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STEPHEN HUNT
‘Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.’
Rabindranath Tagore
Contents
Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Epilogue By Stephen Hunt Copyright About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
Purity Drake tried to struggle as the long needle of the syringe sank towards her arm, but the leather straps on the restraining table were binding her down too tight.
‘Try not to move,’ ordered the civil service surgeon operating the blood machine. ‘We really do need to take a clean sample this time.’ He looked across at the official from the Royal Breeding House. ‘She can talk, can’t she?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the breeder. ‘Her family madness comes and goes, but when she’s not fitting, she’s actually quite well-spoken, for one of them.’
Talk? Surely that was a hypothetical question right now. Purity wanted to swear and scream, but the restraining table was fitted with a rubber sphere that inserted itself in the prisoner’s mouth. After all, the civil service’s surgeons didn’t want their deliberations on bloodwork and which pedigree lines to crossbreed to be interrupted by abuse. She thrashed and tried to yell as the needle sank into her arm with a flare of pain, the glass tube of the syringe slowly turning crimson. She had been feeling faint enough before, on short rations for waking up the guards with her nightmares and her cries – and her rations really hadn’t been that generous to start with.
‘We’re under a lot of pressure to give this one a clean bill of health,’ said the breeder.
The Greenhall surgeon shrugged and tapped the transaction-engine drum rotating in the steam-driven blood machine. ‘I can only give you back what the machine says. How you choose to act on that information is up to you.’
‘Come on,’ pleaded the breeder. ‘You know how thin on the ground we are for fertile females. She’s just turned sixteen, we can’t afford to let—’
The surgeon tapped the vial of blood, making sure every last drop cleared into the siphon on his machine. ‘I can see precisely how thin on the ground you are. This family’s history of lunacy would never have been allowed to breed down another generation in the old days.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. She’s the last one of her house; we can’t afford to let an entire royalist bloodline die out. Not now.’
The surgeon absently rubbed Purity’s black hair as if she was a cat. ‘Ah yes. The invasion.’
Ah yes. The invasion. Purity’s eyes welled with tears at the memory of it; the carnage in the Jackelian capital and the charnel house that the Royal Breeding House had been turned into by the invading troops. The choice her mother had been forced to make by the foreign soldiers from Quatérshift, between Purity and her half-brother. Which of the royalist prisoners was to be allowed to survive. No choice at all, you always went with a fertile female; they were almost guaranteed to be forced to have children, to continue the family line. Purity tried to close the memory off. Her mother and brother being marched into the Gideon’s Collar, the chack-chack-chack of the Quatérshiftians’ notorious killing machine, each report a bolt through the neck.
‘Pity about her madness, then,’ sighed the surgeon. ‘She’s pretty enough, all things considered. Very unusual to see eyes this pale and blue. Green used to be the most common colour for the royalists’ eyes, you know. A little piece of trivia. I collect them.’
Behind them, the blood machine began to rattle as a tape spool printed out its results.
‘Is she fit to be taken to stud?’ asked the breeder.
Purity struggled at the terrible thought of it, trying to break her bonds. Let her still be sick, with whatever illness was stopping them from treating her like a prize mare in season, even the fever of the family madness that had gripped her so tightly.
The surgeon shook his head, confused. ‘No, it’s another partial match for her. Less distinct than last time. Very odd. I can’t even confirm her identity against her house records, let alone declare her clean for your use.’
‘Your machine isn’t working,’ spat the breeder.
‘It was working well enough for the duke’s son I had in before,’ said the surgeon. ‘And I wager it’ll be working fine enough for the children I have in tomorrow.’ He rubbed the wound on Purity’s arm with a swab, a brief sting of alcohol. ‘What’s going on in inside you, eh? Your precious royal blood. We’ll do it the hard way, then. I’ll get her sample sent over to the department and they’ll check her bloodwork for diseases and the like. We don’t want the next prince to have six fingers, now do we?’
The breeder snorted. ‘We’ll need another massacre over here before the likes of her would be used to sire a prince. The royal family are mad enough already from inbreeding without throwing this one into the mix. No, any children we squeeze out of her will only be used to diversify the royal breeding pool around the edges. Hopefully we’ll be able to screen the worst of the lunacy out of her children if we can find her a suitable stud.’
Looking out through bars across the window, the surgeon folded the test results into his pockets. They were old-fashioned at the Royal Breeding House. No cursewalls laid by sorcerers. Just thirty feet of granite, the parapet patrolled by redcoats, their rifles slung over their shoulders and their shakos oiled against the rain.
The arm holding Purity’s gag in place rose with a squeaking of metal, and the breeder unlocked her restraints. ‘Thank the nice gentleman from Greenhall, then. It can’t be pleasant for a gentleman such as he, coming all the way out here to the fortress to see the likes of you.’
Purity rubbed her arm, pulling the featureless brown house-issue shawl back over her wound. ‘Thank you, sir, for taking the time to test me.’
It was a litany, really, like the oaths to parliament they made the royalist prisoners parrot in the brainwashing that passed for a school at the breeding house. The real farewell she invoked in her mind involved the needle on the machine and the surgeon from the civil service’s stinking Department of Blood loosing his footing. Purity tried not to scowl. Keep your face neutral, a mask. That was the way you got through each day. She watched the breeder ring the bell-pull for someone from her dormitory to come and take her away.
Wiggling her cold toes on the flagstones, Purity stared enviously at the plain brown shoes on the Greenhall man’s feet. Even a man’s shoes like these would do, any shoes. Something to keep out the chill of the Royal Breeding House’s stone floors.
‘Take her back to her hall,’ the breeder ordered the young girl who turned up at the door – another royalist prisoner.
‘I missed the dinner call for the test,’ Purity complained.
‘Back to your dormitory,’ snapped the breeder.
‘We didn’t get much,’ hissed the girl who had been sent to escort Purity, closing the door to the surgeon’s office. ‘All of Dorm Seven’s going hungry thanks to you.’
‘It’s the last day of short rations,’ pointed out Purity, but she could hear the paucity of the excuse even as it escaped her lips.
The dreams, the dreams of her madness. Purity had always suffered them, but they had grown so much more intense last month, as if the flaming firmament accompanying the brief passage of Ashby’s Comet across their skies had set fire to her mind. Now the thousand-year comet had sped past for another millennia-long circuit of the heavens, but its mortal effects remained – while she could get through most nights again without visions, without waking up the guards with her puking, there was still a gnawing raw emptiness in her gut.
Still, things could be worse. After the invaders from the Kingdom of Jackals’ eastern neighbour – that most perfidious of nations, Quatérshift – had broken into the breeding house and slaughtered half of the royalists a few years back, things had nudged a little to the better. The shortage of those of noble descent meant that parliament’s stooges couldn’t go as hard on the royalist prisoners as they once had. Why, when Purity had been ten, a punishment like short rations – shorties – would have meant going hungry for a month, not a week. There was a rumour that those held prisoner at the palace were even served watered-down beer for supper now, the iron in the drink good for warding off flu and fever. Purity didn’t believe it, though. Perhaps she’d bump into one of the royal family to ask the next time the palace grounds needed sweeping. Purity had known Queen Charlotte fairly well when the monarch had been a prisoner of the Royal Breeding House, though there was always the inverse snobbery of the house to contend with. While the rest of the kingdom loathed the imprisoned royal family with a passion in proportion to their inherited rank – bottles for a baron, eggs for an earl rang the cry of the stall holders in palace square on stoning day – the blueblood prisoners of the breeding house wore their ancient titles like badges of courage. Which was bad news for Purity Drake. Her ancestors had barely qualified as knighted squires when they had found themselves on the losing side of the ancient Jackelian civil war. Add to that the fact that Purity was a mongrel – the mysterious identity of her father the result of an unplanned liaison forbidden by parliament’s breeding programme – and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration to say that there were guards patrolling the breeding house with more status than her among the royalist prisoners.
The hard shove in the small of her back as they got to Dorm Seven was a frankly unnecessary reminder of her position. Purity’s heart sank as she saw the line of dorm mates waiting for her return. Emily was at their head, the self-appointed duchess of their dorm by virtue of her rank and her bulk. She had Purity’s shoes, looted from her mother’s few possessions after the massacre. They were faded and scuffed, but everyone knew whose shoes they were. Only the strong prospered in the breeding house. The rest made do with bare feet.
‘It’s the last day we’re on shorties,’ said Emily, ‘and we don’t want you shouting the odds tonight and bringing the guards down here again. We want to eat from full plates next week.’
‘I won’t wake the guards,’ promised Purity. ‘My nightmares have nearly passed now.’
‘I was hoping the surgeon would have twigged that you’re not one of us,’ said Emily. ‘That it was all a big mistake you being in the house at all.’
‘Mongrel peasant,’ called someone at the back. ‘Half-caste guard’s daughter!’
As Emily stood aside, Purity saw that the inmates of Dorm Seven had rolled the hard hemp blankets off their bunk beds and her heart sank in wretchedness.
‘The word of your sort doesn’t mean much to us, you understand.’ Emily pointed to their bunks lined up against the damp wall. ‘Time to walk the line, peasant.’
There were too many of them to fight back, and Purity knew it would only make things worse. The governor of the breeding house knew where collective punishment led: it led to the royalist prisoners keeping order among themselves – that was rather the point of it.
‘Walk the line. Walk the line,’ the chant began.
Purity sank to her knees and began to crawl under the line of bunks. A member of Dorm Seven stood at every gap and laid into her with knotted sheets as she emerged into the open, a few seconds of lashing pain before she dragged herself under the cover of the next bunk. Purity almost made it as far as the sixteenth bunk this time before the blackness of oblivion overtook her.
Kyorin leapt down the steps, the tranquillizer dart shattering above his head on the tavern sign swinging in the alley’s draught.
Damn this foul complex of garbage-littered rookeries. Middlesteel was confusing enough a city to those born and bred to its smog-ridden lanes, let alone to a visitor and his companion. A companion who seemed to be far fitter than Kyorin, far better able to leave their pursuers behind him.
The dart’s near miss gave Kyorin a second wind. His legs pumped harder and he nearly caught up with his companion, leaping over a couple of empty barrels tossed out of a jinn house, the smell of rancid water assaulting his nostrils. Kyorin was about to wheeze something but an outburst of crude drinking songs from the tavern behind them put him off. His companion redoubled his own efforts to escape, as if realizing that if Kyorin could catch up with him, then their pursuers – who lived for the hunt and the kill – would be close behind.
Steps led down to a wider street, just behind the course of the great river Gambleflowers. His comrade cut left in front of him and Kyorin followed. They really should have split up; Kyorin could have sprinted off in the opposite direction, hoping that the pursuit would only go after one of them, but he sensed that this would be death for him. Of course, Kyorin didn’t want to die, but he also suspected that of the two of them, it was he who had the best chance of making contact with those who could help their cause. This fast-footed ally of his was desert-born, wild, simple and able – unlike Kyorin – to put up a fight worthy of the name. Neither of them knew the other, but that was the way with a rebel cell structure, compartmentalized to minimize infiltration and betrayal. That they were both in the capital city of the Kingdom of Jackals and on the run from those that hunted them was commonality of cause enough.
The sound of pounding feet down the stairs behind him made Kyorin’s eyes dance about for an escape route off the street – disgustingly well-lit by the iron gas lamps rising out of the gutter. There! A passage, the smell of river water strong on the wind.
Kyorin sprinted away down the pathway, his companion taking another turn ahead. So many scents in Middlesteel – puddles of rain, wet grass in the parks, the river’s pollution – nothing at all like the odours back home. The silence of the docks was broken by the beat of machines from a tannery on the other side of the river. Kyorin could sense the stench of death, of rotting animal skins, even from this side of the water. Curse his luck. The great sage had to have chosen him to come to this city, this Middlesteel, this capital of the strange, rain-soaked nation of Jackals. But no other rebel had been in the right place to pose as a loyal servant joining the party scouting Jackals. And now someone or something had given Kyorin away. Was it the fact that he had allowed a stowaway to join their party, the desert nomad who seemed so eager to abandon his slow, unfit ally, now that their ruse had been rumbled? Had the fool forgotten to use his masking stick to disguise his scent? Perhaps Kyorin could ask his hunters what had given them away, before the monsters devoured him.
Out in the open, the nomad raced away, disappearing into the docks – past silent cranes and bundles of pulley ropes lying on the cobbles. Kyorin was about to follow after him, when a bright light shone in his face, destroying, as was intended, his night vision.
‘Aye, aye. What’s all this, then?’
Blinking away the dots of light dancing in front of his eyes, Kyorin saw it was a policeman. A crusher, as the locals called the enforcers of their law, his black uniform illuminated by the backspill from a bull’s-eye lamp. The crusher rested a hand on his belt, heavy with a police cutlass, a leather holster and a hulking cudgel.
‘You just off a boat, then?’
Taken for a foreigner. Well, that was true enough.
‘I have to get away,’ said Kyorin, ‘There—’
‘Like your mate who bolted off?’ said the crusher. ‘Them that runs away from a warehouse past midnight normally have their pockets full of something that doesn’t belong to them, in my experience.’
It was dark enough that the policeman hadn’t noticed that Kyorin was managing to talk without moving his lips.
‘Please, you must help me—’ Kyorin’s plea was interrupted by a scream from the docks, the nomad breaking cover, a flaming comet with his clothes and body on fire. Not yet dead, Kyorin’s companion launched himself into the river, dousing the flames – but of course, the desert-born could not swim, and as he realized that he had traded a death by fire for a death by water, the wounds of his incineration overcame him. The corpse swept past them face-down on the fast-moving currents. The river took everything, in Middlesteel.
‘Bloody Nora,’ said the policeman, his hand sweeping down towards his pistol as his lamp shone along the dock front. ‘You lads been nicking oil?’
Kyorin’s companion had put up a fight, then – enough of a fight that they hadn’t taken him alive with a paralysing dart, but burnt him to the ground with a lethal-force weapon. From behind the crates a couple of dark shapes shifted just out of sight, hissing in frustration that they hadn’t been able to feed on their first victim. An eerie clicking sounded out of sight of Kyorin and the policeman, rising and falling in a rattlesnake rhythm.
‘Just how many of you are there out thieving tonight?’ asked the policeman, annoyed that one of the gangs of the flash mob had chosen his beat for their night’s pilfering. He rested his lamp on a pulley block and aimed his pistol down the dock towards the crates. ‘Out you come, you toe-rags. Step lively now.’ His spare hand unclipped a Barnaby Blow from his belt. He flicked the trigger on the bronzed canister of compressed air and a banshee whistle split the night. Other whistles sounded as nearby crushers converged on the position of an officer in need.
The hunters’ lethal-force weapon would be recharging. Kyorin only had seconds left.
‘No you don’t, my old son.’ The policeman’s pistol swung towards Kyorin and he pointed to a pair of iron manacles he had laid next to the lamp. ‘You slip those on, nice and easy, like.’
‘Run, you fool,’ Kyorin pleaded to the policeman. ‘You can’t—’
‘Hey!’ The Middlesteel constable had finally noticed that Kyorin was speaking without his lips moving. ‘How—?’
The bolt of fire leapt out from the other end of the docks, striking the crusher on his chest. The black patent leather belt that crossed his tunic shredded as the uniform became a conflagration, the silver belt buckle bearing the arms of the Middlesteel police flying past Kyorin’s face, tiny drops of molten metal splattering his brown hair.
Kyorin caught the burning police officer’s body as he fell back, just enough life left in him to help Kyorin escape – to serve and protect, as the crusher’s oath demanded. Resting his hand above the policeman’s fluttering eyes, ignoring the smell of burning flesh – so repellent to a plant-eater – Kyorin made the connection to the crusher’s forehead with his hand. Swim. How to Swim? I must know! Kyorin was flooded by images – visions that seemed to last hours rather than the solitary second that was passing: the chemical reek of the public baths along Brocroft Street, a stream in a small flint-walled village in Lightshire, fishing rods laid down in the grass while the policeman and his friends launched themselves into the water. The images grew angular and sharp, the constable’s brain shutting down as the fatal burns worked their way through the beautiful system of cooperating organs that was his body.
Letting the dead policeman drop, Kyorin sprinted towards the river and launched himself into its cold, enveloping cover as the howls of his pursuers echoed around the docks. Holding his breath, Kyorin kicked under the surface, using his newfound swimming skills, allowing the current to sweep him away as the water boiled where the hunters’ recharged weapon furiously steamed the river’s surface. But the waters were deep and wide and the sky too dark for the hunters’ killing lances of fire to find his heart this night. With the weapon drained, a hail of darts broke the surface, spiralling past Kyorin like stones dropped in the water. Their final act of desperation became a brief flash of elation for Kyorin. He had escaped! As he swam, his hand checked the carefully wrapped bulge in his pocket where the book was, brought from the stationer’s cart on Burberry Corner with a coin so realistic the shopkeeper would never realize it had been perfectly counterfeited for the expeditionary party. Back home, that book would have been a death sentence. But here in Middlesteel, well, here it might just be a chance for life.
Kyorin let the currents carry him after the corpse of his compatriot, the poor dead desert nomad, leaving hungry mouths behind on the docks; mouths that would now be considering how best to evade the call of compressed air whistles converging on their position on the docks.
The river took everything, in Middlesteel.
Warder Twelve looked at the new boy, hiding his deep reservations about the quality and judgement of the lad. Why, wondered Warder Twelve, when analysts in the great transaction-engine chambers did not live up to their potential, did the Court of the Air’s ruling council always judge that their next career move should be across to the spheres of the aerial city where the Court held its prisoners? Surely the dangerous breed that the Court of the Air removed from circulation in the Kingdom of Jackals warranted more respect than the bored attitude of this new greenhorn. A greenhorn who judged – quite rightly – that duty minding the cells was something of a demotion from modelling the plays and flows of their civilization in the great transaction-engine chambers.
‘So, these colours,’ said the boy, tapping the card slotted above the armoured cell door. ‘They indicate the potential of the prisoner to make trouble?’
‘Aye,’ said the warden, ‘and the care you need to take when interacting with the prisoner. The likelihood they might escape.’
‘Escape?’ The lad laughed. ‘There has never been an escape from the Court of the Air. Not once in five hundred years.’
Warder Twelve winced. This young buck didn’t see all the work that went into keeping things that way: the effort, the foiled escapes – many of them just mind games to keep hope alive in the prisoners, to keep their wickedness and ingenuity flowing in streams the Court could control and curtail. It was the curse of being a warder. Nobody noticed when you did your job well; nobody thanked you for decades of trouble-free internment. But let just one rascal escape, why then the rest of the aerial city would be complaining for months about how many staff it took to man the cells, how they did nothing but sit around and play cards out on the prison spheres.
‘This is a green-ten,’ said the warder, laying a hand on the cell door. ‘Green is the lowest level of threat and ten is the lowest level of prisoner intelligence.’
‘Ah,’ said the lad. ‘A politician, then.’
The warder opened a small slot in the door, a slit of one-way glass revealing a man in a faded waistcoat sitting by a desk before a sheaf of papers, reaching over to dip his metal stylus in a pot of ink. Writing memoirs that nobody would ever read – well, nobody except the Court’s alienists, as the surgeons of the mind perfected their understanding of the criminal soul.
‘Crimes against democracy. This flash fellow used to represent a district down in Middlesteel, until he started using his street gangs to intimidate voters on election day. We disappeared him after he made contact with the flash mob to arrange to have two of his opponents poisoned.’
‘He hardly seems worth the effort,’ said the boy.