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Secretary of the Middlesteel Four-poles Union. His blood code is confirmed by the required-citizen register.’
‘The Union is a proscribed organization,’ said the marshal. ‘You have been encouraging uncommunityist tendencies among the people. Unproductive tendencies. The people must labour to advance their cause, not spend their days as idlers tossing balls of leather at pieces of wood on the grass.’
‘It’s just a bit of a lark,’ begged the boatman. ‘We always go to the inn afterwards for beer and jinn. Please, you can come too, you and all of your soldiers.’
Arinze slapped him to stop the blubbing, then raised his voice for the benefit of the Jackelians being rounded up in the street. ‘Four-poles is banned, debating sticks is banned, summerpole dancing is banned, the singing of “Lion of Jackals” is banned, membership of political parties is banned. You shall work hard in the service of the people as equals and the community will serve you each well in return.’
One of Arinze’s troops indicated the boatman. ‘Processing group thirteen?’
‘A Gideon’s Collar is too good for him. A visible example must be set. Take Compatriot Meagles to the boulevard at Rollfield and hang him from one of the lamps alongside the corpses from the House of Guardians.’
In front of the rookery Wildrake had stripped down to his trousers, and the soldiers who had been oiling his muscles stepped back. It was freezing in the street and Wildrake rubbed his biceps as the bite of the cold wind dug in. He nodded at the troops holding the craynarbian and they released her into the shadow of the street. She was at the height of her youthful vigour, sword arm sharp enough to slice a sapling oak in half, but still looking scrawny on her meagre army rations. Not that you could judge, of course – craynarbian muscle groups worked in different ways, and she was at least strong enough to march with one hundred pounds of shell underneath her infantry knapsack.
Her manipulator and sword arms sprang open and Wildrake pivoted on a single leg, slamming his boot into her left knee. It crunched and she howled. Low tolerance for pain – all that armour they carried – they were simply not used to it. The turncoat Jackelian could almost see the rote drill moves the Sixth Foot had instilled in her. She was not even worth moving into witch-time for. Wildrake grinned as he ducked under her slashing sword arm, slipping behind her and circling her with his arm.
His muscles bulged underneath his skin, swelling with the force he was applying to her thorax. Better than bench-pressing ninety pounds in a muscle pit; the agony was electric. Her shell started to crack, his biceps burning crimson in the cold. The Third Brigade troops looked on in amazement. They had faced craynarbians on the border with Liongeli, but they had never seen the likes of this. There was a sound like a squeaky floorboard being stood on, then a crack as he burst her chest armour. Pieces of shell were sticking out of Wildrake’s bleeding arms but he stood over the gurgling Jackelian soldier, roaring with the thrill of victory as the Quatérshiftian troops cheered his feat of strength.
Damson Davenport turned away in horror – then she realized that the technician by the blood machine was addressing her.
‘It’s your lucky day, compatriot. You’re not on the list. Mill duty – you’re assigned to the cannon works being put up over at Workbarrows.’
She took the numbered chit he handed her. ‘Your queue number. For equalization. Next.’
Damson Davenport watched the laughing troops leaping over Cru’brin’s corpse and tossing burning torches into her rookery. She suspected the falling sleet would put the flames out before the fire cart ever showed up now.
A cry went up among the soldiers – ‘Remember Reudox! Remember Reudox!’
People were still inside the tenement and the Third Brigade opened fire on the poorly dressed Jackelians as they tried to flee the burning building. A few men and women jumped out of windows on the second storey, some clutching young children. The metal zombies in the street surrounded them where they landed, thrashing the burning bodies with their metal arms until they stopped moving.
The head of the Four-poles Union, Meagles, was being dragged down the street, his feet trailing two furrows in the snow, still yelling that the shifties had the wrong man, his cries drowned now by the screams of those trapped inside the damson’s old home.
‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ She shivered, pulling her shawl tight. Part of her wanted to go up to the metal things, to the soldiers of the Third Brigade, and beg them to stop. Tell them that they were the people of Middlesteel. No different from any of the soldiers, but for an accident of geography and birth. No different from them, their mothers, their sisters, their friends. That they could all be compatriots together if they just tried a little harder. But she knew what would happen if she did, and she discovered that as often as she had thought her pains and aches would one day be over with the long march of her old years, she still wanted to live just a little longer. It did not seem like cowardice at all, just common sense.
A thought occurred to Damson Davenport, the kind of random silly thing that the mind throws up to distract itself from a scene too repulsive, too atrocious to observe.
‘Excuse me, what is equalization?’
Tzlayloc smelt the cold fresh air of the House of Guardians’ quad with satisfaction. Once he had dreamed of being elected to this place, of erasing the grinding poverty of Middlesteel, of changing things. The shattered plinths where statues of Isambard Kirkhill and other famous parliamentarians had once stood certainly bore testimony to his desire for the latter. It was a pity that Hoggstone had not been captured when they surrounded the palace of democracy. Now every lamppost in Parliament Square was occupied by a Guardian swinging on the end of a noose, his committee would have to consider doing things the Quatérshiftian way and running the First Guardian through a Gideon’s Collar when they arrested him.
Everyone had to move with the times, as the sacks being piled in front of the altar constructed in the centre of the quad testified. Tzlayloc stopped an equalized worker with blood from a sack leaking down the dull metal surface of his – or her – perfect new body. The earlier metal-flesher models had retained traces of the compatriot’s gender in the voicebox assembly. An inequality his mechomancers and flesh mages had paid for. It was amazing how advanced their hexes and mechanisms had become after he had sacrificed a few of them.
‘Where is this sack from, compatriot?’
‘Equalization mill of victory nine, compatriot,’ buzzed the outlaw metal-flesher.
Tzlayloc dipped a hand in the sack: hearts, hundreds of them, but so few were still beating. Some of them had been removed almost a day ago. They would be fresher once the equalization mills above ground were completed. Right now they were relying on the few factories of liberation they had raised around Grimhope. ‘Splendid. Throw them on the altar fires, compatriot. Incinerate the last vestiges of the sins of difference. Now you are free. Free of greed and lust and pride – free of the master’s yoke and all the mills you labour in shall belong to you!’
The equalized outlaw grovelled at Tzlayloc�
�s feet. ‘Bless you, Compatriot Tzlayloc. A thousand blessings upon you.’
Tears rolled down Tzlayloc’s cheeks. ‘On your feet, brother. You need grovel to no one now. You are who I do this for. Your words mean more to me than I can express.’
He looked at the ring of locust priests shepherding the fumes from the pyre into the air. Tzlayloc could see the darting insect outlines circling the column of smoke. Stronger now, more powerful every hour. They were the perfect allies. Staunch, unstoppable and dedicated, each willing to die without hesitation so that their brothers behind them might advance forward.
He raised a hand and called to all who would hear. ‘I see a perfect world, compatriots. A world where we run not against each other as competitors, but together, as friends – as brothers and sisters. Each of us equal. Each of us perfect.’
The equalized were slower to chant his name now than they had been when they wore their old unequal forms, but slowly the mantra rose to fill the quad. Tzlayloc nodded, hiding his disappointment. They had only just begun, after all. Their understanding of the equalization process would develop with practice, would advance further still when the Steammen Free State was absorbed into the Union of Common shares which Quatérshift and Jackals planned. The mean would be raised. Every year there would be an equality more prosperous, more shining. Every year they would move forward. Together. Always together.
Tzlayloc helped the worker to his – or her – feet, and helped to carry the heavy sack of bleeding organs across to the flames. ‘I wish I could burn my filthy unequal form away, compatriot. But the Wildcaotyl requires the soiled mantle of flesh to work through, not the perfect symmetry of your flawless beautiful body.’
‘The people understand your sacrifice, Compatriot Tzlayloc,’ said the worker, tumbling the hearts into the fire. ‘You who lead the flock must sacrifice most of all.’
Tzlayloc noted the courtiers and their military escort standing at the other end of the quad. More work. Even sleeping just a couple of hours a night and relying on the Wildcaotyl to purify this weak dirty body, the demands on his time seemed only to expand. But he would prove equal to the task. He had to. Tzlayloc picked a blackened heart off the pyre and chewed at it. ‘The people will nourish me, compatriot. As they always do.’
