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.'
