Oliver looked at Carl's supposed butler. 'But then, not everything is as it seems at first glance.'
Molly pointed to the First Guardian's desk. 'That badge you've just covered up with papers on your desk. If you're collecting, we've recovered something a little more substantial from the wreckage of the Court of the Air. Or should I say, someone.'
'You see,' said Carl towards his butler. 'I told you it's always worthwhile making time for old compatriots.'
'Let me explain just how far away we are from the old days,' said Molly. And Carl listened as she shook the foundations of his world.
When Oliver and Molly left the First Guardian's office, a sea of uniforms was being ushered into the largest of the cabinet rooms. The crimson jackets of the Jackelian New Pattern Army, the dark blue of the Sky Lords of the Admiralty, House Guards generals weighed down with braid and medals and a scattering of cyan-uniformed Quatershiftian liaison staff – as incongruous by their presence as anything the pair had ever seen.
Molly waited for the hourly toll of Brute Julius – the bell tower that arrowed out of the House of Guardians – to quieten before speaking. 'Do you think he will help us?'
'The Court of the Air had an inkling of what they were facing towards the end,' said Oliver. 'You could see by the way that hyena in a butler's jacket reacted, that the Court had communicated some of their suspicions to the First Guardian.'
'Maybe it was a mistake me coming with you,' said Molly. 'Everyone in that room knows that I sparked off the celestial fiction genre.'
'Just one of us would have been easy enough to write off as a case for the asylum, but both? And you could see how pale the political crusher went when I told him I was on the Court of the Air when it was attacked. There isn't a nation on this or any other continent capable of taking the wolf-takers down. The great game is changing and I can feel the fear of the unknown eating away inside them.'
Molly lifted her copy of the list Timlar Preston had composed for the First Guardian. The names of the scientists from his old cannon project team at the Institute des Luminaires, in the event that any were still alive after the purges and famines of the terror in Quatershift. As well as the location of the abandoned mine where Timlar had hidden the parts for a weapon unlike any other during the dying days of the war. 'Now all we need is the time to build Preston's cannon.'
'The three greatest armies on the continent fighting as allies… you'll have your time.'
An ancient image rose unbidden within Molly – more of a feeling than anything concrete, another of Kyorin's unwanted gifts to her. The Army of Shadows' raw, rapacious savagery. Kyorin's people had built a great civilization, but the Kals' gentle instincts had made them so many cattle at the abattoir when the masters had fallen upon them.
'I'm not so sure.'
'The steammen are coming,' said Oliver, speaking the words with the reverence of a prayer. 'And Jackals has never lost a war when the Steammen Free State has been fighting by our side.'
Another of Molly's memories rose. One of her own this time, of her old steamman friend Slowcogs, who had given his life to save hers; and she had to choke back a tear. 'Have we had a good life?'
'Define good.'
'After we beat Tzlayloc and his revolutionaries, it felt as if I could do anything, achieve anything. And in my own way I suppose I have. I escaped the poorhouse. I have a living now that many would envy. Wealth. Friends who would die for me. Yet here we are a few years down the line and I'm not even sure if I know what I'm doing. Gambling everything on an escaped slave's vision. When every instinct inside me is screaming at me to run away as far and as fast as possible. What in the Circle's name are we doing here?'
'The best we can,' said Oliver. He lifted his coat and patted the two pistols that had appeared by his side. Molly shivered. The guns hadn't been there when they'd entered the First Guardian's office.
'I used to think I owned these,' said Oliver. 'But now I know that it's the other way around. And we both belong to the kingdom; the pistols' reports just an echo of the lion's roar. I know exactly what I'm doing here. I'm here to protect Purity Drake. I'm the key to keeping her alive.'
'What does that make me?' asked Molly. 'Some lonely old spinster who desperately wants to live out the plot of her last novel while the world is razed to the ground around her?'
They had reached one of the entrances to the House of Guardians, the two redcoats on duty there stamping their boots as Molly and Oliver walked past. Outside, mounted cavalry waited behind the sharp black railings of parliament. A crowd of Broken Circle cultists knelt beyond in Parliament Square, humming a meditation that sounded more like a mass moan of pain. Their numbers were swelling every day, now; more and more of the population convinced that the end of the world was nigh. That the Circle was finally breaking. Maybe the cultists were right. On Molly and Oliver's side of the railings brightly clothed hussars cantered up and down nervously. No looting yet. No riots yet, just that damn rhythmic keening.
Molly raised a hand to shield her eyes against the sunlight. There it was, just to the left of the sun. Ashby's Comet. A baleful red eye behind a thin skein of clouds. 'I hate the sight of that thing.'
'If your friend Coppertracks is right, we had better get used to it,' said Oliver. 'The comet's become another moon now.'
'A cursed ugly one,' said Molly. She looked out at the crowd. It was almost obscene. They looked as if they were praying. The Circlist faith was degrading into superstition and myths of the end-time. How much longer until they started raising false idols to save them from the Army of Shadows and the dark auguries in the sky? How much longer until the Jackelians started believing in gods again? Molly ran up to the railings. 'The new moon's just a piece of loose bloody rock! Caught revolving around us by the attraction of our world's mass. I can show you Coppertracks' formulae to explain everything you see up in the sky.'
The moaning of the cultists just grew louder.
'Get off your knees, you're Jackelians, you're-'
A hussar kicked his stallion in front of her. 'Don't go disturbing them, now, there's a good damson. They're jittery enough this afternoon.'
'They're a disgrace,' said Molly. 'What do they think they're doing? How can you allow them to do that outside parliament's gates?'
'It's hard enough to keep our lads from deserting and joining them at the moment,' said the hussar. 'If trouble breaks out in the capital now, it'll take more than the flats of our sabres to turn them aside. Go home, damson, and make sure you have a stout lock on your door, that's my advice.'
'Come on,' said Oliver, tugging Molly's sleeve. 'We'll go down to the river and hail the sixpenny boat.'
Passing under the shadow of Brute Julius the pair arrived before the low iron profile of an iron gunboat moored alongside the House of Guardians' embankment, its disc-shaped cannon turrets turned towards the opposite side of the river.
Oliver nodded towards the armed sailors on deck across from them as he waved for a riverboat to stop. 'Ready for war?'
'Yes,' said Molly. 'Ready for war. Again.'
Commodore Black touched Oliver's sleeve and pointed to the dark silhouettes emerging onto the shale of the Quatershiftian beach, men and women clambering over large boulders as they left the silent pine forest behind them and headed for the line of dinghies. The commodore pulled a rag off his lantern to show the figures the way through the night. There were about twenty people coming out of the tree line. Burly red-coated marines from the Fleet Sea Arm were holding the craft down in the surf behind Oliver and the commodore, rifles shouldered, waiting for the advancing refugees to board the dinghies. The foreign scientists were exactly where the shifties had promised they would be gathered, with the Army of Shadows currently showing little sign of intervening in the Kingdom of Jackals' attempt to spirit away some of Quatershift's best brains for its gunnery project.
They were a ragged gathering, these refugee scientists, led by a silver-haired man staring thankfully towards Oliver and the commodore with an odd-looking face that managed to be senatorial, proud and ugly at the same time. A lithe-legged beauty accompanied the Quatershiftian man, at least half his years, looking stunning despite her standard revolutionary citizen's garb.
'I am Paul-Loup Keyspierre,' said the shiftie. 'Head of the Institut des Luminaires of the People's
