by Stephen Hunt
'You are a witch doctor then?' said Purity. 'What you did to that crusher who was going to put a bullet in me…'
'I am not permitted to take life,' said Kyorin. 'It is not my people's way. I merely disorientated your keeper of laws to prevent a worse crime being committed.'
'Best you don't try that line on a magistrate here,' said Purity. 'You'd get a boat to the colonies or the rope for helping me escape.'
In the far distance there was a whistle from a policeman's Barnaby Blow. A pickpocket diving into the rookeries to escape justice, or were the police on their trail again? Time to be moving on. Purity looked about the narrow passage, branching out into shadowy lanes that didn't even have old-style oil-fed lamps, let alone the new-style gas ones. Not a place to be hiding after dark. What did Purity know of Middlesteel's geography? Depressingly little. Only what she had seen of the capital while being marched around on a handful of routes by her guards. Hiding inside the Royal Breeding House, that she could do. The other children had taken enough lumps out of her hide that there weren't many nooks and crannies in the old fortress on the outskirts of the capital that she didn't know like the back of her hand.
'Do you have any money?' asked Purity.
Kyorin took out a bag-like pocket book and jangled it. 'I had more yesterday, but I lack the means to replicate additional Jackelian tokens of exchange now.'
'Well, I've got a five-hundred-year-old act of parliament that forbids me to hold property and chattels in my name, so you're looking pretty flush to me. My mother told me once that if I ever needed a safe place to stay, the flop houses in the east of the city don't ask too many questions.'
Kyorin sniffed at the wind. 'The keepers of your law are coming after us. We should leave here.'
'That's a handy nose.'
'It is the hunters from my land that we must fear. Come…'
The two of them fled deeper into the heart of Middlesteel.
Harry Stave pulled out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the pinprick of blood away from his finger, the transaction engine drum on the blood machine in the doorway rattling on a set of loose bearings as his identity was successfully matched to the record on the shop's files. The Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard, where Middlesteel's secrets were hoarded and sold, although very few of Dred Land's customers were aware that the shop was a station house for the Court of the Air. Its proprietor a whistler, in the parlance of the great game the various intelligence agencies of the continent's states played against each other.
If Harry's two companions – so traditional in their long-tailed coats and stovepipe hats, tailored in black and starched to perfection – were surprised by the appearance of the shambling, mute steamman that greeted them as the door opened, they did not show it. Harry smiled, the two crows stepping inside behind him, laconic and hardly taken aback by this obviously human-milled automaton, an expensive toy in comparison to the creatures of the metal that came down from the mountains of the Steammen Free State. A form of labour that was never going to take off, not while the race of man lounged unemployed in vast numbers across the capital's slum districts, breeding and fighting and breeding some more.
They were good, Harry's two crows, the Court of the Air's finest, their presence underlying how unsettled things had become upstairs. Not even fazed when Dred Lands appeared, his silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins covering his terrible wounds; opening up the basement entrance to the duke's hole and taking them down to the concealed rooms underneath his shop. But what was on the table now was enough to pierce even their laconic detachment.
'It's a beauty, isn't it, Harry?' said Dred Lands. 'My informer came up trumps when she fished that floater out of the river.'
'You're as good as my word, old stick,' said Harry. 'I told the Advocate General when she gave me the nod for this job. It'll be Dred that comes up with the goods first. And you haven't disappointed, no you haven't.'
'Not really my area of expertise,' said Dred, indicating his primitive iron drones moving about behind the steam-fogged glass of his underground orchard room. 'But you don't have to be a butcher to appreciate a nice piece of roast beef on Circleday.'
'Don't you worry about butchers,' said Harry. 'I brought my own.'
'Sharp tailoring,' said Dred, moving aside as Harry's two crows got to work. 'Very sharp.'
Running his hands over the wet corpse, the shorter of the two agents murmured in appreciation, pushing at the skin and the bones like a doctor trying to diagnose an inflamed chest.
'Worth the trip down?' asked Harry.
'Yes, indeed,' said the shorter of the two crows. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open, revealing dozens of tools fastened to the lining with straps – bone saws, scalpels, hammers that could crack open ribs.
Harry shook his head. 'Not here. We'll take him back upstairs and do it properly.'
Dred nodded in thanks to Harry. As he might. Dred's iron drones would have been scrubbing for days to remove the blood if the two crows had gone for a full dissection down in his bolthole.
'Then I am done here.' The crow looked at his companion. 'Mister Shearer?'
'Thank you, Mister Cutter.' The second crow ran his hands along the body a couple of inches above the burnt flesh. He hummed an incantation to the worldsong, the air crackling with energy, vortexes of dancing witch-light snapping in and out of existence above the body.
'What about his mind?' asked Harry. 'Can you go for a reading? His last memories?'
'No,' said the crow, through the gritted teeth of concentration. 'Not even I can do that. He's been cold for far too long. One thing I can tell you, though, his death was not an accident. There is an aura of great distress imprinted across the residue of his soul.'
Harry hadn't been expecting anything else. 'How far off the map are we, then?'
'Let me show you,' said the crow. 'Mister Cutter…'
'Mister Shearer?'
'Cleaning fluid, seven strength.'
The other crow reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle, a line of sigils printed in transaction engine code the only markings on its label. Taking the bottle and carefully pouring it onto the corpse's face, the crow rubbed the cheek gently with a cloth. As he rubbed, the pink skin changed colour, the dye running off, revealing a light powder blue underneath.
'Bloody Circle,' said Dred Lands, peering in for a closer look. 'A blue man!'
'And not from the cold of the river, eh, Mister Cutter?'
'Certainly not, Mister Shearer. He's been painted to fit in with the people of Jackals. All very theatrical.'
'Not from the race of man?' asked Harry.
'No, nor from any of our ancestral tree's offshoots,' said the crow. 'His muscles and skeletal groupings bear no relation at all to craynarbian or grasper physiology.'
'From one of the other continents, then?' said Harry. 'Lots of odd creatures and races out down Thar-way. And our colonists have only explored a small part of Concorzia.'
Lifting the lips of the blue man and running a finger down the teeth, the crow indicated the stubby molars. 'Look, flat. No edges to the teeth, no canines at all. This creature is a plant eater. I can sense more than one stomach inside his belly, maybe as many as five, all interconnected. He wouldn't have been able to nibble so much as a ham roll for lunch without becoming violently sick from indigestion.'
'A plant eater,' murmured Dred Lands, looking down at the corpse. 'I knew there was a reason why he was bleeding green blood when my informant brought him down here.'
Mister Cutter ran his hand fondly through the dead creature's hair. 'Yes. A plant eater. I think he would have been non-violent by nature. Peaceful.'
Harry lifted up the blackened sleeve of the corpse's jacket. 'Burnt up, then drowned. If it was peace he wanted, he should have buggered off out of Jackals.'
'You know more about this than you let on when you tipped me off, don't you?' said the owner of the Old Mechomancery Shop.
'Ask no questions and be told no lies
.'
'Harry, I'm the chief whistler in the capital, I need to know what's going on here!'
'Someone has been sniffing around, and not one of the usual suspects, either,' explained Harry. 'One of the Greenhall engine-room men on our payroll found something nasty turning on their drums, not a natural information daemon evolved from legacy code like they're used to dealing with. Rummaging around the Board of the Admiralty's drums it was, but it didn't know we had a sentry on the Court of the Air's own backdoor watching it breaking in. The daemon erased itself when our man tried to isolate it for examination.'
'If they got that far into our transaction engines, then they're sharp,' said Dred Lands. 'Very sharp indeed. You know how many checks a punch card goes through before it's injected into the Greenhall engine rooms. And the Admiralty drums are the most secure in the whole civil service. Which makes it doubly unlikely that our dead friend here is an agent of the Commonshare's Committee of Public Security.'
'Plenty starving across the border in Quatershift eating grass soup these days,' snorted Harry. 'But you're right, this one is no shiftie agent.'
Harry didn't mention the headaches the Order of Worldsingers were experiencing in Jackals, all those little acts of sorcery going wrong, misfiring with unexpected results. He could feel it himself, the change in the earth. Like a bird following the magnetic paths of navigation to the wrong destination. Geopathic stress was what the Court's experts called it. The world was turning, always turning. But where were they going to end up? Maybe there would be more answers when the three of them returned to the Court of the Air and really got to work on the corpse.
'Bundle him up.' Harry indicated the strange body. His two crows did as they were bid.
'But are you for the good or the worse, that's the question?' whispered Harry.
And more to the point, who in the Kingdom of Jackals wanted the blue man dead in the first place?
Purity returned from the vendor with a handful of apples and a couple of pears, and Kyorin nodded his approval at the girl's selection.
'You'll need to eat more than fruit if we're going to keep on walking across the city all day again. There's an eel-seller over there and his jelly looked fresh…'
'My digestion is not very steady where fish are involved,' said Kyorin. 'Let's eat while we walk. It's important we keep moving.'
'If these people from your kingdom are after you, why stay in the capital? I'm getting tired of diving into the crowds every time I see a crusher. I think there's still enough money left in your pocketbook for a couple of berths on a narrowboat up north. We could travel back to your land.'
'I would not be welcome in my home,' said Kyorin. 'I am a slave and I have slipped the collar of my masters.'
'A slave!' exclaimed Purity, spitting out pieces of apple. 'I thought you were a prince, a noble in exile with assassins on your trail to ensure you couldn't return home to reclaim your throne.'
Kyorin devoured his pear, even finishing off the core and pips. 'Nothing so grand or romantic, I fear. Of the two of us, you are the one with a royal birthright. At the very best, I could only be considered a revolutionary… to those who pursue me I am a mere piece of disobedient chattel, to be destroyed for my treasonous inclinations.'
'More reason to be off and out of Middlesteel.'
Stopping in the shadow of a shop window, Kyorin pulled out a waxy white stick and, as he had done so many times before, rubbed his exposed skin with it. Face, neck, hands. 'My hunters are creatures called slats, they track by scent. Luckily for me, they prefer to hunt at night- they are eyeless and see using the noise they project from their throats. There are so many people here, so many strong smells. Even without the cover of my masking stick, your capital is the safest place for me to hide.'
'You sure you're come down from the north, not up from the south? I'd love to go south. They say that the caliph has given sanctuary to Jackelian royalists in the past to tweak parliament's nose.'
'You may use my remaining tokens of exchange to book a passage to this nation by yourself,' said Kyorin. 'It would be best if you headed as far away from the north as you can. You should travel south, travel there and keep on going.'
'And how long would you survive in Middlesteel alone with no coins?' asked Purity. 'You need me to buy things for you. I've seen you covering your mouth when you talk to people, so they can't see how you speak without moving your lips. Everyone thinks you're lying to them.'
'Quite the opposite, young sage. I carry the seed of truth within me.'
'Along with half a kilo of pear seeds. It's the truth I'd like from you myself,' said Purity. 'What are you really doing here? You're not just on the run from these hunters, are you?'
'I escaped here to see if your people would be able to help overthrow the masters' rule. My people are called the Kal, and we have been subject to occupation by the masters for so long we have almost forgotten that there was a time when we were not slaves. Our culture is suppressed; if we are even caught teaching our young to read we are executed. We hoped that the people of the Kingdom of Jackals might help free us from this yoke.'
'We don't do that,' said Purity. 'It's the Jackelians' oldest law, dating from long before parliament made the kings hostage. No empire, no interference with our neighbours' concerns. We can act only in defence of the realm, never in aggression.'
'I rather approve of that law,' said Kyorin. 'But I am afraid my mission to your land will soon become an irrelevancy. My masters will be at your borders shortly and from what I have seen during my travels here, your nation will not be able to withstand their might.'
'You are mistaken, sir,' Purity protested. 'Jackals is the strongest nation on the continent. There is no one who has attacked us who has not lived to rue the day.'
'I wish I was mistaken,' sighed Kyorin. 'But I know better, as I believe do you. Your bare feet feel the power of your land throbbing; can you not feel the sickness spreading underneath you?'
'I-' Purity hesitated. This runaway slave had the measure of her. That was exactly how it felt, like a wrongness in the earth, spreading inexorably slowly beneath the bones of the land; the woman's voice in her skull, her strange madness, whispering to her of the disorder in the land.
'What you feel is no illusion,' explained Kyorin. 'The beastly slats that pursue me may need flesh to dine on, but my masters need life itself. Their machines will drink the life from your land. At first your worldsingers will notice small failings of their sorceries as the leylines grow weaker, then your people will grow listless and uneasy as the connection with the soul of your home dwindles, and then, when enough of your power has been made theirs, your strength weakened, then will my masters' slave armies appear. Legion upon legion of slats. Some of you will be made slaves in turn, some of you will be farmed for your flesh, the majority of your population will be culled down to a manageable number.'
'That will not stand,' insisted Purity.
'You are a sage,' said Kyorin. 'You are a living conduit for your land and she is screaming her rage through your mouth. But your rage will not be enough, just as it was not enough for my people when we faced the masters' fury.'
'But there must be a way to fight your masters,' said Purity.
'Perhaps, but it is not to be found here. There is one among my people who can help, one of the last of our great sages to evade capture. He was meant to send me word of how to defeat our masters; this I was to pass on to your people. But the party travelling to me across the wastes with his secrets was betrayed and ambushed. Only one rebel survived, a desert-born nomad. He escaped to your kingdom alongside me, but I suspect my simple friend was lax with the use of his masking stick. The hunters caught up with us and murdered him.'
'If you have a way of stopping your masters, why has this great sage of yours not used it in your own land to free your people?'
'The same thought occurred to me,' said Kyorin. 'Possibly such a weapon will not work for our people. Perhaps its deployment was judged too late to be of use
to us now. Activating it will almost undoubtedly involve the use of violence that is not permitted to my people. Or the whole tale may just have been a fiction by my own side to encourage me to infiltrate the expeditionary force to your kingdom in the hope that powerful allies could be found here.'
'Allies don't come more powerful than the Jackelian navy,' said Purity.
Kyorin smiled. 'It will take more than your airships to lift the oppression of the masters from the Kal, or to stop them claiming your nation as their territory.'
'What is your kingdom called?'
Kyorin sang a long musical string of words that lasted for a minute.
'But what do we call your land here in Jackals? Where would I find it on a map?'
'I believe it would translate as Green Vines of the Kal: Clean Waters of the Kal.'
That wasn't what Purity had asked, but if he didn't want to tell her…
Kyorin started on the other pear, eating it carefully and consuming all the fruit. 'It is not a description that has applied to my home for a long time. The masters have sucked my land dry. What used to be lakes are now dust bowls swirling with mists of stinging chemicals and our once endless forests have become salt wastes and deserts.'
'It can't be worse than the smogs here. Have you ever smelt a Middlesteel peculiar when the winds don't clear away the smoke?'
'It is far worse. The masters are very adept at dealing with the miasma and filth of their slaves' labours. It is said that long ago they changed the pattern of their bodies to cope with the waste that they generated. Then they introduced schemes to transmute their detritus. But after a while, even their tinkering with their bodies was not enough and when my land itself had had enough of their presence, it tried to restore the balance of the ecos by sending ages of ice and heat. But the masters controlled even the land's attempts to fight back, pumping chemicals and machines into the air to stop the ecos from cleaning their corruption from her skin. Fixing our land in a state of living death. Then the masters settled in for the long haul, feeding on the static corpse of my nation until there were no more resources left to convert, no mines left full, no soil fit for growing food, until even the animalcules flowing under the earth and the magnetic energies that pump through the land's veins had been exhausted.'
