Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'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.