The Rise of the Iron Moon. Stephen Hunt

sky.’

      ‘Please, now,’ wheezed the commodore, his breath misting in the cold air of the chamber. ‘This is a huge great comet in the heavens we are speaking of, not a billiard ball knocked around across our table of velvet downstairs.’

      ‘I do believe you are closer to the truth than you realize,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Ashby’s Comet must have impacted with another minor celestial body after it passed us by, its trajectory nudged into the gravitational pull of Kaliban and set on a new course back towards us. A billiard table is exactly what our celestial bodies’ dance of orbits and velocities have become.’

      ‘Is that it, then?’ said the commodore. ‘A cruel chance meeting of vast stones in the heavens and now we are to have a new moon.’

      ‘How long?’ asked Molly. ‘How long before Ashby’s Comet returns to our skies?’

      ‘My estimation at this point would be in the order of five days.’

      Five days! The Broken Circle cultists would have a field day when the comet they believed augured the end of all times returned and set up permanent residence in the heavens.

       CHAPTER THREE

      The force commander looked out across the plains of Catosia: green fields irrigated by aqueducts that ran out from the city behind her like spokes on a wheel. All except the sparring fields, of course, which were dust, rock, trenches and cover. No olive groves or rows of corn there. That was where the civilized cities of the Catosian League settled their differences using free companies such as hers. Professional fighters and citizen soldiers with a taste for it who would flourish their drug-swollen muscles – so large in some cases that their war jackets could barely contain their flesh – before commencing the ritual of battle. Fighting in front of the judges from the nearest city both sides could agree as neutral in whatever dispute had sparked the fight. That was the way the civilized people of Catosia made war. Unlike, of course, the other nations of the continent. The fat, complacent Jackelians, who relied on their cowardly monopoly of airships and fin bombs to preserve their freedoms, or Kikkosico to the southeast, with the god-emperor’s shiny legions trampling across the pampas.

      Which made it all the more painful to the force commander that her sparring fields lay empty. No judges in purple togas. No audience behind the observer wall, cheering their citystate’s women into battle from the relative safety of angled viewing slits. Instead, the city-state of Sathens’ towering walls were reconfiguring for a full siege; the pneumatic pumps hissing as her battlements raised themselves to full combat height. Seven-inch thick steel plating gliding up and into position, clanking as the walls moved forward to create buffer cavities that began to fill with sand-like compounds piped up from the underground silos ringing the city. The streets of the city were being reshaped in the opposite direction, tall towers sliding down into underground holds, doors and windows disappearing behind blast plates as the lower rise buildings rotated to present a blank face to their thoroughfares.

      Inside the Catosian city, a state of change had infected the population too. After the people of Sathens had taken in the survivors from the city of Unarta, the normally turbulent currents of their city’s anarchy had converged into a single focused stream of purpose. Survival. Survival against the terrible horde their neighbour’s survivors had nicknamed the Army of Shadows. Every voter of Sathens had filed past the crystal head of the goddess their city state had been named for, filed past long into the night, dropping in their pebbles. White for war. Black for peace. When the sun rose over the central square, the crystal goddess had stood proudly as a mass of shimmering white in the sunrise. Not a mere sparring war against civilized neighbours, where the citizens would go unhurt and the city’s infrastructure would be spared. Total war. Absolute war. The sort of war barbarian nations such as the Kingdom of Jackals and Quatérshift still foolishly practised against each other. The sort of war that nobody had been unwise enough to wage against any city-state of the Catosian League in a long, long time. Leave your sword at home or your corpse in Catosia was the adage that was often directed towards foreigners.

      Jackelians might look down on the Catosian League because they treated war with the codification of a duel, but that was only between the city-states. For foreign barbarians, the Catosians practised a different sort of war altogether. Even the men would fight, those who weren’t guarding the children in the city vaults. Ever since the population had voted, the drinking water of Sathens had run crimson with the holiest and rarest of their drugs, the Blood of Forman Thawnight. Some of their men had refused to drink it – the philosopher scientists, so ethereal and haughty in their starched white robes. Their contribution to the war effort would be in tending to the automatics, they had argued, in converting the cogs and artful clockwork mechanisms of their mechanical servants to a war footing. But their wives had known better. They had dragged their menfolk to the drinking basins and plunged their faces under the water until they could breathe no longer and were forced to sup the drug-filled waters. And where the men had no wives, the warrior maidens of the free company had broken down doors and performed the same rites on the trembling virgin lads.

      Now the Catosian law that all men must walk clean-shaven save in time of war was showing its worth. Within days of drinking the Blood of Forman Thawnight, the men of the city had sprouted beards that would have made a polar barbarian proud. Sathens’ nights had been filled with the sound of its men screeching their newfound rage at the stars. The mornings found adrenaline-twitching husbands begging their wives to pass on the skills of the women’s mandatory daily war practice.

      The force commander extended her brass telescope to its maximum length and was about to raise it to her eyes when one of the philosopher scientists barged forward and offered her a heavy double-tubed binocular set. ‘Use these. Gas compression lens. Triple the range of that old piece of brass.’

      ‘You have been busy,’ said the force commander, approvingly.

      ‘A toy!’ shouted one of the scientist’s fellows. Then he proudly pointed to his ranks of automatics shining like steammen knights in front of the city’s walls, jangling with maces, spears, and ammunition bins. ‘Does he expect you to toss his binoculars towards the enemy’s helmets and brain them? I took four of my own servants and built them into a cannon, a cannon that walks! What is that piece of optics compared to my genius?’

      The two males looked as if they were about to start wrestling over the matter, but a company leader stepped forward and as she drew her sword, both men hurriedly stepped back into the ranks.

      ‘The enemy had better come soon,’ whispered the force commander’s aide. ‘Trying to keep any semblance of discipline among these damned males …’ ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

      ‘The city of Unarta was not expecting an attack,’ said the aide. ‘There is no element of surprise here. Our city is reordered for war, as are our people. Even my little husband will fight today.’

      ‘What else can we expect from filthy barbarians?’ said the force commander. ‘A declaration spear shoved into the sparring field and five days of feasting with the opposition free company first? Well, we shall have the measure of these foreign dogs soon enough.’

      There was a rifle shot below as one of the free company officers punished a fighter trying to break the order of the line. Another male overcome with the berserker fury of his drugs a little too early.

      ‘Save it for the enemy,’ muttered the force commander.

      Yes, the enemy. Unarta’s survivors had been hysterical. Men, of course. No warrior woman would willingly abandon her city. Carry me to victory or carry me home on my shield. The end had come shockingly fast, but there was one thing Unarta’s survivors agreed on. The cloud. The hideous crimson cloud gathering overhead and a darkness like night falling during the high heat of the day. Something terrible was coming out of the north. But what was the Army of Shadows? The far north was just a wide wilderness, worthless ice plains and glaciers left over from the age of the coldtime. It had been centuries since any lord of the north had emerged capable of uniting the polar barbarians’ feuding