'You are the queen,' said Watt, looking at Purity's strange glowing sword. 'Sweet bloody Circle, I don't know whether I should hug you or throw a brick at you.'
'I have the land's blade and the lion's heart,' said Purity. She slashed at the chain securing the dungeon door, sending the thick iron links splashing out in a cloud of liquid metal. 'And my Jackelians are not a people to die quietly as they are dragged to the butcher's block.'
The few prisoners who had recovered from their paralysis fled to the damp walls inside the chamber Purity had forced open. Purity banished the darkness with her sword's fire. And there in the light were the Bandits of the Marsh. She burnt the toxin within their bodies, burnt it inside all the prisoners until they had recovered the use of their limbs, standing up sweating and groggy; or, in the case of the four Bandits of the Marsh, as furious as a swarm of wasps trapped under a cider glass and then released.
Purity looked at her fuming bandits. 'You said back in the valley of the war gas that we didn't have time to sort out the lesser evils on the way to fight the greater one. Do you still feel the same way?'
'You are learning, I think,' coughed Ganby, rubbing life back into his numb legs. 'And not just about the mastery of conversion a maths-blade gives you.'
'You no longer have to ask me,' said Jenny Blow, bending her knee in front of Purity. 'You can now command me.'
'I have had my bellyful of this place,' spat Samuel Lancemaster, pressing on his cuirass and ejecting his knuckle-duster, sending the waking prisoners stumbling back crying in alarm as he extended it out to a spear twice his height. 'I have been conscious for hours, listening paralysed to the cries of sobbing children in the dark and the threats from those honourless cowards outside that dare style themselves brigands.'
Jackaby Mention looked down at Purity's bare feet. 'Yet you still have no shoes, my queen.'
Bare feet are conscious of the land. They feel the bones of Jackals, connect with the blood of the world. You will know when the time is right for shoes.
'No,' said Purity. 'But I have an army here and a navy in the dungeon down the corridor waiting to be cut out of their chains.'
And it was time to use them.
Ganby inspected the spear. It had been a most impressive throw, straight through the chief's chest and two of his toadies, to land embedded in the metre-thick casement of the sea fort; the part of the fort's wall that hadn't been reduced to rubble by the JNS Spartiate's cannons when the u-boat's crew had been reunited with their gun mounts. It was no wonder Samuel Lancemaster had to wedge his boots against the wall to retrieve the spear. Extricating themselves from the now truly free town of Wainsmouth might be a little trickier, however.
Ganby shook his head at the sight of the gathering crowds coming out along the harbour slope onto the walkways and surviving Martello towers of the sea fort. Even the townspeople who hadn't fought to chase the chief's men back into the surrounding hills when they realized the u-boat was on their side. Perhaps especially them, as well as all the fools who had taken the Army of Shadows' appearance as a sign of the breaking of the Circle and the end times.
How they begged and pleaded with Purity Drake to stay and make their town her capital. Soon they would be bringing sick children to Purity and asking for the queen's touch to cure them. The gullibility of the desperate. But did Ganby have the right to look down on their superstitions? He had traded on many of the same deep needs when he had been wearing a druid's robes. Pah, so much for the Circlist heresy and their half-witted humanist religion without gods. When the kingdom's people had stopped believing in the druids' many deities they had not begun believing in nothing, they had started believing in anything.
Purity stood on the ruined floor of what had been the chief's throne room to make her address to the mob.
'Your town's walls may feel safe.' Purity's voice carried out beyond the cry of the seagulls. 'But they are an illusion, the illusion of safety and comfort and the familiar. The slats will come tomorrow and if we kill them still more will turn up when they realize this town is no longer a nest of collaborators.'
'Where then?' someone called. 'Where can we go?'
'Back to the land!' Purity called. 'You are the sons and daughters of Jackals and your land will shelter you. The regiments have failed you, the slats hold sway over our sky, and so this must be a guerrilla war from now on. The forests and mountains will shield you and you will prey on the slats before they prey on you.'
'Stay!' the crowd begged. 'Lead us into the land.'
Purity held her sword out. 'I am the land and the land is me. My path lies north, into the heartland of the Army of Shadows. I intend to take our u-boat and drive this blade into the chest of every slat that stands between me and the destruction of that red abomination squatting in our heavens. Those of you that have any fight left in you, those of you that have the taste for vengeance, you'll find your fill of it if you follow me into the foe's heartland.'
A u-boatman in the crowds pointed down to the Spartiate's black hull bobbing in the harbour. 'Our old girl only has enough expansion engine gas left in her tanks to run the screws for half an hour, maybe an hour at most. You'd be lucky to reach Hundred Locks in her.'
Purity bent down and picked up a drinking glass from the floor, placing it on a collapsed column. The oversized flagon only had a lick of red wine left in its bottom. She held her maths-blade over it and the dribble of wine began to bubble and froth, rising higher and higher until a stream of it was spilling over the edge and flooding out across the debris-strewn concrete. Ganby had to stop himself tutting aloud as people jostled in the crowd to try to get a taste of the wine, crying that this torrent was their queen of legend's own blood.
'Her tanks can be made full,' said Purity. 'As can her cannons, and her torpedo tubes – but that means nothing unless I can fill her decks with stout Jackelians with the heart to teach the Army of Shadows what it means to invade our country. To teach them why they will never count themselves masters of this land as long as one free Jackelian remains alive to stand against them. Can I fill her?'
The crowd yelled their approval.
'Can I fill her?' Purity held her sword aloft and the sun turned it to fire as a shaft of light broke through the clouds to strike the roaring crowds out on the ruined sea fort.
Ganby nodded in approval. They would need all the help they could get. The chief's force of convicts might have spared many of the u-boat's ratings from the Army of Shadows' hunger, but they certainly hadn't been planning on taking along the Spartiate's marines. Replacements for the troops that had been fed to the slats would have to come from the town's volunteers. Yes, Purity was doing well. She had asked Ganby on the journey here why Elizica of the Jackeni was no longer coming to her in waking dreams and visions. Purity only had to stare in a mirror to see the answer to that question.
The disgraced druid walked over towards Purity as the surviving senior officer they had freed from the Spartiate – a first lieutenant of the fleet sea arm, his uniform caked in dust from the assault – emerged to talk with the queen.
He was indicating some of the men in striped sailor's shirts in the crowd. 'They've got families in the fishing villages down the coast – wives, children. They've asked to be excused to see how they fare before they join our venture.'
Purity looked at the collection of sailors, respectfully clutching the round hats decorated with the crest of the Spartiate in their hands. 'You want to go back for your children?'
'What man wouldn't, damson?' said a boatswain.
'What man wouldn't?' echoed Purity, sadly. 'Let them go. But we will sail when we sail.'
'You know what many of them will find out there,' said Ganby as he came up to the queen.
'They are leaving as fathers,' said Purity. 'But they will come back as avenging angels. When you have no family to worry your conscience, you have no fear.'
'Please don't hold onto that hardness,' said Ganby. 'It is a bitter seed to plant within yourself.'
'It was never planted by me,' said Purity. 'Those that sowed it are about to reap their harvest.'
A cold autumn breeze came off the waters and chilled Ganby Meridian's bones. It would be colder still in the north. This girl had become their queen and now some small part of him wished that she had not. The u-boat officer and the surviving sailors were starting to make a way for Purity down to their vessel, but they needn't have bothered – Ganby watched the queen walking through the crowds, the people of Wainsmouth parting like a sea for her.
