'You have to let me come with you now,' demanded Purity. 'You heard what King Steam told us. If there's a way of beating the Army of Shadows on Kaliban, I can help us find it.'
'We'll see,' said Molly, trying not to sound dispirited. Oliver was the key, Purity was their last hope. And Molly? She was a riderless knight who merited only King Steam's sympathy now. 'We have to get our damn cannon working first.'
Before Lord Starhome went wild. Before the Army of Shadows came across the country's borders and found them defended only by private fencibles old enough to be Molly's grandparents.
Before the end.
Duncan Connor took the heavy riveting gun from Commodore Black, the submariner looking perfectly at home among the other burly navvies and hulking engineers putting the finishing touches to Timlar Preston's cannon. The strange gargantuan snail-shell, cast from iron, wound its way around the forest floor amid the flash of welding torches and the hammer of machines. There was no rifling inside the iron tubes welded together to form the cannon's massive spiral. Instead, its barrel had been lined with rubber panelling to form a vacuum, steam engines drawing out all air from inside.
Timlar Preston's plan was for Lord Starhome to be loaded onto an ammunition cradle above the heart of the spiral and then slid down into a breech to be injected inside the airless cannon. Once inside, the steamman craft would be fired out with a great detonation – the cannon's power augmented by an additional series of blasts from firing rings, chasing the craft all the way around the spiral. Pressure from the blast would build up in the barrelling behind Lord Starhome at an exponentially increasing rate, riding the vacuum in ever wider slingshot circles around the cannon, until, finally, the shell would pierce the membrane at the muzzle of the barrel with a velocity so fearsome that Lord Starhome would be flung free of the pull of the Earth – into the dark void in which the steammen swore their strange artefact could fly. All the way to Kaliban and the homeland of the Army of Shadows.
It was a mad, daring dream. Yet Duncan had faith in Timlar Preston's plans. Decades before, during the Two-Year War, Preston had hit upon the same innovation that was to cost Duncan his position in the Corps of Rocketeers. No more explosions through the crude mixing of explosive fuel, but a controlled detonation, spraying the highly corrosive and combustible blow-barrel sap into a mixing chamber using hardened glass nozzles. Where Duncan had envisaged a new generation of long-range rockets being developed by the state armoury of the kingdom, Preston had refined the notion of a wave-front cannon, a simple iron tube that could accelerate a shell so fast it could escape the very grasp of the world itself. Preston had originally dreamed of using his creation to send a party to the moon, with explorers wearing diving costumes and brass tanks of air inside water-filled shells to survive the detonation of the cannon. But the Two-Year War had put an end to Preston's peaceful ambitions as surely as Duncan's radical ideas of warfare had derailed the career of the once lauded Connor of Cassarabia.
Duncan Connor pushed the head of the heavy riveting gun against the iron face of the barrel and squeezed the trigger, the coiled pipe back to the pressure drum jumping off the dirt like a snake that had been stepped on.
Commodore Black inspected the cleanly sunk rivet with satisfaction, pulling a fresh bolt from the sack slung over his shoulder. 'As neatly done as any navvy back in the submarine pens of Spumehead could manage.'
Duncan held onto a strut and looked down the scaffold. To the right, one of the engineers from Quatershift had stopped fiddling with the components of an injector ring as Paul-Loup Keyspierre talked at him.
'There's something not quite right about yon one,' said Duncan.
'His foreign accent, is it?'
'No, it's the way people react to him, all the staff who arrived at the project from Quatershift. Just look at that scientist, Jared. How still and pale he is. I've seen simple farm laddies and lasses being given their first lumps by a drill sergeant with less fear than that on their faces.'
'Ah well, he's the skipper of their boat, right enough. Back across the border Keyspierre would have the power to strip a man of his position and send work-dodgers off to organized communities. That's the power to starve you and your family, or imprison you in a living death – until you'd come to welcome the real article when it moved you along the Circle.'
'It's more than that,' said Duncan. 'It's a different sort of fear. And then there's his daughter. She stalks about like a panther.'
'She's sleek lines, that Jeanne, I'll give you that,' said the commodore. 'But the terrors of the revolution have been raising ladies mortal resilient across the border, that's all there is to the girl's manner. Compatriot Keyspierre and his daughter are decent enough salts at heart. Jeanne was quick enough to save me back in Quatershift, when one of the Army of Shadows' giant slugs was about to transform the iron in my blood into another wicked brick for their city.'
Duncan said nothing, but he seemed to cling onto his doubts.
Having finished with the scientist working on the firing ring, Keyspierre walked down along the curve of the cannon to stop underneath the scaffold where Duncan and the commodore were working.
'Commodore Black, I see that your contribution to the effort here stretches beyond your rather curious specialist knowledge of the channels off my nation's coastline.'
Duncan noticed the man's voice was deep and smooth, his Jackelian accent very nearly flawless.
'Just doing my bit, Compatriot Keyspierre,' said the commodore. 'A bit of Jackelian elbow grease to help chivvy this mortal fine piece of engineering along to completion.'
'Grease being applied to a scheme generated by the inspired minds of the glorious revolution,' said Keyspierre.
'But cast,' Duncan called down, 'from Jackelian iron. Aye, much the same as the barrel on a redcoat's Brown Jane. Your people are not strangers to our rifles, I believe.'
'So it once was,' snorted Keyspierre, the nostrils of his large nose flaring. 'I can see how well our cannon is polishing up. A pity we did not have a few of these formidable devices completed during the Two-Year War. Who knows which way the winds of fate would have blown if we had been able to shell the House of Guardians when they were debating the continuance of their war against us.'
'An interesting question, for sure,' said the commodore.
Keyspierre nodded, before starting to walk away. 'Quite. But we speak of the past, when it is the future both our countries needs to look to now. Please do pass my compliments on to the noble workers helping complete this most ingenious feat of gunnery.'
'They must have a different set of history books across the border,' bridled Duncan as the man left their earshot. 'I was sure it was the laddies in Quatershift who invaded us during the Two-Year War.'
'As I recall, most of their books were fed into the fires on the boilers of the shifties' steam-driven execution machines during the purges.' Commodore Black looked at the figure of the departing institute official. 'Ah, well. All friends together now, eh?'
Radford and Sykes lengthened the run of the nets alongside their shallow-draught fishing keel. It was usually such easy work this far from the estuary, where their competition was few and far between. The Gambleflowers splintered into a dozen channels around the marshland of Monymusk before reforming into a single course that snaked all the way out to the coast. The marsh was usually thick with insects and the river crabs, and the fish and birds that fed on them. But something was scaring the fish off today, with the result that the pair's nets had been empty each time they hauled them back on board.
Sykes cast an eye at the lonely fish still flopping about the catching crate on their foredeck. 'It'd be nice to have some friends for Mister Trout here. Some companions, so that we'll have something more to show for the day's labours than an ear-wigging from Damson Sykes when I get back home.'
'Never seen anything like it,' said Radford, pulling his leather hat down tight against the chill marsh air. 'Empty, today.' He nodded to the east where the river cut through Middlesteel. 'You expect bad waters down by Old Reeky; but then when the capital's mills have got a stink on, the fish all head up to us. Look at the bugs flitting over the water. Got to be something wants to bite on them today.'
The lines holding their net seemed to judder at his complaints and both men began to haul the net in. 'That's more like it.'
Sykes winced. 'Is we stuck? This is heavy, Circle it is.'
