Free State. The meaning was clear.
‘It doesn’t want us to go to Shadowclock, Harry.’
‘Jigger me sideways, now I really have seen everything. Unless there’s a worldsinger behind that hill laughing himself silly; but why?’
In answer to the disreputable Stave’s question a strange howl rent the air, like a human in pain screaming through the throat of a wolf.
‘What was that sound, Harry?’
Harry looked at the mist above the hill — the shape of the steamman now shredding into ribbons in the sky. ‘Nothing that should be this far north of the Cassarabian border. Run for the mountains, boy. Fast — NOW.’
Sprinting back through the graveyard of the battlefield, Oliver glanced behind them. Nothing. Just the wreckage of the Quatershiftian refugees’ escape attempt.
‘Your blunderbuss,’ Harry called across to Oliver. ‘The gun, unstrap it and load up.’
Harry was pulling his long pistol out of his pack as he ran, breaking it and slipping in a charge. Oliver’s bell- muzzled gun was jouncing along the side of his folded tent — strapped just the way the wolftaker had shown him. One pull of the fastening and the weapon was falling, its wooden handle in his right hand. Thumbing the release as he ran, he broke the gun in the middle so that the barrel was swinging towards the ground on its hinge. The crystal charge felt like ice in his hand, fingers fumbling to push it into the breach. It dropped in perfectly and the blunderbuss clacked shut with a gentle push from the heel of his palm.
Oliver scanned the landscape behind them. ‘I can’t hear the noise anymore.’
‘Close,’ puffed Harry. ‘Hunting silent.’
Something hammered Oliver into the boggy mud, arcing past and barrelling into the wolftaker; rolling Harry to the ground, a mass of exposed pulsing muscles — as if the creature had allowed its skin and fur to be flayed from its body. Oliver got back to his feet. The creature’s paws were smashing the ground and Harry was a blur, using his worldsinger tricks again, dodging the thing’s claws even as it had him trapped.
Like the crack of snapping wood something pinged off the rocks to Oliver’s right, showering his shoulder with flinty dust. Redcoats stood on the hills where Oliver and Harry had been heading before the spectre’s warning, holding long spindly rifles with bayonets fixed on their barrels, barrels that were pointing towards him.
Harry was rolling in the mud with the hunting monster. Even if he had been a marksman, not an amateur with a sailor’s boarding gun, Oliver couldn’t let a shot off without hitting them both. There was a growl and Oliver looked up at the granite outcrop he had backed into just as the second beast leapt down on him. Oliver screamed as the hunter clawed into his left arm, the weight whamming him down to the watery soil, desperately shoving the blunderbuss into the monster’s mouth. It was ripping the naval pattern out of his hand as he triggered the weapon, an explosion of buckshot and thunder ricocheting off the rock — most of it peppering the creature’s flank, one of the lead pellets glancing across Oliver’s cheek and tearing it open.
Oliver tried to scramble out from under the beast as its wounds momentarily distracted it, but it was too quick, the buckshot a mere inconvenience. Reaching out it cuffed Oliver in the back and sent him sprawling, then lunged forward, snarling. It sounded like it was talking, idiot words mangled by a lolling tongue and razor teeth. ‘Eta flug, eta flug.’
Terrified, Oliver met its gaze — the eyes of a human girl, long lashes and blue irises buried in its skull plate looking back at him — angry, angry inhuman rage. Those beautiful eyes blinked in surprise as the ground beneath them disinte-grated, boy and beast carried into the air as clods of mud rained down onto the earth. Floatquake or some desperate worldsinger magic called by Harry? But Oliver was tumbling off something, a rusting metal shell rising out of the soil, water pouring out of gashes and hollows.
The startled hunter had rolled off him, leaving Oliver’s left arm a furnace of agony, and leapt into the metal sculpture rising out of the mud. It was a corpse, one of the knights steammen, only one battle arm still intact — a pike arm with a rusted brown blade. Metal and muscle joined in a fusion of combat, the panther-sized hunting beast lashing back and forth with its claws, tearing gashes in the zombie’s already broken hull. For its part, the steamman corpse was twist-pumping its pike arm into the beast’s dense stomach muscles. The only sign of the damage it was doing was the red gore slicking its blade.
The centaur-like steamman fell forward and scooped up the beast with its skeletal manipulator arms. Another corpse was rising from the ground, two-legged and hump-backed, like a jumping rat but with a long metal beak. Soundlessly the iron knight slammed the hunting beast down onto the second steamman corpse’s beak, impaling the creature. It let out a reverberating howl so loud it seemed to rattle the heart inside Oliver’s chest.
Hearing more human-sounding cries, Oliver looked around to see the redcoats in the distance retreating, falling back in a disciplined skirmish line, the crackle of their rifles breaking against metal bodies uncovering themselves from the hillside. Harry was pulling himself out from under the corpse of the second beast. A headless barrel-sized steamman had pinned the creature to the ground with its pincer-like tripod of legs and the wolftaker was sliding his hunting knife out from the thing’s skull.
‘There’s a caliph across the border,’ coughed Harry, ‘who is going to be mighty jiggered that his prize hunting cats are feeding the worms in Jackals.’
Behind Oliver the shells of the two steammen who’d saved him were sinking back into the bog, one of the bodies weighted down by a tonne weight of dead meat. ‘The Loas, Harry, they’re riding the corpses.’
‘Well, it’d be rude to turn down good advice freely given,’ said Harry, looking at the iron zombies shambling after the company of redcoats. ‘And by the looks of it, possibly quite dangerous to boot. Let’s go and see what King Steam has to say.’
Harry looked at Oliver’s arm, feeling it with the fingers of both his hands. Oliver yelled as the wolftaker applied pressure to the bleeding muscle. ‘Make a bandage with your spare shirt. I’ll tie a tourniquet above the fang marks. You’re going to need to get that sewn and cleaned neater than I can do it.’
‘What about Shadowclock, Harry?’
‘Shadowclock will still be there after a visit to His Highness in Mechancia,’ said Harry, testing the dead corpse of the hunting beast with his boot. It remained lifeless. ‘So, who do we know who spends too much time in Cassarabia?’
‘The Jackelian ambassador to Bladetenbul?’
‘That was a rhetorical question,’ replied Harry. He took out a telescope and extended it in the direction of the retreating redcoats. ‘There’s a white wagon back there, medical corps — plague wagon.’ He grinned. ‘Bloody plague wagon. That’s
Oliver bent down for his blunderbuss. It was intact except for tooth marks on the butt. They left the bones of the hunting beasts to rot with the wreckage of the steammen and the broken divisions of the Commonshare.
Shortly after they had stopped for lunch, the boggy ground hardened up, the low rolling hills replaced by foothills, tall alpine woods and the start of a snow-capped mountain range. They must have crossed into the Free State — there were no mountains Oliver knew of this far east into Jackals. Most of the metal race’s villages and cities were up in the crags; this low down the only signs of people were the dried donkey droppings from trading caravans. That and metal rods with long ribbons of a paper-thin cloth fluttering in the breeze, the rainbow colours marking the path deeper into the steammen kingdom.
Maybe it was the icy mountain winds blowing down through the peaks of the Mechancian Spine, but after another hour of walking, pushing towards the steammen capital, Oliver started to shiver. At first it was just a chill and he buttoned up the collar on his coat, but it spread, fingers of cold creeping down across his back. Harry noticed Oliver was falling behind and waited for him to catch up.
‘It’s like winter here in the mountains, Harry.’
‘Winter? You’re sweating, Oliver. Let me see your arm.’
Oliver was trembling uncontrollably now. It felt as if just the breeze from the heights was enough to waft him up the slopes, carry him like a leaf spinning into the realm of the steammen. ‘I can’t raise it, Harry. The bandage has made it heavy, like a block of ice. But it tingles below the shoulder.’
Harry said something, but his voice had faded, then the wolftaker grew very tall — or was it that he was standing over Oliver now? The ground felt firm, almost warm, just the right shape for his body. If he had realized how comfortable it was he would have stopped before. On the slopes the pine trees stood like sentries, tall and clear, parading for his pleasure. ‘I’ve seen some interesting things, Harry. Since I’ve been free. It would have been boring to spend the rest of my days trapped in Hundred Locks.’
