Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Purity spun the blade twice in slow windmill turns, then lashed out at the menhir. At first, just for a second, Purity thought she had missed it, though the Circle knows how she could have done so at such a short distance. No impact, or clatter of steel on rock. Then Purity realized she had not missed her target. The top half of the menhir was sliding down the slope she had carved through it, tumbling to the side with a heavy rumble. As the stone fell away, a volcano fire lifted out of the section still resting on the grass, leaping from rock to rock until the circle of stones was a carousel of flames and light. It was being discharged, all the power of the god-machine. The space between each menhir had become a gate of energy, crackling and shimmering in the cold air and filling the hilltop with a fire-grate warmth. Figures began to step from out of the gates, silhouetted against the burning energy behind them for a moment before it winked out of existence.

‹Hail,› said the voice inside Purity's head. ‹Hail, the Bandits of the Marsh.›

Bandits? Purity glanced around the darkening circle. A handful of figures. Four of them. Three men and one woman. The legends of Elizica of the Jackeni from Coppetracks' books came back to her. Two hundred warriors who had fought to free the land from the invaders from the sea. A sword-saint to lead them. 'Aren't you about one hundred and ninety-six bandits shy?'

‹The sword is only as powerful as your belief, Purity Drake. You should have believed more.›

One of the figures was wearing an archaic metal breastplate with a high steel collar, his hair shorn brutally short like that of a Circlist monk. 'This is the queen? She is but a girl, a shoeless child.'

'We have slept an age,' said the oldest of the bandits, scratching at a scruffy silver beard. 'Under the hills and far away. Would you know her better if she carried a trident, Samuel? Only those with the true blood of Elizica running through their veins may summon us.'

'How much royal blood flows through her flesh, old man? There are only four of us here. Where are all the others?'

'Show some manners,' commanded old Silver-beard.

'Have the gill-necks returned from the ocean?' the monk-like bandit asked of Purity, obviously trying not to snarl out the words.

'No. We face a different invader,' said Purity. 'We've been at peace with the underwater kingdoms for as long as I can remember.'

And she was meant to save Jackals with these four strange-looking anachronisms? Wearing dark marshmen's leathers studded with iron pins. Even two hundred bandits couldn't be considered an army – what could she do with this motley group? Offer to field a damn game of four-poles? Purity sighed. 'The ones attacking us are called the Army of Shadows and they have legions of slave soldiers called slats fighting for them.'

'The enemy always has legions, that is what makes them worth fighting. I am Ganby Meridian,' said the old fellow with the silver beard. 'My three companions here are Jenny Blow, Samuel Lancemaster-' he pointed to the tall, monk-like figure, then indicated the rangy black-faced bandit standing by their side '-and this taciturn fellow is Jackaby Mention. You speak very strange Jackelian, lady. We must have slept longer than we expected. How are you known among your people?'

'Just Purity, Purity Drake. You are truly the Bandits of the Marsh?'

'These three are bandits,' said Ganby Meridian. 'I myself am not fey, although I found myself attached to their outlaw ranks by curious happenstance, being of the noble order of druids before circumstances drove me into the margins of the marsh waters.'

The sole woman in the group sniffed the air. 'It wasn't circumstances; it was a baying mob of your own people, old man. This Army of Shadows, young shoeless queen, do they smell like damp rodent fur, no, like bats…?' 'They don't smell of anything,' said Purity.

'Jenny Blow is never wrong,' noted the bandit Samuel Lancemaster. He pointed outside the stone circle down towards the bottom of the slope. 'Her nose knows.'

Purity saw them. Black shapes, a hunting pack of slats, clicking with their rattlesnake throats and surrounding the base of the hill below. There were dozens of the horrors down there and it had taken all of her friends to slay a small handful of slats back in Tock House. The memory of Kyorin dying in her arms leapt back at her. She and the Bandits of the Marsh were about to discover the difference between the Army of Shadows and the invaders from the sea they had once fought, to experience it very directly indeed.

The old man who claimed to have been a druid appeared frozen in terror at the sight of the slats. 'Always are we outnumbered!' The tall one, Samuel Lancemaster, removed a knuckle-duster-like device from his armour and it extended into a full-sized spear at his touch. The other two bandits seemed content to move by his side, unarmed, while the druid overcame his terror enough to cower behind the hastily formed line.

'But rarely are we outclassed,' Samuel shouted down to the enemy.

‹Your sword,› the voice whispered to Purity. ‹Raise the blade in front of you.›

Death came up the hill at them.

Molly had expected to tumble into the airless certainty of an icy death out in the celestial darks, but instead she found herself colliding with Commodore Black inside the storage chamber at the aft of Lord Starhome.

'This is disgraceful behaviour,' called Coppertracks, his sole drone hanging onto his master's tracks as the treads rotated uselessly in zero gravity. 'You owe your existence on the great pattern to King Steam.'

'You're wasting your breath, now, with him,' said Commodore Black. 'The wicked ship's not in any mood to listen to reason.'

'Him!' said Lord Starhome in haughty revulsion. 'You damn ground huggers couldn't even get my gender right. Can a male give birth?'

Molly halted her drift by kicking off the frame of the looking-glass gate, which was anchored by some unknown force to the deck. Their craft had closed off the holes that it had used to suck them into the hold. Also vanished was the sole door exiting the storage chamber. 'You're saying that you're pregnant?'

'I am cleansing myself. All the components that were forced upon my body by your steammen surgeons, all the abuse you've heaped upon my noble frame, all squeezed out.'

Coppertracks sounded astonished. 'You can self-replicate?'

A porthole formed in the side of the hull, to reveal that the hold where they were trapped was curling out from the main body of the craft like clay being pulled off a potter's wheel, fat globs of living metal falling away into the star-studded darks. 'And you're the cleverest of your kind, steamman? The creators help you!'

'You promised me Kaliban!' Molly shouted at the ship.

'All yours,' said the craft, dipping in a graceful turn and bringing the ugly red eye of Kaliban up to fill the window. 'You're even lined up to hit the upper atmosphere above that hideous stone face you're so keen to visit.'

Rooksby banged angrily on the hold's hull. 'Hit? How are you expecting to land?'

'Oh, but that's rather the thing: I'm not,' came the disembodied voice. 'Look after my soul board. My soul is your burden now.'

Around them the hull started to reform, becoming a sphere, and the porthole showed the bat-like form of Lord Starhome disappearing, a faint nimbus of distorted gravity squeezing the craft away through the aether. Their storeroom had become a lifeboat squeezed off the body of the main ship. Starhome was marooning them!

'You traitorous steamman mongrel,' yelled Rooksby.

'Mamma,' a young female voice echoed around the sphere. 'Please don't leave me. Come back.'

'Oh sweet Circle,' swore Molly.

'There's something big out there, a red sphere, getting larger,' squealed the newly born craft's voice. 'I'm falling into it.'