Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Oliver could no longer see the vast hull of the enemy craft, but he could feel the weight of their evil riding the leylines like a mountain balancing on an eruption of magma. Draining Jackals of her ancient lifeforce as they flew, turning the precious power of the land against those that they would conquer. The attacker's vessel was filled with soldier slats similar to the beasts he had slain outside Tock House's walls. He brushed their minds, glimpsing memories of their war craft's construction. It had been built by stripping the mountains of Catosia, levelling them to make a honeycombed cauldron of black rock, minerals sucked out by slug-like things and excreted as a trail of panels and girders in their wake. Oliver pushed past the slats' minds, trying to locate their masters' presence. No, there were only the soldiers of the Army of Shadows inside the citadel. Strange. Oliver recoiled in disgust as he probed their essence. They were foul – it was all he could do to hold back the urge to retch. Greed. Avarice. A stripped-down core of pure selfish loathing for anything outside of the Army of Shadows. Kill. Devour. Breed. All with a fierce, demented energy about them, locking this storm of locusts to their labours with an intensity so driving it burnt Oliver's soul to behold. It had been an age since the slats had fed properly. So many centuries since they'd had a green, fresh land to strip. There was something else, too. Amusement. Amusement at the clumsy collection of locked airships that had made up the Court of the Air – that something so ephemeral and weak and subtle could count itself the guardian of an entire nation. The slats piloting the flying citadel showed their contempt by drawing up the force of the land and reflecting it towards the toy spheres they faced. Great gobs of power flaring out and lighting the floating city up the way children might burn out a hornet's nest for the fun of it. Oh, how they loved to see the hornets burn.

Shaken by a massive impact, the prison sphere's floor dipped out from under Oliver and Harry's feet, leaving them suspended in the air for a second before spilling them back down to the floor. One of the instrument panels blew behind them; a shower of sparks falling over Timlar Preston's body. Harry cursed like a navvy, getting to his feet and struggling to spin a wheel on a hatch in the floor. 'The lifeboat is a tad cramped, but there's room for two if you drop down alongside him.'

Oliver looked at Harry.

'I may be a bastard, but I'm not a coward. This is my battle and I'm not leaving it to a bunch of lousy prison guards on an aerosphere to fight.'

'The Court's finished, Harry.'

'We're never finished. We might be folding this hand of cards on the table, but the great game never ends.'

Oliver dragged Timlar Preston's comatose form towards the lifeboat hatch. How many years had the Court hunted Oliver across the face of Jackals? Fearing him. Fearing the brace of pistols that had been handed down from generation to generation of those who had worn the mantle of the Hood-o'the-marsh. The Court. His implacable enemy. More cunning than the crushers from Ham Yard. More persistent than the cavalrymen from the barracks of the New Pattern Army. The Court of the Air had always been there. The unseen eye in the sky. Always watching. Always planning. How would the kingdom see without them? What future could there be without the carefully crafted path the Court was leading them down? Oliver was missing them already. Invisible and invincible no longer – just a collection of mortals tending the civil war's legacy of democracy, blown to the four winds on a motley squadron of high-altitude aerospheres.

Oliver lowered Preston into the lifeboat, a low moan escaping the scientist's lips as he banged his spine on the iron sphere's walls. Preston fell away and Oliver dropped his feet through the hatch. 'What is the enemy going to do next?'

'After they've blinded the realm by taking us out? Well, if it was me, there'd be a right good kicking coming for any Jackelian that tries to stop them invading.'

A tinny voice broke out from a speaking trumpet mounted on the console. 'Station twelve! Station twelve, we've been boarded. All hands to repel boarders on the lower levels. They're beasts; they're-'

Harry sighed and drew out the knife he had used to kill the warder, wiping the blood off on his trousers. 'No rest for the wicked.'

'Be careful. These things are called slats and they're fast and they take a lot of killing. Their throats are their weakest point.'

Harry watched Oliver climb down the lifeboat's ladder. 'You never did say what you wanted Preston for.'

'We're going to build a cannon. One big enough to shoot us to Kaliban.'

'You're-' Harry threw back his head and laughed. 'Well, Timlar Preston's your man, all right.'

Inside the confines of the cramped lifeboat Oliver pushed Preston to one side and slipped his left foot into the sail deployment pedal. 'Stay safe, you old thief.'

'That's what I do best, old stick. Though, from the sound of it, I rather think it's you who's going to need all the luck.'

With a clang the escape hatch shut, Harry spinning its lever tight. He slid the dead warder's master punch card into the console and there was a clacking from the clockwork deployment mechanism as the lifeboat was lowered out of the prison sphere's hull.

'You stay safe too, boy.' Harry pulled the firing lever, the crack of two charges blowing, and the first – and possibly the last – successful prison break in the Court of the Air's history was over.

A slippery clicking noise sounded from outside the warder station and Harry turned to see the flat eyeless skull-plates of the pair of ebony monsters that had tracked his scent along the corridor. Slats, damn slats!

'That was fast work, lads.' Harry showed them his blade. 'Well done. Now, which of you two ugly slime-dripping jiggers wants some first?'

Commodore Black indicated the sword rack and wiped the fat tears of sweat pouring down his forehead with the towel hanging there. Purity dropped her sabre into the wooden rail and borrowed the towel after the u-boat man had finished with it.

'You've a classic sense of blade work about you, lass. Some might say archaic.'

'Some might say unreliable,' replied Purity. 'This isn't anything to do with me. Until I came here I had never picked up a sword in my life before. If any of the children in the Royal Breeding House were caught fencing with broom handles we would be birched so hard we couldn't sit down for a week.'

'They want to raise sheep to wear parliament's tainted crown,' said the commodore. 'Not lions. Yet you fight as if you've been tutored in the arts of war all of your life.'

'Something's possessed me,' said Purity. 'My madness – whatever you want to call it. Every day it burrows a little deeper within me like a sickness, and it gets harder to tell where I begin and it ends.'

'If madness it is, it's a grand old sort. Your reflexes are getting steadier with each session. Cavalry sabre, fencing foil, debating stick, pistolry, cutlass. There are not many tricks of arms I have left to teach you. Nor, I dare say, any tricks of pugilism that mad strapping uplander Duncan Connor has remaining to pass on to you either. Just remember that the New Pattern Army fights dirty, and that you've your house's honour to carry with you.'

Purity looked around. The corpses of Kyorin's murderers might have been cleared away, but Purity could still feel the slats' lingering malevolence. 'I wish Oliver would come back. He seems to know what I am, to recognize the thing inside me.'

'Let him stay away, now,' pleaded the commodore. 'A day, a week, a month is good and a year would be better still. You've got parliament's warrant sitting on your escaped head to think about. That lad with his wicked brace of pistols draws trouble to him like wasps to a picnic. He goes off to visit the Court of the Air and the whole place comes tumbling down like a pack of cards. I could tell you tales of that lad, Purity Drake, and all the trouble he's got me into before now. Stumbling around the undercity and the sewers of Middlesteel, pursued by vicious killers. Marching across the fields of Rivermarsh while shiftie lancers tried to run my proud chest through with their steel and our own airships rained fin-bombs about my head. If it hadn't been for my quick grasp of military matters directing the armies of the Kingdom of Jackals and the Steammen Free State, why, our nation would be a conquered province of Quatershift and we'd be nodding at each other in the street with a hello compatriot, this, and a how do you do, compatriot, that. Yes, that strange lad you're so keen to see again is fine for getting us into terrible scrapes, but it's old Blacky that everyone has to turn to to get us out of them.'