receive the cargo, Timlar Preston himself anxiously waiting with the project's engineers to see if all of his components had been recovered and transported back without damage.
'I can show Jared the new sabre strikes you've taught me. Do you think he'll be pleased?'
'Aye, that he will.' Duncan raised a smile.
Purity glanced over to the wagon Duncan had driven up to the edge of the canal, the familiar oblong of his battered travel case stowed under a pinewood seat. 'You're not planning to leave us to try taking the recruiting party's coin again?'
'I've spent too long here, now,' said Duncan. 'Helping build this bonnie-looking cannon for parliament. At the very least I want to see if it actually works.'
'It'll work,' said Purity. 'Kyorin wouldn't have asked Timlar to help us build it if it wasn't going to work.'
'Yes, there is that.'
'Soon I'll see Kyorin's home, probably meet the friends of his he told me about when we were on the run in Middlesteel. He said he'd left a wife up there.'
Duncan nodded. There was about as much chance that he, Molly, or any of them would allow Purity Drake inside the cannon as they were likely to load up the First Guardian himself and blast him off towards Kaliban.
A murmur of anticipation passed around the crowd at the canal docks as the first narrowboat rounded the corner into view, her small steam engine driving a single rear-mounted paddle as she pushed a spear of smoke up through the pine forest's canopy. The lead craft was followed by another long narrowboat, then another, a low foldable wooden roof in front of each cabin concealing the cargo that had been procured from Jackals' neighbour to the east. More and more narrowboats turned the curve and hove into view, a veritable armada, and in the lead boat waiting on the cabin step stood the familiar figures of Commodore Black and Oliver Brooks.
Pulling into the lumberyard's mooring channel the lead craft slowed to a drift and the commodore jumped onto the ground to tie up the narrowboat. Oliver stepped out behind him and headed over to Timlar Preston.
'We were getting worried you wouldn't turn up,' called Duncan to the commodore, leading his horse and cart backwards towards the channel.
'And you would have been a lot more worried if you had but known what we were facing out in Quatershift,' said the commodore, his breath momentarily departing as Purity walloped into him. 'But I shouldn't speak of such things in front of you, Purity. Your nights' dreams are troubled enough without me adding to your imaginings.'
'I want to hear the truth as well,' said Purity. 'Those slats that killed Kyorin, there's more of them in Quatershift?'
'A mortal terrible host of them,' said the commodore. 'Crawling all over the north. We were lucky we had that wicked lad Oliver Brooks riding with us, for it was only his dark senses that helped us navigate across the shiftie provinces without attracting the Army of Shadows' attention.'
Duncan patted his cart's flatbed. 'You found the components the shifties had buried?'
'Greased up inside crates at the bottom of Timlar's abandoned mine, just where he said they'd be. And that was as near as we came to failing in our task. There were still ores in that mine and the Army of Shadows has a terrible plague of monstrous black slugs the size of houses sliding over the conquered provinces of Quatershift, eating anything and everything in their path and shitting out a trail of machinery in their wake for their slaves to collect. They were burrowing into the side of the hills where our mine stood like a Circlist vicar making merry with a teacake. If we had arrived a day later with our train of mules, I dare say we would have found the hills and the mine consumed, and Timlar's cannon parts a tasty dessert to round it out for them.'
'Living factories…' said Duncan in astonishment.
'Not so strange to someone who used to guard the southern frontier, I should say, eh, soldier? Some of the same black arts that devil of a caliph practises down in Cassarabia,' said the commodore. 'Although the cleverness of the caliph's womb mages only stretches to teasing living creatures out of his slaves' wombs. I dare say if he could teach his creations to eat rocks and sand, then shit out swords and pistols after the meal, he would be about it quick enough.'
The commodore watched Purity run over towards Oliver, now that the young man had finished explaining to Timlar what had been retrieved. Work crews moved in to draw back the narrowboats' wooden roofs and expose the cargo.
'How bad was it?' asked Duncan.
'As bad as it can be, lad.'
'How can it have come to this?' said Duncan. 'These creatures have travelled all the way from another celestial sphere, such an unimaginable distance, and for what?'
'For a supper long denied,' said the commodore. 'Aye, and we are to be their main course. Before I left, before I saw the ruins of the shifties' country, I was still in half a mind as to the truth of the matter of this Army of Shadows. I thought perhaps that Molly's imagination had laid her a little too open to the ravings of a slave's broken mind, poor Kyorin escaped from the polar barbarians of the north or the satraps of Cassarabia. But you only have to see the fate of the poor shifties to know that the perpetrators of such crimes are free of any ties to this green and pleasant place we call home.'
Duncan watched one of the last narrowboats tie up at the lumberyard docks and a party of dishevelled- looking travellers climb out; more shifties by the looks of them. There was a man at their head, silver-haired, accompanied by a beautiful young woman. Timlar Preston seemed surprised to see the senatorial newcomer and the two were soon closeted away for a private conversation.
'The fruit of our u-boat's voyage, Paul-Loup Keyspierre – some grand nabob from the shifties' Institute des Luminaires,' said the commodore, seeing the direction of Duncan's gaze. 'And the girl is his daughter, Jeanne.'
'A political, then,' said Duncan.
'No doubt a good compatriot to survive as head of their hall of science without tripping and falling in the great terror,' said the commodore. 'And at least clever enough to see which way the wind was blowing in his homeland. Rats always swim out of a burning u-boat, a long stream of them kicking away from the torpedo bays.'
'If it comes to it,' said Duncan, 'and we need to get Purity away from the hubbub, what's the port out of Spumehead looking like?'
The commodore shook his head. 'There's not a steamer ticket to the Concorzian colonies to be had for neither love nor money. The west coast is as thick with shopkeepers on the run from the storm front as there are flies circling the turd pile fallen out of your fine mare's rear. If you still remember the way to Cassarabia from your regimental days, you might be better lighting off down south.'
'If the caliph has any welcome for me, it's in his torture gardens or on the slave block,' said Duncan.
'Is that the way of it, then, the usual fondness of foreigners for our redcoats? Well, if there's three arms of the compass denied to you now, there's still east. Quatershift is as good as rolled up, but you could reach the Holy Kikkosico Empire on the other side of the slopes of the Mechancian Spine, take a caravan across the pampas. But-' he reached out to touch Duncan's sleeve, '-there's one blessed thing you must know. Running changes a man. After too many years of it, you wake up not knowing whether you're home, or just bunking down in an impostor of a place you're pretending will do for the same.'
'The Kingdom of Jackals is your home,' said Duncan.
'So it is, or should I say so it might have been, six hundred years ago, before Isambard Kirkhill's gang of shopkeepers seized the land.'
'You're not going to run, are you?'
'No,' grinned the commodore. 'I'm a sight too tired to run and a sight too old to remember a new alias. So let the slats come for old Blacky and prize my sharpened sabre out of my cold fingers if they dare.'
Duncan watched as the commodore lumbered over to the scientists he had rescued from Quatershift, before turning to haul the crates out of the narrowboat, the long boxes still dark from the dust of the mine where they had been secreted.
‹It wasn't Purity you were worried about, was it?› said the voice from inside Duncan's travel case as he dropped the first crate next to it on the back of his cart. ‹You were thinking of running with me before we're attacked by the Army of Shadows.›
'Was I?' Duncan went back for a second crate, balancing the load across his muscled shoulders.
‹It won't make any difference. Not to me.›
