similar mill-cursed sickness.’
‘I retain you solely for your skill as a hunter,’ said the shadow. ‘I do not require your philosophical musings on the state of Jackelian society. Where in Middlesteel did she escape from your custody?’
‘Not in Middlesteel,’ said the count. ‘Beneath it. She was hiding in Grimhope — quite the quarry, young Molly Templar. Rather admirable. She’s showed more spirit and ingenuity than the grudges I am normally called to pay off among the merchants and flash mob lords.’
‘Grimhope!’ roared the figure in the mirror. ‘She was in the city below? Why did you not tell me this?’
‘As you so kindly pointed out,’ said the count, ‘your largesse is dependent solely on the successful capture of the girl. I am not paid to deliver daily notes on my progress to you. Your two-shilling whippers were of no help to me in Sun Gate. When I require a trail of poorhouse corpses for Ham Yard to follow back to me, I will tip off your thugs. Until then, I will follow my usual practice and work alone.’
‘Test my patience too far, old soldier, and those men will come for
‘I was not merely a marshal in the old regime,’ said the count. ‘I was also first duellist of the court. You would not be the first patron to attempt to renegotiate the terms of our agreement during an engagement. If you have a yearning to send any of your bullyboys to visit me, you had better make sure they are not anyone you wish to see again. I will be returning their ashes to your valuer cremated inside one of my old wine bottles.’
‘Bring me the girl,’ commanded the shadow. ‘Do not let Molly Templar slip away from you again.’
Steam was rising off the surface of the mirror; the worldsinger hex had nearly worked its course. Soon the artefact would be fit only for the scrap heap.
‘One last thing,’ said the count. ‘You are not by any chance the girl’s father?’
A deep cackling laughter like a log being consumed by flames sounded from the mirror. Then the glass twisted and sizzled into silence.
‘I did not think so,’ said the count.
‘May I put the mirror down, sir?’ asked the craynarbian.
‘Of course, old shell. Toss it out the back with the others.’
‘You would think the gentleman would have learnt to communicate using this country’s excellent crystalgrid network.’
The count picked up the book he had been reading.
‘As you say, sir, as you say.’
‘I am so very tired of listening to the locals sing “Lion of Jackals” at the end of every damn play, every damn prom. It is far past time these people lost a war and gained a little humility. I think when we have collected the money from our current patron, we should take a trip out to the colonies. See what the shores of Concorzia have to offer.’
‘A little late for a new start, sir?’ pointed out the craynarbian. ‘I don’t know, Ka’oard. Land is cheap out there. Maybe we could buy a manor with a stream. Free the contracts on some young pickpockets and horse thieves who’ve been given the boat. Watching them farm the land and roll for fish in the water, it might be like the old days.’
‘We did not make war on children in the old days, sir,’ the craynarbian pointed out. ‘We did not hunt young girls.’
‘Don’t confuse our present reduced circumstances with the field of honour, old friend,’ said the count. ‘Here in Jackals we are refugees in a land of shopkeepers. This is not war we make here. It is
The retainer put the brandy bottle back in the cabinet and locked the glass door. When he turned around he found the old aristocrat was asleep in his chair. Ka’oard placed a blanket over his employer’s legs.
‘All things considered, sir, I think I preferred war,’ he whispered and left.
Chapter Eleven
It had been a week since Oliver and the disreputable Stave had traded the warmth of the narrowboat for the damp ferns and wind-whipped moors that ran across Angelset, from the town of Ewehead to the outskirts of Shadowclock. To avoid the blood machines and the county constabulary they kept off the crown roads and away from the toll cottages, trekking across open countryside.
Little of the land seemed to be under cultivation; the border with Quatershift was only a few miles to the east. The presence of the cursewall — and the continual eerie whistling as that dark product of the worldsinger arts absorbed the wind — had been enough to empty any of the villages that had not been laid to waste during the Two-Year War. Now at last it felt to Oliver like he was really an outlaw. They avoided human company, keeping to the wilds, always with an eye to the nearest copse, wood or gully — in case the shadow of one of the RAN’s small border patrol scouts appeared on the skyline. Even in summer the moorland they crossed seemed like a desolate, blasted place. Freezing nights, soggy mornings and only the occasional wild pony or tail-hawk for company.
When they found streams, they would replenish their canteens and Harry would boil up water to make a stew from the dried meats and bacon that Damson Loade had crammed into their travel packs. She had also given them an earthenware jug of her favourite jinn, corked with a silver stopper in the shape of a bull’s head. The most that could be said for the sharp-tasting firewater was that it warmed them briefly, before they turned in at night under the tent that filled up most of Oliver’s bag.
Oliver had also kept the edition of the newspaper that revealed the killings at Hundred Locks. When Harry was not looking, he would unwrap the newspaper and stare at the remains of his old life fixed in print, hoping the details would make sense if he just pondered them long enough. The boring repetitive chores, the invisible cage of his registration order, they seemed to belong to someone else now.
The tent that Oliver lugged around was a strange-looking affair, a blocky harlequin patchwork of greens, browns and black. Harry said a transaction engine had turned out the design; specifically fabricated to disrupt the lines an eye would interpret as a man-made object. Up close it was enough to give Oliver a headache just looking at it. Once, he had pointed at one of the ruined villages, now in the shadow of a wood, and suggested they might camp under the shelter of one of the more solid cottages.
Harry just shook his head. ‘They’re abandoned for a reason, Oliver. Towards the end of the Two-Year War the Commonshare was getting desperate. Their invasion had been beaten back, their large cities had been bombed into rubble by the RAN’s aerostats; the human wave attacks by the brigades of the people’s army had failed; the Carlist uprising in Jackals had been crushed. So Quatershift resorted to mage-war. Their worldsingers hexed shells filled with plague spores and earthflow particles drained from the leylines, and they unveiled their secret weapon. Long Tim.’
‘Long Tim?’
‘After Timlar Prestlon, the mechomancer who created their long cannon. There’s one on display outside the barracks of the Frontier Light Horse; steam-driven monsters with a barrel as tall as the offices of a Middlesteel counting house. During the war the Commonshare was shelling most of Angelset from as far away as Perlaise.’
‘The war was over eight years before I was born, Harry,’ said Oliver. ‘The ruins would be safe now, no?’
‘The Commonshare was not playing four-poles, Oliver. They didn’t load their balls with shrapnel or blow- barrel sap. The devil’s potion their worldsingers brewed up made people sick, like being hit by a dozen plagues at once. The earthflow particles caused transmutations on top of it all — like being caught in a feymist, but without the slim chance of survival. During the months it took the order to neutralize their sorcery, tens of thousands of our people died in agony in this county. Some of that filth could still be active down in the ruins.’
‘But Jackals won the Two-Year War.’
‘For our sins, we did. The Special Guard smashed Long Tim, my people made Timlar disappear and furnished him with a nice warm cell in the Court of the Air, and the fury on the floor of parliament gave the First Guardian the backing he needed to overturn the conduct of war act of 1501. The RAN dirt-gassed the shifties’ second city, Reudox. They say the stench of the corpses was so bad that the God-Emperor could smell the carnage across the
