Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

'Aren't you going to light the shop, lad?'

'Short of oil, that's so, damson.'

It was then that Purity heard a knocking outside the cobbler's shop front, someone tapping on the window panes. Had Ganby or one of the others come back to fetch her? She was about to rise to see just who it was when a wet, sickly-sweet rag was pushed down on her face, her head yanked back.

Purity struggled against the foul stench to reach her sword for a couple of seconds before blackness overtook her.

In one of the Wainsmouth warehouses, two thugs wearing the ill-fitting uniforms of county constables stepped over slumped bodies. Some were spilled across the long pine tables, others fallen off the benches onto the stone floor. The collapsed refugees were being pulled unceremonially through a door at the back like sacks of grain and dumped on the flatbed of the first of the carts waiting outside.

'I thought this one was going to start creating for a moment,' said the thug, pointing to Jenny Blow's body sprawled across the chest of Samuel Lancemaster. 'Look at her brown marsh leathers. Bloody bogtrotter, acting as if she's some grand lady. Sniffing at her plate like the meat has gone off.'

'What's been added to the food doesn't have an odour,' said his friend. 'Ain't the chief cleverer than that? I think she was sniffing at the meat in the pot.'

One of their workers was bending over to get a grip on a body and the thug lashed out with his boot, catching the worker in his stomach and sending him rolling winded into a bench. 'Get about it, you dogs. Faster, less you want to join these 'uns in the butcher's store. There's plenty more fresh fodder waiting outside the walls to come in.'

Purity's eyes blinked open. They felt swollen and itchy but she couldn't reach them with her hands, couldn't even see her limbs. She was lying horizontal in total darkness inside a crate so narrow her arms lay pinned down alongside her ribs, unable to twist an inch. Claustrophobia swept in. She didn't even have the purchase to kick at the walls with her bare feet, or thump at the roof pressed tight down on her forehead.

Something snapped inside her and Purity gave herself to wild panic, thrashing and screaming in the darkness.

Sandwalker had taken something like a brick out of his pack, and placed it on the floor of the tent. Glowing orange, the heating block pushed back the chill of the freezing desert night with a circulating warmth that belied the frosty atmosphere under the silk-like canvas. Along with the silence from Keyspierre, the reek of the canal haunted Molly. Had the pollutants infused Molly's clothes or was it merely the memory of the canal persisting in her nostrils, along with the vision of Jeanne disappearing in the sudden fire-flash, the siren on her barge silenced as pieces of it ricocheted off Kaliban's mighty canal works?

Molly broke the quiet. 'You've not spoken of Jeanne since we climbed out of the canal.'

'What is there to say?' remarked Keyspierre, rubbing tiredly at his stubble. 'She died to save us, so that we might reach this great sage of the Kal. She put the preservation of the Commonshare of Quatershift before her own life – as I would expect any good compatriot from my nation to do, as I would do myself.'

'You're a cold one, Keyspierre,' said the commodore. 'She was your daughter, man, your blood. Would you not have done anything for her?'

'Do not presume to tell me how to grieve for one of my own,' said Keyspierre.

'One of your own, perhaps,' said Coppertracks, the steamman – sitting furthest from the heat of the brick while he generated his own warmth from his furnace. 'But not your blood, I believe. Her iris shared about as many inheritance vectors with your eyes as it did with the scratches on my vision plate. She was not your daughter, dear mammal. Now that she is dead I think you owe her – and us – the truth.'

Duncan Connor sat bolt upright at the news. 'I kenned it. There was something not quite right about the pair of you numpties from the start.'

'You know nothing of me,' snapped Keyspierre.

'I know that you are no scientist,' said Coppertracks, the steamman's voicebox becoming uncharacteristically firm. 'Your understanding of the gunnery project at Highhorn was the superficial sort I would expect to come from a potted briefing on wave mechanics. And aboard Lord Starhome you didn't know one end of a fully functioning circuit magnetizer from another.'

'You're just an informer, aren't you?' accused Molly. 'A shiftie stooge sent to keep an eye on your scientists at the Highhorn project?'

'Is that how highly you think the Commonshare values the survival of its citizenry?' said Keyspierre, sadly. 'That it would dispatch a menial merely to spy on its scientists' fraternization with your Jackelian friends? You are wrong! I am a colonel attached to Committee Eight of the People's Commonshare of Quatershift, charged with ensuring the success of our mission to Kaliban at any cost. At any cost.'

'So then, the wolves have been let out to run free.' The commodore sucked in his breath. 'Your kind I've heard tell of before. Seven central committees operating under the rule of the first, and the eighth that doesn't officially exist at all. You're a wheatman is what you are, as bad as any of the dirty agents from the Court of the Air.'

'A typical Jackelian mangling of our tongue,' said Keyspierre. 'It's huit, you dolt.'

'A secret policeman by any name,' said the commodore. 'Ah, poor young Jeanne. I did not know you for what you were.'

'She was a loyal servant of the Commonshare. Her real name was Jeanne de la Motte-Valois, a compatriot lieutenant attached to Committee Eight.'

Commodore Black suddenly leapt at Keyspierre, landing a punch on the shiftie's chin and sending them both sprawling, the intelligent fabric of the tent trying to reflect their forms back at them as they flailed and rolled under one of the brace poles. Only Duncan Connor was strong enough to haul the u-boat man off Keyspierre, pulling the commodore away as he tried to land a boot in the Quatershiftian's face.

'Jared!' Molly shouted, shocked by her friend's sudden explosion of violence. 'What in the name of the Circle do you think you're doing?'

'Why don't you ask this wicked wheatman,' spat the commodore. 'Ask him about the Quatershiftian aristocrats who escaped with their lives to Jackals but without their children. Tell us about your secret police's schools, Keyspierre, where wheatmen stole the young from the revolution's death camps, training and honing the ones who were strong enough to survive to become fanatics to serve your cause.'

'The job of the people is to serve the people,' said Keyspierre. 'Would you rather I had left Jeanne to die in a camp? She was young enough to be re-educated. She didn't deserve to be condemned for the accident of her noble birth any more than our gutter children deserved to be left to starve outside the gates of the Sun King's palace. And I'll take no lessons on how to treat aristocrats from a Jackelian. Jeanne lived as a productive sentinel of the Commonshare; my people never kept her as a living archery target to be trotted out for a stoning every time parliament needed a distraction.'

'I can see there's aristocratic blood in your veins,' said Commodore Black, 'because you're a royal bastard right enough. She was never your daughter to take.'

'You insult me! She was a daughter of the revolution,' said Keyspierre. 'One who gave her life to keep your useless carcass walking through the desert. And after this is over-' Keyspierre patted the knife tucked under his belt '-I shall demonstrate to you how very foolish it is to strike a ranking colonel of the people's brigades. What is it you call it in the kingdom, grass before breakfast?'