'Yes,' said Purity, 'it was our own troops. The slats would never have left good food on the bone like this.'
Jenny Blow tapped her nose and pointed to the left. Jackaby Mention became a blur, running up the side of the valley and disappearing into the woods. After a minute he returned, the smear of his form coalescing in front of them, wiping a frosting of ice from his dark aquiline nose. 'There was a camp up there, the remains of a fire pit still smouldering and a great many empty shell casings in the tree line.'
'They've gone,' said Samuel Lancemaster, thumping his spear angrily in the mud.
'We must focus on the Army of Shadows,' said Ganby. 'We have no time to track these killers. There will always be people easily driven to brigandage by brutal circumstances and a poor harvest. We did not wake to follow a queen again for the likes of them.'
'I would have a harvest of their skulls if I ever come across such cowards,' said Samuel. A shaft of sunlight glinted off his silver cuirass, becoming a sunburst.
Ganby saw how Purity was staring at the bodies of the dead breeding house inmates. 'Did you know them?'
'No. I thought I might know them, but in the end I never did,' said Purity. 'They were Jackelians, just Jackelians. Like me.'
The plan to capture a slat alive for interrogation sounded a lot more achievable when it was being discussed around a campfire with the Bandits of the Marsh. Now Purity was actually facing the prospect of having to entice one into chasing her, the sense of the plan was melting away in the harsh light of day.
Perhaps it was the shock of seeing Jackelians collaborating with the slats, whip-wielding overseers from the race of man lording it over the slaves. Broken Circle cultists who had finally achieved their exalted position at the feasting tables of the end times. That they had transferred their worship of the iron moon to veneration of the invaders who had come down from it was bad enough; but that the collaborators felt so little sympathy for the lines of slaves labouring under their whips – slaves who had been their neighbours and friends a little while ago – that was unforgivable. The Broken Circle cultists had the smug, self-satisfied look of gamblers who had backed the right bird in a cockfight, and the fact that the loser was left bleeding in the pit mattered not a jot to them. It was the same look she remembered from the staff at the Royal Breeding House, a look that Purity knew well enough to loathe.
The Kingdom of Jackals was being transformed into a nation-wide version of the Royal Breeding House – its occupants not raised as royalist songbirds, but kept as fattening farm animals and beasts of burden. A little piece of Purity had, ever so briefly, felt a touch of gladness that the Jackelian citizenry was finally getting a taste of the existence she and her ancestors had been sentenced to; but that unworthy feeling had been squashed when she'd seen the look of misery on the slaves' faces.
The Army of Shadows' vassals were chained to each other at the ankle with slippery grey cables that resembled snakes; the poor devils branded and struggling under the weight of hexagonal panels. Bringing the components back from the swathes of destruction being worked by the invaders' living factories to the ruins of Crosshampton where the slaves were erecting a new emerald-domed city.
Purity moved the leaves on a bush to get a better look at the slaves.
'How is it that I am to play the part of the bait?' Purity whispered to Jackaby Mention, 'when it is you who can run so fast?'
'I only have two speeds. I can walk or I can run,' said Jackaby. 'And when I run, the wind itself envies my heels.'
Purity stared out towards the slat they had singled out for capture, the beast standing guard over the line of Jackelians struggling past it. 'Precisely.'
'They would be made wary by both my age and my speed if it was I who had to give the hound a taste of the hare. Chasing a young female is something that should come naturally to them.'
'The overseers, perhaps,' said Purity. 'I'm not so sure about the slats.'
'We shall see,' said Jackaby.
Purity glanced back into the woods. She couldn't see Ganby, Samuel Lancemaster or Jenny Blow, but she hoped they were still hiding back there, waiting to incapacitate the slat. Purity rested her blade against a tree and turned round to say something to Jackaby, but he had already disappeared to warn the others that it was time.
Slipping past a thicket, Purity wandered out into the trail of flattened trees, took a couple of purposefully blundering steps into the open, and pretended to see the slat soldier guarding the chain gang for the first time. She followed her discovery up with what she hoped was a convincing scream. The slat's flat oblong head spun around with a hiss, the sound of her scream all it needed to home in on her presence.
Purity turned and pushed back through the thicket, ignoring the yells of the collaborators and warning shouts from the line of slaves. Grabbing at her sword, Purity ran as fast as she could. She could hear the crashing of the undergrowth behind her as the slat followed. She could feel the hunger inside its mind, such a craving to tear and feast on her flesh. More yells came from the human overseers further behind. They had decided to join the pursuit too, but they weren't a quarter as nimble as the slat, its claws ripping apart the undergrowth like a living machete.
At last, as agreed, there was a peculiar roaring sound: Jenny Blow's deadly voice stripping the bark off the trees like the rattle of a hundred woodpeckers at once. On the explosion of sound, Purity opened her bag of ground-down pepper grains and scattered them behind her, thwarting the slat's only other tracking sense. It hardly mattered, the deafening reports were blinding the beast and it crashed through the undergrowth to one side of Purity, its talons slashing angrily at the bush as if it was trying to silence the noise by slicing at the forest. It was concentrating on the source of this deafening irritation and Purity slid underneath a fallen trunk, gripping her sword securely in case the slat changed its mind. How long to wait before heading after the slat? She was about to step out when she heard someone else moving through the undergrowth. Peering out from behind the tree trunk she caught a glimpse of blue skin slipping through the trees. It was one of Kyorin's people, following the slat's trail. A male Kal. Had he used the diversion to slip his chains of bondage and come to try to save her? He was wearing a white robe wrapped around his body, his belt empty of tools.
'Over here,' whispered Purity.
The Kal looked around, his slim body slipping through the trees and raising a hand in greeting.
'Can you understand me?' asked Purity.
'Yes,' said the Kal, his mind-speech reaching across to her and his lips broadening into a smile.
'I was a friend of Kyorin, when he was alive,' said Purity. 'Did you know him?'
'I did,' said the Kal, advancing through the trees. 'We trained together. You say when he was alive. You saw him die?'
'A pack of slats killed him,' said Purity. 'They hunted him down. I tried to save him from the monsters but I couldn't.'
'Of course you couldn't,' said the Kal, moving in front of Purity. 'A slat warrior is bred only to slay and you are just a girl.' The Kal's smile opened wider and two massive fangs sprouted down from his upper jaw. 'A very juicy young girl, bloated with salty fresh blood.'
He leapt at her neck, trying to sink his fangs into Purity's flesh. She reacted on instinct – hers or Elizica's – and punched the Kal's stomach deep with her sword's buckler, winding the blue man and sending him stumbling back.
'You'll taste all the better, for that insolence, my sweet,' laughed the Kal, taken aback by Purity's attack but quickly recovering his composure. 'I'm going to drain every bit of your blood and leave your body a husk before I toss your marrow to my slats to feed on.'
'Taste this instead!' Purity waved the tip of the maths-blade threateningly in front of the Kal's chest.
He was looking for an opening and swaying like a cobra for another attack when there was a blur and a buffeting, the Kal carried back almost too fast to follow and slammed into a tree. There was a sickening thump as the Kal's body joined with the tree trunk and the blur materialized to a stop in front of her. Jackaby Mention crackling with frost. The Kal was dead. Nothing could have survived being slammed into an oak tree at that velocity.
Jackaby kicked the corpse, making sure the creature was slain. 'I thought you said that the blue skins were
