Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

It hadn't helped that there had been nothing to do in their last safe house but watch the Kals who shared their slag-glass hideaway tending the bean-like things growing on terraces in the central courtyard, fed by a trickle of the water collected from the well each day. The Kals would take almost religious care in trimming the vines and bearing away their visitors' stool pots to empty as manure on the rock basins. A complex array of shutters allowed just the right amount of sun to slant through and warm the beans.

Molly was about to press Laylaydin as to why they were being moved between safe houses when the Kal woman stopped them and pointed down to a street on a lower terrace. A company of slats was moving along in two lines, the beasts at the head riding high in saddles on something that looked like a cross between an eagle and a giraffe, an impossibly long neck surmounted by a wickedly sharp beak. There weren't many Kals out in the bitterly cold hours of the early morning yet, but those that were threw themselves to their knees, not daring to look up at the convoy. Not daring to gaze upon the windowless silver-blue metallic capsule being borne through the streets by seventy naked Kals, keeping the capsule aloft at shoulder height on long ceramic poles.

'It is one of the masters,' whispered Laylaydin, indicating the glow of the hulking domes at the end of the city. 'They hardly ever venture out of their city, now.'

Molly thought of the tentacled, octopus-like monstrosities she had seen in Kyorin's vision, plotting the invasion of her home. She shuddered. Was the master bobbing around in the comfort of the last of the world's water inside that capsule?

'You don't think the masters suspect we're inside Iskalajinn?'

'No,' said Laylaydin. 'That procession is heading out on the road to the travel fields. There are still a few deep-cast mines and facilities scattered across our land with resources not yet stripped.'

Travel fields. Molly looked at the sky, but there was no sign of the leathery globes that the Army of Shadows used instead of airships, ugly windowless spheres suspended under rapidly spinning metal blades.

'If they knew we were here, compatriot Templar,' said Keyspierre, 'we would be dead.'

'Or worse,' said Laylaydin. 'Yet you almost sound approving of their efficiency.'

Keyspierre shrugged. 'Efficiency is always to be admired, wherever it is found.'

Laylaydin snorted. 'Between them, the masters and their slat pets have gnawed the last of the meat from our land's bones. That is efficiency of a kind. But I pity it and I shall save my admiration for more worthy endeavours.'

'Well said, damson,' Lord Rooksby agreed. 'They are our enemy, Keyspierre, and it is the bones of our people back home they're busy devouring.'

'Quite,' said Keyspierre, looking knowingly at his daughter as they kept to the shadows of the empty street. 'And I have seen nothing since we arrived in this heat-blasted land fit to help us shake their seeming supremacy.'

'Kyorin thought otherwise,' said Molly.

'An escaped slave,' laughed Keyspierre. 'Who lacked even the means to return home save for the ingenuity of the Commonshare and our cannon.'

'Be quiet!' snapped Laylaydin. 'You don't know what you speak of.' Seeing that those she was leading were taken aback by the shattering of her usual serenity, she added, 'Kyorin was my life mate, an illegal union made outside of the masters' breeding laws. The slats took our children, and now he is gone from me too.'

Molly was nearly lost for words. 'I'm sorry.'

'In the normal course of things his last memories would have been shared with me,' said Laylaydin. 'For all of the masters' breeding strictures, they still have not managed to entirely eliminate our higher powers from the blood line.'

Molly bit her lip. No wonder she had detected a resentful edge to the way Laylaydin dealt with her. 'Kyorin died well in my land.'

'There are no good deaths,' said Laylaydin, 'only bad ones, only the release of our pain. My people's time here is nearly done.'

Laylaydin ushered them into the igloo-like entrance of one of the highest houses nestling against the great carving. Rooms had been blown like bubbles inside the slag-glass building, floors softened by the brightly patterned carpets Molly had seen female Kals weaving using threads stripped off their bean plants. At the end of the house one of the carpets hanging tapestry fashion across the wall was pulled back to reveal a tunnel. A passage burrowing into the great face of Kaliban. The rough-hewn excavation ran only a short way through the structure before joining a series of conduits that had perhaps, once, channelled water to the hanging gardens outside. A trail of fluorescent arrows was marked on the walls of the sluice system and the group followed the long-dry passages to the edge of a precipice. Steps led down to a vast chamber lit by hanging lamps, ancient pumping machines and water filtering equipment lying derelict around its edges. Circular drain holes marked the walls of the chamber at head height, hundreds of dark pipes staring back at them. The floor of this cavern hidden inside the Face of Kaliban was dotted with Kals, some eating fruit at long tables formed by stone slabs, others reading, or sitting cross-legged in circles, humming and meditating.

'This is the heart of the resistance,' announced Laylaydin. 'Many of those here are criminals with slat destruction orders hanging over them. Some are deserters who refused to assist the slats with the invasion of your land. Others are merely sympathizers drawn to our aims.'

'This?' said Keyspierre, looking around the nearly silent empty space in derision. 'This is your revolution? Surely this is a joke – where are your sabres, your weapon smiths, your bomb makers? Where is the training in arms being conducted? The lessons in assassination?'

'We resist in our own way, not in yours.'

Keyspierre looked indignant. 'Please do not lecture me on the ways of revolution, compatriot. Before the tyranny of the Sun King was swept away by the forces of our glorious commonshare, I survived two years on the run from the king's secret police as a Carlist subversive. This, compatriot, is not how you cut off the oppressor's hand.'

'Nor do you defeat your masters by becoming them,' retorted Laylaydin. 'Our land was very different from yours before the occupation and the coming of the masters. We had few meat eaters in the geographic record of our world. The pattern of our ecos was based on a vast network of elaborate cooperating systems that straddled the land. We had no word for violence, none for murder or crime.'

'The perfect commonshare,' said Jeanne in reverence.

'And its end the perfect tragedy,' said Keyspierre. 'But you have since been taught the concept of cruelty well enough from the Army of Shadows. We travelled here to find allies, not sheep willing to step meekly up to the farmer's knife.'

'You came because of the rumours that the great sage has a way of defeating the masters,' said Laylaydin. 'But first we would know that you are fit to receive it.' Laylaydin indicated the largest of the circles of sitting natives to Molly. 'Your friends' weak minds could not survive our sharing, but your mind is different, Molly Templar.'

'I have machines in my blood,' said Molly, sitting down in a place that had been made for her. 'I was an operator of the Hexmachina, the last of my land's god-machines.'

'It is said that our own veins once bubbled with such machine-life,' said Laylaydin. 'But the masters feared our longevity, quick minds and the other abilities our machines gave us, and burnt all traces of the life metal from our bodies. We are mere shadows of our ancestors now, cripples bred into cattle to sate the appetites of the masters' slat armies.'

'But you can still share memories with each other.'