by Stephen Hunt
'And in doing so you would be depriving science of one of its greatest minds,' noted Coppertracks, rolling into the courtyard with a couple of his mu-bodies in tow. 'The schematics I have been helping him draft bear as much relation to our current state of gunnery as a child's catapult does to one of your redcoats' rifles.'
'Then perhaps his mad device will be good for lobbing a shell or two towards those slippery-skinned slat creatures in Catosia without me having to get close enough to unload my deck sweeper's eight barrels into their wicked hides.'
'Our cannon's range will stretch a little further than that, dear mammal,' said Coppertracks.
The commodore looked at the box the steamman's drones were bearing. 'More messages from King Steam?'
'Not this time,' said Coppertracks. 'I spent the morning visiting our old friend at Saint Vine's college.' He waved at his drones and they pulled out a series of tomes, laying the books out on a garden bench in the shadow of Tock House's courtyard. 'The college's library is always my first source for mining the depths of historic esoterica.'
Purity was quick to move over to the bench. 'You found something to help me?'
'I promised that I would,' said Coppertracks. 'Your description of your madness, your visions, led me to a very specific period of Jackelian ancient history: the long dark ages following the fall of the Camlantean civilization. The pre-Circlean age, when the Council of Druids and the Stag Lords still ruled Jackals. The legends say that a warrior queen united the tribes and that her royal bloodline held sway until the age of ice, blood that was later to re-emerge as the lineage of the first kings. Your ancestors!'
Purity looked at the drawing inked on ancient vellum, an angular illustration of an armoured woman riding a chariot pulled by lions, her hair wild and spread by the wind. The face! The face was the same as that of the woman whose body she had shared on the ancient beach of shale.
'Elizica!'
'Elizica of the Jackeni,' said Coppertracks. 'There is not much beyond myth that we know of that period of history. What the glaciers of the coldtime didn't erase, you fastbloods did when you burned your books to keep warm, and the majority of tomes that survived the age of ice were later tossed on the fire by the Circlist church for containing too many religious references for your atheist faith's tastes. These manuscripts are copies of copies, the originals made at some personal risk by a heretic monk and buried in a cathedral meditatory.'
'The woman in my dreams really existed then,' said Purity. 'I'm not going mad!'
'Hardly,' said Coppertracks. 'The Steamo Loas are my race's ancestors and it is considered a great blessing to be ridden by the Loas, to be touched by our gods. The steammen's great pattern is not so different from the one sea of consciousness your Circleans put their faith in.'
'What do these books say about her?'
'That she was a great queen who defended Jackals from an invasion by one of the underwater races. The geographic record King Steam's scholars have compiled indicates the Fire Sea was expanding at that time, so there may well have been mass migrations by the underwater kingdoms during Elizica's age; the Kingdom of Jackals with its long coastlines would have been a tempting target for any fleeing refugees.'
Purity traced a curious finger over the raised ink of the bound volume's leather pages. It was warm to the touch, as if the monk who had illuminated the original had leaked his spirit into the illustrations. 'It's beautiful.'
'Myth always is.' Coppertracks opened one of the accompanying volumes – notes by a modern Jackelian academic. 'I dare say the reality was more prosaic. She is linked to the legends of the Bandits of the Marsh, two hundred warriors who were outlaws, fey-born and sworn enemies of the Stag Lords. This volume speculates that Elizica led the Bandits of the Marsh against the underwater invaders, and then overthrew the corrupt Stag Lords who had been making treaties with the occupiers, clearing the way for your Circlist faith to replace the druids' many gods. Monarchy and Circlism, the precursors to Jackals as we know it today – strong enough to survive even the long age of ice that was to follow.'
'A long-dead queen, now,' said Commodore Black. 'What good will she be in this fight that is coming?'
'If the Army of Shadows is composed of the slats that attacked Tock House, the help of any Loa that comes to our aid will, I suspect, be deeply welcome,' said Coppertracks. 'You were with me outside King Steam's command tent when we saw the lions running through the sky.'
'What we saw that day was a projection,' protested the commodore. 'A trick of the mind from the fey.'
'You should have more faith in the power of your land, my softbody friend,' said Coppertracks. 'Whose lions were they, running through the sky? You know the answer – when the kingdom is threatened, it is said the first kings will return from the hills where they sleep, led by a great warrior – a sword-saint. Those lions in the sky gave heart to your army when it seemed as if all was lost. The kingdom was threatened then and it is threatened now.' Coppertracks laid an iron hand on Purity's shoulder. 'And lo, our new house guest hears the whisper of an ancient queen, her life now protected by the Hood-o'the-marsh, the marsh, mind, while something terrible comes upon us from the north.'
The commodore sadly met Purity's gaze. 'That is the way of it, then, lass. I would shoulder this burden of yours if I could. You already on the run from the scoundrels and dogs of parliament. Now you have to hear the whisper of some long-dead queen, too.'
'I don't mind,' said Purity. 'I really don't. All my life I've been treated like an outcast for the fits I suffered – but they helped me escape the Royal Breeding House and now I know them for what they are. Not a madness, but a gift. It's as if I've been suffocating all my life and now I can breathe again.' Tears welled in Purity's eyes. 'I think this is what happiness feels like.'
'You've a forgiving heart,' said the commodore. 'And you shame an old u-boat man with it.' He looked down at her bare feet. 'And it pains me to see you without some fine cow leather to wrap around your toes. If you will not take one of Molly's spares, will you at least let me buy you a new pair of shoes?'
Purity shook her head and picked up one of the books Coppertracks had brought back from the college. 'I need to feel the land beneath my feet. But shoes or no, I don't think I'm a sword-saint, however quickly I may have taken to your sabre practice. Can I take these books to my room and read them up there?'
'Of course you may, young softbody,' said Coppertracks, his drones collecting the remaining volumes for her as he spoke. 'But you must follow the house rules I explained when I showed you Tock House's library.'
'I remember – no food or drink, no book-marking by folding the pages, no breaking the spines…'
'Quite correct. Books are a little like the Loas. They allow our ancestors to reach out from the past and touch our boiler-hearts with the wisdom of ages long forgotten; although with books, of course, you decide when to ride them, rather than the Loas calling upon you.'
Commodore Black looked at Purity. 'You've practised enough with sabres today, lass. But make sure you read the books in your room and not the library, now. That mad old shiftie is working in there and the further away you stay from him, the better I shall like it.'
Purity left with Coppertracks' drones carrying the tomes for her, their master thoughtfully rocking back and forth above his caterpillar tracks.
'You are wrong about Timlar Preston,' Coppertracks said to the commodore. 'He is a gentle man.'
'And the more dangerous for it. Many a smithy of pistols and blades can say the same… but you put the fruits of their labour in the hands of wicked men like me and the result is dead bodies on the duelling fields and fatherless children left crying after a battle.'
'Yes,' said Coppertracks, 'fatherless children. When will you tell her?'
'Tell who what?'
'Please, Jared softbody. I am a steamman slipthinker. I see patterns, the little patterns that make up the great pattern. While many of my less travelled brothers back in the Steammen Free State might
say that all softbodies look the same to them, I have lived long enough alongside your people not to count among their number.'
Commodore Black seemed to slump and grow smaller at his friend's words. 'You're a canny one, old steamer. There's no denying that.'
'The geometry of Purity's facial patterns matched against yours was enough to pique my curiosity. It was an easy enough trick to use my vision plate to capture a magnified image of her eyes and compare the inheritance vectors against your own. I do not know how it has come to pass, but there's a ninety-four per cent level of probability that Purity Drake is your daughter.'
'It feels like another age,' sighed the commodore. 'When I was younger and still welcomed adventure. What the news sheets called the Prince Silvar affair.'
'The prince was substituted for a double,' said Coppertracks. 'Broken out of captivity from the Royal Breeding House. But I thought that was perpetrated by agents of Quatershift?'
'So it was meant to look, that fine day,' said the commodore, wistfully. 'It was before the fall of Porto Principe, when the royalist court in exile still had a taste for mischief and I wore the face, name and title of Solomon Dark, Duke of Ferniethian. And it was no mean feat for me, even then. I had to join the redcoats, rise to the rank of sergeant and make sure I was posted to the barracks at the Royal Breeding House. I was the inside man for that blow against parliament, and Purity's mother – ah, now, there was a lady. Alicia Drake. As proud and as beautiful and as clever as any of us born free on the islands of Porto Principe. She worked out what I was about, all right, and she was the only one of those poor broken royalist songbirds they keep cooped up in the Breeding House with the gumption to help me organize the prince's escape.'
'You should tell Purity who you are.'
'How can I?' sobbed the commodore. 'I saw her mother fall during the prince's escape with a ball through her head – I thought she had died. Now I find from Purity that it was a glancing blow and that when Alicia recovered, she used her wiles to portray herself as a bystander caught in the crossfire to avoid the gallows, pleading her belly for her life. I believed my darling Alicia was dead. I didn't even know I had a daughter until Purity turned up here with her mother's name and the House of Ferniethian's eyes.'
'She will understand,' said Coppertracks.
'How can she ever do that? A father is someone you are proud of, someone to look up to. Not a fat old fool who abandons his family to a life of hell in parliament's dark, windy fortress of royalist brood mares. She would hate me for it. I would be a coward in her eyes. It would be more than I could stand and more than she could stand, too. Her life to date has already been ruined by my carelessness, and the mortal best I can hope for is to keep her safe now. I'll train her with every trick and wile that's kept me alive and out of parliament's hands, and I'll give my life to save hers if I have to, but you must promise me this, old steamer: you must never tell her who I am. Purity can never know.'
'You owe her the truth.'
'Not when the truth would hurt her more than the lie. I owe her a good life more than I owe her the wicked truth.'
'How much longer do we have left?' Coppertracks argued. 'Darkness is upon us from the north. Nothing can be guaranteed anymore. Not if the spirit of Legba of the Valves were standing guard over Tock House, or Elizica of the Jackeni for that matter. Would you let the truth die with one of you?'
'Let it be buried without either of our mortal bodies if it can,' said the commodore. 'I will keep Purity safe and that is all I can do.'
'I shall go along with your decision, dear mammal. But I fear it is neither the proper nor the correct one.'
'The people of the metal are an honest folk,' wheezed the commodore, 'you leave the lies to old Blacky. I've lived a life full of them to keep my poor skin safe from parliament's agents. And when the rest of those slippery slats turn up to make slaves of us all, you leave the killing to me. I've had a life full of that, too.'
'I will hope instead that the Army of Shadows' masters will prove amiable to reason and accommodation with the existing inhabitants of our land.'
'Is that so?' chortled the commodore. 'Well, I've got eight barrels of reason loaded upstairs and a knapsack full of shells to accommodate all-comers. And we'll see which of us is right about that point as well, before long enough.'
Coppertracks watched Commodore Black pack away Purity's practice arms, returning them to the storeroom under Tock House's grand staircase. Somewhere to the north lay the answer to the submariner's wager, getting closer by the day with the fall of every new Quatershiftian town. Ah yes, the small patterns and the large patterns. And something unexpected coming to disrupt them all. There hadn't been many answers in the corpses of the slat creatures that had attacked Tock House, their organs rapidly dissolving in a soup of their own acidic blood, and the pistol one of them had carried defied the steamman's understanding of modern science – a solid dark thing with almost no working parts, a heat agitation matrix inside capable of releasing bolts of fire from a rotating crystal inside its barrel.
Coppertracks resolved to throw the cogs of Gear-gi-ju that evening, to call upon the Loas to shed what wisdom they could on the matter of the invaders. As if every other steamman from the Kingdom of Jackals to the Free State wouldn't be summoning their ancestors at the same time.
It was interesting, mused Ben Carl, that nobody ever took his butler for anything other than what he appeared to be. Diminutive. Bland. Someone, who, if he stood still for long enough, would begin to blend in with the wallpaper. Just another member of staff from Wolfstones, the First Guardian's official parliamentary residence on the outskirts of the capital; just another piece of furniture adorning the rooms of state. With only the two of them in Carl's office at the House of Guardians, though, it was always a temptation to refer to the man by his true title of General. Where he stood in the ever-shifting secretive hierarchy of the Jackelian political police was hard to say, but somewhere near the top, Carl suspected. Possibly poised serenely on the apex of their sharp, dangerous little organization.
'You have another find?' asked Ben Carl as the man shut the door to his office.
Carl's supposed butler placed a burnt badge on his mahogany desk – the gate of parliament confining a wolf barely recognizable, so blackened was the circle of cloth. 'This was from one of the more recoverable corpses, First Guardian. The wreckage had flattened a farmer's oast house out in Halfshire.'
'Who would have thought it possible?' said the First Guardian. 'Who would have even thought it undesirable?' Carl touched the sides of his wheelchair. The Court of the Air had mangled his legs during the troubles, the brief, failed revolution that had been raised in his name so many years ago. He should have been glad that the Court had fallen. Fallen at last like he had, escaping from one of their black aerospheres as they lifted off the ground of the kingdom, intending to toss him in a cell to rot. Now the pictures the watchers in the sky had been sending had dried up and all he was left with was the terrified reports from refugees fleeing Quatershift and Catosia. The Army of Shadows. Everywhere. Killing and conquering and enslaving and feeding.
'We can preserve the peace in Jackals by ourselves,' said the general. 'Parliament's writ will not falter on our watch.'
Carl nodded. But then, who would watch the watchmen? Who would keep the political police honest now the Court of the Air had been destroyed? Dear Circle, what a turn of the wheel they had come to.
There was another knock at the door and one of Carl's aides entered on his command. 'Word from the southeastern frontier, First Guardian. The army of the Steammen Free State has been sighted assembling in the foothills near their mountains.'
'That is the best news we are likely to have all day. Thank the Circle for ancient treaties.'
The aide pulled a silver-plated watch from his waistcoat and checked the time. 'And the compatriots from our new treaty will be coming over from House Guards on the hour.'
'Three armies to face this strange new foe,' said Ben Carl. '
Jackelians fighting alongside Quatershiftians rather than against them. We live in interesting times. There has been no word from our embassy in Kikkosico, I suppose?'
The aide shook his head.
'The god-emperor's legions will stay dug in along the pampas,' speculated the general. 'Too much dissent in his provinces to risk sending his soldiers outside their borders.'
'They'll march out quickly enough when we prove we can turn the invaders back north,' said Carl. 'He'll be into Catosia and raising the imperial standard over the city-states like a terrier charging into a fighting pit.'
'Sooner him than us, then,' said the general. 'Anyone fool enough to claim Catosia will be raising their flag over an eternity of rebellion and trouble.'
'Oh, and your other appointment is here,' said the aide. 'The appointment we weren't certain we should accommodate.'
'You should always make time for old friends and supporters,' said the First Guardian. 'Show them in.'
The aide did as he was bid and returned with Molly Templar and Oliver Brooks in tow.
'The crows that fly before the storm,' said Carl. 'And now they're flying in pairs. Why does that not surprise me?'
'I'm hoping that you're well informed,' said Oliver. 'Well informed enough not to believe all that nonsense in the news sheets about the Army of Shadows being an exceptionally aggressive horde of polar barbarians.'
'Opinions seem to be mixed on that one,' said Carl.
Oliver looked at Carl's supposed butler. 'But then, not everything is as it seems at first glance.'
