The Hexmachina’s voice carried as an echo across the space. ‘No, Molly, this threat is not something that I was designed to defend against. My pursuers are operating firmly across our level of reality, and they know the fabric of the world as well as I do myself. This is a force manipulating the channels of earthflow, sabotaging the leylines, turning my own techniques and cunning against me. They are masters at it.’

‘But you must be close,’ pleaded Molly, ‘I can see you, hear you. Rise to the surface and I can pilot you. Together we can—’

‘No, I am far from your location. I created a channel between us within your mind, Molly, before we took our leave of each other after the last war. When you were the only operator left alive in Jackals.’

‘There are others born with the gift now, operators other than me?’

Hovering above the shiny material of the sphere, the child’s face nodded in confirmation. ‘Hundreds have passed through their age of puberty in the years that have passed, those who share the blood of your distant kin. But while the blood of those that can pilot me is carried by a new generation, they may soon not have a craft left to direct.’

The white expanse trembled, distortions washing through it like waves. Molly fell over. As she picked herself up, she saw that the facsimile of the Hexmachina was being absorbed slowly into the ground, the featureless white plain that bore their weight becoming an albino quicksand.

‘Stay back,’ shouted the Hexmachina as Molly ran towards the god-machine. ‘The purpose of this mental construct is to allow us to communicate without your position being traced. Do not touch my avatar’s skin, or my attackers will be able to mark your position.’

‘What is happening to you?’

‘I am being frozen,’ cried the Hexmachina, its female voice growing fainter. ‘Sealed within the heart of the Earth inside a tomb of modified diamond-lattice carbons. I have never seen the building blocks of matter being manipulated so adroitly, my own powers leeched, vampirized, to strengthen the bonds of my captivity.’

‘But you must be able to escape,’ pleaded Molly. ‘In the name of the Circle, you’re the Hexmachina. Who has the might to trap you?’

‘Locusts, despoilers. What are they, indeed? It is almost as if they understand the principles of my construction, but that would mean … no, no it cannot be …’

‘Please!’ Molly tried to scrabble around the featureless floor, searching for a way to stop the Hexmachina from disappearing.

‘You must stop them, Molly, my beautiful young operator,’ whispered the child’s face, rising up the side of the Hexmachina’s hull as the god-machine was submerged. ‘You alone, this time. I cannot help you in this struggle. Seek out the scheme of defence: together you may be able to save Jackals.’

‘I haven’t seen Oliver Brooks for years,’ said Molly. ‘Not since he started wearing that stupid hood and scaring the constabulary out in the shires.’

The child’s face, the Hexmachina’s body, had almost disappeared. ‘You – this – the comet, it is the—’

With a snap reality returned and Molly found herself lying in the gutter in the shadow of the hansom cab, Commodore Black splashing crimson-tinged rainwater over her face.

‘Ah, lass, I told you that you’ve been working too hard on your novels, too much time spent crouching over a writing table, knocking around the dusty corridors of Tock House with the likes of Coppertracks and myself, rather than accepting the invitations of those gentlemen callers whose cards pile up unanswered in our hall.’

Blood was running down Molly’s face, her nose leaking a stream of it. ‘The Hood-o’the-marsh, Oliver Brooks.’

‘That dark fey lad?’ The commodore helped lift Molly to her feet, passing her across to Coppertracks, the steamman already inside the carriage. ‘Let’s not talk of that wicked lad, Molly Templar. We’re well shot of him. Oliver’s good for a tale of highwaymanship in one of your penny dreadfuls, but let’s not have him hiding out in the warmth of Tock House again. No, one outlaw on the run from the cruel House of Guardians is enough sheltering under our fine roof.’

‘I fear you have struck your head, Molly softbody,’ said Coppertracks. ‘One of your fastblood fevers, perhaps? Shall I send for a doctor of medicine?’

Molly shook her head. The fever was in her veins, blood that still fizzed with the tiny symbiote machines of the Hexmachina. The Kingdom of Jackals was threatened once more.

But threatened by what?

Opening the curtains wide enough to see the drops of red rain rolling down the windows, the woman gripped the threadbare fabric nervously and tutted in disgust. She hated the bleeding stuff, filthy red rain that would stain your dress – the normal variety was bad enough. Rain, bringing the risk of fevers and time spent off the job. Time not earning money. And here it was again. Rain that might wake up her mark if it drummed down too hard on the roof above. She glanced back inside the bedroom. Thank the Circle, he was still snoring. Down in the lane outside a figure moved from the shadows and crossed to her side of the street, stepping over a gutter quickly filling with a torrent from the crimson downpour. There weren’t many people out late enough to witness what the two of them were about to do, which was just peachy by her. She slipped out of the bedroom and into the corridor, stepping lightly so the floorboards wouldn’t squeak.

She always murdered her victims on her second visit, the first being a sizing-up – so to speak – of the mark’s valuables. Although in this instance there almost hadn’t been a second visit from her; the Circle knows, the absence of anything of value and the dilapidated state of the apartment had given the lie to all the tales she had heard about the apartment’s owner from the tavern’s drinkers. That her mark came from a wealthy upland family, that they had purchased him a commission in the regiments down on the southern border. That he was some sort of war hero. Connor of Cassarabia, that’s what the others called him, half-jokingly, as he drank himself into oblivion. The great Duncan bloody Connor getting bladdered in the corner of their jinn house every night.

Well, all that family money had to have gone somewhere. Yes, she had nearly dismissed her scheme of murder when the bailiffs had arrived during her first visit to the hero’s home, banging on the door of the lodgings and shouting through the letterbox about the unpaid bills at the butcher’s, the tailor’s, the vintner’s. She had been witness to enough similar scenes from her own life to know that the embrace of the debtors’ prison – the dreaded sponging house – wasn’t too far off for this so-called war hero. But then she had seen the ex-soldier hide his little travel case, the hard leather shell not much of a treasure chest, but never kept too far away from him when he was at home. There had to be valuables inside the case, she could feel it with every iota of her street-sharp senses. A man with a suitcase, living alone and half-mad, he was almost begging to be robbed and murdered.

A gust of rain blew in from outside as she opened the front door. Her thug glanced up the empty stairs. ‘He asleep then?’

‘Five pints of jinn and an hour biting the pillow with me, what do you think?’

The thug pulled a garrotte out of his heavily patched coat, a thin, rusty hang of wire between two wooden handles. ‘I think you should find that suitcase you were so full of yourself about.’

‘It’s in the cupboard in his bedroom.’

‘Right,’ whispered the thug, taking his not inconsiderable bulk up the stairs. ‘After I’ve done him, I’ll take him down to the waters of the Gambleflowers and toss him in. By the time the river crabs and eels have had their meal, his own mother wouldn’t know him – or want to.’

She felt a little shiver of excitement. The murder was always exciting, that little tug of power over life and death. It was a power she lacked in almost every other area of her life. Swinging open the bedroom door, there was enough light from the oil lamp’s dwindling reservoir to see her thug moving across to the ex-soldier’s bed. She levered open the cupboard and, finding the suitcase, lifted it out and placed it on the floor. It certainly felt heavy enough. Family silver? Gold gewgaws looted from one of the battlefields down south? Enough to keep her from the company of the other working girls down in the jinn house for a good few months, hopefully.

Her man was about to slip the wire around the uplander’s neck and send him along the Circle when she opened the suitcase. And saw what was inside. And screamed.

Duncan Connor was up and out of the thug’s grasp far quicker than anyone with five pints of jinn sloshing around their body had a right to be. Her thug kept a long knife for the difficult ones, the ones who wouldn’t go quickly, but the ex-soldier’s sheet was off the bed, turned into a matador’s cloak, concealing him from her man’s blade, before becoming a whip, wrapping around the thug’s arm, yanking him off balance and into the ex-soldier’s reach. There was a crack as a kick shattered the thug’s kneecap and a louder snap as the collapsing man’s neck was twisted at an angle his spine could not survive – at least, not while still attached to his head.

Duncan Connor rose up from the floor as a breeze from the corridor outside lifted the papers pinned across the wall. The lassie was gone. She wouldn’t be surfacing at the old tavern on the street corner again, but then Middlesteel had a thousand more taverns like it scattered across its rookeries in the shadows of its pneumatic towers, and a thousand more like her, no doubt, too.

Lifting the suitcase up carefully, the lid still open, Duncan Connor placed it on top of the mattress of his bed. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that wee barney. Are you all right?’

<I think so. Who was that woman?>

‘Nobody you need to worry about.’ He turned the suitcase away from the direction of the thug’s corpse, hiding the sight of his dead would-be assassin.

<It’s nighttime, isn’t it? I should away and sleep some more.>

‘Aye, you should.’ He shut the suitcase gently and placed it back inside the cupboard, making sure to hide it properly under the threadbare blankets this time.

Duncan Connor looked at the corpse. No doubt the thug would be known to the Middlesteel constabulary, his blood code turning on the drums of their transaction engines, a Ham Yard arrest record linked to his citizen file. But if he involved the police in this hubbub, one of them would only leak the tale to the news sheets and Connor of Cassarabia’s name would be linked to yet another horror. It was hard enough finding work as it was, and he had the promise of a little job coming his way from the circus that might vanish if he was dragged along to listen to a coroner pontificate and call witnesses from the jinn house. No, the wee waters of the Gambleflowers would do for this one.

The river took everything, in Middlesteel.

Kyorin departed the perfumery shop along Penny Street leaving an assistant looking in surprise at the silver coin in her hand – not because she had seen through the counterfeit, but wondering how someone as dishevelled as Kyorin actually had the money to buy an expensive bottle of scent for his beloved in the first place. The last couple of days hadn’t been kind to Kyorin, harried and hunted across the streets and slums of Middlesteel by the monsters, staying only in cheap, anonymous dosshouses. He stopped in an alley and squeezed the scent bulb, spraying his clothes and exposed skin, even his hair. Watching the carts and carriages rattle past and praying that the stench of this perfume would be enough to mask him from his hunters for a while.

One of the residual thoughts of the policeman whose mind he had joined with floated up unbidden. <You smell like a whore’s handkerchief.>

‘Shut up,’ Kyorin muttered. ‘When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.’ He had grown uncharacteristically cantankerous with hunger and desperation.

A vagrant stumbled past, his clothes so frayed and ancient they were almost black. He stopped when he saw Kyorin slumped against the wall, muttering to himself. Taking him for one of Middlesteel’s own, obviously. Two friends together, living low on Jinn Lane.

‘Penny for an old soldier? Fought at the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, I did.’

‘What’s a soldier?’ asked Kyorin.

Laughing, the vagrant raised a bottle of cheap grain whisky to his lips and stumbled deeper into the rookeries.

The dead policeman’s residual pattern jumped out unbidden again. <Lying old rascal.>

There it was. Soldier, like a keeper of the peace – <I was a bloody crusher.> – but they acted in rituals of mass aggression between societies, formalized right down to the different colours of the tunics the opposing sides wore to mark their allegiance. <War, it’s called bloody war.> Ah, Clawfoot Moor was the final battle of the Kingdom of Jackals’ civil war between its monarchy and parliament, some six hundred years before. Kyorin’s hunters would appreciate this, although he could thank all that was holy that they were not here to do so. The vagrant’s memory was so raddled the only battle he could dredge up for his beggary was something he had been taught long ago in school.

So many voices in his mind. Too many voices. Kyorin rubbed his head frantically. ‘I just wanted to learn to swim.’

‘I can swim,’ the vagrant called out from further down the alley.

Kyorin had to focus. Two days of adrenaline-fuelled near escapes, low on sleep, nearly out of counterfeit currency to exchange for fruit from the sellers who wandered the streets of the capital with their trays. He pulled out the book from his pocket, the pages still damp from his escape down the River Gambleflowers. Velocities and Trajectories of Science by Timlar Preston. It had originally been written in Quatérshiftian, then translated into Jackelian; not that the language it was written in would have mattered to Kyorin. There was enough detail in the book that he could model the mind of the individual who had written it, feel its uniqueness. Resting his palm on the pages, he reached out.

<Timlar, can you hear me?>

Far above in the holding spheres of the Court of the Air, Kyorin sensed one of the cells of the aerial city filled with a screech of recognition, the noise muffled from the warders patrolling outside by riveted armour and pulsing curse walls. <You have been gone for so long, what happened to you?>

Kyorin was burning up, running a fever from too much time exposed to the near constant drizzle of the Kingdom of Jackals’ capital city. <The things I told you about have been hunting me, the masters’ servants. My scent is unique in this city and they are nipping at my heels. I can sense them getting closer, even as we speak.>

<I’m not going mad, am I? You aren’t a figment of my id, you’re real?>

<You’ll find that out soon enough,> said Kyorin.

<You have a little more to achieve yet, I think,> said Kyorin.

said Timlar Preston.

Kyorin received an image of the Quatérshiftian prisoner brandishing his pencil like a sword, ready to sketch out the few missing pieces of the mechanics he needed for his device.

<Merely knowing something is possible, that is often enough to begin the journey,> said Kyorin. <And you had been working along the right lines long before I contacted you.>

Kyorin listened and began to fill in the gaps. Thank the stars it was he who had survived the masters’ hunters, rather than his ignorant desert-born friend swept away by the river. Half an hour later Kyorin was finished, the voice of the man held captive by the Court of the Air fading as the power of Kyorin’s weakened body began to wane.

<That’s everything I need. But how will you get me out of here?> Timlar Preston’s anxiety was almost overwhelming. <No one has ever escaped from the Court of the Air.>

sobbed Preston. <I nearly became a priest of the Child of Light, once, taking vows for the seminary. I was a pacifist, but the revolutionary government took my wife hostage, my three children. They said I was to dedicate my work to serving the Committee of War or we would all be banished to an organized community.>

<You deserve better than what happened to you,> said Kyorin.

<No, the devices I built were used to slaughter countless thousands of innocents during the Two-Year War,> said Preston. <Children no different from mine, who just happened to have been born inside the Kingdom of Jackals’ borders. I do deserve this. I sacrificed my principles for a mean, personal thing. And what good has it done me? My family have no doubt starved on a widow’s pension during my years as a prisoner. Even before the Court of the Air’s agents seized me, Quatérshift’s streets were full of soldiers’ wives begging in the streets for food, their children in their laps, babies’ arms as thin as shoelaces. The gratitude of our glorious revolution. I helped murder thousands of Jackelians in the Two-Year War and what has happened to my dreams, my nation, my family, as I rot away up here?>

<Your designs must be used as you once intended,> said Kyorin. <And if you once killed thousands, you can now save millions. I must go, we have been in communication with each other for too long. Your mind was not born to safely receive my thoughts over such a duration.>

Far above, Kyorin sensed the Quatérshiftian prisoner finally lying down exhausted on his bunk, left to wonder if the voice in his head was indeed his madness snapped free.

Kyorin rested the book down by his side and glanced miserably towards the strip of sky above the alley. He couldn’t see the Court of the Air from the ground, so high was the aerial city’s station. Wrapped in clouds generated by its steam-driven transaction engines as they modelled the ebb and flow of Jackelian society, in as perfect a simulation as such primitive technology allowed. ‘I’ll get you out, my new friend. I must, or we are all dead.’

The chequerboard hull of a Royal Aerostatical Navy airship went past, a brief thrum from its engine and then it was gone. For a moment, Kyorin thought its shadow had remained, but it was the shadow of the vagrant looming large above him.

‘I’ll trade you.’

‘Trade me what?’ asked Kyorin.

The vagrant pulled out a book from his own jacket pocket, in a better state than the clothes from which it had emerged. ‘Lifted this from the stationer’s stall at the Guardian Fairfax atmospheric. Finished it now.’ He pointed at Kyorin’s damp book. ‘You finished with that?’

‘Yes,’ sighed Kyorin. ‘I believe I have.’

Kyorin received the book from the vagrant and passed up his own. A sudden suspicion struck him as he saw how the vagrant was looking at the cover of his new book. ‘You can’t read, can you?’

‘No, squire. But there’s plenty on the streets around here that can, and they read them for me – Old Man Pew, Barking Billy. The words don’t make sense to my eyes, see. Got the reading sickness.’ The vagrant sipped another swig from his upland firewater. ‘This book any good?’

‘It’s a philosophical treatise on velocity science and its practical applications as related to gunnery and celestial mechanics. Royal Society Press edition as translated from the original Quatérshiftian.’

Belching, the vagrant felt the smog-damp wall of the alley for support. ‘Sweet as a nut.’

Kyorin glanced down at the cover of his new book. The Moon Pirates of Trell by Molly Templar. There was a lurid illustration on the front: three explorers in pith helmets clutching lethal-force weapons as they stepped out of a crashed high-altitude airship onto a desert-like moon. Now this was really very promising.

In the road outside the alley a hansom cab had collided with a brewer’s wagon and an argument was about to boil over into violence. The crushers would be here any minute. Time to be off before the first police arrived.

As Kyorin walked past the vagrant he quickly stooped down and laid his palm flat on the man’s forehead. The vagrant yelled at the terrible flare of burning in his skull as his brain reworked itself into a new pattern.

‘Ask Old Man Pew to teach you to read,’ said Kyorin. ‘I don’t think you’ll have problems interpreting written words any more.’

Groaning, the vagrant reached for his bottle, trying to gulp the pain away. With an obscene gargle he spat the whisky down onto the mud.

Kyorin smiled, disappearing into the labyrinth of the rookeries. ‘Unfortunately, intoxicants will no longer taste quite as appealing as they did to you before your healing.’

There was a Pentshire moon outside the farmer’s window. Round. Full. Easily enough light for the farmer to see by as the squire’s thug took his hand and raised it slowly up in front of his face.

‘Now, imagine your fingers are voters,’ said the thug. He gave the farmer’s fingers a little wiggle.

‘Pay attention!’ hissed one of the other two men pinning down the farmer’s body. ‘This is important.’

‘Nice, fat, plump little voters. Contented,’ explained the ringleader. ‘They know who to vote for. They know who owns the tenancy on their farms and crofts. But—’ his voice turned ugly ‘—now someone else comes along to stand for parliament, and look, they’re all confused.’ He wiggled the farmer’s fingers in a sad little dance.

‘Someone who’s not been paid off to throw the election for you in your rotten little borough,’ spat the farmer, spots of blood from his smashed face landing on his bedroom floor as he spoke.

‘That’s a terrible accusation to make,’ said the ringleader. ‘You see, when the voters are confused, they just need straightening out.’

The ringleader took one of the farmer’s fingers and pushed it back, the snap of bone nearly making him faint.

‘That’s a lot of work for us,’ observed one of the thugs behind him, hissing the words into his ear. ‘And the Circle knows, you’ve kept us busy enough this year already, organizing every labourer whose ear you could grab to pour your poison into their thick heads, setting up a damn tenants’ union.’

Another finger snapped and the farmer desperately tried to stop himself screaming so he didn’t wake up the others in the farmhouse, trying to keep his family out of this.

‘And you wouldn’t like parliament,’ added the second of the thugs behind him. ‘All those long airship trips down to Middlesteel, and the prices in the capital are diabolical.’

A third finger snapped and all the farmer could think of was how he was going to walk the shirehorse and the plough across his fields next week in this mangled state.

‘Don’t get me wrong, now,’ continued the ringleader, ‘but I just can’t see you sitting in the House of Guardians. They’re carriage folk, mostly, and there’s you with no carriage at all – why, I wager you wouldn’t even know which spoon to pick up from the table to use for your soup. You would just embarrass us all if you got elected.’

The ringleader made to break the farmer’s last finger, but then shook his head as if changing his mind. ‘And here’s something I bet you haven’t considered. If you’re down in Middlesteel, hobnobbing with all the quality and listening to all those boring bills being read in parliament, then who’s going to be looking after your family?’

The farmer’s heart leapt. Even they wouldn’t? A fourth thug emerged into the room with the farmer’s son struggling in his grip, one hand covering the boy’s mouth, the other clutching a pheasant-skinning knife.

‘Please!’ the farmer begged.

‘What, you thought we were joking?’ said the ringleader. ‘Thought we’d come a-visiting your home at night for a bit of sport, did you?’

‘Please!’

The shadows in the room were growing longer, thicker. Like mist. But no one noticed. The farmer was struggling desperately under the weight of the thugs holding him down, the others were too giddy with the excitement of the kill.

‘Shut up, you’ve got another two lads, you’re not even going to miss one of them.’

‘You can’t do this!’

‘I feel your pain,’ laughed the ringleader.

‘And I feel your evil,’ hissed another voice, as the thug holding the farmer’s son stumbled back into the shadows of the room. They were both enveloped and disappeared, a second before the grip holding the farmer fast seemed to slip away and he was free.

The farmer backed away as the ringleader and the remaining thug glanced hastily around at the shadows of the room, hundreds of them, swelling and moving like the surf on the sea. Solid. Black. Laughter seemed to bubble out of those shadows, but there was no happiness in it. It was a pit to hell opened in that room, the echo of a fallen soul rising out of the depths. But where was his lad, and where was the thug who had been holding him?

Twisting a knife around in his hand, the ringleader seemed to be trying to locate the sound of the terrible laughter. There was an explosion of light from one corner, blinding the farmer, then a series of wet slaps. As the dots cleared from the farmer’s eyes, he realized the only other person left in the room was the ringleader, the shadows twisting and circling around him.

‘You’ve carried your squire’s message for him this night,’ laughed a dark voice. ‘I have one for you to take back to him.’

There was a snap-snap-snap of light – like the powder flash on a camera – the shadows and the light merging to become an angular figure striking at the gang’s ringleader. The farmer turned his head to avoid the shower of splintering glass as the thug was forced to leave by the window.

The room seemed to return to normal, the intense light diminishing to a sparkle on the handle of a pistol – one of a pair – holstered on a figure wearing a jet-black riding coat, his face covered with a dark executioner’s hood.

‘My son?’ trembled the farmer, looking mesmerized at the three corpses lying on the floor of his bedroom.

‘Back in his room,’ said the figure. ‘A child’s mind is a very flexible thing. He’ll remember nothing of this night.’

‘Dear Circle,’ said the farmer, ‘what have you done, man? There’s three dead here. The squire has the county constabulary in his pocket, they’ll—’

‘The county magistrate is due a visit from me, as, I believe, is the squire.’

‘You can’t interfere with justice!’

The terrible laughter returned to the room. ‘They only know about the law; I shall explain what justice is.’

‘You’re him, aren’t you. The one they talk about.’

‘Look out of the window,’ said the hooded figure. ‘What do you see?’

The farmer stood in front of his shattered window. There was the gang’s ringleader, crawling across the glass on a broken leg, moaning, trying to reach his horse. And a dense fog was forming – seeping out of the woods, fingers of it probing along the ground like the legs of a curious spider. It was a marsh fog. The farmer looked around, but the three corpses had disappeared.

Vanished too was the Hood-o’the-marsh. Only the broken window remained as evidence that the farmer hadn’t dreamt the whole break-in.

* * *

Walking into the woods, the Hood-o’the-marsh allowed himself a smile, shouts from the squire’s mansion echoing behind him as the great house’s retainers spilled into the night, waving their blunderbusses and birding rifles. Someone was yelling to douse the lanterns, more of a hindrance than help on a nighttime pursuit. Not that it would do them any good, any more than cavalry redcoats would be able to help the bloody figure of a county magistrate in a dressing gown, stumbling towards town and the garrison. He owned the night. Not much of a recompense for losing the ability to sleep, to dream.

Which was why the silhouette of the woman waiting at the top of the hill took him by surprise. Nobody could sneak up on him. Nobody. Not since he had found… both pistols were suddenly in his hands as he advanced, treading silently towards the woman. After all these years, could it really be her?

‘Mother, is that you?’

There was no answer. He could feel nothing from her, as if she had no weight on the world. No evil. No goodness either. And there was only one person – if you could call her a person – who had ever registered on the Hood’s senses like that.

‘Mother, if—’

‘I am not the Lady of the Lights,’ said the silhouette. ‘But perhaps you should recognize me anyway, Oliver Brooks?’

He moved closer. There was just enough moonlight to see that the silhouette was wearing what looked like leather armour covered by bronze chainmail – archaic, the very picture of a warrior maiden from the cheap woodcuts of a child’s novel.

‘Enough of this.’ Oliver pointed his two pistols at her but they vanished from his hands, reappearing in her own. The light reflecting from the pistols became twin suns, blinding him. As the light dwindled he saw that the pistols had changed form, one becoming a trident, the other an oblong shield with the crude face of a lion cast on it. The lion of Jackals.

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The Rise of the Iron Moon

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