The Rise of the Iron Moon. Stephen Hunt

      ‘Best you don’t try that line on a magistrate here,’ said Purity. ‘You’d get a boat to the colonies or the rope for helping me escape.’

      In the far distance there was a whistle from a policeman’s Barnaby Blow. A pickpocket diving into the rookeries to escape justice, or were the police on their trail again? Time to be moving on. Purity looked about the narrow passage, branching out into shadowy lanes that didn’t even have old-style oil-fed lamps, let alone the new-style gas ones. Not a place to be hiding after dark. What did Purity know of Middlesteel’s geography? Depressingly little. Only what she had seen of the capital while being marched around on a handful of routes by her guards. Hiding inside the Royal Breeding House, that she could do. The other children had taken enough lumps out of her hide that there weren’t many nooks and crannies in the old fortress on the outskirts of the capital that she didn’t know like the back of her hand.

      ‘Do you have any money?’ asked Purity.

      Kyorin took out a bag-like pocket book and jangled it. ‘I had more yesterday, but I lack the means to replicate additional Jackelian tokens of exchange now.’

      ‘Well, I’ve got a five-hundred-year-old act of parliament that forbids me to hold property and chattels in my name, so you’re looking pretty flush to me. My mother told me once that if I ever needed a safe place to stay, the flop houses in the east of the city don’t ask too many questions.’

      Kyorin sniffed at the wind. ‘The keepers of your law are coming after us. We should leave here.’

      ‘That’s a handy nose.’

      ‘It is the hunters from my land that we must fear. Come …’

      The two of them fled deeper into the heart of Middlesteel.

      Harry Stave pulled out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the pinprick of blood away from his finger, the transaction engine drum on the blood machine in the doorway rattling on a set of loose bearings as his identity was successfully matched to the record on the shop’s files. The Old Mechomancery Shop along Knocking Yard, where Middlesteel’s secrets were hoarded and sold, although very few of Dred Land’s customers were aware that the shop was a station house for the Court of the Air. Its proprietor a whistler, in the parlance of the great game the various intelligence agencies of the continent’s states played against each other.

      If Harry’s two companions – so traditional in their long-tailed coats and stovepipe hats, tailored in black and starched to perfection – were surprised by the appearance of the shambling, mute steamman that greeted them as the door opened, they did not show it. Harry smiled, the two crows stepping inside behind him, laconic and hardly taken aback by this obviously human-milled automaton, an expensive toy in comparison to the creatures of the metal that came down from the mountains of the Steammen Free State. A form of labour that was never going to take off, not while the race of man lounged unemployed in vast numbers across the capital’s slum districts, breeding and fighting and breeding some more.

      They were good, Harry’s two crows, the Court of the Air’s finest, their presence underlying how unsettled things had become upstairs. Not even fazed when Dred Lands appeared, his silvered face-mask riveted with gold pins covering his terrible wounds; opening up the basement entrance to the duke’s hole and taking them down to the concealed rooms underneath his shop. But what was on the table now was enough to pierce even their laconic detachment.

      ‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it, Harry?’ said Dred Lands. ‘My informer came up trumps when she fished that floater out of the river.’

      ‘You’re as good as my word, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘I told the Advocate General when she gave me the nod for this job. It’ll be Dred that comes up with the goods first. And you haven’t disappointed, no you haven’t.’

      ‘Not really my area of expertise,’ said Dred, indicating his primitive iron drones moving about behind the steam-fogged glass of his underground orchard room. ‘But you don’t have to be a butcher to appreciate a nice piece of roast beef on Circleday.’

      ‘Don’t you worry about butchers,’ said Harry. ‘I brought my own.’

      ‘Sharp tailoring,’ said Dred, moving aside as Harry’s two crows got to work. ‘Very sharp.’

      Running his hands over the wet corpse, the shorter of the two agents murmured in appreciation, pushing at the skin and the bones like a doctor trying to diagnose an inflamed chest.

      ‘Worth the trip down?’ asked Harry.

      ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the shorter of the two crows. He unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open, revealing dozens of tools fastened to the lining with straps – bone saws, scalpels, hammers that could crack open ribs.

      Harry shook his head. ‘Not here. We’ll take him back upstairs and do it properly.’

      Dred nodded in thanks to Harry. As he might. Dred’s iron drones would have been scrubbing for days to remove the blood if the two crows had gone for a full dissection down in his bolthole.

      ‘Then I am done here.’ The crow looked at his companion. ‘Mister Shearer?’

      ‘Thank you, Mister Cutter.’ The second crow ran his hands along the body a couple of inches above the burnt flesh. He hummed an incantation to the worldsong, the air crackling with energy, vortexes of dancing witch-light snapping in and out of existence above the body.

      ‘What about his mind?’ asked Harry. ‘Can you go for a reading? His last memories?’

      ‘No,’ said the crow, through the gritted teeth of concentration. ‘Not even I can do that. He’s been cold for far too long. One thing I can tell you, though, his death was not an accident. There is an aura of great distress imprinted across the residue of his soul.’

      Harry hadn’t been expecting anything else. ‘How far off the map are we, then?’

      ‘Let me show you,’ said the crow. ‘Mister Cutter …’

      ‘Mister Shearer?’

      ‘Cleaning fluid, seven strength.’

      The other crow reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle, a line of sigils printed in transaction engine code the only markings on its label. Taking the bottle and carefully pouring it onto the corpse’s face, the crow rubbed the cheek gently with a cloth. As he rubbed, the pink skin changed colour, the dye running off, revealing a light powder blue underneath.

      ‘Bloody Circle,’ said Dred Lands, peering in for a closer look. ‘A blue man!’

      ‘And not from the cold of the river, eh, Mister Cutter?’

      ‘Certainly not, Mister Shearer. He’s been painted to fit in with the people of Jackals. All very theatrical.’

      ‘Not from the race of man?’ asked Harry.

      ‘No, nor from any of our ancestral tree’s offshoots,’ said the crow. ‘His muscles and skeletal groupings bear no relation at all to craynarbian or grasper physiology.’

      ‘From one of the other continents, then?’ said Harry. ‘Lots of odd creatures and races out down Thar-way. And our colonists have only explored a small part of Concorzia.’

      Lifting the lips of the blue man and running a finger down the teeth, the crow indicated the stubby molars. ‘Look, flat. No edges to the teeth, no canines at all. This creature is a plant eater. I can sense more than one stomach inside his belly, maybe as many as five, all interconnected. He wouldn’t have been able to nibble so much as a ham roll for lunch without becoming violently sick from indigestion.’

      ‘A plant eater,’ murmured Dred Lands, looking down at the corpse. ‘I knew there was a reason why he was bleeding green blood when my informant brought him down here.’

      Mister Cutter ran his hand fondly through the dead creature’s hair. ‘Yes. A plant eater. I think he would have been non-violent by nature. Peaceful.’