'Don't talk like that,' spat Duncan. 'I'd run if I thought it would keep you safe. But it won't. Those ugly kelpies from the Army of Shadows will arrive wherever we flee to soon enough, and the stronger for having consumed all the nations between us and wherever we end up. We might as well make a fight of it, here, on our home soil.'
‹Do you have a battery of rockets to kill them with?›
'No, I'm not in the Corps of Rocketeers any more,' said Duncan. 'You know that. But I might just have a bonnie cannon to do the job.'
As the cashiered soldier dropped his crate into the cart there was a massive explosion and for a second Duncan thought that one of the canal boats' cargoes had detonated – some explosive cache fused early – but the shower of leaves and loose pieces of timber was rattling off the forest canopy from above. Whatever had struck Highhorn Forest had fallen well wide of their canal path.
Duncan pushed the precious travel case under his cart in case they were being mortared, dipping his head out as Coppertracks came steaming past. 'I thought the first gunnery test was scheduled for next week, old steamer?'
'A message,' said Coppertracks. 'I received a message from one of my people seconds before the explosion. It said: 'Coming in hard. Landing on my shields.''
'Hard!' Duncan blinked as a piece of blackened bark fleeted off his forehead. 'Even the dafties of Dennehy's Circus don't make landings any harder than that.'
'I believe the cannon's vital component promised to me by King Steam has arrived,' said Coppertracks. 'Though not in quite the manner that I had been led to expect.'
The steamman was the master of understatement. The task of unloading the components from the canalside forgotten, the project workers began to run towards an unexpectedly felled section of forest.
At its centre, the smoking, silver form of a shell-like capsule lay embedded in the super-heated mud. An imperious steammen voice roared out at Duncan and the others, as they stood clustered around the broken trees and boiling mud, looking at the crash site in amazement.
'Precisely which part of me being stuck in this foul gloop do you witless ground huggers think I'm enjoying? I am sure some of you possess the sentience to clutch a shovel and begin digging me out.'
Coppertracks rolled forward. 'Lord Starhome, I presume.'
Skyman First Class Hanning polished the glass face of his heliograph as he waited for fresh signals from the lamps of the lead aerostat in the Revenge's squadron. Mounted beneath the airship's chequerboard hull, lower than the gun ports, lower even than the fin-bomb bays, the h-station was a tiny domed nodule, manned by an adept in the code that allowed the Royal Aerostatical Navy fleets to move in synchronized flights.
It was a solitary calling, manning the h-lamps, but the job did have its consolations. Lamp men were always privy to the captain's orders from Admiralty House – at least when they were communicated in the field, rather than via the wax-sealed written orders handed to skippers before a stat pushed off. The quick wits needed for coding the messages – as well as their confidential nature – meant that h-operators were treated with the courtesies of a petty officer's rank, even when they hadn't passed the board exams for such: extra grog, PO's rations, and spared deck-scrubbing duties. And they got a better view of the scenery and the skies bar all but the wheelman on the bridge, or maybe the spotters in the crow's nest.
Right now, the skyman looked out on as respectable an assemblage of both soldiery and the fleet's sleek ships as anyone sitting on his wooden seat in the RAN Revenge's h-station had ever seen. Hanning let his eyes wander to the nearest of the Revenge's sister craft. There was the RAN Diligence, his first berth as a greenhorn, running proud next to the RAN Flying Fox – the Canny Fox, or Old Canny to her crew – said to be one of the luckiest hawks in the Fleet of the South; never brought down by squall, ground fire, or any of the foes she had ever been dispatched against by the Kingdom of Jackals. Just a couple of the hundreds of airships gathered here today, their shadows a reassuring sight for the earthworms of the New Pattern Army below. And the Circle knows, they were marching in numbers that hadn't been seen since the Battle of Clawfoot Moor, when parliament's forces had smashed the rump of the royalist army so many centuries earlier. There was the Heavy Brigade, their exomounts' green scales glittering in the sunlight; the Twelfth Glenness Foot and the Sixth Sheergate Rangers, redcoat columns two abreast in full marching order; the iron land trains of the Royal Corps of Rocketeers, steam from their black stacks obscuring the racks of Congreve rockets primed and ready for battery fire; the green uniforms of the Middlesteel Rifles, walking in ragged skirmish order at the head of the infantry columns. The tactics of the New Pattern Army hadn't altered substantially since they had been perfected by First Guardian Isambard Kirkhill centuries earlier, but then why improve on perfection? Besides, the earthworms in the regiments always relied on fighting in close coordination with the Royal Aerostatical Navy, and the Jackelians' monopoly on airship gas had served their nation well when it came to defence.
Occasionally, one of the clockwork-driven horseless carriages mounted with an oversized version of Hanning's h-lamp would flicker into life below, requesting an update from the flagship or reporting the findings of the army's mounted scouts. If the musings of the command staff from House Guards were found to be mildly pertinent they would be circulated lazily among the high fleet's airships a while later. They did worry and fuss so, the braided and medal-breasted generals of the army – but then, they weren't drifting hundreds of feet out of range of the effective fire of the foreign brigades which the kingdom's armed forces were called to suppress. Where the high fleet sailed safely and omnipotently above the fog of war – often adding to it by dropping fire-fins and gas shells onto the battlefield – the poor benighted scrapings of the regiments had to face every hail of shrapnel, hot shell and ball that the enemy tossed at them.
No wonder jack cloudies were hailed as the heroes of the nation and welcomed into every jinn house and drinking establishment with offers of a song and a round freely stood, while the earthworms had to be press- ganged into the regiments, or recruited from the ranks of those facing transportation to the colonies to an alternative service under the sharp tongues – and sharper floggings – of the army's sergeants.
Hanning's musings about the good luck of his employment were interrupted by a clatter of bony feet coming down the ladder to his little glass bubble of solitude. It was Ti'ive, the young craynarbian midshipman bearing a note scribbled in the captain's hand for him to translate into lamp flicker.
'Another one for the Thunderbolt, if you please, Mister Hanning.'
Hanning checked to make sure he still had line of sight to one of their flagship's h-stations (as a flagship, the Thunderbolt had the unusual honour of possessing four h stations – fore, aft, port and starboard), then the skyman flicked into action the flint igniter on the side of his lamp's gas assembly. Hanning looked at the note he had been handed by the officer and harrumphed. The skipper was asking permission for the Revenge to break east to make contact with the missing steammen army. The steamers were a day late for the planned rendezvous, and it seemed the skipper considered it unlikely that the Free State's usually punctual army would allow themselves to fall so behind schedule.
'I doubt if we'll cut any orders independent of the fleet, sir,' opined the lamp operator. 'None of our hawks have been taken since we've started sailing convoy fashion.'
'The captain's worked with King Steam's fellows before, and he's a sight more concerned by their non- appearance at the border than our flag officers seem to be at the moment,' said the young middie.
'And has he said anything on the bridge about the six missing brigades of Quatershift's finest that were meant to be waiting on their side of the border to join up with our earthworms?'
'Jon Shiftie?' Ti'ive said, fiddling with his starched officer's uniform. 'Only that they're not fit for much beyond the fine art of retreat anyway, and that it might be better all round if the shifties took to their boot leather now, rather than folding a flank under fire and leaving good Jackelians exposed to the Army of Shadows when things start getting thick down below.'
Hanning started to blink the message out to the Thunderbolt. 'I saw Jon Shiftie fight in the Two-Year War, and I'd sooner have a few regiments of their bluecoats to add to our number than not. Even if their backbone does owe a debt to political officers with pistols ready to cut down anyone who tries to run, I reckon their boys held their lines well enough under our hawks' shells last time around.'
Skyman First Class Hanning was trying to talk over his nerves. Everyone on board the Revenge had been nervous since they had crossed the border into Quatershift. It wasn't just the sight of the dead Cursewall that had once been raised to separate the two nations, now drained of the very power of the land that once fed it. Not just the missing brigades the shiftie attaches had promised and failed to deliver to the House Guards staff. Not even the
