braking. Molly had realized what was going on soon after the gel had filled her nostrils and lungs – a brief sensation of drowning before she registered that the liquid she was suspended in actually allowed her to breathe. After all, this design wasn't so different from Timlar Preston's original plans for a shell to cross the celestial darks. But instead of Quatershiftian explorers wearing diving suits, insulated from the shock of launch and flight in water- filled chambers, the slats had obviously crossed to Molly's home cosseted in this strange umbilical fluid.
After holes opened in the floor and drained all the gel away, Molly waited, still sopping wet from the sticky protective fluid, shivering and trying to clear the gloop from her hair. She thought she heard the commodore complaining in the corridor outside, then silence as he was removed. Still they didn't come for Molly, but after an hour had passed, two slats unlocked her cell door.
One babbled at Molly in what she thought was the Kal language, and then the second beast stepped forward, towering over her. 'Speak new slave tongue. Come.'
It was disconcerting, no eyes to focus on, fangs sliding up and down as the slat spoke. Molly realized how much of communication came just from looking into another person's eyes.
'Where are you taking me?'
'Food not speak,' hissed the slat, clicking in annoyance. It jabbed her with its rifle barrel, a flared metal pipe with a shaped crystal set inside it. 'Food obey.'
'Food obeys,' sighed Molly.
No sign of her two friends outside. Circle, she hoped they were still alive. The tight corridor of the shell-ship opened up into a vast hangar, walls of rusting red metal rising above lines of capsules, hundreds of shells, some tended by slats with a few blue-skinned Kals overseeing the maintenance. The iron moon! They had sent her to the iron moon. And alongside the capsules they used to cross the darks was Starsprite; the half-steamman craft locked in a vice-like girdle while slats were crawling over her hull. Oh sweet Circle, they had found her ship. Found the looking-glass gate she would have used to jump across to the realm of the steammen. Molly tried to wave to Starsprite, but the slats pushed her brutally past. Failed. The expedition to Kaliban had failed in every way it could have done. She was on the iron moon and she didn't have the great sage's weapon. For the sake of a device the size of a marble she had lost the power to bring down the whole rotten edifice of the Army of Shadows.
As she was marched through the iron moon, Molly saw that its chambers and passages were a bizarre mixture of the advanced and the primitive. She was shoved into a cart pulled by six lizard-like things, the beasts dragging her through the iron corridors of the artificial satellite, past deep halls where legions of slats swung swords at rock posts or trained with their talons. Eventually, Molly reached a more advanced transportation station, a polished black carriage hovering above a rail outside a tunnel mouth. Then the railcar was accelerating her through the iron moon, some tunnels as black and sightless as the Middlesteel atmospheric, others transparent and showing chambers filled with strange glowing machines that swung around each other like the pieces of an orrery.
At one point Molly's tube ran along the outside of the iron moon and the awe-inspiring vista of her world filled the velvet night below. The bone-white cable of the beanstalk Molly had seen in the steammen's observatory pictures stretched all the way down to the surface, like the proboscis of a mosquito impaling its host.
Once back inside the alien satellite, the railcar slowed to a stop alongside a watercourse, a garden waiting on the other side of an ornately carved wooden bridge. It was a surreal juxtaposition: a sculpted green paradise sitting in an ugly rusting chamber. At the far end of the garden, a curving wall of glass displayed the view she had been ogling outside, the gem of her world seen from on high. Precious, fragile. Home. The slats pushed Molly though the garden, butterflies landing on her arm and fluttering away as the gurgle of a nearby fountain startled them.
At the other end of the garden a figure was sitting on a stool in front of a canvas, where the view of the world below was captured almost perfectly. Was this a Kal? The figure turned. He looked like a Jackelian, save that he had to be eight feet tall, a man-mountain rising up from the stool; golden locks curling atop an achingly handsome pink face, his hair bound by a circlet crown bearing a golden helix just above his forehead. Both slats knelt in front of the giant and he spoke to Molly in mind-speech, even though his words were Jackelian. Jackelian? Was he a Kal or not?
'So, this is what a slayer of gods looks like?'
'And my,' said Molly, 'haven't you been eating a lot of beans.'
The giant roared with laughter and wiped his brush on a piece of wet cotton by the easel. 'You think me a Kal? No, little animal, I am what the Kals call a master, the master of all masters in fact.'
A master? Molly looked in shock at the ridiculously striking figure. But this was a man, albeit a giant of a man… 'I've seen the Army of Shadows' masters. They look like squids with great big tentacle limbs.'
'Then you have seen how the masters looked in ancient days, when we were adapted for life in the ocean. Form is a fleeting thing, little pet. We cut our flesh to suit our times. You see before you our original form, one that predates even our aquatic existence. I am magnificent, am I not?'
A trick, they were trying to trick her. But why?
'No,' insisted Molly. 'I saw the masters' council of war, I saw them planning the invasion of my home. The Army of Shadows' masters are octopus-shaped monsters.'
'Council of war?' said the giant, bemused. 'Ah, those mischievous Kal. Who would have thought that our own sheep would one day try to savage us? I shall be quite glad to leave their kind behind. With the appropriate breeding programme in place your people will make far better slaves.'
'This is a ruse,' said Molly.
'To what end, little animal? If the Kal showed you us in our aquatic form, the memory they shared was ancient indeed. And the only invasion they had to show you was not that of your world, it was of their own, the fall of Kaliban.'
'I saw the Army of Shadows' ships leaving Kaliban to attack us!'
'The Kals' memories are as broken as the machine abominations they were once melded with, or perhaps they have not told you and your little band of explorers the truth, for fear you would not prove as pliable as the so-called great sage obviously hoped you would. You have it the wrong way around. The ships you saw weren't leaving Kaliban to attack your world, they were leaving your world to attack Kaliban.'
To attack Kaliban? What was this mad giant talking about? He was clearly an oversized slave gone mad. 'I'd do it now if I could,' said Molly, 'blow your iron moon to pieces. The great sage wouldn't need to trick me into doing it.'
'I believe you would,' smiled the giant. 'But then in your own primitive way you are as much an abomination as the great sage, a symbiote for that revolting little machine spider we sealed inside the world. The Hexmachina. Very cunning, machines that mimic a blood disease pumping inside your veins. Of course, those that share your heritage can't be allowed to breed on.'
'If you're not just a Kal wearing human skin paint, how are you able to communicate using mind- speech?'
The giant tapped the canvas he had been painting. 'A true artist is never afraid to borrow from others, little animal. We took the ability for mind-speech along with memory sharing from the Kals' own blood code. To the victor, the spoils. You stand in the realm of the masters and I am their emperor, Gabraphrim.'
Molly shook her head. What lies had the great sage told her to bring her to this strange green garden high above the Earth? Had any of what he had said been true?
'Well,' said the giant emperor. 'We're going to cut you apart to see the truth of what makes you tick. You may as well enjoy a little of the same courtesy before your infected blood is flowing around our test tubes.'
The emperor clicked his fingers and the two slats shoved Molly after him as he walked to the far side of the chamber, the walls folding back and forming a corridor for him to stride along. Molly followed and they entered another iron chamber, this one filled with figures just as large as the emperor, giant men and women of prodigious beauty. Carpets and pillows covered the cold iron outlines of the room where slats and Kals worked alongside their masters. And there was a single member of the race of man there too: Keyspierre! The treacherous jigger. Molly had shouted the words before she realized she was crying them aloud. The emperor seemed amused by her outburst.
'I will be hailed as the saviour of all of Quatershift when I return,' called Keyspierre to Molly, indicating a cage resting under an iron pillar. 'And see what your people's defiance has earnt Jackals…'
Molly was hardly able to make out the occupant within the cage, which was surrounded by blue-faced Kal
