Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

Duncan Connor knelt down and examined the glass. 'It's not the spoor of one of the kelpies that live out here, is it?'

'A beast,' said Sandwalker. 'But not a living creature. This is the sand flash left from a lightning strike on the dunes. There is a permanent pizo-electrical storm we call the Beast, but it normally rotates eight hundred miles north of here. The masters' systems are truly failing if the storm has moved so far south.'

Molly tried to break out of line and flee into the haze, but Commodore Black caught her and pulled her back. 'No, lass, that's not our way.'

'Keyspierre wants us to die,' insisted Molly. 'He knew the storm was here. You have seen what his people are capable of, Jared. He wants the great sage's weapon just for Quatershift, not for us. We all have to die.'

'I'll not lighten that secret policeman's reputation,' said Commodore Black, 'but this is your fever speaking, lass. Your imagination is swinging wild on the yardarm with your sickness.'

Why couldn't the commodore see what Keyspierre was doing, was planning to do to them all? He was so dangerous.

'We don't have time for Molly to rest,' said Sandwalker. 'We must be skirting the fringes of the stormfront or we would already be dead. We have to clear the basin and the storm area before we are-'

His words were cut off by a tremendous burst of light in the sand haze, an ozone stench and a sound like a cannon being given the fuse right next to their ears. Coppertracks' sole remaining mu-body was blown apart by the lightning strike, cut in two, sent spinning into the dunes.

A wave of aftershock from the discharge rippled through the sand haze, making the skin along Molly's hand twitch as if someone were pinching it.

They had met the Beast and they were balancing inside its maw.

With a scraping sound, the lid of Purity's crate was wrenched off, blinding her with the sudden flood of light. Pulling her aching body out of the crate, Purity saw she was in a room lit by a solitary gaslight on a circular table. And there! There was the one-legged jigger who had attacked her, accompanied by a steamman, an old four-armed affair wearing a leather apron over his iron chest, hung with hammers, pins, scissors and other tools of the cobbler's trade.

'What-?'

'Quieten down,' said the apprentice boy. 'We had to hide you. There were men looking for you who thought they had seen you come into the shop.'

Purity rubbed at her swollen eyes, the skin of her face red and peeling where the apprentice had drugged her with his rag.

'Leather cleaner,' noted the apprentice. 'As good as a teeth-puller's gas if you're not wearing a cobbler's mask.'

'Or don't have a boiler heart not much subject to the vagaries of atmospheric composition,' said the steamman. 'My name is Cam Quarterplate and this young softbody is my apprentice, Watt.'

'What in the name of the Circle are you doing?' Purity shouted. 'Those men at the front of the shop were my friends.'

'The men who came looking for you weren't the ones you went walking down the hill with, that's so,' said Watt. 'They were the chief's men, damson.'

'Chief?' said Purity. 'What chief? Are you two foot-shodders completely mad?'

'That's what the softbody who now runs the town calls himself,' said Quarterplate, his twin stacks nervously quivering out a trail of smoke, his voicebox set low to a whisper. 'They came out of Middlesteel, a horde of them. Convicts, we think. From Bonegate or one of the other large prisons. Wainsmouth belongs to them now.'

Watt nodded sadly. 'And everyone inside the walls is as good as their slave. Rumours I heard in town say their chief used to be a leech-monger, a doctor who was waiting the rope in Bonegate for poisoning rich patients after the carriage folk had changed their wills to favour him.'

'But there are soldiers outside the gates,' said Purity, shocked, 'and that vast u-boat sitting in your harbour…' 'There are men dressed in uniform outside the gate. Our garrison cleared out months ago with the rest of the army to march east to the war in Quatershift,' said Watt. 'And the chief's brutes took the Spartiate's crew just like they've taken all you refugees. The Spartiate sailed into harbour looking for fuel. Except we haven't got any, of course. If we did, the chief and his men would have seized the u-boat and sailed off to Concorzia like all the bloody guardians did when the capital and parliament fell to the Army of Shadows.'

'This is no free town,' said Cam Quarterplate, the outrage seeping through his voicebox. 'The only freedom we have here is to be made deactivate if we go against the chief. That duplicitous fastblood has made a deal with the slat creatures.'

'Don't you see, damson?' protested Watt. 'We don't have the victuals to feed a tenth of the people who have come to camp outside Wainsmouth's gates. You refugees come here with supplies, the chief's men steal them off you, and then you leave as food. Food and slave labour for the slats. There are not enough of the bloody monsters in Jackals for the Army of Shadows to hunt down everyone yet, but when people on the road hear of our free town and the free feeds down in Wainsmouth's warehouses, they all make their way here readily enough. The slats are licking the bugs off the flypaper in Wainsmouth.'

'Will one of you two please tell me what happened to my friends?'

Watt cast his eyes ashamedly to the floor. 'They've been drugged, damson. Not everyone survives the dose of what they slip in the warehouse food, but them that does is paralysed for about a week. Your friends will be chained up in the sea fort's dungeons. No RAN airships come calling here now, but the Army of Shadows does. Every week, in those ugly hovering aerostats they rattle through the sky in, with nets underneath to carry away all their slaves and meat.'

'It is true,' agreed the steamman.

'But they don't know you're here, damson,' continued Watt. 'They've already searched our shop for you, when you were nailed inside the crate. You're not on the worker count, you won't be missed here. If we can get you out of Wainsmouth… you have to find the people coming here, tell them what will happen to them – spread the truth about the last free town!'

'They'll know I'm here, all right,' said Purity. 'When I free my friends.'

'Don't be stupid, damson,' begged Watt. 'The chief's men are animals. When they stormed the town they made our defenders strip, then they covered our fencibles and the county police in oil and burnt them down in the square like it was bloody Smoking Prester Charles Night, made everyone in the town watch it, too, so we'd know what we'd get if we went against them again. If they catch you, you'll end up just like the people we find floating in the harbour after they've been tossed from the sea fort.'

'Oh, those poor fastbloods,' said Quarterplate, the iron fingers on his four hands flickering in dismay. 'The sounds that drift across from the sea fort at night. It's enough to make one deactivate one's sound baffles. Those poor, poor people.'

'My people,' said Purity.

Watt and Quarterplate ducked as Purity extended her arm and her sword burst out of its sheepskin wrap and flew across the room to wallop into her hand. The cobbler's backroom suddenly did not seem so dark, the light of the maths-blade scouring away the shadows.

'My people!' she yelled.

The man sitting on the old mayoral chair of Wainsmouth had more of the manner of a king than a mayor, even if he had completely failed to dress for the part. He reclined against the cushioned chair-back sporting a tattered officer's uniform looted from the regiments, covered by a sheepskin waistcoat, while a dark stovepipe hat warmed his bald white scalp. At his feet a woman was chained to the floor.