Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

A figure emerged out of the sand haze, like a sketch from the Middlesteel Illustrated News. A pieman opening his barrow to expose the hot charcoals at the bottom of his iron box.

'I don't want hog's pudding,' heaved Molly as the seller indicated his fare.

Molly screamed. It was Purity Drake's head lying inside the pie-seller's barrow, human limbs piled alongside. The slats, the slats were devouring Purity, consuming everything Molly cared about in the kingdom.

The lines of the pieman's sketch danced and reformed into Keyspierre's face. He was shaking her. 'Compatriot!'

'The pieman's fare,' said Molly. 'It was human meat.'

'Your line, compatriot.'

Molly looked down. The guide cable she was holding was smoking at the end, unconnected to the rest of the expedition. That last lightning strike must have sheared it. Sweet Circle, she was alone with Keyspierre, the others blundering ahead somewhere in the sand haze, still following on behind Sandwalker.

Molly slipped out her knife. 'Purity was trying to warn me.'

Keyspierre stepped out of the way as Molly lunged at him, the blade passing through the space his chest had been occupying a second ago. 'Not going to cook me, not going to chew on my ribs, you jigging shiftie scum!'

'You've lost your mind, woman!' Keyspierre caught Molly's wrist and moved to one side, twisting her around and making the knife fall out of her hand; but she had seen what he was doing and had slipped the treacherous Quatershiftian agent's own blade out of his belt with her other hand. She slashed at him with it, cutting his arm, then tossed the knife into her right hand and went for his gut before he could register the switch. He wanted to cook her flesh, but it was going to be his organs lying spilled on the sands. Then she was tumbling through the air. The damn secret policeman had second-guessed her move, converting her movement into a – she thumped down hard on the sand, Keyspierre's weight smashing onto her back before she could get up.

Keyspierre pushed Molly's face down into the blanket of sand, his left hand reaching around to encompass her neck, strangling her. Choking sand spilled into her mouth and she tasted salty grit as she lost consciousness. Salt. Salt to season Molly for the fire the Quatershiftian agent was going to cook her flesh over.

Purity was dragged along the damp dripping length of the sea fort's dungeon level, the old supply cellars fastened with iron chains around the doors, faces of human produce pressed up against the bars or sprawled inside, paralysed by the criminally insane doctor's drugs. That was one thing you could say about an army of convicts, they knew how to lock down tight the unfortunates who were to be the slats' fodder.

Purity could feel her throat swelling, the muscles burning around her neck, growing increasingly numb as the poison the chief had stuffed into her worked its bile inside her.

'Shall we toss her in with the sailors from the Spartiate?' one of Purity's escorts asked the turnkey.

'No, chief wants the crew kept to themselves, in case we turn up some fuel later. Chuck her in with the rest of the meat.'

'She won't be shipping out with the Army of Shadows,' explained the guard, twisting Purity's arm further behind her back to stop her from thrashing. 'She's only got until the end of the hour. She's been "cured" right enough by him upstairs.'

'Best we keep her fresh, then.' The turnkey beat a rifle butt against the door's bars, making the few prisoners that were on their feet retreat in fear. 'Back, you vermin. You might be dinner, but we've got dessert here, and we'll be wanting her out again in a bit.'

Watt and Cam Quarterplate were being shoved along the corridor a few steps behind Purity.

'When my friend opens the dungeon door, you point out your ma, just as quick as you like,' threatened the appren-tice's guard, waving a knife in front of the two cobblers. 'Otherwise you'll find out what else this is good for cutting off before you croak.'

'But my ma's your wife, that's so,' spat Watt, who had taken some lumps on the way down the sea fort's steps himself. 'My dad gave her a little of the hey-jiggerty while you were locked inside Bonegate Gaol.'

Watt was slammed against the wall and the guard was about to make good on his threat, but Purity was close enough to Cam Quarterplate now. She gestured in the air and her maths-blade leapt out of the steamman's vertical stack, her sword glowing white-hot from the superheated exhaust of Quarterplate's boiler heart. There was a brief burning agony as Purity seized the grip before she used its power to transmute the heat into a flash of blinding light. Watt had his eyes closed, and, as agreed, his master had flipped the cover of his vision plate down – but for the guards, that flash was the last thing they were going to see.

Purity hardly needed the part of her that was Elizica of the Jackeni to show her the thrusts and steps of the dance – the feathery burden of the maths-blade curving and twisting and carving. When she was finished, six men lay dead at her feet. It took a second more to direct the sword's force along her own body and isolate the swelling tide of the poison making her throat muscles bloat and turn purple. Her blade passed the chemical signature of the ascomycete toxin through her mind and she twisted at its bonds, snapping the chains of the chemical as easily as if she was breaking a necklace of daises.

Then silence apart from the cries of the seagulls flying on the other side of the fort's thick walls. Outside the dungeon door the two cobblers were staring at Purity in shock. The way she must once have looked at Oliver Brooks, the Hood-o'the-marsh, before the strange young man's existence had been joined with the land and her terrible blade.

'That was vengeance,' said Purity, shaking.

'That much was clear, Purity softbody,' said the steamman.

'How did you know?' asked Watt, looking at the deadguards at his feet in horror. 'How did you know this scum wouldn't send me and old Cam back to the town for turning you in?'

'I had a life of people like the chief telling me what to do,' said Purity, sadly, 'back in the Royal Breeding House. That's just how his kind use power, when they have it.'

'You are the queen,' said Watt, looking at Purity's strange glowing sword. 'Sweet bloody Circle, I don't know whether I should hug you or throw a brick at you.'

'I have the land's blade and the lion's heart,' said Purity. She slashed at the chain securing the dungeon door, sending the thick iron links splashing out in a cloud of liquid metal. 'And my Jackelians are not a people to die quietly as they are dragged to the butcher's block.'

The few prisoners who had recovered from their paralysis fled to the damp walls inside the chamber Purity had forced open. Purity banished the darkness with her sword's fire. And there in the light were the Bandits of the Marsh. She burnt the toxin within their bodies, burnt it inside all the prisoners until they had recovered the use of their limbs, standing up sweating and groggy; or, in the case of the four Bandits of the Marsh, as furious as a swarm of wasps trapped under a cider glass and then released.

Purity looked at her fuming bandits. 'You said back in the valley of the war gas that we didn't have time to sort out the lesser evils on the way to fight the greater one. Do you still feel the same way?'

'You are learning, I think,' coughed Ganby, rubbing life back into his numb legs. 'And not just about the mastery of conversion a maths-blade gives you.'

'You no longer have to ask me,' said Jenny Blow, bending her knee in front of Purity. 'You can now command me.'

'I have had my bellyful of this place,' spat Samuel Lancemaster, pressing on his cuirass and ejecting his knuckle-duster, sending the waking prisoners stumbling back crying in alarm as he extended it out to a spear twice his height. 'I have been conscious for hours, listening paralysed to the cries of sobbing children in the dark and the threats from those honourless cowards outside that dare style themselves brigands.'