The Rise of the Iron Moon (8 page)

Drawing his club from his belt, the crusher waved the cosh at the vagrant’s face while his pistol stayed firmly pointed up towards Purity. ‘Back to the jinn house with you, you damn drunken fool, or you’ll know the why of it from me.’

‘I have not been drinking,’ insisted the vagrant. ‘Can you not see this child is pure? Is this how you honour your sages?’

‘No, this is how we do it at Ham Yard.’ The crusher swung the cosh towards the vagrant’s head and the thing inside Purity’s skull told her to leap. She did, the policeman catching the movement out of the corner of his eye and triggering the hammer on his pistol. As a storm of smoke blew out of the pistol, Purity felt as if she was frozen in amber within the air. The ball exited the barrel with a crack of broken crystal. The vagrant had raised both of his hands – not to ward off the cosh, though – a wheel of air detonated out of his outstretched fingers. Followed by another and another, the policeman slapped off his feet and falling into the railings, Purity rolling in the air with the backdraft of the strange energy force, pushed out of the path of the ball. She landed down on the square’s flagstones as nimble as a cat. This was a vagrant? If so, he was the sort who must have studied the sorcery of the worldsong at some point; he had surely mastered the magic of the leylines. Purity heard redcoats shouting from the palace grounds behind, running towards the sound of the pistol shot.

‘Come,’ called the vagrant, beckoning Purity to follow him.

No time to slide the unconscious policeman’s boots off, not that they would have fitted her. Pity, a crusher walking the beat every day would have some pair of boots.

‘Other keepers of your law are approaching, they will come after you.’

He had that right. Purity Drake on the run from the Royal Breeding House, a political officer lying dead in her wake. They were going to keep on coming after her until they had her kicking at the end of a gallows rope. She looked at her odd saviour. There was something wrong with the vagrant’s face, as if the proportions were out of balance, the hair too stiff, like feathers on a bird. The voice in her skull was undecided about him, but Purity was out of options.

‘Thank you for saving me,’ Purity wheezed as the pair of them fled into the side lanes.

‘I have done you no great favour, I fear,’ said the vagrant. He was fast on his feet for someone living on the street; Purity was having trouble keeping up. ‘You should leave my presence, there are people pursuing me far more dangerous than the keepers of your law.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Purity. ‘Hey!’ She had just realized how unnatural the vagrant she was running with actually was. ‘You’re speaking without moving your lips. Am I on the skip with a theatre act?’

He slowed down, his eyes blinking. ‘No, I am not one of your city’s stage players; I am a visitor. I have travelled down to your kingdom from the north.’

A foreigner, she should have guessed. Perhaps she could slip out of the country with him, back to his land. Jackals was never going to be safe for her again. By tomorrow, her blood code sigils would be printed on an arrest warrant hanging in every police station from Middlesteel to the border. The full horror of the future she had opened up for herself dawned on her.

‘They couldn’t see it,’ said the foreigner. They had fled deep enough into the tenements to catch their breath briefly.

She looked at him quizzically.

‘Your purity. You walk with the power of your land.’

She gazed down at her bare feet, standing in a puddle of stagnant rainwater in the rookery alley. ‘I walk with no shoes, sir, and that’s just what they call me. They call me Purity.’

‘I am called Kyorin.’

‘You’re a strange one, Kyorin, but with the way things have been going for me lately, I’m not much of a one to talk. Do all your country’s people speak by throwing their voices like a stage act?’

‘Not all of them,’ said Kyorin. ‘The ones who are coming after me would be more interested in eating me than conversing with me.’

‘Circle be damned, you say?’ Purity looked at her saviour’s oddly angled face. From the north, the far north perhaps? The polar barbarians were said to practise cannibalism, but this queer fish didn’t even have a beard, let alone a fur-shafted axe with him.

‘It is true,’ insisted Kyorin.

‘Well, Jackals is full of refugees. You’re one kind, Kyorin, and now I’m another. A royalist on the run, like old King Reuben hiding in the forest from parliament’s rebel redcoats.’

Kyorin bent down to examine Purity’s feet. ‘Your connection to the land, it is consuming for one so young. Have you yet experienced the visions of a sage?’

What was the point of lying to this vagrant, this shambling exiled witch doctor? Whatever arts of the worldsong he held to, he had the measure of her, all right. ‘I thought it was madness. Everyone in the house did.’

‘And so it is,’ smiled Kyorin. ‘But it is a glorious sort of madness. You are a conduit for the soul of your land, nourished by the leylines. It is no wonder I felt myself drawn to your presence. I can feel the power within you, it is very strong.’

‘You are a witch doctor then?’ said Purity. ‘What you did to that crusher who was going to put a bullet in me …’

‘I am not permitted to take life,’ said Kyorin. ‘It is not my people’s way. I merely disorientated your keeper of laws to prevent a worse crime being committed.’

‘Best you don’t try that line on a magistrate here,’ said Purity. ‘You’d get a boat to the colonies or the rope for helping me escape.’

In the far distance there was a whistle from a policeman’s Barnaby Blow. A pickpocket diving into the rookeries to escape justice, or were the police on their trail again? Time to be moving on. Purity looked about the narrow passage, branching out into shadowy lanes that didn’t even have old-style oil-fed lamps, let alone the new-style gas ones. Not a place to be hiding after dark. What did Purity know of Middlesteel’s geography? Depressingly little. Only what she had seen of the capital while being marched around on a handful of routes by her guards. Hiding inside the Royal Breeding House, that she could do. The other children had taken enough lumps out of her hide that there weren’t many nooks and crannies in the old fortress on the outskirts of the capital that she didn’t know like the back of her hand.

‘Do you have any money?’ asked Purity.

Kyorin took out a bag-like pocket book and jangled it. ‘I had more yesterday, but I lack the means to replicate additional Jackelian tokens of exchange now.’

‘Well, I’ve got a five-hundred-year-old act of parliament that forbids me to hold property and chattels in my name, so you’re looking pretty flush to me. My mother told me once that if I ever needed a safe place to stay, the flop houses in the east of the city don’t ask too many questions.’

Kyorin sniffed at the wind. ‘The keepers of your law are coming after us. We should leave here.’

‘That’s a handy nose.’

‘It is the hunters from my land that we must fear. Come …’

The two of them fled deeper into the heart of Middlesteel.

Harry Stave pulled out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the pinprick of blood away from his finger, the transaction engine drum on the blood machine in the doorway rattling on a set of loose bearings as his identity was successfully matched to the record on the shop’s files. The Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard, where Middlesteel’s secrets were hoarded and sold, although very few of Dred Land’s customers were aware that the shop was a station house for the Court of the Air. Its proprietor a
whistler
, in the parlance of the great game the various intelligence agencies of the continent’s states played against each other.

If Harry’s two companions – so traditional in their long-tailed coats and stovepipe hats, tailored in black and starched to perfection – were surprised by the appearance of the shambling, mute steamman that greeted them as the door opened, they did not show it. Harry smiled, the two crows stepping inside behind him, laconic and hardly taken aback by this obviously human-milled automaton, an expensive toy in comparison to the creatures of the metal that came down from the mountains of the Steammen Free State. A form of labour that was never going to take off, not while the race of man lounged unemployed in vast numbers across the capital’s slum districts, breeding and fighting and breeding some more.

They were good, Harry’s two crows, the Court of the Air’s finest, their presence underlying how unsettled things had become upstairs. Not even fazed when Dred Lands appeared, his silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins covering his terrible wounds; opening up the basement entrance to the duke’s hole and taking them down to the concealed rooms underneath his shop. But what was on the table now was enough to pierce even their laconic detachment.

‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it, Harry?’ said Dred Lands. ‘My informer came up trumps when she fished that floater out of the river.’

‘You’re as good as my word, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘I told the Advocate General when she gave me the nod for this job. It’ll be Dred that comes up with the goods first. And you haven’t disappointed, no you haven’t.’

‘Not really my area of expertise,’ said Dred, indicating his primitive iron drones moving about behind the steam-fogged glass of his underground orchard room. ‘But you don’t have to be a butcher to appreciate a nice piece of roast beef on Circleday.’

‘Don’t you worry about butchers,’ said Harry. ‘I brought my own.’

‘Sharp tailoring,’ said Dred, moving aside as Harry’s two crows got to work. ‘Very sharp.’

Running his hands over the wet corpse, the shorter of the two agents murmured in appreciation, pushing at the skin and the bones like a doctor trying to diagnose an inflamed chest.

‘Worth the trip down?’ asked Harry.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the shorter of the two crows. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open, revealing dozens of tools fastened to the lining with straps – bone saws, scalpels, hammers that could crack open ribs.

Harry shook his head. ‘Not here. We’ll take him back upstairs and do it properly.’

Dred nodded in thanks to Harry. As he might. Dred’s iron drones would have been scrubbing for days to remove the blood if the two crows had gone for a full dissection down in his bolthole.

‘Then I am done here.’ The crow looked at his companion. ‘Mister Shearer?’

‘Thank you, Mister Cutter.’ The second crow ran his hands along the body a couple of inches above the burnt flesh. He hummed an incantation to the worldsong, the air crackling with energy, vortexes of dancing witch-light snapping in and out of existence above the body.

‘What about his mind?’ asked Harry. ‘Can you go for a reading? His last memories?’

‘No,’ said the crow, through the gritted teeth of concentration. ‘Not even I can do that. He’s been cold for far too long. One thing I can tell you, though, his death was not an accident. There is an aura of great distress imprinted across the residue of his soul.’

Harry hadn’t been expecting anything else. ‘How far off the map are we, then?’

‘Let me show you,’ said the crow. ‘Mister Cutter …’

‘Mister Shearer?’

‘Cleaning fluid, seven strength.’

The other crow reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle, a line of sigils printed in transaction engine code the only markings on its label. Taking the bottle and carefully pouring it onto the corpse’s face, the crow rubbed the cheek gently with a cloth. As he rubbed, the pink skin changed colour, the dye running off, revealing a light powder blue underneath.

‘Bloody Circle,’ said Dred Lands, peering in for a closer look. ‘A blue man!’

‘And not from the cold of the river, eh, Mister Cutter?’

‘Certainly not, Mister Shearer. He’s been painted to fit in with the people of Jackals. All very theatrical.’

‘Not from the race of man?’ asked Harry.

‘No, nor from any of our ancestral tree’s offshoots,’ said the crow. ‘His muscles and skeletal groupings bear no relation at all to craynarbian or grasper physiology.’

‘From one of the other continents, then?’ said Harry. ‘Lots of odd creatures and races out down Thar-way. And our colonists have only explored a small part of Concorzia.’

Lifting the lips of the blue man and running a finger down the teeth, the crow indicated the stubby molars. ‘Look, flat. No edges to the teeth, no canines at all. This creature is a plant eater. I can sense more than one stomach inside his belly, maybe as many as five, all interconnected. He wouldn’t have been able to nibble so much as a ham roll for lunch without becoming violently sick from indigestion.’

‘A plant eater,’ murmured Dred Lands, looking down at the corpse. ‘I knew there was a reason why he was bleeding green blood when my informant brought him down here.’

Mister Cutter ran his hand fondly through the dead creature’s hair. ‘Yes. A plant eater. I think he would have been non-violent by nature. Peaceful.’

Harry lifted up the blackened sleeve of the corpse’s jacket. ‘Burnt up, then drowned. If it was peace he wanted, he should have buggered off out of Jackals.’

‘You know more about this than you let on when you tipped me off, don’t you?’ said the owner of the Old Mechomancery Shop.

‘Ask no questions and be told no lies.’

‘Harry, I’m the chief whistler in the capital, I need to know what’s going on here!’

‘Someone has been sniffing around, and not one of the usual suspects, either,’ explained Harry. ‘One of the Greenhall engine-room men on our payroll found something nasty turning on their drums, not a natural information daemon evolved from legacy code like they’re used to dealing with. Rummaging around the Board of the Admiralty’s drums it was, but it didn’t know we had a sentry on the Court of the Air’s own backdoor watching it breaking in. The daemon erased itself when our man tried to isolate it for examination.’

‘If they got that far into our transaction engines, then they’re sharp,’ said Dred Lands. ‘Very sharp indeed. You know how many checks a punch card goes through before it’s injected into the Greenhall engine rooms. And the Admiralty drums are the most secure in the whole civil service. Which makes it doubly unlikely that our dead friend here is an agent of the Commonshare’s Committee of Public Security.’