The Rise of the Iron Moon

The sea beast snarled, revealing its white fangs, and spat something at her in a language full of whistles and guttural stops, a language that was made to carry underwater. Purity didn’t need a translator to know it was a curse of the deepest kind. The gill-neck reached for a razor-sharp blade strapped to its forearm and she squeezed the trigger on the trident, a stream of energy shooting from its prongs and burning a hole in the beast’s chest. The beast was still shuddering its last breath when she whirled the trident around, releasing a whip of energy across a line of the corpse’s kin wading out of the sea and trying to break through the warriors defending her beautiful white cliffs.

‘I am Elizica, Elizica of the Jackeni. Drive them back! Drive the gill-necks back into the water!’

Snap.

‘Into the water, into the water.’

The Toad was dragging her off the prone form of Officer Pushy. ‘Stop it, you mad little cow. You’ll put his brains across the floor, you will.’

Outside the railings the policeman was laughing. ‘She can take a slap and give one back.’

‘I’ll see you get a flogging for this, you little—’

Purity stopped struggling, the terrible realization of what she had done sinking in. The sudden strangeness of modern Middlesteel replaced the vision of the ancient battle at the beach. The knock of the atmospheric station’s steam engines in the distance, the shadows of the pneumatic towers lengthening as the sun emerged from behind heavy rain clouds. She’d struck a political officer, struck him down unconscious by the looks of it. What would they do to her now? How much was her rare, wild, mad royal blood worth to parliament after such a vicious assault?

‘You’ll pay for this, you—’ The Toad was bending down over his colleague, touching two fingers to the man’s neck. ‘He’s dead! Oh, jigger my soul, how am I going to explain this one to the colonel? He’s dead.’

‘But I only knocked him to the ground, how can he be bloody dead?’

The Toad drew his pistol from his holster, slipping a crystal charge into its breech. ‘You broke his nose, drove the bone right back into his head. It’s a murder trial for you now, girl, no two ways about it.’

A trial! Purity looked at Officer Pushy desperately, as if she could will the dead guard back to life with the seeming ease that she had brained him. She couldn’t even remember doing it. A death. A trial. The state always turned a blind eye to deaths inside the Royal Breeding House – but only among the royalists. One more or one less in the breeding pool was just natural wastage. But a guard, not even a redcoat, but an officer, an agent of the political police? Purity had been eleven when they took Jeffers away, the wild boy, a duke’s son who’d knifed a soldier on the ramparts as he tried to escape from the breeding house one night. They didn’t allow much reading material in the Royal Breeding House, but they had allowed the copy of the MiddlesteelIllustrated News that had carried the front-page cartoon of Jeffers being hanged outside Bonegate, the crowds howling their rage at the royalist murderer. Would Purity’s end be any more dignified when they dragged her to the scaffold and slipped a noose around her neck? She didn’t even have the customary coin to bribe the guards to jump on her legs and pull her feet to make it quick for her.

The Toad licked his lips nervously. The man’s position wasn’t that different from hers now. Justifying this calamity, on his damn watch, back to his masters in the state was going to be no small matter.

‘I want his boots,’ sobbed Purity.

‘What?’ the Toad levelled his pistol at Purity, unsure if he needed it. Was she the girl they pushed around at the Royal Breeding House or was she the young wolf who had just killed his colleague?

‘I’m going to bloody swing for this,’ said Purity. ‘At least let them kill me wearing his boots. I can pad them out with paper and cloth; they’ll fit me fine, you’ll see.’

‘You’re mad,’ growled the Toad. ‘Mad as a bloody biscuit. When they take you to the scaffold they’ll be putting you out of your misery.’

Toad-face needed her alive to bear the punishment for this; the man wasn’t going to shoot her now. Purity knelt to untie the dead guard’s laces, but the voice in her skull returned, the woman’s voice she had heard on the beach. Bare feet are conscious of the land. They feel the bones ofJackals, connect with the blood of the world. You will knowwhen the time is right for shoes.

‘The blood of the world.’

‘Get away from his boots, you babbling nutter. You’re not even fit to touch him.’ The Toad grabbed a bunch of hair at the back of Purity’s head and yanked her to her feet.

She let him have the hair. Ignoring the pain, she seized his wrist and rotated the arm so he had to fall to his knees, kicking the pistol out of his other hand with her rigid toes. ‘The bones of Jackals.’

‘My bloody bones!’ the Toad screamed as his arm stretched close to breaking point.

Purity released her grip and spun around on the ball of her left foot, smashing the Toad’s face with her right sole. Bare, calloused, Purity’s foot was every bit as tough as shoe leather. Catching the falling body she rammed the Toad against the palace railing, jamming his head between two bars. It was like watching one of the crude plays the children in her dorm put on for each other back in the Royal Breeding House. Although here she was the audience and the actor both – but with every movement her actions felt more and more like her own volition, not the ancient thing whispering in her mind. She even knew why she had rammed the Toad’s head through the railing, stepping back, running at him – a human vaulting horse. A quick jump. Her hands dug into the metal between the palace railings’ sharpened ornamental spikes, hauling her weight up.

Purity saw the crusher with his pistol drawn below, the old constable stunned by the murderously quick turn of events on the other side of the palace gates. ‘Gentle as you like, girl, back onto the ground with you.’

Purity’s shared, knowing vision noted the gun’s clockwork firing mechanism, the hammer cocked back behind the crystal charge, its fluid explosive sloshing around inside the shell, the curve of her arc down at him and the insignificant chance his ball might miss at such close range.

‘Please don’t!’ The voice distracted the crusher. A vagrant, his clothes dirty and torn, his mind probably too raddled to do anything but be drawn closer to the centre of the action rather than scatter and run like all the other panicked citizens in the square were presently doing.

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.’