years by listening to every wise man who would bend my ear without taking account of my own counsel.'
'Nor,' said Bear behind his paw, 'has he been their prince for those long years without having the heads of those wise men who disagreed with his counsel removed with large iron shears.'
'Yesterday evening I sent our most percipient thog riders out to the south. Men of keen vision whose eyes may gallop along the horizon more swiftly even than their mounts.'
There was nodding and agreement in the crowd. 'It's true,' said one man. 'Fast they are. And the men keen- eyed.'
'What the hell is a thog?' said Richards out of the corner of his mouth.
'Like a cow with six legs,' said Bear.
'Very quick, and extremely palatable. Needlessly pedantic, though,' added Tarquin.
'Nine set out,' continued the prince. 'Only one returned, and on the point of death. Before he died in my own arms he said this to me: 'Make ready for war, my prince. Lord Penumbra marches on the city.''
'What? Why would he attack us?' shouted a man at the front of the square. 'We sold him his army!' There was much coughing and shuffling about amongst the men present. A four-foot rat in dungarees turned to a well- padded fellow. 'Shame on you!' it said. The man flushed and looked away.
'Yes. Well,' said the Prince, 'perhaps it is time to look over our long-cherished views on impartiality.' There were murmurs. The Prince paused. 'And perhaps we should question the wisdom of selling an army of automata to a man who is composed entirely of darkness.'
'You don't say,' said an angry cat in a hat.
'Though many of our number are but artisans and fabricators, we have no choice but to make a stand,' continued the Prince. 'I have placed the Pylon Guard under the command of Lord High Commander Hedgehog. He and Mr Spink have brought eight thousand animal warriors with them. We of Pylon City stand with many folk who have fled here from elsewhere, as we do also with the people of the plateau and western lands. It is only true and proper that the Lord High Commander lead our combined forces in battle. I delegate full responsibility to him, for I am a merchant, not a soldier. Henceforth our troops are his to command.' The Prince smiled winningly at the crowd.
'I'll bet he's on the next train out of here,' said Bear. 'No balls, that prince.'
'And he's beaten you like twenty times!' called out a highspirited seal pup. He was shushed by his father.
'Gentlefolk, I give you Lord High Commander Hedgehog.' There was a burst of applause as a man-sized hedgehog in a suit of armour waddled onto the stage, spines poking through holes in his cuirass, all protected by artfully articulated sleeves. A cohort of heavily armoured men and animals took up station before the stage. Richards felt himself jostled, and he turned to see guards encircling the crowd.
'Hello,' said Lord High Commander Hedgehog in a cheery kind of way. 'I say, I say, it's a rum old thing but I've got some awfully bad news.' He smiled weakly at the crowd. 'I'm afraid you're all going to have to fight. Sorry and all, but there is a war on.' Hedgehog's voice was cluttered with stilted upper-class nonsense, but there was steel in it.
The hedgehog began to talk of musters and conscription, of regiments and barracks. But Richards caught none of it. A guard approached Bear.
'Sir? Commander McTurk is here to see you.'
'He has come in person. Good.' Bear nodded in satisfaction as a stumpy mechanism clunked through the crowd to them, steam-powered and man-shaped, like the haemites, though fairer of form.
The automaton stopped by the Bear and his prisoner. Bear saluted. 'Sir! I came upon this man while I was conducting a longrange patrol to the east of Optimizja. He maintains that he…'
McTurk interrupted, steam whistling out of his mouth as he spoke. 'Richards. So you got my message. Not that I am unhappy to see you, but just what the hell are you doing here? It's not safe.'
'Huh?' said Bear. 'You know each other?'
'You could say that, Bear.' Richards' face broke into a broad smile. 'A social call is all, Rolston. I thought I'd see how k52's plan to take over the world was doing. And how you were. Say, what do you know about k52 and his plan to take over the world?' His smile grew less friendly. 'Or is it your plan too, Rolston?'
'There's no time for that,' the automaton rumbled. 'k52 has eyes everywhere. Come with me — there's somewhere we can talk.'
The Prancing Weasel was a rough pub on a rough night at a rough time, and was actually full of your actual weasels: long, ribbon-bodied psychopaths who were amusing themselves by doing dangerous, drunken things with knives. The iron of the walls was rusty, the floors sticky, the air heavy with oxidised iron, stale beer and sweaty fur.
The tables and benches were in a worse state than the floor. Richards got a table while Bear and Rolston were at the bar, but when Bear returned, he refused to sit. 'My fur will get dirty,' he said. Richards sat anyway, getting a rust stain on Tarquin's hindquarters from the bench.
'What is this place?' said Tarquin with dismay. 'This isn't the kind of establishment I am inclined to frequent.' He looked at the embattled bar staff running from table to table, slopping grog as they went. 'My tail is dangling into something most unpleasant.'
'You're imagining that,' said Richards, as he flicked Tarquin's tail out of a spittoon.
'Hmmm,' said Bear, gulping ale from a bucket.
Richards sipped his own drink. The beer was surprisingly good. The Prince had declared all inns to be free for the night, and people and animals had crowded them to breaking point. They're partying like it is the end of the world, thought Richards. Which, technically speaking, I suppose it is.
Most of the patrons were mammals of one kind or another, although the Prancing Weasel's clientele included a couple of birds, and there was a frog with a gun in the corner.
A band of rowdy vole mercenaries sat on a nearby table, upsetting acorns and starting fights. They sang songs in a register so high it set Richards' teeth on edge. On the other side of the room a gang of drunken badgers boxed with hares, while the men in the place built their courage with outrageous tales and heroic quantities of booze.
The noise in the pub was deafening, almost enough to drown out the sound of machinery outside. The city boomed to the banging of trip hammers. They'd started soon after the moot, one or two at first, asynchronous and isolated, but more took up the rhythm until they blended into the pulsing of a giant ferrous heart. Furnaces roared like lungs, and fiery blood of molten metal ran into moulds in noisy foundries. The metal of the buildings grew warm to the touch as Pylon City came alive.
A weasel fell over in front of Bear and threw up by his feet.
'Dear God!' moaned Tarquin. 'Are you sure there's nowhere else we can go?'
'Rolston says this place is safe,' said Richards.
'Bloody weasels,' said Bear, kicking the mustelid.
Rolston joined them. He was no longer McTurk, but a neongreen skunk with sexualised facial features and a studded posing pouch.
'What sordid corner of the Grid did that come from?' Richards asked.
The skunk looked uncomfortable. 'You must pardon my appearance,' it said with Rolston's voice. 'I have been forced to parasite multiple bodies. I must switch my sensing presence regularly, or k52 will nail me. I get little choice.'
'I'd avoid talking about being nailed, looking like that,' said Richards. Bear sniggered in his bucket. 'Sit down,' he continued, 'you owe me an explanation.'
'Yes, yes, I suppose I do,' sighed Rolston. He wrestled his unwieldy body onto the bench. 'We'll have to talk. I've very little access to the underlying network here, no data transfer. The Realms are not keyed for our kind.'
'No,' said Richards.
'Why on earth did you bring us here?' said Bear, scowling at the voles.
'It is the only place where we are unlikely to be seen or heard,' said Rolston. 'That is why, a bare spot on the informational nets that underpin this place. Think of it as sitting upon a scar joining two fragments together, Boogie Woogie Farmland and the Iron Princes game constructs.' Rolston the Skunk looked nervous, and peered into his undrunk beer. He was on edge, not the flamboyant experimentalist Richards knew. 'I came here with k52 some months ago, months in Real terms; subjectively I've been here centuries, with Pl'anna and some others, a Six and
