own council. King and queen kept only as symbols.'
Purity took the bag through to the back room, tossing it next to the supplies they had found in the cottages of the abandoned village. It was a good haul. The people must have moved out very fast. Evacuated by the county constabulary or – well, the alternative did not bear contemplation. 'Only the old nobility, the royalist cause. You won't find any of the Lords Commercial inside the Royal Breeding House.'
'And these Lords Commercial,' said Ganby Meridian, his silver beard tinged yellow by the firelight. 'They are given their titles by your parliament of shopkeepers, or by your hostage-queen?'
'Neither,' said Purity. The conversation was making her uncomfortable, calling forth too many memories of the patriotic songs and lessons she had been forced to learn by rote in the cold school chambers of the fortress where she had grown up. 'They are decided by the tables and logs of Greenhall, the treasury office of the Guardian Chancellor. You are automatically granted a title after you have paid a certain amount in taxes to the state; the rate varies and is voted on each year by parliament. The more money you pay, the higher your precedent in the lists.'
'Hmm,' groaned Ganby, the disapproving noise rumbling at the back of his throat.
'Is it so different, Ganby Meridian, from the queen we placed on the throne of the Jackeni, or the council of druids deciding who would rule among the stag lords?' asked Jenny Blow.
'To become a druid took years of hard study and mastery of the worldsong. You had to prove yourself worthy of tasks as weighty as selecting a new ruler. My ostler I would trust to care for my horse, my smithy to shoe her. But to look inside the heart of the person I would call Sovereign? I am not sure I would trust such a matter to my ostler or smithy.'
Samuel smiled and tossed the leg of a table into the fire grate, sparks spitting against his silver breastplate. 'Has Ganby mentioned he was a druid long before he joined our ranks?'
'Yes,' added Jenny Blow. 'Before his crimes and knavery saw him thrown out and drawn towards the margins of the marsh's waters as an outlaw.'
'Pah,' said Ganby. 'If I ever stopped lying, I would disappoint you. These are strange new days indeed. Queens who are mutilated and kept in chains, councils of standing chosen by those who have none, and a faceless legion of monsters walking the world. Fighting those gill-necks from the kingdom below the waves seems as a blessing in comparison to this new war.'
A knot of anger tightened inside Purity. 'My friend Oliver gave his life to free you for this war.'
'Not just us four,' said Jenny Blow, pointedly.
'That's enough,' said Samuel. 'We four answered the call and you speak to the true queen of the Jackeni, that much you must know.' He knelt down in front of Purity. 'My spear is your spear, as it was for Queen Elizica.'
And what a spear it was. By activating a hidden control, Samuel could collapse the weapon into a nasty weapon shaped like a knuckle-duster that could smack bricks out of a wall. When he was thinking, he would sometimes snick the spear out to its full length and then swing it back to its fist-sized shape, rattling the air with the noise of the spear's reorientation.
'A queen without boots,' pointed out Jackaby Mention from his chair, wiping his lips with relish as he set about the contents of one of the tins.
Purity looked across at the brooding black bandit. 'You wear no shoes either.'
Jackaby raised his bare toes and wiggled them. 'I meant it as no insult. I run faster when I have none and I like to feel close to the bones of the world, the earthflow.'
Ganby drew Purity to one side. 'They mean no harm by their words. They are touchy around normal people.'
Purity wasn't sure if she should feel flattered or frightened that they considered her normal. 'You mean those who aren't fey?'
'Quite. In our age the druids made sacrifices to keep the killing, changing clouds of the feymist at bay – children were bound and cast into the feymist curtain. Most died, but some did not.' Ganby indicated his three companions. 'Those that survived the changes of the warping mist were considered cursed and hunted without mercy by the land's tribes. Where else could they hide but the great marsh? They have little love for the affairs of mortals and as loyal as they became in the end to Elizica and her lion throne, I fear they see only a little of her in you.'
'I wish there was none of her in me,' said Purity. She picked up the sword from the stone circle. 'And I wish that I hadn't been given this.'
Ganby rubbed his beard thoughtfully. 'I remember another young woman standing before me, saying the same thing about a trident she had retrieved from a lake.' He sighed. 'We slept for an age to reach this strange new time, when she said she would need us again. That was not easy for us, nor for you to be the one to receive us. Let us see if we can make it worth the while for both of us…' He took Purity's sword from her, carefully weighing it two hands. 'Do you know what this blade is?'
'Sharp,' said Purity. 'And the sword contains a little of the essence of my friend Oliver… and of the Hexmachina.'
'They are facets of it,' said Ganby. 'You have described it a little, but they are not what the sword is. It is a maths-blade, a tool to manipulate the worldsong.'
'Maths?' said Purity. 'You mean sums and adding up? What does that have to do with sorcery and the worldsong?'
'Everything,' said Ganby, his hand sweeping out to encompass the room. 'All that you have seen, all that you will see, everything that you are, these are all mathematical constructs. The song of the world is composed of notes, the notes are composed of waves and strings, and they can be modelled and manipulated by an adroit mind. When you change the factors of an equation, you change its outcome. The worldsingers' training allows them to tap into the flow of power within the earth and change the equations that underlie the world, by hand, spell and mind.' He indicated the other bandits sitting around the fire and handed the blade back to her. 'The fey carry some of that ability innately. Your sword is a tool that allows you to manipulate reality. It cuts through stone so easily because it can change the equations of existence that define how matter should interact with its surface.'
'More than a sword,' whispered Purity.
'An essential truth,' said Ganby. 'I would never have shaped it as a sword myself. When you give someone a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. I would have made it a book, or perhaps a slide rule.'
'What can I do with it?'
'What can you not?' Ganby indicated she should hold the sword out. 'A start would be to tear a hole in the veil of the world and free our fellow Bandits of the Marsh from their sleep of ages. You managed to do it for the four of us.'
'But there was power in the circle of standing stones,' said Purity. 'Helping me. I could feel it flowing through me. The power of the god machine, the Hexmachina.'
Ganby waved his hand impatiently as if this were a mere trifle. 'Pah, there is more power in the human heart and the imagination of a child than there is in any stone circle or blade. You can use the sword. Just feel the lingering aura of our sleep and then reach to the place where the energy is connected. Tear a rent towards it using your blade.'
Purity clutched the pommel of the sword and symbols started to flow down the flat of the blade. She could feel the connection the old wizard had spoken of. Thin tentacles of else-when connecting the four bandits to the place where they had slept away the centuries. Spinning the blade, she tried to cut a portal in the air, reach the sleeping place. Instead of a rent forming, the arcs of her blade left scratches of golden light hanging in the air, shrinking and diminishing before the threads blew away like candle smoke.
'I can't do it,' said Purity, frustrated, proffering the blade back to Ganby. 'You're the great druid, you open the gateway for your friends to come through.'
He took the sword out of her hand, gripping it properly in a fighting stance, the symbols creeping along its surface disappearing, the blade's silver brightness darkening. It had died in his hand. 'You see, just a cold length of metal. Something to bash away at an enemy's helm with. I could never get Elizica's trident to work for me either. This is not my sword.' He passed it back to Purity. 'It is yours.'
Purity took a few more swings to the same negligible effect. The maths-blade was becoming heavier where
