dark substance.
'Swing your blade,' sobbed Ganby from behind her. 'Swing it at the anchor lines and let us quit this frozen hell.'
Purity turned the sword once, willing her blade to cleave a substance so strong that it could clamp the iron moon to their world. Then she yelled and struck down with everything she had. There was a terrible screaming sound as the fibres of the anchor line split apart and the first of the holding cables lashed away to the ground. She ran to the next mooring point and swung her sword in another testing arc. There must have been at least twenty anchor lines on her side of the beanstalk. Already Purity's arm was aching with the effort needed to drive through a million diamond-hard threads bound together more densely than anything the race of man had ever encountered. She hove at the second one, feeling the flash of energy as the maths-blade converted the strength of the carbon into something more brittle and malleable. It went tumbling away. Purity ran to the next line, ignoring the shouts of the raiders calling to each other for more ammunition or screaming as the slats broke through and tore into them with rifle bolts and the force of their talons. Ignoring the blur of Jackaby Mention, darting between the attackers, sending slats spinning away into the snowstorm, and Samuel Lancemaster's spear whirling around like a windmill. Purity forgot even the bite of the cold as the labour of chopping away the anchor lines began to tell. How many lines had she cut now? Half? She was losing count, having to take six or seven lunges at each anchor line to sever it.
'Make speed,' appealed Ganby, shivering from exposure to the freezing winds. 'We don't have long left. Damn this place, I can't feel my fingers.'
But Purity felt the pulse of fire spurting along the ground behind her, accompanied by the screams of the Jackelians sent flying into the air on geysers of exploding rock and snow and blood. It was a flight of the slats' aerial spheres, the leathery crafts' wasp-hum cutting through the storm. Turned back by the destruction of the beanstalk's defence perimeter, the air fleet were dipping in and out of the whiteout, their cannons wreaking destruction among the defending Jackelians. Jigger the beasts! They knew the tough anchor lines would withstand the blasts of their guns, near indestructible compared to the weak, soft bodies of those who had followed her to this place. But they had reckoned without Samuel Lancemaster. He sprinted out of the shadow of the beanstalk, casting his spear forward, his first throw passing through two of the slats' globes, smashing their pilots and the organic machinery inside. Jackaby Mention was out there too, speeding to where the spear had been cast and hurtling it back to Samuel. Allowing him to throw it again and again, as if he had an unlimited supply of deadly javelins by his side.
The attackers' cannons couldn't home in on Jackaby, but they realized who their true enemy was soon enough, avoiding the missiles of their own broken craft falling out of the sky, blazing at Samuel with their guns. His silver cuirass deflected the first of the bursts of fire, then buckled under the continued fusillade, sending him stumbling back. He was on his knees moaning, trying to hold in his shattered living armour with one hand, the other stretched out imploringly for the blur of Jackaby Mention to bring him his spear. The spear appeared in his hand and he used it as a crutch to get to his feet and face the two remaining craft circling him.
'Is that it?' Samuel yelled. 'Is that all you have?'
Both crafts' cannons opened up on him and he cast out the spear at the closest in a chopping motion, driving his missile all the way through the globe and out across the rotating array of blades keeping it suspended, the craft's flight mechanism chewed to pieces as the bandit's projectile smashed across it.
The remaining sphere drifted behind Samuel, almost cutting him in half with its stuttering cannons, creating a gale as it hovered just above the ground, slats jumping down from a hatch in the craft's side. Samuel Lancemaster stumbled forward empty-handed and, ignoring the rifle fire of the dismounting beasts, drove a fist into the front of the globe, lifting the craft up over his head and breaking the whirling array of blades as it dug into the frozen soil behind his back. Purity swore the slat troops actually flinched and stepped back as he roared at them, tossing the broken craft away to detonate across the frozen plain. Then Samuel fell face down to lie still in the snow, burning fluids from the smashed craft leaking across his body.
Jackaby Mention coalesced into solid form in front of Purity. 'Samuel has claimed his fifty corpses, my queen. This is the last anchor line. Sever it, sever it now!'
Purity was dizzy, swaying on her feet. She hacked wildly into the anchor line like a drunken woodsman, dozens of blows needed to break its tightly woven bonds. Purity lined up her final cut, the last cable screeching like fingernails on a blackboard as it subsumed all the stress of the anchor filaments she had already severed.
'Quickly,' begged Ganby. 'There are hardly any of our people left now. The slats are overrunning us.'
'Be quiet, druid.' Jackaby was panting from his exertions. 'Let our queen concentrate.'
Purity let swing at the anchor cable and chipped out perhaps a tenth of it.
'Pick me up,' Ganby pleaded with the only other surviving bandit. 'You can run me out to one of the hills over there. We're almost done here.'
Purity took another fatigued bite out of the anchor line.
Jackaby shook his head, rapping the layer of frost that had formed across his marsh leathers. 'I can't run any more, cramps from the cold. When we've cut the last line I'm going to have to walk out of here.'
Purity was so tired, she almost ignored the sense of confusion coming from her maths-blade as she raised the sword to hack again, but the information came flooding through anyway. It was the blade's stress model. This shouldn't be so much work; with half the anchor lines already severed; this last line should have been half-pulled apart by the drag of the world on the beanstalk. What was going on here?
Purity looked back over their snow tracks. The cables she had already severed were reaching out like snakes to their mooring points, little black threads extending from each sheared line to the stations left embedded in the rock. Tendons of a regrowing muscle.
'Hell's teeth,' howled Ganby. 'It's repairing itself, the beanstalk can repair itself!'
'Strike now!' shouted Jackaby. 'Strike, my queen, while you can.'
'Believe in yourself,' whimpered Ganby, making himself small on the ground as bolts of fire spun past from the dark, splashing against the beanstalk.
Purity swung the maths-blade over her head, trying to use the cold bite of the snow against her bare toes to focus, concentrating on the anchor line's alien material, altering it, allowing her sword to slice deep. She struck. The sword stopped, held tight by the anchor line – the blade was stuck. She tried to yank it out, but the anchor line's material was flowing over it. Repairing itself. Purity's sword was as stuck as it had been before she first drew the blade from the stone circle back in Jackals. But Purity couldn't afford to fail. The entire nation was riding on this. The lives of all the people she had led here sacrificed for… nothing?
Ganby was still on his knees, weeping. 'We can come back. If we just escape now. We can come back and mount another attack later, factor in the healing time of the anchors, maybe come up with a way to stop the mooring lines repairing themselves.' Then the terrified druid was on his feet, lunging out of the shadow of the beanstalk, trying to escape.
'Ganby!' bellowed Jackaby Mention. 'Come back here, you craven druid's whore.'
Jackaby tried to grab at the fleeing bandit's back but fell over, the cramps in his muscles toppling him moaning into the snow. As the druid was swallowed by the snowstorm there was a succession of thumps, the volley of slat rifles slapping into a soft human form.
Ganby's smoking corpse appeared a minute later, dragged forward by a line of slats. The Kal at the front of the line looked at his soldiers picking through the slumped bodies of the last of the kingdom's raiders, taking in Purity Drake, shedding cold tears as she lay collapsed over the anchor line, her hand still resting on the grip of the embedded maths-blade. Jackaby Mention lay semi-paralysed on the snow, gazing hatred back at the line of the Army of Shadows' fighters.
Smirking, the Kal went over to Purity and pulled her up by the hair. Then he breathed on her icy cheeks through those monstrous fangs, meeting her eyes. 'When, many generations hence, your ancestors are penned up, soiling themselves in their food cages, the suffering you experience for this day's trespass will still be legendary among them.'
The last legend told by the Jackelians.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
