by Stephen Hunt
'But polar barbarians have been sighted on the move by my own clipper captains,' a backbencher called out.
'No doubt fleeing south from the same forces that are occupying Catosia,' said Carl. 'It may be that the Army of Shadows are from one of the continents on the other side of the polar darks. Quadgan, possibly; a crossing over the ice pack passage is still possible this late in the year. What is certain, however, is that if we meekly await our fate within our borders, we cede a vital strategic advantage to the invaders. Our duty to the people is clear! We must act to preserve the kingdom, even if that means intervening in the affairs of our neighbours.'
'A twelve-month repeal of the Statute of Splendid Detachment,' boomed Hoggstone, waving a fist at the members of his own party. 'And I'll take a debating stick to the skull of any man-jack among you that dares to vote against it.'
'I thank the leader of the opposition for rising above narrow party interests. You should know I have already ordered the high fleet to be concentrated at Shadowclock,' said the First Guardian. 'While the Board of War is now mobilizing every regiment of the New Pattern Army, ready to receive our instructions.'
'That's the style, sir,' said Hoggstone. 'Taking a Jackelian merchantman by surprise on her bow is one thing; let's see how these sneaky damn foreign devils like a dozen squadrons of RAN frigates up 'em.'
Gripped by the moment, the mass assemblage of guardians howled their approval. The vote was a foregone conclusion now. Benjamin Carl looked at their faces. Contorted by rage. Haunted by fear. Shown their own weakness, where an hour before they had still laboured under the illusion that their nation was unassailable. Thinking the unthinkable. A foreign war, not a war of defence within the Kingdom of Jackals' acres, but a true war of aggression.
But a war against who? Who were the Army of Shadows?
Duncan Connor looked up from his bed, alerted by the smell of the commodore's seadrinker broth, which Molly was trying hard not to spill as she opened the door to the room.
'Your bruises are fading,' said Molly, putting the food down to take a good look at the sail rider they had pulled from his burning rig in their garden.
Duncan touched his lumpen cheeks. 'I think you're just trying to make me feel better.' He picked up that morning's copy of the Illustrated. 'Aye and thank you for all of this, I've stayed in worse hotels. Far worse, in fact.'
Molly pointed to the line drawing on the front of the newspaper. A portly Jackelian, the cartoonist's everyman, old John Gloater, standing on an outline of the realm and shaking a blunderbuss at a giant, sly-looking polar barbarian from the Army of Shadows while a mob of miniature politicians pushed and shoved the large-bellied yeoman across the border. ''Pon my word,' announced the speech bubble from the Jackelian's mouth, 'this splendid detachment is a right sharp business.'
'Interesting times,' said Molly.
'It seems our army commanders are showing a taste for original thinking the medal-heavy numpties singularly failed to demonstrate when I was in service in the regiments.'
'A soldier? I thought you might have been a jack cloudie,' said Molly. 'Your sail-rider chute…'
'From an old friend in the navy,' said Duncan. 'I served in the Corps of Rocketeers, until myself and the general staff over at House Guards had a wee philosophical difference of opinion over the development of the rocket as a weapon of war. A consideration for you, if you ever fall foul of a recruiting party – never put yourself on the side against tradition, tradition always wins out in the regiments.'
'I believe I'm a little too respectable to be press-ganged now,' said Molly. She didn't elaborate on how things might have gone for her a few years back, though.
'Broth again?'
Molly laid the bowl down on the bedside next to the travel case – the one he had woken up shouting for when he first regained consciousness. Did it hold his campaign medals? Something about Duncan's manner told Molly he would have pawned those off a long time ago. Anybody desperate enough to strap themselves to a rocket would have gone through a lot of trips to the pawnshop first. 'The commodore swears by it.'
'Aye well, you won't find me complaining. As I said yesterday, I'm afraid I'm rather between trades now that the army doesn't require my soldiering and the Circus of the Extreme has no doubt gone bankrupt.'
'You've not remembered any more about your sail jump?'
'Nothing you could make a penny sheet tale out of, I'm afraid, lassie. The force of the rocket launch concussed me during the ride up. And things happened awful fast after that. I remember seeing shapes moving in the clouds. Very big shapes. Then there was just waves of flaming pilots plummeting past me. A wall of fire above me that set my own sail rig ablaze.'
'Aerostats?' said Molly.
Duncan shook his head. 'I've flown on enough RAN airships as regimental steerage to recognize the hull of a man-o'-war running in the clouds alongside me, and the shapes I saw didn't look much like one of our bonnie ladies of the air. Not the underbelly of a skrayper, either. All you ever see of one of them is a half-transparent tentacle coming down from the sky to tear you apart.'
'Well, I'll tease a tale out of you for your board somehow,' said Molly. 'That is, if the Army of Shadows manages to forgo looting all the stationers in the capital that are willing to take my work.'
Molly left the sail rider to his broth.
As she shut the door to his room, Duncan tapped his travel case thoughtfully.
‹I like her.›
'Aye, so do I,' said Duncan. 'All three of Tock House's owners appear to be fine wee people. We were owed a turn of good fortune and I believe we'll be safe enough laying away here awhile.'
‹I'm afraid of these polar barbarians. You won't let the Army of Shadows get me?›
'Don't be a daftie, I'm always going to be here to protect you,' said Duncan. 'This hubbub may be an opportunity. When the regiments start running short of cannon fodder and are down to bairns who don't know one end of a dirk from another, the recruiting sergeants might not be so fussy about letting the likes of me hold a commission again.'
‹I don't care for war.›
'Nobody ever does,' said Duncan. 'Nobody ever does. But work is work.'
Molly blinked the sleep out of her eyes, the owl's cry fading away. Woken again. She normally slept so soundly too, but then, the birds had been chattering uncommonly loudly since the news of the fall of Catosia – each dawn chorus a panicked explosion of robins and starlings. Now, even the nocturnal birds had become infected with the fear of what was coming down from the north. But this night there was something else in the air, the sense of something familiar. Something was- no, it couldn't be? Molly swung her feet out of bed and padded over to the window, pulling the curtain back an inch. Down among the trees, was that a shadow of moonlight and clouds, or…?
'Please don't be alarmed.'
Molly spun around. To see… not who she had been expecting! A thin and scrawny young girl, as much a ragamuffin as Molly had been when she was a poorhouse urchin cleaning the heating stacks in the capital's great pneumatic towers. Accompanied by a man who might have been her father in his dishevelled lack of means. Molly kept a compact purse gun in her sideboard, but these two odd intruders were between her and the expensive little Locke's Lady Pattern.
'How did you get past the front door? Molly hissed.
'I spoke to your lock,' said the man.
'There's seven drums turning on my front door's transaction engine,' said Molly. She should know, she had upgraded the cipher on the engine herself. 'That must have been quite a conversation.'
'For Circle's sake, Kyorin, you're frightening her,' announced the ragamuffin. 'I told you we'd be better waiting for daylight hours to come visiting.'
'Would that we still possessed the luxury of a lost night, Purity, our time is running short,' said Kyorin.
'Listen to Purity's advice next time,' advised Molly. 'If I scream for help there are three others inside the house.'
'There is no need for that. I intend no
harm towards you; quite the opposite, I have come to warn you.' Kyorin drew out a copy of Molly's novel from the pocket of his frayed jacket.
'Oh, please! Not another one of my readers who belongs in an asylum. This is completely the wrong way to get me to write a dedication in your bloody book.'
'I have come to warn you, to enlist your help as a person of influence with the vision to appreciate your people's predicament. But I believe you have already been warned, you have a… talent for the soul of machines, you are – ah, now I see, you are a hybrid – your blood bubbles with sub-cellular level machinery.'
Molly stiffened. Who was this madman? 'I really don't know what you are talking about.'
'There is no need for deceit. You must not think of me as an enemy,' insisted Kyorin. 'I can feel the imprint of your land's sentinel machine upon you. We share an enemy, you and I, Molly Templar of the Torley Street Press. An enemy who I fear has already neutralized the sentinel machine you act as a symbiote for.'
'Torley Street Press are only my publisher,' said Molly, 'and who are you to know of the Hexmachina?'
'He's a slave and a witch doctor,' blurted out Purity. 'On the run from the polar barbarians. He should have a beard, I know.'
'Yes he should,' said Molly, looking more closely at the ragamuffin. And the girl should have stolen a shawl from a washing line to hide the shadow mark where the golden crown of a royalist prisoner had so obviously been ripped off her cleaner's pinny.
'I know of your sentinel machine because my people once created similar devices. But they were not nearly enough to protect us from the masters' fury.'
'You're talking about the people who have frozen the Hexmachina within the earth? I had been hoping that it was all only a bad dream. Who has the power to imprison the Hexmachina…?'
'It is no dream. My masters' craft is great. I can show you, if you allow me to join with your mind. I carry a forbidden memory, a seed of truth passed down from mind to mind, from generation to generation. That is why I am here, to try to stop the fate of my land being visited upon yours.'
Molly touched her neck nervously.
'He means well,' said Purity. 'He does. He saved my life.'
Molly nodded towards her dirty pinny. 'He picked the lock on the gates of the Royal Breeding House too?'
'I will not hurt you,' said Kyorin. 'I sense that your brain is already evolved for a similar form of communication. Your land's sentinel machine has used the structure of your mind to join with you before.'
For the seed of truth? Molly winced. The truth was a mutable thing, it moved and flexed with the eye of its beholder. But she had to know, after the Hexmachina's last garbled warning and the polar barbarians' deadly incursion from the north. The Army of Shadows. She had to know.
'Show me,' whispered Molly.
'Clear your mind,' instructed Kyorin, reaching out with his hands. His fingers felt warm on Molly's forehead, warmer still as the vision began to rise inside her mind. It was as if each of her eyes was showing her a different sight, the dark familiarity of her room at Tock House overlaid with something alien, at first smoke-thin, but the image growing clearer as she focused in on it.
It was a room, a large chamber made of a glowing substance Molly could not put a name to. A council was about to begin, illuminated by an emerald light falling through cathedral-sized windows that should have been covered in ocean, but were submerged no longer – waves of green sludge lapping against the lower panes instead. She could hear the noise of the surf in the vision, a repugnant polluted gargle as each thick wave sloshed against the glass.
Around the crescent table sat rubbery-skinned albino creatures, octopus-like, but with very humanoid eyes and very humanoid fingers branching out at the end of their tentacles, the pallid limbs flickering across machines built into their table. Communicating with distant functionaries while they waited for the council to start. This was a most peculiar vision. Molly could actually interact with it, push her mind towards areas of the image and gain knowledge of what she was looking at.
Molly was about to try to divine just what these strange creatures were, when a truly giant member of the species rose into the chamber through an opening in the floor.
'The emperor's council is in session.'
Molly concentrated on what was being said, trying to banish the image of her bedroom that underlay this strange sight. Hear the words; hear her vision's translation of them.
'The Department of Nourishment will open this session of the council with their report.'
One of the creatures leant forward to speak into a box on the desk, its beak warbling. Others were watching this scene, the session broadcast to a select group of rulers who could not be present, sent out like a punch card message coded and carried across the Jackelian crystalgrid. 'Oceanic evaporation has increased by six per cent since the last reporting of my department, four per cent higher than the predictions we had been supplied with by the Department of Adaptation.'
Another of the creatures stiffened at so public a rebuke.
'Our remaining plankton farms at the south pole are now reporting ninety per cent harvest failure, despite the successful seeding of the latest heat-resistant strains.'
'Then your new strains of plankton were obviously not nearly heat resistant enough,' hooted the council member who had been singled out for criticism a moment earlier.
Sharp beaks clicked angrily at each other, but Molly's vision lacked the means to translate so quickly.
'There is another way,' announced one of the creatures. There was something about this one. Molly probed and got back the answer. This creature was the source of the secret recording of these events, the one who had passed it on to hands that would have been regarded as outlaws by the others within this chamber. 'We can make a truce with the faction of the healers. They have a plan to regenerate the heart of the world, to inject the core with modified bacteria to begin to clean the atmosphere, to-'
'For shame,' hissed the giant bull creature whose entry had started the meeting. 'Do we have a hundred generations of life left to us to wait for such a wild scheme to bear fruit? Our land is dying now. To hear such defeatist anti-science sentiments from one of our own council. Our people strive to master base nature, not surrender to it. Would you invite disease back into our world as well? Would you take the cells of predators from our zoo's refrigerated vaults and release extinct killers back into the land? Would you turn off our sky control and allow superweather systems to ravage the surface without check?'
'You can see about you what wonders our industry has wrought,' argued the dissenter. 'When land temperatures climbed burningly hot we adapted our bodies to live under our oceans, but now even the seas our grandparents swam in, the seas we have farmed for centuries, have dwindled to a barren desert with a shrinking lake at its centre. This chamber once rested secure on the seabed and now look at it.' The dissenter raised a tentacle to point at the ceiling. 'The walls of our sanctuary hum with the buzz of insects swarming over stagnant water. How shall we adapt our bodies to survive next? Will we become sand serpents wriggling through the wastes of the dunes? Is that the fate you wish for the children of our mighty civilization, to hunt rodents through the deserts we ourselves have wrought, only dimly remembering that they were once masters of machines and the keepers of ancient wisdom?'
'There is food enough,' said the giant bull. 'You know of what I speak. Food enough to last our people for the handful of generations we require to lay the plans to reach our final sanctuary.' As the creature tapped the desk in front of him, the image of a blue sphere flickered into view, bands of white clouds swirling above seas and green landmasses.
Molly focused in closer on the rotating globe. A verdant, ocean-covered celestial sphere. Green fields. Oh sweet Circle! Catosia hadn't fallen to a horde of polar barbarians. Quatershift hadn't been invaded by the bear-pulled sleds of any northern warlord. These invaders were from one of the celestial spheres neighbouring the Earth – a devastated dead world of s
and and dunes. Dunes… all the images of Kaliban produced by Coppertracks' observatory rose up at once. Kaliban. As if confirming her epiphany, the vision running across her mind shifted to a scene of black cones lifting away from the endless wastes on beams of light, great shell-like vessels to cross the celestial darks and burrow into the poles of their new home – the valuable polar territories, always the last land to heat up and lose its life-giving moisture while the world's bounties were depleted. Locusts and despoilers, indeed.
Molly's vision started to shift onto something new, but the scene fragmented before it fully formed, broken by Purity's scream as the window looking out at Tock House's inner courtyard shattered, the dark shape that had been pressing its face to the pane judging its prey located.
Something black and heavily muscled swung through the gap. Molly stared dumbly at the creature for a second, frozen by the splintering of the vision that had been filling her head and paralysed by the shock of the brute's sudden appearance. Taller than a man by a head, the bipedal creature appeared both rangily thin and densely muscular at the same time, moving across the floor with the deadly predatory grace of a flicked whip. The intruder's skin was dark and oily, covered in chitin-like plates and glistening like a blood-wet blade, the slyly darting skull a flat, shockingly eyeless oblong of bone, a fanged mouth leering under a cluster of nostril slits. It moved on all fours like the killer apes Molly had idled afternoons away watching in Middlesteel Zoo, but quicker, long talons on its fingers clicking on the floor where they briefly gashed the wood. The womb mages of Cassarabia were said to be masters of growing horrors inside the wombs of their slaves, and if they had captured a demon and crossbred it with a mantis and a bat – then spiced the mix with the instincts of a shark given legs – something like this thing might have puddled out of some poor unfortunate's thighs in the caliph's slave pens.
