Stephen Hunt - The rise of the Iron Moon

At the other end of the garden a figure was sitting on a stool in front of a canvas, where the view of the world below was captured almost perfectly. Was this a Kal? The figure turned. He looked like a Jackelian, save that he had to be eight feet tall, a man-mountain rising up from the stool; golden locks curling atop an achingly handsome pink face, his hair bound by a circlet crown bearing a golden helix just above his forehead. Both slats knelt in front of the giant and he spoke to Molly in mind-speech, even though his words were Jackelian. Jackelian? Was he a Kal or not?

'So, this is what a slayer of gods looks like?'

'And my,' said Molly, 'haven't you been eating a lot of beans.'

The giant roared with laughter and wiped his brush on a piece of wet cotton by the easel. 'You think me a Kal? No, little animal, I am what the Kals call a master, the master of all masters in fact.'

A master? Molly looked in shock at the ridiculously striking figure. But this was a man, albeit a giant of a man… 'I've seen the Army of Shadows' masters. They look like squids with great big tentacle limbs.'

'Then you have seen how the masters looked in ancient days, when we were adapted for life in the ocean. Form is a fleeting thing, little pet. We cut our flesh to suit our times. You see before you our original form, one that predates even our aquatic existence. I am magnificent, am I not?'

A trick, they were trying to trick her. But why?

'No,' insisted Molly. 'I saw the masters' council of war, I saw them planning the invasion of my home. The Army of Shadows' masters are octopus-shaped monsters.'

'Council of war?' said the giant, bemused. 'Ah, those mischievous Kal. Who would have thought that our own sheep would one day try to savage us? I shall be quite glad to leave their kind behind. With the appropriate breeding programme in place your people will make far better slaves.'

'This is a ruse,' said Molly.

'To what end, little animal? If the Kal showed you us in our aquatic form, the memory they shared was ancient indeed. And the only invasion they had to show you was not that of your world, it was of their own, the fall of Kaliban.'

'I saw the Army of Shadows' ships leaving Kaliban to attack us!'

'The Kals' memories are as broken as the machine abominations they were once melded with, or perhaps they have not told you and your little band of explorers the truth, for fear you would not prove as pliable as the so-called great sage obviously hoped you would. You have it the wrong way around. The ships you saw weren't leaving Kaliban to attack your world, they were leaving your world to attack Kaliban.'

To attack Kaliban? What was this mad giant talking about? He was clearly an oversized slave gone mad. 'I'd do it now if I could,' said Molly, 'blow your iron moon to pieces. The great sage wouldn't need to trick me into doing it.'

'I believe you would,' smiled the giant. 'But then in your own primitive way you are as much an abomination as the great sage, a symbiote for that revolting little machine spider we sealed inside the world. The Hexmachina. Very cunning, machines that mimic a blood disease pumping inside your veins. Of course, those that share your heritage can't be allowed to breed on.'

'If you're not just a Kal wearing human skin paint, how are you able to communicate using mind-speech?'

The giant tapped the canvas he had been painting. 'A true artist is never afraid to borrow from others, little animal. We took the ability for mind-speech along with memory sharing from the Kals' own blood code. To the victor, the spoils. You stand in the realm of the masters and I am their emperor, Gabraphrim.'

Molly shook her head. What lies had the great sage told her to bring her to this strange green garden high above the Earth? Had any of what he had said been true?

'Well,' said the giant emperor. 'We're going to cut you apart to see the truth of what makes you tick. You may as well enjoy a little of the same courtesy before your infected blood is flowing around our test tubes.'

The emperor clicked his fingers and the two slats shoved Molly after him as he walked to the far side of the chamber, the walls folding back and forming a corridor for him to stride along. Molly followed and they entered another iron chamber, this one filled with figures just as large as the emperor, giant men and women of prodigious beauty. Carpets and pillows covered the cold iron outlines of the room where slats and Kals worked alongside their masters. And there was a single member of the race of man there too: Keyspierre! The treacherous jigger. Molly had shouted the words before she realized she was crying them aloud. The emperor seemed amused by her outburst.

'I will be hailed as the saviour of all of Quatershift when I return,' called Keyspierre to Molly, indicating a cage resting under an iron pillar. 'And see what your people's defiance has earnt Jackals…'

Molly was hardly able to make out the occupant within the cage, which was surrounded by blue-faced Kal women, prodding at it and hissing laughter through their carnivores' fangs. It was Lord Rooksby! The Lord Commercial was stripped naked and looking emaciated. His throat was bound with a metal collar, and he had two feathery wings rising out of his back. Circle's teeth. They had twisted Rooksby's flesh! Made him into a bird-like chimera.

'You have served me well, Keyspierre,' said the emperor. 'But you have yet to pass the final test. To make a reliable governor of your nation you must first be given the gift of the hunger. As for my fine-feathered songbird here, make it sing, little Kals. Make it tweet its foolishness for us. Let us hear its song of how the race of man and the Kingdom of Jackals is destined for mastery of all your pathetic, flat horizons.'

Rooksby hardly needed the cruel urging of the corrupted Kal women. His man-beak twitched and he broke into a cracked song, whistling and capering behind the bars while they poked at him.

The emperor grabbed Molly's face and squeezed it painfully, making her meet his burning red eyes. 'Don't you understand why your kind are perfect as slaves, little animal? Five million years ago we discarded your world with only a few exiles, criminals and dissenters remaining behind. Left it as a farmer leaves a field fallow, for the ecos to recover. You people, with your stunted pathetic little lives over in less than a century, are the crippled mongrel descendants of the criminals who wouldn't accept the changes necessary to live under the oceans, who stayed behind on our old home. Those who lacked the courage to conquer Kaliban after our oceans boiled away.'

Molly pulled away from the emperor's grip. 'No!'

'The ecos always recovers,' said the emperor. 'Given enough time. Life begets life. The bacteria at the world's core breed and multiply, the leylines begin to pulse again. Life rallies and grows and spreads across the surface once more.'

It wasn't true. These giants weren't the race of man's ancestors. Her kind's forefathers hadn't invaded Kaliban, hadn't inflicted the miseries she had seen on Kyorin's home.

'Now you see why the great sage wouldn't trust you with the truth,' laughed the emperor. 'We are you, but better, our flesh reworked across the ages to perfection. But we are from the same seed. You little pygmies are the stunted offspring of the masters. How could you animals possibly kill such magnificent titans as us when we are your very progenitors?'

At last Molly understood. Why the Army of Shadows couldn't just invade the Earth of their era from Kaliban, a world still left dead and burning from the masters' pillages, its ruined, abandoned dunes as dead as any of Kaliban's wastes; why the emperor's people had to travel five million years into the future to find their new harvest. Why there were lashlites flying wild on Kaliban: the lizard people and other creatures brought from Molly's world to Kaliban when the masters crossed the celestial darks.