man-o'-war running in the clouds alongside me, and the shapes I saw didn't look much like one of our bonnie ladies of the air. Not the underbelly of a skrayper, either. All you ever see of one of them is a half-transparent tentacle coming down from the sky to tear you apart.'
'Well, I'll tease a tale out of you for your board somehow,' said Molly. 'That is, if the Army of Shadows manages to forgo looting all the stationers in the capital that are willing to take my work.'
Molly left the sail rider to his broth.
As she shut the door to his room, Duncan tapped his travel case thoughtfully.
‹I like her.›
'Aye, so do I,' said Duncan. 'All three of Tock House's owners appear to be fine wee people. We were owed a turn of good fortune and I believe we'll be safe enough laying away here awhile.'
‹I'm afraid of these polar barbarians. You won't let the Army of Shadows get me?›
'Don't be a daftie, I'm always going to be here to protect you,' said Duncan. 'This hubbub may be an opportunity. When the regiments start running short of cannon fodder and are down to bairns who don't know one end of a dirk from another, the recruiting sergeants might not be so fussy about letting the likes of me hold a commission again.'
‹I don't care for war.›
'Nobody ever does,' said Duncan. 'Nobody ever does. But work is work.'
Molly blinked the sleep out of her eyes, the owl's cry fading away. Woken again. She normally slept so soundly too, but then, the birds had been chattering uncommonly loudly since the news of the fall of Catosia – each dawn chorus a panicked explosion of robins and starlings. Now, even the nocturnal birds had become infected with the fear of what was coming down from the north. But this night there was something else in the air, the sense of something familiar. Something was- no, it couldn't be? Molly swung her feet out of bed and padded over to the window, pulling the curtain back an inch. Down among the trees, was that a shadow of moonlight and clouds, or…?
'Please don't be alarmed.'
Molly spun around. To see… not who she had been expecting! A thin and scrawny young girl, as much a ragamuffin as Molly had been when she was a poorhouse urchin cleaning the heating stacks in the capital's great pneumatic towers. Accompanied by a man who might have been her father in his dishevelled lack of means. Molly kept a compact purse gun in her sideboard, but these two odd intruders were between her and the expensive little Locke's Lady Pattern.
'How did you get past the front door? Molly hissed.
'I spoke to your lock,' said the man.
'There's seven drums turning on my front door's transaction engine,' said Molly. She should know, she had upgraded the cipher on the engine herself. 'That must have been quite a conversation.'
'For Circle's sake, Kyorin, you're frightening her,' announced the ragamuffin. 'I told you we'd be better waiting for daylight hours to come visiting.'
'Would that we still possessed the luxury of a lost night, Purity, our time is running short,' said Kyorin.
'Listen to Purity's advice next time,' advised Molly. 'If I scream for help there are three others inside the house.'
'There is no need for that. I intend no harm towards you; quite the opposite, I have come to warn you.' Kyorin drew out a copy of Molly's novel from the pocket of his frayed jacket.
'Oh, please! Not another one of my readers who belongs in an asylum. This is completely the wrong way to get me to write a dedication in your bloody book.'
'I have come to warn you, to enlist your help as a person of influence with the vision to appreciate your people's predicament. But I believe you have already been warned, you have a… talent for the soul of machines, you are – ah, now I see, you are a hybrid – your blood bubbles with sub-cellular level machinery.'
Molly stiffened. Who was this madman? 'I really don't know what you are talking about.'
'There is no need for deceit. You must not think of me as an enemy,' insisted Kyorin. 'I can feel the imprint of your land's sentinel machine upon you. We share an enemy, you and I, Molly Templar of the Torley Street Press. An enemy who I fear has already neutralized the sentinel machine you act as a symbiote for.'
'Torley Street Press are only my publisher,' said Molly, 'and who are you to know of the Hexmachina?'
'He's a slave and a witch doctor,' blurted out Purity. 'On the run from the polar barbarians. He should have a beard, I know.'
'Yes he should,' said Molly, looking more closely at the ragamuffin. And the girl should have stolen a shawl from a washing line to hide the shadow mark where the golden crown of a royalist prisoner had so obviously been ripped off her cleaner's pinny.
'I know of your sentinel machine because my people once created similar devices. But they were not nearly enough to protect us from the masters' fury.'
'You're talking about the people who have frozen the Hexmachina within the earth? I had been hoping that it was all only a bad dream. Who has the power to imprison the Hexmachina…?'
'It is no dream. My masters' craft is great. I can show you, if you allow me to join with your mind. I carry a forbidden memory, a seed of truth passed down from mind to mind, from generation to generation. That is why I am here, to try to stop the fate of my land being visited upon yours.'
Molly touched her neck nervously.
'He means well,' said Purity. 'He does. He saved my life.'
Molly nodded towards her dirty pinny. 'He picked the lock on the gates of the Royal Breeding House too?'
'I will not hurt you,' said Kyorin. 'I sense that your brain is already evolved for a similar form of communication. Your land's sentinel machine has used the structure of your mind to join with you before.'
For the seed of truth? Molly winced. The truth was a mutable thing, it moved and flexed with the eye of its beholder. But she had to know, after the Hexmachina's last garbled warning and the polar barbarians' deadly incursion from the north. The Army of Shadows. She had to know.
'Show me,' whispered Molly.
'Clear your mind,' instructed Kyorin, reaching out with his hands. His fingers felt warm on Molly's forehead, warmer still as the vision began to rise inside her mind. It was as if each of her eyes was showing her a different sight, the dark familiarity of her room at Tock House overlaid with something alien, at first smoke-thin, but the image growing clearer as she focused in on it.
It was a room, a large chamber made of a glowing substance Molly could not put a name to. A council was about to begin, illuminated by an emerald light falling through cathedral-sized windows that should have been covered in ocean, but were submerged no longer – waves of green sludge lapping against the lower panes instead. She could hear the noise of the surf in the vision, a repugnant polluted gargle as each thick wave sloshed against the glass.
Around the crescent table sat rubbery-skinned albino creatures, octopus-like, but with very humanoid eyes and very humanoid fingers branching out at the end of their tentacles, the pallid limbs flickering across machines built into their table. Communicating with distant functionaries while they waited for the council to start. This was a most peculiar vision. Molly could actually interact with it, push her mind towards areas of the image and gain knowledge of what she was looking at.
Molly was about to try to divine just what these strange creatures were, when a truly giant member of the species rose into the chamber through an opening in the floor.
'The emperor's council is in session.'
Molly concentrated on what was being said, trying to banish the image of her bedroom that underlay this strange sight. Hear the words; hear her vision's translation of them.
'The Department of Nourishment will open this session of the council with their report.'
One of the creatures leant forward to speak into a box on the desk, its beak warbling. Others were watching this scene, the session broadcast to a select group of rulers who could not be present, sent out like a punch card message coded and carried across the Jackelian crystalgrid. 'Oceanic evaporation has increased by six per cent since the last reporting of my department, four per cent higher than the predictions we had been supplied with by
