the start of the Two-Year War. King Steam’s knights broke the back of them down here. Most of the trenches have filled in now, but if you dug deep enough, you’d find the bones and rotting shakos of Quatershift’s elite troops — the pieces the foxes haven’t dragged away.’
Perhaps the old battlefield had unsettled the disreputable Stave too, because he kept up his commentary like one of the tourist entertainers who haunted the foot of the waterways at Hundred Locks, filling the eerie silence with the life of his voice. The rotting spokes of light artillery wheels, the shattered glass of old cannon charges, rusting harpoons from Commonshare anti-steammen ordinance, lead balls from Free State pressure repeaters — each picked out as landmarks on the gruesome wartime tour.
After the ranks of buried, mud-drowned corpses fell away, Oliver spotted a splash of red on the side of the hill — out of place, as if someone had spread a gaudy picnic blanket over the gloomy brown slopes. ‘That looks fresh.’
‘A bizarre enough sight out here, old stick,’ agreed Harry. ‘Let’s take a closer peek.’
As they got nearer Oliver saw that the object was not as uniform as it first appeared. What he had taken for a solid crimson swathe was a patchwork of oblongs stitched together, mostly red, but some with stripes and yellow suns sewn on. They were flags, pieced together by wiry cord — river fisherman’s netting by the look of it; the large wave of canvas lying crumpled over a mound.
‘What is it, Harry?’
The wolftaker looked towards the east, his lips pursed. ‘Let’s go, lad.’
‘What is it? It looks like flags.’
‘You don’t need to know — let’s just keep going south.’
Oliver took the corner of the canvas and tipped it up. There was a blanket underneath, a huddle of sacks with … a field of fungus-like balloons growing out of them. This was a strange way to farm mushrooms. But then Oliver saw the lines of legs, arms, hands, a couple clutching tightly at each other. Dear Circle, that was a baby they were holding between them, its feet as tiny as a doll’s — so small and grey he could not even see if it was a boy or a girl. Bile rose in Oliver’s throat and before he knew what he was doing his breakfast was vomiting over the grass as he stumbled towards the family to see if any of them were alive.
Harry seized his arm. ‘Don’t touch them. You can’t help them now.’
‘They might be alive, they might be.’
‘Oliver, no. They’ve been through the cursewall. Those things growing on them are from the hex — sometimes their hearts give out, sometimes they start sprouting plague spores, sometimes they might age a hundred years or have their blood turn to stone. They were dead the moment their balloon lost height and they blew through the wall.’
‘They can’t have had a balloon.’ Oliver was crying. ‘They don’t have balloons in Quatershift.’
‘They don’t have celgas, Oliver. They don’t have aerostats. But take canvas, fire, hot air … you have a balloon. Not good enough to get them over the cursewall, but how were they to know? I doubt if there’s many engineers left on their side of the wall now.’
Oliver couldn’t take his eyes off the human wreckage — bodies that once laughed, cried, walked, lived, now just bags of flesh, no spark of what had made them human. How could it be? One moment something vital with hopes and dreams, the next nothing — compost for a hex-born toadstool.
Oliver sunk to his knees. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘I wish you hadn’t had to find out,’ said the wolftaker.
‘But you knew, Harry.’
‘Most of the refugees come by water, Oliver. Can’t run a cursewall under the water — over it, but not under it. And yes, I’ve seen this before. During the worst of the famine years the refugees even tried building a catapult to throw themselves over the wall. It would almost have been funny, if you hadn’t seen how thin the bodies were that rained down on Jackals.’
Oliver’s throat had dried up. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘For the big idea, Oliver. Someone comes up with the big idea — could be religion, could be politics, could be the race you belong to, or your clan, or philosophy, or economics, or your sex or just how many bleeding guineas you got stashed in the counting house. Doesn’t matter, because the big idea is always the same — wouldn’t it be good if only
‘But people are too different, too diverse to fit into one way of acting or thinking or looking. And that’s where the trouble starts. That’s when they show up at your door to make the ones who don’t fit vanish, when, frustrated by the lack of progress and your stupidity and plain wrongness at not appreciating the perfection of the big idea, they start trying to shave off the imperfections. Using knives and racks and axe-men and camps and Gideon’s Collars. When you see a difference in a person and can find only wickedness in it — you and them — the
Harry pointed at the bodies huddled in the wreckage. ‘That’s the true power of evil. You think the people that made those poor jacks’ lives so unbearable the only choice that was left to them was to trust their fate to the wind and a bag of cloth; you think they think of themselves as wicked? In their own minds the rulers of the Commonshare are princes on white horses, Oliver, dispensing justice and largesse and making the world a better place. Even as they’re tossing burning torches onto the thatched roofs of
Harry threw the canvas back over the bodies in disgust, covering their empty shells. ‘They used flags to make it. That’s fitting. More flags in the Commonshare now than blankets.’
‘I can still see them,’ said Oliver.
‘Yes you can. And you will for years. And next time you meet some holy jacks banging on about how the Circle will save you, ask them what their views on the next election are. And when you meet Carlists banging on about how the party will make you free, you ask them what their faith in spirit is. Because the big idea suffers no rival obsessions to confuse its hosts, no dissent, no deviation or heresy from its perfection. You want to know what these poor sods really died for, Oliver? They died for a closed mind too small to hold more than a single truth.’
The wolftaker took out the jug of slipsharp oil and sprinkled black pools of the thick liquid over the crumpled skin of the makeshift balloon. ‘Time to burn the flags, I think.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Oliver. To the family, to the moor-bitten wind, to no one in particular.
Harry stuck a match and threw it onto the canvas, flames leaping up and crackling across the fabric. ‘One day you’ll face a trial, Oliver. A difficult task that may seem impossible. A choice you can’t confront. When that time comes, you remember these three here on this day. Remember all the details you’re going to try so hard to forget. Then you’ll know what you need to do.’
‘Is that what you do, Harry?’
‘Your father told me that, Oliver,’ said the wolftaker. ‘And he was right too. I’ve seen so many bodies for so many big ideas. Sometimes it’s the only way you can make yourself go on.’
The fire reached across the length of the quilt. At the head of the hill the remaining mist of the day was spreading out towards the sky as smoke billowed and curled around the wreckage of the flimsy vessel. Oliver looked on in amazement. The mist was coalescing into a body. Were the ghosts of the poor dead family returning to visit their own pyre?
‘Harry!’
‘I see it,’ said the wolftaker.
Slowly the mist took shape — a horned warrior in armour — no, not armour — the plate metal was its body … a steamman.
‘Harry, what in the Circle’s name?’
‘Steamo Loa,’ said Harry. ‘One of their gods — an ancestral spirit.’
As they watched, the spectral figure pointed a mailed glove towards the south, its head slowly shaking in warning, then it turned to the east and pointed a hand in the direction of the distant mountains — the Steammen
