a monster!'
'Oh, I'm exceptionally proud of my slats,' said the scholar. 'My grandmother created the slave labour assault troop pattern during our last wars on what is now your world, securing my family's high position in the observative sciences. The slats are the perfect soldiers, a blend of human, rodent, wolf and insect flesh. They fall out of their birthing tanks ready to function on instinct only. A superannuation date of five years ensures they are retired before the accumulation of memories and experiences outside the tank leads them to question their loyalty, and even if a few become separated from the pack, they can't breed without us. Obedient, hardy, deadly, controlled. Would that everything we made was such a success.'
Molly swore as the slats tightened leather straps around her limbs, cutting off her circulation.
'I don't expect much from you,' said the scholar, a forlorn look crossing her face. 'But I should at least be able to design a plague that will target those with your machine symbiote bloodline. I can't risk your kind polluting the farms' breeding stock.'
Molly yelled as a blade arm came falling down and skimmed above her belly and breasts; but the scholar was only starting by slicing Molly's clothes away.
'Your kind have almost been mongrelized beyond use,' continued the giant, pointing to the far wall of the lab where a transparent pane showed figures floating like pickled sweetmeats in a jar. Craynarbians, graspers, the race of man, their bodies skinned and muscles exposed. 'Look how many subspecies your stunted strain has branched into. You have surrendered your breeding to nature rather than science. This filth is the result. To think, there were those who argued that the timer on our comet should have been set to add an extra million years to the clock, to allow the ecos on our old world time to fully recover. I dread to think what we would have had to feed on if we had left your kind feral to jig each other stupid in the dirt down there for another million years.'
As Molly thrashed against her restraints she heard a hooting noise and stretched her neck around to place it. There, to Molly's side, was a cage. Lord Rooksby danced inside, one of his wings torn and bloodied, exposing the flesh underneath.
'You see how little my labours are appreciated,' said the scholar, scowling at the agitated form battering the cage's bars. 'The Kals that pervert the emperor takes to his bed have damaged the animal's wings, and now it is the directorate of observative sciences that must act as vet. Even a child knows not to play with their food, but not the emperor and his disgusting little pets.'
Molly gritted her teeth as one of the medical machine's syringe needles plunged into her newly bared arm.
'This really is such a waste of my time,' muttered the scholar, then she turned to scream angrily at her slats, the pair of soldiers hungrily clicking as they watched the operation. Molly's thrashing was exciting their feeding instinct. 'Shut up and get out! Get out, both of you, you'll have what's left here when I'm finished and not before.'
What would be left of Molly? A platter of slops for the masters' beasts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Purity and Commodore Black watched Jackaby Mention pacing the small feeding pen, the bandit stopping every few seconds to stretch his heavily muscled legs, working out the frost cramps. Purity stood by the door and gave a sad little wave to Watt, who had been imprisoned in the cell opposite along with the rest of the Jackelians who had survived the raid on the beanstalk. The cobbler lad held up a paper-wrapped parcel behind the bars. Her shoes? Sweet Circle. Of all the stupid things to have survived the raid. But there wasn't enough room between the bars for Watt to squeeze them through and toss them across the corridor to her. Purity tried to suppress a sad laugh. When the masters came to the cell to cut her up like Molly, it looked like she wasn't going to be able to die with her boots on after all.
The commodore rubbed angrily at his beard, 'Ah, poor Molly and Coppertracks, is this how it is to end for us? All the tenants of Tock House to be murdered by a race of perfect wicked giants, cut up like anatomy show cadavers under the spotlights of a Lump Street theatre.'
'Where's Duncan? Did he not make it?' asked Purity.
Commodore Black shook his head. 'The brave, luckless lad. I watched the slats toss him out of one of their wicked flying globes, lobbed down onto the sands of Kaliban, naked and smeared with the scent of terrible ants as tall as the trees back in my orchard. His fate was no kinder than the one the Army of Shadows has in store for us.'
'I will not go quietly,' said Jackaby. 'Not when the wind itself envies my heels.'
'The wind may envy them, lad,' said the commodore. 'But it's the slats and their giant masters that'll have them off you before the day is out. And I've seen the slat guards coming by here, eying my grand belly and arguing over which of them is going to have me for their roasting spit.'
'Our cell door,' said Purity. 'You showed me how to pick locks back at the house. All the stories, Jared, the ones you told me about how you broke your friends out from the prison on the lost land of Camlantis. Can you not get us out of here?'
'I've tried, lass,' sobbed the commodore, 'but poor old Blacky's genius with locks has met its match in what the Army of Shadows have done to this doorway's seals. Break us out? I don't even understand the basic principles of what they have running on this mortal clever lock. There are no moving parts, nothing to pick, no transaction- engine drums rotating inside it with codes to break. I'm like a fish drifting through the engine room of a wrecked u-boat, gazing at the expansion-engine scrubbers and wondering what manner of marvel it is that lies before me.'
'Then we are dead,' said Jackaby.
'That we are, lad. But I have one last story for you, Purity, before I move along the Circle,' said the commodore. 'And it's one that I should have told you when we first met at Tock House. A tale I spent every day walking across the hot merciless sands of Kaliban begging the gods of fate for the chance to recount to you. It seems that fickle fate has thrown me that chance, in return for my brave old bones being given to the slats to chew on.'
Purity listened as the commodore explained about his involvement in the royalist rebels' plot to free a prince from the Royal Breeding House, her mother's part in the scheme, and how the man who had worn the title of the Duke of Ferniethian had left a lover he thought was dead behind in the escape attempt. Left her with a child swelling her belly.
'Your father was no fortress guard,' finished the commodore. 'He was a fat fool of a royalist u-boat commander who went back to Porto Principe before its fall, went back not knowing he had a darling daughter alive and in the hands of parliament's dogs.'
Purity was rocked by the news.
All these years, treated like dirt by the other prisoners at the breeding house, called a prison guard's bastard. And she had been the daughter of the Duke of Ferniethian all along. She had a father!
'I would have done anything for your blessed mother and I would do anything for you.'
'She is our queen,' said Jackaby, not quite approving as the commodore and Purity embraced.
'She always was mine,' said the commodore. 'But here we are. I have been given my chance to make amends, but it is to be cut short by a crew of monsters strutting about their mortal iron moon, monsters who intend to make us as dead as their land.'
Purity stepped back. 'I am the land and the land is eternal.'
The two men in the pen rushed forward as Purity doubled up in pain.
'Lass!'
'The sword,' said Purity, pushing them back. 'I can feel it at the foot of the beanstalk.'
And she could. It was burning, embedded inside the near indestructible anchor cable securing the beanstalk to the ground; showing her a possible way to destroy the iron moon, destroy the Army of Shadows once and for all.
Purity turned to Jackaby Mention. 'We must get out of here.'
'But how, my queen? Your sword is lost to us, your power with it.'
