alive.
‘Sell out one of your own? No, duke. I don’t think you’re ready for that. You are a sentimentalist, pining for an age that was buried by history long before either of us was born.’
The commodore stamped left but swung right, slipping his blade beneath Wildrake’s sabre, trapping it, then with a deft twist spinning the weapon out of the wolftaker’s hand and onto the ground. The blade impaled itself in the snow and stood there quivering.
‘I should give you the same chance you gave the fleet when you blew us out to the RAN’s airships,’ said the commodore. ‘But maybe I am a sentimentalist, Jamie.’ He stepped back and bowed slightly, pointing to the fallen sword with the tip of his sabre.
Wildrake shook his head and grinned ferociously, retrieving his blade without taking his eyes off the commodore. ‘You have to be joking! Dark, you are a piece of work and no mistake. You never would have made a wolftaker in a thousand years.’
‘You’re as cold as your friends, Jamie. The Court and the Commonshare both. You never understood; that piece of metal in your hand is only as good as the heart of the man behind it. You’ve got the moves and you’ve got the sinews, but they couldn’t give you the heart. You’re just a weapon, Jamie, a shiny sabre all bent out of shape and dirty from the hands of the bludgers and assassins who have used you.’
‘And you’re a relic, Dark. The last of the royal privateers. The last of a dead age. They should stuff you and put you in the museum back in Middlesteel next to one of the old monarchs.’
‘That they haven’t is not for want of trying. You broke my heart, Jamie, when I found out it was you that was the Court’s man on the boats, that it was you that blew on the fleet. You would have made a fine fleet-man if we could have fixed your soul — one of the best.’
Wildrake roared and thrust forward, but the submariner turned sideways and with a — snap — snap — snap — Commodore Black parried past Wildrake’s cuts using short controlled butterfly strokes that almost seemed too slight to be effective. But with each snap of metal Black pressed his sabre a little closer until — almost gently — he pushed the blade into the turncoat’s chest, sliding it right through Wildrake’s heart. ‘For old time’s sake, Jamie, for old time’s sake.’
Wildrake looked at the blade impaled into his body with incredulity. ‘I am tight — my muscles — so tight — your body — so flabby.’
Black shoved Wildrake off his sabre with his boot. ‘You’re all piss and wind, Jamie.’
Wildrake collapsed, falling on the snow, watching dis believingly as the commodore staggered back and lifted up the prone form of Prince Alpheus.
Black pointed to the smoke of the battlefield rising behind them. ‘You’re one of us, Jamie. A Jackelian with the blood of kings running through your veins. Why did you do it?’
‘I just got tired — old man. Of the dirt and the pain. The Court was too weak. The Commonshare had what is required to change things. I could have — made — our country perfect.’
‘We’re a blessed weak people, Jamie, for a perfect idea. Well now, it looks like I’ve saved the Court the trouble of hunting you down, so I think I shall take the lad as my payment and be saying my goodbyes to you.’
‘They will — find — you.’
Black winked before he limped away, hauling the prince behind him. ‘You killed Samson Dark, remember? And poor old Blacky, well, he is a hero of the war of 1596 — fought alongside the First Guardian at Rivermarsh, so he did. You killed Samson Dark and now I have returned the favour. I believe that rounds things out nicely.’
When the wolftakers found Wildrake’s body, the bloody message of accusation against Samson Dark that he had written in the snow had long since melted away into the meadow grass.
Molly was not sure how long she had been standing on the downs of Rivermarsh when she realized the melting snow was soaking her feet. Despite the fall of night it was warmer now than it had been earlier, the seasons of Jackals returning to normal. Her body felt strange, as if she was not sure where she began and the Hexmachina ended. The land seemed part of her still.
A pile of burrowed dirt in front of her was the only clue that the events of the day had not been a dream. Once more the Hexmachina had returned to her lover’s embrace. The Wildcaotyl had faded away like an echo in a well. Down the hill a few torches moved around the dark plain — scavengers looking for boots and coins to strip from the corpses, soldiers calling out for comrades, wives and children calling for fathers who had not returned, a few medical company orderlies moving between the bodies, trying to locate the increasingly weak cries of the wounded.
The stars were in the east, partially covered by smoke still rising from Middlesteel. No glow of fire though — the water must have been restored and the fires put out. For the first time in her life Molly did not know what to do. She had felt the heat of familiar souls when she had been joined with the Hexmachina — the commodore and the fey boy, Coppertracks too. They might be back at Tock House now if the folly had not been smashed apart by the Commonshare’s aerial assault. She could join them. She could do … anything. Nobody was hunting her blood now, the poor house was gone — Circle, the very records of her existence might lie in a broken tran saction engine smouldering in the ruins of Greenhall for all she knew.
But she was a Middlesteel girl at heart; she headed in the direction of the moon, across the battlefield towards the capital.
Molly wandered through the downs of Rivermarsh like a wraith. After being joined with the Hexmachina everything seemed flat and dull, denied the sight beyond sight the ancient machine possessed. It was a surreal nightmare. The wailing of a wife who had just discovered her dead husband on the ground, his face sliced by a Commonshare sabre. The multi-armed steamman she found walking through a field of deacti vate knights and mounds of dead metal-fleshers, the water from his boiler leaking out as tears for the warriors he had commanded. She pressed on him the fused soul boards of Slowstack in return for a promise her friend would be taken back to the Free State. She doubted they would inter a desecration in their hall of the dead, but perhaps the board would be scrubbed and returned to a new body, as was their way. Circle knows, there would be enough parts to be returned to the mountain kingdom over the next few weeks, caravans of deactivate. Parts enough for a new generation of steammen to replace the fallen of the last.
She was trudging up a slope when she noticed a figure in a bath chair slowly pushing itself up the hill in front of her. The ground was damp and his wheels were grinding through the slippery mud.
Molly took the handles on the chair and helped persuade it to the top of the rise. ‘You want to be careful, old fellow. The steammen have pickets out here to stop mechomancers robbing their graves, they won’t care if you’re after a Commonshare sabre to sell at the market or a Free State voicebox.’
‘Thank you, compatriot, but I’m not with the crows,’ said the man. ‘I was looking for a friend of mine, an old student.’
‘Did you find him?’
‘What was left of him. He died during the battle. It helps to see the body sometimes, to remember the man.’
Molly pushed the chair around a collapsed exomount, a circle of dead Jackelians surrounding the beast, testament to the power of its pincers. ‘A lot of people died here today.’
‘Is that not the truth?’ He slowed the chair and they listened together to the cries of the dying and the wounded still out on the field. ‘What is it they say about Jackals? Every valley has a battle and every lake has a song. I wonder what they will say about this place in a hundred years?’
‘They’ll talk about the lions in the sky and the shifties dead in the snow. But you won’t have to wait a hundred years; there’ll be penny ballads on sale outside Rottonbow by the end of the week.’
‘You’re a true Jackelian,’ laughed the man. ‘You should write some of those ballads yourself and approach a printer; you would have the market to yourself if you got in early enough.’
‘You know, I think I might just do that,’ said Molly. ‘And are you going back to teaching?’
‘I have an invite,’ said the man. ‘From a Guardian called Tinfold, to run for parliament.’
Molly snorted. ‘That old whistler? He’s a radical — the Levellers haven’t held the majority for a hundred years.’
‘Do you think so? I always thought they were a bit middling. Still, I like to tilt for lost causes.’ He indicated one of the corpses Molly was pushing him past. ‘And after this I don’t think Jackals will be quite as complacent about our position in the natural order of things. Middlesteel will need rebuilding and the fleet will need rebuilding; most of the Special Guard are torcless and on the run; there’ll be calls to firebomb Quatershift to rubble that will
